“Doesn’t Zoloft make you into a zombie? Isn’t that too extreme? You don’t need to be taking that.”

That is the paraphrased version of what my mom told me when I told her I had gone on the pill. The depression medication, not the one involving babies. I began taking sertraline a month earlier at the request of my therapist, a lovely woman who was the first to really understand how bad my problem really is. My mother, on the other hand, had made an unconscious habit of ignoring any potential sign that I had a problem.

My whole life has been one riddled with signs and symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and its partner in crime, depression. I remember, after being told by my mother not to play with plastic bags, refusing to even touch a plastic bag for more than a year. I remember checking my parents for signs of life in the night, afraid that perhaps the sweet lull of sleep had become too comforting and turned into the kiss of death. I remember developing a habit of picking my arms until the point of bleeding. I even remember one of the first health-related panic attacks I had, an incident involving my first kiss and poor knowledge of HIV transmission. An army of clear signs was marching toward my mental gates and nobody, not even myself, saw it for what it really was.

You can’t really blame my mom for not seeing any of this. My mom means well and loves my sister and I. My mom is an anxious person, like her sister, brother, father, grandfather, and children. It runs in the family, though given its wide spread it may be more of a sprint. It is not surprising that she didn’t pick up on my issues since many of them were issues she shared. I began to keep problems inside that really should have been let out. As I grew and matured my repressed anxiety and fear manifested themselves in the form of a quick temper, a tightly-wound ball of anxiety covered in a facade of normalcy that would erupt badly when provoked. It fooled me into thinking that I was an angry person who hated the world and everyone in it, when in fact I was simply suffering from a mental disorder.

Is it any wonder that nobody in my family has ever sought treatment? That so many of us are ‘antisocial’, ‘selfish’, ‘introverted’, and ‘cranky’? We all bottle it up and refuse to let anyone else see inside. We pretend it isn’t an issue and so we all suffer. My father, who noticed that my behavior and thoughts were abnormal, would mention the possibility of treatment to me on a regular basis. Everyone else told me there was nothing wrong with me. Worse still was being told that I wasn’t ‘crazy’, as if saying that would ward off the crazy demons trying to worm their way into my brain.

You can’t solve a problem by pretending it doesn’t exist. It took years for me to finally seek treatment after repeated bouts of extreme obsessive anxiety culminating in suicidal thoughts and desires to self-harm. My therapist recommended I get on an SSRI ASAP, and I chose sertraline. Despite being told by many that drugs don’t work, that they are unhealthy, and that they make people into robots, sertraline worked wonders on me. I went from a nervous wreck unable to walk outside without attacks of delusional obsessive anxiety to a relatively stable man in about 2 months.

Not your typical lord and savior, but for some of us it will have to do.

I remember, after my blissfully official diagnosis of OCD, my mother crying to me. She told me she felt she had failed as a mother, that she did something wrong and ‘screwed me up.’ Taking medication seems to be a sign of failure. Talk about a stigma. To me, medication was a victory. A call of triumph that I finally had looked my foe squarely in the eyes and was prepared to defend myself.

Whenever we talk now, she asks me if I am still on the medicine. I always tell her I am, and to that she responds : ‘You won’t take it forever, right?’

My mind always comments back. ‘You might not like it if I stopped.’

It’s been about a year and a half since I began taking sertraline and I can say with confidence that it saved my life. I don’t know how long I will be on it, but I know that if or when I stop it will not be to soothe the worries and vanities of other people. My condition didn’t have to become so bad, but I followed a well-trodden ancestral path of treating medication and help as taboo.

I never should have felt so alone and so in pain that I wanted to hurt myself and should have sought help years ago. Though I have a long way to go, medicine helped me cope with a chemical problem in my brain that nothing else would have been able to vanquish. I can’t deal with the underlying emotional and logical issues that contribute to my problem until I can think clearly, which is an opportunity being medicated gives me. I wish people understood that when they told me I don’t need to take pills.

It’s okay to need medication. It’s okay to need help.

Update: Here is a link to my response to the many people who have told me that, in fact, I don’t need meds and that medication is poison.