October 8, 2024 • 29 mins
Samara puts her trust in psychiatry to fix her.
WITH:
AND INFORMED BY:
The Ritalin Explosion - PBS FRONTLINE
Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker
Strangers To Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv
Antidepressants rapidly alter brain architecture, study finds - Los Angeles Times
Breaking Off My Chemical Romance - The Nation
The Illusions of Psychiatry - The New York Review of Books
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, it's okay. Baska Case gets into some heavy topics
about mental health, but keep in mind that I'm not
a mental health professional, So in the description of this
and every episode, I'll leave you a list of relevant
resources and links to the things I'm reading, and while
you're listening, take care.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm not like anti psychiatric meds per se. Certain people
can figure out what's best for them, but just look
after yourself first and don't blindly trust other people and
what they think is best for you. I guess.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
What person's gonna want me, Whah, person's gonna want me,
What person's gonna want me, Whah, person's gonna want me,
person's gonna want me, Whah, person's gonna want me? What
person's gonna want me? When I have a president anxiety?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
This is basket Case. I'm nk. I'm not medicated that
I probably should be, and this episode is about what
happens when you feel like a problem that only psychiatry
can solve.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Lyrically, I have very different inspirations.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
This is Samora.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
I find inspiration from a lot of metal music, hardcore punk,
very like Sophie Beer, Fucky like noise type, realm stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
She's a musician. This is actually her music. Samar I
grew up in a small town in Oregon, and she
knew from an early age that growing up to be
a successful adult was both not guaranteed and very very important.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
My dad didn't do well in school, and he always
like projected his own issues onto us about that, like,
oh my god, if you keep failing at school, you'll
end up like me as a purchasing agent at the
road Department. Not like he had a bad life or anything,
(02:21):
but I guess he just wanted something different from us.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
For her parents, that meant private school.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
We had Bible class every day, we were taught creationism.
We had to go to a weekly chapel and dress
up for it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
That kind of private school.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Pledge allegiance to the Christian flag and the Bible. It
was weird.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Whoa Yeah, But despite the dubious curriculum, the academics were rigorous.
Her teachers expected a lot.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Yeah. I guess it really depended on which teacher it was,
because some teachers were harder than others. But I've always
been like a really mellow kid, just very easily distracted.
Because I had a hard time focusing in school and
I always just wanted to draw instead of do school.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Where what were you drawing?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Comic books about my dog as a superhero. I was obsessed.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
But to Samara's teacher, her inability to focus was the disruption.
Samora had trouble following instructions retaining lesson plans, and her
grades reflected it.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
I think it might have been in second or third grade,
because my third grade teacher was very hard on me,
and she pretty consistently told me I was lazy because
I just like didn't understand how to do the work
and I would just like get it wrong or like
(03:53):
do it the way I know how and like not
absorb the new ways. And she told my parents that
I was lazy and didn't apply myself.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
And first I want to expressed, I'm having a reaction
to your teacher calling a third grader lazy.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Let's move on from that.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
In hindsight, that's probably what pressured my parents to find
a medical solution to that.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Samara's teacher referred her parents to a psychiatrist. After one session,
she was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD attention deficit hyperactive disorder.
The doctor prescribed adderall an amphetamine because that was what
her brother already took for his ADHD, the kind marked
not by distracted dreaminess but by aggression and hyperactivity.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
But it made me super hyperactive and life I really
like just I don't know, cracked out.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So the doctor tried a different approach, this time with ritalin,
another stimulant and one of the drugs most widely used
to treat ADHD.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
And then and that kind of made me brain dead
but focus, and I guess that was the better of
the two.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Her dad even got his own Riddlin prescription, but when
Tomorrow went back to school, she felt switched off, out
of it.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
I remember just like feeling this ever present mental fog
and general malaise. I was very dissociated. It was just
like I was sitting in a chair and just watching
a TV screen of my life and my body moving
(05:38):
around and just no connection to my body at all. Honestly,
it's how I learned how to process the world around me.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
This zombie effect is a known but avoidable side effect
of Riddlin, a sign that the DOSA she had been
prescribed was too high. But Tomorrow would stay on Riddlin
zombie for another nine years, all through high school. More
with Samara after the break. Samora was still living at
(06:14):
home when she started attending community college in Oregon after
high school, and so she was still living with her
parents when she came out for the first time.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
I viewed myself as gender fluid at the time, so
I grew out my hair too, about my armpits, and
there was like a nish mash of like men's and
women's clothes that I would wear. And I would on
a regular basis wear mascara because I was the least noticeable,
(06:46):
and paint my nails.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
But somehow that wasn't enough. Her gender was like a
loose thread on a sweater, one which she would eventually
unravel entirely, but for now she just pulled out the thread, experimenting,
trying to push the boundary a little more.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
I kind of had this romantic thing with somebody at
a Bible camp I was working at, and she would
take me to Pride because I just would talk to
her about these like different mixed feelings I'd have. I
didn't know about trans anything. I just knew like drag Queen's.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
So when her friend told her about an all ages
LGBTQ nightclub in Portland, that had drag shows, Samorrow, I
wanted to go, and she didn't just want to watch
drag performances. She wanted to perform herself. It felt like
an obvious and easy way to experiment with gender.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, I mean it was fun. I liked the dressing
up part more than the actual dancing or the judged
or whatever like.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
But she had a hard time fitting in with the
Portland queers. She had never even met a gay person,
at least not that she knew of.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
I was a very closeted, ignorant Christian child who didn't
even know I was queer. But I just knew that
I wanted an outlet for my gender expression.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
And she had not really detached or even rebelled from
the evangelical culture that she had been raised in and
which she still lived in at home, And so she
decided to tell her parents where she was going on
Friday nights.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
And then they ended up treating me very differently, and
the home life got very hostile. I ended up dropping
out of school because of it. Because I couldn't handle that.
