Happy pills and Covid jabs

I would like to introduce you to my new friend, Harriet the happy pill. (Crocheted by Littlest Pip Knits if you would like a little friend of your own.)

Harriet cheered me up at a time when I needed it, and weirdly gave me the strength to write this blog that has been rattling around in my head for a while.

The bad old days

Happy pills and I are BFFs now, but we have had a rocky relationship in the past. I thought I’d put our issues behind me, but lately I’ve been getting reminders of the bad old days every time I read an article online or scroll through my social media feeds, and it’s all tied up with the Covid-19 vaccine.

Every time I see comments along the lines of “we don’t know what’s in it” “we don’t know what the long-term effects will be” “Big Pharma is going to microchip my goldfish”, it throws me back to the late 90s/early 2000s, to the first time I stopped taking my meds.

Hello, my name is Anna and I’m on drugs

Quick backstory for new followers. I was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety and depression, when I was 15 years old. It was in the mid-1990s, at a time when mental health wasn’t something people really talked about. It was debilitating and scary, but having a diagnosis was huge for me. I received treatment through a youth mental health facility, which included counselling, cognitive behavioural therapy, exposure and response prevention, and medication.

The medication I was on was well-known, well-judged and well-mocked. Fluoxetine (good old Prozac) was a common treatment for depression at the time, but a therapeutic dosage for OCD was a LOT.

Doing my research

Fast-forward to my first years at university. There were a couple of studies from the US doing the rounds and getting a lot of airtime. They were generally along the lines of Prozac being over prescribed to young people and potential terrible side-effects we didn’t know about yet. Suddenly my happy pills were all over the news, on talkback radio and discussed at parties.

It freaked me out so I started to do a bit of ‘research’ of my own. This was pre-Google so a lot of this was information cribbed from magazines and the various email newsgroups I’d signed up to. I was typically suspicious of authority and big corporations and got a lot of my information from websites like Disinfo and Indymedia. They were great sites, but ones that you needed to take with a grain of salt. Problem was, I was scared, and there wasn’t a salt shaker in sight.

An ‘informed’ decision

So I read and I read and I read. I terrified myself with the thought of side-effects down the track. Would I become infertile, or turn into a zombie? Would they change my personality? I started mistrusting the meds. I didn’t understand what was in them. Were they addictive? How much money was Big Pharma making out of me?

Long story short, I stopped taking the pills, and I was fine – until I wasn’t. About six months down the track my world came crashing down around me. The OCD was back with a vengeance, I dropped some of my classes (TBH I was never going to pass ancient Greek anyway), I struggled being around my friends and classmates, and even myself. I was in a pretty dark place.

Learning to trust

With the support of those closest to me, I learned to trust Big Pharma again and got my life back. Over time my happy pills have changed size and shape and colour and brand. I’ve experimented with taking less, and gone through phases of thinking I don’t need them, before quickly realising that I do. I’m now in a place of acceptance and thankfulness. My happy pills don’t change who I am, they keep me being me. I still don’t really understand what’s in them, but that’s okay, I trust those who do.

I guess what I want to say is that I understand the fear and confusion and mistrust around the vaccines. I’ve been there. It’s a scary leap of faith to put your life in the hands of something with so many question marks around it, but sometime you just have to trust the experts.

Boats don’t break, people do

I don’t understand the mechanics of how a plane is put together, and I still get flutters when I go on one, but I also trust the people who maintain it enough to accept it’s not likely to fall out of the sky.

When it was us and Wildflower in the middle of the ocean, I never lost faith in the boat. I was scared, but I knew Paddy knew her inside and out, and I’d seen him fix her so many times. I didn’t understand how he did it, but I trusted him. One of the things he often said, when it came to stories about people ending up in danger because they’d bailed out of a perfectly solid boat in scary conditions, was “boats don’t often break, but people do.” In this situation, I see the vaccine as the boat that will sail us through this, and I’m going to trust the boat.

I’ve never been good at taking advice anyway

I really did agonise about writing this blog. I’ve seen what happens when people speak up on this topic online. They get attacked, by people who are angry and scared.

My mental health was a bit more delicate than usual this lockdown and I wasn’t sure if I could handle that. When I talked to people about wanting to write this, and my fears, some said “don’t do it. You don’t have to put yourself through that.” And for a while I thought the same. But every time I hear an argument that mirrors one from the 1990s about my happy pills, it’s like a punch in the guts.

It was my decision to eventually trust the unknown back then, but that was a decision that impacted just one life, mine. This decision affects not just me, but so many around me. So many people I love and don’t want to lose. We are so privileged to be where we are in terms of this disease. When I think of my friends overseas who have had it, and who have lost people to it, it strengthens my resolve.

Taking fear in hand

I’m hoping putting this out into the world will help make the punches less winding for me when I see “do your research sheeple” comments on things, but I’m also hoping it helps some of you who are scared and on the edge of trust.

I am very cynical about a lot of things and have a healthy distrust of propaganda, but I also know there are times when you have to take that fear in hand and trust the experts. That’s why they do what they do.

I’m going to leave comments open on this for a while, but if they get toxic or anyone gets attacked, I will close them. This is my space and I will do what I need to to keep my readers safe. Please respect that.

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