I recently resumed anti-depressants after a few months pause due to insurance lapse, took a tiny THC gummy, and watched the Pixar film Luca with family. The night greeted me with the most fantastic dream, and I woke up feeling like I actually slept for once.

The anti-depressants are working. Let’s talk about them.

Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional. This content is only my personal experience and should not be considered medical advice.

The journey to anti-depressants is guided by the psychiatrist, not to be confused with the therapist. They play a complimentary role to make the client/patient feel better through different means.

The therapist tries to diagnose the source of the problem through past experiences, whether insomnia, anxiety, depression, and teach ways to better address them. For me, it means invoking the image of Gordon Ramsey when I’m being too harsh on myself. It was difficult initially but became easier after some practice. Where this breaks down are cases where my mind spirals out of control and becomes this hot ball of anxiety, auto-piloting towards the most self-destructive thoughts. After a few of these episodes, my therapist suggested that I seek additional help from a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist has a very different approach, and seem to care little about the source of the problems like childhood trauma but rather the symptoms that are currently manifesting. From this understanding, they prescribe some combination of drugs from their vast arsenal, and see what happens. The “see what happens” part might not induce confidence, but this is because the same drug can have vastly different effects on each person: one person might become less anxious and another more. Same goes for other attributes like insomnia, energy-level, etc. Potency is another factor. The psychiatrist might try drugs of the same class that are more or less potent, and at different dosages too. Since the only way to find out how a drug affects an individual is through actually taking them, with the ultimate objective of finding a combination of drugs that works with accepted levels of side-effects. For some, this may require multiple rounds of trials spanning months, for others, the combination might just work on the first try. I was one of the luckier ones.

I filled my prescription as soon as they were prescribed. But before even taking the drugs, I spent hours researching them due to caution and suspicion. Medical websites (those that say you have cancer from everything), and Wikipedia were good for high-level overviews about the medication and the potential side-effects. For personal anecdotes, I turned to Reddit (try queries like <drug name> site:reddit.com on Google to limit the search results to Reddit). They were quite fascinating. For some, the drug had no effect until a higher dose was prescribed; for others, the drug simply did not work or caused other side-effects. Some reported more anxiety and others less, but the experience overall was pleasant. I was also curious about how it interacted with other substances like alcohol, since this class of drug usually comes with huge warning labels about alcohol interactions. Despite the labelled risk, many people reported having no problems with a few drinks. I started experimenting in controlled settings, started with just half a drink at home, gradually increased dosage, and fortunately have yet experienced side-effects.

So how does it feel? My mind generally feels clearer. It’s hard to explain, but before there was always this fogginess, like waking up sleep-deprived despite having slept regular hours every night. I also experienced no bad episodes where my mind spiraled out of control since starting the drug. Specifically, while triggering episodes still occur, instead of consuming my mind entirely, I felt there was enough mental capacity left for intervention and introspection, that instead of going straight into the auto-pilot of doom, I was actually able to use the tools taught by my therapist. Another interesting aspect is how I approached entertainment: I seem to crave less for quick dopamine boosts, but instead cared for activities that have longer term payoff such as writing. One thing I want to do now is to write everyday for at least 100 days. This is a start, and we’ll see how far we go.

As for Luca the film, I mostly wanted to share the delight I experienced. Maybe one day I will write an actual film review. For now, I’d say just watch it. Thank you for reading.