#and i tell my mom i finally was prescribed antidepressants and she tells me shes been on them for years and 'they helped'

[odysseys-blood]

betrayal from your own mother feels so. like you were supposed to protect and care for me but obviously that didnt happen so here i am now.

[redspringthorn]

I'm literally never gonna be over how many times I've gone to doctors and just received literally no help. How many times did I go to a doctor for help with sleep? They never have a shit about just giving me something to make it easier, their solution was just "get mental help it sounds like you just have anxiety" and so I got mental help and got mental help and got mental help over and over and STILL never had a good nights sleep FOR 10 YEARS !!!!

And I go back to the dr when therapy isn't helping my sleep and they say well you need to be in therapy. I say I am and I get told I need to talk to my therapist about sleeping problems. I have talked to them about the sleeping problems, some of them recommending antidepressants and some anti anxiety drugs like benzos especially. And I go through the cycle again. "Well sleep medications can be addictive and it's not good for you to be on if you don't really need it :( " Eventually give up on that therapist and find another one.

And fucking finally I mention sleep problems to a psychiatrist that just offhandedly prescribed me something for sleep.

So I can sleep through the night for the first time in my entire life. I was talking to my mom about it and she goes "oh yeah you were never a good sleeper even when you were a baby"

Now that I have the relief of sleep it's just sinking in how much I've fucking suffered. How any one of these other people I saw could have alleviated my suffering and just fucking didn't. Could have taken pity on me when I told them being unable to sleep was ruining my life and given me something to help but no they had to just tell me to fix my anxiety. How can I fix my anxiety if I can't sleep and my emotional state is absolutely fucked from being sleep deprived for literally my entire fucking life? 26 years?

This medicine I'm on has been around forever, it's side effects are minimal and even positive for me and it's not highly tolerance building. The risks are so fucking minimal. I don't understand why none of these doctors I came to for help ever fucking helped me. I don't see why giving me medicine was seen as this intolerable option as opposed to "just let this person continue never fucking sleeping and getting psychological damage from it" Just let me suffer even though I keep coming back begging for help and then they just get annoyed. I hate all of them so so much for not helping me and just letting me go through that. Just going "well you're mentally ill so the obvious solution is to fix that, anything I give you would just be a bandaid sweetie :(" like I don't deserve a fucking bandaid when I'm suffering.

[rubyeditsandstuff]

this is a vent post with tw’s for abuse, child abuse, medical neglect, csa, mental health including a mention of self-harm and suicide.  it’s just me getting a lot of things off my chest. it’s gonna be long, rough to read, but i need to get this all out of me. 

I can remember getting abused from the time i was around 6-ish. Parents were, and still are, religious nutcases who firmly believed in  “spare the rod, spoil the child”  to the extreme. I would get spanked over the tiniest infraction, even at 6 years old.  If I forgot to do something, if I asked too many questions, if I was “disrespectful”, etc., I would be instructed to lean over a stool in the living room, and my dad would take either a wooden spoon or, usually, the metal handle of a flyswatter, and spank me with it all up and down my buttocks and thighs until they went stinging. I would also be told to go bring it to them, adding another element to the abuse. 

As I got older, I realized I could make the beatings hurt less by padding underwear, wearing multiple pairs if I was told that I was going to get abused. Unfortunately, my parents caught onto this. And I started being told to pull my pants and underwear down before the punishment started. These spankings happened clear up until I was about 14-15. After they stopped, the slapping started. 

My mom would slap me for just about anything. She once slapped me so hard my glasses flew off my face and hit the wall behind me. Another time, we were on the way into town to see my friends and I said something she didn’t like... so, she reached across and backhanded me across the face, then had the nerve to tell me to clean myself up and stop crying before we got there. 

My mom has depression and would bring it up a lot, and use it as an excuse for shitty behavior. But, when I started exhibiting depression/ptsd symptoms, she acted as though I was faking them, or that I didn’t deserve to be taken seriously. My symptoms got so bad, I started failing my homeschool lessons and was unable to do any school work. My mom told me that they “just didn’t know what to do with (me) anymore, “  and dropped me into a public school. I’d been homeschooled my entire life. That huge change, without any ability to adjust, worsened my depression. I couldn’t make myself get out of bed to go to school in the morning. And, instead of realizing I needed help and bringing me to a therapist, or finding a more gentle way of coaxing me... my parents took a different route. They started waking me up in the morning by ripping the blankets off of me suddenly, and hitting up and down my legs with a long, wooden rod, full force. I’d be woken up from a dead sleep like this. And it went on for a month and a half, every single school morning, until I finally threatened to kill myself if they did it, again. 