I dropped out of community college.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Her parents threatened to kick her out of the house,
so she left.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
So I ended up staying with somebody in an abandoned
van and then just lept on the sidewalk for part
of it.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Samara found herself in survival mode. Cut off from her parents,
she lost all her financial support, including her access to
psychoactive medication. It was the first time in a decade
she was pharmaceutically sober. But she kept performing drag.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
But like, there was a really heavy culture of like
you have to look like you are trying to pass
as a CIS woman or like be a super high glam,
high thin drag queen.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
But Samorrow's drag performances were not that. They were gross
and shocking on purpose.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
I gave birth on stage, spilling like old spaghettios from
between my legs out on the stage. It was hideous.
Oh my god. I had a pregnant belly that was
a balloon underneath my dress, and I had big, brised
out hair, and I didn't tell anybody what would happen.
(10:11):
And the entire night I had a baby doll strapped
through my inner thigh and a plastic bag full of spaghettios.
At one point I turned around, popped the balloon, spilled
the spaghettios, and pulled out the baby and how did
the crowd react.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
People were gagging because they could smell the old spaghettios,
So like half the crowd was really into it and
they really liked how gross it was, but like the
other half was like, oh girl, what are you doing.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Either way, Samara liked Shocking Mom. The performances were cathartic,
and they were also reflections of how she felt ashamed
and angry, like she would never be pretty or pass
and she also felt like she was broken because she
even wanted to.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
I did want to find an outlet for my gender expression.
But also if I'm hideous and I'm gross and I
already know I look super ugly and it's on purpose,
then I'm untouchable. Like nobody can say shit about me
(11:24):
because they're like, oh, you're a hideous man in a dress.
I'm like, I fucking know. Don't you think I know that?
Look at me. I don't say this as every artist
who does that type of stuff feels this way, but
that was also my defense mechanism where I was like,
I'm not gonna be pretty, so I'll be ugly on purpose.
(11:47):
I felt like my brain was broken, so I just
like thought I was this terrible thing.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Samara still felt like a terrible thing, like something was
wrong with her when she moved to Portland in her
early twenties, where she joined a church. It was a
high control environment, even more religiously dogmatic than the evangelical
church she had grown up in. But after several years
of living in vans and on the street, crashing on
(12:14):
friends couches and at random traphouses, being part of a
church community again still felt like a relief.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
When I would be living as queer or trands, those
were the times where I was homeless or in poverty
or living in trap houses things like that. And when
I was a straight SIS man who was a Christian,
(12:44):
then I would get assistance from my parents and old
family friends and church support.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Living as straight sis and Christian was the only way
Tomorrow knew how to access safety and civility.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
So it was like a balance between self preservation and
self authenticity. After I was homeless and like expressing my
gender fluidity, I went like the hard other way and
went like, Okay, I'm going to fix this and ignore
it and become super Christian man, like try my best,
(13:22):
stuff it down, like I guess I would think to myself,
I'd still have this rugged individualist mindset and be like, oh,
I have to be mentally well if everything is stripped
away from me, like no level of support, I need
to be well.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
After this break, Samara puts her trust in medicine to
fix her. By now, Samara had realized that she was
not just bisexual or gender fluid, she was a girl.
