Guinea Pig

Mike arrived at Lycoming College in the fall with a 3.8 GPA from his first semester and a spot on the wrestling team. Freshman year, first semester—he’d proven he could do it. Could go to class, make weight, compete, maintain the structure that kept everything else from unraveling.

Then he quit wrestling.

Not because of an injury. Not because of grades. He just stopped showing up to practice one day in January, and when the coach called him in, Mike said he needed to focus on academics.

It was a lie.

What he needed was to drink without the constraints of weight class and practice schedules and teammates who’d notice if he showed up hungover. What he needed was the freedom to fall apart without anyone tracking his decline.

The coach tried to talk him out of it. Wrestling had been good for him, the coach said. Gave him structure. Community. Purpose.

Mike nodded and said he understood, and then he walked out of that office and never went back.

That was the first thing to go.

The panic attacks started in February.

Not the kind where your heart races and you can’t breathe—though that happened too. These were deeper. More pervasive. A growing certainty that everyone who looked at him could see through to the truth underneath.

Fraud. Scumbag. Damaged.

The kid who’d been molested by his sister. The kid who’d wrapped a car around a woodpile at .258. The kid who’d gone to rehab and lied through every session. The kid who was only pretending to be a college student, pretending to be normal, pretending to be someone who deserved to take up space in the world.

He started skipping classes. Not all of them at first—just the ones where he had to speak, where participation mattered, where the professor might look at him directly and see what he really was.

Then all of them.

By March, Mike rarely left his dorm room.

Dr. Mayakar prescribed Paxil in late February.

Mike sat in the psychiatrist’s office—a referral from the student health center after his second panic attack sent him to the ER thinking he was having a heart attack—and answered questions he’d learned to lie about.

“Are you drinking?”

“Not really. Sometimes at parties.”

“Using any drugs?”

“No, sir.”

“History of trauma?”

Mike hesitated. Thought about Erica and the invented word and the elementary school locker room where he’d lost two years of his childhood. Thought about LBI and the man and the thing he’d never told anyone about.

“No,” he said.

Dr. Mayakar nodded, barely looking up from his notes. Wrote a prescription for Paxil, 20mg daily, and told Mike to come back in two weeks.

The appointment lasted twelve minutes.

Mike took the pills. Mixed them with the whiskey he kept in a water bottle under his bed. Waited to feel better.

Instead, he felt nothing.

Not better. Not worse. Just absent. Like someone had wrapped his brain in cotton and turned down the volume on everything—panic, yes, but also joy and interest and the basic human desire to leave his room and interact with the world.

When he went back two weeks later and said the Paxil wasn’t working, Dr. Mayakar increased the dose to 40mg without asking any follow-up questions about the drinking he wasn’t doing or the trauma that didn’t exist.

The flatness persisted. Mike sat in his dorm room and felt like he was watching his life through plexiglass—there, but not there. Present but fundamentally disconnected from everything that made existence feel real.

Two weeks later, Dr. Mayakar switched him to Effexor XR. 75mg to start.

“This one’s different,” he said. “SNRI instead of SSRI. Should help with both the depression and anxiety.”

Mike was nineteen years old and becoming a guinea pig for pharmaceutical intervention without proper diagnosis, without proper monitoring, without anyone asking the questions that mattered.

The first brain zap hit him three days after switching from Paxil to Effexor.

Mike was lying in bed—his usual position by then—when his skull seemed to snap with electricity. Not pain exactly. More like lightning had jumped between his synapses, a sudden jolt that left him dizzy and disoriented and certain something in his brain had just short-circuited.

It happened again an hour later. Then again. Sharp electric snaps inside his head, each one accompanied by a wave of vertigo and the nauseating sensation that his consciousness was skipping like a scratched CD.

He didn’t know these were withdrawal symptoms from stopping Paxil too abruptly. Didn’t know that Dr. Mayakar should have tapered the dose, should have warned him about discontinuation syndrome, should have monitored the transition instead of just swapping one prescription for another like changing batteries.

Nobody had told him that SSRIs grab hold of your brain chemistry and don’t let go easily. That stopping them cold turkey—even to start a different medication—can cause your nervous system to revolt.

