“Prozium, the great nepenthe.  Opiate of our masses.  Glue of our great society.  Salve and salvation, it has delivered us from pathos, from sorrow, the deepest chasms of melancholy and hate.  With it, we anesthetize grief, annihilate jealousy, obliterate rage.  Those sister impulses towards joy, love, and elation are anesthetized in stride, we accept as fair sacrifice.  For we embrace Prozium in its unifying fullness and all that it has done to make us great.”
~ The Father in the movie Equilibrium

After losing my marriage and my home, after difficult separations and lost friendships, after being cut off from social circles I had adopted as tribe, after going into debt and struggling to care for my oldest son, I finally submitted.  I officially joined the drug-your-emotions-away dystopia.

Nearly every day, grief, panic and despair were flooding my system.  A doctor prescribed a drug for anxiety, to take as needed, which blankets loss with a perfidious mellow feeling.  The drug acts on receptors that are also influenced by alcohol and produces a similar effect to a glass of wine.  I set it aside and tried to avoid taking it.

In the movie Equilibrium, the government of the future forces every citizen to take a drug that eliminates emotion.  Art and literature are banned.  By eliminating emotion in the population, society is controlled and functions in harmony with the imposed systems.  A regime hunts down anyone who stops taking the drug.

One cleric in the regime, played by Christian Bale, misses a dose.  He begins to feel.  He experiences sympathy for those he captures and soon joins the underground.

Drugs to dampen emotional pain horrify me, but at the same time, they bring relief when such pain no longer brings about needed change.  I was really hurting.  Could a psychiatric drug offer a path to healing?  I gave this question to the universe.

About a week ago, I was rummaging through my kitchen cabinets, and in the back of my pantry, I saw a small box full of junk: plastic spoons, old toddler cups and baby bottles.  I have seen this box many times and ignored it.  However, this time something caught my eye.  A tiny bottle of liquid Orajel for teething babies.  Without thinking, I grabbed it and placed it in my medicine cabinet near the sink, although my children have long since stopped teething.

With great trepidation, I began taking an antidepressant.  Though my dose was ridiculously small, I was already noticing withdrawal if I missed a dose by more than two hours.  One side effect of the medication, which I began to experience right away, was “dry mouth.”

I woke up in the middle of the night, and my mouth was so dry, that I had sores on the inside of my lip.  My mouth was almost bleeding, my lips swollen.  I stumbled out of bed, still half asleep.  I wasn’t sure why I was getting out of bed, but without thinking, I wandered into the kitchen straight to my medicine cabinet, where the baby Orajel was sitting right at eye level.  I grabbed it, put a few drops on my lips, and the pain was instantly gone.  The next morning, I found something to help my mouth heal.

The scene unfolded so effortlessly, it made me think.  Pain killers can act as a bridge between suffering and actual healing.  I was hurting.  The medicine made the pain go away, and that made it easier to focus on healing.  Is it that simple?

When we use pain killers for a physical ailment, it’s easy to see that it fails to solve the real problem, because the injury or damage is still apparent.  For emotions, however, that is harder to see, especially when the injury or damage is collective or cultural.  Pain killers for emotion are marketed as a cure.

Psychiatric medications carry so many messages and so many potentially horrible downstream effects, such as addiction and withdrawal (see articles listed at the end of this post).  They imply that strong emotions are defective, a sign that something is broken.  This in turn implies that we function independently of the environment.  All of this erodes our sense of responsibility to create a world that nourishes the well being of others and honors our collective nature.

Things are not so black and white, but my concerns linger and pool like the serotonin in my synapses.  I swallow my next dose of Felicium (a narcotic sold as a medicine for an imaginary plague in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Symbiosis;” Felicium is also a trade name for fluoxotine hydrochloride, or Prozac).

I let go of my anger towards the pharmaceutical companies and their army of diagnosticians.  I let go of my anger towards the events that made it necessary.  Perhaps I can use this for what it’s worth, straightforwardly.  Just something to allay the suffering.  How would the story of Job have turned out if he had taken Prozac?

The benzocaine of sorrow goes straight to my head and severs the link to my heart.  With the wires cut, the bomb will not go off, but what else have I deadened, and what will happen when I one day reattach the wires?  I cannot cry as easily, and I cannot orgasm as easily, which makes me wonder about the similarities between the two and whether an inability to cry is a primary mechanism by which these drugs work.

My body cannot heave in response to the movement of love, either its coming or its going.  Soon, I can look back on those who are gone and feel almost nothing.

A poem by Hafiz, entitled “We Might Have to Medicate You:”

Resist your temptation to lie
By speaking of separation from God,

Otherwise,
We might have to medicate
You.

In the ocean
A lot goes on beneath your eyes.

Listen,
They have clinics there too
For the insane
Who persist in saying things like:

“I am independent from the
Sea,
God is not always around
Gently
Pressing against
My body.”

Scenes from the movie set to the song Without Emotion, by Combichrist:

Recommended:

Dangers of Antidepressants: how SSRIs blunt emotion, including spiritual emotions
Emotional Side Effects of SSRIs: describing emotional detachment

Media Articles

Medical Reports: Mental and Physical Side Effects of Withdrawal/Discontinuation