Sad, Mad & Medicated: Part 1

1 star, would not recommend...

Apr 06, 2025

Hi friends,

Today’s writing is in service of a topic that conversations with friends can sometimes drift towards, and something I alluded to in my About page. Now and then, someone asks me what’s helped most in finding my way through, and out the other side of depression, anxiety, and cPTSD, so I’m offering this story as a gentle hand squeeze to those still in the thick of it, still walking through the shadows. This will be the first of a two-part article, where I’ll begin to map the terrain of my recovery. It’s not a prescription. Just retracing the footsteps from an exploratory path.

My first little meander into the inner landscape was at 19 years old, when I was befuddled with disordered eating, and undoubtedly a whole host of other follies and frenzies which thankfully, would iron themselves out later in ways I would never have expected. I was at university at the time, in one of those romantic catastrophes that snowballed invisibly into a whirlwind of hurtful mistakes that we’d naively promised ourselves and each other we’d never make, leaving in its wake a bewildered sorrow and an embittered regret, scattered in the rubble of a disenchanted heartbreak. But the tremors in my mind had started well before this chapter.

The six-session counselling starter pack helped me to begin connecting the dots: how the past has a way of writing the script of the present, how our conditioning creates the blueprint for how we come to perceive and interpret reality itself. The initial relief of counselling was the realisation that there were perfectly valid reasons for the way things were, why at times I felt like a total nutcase, and that an understanding of it seemed to alleviate the dizzying confusion of it all. Maybe I wasn’t wholly to blame. Maybe there’s more to it than I realise. Maybe there’s a way to do things differently. It touched that sense of possibility with which I was always enamoured.

Life continued until I inevitably kamikazed into the next brick wall. This time, in my mid-20s, as an anxious and depressed postgraduate student, I was referred to a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) course while another calamitous romantic relationship was in the process of going tits up (yes…I’m aware of the pattern here ladies and gents). MBCT was my introduction to meditation and contemplative practice, which seemed to orient my attention to this peaceful awareness that was always present amidst unravelling chaos. And with practice, embodying that awareness could reconfigure my moment-to-moment experience, where transient phenomena like thoughts and feelings, which were often overwhelmingly consuming, could simply pass like weather. The revelation was in training myself to slow down in the moment and learning to be present, and in viscerally experiencing the freedom to choose how I could respond to the happenings of life, rather than remaining shackled to default, unconscious reactions. These were the seedlings of centredness and equanimity, which would come in handy when my explorations led to more radical terrain.

The assault happened around 5 years later, which was when my health collapsed and shit got pretty real. “That” had suddenly “happened to me,” and there I was in the humiliating disgust of becoming one of “those” statistics, with all the diagnoses and labels that seem to rewrite the narrative of one’s entire life. And in the months that I couldn’t get out of bed, I desperately wanted to get better.

I was lucky with my GP. She was gentle, approachable, and exceptionally kind. She started me on the antidepressant citalopram, where we gradually increased the dose over the best part of a year before changing to sertraline after no discernible benefits. I diligently adhered to my regimen, accepting that it can take time to begin working and that there was a degree of trial and error to find what might be effective. However, after 18 months of increasingly adverse side effects, which seemed more debilitating than the original (already quite severe) symptoms I was experiencing, I started to question the entire idea that “my brain chemistry was wrong.” I wanted them to work, but that felt like too simplistic an explanation, and given my understanding about how stress was deeply intertwined with the meaning ascribed to it from my own work, I wasn’t convinced that treating this at the level of neurochemistry was going to do anything helpful. In short, it seemed like the epitome of reductionism, something I’d later learn that the field of psychiatry had struggled with for much of its history. If my brain chemistry was wrong, why hadn’t anyone measured it, in line with the scientific method? Where was the data? For other diseases with a biological cause, normally, samples are taken, like blood, tissue, other specimens, sometimes with various imaging tests, to compare an individual’s data against rigorously established population norms, before a diagnosis and a prescription can be decided upon. At the time I couldn’t help but think that the arbitrary flinging of pills with a list of side effects that basically described the disease they’re supposed to treat, in response to tick box questions like “are you sad?” and “do you want to kill yourself”, in the absence of biological tests that modern science claims are causal, just seemed…silly. Let’s not forget…humans are very silly.

