Sometimes doctors don’t get it. They don’t understand when you want to learn to help yourself instead of get help from pills. They think you should take this pill to balance the chemicals in your brain, and think that that’s fine. You don’t think it’s fine. You don’t want to take a drug that they say will make you happy. You don’t want to depend on this drug for the rest of your life, but here you are sitting in the doctor’s office crying, crying because he says you’re depressed and the only way you can ever be happy is to take this pill every day for twenty years. If you take this you will gradually be happier in a month, in a year you’ll stop crying so often, in ten you won’t remember what it’s like to be sad for no apparent reason, and in twenty you can stop. But you know you won’t. Can you just stop taking a drug that kept you emotionally stable since you were seventeen? The doctor just expects this pills to cure you of sadness when in reality, deep down beneath the effects of these pills you might still feel this hollowness, this utter emptiness that has haunted you since you can remember.

What if these wonderful pills that are supposed to clear away this emptiness instead fill it with a bunch of bull that never teaches you what it’s really like to be happy? You ask your doctor these questions and he looks like he’s listening, understanding you through your sobs, and he says “If you were diabetic would you feel bad about taking insulin? That’s what this antidepressant is like, your body isn’t making enough of a certain chemical to make you feel happy so this antidepressant is going to make up for what your body can’t produce.” He heard you. He heard your questions, but he didn’t listen. He didn’t care. You tell him that although you feel this hollowness, you feel a light inside yourself, you feel happy, and are able to be happy, you completely capable of “good days” where you don’t cry, those “good days” where you smile all day and laugh, and you ask your doctor, how can you help me channel these happy feelings? You know they’re there, you just need your doctor’s help, and he continues to push the antidepressants on you, shoving the idea that they will be the only source to your potential happiness.

You succumb to his pressure to try the antidepressant out. He probably know what he’s talking about, he has spent half an hour trying to shove the drugs down your throat, not to mention years of education to qualify himself as a physician. You fill your prescription and take your pill hoping it will remove the hollowness that haunts you.