She was trans and that revelation, the private knowledge, filled
her with dread.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
I was like, I'm not going to transition, so I
gotta do something else to fix it. I just felt
like if I could just get my brain to act
like everybody else's, then I would be respected and accepted
and successful.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
So Samara got married to a girl her age in
the church.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
We were both like outcasts in a sense, her because
of her personality and anger issues, me because of queerness
and hardships.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
But she kept feeling like a problem to be solved.
She was anxious, depressed, and sometimes suicidal, and it all
felt like her fault.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
My partner had a more extensive experience with psychiatric medication.
She had also gone through lots of trauma in her
life and was just seeking the solution of medication to
ease that pain. She was a big advocate for medication
(15:21):
helps me. Medication is like super important, and she was
like big on life trusting doctors and things like that.
So I was like, wow, this is very inspiring. So
I trusted doctors too, because like, what do I know?
Where did my decisions lead me in my life? And
(15:44):
I guess I didn't trust my own decisions, so I
would often defer my life decisions to the person I
trusted most.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
So Samara once again put her trust in medicine.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
And I was like, well, fuck it, I haven't tried
just delving deep into a psychiatrist beyond riddle in and
nothing's helping.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
What were the kinds of things you were saying to
the doctors.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
I guess I would say that I'm anxious all the time,
I'm depressed all the time. I didn't like myself, just
like extreme discontent for life. The whole big focused was
you're broken, So that's it. I just always felt inferior.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Samara saw another psychiatrist, and just like what happened when
she was a kid, the doctor got busy diagnosing and
prescribing right away.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Just like one session and they're like, oh, you probably
have this. Here's medication for this. We're going to start
you on it and see how you respond.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
For Samorrow's depression, they tried as an anti depressant. For
her anxiety, the doctor prescribed a series of sedatives. Then
Tomorrow was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, for which the doctor
prescribed lamotrigene, a mood stabilizer. The psychiatrist said she didn't
have ADHD after all, but she might be autistic. The
process often felt arbitrary.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
If I would stop one abruptly, they would start me
on a different one. It was just very big, sudden
swaps of different meds, and she's like, do you want
to try this different one? It might work because this
and I'd be like, well sure, I'd trust you, like
you're a medical professional.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
And she preferred the overall layered effect of the drugs
to the even scarier alternative.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
It was also at the same time making me more
brain dead, so I was just like, I'm very numb,
So I guess thought's better than dealing with raw emotions.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
But what Samora didn't know was that the psychoactive drugs
she'd been taking the years of ritilin followed by just
weeks on, antidepressants were actually affecting her brain's ability to
function normally because at first the brain tries to resist
the effect of the drug. It compensates in response to
the increase of serotonin caused by an ssri, the body
(18:19):
produces less of it. It tries to keep the body
in its original equilibrium, but after just several weeks, the
brain is unable to continue that process of compensation, causing
side effects symptoms which often need to be treated with
other drugs like the antidepressant samaratok an SSRI or serotonin
reuptake inhibitor. It made her feel less depressed by increasing
(18:41):
the levels of serotonin in her brain, but the excess
of serotonin can cause symptoms resembling mania, and the episodes
of mania caused by antidepressants may lead to a new
diagnosis of bipolar disorder and new treatment with a mood
stabilizer like limotrigene or depicote. Samorrow took a spin on
deficoat herself along with the clonopin and other sedatives. Clonopin
(19:04):
can treat panic disorder and anxiety. It can also cause
paranoia or suicidal ideation. This kind of layering of medication
is called a prescription cascade, and it's often accompanied by
a cascade of diagnoses. While psychiatrists rely on their best
educated guesses to make recommendations for treatment.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Most of the time, her explanation would be it'll even
you out, and that I learned very quickly as code
for I just want to give you this medication and
see if it worked.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Did it even you out, did you feel like you
got better?
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Or I feel like it made things worse. Sometimes I
would have bad reactions in my body. I was I
remember there was when I was taking it was called depicote.
I don't know why they were giving me depicoat, but
I stopped that after I started getting pain around where
(20:08):
my liver is, like swelling around there, and like I
couldn't even figure out why they were giving it to me,
so I, you know, stopped that. I felt like there
wasn't a lot of thought put into how these medications
were given to me and how they would affect each other.
(20:34):
I can't even remember the names of them anymore. But
I was on about six different psychiatric medications at one time.
At a certain point, my thinking was so scattered. I
was more impulsive. I had worse panic attacks. People around
me were concerned for me. I didn't recognize my own personality.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Samara eventually went to a therapist where she was able
to reflect on all the overlapping life experiences being unhoused,
religious trauma, her gender, and the years of being numbed
out on a cocktail of psychotropic drugs. Samara felt like
she didn't know who she was and that maybe she
never had. But after years of trying to fix it
(21:23):
or push it down, she decided she finally had to
face the truth about her gender, and so she started
HRT hormone replacement therapy and slowly she started to come
back into herself.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
So what converged to get me off of that medication
is I had felt better.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
She was also about to lose her state sponsored health insurance,
so she decided to stop most of the drugs altogether.
