Paxil almost made me go insane after just a few days.
Ive been looking for a site like this for a long time now-ever since I decided (thank God) to get off my antidepressant medication.
Ok, so I am a 17-year old male, right… When I first got to high school, my parents divorced so things were kind of a mess and for the first time in my life I had made enemies.
Well, thats when I first started seeing a psychiatrist. We would talk and underlying everything that was discussed to make me better was a deep, conviction that I was so terribly shy and this needed to be cured.
So I tried Zoloft and Paxil, but went off them immediately after not even a week. I will say that the Paxil almost made me go insane after just a few days. Yes, it was against the doctors word to go off them. Thank God I did though. Then a while passed and this time I thought I truly needed help.
I had gotten into a fight at school and received threats from a lot of people. I was completely paranoid and my mom (and I gave in) put me in the mental hospital (for kids). Oh my God, this is where I had like my calling or whatever the hell I was thinking (hoping they could cure me so I would fit in and be my old self again).
I dont even remember if all this is right because my memory is really screwed up now. But, so I went on Celexa this time and unfortunately, for good…I was sixteen at the time. I talking a lot more in class, my anxiety was gone, I got really into the stuff they were feeding me at school, and my reputation for a nice, respectable young man went down the tube. I guess it was my own doing. But I started wanting to be different from everybody else, but I was Zen-like, using the Bible (its cover) as an inspiration.
I think I had too much ADD to read the bible at the time-it was just a matter of calming my emotions. Ok, so mix these calming drugs with listening to the band Radiohead. Not cool at all. I lost my two best friends. I got full of myself because I had gotten accepted to an art school. But the summer between leaving my old school I started believing I was getting really close to my family. My Dad at least because he was (and still is) taking the same medication I was. But I would say anything that came to mind. I thought I was better…
Then art school started and I went from being a boring person with a vivid imagination that could be translated to paper (drawing) to a zombie who could only draw from observation. My concentration was really good but I had spurts of anger with anticipated culmination of disaster. I was a totally different person. I wasnt self-conscious at all anymore, had no friends either. Then I saw something in the other people at that school that reminded me of the old-me (the one I didnt like for some reason) that made me want to change.
A beautiful mind, one flew over the cuckoos nest- these movies made me realized Id lost my artistic passion or whatever the hell I had before. A reason for living…
Well, yeah so then I went cold-turkey off the medication and slowly but surely went insane. It was not cool at all. I re-visited the past that I had tried to escape on medication. I thought I had lost the holy spirit though and this made me think about committing suicide. It was horrible. Before I would say such things to get attention but now I really felt it.
The bottom line is, do not believe that you have a depression that needs correcting. My God, thats what I believed but then I realized it is just the devil doing his work. I have no life now really. I had lots of talent and potential and I think its all gone now because I thought I had a problem but really didnt. Now when I hear these antidepressants being touted to save people or whatever, I have other thoughts. Its hard for me to realize that I am my old self again. I had to piece back together my memory. It is better to be this way than a zombie on drugs though.
5/4/2002
This is Survivor Story number 26.
Total number of stories in current database is 48
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