Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
In the fall of 2014 the author decided to quit the prescription medications she has been taking to treat her anxiety, depression and insomnia, and began the process of gradually reducing her dosages. In Going Off, a series of Anxiety posts that began in February, she has chronicled the challenges she has faced from both the drugs and the withdrawal. This is the final installment.
- Tell everyone close to you that you’re tapering off your meds. Tell them that if they think you seem down, they should speak up; you won’t get defensive. Yes, you’ve been defensive in
the past. You used to think depression meant you were weak, or at least, you interpreted expressions of concern as accusations of weakness. But it’s time to change. Let your skin become not thicker,
but more porous, so love can seep in. Let your friends stop by unannounced to make sure you haven’t spent the last three days in your blue fleece bathrobe, the one you gave an ex-boyfriend for
his birthday a decade ago. It’s weird that you have that bathrobe.
- You might need to taper more gradually than your doctor thinks. Reduce one medication at a time, just a sliver, every couple of weeks at the most. Be gentle. For example, if you’re planning to cut
your benzo on a Friday night, but you’re still having withdrawal symptoms from your last cut, or you see the aftermath of yet another shooting on the news, take your usual dose. You can always
cut on Monday. Or next Monday. Or the next. It will take you seven months to get off of three drugs. That’s fine. That’s good. You got this. Mid-taper, you can always go back to your previous
dose. Medicate if that’s what helps you make it through a day without hiding in the bathroom. The goal is to feel O.K., not to prove that you are O.K. without meds.
- There will be a period of hell for two to three days after each cut — dizziness, nausea, panic attacks, headaches, crying jags, strange symptoms like aching teeth. Some people experience extreme symptoms
for months. For some people, the withdrawal proves impossible. You will be one of the lucky ones: Your teeth will stop aching. Your panic will subside. You won’t faint or vomit even once.
Related
Read previous contributions to this series.
- Clean up your diet. Alcohol suppresses R.E.M. sleep. Trans fats and sugar cause mood swings — remember the time you sobbed on the subway when that guy’s backpack hit you in the face? That said,
if you don’t have it in you to clean up your diet, if there are days when Cool Ranch Doritos are the best thing you’ve got going, then by all means enjoy. Buy the family-size bag. Pop it
open, crack a beer, watch an entire season of “Dexter.” Forgive yourself for your hedonism. Forgive yourself for everything.
- Have someone you can call in the middle of the night. Here’s the upside of your best friend living in California: Your middle of the night is her evening. Her voice will feel like the first deep breath
you’ve drawn in hours.
- If there’s no one to call, or even if there is, download hypnosis, meditation and relaxation apps. If the apps don’t work, do something else. Read your friend’s book that you were supposed
to read eight months ago. Borrow your brother-in-law’s HBO GO password. Learn Spanish on your phone. They say insomniacs should avoid electronics at night. Forget that. What you want to avoid
is panic. What you want to teach yourself is that you deserve better than lying alone in a dark room, imagining yourself buried.
- Take very good care of your free time. Don’t give your precious hours to that person you meet for coffee every three months who never asks you a single question — the one who holds forth about
nothing but green energy. Tell her you’ve developed a coffee bean intolerance. You’re healing. She’ll live.
- Don’t undergo a breakup. But if you do undergo a breakup, know that you’ll be O.K. Don’t make lists in your head of things you could have done differently. No, you could not have altered
your entire personality. No, you are not difficult just because you made requests like please don’t sometimes ignore me for two days. And if you are difficult, so what? Be difficult.
You’re human; you’re not a compilation of the qualities that someone else declares attractive. If you find yourself composing self-blaming lists, write them down; that’s the only
way to empty your head. The blank page can take the abuse. When it’s just you and your writing and the early morning, all is well — your coffee pot looks full, your vertebrae feel neatly
stacked. This is how you return to yourself. Your boyfriend was not your antidepressant. Don’t vilify him, either. He’s just a person. He gave what he could.
- Everyone has an opinion about depression. Everyone has an opinion about psychiatric medication. If you tell people who don’t know you that you’re on medication, or that you’re trying
to get off of medication, some might shout their opinions. At times, you’ll feel like you must have wronged them, if all this vitriol is landing on your head. But their reactions have little to
do with you. You are all products of a society with arbitrary taboos, a society that has made mental health a fraught topic, that hasn’t learned how to talk about mental health without worrying
about what others will think. Let them shout. They need to shout. Don’t be afraid. You have a right to voice your experience. Maybe it’s not just a right but an obligation — to fight
this collective shame with your clearest, most honest words.
