antidepressants, i quit cold turkey!

Emerging from the dark night of the soul, transformed, and then slipping back into an unconscious way of being, antidepressants, more dark nights, therapy, and more breakthroughs. This is what I know, this is living with depression. After living most of my adult life depressed, this is what I know, that it IS a journey, that moves through me, like the high and low tides, and I cannot ever expect a final outcome, one way or another, because it is always changing. I am always changing.

I am not offering any of this as any kind of psychological advice or instruction, this is simply a public journal of my own journey, what has worked for me and what hasn’t, as a part of my own healing. A blog is a form of creative expression that so many of us lack, and creative expression through writing, art, or music is essential for any depressed person to help them on their journey  in their search for wholeness, or, at the least, feeling. I’m an old veteran of the numbness, the emptiness, and hopelessness of not being able to feel anything. Yet, in the bleakest of times, I have always been aware of a tiny light glimmering in my heart, and I’ve let it guide me through some of the darkest times in my life, even though I did not know where it would lead me, and I can say, that if one can hold on to that light in the clenches of the worst times, there is a greater joy and knowing than they have ever felt or known waiting for them once the darkness lifts. And it will lift, we just need to give the process time. If you do not sense that light, then ask for help, whether you are asking family or God, and just blog or draw or play music and wait… even if you suck at it.

I just want to write about my experiences, mostly the ones that occurred in my head, the ones no one knows about, partly for my own selfish reasons, if you will, of therapy through creative self-expression, and, partly to offer any reassurance to anyone else who may be going through the same thing. I know that when I was in my own little personal hell, I felt that no one else in the world knew, or cared, where I was psychologically, mentally, and spiritually.

I think it is important to say that depression is a disease of the soul, a build-up over time of unfelt feelings, lies to the self, and simply not allowing ourselves to be who we are. The only way out is to sit in the pain of being who we are, to let that pain wash over us and burn away our past, to allow ourselves to ‘grieve’ the ‘death’ of that old self, to let go, and to emerge, from the ashes, as a new person. While some people who may be on the verge of suicide could benefit from antidepressants, to be lifted out of the clenches of depression, we must be drug free.

During my last visit to the doctor where i was diagnosed at the low end of severe depression, my doctor prescribed Prozac, which I took for several months before I simply could not take it any more. She recommended that I stay on antidepressants for the rest of my life, because depression is a disease just like diabetes or what have you. She also offered me reassurance that a depressed person cannot simply be expected to ‘buck-up’ or ’snap out of it’ because clinical depression resides in the brain, where the victim’s neuro-transmitters are not functioning properly, and antidepressants can fix these problems. But I don’t really buy the part about needing to stay on meds for the duration. My little red flag went up when she told me that because I KNOW with some certainty that everything is always changing, especially our brain. We can heal our depression from within, and when this happens the brain rewires itself to function properly. I was not aware of this at the time, though.

I’m not slamming my doctor’s recommendations. But, while her reassurances did boost my self-esteem a bit (I felt flawed and even guilty for being depressed!), the Prozac did not sit well with me. I was always gnashing my teeth and quite jittery. I was also aware of the artificialness of my feelings. While my mood DID lift, I could tell it was ‘fake’. It’s hard to explain the ‘unreal’ feeling I experienced under the influence of Prozac. Within a few months I was back at the doctor for something different. I told her how a few years back I was on Wellbutrin and had responded pretty well to it.

We tried a generic version and I was a bit surprised that I did not respond to it at all like I had before. I still felt like the ‘real me’ was obscured behind a veil, I was always quite cottonmouth and I couldn’t catch my breath. All of this finally culminated to the evening when I felt like my backbone was on fire. I had actually heard about a similar reaction from a friend of mine, and, while I do not recommend this course of action, I simply stopped taking the pills and never went back to her. At the time I was reading a book called ‘the seat of the soul’ by gary zukav and something was already awakening deep inside of me. I began returning to myself a more holistic approach to medicine that I had for some reason completely abandoned when I started to see my current partner some 7 years before (but that’s another post). I knew I had to do something before the depression returned so I started taking St. John’s wort and I am still taking it, with very promising results and virtually NO side effects. But this is the important part, I started expressing my emotions through blogging, journaling and art. Playing music is also a great way to express. Expression is crucial to healing, even if no one ever sees it. It is the creative process that is healing, not the final product.

If a person is severely depressed, antidepressants are an effective way of protecting the victim from doing anything drastic (like committing suicide or shooting people). But I also believe it is irresponsible for a doctor to simply prescribe pharmaceuticals for the rest of their days and send them on their way. I think it is important for the therapist to recognize the depth of their patient’s depression in order to prescribe the correct medication in addition to the correct course of therapy. I also think it is crucial for the therapist to consider the condition of the patient’s soul. If they are treading into uncharted territory as far as soul issues go, there are some very helpful books available in this field of study. In some patients medication alone simply covers the pain of depression and does not address the sometimes complex courses of events in the person’s life that got them to this point to begin with. And ultimately, a drugged person cannot be healed because depression deals with emotional and soul issues, and the meds obscure the emotions and messes with the subtle energies of the soul.

I want to put emphasis on the importance of the soul in this subject. It seems to me that therapists have been, for the most part, ignoring a critical piece of the puzzle by not addressing soul issues in conjunction with depression. However, recently things have started to shift to an awareness of soul issues in conjunction with mental health, so I believe there is hope. But do not take your doctor’s prognosis as gospel, and do not take my word as gospel. Experiment, explore, ask for help when you are lost, and you WILL begin to find your own way. And , above all, EXPRESS!!!!!