Furiously Happy - excerpt

When I went on my first antidepressant it had the side effect of making me fixated with suicide (which is sort of the opposite of what you want). It's a rare side effect so I switched to something else that did work. Lots of concerned friends and family felt that the first medication's failure was a clear sign that drugs were not the answer; if they were I would have been fixed. Clearly I wasn't as sick as I said I was if the medication didn't work for me. And that sort of makes sense, because when you have cancer the doctor gives you the best medicine and if it doesn't shrink the tumor immediately then that's a pretty clear sign you were just faking it for attention. I mean, cancer is a serious, often fatal disease we've spent billions of dollars studying and treating so obviously a patient would never have to try multiple drugs, sugeries, radiation, etc. to find what will work specifically for them. And once the cancer sufferer is in remission they're set for life because once they've learned how to *not* have cancer they should be good. And if they let themselves get cancer again they can just do whatever they did last time. Once you find the right cancer medication you're pretty much immune from that disease forever. And if you get it again it's probably just a reaction to too much gluten or not praying correctly. Right?

Well, no. But the same, completely ridiculous reasoning is what people with mental illness often hear... not just from well-meaning friends, or people who were able to fix their own issues without medication, or people who don't understand that mental illness can be dangerous and even fatal if untreated... but also from someone much closer and more manipulative.

We hear it from ourselves.

We listen to the small voice in the back of our head that says "This medication is taking money away from your family. This medication messes with your sex drive or your weight. This medication is for people with *real* problems. Not just for people who feel sad. No one ever died from feeling sad." Except that they do. And when we see celebrities who fall victim to depression's lies we think to ourselves: "How in the world could they have killed themselves? They had everything." But they didn't. They didn't have a cure for an illness that convinced them they were better off dead.