Giving In

It will come as no surprise that I have always had a very dystopian take on psychotropic medication. I think that pill manufacturers are in league with the “powers that be” and they are using our fears into doping ourselves into complicity with their evil plot to take over the world and all the people in it so that they can take for themselves all the resources for themselves.

But I don’t limit myself to blaming the pharmaceutical industry. I go so far as to blame those of us who would medicate away the guilt and shame that naturally accrues on us as we are ground to death in this hyper industrialized machine. No, we would take the easy road and wish all those feelings away. We would convince ourselves that we aren’t unhappy because there are drones in the skies and we can’t trust anybody but because our lives are pathetic in comparison to those who profit off of these mechanizations. We won’t admit that we aren’t happy because we polish the same widget every day through the best years of our lives. We’ll blame ourselves and our friends and our families. We will destroy the things that should be most important to us long before we ever lose our jobs.

Worse than the pills is the way that the pharmaceutical industry has taught us to think about our lives. Having a brain is an amazing responsibility. Every one of us is a bipedal emotional super-computer. Our brains are the fanciest things nature has ever produced. Each one is so unique in its design and programmed with user specific life data as reduced through the senses and retained. This process induces behavior. I mean, that is some complicated shit.

But you can walk into any psychologist office this whole great nation over and within two hours tops leave with a prescription for your very own bottle of drugs that’s meant to change your life. The psychiatrist will determine the drug of choice and the dosage in a surprisingly short session of rapid fire questions with the goal of categorizing you into a few very broad categories.

Depression is by far the easiest category to fall into. Happiness is hard to come by these days and we all get the blues. I would submit that this world is fucked up is now an established scientific, mathematical fact. If you need a reason to be depressed you need but flip on your television and watch for one hour as the world unfolds before you.

You are trapped in a world that only wants to sell you things. You are no more to America than the amount of dollars in your bank account and all this nation seems to want are your ever diminishing dollars. To make it you have to polish an awful lot of widgets and nobody likes that. What’s not to be depressed about?

Luckily enough for me I’m a veteran so all my pills are free. In fact they were the easiest resource to get from the Veterans Affairs medical center in Detroit. I got pills from them faster than I got my food stamps. That is service. I was very fortunate to move through the system in the fast lane because my record has suicide written all over it. There were a lot of appointments with social workers and one extremely awkward trip to the Emergency Room. To digress, veterans, never go to the emergency room for psychiatric care. You will leave much worse than you came in.

After a week of these I met with a resident psychiatrist. We talked for about two hours about why I feel so dead inside. All this running has really soured me and it’s time for me to sit down and actually deal with myself for once. I need some distance from my constant self-destruction if I’m going to get any real work done. I just need to dial down the voices, my voice, enough so that I can hear the world again.

She conferred with her boss doctor and he came in to ask me some of the same questions again. Then they sent me down to the pharmacy.

If you’re ever feeling like you need a huge dose of reality take a trip to your closest VA pharmacy. Sit down and watch. This is the pharmaceutical industry at its best. This is art. This is science fiction.

So I’m giving in to the big evil machine because I finally realize that life would just be easier with more serotonin. It might turn me into a zombie. I don’t really care. My brain has produced anything valuable for at least two years and I’m kind of over it so I’d like to put it on the bench for a while and try to fix my body. Maybe learn to eat food like a person again. That’s something the mind tyrant has kept from me for almost ten years.

I’m going to use this blog to track the effects this submission is going to have on my mental activity. I’m sorry to anybody who reads these useless rambles. They’re just the best way for me to capture my mindset at any given time and save that for future reflections. Hey, and maybe get a little extra attention in the process.

Day one has been pretty nauseous. But also noticeably more quiet.