Trying to fix me by putting me to sleep.

In class so far, we’ve discussed at length, at least within the small group discussions, the problems with the word “disorder,” and the way particular irregularities within an individual’s nature are defined. Looking past the difficulties of determining what exactly a disorder is, and how it manifests itself, this is a story of the way in which medication played a huge role within my life for a large chunk of my high school life.

Without potentially revealing too much of my personal background and thereby taking focus from the blog post question, this is a shortened version of the situation.

Although I am an English major, I was originally double majoring in English and Psychology, and have always been interested in psychology as both my parents graduated with psych degrees, and my father got his Ph.D. in psych here at the U of M.

It had never occurred to me as a young teen that medications may interact with each other in ways that take on manifestations that are quite arguably worse than the actual problems themselves. In my sophomore year in high school, I was diagnosed with insomnia. I wasn’t aware there was a problem; not sleeping did not seem that abnormal to me, and it was not physically harming me. I suppose this ties back with our discussions on ideological standards, which greatly affects how behavior differing from the norm is classified. The process of the diagnosis consisted of a double-sided survey, containing about twelve questions, and was weirdly objective. Even after taking dozens of psych classes now, and learning about the process of diagnosing a person with this or that disorder, determining compulsions and strange behavior, something always seems off. It shouldn’t be possible for someone who has never met me to know, by my answering “true” an ambiguous question such as “sometimes it is hard for me to fall asleep,” could possibly know about my psychological state. But through scientific processes, psychologists have been able to determine that there are objective ways to figure these things out.

But good news, the doctors told me, it could be cured by simply popping a pill at night and IMMEDIATELY laying down to fall asleep (I learned the reasons for the stress on “immediately” much later, as most medications prescribed to “cure” insomnia cause wild hallucinations if the user doesn’t fall asleep pretty much five minutes after taking the pill).

The problem was, however, that although the medication did indeed do its job of quite litereally knocking me out for hours on end, it came with a little side effect that not only was I not prepared for, but had no prior warning as I was handed the prescription. I began to have night terrors. I was immediately prescribed more pills to take to counteract the night terrors, which, strangely enough, had side effects including insomnia. This seemingly psychotic cycle of pills changed and then prescribed to counteract the other drugs went on for years before I finally decided that straight insomnia would be a blessing. The quick-fix drugs had, unfortunately, left me with permanent waves of night terrors, which I had later explained as a “lasting side effect” of the original medication I had been prescribed.

I am not dismissing the problem that was my insomnia, but it led me to question many things about the system that led me from insomnia to permanent night terrors as a lasting side effect. This particular instance is one way in which science has greatly affected my life, but by no means would I say in any negative way. As cool as I think it is that “science” – if I may for a second use such a blanket term – has allowed people to figure out ways to fix difficult problems on a health level (as well as every level of life), I feel as though the relationship between medical science and drug companies needs to be examined carefully, for lack of a better word, fixed.