Antidepressants: MY Opinion

 When I was in high school I struggled with your usual teenage problems.  I felt foreign in my own skin, completely alone, and useless.  I also worked myself into a nice little eating disorder too- which was pretty ugly and did not help my teenage angst at all.  It wasn’t like I had a horrible life or anything, I was just a depressed girl with no one to talk to and terribly low self-esteem.

Anyway, as my eating disorder spiraled out of control (like they always do) my poor mother did her best to try and help me.  I refused and refused for the longest time, I loved being at my low weight and had found comfort in the isolated life that eating disorders encourage you to create. 

After an especially scary episode, however, I finally decided to take my mom’s advice (mainly because I couldn’t take the turmoil that was being caused by me at home any more) and went to see a doctor.  My doctor was really nice, she was Scottish and really pretty and skinny so of course I liked her.  I was also under the impression, due to several comments she made during our first visit, that she struggled with an eating disorder at one time or another as well.  Anyway, after some blood tests and all that I was told that if I didn’t improve my nutrition I was going to end up in the emergency room and that I should probably seek treatment.  So I did, and along with treatment guess what else I got?  Anti-depressants.

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*Disclaimer* Antidepressants can really help some people, they could perhaps even save someone’s life.  This is a telling of MY experience with those types of drugs, however, which was horrible, and I personally believe that along with having the potential to do good, anti-depressants can also have the complete opposite effect on some people.  I am in no way saying that no one should take them, my point with this post is that you should always listen to your body, and don’t assume that anti-depressants are your only option.  Please don’t post an assload of comments about how great they worked for you and I don’t know anything/ I’m an asshole for saying they’re bad/You hate me because I am badmouthing prozac/etc.  This is my telling of my reaction. 

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Anyway, off I went to treatment, a semester off school and a full time job of talking about my feelings and my relationship with food, blah blah blah.  I completed treatment, became healed of my eating disorder (well, not really, but I could at least once again function in society), and went back to complete my final year in high school.  One thing that I had to hang onto, along with the mental tools I gained from my stay in the hospital, were those pesky pills that I never liked taking in the first place. 

The first drug I was prescribed is, I believe, what really caused me to crack.  I was messed up before, but after my visit with the Scottish doctor and right before I entered treatment (a span of about 2 weeks), I pretty much went bananas.  I went from counting calories and over exercising (anorexia) to eating 4,000- 5,000 calories a day (sometimes in one or two sittings) and throwing up after each ‘meal’ (bulimia) almost overnight.  I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin, and even felt the need to scratch and scratch myself- one time causing myself to bleed.  I felt like a zombie, hated everyone, and remember laying on the floor numb telling my father that I just hated existing.  After taking this medication for a few weeks, and then being in treatment for a few weeks, I talked to a different doctor and told him I did not like taking anti-depressants because of how they made me feel.  He switched me to a different drug.  Time went by, and like I said, I completed treatment and went back to school. 

I continued taking my prescribed medication for another year, yet still struggled with horrible ‘black moods,’ feeling as though nothing could fix me, and just wanting to cease to exist- a numbness and feeling of hopelessness that I can’t even begin to describe accurately.  I felt like I was just wrong!  Even though I was on this pill that was supposed to keep me from getting in my horrible states, it seemed as though they were worse now than they were before I was taking anything!  I continued to live this way, okay for a few weeks or maybe a month, then would be hit with a feeling of despair so deep I’m amazed I never tried to kill myself (the only thing that kept me from attempting this is the thought of how much it would hurt my mother). 

So I began college, still occassionally struggling with ‘food issues’ (i.e. making myself puke) and began to despise taking my medicine.  I would quit taking it (which is a BAD idea) and would feel even worse, but I knew that I was not myself when I was on it either.  So I would go crazy if I stopped taking it, and would go crazy when I did take it.  I would ask my doctors (three different doctors who I had been seeing since high school) to help me ween myself off (which is what you’re supposed to do when you quit) and they would just switch me to a different pill, which I would then not take because I was pissed.  I would argue with my doctors about whether or not I even needed it, telling them that I was 16 when I started taking it, surely I was different now and maybe no longer needed it.  Maybe my depression was a result of outside factors, not a chemical imbalance.  Their answer to this was: a diabetic can’t just not take insulin anymore- this is something you will have to take the rest of your life.

What a horrible thing to tell a young, thoughtful girl who just happened to have a hard time during her teenage years!!  What I heard when they told me this was:  there is something wrong with you that cannot be fixed, it can only be treated.  The phrase ’situational depression’ was not in their vocabulary, so I finally bit the bullet and threw out all my pills and quit cold turkey.  I do not recommend this, because when you quit abruptly like that it makes your ‘levels’ go totally wacky- leaving you temporarily bat-shit crazy, even if you weren’t that bad to begin with.  But I did it anyway because I figured anything would be better than constantly not feeling like myself and suffering from my ‘black moods.’  Luckily, thanks to smoking pot (I believe- because it got my mind off the bad thoughts I was having as a result of quitting my medicine instead of weening myself off) I managed to survive the following few weeks. 

To this day (4 years later) I have not suffered any ‘black moods,’ have not wanted to kill myself, have not had any urges to return to my old eating disorder habits, and have managed to deal with life’s obstacles.  Sometimes I still get in a bad mood, and feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders- but I can still go about my day and don’t feel paralyzed by sadness. 

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I think there are a lot of cases where anti-depressants can be very helpful to people.  But I firmly believe that you cannot just put someone on a pill and forget about them, it’s important to work through whatever is making you depressed, everyone needs coping skills.  And if you are taking medicine and don’t feel like yourself after giving your body a few weeks to adjust, then something is wrong.  You need to establish a working relationship with your doctor and they should listen to you, not brush you off simply because you’re young or you don’t have a medical degree.  If you are taking something and feel weird or feel like something isn’t right or feel like it just isn’t helping you, then you should really talk to someone and perhaps plan a different path for yourself (with the help of a professional of course- don’t do what I did).

