Pop another pill, and leave all your cares behind

Your monkey’s messing with that medicine
And you’re beat down with the jones
(I got the cure–you want it?)
I see ya sweating shaking your body’s aching badly
Feel the fever in your bones now
(Oooooooh sooo sick)

Baby theres no need to go under
With D. Wayne’s number woman you’ll be feelin free

I wonder why (no I don’t) medical professionals never speak of psychiatric medications in terms of addiction.

I have always prided myself upon my resistance to addiction. There has never been anything but nicotine I couldn’t quit with relative ease, and even that was a breeze once I foreclosed the other option.

But man, Lexapro has beat me down and done me in and enjoyed it. For reasons that aren’t immediately germane but are annoying in the extreme and may warrant examining elsewhen, I was told to quit taking the stuff. That was about two weeks ago. Yesterday, I said “Fuck it; where’d I put the stash?” More or less that’s what I said, anyway. And I feel sooooooooo much better today.

In the larger scheme this is not a great tragedy because left to my own devices I wouldn’t have stopped taking the stuff; it’s just that having stopped, I expected things to go swimmingly. More than that, really; I never gave a thought to the possibility that they mightn’t, and I never made the connection between the drug and all the weird physical shit that descended upon me when I stopped taking it.

That’s in part because the psychiatrist, the good shrink, the one I like, the one who rescued me from the bad shrink (after some blandishments and histrionics), didn’t tell me about the 50-50 chance that the gates of hell might yawn wide before me, and in part because stuff like that simply doesn’t happen to me. I was very nearly shocked (that’s a pun!) when I finally resorted to calling the appropriate medical authority and learned that I might be beat down with a jones.

So here’s the score: The drug made me feel better than I did before I started taking it (the first of its kind to do that). When I stopped taking it I felt horrible, in an astonishing panoply of manners—pancreas broke? thyroid broke? thermostat broke? gyros (the stabilizers, not the Greek pita delights) broke? brain broke?—for weeks. Within hours of restarting it, I felt almost back to normal, such as that may be.

That there, my friends, is an addiction. And if ever comes a time when I think quitting really might be a good idea, I’m going to look back at these past few weeks and think long and hard about whether I want to go through that again, because it was a contest and that drug won it in a stroll.

Lyrics courtesy of the Reverends D. Wayne Love and Larry Love of Alabama 3, the greatest country acid house gospel band of all time.

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