“You Don’t Want to Take Those Forever, Right?”

CN: Mental health stigma, stigma about taking medication for mental illness.

Take care!

About six months after I began taking medication for my anxiety, I was telling a new (at the time) coworker the story of how I went back to therapy and decided to give meds a try. This person said they had been on medication for a while years ago, and they were happy they got off of it. I nodded and said that was I was glad they found something that helped other than meds. They then asked me if I had a plan for stopping my own dosage.

This caught me off guard to say the least, and I’ve been thinking about this experience lately.

If you’ve been around for a while, you’ve heard the story of how bad my anxiety was in 2020 and how if affected my ability to drive and even ride in a car without feeling like I was going to have a panic attack. It was unbearable, and it made my life really difficult. The anxiety wasn’t limited to cars, though. I was also dealing with insomnia and anxiety during the days when I was just sitting around at home. I finally had enough and found a therapist, who spent the next year or so trying to figure out what had triggered all of this anxiety. I’ve never been in a car accident, no one I know has been seriously injured in one. Eventually we came to agreement that COVID-19 had triggered a huge bout of anxiety that seeped its way into every aspect of my life.

One reason I’ve been thinking about this recently is that I have been looking back on the progress I’ve made in this area of my life. My anxiety isn’t cured by any means, and there are still moments when I’m behind the wheel where I start to feel anxious. The only difference is that my medication is actively helping me cope, in cooperation with skills I’ve learned in therapy to self-soothe in those instances.

Back to this coworker. I understand that there likely wasn’t any malice behind their words, but I do think that they have internalized some of the stigma associated with taking medication to help their mental health. I had to work through my own stigma about that—even though I wasn’t aware that anyone I knew was taking meds—and to this day I’m not sure where it came from. Maybe it had something to do with the cultural conversation around mental health as a whole. Mentally ill people were criminals, they were dangerous. Being medicated carried a connotation that I internalized, too. However, in the nearly three years I’ve been on medication, my opinion has completely changed.

I likely would not have applied for my current job if I had not started taking Paxil. I would not have met all of the incredible people that I’ve become friends with through this job. I probably wouldn’t have started this blog, or submitted my writing to The Mighty. I have no idea where I would be, but I am so proud of where I am.

Anyone who tells you that you don’t need medication to treat your mental health most likely does not know your entire story. You are in charge of making those decisions for you, whether that includes medication or another treatment option that works for you. My stance will always be this: If it helps you and doesn’t hurt you or anyone else, do it.

Do what helps you. You don’t have to explain it to anyone else.

—Abbie