Somehow, that made them realize, and they brought me to a doctor. I was officially diagnosed with depression and anxiety. I was prescribed antidepressants... and the pills made me violently sick every time i took them. I tried to tell my mom that, and tried to explain to her that I couldn’t take them. She didn’t believe me. And, when I’d refuse to take them willingly, she would literally force them down my throat... she’d grab my hair, jerk my head back, force the pills into my mouth, then hold my mouth closed until I swallowed. I’d always end up throwing them up within an hour of taking them, which just made her angrier. 

I started self-harming as a way to cope. And I’d be guilted for it. My mom would tell me how upset it made her, and how she’d wished I’d stop. She’d shame me for it. Once, when I was heading back to my bedroom with fresh bandages on my arm, my younger brother saw them and asked what they were for. Before I could answer, my mom told him, “ignore it. She’s just doing it for the attention.” 

I was medically neglected all throughout my childhood. My older brother was extremely, violently, physically abusive, often beating me to the point I should have been taken to the hospital. There was one time he threw me up against the basement door and beat me so badly I coughed up blood. When I went to my mom and told her, she told me I must’ve done something to deserve it and sent me to bed. I remember not being able to sleep because the pain in my ribs was so bad. 

With mention of my older brother, he also sexually assaulted me from the time I was 8 years old to 14. I’m not going to go into details on this, but it was repeated and has contributed to my difficult and complicated feelings toward intimacy, now.  I finally, earlier this year, told my mom about what he’d done... she’s been pretending I never said anything since, and siding with him. 

When I was full on raped by someone just after my 18th birthday, my mom was more concerned with the fact that I wasn’t a virgin anymore than she was with the fact I’d been raped. After I started dating my now husband, I had a pregnancy scare and was exhibiting signs of an ectopic pregnancy, which is life-threatening. And my mom reacted to that news by telling me she would slap me if it turned out I was pregnant. Thankfully, it was a false alarm. 

I ended up having to live with him in my adult life, too. Our grandparents passed away and I volunteered to move into their home and look after it, at request of the rest of the family, to make sure no one broke in and that it basically stayed standing. My older brother got dumped on me there. MY parents wanted him out of their house, so they sent him to live with me there.  He proceeded to maliciously trash the home every single day. For a year and a half. I would pull all-nighters, frantically cleaning up he messes he made. For added stress, our extremely passive aggressive aunt, who apparently wanted the house to be a shrine to our grandparents --- her parents --- stopped by weekly for a visit (read: inspection). If there was a single dish out of place, she would threaten to kick us out. I worked myself into the Emergency Room on multiple occasions, overworking myself to the point of hospitalization with the amount of cleaning I had to do just to maintain a standard of livable clean. If I was away from home for more than a day at a time, it would be in such a bad state (dirty dishes, garbage, dirty laundry everywhere) that I would have to clean for hours just to get the worst of it cleaned up. All this severely worsened my physical disabilities. 

I developed severe asthma in my teen years, bad enough that I would stop being able to breathe entirely, would hyperventilate, and even pass out cold on the floor. I remember one particular instance where this happened and, as I was on the floor, curled up, fighting to get a breath in, I heard my mom coming. And she proceeded to step directly over me and walk to the bathroom.  I got severely ill in my late teen years and was bedridden for a month. I barely remember anyone checking on me. I lost 60 ibs in the span of that month. I was so skinny, my dad could put his hands around my waist and just about have his fingers touch. I was too weak to walk. I had to crawl from my bed to the kitchen or bathroom just to keep myself alive. I should’ve been admitted to the hospital. I almost starved to death in my own bed due to neglect. My body still hasn’t fully recovered from this. 

I would get weight shamed constantly. I was never large. In fact, I’d always been a standard weight for my age, but not according to my mom. She would frequently call me into her bedroom, hold up a pair of my pants, stretch it as far as it would go, then tell me “you see this? This is unacceptable. No one is going to love you unless you lose weight”.  She would comment on what I was eating, how much I was eating, too. Hearing all that constantly has resulted in a serious eating disorder, one that almost killed me. 

