Does This Pill Still Come With A Stigma?

For many, taking medication for mental health issues is a last resort or a guarded secret. Why? And is it time we opened our minds?

- Roisin Dervish-O'Kane

The doctor already had the pen in her hand, ready to start scribbling Roisín Dervish-O’Kane’s way out. For months the journalist had been trapped in a vacuum, swinging between spinning-top anxiety and hollowed-out despair. “She listened as I spoke – the first time I’d told any medical professional about this – then she diagnosed anxiety and depression,” says Dervish-O’Kane. “She said I had options: cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), counselling – or would I consider a month’s course of antidepressants? She told me they could help me feel calm and more able to cope within three weeks. I politely declined and said I’d wait for the CBT. Why? Because taking the medication felt like giving in.

“Of course, I wouldn’t have felt like that if I’d had a migraine or a chest infection. But as we know, when it comes to our health, we apply a different set of criteria to our minds than to our bodies,” says Dervish-O’Kane. In South Africa, where the lifetime prevalence of common mental disorders among adults is roughly 30 percent, you’d think we’d be more open about taking pills for niggles of the mind. Pharma Dynamics says over one million South Africans are on some form of antidepressant – and that’s a conservative estimate, since that’s for the private healthcare sector alone. But the Mental Health And Poverty Project report (MHaPP) found that when it comes to mental illness, negative perceptions are rampant. “You hear people talk about how they are afraid of working with a person with a mental illness because you never know if they are just going to flip off,” one policy maker is quoted as saying in the report.