First published on Mad in America on 11th October 2024
PART I: FIRST CONTACT
RONIN GREY: What was your perception of psychiatric medication before anybody ever talked to you directly about them?
CAMERON TERHUNE: I knew nothing about them. People who were depressed took antidepressants like Prozac and it made them feel better.
RG: So, in your opinion they worked?
CT: Well, yeah. Why else would they even make them? Like any other medication – if you needed it, a doctor prescribed it and it fixed your problem.
RG: What was going on in your life at the time you got your first prescription to a psych med?
CT: I’d just quit film school. I was on the verge of being evicted. I felt totally lost. Most of that was because I’d been adopted at birth, but around age 20 I met my biological mom. We started talking, and when I was 22 she invited me to come live with her. But moving from California to Georgia didn’t fix my problems. Within a month I felt more anxious than I ever had – holding on by just my fingertips, caught between my adopted and biological families, trying to figure out who the hell I was but coming up empty.
So, I called a suicide hotline. I told them I needed help. I didn’t want to kill myself but I didn’t know what the point was of being alive. They set me up with an appointment to see a psychiatrist the next day.
RG: How did that go? And what did you expect?
CT: I thought I was going to see a therapist, someone who would help me figure out all my issues and tell me why I was so messed up. Instead I saw a social worker. She took my history, then I saw a psychiatrist. He was all business. We talked for about fifteen minutes. He told me I had an anxiety disorder on top of being depressed, and that there was a medication called Klonopin that would help my anxiety and another one called Celexa for my depression. He prescribed both and told me to schedule a follow-up with my regular doctor.
RG: Did you?
CT: No. I didn’t have a regular doctor. Or insurance. I just said OK and filled the prescriptions.
RG: What did you expect the meds to do?
CT: Fix everything. If it was just chemicals all screwed up in my brain, like the doctor implied, then this would fix all that and I would feel normal.
RG: Doesn’t that seem a bit too good to be true?
CT: I never questioned a doctor before, so it never occurred to me to question this guy. That’s what doctors do – you have a problem, they fix it.
RG: How did you feel after you filled those first prescriptions?
CT: Relief. Finally, I’m free. I’d been struggling for a really long time. I’d wanted to die since I was a kid. I believed the meds would fix that.
RG: Did they?
CT: A little, at first. I felt less anxious when I took Klonopin, but I actually got more anxious when I wasn’t taking it.
RG: Did you report that to the doctor?
CT: No. I just figured whatever my problems were, they were so bad I needed more help. So I kept taking the meds.
RG: Was there anything else that, in retrospect, you see as a sign that all was not well?
CT: Yeah – I drank heavily from age 12 to 20. I managed to quit, because I started smoking weed all the time instead. But when I moved to Georgia I stopped that too. I wasn’t even smoking cigarettes. As soon as I started taking the meds, though, I craved alcohol all over again.
RG: How long until you started to drink?
CT: I worked in a liquor store. And they sold cigarettes too. So, you know.
RG: But you didn’t see that as a side effect of the medications?
CT: I didn’t know those medications could have side effects. I never considered that. I just took it as more evidence that I sucked and that my life was out of control.
RG: So what did you do?
CT: I started looking for a doctor, so I could get another prescription.
PART II: DESCENT
RONIN GREY: So take us on the journey: you were deep in the grip of depression and anxiety, you were taking medications that were supposed to alleviate those feelings but instead were either doing nothing or making them worse, and now you were drinking too. Why didn’t you turn to the people in your life for help, support, at least to talk it over?
CAMERON TERHUNE: I didn’t have people in my life I could talk things like this over with. My whole life up until that point had focused on putting every ounce of effort I could muster into plastering a mask over my face so nobody would realize how bad things were inside me. I was terrified that if anyone saw the real me I would face the worst kind of ostracism. Being adopted at birth really messed with my head. I found out at a very young age. I think I was six. And I was told, “Your mother didn’t want you, so we took you.” And the subject was taboo after that. If I asked about it I caught hell, so I learned never to do that. Instead I internalized being adopted as a secret nobody could ever find out about me, something shameful.
From age seven to twelve I also got sexually abused. That to me became further proof that I was worthless. I buried that even deeper, so far down I couldn’t even admit it to myself in any real way until I was 30. So when you ask why didn’t I tell someone I was all depressed and anxious and feeling like my life was coming unraveled in my hands, that’s the last thing I could have ever done. All the feelings I sought to fix with the meds were what I believed were broken in me and made me unlovable. If people knew, they’d abandon me too. Those feelings were born from issues so toxic I couldn’t even touch them. I had Pandora’s box in my heart and I would rather die than open it. If I told someone I was anxious, or depressed, they would just ask why. Why, the hill I always died on. I faced the firing squad and never said a word – I’d already been doing it my whole life.
RG: It sounds like being so isolated played a role in your ongoing medication, getting more prescriptions without any attempt to seek out the roots of why you felt the way you did.
