Zoloft
This one is personal...
This is a narrative of the night after my first dose of my first psychiatric medication. It was Zoloft. I was a teenager. It did not go well.
Welcome to the Frontier Psychiatrists newsletter.
September 29th, 1995.
I woke up at about 3 AM. Maybe it was four. I had a clock next to my bed. It was triangular when you looked at it, end-on. It was about 8 inches long.
It had a cassette player built-in. It had a radio built-in. It had a deafening alarm. It had bright red digital numbering. The time was somewhere between 3:00 and 4:00. AM. I was 16 years old. I was very, very awake.
I had taken my first dose of Zoloft that night prior. I was depressed—or at least the night before, I was very depressed. Now, I had energy. I was awake. I didn't know what to do with it. I looked up. My eyes followed the canted ceiling of the third-floor room, with the high, peaked ceiling, till the dim red light from my alarm clock bounced in just the right way to allow my eyes to come to rest. They stopped, for a moment, on the wood of the bed frame. My bed had four tall posts. They were painted a dark green. They were made of pine. They were about 7 1/2 feet tall. I was not 7 1/2 feet tall. It was like a princess bed concept was co-opted by something deeply male, teenage, and desperate.
In my room, a ceiling like a cathedral rose to a point in the dim red light of the alarm clock’s LED. It was an implausible ceiling. I pretty regularly had trouble sleeping. This was different. I wasn't tired. I was awake. I got out of my bed. In my youth, I was very thin.
I weighed 119 pounds. I was 5'8" tall. I was wearing pajama bottoms, and I had taken off my shirt. I have these old, ratty square floor pillows. Feeling restless, I got out of my bed and laid on them. I was squirming and moving back and forth. This restlessness was novel. In fairness, it was novel then. At the age of 44, I've been restless many times since. If I had known that restlessness would continue, I might not have been so casual about the experience of restlessness at the time. It is awful.
I was very awake. I should've been asleep. This medicine was doing something. I didn't know what, but it was something.
Two weeks earlier, I finally told my mom I wanted to die. I had wanted to die for a long time. She got me an appointment with a psychiatrist. I don't remember this person's name. She had curly gray hair. She was in her late 60s. As I remember it, she didn't ask good questions, but I don't know anything she asked.
I remember she prescribed sertraline— Zoloft—and I dutifully took 25 mg. My mom and I picked up the prescription about two weeks later, and now I was awake. One dose in. At 3:45, now. Torture danced in my mind as my legs moved back and forth. And…back.
I was in love. That's what I told myself. I was in love. And she didn't love me back. And that was torture. That was a story I could Believe. Catherine was my age. We both attended the same high school. She was a boarding student. I was a day student. She played piano beautifully. It's more beautiful than I could stand. She didn't know what I thought. At that age, you don't tell anyone what you think. Because you're too worried about what they're going to think. I remember spending a lot of time worrying about what Catherine would think.
She had been through a lot. It's one of the reasons she spent so much time practicing the piano. It was a place for her to think. It was a place for her to be. It was a place for her to talk to me. It was a place for me to fall in love.