The brain zaps continued. Five times a day. Ten. Twenty. Each one a reminder that something was profoundly wrong inside his skull, that the medications meant to fix him were creating new problems he had no framework to understand.

The insomnia got worse.

Mike had always struggled with sleep, but this was different. This wasn’t lying awake thinking. This was a wired, chemical sleeplessness—his body exhausted but his brain electric, pacing his room at 3 a.m. because lying still felt like being buried alive.

The Effexor created a constant low-grade buzz. Not energy. Not alertness. Just an inability to power down. His thoughts raced—jagged, nonsensical, looping back on themselves. The brain zaps punctuated the darkness. His heart rate stayed elevated even when he was sitting still.

Dr. Mayakar added Seroquel for sleep. 50mg at night.

It knocked Mike out—the kind of chemical unconsciousness that felt less like sleep and more like being erased for eight hours. But when he woke, he was groggy for the entire next day, his brain wrapped in fog, his body sluggish and uncoordinated.

So he stopped taking it regularly. Took it some nights. Not others. Forgot sometimes. Took two pills when one didn’t work fast enough.

The irregular dosing made everything worse.

The brain zaps intensified. The insomnia became unpredictable. Some nights he’d pass out for twelve hours. Others he’d lie awake until dawn, brain crackling with electricity he couldn’t discharge, anxiety building like a neurological threat his body couldn’t identify or escape.

This wasn’t fear. Fear has an object—a tiger, a test, a social situation. This was his nervous system screaming warnings about a danger that didn’t exist, cortisol and adrenaline flooding his bloodstream in response to nothing, leaving him shaking and wired and convinced he was dying even though he was just lying in bed.

He added Wellbutrin next—or was it before the Seroquel? He couldn’t remember. Dr. Mayakar kept adjusting, kept adding, kept switching dosages based on twelve-minute appointments where Mike lied about the drinking and the irregular pill-taking and the growing sense that his brain chemistry was being scrambled beyond recognition.

The Wellbutrin made his hands shake. Made his jaw clench. Made the insomnia even worse and added a jittery edge to the Effexor’s electrical buzz.

But he kept taking it. All of them. In combinations and dosages he couldn’t track anymore, mixed with the whiskey he was drinking more of, creating a pharmaceutical cocktail that no psychiatrist would have prescribed if they’d known the truth.

The bottles started in March.

Empty Gatorade bottles, two-liter soda bottles, anything with a wide enough mouth. Mike lined them up against the wall behind his bed—his own piss, going darker and more concentrated as he stopped drinking water, stopped eating regular meals, stopped doing anything except lying in bed riding out the brain zaps and the insomnia and the chemical anxiety that felt like his nervous system was trying to claw its way out of his skin.

Leaving his room had become impossible. The walk down the hallway to the bathroom required passing other students, required the possibility of eye contact, required the risk that someone would look at him and know.

So he pissed in bottles.

Started with one. Then three. Then a whole row of them, amber and cloudy, evidence of complete dysfunction hidden behind his bed where his roommate—who’d requested a room transfer in February—would never see.

He stopped bathing. Stopped changing clothes. Wore the same sweatpants and t-shirt for days at a time, until they were stiff with sweat and the smell of his own unwashed body filled the small room.

The nightmares started around the same time.

Not regular nightmares. These were vivid, hyperreal, soaked in the kind of detail that made waking up feel like surfacing from drowning. They bled trauma he’d never processed—Erica’s hands in places they shouldn’t be, the man at LBI, fragments of violence and shame and childhood terror that his medicated, sleep-deprived brain could no longer keep contained.

He’d wake gasping, covered in sweat, brain zapping, heart racing, unable to distinguish the nightmare from reality for several terrifying seconds. Then he’d lie there in the dark, afraid to go back to sleep, afraid the dreams would drag him under again.

The Seroquel was supposed to help him sleep without nightmares. But he wasn’t taking it consistently, and when he did take it, the dreams just became more vivid—high-definition horror his drugged brain couldn’t wake up from until it was finished playing out.

He started smoking weed in his room to avoid the dreams. Stuffed a towel under the door, opened the window, lit up and held the smoke until his lungs burned. The THC mixed with the Effexor and Wellbutrin and irregular doses of Seroquel, creating a fog thick enough to muffle the brain zaps and the anxiety and the nightmares, at least for a few hours.

