I enjoyed your thread about Nostradamus when you first arrived; I believe I posted a welcome and expressed appreciation for what you had to say in that thread. I found your later threads quite disturbing and felt frustrated and helpless reading your posts. You seemed to be deteriorating and nothing anyone said seemed to help at all.
So, welcome back! This thread has brightened up my day immensely.
I’m very, very glad to know you’re okay. Stay well and be safe. hugs
Last time I got home, I dumped my bags on the hall and entered the living room. Mom, trying to rise from her armchair, was having more difficulty than usual (she’s had some kind of rheumatic illness at least since her teens, apparently a consequence of the pulmonia she survived at age 3) and looked, in unprofessional terms, like shit. In more professional terms, she had about the same skin color as the poo of a newborn (a pale something between yellow and green). I asked was she ok and, remembering that she’d had a doctor visit two days before, whether she was on anything new.
In Spain you get the prospectus along with the medication. The rehab doctor had decided to take Mom off her usual painkiller (over the counter, minimum dose, has worked fine for three years thank you much) just because she decided that three years on the same medication regime was too long. The new medication said it:
should not be given to people with a history of liver problems (Mom)
over 65 (Mom just turned 66)
with a history of blood clot problems (Mom’s had thrombos three times)
or varicose veins (wanna see a blue roadmap? I’ll take a pic of Mom’s legs)
who’d ever had a bad reaction to any kind of hormone therapy (the aforementioned liver problems were caused by HRT)
So when, while I was reading that Prospectus From Hell, Mom told me that Lilbro had taken one look at her and said “you know, maybe you should stop that new pill and go back to the usual until you talk with your GP, you look like shit”, I told her to please, now that I’m going to be about 1500km away, listen to him.
The look in Spaniards’ faces when I tell them that in the US you get “with recipe only” medication without those life-saving prospectuses is… pretty undescribable.
Glad to hear you got better, Valteron, best wishes.
Good to hear Valteron!
I’m very glad that this has worked for you, but I caution people that mental illness is not always “all in the head” in the sense that you can just “think” yourself out of it. Your post scared me because it seemed to imply that you felt that all people could get along fine without their psych meds with enough will power. This may work for some people and some illnesses… but I know that I deteriorate horribly without my medication and become quite irrational and psychotic. It used to be much worse when I was on SSRI meds, because they leave the system so quickly–one missed dose could have me completely unstable. I’m on Welbutrin now and it is much more even-keel… but I know that eventually if I stopped taking it my world would change back. I just want to make sure that you don’t think that your solution is the right one for everyone… because while dependence on medication may be bad or even fatal for some people, I have very little doubt that I would be dead right now if I were not on my meds. In fact, it seems fairly likely that before switching my meds, it may have only taken another time or two of forgetting to refill my prescription and going for a day or two without it for me to slip that tiny, tiny step further. If I had never been prescribed psych meds in the first place I’d doubt I’d have lived past 25.
I’m not familiar with your posts, but I’m definitely glad to hear you have figured out the root of your problems and are working to correct them.
I absolutely agree that some doctors give horrid advice as far as medications go. When I was a teenager I was on a number of meds for ADD (I still don’t know why I needed to be on two types at once). At the age of 14 I became severely depressed, self-destructive and anxious. I could barely contain the frustration and rage I held. So an antidepressant was added. The symptoms improved, and I asked the doctors to wean me off the ADD meds. They had helped when I was first on them, but the side effects (I was going through withdrawal from them every afternoon) were too much to bear. While researching at this time I found that a common side effect for these medications is depression. No one ever warned my mom to keep an eye out for this and I was miserable for a lot longer than I should have been. She still rants about those doctors 10 years later.
More recently, I realized during my senior year of college that was feeling depression symptoms again. I began seeing a grad student counselor through the school and she suggested (after a lot of talking) seeing the psychiatrist about medications. After a 45 minute session she sent me off with a prescription for Effexor. She said that it might affect my libido and that skipping doses might cause stomach upset. I immediately went home and researched the medication, and found that many who use it have horror stories of the side effects from missing one dose and other fun facts. After careful thought I decided it wasn’t the drug for me. (Still ADD, still forgetful). But there was no mention of the gut-wrenching nausea and withdrawal symptoms from the doctor.