But in order to quit the antidepressants, she'd have to
tape her off slowly.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
I just had to wean myself off before I had
to suddenly stop. I did do a slow taper in
my early years. I would just like to stop them
out of nowhere, and that was not good. So I
just wanted to be sure I did it right this
last time.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
When you stopped taking a psychiatric medication, there are often
physical symptoms of withdrawal. That's why tapering was important. But
for Samara, the uncomfortable effects of quitting were more mental
and emotional than physical. In a day to day since
she felt relief, she did feel less on edge, but
the huhs and the lows were more intense than even before.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
So it was interesting once again dealing with my emotions
from a raw and tampered with steak.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Is it fair to say that up until that point
you hadn't really had practice regulating your own emotions.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Yeah, or at least with the tools that I would
need to do so, because when I was off medication,
I was homeless, stuffing it down in survival mode doing
what I could survive, or in a religion like trying
(23:16):
to deal with it in the methods that they want
you to deal with it that were not helpful. So
it was the first time I actually had the tools
to help myself and commit to doing that. A lot
(23:42):
of recognizing how my environment affects me, recognizing depression spirals
and suicidal thoughts.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Before transitioning, Samora have been living on autopilot, ignoring what
her body and her subconscios or telling her. With the
help of a therapist, she started to get in touch
with what she really wanted. She started to feel less
attached and more embodied.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
And it was just more what's the word for it,
when it's like awareness, grounding or something like that.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Well, you said present earlier, you were able to feel
more present? Yeah, yeah, how did you wind up feeling
more embodied?
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, transitioning was a big part of that. A lot
of me not feeling in my body was because I
didn't want to be in my body right and I
couldn't relate to my own body. Okay, yeah, some of
it comes from trauma too, And like being traumatized, do
you learn how to be separate from yourself? When I
(24:53):
was on that many psychiatric medications, I felt like my
brain wasn't accurate storyteller, but it wasn't very good at
expressing or dealing with the things that came up.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
If I've just asked, like how are you?
Speaker 2 (25:19):
How am I?
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Like?
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, how are you? I'm better. I've come to learn that,
like happiness isn't really a destination. It's like brushing your teeth,
It's like you can't have the whitest teeth possible and
then be like, Okay, I'm done. I did it. It's
just something you have to keep up with. And some
(25:42):
days are better than others. Some days I get pretty down,
but I have not revisited suicidal thinking in a good
long minute. I'm being more so reported by my community nowadays,
and it feels good to be seen and to be known.
(26:07):
I have a very caring and loving partner. I've connected
with a community of trans people locally and we have
been of good support to each other and just all together.
I feel very cared for by the people around me,
and I'm very honored to be a part of the
(26:33):
community that I have. I need to be well, but
like it's okay to be well because you're supported, and
it's okay to like have things around you that help
you get to the point you need to be and
that doesn't make you less stable of a person.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
And She's performing again, this time as a noise band
called Puppy Breath.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Down the list of things I cannot up It is me,
but it's just a caricature of myself. Like I still
fuck with like really grimy, nasty, art, and that's a
facet of who I am too. I'm really shifting how
(27:38):
I go about it, being less of a cathartic experience
and more figuring out how I want to approach it
from a more sustainable point like my writing, instead of
I have to get this out. I feel unheard, I
feel unseen. Now I feel heard and I feel seen.
(28:06):
It's not really like encouraging you can do it type lyrics,
but it's more like who is this praising guy?
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Anyway?
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Where I'm at is like this is how I felt,
but I persist, and this is where persisting has gotten me.
Speaker 4 (28:34):
By how busy that.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Day?
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Baska Case is a production of molten Heart and iHeart Podcasts.
This series was created and is exactive produced by Jasmine J. T.
Green and it is hosted, produced, and sound designed by
me Mk Nicole Kelly. Our associate producer is Ciona Petros.
Sonic elements provided by Chad Corey Adrian Lilly as our
(29:15):
mix engineer. Our theme is blue and orange by Command Jasmine.
Our show art was created by Sinney Rolson, fact checking
by Serena Solynn. Legal services provided by Rowan Maren and File.