My dad would force me to eat bad, molding food. He took “waste not, want not” to the level of ridiculous. Once, one of my siblings left a bagel in the toaster for days, forgotten. and my dad blamed me for it, and forced me to eat it despite it being stale and starting to mold. I was then beaten for “lying” about it not being mine, even though it wasn’t. He would dig through the garbage and pull out any food that got thrown away, then read us all the riot act for it, no matter what shape the food was in when it was tossed. He would arbitrarily decide that certain foods were banned from the house on a whim... aka, he once found a piece of a poptart uneaten and went on a rant about us “always wasting food”, then forbade any of us (even my mom) from buying or eating poptarts. 

Once, when I was washing dishes, my dad poured boiling water over my hands for the crime of not listening to him. Another time I was washing them, my dad roughly grabbed my arm and jerked my away from the sink to yell at me about how I wasn’t rinsing the dishes the “right way”

A handful of years ago, I worked up the courage to ask my mom, to her face, why she thought everything she did to me growing up was acceptable. Her response was,  “well, you were a bad-difficult child, so you deserved it. You gave us no choice”. 

When I had a trauma-induced break from reality at 17 and started hallucinating and having delusions, my parents seek mental health help for me. Instead, they brought me to church to be exorcised. I’ll bet you can guess how much that helped... 

My mom actually used mental healthcare as a threat during my teen years. Anytime I started “acting up”  (aka, exhibiting signs of emerging depression, anxiety, and ptsd/cptsd), she would threaten to bring me to the local mental healthcare facility and “leave (me) there. Let them deal with (me)”. She used a similar tactic with CPS, turning the idea of help into a weapon. I was repeatedly told, all throughout my childhood, that if I ever told anyone what was happening at home, or anything about the abuse I was enduring the big, mean scary government would  “take (me) away and put you in a family that doesn’t love you. And you’ll never be able to see your friends, or (insert activity here) ever again! And they’ll take us away and punish us!! You don’t want us to get in trouble, do you?” 

[emyluwinter]

This is my blog because I can write whatever I want. Isn't it? no twst

My mom found my antidepressants in my room, which I haven't been drinking for a long time and just...(I stopped drinking them last year. Because my condition deteriorated dramatically, and the doctor I was with just left me with this terrifying condition. )

She just...

threw them away...

she didn't even ask if I needed them. Maybe if they were overdue, I would understand. But....

She called them "psychotropic." A very rude name for me. And she asked why I didn't tell her anything about it. And why I "prescribed them to myself"

She didn't even listen to me that these are medicines, they can't be bought just like that and without a doctor's prescription.

But she started the old manipulation with the fact that "you're lying again. don't you think I'm a person," and all that sort of thing.

And you know what, honey?I stopped this conversation.

I'm tired of her manipulations and accusations. I am not that little intimidated girl who cannot respond to the hysteria and manipulation of others and an adult who has no idea how not to deal with a child.

I no longer have the strength for all these "proceedings". If I don't like the topic of conversation, I stop it. If I see that a person is not even trying to hear me, I do not consider it necessary to waste my scarce resources and energy on this waste of time.

But the most disgusting thing....this means that she was rummaging through my things again. Throughout my life, she could easily get into my bag/backpack/notebooks/correspondence in my phone or computer.

You can't imagine what a scandal it was when I locked myself in a room just not to hear her screams and verbal attacks.

Damn it, I'm over 25 years old, and I still don't have my "safe place" in my life...

On the one hand, I am glad that I do not use the method of "medical treatment", because if I were taking them now. This would mean that I would be left without medication. I will explain a little about the situation.

Because of the whole situation that is happening now, antidepressants stop being supplied to the country. And from local analogues, there are more side effects than benefits.

And to find a good specialist who will not reduce everything to the fact that for girls it is "find yourself a guy, and give birth quickly" But no one will help you. I'm sorry, I do not know how the boys are doing with this.

For creative people, the most cruel times have come now. Because many have lost their only earnings, which they sought not for a day or two, but by building it over several hard, persistent years...And I really wanted to join this, to do what I want and earn a little. ..

At the local market, it is hardly possible to earn a match for yourself, not a crust of bread. And then, for the most part, many consider "creativity" only a hobby for which it is not even worth paying, but only exploits the creator.

You can't imagine how it pisses me off...

Add to this that in this country they do not treat psychological disorders as something serious.

Many people of the older generation or my peers consider it only "whims" and "take a rag in your teeth, wash the floors and all this will pass" they do not even try to understand what kind of condition it is.

Many associate the words "psychotherapy/psychologist" and antidepressants as consonant that a person is "mad" and "psychiatric hospital". They automatically put an end to the person.

