Me and My Pills

**Trigger Warning. I’m not too hot on the internet lingo but I will be talking about my experience with antidepressants in this post. This IS NOT pillshaming, but just my experience with them. If you are feeling particularly vulnerable about your medication, this may not be the best post to be reading.**

Things have been settling down here at Spoonie Towers since my manic week in and out of London (Yes, for me, that was manic!), but I have a confession to make.  I did something that I definitely was not supposed to do and just stopped taking all my pills. The medication I used to be on was...

Duloxetine – an SNRI antidepressant that can also be used for neuropathic pain management

Gabapentin – originally developed as an anticonvulsant, this is now one of the first drugs prescribed for neuropathic pain. It is also used ‘off the books’ to help with anxiety and insomnia.

Nortrityline – a tricyclic antidepressant which apparently helps to regulate your diurnal rhythm (day and night) and is used in chronic pain conditions.

I have been on antidepressents at a number of points in my life. When everything first went to the shitter it took me about 3 or 4 months before I had the courage to say to myself – you need help. And that’s exactly what these pills can do. They can lift you out of your hole enough that you are actually able to look over the edge and think, ok, maybe I can do this. When I’ve needed them, they have got me to a place where I can actually help myself and have been AMAZING. I dread to think where I would be now if I had listened to my dickhead of a close confident (I think that there is no need to name and shame, but anybody who knows me will know exactly who I am talking about) and never started taking anything.

I started this particular set of pills about 2 years ago now when I saw a private rheumatologist (the one who then referred me on to Professor Grahame). At first I just took nortriptyline before we added gabapentin into the mix, testing out the effect of different doses. At this point I didn’t want to go onto a strong antidepressant. The last time I’d tried to go on them I spent a week feeling like I had taken drugs with none of the high. My skin was hypersensitive and it was painful for anyone to touch me, I felt panicked, my heart was racing and I couldn’t sleep.  However, after about a year of putting it off and becoming increasingly depressed, isolated and anxious, my GP and I decided it was time to give them a go.

Something that I (and Mr SF in particular) struggle with about antidepressants is it is so hit and miss and the research is often tenuous at best. It isn’t like they test out these supposed non working chemicals in your brain and then match them up to the best drug, instead they just hand out pills like they are sweeties and hope for the best. I think it is quite dangerous to hand out antidepressants without some other complimentary therapy to help the patient in coping. Pills are only one part of a picture, and they are much easier to hand out than effective talking or coping therapy (which as we all know are massively oversubscribed on the NHS).

I have now been on this concoction of pills for the best part of a year, and in that time I don’t seem to have got any better. In fact, if anything, I seem to have deteriorated, both physically and mentally. My anxiety has increased tenfold (though that is definitely MILES better since I actually got to the London appointments), my depression worsened resulting in self harm and my activity tolerance has just dropped dramatically. Then, the other week I ran out of my pills. I tried for days to get to my doctor, but she only works part time and is always booked weeks in advance. So I did the thing the docs always warn you off doing and I said ‘fuck it’. I’m fed up of taking more than a dozen pills every day, worrying that if I miss one I’ll go mad (except that I have never really noticed a difference between the days I take them and the days I don’t). I just stopped...and this is NOT ADVICE THAT ANYBODY ELSE SHOULD BE FOLLOWING but I feel so much better. I am definitely in more pain than before, and that is obviously utter shite, but I feel alive again. I feel like I’ve been deadened inside for so long and that I am finally remembering who I am underneath the haze of drugs. I am passionate again, I’m re-finding my feminism and I am wanting to tackle the big issues. I feel like I’m finding a part of who I lost when I was 20 and first went a bit batty (I’m allowed to call myself batty!) It’s wonderful. Oh, and I haven’t gone bat shit. I’ve had bad days, obviously, but I actually think I’ve had less bad days in the last month than I had in the month before that. Oh, and I’m hungry again! I don’t think I’ve been actually hungry for months. I’ve just eaten enough to get me by, often only one meal a day. Now, I’m waking up hungry and wanting to eat., this has never happened in my life before, but obviously the hungrier I am and the more energy I get into my body the more I will be able to do (in theory at least).

I haven’t stopped treatment. I see a private psychotherapist once a week that I have been seeing for about 4 years now(who is DELIGHTED I am finding my passions again – he thinks I actually look different since I’ve come off the pills) and I stay in regular contact with my lovely GP. I *know* this isn’t the way to do it and I certainly don’t suggest that anybody else does, but for me, for now, it was the right thing to do. I worry about what will happen when winter comes, as I know I suffer from SAD, but there is no point worrying about it now. Plus, I evidently wasn’t on the right head meds.

So yeah, that’s happened. I still take over half a dozen pills a day in the form of vitamin d and painkillers and every three months I go and have a b12 injection to help boost my mood and energy. But for now, I just want to feel and think and be me. Not the me that is masked by deadening drugs and is hidden behind a haze of apathy. I don’t think that is so wrong.