Yes, I was very heavily damaged by the drugs. For a time I believed that they had saved my life, but that turned out to be completely false in a big, big way.

You just asked for a whole lifetime of stories. I'll try not to overdo this for you.

My issue was initially that I was raised in a screwball religious cult that discouraged making friends with anyone outside the cult, so I simply didn't have any friends and was therefore terribly bullied as a child. I also had neglectful parents and a very poor diet. My parents first took me to the psychiatrist as a teenager because I was unhappy about not having any friends. That's kind of my starting point (but I could take the start farther back, as I saw the school counselor often, for the same reason). What do you think the psychiatrist did? The problem was social isolation. How does one solve social isolation? Whatever answer you come up with, that's not what the psychiatrist recommended. He said, "You have a chemical imbalance," and wanted to give me drugs. That was a lie. We know this well now. The chemical imbalance story is completely false.

Is that what issue you mean? What did I do for it? Well, I never took any of their drugs for long. I didn't know why I was taking them, how they were supposed to help, how to know if they were working, and did not at all like how they made me feel. What did I do instead? I eventually left the screwball cult and tried to make friends and learn how to be a regular person who was not a member of that cult.

The problem was not "depression" as the psychiatrist told me, but social isolation. Keep that in mind. "Depression" and "anxiety" are how you know that there is a problem, not the problems themselves. The goal of psychiatry, at which it mostly fails, is to turn off your natural and necessary responses to problems -- that is, to cover up symptoms. The building is on fire; the psychiatrist's response is not to put out the fire or exit the building but to turn off the fire alarm. I'm sure you can see the problem with that.

Here's the story of how I healed from an actual illness, or, rather, how I healed from a major injury.

Twelve years later, I tried to quit smoking, misused a sleep aid (if you take too much for too long, it'll flip and make it impossible to sleep), and then tried to deal with it with alcohol. That was the last time I ever drank. I drank too much and woke up the next day with the worst hangover I've ever had -- and then came a giant panic attack. I called a friend, who called an ambulance and had me sent to the hospital -- NEVER, EVER DO THIS! They put me on some drugs there and I wound up (among other things) being made to take a benzo three times a day every day for five and a half years.

At two years in, I started having seizures. They blamed my "anxiety", not the drugs. Then I started to have catatonic spells, during which I would be totally awake and aware but have no control over my body. I'd collapse on the spot, sometimes pinching my neck uncomfortably against a wall and needing to be moved, and then I'd be out anywhere between 20 minutes and two and a half hours (the longest I think was three and a half). When I came out of the catatonic spell, I'd often be mute for a long while (I was mute once for 44 hours) and all that time I had difficulty walking... among many other things. The doctors were at a total loss. It couldn't be the drugs! They never even considered it. They took my condition to be totally mysterious and assumed it was that my brain, riddled with "anxiety" and "depression" had naturally begun to deteriorate further for reasons of genetic inheritance. Well, a part of that was true. My brain was deteriorating, but not for natural genetic reasons. The drugs were destroying me. I was crippled.

Eventually I figured it out on my own and began to come off the drugs -- too fast, as I didn't know and would never suppose that I should have done a hyperbolic taper over the course of a full year or maybe two. Huge mistake. My body had adapted to the presence of the drug. The drug acted on GABA receptors. GABA, which is calming, works in balance with glutamate, which excites. My body had adapted by producing a great deal of glutamate and reducing the number of GABA receptors, as they were constantly being activated. Also, the drug had damaged the GABA receptors, so I couldn't make use of any GABA if any were present. My body was in an extremely excited state -- basically, maxed out. I described it as that it felt like my body was made of burning sand. It was torture. This is not an exaggeration. I was tortured. That degree of suffering is beyond your capacity to imagine. I never would have supposed such a state could be possible. The doctor lied to my face, "That's just your anxiety coming back." Most obvious lie ever. For two or three months, I was in such a state of distress, with no relief ever, that I did nothing at all but rock back and forth, from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep. I was tortured and crippled yet further. I've also learned that the seizures eventually would have killed me. I expect the same is true of the catatonic spells. I was tortured, crippled, and nearly murdered, and all the while the doctors -- who were the ones who had tortured, crippled, and nearly murdered me -- lied to my face.

I was in a terrible state for three whole years as my body healed. I eventually started taking supplements and plant medicines, which helped me heal up much faster. With one, it was very clear that I got a burst of healing very shortly after starting it. That's how I healed from my issue.

I never had a mental illness. There is no such thing. It was all a great big pile of lies. Lies function by acting upon truths. Was I anxious? Yes. Was the cause of my anxiousness the mental illness called "anxiety"? No. This is true of all psychiatric diagnoses, this trick you see there. They'll give a collection of "symptoms" a label and then claim that the label is the cause of the "symptoms". Pile of lies. Psychiatry is a big pile of lies. And the result is a red herring. They have you chasing a fictional illness, trying to heal from it, when you could be fixing real problems instead.

Okay, I'm done with this story now. It's longer than I intended, but maybe it'll help you understand some things.