Annaka Harris

I took an SSRI for postpartum and it was fascinating to me.

I ended up interviewing my psychiatrist because I was so fascinated in the whole thing.

Once I was on the other side of it, just what I had been through, how different I felt during that period of time, and then how quickly the medication made me feel like myself again.

I had come out the other side of the experience of postpartum and was going to start tapering off the medication.

And in this window where I no longer had postpartum depression and hadn't yet gone off the SSRI, I realized,

that life was not only a lot easier than when I had postpartum, but it was easier than it had ever been.

And it took taking all of that anxiety away to recognize how much I had been grappling with it my entire life.

And it first started coming in the form of realizations like,

oh, is this how other people, is this how other people feel?

Is this how that, like the things that I just always thought of myself, I'm really sensitive.

I'm an introvert.

I need a lot of time to myself.

And all of these things that I felt like, I mean, it's always very high functioning.

And in some ways, you know, I was a professional dancer and I think that was the type of therapy for me.

There was the obsessing over, you know,

the training and dancing nine hours a day and all of that, I now look back on and see how much that was therapeutic for me and that I was kind of treating something.

But yeah, so it was just this experience of treating an anxiety disorder that caused me to realize that I had one.

I didn't know I could feel the way I felt

After taking Prozac.

And I became very interested in... I mean, I was already working with neuroscientists.