Sometime during the first year of the pandemic, the lockdowns had eased in Newcastle, and I was having drinks with some girlfriends. The topic of antidepressants came up, and I realised that I was the only one among them who wasn't on some kind of drug.
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Mildly disturbed, I began researching the topic and found several articles highlighting mental health problems spiking during the pandemic, and with them, the rise of antidepressants. Concerns about overprescriptions, antidepressant addictions and their side effects are growing as well. Of surveyed OECD countries, Australia is ranked in the top five countries for antidepressants consumption. It's right up there with Iceland, Portugal, Canada and Sweden.
On a personal level, I worry that widespread mental health issues are a sign of a society disconnected from each other and nature. More and more people told me they were on antidepressants. I felt like I was the only one in Newcastle who wasn't anxious and depressed.
Four locals talked openly with me about their mental health journey.
CRAIG HAMILTON
Craig Hamilton is an author, public speaker and broadcaster. He's one of the few men I know who are willing to talk publicly about their mental health.
"It's because we [men] are conditioned that way. From the time we are small boys [we're told] to be strong to not show our emotions, to be tough and when we are hurt not to show it. If your sister hurts herself it's okay for her to cry. If you hurt yourself, it's not okay to cry because you're a boy. That's no negative reflection on any parent, that's been just the reality." Craig says.
Craig finds that men don't want to be confronted with anything to do with mental health, particularly depression.
"We have this view that to talk about it is a sign of weakness, so we don't talk about it. The suicide rate in Australia is more than double the road toll every year. The number one killer in Australia of men aged 20 to 45 is suicide ahead of heart disease, cancer and road accidents," he says.
Craig is happy to break the cycle with his own story, which he has told many times. He became severely depressed in 2000 at the age of 37. He'd never been on medication before but his level of depression was so bad that immediate action was required.
"I felt suicidal. I finally got to see a GP and the GP diagnosed clinical depression straight away and prescribed an antidepressant, a drug called Lovan. I felt worse across the first week. I thought 'This drug doesn't work'. But after a week, I started to feel better," he says.
It took him a month to get over being suicidally depressed and get back to being normal.
"I learnt one thing, antidepressants worked; they worked for me," Craig says.
He later found that he wasn't just a person with depression. He also had bipolar disorder, a totally different illness, where you not only have the depths of depression but also manic highs.
The doctors believed the antidepressant he was on triggered a manic episode, not an uncommon story for people with bipolar disorder. He ended up in the hospital where his medication changed straight away.
"I was taken off the antidepressant. I was no longer depressed; I hadn't been for over a month. They said 'This guy doesn't need antidepressants'," he says.
Then he went on Epilim, an anticonvulsant and mood stabiliser which levelled his mood out and became part of his medication regime. He's been on it 22 years, and he takes it twice a day.
"It's been very good. It's worked and there's been minimal to no side effects," Craig says.
However, there is an important side step that happened during that time that's worth mentioning.
"It got to a point, I think this is true of many people with bipolar, you miss the highs," he says. "Either consciously or subconsciously, when your mood is elevated, you feel fantastic. After seven years of good stable health, I decided no I didn't need Epilim anymore."
He didn't talk to a doctor about it at all.
"Craig knows best," he jokes.
Six months later he had another manic and psychotic episode. It took six months for that episode to occur, but the bottom line is, according to Craig, it was Russian roulette. He ended up in the hospital.
"For the record, I didn't go completely off the meds, I would take them here, take them there," he says. "What you need to do with this type of medication is to be within the therapeutic range. And a lot of people with bipolar do have a bit of a game with it."
Since that experience Craig's changed his tune around taking meds. He's accepted that depression follows the mania, so if he can control the high he can avoid the low. When he wasn't properly medicated, that's when he became unwell.
He also strives to eat well, sleep well, relax, manage stress and have a good work-life balance.
"It's a multi-pronged stay-well plan," he says.
