Big Pharma: A Love Story
Antidepressants saved my life—but there is no cure for the human condition.
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Oxford Sour is now my full-time job. For too long, this publication has coasted on that millennial malady: potential. Those days are dead. Over the coming weeks, I’ll publish 25 essays. No more Millennial dithering. No more bullshit.
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Back in the early 2000s, I’d trade a handful of Attarax—the dreamy sedative—for sticks of low-grade hash, and with the reprobates I called my friends, skulk off into the woods safe from the steroidicidal Mr Lewis—our overzealous rugby teacher.
Most of us had a ‘script’. Tens of thousands of other troubled teens were deemed problematic—what I insist was healthily cynical—and regularly dewormed with a wonder drug called Seroxat.
That little white pill promised not just the earth but the earth’s inhabitants a cure to their inherently faulty human software. Seroxat, its breathless champions assured, could even cure shyness. Doctors plonked millions of such pills down millions of throats.
Until the ink in their pens ran dry.
Overnight, my faithful little dove arrived with one wing clipped. Then two. The next day, she was gone for good.
A BBC Panorama exposé aired a few weeks later. Those weeks—marked by vomiting, shaking, clucking like a junkie—enjoyed headlines with words like scandal, suppressed trial, and suicides. The miracle drug had told a few tall tales. One study revealed an awkward truth: suicidal thoughts were higher among those who’d taken the drug than those on a sugar pill.
By the time I was twelve, eccentricity and teenaged angst had graduated from normal features of the human condition to pathologies in need of cure. Doctors bought it. Parents bought it. Patients, too.
This was, of course, the End of History.
Our grandparents defeated fascism. Our parents outwitted communism. With no more demons to exorcise, liberal capitalism—the final state—turned to human nature itself.
The prevailing wisdom back then viewed depression and anxiety as one would a spluttering engine. Maladies of the mind were not existential, social, or moral, but mechanical. Depression was simple. A chemical imbalance. The cure was straightforward. A chemically imbalanced brain found repair much like a seized Toyota engine found oil. The End of History, it seemed, entailed the end of suffering itself.
Let me complicate matters before someone does so for me. Zoloft saved my life.
I don’t mean that quite so literally. Zoloft has saved me countless hours each day. Before that trusty little pill, I’d dissolve much of my waking hours in failing to please the impossible demands of Uncle OCD.
My condition isn’t the type one contracts on TikTok. It’s not quirky. It’s not an understandable yen for neatly aligned bookshelves (who doesn’t demand such things?). It is the kind which convinces you that you may have knocked over a child in the road en route to town. After all, what else could that bang have signalled?
It’s the kind that Googles hit and run and has you click through page after page of nothing whilst scenes of tearful juries condemning you to death flash through your brain. It’s the kind which asks: Do you think they’ll revive the death penalty for this? You deserve it. I mean, running over a kid and driving off. You’re a fucking monster, mate.
With OCD, no news is not good news. No news is indelible proof that there could be bad news. Of course, you know that this heinous act hasn’t happened. You know it. But with OCD, you never quite know it.
Not to invite accusations of shilling for Big Pharma, but Zoloft stopped all that. It’s not a magic pill. OCD is a chronic condition. But it saves me the bother of being at constant attritional war with myself.
Neither are its cousins in any way miraculous. In 2021, a major Cochrane study broke the taboo: the chemical imbalance theory was laid on the wayside, its spine snapped in six segments—antidepressants work only in a “small and unimportant way.”
Now let’s riot in nuance: the chemical imbalance theory suffers from residual 1990s wishful thinking. But millions—like me—swear by these little helpers.
Our culture is emerging from a decades-long bout of magical thinking. We confused chemical relief with cosmic resolution. Zoloft hasn’t cured my OCD. But it has turned down the volume so that I can hear myself think. And that, as Carl Jung insisted, is where meaningful change lights a cigarette, pours a large Rioja, and gets to work.
In Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, the evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse argues that anxiety and depression are not necessarily disorders at all. They are often functional responses—defence mechanisms that have evolved to protect us. Panic attacks are the smoke alarms of the mind: unbearable, overwhelming, and sometimes triggered by burnt toast—but not evidence of defect.
Nesse tells patients something profoundly comforting: you are not broken. Your mind is doing exactly what it evolved to do.
Carl Jung made a similar argument decades earlier. “Neurosis,” he wrote, “is an attempt at self-cure.” For Jung, anxiety and depression were not conditions to grouse over but signals that one’s life had drifted out of alignment. They were wars with oneself—painful, destabilising, but potentially transformative. To blunt them indiscriminately was to risk arresting growth.
This is the irony at the heart of the antidepressant age. At precisely the moment we became obsessed with self-help, we may have medicated away the very mechanism that forces self-reflection. We turned the mind’s emergency signals into background noise. We confused comfort with health.
This is the inevitable result of a culture that long ago decided suffering was a mistake. That the human condition itself was mere faulty software.
In such a culture, the idea that anxiety might be meaningful—or that depression might demand change rather than suppression—sounds almost heretical. And I hope it does.
If Jung and Nesse are right, then we must consider this cosmic irony: we spent decades trying to cure our minds of their own attempts to cure us.
And now we are sicker than ever. As they say, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.
I’m glad it helps. Your description of intrusive ruminations in OCD is suitably harrowing and, not, I believe, uncommon. The effects are often crippling. People, understandably, tend to become isolated when they suffer from these experiences and often fail to seek help, with, for instance, overwhelming feelings of shame. I hope you’re mentioning your experiences will be of benefit to others. All the best, John.
I watched an interview with Tom Cruise and a very bad interviewer who wouldn't accept what Tom Cruise was saying, which was "if you put a child on drugs to stop them fidgeting in class, these children are becoming addicts and they will end up on the streets most likely because having stronger drugs like Fentanyl will be too enticing to refuse." (I paraphrased)