In 1998, my mother died. She had the choice to live and she chose not to by refusing a life saving procedure. She was only 66 years old. It was her choice… but it still left me very depressed.
At the time, the Physician Assistant at my primary care physician’s office suggested that I start “taking something” to help me cope. My son was 7 years old, I wasn’t coping well with life and we had just bought a new home. My job status was iffy and when she said “I’m taking it and it works great”, I thought “What the hell? Why not?” I got my first prescription for the new wonder drug Paxil which had taken the place of the earlier wonder drug, Prozac. I am a Paramedic and I had heard all the horror stories about addiction to Prozac and the problems associated with the drug in the form of deepened depression, suicidal tendencies and a host of other problems. Supposedly, Paxil had fixed all those problems.
Maybe I should explain what an “SSRI” is or rather what it does.
There is a naturally occurring neurotransmitter made by your brain called serotonin. What serotonin does is promote activity in the synaptic gap with means that the nerves in your brain work at full capacity. Without getting into a whole bunch of stuff, I really don’t understand, SSRIs prevent the reuptake of serotonin and in short, dulls your brain. You don’t think as much, you don’t feel as much and thus you don’t get depressed as much (SSRI stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, just to let you know.)
My original dosage was 10 milligrams by mouth once a day which was upped in three months to 20 milligrams per day after I reported that I didn’t really feel much better about life and things. The increased dosage seemed to hit the spot. I was able to deal with life and things didn’t seem like such a struggle. It was great! Everyone thought I was a bit more moody but overall, I seemed happier.
The truth of the matter was far from that. While I have been a “sleep talker” all my life, things were getting progressively worse. I was thrashing in my sleep, cursing like a sailor (or anyone else who might curse a great deal) and I was striking out in my sleep and throwing myself out of bed. My dreams were quite often frightening and seemed to focus on a particular anger which was turning into rage in my sleep. The subject of the anger and subsequent rage is not something I care to reveal but I thought that through my dreams, I was just working out all the old stuff. After all, psychologists tell you that your dreams are a release. But there came a night when I hit my wife and a few nights later literally leapt across the bed to attack her. I awoke to find her standing next to the bed insisting I see a doctor. I was diagnosed as having “REM-B disorder” which meant that a certain drug that acted like a paralytic in my sleep wasn’t working and in rapid eye movement sleep (the time when you really dream), I was sensing the physical presence of someone in bed as the threat in my dream and would lash out to protect myself in the dream when I was actually hitting whomever was near me. I hit walls while in quarters at the ambulance station. I hit my son when he was napping next to me. I hit my wife. I threw myself out of bed to avoid dream fights and, well… it was just hell. So they put me on Clonazepam which if you know anything about drugs, you know that drugs ending in “-pam” are basically tranquilizers. I needed something now to calm me down to sleep, let alone stay happy during the day. In other words, one drug now turned into two.
Later on, as I grew into my 50’s, I began to really lose interest in any kind of sexual relationship with my wife. We stopped sleeping together (for one, she feared for her life at times and two, I just didn’t care). I thought that was what happened as you got into the later years of life and also after 15 or so years of marriage. I thought that was how it was supposed to be. And I thought that was it. My doctor kept trying to tell me I had adult attention deficit disorder and then he started trying to convince me I was “bi-polar”. I wouldn’t bite. He kept trying to convince me I needed more drugs. Mind you, by now, I am 55 and because of cholesterol, hypertension, asthma, depression, a sleep disorder and lack of half of my thyroid gland, I was taking 15 (count ‘em 15) prescription drugs. When I asked about the inordinate amount of drugs, my doctor would go through them and convince me, that based on his education (|I am the doctor, right? I think you need all of these…”), I needed to continue taking them all. Fifteen prescriptions already and I haven’t even hit 60. What could I look forward to at 65?
After I had an heart attack that would result in four more prescription drugs on a daily basis along with a full strength aspirin, I thought “My God… I am taking 20 pills a day! I need to make sure I know what is going in and why!” So I started educating myself about the drugs. Apparently , the worst drug of them all was Paxil; the SSRI drug that was supposed to be doing me the most good.
