[WantToGrow]

I used to post here a lot, and I felt so negative and hopeless back then...but I am doing so much better now, and I wanted to share my story so that maybe someone will recognize him or herself and see a new path.

I had been on psych meds since I was 30, and I am now 51. Started with Prozac after I had a horrible break up and felt worthless with suicidal ideation. Prozac had gotten tons of press about being the Happy Pill, and I thought, why not? Well, it didn't magically fix things, but since there was depression in the family tree, I figured I needed it and just kept taking it.

I met my husband not long after I started Prozac. I felt I was in love, but there was a distance there, and sex became less satisfying.

About six years later I switched to Wellbutrin, hoping it would fix the sexual side effects, being the new TV star of the day. I was still dissatisfied with myself and not Happy. After a serious bout with the flu, with pneumonia developing, a doctor told me to see a psychiatrist who put me on Effexor. I remained on Effexor for 11 years. I still had serious bouts of depression, worse in fact, with big blow ups where I wished I were dead. This wasn't good.

In 2014 I decided I'd had enough of sexual side effects, having spent the last 19 years with a very unsatisfying sex life, no libido, with difficulty arousing and orgasming. I didn't want to spend the rest of sexual life that way. I realized I had had emotional blunting all those years as well. I couldn't feel true excitement about anything and had little sense of joy and pleasure in my life. So, I tapered off Effexor rather quickly.

The first couple of months were ok, but I was noticing my memory and concentration were really slipping. I was also now menopausal so thought maybe that was it. A friend thought I was ADHD, and certainly I was having run-away thinking, forgetting what I was doing half-way through doing it, losing things, etc. I was tested, but came up negative. I also began having serious sweating, waking with the sheets drenched top and bottom, but thinking it was menopause. I pursued hormone testing.

Hormones were rock bottom, so went on bio-identical hormone replacement, but it didn't help. I began having serious anxiety, generalized, like I'd never had before. My mood began to slip and energy was low. I kept hoping the hormones would kick in but they didn't. I also had a higher resting pulse, around 99, which I thought odd. My BP also raised to 139/xx when it used to always be 120/xx. I also had a prickly burning sensation that would pass over me in the night.

I began waking with panic, fear, doom, dread, with racing thoughts. I couldn't sleep. I didn't care to eat, to prepare food for myself. I lost interest in doing anything, not even things that I used to "enjoy." I began to feel agoraphobic, just not wanting to go out in the world. I stayed home on the couch. I began feeling I was worthless.

I had my first ever episodes of derealization, where nothing looked right and everything felt wrong. I began fearing everything, death, growing old, fear of being alone when I was old, etc. The depression and fear were beyond anything I had ever experienced in my life!

This was now about 8 months out from going off Effexor. I had told several health care providers about coming off Effexor, but no one, including me, put two and two together. My doc put me on Remeron to help me sleep and eat, since I had lost weight and didn't care about eating. I didn't care about anything, really. The low dose helped me sleep, and my mood improved briefly, but then I kept raising the dose chasing feeling better. Six weeks out and almost at the highest dose, I was desperate.

My doctor put me on the lowest dose of Effexor, 37.5 mg, and reduced my Remeron to 30 mg, a 20% cut. Within an hour of my first dose of Effexor, I was fixed!!! I still didn't put 2 and 2 together.

It wasn't until after I met a gal who was over a year out from going off Lexapro and in profound protracted withdrawal that I figured it out. She directed me to a withdrawal forum where I learned that I was not alone and that what happened to me was a common sequel to coming off psych meds, especially after years of chronic use. I was horrified that 10 months of suffering were due to Effexor withdrawal, and that these symptoms are due to the drug actually CHANGING your brain! The brain does not like the increased serotonin level, wants homeostasis so makes oppositional changes to bring about homeostasis. It is that down-regulation that is left unopposed when you come off cold turkey or too quickly that cause the symptoms, and withdrawal can last months and years.

It turns out my reinstatement dose didn't need to be so high to stop withdrawal. The withdrawal forums recommend much smaller reinstatements to get relief from symptoms, but I found this out too late.

I was hell bent to be off drugs that actually do this to you. I learned that 80% of adults who use ADs chronically do so because trying to come off was too hard. I also learned that because the emotional withdrawal doesn't come on until months out in some cases, the patient is deemed "relapsed" and put back on with the belief that he must be on for the rest of his life, that his brain needs these drugs and that they are correcting a chemical imbalance.

This is a myth that has been perpetuated, even though the chemical imbalance theory has been disproven and has been for nearly 20 years. There is no known disease process that causes depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bi-polar, and the drugs are not correcting any known imbalance. The drugs simply alter mental states such that perhaps the patient doesn't care as much. This might be helpful in the short term, but long-term outcomes are poor. These drugs actually CAUSE treatment resistant depression, with patients becoming more prone to depressive episodes. Due to oppositional tolerance, these drugs actually CREATE the very condition they were supposedly treating: low serotonin due to down-regulation of the serotonin system.

So, where does this leave me? Well, I was incredibly angry that I had lost so many years to the drugs, to what essentially was treatment resistant depression that went undiagnosed. Many patients in that case end up increasing dosages, switching to new drugs, and end up on drug cocktails, as the doctor chases tolerance symptoms and drug side effects with more drugs. They become grossly overmedicated and still feel horrible! They are usually diagnosed as bi-polar due to the mood cycling caused by tolerance.

I became determined to get off the poison and started tapering after I was stabilized after reinstatement. A year later I am down to 11.5 mg Remeron and 23.75 mg Effexor, both below the "minimum effective dose." I feel wonderful!

The only time my mood shifts is if I am hit with a stressor, such as my dog almost dying recently. Stress will set off withdrawal symptoms like burning skin, sudden surges of body anxiety, irritability, but this is all very rare. I am following a 10% taper per month, based on the previous month's dosage and have been focusing on Remeron because it caused me to gain weight. I have been micro-tapering the Effexor, because you aren't supposed to do two drugs at the same time. I do hold periods to let my nervous system get caught up and must say that I am now able to handle stresses easily which used to send me reeling. For instance, I used to get so stressed and worked up preparing to go out of town for a weekend, getting more and more irritable as the weekend approached. Now it is no big deal! Same with guests visiting, used to get worked up trying to get ready and now, no problem!

So, if you have been on meds for years and are dissatisfied with how you are doing, it may be your drugs truly are your problem a la Peter Breggin. He is the author of Medication Madness and other titles and has his website breggin.com.

Helpful sites: survivingantidepressants.org, madinamerica.com, cepuk.org, beyondmeds.com

It will take me a good while to finally come off these drugs, but I've been drugged for years, so my system deserves to take it slow so it can gradually adapt back to the factory default.

Oh, I am also no longer negative and feeling worthless, having done the work with Emotional Brain Training. I think reducing the meds has helped with that, too.

[gayleggg]

Congratulations!!! Such and encouraging story. Thank you for sharing.

[Fuzzybear]