The Daily Orange

Media Credit: Mackenzie Reiss

Summer Beretsky felt uneasy as she sat in the doctor's office.

"Paxil or Celexa, Paxil or Celexa," her doctor pondered out loud over a notepad. "Alright, we'll get you started on some Paxil."

Beretsky was confused as she wondered to herself, "Seriously, is this how doctors make decisions about this sort of thing?"

It all started one night during her sophomore year. It was finals week, and Beretsky recalls lying in bed and suddenly feeling her entire body go numb. Her heart started racing and she thought she was having a stroke.

"I started shaking and got dizzy. After about two hours of walking around my dorm with a cup of hot tea, I was finally able to calm myself down enough to go to bed," said the then-20-year-old at Lycoming College.

A few weeks later, Beretsky went to her family doctor and described the symptoms she had. After taking several tests for her heart, she discovered that what she was experiencing were panic attacks.

To combat them, her doctor gave her a prescription for Xanax, a drug used to curb panic attacks, with the instructions "Take them every time you feel a panic attack coming on."

And she did.

For about a year, until finals week of her junior year, Beretsky found herself having panic attacks daily - sometimes several times a day. She continued to take Xanax as she felt the symptoms, but soon the constant pill-swallowing made her uncomfortable.

She decided to visit her Wellness Center at school, where she was told maybe a daily medication to prevent the attacks would be more helpful.

So, Beretsky sat in the doctor's office, trying not to let his indecisiveness scare her too much. She ended up leaving the office with a prescription for Paxil CR at 12.5 mg - and a month's worth of Paxil samples. Beretsky said the small, foiled blister pills came with no instructions or side effects listed.

Prescriptions for drugs, particularly antidepressants, have become really easy for people to get their hands on.

"If you go to the physician's office and say you're depressed, you get a drug," said Tibor Palfai, a professor of psychology at Syracuse University. "If you complain, you get a drug; even if you just get a placebo drug, you get a drug."

This is part of the current drug culture in America.

Anti-depressants are becoming readily available for anyone who wants to take them, especially college students. The dangers of simply writing off a problem with a prescription is that users are rarely given proper instructions for taking these medications, creating bigger problems, often making the depression worse rather than improving it.

Continued...

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