Don’t skip pills – even if it seems interesting
Scene from Umbrellas for Cherbourg (1964)
When my kids were young I yelled. Just a little. But then I read that any yelling at all permanently damages kids. I thought: Really? One time? That’s weird. Because when I was a kid, a yelling day was a good day. It meant no blood.
But I knew the patterns I’d inherited from my parents would have to change; I had to find new patterns. So I started drinking to make myself less anxious.
After a year of escalating alcohol, the CTO of my startup said he wouldn’t make the site live until I stopped drinking. I told him, “I only drink so I’m calm with my kids.”
He told me, “You’re an alcoholic.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know what I’m talking about,” he said. “I’m Russian.”
So I stopped drinking and I started taking anxiety medicine. Mostly. Whenever I thought it was doing nothing, I’d skip a pill. My kids would notice within hours: “Mom, did you forget your medicine?”
I would pretend I’d forgotten. I mean, I really had, sort of – I’d forgotten that the pills actually work. So I’d say thanks for the reminder and take a pill. Once I did say, “How could you tell?
They could hear a change in my tone of voice. That’s what made me stop skipping. I accepted that I was taking the medicine for my kids. I couldn’t tell the difference in my behavior but they could. I also learned that yelling is so awful for kids that they learn to identify a portentous shift in tone of voice. You really can’t see your own childhood until you see it through your kids.
Now that they’re gone, I’ve been skipping. I think it’s the human condition to stop taking psychiatric meds because we forget who we are when we don’t take them. The meds work so well that they convince us that the person we are with them is the person we’ve been all along. And so, we let ourselves forget why we ever needed help.
I skip one day and find myself writing such good emails that I make a note to include my insights in a blog post:
The Alpha School is an example. They report using AI during the school day with great success. But Alpha School has a 3:1 teacher/student ratio, which means that AI is helping teachers, not kids.
Then, while I’m on a roll, I order pizza for me and Nino because while I was so busy being manic, which I get from skipping pills, I forgot to figure out what’s for dinner. In some other universe where I am nice, I told Nino that I like cooking for him, and so it’s my job to deal with dinner for us four nights a week.
Nino and I watch The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Nino is selecting his favorites from the list of top 250 movies rated by film directors and film critics. Trust me when I tell you that you’ll know less than 15 of those movies. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is all in song. In French. It feels like we’re dating again because I used to love doing deep dives into his eccentric interests. My love language is expertise.
I pause to go to the bathroom. This is also something I have not done since we were dating. Not the bathroom part, but sneaking off to write down something I don’t want to forget. I write:
AI can’t replace tutors because the kids who can self-study already do. Thousands of kids self-study for AP exams every year. The kids who really need tutoring can’t self-study.
Then I go back to Umbrellas. The movie is gorgeous. I have to concentrate to not be a bitch about the insane singing. I tell myself over and over again that if I’m going to be snarky when Nino shares something with me then I’ll be all alone for the rest of my life, or I’ll have to start over with someone else and they won’t have seen all the same movies as me and it’s just too much. So I follow along with the songs and try not to be aware that the rhyming isn’t there. Not all songs need rhyme. Fine.
Anyway. We only watch half a movie. Then Nino goes home to bed.
Normally I’d go to bed too, but I’m already in pill skipping mode, so there are no rules. I snuggle up on the sofa with my laptop and catch up on Marginal Revolution which is a blog I love when it doesn’t infuriate me (which is funny, because that’s what readers say about my blog). And now that I’m feeling warm and cozy, I start a fight.
This is the comment that sets me off:
My kids used two AI learning apps that really helped them. 1) Google Read-along, which listens to them reading and helps out if they are struggling with a word. 2) Simply Piano, it listens to what they are playing, uses spaced repetition, and increases difficulty as they move on. It’s also super gamified. My kids learned piano and thought they were playing a video, won’t move on until they get 3 stars for every song.