Anyway, this is my story of eating disorders, teenage turnmoil, anti-depressants, and doctor’s who maybe need to work on listening to their patients.  During my experience I took varying levels of Paxil, Prozac, Lexapro, Cymbalta, Xanax (which isn’t an anti-depressant), and Fluoxetine (which I was told by my doctor is different than Prozac, but later found out it is just generic Prozac); I was not prescribed Wellbutrin because it can cause people to lose weight, and because of my eating disorder the doctors didn’t want to start anything.

Smoking and Oprah

Blah blah smoking is bad, you would have to be a total idiot to not know that.  I know smoking is bad, and I do it anyway.  I tell myself (and everyone else) that I quit, but ever since I “quit” about a year ago I have probably smoked 40% of the time.  I read, and still swear by, Alan Carr’s book The Easy Way to Quit Smoking because even though I am a known relapser, I feel like some day very soon Carr’s words will stick.

Smokers take a lot of crap from everyone, and now we can’t even go to a bar and hide among the drunks to enjoy a cigarette or eight.  I think this constant condemnation is what makes us hang on to the addiction.  I know that whenever I get the craving for a cigarette, and eventually slink over to the gas station to buy a pack, the dialogue inside my head is kind of like “I smoke, and people hate that I smoke, and that is the burden I carry; poor me, I’m a rough person, I have issues and by smoking I can communicate that to others- a simple ‘back off’.”  Even though that’s all crap, it gets me to the gas station and gets me to shell out money I don’t have for smokes.

What is so foolish is that I have gone months without smoking, and have survived, and then don’t have to feel guilty about anything.  I can still survive a car ride, a walk, or sitting outside without a cigarette.  I feel better, my skin looks better, and I don’t smell.  But once you get that idea into your head that you want to smoke, you can’t get it out until you do.  It’s like instinct- I have to eat, I have to smoke, I have to pee, I have to sleep, etc.  It doesn’t matter how long I’ve gone without one, when I get that voice in my head it’s all over.

But it really is stupid, and I know that.  And I’m vain enough to feel motivated when I see that wrinkle in my forehead, or that yellow middle fingernail- tainting my message as I flick off various people I come across throughout my day.  So after I finished my most recent pack last weekend, I was motivated once again by that pesky wrinkle.  Today as I sit and watch Oprah and Dr. Oz show people the shadows on their lungs and the blockages in their hearts I really hope I can grow up and show a little perseverence with this sucky habit.  When I started smoking I did it for no good reason, just because I could and everyone else did it too.  Nowadays it’s more because I like having a secret, even though I’m sure people know- my husband has a nose after all, and my mother is one 900 number away from being psychic, so it’s really not a secret at all.  But for some reason I feel like I need something that is mine that no one knows about.  I just have to find something that fulfills that need but wont kill me or make me look like an old paper bag (the latter being the most scary for me!). 

So good luck to all you smokers out there, I’m sure you really would love to quit.  I find motivation in many things, like my looks, my family, my future family, and my constant struggle to be as physically fit as my sickeningly athletic husband- and I’m sure other smokers have their own motivations for quitting as well.  But I just want to tell any fellow smokers that I too, hate this whole addiction thing- and I wish I could just enjoy my cigarette consequence free- but I guess we all have to accept that that is never going to happen.

I recommend reading Alan Carr’s book, not getting discouraged if you relapse (we all do it!), and not feeling bad if lung cancer doesn’t scare you but wrinkles do.  One thing I have learned, even though I still take my spills off the wagon, is this:  you can be the same person without the cigarette, you just have to find something to replace it for a while and then slowly ween yourself off of that.  So, as I begin once again my life as a non-smoker, I hope that if you’re reading this and you smoke and you hate it as much as I do, that you can start your journey of quitting and be successful at it! 

Sometimes you already know the answer

So I’ve been having a difficult time lately, moving back and forth between Canada with my husband and Illinois with my parents, the immigration process, and a general feeling of “I haven’t accomplished anything with my life!”

Along with my usual issues and everyday things that annoy me, the above things have been heavy on my mind for over a year now.  So I’ve learned to live around them I guess, even though immigrating to Canada has kind of steered my life and the choices I make (as far as working/ going back to school).  But I really have felt like a shell of my former self for a long time due to current and past events.  I even feel like I look old from it!  I’m always nervous about something or mad or stressed. 

So as I was taking my smoking walk (where I sneak through the alleyways sucking down a secretive cigarette after dinners) I was rehashing a fallout with a college friend.  The issue has annoyed me ever since it happened, especially because- even though the said ‘falling out’ was clearly the end of a friendship, this girl still writes me occasionally- writes me shallow pointless notes that signal anything but a reconcilliation- but anyway, I was thinking about how much this girl annoys me and how dumb she is, and then I thought very clearly almost saying it outloud to myself “she is so concerned with what other people think that she doesn’t have any real feelings of her own.”  And then I stopped in my tracks because, HELLO?!  That’s ME.  It might be her too, but that was a very clear message from my brain to me that I have been way too concerned with what other people think, and in turn have lost myself! 

It seems obvious maybe, but I have been much too concerned with how my husband looks at me, what his parents and family thinks of me, what my extended family thinks, what The Girlfriends at the hockey games think, and I could go on and on.  So, honestly, how does one stop caring what other people think?  Why can’t I just pick up and go do what I want (go to school somewhere warm, get a good job, sign up for a yoga retreat overseas, etc.)?  I’m always too busy worrying about how stupid I look, and end up looking stupid because I am putting my life completely on hold.

Forget that, time to stop it.