Our executive producer from iHeart Podcasts is Lindsay Hoffmann Special
thanks to Samara. Music by Puppy Breath was also featured
(29:36):
throughout this episode, and thanks to Robert Whitaker, p. E. Moskowitz,
Marcia Angel, Andrew Skull, and Rachel Levive whose work guided
my thinking about this topic. For transcripts and a relevant
reading list, go to our website
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Racing's Gonna Want Me, Bracon's Gonna Want Me Depression and
anxiety
Hey, it's okay. Baska Case gets into some heavy topics
about mental health, but keep in mind that I'm not
a mental health professional, So in the description of this
and every episode, I'll leave you a list of relevant
resources and links to the things I'm reading, and while
you're listening, take care.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm not like anti psychiatric meds per se. Certain people
can figure out what's best for them, but just look
after yourself first and don't blindly trust other people and
what they think is best for you. I guess.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
What person's gonna want me, Whah, person's gonna want me,
What person's gonna want me, Whah, person's gonna want me,
person's gonna want me, Whah, person's gonna want me? What
person's gonna want me? When I have a president anxiety?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
This is basket Case. I'm nk. I'm not medicated that
I probably should be, and this episode is about what
happens when you feel like a problem that only psychiatry
can solve.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Lyrically, I have very different inspirations.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
This is Samora.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
I find inspiration from a lot of metal music, hardcore punk,
very like Sophie Beer, Fucky like noise type, realm stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
She's a musician. This is actually her music. Samar I
grew up in a small town in Oregon, and she
knew from an early age that growing up to be
a successful adult was both not guaranteed and very very important.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
My dad didn't do well in school, and he always
like projected his own issues onto us about that, like,
oh my god, if you keep failing at school, you'll
end up like me as a purchasing agent at the
road Department. Not like he had a bad life or anything,
(02:21):
but I guess he just wanted something different from us.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
For her parents, that meant private school.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
We had Bible class every day, we were taught creationism.
We had to go to a weekly chapel and dress
up for it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
That kind of private school.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Pledge allegiance to the Christian flag and the Bible. It
was weird.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Whoa Yeah, But despite the dubious curriculum, the academics were rigorous.
Her teachers expected a lot.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Yeah. I guess it really depended on which teacher it was,
because some teachers were harder than others. But I've always
been like a really mellow kid, just very easily distracted.
Because I had a hard time focusing in school and
I always just wanted to draw instead of do school.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Where what were you drawing?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Comic books about my dog as a superhero. I was obsessed.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
But to Samara's teacher, her inability to focus was the disruption.
Samora had trouble following instructions retaining lesson plans, and her
grades reflected it.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
I think it might have been in second or third grade,
because my third grade teacher was very hard on me,
and she pretty consistently told me I was lazy because
I just like didn't understand how to do the work
and I would just like get it wrong or like
(03:53):
do it the way I know how and like not
absorb the new ways. And she told my parents that
I was lazy and didn't apply myself.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
And first I want to expressed, I'm having a reaction
to your teacher calling a third grader lazy.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Let's move on from that.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
In hindsight, that's probably what pressured my parents to find
a medical solution to that.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Samara's teacher referred her parents to a psychiatrist. After one session,
she was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD attention deficit hyperactive disorder.
The doctor prescribed adderall an amphetamine because that was what
her brother already took for his ADHD, the kind marked
not by distracted dreaminess but by aggression and hyperactivity.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
But it made me super hyperactive and life I really
like just I don't know, cracked out.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So the doctor tried a different approach, this time with ritalin,
another stimulant and one of the drugs most widely used
to treat ADHD.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
And then and that kind of made me brain dead
but focus, and I guess that was the better of
the two.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Her dad even got his own Riddlin prescription, but when
Tomorrow went back to school, she felt switched off, out
of it.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
I remember just like feeling this ever present mental fog
and general malaise. I was very dissociated. It was just
like I was sitting in a chair and just watching
a TV screen of my life and my body moving
(05:38):
around and just no connection to my body at all. Honestly,
it's how I learned how to process the world around me.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
This zombie effect is a known but avoidable side effect
of Riddlin, a sign that the DOSA she had been
prescribed was too high. But Tomorrow would stay on Riddlin
zombie for another nine years, all through high school. More
with Samara after the break. Samora was still living at
(06:14):
home when she started attending community college in Oregon after
high school, and so she was still living with her
parents when she came out for the first time.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
I viewed myself as gender fluid at the time, so
I grew out my hair too, about my armpits, and
there was like a nish mash of like men's and
women's clothes that I would wear. And I would on
a regular basis wear mascara because I was the least noticeable,
(06:46):
and paint my nails.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
But somehow that wasn't enough. Her gender was like a
loose thread on a sweater, one which she would eventually
unravel entirely, but for now she just pulled out the thread, experimenting,
trying to push the boundary a little more.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
I kind of had this romantic thing with somebody at
a Bible camp I was working at, and she would
take me to Pride because I just would talk to
her about these like different mixed feelings I'd have. I
didn't know about trans anything. I just knew like drag Queen's.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
So when her friend told her about an all ages
LGBTQ nightclub in Portland, that had drag shows, Samorrow, I
wanted to go, and she didn't just want to watch
drag performances. She wanted to perform herself. It felt like
an obvious and easy way to experiment with gender.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, I mean it was fun. I liked the dressing
up part more than the actual dancing or the judged
or whatever like.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
But she had a hard time fitting in with the
Portland queers. She had never even met a gay person,
at least not that she knew of.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
I was a very closeted, ignorant Christian child who didn't
even know I was queer. But I just knew that
I wanted an outlet for my gender expression.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
And she had not really detached or even rebelled from
the evangelical culture that she had been raised in and
which she still lived in at home, And so she
decided to tell her parents where she was going on
Friday nights.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
And then they ended up treating me very differently, and
the home life got very hostile. I ended up dropping
out of school because of it. Because I couldn't handle that.
