It was in 2005 that my parents put me on the spot about why I was acting “weird” when my older sister was pregnant with my niece, even though they knew since I was diagnosed in my infancy with autism after I was born in 1984, and I naturally stammered about explaining myself. Despite my poor in-person communication skills, they continued to harass me, and I couldn’t come up with a coherent answer. After my niece was born, at my birthday dinner in January the following year in 2006, my parents mistook my boredom (I had nothing in common with my toxic family) for “depression,” and they coerced me into psychiatry. Given that my mother and father are ugly when questioned, I complied.
My first psychiatrist was friendly, and I talked to him about what my parents had told me about my hypothetical depression, and without actually diagnosing me with anything, he gave me never-ending cocktails of different medications, starting with Zoloft (I remember the quirky “dot ad” around that time). I felt no difference, although my mother and father would have said otherwise. I really didn’t think I needed medication, but my parents and psychiatrists insisted that “you usually don’t notice any difference,” and I continued to take them, unaware at the time of the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry. I received no warnings from my doctors about drug interactions, side effects, and what to avoid when taking the medications.
Around this time, I had gotten into online blogging and posted endless flame posts in my first online blog, which I had started due to trauma inflicted by the toxic administrators of a video game website I had contributed reviews and editorials to that still haunts me to this day. I also dove into the world of furry fandom and friended many fellow furries online, only to discover their own toxicity, mostly political, that ultimately drove me to really tear into a former friend, which got me doxxed and my first blog was hacked along with several other internet accounts. That my parents were highly unsupportive of me when I told them this didn’t help, with my mother’s first words being “You pissed off a lot of people!” Incidents like this resulted in repeated relapses, yet the psychiatrists’ solution was always more medication instead of getting to the roots of my myriad issues; my toxic family still, to date, being a huge obstacle towards my recovery.
I tried stopping the medications in 2008, only for my family to constantly complain about my yelling and screaming at night about how I hated them; my younger brother cussing at me was a catalyst that drove me back into psychiatry, resulting in the same process again for over another decade. Around this time, I graduated college, fortunate to still receive a great final GPA despite my medicated state. But my problems prevented me from retaining the jobs I had after my graduation, none of which lasted more than half a year, and it hadn’t occurred to me to get special accommodations at work, to the point where I ultimately gave up paid work and continued living with my parents while receiving my monthly SSI benefits.
I would probably consider the 2010s my “lost decade” since I don’t have a lot of memories of that time, positive or negative. I did my best to avoid exposure to politics, still one of my biggest triggers to date as it reminds me of the toxicity of my household, and even slight exposure for me was akin to gazing into the Ark of the Covenant. I suppose I was “sedated into submission” as I didn’t encounter a lot of online drama during this period. At this time I disregarded advice from former online friends, given some of my ravings, to move out of my parents’ home. Perhaps it was a form of Stockholm syndrome.
In 2019, I decided to reenter the workforce, although the first job I was able to land, despite my associate and bachelor degrees and myriad creative talents, was a customer service representative position at my town’s call center, where I trained and got on the phones, dealing with the stressful environment of endless customers of unpredictable moods. Still medicated, I had occasional lapses in judgment that cost me quality assurance points, but on the flip side, I did get nominated maybe once or twice for Collector of the Month. The pressure of the onset of the coronavirus epidemic and complications about setting up to work at home (which was unfeasible since my family was always noisy) caused me to quit.
After I was let go from a work-at-home customer service job where I didn’t have to deal with customers on the phone, I found myself back at the same call center in another on-phone customer service rep position after training. I was promoted to a less-stressful job I applied for at the call center, which gave me a huge confidence boost, but in April 2021, as I was walking to my workstation, I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my right shoulder and collapsed, requiring that I be ambulanced to the hospital. Apparently I had developed epilepsy and had a seizure, with two more accompanied by right shoulder displacements happening the following summer.
Brain scans confirmed that my brain structure had been altered, but the psychiatrists continued to push medications onto me. I had talked with my first psychiatrist about special workplace accommodations due to my zoned-out state, but he said I required none, even though I could barely focus and had constant lapses in judgment. I ultimately fired him and settled for a different one online that was okay, but it didn’t occur to me to tell him about my neurologist’s indications that my brain structure had changed. Insurance issues would eventually make me leave for a different local psychiatrist that was similar to my first, friendly but exploitative, whom I again neglected to tell about my changed brain structure.