CT: At that point in my life all I wanted was an easy answer. That was all I could handle. I couldn’t look at myself, let alone let anyone else look at me. So I didn’t even recognize I had problems that stemmed from actual causes. The ‘chemical imbalance’ idea made sense to me, because I understood nothing and that made it easy to just do what the doctors said, take the pills until they found out which ones would make me better.
And I couldn’t believe how easy it was to get a prescription for psychiatric medication, either. One appointment – fifteen, twenty minutes – and you walk out with a pharmacy. In Illinois, I saw a guy I found in the phone book. We talked for maybe half an hour. He had a luxurious office, and I remember thinking this guy has to know his stuff – it was just how I always imagined a real shrink’s office should look, all leather and wood, art on the walls, expensive carpet. He even had a fireplace.
RG: Did you participate in any talk therapy with him?
CT: I don’t remember. If so, just surface stuff. Mostly he just asked what I now think of as the standard leading questions psychiatrists use: “Ddo you ever feel X, Y, Z? How often? How long have you felt that way? OK, I think you have this disorder, and I’m going to write you a prescription for this, this, and this.”
RG: This Illinois fellow thought you should take even more medication than you already were?
CT: Oh, definitely. He renewed my prescriptions for Klonopin and Celexa, and he added Wellbutrin and Abilify to the mix.
RG: All in a single appointment?
CT: Yeah. He didn’t get that fancy office by playing around.
RG: But by this time you had to have been aware that the meds weren’t helping you feel any better.
CT: I felt worse than I ever had, but when I stopped taking them I felt ten times worse so I figured they were doing something good. The only one I quit was the Abilify. It made me so psychotic that even through the fog I was drifting in, I recognized something was really, really wrong. Still, the main reason I stopped it was that I had some really unpleasant physical side effects and it was brand new, and super expensive. The others – Klonopin, Celexa, Wellbutrin, and Xanax by then – I kept taking. I also met someone who gave me Remeron, which helped me with the horrible insomnia I’d started having, so I got a prescription for that too.
RG: All while moving all over the place – California, Georgia, Illinois – and basically being unsupervised by any medical professionals, with no continuity of treatment.
CT: They usually gave a discount for the first appointment, so whenever I moved I just went once. Then I could phone for a refill when I ran out.
RG: You just called and the doctor gave you more pills?
CT: Yeah. They would just ask how I’m doing, “still anxious, still feel like crap, whatever” – “OK, let’s bump the dose up and see if that works.” Sometimes you would just leave a message with a secretary and the doctor took care of it later.
RG: That sounds dangerously unregulated.
CT: I never questioned it. They’re busy. And I couldn’t afford to go see them all the time anyway, so to me they were doing me a favor. I was just glad someone was helping me.
RG: But the end result of all that ‘helping’ was horrific.
CT: Very much so. I was spiraling out of control fast, probably so fast the people around me didn’t even realize how far from OK I was. I certainly had no idea. I didn’t even understand how radically my thought processes were altered. People sometimes told me, “You’re not the same person since you started taking those pills,” but I brushed it off. I thought, well everyone thought I was a failure and a loser before so who cares if I’m different now? But I was nowhere in the same universe as ‘OK.’
PART III: DESTRUCTION
RONIN GREY: So tell me about where not being OK ended up for you.
CAMERON TERHUNE: In a jail cell, two days after I shot and killed my adopted parents. I had no sense of what I’d done at the time, no ability to articulate anything I was thinking or feeling, so other people supplied a narrative that made sense to the cops, the media, the courts: I’m evil, I have no soul, I did it because I was angry, for money, for some other unspecified selfish reason. Nobody wanted to know about the medications. In fact, a great deal of maneuvering went into excluding any mention of my psychiatric history except to say I was a drug addict and scammed people, playing crazy for sympathy. They said I was ‘mentally ill, but not mentally ill enough to be psychotic’ and that I had personality disorders. Not a word about the meds.
RG: OK, that’s ‘them.’ What about you?
CT: I had been circling the drain for weeks. Even in the police reports, I don’t remember but I saw my girlfriend, my brother, and a few other friends all mention I had been making statements to them about killing people and wanting to be free for a long time, paranoid rambling, completely out of character comments. Sometimes I would drink, which I understand now is part of a suite of symptoms of something called akathisia, the cravings, and I’d black out and rant about who knows what. But mostly I was yo-yoing, because I was taking 20 to 40 milligrams of Klonopin and Xanax a day, then I’d run out because I was only prescribed 2 to 4 milligrams a day, and I’d start to withdraw until I got more and bounced back up.
RG: But weren’t you just abusing medication at that point? Taking the meds in a way you weren’t prescribed?
