When I first started taking antidepressants, I felt… not ashamed, exactly, but that it was a temporary measure. More than that, I felt that it should be a temporary measure; taking “brain pills” was inherently unsustainable and undesirable. This belief caused me to taper off and eventually cease using them after about a year. I wasn’t feeling depressed anymore, so I figured “hey, I’m cured, time to ditch the meds!”

That was a mistake. Depression is subtle enough that it took a while before I realized that the medication really had been helping, and I was not in a good place, mentally. Between that realization and the quitting of the medication, I had quit my high-paying tech job with no real backup plan and moved back in with my parents. This wasn’t entirely due to depression but I think it played a part, and if I’d been on medication I may have stuck it out longer and put together a better plan before leaving.

This negative attitude I had towards mental-health drugs is mainly because I was thinking of the brain as something disconnected from the body, when it’s really not. It’s a complicated bundle of flesh, to be sure, but in the end it is just flesh. For years, I’ve taken a daily multivitamin supplement, and I’ve never considered that to be a crutch that I should seek to discard. I wear glasses to correct my horrendous vision, and although these glasses are far from “natural”, I have no problem wearing them, because they fix a biological defect I was born with. In the same way, I now see my daily dose of bupropion as simply fixing my biological defect of below-average dopamine.

If I end up taking these antidepressants for the rest of my life, so be it. I now realize that they, and other “brain pills” are no different than any other medical intervention. If they work, and the effects outweigh the side effects, there is nothing to fear from them. One shouldn’t close one’s mind to alternate treatments, of course, be it different medication or something like Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Just like I’ve been keeping an eye on the development of implantable contact lenses as an alternative to glasses.