The right-wing are coming for your antidepressants

and other rabbit holes I fell down this week

Imagine you are walking down a train carriage, hurtling at speed. You’re trying to get to the bathroom to piss and you’re trying to get to where you need to be and at the same time everything is moving very fast. Suddenly the train swerves a corner and you are thrown sideways.

You know that sensation? That was the sensation I had every day for the last few days. I could also hear my eyes moving, tiny sparks of electricity every time I moved my eyes side-to-side, as though the firing of my synapses were actually audible.

No, I wasn’t taking drugs. That was, rather the point.

I was withdrawing on Sertraline. Zoloft, for the Americans in the room. It’s an anti-depressant, an SSRI and by and large, one I tolerate well. Perhaps too well, as a pharmacy screw-up meant I wasn’t able to refill my supply and I went into withdrawal.

I thought at any moment I might have a seizure

It’s a symptom known as ‘brain zaps’.

Brain zaps can apparently feel like a brief electric shock, tingling, shivering, or a burst of bright lights, with some people also describe them as a forceful roll of the eyes into the back of the head, loss of balance, or a pulsing sensation in the ears. And it can happen after missing just one dose. It doesn’t take much in life to miss a dose - a stressful day at work, a hangover, forgetting your meds on holiday, bringing the wrong bag. And here I was, watching the world shove 10m to the right every time I tried to move because of a pharmacy screw-up.

Some background information

People have a lot of complicated feelings about SSRIs. In 2021/2022, 45 million were prescribed in the UK, which is a 35.2% increase from 2015/2016, which ties in with both overall trends of worsening mental health but also a greater willingness to ask for help and support.

Before I started taking Sertraline, I was a hot mess. Regularly self-harming, casually suicidal, horrendously depressed. I was also a bit traumatised by homophobia, and didn’t know how to support myself being autistic. To my shame, I didn’t take them sooner because I thought they’d make me gain weight. And, to be fair, they did, which is a surprise given that for the six weeks I didn’t want to eat anything at all. And then, quite specifically, was consumed with the overwhelming desire for cinammon crunch cereal from Sainsburys. Sertraline didn’t save my life, but it helped build the stability which enabled me to access therapy.

Let’s be clear: I do not think SSRIs are a cure-all.

When my dosage needs tweaking I feel so irrevocably numb, a sensation not dissimilar to the depression they’re aiming to alleviate. And then there’s the fact that I can’t cry, or come, really - a side effect often-reported particularly by women. I don’t think that my value as a woman is rooted in how much sex I have, what my emotional capacity is. What I do care about is my writing, my ability to craft a narrative and when I take meds, I can do that.

What I discovered in my desperate attempt to get help was there is literally nothing you can do except wait out the withdrawal or take meds again - neither of which were feasible options for me in that moment.

The Right Is Coming For Your Mental Health Meds

There is a particularly strong ‘white woman in wellness spaces, here is my ‘natural’ solution’ to ‘full-blown neo-Nazi’ pipeline that is far to complex to get into here, but I landed on one too many alt-right forums yesterday trying to find solutions to the withdrawal because, strangely enough, it turns out the far right hate SSRIs and unsurprisingly hate women taking SSRIs. Unbeknownst to me, they see the negative side effects some people experience such as a lack of libido as evidence of us straying from our ideal positions in society - men made impotent and women made sexless. Some have gone as far as to suggest mass shootings are the result of SSRIs.

Just two years ago, right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, stated that' ‘ first we were told that SSRIs would save lives. Now we learn they don’t actually work as intended. In fact, the whole idea behind the drug was completely wrong. And yet — and here is the best part — people are ignoring this news, and the drugs are still being prescribed.’

‘If it steals your sex drive, maybe it’s stealing your soul’, he went on.

I don’t know about you, but my soul isn’t actually stored in my vagina, but this just emphasises the right-wing relationship between a person’s value and their (I presume cis, straight) sex lives.

Informed Consent

I was recently asked at an afterparty for a gallery opening of all places, by a well meaning gay man, whether I was ‘pro-puberty blockers’. To which I responded ‘yes, in the same way I’m pro the pill’, a response he didn’t expect.

As someone who has just written a book about the state of LGBTQ+ equality including the blocking of trans people’s healthcare and particularly trans youth healthcare, I know that the removal of trans young people’s right to medical transition serves as an avenue for removing other rights to consent to medical care, enshrined in UK law in the Gillick competence.

I don’t think the pill is a perfect solution for everyone, but I know it has saved countless lives and been transformational in the lives of even more. I also know that access to it has been a way of controlling people's bodies, predominantly women. Likewise, the denial of puberty blockers in addition to hormones to trans people is used as a way of controlling - and attempting to eradicate - them. Trans people and women are often placed in opposition to one another but the right is pursuing the control and regulation of both.

The internet is an incredibly hard place to have nuanced discussions about such topics. I want to be able to say ‘I think people should have better access to informed consent when starting medication because many people especially women and especially women of colour are not given proper information’ and that doesn’t mean ‘this medication is bad and doctors who prescribe it are bad’. That’s the same rhetoric that got us bans on abortions and restrictions on trans healthcare. But, people should know the pros and cons and be allowed to make informed decisions about consequences, either way.

When I told people what had happened, they assumed that my negative reaction was to sertraline, not to the absence of it. Some had shunned meds altogether, some people had particularly adverse reactions. Many found themselves eating their words, a tad, on discover of the fact that - no, actually - this works for me. It’s worked for me for about six years now. It’s the not having it - and having the information about side-effects of coming off - that was the problem.

Community saved me, this weekend, as it often does. A neighbour had some left lying around in a drawer and ran them over to me. I feel like I should caveat I don’t recommend sharing medications, but I also don’t recommend going cold-turkey on a medication that basically keeps you alive and functional. Given the roll-backs we’ve seen on other essential healthcare and the shortages we’ve seen for other essential medication like HRT and ADHD medication in recent years, I suspect we are all going to be relying on each other more and more.