Might be short, might be long in Mental Health, 2017

Alright, so I’m just going to start typing and see where this goes. The day after I wrote my last entry in which I felt like I was going to die at practice (2 weeks ago), I decided that I was going to stop taking Zoloft cold turkey. This is against all of my “care team“‘s advice and even the internet is very “DON’T DO IT!”. But I did. No weaning.

I don’t know how to put into words how icky I was feeling physically. My psychiatrist increased me to 200 mg of Zoloft on March 30. My primary care doctor had just increased me from 50mg to 100mg in January. I think 200mg proved to be more harmful than good. Or it was just increased too quickly. I don’t know. I do know I was supposed to contact my dr if I had really bad effects, and I did not do that.

Hopefully I can find the right words to explain my reasoning behind that. Because it seems like decent reasoning in my head. (says the headcase)

So in my last entry I wrote how it felt like I was fighting a panic attack all through that evening’s football practice and how it felt like my chest was either going to explode or have a heart attack or both. And I felt soooooooo weak. Like I just wanted to lay down on the field and not move. Luckily, I made it home okay that night and was able to privately lay on my living room until I got my bearings straight. I hadn’t felt those kinds of anxiety symptoms in that severity since before I started taking the Zoloft.

It freaked me the fuck out that I was experiencing those feelings again. Legit freaked me out because that was part of what lead me to seek help in the first place. It felt like I was back at square 1 and I didn’t know why, which caused further panic.

I’ve had what I call a decent “survival instinct” lately, meaning I don’t really want to die, no matter what lies my brain is feeding it. It’s a thread of hope which I cling to, because when I have this “survival instinct”, I trust myself not to do anything retarded. The “survival instinct” is life. That had started going away after the first week of the increase to 200mg (first week was fabulous!). I think my brain decided that 200 mg was just more than it could handle and that’s when I started to feel like absolute zombie shit and also had that wonderful self-harm episode and therefore lost that “survival instinct” because I clearly didn’t trust myself after that.

So I was curious as to what would happen if I stopped taking the zoloft altogether. Cold turkey. There are many horror stories about this on the internetz. I wont go into detail. But I will say I have felt more like myself than I have in a long while. My head is clearer, my anxiety went way back down, and I have my energy back for football practice. I’ve even been challenging negative thoughts, which the therapist was trying so hard to teach me, but my head wasn’t far enough above water at that point for me to be successful. I’ve been lucky. The only physical withdrawal symptoms I’ve experienced so far were two nights of night sweats, and really pronounced night jerks throughout my entire body as I’m just on the verge of falling asleep. The survival instinct is totally back.

The reason I didn’t contact my dr is because I was fearful. Fearful of a new, different SSRI that might work amazing at first (like my BFF Zoloft did) but then backfire down the road. Fearful that it wouldn’t work at all and make things horrible right away without making them better at all. Fearful of losing the survival instinct.

Anyway, hope that make sense. I have a follow-up with my primary care manager June 13 which is when we’re supposed to talk about how well the Zoloft is working for me. This is the first time I’ll be seeing her since the psychiatrist released me from her care. Hopefully I can describe all of this to her.

And the next thing I was going to write about before this got so long was about how my dad and stepmom are in town for the weekend (they flew in this afternoon). I’ll save that for tomorrow. But here’s a teaser…we went out to eat tonight and I actually missed my therapist (not the psychiatrist) terribly during that meal. I realized I learned more from her than I thought, even though I wasn’t able to do everything she wanted me to work on when I was seeing her. My brain “saved” her insights for nights like these when I needed her wisdom and could use them to help keep the family outing a mostly positive one. More on this tomorrow.