I remember reading stories about people who seemed to accept the limitations and debilitating side effects of these medications, yet took them anyway for decades, for fear of things being worse without them. This was where I drew the line. I wasn’t willing to spend the rest of my life taking pills that were so obviously more harmful than they were helpful, that seemed to be prescribed in the apparent absence of any rigour, with side effects that perpetuated the symptoms they were supposed to alleviate. Instinctively, I was searching for a sense of purpose, for something that could orient me to reality in a way that made sense, that could provide direction to the fragmented, existential dissonance and emotional shadows in which I was lost…and deep down, I knew a little pill claiming to “rebalance my serotonin levels”, wasn’t capable of that. While all that was going on, I worked hard with a brilliant psychologist in talking therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy to address unresolved trauma. This seemed to provide some fantastic tools and insights that helped me to understand and navigate the emotional landscape, which would continue to help me later, in more intensive shadow work with psychedelics, entheogens, and self-inquiry practices.

The end of modern medicine and psychological therapies came when I weaned off antidepressants and eventually emerged from the fog of withdrawals. Psychological therapy brought me to a place in which I understood the narratives and origin stories of emotional pain. This was wonderfully helpful, but still incomplete, because intellectual understandings didn’t have the potency to shift what was primarily a felt experience in any meaningful way. It seemed as though attempting to address the dimension of feeling with the tools of the intellect was like trying to alleviate hunger by analysing the concept of a sandwich for one hour a week. At this stage, it was time to take matters into my own hands and follow my instincts.

I owe a lot to the medical practitioners who helped me, who had the kindest hearts and the most noble intentions. Throughout my life, I’ve benefited from them all, and I wouldn’t be here without them. My dear mother, with whom I shared an old photo in my previous article, persevered through kidney failure and two transplant operations before my brother and I were born. The story of how our family came to be here in the first place is a testament to the miracles of modern science and medicine, the compassion and hard-earned skill of the doctors and practitioners involved in her care, and the unwavering love, courage and determination of my wonderful parents and their respective families on opposite sides of the globe (my Dad is English and my Mum is Filippino). We’re extremely lucky to live in an era with people and institutions serving lifetime upon lifetime for the well-being of humanity, to the best of their knowledge and abilities. What humanity can render with love in the driving seat is incredibly special.

Here’s Mum and Dad getting married shortly after Mum recovered from her surgeries, sometime in the early 1980s.

Some of the darkest times were those in which I actively and wholeheartedly pursued the modern, conventional means of recovery, but I had to eventually accept that they could only take me so far. The only thing I had left was my intuition and dogged stubbornness, which took me down a slightly different path, beyond what modern science and medicine can currently offer. I’ve noticed how heated and polarised the conversations about modern medicine, mental health, and general well-being can become. While I understand the despair of attempting to navigate broken systems and various treatments not being as effective as we might initially hope, what might be helpful here is not another polarising argument that provokes further suspicion and mistrust, but something that expands the possibilities around the available options. It’s ok to take a knee once in a while, to withdraw into a peaceful solitude that provides the space to move through recovery as patiently and gently as possible, while exploring the array of possibilities and listening to the wisdom of what resonates with your deeper instincts.

My path to discovering inner peace and subsequent well-being has involved a range of psychological, pharmaceutical, philosophical, psychedelic, entheogenic, contemplative, and spiritual experiments, all of which have been, and continue to be, valuable in some way. Among my favorite realisations of all this is that journeys back to health, to a life of peace, joy, beauty, and wonder, don’t have to be strictly limited to one particular method or paradigm. We have a beautifully rich tapestry of modern tools and ancient teachings, a plush expanse of nature’s pharmacopia from the soils of the wilderness to the immaculate precision of the scientific laboratory, and the potential revelations arising from seeking out the depths of things, to the realisations hiding in plain sight, all at our disposal. And all of which, of course, require navigating with safety, sincerity and discernment. While we have much to be grateful for from modern science and medicine, we often forget the timeless wisdom left to us by our ancient ancestors from cultures extending all over the globe and throughout history, many of which are just as relevant and helpful now as they ever have been.

In the next part of this article, I’ll explore the slightly unusual turns my path took through psychedelics, entheogens, and contemplative practice. It’ll start with what led to my arrival in this little spot in the Amazon back in 2021, where everything as I knew it changed.

Dreamglade, Iquitos, Peru

Thanks for reading my darlings. If any of this resonates with you, if you’re somewhere along that winding path, deep in the questioning, or perhaps just beginning to sense the pull toward something more honest, more whole, I’d love to hear from you.

💬 What has helped you the most in your recovery or wellbeing so far?
🧭 Have you ever found yourself questioning the tools you were handed, or turning toward something unexpected instead?
🌱 What inner wisdom have you learned to trust, even when the world told you otherwise?

Feel free to share in the comments. I read them all and genuinely value the sense of community that can grow through these shared stories.

Sad, Mad & Medicated: Part 1

1 star, would not recommend...

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