Addicted Brains

Most people are not taking SSRI's to be safe, comfortable and secure. They aren't taking them to protect themselves from reality. In fact, taking an SSRI helps people gain a more realistic perspective and problem solve resulting in better functioning across all areas of life. Without the medication, they could be jobless, dead, or hospitalized. I don't think you have any idea what anxiety and depression feels like, if you did you wouldn't had written such a poorly informed post. Depression and anxiety is not reality, as you imply, they are actually distortions of realty that create all kinds of problems for people. Please do some more research on what depression and anxiety are, it's not just cowardess or discomfort. Your article is just another example of how some people dismiss the reality of mental illness, you might as well be saying people who are suffering from mental illness should pull themselves up by the bootstraps and snap out of it. It's the same mentality disguised by hippy romanticism. And this is coming from someone who would identify as a hippy. Let me just say that any discomfort or anxiety you felt on your trips, could never compare to the despair of long term depression or the life shaking experience of PTSD or OCD. I have met many many people tripping on acid or shrooms at Phish shows an I can tell you they are some of the very least. Open minded people I've ever met. Baby boomers need to get over themselves.

I think you make a very valid point -- although boxing and disparaging me as an indulgent baby boomer doesn't help it much. You're right about the importance of SSRIs for people who suffer terribly from depression, anxiety, and related disorders. And by the way, I've known plenty of depression and anxiety in my own life -- not long-term at clinical levels, but I've had some pretty nasty periods and a lot of helplessness.

My article set up a dichotomy and even a symmetry between LSD on one hand and SSRIs on the other, based on their opposite effects on serotonin levels. I think there's something important that this neurobiological phenomenon tells us about the psychological effects of these drugs. I think it's truly interesting that one pill makes you larger, and the other makes you small, so to speak. I've spent a lot of time and effort trying to make connections between brain and mind when it comes to drugs, and I detail my own struggles with depression and addiction in my book, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain. But I admit I took artistic licence with this article: I emphasized the contrast between these drugs in order to write a compelling and intriguing piece of journalism. I did not tell the whole story, and you are telling another side of the story which is also important.

I'll take this as a lesson learned. In fact, I'd like to do another post in which I look at SSRIs from a different angle. I can point out how the "comfort" bestowed by SSRIs is so necessary to relieve suffering, especially following the traumatic events that often precede depression and anxiety, and how they help people build crucial bridges back to a world with light and joy in it.

Thanks for listening and I am sorry for some of my harsh words. I've struggled with depression and anxiety all my life and the SSRI was the only thing that helped me. I tried meditation, yoga, vitamins, and in the end, that one tiny pill is what worked. In the meantime, I've heard people argue that there's no need for the medication for a variety of reasons from it being a placebo to putting everything in God's hands. These dangerous messages encouraged me to go off the medsfor 9 months and then I had a very traumatic episode where I could barely function. When I got back on the meds I improved greatly. So I am truly sorry, I'm just sensitive to criticism of SSRIs. Thank you.

I don't like that you are sticking MDMA in with SSRI drugs. Many people very interested in the "Door of Perception" are super interested in MDMA. In fact, it is very much a mild psychedelic for some users. Anyways, I like how you put SSRIs with "Instead of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, they help us turn off, tune out, and drop in – into a solipsistic safety zone, protected from too much reality." There has been a lot of research showing the SSRIs are actually just placebos with negative side effects as well.

Err... serotonergic psychedelics are 5HT2A agonists, not antagonists. They engage those receptors, not block them.

It's true that their effects are functionally opposed to SSRIs' effects, which over the long term desensitize the 5HT2A receptors and favor activation of the 5HT1A receptors. And it's true that MDMA is a more powerful 5HT1A agonist than the classical psychedelics or the SSRIs. But to be fair, it activates all the 5HT receptors because it's a releasing agent more than a selective receptor agonist.

At any rate, if you're going to interpret what MDMA tells us about ourselves then do it in light of its overall effects, not just those it shares with SSRIs. MDMA is well-loved for its enhancement of social connections primarily, and musical enjoyment secondarily. So I think it tells us that we miss having deep, meaningful experiences with other people. However, it also suggests that we may want to use those experiences as a way to avoid all the negativity in our lives, both social and otherwise.

I do think you're right that people crave change less nowadays. The world is so different now than it was 10 years ago, and we really have no idea what all is going to change over the next 10 years. So why would people need to drop acid to experience new things? New things are a dime a dozen in 2012.

If you want to talk about people desiring to escape change and uncertainty, what do you think about anxiolytic abuse or the increased use of diversionary entertainment? That discussion might be a bit more productive than one about SSRIs. To me personally, use of SSRIs represents little more than Big Pharma's capitalization on our difficulties adapting to environments that continue to move farther and farther away from those we evolved in. But I think TV, computers, and games are the new anxiolytics, and that in and of itself ought to say a whole lot about us.

By the way, all the criticisms of my above post are academic, not personal. I love this blog, and I'm a bit bothered that you keep getting negative responses to your posts. If it's any consolation, I think it just means that you're saying engaging, challenging things about emotionally rich topics, because contention is the natural outcome of that. It means people care about these subjects and they're paying attention to this blog and thinking hard about what it says. I applaud you for doing this, and for making public some of the difficulties you worked so hard to overcome.