When I was a teenager, the medical field's understanding of mental health issues in young people was only just developing, to the point that it was burgeoning on non-existent. My parents and doctors tried, but the resources available to me were limited as I didn't fit into the categories that were usually set out for young people. The people I saw didn't really know how to help me, even though they really tried.
One of these good intentions was the idea that medication was the right choice for me from very early on. Lamotrigine saved my life, but it took a long time for doctors and psychiatrists to find the right medicine for my condition, and I was prescribed multiple different medications and dosages until I found the right one. One of the ones that they tried, the very first one they tried, was Fluoxetine.
Commonly known as Prozac, Fluoxetine is an SSRI or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor that I was first prescribed when I was 15. Although I was prescribed multiple other medications throughout my diagnosis journey, I stayed pretty consistently on fluoxetine to the point that I didn't really know what it did anymore. A quick Google describes long-term SSRI use as anything over two years. I was taking fluoxetine for 18 years.
After a lengthy conversation with my doctor and a rather stupid incident whereby I cut my dosage by two-thirds overnight, it was decided that slowly reducing my dosage and eventually weaning myself off the drug was a good idea. I began lowering my dosage in September and eventually stopped taking them in February.
It turns out, even after 18 years, fluoxetine was still doing its job by treating my anxiety. I was very young when I started to experience feelings of anxiety, too young to really know what anxiety was. After working this hard to wean myself off of them, I really don't want to start taking SSRIs again, and so now I'm having to find my own ways of managing my anxiety.
In the past, I would simply have used drugs or alcohol; nervousness was often one of the reasons that I drank. Now I'm getting sober, this method isn't an option, and so I'm having to find other ways of calming myself down. Pain helps, which is what has led to an increase in alternative methods of self-harming such as biting my arms, but that's not a healthy choice either. After all this time medicating with prescribed, legal and illegal drugs, I'm having to find healthy ways of making myself feel better, and it's proving to be a harder task than I thought it would be.
So far, I've been working out what triggers my anxiety and what helps ease it. Being late, for instance, really upsets me, as does spending money. But listening to Agatha Christie books read by Hugh Fraser on Audible and watching Cleanwithbea, a lovely woman on YouTube who cleans people's houses for free, calms me down. I've still been getting quite upset, but I'm doing my best to remind myself that what I deem "bad" things aren't punishments, and that I don't need to hurt myself to feel better.
But that's a conversation for another day
xXx
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