TOTW: DETOXING

pill bottles

“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy." "Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be."
—Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Though I’ve consistently dodged clear-cut psychiatric diagnoses from a young age, this never ceased a steady flow of medication from coursing through my veins. Not bipolar, but a “mood disorder,” not ADHD but an “inability to stay focused in school.” Looking back, I joke about my irreducibility, my imperviousness to rigid category. My smile fades a bit when I think of how, years down the road, I’m taken off the amphetamine salts due to panic attacks. The metaphor given to me after the fact was it was like “pouring gasoline on a fire.” It was determined the proper way to extinguish the fire left within me was with 1500mg of Lithium Carbonate daily—a staple of my mornings and evenings for the next decade. A toxicity measurable in side effects of weight gain, ringing ears, and runny shit.

Taking psychiatric medication is an everyday admission of maladjustment, a corrective act to stay “in formation” [1]. To negate such a commitment is a concrete opportunity to respond to assimilation seven days a week—a rare and tempting liberatory potential, for me. After careful consideration, research and with an intentional support system around me, I tapered my dose and eventually detoxed off this medication*.

Detoxing off psychiatric medication can mark a clear point of departure given appropriate circumstances. While it’s important to not glorify this departure, I think recognizing neurodiversity can serve to identify areas of weakness not in us as subjects but in the objectivity that attempts to control us. Can society's coercion through medication be seen as an admission of its own vulnerability, a chink in its armor? How can anarchists weaponize diagnoses as a point of attack? What are the limits to this approach?


[1] R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (p.98)
* Not an endorsement, only sharing my personal experience

There are 8 Comments

the formation of the 'I' is tricky. if I take pills that change my brain chemistry am i the same person? an anarchist could reject pills because its an obvious conformist deed but an anarchist could also take pills as self defenseto deal with the fact that society is a legitimate threat to the individual...

good point. theres obviously just too many factors. i don’t want to get too stuck in the thinking of how can we make the perfect anarchist development factory. as much as i want more anarchists, better anarchists, whatever that may mean. its a chaotic dice roll. its cold fronts and warm fronts smashing together. we tell ourselves and others stories about why and how we think we got here. was it really because you ended up at a punk show or the right book fell into your lap? or were you predisposed? your brain worked differently than normal society? is there a spiritual force at the wheel? was it just constantly saying no and not knowing why until someone framed it out for you and you were amenable to it? we are out here, anarchists, we come and go. we question our identity or our steadfastness, what are we really? right now?

the minutiae matters, i can enjoy dissecting and analyzing, but you can’t cleave a person. anarchy is an urge and personal struggles are every bit a valid terrain as the streets or the workplace or the sacred site threatened by industry. don’t confuse your timeline with someone else’s.

achieving the right balance of of substances with aims to tweak one's affect or performance or well-being is very difficult and tricky and even dangerous

yeah, and it’s not just doctors, lots if people push through and come out better on the other side glad that they did and went through all that. it’s not everyone’s experience though

The Naked Mind for anyone that wants to detox off alcohol too. Alcohol use really exacerbates and brings out so many conditions for how accepted and prevalent it is in society. It's highly addictive, and damaging. Plus: it's nice to regain some inner quiet, balance, composure.

This society is insane. It's pathological. Has no values but seeks control based on various phantoms it haunts itself with that all involve divisions and contadictions. Most everyone feels that something is wrong, but knowing we can yet won't come together to imagine anything being otherwise is a tragedy that is hard to bear. A stupid species. A stubborn species. Stupidly stubborn. All yin, and no yang. The futility in the impossibility in the Beautiful Idea.

Yes, though a simple yet impossible solution to this problem requires dire events to unfold in the near future. Yin-yang reference and the male/female, positive/negative analogy doesn't work for me, instead I blame the " behavioral sink" , a term invented by ethologist John B. Calhoun to describe a collapse in behavior which can result from overcrowding. As long as there is the insanity of urban life, there will be substance use to alleviate stresses. Greed and vanity exceed any vices related to drugs, which can sometimes ease the pain. Inner balance requires solitude, a difficult condition to enjoy unless one gets off the grid and partakes in meditative exercises. Omm.

DAMN! 1500mgs, impressive inner demons on you. seriously, i mean that, since I make friends with mine and we draw up mutually beneficial arrangements. demonic friends with benefits, demons need skinsuits and who are we to deny them?

i'm told this advice isn't always helpful and maybe i'm a poor choice to provide emotional support tho? whatever

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