After seven years on anti-depressant medication I have decided to come off of them. It’s not that there is anything wrong with being on anti-depressants, I have had great success with my medication and would go on it again in a heartbeat if I felt my depression returning. But after seven years, I’ve forgotten who I am unmedicated and I want to see how I cope now with the skills and knowledge I’ve gained about living with mental illness.
I take the most common form of anti-depressants known as Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) and they come with an impressively long list of withdrawal symptoms, which is interesting because the medical community likes to tell us they are not addictive. However, they clearly change the way the brain works and they must create some sort of dependency, otherwise they would be much easier to come off of.
I’ve been weaning off my meds with the support and guidance of my family practitioner for nearly two weeks, and I have to tell you the experience has not been fun.
I am normally an easygoing person. I think people are generally good at their core and just trying to do their best. I don’t often get angry and I am usually quite forgiving. But in these last two weeks I have become a rage beast.
My husband and I went out for dinner the other night and I wanted to stab the waiter with my butter knife each time he came and asked us, “How are we doing?” You are not part of this twosome, sir, there is no “we” here. Thankfully, I am aware stabbing a waiter with a butter knife is not appropriate in any situation and I managed to keep it together throughout the meal. But that type of overreaction has become common for me in these last few weeks and is not something I am used to.
I honestly thought the rage beast was a sign of my depression coming back with a vengeance and was ready to throw in the towel and start taking my full dose of meds again. Then I did something I rarely do when it comes to medical issues, I looked online. To my surprise, irritability, aggression and mood swings are a symptom of SSRI withdrawal, as is the insomnia, lethargy, confusion or forgetfulness, depression, and the dizziness I have been experiencing.
There is even a symptom described as a brain zap that feels like an electrical shock going through your body. Though I haven’t experienced the brain zap as I wean off this particular med, I had experienced it when I came off another form of SSRI in the past. No one had told me this was a “normal” symptom and I thought I was losing my mind when I experienced it.
That’s the thing, as supportive and helpful as my doctor was about me coming off the medications, she never once told me what I might experience as my brain readjusts to its former, non-SSRI dependent self. I was left to figure it out on my own and I feel like I nearly drown in the fog of withdrawal. From what I’ve heard from friends and read online, this lack of information sharing isn’t unusual.
Talking about mental illness is hard enough; we shouldn’t be made to feel we are on our own in any stage of the battle.
