The Elimination of Pain and the Stabilization of Symptoms – It’s Not Helping People Heal
For nearly 14 years, I've helped individuals navigate the complex landscape of addiction in order to achieve recovery. Nicknamed "The Casual Counselor", my approach is unconventional but undeniably effective.
The entire model of Western Medicine is built upon a platform of medicating the hurt, stabilizing the symptoms, and eliminating the pain that persons who abuse drugs and alcohol are experiencing. In essence, it’s what they’re already doing for themselves, just under the supervision of an MD, a psychiatrist, a program, an “expert”. And, by and large, it’s a very effective model. It works. Though it doesn’t create as much euphoria and bliss as substances like cocaine or alcohol, psychotropic medication essentially creates the same “positive outcome”, it stabilizes the individual’s symptoms, in the hopes of creating a set of guardrails so that the user can get to work rebuilding their lives in a healthier manner.
I’m not here to bash psychotropic medications. As a former user myself, in my early days of recovery, I can honestly say that they helped to improve, and maybe even save my life for a while at least. I started taking an SSRI after a particularly powerful depressive episode.
One in which I was having difficulty, namely, finding it basically impossible to do the very basics of self-care on a subsistence level. I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t shower. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t make it to my night classes at the community college I was attending. I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was about 2 years sober at this juncture.
So, I opted for the SSRI. The anti-depressant. And though my mood was still somewhere tangled up in blue, I noticed positive physiological effects on my level of energy within a matter of days. Effects that would continue to improve in the weeks that followed my introduction to the medication. Though still down in the dumps, I had more “oomph”. More “get-up-and-go”. More resilience. I was up and out of bed. Showering. Eating. Back at my desk at school. I was even going to the gym again. That little blue tablet was a game-changer. At least, it was for a while.
After a few months, the positive effects of the boost it provided me started to plateau. Even waned to some degree. I spoke with my prescriber, and he did what any other provider would do. He increased my dose. Within a couple of weeks, I was humming again. No low-lows, and functioning on a level where I could get shit done, all while maintaining my recovery and sobriety. At least, for a while. Because a few months later, it happened again. The plateau. The diminishing returns on the boost to my CNS.
Back to the shrink, and pre-authorized for an increase in my daily dose, back on track. Back on track until the pattern started to emerge within my awareness, this medication, as effective as it was in helping to stabilize and improve upon my symptoms of depression, had a shelf life.
And, eventually, over the course of maybe a year or two, I had reached the maximum dosage of that particular anti-depressant. I had maxed out. And when the inevitable plateau and flatline occurred, my prescriber presented me with an option.
Since I had maxed out on that particular drug, he couldn’t raise my dose, but what he could do was add another medication to the mix. Something to bolster the positive effects of how the medication had been helping me to live. An amplifier of sorts. Knowing what I know about drugs, I’m no dummy after all, I had my reservations. The short version of the story is this, anytime a person ingests two drugs, whatever they are, they’ve just created a “new drug”, and the way that those two drugs are going to affect a person’s brain chemistry is entirely a mystery. There’s only one way to find out, but often what people find out is that it’s not a happily-ever-after outcome.
With psychotropics come side effects. Weight gain. Decreased libido. Increased triglycerides. Headaches. Nausea. Confusion. There’s plenty more, and many of them are much more severe than just a dry mouth. It’s something that MDs and other prescribers don’t discuss with patients or clients at the outset of prescribing these drugs. What they also don’t discuss is how difficult it can be to stop using them, should you decide you want to come off of them. Why? Though it’s just speculation, prescribing psych meds keeps customers coming back. Sometimes, even creating customers for life, and keeping the business of Big Pharma pumping.
Do these medications help people? Sure. In many cases they do. But that’s not the story every time & all the time. Sometimes the side effects from these powerful compounds can be incredibly serious and incredibly dangerous. There are many cases of people taking what were purported to be relatively benign medications by their care providers that sent them into psychotic episodes, prompted seizures, or, in the worst case scenario, created the tipping point that compelled an individual to commit suicide.
The withdrawal symptoms that users experience, and the post-acute withdrawal symptoms, can be on-par with popular and more pleasurable “illicit drugs”, and sometimes even more so, more acute and lasting longer, sometimes longer than a year or more, even when the user goes through a long, slow and rigorous titration, weaning themselves from a high dose to a tiny one over the course of a long period of time. Many people experience symptoms so severe that they just say, “fuck it”, and continue taking the medication, or a cocktail of medications they’ve been prescribed.
It’s not a very feel-good story, despite the fact that it can get people up and running in their recovery. I have clients who might not have survived if not for certain medications in the early stages of recovery.
Most importantly, though, the overarching point of this article is this:
The elimination of pain does not equal healing. It’s a “band-aid on a bullet wound”. It works to an effective degree to help people feel “normal” and “functional”, but without the understanding that the positive effects have a finite efficacy to them, and without knowing that, “sure, an SSRI can get rid of the low-lows of depression, or the high-highs of anxiety”, but at the cost of putting someone’s connection to their emotional state into a flatline. No highs. No lows. No belly laughs. No tears. Just a disconnection from the richness of feeling.
Feeling.
Feeling is how we heal. It’s not the elimination of pain that helps people heal for real, it helps them “get better” for a period of time, but at a cost. The price is high. We pay for it by covering up what we were covering up before we ever walked into that doctor’s office for help with our symptoms. It’s a replacement, just with less abuse potential. Nothing is free in this life, and that’s the price you pay should you get stuck on psychotropics. Side effects notwithstanding, we pay for it by feeling disconnected from our feelings, ourselves, others, and the world in general. We become stabilized by being anesthetized.
Most people opt not to heal for real. For what that costs us is the requirement to sit and feel. We feel pain, anguish, guilt, shame, unmet needs, all of the awful and desperate moves we made to maintain our habit of trying to relieve our pain. We need to confront the pain. We need to feel it, hold it, face it, allow space for it, and it’s hard fucking work. I totally get why so many people say, “Screw it, just give me the pills.” The past of least resistance is often the more enticing one when we have a powerful sensitivity to pain.
But just eliminating the pain doesn’t heal us. And the work of healing? It’s not fun. It’s not breezy work, and it’s truly a lifetime journey. The first days are the hardest days of all. But should we commit to “facing out demons”, feeling to heal, and getting it out of ourselves. Sharing it. Creating something from it. Shouting it from the rooftops. Ascending to the top of the mountain’s peak.
Do you know what’s waiting on the other side of that kind of work? Freedom.
Read more from Joshua Bennett-Johnson
Joshua Bennett-Johnson, Licensed Counselor & Owner of JBJ Counseling
After working for 7 years in an amazing clinic, I launched into private practice in 2018. I love my job. I can say that without reservation. Watching people rebuild their lives is something that is worth more than any dollar amount.
