Posts tagged antidepressants

Hello.  My name is Lesley.  I’m 26, single, non-smoker, Capricorn, deist. I like knitting and kung-fu movies.  If I was really drunk, and you were really, really drunk and neither of us were wearing our glasses, I’d try and convince you I look like Jessica Rabbit dressed as a librarian.

All of that is true (the Jessica Rabbit part slightly less so), but how much of it is ME?

We all go through a struggle to identify who we really are, it’s a big philosophical question, and in my own personal opinion, the less you wonder about it the more yourself you’re likely to be.  We construct a persona, an outside layer to present to the world at large, and beneath that our true self lies, some of us are acutely aware of who that person may be, and some completely ignorant.

I’m depressed and anxious, which is something I try and keep largely hidden, no one really gives a rat’s arse about it, but is it part of my identity or just an illness?  You wouldn’t define yourself by a broken leg or a bout of flu, but would you feel like your diabetes was part of you?

I do feel like “Being Depressed” is a big chunk of who I am.  It’s been with me my whole adult life, shaping my choices and my personality just as much as anything else has.  So it feels doubly hard sometimes to face up to the idea of “getting better”.  I don’t want to take pills to stop me liking computer games, or go to therapy for my Depeche Mode obsession (even though some people probably think I need it), and sometimes I don’t want to go through a huge struggle to redefine myself.

My counsellor leant me a book once, where someone was talking about how their depression had interrupted their life, how they wanted to get back to where they were before it happened, and I got angry as hell about it.  There was no “before” for me, nowhere to go back to, and I felt quite bitter about it at the time.  I can only go forward and take things as they come.

Over the past 8 years of my life I’ve been on medication for about 50% of the time, with a pretty poor success rate.  I’ve had Citalopram, Lofepramine, Clomipramine, Fluoxetine (that one is better known as Prozac) and Citalopram again.  Nearly all of them had unpleasant or inconvenient side-effects, and none of them seemed to actually help - unless I would have been even more depressed without them, which is a scary thought.

Citalopram seems to be the go to thing for a GP to prescribe to you, and was the first anti-depressant I was ever given.  The university doctor gave me a couple of weeks worth of a small dose, and told me to come back and let her know how I’d got on.  She also informed me they were impossible to overdose on.

I took the first one that afternoon whilst with some friends, who said they noticed an immediate difference in my behaviour.  Whether that was an actual effect from the pill or just in my own head I don’t know, but I felt sort of drunk - that feeling of everything being fuzzy and detached. I also went on to abuse the hell out of them, since I knew there was no possibility of overdose I would take 3 or 4 at once, for reasons I still can’t fathom out.  Just a self-destructive impulse.  

It also made me sleepy as hell, and whenever I went to the doctor and explained that it wasn’t really providing me any benefits, just making me feel weird, they would up the dose.  Eventually I got sick of it and gave up cold turkey, which lead to some unpleasant withdrawal.

Next was Lofepramine, from another GP.  This one did something strange to my sex drive.  I was constantly in the “on” position to the point where I could not think straight and made more than one questionable decision.  Again, no tangible benefits to my mood, it was all sobbing and sex toys for a good few months.

When I finally got referred to a psychiatrist, he gave me Clomipramine.  I was on this one for the longest period - maybe 18 months or so.  I remained very depressed, and it also came with the warning to “avoid alcohol” and I absolutely did not.  One of the lowest points in my life was being asked to leave my student union bar because I’d had a bottle of red wine and started puking and crying in the ladies’ toilets.  My only defence was that I was terrified I was about to fail my degree and just gone into full-on self-destruct mode.

Once I had got out of university (thankfully with a degree) I was med-free for a long time, up until a couple of years ago.  A lot of bad things happened at once and I went running to the doctor who gave me some Prozac.  Technically he wasn’t meant to, because I had only scored 13 points on his test and you need 14 to be properly miserable, but he took my history into account and erred on the side of caution.

Prozac was the worst thing to ever happen to me.  It amplified every nervous, anxious feeling I ever had.  I couldn’t sleep, I could barely eat and would be sick most days.  I stuck it out for a couple of months in the hope that I would adjust to it, but it never happened.  I also felt horribly out of control of myself, bordering on the manic.  I went back to the GP and ended up back with Citalopram, despite my protestations.

I am currently not riding the medication roller coaster, and now I’ve typed all of that up you’re probably expecting me to denounce medication out of hand.  Well, I don’t.  People fear that they will become enslaved to medication, zombified and stupid.  For something like depression or anxiety, meds should never be a long-term solution.  They can be a tool to assist in managing symptoms until psychological methods can be put in place using counselling.  They are a crutch.  Some people do need meds long-term, but they should never feel as though they are worse off with them than without.  Unfortunately it is still a process of trial and error for many people, and it can be hard to have the patience to stick with it, and to find the right healthcare professional to help you work it out.