From a comment in my previous post:

I'm curious as to how you ever ended up on Anti depressants in the first place? Were you in some deep form of depression where you felt drugs were the best option? Or were you duped by all of the "take our pill and life will be bliss" ads/commercials? It sounds like the making of a good blog post. Could you describe from the beginning what lead to this?

I’ve taken a lot of flak from friends, readers, and even Aydika (who has since changed her stance) about my use of anti-depressants to deal with my head thingies.

First off, I was never “duped” by any sort of drug company advertising. If anything, I’ve been resistant to the idea of taking pills – I consider them part of a solution of last resort, but not the solution itself. I’d never expect pills on their own to do much of anything (although there is quite a bit of data to the contrary – on their own, anti-depressants can actually do a world of good for people even without counseling – but that’s not always, or often, the case). I had been seeing a shrink for nearly a year at the time I last went on meds, so it’s not like I didn’t give good old fashioned counseling a shot.

Also, I’m a skeptic. When my doctor/neurologist/whoever recommends that I take a new drug, I do my research. I typically turn down about two out of three suggestions, narrow my options down to a pool of acceptable meds, and then choose the one that seems like it will provide the most benefit with the least side effects.

For example, my neurologist wanted me to take a drug called Topamax to prevent my strange migraine blindness thing. The drug is actually an anti-seizure medication which has been approved for prevention of migraine, but the side effects are just way too potentially awful for me to even consider it. One of the most interesting things I read about Topamax was that it will make you “dumber than a box of rocks” if you don’t meet certain criteria. Since I have absolutely no interest in finding out by trial and error if I meet those criteria or not, I decided not to take the drug. Plain and simple. I’d rather go blind every now and then than get my ass kicked on Jeopardy by a box of rocks.

So, my decision to get back on anti-depressants wasn’t something I took lightly. I wasn’t even depressed at the time, actually (we’re talking late August here). The problem I was having was anxiety. I could be lounging in the sun, reading a book by my favorite author, and then get nailed by a panic attack so bad that I thought the world was going to end.

That happened to me every day. Over and over. And over.

And over again.

I was treating the panic attacks acutely with Ativan. Ativan is a benzodiazepine similar to Valium except that it has a much shorter half-life which means that I don’t have to be stupid for quite as long as I would be on Valium (benzos can temporarily blunt your intellect, although the effect is quite preferable to sitting through a panic attack that will blunt your desire to live).

Not wanting to be stupid all the time, and noticing that I had been taking benzos “acutely” for nearly two months (I don’t consider two months of straight meds to be “acute” anymore), I wanted to switch to something else. Ativan can foster physical and psychological dependencies, and I wanted to be off of it.

That’s when I decided to go back on Zoloft (depression and anxiety have their roots in the same chemical imbalances, so anti-depressants are used to treat anxiety as well), which is a drug that had worked incredibly well for me in the past. In the spring of 2000, I thought my life was over. A month after a started Zoloft, I was “me” again. It was great.

The problem with drugs like Zoloft, though, is that your body goes through changes. The brain to which I recently tried to apply Zoloft isn’t the one that received it in 2000. I’m older, probably showing some wear and tear on the neurons, under all new kinds of stress, and live a completely different life. This time, the amount of Zoloft that restored my sanity in 2000 pretty much took it from me.

In spite of this, I still think Zoloft is a good drug. I know plenty of people for whom it has provided great benefit, and I’ve had my own good experiences with it. But, it looks like I’m going to have to figure out something else because this stuff isn’t working for me anymore.

That, then, is the short version of how I wound up on meds. I could probably write a good twenty pages on my experiences with different SSRIs, with counseling and without, to describe all the events that led me back to Zoloft, but I won’t. I have a presentation to give in four hours, and I should probably be doing my usual pre-event prep.

If you have any questions about the head drugs, though, then feel free to leave ‘em.