Flametoad

Or, How I Tried Better Living Through Chemistry But Came Back To My Senses.

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while, but lacked either the time or energy. It’s probably several posts worth of info, but it’s probably more than you want to know anyway so I’ll just give you the executive summary.

Near the tail end of last Winter I realized that I was suffering from genuine, clinical depression. I had low energy, I was highly irritable, I was emotional, and generally blue. However, once Spring came along and daylight savings time started, so did my mood. I realized that I’d had seasonal depression (seasonal affective disorder, or SAD). Furthermore, with the benefit of hindsight I realized that I’d experienced something similar the year before that, and possibly the year before that. It’s hard to peg things down at that point because I also had an infant and was sleep deprived, so one may have exacerbated the other.

I resolved that I didn’t want to go through that again this winter and that I’d hit the tanning salon when I noticed the symptoms. Well, I noticed those symptoms creep up on me at the beginning of December. It was becoming harder to concentrate, I was losing patience with the tadpoles, and my mood was generally taking a downturn. I did a little research, and according to what I read it seemed like a tanning booth wasn’t going to cut it. While doctors have had positive results with “light therapy” for SAD, it involves staring at a bright light for 30 minutes a day. Apparently that triggers the chemical production in your brain yadda yadda yadda.

At this point I should be absolutely clear that this is strictly a physiological problem and not a psychological one. I am very blessed when it comes to my family, my friends, and my job. I have no complaints in that regard, and thus there’s nothing for therapy to fix. This is strictly a case of brain chemistry gone awry.

I visited my family doctor to talk about my options, and he was pretty open to prescribing me an antidepressant. The one he prescribed is called Effexor, and it has been around quite a while. I’ll skip all the stuff about how conflicted I felt about going on an antidepressant, but the bottom line is that I gave it a shot.

They said that I should start noticing a difference in a week, but I noticed a difference in about three days. At first, it seemed like a Godsend. It was like a fog had burned away. I could concentrate again, I had more patience, and had more energy. In fact, the side effects for me included the jitters. It was like having  a 24 hour cup of coffee.  It also decreased my appetite, which I thought was unusal since I’d heard of so many people who had exerpienced weight gain when they got on an antidepressent.

Strangely enough, on one hand it gave me the jitters but on the other it also made me sleepy. Is yawned all day long, and despite having more focus work on 12 to Midnight stuff almost ground to a halt because I was going to bed at 9 pm every night.  Furthermore, I realized that while it raised my baseline mood from “blah” to “meh” and made the lows not so low, it suppressed the natural highs from being so high. By the end of the second week I’d pretty much decided that I’d merely traded one set of symptoms for another. I accidentally missed a dose, took the next, and then decided just to discontinue use.

That turned out to be pretty stupid on my part. My doctor had sternly warned me to talk to him before discontinuing use. However, he also started me off on the lowest possible dose and told me to double up after the first week. I never did that, so I assumed there wouldn’t be much to be done other than stop taking my daily dose. Wrong! After suffering cold symptoms, very low energy, and other symptoms, I did some research. It turns out that this class of antidepressants is pretty addictive. I was only on it for two weeks and I suffered some pretty unpleasant side effects for several days. If you do a search for Effexor withdrawl, you’ll read some pretty scary stories from people who have been on it for years. I didn’t do that search until day 2 of my withdrawl symptoms, when learned that I should have pulled the caplets apart and decreased my dose more slowly.

So that’s my brief sojourn into the world of antidepressants. If I was more severely depressed, or for longer term, then Effexor would probably still be a viable treatment. There are people a lot worse off than me, and sometimes when your brain chemistry betrays you the only option left is to correct those chemical imbalances with other chemicals. I would just recommend that you do your research and listen to your doctor. I might have avoided several days of withdrawl if I’d talked to him first.