It was 2pm on a Tuesday and Ben Harvey was only just waking up.
It had been another long night of fitful sleep and graphic nightmares for the then 26-year-old.
Despite many hours under the duvet with no alarm to wake up to and no job to go to, Ben never felt rested or refreshed upon waking.
‘I’d been deeply depressed for five years and felt like a zombie,’ Ben tells me.
‘And the antidepressants I’d been prescribed made me feel even worse.’
Each afternoon, he’d make his short daily walk to KFC, where he’d use his Centrelink benefit to buy three chicken drumsticks, a bacon cheeseburger, large fries and a Pepsi.
‘That would be my only meal each day. Whatever money was left, I’d spend on drink in the local Irish pub,’ he says.
At closing time, he’d stumble home to bed, where he’d remain until 2pm the following day. ‘Rinse and repeat. I was just existing.’
Ben was clinically depressed and over-medicated for five years. He was eventually able to wean himself off antidepressants after the suicide of a school friend was a ‘wake-up call’
Ben’s struggles began in school.
‘I was dyslexic and basically couldn’t read,’ he explains.
‘I knew I was never going to succeed academically, but I didn’t want to draw attention to it, so I’d get in trouble on purpose instead.’
Without any focus on alternative, non-academic career paths, Ben felt sidelined and forgotten. After leaving school at 18, he floundered.
‘I didn’t get good enough marks to go to university like my friends. I had the odd job in hospitality but the late nights and drinking culture didn’t help my mental state at all,’ he recalls.
In his early twenties, Ben suffered his first manic episode and ended up in a hospital psychiatric ward.
‘I wasn’t eating. I looked like a skeleton and felt sick all the time,’ he says.
He had gone to the emergency department believing he was suffering from food poisoning, but while he was there he alarmed doctors by talking ‘absolute gibberish’ and suffering from delusions.
Ben estimates he was having 40,000 suicidal thoughts a day and was ‘simply existing’
Ben was admitted to the psych ward for four and a half months, and was stabilised with anti-psychotic and antidepressant medication.
‘After that I was basically in and out [of psychiatric care],’ he says.
‘One time I thought I was in a real-life video game. Another time I thought I’d won a car in a competition and my parents found me late at night, looking around a car park for my “prize”‘.
Eventually, his manic episodes calmed down, but Ben was left in deep depression, with constant suicidal thoughts.
‘It’s been said that people have about 60,000 thoughts a day. I would estimate that at least 40,000 of mine were focused on ending my life,’ he admits.
Ben’s diet of takeaway and beer meant his weight ballooned to 120kg (265lbs) and he’d accumulated a debt of AU$137,000 (US$85,300 / £66,951) from living expenses he could not afford as well as irresponsible spending.
Aware that the cocktail of medication he was on was simply numbing him, he tried many times to stop taking them.
‘I’d quit cold turkey and the withdrawal effects would be so messed up. I’d feel like I was going crazy,’ he says.
Ben would suffer insomnia and emotional instability whenever he tried to even reduce his dose.
‘They were just insanely challenging to get off, so I stopped trying.’
Doctors weren’t much use. Instead of helping him wean off, they would instead suggest he increase his dose, or recommend another drug to add to his prescription.
Shocking news about an old school friend inspired Ben to turn his life around
The turning point came when Ben was 27. On a rare night out, drinking in a club with friends, a man he’d gone to school with came over to chat.
‘He asked me if I’d heard the news about one of our school friends. I had no idea what he was talking about.’
It turned out that a close school friend of Ben’s had taken his own life.
‘I was in complete shock, it was like my entire world stopped,’ he tells me.
‘He had struggled with his mental health, like me. And he was on antidepressants, like me.’
In another blow, Ben discovered this had all happened several months earlier – and his family had avoided telling him because they worried about the impact of the news.
‘It just hit me in a way nothing else had. It was my wake-up call,’ he says.
At 3am, Ben left the nightclub and walked home. ‘I laid all my medication out on the table and just stared at it. I knew I had to do something different.’
The next day, Ben went to the pharmacy and bought a pill cutter. With guidance from his doctor, he began talking three quarters of his previous dose of antidepressants.
After a couple of months, he then halved his dose.
Within nine months, Ben had effectively weaned off his medication entirely – with none of the nasty side effects he’d suffered when he tried to go cold turkey before.
‘I still hated myself,’ he admits.
‘Life was still terrible – but that was the point: the drugs were doing absolutely nothing to help me. They’d just been masking my symptoms.’
And even though he was still depressed, Ben says a ‘light had come on’ inside him.
He began studying mindset work, personal development and coaching. ‘I wanted to understand how to transform my beliefs and actually create lasting change within myself,’ he says.
Through his studies, Ben found he wanted to impart the knowledge he was gaining, and soon developed a passion for helping other people.
After completing his studies, losing weight and paying off his debts, Ben started a healing and coaching business. Three years later, he joined with a business partner to launch Authentic Education, with a mission to teach people how to transform their lives the way he had.
‘Our slogan is “live your love”, which is what I’m doing and what saved me,’ he says.
Ben insists he is not anti-medication. Instead, he believes that for many people, the solution is not antidepressants, but rather living in alignment with their true desires.
‘Medication is miraculous but as a society, we are grossly over-medicated. Some people need it, but so many of us don’t,’ he explains.
Ben meets so many people through his work who are not being true to what they love and value, which makes the depressed.
‘I’ll be talking to a bloke who loves travel and time with his family, then I ask what he does for work, and he’ll tell me he’s an accountant who works long hours,’ he says.
‘Living out of alignment is what makes us depressed.’
Ben is still medication free, loves his job, and cherishes spending time with his partner and two daughters.
‘Finding something I loved doing and starting to value myself was the turning point,’ he says.
‘I think about my friend who took his life and I know that if he’d found something he loved doing, he would still be alive.’
That is Ben’s fuel to keep going. ‘Losing my friend really was the birth place of everything. It’s the driving force behind everything I do now.’
Disclaimer: Sudden withdrawal from SSRIs can cause severe side effects. Always consult your doctor before adjusting medication.
