An Elegy for Years Lost

For the past ten months, I have been living through a form of suffering so extreme, so protracted, and so totalizing that I would once have struggled to believe it possible. I am 29 years old, and I can say now, without histrionics and without exaggeration, that medication made me sicker than I ever was before I touched it. What I have endured in benzodiazepine withdrawal has not been a difficult patch, nor a rebound of the symptoms for which I was once treated, nor some dramatic but ephemeral spike of instability. It has been an ongoing neurological, cognitive, psychological, and spiritual dismantling. It has hollowed out my life from within. It has reduced my world to terror, dysfunction, and confusion. It has made me acquainted with manifestations of mental anguish I did not know the human organism could sustain without dying.

I have been on antidepressants for fifteen years. Benzodiazepines entered the picture ten years ago, largely to dampen the hell unleashed by reckless changes made by doctors to the cocktail of pharmaceuticals I was prescribed. Then came more drugs: antipsychotics, sleeping aids, Lyrica, gabapentin, adjunctive antidepressants, stimulants prescribed to offset the lethargy of the antidepressants and the sedation of the benzodiazepines. One medication was used to treat the fallout of another; then another was added to treat the fallout of that one. What was presented to me, over years, as a necessary treatment protocol to counter lifelong conditions now appears in retrospect as a long pharmacological chain reaction, a slow and devastating departure from myself. Each new layer was framed as imperative. Each new deterioration was explained away as a further illustration of sickness. Each injury I incurred was laundered back to me as proof that I required further intervention.

And because I was desperate, because I was suffering, because I was told by people in white coats and with polished titles that these drugs were the only barrier between me and collapse, I believed them. I just wanted to get on with my life. Faith in my own judgment was eroded significantly, because how could a diseased mind know what was best for it?

What is unbearable now is not only the suffering itself, but the grief engendered by the awful clarity that has followed in its midst. Things that once felt mysterious, shameful, or altogether intransigent now make terrible sense. I was once a very high-functioning, high-achieving student, an ideal student in many respects, and yet over the years my life became increasingly unmanageable in ways that I simply could not comprehend at the time. I could produce extraordinary work, but only through grotesque expenditure. I would toil for hours and hours and hours over papers that should not have required such a degree of torment. I wrote sixty-page essays in states of paralysis and brute-force overcompensation because my executive functions were shutting down and no one recognized it for what it was. What looked from the outside like obsessive perfectionism or scholarly intensity was oftentimes something far more insidious: a mind no longer able to regulate itself, a brain that could no longer initiate, organize, prioritize, or complete tasks naturally, and so had to drag itself across the finish line by main force. It was like smashing my head against a brick wall. And it happened over and over and over again. No matter what I did to overcome such inexplicable, Sisyphean torments, they would repeat, and I would then frantically apologize for my own inability to get beyond them.

The real-world consequences were devastating. I stayed in university for far longer than I should have. I lost years. Years. My life did not proceed cleanly forward; it snagged and stalled and fractured around problems no one could explain except by appealing to the very diagnoses for which I was already being medicated. I dropped out twice. I came terrifyingly close to institutionalizing myself. I sought help again and again and again, not because I was resistant to treatment (as I can only now perceive), but because the treatment was producing progressively worse problems that were upending my whole life. Yet every time I returned in distress, the same interpretive machine was waiting for me: this was my depression, my anxiety, my pathology, my incurable condition. The drugs were not suspected. The drugs were the solution. Always the solution. Never the accused.

I was gaslit by the system as a whole. That is the plain truth of it. I had dozens of consultations with top psychiatrists, psychopharmacologists, psychologists, people with credentials, prestige, self-purported certainty. I was repeatedly induced to believe that I was simply very ill, that I had an especially obstinate case, that I would likely need treatment for life, that I had some essentially intransigent depression or anxiety disorder that required permanent pharmacological management. When I would advocate for myself, I was flatly dismissed, as though my objections were a transgressive act of disrespect. What I was not encouraged to consider, what no one seemed willing to entertain in any serious way, was that the treatment itself might be generating, amplifying, or entrenching the very dysfunction for which it was being ostensibly prescribed.

And because that possibility was kept off the table, I internalized everything as personal failure.

For instance: Why could I not pack for a trip like a normal person? Why did it take me nine hours to do something other people seemed to do almost automatically? Why would I stand in absolute paralysis before a suitcase, unable to sequence the simplest decisions, unable to gather and order and execute, until I would literally miss flights? This had never happened before, but had suddenly become an inexorable ordeal. Why did the smallest practical tasks begin to feel like impossible, almost metaphysical obstacles? Why did folding clothes, cleaning my room, making a bed, sorting through belongings, or preparing to leave the house begin to feel like debacles requiring an entire day's worth of strained cognition and emotional depletion? These were not eccentricities. They were not features of my native personality. They were not childish deficiencies or moral failures. They were real, excruciating impairments, and they emerged in a life that had not once looked like this before medication entered it.

At the time, I could not understand it. I did not know how anyone moved through the world with such apparent ease. I did not understand how a person could decide, begin, proceed, and complete. Those functions, which should have been inconspicuous in their seamlessness, had become wrecked enough in me that normal life itself began to appear outside the realm of possibility.

And now, after ten months of benzodiazepine withdrawal, I understand that this was a severe and prolonged injury, borne of harm that I had unknowingly been inflicting upon myself. It was the result of a nervous system and a cognitive apparatus being deranged by substances that I had been told were helping me.

The acute phase of withdrawal was unspeakably violent. I do not know how else to say it. My mind was in such a cacophonous whirlwind of delirium and agony that I can barely remember those four months now, which is a small mercy. It was as though my body had become electrified with dread. I was not merely anxious; I was saturated in terror. Every waking moment was grating and gruelling. And when I slept, I had dreams of the most horrible, grotesque, unimaginably gory variety. My limbs would thrash and flail. For half a year, my sheets were drenched whenever I woke up.

