What does it feel like to experience severe anxiety and depression?
Why is there so much stigma around treating it?
In the fall of 1985, my life was pretty darn good.
We moved into a cozy one-bedroom bungalow on Queen Anne Hill with a view of Lake Union.
My ears buzzed, my leg muscles spasmed, and my throat closed.
What was worse: I did not know where not even who I was.
“Take me to the hospital!”
“We’re in a new place,” he said, donning his therapist hat.
“It’s normal that you might at times feel scared.”
He managed to coax me, still shaking, back into bed, where he held me tight.
With him at my side, I tossed and turned until dawn.
You haven’t been going to church enough!"
My father, a surgeon, said I was too smart to need a shrink.
And so it was in late January of 1986 that I fled home to my parents in Phoenix.
I returned to Seattle and began treatment with a gentle, compassionate Dutch psychiatrist named Johan Verhulst.
It would be my secret my hidden struggle for the next 30 years.
Because I remained in the closet about my condition, I felt a tremendous sense of alienation and shame.
Little did I know that I was hardly alone in my distress.
One in 4 American adults approximately 61.5 million people experience mental illness in a given year.
Fifteen million people in the U.S. live with major depression; 42 million suffer anxiety disorders.
For me, getting healthy was a difficult and gradual process.
For months my symptoms swept in and out like pernicious tides.
I’d be lost in a fog numb and dull.
Indeed, merely anticipating what I saw as the next inevitable bout of panic seemed to bring one on.
To live without all the angst was worth the side effects.
A year later, I was feeling better but still fragile.
Boomers like me, struggling through the middle of our lives.
I am well aware that they were never designed to be taken indefinitely.
Doctors typically recommend a six- to nine-month course of treatment, or until well after symptoms have subsided.
That’s half my life.
But there are many unanswered questions: Are we longtimers risking our health in ways yet to be established?
Does open-ended pill popping represent a chemical crutch or a rational approach to a chronic illness?
Are the meds addictive enough to discourage getting off them?
Or, to put the questions in personal terms: Should I be worried?
Most conceded that SSRIs and other antidepressants can be extremely difficult to withdraw from.
“They then assumed they were getting sick and rushed back on.
That might be the wrong answer.
Some people need a long and slow taper to come off.
These drugs should never be stopped cold turkey.”
Tell me about it.
He recommended a very gradual decrease in my daily Prozac.
Overly confident, I immediately cut my dose by half.
