My thoughts about antidepressants

I am still not sure how I feel about antidepressants and I will tell you why. On one hand, I don’t think I could have survived with out them. On the other hand, they left me with some lasting horrible side affects.

Not long after I started on Effexor, Jim left for a nine month tour in Iraq. Being so far apart for so long had its very lonely moments, especially near the end, but all in all it was a good period in my life. Now that I wasn’t acting so crazy I was free to have a wonderful time with my girls. We had a nine month girls party! we ran through my house in just our underwear, watched Barbie movies while doing our nails and had pajama parties. I was able to get them two little ponies and teach them how to ride and in the summer we did a lot of traveling. By keeping ourselves busy and recording it all to send to Jim, who was so far away, we were content enough to visit with Jim over the phone and over the webcam.

I was hopeful that during this time I would be able to finally loose weight and Jim would come home to a happy and healthy me. I was on a very small dose of Effexor, the starter dose in fact, because anything more than that made me sleepy all the time. (for a week I was not able to get out of bed because I was just too tired, even with the small dose I was groggy and needed lots of sleep to function well but it was manageable)I started working out and eating right again but it was not to be. My weight did not budge. the good news, though, was that I didn’t get any bigger.

I was grateful that I was given a mental break. like I said before, I don’t think I could have gone through Jim's deployment without the Effexor but it was just that, a break. A few months before Jim came home I started noticing my anxiety coming back. Finally the drug was not working at all. I talked to my doctor about switching to a different antidepressant, Wellbutron.

Anybody who is considering taking Effexor needs to know this now: it is a BEE-OTCH to get off of! And its not just me, from reading other forums of people who have taken it or are taking it, it is one of the worst ones to try to get off of. One man in particular has been on it for ten years simply because he cant get off of it!

Most antidepressants fall under SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) These drugs make your brain produce more and receive more serotonin, the chemical in your brain that is responsible for making you happy, among many other things. So that you don’t hurt yourself, you need to be winged onto and off of these sorts of drugs. if done too quickly your brain starts going through major withdraws and that can have horrible physical consequences.

Case in point, when the girls and I were visiting my mother in California that summer, I went through a five day period that I was not able to get my prescription refilled. I was able to stave off some of the craziness for a few days by taking very high amounts of vitamin B, but eventually I started suffering sever withdraws. I started shaking uncontrollably. It sacred the poodle-doo out of my poor mom and with the both of us unable to come up with any other option, she called the ambulance and had me taken to the hospital. Why they didn’t just give me some Effexor, I don’t know, but with a combination of benadril and morphine in my blood, I was able to sleep through the rest of my withdraw until the wal-mart pharmacy opened the next day. Once I was able to get back on my normal dosage, I was fine, but like I said, not for long.

With the Effexor no longer effective, I started to wing off of it and onto the Wellbutron but it was not so willing to let me go. I was able to go off of Prozac in a little more than a few days, and I didn’t even notice the change. the recommended time to wing off of Effexor is two weeks of lowering your dosage and lengthening time between dosages. it took me two months to get off it, not even to get off it but to get onto a different drug that did pretty much the same thing! The Wellbutorn never helped me as much as the Effexor did but it did take the edge off of the depression. (Eventually that stopped working as well.) During that time I even went through withdraws. I had headaches and muscle aches and I started shaking again.

A lot of people think that what I mean by 'shaking' is like a trembling of the hands or a shiver. Nope, this is a full body convolution. When the shaking didn’t go away after several weeks of being off of the Effexor I saw my doctor. He didn’t know what was going on with me so he sent me to a neurologist. He looked me over really good and sent me to get a lot of test done. I got an MRI and an EEG. They both came back saying that I was completely normal. The neurologist didn’t know what was wrong with me so he did nothing. I was not having epileptic seizures. Apparently to have an actual seizure, you have to not be able to keep your mental faculties. I shake and convulse but am completely aware of who I am and what’s going on.

So that was that. I lived with it. I noticed that it always was set off when I got stressed (like around my period) but it would come and go seemingly without any provocation as well. it would happen as I was driving or as I was working as a dance instructor and a lot of the time as I was laying down to sleep. I also noticed that it could be set off by loud noises and flashing lights. It wasn’t until just earlier this week (that is just over a whole year that I have been living with it)that I finally found out exactly what it was.

I was having a particular hard time with it and Jim sat down and dug through a bunch of internet info and forums. we found a person that had been on Effexor and was suffering from 'myoclonus'. We were like what the heck is that? so we looked it up. Myoclonus is "is brief, involuntary twitching of a muscle or a group of muscles. It describes a medical sign and, generally, is not a diagnosis of a disease.....Myoclonic jerks may occur alone or in sequence, in a pattern or without pattern. They may occur infrequently or many times each minute. Most often, myoclonus is one of several signs in a wide variety of nervous system disorders such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD)" Wikipedia.

There are several kinds of myoclonus, mine falls into the stimulus sensitive kind. almost always it is brought on by a trauma to the brain or spinal cord via chemicals or physical injury. Digging a little deeper we found that myoclonus is listed (although very deep in the paper work) as a side affect of Effexor. how long is this "side effect" going to last? I don’t know. we have found people that have been living with it for years.

I am not sure why I picked it up. it could be that I have always been prone to it. I have had restless leg syndrome (a type of myoclonus)since I was eight but this is what I think is most likely to have happened. I think that during my withdraws that summer I experienced serotonin syndrome witch is when a pool of serotonin backs up in your brain because there is nothing to uptake them. at that point serotonin becomes toxic and it can be fatal. My husband and I think that is likely how my brain nerves got shot and stayed shot after I got off of the Effexor. I don’t know what the doctors think, I still don’t know why the doctor that prescribed it, the one that saw me shaking, the psychiatrist they consulted with over my medication withdraws and the neurologist couldn’t tell me that what I was experiencing was myoclonus and that it is a side effect of Effexor and almost all SSRIs!

So do I regret antidepressants? Yes, especially now that I know the real problem was the major depletion of progesterone in my body. Could I have done without them? No, the break from madness that it gave me I could not have done without. It is a classic tale of 'I wish I knew then what I know now'.

Do I think antidepressants have a place in the world? I would have to say yes, there are valid issues of the brain that need some chemical action (although I am disposed to think that there are hormone issues there as well). But over all, I think that they are given out too, I wont say freely, but commonly. women, like me, are going to their doctors for help and given a catch-all band aid for catch-all craziness. they don’t try to look deeper. Eventually the "band aid" gets worn out and stops working because it was never the right fix for the problem to begin with. some people go through several different antidepressants or a combination of them, all the while living with the gosh-awful side effects, that for me, I don’t know if they are better or worse than the problem in the first place!

All I can say in the end is that I am grateful that God has answered my prayers to find the root of my problem and cure it. And as He usualy dose, He did it in the most unlikely of ways.

PS
I had my husband record me in a stimulus enduced fit of myoclonus. He flashed a flash light at me and this is what happend.