CT: For sure. But I started out taking them as prescribed. Then my soul started coming apart inside me. All the cracks were widening and I was falling to pieces. Only the meds held me together, like glue. If I broke open, everyone would see all the bad things inside me and I’d stop existing. I even had a day I believed I died. That was a few days before the killings. I woke up and looked at the clock and I realized I was dead. I couldn’t move. I lay there frozen for half a day waiting for whatever happens after you die. I only realized I was alive after someone banged on the door and shouted my name. That broke the spell. I got up and… did whatever I was doing then, most of it is a blur. I was hallucinating a lot towards the end. Most times and dates are foggy.
RG: Yet you still never asked for help.
CT: Nope. Take the pills. Keep my soul together. Don’t let anyone see the darkness. I had tunnel vision. Nothing else mattered. Nobody else mattered. I would be OK as long as nobody realized it was all darkness inside me. If they saw it, I’d stop existing.
RG: Did your parents see the darkness?
CT: I suspected they did. At the time I believed I only had one choice, and it became an obsession: if they didn’t exist, then everything inside me would not exist either. So I killed them. It was the worst mistake of my life, and I regret it with every fiber of my being. That doesn’t erase what I did. It’s just what I believed I had to do at that time.
RG: Then you were arrested.
CT: Yes. And I told the detectives everything, and a psychologist from the prosecutor’s office interviewed me. He said I had all sorts of disorders but ultimately that it would be “difficult for my defense to present a meritorious psychiatric defense.” He said I was competent to stand trial. Then they canceled all my old meds and put me on a whole ton of others: Thorazine, Haldol, Paxil, and about a dozen others over the next year and a half.
RG: Why, if you were supposedly not psychotic or incompetent?
CT: I don’t know. To keep me sedated after my confession. I barely remember being in jail.
RG: What did you lawyer say?
CT: The first thing my public defender told me was, “I don’t know what you expect me to do, you already confessed.” I heard her call me a monster just before, to someone she was talking to when she didn’t realize I was right there behind her. So I didn’t expect much. I was still in shock, and later she told me we would consider a Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity defense but after sixteen months she told me she couldn’t get the expert she wanted to come up from Los Angeles and meet with me so I had no defense at all. So, I just pled guilty at my preliminary hearing before it even started.
RG: Why?
CT: She said I’d go to prison for 100 years no matter if I went to trial or not, so I wanted to just get it over with, and get to prison. I’d heard there’s a lot of drugs there so I figured I could get a bunch of heroin and overdose and finally be out of this life. I pled guilty. I got 100 years. I went to prison.
RG: But you didn’t kill yourself.
CT: I tried. I couldn’t get any heroin so I used a razor. That earned me a trip through the prison psych ward and whole piles of more pills. I lost count of how many psychotropics they put me in – thirty, forty, over the five years I was taking meds in prison. None of them did one thing positive for me. All I thought about was killing myself. I gave up on life – I didn’t have much of one anyways. Eventually I stopped taking the meds, mainly because I got so sick of seeing psychiatrists who didn’t care at all and having to talk about my feelings when I really felt nothing at all. I didn’t care about anything. I was totally empty. So I just told them – I’m done with you and your pills.
RG: Did you go through withdrawals as you tapered off your prescriptions?
CT: They don’t do that in prison. You’re on the max dose of something one day, the next day there’s no order and you’re not on it at all. You sink or swim. I had no idea there’d be withdrawals. I came off 2700 milligrams of Gabopentin a day cold turkey and wanted to kill myself all over again. Thankfully by then I’d learned a few coping skills and made a couple friends. I held on – barely. I hated life for a long time but I learned never to touch a psych med again. And over the next year, I finally had my first clear thoughts in the decade since I’d been medicated.
RG: What were they, these first thoughts?
CT: I am so, so, so screwed. And everybody hates me. And my life is worth nothing. But… for the first time in a really long time, I didn’t want to die. So instead of giving up on myself, I went to work.
RG: Ten years after you took your last psychotropic, how are you today?
CT: I’m alright. Truly. I like myself and I like my life. I am still in prison, but I feel free. I’m doing positive things. I care about others. I feel. I haven’t been depressed in years, or bored. I sleep OK. I have written a bunch of books, I have made friends all over the world, and I am building a future for myself whether in here or not.
RG: It’s been 16 years since the killings. Has the system changed to allow you to introduce the issue of your psychotropic medication in your defense?
CT: No. To this day not a single doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, or any other professional has ever even suggested to me that psych meds could potentially be a contributing factor to violence or homicide. Not once. In fact, the only people I have ever met who do recognize this are other people like me who are locked up for killing someone while under the effects of psych meds. And there are a lot.
So, while I feel like this huge issue is looming like an iceberg waiting for our society to rip itself apart on, I see zero progress within the system to face what is coming – what is already happening. The only relief I feel is that I already went through my hell. I hope that those who come after me can benefit from my experience.
They’ll need all the help they can get.
Cameron Terhune
AD0786 RB 124 up
CTFN PO Box 705
Soledad, CA 93960
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