The Egyptians Invented Adderall in 2000 B.C.E.

A look into our broken relationship with mental health, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare

My Decision to Anti-Depress was the marquee article—the grand opening—of a blog I had years (and maturity levels) ago. Embarrassingly enough, the article was originally titled My Decision to ANIT-Depress, because I was too frantic as a person and as a writer to check for typos.

In that essay, which is now lost, I spilled my guts about my mental health and about how I finally overcame the mental hurdles present when deciding to take a mind-altering prescription drug, in hopes of a better life.

As far as I could tell, the article was well received. Today, I doubt the article would do as well, if only because #mentalhealthawareness is now such a ubiquitous cause, with plenty of athletes and celebrities behind it, leaving less room for the stories of the average person.

And now—roughly six years later—this is my new blog, and I’m off antidepressants, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibtors (better known as SSRIs), the most common type of these drugs.

Why did I feel I needed them to begin with? Why am I off them now? And what does this have to do with Modern Anxiety?

Modern Anxiety = Mental Health

Modern Anxiety is an umbrella term I use for the elements of our culture which are backward or quietly detrimental. These broken pieces of culture negatively effect our mental and spiritual health, and are thus worth exposing and investigating.

So it is then sensible to assess “mental health” itself, to discover what parts of our relationship to it are dysfunctional.

In my mind, the two most troubling parts of our relationship with our mental-well-being are 1) our brutally calculating healthcare system and 2) the idea that pharmaceuticals should play the prominent role they do in making our minds healthy.

There’s tons of discussion, hashtags, and social media posts surrounding mental health—that’s good, and it’s a major change from just years ago—but the role that pharmaceuticals play in mental health diagnoses is rarely part of that conversation.

This is most likely because big pharma wants it that way, but also because the healthcare system has indoctrinated us to assess health in such inhuman terms, that we don’t think to question it in the first place.

Dialogue surrounding our mind-health is often about encouraging openness and acceptance to those who are scared to ask for help or even express vulnerability. This is also where the dialogue usually stops. It says, “it’s okay to feel like dogshit, there are people who care about you, they’re here to listen, you can tell them you feel like dogshit, there’s no need to be ashamed of dogshit mental health.”

Dog-poop jokes aside, that’s the correct first step. We have to have an honest assessment of our psychological state in order to improve it, and I believe unwaveringly that simply talking about it, whether to a friend or to a therapist—can help improve your well being.

But beyond just talking about it, we tend to assume that the only recourse is to go to a doctor. And that wouldn’t be a bad recourse if our doctors weren’t so ill-equipped to help in capacities that don’t involve dolling out drugs.

In sum, we’re great at expressing our mental illness, but terrible at improving it. Why? And how do we change this?

Well, to use a metaphor, if we want to change the way we walk through a building, then we have to change the architecture.

The Way I Walked Through The Building

I was sort of a high functioning wreck my sophomore year of college—the year I first began taking antidepressants. My mood swung wildly—sometimes I was on top of the world, other times, I wasn’t sure if being alive was worth it. Sprinkled throughout these polar opposite feelings, was a smattering of good old fashioned paranoid anxiety: Am I messing up? Am I in the right place? Am I bound to fail in a unredeemable, tragic way?

Part of this was undoubtedly the growing pains of being in a new phase of life. I was thousands of miles from home, and childhood was getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror as I barreled toward the cold harsh realities of adulthood.

But growing pains—in the moment and in hindsight—didn’t seem to fully explain or justify the intensity and frequency of bad thoughts and feelings that plagued me.

I was in San Diego, a place with sunshine 300 days a year. I was getting an education. I was passing my classes. I had friends and was growing my network. I was doing everything I was supposed to do.

Assessing my life “on paper” and comparing it to how I felt in real life, led me to believe my mental health was dogshit. And it was dogshit.

Yay! I made the first step forward, I admitted I didn’t feel well. What next? I guess I go to a doctor.

Before I went to a doc at my university, who we’ll call Bill, I had probably gone to three or four doctors in years prior, hinting at the same mental unrest. While I give major kudos to Bill for communicating with me in a genuine, caring capacity, I can’t say the same of those prior physicians.

Before Bill, the conversation pretty much went like this:

Jack: I’m pretty sad and tired all the time.

Doc: Okay, drugs?

I’m exaggerating of course, but not immensely, I’m afraid. I did the job of assessing how I walked through the building. But then crashed into a wall that maybe shouldn’t be there. Which brings me to the bad architecture.

Bad Architecture

Alarmingly, we operate as if mental-illness is a given. If you consume enough memes and viral tweets and comedians’ jokes and celebrity news, you can see a common thread that seems to say “shit is so obviously fucked up, that of course I have depression and anxiety. And since everyone has it, let’s have a laugh about our broken state of being”

But I want to rebel against that—not because my life is peaches and cream, not because I don’t have empathy for those who struggle, not because I believe our culture isn’t currently F.U.B.A.R, and not because I don’t think those jokes are occasionally funny—I want to rebel against that implicit statement because the acceptance of its terms insinuates that we’ve collectively rolled over. It insinuates that our mental health originates in poor condition, and it implies that nothing can be done to fix the obvious societal shit show that’s causing our mental troubles in the first place.

