I have no idea how many of my students are on medication, but the number is certainly significant. We live in a medicated society, yet we’ve never heard the stories of those who grew up taking medications.
“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”
At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14. There was little question that she had very serious depression and had survived several suicide attempts. In fact, she credited the medication with saving her life.
But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity. (Coming of Age on Antidepressants)
During my brief stint in graduate school, I had a brief discussion with my adviser about the metaphysical connotations of such medications. These substances change the very core of what we think of as the soul, I said, adding that it brings up once again that old chestnut of the mind-body problem: what exactly is the connection between the “I” that I think of as GS and the brain/body? How can something physical change something we tend to think of as non-physical. If we throw out the idea of a soul, it’s an easy question to answer; if we want to cling to that idea, it’s somewhat more difficult.
Our discussion continued along these lines, moving to a discussion of how these medications tend to change things we used to think were personality traits. “How many Kierkegaards have we destroyed with Prozac?”
Indeed — think of all the creative geniuses in history and it’s almost shocking how many of them displayed characteristics that would now be labeled bipolar, for instance: Mahler, Van Gogh, and Kierkegaard all come to mind.
The possibility of changing personality through medication seems more likely when we think of people taking medication from age fourteen, before a solid “I” has formed. Who would these people have been without medication? In many cases, the answers is no one — they would have ended up as suicide statistics. But tweak the question a bit: who would they been if they had begun medication a few years later?
We’ll never know.
Nor will they.
Bipolar disorder is dangerous and often deadly, but you’re right — many of our very creative people had what appears to be bipolar disorder. But it’s not the only mental disability that might indicate a different kind of intelligence. ADHD is a good candidate; so is Asbergers and autism. Do we medicate because of the social problems these diseases cause and end up destroying the intelligence or creativity that often happens as a result?
“Do we medicate because of the social problems these diseases cause and end up destroying the intelligence or creativity that often happens as a result?”
Even the thought of medicating simply to avoid social problems is somewhat troubling. While working with autistic children, I found myself seeing things in entirely new ways because of the quirky way they saw and explained the world. That’s probably why genius and “insanity” are so linked — someone steps outside the flow of normal human experience and reports what he/she sees. The rest of us say, “Wow.”