I ended up taking a break from that trial and have now been on emsam again (I know, I know) for about 11 or 12 days now, having jumped up to 9 mg from the beginning this time.

Feeling weird and unsure. I'm doing worse in life/outwardly (have now had a few lying on the couch unmotivated type of days) but somehow almost feel like there's some sort of improvement I can't put my finger on? Life circumstances taking my mood really up and down make it hard to consistently measure how meds are really affecting my mood, too, (i.e. not working now and that having me down in a rut and not consistently functioning, niece visiting from out of town which made me have to get up and out for a bit and positively affected my mood, stuff like that). It's pretty up and down.

I've noticed I'm pretty sure it has me feeling a little better about myself in some ways, yet anxious and to where I can't go do things anyway.

It's the weirdest thing, I swear it's like it's taking some depression symptoms away and adding new ones. I've been in a sorta dysthymic (but maybe a little worse) kinda unmotivated, feel like I've lost myself, not happy but not particularly painful depression. With emsam, (I think) I've felt a tiny bit more positive about some things in general and want to do things a bit more, but only in my mind... in reality, I'm kinda doing less. This stuff seems like (so far) it's giving me more symptoms of what feels like my old major depressions. I feel sad and tearful sometimes, definite mood swings.
Anxiety-wise it almost helps in some tiny way, but has definitely increased anxiety a lot in other ways. I've got a constant internal anxiousness and having been having a lot of increased overthinking.

I'm trying to figure out whether some of the effects are caused by the med or are just kinda more "indirect" effects than the med itself causing things. For example, if I feel an increase in sadness and anxiousness about life...is the med itself making me feel sad about things, or could it be that like... coming from a depressive spell not doing much, I'm now actually wanting more from life and I want to do more but can't yet, so that makes me feel sad, but doesn't actually mean the med should be stopped.


Last night I'm pretty sure I was having some kind of visual hallucinations. I've had basically constant pretty bad floaters for months from lamictal, and I'm trying to decide whether this could just be some kind of vision thing added onto that, or actual hallucinations, but the way it was last night I think it went into actual hallucination territory. For a few days I've been having just sort of peripheral hallucinations where things just look weird out of the corner of my eye. But last night it was like things in my field of vision were moving. When I'd look at anything with a weird texture, it'd do weird things to my eyes. Also, when I looked around my mind kept mistaking objects for other things just for a split second.

I know I should probably be pretty worried about that, but for some reason I can't even explain I'm not. This was one of the meds I was on the winter that I became psychotic, but I was doing a lot worse then already and the doctors and I believed that was probably caused by actually switching the meds too fast rather than by 1 med itself. Also, I always placed more blame on parnate for it all. I feel like common sense should tell me to get off the med ASAP, and part of me really wants to, but part of me has just finally settled on pushing myself through sticking on it and I almost think I could be feeling some improvement under all the junk. I also can't 100% rule out that I'm somehow having symptoms of psychotic depression on my own and it's not the med. I've never been psychotic other than the one complete psychotic break I had 2 years ago, but what if I'm prone to psychotic depression and it's just happening? In that case I'd be scared to death to quit, because if it's just my depression naturally getting that bad I'd want to get help from a med ASAP and cross my fingers for emsam.

Sorry for my overthinking and babbling, getting it out and complaining kinda helps.