Can Antidepressants Make You Mental???

[J_trustno1]

This is a real concern and I'm not trolling. I've been on and off antidepressants for the last 11 years. I started off with Paroxetine at a low dose when I was 16.

Paroxetine stopped working on me last year and didn't even work after increased dose. Then I was put on Venlafaxine 75mg in June 2014 and was told to increase it to 150mg in July 2014. I was given Seroquel 7.5 mg along with it and was told to take it only if I couldn't stop thinking and sleep. The increased dose caused suicidal ideation so my psychiatrist told me to go back to 75mg. I couldn't take seroquel either because it made me see things, made me have headaches and nausea the next day. So my psychiatrist told me to stop it.

After going to 75mg Venlafaxine and stopping seroquel, my psychiatrist prescribed me Mirtazapine. He started me with 7.5 mg Mirtazapine and told me to go up to 15 mg after a week along with 75 mg Venlafaxine. Initially Mirtazapine made me very very happy. I was very easy going. Then I started becoming more aggressive and irritable to the point I nearly committed suicide. I only took Mirtazapine for 18 days and it caused me to gain 3.5 kg of weight in first 6 days of only 7.5 mg, caused me cravings for carbs and refined sugars. So my psychiatrist told me reduce it to 3.75mg (i.e. 1/4 of the whole pill ). During those 18 days, I had nightmares of suicidal bombs, conspiracy therapy where doctors were planningto spread cancer and ghosts trying to strangle me. I woke up screaming and seeing things just within 18 days. So I was stopped from Mirtazapine. I was back to Venlafaxine by itself.

I was given another pill for my thyroid disease called Hashimotos thyroiditis but iy didn't help with my increased thyroid antibodies. So it was stopped as well.

I've always had horrible mood swings for my PMDD and my psychiatrist gave me Omega-3, SAMe and DIM for my PMDD.

Two weeks ago I was in horrible condition where I was very depressed and my GP doubled my Venlafaxine dose. I told her that it was too much for me in the past but she said it gives you symptoms then lower it back to 75mg. Guess what??? At 150 mg of Venlafaxine I'm back to suicidal ideation.

In the past: I've had hypothyroidism and been on thyroxine whenever my TSH levels were high and that usually helps with my depression.

Now I'm sitting here and wondering if these antidepressants are actually harming me more than helping me? Am I going to end up mental and in a psych ward because of these pills??

 

[Deleted member 1860]

Yes, medications can cause more harm than good. You may want to look into detoxing. (Under medical supervision).

Will you end up mental? Probably not.

 

[J_trustno1]

How do you detox from medications?

 

[mrsps]

Hey @J_trustno1

Sorry I cant offer any advise on the medication just wanted to say hi to a fellow kiwi :D

 

[Neverthesame]

To detox, you talk to your doctor. They will then draw up a step down process, where you gradually reduce your dosage over a period of weeks/months. How long it will take depends on the drug, severity of withdrawals and your level of mental stability.

As for the effects being permanent. No that should not be possible. You may find some minor symptoms or weird physical tics can last for an extended period, though they should eventually go away. As long as you keep following your doctor's orders, and speak up if something is bothering you (If you are feeling unstable, suicidal, violent, ect, ect.) It probably means your lowering your dosage too quickly. Also be patient, it will take a while. Often times the people who "go mental" have probably tried to quit cold turkey. Which is an extremely dangerous thing to do.

 

[Fadeaway]

I was given another pill for my thyroid disease called Hashimotos thyroiditis but iy didn't help with my increased thyroid antibodies. So it was stopped as well.

I find this quite disturbing. The stopped the medication? Unlike anti-depressants, wich scae the carap out of me for what they do to me, thyroid medication is a must. Everything you have posted in the last week or so is significantly magnified by low thyroid. What thyroid med did they put you on? You want natural not synthetic. Armour or nature-thyroid is the best. Stay away from synthroid at all costs.

Make sure they test your free tsh3 This is vital as most dr.s only test your T4 and creates inaccurate results.

 

[J_trustno1]

I am on Levothyroxine for hypothyroidism. The medication my psychiatrist prescribed to control thyroid antibodies was LDN (Low-dose Neltroxine) which didn't work that well despite being on it for 6 months and it also started giving me nightmares so my Psychiatrist decided to stop it. Now my GP has given me Levothyroxine and it has helped me with my weight which I was struggling to lose for a year only in 6 weeks. I have managed to lose 2 kgs in a month which I couldn't lose despite being on strict diet and exercising daily.