- The time will come when you wake each morning not woozy with dread, but excited that the sun is shining. It will be summer, your favorite season, and you will be 20 days med-free, eating only whole foods,
stepping back into the world, a yoga mat strapped to your shoulder. Can you believe it? You’re going to be that person with the yoga mat strapped to her shoulder. You will greet yourself, the
person you almost forgot, the person under the bandages. Before peeling back bandages, you have no way of knowing if the wounds are still open. You are so lucky: Your healing was done, as you suspected
it was. You’re back, the person who is usually barefoot despite a hideous bunion, the person who can’t handle concerts or Saint Mark’s Place, the person who wishes she didn’t
have under-eye circles, who wishes she spent less time thinking about her under-eye circles, the person who trembles visibly when she meets someone exciting, who can’t stop smiling at the subway
dancers, even though you’re supposed to hate the subway dancers if you want to be deemed a real New Yorker. Say hello to that person. She was missing. She was depressed and then she was recovering
from depression. She was pinned to her furniture. She was counting calories. She was horrified that her hair was falling out in her hands. She was drawing her curtains closed. Hello! Embrace your feelings
of gratitude, for everything, for everyone, for the way people need other people, for the way they avoid eye contact and open their arms and lend books and coats and eat the baked ziti you make them
for dinner. Yes, ordinarily, your gag reflex would activate at the mention of “gratitude,” but not anymore. Go outside. Feel sun on the soles of your feet. Buy broccoli from the outdoor
produce stand. Why haven’t you ever done that before? Why did you think you had to go inside to buy broccoli? And then maybe you’ll be 40 days off meds, or 50, or it will be winter, and
you’ll skip a week of yoga or you’ll cry for two hours or you’ll drink too many beers and that’s fine, you’re fine. That’s life. You’re letting go.
Read the entire Going Off series here.
Diana Spechler is the author of the novels “Who by Fire” and “Skinny.” Twitter: @DianaSpechler.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and on Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
I’m almost unmedicated. Each morning, I take just 100 milligrams of bupropion. At bedtime, I take a quarter milligram of lorazepam. I’ve eliminated trazodone. And I’m single. My ex and I
are friends again — we were friends for years before we dated — and now that my heartbreak has receded, I don’t miss the upstream swim of that relationship. I still pop awake in the
middle of the night, and often stay awake for two or three hours, but there’s a peacefulness to my days now. Summer is helping. It always does.
My worst depression comes not from heartbreak, but from feeling trapped. Yet I’ve sought out relationships again and again.
For the first time since age 12, I’m not engaged in the compulsive relationship pattern that those close to me have often questioned, that I’ve often questioned, too: I neither have a serious boyfriend
nor want one. I spend a lot of time thinking about one man (it’s hard to imagine quitting that vice), but he’s 2,600 miles away without a working phone or a passport.
I didn’t make a conscious decision to take a hiatus from serial monogamy. At other times in my life, I have tried militantly to stay single, knowing that a steady stream of boyfriends is not the antidote
to depression, but I’ve always wound up panicking and tumbling into a relationship. I just feel something different now, as if a cord that’s usually pulled tight has slackened.
I’ve been single for only four months; I don’t deserve a medal or induction into a convent, but it’s interesting to me that as I decrease my meds, the urgency I feel around men subsides.
Read more…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
I’m spending a month at an artist residency in central Mexico, where I’ve befriended a local healer named Katuza who believes in the spirit world. He believes in the power of plants, especially
peyote. He believes in the temescal (sweat lodge) as a cure for most ailments, including depression, anxiety, and insomnia. He has long gray hair, a long gray beard, the wide eyes of the ecstatic.
He says that I need to release the things I hold in my chest. “We will teach you how to scream,” he says. He often uses the first-person plural — maybe because English is his second
language, maybe in homage to interconnectedness.
When I’m not immersed in writing, I feel frantic and distracted, guilty and aimless.
My version of screaming is writing, but for two years, from the time I started taking medication, until recently, the words were stuck inside me. I had to force them out. “I like the feeling of words
doing as they want to do,” wrote Gertrude Stein, who died more than 40 years before Prozac hit the market. Same here. And with each cut in dosage (my most recent being 150 milligrams of bupropion
down to 100), my words flow more easily, brain to fingers to screen.
