Living for Disco

During my first wrestling match with depression about ten years ago, my doctor put me on Prozac. Prozac didn’t do much for me except make my hands sweat, and turn me into an emotional zombie. I stopped taking it. Nothing happened. It was as straightforward as that.

During my second wrestling match with depression last year, my doctor put me on Effexor. I wrote about the debilitating initial effects on this blog some time ago, as well as the cavalier attitude of my doctor, who said “I knew I shouldn’t have given you that information leaflet. Just take the bloody pills”.

Effexor has really been a miracle drug for me. It lifted me out of a hole, and made me feel normal. I was able to make rational decisions, and approach daily tasks like food shopping, and washing up, without weeping with stress and confusion. I stopped having fruitless, angry conversations with people in my head. Life improved.

Unfortunately, now that I’m ready to stop taking it, I’m discovering that I am physically dependent on it. I didn’t know when I started that Effexor withdrawal can be a very long, painful and traumatic process, but boy, am I learning now.

It goes like this (and this isn’t from a sudden stop – it’s from a slow tapering of the dose as recommended by the doctor):

Stage 1: Brain Shivers.

I have discovered that someone has given a name to this unsettling sensation. To be honest, though, I don’t think ‘brain shiver’ really describes it. It is more as if you’re going along happily as normal, and you suddenly decide to turn your head to the left. Your brain is not ready for this, goes “Whoah there, cowboy!” and refuses to move. Your eyes feel a bit squiggly, and you are momentarily disoriented. The sensation, which is amusingly ticklish at first, worsens the longer you go without the drug. It usually results in

Stage 2: Nausea

Intense, although never actually followed through by the stomach, so not even throwing up will relieve it. Tends to happen suddenly, in shops or meetings. Inconvenient. Followed quite quickly by

Stage 3: The Shits.

There’s no delicate way of putting it. Suddenly, the contents of your intestinal tract have turned to liquid, and begun to boil. Understandably, your intestinal tract no longer wishes to accommodate this bubbling, toxic mass. On no account should you mistake this feeling for trapped wind, unless you have a change of underwear handy.

And as if these physical manifestations of withdrawal weren’t distressing enough, you also have hideous emotional symptoms.

Imagine, for example, that your perspective shifts suddenly, and you come face to face with your worthlessness. It becomes a logical deduction that anyone who says they love you must be lying, because frankly, why would they when you’re like this? Ergo, they are certain to abandon you unless you start behaving like a rational human being. Unfortunately you no longer have any idea how to behave in a normal fashion. It feels like being trapped in an invisible box.

Fortunately, I have a very understanding fiancé, who listens to me ramble on in tearful lunatic fashion, and when I ask him anxiously what he is thinking, he says things like “I was thinking that I’d like to go base jumping off El Capitan”*, which is just so irrelevant to my personal internal crisis that it is like being offered a firm piece of ground to stand on.

This phenomenon can last between anywhere from ten minutes to (in my case) four hours.

Also, I like to rant, but I’m now occasionally afflicted by brief, but irrational bouts of absolute fury. I can now empathise with screaming, purple faced toddlers in Sainsburys. We are as one. It’s almost zen.

Other, more minor side effects include uncontrollable teeth grinding, sudden bouts of intense apathy, memory loss, time-slips, loss of concentration… the list goes on. At this rate, I’m going to be toothless and temporally confused by the time I’m 35.

This has now become a personal challenge. I simply can’t stomach the idea that this one small pill is causing me so much trouble, even though once it made life so much easier. I’m not belittling the wonderful transformation to my life that Effexor effected, but why does it insist on hanging on in there where it’s not wanted? It’s like the one remaining drunk guest at the end of a really great party, and it’s really objecting to being evicted.

So here I am, stepping into the ring for a battle of wills against my own brain. It doesn’t get better than this.

*I am assuming that this is not necessarily translatable as “I wish to die, now, please”.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Lost. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.