She felt better some days but deeply sad on others. These included one for seizures and migraines - she experienced neither, but the drug can be also used to stabilize mood - and another to dull the side effects of the other medications, although it is used mainly for schizophrenia. During 2021, the year she graduated, she was prescribed seven drugs. The medication offered a reprieve from her suffering, but the effect dissipated, so she was prescribed an additional antidepressant, Effexor.Ī medication cascade had begun. The following spring, a psychiatrist prescribed Prozac. Intervention for her depression and anxiety came not from the divine but from the pharmaceutical industry. “But I cried, screamed and begged the universe or whatever godly power to take away the pain of a thousand men that was trapped inside my head.” “I should have been happy,” she later wrote. In the following days, her anxiety mounted into despair. One morning in the fall of 2017, Renae Smith, a high school freshman on Long Island, N.Y., could not get out of bed, overwhelmed at the prospect of going to school.

Depression medication