Poets on Prozac: Poetry and Mental Illness, Part 3

I’ve posted before about how poets are more likely than most to struggle with mental illness. Richard Berlin, a psychiatry professor and poet, edited Poets on Prozac, a book of essays by sixteen poets about creativity, illness, and treatment. 

They all agreed on one thing: when you’re really messed up, you can’t get anything done. Their experience bears out the quote from Sylvia Plath that Berlin supplies in his introduction: “When you are insane, you are busy being insane—all the time…when I was crazy, that was all I was.”  

As far as Prozac, specifically, goes: I think only Chase Twichell (who, I was startled to learn, is not a guy—I always thought that was a dude’s name) felt like it inhibited her ability to create.

Bizarrely, two poets said that Prozac made them write more formal poetry (sonnets, villanelles, etc.) This is also the case with me! What the hell?! Why would that be? They both had theories, which I found unconvincing. I really have no idea.

I know that some meds can be a problem for some writers, though. As an adolescent, I would involuntarily shudder now and then—I still do it once in a while. Our family doctor diagnosed me (incorrectly, I think) as having some kind of epilepsy. He put me on Dilantin and phenobarbital. When this made me perpetually sleepy, he added Ritalin, which kept me awake. The meds were actually a disaster for my writing. I felt like the creative part of my brain had been packed away in cotton.

They also made me fixate on suicide, in a sort of dogged, dispassionate way. (A quick Google search suggests this was probably the Dilantin.) Anne Sexton wrote about this mindset in “Wanting to Die”: “But suicides have a special language./Like carpenters they want to know which tools./They never ask why build.” I kept trying to figure out how to do it without making too much of a mess (overdosing on the Phenobarbital, probably) and without upsetting people too much. Eventually I did make the connection between the meds and my fixation, and I stopped taking them. Obviously I should have discussed all this with someone, but I was a weird kid.

I started taking Prozac a couple of years after getting married, mostly in hopes it would make me a more pleasant, easy-going person for my husband to live with. It totally worked. A few years ago, I went off of it, and that’s when I really got back into poetry again.

Last year, though, I started having these episodes—once or twice a week, usually at night—in which I would cry nonstop for several hours and want to slash my wrists. At those times, I would feel positive that no one would mind me killing myself—that people would be relieved to be rid of me. I mention that because people always wonder how suicides could be so selfish, but the thing is, they’re not thinking clearly. After these episodes, I’d be just fine, even cheerful, if a little sleepy, and I’d think, “Huh. That was weird.” I went back on the meds, and talked to a therapist, and it went away quickly. I feel uncomfortable blogging about it, because mental illness carries a stigma, but of course that’s also one reason I’m blogging about it. And hey, hardly anyone reads this anyway. 

My doctor recently increased the dosage, because my new job was making me unreasonably anxious. I can feel the open space in my head where the worry used to be. And I’m just about to start writing a poem a day again, like I sometimes do, because that kind of works for me and I want to finish a full-length manuscript with supernatural and mythological themes. It’ll be interesting to see if the higher dosage effects my writing at all, but except for making me want to write sonnets, I don’t think it will.