I would like to start treatment...and made another attempt in November. But the specialist who came across to me was too .....strange....

Why does no one send for tests to find out if it's a physiological /biological matter, and not just shove pills and look at the result...

The worst thing is that I can't find any clear research on derealization/depersonalization....Nobody works with it, and nobody wants to deal with it...

and I want to finally feel what it is...to be alive...and not just exist in some disgusting show that I can't turn off or stop all this...

[laws-yellow-submarine]

Forgive me a moment but I need to vent so uhhh scroll on if you'd like or read my ramblings, I don't care either way lol

So like, I posted last week about how I was FINALLY having the appointment to get ADHD meds prescribed, and I was nervous but I was also super excited, and then the appointment just...never happened. Totally wiped from the system, not a word from anyone.

Well I called the office the next day at like 11:30 am and got their voicemail, figured ok no big deal probably on lunch this is easier anyway cause I can just say everything I need to (I have major phone anxiety so I honestly prefer leaving voicemails cause I can't be interrupted and lose track of my thoughts, and it puts it back in their court to contact me). I figured I'd get a call back that afternoon, or maybe the next day.

It's been a week. I haven't heard from anyone.

Now granted I haven't tried calling a second time, mostly because I'm so goddamned frustrated by this entire situation, after months of already trying to get in to see someone about medication (and if you've been here a while you KNOW I've talked in the past about how many hoops I've already had to go through for no reason). Plus there's no reason if they were being professional that they shouldn't have called me back! I was more than willing to give the benefit of the doubt that it was a weird fluke, but now? Not so much.

But that's not even the worst part! The anxiety meds that my current NP pushed for, that I don't personally think I need (or even WANT because anxiety meds have never worked for me) have completely run out, and my automatic refills aren't working! The pharmacy said "we'll contact them for you!" and then nothing! I'm currently in lala land because I had to go off these meds I didn't want a month and a half after starting them!

AND my boyfriend is now getting pissed off at me for not "just making one phone call" because he's under the impression that'll fix everything, not even taking into account that I'm stressed, frustrated, overwhelmed, and going through antidepressant withdrawal, and I've expressed that I don't feel capable of "just making one phone call" right now, and considering all the other goddamn issues I've had with this place, I'm not convinced just calling again will do anything other than make me EVEN MORE FRUSTRATED!

He wants me to just keep pushing through and trying to reach them, at this point I'd prefer to just walk away from it and wait until I'm on different insurance (cause I HAVE to switch by June 18th) and finding a competent therapist, especially since it sure seems like I'd have to start all over anyway...

Oh and to top it all off, I was complaining to my mom about the appointment and she flat out told me she went to this place as a teenager and had similar issues, and the patient records she has to look through for her job that come from them haven't improved her opinion on how they operate, so it's not even like this place has a good reputation and I'm just having bad luck, this is the NORM! Like, yes I want/need to medicate my ADHD, but you can't tell me that at this point I'd get them to do it before my insurance ran out anyway...

Anyway this is probably not coherent and I apologize but my boyfriend made some passive aggressive bullshit comment to me about it all and I just had to scream because otherwise I would lose it. Thanks y'all

[plastic-portrait]

Hi I apologize if this adds to your workload, so feel free to ignore or so.. but I was wondering if you're still doing the writing prompts, 21 and 44 from the Hurt/Comfort for Sal and Larry? Thank you ♡

A common branSorry for being so late! This is actually an interesting combo of prompts, I had to think for a bit about how to do it. Hope you enjoy! Also TW, I’m not sure if this will be a trigger subject for any of you lovelies but I want to make sure I mention that this prompt contains mentions to things such as substance abuse. 

21: “Where are you? Tell me where you are.”

44: “You’re burning up.”

(Larry’s POV)

I was pacing back and forth across my room, radio in hand. 

“Sal, answer me. Over.” God, it was the hundredth fucking time I’d said the exact same thing. Where was he? I hadn’t seen or heard from him in days. All I got from the others were shaking heads and shrugged shoulders. 

A click and static, then... not Sal. “Hey Larry, it’s Ash. Robert said he saw him come home with his dad two days ago. He went back to work but Sal never came out. Think you can check it out? I’d join you but I have to stay with my brother. Over.” 

I was both relieved and even more worried. This wasn’t what I had expected. “Thanks, Ash. I’m on my way now. Over and out.” 

