I haven’t written much, or maybe anything, about my love affair with Lexapro, which is the brand name for the SSRI escitalopram, which is basically a glammed-up version of Celexa created so that the pharmaceutical company would have a "new" drug to sell at retail once the patent on Celexa ran out — which is a long-winded way of saying that I’ve been on anti-depressants for almost a year, though in my case I think the drug regulates my obsessive tendencies, which un-medicated can get pretty unpleasant, much more than it does anything for my depression, which is pretty mild.
I mention it now just as a sensationalistic intro to the suggestion that you read this essay, by Justin Smith, about his philosophical wrestling with what psychopharmacologicals, of which he’s taken many, have to say about the nature of human existence.
I have chosen to write about this condition not out of desperation –no, the drama of it was all played out years ago, and now I am nothing if not stable–, but rather out of a sort of calling, rare for me, to enter into identity politics. I am tired of all the stupid things I hear said about my fellow depressives. It was not so long ago that Jesse Helms, or perhaps Strom Thurmond, described Jean-Bertrand Aristide as a confirmed ‘psychotic’ when he learned of the Haitian president’s Prozac prescription. My fellow philosophy professors thoughtlessly invoke ‘happiness pills’ as the easy way out for the philosophically lazy, while the general public seems to perceive antidepressants as a crutch for the frivolous, as a Hollywood indulgence, as a symptom of privileged frailty. This moralistic condemnation is usually counterbalanced only be the equally unsubtle medicalistic reduction of our emotional lives to chemical imbalances. I am neither crazy, nor lazy, nor is my state entirely explicable in terms of a certain disequilibrium of fluids. I am a depressive, which is to say a person who experiences the world in a certain way. Now I am every bit as materialist as the cynical doctors who paid for that billboard, yet I dare say that when I talk about my depression what I am talking about is nothing other than my ‘character’.
I’m not quite sure I get all of Smith’s points, but I think depression is fascinating topic to gaze at through the masculinist lens not just because we know, from science, that men are much less likely to seek treatment for depression than are women, and not just because I have some experience of it, but because depression can be particularly destructive when it intersects with some of the inhibited ways that men engage the world. It strikes at the heart of perhaps the greatest of the masculine delusions — the idea that we can control ourselves, the world, our fates.
To accept that prescription for meds is, at its worst, to deflect all responsibility for self-control, self-improvement and self-awareness onto the scapegoat of brain chemistry, but at its best it’s to accept, in a healthy way, that it’s an enabling technology, and that it’s okay, sometimes, to be helped.