After everything I'd already endured, I still did not imagine that suffering of that magnitude was even possible. It was cellular. It was ambient. It was the atmosphere in which I woke and in which I lay down. It was unremitting. My skin burned as if I had been flayed. Stillness became difficult, sometimes intolerable. Rest did not restore me. Sleep did not permit me any tranquility. There was panic, but also something worse than panic: a sustained state of internal emergency from which there was no exit, because the emergency was not in the world. It was in the tissue of experience itself.

My mind became almost unrecognizable to me. My thoughts lost coherence, were hijacked by intrusive portents of horror. Memory became unreliable. Attention shattered. Language, which had once felt native to me, began to recede. I began to stammer. Words would not come. Fluency vanished. I could hear the diminished quality of my own speech and feel the humiliation of it in real time. I became socially awkward in ways that were foreign to my nature, not because I had suddenly become someone else in essence, but because the bridge between thought and expression had been damaged. Conversation, which had once been effortless, had now become a site of strain, delay, self-consciousness, and inward panic. I have felt cognitively mutilated by this process. That is not a figure of speech. It has felt as though the very faculties by which I had known myself, verbal quickness, clarity, subtlety, intellectual agility, the power to follow an intuition and bring it cleanly to its realization, had been blunted, obstructed, or intermittently confiscated.

This has been among the cruelest dimensions of it, because it has not merely caused pain. It has altered my self-experience. It has made me feel estranged from my own mind. It has made me fear that what was once most intrinsically mine could be chemically degraded. There are forms of suffering one can bear while remaining inwardly intact. This has not been one of them. This has affected my basic conception of myself. My personality. My confidence. My sense of inward continuity. It has degraded the very trust I am able to place in my own capacities.

It subverted basic functioning in ways I never would have thought possible. There were days when the smallest acts of ordinary life felt beyond me: tidying a room, returning a message, making a plan, beginning a task, reading a few pages of a book, watching a film, holding a coherent thread of thought, remembering what I had just done, leaving the house, experiencing the passage of a day with any emotion besides agitation. When people speak casually about "brain fog," they have no idea what this can mean at its worst. It is not haziness. It is the collapse of executive order. It is the wholesale degradation of one's own agency.

The most horrifying aspect may be the duration. Acute torment is one thing. Ten months of it is another. Ten months is long enough for suffering to cease feeling episodic and to become cosmological. Long enough for one's entire life to be reorganized around symptoms. Long enough for fear to become habitual, for hope to become effortful, for one's sense of the future to warp. Long enough to begin wondering, with real seriousness, whether one has been fundamentally altered. Long enough to watch the world continue while one remains trapped in an invisible, unrelenting disaster.

And yet even in the midst of this, something has become clear.

What I have been in search of for years is not another pill, another combination, another elegant psychopharmacological adjustment, another explanation for why I supposedly remain hopelessly ill despite treatment. What I have been seeking, blindly and desperately, is the condition in which I lived before I ever touched these drugs. Before the antidepressants. Before the benzodiazepines. Before the antipsychotics, the sleep aids, the adjuncts, the stimulants, the compensations, the counterweights. Before my life became a laboratory of adverse reactions and rationalizations. Before my suffering was multiplied and then redescribed as evidence that I needed yet more of the compounds that were hurting me.

That is the condition I want back. Not perfection. Not mania. Not chemical transcendence. Not some fantasy of constant happiness. Simply my own original mind, my own original faculties of thought, my own original humanity.

And that is why, after ten months of this unremitting benzodiazepine-withdrawal hell, I have determined that I must now come off 300mg of Pristiq. The thought terrifies me. I do not say this cavalierly. I say it with full knowledge of what medication withdrawal can do to a person, because I have already been dragged through one of its infernos. But I also know this: if I do not follow through with this now, I may never do it. Once I finally heal from this debacle, if I finally heal enough to feel some measure of safety again, the memory of this horror may itself become the reason I stay trapped. I may tell myself it is too dangerous to touch anything, too formidable a prospect to risk another collapse. And then the rest of my life will still be inflected by the very substances that have cost me so much.

I cannot accept that.

Medication was supposed to help me. Instead, over fifteen years, it estranged me from myself, degraded functions I once took for granted, and produced forms of anguish, impairment, and terror that I would never have thought possible. I sought treatment for progressively worse problems that upended my whole life, and I was told those problems were manifestations of the illnesses being treated. I asked for help while becoming more disabled, and the answer was more medication. I lost years to this. I lost the sense that ordinary life was something I could naturally inhabit.

I know now that so much of what happened to me was not a moral failure, not laziness, not weakness, and not some mysterious incapacity at the core of my being. It was the long, disfiguring consequence of drugs I was told I needed, prescribed by people who would not consider that the treatment itself might be the source of the devastation.

That is the horror of it: not merely that I suffered, but that I suffered on account of being misguided. Not merely that I deteriorated, but that deterioration was incorporated into the logic of more treatment. Not merely that I was injured, but that the injury was interpreted as proof of my underlying brokenness.

I am 29 years old. I should not know what it is to have one's nervous system turned against itself like this. I should not know what it is to feel my cognition, personality, and daily functioning altered in ways I could never have anticipated were possible.

But I do know.

And if there is anything left to salvage from this, it is the truth that has emerged from the wreckage: that what I have wanted all along was not to be chemically managed forever, but to be returned, insofar as that remains possible, to the life and mind I inhabited before these substances entered my bloodstream and remade my suffering into something far more monstrous than what first brought me to treatment.