Free Coming of Age on Zoloft by Katherine Sharpe

year in Spain. The fantasy of remaking her life into one of less-challenging work and no medication can be tempting, an incursion of the romantic critique of antidepressants into Emily’s inner dialogue about herself and her choices. “So I think about that sometimes,” she continued. “Maybe if I just worked in a café and made that my life. Maybe that’s the answer.”
    And yet, and yet. There are two strains that run though our conversation, like different instrument sections in an orchestra, balancing each other out. As much as Emily wonders who she’d be without medication—and clearly these questions are very active for her—she also defends the authenticity and the validity of the person she has become. This second voice talks against the first voice, and against the voices of people in her life who call Emily’s antidepressant use into question. “Sometimes I have this feeling like I failed,” she said. “I have this one friend who says things to me like, ‘You’ve just never learned to deal with your problems.’ And most of the time I don’t agree with that, but there are times when I think, ‘God, maybe he’s right. Maybe instead of really dealing with the problems, I’ve chosen to go the weaker route.’ ” She nudged a crust of French toast around her plate with her fork. “But then again, it seems to me like maybe medication is a way of dealing with it. It’s a way of making what can be a tough choice. I could choose not to take it and have living without it be what I focus on, but in the end I stay on it because there are other things in my life, there are other problems and issues where I’d rather concentrate my energy.”
    At twenty-eight, Emily still asks herself regularly how fourteen years on antidepressants have affected the person she’s become. There is much she doesn’t know. Would she be a better, if more tortured, writer without medication? Would a simpler life without Prozac, if she could achieve it, have more meaning? Who is she, really: the adult she’s made herself into, or the unmedicated person she’s only met a few times since adolescence? Or is that distinction an illusion? There are also some things that she does feel certain about, such as that medication keeps her perfectionism to a manageable level, lets her live the life she’s used to and do work that she values. Tentatively, she’s answered her ambivalence about antidepressants by affirming that the identity that she’s created on them, and which they support, is more real and more valuable than the hypothetical identities she imagines she might have if she were not taking antidepressants.
    But her struggle has been an active one, and the existential questions that antidepressants raise for her are still there in the background, occasionally demanding reconsideration. With Emily, as for many people who have grown up on antidepressants, these questions—sharp and uncomfortable at some moments, barely perceptible at others—are now woven tightly into the fabric of her life.
    THOSE EXISTENTIAL QUESTIONS are felt more keenly by some people than by others. One thing that causes variance is a person’s sense of how ill they are. People who strongly and viscerally believe in their own need for medication are less likely to spend time and energy second-guessing about the self that might have been. Emily, for example, believes that she’d be able to get along without antidepressants in a life rinsed of professional stress. So from time to time, she feels compelled to weigh the value of the career she has built for herself against the strength of her desire to live without medications. For other people, the questions break down very differently. Those who believe that antidepressants literally have life-saving power often find it easier to accept antidepressants as, on balance, an element of good in their lives, and move on.
    This is the equation that Claire makes. Now thirty-four, Claire went through periods of