Feature — Accutane
BEYOND SKIN DEEP
The overlooked mental health effects of Accutane Writer: Synthia Fahima Chowdhury Illustrator: Georgia Kelly Content warning: This article discusses suicide and mental illness. After she turned 30, Christa Huggins decided she had to do something about her skin. Huggins, a registered social worker in Ontario, had been battling stubborn acne on her face and back since she was a teenager. When she was 17 years old, she was prescribed an acne-treating drug called 50
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isotretinoin, commonly referred to as Accutane. At the time, Huggins didn’t experience any notable side effects other than a dryness that made her lips look like “they had been [scraped] with a cheese grater.” Miraculously, her skin cleared up — but the effects didn’t last. Taking the gel capsules once or twice a day over a four- to sixmonth course is often enough to banish acne completely, yet relapses sometimes occur months or even years after treatment. In Huggins’ case,
her acne was back after a month. Despite her positive first experience, Huggins — who had stable obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) that was not significantly impacting her daily functioning at the
time that she was seeking out treatment — was cautious about taking isotretinoin again. After doing her own research on the drug, she hoped that a low dose over a longer period might keep