I write a reply:
I don’t understand using AI for this. There is no evidence that kids enjoy reading out loud to a computer, and there’s no causation between quality of education and ability to read aloud: fluency is genetic. Also, there is no evidence that kids learn to enjoy practicing music by doing it with a computer. A $100,000/year nanny is not nearly as good as a parent home with the kid. Why would we start talking about an AI nanny? What is the point? What are we measuring this “AI achievement” against?
I get upvotes. Only three. But I’m emboldened. The AI Parent comments back to me, explaining what gamification is and why it’s so great for parenting. And I write another comment about how he should stop offloading his parenting duties to AI.
It’s an understatement to say that I do not get upvotes. Because you can downvote on Marginal Revolution. Also, it’s an economics blog. So I am wishing that I at least hadn’t commented with my real name. I know I always say that I don’t care when people think I’m stupid. But I do care when I am stupid, and I wish I could delete my comment.
Then I decide that I am grateful that I expressed my pill-skipping ire online. At least I didn’t pick a fight with Nino. And now I have the chance to write it down, right here, to remind myself that skipping pills never works. I always regret doing it, even if I like that little manic moment right before everything goes bad. This is my reminder to myself: Skipping pills is not good. It’s a repetitive story, and it never ends well.
I notice within hours too if I’ve forgotten meds. Doesnt seem fair that a few hours of my brain’s own natural chemistry is untenable.
Thank you for your comment – It’s easier to take my own experience seriously when someone else has the same thing.
Ugh I feel this for you!! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve commented on blogs and the next day… hindsight. It’s hard to manage, especially because I think it’s not as “important too” being an empty nester.
The Internet is hard. It feels too much like writing in my diary in 6th grade. Then later I would read what I wrote and destroy all of the pages, because, what if someone knew how my insides really were? Now everyone knows. Anxiety!!
I kep diaries my whole life and it never once ocurred to me to destroy pages because I wrote something terrible. This makes me think I was probably destined to write everything in public – I didn’t even have a literary edit button in 6th grade!
I’ve been on meds since my daughter died. After 3+ years I’m in a good place. But I can’t tell how much of that good place is the meds. I don’t want to take them anymore, but I don’t want to find out that they’re holding me together.
It’s definitely a sign of sanity that you can imagine the meds are holding you together.
Everyone thinks they are fine without meds and no one can tell they are not ok. Everyone thinks they are brilliant without meds, but if they were- no one would suggest meds.
I went to the med provider and when they asked why I was there I said, “my friend told me to come.” I realized at some point I had to trust someone and to believe them. I am much happier on meds. Until I forget, and they stop working or make me gain weight, and then I’ll tell the med provider they aren’t working. And they will ignore me. And I’ll quit until I start to wonder why I’m staring at a wall all day and I need someone to tell me how awful I am.
I don’t know much about meds but I do know that if someone is living with schizophrenia, controlled by medication, and if that person goes off their medication, then no matter how much you believe in freedom and letting people make their own bad choices… you truly have to intervene, perhaps by getting them to see a physician.
Why? Because of the consequences. Because when they get back on the pills they might resume life at a lower level of functioning and never be back to where they were, before going off meds. A college graduate who went off (I don’t know how many times) ended up at a welfare level of functioning: will never hold a job again.
Great public service announcement, Sean. Thank you.
I have a feeling the cycle you outline is true with other meds as well, but it’s not as extreme so we don’t acknolwedge the damage. I think the damage is long term.
I learned the consequences of discontinuing medication while on my doctoral internship in clinical psychology. We had a fantastic psychiatrist who was much loved and requested. He ended up on medical leave for months when he stopped taking his own anti-depressant. I learned that if you start and stop a medication too many times it can take infinitely longer each time to regain good functioning. I’ve been faithful to my own meds for 25 years now after seeing what might happen.
I take 4 psychiatric meds. A couple of them, I notice within hours that I’ve missed them because I feel miserable. Like I did before meds. And I wonder how I lived like that for so long.
The other two, I don’t notice any difference if I don’t take them. Until I start pissing people off and messing up relationships. Those are the scarier ones to miss because I don’t realize how important they are until I’ve already ruined something.