stop taking anti-depressants

It’s been three years and I think I can do this…I want to fire my therapist and just be the competent, capable, together person I know I am.

i’ve been having problems with depression lately, despite the wellbutrin xl. i’m having blood work done to see if there is anything physical causing problems. if not then it’s time for a dosage adjustment, this isn’t the direction i want to go in, but with the way i’ve been feeling for the past few months i don’t feel like i have much of a choice. i WILL eventually get off meds, but i guess i’m just not ready yet.

I worry that when I have this huge transition in my life, I’ll get all frazzled and start thinking I need happy pills again. I hope this is not the case of course.

my doctor has prescribed me lexapro. Ive only just started taking it. I was having obsessive thought patterns. She says it wont make me homicidal like the zoloft was… so.. oh well =)

I haven’t taken anything for two weeks and I am fine. For the first time I haven’t had dizzy spells, I guess that’s because i came off slowly like you should. My psych sessions are going great and I don’t feel like I need anything else – I wish I started therapy when I was 20 instead of assuming the meds were doing the job. I am going to mark this as done :) Good luck everyone.

I’m almost at 3 months of not taking them and have been doing GREAT. Better than ever, because part of it is knowing that I’m not taking them and still being fine.

And then I had a total meltdown in public (NEVER happens…once in a blue moon maybe?) this weekend. An aunt insulted me (not that I cared too much about the thing she insulted, which wasn’t original – it was about my weight) and it was like the last piece of jenga that you yank before the tower crashes. It was just the last straw on top of a horribly depressing week and I just started weeping nonstop through brunch. I couldn’t bring myself to step away because if I went to the bathroom, I wouldn’t leave until I had finished crying and I couldn’t do that….I couldn’t shame my parents like that for having a daughter who can’t “take a f—kin fat joke” and who “don’t have a sense of humour” (I don’t see any humour in joking about sensitive subjects thank you very much) and a daughter who abandons the family in the middle of brunch. sigh

I ran to another public bathroom afterwards because I couldn’t bear the thought of going home but not going off with the family either….and I just cried there for like 15 minutes. And the worse part isn’t the breakdown. Or the part where I pretended to have an allergy attack just so I could have tissue next to my face.

The worst part was believing, briefly, that I couldn’t survive this semester without antidepressants.

I was taking 50mg of zoloft, on and off, for the last 14 years. Unassessed and unmonitored. GPs would just prescribe it because I asked for it. There was no need – in retrospect I believe it was lazy and unprofessional for a teenager to be prescribed anti-depressants when the GP was aware of the serious family issues going on at the time for which psychotherapy or counselling would have been sufficient. My depression was situational and reasonable considering the circumstances. perhaps medication would have helped along side therapy. I have been able to connect the zoloft to rages that I would have and nightmares and irritability – I would prefer to be sad than angry and unpredictable. I am now taking 25mg of Zoloft every three days to ward off the withdrawal symptoms and I have started therapy to deal with the issues that have been preventing me having happy and fulfilling relationships all this time. Medication could never have fixed those things. I am also going to stop getting the female contraceptive injections because who knows what they are doing to me. I have period pain and PMS for three weeks every 3 months instead of for 1 day every month. I don’t need half the crap I pump into my body :)
Good luck everyone and i hope you all have GPS and therapists who are professional and considerate and help you with your goal. xo

Yay I’m going strong after 2 months…whoohoo! I have to go knock on wood, now. :D

But I’m hoping this keeps up.

Keeping busy helps preventing too much depression. But the bad thing is when the depression gets overwhelming, everything crashes to a stop – I can’t deal with anything and everything temporarily stops for me.

i’ve tried to stop taking wellbutrin before and after a week i get so tired that i have to start taking it again. it’s a natural homeostasis resonse to taking a stimulant, but it sucks nonetheless. well, i was browsing the internet and found a table created that showed how to wean yourself off 150mg of wellbutrin xl in 25mg increments. the way to do it is to switch to the wellbutrin sr so you can gradually decrease the dosage over a few months. teh only sucky part is that my boyfriend closed the tab on the comuter before i had a chance to print it or save it.