MARCELA DEL SOL
Marcela Del Sol is a mother, a writer, a feminist activist and a community educator. She is completing a Master Degree in Criminal Profiling and Forensic Psychology. She has a special interest in victimology and gender and crime.
Originally from South America, she first began developing depression after arriving in Australia in the mid-1990s. She was diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorder and began taking antidepressants. In 2013 she was diagnosed with PTSD and Dissociative Identity Disorder. For this, doctors prescribed her a variety of pharmaceutical drugs which she struggled with. Frustrated with Australia's mental health system, she felt the medical industry had no cultural perspective. She's seen that discrimination and stigma are inextricably linked to how mental health is dealt with, and she believes those are the issues that should be eradicated, beyond the embellishment of political discursiveness.
"I feel that I was trapped into a medicine world, where treatment was assessed by monocultural standards where I, as a patient, had no participation in and where healing was never even a part of the discussion," Marcela says. "Being under the microscope for behaving in a way that in my original culture is normal but here is rapidly pathologised. It just breaks my heart. I feel that I have been mishandled and thrown around for so many years, that I'm just a normal person who experienced complex trauma. Dissociation is a symptom of complex trauma. I was treated as a label, not by what I was expressing. There was no willingness to tap beyond the symptomatology. There is an evident lack of cultural and gender perspective in medicine; they often infantalised me."
Marcela was unhappy with the medical system here, but she found peace every time she returned to her home country. In late 2018 she went to South America and was so desperate to find a solution she tried a plant-based psychedelic alternative after a trusted friend who had also been affected by trauma recommended it. Since then she has not experienced dissociation in the same way as before.
Being in therapy with a psychologist in South America has helped her manage her mental health.
"I was very scared coming back to Australia, because most of my worst triggers are here. I of course started experiencing extreme anxiety. It was situational; I have gained the capacity to identify and reason the emotions I feel. I am a lot more comfortable with them," she says, "and a lot stronger to face certain memories I have been recovering."
She came back to Australia and continued to take Lexapro, but in April of 2022 she was prescribed Sertraline and experienced terrible depression and thoughts of suicide, the worst she'd ever been through. She was breaking off friendships and not sleeping. The doctors encouraged her to up the doses. When she complained to a psychiatrist, she was told she had "treatment resistant depression."
"I don't believe treatment resistant depression exists. It's the lack of willingness of doctors to look into the origin of trauma, it's cheaper for public health to extenuate and subdue, than to meticulously examine, I believe," Marcela says. "I think public mental patients are at the bottom of any medical hierarchy."
She was offered a medicine that bipolar people take, that works for people with treatment resistant depression. She was told, 'if you develop a rash, you just have to run to the ER.' She felt the doctors were simply trying to subdue her, and she didn't take it.
In August, she went off all medication. She quit over weeks and experienced terrible withdrawal symptoms; she felt like she was spinning all day long.
"I knew that nothing had provided me with remarkable changes, no therapy, no medicines. In a sense I wanted to cover myself, shield myself from possible further mental afflictions," she says. "I left the medication, and I haven't felt the need to see any doctor other than a GP and my online psychologist. I feel cleansed. Even at a physical level, my skin is so much brighter."
She knows drugs can save lives, but she hopes one day modern medicine will have a more profound sense of humanity adjunct to it.
"I felt as if this drug [Sertraline] was poisoning me, changing me for the worse and I don't want anyone else to suffer like that because it's blatantly awful. My weight has dropped a little bit, my libido has come back from an extended holiday," she wrote on her Instagram.
Her advice to anyone struggling with the medical system is to explore alternatives and not undermine the power of human connection.
"In my experience I can tell you that a large percentage of mental patients are victims of loneliness and the disconnection that's so natural in predominantly capitalistic societies. We go back to this argument about taming people into repressing emotions since they are born, to be able to sustain yourself on your two feet, and to accomplish all those goals of significant material value but no one is paying attention to, or allowed to voice what is happening inside. The glorification of independence as a symbol of status and strength displaces us from community, which is of tremendous importance for wellbeing" she says,
ISABEL WHITTLE
Isabel Whittle is in her mid 20s. She moved to Newcastle when she was eight. Her entire life she's experienced bad anxiety, and at the age of 12 she was put on medication for depression. She went through different types of medication and dosages until she was 24.
