Supplements Made Me Lose My Mind

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In early 2021, when my boyfriend suggested I might be depressed, I thought he was overreacting, prescriptive in his high-functioning ways. This from a person who always has clean laundry and can’t sleep unless there are chia seeds soaking in the fridge for breakfast. His assessment of depression was meaningless to me.

Sure, I was kind of tired and in a bad mood all the time, but I chalked that up to a combination of the weather, my general personality, and having to commute to New Jersey three times a week to teach Literature 101 to college freshmen who had never read a book and didn’t intend to start now. My occasional bad moods were not a medical issue, I thought — more like the way I could never figure out how other women were physically able to wear high heels or keep their hair de-frizzed. I’m “built different.” But I do love easy, acquisition-based routes to self-improvement, so I did what any slightly crunchy-granola zillennial with a skin-care routine and four-plus hours of daily screen time might and Googled “depression supplements.”

I was aware of the available pharmaceutical treatments, but I was wary, nearly phobic, of psychiatric drugs. Everyone in my immediate family has been highly medicated on a cocktail of ADHD, depression, and anxiety medication for as long as I can remember. I’ve watched the agonizing process of my parents switching medication enough times to see that managing them can be as much of a job as being not depressed. For a while, my dad was on an Elvis-like cocktail of Ritalin for focus and clonazepam to take the edge off. Over the years, as his dosage of one crept up, the other rose to meet it. At their peak, my father, usually a quick-talking latter-day Groucho Marx, started speaking slowly, losing his train of thought. When he decided to taper off his behemoth dose of benzos, it took almost a year of agonizing weaning, exiled from the artificial benzo bliss and sent into an anxious state far worse than whatever the drugs were meant to mask. There’s a reason when you Google “benzo withdrawal” the first result is a large banner for the suicide-prevention hotline.

To be clear, I do believe in mental health. When I started looking for “depression supplements,” I had been in psychoanalytic therapy for about two years. She was the Platonic ideal of a therapist: an older Jewish woman who wore big wooden beads and worked from an office in the West Village. She pushed me to, as she said, “detangle a web of contradicting and harmful associations I’d made to cope with being a living person.” Also, she worked on a sliding scale and was covered by insurance. She never suggested I go on medication for depression. Actually, she didn’t think I was depressed.

Still, I figured the supplements could only help. And if they did nothing, then I’d at least enjoy the positive placebo effect of participating in self-care. Like all the times I’d taken zinc to stop a cold, ingested probiotics for my “biome,” or any other tiny sugar pills found in the homeopathic aisle — I figured losing 20-ish dollars was the worst thing that might happen. I consulted websites of varying levels of credibility, including Healthline, Goop, and the blog of RFK Jr.’s consigliere, Dr. Mark Hyman, who seems to believe that frequent trips to the sauna and a diet of nuts and berries makes you age backward.

Some sites suggested classic supplements like vitamin D and fish oil. Others hawked more New Wave “adaptogens” like ashwagandha and “Reishi mushrooms,” powdered panaceas I’d seen for sale at Los Angeles crystal-and-smoothie emporiums like Moon Juice and Erewhon. My favorite skin-care–slash–woo-woo store, CAP Beauty, recommended a $2,000 “BioMat” that “uses a combination of heat and amethyst to drive far infrared rays and negative ions deep into our cells and tissues.” But man cannot persist on vibrations alone, and I was looking for something cheap and expressly mood boosting.

All of the sites mentioned St. John’s wort, which was apparently amazing for “a positive mood.” None said it would cure colds, banish brain fog, or make my joints feel better. I liked that it was specifically a supplement helpful for aiding in the treatment of mild to moderate depression. My depression, if anything, was mild to moderate. I just wanted to be in a positive mood all the time. Plus I’d once taken a bath using Susanne Kaufmann’s $65 St. John’s wort bath powder and it made my skin feel slippery-smooth. So I went to Duane Reade and bought a bottle of Nature’s Way St. John’s wort supplements.