We should not be complacent, though. We should not be “okay” with the number of people who claim to suffer from life-altering mental illness. So where is this coming from?

UNRELENTING CONSUMERISM AND OUR SAVIOR, ZOLOFT

Per the CDC, 13% of American adults age 18 and over reported that they had taken anti-depressants in the past 30 days. That data is from 2015-2018. I’m willing to bet that given the events of the last couple years, that number is higher now—and it was probably over 13% to begin with, considering some people likely didn’t self-report.

Let’s just think about that for a second. Over 1 in 10 people in this country take a drug to improve their mental well being. But a century ago, these drugs didn’t exist. So what’s going on?

I once heard a doctor on a podcast say, “we aren’t born with a prozac deficiency.” I apologize for not being able to quote verbatim or name the source, but even if I made this up in a fever dream, the point stands.

We didn’t evolve into the most dominant, intelligent creatures on earth because the ancient Egyptians invented Adderall in 2000 B.C.E. We evolved into the most dominant, intelligent creatures on earth because we are naturally equipped to survive and thrive.

BUT! Over the last 100 years, there’s been a concerted effort to make us believe otherwise, and that effort is not exclusive to pharmaceutical companies. It’s all around us. We are constantly sold the idea that we cannot be whole without external goods or services.

You need more cloud storage. You need the new Xbox. You need the iPhone 16 plus. You need the new Nikes. You need a Peloton. How come you don’t look like Dua Lipa? How come you don’t look like Kumail Nanjiani? How come your skin isn’t as smooth as instagram influencer #11783? You need 5G on your phone or your life will be miserable. How will you send a fucking email in house full of people if you don’t have 5G? How are you going to get service in the mountains if you don’t have 5G? You’re doomed if you don’t have 5G! YOU’D BE BETTER OFF DEAD WITH 4G LTE, SO YOU NEED 5G!

It starts early. We do not teach our children to look inward, we teach them to solve internal problems with external solutions. You didn’t make the basketball team? Well let’s get you an ice cream cone then.

Alright. It’s okay to get your kids ice cream. But you catch my drift, I’m sure.

This sickness pervades our entire culture; If we’re constantly told by a consumerist onslaught that we are inadequate, then it’s no wonder that so many people feel so insecure, and often believe the only solution for solving dogshit mental health is something external like an orange bottle of pills.

COLD, CALCULATING HEALTHCARE

You are a complex individual and there are number of inputs that contribute to who you are and how you feel. And western medicine doesn’t really give a damn about that. It just looks for hard facts—symptoms—and if you show symptom set A then you get Drug A and if you show symptom set B you get drug B.

It’s not holistic. It’s not reasonable. And you know what?

It’s absolutely ludicrous that we send people to medical school for a decade and put them in immense debt, all under the guise of vetting and finding the best possible candidates for the profession, just so they can then spend ten minutes with their patients and scribble a prescription.

It’s one thing when doctors are specialized in a particular area, like radiology—in that case, all that schooling and expertise makes sense. But the mind-boggling amount of people crying foul over their mental condition aren’t doing so because they have cancer. They’re doing it because they need genuine care. They need someone to help them on a more human to human level.

When we look at our health, we should look at all the facets that contribute to it.

We need to think about our diets. We need to exercise. We need to think about who we spend our time with. We need to talk about our romantic relationships. We need to think about what we do for a living, and whether that living makes us whole financially and spiritually. We need to talk about what we do in our free time. We need to talk about what social media and “the news” does to us. We need to talk about our traumas and our insecurities and where they come from and how we can move past them.

These are the facets of life I had to painstakingly assess to get off prescription psychiatric medication. And I think subconsciously when we go to the doctor, this is what we’re hoping to get—an unbiased source that really cares and can help with these personal changes.

Therapists are great for working some of this out, especially personal narratives built up in your head from whatever happened in your childhood—perhaps that’s why it’s so disappointing that doctors can’t complete our mental-healthcare puzzle. You’d hope that they’d listen somewhat to what you’ve already worked on with a therapist, and then step in to fill the gaps that will bring you the mental state you desperately seek.

Maybe it’s wrong to think that doctors should be that solution, but can you blame me for believing they should at least try to be?

Internal Problems, Internal Solutions

Maybe our species will be extinct before the United States healthcare system has proper reform.

But in the mean time, life is still difficult. You may not always feel good. And while there is a major distinction between normal ups/downs and anxiety/depression, mental illness is real. I’m not just suggesting that those who suffer simply “buck up.”

And if you feel that psychiatric medication is the option that will work best for you, I encourage you to try them. I’m not here to judge anyone. I took drugs, and perhaps they helped me cope—or made me believe I could cope—but they will never and did not replace the self examination and excavation that really made me healthier and happier. And with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure if I needed them, so much as I believed they were my only option in ending my plight.

I’m just asking that we instill some balance. I’m asking that we ask more questions. I’m telling you that we have more power to heal ourselves than the advertising is willing to admit. I’m telling you that we can display fortitude and compassion and vulnerability all at once, and that if we do that, less of us will feel like dogshit. And that’d be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?

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Modern Anxiety is a newsletter about culture, media, and mental health. If you enjoyed this edition, I would greatly appreciate if you shared it with someone you know! And if you’re not already, consider subscribing (for free) to receive future editions straight to your email.