When I was a college freshman in the late 1990s, antidepressants were everywhere. Prozac was appearing on magazine covers, and I'd just seen my first commercial for Paxil on TV. Halfway through the semester, I was laid out by a prolonged anxiety attack and found myself in the school's campus health center, tearfully telling a newly minted psychiatry resident about my feelings of panic and despair. Given the spirit of the times, it wasn't a complete surprise when she sent me away a few minutes later with a prescription and a generous supply of small cardboard boxes full of beautiful blue pills, free samples dropped off on campus by a company rep.
The school psychiatrist didn't suggest talk therapy. She simply asked that I return for a "med check" every few weeks to make sure that the pills were working.
Work they did. My dread burned off like valley fog in the sun, and my tears dried up as decisively as if someone had turned off a spigot. Soon I felt less anxious and more sociable than I could ever remember being.
When I started using antidepressants, I didn't know anyone else my age who was taking them. Within a few years, I felt hard-pressed at times to find someone who wasn't. Antidepressants and other psychiatric medications went mainstream in the 1990s and 2000s, and my generation became the first to use these drugs in significant numbers as adolescents and young adults.
Young people are medicated even more aggressively now, and intervention often starts younger. In children, as in adults, antidepressants and medications for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder are often used continuously for years. These trends have produced a novel but fast-growing group—young people who have known themselves longer on medication than off it. (...)
Like me, most young adults who take antidepressants have felt relief from symptoms. But there are several aspects of the experience of growing up on antidepressants that should give us pause.
First, using antidepressants when you're young raises tough questions of personal identity. Adults who take these drugs often report that the pills turn them back into the people they were before depression obscured their true selves. But for adolescents whose identity is still under construction, the picture is more complex. Lacking a reliable conception of what it is to feel "like themselves," young people have no way to gauge the effects of the drugs on their developing personalities.
Emily, 28, grew up in the Midwest and began taking Prozac for the depression and anxiety that began to overwhelm her at age 14. (Like all the young people I interviewed, she agreed to talk on the condition of being identified by a pseudonym.) She has used it nearly continuously since. Emily is confident that Prozac helps her, even crediting it with allowing her to work. Even so, she describes a painful and persistent desire to know what she would be like without medication.
"I think Prozac has helped me a lot," she said. "But I wonder, if I'd never gotten antidepressants, who would I be? What would I be like?"
by Katherine Sharpe, WSJ | Read more:
Photo Illustration by Stephen Webster
The school psychiatrist didn't suggest talk therapy. She simply asked that I return for a "med check" every few weeks to make sure that the pills were working. Work they did. My dread burned off like valley fog in the sun, and my tears dried up as decisively as if someone had turned off a spigot. Soon I felt less anxious and more sociable than I could ever remember being.
When I started using antidepressants, I didn't know anyone else my age who was taking them. Within a few years, I felt hard-pressed at times to find someone who wasn't. Antidepressants and other psychiatric medications went mainstream in the 1990s and 2000s, and my generation became the first to use these drugs in significant numbers as adolescents and young adults.
Young people are medicated even more aggressively now, and intervention often starts younger. In children, as in adults, antidepressants and medications for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder are often used continuously for years. These trends have produced a novel but fast-growing group—young people who have known themselves longer on medication than off it. (...)
Like me, most young adults who take antidepressants have felt relief from symptoms. But there are several aspects of the experience of growing up on antidepressants that should give us pause.
First, using antidepressants when you're young raises tough questions of personal identity. Adults who take these drugs often report that the pills turn them back into the people they were before depression obscured their true selves. But for adolescents whose identity is still under construction, the picture is more complex. Lacking a reliable conception of what it is to feel "like themselves," young people have no way to gauge the effects of the drugs on their developing personalities.
Emily, 28, grew up in the Midwest and began taking Prozac for the depression and anxiety that began to overwhelm her at age 14. (Like all the young people I interviewed, she agreed to talk on the condition of being identified by a pseudonym.) She has used it nearly continuously since. Emily is confident that Prozac helps her, even crediting it with allowing her to work. Even so, she describes a painful and persistent desire to know what she would be like without medication.
"I think Prozac has helped me a lot," she said. "But I wonder, if I'd never gotten antidepressants, who would I be? What would I be like?"
by Katherine Sharpe, WSJ | Read more:
Photo Illustration by Stephen Webster