I swear I’ve never burst into mom’s room like that before. She was confused, clearly, and asked what was up. 

“Can I borrow your keys?” I was out of breath for some reason. 

“Oh, honey, what for?” She sat up in her bed. 

I thought about telling the truth, but I wasn’t sure how that would go. “Sal’s dad is at work and Sal lost his key, so he can’t get into the apartment.”

“Oh, okay sweetie. They’re on the kitchen counter.”

“Thanks, mom. Love you!” I said, quickly running out the door. 

The elevator had never been this slow, had it? Every inch took hours in my mind, leaving me to worry if Sal was even here. Was I wasting time?

Finally, the doors opened. The hall was so empty, so quiet it almost hurt. I could’ve heard the rustling of the carpet if I stopped. I unlocked the apartment door. Walked inside. Nothing.

“Where are you? Tell me where you are Sal.” Normally he would’ve chuckled at my voice cracking like that. 

I looked around the rooms, finally making my way to his bedroom. Something hit the back of the door as I opened it, rattled. I saw a pile of tangled blue hair underneath the edge of the blankets on his bed. I shouted his name and ran over to him, turning him over. He was asleep. It was one of the very few times I had ever seen his face, scarred over with small round holes and larger scars, varying in shape and size like close-up freckles. His blue eye sat in a cup of water on his bedside table. 

I pressed the back of my hand to his forehead. “You’re burning up. Fuck” I whispered under my breath. 

I shook him to try and wake him up. Nothing. His breathing was slow, barely there at all. I grabbed his phone and called for an ambulance. 

“911, what’s your emergency?” A woman spoke.

“I’m at the Addison Apartments, my friend has been missing for several days and I found him, he isn’t responding to me and he’s barely breathing.”

“I’m sending an ambulance to the location, sir. Can you stay on the line with me until they arrive?”

“Yeah, yeah I can stay,” I tucked the phone between my ear and my shoulder, and picked Sal up, carrying him out of the room. He was so much lighter than I remembered. 

When I turned to leave the bedroom, I saw what had hit the door on my way in. An orange bottle, with maybe two pills left inside. Several more empty bottles and one or two full sat on the bookshelf. 

“God damn it, Sal! What were you thinking?” I was sure he wouldn’t hear me, but that was the least of my concerns right now. As long as he made it, I didn’t care.

I waited with him on the front steps of the apartment building for the ambulance. They arrived quickly, and loaded him into the vehicle, with a respirator mask and all. I hadn’t seen them carry away someone alive before. Hopefully, Sal stayed that way. I sat in the ambulance with him, crying my eyes out and just wishing he would be okay. 

After he was settled in, a male EMT sat next to me with a clipboard and asked me what happened. I explained everything I knew. 

“Do you know which medications he had access to?” A lot, for sure. 

“Uh, I know he had a leftover Duragesic prescription, sertraline, Xanax, and um...” I stopped to think, remembering what Sal had told me each one was for. I had asked why he had so many once. “and I know he used doxepin. I think other than that it was just normal household stuff.”

The EMT wrote quickly. “Thank you sir, this helps us radio to the hospital so they’re ready when we get there. We are going to do everything we can.” He spoke to the other EMT, some things I didn’t really understand. 

I held Sal’s hand, which was extremely warm. “It’s gonna be okay Sal. I promise. You’re... You’re gonna be okay.” I couldn’t even see him through the tears in my eyes, just a blur of blue and white. 

When we got to the hospital, they put Sal on one of the rolling beds and they let me stay in the waiting room until he was treated. I wasn’t sure if it was hours or minutes before they let me see him. 

He turned to look at me, slowly. “Larry? What am... what are we doing here?”

“I found you in your room. It’s okay now, you’ll be okay and we’ll go home soon.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath. “Why?”

“Why what, Sal?” 

“Why did you come find me?” He placed his hand on top of mine at the edge of the bed.

“Because I wasn’t just gonna let you die, man, you’re the best thing I’ve got here. I know there are things I’ll never know about your life. I don’t know what happened to you, why you have to feel like this every day. But...” I squeezed his hand gently, “But I’m here. I want to help, I know it doesn’t ever go away totally but I know it can get better. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

I could tell he was crying now. “I’m sorry, Larry. I shouldn’t have...”

“I know. I know. But we just have to move forward from here. I love you, man. We’ll get through this.” 

Our conversation was interrupted by a nurse, checking Sal’s vitals and anything else he needs.  “He’s stable and can be released tomorrow after overnight observation. His father has been notified and is on his way. You are welcome to stay as long as he allows it.” 

