Free Coming of Age on Zoloft by Katherine Sharpe Page B

and the director of counseling and psychological ser-vices at Swarthmore College, says that the young adults he sees in his practice reliably break down into two groups. “For some people, it’s like ‘Whatever, it’s like a vitamin, I just take it,’ ” he said. Others brood. “For other people, it’s like, ‘I am this person who’s also on this medication, but maybe there’s this other person I could be, who I don’t know who that is. I don’t know who I would be if I wasn’t on this.’ Some people feel more realized on medication, and that’s nice,” he said. “Other people feel unrealized.” Ramirez thinks that these responses are rooted in differences of character: some people are just inclined to feel that taking an antidepressant is a philosophical dilemma, and some aren’t.
    Perhaps not surprisingly, a majority of the people who answered my call for interviews were the brooding type—at least to a degree. But some of those I talked to contrasted themselves with people they’ve known who have taken antidepressants without angst:
     
    I was in a relationship for a while with a guy who was also on antidepressants. But he wasn’t in therapy or anything, never had been. He just woke up and took a pill every day. It drove me crazy—how can you not want to know what’s really going on? But he just didn’t care to think about it. And that was certainly his choice. But it wasn’t one I could have made.
    —Vivian, age twenty-four
     
    I have a friend who’s been on Prozac since she was really little, and she has always said “No, there’s just this chemical thing in my brain, and I take my happy pills and I’m good.” And her depression really has been helped by taking medication, so she doesn’t think there’s anything behind it except maybe a genetic tendency to some sort of brain malfunction.
    —Elizabeth, age twenty-five
    By a similar token, Teresa, the twenty-five-year-old in Iowa, wrote of feeling so certain that her depression was “other” that she never doubted that antidepressants reveal her authentic self. “For me, I always felt like the depression hid who I really was,” she wrote. “My therapist commented earlier today on how much I’d changed since she started working with me, and I was confused. To me, I haven’t changed at all. I’ve just shed the tremendous weight of depression and anxiety that was stifling my actual personality.”
    BUT MOST OF the people I talked to did wonder, sometimes with a fair amount of torment, how antidepressants had impacted who they are, and how they experience the world and themselves in it. It makes sense that they did: developmental psychologists agree that establishing an identity is the main developmental task of adolescence (a stage that spans, roughly, the ages eleven to nineteen years), and adolescents who are already actively reflecting on questions of identity are likely to fold medication into the process. “Teenagers tend to incorporate their use of medication into their identity and reflect on its meaning more than adults,” said Lara Honos-Webb, a Walnut Creek, California–based clinical psychologist. “Because teens are presented with the question of ‘Who am I?,’ being a person who takes medication gets included in that quest.” Sharing some of their comments can illuminate what this kind of wondering sounds and feels like.
    One of the ways that teens can incorporate using antidepressants into their developing identities is to internalize the idea that they’re sick. Honos-Webb has noticed this phenomenon in her practice. “I think what’s tragic, and I think this is what a lot of psychiatrists really miss, is that the diagnosis and the medication have a serious risk that a teenager will define themselves as fundamentally flawed and lacking,” she told me. “I have seen teenagers directly say, ‘Why should I try, if I’m already handicapped in some way?’ ” And though that isn’t the message that anyone