The folly of doing your own damn research, when it comes to medicine, is that you are suggestible by design. You are built to take in givens and from them draw conclusions. You are built out of layers of self-hypnosis.

There is something like a WebMD effect, where you start feeling a bit off and so you go and take a look at WebMD and then it turns out you have sixteen types of cancer and it's really a wonder that you're still alive at all. The act of reading about symptoms helps to strengthen the symptoms you do feel, as well as inducing the sensations of symptoms you do not.

The same applies to medications. You start taking a medication and, curious,  you look up the side effects. Suddenly, you are having an averse reaction to whatever it is that you're taking, and you will surely die.

Maybe this isn't universal, but it certainly shows up quite nicely in folks with anxiety. Find yourself medicated for anxiety, and it's only natural that every side effect from the medication starts applying to you. Are you sleepy? Are you *too* sleepy? You're probably going to die.

So anyway, at some point my depression and anxiety started to get out of hand, and my boss at the time nudged me not-so-gently toward a psychiatrist to try and get me to chill the fuck out. Dr Johnston was a pretty okay doctor, too. He ran his practice out of his basement and, in the style of psychiatrists everywhere, showed precisely no emotion on his face as I talked. It was not exactly validating, talking to a mannequin, but at the end of the session, he handed me a few prescriptions to try and sent me on my way.

The folly of doing my own damn research was that when I got my meds and took them, when that inner clamor of voices finally calmed down and I was able to fall asleep with relative ease, I started reading up on what it was that I was taking and why, and immediately started feeling all of the different side effects all at once.

But that's not wholly true, is it? I didn't do my research. I promised myself that I wasn't supposed to do my research, and instead of looking into what was happening with me, I said I felt anxiety, because I did, and so I was treated for anxiety, but if I'm honest, I was just depressed. Like, horribly, clinically depressed.

And so the anxiety meds just 