I dropped out of community college.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Her parents threatened to kick her out of the house,
so she left.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
So I ended up staying with somebody in an abandoned
van and then just lept on the sidewalk for part
of it.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Samara found herself in survival mode. Cut off from her parents,
she lost all her financial support, including her access to
psychoactive medication. It was the first time in a decade
she was pharmaceutically sober. But she kept performing drag.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
But like, there was a really heavy culture of like
you have to look like you are trying to pass
as a CIS woman or like be a super high glam,
high thin drag queen.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
But Samorrow's drag performances were not that. They were gross
and shocking on purpose.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
I gave birth on stage, spilling like old spaghettios from
between my legs out on the stage. It was hideous.
Oh my god. I had a pregnant belly that was
a balloon underneath my dress, and I had big, brised
out hair, and I didn't tell anybody what would happen.
(10:11):
And the entire night I had a baby doll strapped
through my inner thigh and a plastic bag full of spaghettios.
At one point I turned around, popped the balloon, spilled
the spaghettios, and pulled out the baby and how did
the crowd react.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
People were gagging because they could smell the old spaghettios,
So like half the crowd was really into it and
they really liked how gross it was, but like the
other half was like, oh girl, what are you doing.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Either way, Samara liked Shocking Mom. The performances were cathartic,
and they were also reflections of how she felt ashamed
and angry, like she would never be pretty or pass
and she also felt like she was broken because she
even wanted to.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
I did want to find an outlet for my gender expression.
But also if I'm hideous and I'm gross and I
already know I look super ugly and it's on purpose,
then I'm untouchable. Like nobody can say shit about me
(11:24):
because they're like, oh, you're a hideous man in a dress.
I'm like, I fucking know. Don't you think I know that?
Look at me. I don't say this as every artist
who does that type of stuff feels this way, but
that was also my defense mechanism where I was like,
I'm not gonna be pretty, so I'll be ugly on purpose.
(11:47):
I felt like my brain was broken, so I just
like thought I was this terrible thing.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Samara still felt like a terrible thing, like something was
wrong with her when she moved to Portland in her
early twenties, where she joined a church. It was a
high control environment, even more religiously dogmatic than the evangelical
church she had grown up in. But after several years
of living in vans and on the street, crashing on
(12:14):
friends couches and at random traphouses, being part of a
church community again still felt like a relief.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
When I would be living as queer or trands, those
were the times where I was homeless or in poverty
or living in trap houses things like that. And when
I was a straight SIS man who was a Christian,
(12:44):
then I would get assistance from my parents and old
family friends and church support.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Living as straight sis and Christian was the only way
Tomorrow knew how to access safety and civility.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
So it was like a balance between self preservation and
self authenticity. After I was homeless and like expressing my
gender fluidity, I went like the hard other way and
went like, Okay, I'm going to fix this and ignore
it and become super Christian man, like try my best,
(13:22):
stuff it down, like I guess I would think to myself,
I'd still have this rugged individualist mindset and be like, oh,
I have to be mentally well if everything is stripped
away from me, like no level of support, I need
to be well.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
After this break, Samara puts her trust in medicine to
fix her. By now, Samara had realized that she was
not just bisexual or gender fluid, she was a girl.
She was trans and that revelation, the private knowledge, filled
her with dread.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
I was like, I'm not going to transition, so I
gotta do something else to fix it. I just felt
like if I could just get my brain to act
like everybody else's, then I would be respected and accepted
and successful.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
So Samara got married to a girl her age in
the church.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
We were both like outcasts in a sense, her because
of her personality and anger issues, me because of queerness
and hardships.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
But she kept feeling like a problem to be solved.