Inside his temescal, which he built out of clay, stones, and bricks, Katuza sings to the spirits. He tells me I can sing to them, too, but I feel shy. Though I’ve always been drawn to those who
subscribe to magic, I’ve never been able to justify believing in spirits, in anything supernatural. I’m the daughter of a scientist; that might have something to do with it. I believe in this wall,
I once told someone who was preaching to me about the importance of “believing in something.” And then I was ashamed — I was a woman who believed in a wall. Read more…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
Two days before my period, having just decreased my dose of bupropion from 150 to 100 milligrams, I am in the throes of some record-breaking premenstrual syndrome. I’d rather not discuss it. I feel like
a traitor admitting that PMS lays me flat — women have been fighting for decades to shake our image as hysterical, chocolate-wolfing slaves to the moon cycle. But PMS is as much a part of my depression
as gray skies, insomnia, and difficult writing days. About five years ago, after reading my journals with a therapist (we were trying to identify patterns in my depression), she gave me a diagnosis of premenstrual
dysphoric disorder (PMDD) — basically, brutal PMS.
I felt like a cartoon character woman wielding an ax, surrounded by heating pads and Advil and wadded-up Kleenex.
In 2013, when PMDD first appeared as its own listing, rather than as a “depressive disorder otherwise unspecified,” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), some feminists
were understandably horrified — women suffering through the days before their periods are not mentally ill; they’re just women. Upon receiving my diagnosis, I, too, objected to pathologizing
my body’s natural processes, to affixing to myself yet another label — Depressed Diana, Anxious Diana, Diana the Insomniac, Diana who turns into a raging maniac each month before her period.
This was not a verdict I wished to advertise. I was not going to sport an awareness ribbon on a pin. I felt ashamed that I’d been deemed out of control of my emotions; I felt like a cartoon character
woman wielding an ax, surrounded by heating pads and Advil and wadded-up Kleenex.
Read more…
1.
When I was 18, while hiking with a friend in Colorado, I tried to impress him by climbing up a rock. A minute later, realizing I was stuck, I called down to him, near tears.
“You’re O.K.,” he said, spreading his arms. “Jump. I’ll catch you.”
So I jumped. Had I been alone, without encouragement, without those open arms, of course I would have found my way down. But I would have struggled.
2.
“I often teach about happiness,” Tamara Star wrote in “7 Habits of Chronically Unhappy People”
on the Huffington Post last fall. According to Star, life is hard only if you make yourself its victim; happy people “take responsibility for how they got themselves into a mess, and focus on getting
themselves out of it as soon as possible.” Her list includes “Your default belief is that life is hard” and “you concentrate on what’s wrong in this world versus what’s
right.”
It’s a not-so-subtle assertion: Depressed people should just stop being so depressed already.
Read more…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
This is the sixth installment of Going Off, a series of Anxiety posts chronicling the author’s attempt to wean off the medications she takes for depression, anxiety and insomnia.
•
I joined Tinder. I did not plan to date while tapering off antidepressants, benzos and sleeping pills. But nor did I plan to go through a breakup.
I am going through a breakup. Now I’m in two kinds of withdrawal.
I know it’s too soon to start dating. At least, I know I’m not at my most datable (“Nice to meet you! I’m trying to get off my psych meds and over my ex!”). But Tinder feels
good. Tinder, with its festive sound effects, floods my brain’s reward center, just like bupropion.
I swipe left on three men who share a name with my brother, on five who share a name with my ex-boyfriend. I swipe right on someone whose name is Okay.
On Tinder, men claim heights well over six feet. They scale mountains and cannonball into pools. They play hard and don’t take life seriously and want a partner in crime. In New York City, I never meet
towering optimist-adventurers. They exist only on dating apps.
In another sense, Tinder simulates reality quite well: All that swiping is like standing in a crowd, scanning 50 people in a minute, thinking, that face could make me happy and that one might be able to and that one could if it didn’t remind me of a person I know who annoys me and that one — no. That one could not. Swiping
right on someone’s profile means, “You could make me happy.” To swipe left is to say, “I don’t believe you could.”
Read more…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
This is the fifth installment of Going Off, a series of Anxiety posts chronicling the author’s attempt to wean off the medications she takes for depression, anxiety and insomnia.
•
Last night at the karaoke place, I could tell that the bartender was happy. It has to be one of the worst service-industry jobs in Manhattan — listening to drunk people croon into microphones. But he
was smiling without restraint. Because my friend and I constituted half of his customers and had belted out the last eight songs, he decided to take a turn. “You can’t hear my accent when I
rap!” he told us as he geared up for “Forgot About Dre.” He was right. His Japanese accent vanished and he sounded like Dr. Dre, if Dr. Dre were a nice person instead of a violent one.
His performance made everyone cheer. His happiness made everyone happy.
