This is Your Brain on Psychopharmacology
Some days I wish I weren't such a goddamn hippie. Life inside my head would be so much easier if I truly believed that anti-depressants are to crazybrains just as insulin is to diabetics. But no matter how stable I get, how easy life becomes with one little pill a day, there's always this part of me that starts thinking that maybe I ought to be able to get along without help from the pharmaceutical industry. It's the secular counterpart to the pray-harder imperative I was raised with. It's total bullshit.
The reason I haven't been writing much here is because for the past nine weeks I've been trying to get along without 30mg of Remeron every day. I went off the drug with my doctor's blessing because: 1. I really wanted to to see if I could, 2. I had gained 20 pounds in the last three and a half years and was tired of eating compulsively all day long, and 3. I thought that just because I've finally become someone who loves being alive that means that I am someone who can eat without being reminded, sleep more than three hours at a stretch, and manage stress in a productive manner.
The good news in this experiment is that by going off the drug I stopped eating dessert three times a day and therefore managed to lose ten pounds without even having to get extra exercise. The other good news is that it turns out that I still want to be alive even when I'm not western-medicated (which is a vast improvement over the first 25 years of my life).
The bad news is that without the drug I just don't sleep. I don't really eat much, either. My panic attacks are much more severe than they were on the drug. And while I am not nearly as depressed as I used to be (e.g. I know how to drag my ass out of bed no matter how I feel about it), everything is tinged with this annoying melancholy and negativity that is just plain dumb. I've also been sick with colds or allergies pretty much non-stop since I went off the meds -- and I've come to think that a large part of that is that my body is so obsessed with keeping my brain happy that it doesn't have time for the rest of me.
As my sister put it last night: I'm not in crisis, but I'm working so damn hard to get to baseline that I don't have time for anything else.
Oh, but did I mention the part where I've decided that I hate my house and my town and my job and the world and want to move in with my parents?
Right. Time to go back on the meds.
Anyway, I haven't been writing about it because my private hell hasn't been nearly as bad as it once was, and I have long outgrown the desire to be melodramatic about losing the brain chemistry lottery. Growing up with a parent with unmedicated bipolar disorder instilled in me the firm conviction that my mental health is my responsibility, mine alone, and that it is unfair to ask anyone around me to suffer as a result of my (in)ability to deal with my own brain. (Well, except that I do ask my sister and parents to talk me through bad patches occasionally, but I don't even like doing that and try only to do it when absolutely necessary. Otherwise that is what my therapist is for.) But I also believe that if I can't even be compassionate towards myself, then there is little hope for our culture to develop a nuanced understanding of mental health issues. So I'm talking about it.
I don't know that I will ever be at peace with the idea of taking medicine to feel sane. I don't know that I will ever fully stop thinking and wishing that I could just work hard enough to be balanced. But for now I do know that the three and a half years that I spent on this medicine were so much better than the 25 years I spent not on it. And frankly, when it's this hard to sleep at night and get up in the morning I'm not much use to the world. Sometimes I forget that the best thing I can do for myself is to take my goddamn medicine.
Bottoms up.
The reason I haven't been writing much here is because for the past nine weeks I've been trying to get along without 30mg of Remeron every day. I went off the drug with my doctor's blessing because: 1. I really wanted to to see if I could, 2. I had gained 20 pounds in the last three and a half years and was tired of eating compulsively all day long, and 3. I thought that just because I've finally become someone who loves being alive that means that I am someone who can eat without being reminded, sleep more than three hours at a stretch, and manage stress in a productive manner.
The good news in this experiment is that by going off the drug I stopped eating dessert three times a day and therefore managed to lose ten pounds without even having to get extra exercise. The other good news is that it turns out that I still want to be alive even when I'm not western-medicated (which is a vast improvement over the first 25 years of my life).
The bad news is that without the drug I just don't sleep. I don't really eat much, either. My panic attacks are much more severe than they were on the drug. And while I am not nearly as depressed as I used to be (e.g. I know how to drag my ass out of bed no matter how I feel about it), everything is tinged with this annoying melancholy and negativity that is just plain dumb. I've also been sick with colds or allergies pretty much non-stop since I went off the meds -- and I've come to think that a large part of that is that my body is so obsessed with keeping my brain happy that it doesn't have time for the rest of me.
As my sister put it last night: I'm not in crisis, but I'm working so damn hard to get to baseline that I don't have time for anything else.
Oh, but did I mention the part where I've decided that I hate my house and my town and my job and the world and want to move in with my parents?
Right. Time to go back on the meds.
Anyway, I haven't been writing about it because my private hell hasn't been nearly as bad as it once was, and I have long outgrown the desire to be melodramatic about losing the brain chemistry lottery. Growing up with a parent with unmedicated bipolar disorder instilled in me the firm conviction that my mental health is my responsibility, mine alone, and that it is unfair to ask anyone around me to suffer as a result of my (in)ability to deal with my own brain. (Well, except that I do ask my sister and parents to talk me through bad patches occasionally, but I don't even like doing that and try only to do it when absolutely necessary. Otherwise that is what my therapist is for.) But I also believe that if I can't even be compassionate towards myself, then there is little hope for our culture to develop a nuanced understanding of mental health issues. So I'm talking about it.
I don't know that I will ever be at peace with the idea of taking medicine to feel sane. I don't know that I will ever fully stop thinking and wishing that I could just work hard enough to be balanced. But for now I do know that the three and a half years that I spent on this medicine were so much better than the 25 years I spent not on it. And frankly, when it's this hard to sleep at night and get up in the morning I'm not much use to the world. Sometimes I forget that the best thing I can do for myself is to take my goddamn medicine.
Bottoms up.