Lab Rats Aplenty

At Dr. E’s request, I started getting some personal counseling and attending a class in Dialectic Behavioral Therapy - DBT - so that I could learn better coping strategies for dealing with the distress I was forced to live with for the time being. I found myself in a room with several women that I would have, not long before, thought were very different from me. These women struggled with bipolar disorder, various personality disorders, addictions, run-ins with the law, abusive relationships, you name it. These were people that some might have considered the dregs of society, cast-offs from polite circles. In the passage of time, I was to discover that we were not so very different, not me and them, and not anybody else.
I felt a renewed sense of anger at the pharmaceutical companies, and the medical profession, as I watched these women who went from drug to drug - and I mean the legally prescribed ones - hoping for something to make their pain go away. I listened to the ways that the drugs failed them, the days spent in bed because they felt too dopey to do anything, the anxious days, the hopeful days when they thought something could actually help them, and the terrible crashes when those hopes were dashed. I empathized with them as I wondered how anyone could be expected to keep up appearances with such a barrage of chemicals going through your system for years and years. I kept thinking how much we, as a society, had failed them, how much we had failed ourselves.
I felt it wasn’t just the drug companies, but also the societal expectation of quick fixes in our modern world. If something is broken, you fix it. If something hurts, you take a pill. If the pill doesn’t work, then we don’t want to have to deal with the mess. We want everything neat and tidy, and if it’s not, it gets shoved into the closet where nobody has to look at it. Or in the nearest mental institution, if that’s were the mess can best be hidden. I was grateful that had not been my lot, but also mindful of how easily it might have been.
I also became mindful of just how easy it is to compartmentalize people into set ideas of what sums up their personalities. Even amongst those few professionals and laypeople who really understood the difference between schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder, which was rare enough, there seemed to be a tendency to label a person - depressed, narcissistic, passive/aggressive. I became both fascinated and appalled at the readiness to stuff a person into her niche and leave her there. Nobody said anything to me about being anything other than depressed, having some anxiety, but because I was analyzing myself so much, I wondered if they didn’t think I had borderline personality disorder or co-dependent tendencies or Munchausen's syndrome. I thought, even if these were on the mark, which I didn’t think was really the case, there was so much more to me than that. I had gotten through so much hardship in life just out of sheer tenacity and a strong sense of my center. Where had that all gone, and why? I kept coming back to the impact of the Effexor.