She was anxious, depressed, and sometimes suicidal, and it all
felt like her fault.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
My partner had a more extensive experience with psychiatric medication.
She had also gone through lots of trauma in her
life and was just seeking the solution of medication to
ease that pain. She was a big advocate for medication
(15:21):
helps me. Medication is like super important, and she was
like big on life trusting doctors and things like that.
So I was like, wow, this is very inspiring. So
I trusted doctors too, because like, what do I know?
Where did my decisions lead me in my life? And
(15:44):
I guess I didn't trust my own decisions, so I
would often defer my life decisions to the person I
trusted most.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
So Samara once again put her trust in medicine.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
And I was like, well, fuck it, I haven't tried
just delving deep into a psychiatrist beyond riddle in and
nothing's helping.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
What were the kinds of things you were saying to
the doctors.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
I guess I would say that I'm anxious all the time,
I'm depressed all the time. I didn't like myself, just
like extreme discontent for life. The whole big focused was
you're broken, So that's it. I just always felt inferior.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Samara saw another psychiatrist, and just like what happened when
she was a kid, the doctor got busy diagnosing and
prescribing right away.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Just like one session and they're like, oh, you probably
have this. Here's medication for this. We're going to start
you on it and see how you respond.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
For Samorrow's depression, they tried as an anti depressant. For
her anxiety, the doctor prescribed a series of sedatives. Then
Tomorrow was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, for which the doctor
prescribed lamotrigene, a mood stabilizer. The psychiatrist said she didn't
have ADHD after all, but she might be autistic. The
process often felt arbitrary.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
If I would stop one abruptly, they would start me
on a different one. It was just very big, sudden
swaps of different meds, and she's like, do you want
to try this different one? It might work because this
and I'd be like, well sure, I'd trust you, like
you're a medical professional.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
And she preferred the overall layered effect of the drugs
to the even scarier alternative.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
It was also at the same time making me more
brain dead, so I was just like, I'm very numb,
So I guess thought's better than dealing with raw emotions.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
But what Samora didn't know was that the psychoactive drugs
she'd been taking the years of ritilin followed by just
weeks on, antidepressants were actually affecting her brain's ability to
function normally because at first the brain tries to resist
the effect of the drug. It compensates in response to
the increase of serotonin caused by an ssri, the body
(18:19):
produces less of it. It tries to keep the body
in its original equilibrium, but after just several weeks, the
brain is unable to continue that process of compensation, causing
side effects symptoms which often need to be treated with
other drugs like the antidepressant samaratok an SSRI or serotonin
reuptake inhibitor. It made her feel less depressed by increasing
(18:41):
the levels of serotonin in her brain, but the excess
of serotonin can cause symptoms resembling mania, and the episodes
of mania caused by antidepressants may lead to a new
diagnosis of bipolar disorder and new treatment with a mood
stabilizer like limotrigene or depicote. Samorrow took a spin on
deficoat herself along with the clonopin and other sedatives. Clonopin
(19:04):
can treat panic disorder and anxiety. It can also cause
paranoia or suicidal ideation. This kind of layering of medication
is called a prescription cascade, and it's often accompanied by
a cascade of diagnoses. While psychiatrists rely on their best
educated guesses to make recommendations for treatment.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Most of the time, her explanation would be it'll even
you out, and that I learned very quickly as code
for I just want to give you this medication and
see if it worked.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Did it even you out, did you feel like you
got better?
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Or I feel like it made things worse. Sometimes I
would have bad reactions in my body. I was I
remember there was when I was taking it was called depicote.
I don't know why they were giving me depicoat, but
I stopped that after I started getting pain around where
(20:08):
my liver is, like swelling around there, and like I
couldn't even figure out why they were giving it to me,
so I, you know, stopped that. I felt like there
wasn't a lot of thought put into how these medications
were given to me and how they would affect each other.
(20:34):
I can't even remember the names of them anymore. But
I was on about six different psychiatric medications at one time.
At a certain point, my thinking was so scattered. I
was more impulsive. I had worse panic attacks. People around
me were concerned for me. I didn't recognize my own personality.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Samara eventually went to a therapist where she was able
to reflect on all the overlapping life experiences being unhoused,
religious trauma, her gender, and the years of being numbed
out on a cocktail of psychotropic drugs. Samara felt like
she didn't know who she was and that maybe she
never had. But after years of trying to fix it
(21:23):
or push it down, she decided she finally had to
face the truth about her gender, and so she started
HRT hormone replacement therapy and slowly she started to come
back into herself.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
So what converged to get me off of that medication
is I had felt better.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
She was also about to lose her state sponsored health insurance,
so she decided to stop most of the drugs altogether.