All recommendations for supplements, including classics like vitamin C, include a disclaimer: Speak to your doctor if you’re taking other medication. Well, I wasn’t. A website I consulted said St. John’s wort could make hormonal birth control less effective, but I had a copper IUD. Also I’d never even heard of anyone getting sick from vitamins. So I started taking the dose the bottle suggested. Three caplets, twice a day. I took those dark green pills for five months. Was I in a better mood than usual? I don’t know. Honestly, I tend to have a pretty cheery disposition except for when I have to do things that are irritating, like commuting two hours in the dark. But those five months were spread across the summer, meaning I had access to the healing powers of the sun and the Atlantic Ocean. So when my fourth bottle ran out in early November, I didn’t buy any more.

A few days after Thanksgiving, I went to a rave in Ridgewood with my old roommate. I got home around 4 a.m., feeling full of energy. The next morning, I woke up early and cleaned my room while listening to Ethel Merman and Barbra Streisand, singing along to “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” After, I met on Zoom with my psychoanalyst, who was spending extra time upstate for the holiday. We talked about how amazing I felt; our sessions, I said, were definitely working. Then I went down to the small grocery store on my corner to get some lunch. It was lightly snowing, and I felt buoyant in my large goose-down parka. I picked up some chicken noodle soup and a box of chocolate-covered biscuits named after a German philosopher who believed we live in the best of all possible worlds. In the checkout line, I felt a stabbing pain in my lower right abdomen, a sort of one-second period cramp. The woman at the checkout beckoned me over, and I put the soup on the counter. My vision blurred. I felt as if I were in a scene in a war movie when the sound gets cut in the middle of a battle to convey that the soldiers are overwhelmed.

Aha! I thought, still feeling in control of everything. I know this feeling. I’d fainted before, once from dehydration and basically every time I’ve smoked pot. With my vision going, I crouched down into a ball to lessen the impact to my head from the impending fall, then toppled over. A few seconds later, I woke up with five people crowded over me. I live on the Upper West Side, so there were multiple elderly women offering to call me an ambulance. I was fine, I told them, I’d only fainted. The store manager brought me a bottle of water and a small bar of some of the very bad Turkish chocolate I’d always wondered if anyone actually bought on purpose. I sat on a stool, eating the waxy chocolate, feeling better by the second as the blood came back to my head.

But at home, eating my soup, the pain in my lower abdomen started worrying me. Its sharpness earlier was strange, and the fact that it was now totally gone was equally unsettling. I called my doctor’s office, a large practice in Midtown East that typically schedules appointments six months in advance. They said they could fit me in the next day if it was urgent, so I decided to try to relax until then. Except instead I had a full-blown panic attack. My friend who lives nearby came over and decided the best thing to do was have me do some kind of physical exercise so I could “be more in my body.” We put on the Tracy Anderson arm-exercise video and flapped our arms like inelegant birds, a move credited with sculpting the arms of Gwyneth.

The next day, now afraid of leaving the house by myself lest I faint again, I asked my dad to accompany me to my appointment in the Midtown East hospital district. At the doctor’s office, they said my appointment was actually one month from now. That was impossible, but they refused to believe me or let me see anybody. So my dad called his own cardiologist, whose office happened to be upstairs, and, through the same charm, winning personality, and ability to work the system that has always made him a favorite with strangers, the cardiologist eventually met us outside on the sidewalk, where he gave me an evaluation. He said that I should have gone to the emergency room after I’d fainted, but that now, since I no longer had the abdominal symptoms, there was nothing really to test. He bet it was an “ovarian torsion,” in which my ovaries twisted around each other and then quickly righted themselves, which was extremely serious, and that if it were to happen again, which he bet it would, I should go straight to the ER.

Of course, that wasn’t the most calming thing to hear, but I white-knuckled myself into submission that evening by listening to a calming podcast by Tara Brach, the Buddhist meditation coach who said my anxious thoughts should be but waves on the ocean. “By not resisting, by letting the waves wash through us, we began to relax,” she said. The thoughts Am I dizzy? Am I about to faint? flooded in nonetheless, leaving me frantic as I attempted to grade 27 undergraduate papers about what makes comedy funny.