“Thank you,” I said, and she nodded to me as she left the room. 

I turned back to Sal. “After you come home, we can all get together and camp out in the treehouse. Mom will make us cookies. Sound good?”

“Yeah. Sounds good.” 

We sat there together for most of the night, even when Henry showed up. I promised I would always be there for Sal, and I’ll be damned if I can’t keep that promise.

A/N: I hope you guys liked this one! I know it’s a bit dark but it’s just what I felt when reading these prompts. If you guys want something fluffier let me know!

For reference to understand why Sal would have these, the medications listed in this prompt: 

Duragesic: A brand of fentanyl that’s used to further treat pain after surgeries. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is between 50 and 100 times stronger than morphine. It is prescribed by surgeons after major surgeries to treat extreme pain, or used for cancer patients. With Sal’s facial trauma he would likely have this or a similar prescription after his surgeries. 

Sertraline: A common brand of sertraline is Zoloft, it is a type of antidepressant used to treat PTSD symptoms. 

Xanax:  A common brand of alprazolam, it is used to treat anxiety and panic disorder, I’m guessing many of you already know what this is but just in case!

Doxepin: A common brand of doxepin is Prudoxin, it is used to treat anxiety, depression, and chronic insomnia or other sleep disorders. 

[maren-as-an-adult]

The 2020 Experience, Part 4

December was...rough. Every free moment I had was spent looking for better paying jobs and more apartments. Christmas gifts were planned and purchased under extreme budget. I had an upcoming OB-GYN appointment. And the accumulated stress finally broke me physically and mentally.

I started noticing it when I had my OB-GYN appointment. My appointment wasn’t until 4:30pm, but I wanted to get some Christmas shopping done, so I took an early train into Atlantic Terminal to do some shopping in and around Barclay’s Center. I didn’t have breakfast before I left, so I grabbed a latte and a slice of iced lemon cake from Starbucks. There were some benches outside where I sat down and ate. Afterwards, I hit up Target and Marshall’s. Once I was in line for Marshall’s, I started feeling... off. I could feel my pulse rushing in my face, and my stomach felt simultaneously empty and twisted upside down. I couldn’t tell if I felt like I was going to vomit or poop, or if I was just really gassy and needed to fart. I made it through purchasing and left to sit down somewhere, anywhere. I think I settled down in front of either TJ Maxx or Burlington on the ground. I pulled my knees into my chest, waiting and hoping for this feeling to pass. After about 15 minutes and no change, I knew I needed to find a bathroom. And in COVID times, I had a better chance of finding a four-leaf clover growing out of the concrete than a public toilet I could access.

Target, however, was my savior. Having purchased from them earlier, I happily took advantage of their open and clean bathroom facilities. I won’t go into too much detail, but I will say I spent a long time on that toilet trying to feel better. Eventually I had to move on, and I decided I would go outside and get as much fresh air as I could, hoping that would somehow cure me of this... whatever feeling it was. It helped, or at least that’s what I told myself as I slowly sipped water from my water bottle. I tried to make one last stop at one last shop before heading down to Bay Ridge for my OB-GYN appointment, but after two instances where I was forced to sit down again and wait for the feeling to pass to something barely more manageable, I decided the best course of action would be to arrive exceptionally early to my appointment and hope they had an unoccupied bathroom I could access.

Thankfully, they did. I somehow managed a thirty minute train ride, a ten minute wait for the bus, a ten minute bus ride, and a ten minute walk to the doctor’s office, where after filling out a few forms I retreated to their very clean single occupancy bathroom. I felt awful and wanted something done about it, so I open mouth breathed while kneeling in front of the toilet bowl for a while. It’s a technique I use when I feel like I may throw up and want to encourage my stomach to expel whatever’s clearly upsetting it. [I also wish to take this moment to make this very clear: I am not, nor have I ever been, bulimic. I don’t endorse or condone bulimia. I’m sure it’s very easy to read what I just wrote as inducing vomiting to purposefully purge, but it is not. I was not trying to make myself vomit, but I was prepared for that to happen should my body have decided that’s what it needed to do.] What ended up happening was about five minutes of dry heaving before my body apparently decided that because there was nothing there, that nothing was wrong anymore.