I was ultimately and suddenly fired from my last full-time job in 2023 due to comments I had made on social media about how boring it was, coupled with political opinions I had expressed, all while still under endless medications. I had been looking for alternate work in the months prior, but despite my qualifications and creativity, no one would take me, and I had to settle for several unpaid internships that didn’t last long. I did enter a coding bootcamp late that year where I didn’t owe anything until I graduated, although with my alternating medical cocktails, coupled with my increasingly-toxic parents I was shackled to at home, I couldn’t focus and had to take a reprieve in the months when I decided to move out, and resigned from my internships.
Although I had sizeable savings, supported by disability payments, during the time when I was desperately trying to move into my own apartment I carelessly squandered my other savings on various impulse buys and got into deep credit card debt. But I did transition into my new place eventually, and have no intention ever to move back in with my toxic parents. I am still gradually attempting to pay off my debt, with my parents paying my rent and water bill, but I am uncomfortable talking to them about my true financial situation for fear they would eviscerate me, as they always had whenever I made mistakes like that in the past.
I ultimately got a full medical discharge from my coding bootcamp without owing anything, thanks to a letter from my psychiatrist, and around this time, I began to monitor my various medications for possible interactions, using Drugs.com and various other sources across the internet. However, when I mentioned this to him, he suggested that I blindly trust him, that he was an expert. I felt he really didn’t care about me since dozens of times, I called 988 and left desperate messages on his clinic’s answering machine and online portal only to be constantly ghosted, and had to make formal appointments to get changes in medication when I felt they were clearly not working.
I rage-quit physical therapy, and I maybe got into a few fender-benders, yet my psychiatrist was apathetic and suggested I take even more medications, and when he prescribed new ones and they had immediate adverse effects (such as suicidal thoughts, impaired judgment and difficulty sleeping), he said to “give them time to work.” The very same advice my mother told me in the time before my late maternal cousin, who went through similar issues as I did and was in and out of psychiatry, met his untimely end, shackled to my late maternal grandmother and also equally distant from his mother, my maternal aunt.
In January 2025, I decided to completely forgo psychiatric medications for alternative therapies, aside from a brief stint suggested by my primary care provider with sleeping medication doubling as an antidepressant.
In a local clinic, I had a full evaluation that confirmed my IQ had dropped to 104, down twenty or more points from before I was on and off psychiatric medications. I am still trying to recover from all the damage psychiatry did to me and I am seeking therapies that work, with mixed results. Most things today, as they were when I was under psychiatric care, are major melting points, like texting my parents, vicious political opinions, people bashing things that are dear to my heart, and so on. I left virtually every autism support group due to others thinking I’m delusional and triggering me with their stereotypical autistic actions—and I myself exemplify many adverse neurodivergent stereotypes—and I hate my own people to the point where if a cure became available, I would take it in a heartbeat.
The psychiatric medications had seemed to exacerbate my autistic qualities in some ways. They made me recall details of my trauma more vividly, with intense focus on trivial knowledge being an autistic quality. They also really reduced my empathy off and on, which is another autistic trait, lacking (cognitive) empathy. They also made me even more withdrawn, another autistic trait, and tended to overload my senses, which continues to this day even off them.
While I have a few disagreements with him, Secretary Kennedy’s leadership as head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, given my shared skepticism with him of the pharmaceutical industry, presents an unprecedented opportunity to go after psychiatry, and I believe commonsense measures like totally banning the use of psych meds on children and ending pharma ads are also in order, alongside emphasizing alternative, less dangerous therapies for those who suffer similarly as I have. Psychiatric exploitation, misdiagnoses, the adverse effects of medications, and suicides of those under the care of psychiatrists truly deserve scrutiny.
It is my firm belief that psychiatry is pseudoscience, as the various range of emotions like anger, depression, happiness, and so forth, have always been part of the human condition, and despite increased use of psychiatric medications, alongside other medicines, chronic illness is still continuing to climb in America. In addition to making my country physically healthy again—and kudos to Bobby Jr for ordering companies to take dangerous chemicals out of our food—I hope that he can make us mentally healthy again as well, and that no one, neurotypical or neurodivergent, has to suffer the way I did at the hands of psychiatry and Big Pharma.