Keep calm and take your medication

I’VE always been a bit anti-medication. I’m not an anti-vaxxer — I think those people are dangerous — nor do I think a crystal is going to heal me. I’ll take a few paracetamol if I have a blinding headache but in general, I’m a natural deodorant (all the others have aluminium in them to block your pores!), anti-consumerist, recycling type of gal with a tendency towards treehugging. With the mental health roller-coaster that is Covid-19 (and, if I care to admit it, long before coronavirus) I’ve been feeling low… I’ll stop beating around the bush — I’ve been depressed.

After things came to a head a few weeks ago, I had to go to the GP, who took one look at me (a shuddering, snotty mess) and wrote me a prescription for anti-depressants with a side of Xanax for emergencies. I made the mistake of Googling my new meds and found horror story after horror story of drowsiness and weight gain. The first night I took one of each as directed and they knocked me out. I slept for 12 hours straight, although I wouldn’t call it sleep: it was more like a caveman came up behind me, swung his club, knocked me out cold and dragged me back to his cave. I had epic and unpleasant trippy dreams — in one I was writing a Tolkienesque moving book/sculpture made from malleable marble and chocolate; and then there was a violent, visceral Hieronymus Bosch-style brawl in the car park. In another, the members of Westlife were singing Mandy to me from the top of lamp-posts in Dublin.

For the first 10 days, I walked around like a zombie: no thoughts, no intentions and definitely no sense of humour. But I stayed the course and two weeks later I started to feel different — no, different is the wrong word — more like back to my old self.