When it comes to my mental health, even though I was suffering severe depression for several years, I refused to take so much as a single pill. I am not quite sure where this aversion to pharmaceutical products comes from, and looking back, had I taken them, I might had shorten the time I needed to get well for a few years, but instead, I chose to self-medicate with marijuana.
It has proven to work great for my anxiety, but only when taken in small doses.
Life experience has caused me to change my mind. Having seen someone close to me suffer from prolonged exposure to numerous traumatic events and having seen the difference in their behaviour after they started taking antidepressives made me realise just how beneficial the meds can be. Sometimes, they save lives. Of course, it takes weeks or months for the effects to kick in, but once they do, it’s like the clouds have dissappeared and the sun started shining again.
The danger in taking the meds in certain conditions that can be cured is the dependency and reliance some people develop that can often last a lifetime and makes them the perfect consumers for the pharmaceutical industry, which does as much good as bad for the society with their unreal profit oriented business model and their ruthless marketing methods which extend far beyond paid cruises for the prescribing doctor and his family. The real cost is that people place all their long-term responsibility on a medical product. It is easier, I get it.
However, I believe in curing ourselves with honesty and hard work. Deep introspection which leads us to understand the cause of our mental illness and ourselves, in combination with learning new coping mechanisms can one day make the need for pills redundant or greatly reduced. It takes work, because it is not something that can be achieved in the short term. It takes motivation and drive that – thanks to the soothing effect of the pills – a person now has. Someone said it well: “Pills take away my ability to feel the bad stuff, but also the good stuff. They dull my senses and they don’t teach me how to cope by myself.”
We decided to design a t-shirt with a twist in the old children’s song’s lyrics, because it has wit, irony, humor and some truth to it. When testing the product, there wasn’t a single person who didn’t laugh when reading the final punch line. We chose happy, bright colors and a simplistic fond, adding just a little bit of graphic, not to distract the reader from the message.
This t-shirt is made of 100% organic, ring-spun, combed cotton, which is a warm, flexible, stretchy, and very comfortable fabric, making it a popular choice for the layer worn closest to the body. This cotton is grown without the use of pesticides, herbicides or other chemical fertilizers, and is simply awesome. The garment is sewn around the edges with a narrow double topstitch, making it long-lasting and durable. The ribbed collar allows the shirt to stretch as it is put on, but afterward the collar goes back to its original size, leaving a well-fitted tee.
