LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

And here the hope lies

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To the editor:

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of that single drug, Zoloft — or by its generic name, sertreline. 

I’ve known it since the very first week I started taking it some time in the murky past, its immediate effect was that powerful, that striking.

That very effect is renewed each morning during the first 20 minutes of the day. I get up and take the 100mg white oblong, pill, along with Abilify, and the lithium and the Thorazine. But it is the Zoloft that really strikes a pose.

I might compare it to a really skilled window washer, who with an even sweeping motion of a black, rubber squeegee scraper, cleans away a year’s worth of dirt and grime from a plate-glass window. The glass is clean. You can see through it without obstruction. My vision, my clarity of mind, is so restored.

Believe it or not, this takes place each and every morning, whether or not the rest of the morning ritual takes place at all. Today, I have had very little success with the very best of the literature that can serve to get me headed in the right direction. But there was the Zoloft, and with it, the fog lifted, and my day began.

It is, in fact, hard to overestimate the effect of it by the entire psychiatric pharmacological revolution. It is here, I believe, that the great hope for the future lies.

My hat is always off to the men and women who do the vitally important work of developing these new drugs. Yes, there is a lot of money in it. But it is exactly for this reason that the drugs are getting better.

It is for this reason that the path of the next generation will be easier. 

I am only too familiar with the horror stories, of the drugs misused. 

Believe me, I can speak from experience, having once abruptly halted them myself and consequently lived through the trauma of a hospitalization gone wrong. 

It hasn’t altered my conviction that it is in the latest generation of psychiatric medication that the greatest hope for the future lies.

Josh Greenfield

Josh Greenfield

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