Fluoxetine

I keep taking the tablets. It's difficult to unthread from within my mind what the tablets actually do, as against all the other life-factors. They seem to smooth the extremes on the wave diagram, flatten both the black troughs ('What is the point?') and manic highs ('I must complete everything on this list right now.')

My wife fears the withdrawal from the pills. The last time I tried I seemed to lose a week of my life in a murky, psychotic fog. So I keep taking them, and we don't mention it.

What have we come to, though? There are millions on anti-depressants in the UK. Tens of thousands of children with mental health problems. Billions of pills swilling around the nation like a floodtide.

I asked the doctor what function they perform in the brain.

'Well, they alter the chemical interactions, in the receptors...'

'Permanently?'

'Not really. But you might take the opportunity, whilst on them, to change the patterns of your behaviour that seem to trigger the depression.'

Not reading existentialist novels, for example.

I once forgot to take my medication on a family trip to Northumberland. This created a sense of panic more noticble in other family members than in me. I had been cycling with my son and we stopped on a quiet lane and I forgot to take my shoe cleats from the pedals, and collapsed in an ignoble heap at the road side. This was put down to the withdrawal effects, and it is now a family tradition that coming off medication leads to loss of balance.

So we found a chemist in a small Northumbrian town, all dark painted woodwork and curved glass windows. After what can only be described as a few perfunctory questions, I was sold a box of Fluoxetine for £1.20. Which is a snip, compared to the cost of a prescription. Worth nipping up to Northumberland for supplies.

When I mentioned this to the pharmacist in my local Boots in Sheffield, and asked - just on the off-chance - whether she would be prepared to sell me some at cost price, she gave me a look generally reserved for calling the police or social care. So I refused to tell her which compatriot had, apparently illegally, sold me colourful capsules over the counter.

But with several million of the things spilling out of every bathroom cabinet, handbag, manbag, desk and pocket in the country, maybe we should just give in and sell them in carboard tubes with a plastic embossed letter of the alphabet on the lid.