Overmedicated
How a confluence of perfectionism and mistreated mental health diagnoses led me to drug addiction with the unrequited assistance of my Ivy League psychiatric care.
It is 2013 and I have just landed at Dartmouth College for my first term of studies. I am a former high school sports captain, extra curricular president of this and that, and a gracious recipient of a full ride to an Ivy League school as a first generation college attendee. I have smoked cannabis in high school and had alcohol on occasion. I was on no over the counter medications and would have considered myself relatively healthy in September of 2013.
By 2019 I would snort anything put in front of me, I would take pills of all kinds, and barely question what was being smoked. My only line was no heroin and no IV drug use. How did this happen? How did I go from Ms. High Achiever to returning bottles and selling gift cards for enough money to buy a dime bag of blow…
Upon starting classes at Dartmouth College, academic achievement was no longer an easy success. I could no longer not study and be okay. This was also my first experience living with others. I had just spent the last 5 years living with my very clean and very quiet father with no siblings and no one else in our home. I wasn’t ready for the massive adjustment that cohabitating with others would put on my system. This social shock had also alerted me to tics of mental illness that had gone ignored in my childhood home. There had been talk of ASD and OCD from my doctors when I was young although my father went the unmedicated route and we let me be. Now that I was out in the world, there were various psychological phenomena that I could no longer overlook in my experience.
I thought I was doing myself a favor when I made an appointment with campus psychiatric care. Quickly routed through the system, I was on an SSRI within a week of my first appointment. Within the next three weeks, my super power focus would decline entirely. When I reported this side effect to my attending psychiatrist, I was placed on Ritalin to counteract the reported brain fog. I had never had a stimulant before besides a few rowdy energy drinks the summer before college and too much espresso. The issue with my Ritalin prescription was that it turned the lights on in a way that my inner perfectionist was obsessed with. I couldn’t believe how long I could sit and study in the library. I couldn’t believe how long I could go without eating and how good it felt to be hyper focused, under-slept, and losing weight.
I started to research Ritalin in hopes of better understanding how I was allowed to feel this good from a prescription medication. In my research, I found that Adderall was a more favorable option for many users and also that Vyvanse was nearly the most preferred due to a longer state of effect. I used my research and passionate desire for access to these medicines to persuade my attending health team that I needed to be put on the highest doses of Vyvanse and Adderall. My persuasion was successful.
By January of 2014 I was on an SSRI with the highest prescribe-able measures of both Vyvanse and Adderall. This in itself is a glaring red flag of the college psychiatric care system. Within a few more months, I had lost 40 pounds from my college arrival weight and I clearly looked unwell.
As I further steeped in college culture, I realized that these psychiatric drugs were coveted by many and during finals — prescribees with excess would sell their wares. I was a prescribee and I began to buy others’ excess too. I began to buy others’ pills and I began to snort any pills that I could as I had recently learned that it increased the overall intensity of the affect although it did not last as long as ingestion.
By the end of my freshman year, I was fully addicted to my psychiatric meds. I had to be prescribed a higher dose of my SSRI and I was now prescribed Ativan and Xanax to combat the anxiety from all my stimulant usage.
With increased dependency, what had started as a hyper fixation on the prospect of perfectionism from these performance enhancers had now devolved into recreational substance abuse. My substance abuse was localized to my prescribed medications, cannabis, and frequent cigarettes.
In September of 2015, I tried cocaine, MDMA, and ecstasy for the first time. Now I was open to try anything anyone would offer me. My mind was addiction primed to seek out dopamine however it was most accessible.
By June of 2016, I was blowing through my prescriptions at a record rate and I was supplementing with near daily cocaine use and spent my weekends buying research chemicals, off brand MDMA, and taking not so pure LSD. My mental health was at an all time low and it was a miracle to not be failing out of my classes.
This behavior continued with no reprieve. I graduated in June of 2017 and the night before my graduation, I had a cocktail of my psychiatric medications, cocaine, nearly a strip of acid, and snorted a handful of percocets. This was the state in which I graduated with my Ivy League degree.
I lost my college experience. There are horror stories I could tell you of my time at Dartmouth College…maybe I will some time, I am on the other side of addiction now although I was snorting meth, smoking crack, and abusing my prescriptions until September 2019. I spent 6 years abusing substances and that was my life — everything else was secondary. I have spent the last 5 years trying to reconcile my very altered neurochemical balance. I am on no psychiatric medications at this time and have not since I stopped taking them along with hard drugs.
My current mental health diagnosis is Autism Spectrum Disorder and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was misdiagnosed and medication mismanaged and it nearly killed me. The point of my experiential report of my college prescription and recreational drug journey is to tell you that not all medication intervention is for the patient’s best interest. I am not the only individual I have heard of who was put on medication before exploring root cause and other means of remediation…