The sharp pain didn’t return. But with the cardiologist’s gentle words ringing in my ears, I decided to visit the CityMD on my block. The doctor there informed me that I needed to go to the hospital immediately. He said that fainting when accompanied by pain is often a “limb-threatening” illness and that I absolutely needed to be checked by an MRI machine ASAP. Somehow this information put me in a better mood than a medical emergency should have. That there might be a real medical reason for my fainting meant that it could soon come to an end. By the time I got to Mount Sinai, I felt amazing. If I fainted here, I thought cheerfully, they could probe my insides and get down to the bottom of what was going on. But after they ran myriad tests, they told me that the CityMD doctor had no idea what he was talking about. From their tone, I could tell they thought And that’s why he’s stuck working at CityMD. The doctor said the only possible emergency she’d have imagined was the small chance I had a life-threatening blood clot in my stomach. I’d have to wait four hours to get scanned. I would be kind of crazy to wait for that, the doctor told me, and if it were her, she’d go home. I felt a bit like Tony Soprano when he screams at the doctors for telling him there’s nothing medically wrong with him. But I had plans in two hours to see my friend Caroline’s concert at Terminal 5, and I was relieved to be able to leave the emergency room, where I saw a lot of people way more fucked up than I was.

At Terminal 5, I was in the VIP section, right next to the speakers. My best friend, who had no idea what was happening to me, bought me a $27 tequila-soda. Everything was right as rain. At the after-party, I celebrated my internal secret victory with a few more drinks. I was outside and normal. Except the next morning, a growing sense of unease crept back in, accompanied by a brand-new ringing in my ears courtesy of the speakers, and a fear that I did, in fact, have the blood clot the doctor at the hospital had warned me about. The fear of fainting had morphed: Suddenly, I had no idea where I was. Actually, I had no idea who I was. I felt certain I had to escape the room, the apartment, and my body. Whipped into a frenzy, I FaceTimed my boyfriend, who was Britishly on “holiday” in “Wales” with his “school friends.” Seeing his face somehow reinforced my dissociation. He looked like a stranger, an impostor. I felt locked behind my own face, which I could see in the phone reflection was contorted into a rictus of a smile.

He could sense that something was amiss, and when he asked what was wrong, my response was a terrifying cackle. “What’s wrong? How can you even ask that?” He gently recommended I go see my parents who lived only a mile away. It was getting dark outside, and various inanimate objects in the sublet apartment had started to appear menacing: the beaded curtain that blocked off the kitchen, the Calder-inspired mobile, the wall clock covered in rainbow plastic spikes. The psychiatrist I would eventually meet with, a panic specialist, explained I had been experiencing the “three D’s of panic disorder,” dissociation, depersonalization, and derealization, and for an unusually long duration.

After I had been on the “three D’s” for five hours, crying and screaming, I took my boyfriend’s suggestion and called my parents. My mom was visiting her brother in Pennsylvania, and my dad was at dinner in midtown with his childhood friend, but he left when he heard the urgency in my voice. I lived then on the tenth floor of a prewar building with an elevator that broke at least twice a month, so my dad got stuck inside the elevator for a half-hour on the second floor. Of course, an elevator is a Faraday cage, so I experienced those 30 minutes as the complete disappearance of my dad from the Earth. When he eventually got out, he climbed eight flights of stairs with his wooden walking stick. He found me shivering and crying and was calm. Having a family history of anxiety and depression, I suppose, means that the family comes equipped with skills to manage anxiety and depression. He sat next to the bed, his thick, knobbled wooden walking stick leaving the soothing impression that he was a Gandalf-like protector. Then he gave me my first-ever Valium.

The feeling of benzodiazepine entering your bloodstream is like taking your bra off after a long day at work. No, better. It’s like clean socks and a hot bowl of chili by the campfire after a long day backpacking through mud. It’s like your grandmother brushing your hair after a hot bath. I probably don’t have to explain this particular feeling of well-being, as tens of millions of Americans are legally prescribed benzos every year. Xanax cozy is our hygge, an American gemütlichkeit.  In the words of Future, I was “welcome[d] to the Xanny family.”

People are always talking about “texting their therapists,” but I had never communicated with mine outside sessions except to schedule our meetings. This seemed to be the right kind of exception. “Hi, I’m sorry to bother you,” I wrote her, “but wanted to tell you I fainted right after our last meeting. Have been in sort of a state of nervousness and occasional panic / crying / freak out since. Went to the doctor who said nothing was wrong with me. But still feel very anxious and tired and freaked out.” We met on Zoom, where my therapist informed me she thought that through our sessions I had dissolved so many of my frameworks and coping mechanisms I’d been left destabilized and was in the process of rebuilding on steadier footing. Though I believe in Dr. Freud and his theories, I was not convinced.

