The truth behind antidepressants

The truth behind anti depressants

My experience of SSRI’s.

 So despite having experienced difficulty with stress and anxiety since a young age, it took until this time last year for me to be formally diagnosed with an anxiety/OCD disorder. As I had not found the doctors, school nurse, or my CAMHS counsellor at all useful, I gave up on a pharmaceutical method of recovery. Instead, I tried numerous other options, such as: homeopathy, private counselling and osteopathy. However none seemed to make a lasting impact and the anxiety I was feeling did not go away or lessen, which hindered my ability to perform well in exams at school. Therefore, I returned to the doctors as a last resort, in June last year.

After speaking to my doctor, she offered me SSRIs and a few websites others have found useful such as ‘Kooth’ and asked me to go and research to see whether drug therapy was right for me. As by this point I did not feel any types of counselling would greatly benefit me, I decided to try taking the medication. I was given 10mg tablets of Citalopram, which I had to take every morning.

If you research or look at the instructions within the box of tablets, you will immediately see the huge list of possible side effects, though my doctor assured me many people do not suffer from many of them. However on the day after my first tablet, I immediately felt the impact of the drug. The first side effect I experienced was confusion. It was an extremely strange sensation and I had to stop what I was doing throughout the day, as I was muddling up simple things such as where I was supposed to be at certain times. Although, I carried on taking the tablets, as my doctor had said the initial side effects would wear off. As the days went by I became more and more unlike myself. People close to me noticed I had lost weight and my skin tone had become quite grey and pale. My appetite changed, as before I could eat a healthy amount of food and still feel hungry but when taking the tablets I lost almost all appetite. When my body became hungry, there was a short (by short I mean around 10 minutes) window between the initial ‘I’m hungry’ feeling, to feeling grossly sick.

I also began to experience exhaustion, which is the main trigger for my anxiety. The exhaustion led to me missing lessons at school due to not being able to physically get out of bed, so I got behind on school -work, which caused me even more stress. Therefore, I was experiencing more anxiety than I was before I started taking the medication and felt no positive impact from taking the pills at all.

I decided to go back to the same doctor and told her all of the side effects I was still experiencing more than a month after the first tablet. As I had reported to her that the drug had seemingly made no positive impact so far, she doubled the dosage I was taking from 10mg a day to 20mg. At this point I was desperate for anything to work so agreed to taking the tablets.

After taking the tablets for a week or so, I felt nothing like myself at all. I would come home from school each day and not be able to do anything except sleep. Unless I wrote down everything I needed to do I would forget everything, leading to frustration. I found that the more tired I was becoming, the worse my anxiety became and the less I left the house. Before starting the medication, I benefitted greatly from going to the gym around 3-4 times a week, but being on the medication left me struggling to walk to school without being exhausted.

After giving the medication long enough to have worked if it was going to work, I decided enough was enough and booked a doctors appointment in which I asked to come off them. However, it wasn’t as simple as just stopping taking the pills, as I had to slowly lower the dosage. The doctors recommended that I took the 10mg tablets for a week or two and then stop taking them altogether. With this method, though, I suffered massively with the ‘possible’ withdrawal symptoms and felt the worst I had felt during the whole process. When speaking to someone I knew who had taken a similar medication, he told me that he was recommended to come off the pills much slower than I did (e.g. by alternating days of 20/10 mg, then dropping just to 10mg, then reducing to half a tablet of 10mg a day) which aided him.

It took me a few months before I started to feel myself again. However despite having started taking SSRIs in August 2017, I still am yet to be able to get back to my fitness level I had prior and I am aware that I will need to ease myself back into my routine very slowly. All in all, I am glad I tried out the medication, so I could rule it out as a means of coping with my mental health.

 If anyone reading this is considering drug therapy as a means of coping with mental health problems, I urge you to listen to your body. For me, I have such a sensitive body and I think it was utterly overwhelmed by the drug. However, the man I spoke to who has also tried SSRIs found that they hugely helped his anxiety/OCD and was shocked at how differently my body had reacted to the drug than his. There are many other ways of coping with anxiety and different mechanisms aid different people. If you are someone considering whether or not to start taking SSRIs, do not ignore the list of possible side effects- you must consider whether the benefits of taking the drug outweigh the possible consequences.