But in order to quit the antidepressants, she'd have to
tape her off slowly.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
I just had to wean myself off before I had
to suddenly stop. I did do a slow taper in
my early years. I would just like to stop them
out of nowhere, and that was not good. So I
just wanted to be sure I did it right this
last time.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
When you stopped taking a psychiatric medication, there are often
physical symptoms of withdrawal. That's why tapering was important. But
for Samara, the uncomfortable effects of quitting were more mental
and emotional than physical. In a day to day since
she felt relief, she did feel less on edge, but
the huhs and the lows were more intense than even before.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
So it was interesting once again dealing with my emotions
from a raw and tampered with steak.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Is it fair to say that up until that point
you hadn't really had practice regulating your own emotions.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Yeah, or at least with the tools that I would
need to do so, because when I was off medication,
I was homeless, stuffing it down in survival mode doing
what I could survive, or in a religion like trying
(23:16):
to deal with it in the methods that they want
you to deal with it that were not helpful. So
it was the first time I actually had the tools
to help myself and commit to doing that. A lot
(23:42):
of recognizing how my environment affects me, recognizing depression spirals
and suicidal thoughts.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Before transitioning, Samora have been living on autopilot, ignoring what
her body and her subconscios or telling her. With the
help of a therapist, she started to get in touch
with what she really wanted. She started to feel less
attached and more embodied.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
And it was just more what's the word for it,
when it's like awareness, grounding or something like that.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Well, you said present earlier, you were able to feel
more present? Yeah, yeah, how did you wind up feeling
more embodied?
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, transitioning was a big part of that. A lot
of me not feeling in my body was because I
didn't want to be in my body right and I
couldn't relate to my own body. Okay, yeah, some of
it comes from trauma too, And like being traumatized, do
you learn how to be separate from yourself? When I
(24:53):
was on that many psychiatric medications, I felt like my
brain wasn't accurate storyteller, but it wasn't very good at
expressing or dealing with the things that came up.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
If I've just asked, like how are you?
Speaker 2 (25:19):
How am I?
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Like?
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, how are you? I'm better. I've come to learn that,
like happiness isn't really a destination. It's like brushing your teeth,
It's like you can't have the whitest teeth possible and
then be like, Okay, I'm done. I did it. It's
just something you have to keep up with. And some
(25:42):
days are better than others. Some days I get pretty down,
but I have not revisited suicidal thinking in a good
long minute. I'm being more so reported by my community nowadays,
and it feels good to be seen and to be known.
(26:07):
I have a very caring and loving partner. I've connected
with a community of trans people locally and we have
been of good support to each other and just all together.
I feel very cared for by the people around me,
and I'm very honored to be a part of the
(26:33):
community that I have. I need to be well, but
like it's okay to be well because you're supported, and
it's okay to like have things around you that help
you get to the point you need to be and
that doesn't make you less stable of a person.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
And She's performing again, this time as a noise band
called Puppy Breath.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Down the list of things I cannot up It is me,
but it's just a caricature of myself. Like I still
fuck with like really grimy, nasty, art, and that's a
facet of who I am too. I'm really shifting how
(27:38):
I go about it, being less of a cathartic experience
and more figuring out how I want to approach it
from a more sustainable point like my writing, instead of
I have to get this out. I feel unheard, I
feel unseen. Now I feel heard and I feel seen.
(28:06):
It's not really like encouraging you can do it type lyrics,
but it's more like who is this praising guy?
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Anyway?
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Where I'm at is like this is how I felt,
but I persist, and this is where persisting has gotten me.
Speaker 4 (28:34):
By how busy that.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Day?
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Baska Case is a production of molten Heart and iHeart Podcasts.
This series was created and is exactive produced by Jasmine J. T.
Green and it is hosted, produced, and sound designed by
me Mk Nicole Kelly. Our associate producer is Ciona Petros.
Sonic elements provided by Chad Corey Adrian Lilly as our
(29:15):
mix engineer. Our theme is blue and orange by Command Jasmine.
Our show art was created by Sinney Rolson, fact checking
by Serena Solynn. Legal services provided by Rowan Maren and File.
Our executive producer from iHeart Podcasts is Lindsay Hoffmann Special
thanks to Samara. Music by Puppy Breath was also featured
(29:36):
throughout this episode, and thanks to Robert Whitaker, p. E. Moskowitz,
Marcia Angel, Andrew Skull, and Rachel Levive whose work guided
my thinking about this topic. For transcripts and a relevant
reading list, go to our website
Speaker 3 (29:52):
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