Mmmmm tasty SSRIs (that don’t work for shid) :3
I get that they work and are quite helpful to many people, but I will never take another SSRI in my life again. I hate them things. They make me feel dead. It’s like tricking my mind into pretending everything is okay and jolly by becoming stupid and unaware to the reality of the overall situation. If I feel depressed, it’s for a reason, and the solution is to address that reason, not pretend it doesn’t exist or it’s fine. It’s like if you are in a situation where your leg is broken and can’t heal, would you rather take an opiate to numb the pain or change the situation so your leg can heal? I guess my issue wasn’t necessarily a serotonin imbalance 🤷
I still have prominent scars from the time SSRI withdrawal triggered psychosis and I went apeshit on myself with a knife. absolutely never again
That sucksssss. I remember feeling the zaps for a few nights and feeling entirely disconnected from reality. I couldn’t tell if I was awake or in a dream. I would close my eyes and fantasize about whatever I could to pretend I was somewhere else to ride it out. Then when at work during the day, I was pretending that I wasn’t exhausted from severe lack of sleep. I would have to go to the bathroom to take breaks and recover a little and convince myself everything was okay. I even asked someone I got a long with to make sure I didn’t look weird or did anything stupid.
Seems like the withdrawal hit you a lot harder than me, so I can’t even imagine how difficult that was to endure.
If your depression is for a reason, then yeah, probably not chemicals.
Mine is treatment resistant major depression and very much chemicals. Took me until I was in my midthirties to find the solution. There’s hope even for people with bad chemistry!
That first bit is totally untrue. Do you think our grief is not chemical? That we can’t have neural rewiring occur following the loss of a loved one? Don’t dichotomize experience and neurochemistry. They’re two sides of the same coin.
Not good for bipolar people. I wound up with two different anti seizure medications. One of them makes me horny AF all the time.
I find the whole class of anti-convulsant mood stabilizers very interesting. They are also sometimes prescribed as migraine preventative medications.
It’s fascinating how these compounds have these multiple indications. It raises question to how the underlying mechanisms of these conditions may interact.
As someone who recently weaned off of SSRIs after several years on them, I found that thre worked quite well for managing my (at the time I was prescribed) debilitating OCD. That combined with occasional weed edibles (1-4 times a month) seems to have permanently decreased my symptoms, to the point where I no longer need SSRIs. I’ve generally heard that they work much better when applied to anxiety disorders than for depression, which makes me wonder why they’re still prescribed so often for that. My guess is some combination of institutional inertia + minor symtom improvement + profit incentive.