"It got to the point where it didn't really feel like it was doing anything. It would feel like when I would say I'm struggling with my mental health, they'd say let's up your dosage. Let's try some new drug," Isabel says of the mental health practitioners
She was seeing so many different mental health professionals and she remembers one counsellor once even told her she just needed to "try harder".
At 25 she was on a high dosage of a drug called Pristiq, when she received an autism diagnosis. She realised everything she'd been dealing with her entire life were symptoms of untreated autism.
Now in her adult life she's learning what it's like to be off medication. She is bothered by the fact that for so much of her life she was on medication she didn't need.
"I know with things like autism, we've come a long way and there may not have been that information available when I was younger. I do wish mental health professionals would have taken more time to get to the root of the issue rather than saying we're going to try this medication, instead of upping my dosage," she says.
Isabel felt like many practitioners never wanted to consider any alternatives or delve deeper into the problem. At some points, the medication did help although it felt like a band-aid. At other times she thinks the drugs made her worse and made her more depressed.
The autism diagnosis changed everything.
"I found out that a lot of my issues stem from basic things like sensory needs. Really really loud sounds really really upset me. I was sort of numb to it epically with the medication. I just knew that I was uncomfortable which caused me more anxiety. Things like clothing material, really bright lights, the more attuned I become to these issues the less I feel the anxiety. It helps me take myself away from situation that will cause this to happen," she says.
Growing up she thought something was fundamentally wrong with her and she planned to "white-knuckle" through life.
"Getting the autism diagnosis, everything clicked into place. I realised why I was the way that I was," she says.
RUS KIRCHNER
Professional golf caddy and marketing manager Rus Kirchner is originally from the US. He moved to Australia in 2007. For him, the hardest part of the mental health battle is finding the strength to get help. His wife Elizabeth Cumming was crucial to getting on track with his mental health.
"It feels like the weight of the world is on yourself to fix yourself, but it's really about getting help," he says.
Rus has dealt with depression for many years. Particularly after COVID hit, he found himself struggling.
He and his family moved to Newcastle from Sydney over three years ago, and in Sydney he'd been seeing a psychologist who gave him some strategies to manage. When he moved to Newcastle he started exercising and mountain biking. It was great for his mental health until the pandemic.
"There was a disconnect as to what you see on the news and what's the reality with family over in the US. It seemed overwhelming; you had no control to help your family," he says.
Rus was on a mountain bike ride at Glenrock when he got a phone call about a friend's suicide. He started to associate cycling with the call. He became less active and went to see a doctor who gave him an evaluation and suggested he go on Lexapro. He felt Lexapro cleared his head and motivated him a bit more, from helping out around the house to being nicer to people.
"But then over time it felt more like a rock sitting on a log with a smile that was incapable of having a dynamic or creative thought. Being in marketing, you know, it's not great to have zero inspiration," he says.
He went back to his doctor and got another prescription with a higher ceiling so he could feel a bit higher with the same baseline. Called Zyban SR, it gave him the ability to have more creative thoughts and more openness. He's been on it for over seven months, and he is glad to get his emotions back.
Before the pandemic he used to caddy on the Asian golf tour and he found that sunshine, exercising, travelling and having a chat with everyone brought a sense of accomplishment and enjoyment in life.
He talks specifically about the benefits of caddying because it short circuits your brain activity. You have to be at the golf course at a certain time, you have to do the work to get through the day, and you're out in the sun and experiencing physical exertion.
"You don't have time to sit and ruminate on thoughts because you're kind of constantly doing things. I feel the most comfortable in life caddying. Being a little bit in that competitive end of the margin where you're hyper focused on the outcome, it's like solving a puzzle," Rus says.
