I was going to wait until the next time I went to the doctor to ask about this but I'm struggling so I may need to rush things...

I have been on three antidepressants, Prozac, Paxil, and Celexa, and I don’t understand what happened with either of them. Has anybody had any similar experiences that might shed some light on what's going on with my head?

In my mid 20s, I was put on Prozac because I called an emergency mental health number and said I was afraid I’d hurt myself or others because I was so tired of people tormenting me that I had started having violent thoughts when I was picked on at work. At first I felt amazing, like Tour Guide Barbie. Something about it made me do this weird jerking thing sometimes though, which kind of alarmed me but I felt so good otherwise I let it go. Then I settled into feeling pretty normal. My only bad side effects were a very a mild headache and very mild nausea that I could easily overlook. Previously I had been obsessed with food and I didn’t feel like that anymore, so that was a great relief too. Somewhere between a month and two months, I noticed my stress level going back up. I told my Doctor and he raised my dose, but my stress level kept going up until I started feeling almost exactly as I had when I first went to him. I stopped taking the Prozac because it wasn’t helping anymore and trying to make the appointments was stressing me out. I finally got better when I left that job and got out of a bad relationship.

I took Paxil a few years later at the same time my mother was taking it. For a month or two, I was not debilitatingly self-conscious like I normally am. During this time I started getting really hot and sweating and I even got a heat rash. One day, while still taking the same dose of Paxil I had been, my mother said something about the way I laugh reminding her of my dad and even though she meant it to be a good thing, I got very self-conscious because those kind of comparisons usually aren’t good and someone even mentioning how I laughed reminded me of past bad things people had said and the “spell” was broken. It didn’t work anymore. I really suspect that the only reason it worked before was the combination that I had a new attitude from believing the medicine would work and was trying to look at things in a new way, and the fact that my mother was medicated that the primary person I was dealing with at the time was happier and so both of us were kind of riding this happier, healthier wave. I don’t know why else it could suddenly stop working unless it was just a coasting thing to begin with? I stopped taking it, but the heat remained in the form of more often being hot-natured and getting inexplicably, horribly hot as an anxiety symptom. Thankfully, I’ve never had the heat rash again but that may just be because I learned not to sit there and remain that hot anymore without doing anything about it.

Last year, at 32, I was put on Celexa mainly to address eczema that I had tried everything else to treat so I thought it was coming from stress. The Celexa didn’t help my eczema, and it made my stress and depression worse. I was so anxious and crying one night because someone got me emotional over my recently deceased cat that I stupidly cut an apple on a plate on an unstable surface and the plate slid out and landed on my toe. It made my toenail go completely black and I was in horrible, horrible pain but I refused to go to the doctor because I was too upset to have anyone touch me. My mother commented that was completely unlike me, and the rest of the time I was on it, my stress level was actually higher than normal, though thankfully not with that drastic of a reaction. I also was so depressed the whole time that I kept having a desire to get in the fetal position. The only other time I was that kind of consistently, emotionally-tormented depressed was when I tried to take birth control pills, those most common ones that have been around forever, can’t remember the name. About halfway through the time I was taking Celexa, I also suddenly lost what felt like about a third of my body’s elasticity seemingly overnight or at least in a few days. I felt like I deflated, and I can push my cheeks up to where they touch my eyes. Don’t know if that’s my age and normal or something hormonal the medicine did to me.

I feel like there is some clue in here to how antidepressants work in my body and what I therefore need but I don’t have the knowledge to put it together.

Right now, I am tormented by eczema(which I continue to believe is triggered by stress because of the timing of the flareups), an extremely knotted neck, sickening body aches, tension headaches, and sundry other physical problems that can come from stress. My anxiety spikes in irritability and inability to think or deal with things at varying amounts of severity and frequency but a lot of times I'm just running around in a constant state of what seems like "normal" life with a high anxiety level.

I don't know what to do. Maybe some other people's experiences can help me.