But it made the dissociation worse.

Time started slipping in April.

Not blackout drunk lost time, though that happened too. This was different. Dissociative. Hours would disappear and he’d come back to himself in places he didn’t remember going to, doing things he had no memory of deciding to do.

He’d find himself standing in the bathroom staring at his reflection, no idea how long he’d been there or what he’d been thinking about. He’d come to awareness in the campus store, items in his hands he didn’t remember picking up. He’d realize he’d been walking for twenty minutes with no destination, no purpose, just moving because staying still felt like suffocating.

The medications and the alcohol and the weed and the sleep deprivation were shredding his ability to stay present. His consciousness kept cutting out like a faulty connection, leaving gaps he couldn’t account for.

The worst was the elementary school.

Mike had been up all night—not unusual by then, the combination of Effexor and Wellbutrin and alcohol creating a kind of wired exhaustion where sleep felt both impossible and desperately necessary. He’d left his room at some point. Started walking. Brain zapping every few minutes, little electric snaps that made his vision blur and his balance falter.

The next thing he knew, he was standing in a locker room that smelled like industrial cleaner and old sneakers. Small lockers. Child-sized benches. Morning light coming through high windows.

An elementary school locker room.

He had no idea how he’d gotten there. No memory of the walk or the decision or the reason. Just the sudden, horrifying awareness that he was standing in a place he had no business being, a place where his presence would be interpreted in the worst possible way.

The shame hit him like a physical blow.

Why was he here? What had he been planning to do? What kind of person blacks out and ends up in an elementary school?

The kind of person who’d been molested as a child, maybe. The kind of person who carried that damage forward like a virus. The kind of person who—

His brain zapped hard enough to make him stumble. The electrical snap coincided with a wave of nausea and the terrifying sense that his mind was fragmenting, that the medications had finally pushed him past some point of no return.

He left immediately. Walked fast, head down, praying no one had seen him. Praying there were no cameras. Praying this would be another secret he could bury and never examine.

He never told anyone about it.

Not Dr. Mayakar. Not Dr. Neil—the therapist he’d stopped seeing weeks ago because talking required coherence he no longer possessed. Not the friends who’d stopped calling after he’d blown them off too many times.

He just added it to the pile of evidence that he was exactly what he feared: fundamentally wrong.

The brain zaps continued for days after. Constant reminders that something in his nervous system was misfiring, that the pharmaceutical experiment being conducted on his brain chemistry was creating symptoms that felt indistinguishable from psychosis.

The gas station theft happened a week later.

Mike didn’t remember making the decision. He was buying cigarettes—one of the few times he left his room anymore—and the cashier stepped away to help someone, and there was a jacket hanging on the back of her chair.

His brain zapped. Hard. The electrical snap coincided with a surge of impulsive energy—not thought, just action. His hand was in the pocket pulling out cash before his conscious mind caught up to his body.

Twenty dollars. Maybe thirty. He didn’t count it.

He walked out, heart pounding, brain zapping every few seconds, the anxiety receptors in his nervous system screaming threats about a danger that had already happened, that he’d already committed, that there was no escaping now.

He used the money to buy more whiskey at the distributor down the street. Drank half the bottle in his room, chasing the chemical panic with more chemicals, trying to quiet the electrical storm in his skull.

Campus security showed up at his door the next day. The gas station had cameras. The cashiers remembered him. They wanted their money back.

Mike gave it back—what he hadn’t already spent on whiskey. Mumbled an apology through a fog of Effexor and Wellbutrin and sleep deprivation so profound he could barely track the conversation.

The security guard looked at him—really looked at him—and saw something that made him pause. A kid who’d lost twenty pounds. Who hadn’t bathed in days. Whose hands shook and whose eyes wouldn’t focus.

“You okay, son?”

“Yeah. Just… school stress.”

The security guard didn’t press. Didn’t ask about the medications or the drinking or the state of the room behind Mike that reeked of unwashed human and stale cigarettes.

Just reminded him not to steal again and left.