When I was taking 300 milligrams of bupropion, unpleasant memories registered as neutral; on 150 milligrams, I recall pain the old-fashioned way — I relive it.
I find myself cataloging the people around me as baseline happy or baseline depressed. Years ago, my mother (baseline happy) told me gently that she’d heard that “depression looks like a gray cloud.”
That made me cry; I was touched by her effort to understand my pain, and disoriented by the reminder that some people aren’t depressed.
Read more…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
In the fall of 2014 the author decided to quit the prescription medications she has been taking to treat her anxiety, depression and insomnia, and began the process of gradually reducing her dosages. In Going Off, a series of Anxiety posts in the coming weeks, she will chronicle the challenges she faces from both the drugs and the withdrawal in her pursuit of a drug-free life.
•
My friends gave me a plant. I’ve never owned a plant on purpose. It came in the mail in need of assembly — bulbs, soil, a forest-green plastic flower pot. The card said, “for our very special
friend.” I was so touched, I cried. I cry several times a day lately, probably because I’m withdrawing from benzos and antidepressants — adjusting to a new world order makes me cry.
I’m a drink that’s constantly about to spill. I read the instructions. My plant was capable of sprouting white flowers. I was going to make that happen, I decided.
Later that day, I was annoyed that I had a plant. It wasn’t even a plant. It was a pot I’d filled with dirt. Every day, I would have to set it during sunny hours on the windowsill, but each evening
when the time came to lower my blinds, I’d have to relocate the pot to my desk. That was two tasks a day. Plus watering.
The prospect overwhelmed me. I’d recently decided that outside of work I don’t have to do any tasks at all. I’m in drug withdrawal; I should be going easy on myself. For instance, filling
my pill box each week is a chore that I keep thinking I’ll do tomorrow. But no one is asking me to fill that pill box. No one will know if the pill box remains empty, if I drink Diet Coke out of a
coffee mug instead of washing a glass, if my mail sits on my kitchen counter, unopened, day after day.
Read more…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
In the fall of 2014 the author decided to quit the prescription medications she has been taking to treat her anxiety, depression and insomnia, and began the process of gradually reducing her dosages. In Going Off, a series of Anxiety posts in the coming weeks, she will chronicle the challenges she faces from both the drugs and the withdrawal in her pursuit of a drug-free life.
•
Two years ago, when my doctor first wrote me a prescription for bupropion, an antidepressant, I asked him, “Will I gain weight?” For me, body image and depression have always been tightly woven
together. “Probably not,” he said, which made me nervous. I wanted him to say, Are you kidding? I would never let that happen to you!
“Will I lose weight?” I asked him, touching a tiny hole on the knee of my jeans. I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask. My depression was the urgent matter at hand. And I wasn’t overweight.
“Most people don’t,” he said.
I didn’t say anything more. After all, I’d been in therapy on and off for two decades — my food and body-image issues, which my doctor and I had discussed at length just minutes before,
should have been long resolved. Besides, I know how cloying it is to hear a thin person grumble about the roll in her stomach. But my relationship to my body remains fraught: I still find fullness depressing,
hunger uplifting, weight-gain depressing, weight-loss uplifting. The more of me there is, the worse I feel.
Read more…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
In the fall of 2014 the author decided to quit the prescription medications she has been taking to treat her anxiety, depression and insomnia, and began the process of gradually reducing her dosages. In Going Off, a series of Anxiety posts in the coming weeks, she will chronicle the challenges she faces from both the drugs and the withdrawal in her pursuit of a drug-free life.
•
One night a few weeks ago I taught a writing class. I had a cold, but the class was an online video chat, so I could fake good health. Because my students could see only my head and shoulders, I wore a nice
red blouse over my sweatpants — the color my mother tells me to wear when I want to look my best. I was disguised as a polished authority figure who was not undergoing drug withdrawal.
Four nights before, I had reduced my dose of lorazepam, the benzodiazepine (anti-anxiety medication) I take before bed, from one milligram to .75 milligrams. The next night I came down with that cold, which
would last nearly a week. If you Google “symptoms of benzo withdrawal,” you’ll find colds. You’ll also find seizures and hallucinations and headaches and strange tingling sensations
and tinnitus and death. Any symptom you can imagine, or can’t imagine, you’ll find somewhere online associated with “benzo withdrawal,” which those in the know call “w/d.”
I talked with my students about breaking through writer’s block and my voice embarrassed me. I sounded like a man trying to sound like a woman. I sounded like Marge Simpson holding forth about writer’s
block. “Writer’s block is mostly fear,” I rasped.
Read more…
