Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
November 23, 2011
THIS IS A JOURNALLING BLOG , MY DAILY ACCOUNT OF GOING OFF THE ANITDEPRESSANT -ANTI ANXIETY DRUG CALLED EFFEXOR. THROUGH MISSGUIDED CONSULTATIONS FROM REGULAR PSYCHIATRISTS, I HAVE BEEN TAKING 600MGS OF THIS MEDICATION FOR 3 YEARS ++ THIS IS THE STORY OF HOW TO GET OFF EFFEXOR AND BECOME YOU AGAIN!!! LOTS OF LUV, SANSFLEURETTE
okay do it’s the 28th of July, 2011
im just thinking about how much of this i want to go forward with the next two weeks of tapering off medication, im seriously afraid now of how tough it’s going to be. literally i’m not ready for it , i’m not ready to go through the nausea, the headaches, the where am, who am i , where are we going euphemism of a gauguin painting that i will become..it’s also i feel like i am silenced , i can’t be me because life as i know it will be shrouded in withdrawal symptoms and clouded with questions like am I ok will i be good tomorrow for another two weeks where from all of this my spirit gets darkened and i try desperately like the fish to swim upstream!
I know almost everything i say sounds poetic but i just have this way of thinking where i visualize my life, and how it looks and in the next two weeks “all does not look cool on the western front”.t
I’m tempted to talk to my doctor , who is this weird eastern european man .. anyways he is helping me through this whole shin dig of non exitation and non- living escapade!!.
“ i just want someone to come and save me , from life, from fear, from memories, from everhing, Just take me away”
I wish i didn’t have to do this and go through something agoniz ing like this. i remember watching HOUSE where they literally induce a coma to this women whoa became addicted to something , because her body wouldn ‘t sustain another day of the drug she was taking, so they had to put her in a coma in order to do the rapid detox. Which i guess would be the only way one can do this kind of thing, because otherwise her heart would not take it. I wish a safer way existed to do rapid detox for people like me on 600mgs of effexor.
Dont get me wrong I’m not saying that if i had to get some orifice removed or had a major root canal it wouldn’t be painful and i wouldn’t just let the treatment slide as i feel like doing here. i can”t say whether it’s because of society’s outlook on all mental illnessed or what not , but in my mind this isn’t like getting my leg fractured in 3 places and wether i go through this procedure or not, will dictate the fate of my living or not being able to move , or walk around freely for the rest of my life.
Nowhere do i see here a doctors advisory for treatment , or something saying ” must not do anything but succumb to paralyzing numbness, loss or orientation, nausea, no appetite, only drink water, make sure to not get dehydrated” and for that matter i don’t see where it says i must go through this operation or i simply will not make it through in this lifetime!
so initially this is how i felt when i started this whole game of taking medically prescribed pills, that i was vehemently opposed to them, that i didn’t believe one iota of what doctors had to say on the subject ..essentially that it’s a farce, a conjurring up of terms and selling mechanisms to get people to depend on something…
I mean you or anyone would be surprised how i ever got on to taking these or injesting these substances in the first place. To add to my whole mistrust of prescription drugs for ten going on eleven years i’d been what i call a pretty staunch buddhist and i am actually not that shy to talk about it .. for ex: i let my therapists know from the get go, that i had my own philosophy and kind of way i see my problems and that i wouldn’t just take pills like they were vitamins , like down them with a glass of water and think i was just taking something that is good for me.
You haven’t heard me talk yet or met me but I have a pretty big sense of humour and i’m quite jovial, it’s rare that i frown..i have to say i am good with people. Over the years i’ve learned how to talk about buddhism so that the person i’m reaching out to knows what i practise isn’t some odd incantation or about some guy sitting up by a waterfall and a moutain top and is om-ing his way through boredom slash being a self proclaimed enlightened god! … but thats just me , everyone has their way.
The way i talked about it with my psychiatrist is i always insisted that i was the one and only arbiter of my life and that i truly believed in taking responsibility for my life so long as it promoted good health and lead me towards attaining my life goals
. Sometimes i felt like my practise and beliefs led me to having a kind of harder life than i would have experienced , because i encourage myself to go to the limit, take on challenges, learn through hard knock life experiences. All in all though i think ive gained more from it because it’s taught me to go the extra mile if i want something to happen, i’d work harder if i want a good relationship to foster between a boss, co-worker, or even it’s helped m pe get along better with everyone in my personal life.
so all that said , you can now imagine how hard it is for me to listen to someone telling me, let alone a highly astute psychiatrist that i will need to take prescription medication because my level of clinical depression is too severe as well as my anxiety is through the roof that i wouldn’t be able to learn the things i need to learn in psychotherapy if i don’t adhere to taking anti depressants slash anti anxiety pills.
At first i agreed they might have a point , but i still argued them down by maintaining it goes against rationality that i should put faith in a tiny pill and it’s ability to have therapeutic value. I insisted at the time that i would not do this by pain of death, i had From the beginning put up such a fight and was soo oposed to this i fought tooth and nail to not take these drugs.As that is exactly what i saw them as .d-r-u-g-s I also talked at length with my father and family to try …
“ The human spirit is the strongest force there is. As long as our spirit remains unbroken, there is no defeat. In life, spiritual defeat always precedes actual defeat. Guard against laziness, cowardice, carelessness, impatience, resignation and despair which corrode the human spirit and sow the seeds of defeat.” -Daisaku Ikeda
- “ The human spirit is the strongest force there is. As long as our spirit remains unbroken, there is no defeat. In life, spiritual defeat always precedes actual defeat. Guard against laziness, cowardice, carelessness, impatience, resignation and despair which corrode the human spirit and sow the seeds of defeat.” -Daisaku Ikeda
Joshua Walters: On being just crazy enough (byTEDTALKSDIRECTOR)
the above video is great , the first of it’s kind to represent this world of mental illness in a right way. I found this on a friends fb profile , and i thought this really applied to the things i am talking about..
Now i find myself at a similar crossroads with getting off these medications, is that no one has directly told me Y-E-S miss Leah you should come off of 600mgs of effexor xr RIGHT NOW- because it is debilitating physically and mentally for YOU to be on such a high dosage for over one year.
I even saw a doctor who is this strange eastern european doctor who is supposted to be one of the best in his field , on this continent i believe…and i didn’t get such a warning.
it boggles my mind to revisit all of this and only recently until i decided post getting terrible drowsyness, nausea, trembling , confusion the like , what people are deemed to experience on such high dosages of effexor for a prolonged period of time.. i decided i should go to my local family clinic to check out these symptoms and get a second opinion.
The doctor there said to me right away “no wonder you feel this terrible this isn’t a random dose of effexor , miss.. this is 600mgs, he was quite adamant in saying you must go back to your original doctor and he must taper your dose down and see you through this process”..
so this is why i have started to reduce my intake of effexor, and this is where i’m at. I feel so alone in this process and going through this is, the only thing i know or can have hope in is our human brains ability to adapt to new dosages of medication.
I really have no other proof that the pain will go away from this withdrawal black hole i’m in. Somehow my body has begun to reject this drug and has caused me so many problems over the past few years and needless to say i can’t really hold food down eithe —which is a whole other story.
Well The saga itself is endless. I wish i could have answers but what i know is the less i have of effexor running through my system the less i will be in harmsway.
My father said the same thing ” how peculiar it is that this medication is causing you so many problems when initially this was supposed to be the cure for your clinical depression” , he maintains that the cure has in itself become the illness, and it is now the one thing that is harming me, i can’t say i disagree with him on his point.
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