I started taking anxiolytics around the age of 17. I was doing panic attacks, I thought I was dying, I yelled to stay alive. I was given temesta, I don’t remember the doses. The crises passed, returned. I dragged an anxiety that never disappeared completely. The tranquilizers helped me greatly. My mother also took it. My father too. My grandmother the same. We were a family of drug addicts.
At the time, in the 1980s, we did not talk about mental health like today. You had to fend for yourself. I did not go to see a psychologist, much less a psychiatrist. What good? I was not crazy, I just had a vague ill-being that sometimes led to a panic attack that calm the taking of anxiolytics. Not the sea to drink. With hindsight, I have the impression that in that time, everyone was fuel at the benzodiazepines. That everyone took it. Like a kind of miracle pill which healed almost everything.
Years have passed, I continued to take it. Mechanically. Mechanically. Never in massive doses but regularly, daily. The question of knowing if I really needed it was not even. The important thing was to be able to lead a normal life without fear of being struck by the always unexpected appearance of a panic attack. So I never went out without my temesta box. Her presence in my pocket reassured me even if the feeling of anxiety never really left me.
Later, during a first stay in Canada, I was prescribed Zoloft, an antidepressant, to fight against my panic attacks which appeared and disappeared as an evening visitor at unpredictable hours. Obviously, I did not make enough serotonin: the drug would therefore provide for it and, in doing so, would prevent the anxiety and its various and varied manifestations from colonizing my brain.
Obviously, I read almost everything about the question. Given my total absence of medical knowledge, I did not remember except that the brain is a very strange machine that nobody understands and will never really understand how it works, those who claim the opposite are infabulars intoxicated to science. We are there faced with the absolute mystery of life, of the intertwining of the soul and of being, consciousness and achievement, chemistry and the inexpressible, experience and feelings, the flow of thought, inert but nevertheless active matter which constitutes the very singularity of the individual in his ontological dimension.
I am now 57 years old. I always take the same treatment, a mixture of valium and effect. Are these drugs necessary for me because I have shortcomings in the cerebral level, incuperable weaknesses inherent in the very structure of my brain, or have they become essential by the force of addiction, of addiction which makes their stop almost impossible? I ignore it and to tell the truth, I don’t care.
I started a few years ago a withdrawal to anxiolytics, under the supervision of a psychiatrist. It was a dantesque fight, suffering at all times. Painfully, taking my time, I managed to reduce my daily dose halfway without being able to stop completely. There are fights that cannot be won, it is one.
The only thing I know is that these drugs allowed me to lead an almost normal existence. Admittedly, I have phobias in a mess, of course, I live a single monacal existence which would not suit everyone, certainly I have a certain tendency to get anxious for nothing, certainly I feel life more like a burden than a gift but despite all these obstacles, I am able to go in existence without tripping too much.
I may be autistic. Or schizophrenic. Bipolar. Mad. Alienated. Meschugge. Totally ravaged. Never mind. I have always been convinced that Vivre consisted, mostly, to escape from oneself. That all that we undertake in existence is a way of escaping from this anxiety of living on a foreign land, to be born, to die without understanding the universe around us. To flee, to escape this metaphysical vice, we watch television, we socialize, we drink, we pray, we make children, we garden, we write. And sometimes we take psychotropic drugs.
It is neither a drama nor the panacea, just a way like any other to be in the world.
