Coming of Age on Zoloft Quotes

“When it comes to antidepressants in particular, there’s one more rumple: the American attitude about happiness. In this country, happiness is another ideal that carries nearly the weight of a moral imperative; as Elliott observes, there is an unspoken expectation in America that people should feel and act happy most of the time. Travelers to the United States often remark that in America, more than other places, cheerfulness is viewed as a default state, and that there’s considerable pressure to present oneself as upbeat. There’s also a peculiarly American belief that authenticity and happiness stand in a causal relationship to each other—that really being oneself will lead to happiness every time. Elliott thinks that this belief evolved from a loose interpretation of Freud, who taught that unhappiness was caused by repressions of various kinds: by that logic, the least repressed, most fully realized self would be the most happy. Americans possess, says Elliott, a naive trust that achieving perfect personal authenticity, a feat summed up in the popular phrase “self-actualization,” will result in the deepest possible contentment. So: Americans are supposed to be authentic, and we’re supposed to be happy. When happiness comes easily, this is not a problem. But for people who aren’t feeling happy and are contemplating antidepressants, it can make for tough choices. Is it better to take antidepressants and be happy (but maybe inauthentic, if you believe that antidepressants can temper the self)? Or is it better to press on, authentic but not happy? Either way, you’ll be failing to fulfill the script that American lore has laid out for you: be who you are, and happiness will surely and naturally follow. There’s only one way out of this bind, and it’s to believe that antidepressants make you more, not less, authentic. As it happens, this is precisely the claim that Elliott finds people make about a wide variety of enhancement technologies: people use a technique to alter a certain thing about themselves, and then speak about the alteration as something that makes them into, or expresses, who they really were inside all along. (For example, recipients of sex-change operations often describe them as a way to bring the physical body in line with a deeper reality. I always felt like a woman, and now I am one.) In short, people who use personal enhancements often speak like Tess did when she told Peter Kramer that, off Prozac, “I am not myself.”
― Katherine Sharpe, Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down, and Changed Who We Are – Investigative Journalism on Psychiatric Medication and Identity

“Elliott argues that enhancement technologies fascinate and aggravate us because they alert us to a contradiction in our national value system. On the one hand, America prizes success, and life here is organized around the heated pursuit of it. America is a democracy with a high degree of social mobility; we’re all searching for anything that might give us a competitive edge over our neighbors. (We are also, most likely, looking over our shoulders at whatever our neighbors might be using to get ahead, simultaneously judging them for using it, and wondering where we can get some ourselves.) On the other hand, Americans are also devoted to the idea of personal authenticity. We believe it’s important to be our “real” selves and are ever fearful of losing touch with our inmost natures in the push of worldly ambition. Self-discovery and self-actualization aren’t just enjoyable activities; they’re social demands. In America, Elliott believes, we tend to think of life as a never-ending process of figuring out “who we are” and then striving to live in such a way that we can enact the interests and proclivities that make us unique. This focus on the self as a guiding principle may partly stem from the secular nature of our society. In America since the late nineteenth century, Elliott writes, “finding yourself has replaced finding God.”29 Being who we really are is nothing short of a moral imperative—maybe the strongest one we modern Americans have. These two drives—on the one hand, to succeed; on the other hand, to be who you really are inside—often come into tension.”
― Katherine Sharpe, Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down, and Changed Who We Are – Investigative Journalism on Psychiatric Medication and Identity

“This was the dilemma of cosmetic psychopharmacology: we wanted to be happy but we worried that maybe there was something even more important than happiness that we’d unwisely be giving up in the bargain.”
― Katherine Sharpe, Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down, and Changed Who We Are – Investigative Journalism on Psychiatric Medication and Identity

“She believed that children attempt to soothe their fears and insecurities by resorting to their imaginations, beginning to picture a version of themselves that embodies all the traits that the child, or the people around her, find most admirable. By adolescence, these imaginings begin to solidify into the image that Horney calls the “ideal self.” Our ideal selves are the smartest, the kindest, the shrewdest, the most lovable—depending on how we want to see ourselves. But what starts out as a protective fantasy quickly becomes an instrument of self-torture too, giving rise to the tricky system of inner conflicts and secondary insecurities that Horney called neurosis. Specifically, she wrote, neurotics suffer from the strain of their own doomed quest to become the superhuman image they have created. They flagellate themselves with a barrage of statements that include the word should. The “shoulds” are the demands that must be satisfied in order to transform the neurotic person into his idealized self—and his failure to live up to them leads to the slow, seeping growth of self-hate.”
― Katherine Sharpe, Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down, and Changed Who We Are – Investigative Journalism on Psychiatric Medication and Identity

“Karen Horney was a German psychoanalyst who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. I hadn’t heard of her, and I’d been looking for something else when I found her book Neurosis and Human Growth wedged into a bottom shelf next to some of the heavyweights of twentieth-century psychology, but its strange old title called out to me, and on a whim I took it home. Horney’s premise was that, in childhood, most people suffer from the feeling of being small and powerless in a dangerous world; she considered the feeling so common that she called it “basic anxiety.”
― Katherine Sharpe, Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down, and Changed Who We Are – Investigative Journalism on Psychiatric Medication and Identity

“we wanted to be happy but we worried that maybe there was something even more important than happiness that we’d unwisely be giving up in the bargain.”
― Katherine Sharpe, Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down, and Changed Who We Are – Investigative Journalism on Psychiatric Medication and Identity