A couple of days ago while waiting for Tony I listened to an interview with Charles Barber on NPR. He was promoting his new book, Comfortably Numb; How Psychiatry is Medicating A Nation and making the case that antidepressants and other psych drugs are over-prescribed when therapy is more effective and shorter term. While it’s not been my experience that anyone not needing the meds is taking them (who would put up with the physical and sexual side effects if she didn’t have to?), I agreed with his point about direct to consumer advertising being detrimental, not, in my opinion, putting people on drugs they don’t need but in directing people to specific brands that may not be right for them.

As I said, I didn’t agree with him, but respected his position and his apparently honest intention to see people get emotionally healthy. But then talk drifted to his earlier book, Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors. In it he detailed his personal struggle with mental health, primarily OCD, and how medication led him out of the dark place into the light. It’s a courageous topic to tackle, and I applaud anyone who tries it.

But the cosmic dissonance between the two books rang all my bells.

Having recovered, or at least achieved stability, through drugs himself, he’s now on a crusade to stamp out “frivolous” med use by others. Talk therapy is good enough for others who are suffering, but not for him. He needs his drugs. He’s different from the average psycho on the street getting happy on Prozac and Effexor. His illness is serious.

I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and hypothesize that he’s never experienced depression and sees it as less of an illness than his OCD. Even though he’s a psychiatrist himself, perhaps he cannot empathize with the pain of the black well and sees the need for relief as less immediate. If so, I’m thankful he’s not my doctor.

But it is his ability to count himself as an exception to the rules he defines that angers me. What’s good enough for others isn’t good enough for him. He’s a fricking exception, just like every other sanctimonious jerk I’ve run across in my life who tells me that if I only “got religion” I’d be cured of my BPD, or if I’d just “think positive thoughts” and not wallow in my problems everything would be just peachy. As a doctor he ought to know that antidepressants are not some damn “happy pill” that plops the user down on some cheery little cloud above the fray. Instead, he gets paid to pen a book that tells the rest of us how weak we are.

Am I angry? You betcha. Am I taking it personally? Of course I am. From what I can tell the man doesn’t have a thought I haven’t heard before. People like him kept me from getting help for 30 years. I’m not likely to forget that.

So ignore this guy. If you hurt, see a professional. If she gives you meds, take them. If the first drug doesn’t work, keep trying. If you want to talk to a therapist about your condition, great. But do it because it eases your pain, not because books like this guilt you into passing up meds that can give you relief.

Escaping the well is what matters, not how you get to the surface. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.