What was wrong with me? I hadn’t interacted with anyone who was sick, had I? I had recently started babysitting, could I have gotten something from one of the kids? Was I not as diligent as I thought I’d been with maintaining social distance and wearing a mask and sanitizing and washing my hands? Or was it something else? All I’d had to eat that day was some processed cake and a sugary latte, could I possibly have developed celiac disease overnight? Was my body finally shutting down it’s lactose-digesting functions? Was I just really overcaffeinated because I forgot to specify “half-caf” in my Starbucks order?

I posited these queries to my doctor while she poked around my vagina. She said it was possible I could be lactose intolerant or I could be crashing from the caffeine. When the staff had taken my temperature I wasn’t running a fever, so it wasn’t likely I’d caught anything off of someone. With a final fingering to gauge the position of my uterus (I learned it has a slight anterior tilt), my appointment was done and I was free to go home. Though I felt better, I decided against calling on my old roommates and to instead just head back to Graham’s. I made one last gift purchase before hopping on the LIRR, and my Christmas shopping was essentially done.

The feeling didn’t disappear though, and on some days it became unmanageable. My GI system was clearly in distress, and not a lot was helping. I found a few packs of ginger turmeric tea at Graham’s house and made myself a cup, firmly placing my faith in the healing properties of what some (uncultured) people call “hot leaf juice”. I think it helped, but I can’t be sure. I’d told Graham about what was going on and what I thought it could be, and he could sympathize and to a degree empathize. It wasn’t until one night when I was again dry heaving into a toilet bowl that Graham fully saw what an awful state I was in. I told him at this point I thought it was a manifestation of the stress we’d been under for the past eight weeks. For eight weeks we’d been searching for apartments, passing on nice ones just out of our budget, trying to come to terms with the infinite number of mediocre same-floor plan, same-color, same-appliances, same-building looking ones, and getting discouraged with the shitty, falling apart ones. I had spent my first Thanksgiving away from my family and had resigned myself to spending Christmas apart from my family for the first time as well. I’d had three separate COVID tests in the past two months. I hadn’t spoken to my therapist since before Thanksgiving. And I had spent the entire month at Graham’s family’s house, which was not something I had wanted.

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. Truly, I’m indebted to Graham’s mom for letting me not only stay with them rent-free (but agreeing to walk their dogs) but also keep my stuff there while she is also getting ready to move out. But I have never felt comfortable calling someone else’s place my home. I cannot help but feel like an outsider, and no matter how many times people tell me to “make [myself] comfortable” and “help [myself] to whatever food there is” I will feel like an imposition and a burden. It’s only my anxiety coming through, but it comes through LOUD.

I finally scheduled an appointment with my therapist again, and poured all this out to him. I told him exactly how bad things had gotten, and not for the first time I considered asking to be prescribed anti-anxiety medication and possibly antidepressants. I decided to keep going without them...for now.

Christmas Eve came and Graham, his family, and I all celebrated together. We were gifted some lovely items to start our life living together, like a knife set, a set of glasses, new bedding, and a casserole dish. It was a lovely respite from the stress.

On Christmas Day, Graham and I went to see another apartment. This apartment was in the same building as the apartment we almost signed for, and the only differences were that this apartment was on a lower floor and didn’t have a balcony. It was also almost $100/month less than what we had almost agreed to. The owner said he would send over the application and answers to our questions on Monday. We both felt good about this apartment.

When Monday came with no e-mail from the guy, I reached out to him to ask when we could expect it. His response was that he had just been diagnosed with COVID-19 and now wanted to sell instead of rent. This became all too much for me, and when I got back into Graham’s car as we were out running errands, I started screaming. I hadn’t screamed like this since a particularly bad day of work I had back when I worked at Target. It was cathartic, but I felt cold and disconnected from Graham for the rest of the day. Something had broken inside me, and I wasn’t sure if it was my heart, my soul, my mind, or all three. It took a while for me to recover, and honestly I’m still hurt and feel betrayed by this guy. I understand I cannot speak for what’s best for him or what he felt he should have done, but Graham and I felt that we were given the runaround by this guy. We scheduled another COVID test for ourselves, and tried to move forward.

We made it to New Year’s Eve, and stayed up to watch 2020 end. New Year’s felt somber this year, and it felt hard to celebrate the start of a new year when the one we just went through was so damaging.

But we made it. We’re here, and it’s the first week of January in 2021. Currently there are radical conservatives storming the Capitol protesting the electoral college results, but in less than 20 days, Trump will be out of office. I’ve given myself goals that are manageable for the new year, and Graham and I have three applications out for three different apartments, and there’s a chance we may be able to get the apartment we saw on Christmas Day. We keep moving forward, because the alternative is to not move at all.

