Anxiety Support Group
Anxiety is a physical condition marked by intense and persistent feelings of distress, fear, angst or dread. General anxiety caused by routine day-to-day stresses usually passes quickly and is experienced by almost everyone at one time or another. However, such feelings that linger over time and are very difficult to cope with, and which lack a clear cause, may indicate...
my medication isn't working anymore. school is crazy, I don't have ANY friends or lots of solid support, and I'm scared. I'm scared to change medications. I was super lucky because when I started this medicine three years ago it had almost no negative side effects and I loved it. but we've had to steadily increase the dosage overtime. and now if I raise it anymore it'll become unsafe. I'm on sertraline (Zoloft) right now. now if I go a few days without taking it I get dizzy and often have heart palpitations that are unrelated to my anxiety, it's just because I didn't take the medicine. if anyone is on an antidepressant they love can you please let me know? this is giving me so much stress.
The question with an antidepressant is really, is it there to stop you having any problems at all, or is it there to simply make your problems manageable? I think the best thing is to see it as something that doesn't remove all suffering, but does lower it to a level where you can identify the source of your troubles, and maybe use talk therapy or self-analysis to get through the issues that life brings at you.
If you use it as a total painkiller you'll just become a junkie, addicted to pills that have to be taken in higher and higher doses as your brain changes shape in response to them.
While you are still young, stop increasing, and start handling the issues. Change your method. Your brain is still young enough to slowly, over time, revert to a pre-drug state. So that means start a concerted effort at dealing with the problems life hands you by actually emotionally resolving them, experiencing the bad feelings, letting those bad feelings happen to you and letting the learning that comes from emotional resolution come to you. This will have the effect of increasing your capacity to cope with life as a person.
you will become less vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. You will become larger, and stronger, broader and wiser. That's the aim and you can't get there without going through a bit of hell here and there.
As to the drugs? I got palpitations, and it took maybe six months after going off the drugs before the palpitations stopped. they don't cause any harm. They're just you hearing something that's going on anyway. And no they're not during an attack, they're any time. They're the result of you putting chemicals into your system that your system wouldn't normally have to handle.
Sorry this is so long: but if you learn to see your antidepressant use as a short term crutch, and understand that when your leg is broken, you do at some point have to go through the discomfort of putting weight back on it, and making it strong again, then you're in a better position to live your life fully.
It can take five years. it took me over five years. I had 2 yrs on the pills, 2 yrs weaning slowly off, and maybe a year since then to emotionally stabilise and discover life isn't as bad as I thought. I had major depressive disorder and generalised anxiety disorder. I was so bad I couldn't open the mail. Let alone hold a conversation.
Change yourself. Change your understanding, Lower your expectations. Be glad to make it through each day; and you will find your stability point. When you have that, hang onto it. People call it a centre, they call it 'rock bottom', they call it all sorts. But it's the ground. Where you can't fall from. Where nothing can get worse from. When you have that, you can start to build.