Anti- Adolescence

My peoples...some of you already know this. If I'm going to be pessimistic, all of you already know this. But anyways.

I went on an antidepressant when I was ten or eleven. I don't regret this. I don't think I ever will; you see, I'm pretty much convinced that those antidepressants, at that moment in time, saved my life. I was coping with suicidal thoughts by reading 24/7, could no longer go to sleep with the lights on, and needed my mother to read in q corner of my room when I fell asleep. It wasn't good.

For years, it was pretty good. In terms of psych drugs, it was perfect. I only needed one drug, the first one they tried worked, and any side effects were really minimal.

It was only in the past few years, as I started reading more broadly, including sexuality texts, that I began to reconstruct a very different version of events. After I went off my antidepressants, I realized how much of this was correct.

You see, SSRIs, the class of antidepressants mine came from have two notable side effects that no one considered when I went on them, or ever bothered to tell me: they can reduce sex drive and make it more difficult to achieve orgasm.

Reflect back on your own adolescence. Imagine going back and pulling out your sex drive. Think about how it would be different. Maybe you would have liked it. Maybe you would have hated it. I'm actually unsure specifically how it would have changed my life. But either way, I experienced my adolescence in a fundamentally different way than I would have without antidepressants, and I would have liked to have known it at the time.

How should it have been done? Probably not by telling me at age 10, but at a reasonable age, when I'm undergoing puberty. Maybe in middle school, when I got my period? I should definitely have been told by high school. Not that I would have chosen differently, but because I should have been aware of it.