Another secret. Another confirmation that the medications weren’t fixing anything—they were just making it easier to disappear into someone he didn’t recognize.

They caught him with weed in late May.

The towel under the door, the window open, the classic dorm room setup that worked unless you forgot about the hallway window. Which Mike had, because his brain was zapping every ten minutes and the Effexor had made him so agitated and confused that basic operational security was beyond his capacity.

An RA smelled it. Knocked. Found Mike in a room that reeked of weed and unwashed human and the faint chemical smell of piss from the bottles he hadn’t emptied yet.

The RA didn’t say anything about the bottles. Just stood there, taking in the scene—the weight loss, the tremor in Mike’s hands, the way his eyes couldn’t quite focus, the row of amber bottles barely visible behind the bed.

“Mike, I have to write this up.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

Mike’s parents got the call. Came to campus. Saw the state of his room, the state of him—twenty pounds lighter, unwashed, shaking slightly from the medication cocktail and the lack of sleep and the constant barrage of brain zaps that made every moment feel like his nervous system was shorting out.

His mother cried.

His father just stared, trying to reconcile this hollow-eyed, trembling stranger with the 3.8 GPA wrestler who’d left for school eight months ago.

They didn’t ask about the bottles.

They didn’t ask about the panic attacks or the missed classes or the fact that their son had gone from college athlete to someone who couldn’t leave his room without dissociating.

They just took him home.

Dr. Mayakar never followed up. Dr. Neil’s office sent a bill for missed appointments.

The prescriptions kept getting filled—Effexor XR, Wellbutrin, Seroquel, Remeron added later when Mike couldn’t sleep even with the Seroquel, each one layered on top of the others without anyone asking what the cumulative effect might be, what happens when you mix all of these with alcohol and weed and unprocessed trauma and an irregular dosing schedule that guarantees withdrawal symptoms and medication overlap in unpredictable combinations.

Guinea pig.

That’s what Mike had become. A test case for what happens when you prescribe psychiatric medication to an actively drinking, undiagnosed trauma survivor without asking the questions that matter, without monitoring the interactions, without explaining that stopping these medications abruptly causes brain zaps and insomnia and anxiety that feels like your nervous system is under attack.

The pills didn’t fix the panic. They didn’t fix the shame. They didn’t fix the fundamental belief that he was damaged and everyone could see it.

They just added new layers of chemical dysfunction—brain zaps and agitation and vivid nightmares and dissociative episodes where he’d come back to himself in elementary school locker rooms with no memory of how he got there.

They made it easier to disappear.

Into bottles—both kinds. Into rooms he couldn’t leave. Into gaps in time where consciousness just cut out and his body kept moving without him.

Into a version of himself so far from the 3.8 GPA wrestler he’d been eight months ago that he couldn’t remember what that person had felt like.

Structure had kept him functional. Wrestling, classes, schedules, the basic framework of college life.

And he’d abandoned it all, piece by piece, until there was nothing left except pills and bottles and brain zaps and the growing certainty that he’d never been meant to survive this long anyway.

The doctors kept prescribing.

Mike kept taking them—irregularly, in combinations no one had approved, mixed with substances no one knew about, creating a neurological storm no one was monitoring.

And nobody asked why a nineteen-year-old needed Effexor and Wellbutrin and Seroquel and Remeron just to get through the day.

Nobody asked what he was running from.

Nobody asked if the pills were helping or just fragmenting his consciousness into smaller and smaller pieces until there was nothing left to hold together.

They just kept adjusting the dosage and sending him back out into a world he’d learned to be terrified of, armed with prescriptions that treated symptoms without ever touching the wound underneath.

Summer was coming.

Mike would spend it down the shore, at Long Beach Island, mixing his pharmaceutical cocktail with alcohol and ephedrine and the unprocessed memory of being raped in that same location as a child.

It would not go well.

But for now, he went home with his parents, prescriptions in hand, brain zapping with every step, and tried not to think about the bottles behind his bed or the elementary school locker room or the gas station cashier’s money or the electrical storms in his skull that wouldn’t stop.

Tried not to think about how the pills that were supposed to save him had just made it easier to disappear.

One structure at a time.

One day at a time.

One brain zap at a time.

Until there was nothing left to abandon except himself.