“It’s okay, you don’t have to be ashamed if you need it but I would never take that stuff. Who knows what it’s doing to you.”

Psych meds. Anti-psychotics. Anti-depressants. Anxiety pills.

Crazy pills. That’s what I called what I took. For a while I cried every night at pill time over being the abject failure that I saw myself as for needing the pills just to be “normal” or “human”. One of the hardest things I had to accept early on was that I needed medication to cope with my existence and the symptoms of my injury. I knew what they all were, that’s what the psychiatric patients we took to crisis were either on or avoiding because of the side effects. I knew exactly who took those and I was one of them now. It didn’t help that when I did approach the subject early on in my journey I was always met with the same skepticism and consternation I had for it all.

Saying you take psychiatric medication feels like admitting you’ve drank the kool-aid or that you agree with stigmatization and labels. This seems especially common in the first responder community. No one ever says they’ve had a good experience with medication. They hide that they take it, speak of it with shame or speak against it.

It does take time to adjust. It takes time to stop. It takes time to figure out dosing. It takes time when the medication doesn’t work and you have to keep trying new ones. It takes a lot of time. It’s fucking shit. Ultimately it isn’t going to help everyone equally and evenly, true, but having that conversation with people who are generally problem drinkers seems unreal in its own way. Thing is, looking back, I would have been sick that whole time anyway so what was I losing? The experience only seemed worth it once I realized that I wasn’t feeling as shitty as I had been. I actually wanted to do stuff again. Open curtains didn’t make me angry. People were a little less exhausting.

I increased my fluoxetine yesterday. I’m feeling really overwhelmed and I’m struggling again lately. I can feel myself falling through the cracks. I’m aware, I’m fighting back, this wasn’t my first option but it’s there as a next step and it feels empowering and relieving to have that tool instead of just wondering how far I’m going to fall this time while I’m slipping anyway.

I’m here to say I do take that stuff. It can’t break what’s already broke, can it? Do I want to take it? No. Am I happy about it? No. Can I accept that it helped? Well, can you?