In any case, I told her, I had to return to teaching the following week and was sure that, in this state, I couldn’t make it to Newark via train. The under-construction Penn Station had become a homeless shelter guarded by military police with AK-47s, in which I was often tapped on the shoulder by some very severely mentally ill people. If I fainted there, what would happen? What if I started hysterically crying in front of my students? So my psychoanalyst referred me to a psychiatrist and said she’d have her call me that day. This psychiatrist was no Dr. Pill-pusher. Instead, she was a gentle Swedish American woman, also a boomer, with long white braids and reading glasses that hung from beaded Croakies. The Western Massachusetts–ness of her array put me immediately at ease.

She was also an expert in panic disorders and said I looked like I was in severe physical pain. She asked me about anything that could have triggered the panic attacks. Any major life changes? No. Any medical issues? No, aside from the new, imaginary ones. Any changes in medication? This wasn’t adding up for her, she said. She asked me to seriously think about if anything traumatic or different had happened to me. Just as we were giving up, she asked if I’d been taking any vitamins. “Oh, yes,” I said, “St. John’s wort.”

She sported a grave face. “Well, there’s your problem,” she said. Apparently, St. John’s wort is metabolized similarly to an SSRI like Zoloft or Lexapro. When I’d gone off of it abruptly, it was as if I’d quit a high dose of an SSRI cold turkey. The mystery had been solved, but the misery was nowhere near over. She said that because I was taking an unregulated substance without proper studies or trials regarding cessation, it was impossible to know how long it would take to get back to normal. To feel better, she said, I would absolutely need to take a psychiatric drug. After I refused Zoloft, she decided on a course of Xanax to be taken every four hours to “hold me”; after three months, I’d wean off. One of the things I remember about those first few days, when the worst of the panic attacks had been shut down by the Xanax, but when all I could do was stare blankly at 30 Rock, was my deification of Dr. Leo Sternbach, the Polish scientist who had discovered benzodiazepine in a Roche lab in New Jersey in 1956. Thank you, Dr. Sternbach, I thought as I read his Wikipedia page in the dark. What a miracle you escaped the Nazis in 1941, what a clever doctor you were to accept a fellowship in Zurich so that you were saved and could invent medicine to save me. I couldn’t stop imagining what it would have been like if I’d had this psychotic break in, say, ancient Greece. Would I have been stuck like this forever? Would everyone have thought I was a seer in contact with Athena or something while really I was having a mental breakdown?

Even while on the Xanax, during those first few months I had a small panic attack at least once a week, which felt like charging rivers forcing their way over the dam of the drugs. The triggers were always different. A single bite of chicken once sent currents of panic to my brain at a birthday dinner, leading me to hide in the bathroom of a restaurant. At a crowded weekend matinee of a Norwegian indie film, realizing it might be difficult to leave my central seat to get to the bathroom in case I had a panic attack, I ended up having a panic attack. In these cases, I would then take still more Xanax, which would take about half an hour to kick in, time I usually spent in some bathroom stall sweating through my shirt like a loser kid in a teen movie.

Eventually, I figured out that if I just simply held the bottle of Xanax — if I just touched the bottle and felt it in my hands — I would remember that I could cancel out any panic attack that was coming. The pill bottle became talismanic, and its contents were crumbled and powdery from being shaken around like a magical maraca. After three months, under the psychiatrist’s supervision, I began to taper down my dosage by a quarter milligram every two weeks. I started the Xanax regimen in late November. Nine months later, in August, I was finally off the daily dosage, and only taking the pills “As Needed,” as it read on the bottle.

Lately, I see these traps everywhere, the mental-health equivalent of tweakments. RFK Jr. and his MAHA friends peddle “Peptides” and intermittent fasting”; Trump’s nominee for surgeon general wrote a book with a chapter called “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor.” Still, recently, I was served some ads by a mommy-earthy fashion designer for a mushroom-adaptogen coffee. Drinking this would supposedly give me more energy and tackle “brain fog,” that eternal bogeyman. And I really considered buying some. Her life looked amazing. I told my therapist about it. She forbade me in the clearest terms from messing around with supplements and seemed genuinely bewildered by my desire to experiment further after what had happened the last time. “Don’t you already feel good?” she asked. “And if you don’t, why don’t you want something that’ll actually work?”