Ok, I admit it, I'm a people watcher. When I'm out and about I like to watch people and admire their idiosyncrasies. When I'm shopping I look at the purchases of other customers and try to figure out what type of person they are, or what they might be cooking that night. On the bus I find myself listening to conversations and half wanting to join in..... I realise I'm not alone in this, in fact, I suspect most people do it so I was thinking about this as I wandered around Waitrose yesterday afternoon and couldn't help but wonder what the people there were noticing about me.
This isn't a symptom of depression by the way, but for the last two days I have been struggling with the withdrawal effects of the anti depressants so I felt it was time to write a post about this aspect of my illness as I'm sure the people in Waitrose must have been wondering what on earth was wrong with me.
About 6 weeks ago I ran out of medication, I dutifully emailed my doctors surgery to order some more, but just didn't get round to collecting them. I thought nothing of it until about a week later when all of a sudden I was overwhelmed with a wave of dizziness while out walking with my boyfriend. I have always thought withdrawal, like jet lag, was merely a thing people complained about, that wasn't really a big deal. Turns out I was wrong; I have never felt anything like the dizziness and I had to sit very still for several hours because every time I moved my head spun. The next morning I apologised to work for being late and went via the doctors to get more medicine and did some research into coming off this medication carefully.
Escitalopram, the drug I'm on, isn't listed as having massive side affects, however if you search on Google for escitalporam withdrawal you will find a whole host of people who disagree with this - the first thing people complained of was overwhelming dizziness followed by 'shocks' through their whole body. The people on one of the sites I looked at suggested the best way to come off was to lower your dose each day, changing the dose each week - rather than, say, take a pill one day and skip the next, take half a pill every day. Over the last month or so I took half a pill for two weeks then a third of a pill for a week, then I stopped taking the medication all together. The last pill was ten days ago and for the last 5 days I've been suffering from withdrawal to the extreme, but I am determined to get myself off the medicine, as I feel I don't need it anymore. Two days ago I finally had one of the shocks that other people had described and yesterday I had a number of them - when I read about them I had assumed that it would feel like an electric shock running through your system, but what I actually felt was more like a dizzy buzz throughout my system, emanating from my brain - like dizziness multiplied by ten. In fact, after my shopping trip I had to just sit in my car for a bit before I felt safe to drive home and even then I had to go upstairs and sit down for quite a while. I ate a banana when I walked through the door and that seemed to help too.
The other thing I'm finding about the withdrawal is that I can't concentrate on a conversation for a decent amount of time and I have to keep apologising as I zone in and out - particularly bad when I'm more dizzy and suffering shocks. The dizziness and shocks are also accompanied by a feeling of overwhelming sadness, which fortunately passes quite quickly.
My understanding is that these feelings won't last for too long and if I wanted a quick fix I could quite simply just take another pill but I'd like to use the time I've got off work to get myself sorted and drug free. This is a word of warning for those of you who know me however, please bear with me if I appear to not be focusing on our conversation - I'll get there in the end!!
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