Is The Purpose of Life To Go Through It Without Medicine?

Yesterday I ran into a  friend and she confided that her 15 yr old daughter, who is a friend of my son's, was not doing well.  Her grades had dropped, she was uncharacteristically irritable, and she spent long hours in her room alone.  She turned down invitations to socialize with family and friends.  A man standing nearby said, "Sounds like depression to me.  Depression....or drugs."

I opened up about my son's depression.  She was incredulous when I told her that my son had struggled with depression and anxiety since before the age of 8.  She never would have known, she said.  Of course not: we cannot guess what is really going on in the heart of another person, even the ones in our own homes.

We talked about antidepressants, and I told her about my initial fears and my attempts to treat the depression with counseling and fish oil and gymnastics and wrestling and St. John's Wort. ANYTHING but a pill.  There were strategies, right?  There were tools and good counselors, and we would figure this thing out!

But through all these methods, I could see that my son was still isolating himself at home and at school.   His anxiety was keeping him awake long after he had gone to bed and waking him up long before dawn.  He had stomach aches daily, and often I had to force him out the door to school.  Nothing in our life had changed.  He had a good teacher, friends, and he wasn't being bullied.

But he could not do the things he wanted to do.  For example, he wanted to play little league basketball, but on game days, he would cry and fret and not be able to get out the door.  He was irritable and overwhelmed by very small tasks.  He was not the person I knew him to be.  I mourned the loss of the son I once had


We finally (after a 5-month wait), got into a child psychiatrist, who changed our perspective.  He said something to this effect:

"There are people with mental illness that go through life without taking medicine, right?  So I want you to ask yourselves: Is the purpose of your life to go through it without medicine?  Or is the purpose of your life to do as well as you can do?"

That doctor gave us the courage to give our son a very small dose of Zoloft and to watch and see what happened.  During that appointment that doctor also persuaded my husband to try medicine for his never-before-treated depression, something that I had been begging him to do for nine years.

That was in the spring of 2006, and I remember Thanksgiving of that year vividly.  As my family went around the table saying what we were most grateful for that year, there was one thing on my mind:  ZOLOFT!  Of course I was still hiding and projecting perfection, so I made up something else to say, but antidepressants had changed our family dynamics drastically, and I was grateful to God for allowing medicines to be developed for mental illness.

Mental illness is an illness.  Not a lack of will power.  Not a consequence of sin.  Not something that can be snapped out of.  Not something to be ashamed of.  But boy, our society shovels shame onto mental illness like we shovel Ben and Jerry's ice cream into our mouths.