The first things I started reading about were the long term effects of SSRI usage. The side effects included apathy, bizarre and vivid dreams, headaches, fatigue, changes in sexual behavior (I had become basically impotent by 2009… and I thought at 56, that was just normal. It had actually started in 2007 but I thought it was me and the fact that my wife had gone through menopause and we both had gained weight and well, of course, we weren’t kids any more…), photosensitivity (I had started to have what I thought were migraines. I would become very photosensitive to the point where I couldn’t drive.). One other amazing fact… SSRI’s can cause a person with a unipolar diagnosis (just being depressed without the high afterwards) to become bi-polar.
This was enough to convince me that I needed to wean myself off this stuff. I could count at least 5 side-effects from the usage of Paxil that were manifesting in me. Now, to be fair, I never pressed the issue with my doctor but he never put two plus two together either and came up with four. I trusted him but he never asked. He jsut kept suggesting drug for the sied effects and what I didn’t want were more pills to swallow every day. The ones necessary to prevent my hypertenstion and prevent another heart attack were one thing. But the drugs for all the sideffects I was feeling from the axil? I decided to quit on my own.
Once again, I went to the internet and found out that quitting SSRIs cold turkey has been described as being worse than quitting heroine on your own. That was great news, don’t you think? I mean I was in the middle of my marriage breaking up, trying to explain to my son why that happens after 18 years and now I find out I have been taking a very highly addictive drug every day for 12 years. How fun for me!
I talked to one friend (he is also in EMS) who had been taking Paxil for five years and he gave me some advice as to how to wean myself off this crap without going back to the doctor to listen his spiel about how I needed another drug to fix what this one drug had done. I started out by halving my dosage every other day while taking the full dosage on the other days. That’s when the side effects of SSRI withdrawal kicked in. (To be fair, I was warned that quitting would be a bitch… and he wasn’t kidding!)
I began to experience dizziness, headaches, sweating and a very annoying noise in my head that I called the “click-clicks”. I came to rationalize that the noise in my head was the synaptic gaps beginning to fire again because that is what it felt like. There was a noise and then a feeling like someone had snapped a rubber band on the surface of my brain. Taking four Advil seemed to be the only solution. (Let me advise you at this point, I am not telling you to quit or how to quit taking SSRIs… I am just telling you so you know one person’s story.)
It took my over two months to wean myself off this drug. I kept decreasing the dosage by half until I finally had come to zero milligrams a day. I still hear the “clicks” occasionally but let me tell you what else has happened.
My impotence has gone away. I have stopped having such bizarre dreams. I no longer lash out in my dreams physically. I don’t feel depressed if I miss a dose of a medicine. I feel all my feelings. And most of all, I have been told that I am more emotionally stable now than I have been in years. I don’t fly off the handle. I don’t look at things as a “worst case scenario” any longer. I am able to deal with the ups and downs of daily life without coming unglued. In short, I am happier and less depressed than I ever was when taking an “anti-depressant”.
Once again, let me reiterate I am not telling you to stop taking your meds, especially an SSRI. You need to consult your doctor. But I am telling you THIS… learn about what you are putting into your body. Don’t just take your doctor’s “word for it that this is what you need”. Doctors get paid by pharmaceutical companies to write prescriptions for new wonder drugs (why do you think those slick suited folks are hanging out at your doctor’s office providing free samples of the latest and greatest? The drug companies make it back when your doctor writes a prescription that costs money after the “free samples” run out… and you wouldn’t believe how the drug reps lay out the cash and gifts at the holidays to make sure the personnel in the local doctor office know about their drugs. I know. I worked in a “doc-in-the-box” where the Doctor left word that if a drug rep walked in between Thanksgiving and New Years with nothing in hands as a gift, then he wasn’t interested in seeing the drug rep… hand to God… true story.)
But I digress. Learn about what your doctor is telling you to put in your body. It is okay to question authority, especially if it is causing more side effects than it is curing and requires you to take 4 or 5 drugs when you didn’t take any before you started taking SSRI. In other words, be educated and be safe. Don’t learn the way I did… and then go through the withdrawal that I experienced. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. It was hell… and it could have been avoided.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Just remember that…
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