When the Answer is a Pill (...and when it isn't)

It’s often the first thing offered. You go to your GP, tell them you're struggling, and they write you a prescription. Quickly. Kindly. Often with the best of intentions. Because they want to help. And because they have limited time, limited options — and medication is what the system can offer.

And for some people, it helps. Medication can provide relief, stability, a bit of breathing room when everything feels unbearable. It can interrupt a spiral. It can save a life.

But it’s not the whole answer. And for many, it isn’t the right one.

Because pain has meaning. It speaks. Even when it’s uncomfortable or overwhelming or inconvenient. And when we numb it too quickly, silence it too completely, we lose something — a signal, a story, an invitation to understand ourselves more deeply.

Medication doesn’t ask why. It doesn’t wonder what your anxiety might be trying to protect. It doesn’t sit with your grief, your rage, your shame. It can flatten, dull, suppress. It can make it harder to cry. Harder to feel. Sometimes that’s necessary. And sometimes… it’s a kind of disappearance.

Coming off medication — if and when that happens — can be its own reckoning. The feelings return. The questions, too. And often, people feel unequipped to meet them, because no one ever helped them learn how.

Therapy doesn’t offer quick relief. But it does offer something else. A space to turn toward what hurts — with someone beside you. To hear what your pain is saying. To find your footing without needing to silence your experience.

Medication isn’t bad. It’s just not always enough. Sometimes, what we need most is not to be managed — but met.

For a deeper dive into the history and impact of psychiatric medication, you might like Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker.