Update - Feeling MUCH Better

Oct 25, 2010 10:06

I got into the doctor last Tuesday and told him about my anxiety attacks and all. He increased my dosage of medication and prescribed me a very low dose of Xanax, to take when I think I may be entering into a really stressful situation in the next month. I have taken one pill a couple days and did notice that it seems to help the worry just melt away. Once it takes effect, if I think of something stressful, I don't start having an attack, I just think like a normal person, "Oh, we will take care of that when we can." I am not one of these people who believe medication is the answer for everything. For anyone reading this, I want to make that perfectly clear. Growing up, my household was one with very little medication. I hardly even took Tylenol or Advil much. My mom was not a big advocate of pills and she worried that it was a slippery slope once you started taking pills for little things.

I agree with that philosophy. My best friend growing up came from a household with a completely opposite strategy for handling aches and pains, mental anguish, etc.. They popped pills in that house like candy. So, I would say that my opinion on medication is somewhere in the moderate range. I'm not against it, but I'm not an advocate that anyone with a little problem should just take some pills.

My journey with anti-depressant medication began as far back as my junior year/senior in high school when I was 17. I spent a few years battling depression, partly due to big-time household stressers and partly due to an actual mental deficiency of dopamine that I so luckily inherited from both parents. Obviously the doctors can't actually test my brain to determine that I have a lower amount of dopamine than normal, so the only way they could see was to put me on anti-depressants and see if I improved at all. Unfortunately, they started me on one of the worst meds ever, at least for me, Prozac. It was way too strong of a dose and I believe it didn't work with my body chemistry. There are SSRIs and MAOIs and my body and mind does not work well with SSRIs. I was like a zombie on it, and I couldn't control my emotions. If I did start crying, I couldn't stop for hours. It was pretty awful and everyone could tell I was way different, and not in a good way. After 6 months of Prozac, my mom and I decided I should definitely stop taking it. The other problem is that I wasn't going to therapy as part of it. I had no one to talk to and my family practitioner isn't a therapist.

If I remember correctly, I was off of medication until probably my 2nd year of college. I had been suffering from depression and subsequent weight gain, trouble with school, trouble with work, drug use and alcohol abuse to try making myself feel better. If I'm honest, I experimented with several pretty serious drugs starting when I was 16 and landed myself in the hospital to have my stomach pumped, 17 with diet pills and some weed, 18 with diet pills, 19 with weed, cocaine, alcohol, and a few times with even harder stuff. Luckily for me, I really wasn't a fan of the hard drugs at all. They made me feel awful and I had way too much going for me that I was terrified of losing. For one, Shaun, who straight out told me that if I didn't give up drugs I was choosing to give him up. I also had a great career growing and even though drugs are more prevalent than some may expect in the broadcasting business, I didn't want to be one of those losers. It was funny that the ones I worked with that I knew did drugs a lot were the ones who never moved up anywhere. Funny how that happens, isn't it?

Another huge problem that I didn't know I had back then was Celiac, or gluten-intolerance. About 2 years ago, I learned I am severely allergic to wheat, rye and barley. This allergy creates an auto-immune response in my body (past blogs talk more about it). The auto-immune response can attribute to depression which I know happened in my case. Once I changed my diet two years ago, I noticed a huge decrease in mood swings, irritability, lethargy and depression. Shaun can happily attest to that also. :-) I even asked to be removed from my anti-depressant medication, Wellbutrin, because I wanted to see if I was cured. Wellbutrin has treated me the best out of all the medications I've tried since Prozac. Lexapro made me gain weight and made the depression worse after a few months on it. Well, anyway, after a few months off of Wellbutrin, earlier this year, I started having these really scary thoughts,  horrible flashes in my head of death and gore. I didn't have any thoughts of me doing anything bad, it was more that these scary pictures would flash through my brain randomly and practically scare the you-know-what out of me. I also experience suicidal thoughts. Also, I noticed the depression was still there, although the mood swings have remained much less frequent with my gluten-free diet and I can pay attention to things much longer and more intently than ever before.

This latest increase in dosage was made more because of my anxiety problems than depression. Anti-depressants also have amounts of anti-anxiety agents in them, so my doc suggested we increase that to see if it helped daily. So far, so good. I have felt really great and calm and energized since I began the new regimen last Wednesday. My feeling about it now is that at least for the next month, until the wedding week is over, this is the best plan for me to stick with. Eventually, I may go back down to my lower dosage of Wellbutrin, but maybe not. Your mind starts getting used to the amount of meds, so then that amount often stops being as effective after prolonged use. Therefore, I may now need the higher dosage, which is still not the highest there is. I am on a normal amount now, whereas I was on the lowest dosage before.

Obviously, I would love to be able to function normally, without the help of medication one day. And, hopefully that can happen. However, I am also ok with the possibility that this may be a life-long thing. It's just like any other physical illness. When you have a lack of a certain nutrient or disease fighting agent, you can supplement it to help your body be healthier. Mental illnesses, including depression, are physical illnesses, despite what some lay-people think. That's the hardest thing to accept and to teach others. It's easy to say it's literally "all in your head." However, until that person walks in the shoes of someone who has struggled with suicidal thoughts repeatedly, struggled with motivation to get out of bed in the morning, struggled with not crying every day, struggled with mood swings that create problems in their relationships with others - that person has no idea what they are talking about.

I told Shaun the other day that I just hope any kids we have get his mental agility and mental stability. I have the same amount of mental agility, but stability - not so much. I hope I don't pass the mental stuff on to my children as it was passed on to me. I don't blame my parents for it, because neither one of them believed they had a mental illness, and even if they had, it doesn't always mean you will pass it on to your children. I could say I don't want to have kids because I don't want to pass on these things, including Celiac, but there is no guarantee that I will and if I do, I will know how to help them get through it. I have a wonderful and happy life, even with all these "issues." I don't even consider them issues really, just obstacles that make life more interesting. :-)

anti-depressants, depression, celiac, mental illness, medication, diet, gluten

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