For years, I thought that anyone who took antidepressants was just a malcontent, a whimsy-deficient soul who refused to take responsibility for his or her own good time. But recently I was forced to join the Ranks of the Medicated myself, after discovering that medication of some sort is a virtual prerequisite for living in Los Angeles. Nearly everyone here seems to take some enigmatic pill every day to keep their rudder under the boat. Since the ultimate L.A. stigma is attached to possessing any emotion other than Fabulousness, however, nobody talks about it openly -- which, given the evident proportions of deep biochemical gloom, strikes me as being nearly as ludicrous as being in denial about defecation.
Once people have crashed the door of taboo and disclosed that they are mutual members of the tribe, however, they furtively bond with each other over which pill they're taking to keep the beast in the sock drawer. Prozac was, of course, the number one for a while (if you had Nirvana's Nevermind in your CD collection, chances are you too were on Prozac). But many now favor antidepressants such as Zoloft (called "Soul-Off" by those who don't enjoy its spooky detached qualities), or drugs like Wellbutrin, which is daring because nobody really knows why it works and purportedly has the extra bonus of causing some people to have orgasms every time they yawn or sneeze, and a little pink pill I'll call "P" which drives one in a thousand people to become instantly suicidal.
Antidepressants, for all of their high-tech glory, are still prescribed mostly by smell and intuition and voodoo guesswork, and my doctor might just as well have had a dartboard with the names of the 10 most popular pills fanning out from the center in different colors.
I go to a very expensive and reputable psychologist. When she finally decided that I did indeed have a biochemical depression she referred me to a psychiatrist. Knowing that I had no medical insurance and would be paying for the visit in cash, she found one who would see me for $60.
The person to whom I would be entrusting the seasoning of my brain opened the door and I found myself in a small, windowless troll cave filled with plates of unfinished food, pen tops all over the floor, empty wadded-up bags, boxes exploding with dog-eared files sticking out in all directions, and, most disturbingly, clothing shoved indiscriminately into the largely empty bookcases. The doctor was a little Freud-cum-Willy Wonka man with a pointy white Satan beard and the posture of a hermit crab. He found a clipboard under his couch and asked me a few questions.
Thus began our throw-the-baby-in-the-pool-and- see-if-it-swims quest for The Pill That Works. Antidepressants, for all of their high-tech glory, are still prescribed mostly by smell and intuition and voodoo guesswork, and my doctor might just as well have had a dartboard with the names of the 10 most popular pills fanning out from the center in different colors.
