1
My name is Rachelle Henryka Ingerson, and I’m addicted to my antidepressants.
There are no groups for people like me. There are no programs for people like me. There is no support for people like me. I’m simply told to stay on the pills for the rest of my miserable life, despite the side effects, because I get five-times-worse side effects when I go off them.
2
It’s called Effexor, and it was wonderful at first.
I was manic. I was high. I was living the life, completing five weeks of homework in five days, getting the entire football team in my bedroom because they couldn’t resist my personality, doing these ingenious speeches off the cuff rather than practice them and still getting marks of a hundred on my public speaking assignments, cleaning my and all my friends’ houses until their toilet bowls and windows and patio doors and stainless steel fridges shone like the sun. I hosted a spectacular party and danced for seven hours on my grandpa’s dining room table. I laughed and smiled through the lectures and scolding and hating I got from my family for hosting said party. I hacked into Dad’s email and sent a letter of rejection for a good-paying job overseas to his boss. I sneaked out to Six Flags after being grounded and went on every single ride.
I told complete strangers my family’s dirty laundry.
I asked my history teacher out on a date.
I spat in the most menacing bully’s face when he went to bother someone.
I ate nothing; I was too busy to eat!
3
Everything was wonderful.
Everything was remarkable.
Everything was stupendously, gloriously, enormously, hilariously beautiful and colorful and flavorful and bountiful.
Everything was fantastically, phenomenally, unreally, unusually perfect for me, if not perfect.
I threw caution to the winds. I threw tact to the birds. My survival instinct went out the door and my ability to sense danger went down the toilet.
I went to Las Vegas and married my history teacher. I was eighteen by then, so I was allowed.
4
Where did this all start? Where did my depression go? It went to pot, or rather, was replaced by Effexor.
I never smoked pot.
I didn’t want to smoke pot.
I don’t want to smoke pot.
I never did anything else either, and didn’t want to. Effexor, I reasoned, was safer.
NOT.
5
My brain could finally manage math assignments, and manage them easily. It could finally manage breaking up with my boyfriend from the football team and explaining that it was because I had married my teacher, and it managed this tactfully and gracefully and joyfully. It could even manage dropping out of high school, ironically with honors, and it managed this feat absolutely faithfully and hopefully.
My brain and I moved in with Gordon and got a job as a morgue attendant, which was a good thing, because Gordon lost his teaching job over me, and I needed to put all my infinite energy into loving him and loving on him and lovingly working to support him.
6
He was blackballed… he lost his right to teach.
We couldn’t make ends meet, so he lost his house. Cheerfully, we moved into an apartment.
We were picked on by all the college students living in the building, who had been taught by him. Energetically, I came up with comebacks that were both snappy and happy, for all their comments.
Our apartment eventually got broken into and Gordon’s journals stolen. And then Gordon was in jail. Because unbeknownst to me, sneakily, he had been fucking younger students for years. And written all about it.
I divorced Gordon. Happily, I went back to my old boyfriend, Alain.
Alain slammed the door in my face. Hilariously, I opened the door again before he could lock it and poured my hot McDonald’s coffee in his face.
The cops arrested me for assault. Heroically, I talked them out of charging me with aggravated assault.
7
Once upon a time, there was a brain cell. It didn’t have enough serotonin, norepinephrine (also called noradrenaline) or dopamine. It was sad and understimulated and bored and unmotivated and scared and depressed.
The brain cell beside it had too much serotonin, noradrenaline and dopamine in it. It had sucked all of it up from the synapse, more than it could ever use, leaving none for the one beside it.
Then along came a drug called venlafaxine… Effexor. It blocked the entrance to the second brain cell so that there was more serotonin, noradrenaline and dopamine in the synapse for the first, and still enough for the second.
Now both brain cells were happy instead of just one of them.
This repeated itself all over the brain in question, with different brain cells.
The brain in question was mine.
8
“It’s like she has no conscience,” I heard my brother telling my aunt one Christmas day. “We tell her off, and she doesn’t get appropriately sobered. She has this big smile on her face. I think she’s on drugs.”
“I don’t know. Your parents should search her room,” my aunt Barbara said.
Search my room?
I started to laugh.
Startled, they turned around and saw me.
Guilt on their faces.
The reason I was laughing was because if they searched my room, all they’d have found was the Effexor.
7
“You are not moving out! You are not ready! Remember the last time you moved out? It was with a pedophile!”
“I was eighteen. He was not a pedophile.”
“You were his student!”
“If everyone followed the rules, there would be no love in this world,” I retorted. “If nobody dated their coworkers, because it wasn’t allowed. Or if nobody dated their students, because it wasn’t allowed. Or if nobody dated their patients, because it wasn’t--”
My mom looked stricken at that last example. Her face clouded over with shock. She knows me well enough to know that I use examples from my life more often than not.
“Rachelle, did you have a relationship with your therapist?”
Even manic as I was, I knew enough to lie and say no.
9
It was my psychiatrist, the one that gave me the Effexor.
It started when I told him I was part of the school choir, and he asked me to sing him something.
I sang him Lady Marmalade, complete with the “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?” and some appropriate-- or not-appropriate-- gestures.
