This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!
Transcript:
More than ten years ago, I was the target of a massive hate campaign that started online and moved into the “real world” to the point where people were trying to SWAT me and my family, threatening to sexually assault, rape, and/or murder me, and blackballing me from the lecture circuit where I got my rent money. It was a whole thing. I won’t bother with the details but if you wanna hear more about it, I wrote all about it for Slate.
I have a really thick skin. It’s a point of pride. My superpower, even! But I have to admit that as the campaign dragged on for months, and escalated to the point that I had to hire private security to give talks (mainly thanks to one guy who eventually went to prison for shoving his own mother down the stairs, which is fun), it eventually got to me. I noticed that I was experiencing really severe stomach aches and nausea that made it really difficult to eat or to do much of anything besides curl into the fetal position.
But that wasn’t a big deal, because I knew what was wrong! Many years ago when I was finishing up my last exams of college while trying to leave a horrific boyfriend who I lived and worked with, the exact same pain and nausea happened. I went to a doctor who told me I had acid reflux, so he prescribed me a medicine called Prevacid that took away the pain immediately, and when my prescription ran out I had graduated from college, quit my job, dumped my boyfriend, and moved to the other end of the country with no health insurance so I just stopped taking it and the pain didn’t come back.
So I marched off to a doctor, described my problem to him, and asked for a prescription for Prevacid. My new doctor patiently explained that there were a few issues with my request. For a start, Prevacid was now available without a prescription. And secondly, he said, it was pretty obvious that my problem was NOT acid reflux, but severe untreated anxiety that led to acid reflux and thus my debilitating stomach pains.
“Oh,” I said, “that’s interesting. A friend of mine once gave me half a Xanax and it WAS great, so I’ll have a prescription of those, too, thank you very much.”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I’m putting you on an anti-anxiety/anti-depressant called escitalopram, or Lexapro.”
I fought back, arguing that I didn’t need to take a pill every day when the anxiety only became overwhelming once every OTHER day and sometimes only a few times a week. But he convinced me to try it for a month and see what happens.
You guys? That man changed my life. I came back a few weeks later and he asked how things were going. I said, “This shit fixed things I didn’t even know were wrong. For instance, I used to regularly lie in bed at night and a thought would pop into my head that I was going to die one day and there is literally nothing I can do about it, and despite the fact I can’t do anything about it, I would spend the rest of the night quietly freaking out about it. I just figured that happens to everyone who doesn’t believe in an afterlife. The human condition. But after a few weeks on this pill, the same thought would pop into my head but then I’d just go, oh well, and roll over and fall asleep. What the fuck!”
I’m still on that same minimum dose of escitalopram more than a decade later. I tell you all this not to say that fixing mental health issues is always that easy–lots of my friends had to try several different medications and toy with the dosage and deal with nasty side effects and some of them still haven’t found the right solution. And it’s not to say that medications like escitalopram, known as SSRIs, aren’t being improperly or even over-prescribed–maybe they are, but that’s a complicated subject that’s debated amongst experts.
All I’m saying is that for me, personally, this particular SSRI has greatly increased my quality of life with zero negative side effects thus far, and I’m not the only one: systematic reviews like this one from Cochrane consistently find that SSRIs (and tricyclic antidepressants) are effective for treating depression in high quality studies compared to placebo. We still don’t know HOW exactly they work (recent research suggests it isn’t simply thanks to one of those “S”s, “serotonin”), but they absolutely do work for many people, just like me.
And so for me, if, say, a brainworm piloting a nepo-baby flesh mecha tries to take them away from me, I will personally take up arms and form a militia to unseat the fascist regime. Or I’ll curl into the fetal position and give myself alcohol poisoning. One or the other. I haven’t gone more than a few days without the SSRI in all this time so I’m honestly not sure how things will go.
Anyway, yes, I’m talking about all of this today because the Republicans are absolutely, without a doubt coming for the medications we use to manage our mental health in the same way they are coming for birth control and vaccines. And they’ve flipped a coin to determine how they’re going to do it: is it to stop terrorism or to save the children? The coin landed on “save the children,” which is lucky for them because they’ve been blaming “mental illness” for the past several decades of domestic terror so taking away our happy brain drugs would be a tough sell in that light.
They will be saving the children by reconsidering whether or not pregnant people should be allowed to take SSRIs, starting with a panel stacked with people who support RFK’s idea of science, which is to say, “morons.” Nine of the ten people on the panel did nothing but fearmonger and lie about the effectiveness of SSRIs, while the tenth (the only person present who actually specialized in the topic at hand) tried in vain to argue for the actual science, which shows SSRIs to be safe, effective, and overall the less risky choice for many depressed people who would otherwise be at high risk of completely losing it thanks to pregnancy hormones.
“The others insisted, with just as much of a sense of authority and certainty, that the medications were ineffective and that they caused miscarriages, hemorrhaging, autism, ADHD, cardiac birth defects, fetal alcohol syndrome, and other frightening outcomes.” The president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists responded by calling those claims “outlandish and unfounded,” because the consensus of experts have found that the only relatively common risk is that some newborns experience a few days of poor sleep or inability to eat. And that would be stressful for new parents! But not as stressful as going through a pregnancy with severe depression and suicidal ideation.
The administration didn’t just happen to compile a panel that was 90% fear mongering over SSRIs. It’s all part of their larger eugenics program, in which it’s perfectly fine that people die or are disabled by otherwise treatable conditions, because many of the Republicans now in charge genuinely believe that they deserve it, and removing them from the population will improve humanity. Just like the Nazis! Those who don’t genuinely believe in that are happy to go along with it if for no other reason than potential cost savings. Just like the Nazis!
In case you aren’t aware, it wasn’t just Jewish people targeted by Nazis during the Holocaust: atheists, homosexuals, transgender people, and yes, people with physical and mental disabilities were also killed en masse. The Nazis established a database of people with disabilities, just like RFK, Jr. has called for, and instituted the “T-4” program, which saw those deemed unworthy of life moved to death camps where they were gassed, shot, or injected with poison. Hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities were murdered. Another three to four hundred thousand were sterilized.
But don’t worry, I’m sure that can’t happen here! In other news, a few days after the anti-SSRI panel, Donald Trump released an Executive Order titled “ENDING CRIME AND DISORDER ON AMERICA’S STREETS,” in which he ordered RFK, Jr. and the Attorney General to enact a policy of “encouraging civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public.” You may have heard about this EO as it relates to homelessness because it’s also trash in that regard, calling for homeless people to be disappeared into private facilities or, well, who knows where? But it also plainly states that you can now be committed involuntarily to an asylum if some goon in a mask determines you aren’t, say, dealing well with the sudden loss of the medication that helps you live a full and happy life.
So yeah, that’s where we are at this point in America’s fast track to fascism. If you are concerned about maintaining access to your medication, please talk to your doctor and to your Congresscritter. Who knows if they’ll do anything about it but at least maybe you can annoy them a bit while they’re on vacation doing whatever it is Congresscritters do these days. Investing in private asylums, probably.
