I take antidepressants. You’re welcome

It’s amazing how much smarter everyone else gets when I take antidepressants.

It makes sense that the drugs work on other people, because there’s nothing in me to fix. I am a perfect and wise arbiter of not only my own behavior but everyone else’s, which is a heavy burden because some of ya’ll are terrible at life. You date the wrong people. You take several seconds longer than necessary to order at the bagel place. And you continue to have terrible opinions even after I explain the right one to you. But only when I’m depressed. When I’m not, everyone gets better at merging from two lanes to one.

This effect is not limited by the laws of causality or time. Before I restarted Wellbutrin, my partner showed me this song.

My immediate reaction was, “This is fine, but what if it were sung in the style of Johnny Cash singing Hurt?” My partner recorded that version on GarageBand for my birthday, and I loved it, which means I was capable of enjoying things and thus not suffering from distorted cognition, just in case you were wondering. But I restarted Wellbutrin just to see what would happen, and suddenly the original recording had become the kind of song you can’t describe because you sound too sappy, so all you can say is it brings you to tears. My partner couldn’t tell the difference, so my theory is that because I was the one who took the drug to make the song better, only I remember the old, mediocre version.

The effect extends to physical objects. As previously mentioned, I spent the first half of 2024 laid up with mold poisoning. For about half of that time, I knew the problem was under the bed* (I’d recently bought a storage bed that was completely surrounded with drawers). In that time I bought dozens of air filters, spent $4k on getting my entire house scrubbed and set up a ventilation system under my bed. I did everything except replace the mattress. This was due to the mattress being too heavy for any human being to lift and everyone was too busy to help me.

And even if I had found mold in the mattress, what could I have done about it? The websites for mattresses and bed frames are labyrinths that require feats of strength and skill to defeat. Nor was it possible to get the mattress out of my apartment, so it would just continue leaking the spores in a slightly different place.

Then I restarted a second antidepressant (Abilify, 2mg). The mattress was still too heavy for me, but suddenly light enough that it wasn’t an unspeakable imposition to ask my partner to flip it against the wall. And at the exact same time, the manufacturer’s website simplified itself so I could not only order a copy of my current mattress, but ask for a discount because my old one was so new (it worked! They give half off if you waive return rights). Less than a week after I started Abilify I was sleeping on a new mattress on a new frame, the old mattress and frame were at the dump, and my mold symptoms began to ease.

Given how well they work, taking antidepressants seems downright prosocial, so why are some people reluctant to try them? Sometimes they’re concerned that antidepressants work too well and turn everyone into a happy zombie. This is based on the fallacy that antidepressants work on you rather than on your environment. The fact that everyone is suddenly better at lane merges doesn’t make me incapable of being sad about medical setbacks. If having your world-is-easy meter set two steps higher seems like a bad thing, consider that that may itself be a symptom of your world-is-easy meter being set too low.

Pills aren’t the only way to make the outside world bend to your will, of course. Diet and exercise have a great reputation in this arena, matched only by the complete lack of effect of wishing for good diet and exercise. Luckily, one of the ways antidepressants change the environment is making weights lighter, lung capacity higher, and food take fewer steps to prepare. So if you’ve spent a few years knowing you should improve your diet and exercise routine without managing to get over the hump to actually doing it, maybe it’s time to give the everything-is-easier pill a try. Especially because the benefits extend not only to you, but to everyone on the highway with you.

Caveats

I’ve had an unusually good experience with antidepressants and psychiatrists. The first two antidepressants I tried worked very well for me (the second one is only for when things get really bad). I didn’t have to cycle through psychiatrists much either.

The most popular antidepressants are SSRIs, which I’ve never taken. My understanding is they are less likely (and slower) to work and have a worse side-effect profile than Wellbutrin, whose dominant side effects are weight loss and increased libido (but also insomnia and a slight increase in seizure risk). I’ve heard of good reasons not to start with Wellbutrin, like a family history of seizures or being underweight, but (I AM AN INTERNET WEIRDO NOT A DOCTOR) they seem underutilized to me.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Patrick LaVictoire and the Roots of Progress Blog Building Fellowship for comments and suggestions. Thanks to the CoFoundation Fellowship and my Patreon patrons for financial support.

*Medicine being what it is I’m still only 95% that this was the cause, and was less certain yet before I got the mattress off the frame and examined it