Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process

TWO: The Desire to Think Clearly

Two the desire to think clearly j. d. smith, ma 23 for a poet, seeking treatment for depression is to break with an implicit social contract. To the extent that the culture at large has a view of poets, beyond acknowledging their existence as a strange but seldom seen life form, such as a platypus or giant squid, that view is based on the Romantic myth of the poet as a strange, distraught creature , preferably consumptive, who occasionally breaks forth in song or a dirge. The poet in this view is morose so that others do not have to be, a pack mule for the collective burden of consciousness. I had not been consulted on this arrangement, though, and even before I wrote anything worthwhile I wanted out, because depression did far more to obstruct than encourage my writing. Coming of age in the 1970s and 1980s, in the shadow of the confessional poets and during a time of growing narcissism in American culture, I was nearly predestined to plumb the depths of my angst in verse, but the results amounted to more or less elaborate ways of saying “I feel miserable and hopeless,” though with line breaks. In one of the perverse defeats of youth, I had to admit that Plath, Sexton, and Lowell had “better” material to work with and more profound psychiatric problems. Besides, whatever gifts I possess as a poet lend themselves more to engagement with the outside world than portraying inner states. Being a poet in despair does not necessarily make one a poet of despair. My own inner states have existed largely as an obstacle to concentrating on other, more interesting issues. The depression that had mercifully turned me away from gregarious and time-consuming professions such as selling real estate or running for oªce, which might have distracted me from poetry altogether, had also kept me from paying suªcient attention to subjects beyond myself. More than a decade after the fact, I can still remember my exact words when the doctor asked me what I was expecting from the medication (fluoxetine hydrochloride, aka Prozac) that would finally work for me. “I want to think clearly.” If nothing else, it would have been a novelty. By then I had spent most of my life seeing the world through whatever is the opposite of rose-colored glasses. Still, some part of my psyche stood apart from the larger tumult and realized that things felt far worse than they should. What I said to the doctor next does not stay with me verbatim, perhaps because it wasn’t completely honest. I stated, more or less, “I’m not looking for a happy pill.” I should have added, “anymore.” It wasn’t for lack of trying. By the time raves and Ecstasy had entered the culture I was too old to travel in those circles without feeling like a creepy hanger-on. Before then I had used alcohol in repeated attempts to feel right or, in the jargon I later learned, self-medicate. Luck, or grace, or an incongruous sense of selfpreservation based on seeing The Lost Weekend at an impressionable age kept me from following some of my relatives—perhaps self-medicating as well—into alcoholism. Thinking clearly seemed to be all I could hope for. Thinking clearly, though, might let me write without the sabotage of self-doubt, trouble concentrating, and diªculty in sustaining projects or working through multiple drafts—followed by guilt and self-loathing for my failures. I had somehow managed to endure talking therapies and previous attempts at medication without taking a razorblade to my wrists. I had even managed to write passably at times, though my “successes” were short poems that needed little revision and that were largely confined to my own concerns. The following poem, “Shortness,” which I wrote as an undergraduate, embodies all of these tendencies. You are king nowhere, not even in your skin’s space that one large hand can drag away or crack. Your coins are thin, picked up o¤ the ground, and no one will take them when you reach the bar, debate your age, strut length into toy legs. You look close, seeing things parallel to flight below radar range the way maple seeds fall, j. d. smith 24 the flutist’s tapping foot, how a lie hides in the extra half inch you tell your blind dates...