Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker

Author:Robert Whitaker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science, History
ISBN: 9780307452436
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2010-04-13T10:00:00+00:00

Greg

A math and science whiz, Greg, who asked that I not use his last name, was the sort of child who, when he was in junior high, built a Van de Graaff generator from scrounged parts (which included a vacuum cleaner and a salad bowl, to be precise). However, he had a troubled relationship with his parents, and at the start of his senior year, he began to slide into a mad state (and without having used illegal drugs). “I was delusional, very paranoid, and full of anxiety,” he says. “I was convinced that my parents were trying to kill me.”

Hospitalized for six weeks, Greg was told he was schizoaffective with bipolar tendencies (a “manic-depressive” type diagnosis), and he was discharged on a cocktail composed of two antipsychotics and an antidepressant. But the drugs didn’t chase away his paranoid thoughts, and after he was hospitalized a second time, his psychiatrists added a mood stabilizer and a benzodiazepine to the cocktail and told him he needed to give up his scholastic dreams. “They told me I would be on medication for the rest of my life, and that I would probably be a ward of the state, and that maybe, by the time I was twenty-five or thirty, I could think about getting a part-time job. And I believed it, and so I began trying to figure out how to live with the crushing hopelessness that they are telling you is going to be your life.”

The next five years passed pretty much as his psychiatrists had predicted. Although Greg entered Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts, he was so heavily medicated that, he says, “I was living in a haze most of the time. Your mind is just a bag of sand. And so I did really poorly in school. I rarely even left my room, and I was kind of out of touch with reality.” He petered along in school for a couple of years, not really making much progress, and then, from 2004 to 2006, he dropped out and mostly stayed in his apartment, smoking marijuana constantly, as “it helped me accept the condition I was forced into.” Six feet, five inches tall, Greg’s weight went from 255 pounds to nearly 500 pounds. “Finally, I said to myself, this is ridiculous. I’d rather be crazy and have a life than not be crazy and not have a life.”

He went for a medical checkup, thinking this would be a first step toward reducing his medications, only to be informed that he needed to stop taking Depakote and Geodon right away, as his liver was shutting down. The abrupt withdrawal induced such physical pain—“sweats, joint and muscle pain, nausea, dizziness,” he says—that he didn’t even pay attention to whether his paranoia was coming back. But in very short order, he was off all of his psychiatric drugs, except for occasional use of a stimulant, and he had also stopped smoking marijuana. “Honestly, it felt like I was waking up for the first time in five years,” he says.

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