It was then that he couldn’t resist any more.
10
Even I know that he gave me the dosage increase in my Effexor on purpose so I’d get more manic and fuck him.
Fuck him I did. On the couch, on the table, on the chair, on the desk, on the floor, against the wall, hanging out the window. Against the bookcase, knocking a shower of books onto us including one called Bipolar Disorder For Dummies.
Maybe he was manic too.
11
I was subpoenaed to testify against him in court, but I refused to say anything bad about him on the stand and maintained that he was innocent.
The judge threatened me with jail for obstructing justice.
My huge amount of happiness and confidence turned to an equal amount of anger.
“Fuck you!” I said to the judge, and I ran out of the courtroom.
I went to my friend Iris’s house, but she wasn’t there.
I went to the Greyhound station to buy a bus ticket to New York.
That’s when I saw the empty bus with its door open.
Ladies and gentlemen, I stole that bus.
12
I drove it into the city. New York.
I didn’t get stopped. Even if I had, I luckily had that class of vehicle on my license thanks to my taking of extra driving courses (and French courses, and math courses, and world religion courses, and psychology courses, and computer programming courses) when I was hopping manic (which I still was the day I stole the bus).
I knew some people online who lived in New York. People from a Facebook group about psychology who became my friends when I joined their group with questions about a project. I was doing my project on bipolar disorder, because better to write about what you know, right?
My friends online all, thus, had bipolar disorder.
I figured they’d understand.
12
They’d understand about being prescribed the wrong meds, getting manic and digging oneself into a hole of horrid, disgusting, sinful humiliation.
Wouldn’t they?
Oh well, I’d try them all.
13
Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know which one called the cops on me, but I think it was Juna.
I never trusted her, so I saved her for last.
Unfortunately, when I had arrived at Byron’s place, his mom answered the door and told me Byron was in the hospital.
When I arrived at Diane’s place, I found the door open, with an eviction notice still stuck to it, and most of her stuff gone.
When I arrived at Sherry’s place, her husband told me she was out of town at an event.
When I arrived at Nikolai’s place, he told me this wasn’t a good time because his wife had just died.
So I went to Juna’s place.
Stupid, stupid me.
14
I’m writing this from jail. I write to Jan, my ex-therapist, too, who is also in jail.
I’m starting to come down from my manic ways. I don’t like it. I’m dreading the shock I will get one night while trying to sleep, when I realize what I did.
This is not going to look good for any employer.
I’m gonna have to buy a pardon, but those things are expensive. How will I get the money for one if I don’t have a job?
I’ll have to charm one of my friends, I guess.
Yes, I’ll do that.
I go to sleep feeling a bit better, but not much.
15
Nobody will hire me.
I’m stuck at my parents’ place because no job means no money which means no apartment.
I leave and go to a day center for people with mental health issues just to get out of the house, to get away from those awful people who tell both me and each other that I’ve got no conscience.
And that’s when I see the pamphlet.
16
It’s advertising itself as a commune, a respite, a camp in the mountains, a farm, a village, a community, a gathering place, a convention.
Where there are animals and fruit trees, vegetable gardens and workshops, classes and jobs, for people of all ages and backgrounds and nationalities and races and genders and sexual orientations, who have any and every mental health issue or neurodivergence under the sun.
I see it simply as a way out.
17
The parking lot is full of laughter.
The buses have already started their engines; it’ll probably soon be time to get on.
I’ve already made friends: Hettie from Montreal, Ruth from Houston in Texas, Celine from Erie in Pennsylvania, Miraleh also from Montreal.
We stay together so that we can get on the same bus.
Suddenly someone calls Hettie’s name. Hettie runs at the person and jumps into his arms.
“Mike! Is that really you?” Hettie says.
“It’s me, hon. It’s me. I got out last night,” Mike says.
I’ve heard about Mike from Hettie. Hettie told me they met in the psych ward and did activism together. Now, they’ve got a job writing in the commune newspaper and doing outreach for the commune, getting people to join, going all over doing speeches and inviting people on board. It was Hettie who answered the phone when I called the number on the pamphlet, Hettie who gave me the time and place to meet and the list of what to bring. It was Hettie who assigned me to the classrooms at the camp to teach, because I’ve taken so many courses. I’m also to be a car and truck driving instructor for teenagers. (I got my license back last year.)
Ruth has her two children with her; she recently escaped her abusive husband who would lie to psychiatrists about her making her seem dangerous and incompetent when she was neither. She won her children back in court and now is going to be the daycare lady at the camp.
Celine has her own amazing story that got her an investigative journalist job for the camp. She and her friend Keira (who’s still in the hospital) managed to sneak cameras into the hospital and document abuse. It was all over the news.
Miraleh and Hettie know each other; they were both recruited by Mike at the same time to join the International Incident Instigation Initiative, the organization that runs the camp. Miraleh has her own adventure to tell about: she escaped from the hospital during a fire but then they were all caught and sent back to a locked ward and she had to get involuntary electroconvulsive therapy. Miraleh’s husband Bob was another one of those patients that escaped and was caught; that’s actually how they met, and he’s here with us too.
This is going to be amazing.
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