So quick disclaimer, both my wife and I are on the Autism spectrum, we both figured this out far too late in our 20s and have been working to re-frame our mindsets about it to understand ourselves better.
Recently, she reached out to a Psychiatrist for adhd and PMDD symptoms and was immediately clocked as ASD and prescribed zoloft to help long term with PMDD syndromes.
The first night was absolute hell of mood swings and discomfort so I was looking more into SSRIs, previously all I knew is you cant just stop taking them and they make certain people’s dicks stop working.
Strolling into the zoloft subreddit is an absolutely crazy experience, half the posters are like “i’m going insane is this normal?” and they receive responses like “yeah just wait 12 weeks of these symptoms and maybe you’ll be cool”. The other half of the posts are people post 12 weeks being like “this shit cool”, but there’s a weird confirmation bias where the people who got off of it are not lurking in the zoloft subreddit. Every once and a while you’ll see someone necro-bump a year old post about someone giving it time and they’ll be like “oh yeah sorry for the late reply, the drug was incredibly bad for me and I had to get off of it”.
My wife was experiencing this out-of-character rage at certain things, but also felt a weird control over said rage and began looking into posts about that and apparently its common? Weird rage too, like being frustrated with fellow ASD people. I started connecting the dots and thinking about people in my life who were on these and holy shit, they’re absolute seething assholes to us, is this why? What is this drug???
And this doesn’t even touch getting off the drug, apparently the withdrawal is absolutely demonic for many many days. Then you have serotonin syndrome, the endless list of side effects that you have no idea if you’ll experience or not because doctors don’t give a shit and blood panels for drug reactions are too expensive to bother with.
All this stuff basically points to “neurodivergent people are being tortured with the promise of a semblance of normalcy in order to cope with our capitalist world, and all the “normalcy” is, is the ability to control your emotions externally despite them being wildly out of control internally”.
Rip me apart for this all you want but i’m leaning towards crank status being anti-anti-depressants. All this to say I’m prescribed stimulants and i’m grateful I can just take days off or just not take them when I’m happy to be my autistic-adhd self.(I know not all people can do this with ADHD, my heart goes out to them, but it’s more an issue with existing at baseline rather than going off wrecking havoc)
psyilocibin therapy needs to become more widespread because SSRIs are far more terrifying than seeing god and your subconscious.
My wife is on sertraline, and I am absolutely 100% sure it saved her life. She’s been depressed and on-and-off suicidal for her whole life. After a pretty dramatic escalation in her symptoms about 18 months ago, I finally got her to give medication a try. It turns out that she is one of the very lucky (and very small) minority of people who respond extremely well and extremely quickly. Within a month her depression had almost totally abated for the first time since she was 10 years old (she’s about 40), and she’s been stable ever since. She was worried that it would blunt her feelings or make her experience “artificial happiness,” but it so far has not; she says it just makes her stop blowing everything out of proportion, and lets her get perspective on how bad something really is. The phrase “life-changing” sometimes gets overused, I think, but this truly was. The only real downside has been the drug interaction stuff, since she’s always been a recreational substance enjoyer. She has to be a lot more careful with some drugs (MDMA in particular), and others don’t work as well as they used to (LSD in particular). Other than that, she couldn’t be happier with the decision, and has told me multiple times how much she wishes she would have tried this decades sooner. Her life is just so much better now.
I should reiterate, however, that she is definitely in the lucky minority. The very first thing she tried not only worked, but worked quickly, well, and without major side effect. Most people are not that fortunate, and I’ve absolutely heard some horror stories. I think a lot of doctors aren’t nearly as careful as they should be with these drugs, and we don’t appreciate enough how powerful and nervous-system-overhauling they are.