Let’s talk about a little thing called medication

Every day when you wake up it’s three pills, choked down with juice. (Always juice, because having pills with water tastes like suicide.)

The one that’s supposed to keep you from killing yourself.

The one that’s supposed to make you talk and smile and act like you don’t have crippling anxiety.

The one that’s supposed to take away your mood. How dare you have emotions. How fucking dare you.

It’s bullshit.

There’s no way to measure whether it “works” or not. If you ask my parents, it doesn’t, because I’m still not normal. Like, so what if she feels happier and doesn’t generally want to throw herself off a roof? She still doesn’t fit the template of a normal 18-year-old. Her GPA is getting worse and worse. We never signed up for this! We can’t mold her into something remotely socially acceptable and thus never reap the supposed benefits of having a child. We can no longer brag about her at dinner parties like we could when she was a kid, or even two years ago when she was an honor roll student with a 2220 SAT score. We can no longer expect her to care for us when we’re old, because either we’ll have disowned her for being a blasphemous lesbian athiest, or she’ll be unable to take care of anyone due to being a failure in life.

I know, I know, that’s a somewhat cynical take on things. But that’s exactly what it’s all about. Nobody gives a fuck how you feel if you appear to be doing well in life. Who cares about the fresh red lines on your arms or the thirty-five pills you swallowed last week which landed you in the hospital for six days, as long as you’re getting straight A’s and having “friends”? You’re FUNCTIONING.

Because psychological well-being can’t, unlike other health conditions, be weighed on a scale or discerned with a lab test. It’s subjective. A 98.5 degree temperature is the same no matter where you are in the world, but not so with mental wellness. Psych doctors and therapists assess you through their own standards, which varies widely between cultures and people.

But if you don’t fit the standards? They drug you up and make you dependent on chemicals that fuck with your brain and you can’t think properly enough to tell the difference. (True story. I was on this one pill for months that made me feel like a zombie and I didn’t realize till I accidentally skipped a couple days and felt LOADS better.)

Honestly, fuck the psych industry and everyone in it. The worst part is that I benefit from it both because my dad (who pays for my existance basically) is a psychiatrist AND because my body is addicted to meds.

Isn’t the world such a great place.