 

[shimmerz]

Perhaps you need to have an assessment and perhaps an overhaul of what medications are working well for you. What do you want to do regarding your meds J? Have you researched? I think in order to be proactive it is really important that you educate yourself in such a way that you know where you stand on the drugs you are being prescribed.

 

[joeylittle]

Everyone has said smart things. I just want to add that medication for mood really only works in conjunction with cognitive therapy. If all you have is a situational depression and you need some help in the short term, then yes, an anti-d can pick you back up til you are on your own feet. But for anyone with more than that (PTSD is obviously more than that), you have to be doing regular cognitive therapy of some kind to address that aspect of your mood disorder.

No medication just "makes you happy". It will help you function and lessen the psychic load. I know I'm a broken record on this subject with you, @J_trustno1, but you need to do solid cognitive work more than you need med increases (in my opinion).

 

[Neverthesame]

@joeylittle Less is more, am I right?

The reality of any mood drug really is: Something which which can make the debilitating symptoms of a psychiatric disorder more bearable for the purpose of therapy. Much like if you have an injured joint, in order to regain full use and range of motion. You will need physical therapy. Meaning you have to make the joint hurt worse now, in order for it to hurt less later. Your doctor may prescribe you something for the pain, it won't make the pain disappear. Just make it easier to bear whilst in therapy.

Now, you could also choose to take the pain killers and not undergo physical therapy. The pain will be lessened, but whenever you try to do anything with the injured joint it will always hurt. No pain killer in the world can eliminate all physical pain. Just as no mood drug will ever eliminate all emotional pain.

 

[Neverthesame]

I think in order to be proactive it is really important that you educate yourself in such a way that you know where you stand on the drugs you are being prescribed

Oh, and this, yes, this. So much this. Yes, yes, yes. So important. Always research everything you take, and how it may interact with other things you take (even non-medicines). Doctors and pharmacists (chemists), may have a fair bit of education and knowledge about drugs and their effects. But they are still people, and are not walking encyclopedias. It is possible to be prescribed things that interact with something else you are taking, despite your doctor "knowing" the drugs don't mix well. It would be an accident, but it does happen. Absolutely cannot agree with @shimmerz enough.

 

[Deleted member 1860]

I hope that you take @joeylittle's advice to heart. I know you say that CBT doesn't work for you, but I'm wondering what about it is the problem?

I really am concerned about your looping thoughts. Mine used to be SO bad, and I see much of myself in you. The two things that helped me the most with my thought issues were neurofeedback and Geodon (no other Antipsychotic worked in quite the same way).

I guess I'm going off on a tangent here..... I know that its hard to be told to use cognitive therapy when it doesn't seem to work. I can't help but wonder if you have obsessive thoughts that are indeed caused by some sort of imbalance, but you just haven't found the right medication to help you? If you do indeed have something amiss in your head that causes these thoughts to go into overdrive, no amount of anything is going to help you as much as the right medication..... I'm not saying that medication will cure you 100% because it is important for us to be able to cognitively battle our own thoughts. Rather, telling someone who has a chemical imbalance to fix it all by changing their thoughts is akin to telling a diabetic to think their sugar issues away. It just doesn't work like that.

I had a neurotherapist (my second one, not my awesome first one) who thought that neurofeedback (ie training my brain) was enough to fix me. She was very anti-medication and believed they were poisons, that nobody truly needed them. Well, she was wrong. Neurofeedback did indeed help me, but no amount of fixing my thoughts or brain training was able to pull me out of a bad obsessive episode. I TRULY believe that my brain does indeed deal with some sort of chemical imbalance given that a single dose of medication is able to calm my thoughts......its as if it is a "reset" in my brain.

So maybe this is a little long winded, but I guess my point is that I worry about the extent of your obsessive thinking. I know that hell. I know that for me, it was a matter of finding the right medication to put my mind at rest.

Have you tried anything beyond antidepressants?

Oh.....and I'd like to add this. Does your anxiety follow your depression, or does your depression follow your anxiety? Figuring out that my anxiety followed my depression was KEY in determining that antidepressants are useless in treating my depression. If I fight the anxiety, the depression stays away. I'm wondering if you could be the same? Maybe you need to fight the anxiety in order to ease your depressive symptoms? Maybe its the anxiety that fuels your obsessions and the depression comes later? This could be why antidepressants don't seem to help you.