Sometimes living with roommates is just a financial necessity, but it can also be a beautiful and meaningful way of nurturing community. Small acts of kindness and collectivism can go a long way in turning your roomies from the people you share a house with to the people who make your house a home. That’s why my roommates and I go the extra mile and do all of our SSRIs family style, in a big bowl at the center of the table.
I live with three people, and while we all have different backgrounds, interests, and fields, we are all held together by the common thread of being medicated for mental illness. Between the four of us, we’ve got Prozac, Lexapro, Xanax, Klonopin, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Trazodone, which I’m pretty sure is, like, a dog tranquilizer. These aren’t all technically SSRIs but they all sort of fall under the same family, just like my roommates and I form a family when we pool all our pills together in a beautiful cornucopia that we share together.
While we’re all prescribed different medications for our various mood and brain disorders, we’ve found that there’s a more communal feeling in our home when we just open those pill bottles, pour them all into one big bowl in the middle of the dining room table, give em a good mix, then dip in and out as we please.
Doing SSRIs family style creates a sense of trust and interdependence that can help to alleviate feelings of isolation or alienation. In fact, the system un-isolated my roommate Barry so much that it cured his depression, but he still reports the same symptoms to his psychiatrist so he can continue to contribute to the Bowl, and that’s what family is really all about.
Of course, things don’t always run so smoothly. Once, we had to stage an intervention because our roommate Christi was taking all the Xanax. The intervention wasn’t so much about Christi becoming addicted to Xanax, but more so that she wasn’t leaving any for us, which, ironically for someone on a ton of Xanax, was remarkably unchill.
For the most part, the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny system of our brain chemical bowl works great. Occasionally someone slips in a Tylenol or a Tic Tac, but that can be a fun surprise in its own right. We’re also like a real family in that none of are having sex with each other, even Christi and Salem who are a couple, thanks to the side effects of the SSRIs. I would highly recommend this system to any other household on a lot of drugs.
Anyway, thanks for reading and let me know if you have a plug for weed, because none of my roommates will give me any.