And I refuse to allow that for myself.

[anger----issues]

Okay so, last Thursday I had to leave school because of an anxiety attack, I have a certain classmate who triggers me now apparently (verbally abusive classmate I mentioned in the last ask)

We had a big psychology project where we had to do surveys, write reports and all kinds of fancy stuff, it was super exciting. Until my classmate decided, even after I had done the majority of the work since she had been sleeping away 2 days of the 4 days we had to do the project, that she’d blame everything on me, it was my fault we were behind, my fault there were flaws in the data, my fault that the other’s work were better than ours, my fault that our schedules didn’t match ect. ect...

And first I was just annoyed considering we were behind because she just really loves smoking weed and being asleep all day because of it. But then it really started to get to me, I knew it wasn’t my fault, but it was the repetition, the guilt-tripping, and constantly telling me that even though I worked really hard, it just wasn’t good enough for her, that really started to hit me.

So for 3 days I stayed home, I tried going some of the days, but as soon as I got myself out of bed and thought about school, it felt hard to breathe.. then I went that Thursday, saw my classmate, and she began her criticizing again... and I just had to get out. I went to the library when I got off the train bc it was too early for me to be home and I didn’t want my mom to question me, so I thought “might as well do some of that homework for tomorrow” I pulled up the assignment and the anxiety was back, my entire body was filled with fear and my head was a mess..

So Friday I get an appointment with my doctor, I tell him that I think school might be stressing me out, and I let him know that I won’t be starting up with a new psychiatrist before in March (finally got new psychiatrist btw yaay), so he tries calling her to see if she has an earlier appointment, sadly she doesn’t take phone calls on fridays, so my doctors tells me that he will call me if he hears anything. Two hours later I get a call from my doctor, and apparently he got in contact with my psychiatrist who gave him permission to prescribe me medication.

So I get to the doctor again, blood tests, urine test, heart electrolytes test?? (Urine test part was super awkward bc I had my blood test taken in a room with a very cute person and the nurse handed me a cup and asked if I could pee and I was like “uhh idk but I’ll try”, but me and the cute person both had to wait for the heart test thingie and we sat next to eachother and I was just thinking “how tf am I supposed to go pee in a cup when this really attractive person knows I’m about to go pee in a cup”) I have a short chat with my doctor, about side effects, dosage ect. He writes my prescription, I immediately go to the pharmacy to pick it up, very nice pharmacy lady tells me more about how the pills work, the side effects I’ll definitely be feeling, how to make them less terrible ect. ect.

So very long story short, I’m now 5 days on antidepressants!

[audreygracethomas]

Depression has been a major pain point for me throughout my life, as I know it has been for a large majority of human beings on this Earth as well. I am not special or different or unique for dealing with mental health challenges, and to be honest no one else is either. What is unique though, is how each one of us deals with it, our different triggers, intrusive thoughts, events that impact our depression, and so many other details. That’s what’s important to realize about our mental health struggles is that individually it’s all in our details. We each have a story tied to our struggles and we each feel different about what we’ve been through.

My goal in discussing my mental health is not to draw attention to myself as a single entity, but to draw attention to the issue at hand. To set an example that talking about how you feel or what you’re going through is perfectly ok and reasonable. We need more people who face mental illness to speak up on it so that others can see that it’s not because anything is wrong with you, you didn’t choose this. You didn’t wake up one day and say “I want to be so anxious that I make myself physically ill” or “I want to be so depressed that I never leave my bed and I never eat.” This is something that so many people do not understand, and those are the people who have most likely never been in that position. Revealing our narratives might help them understand from a more empathetic point of view. If sharing can help even one person better understand the struggles and the realities that mental illness carries, then at that point I’ll feel we’ve succeeded.

I was diagnosed with a general anxiety disorder around the age of 13. I knew way before that though that something felt off and different. I grew up being constantly inside my head. I would make up stories, plan out conversations, and pretend I was someone i wasn’t. And in all of this I developed a deep anxiety about the real world around me. And I often think my dreams of what I wanted to be created an intense insecurity of who I really was. When my doctor finally made the realization that there was something going on, she prescribed me my very first anti depressant. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember taking something everyday and then suddenly I stopped taking it, more than likely my mom wasn’t a huge fan of me being on medication she felt I “didn’t need.” But, that was a different era where mental illness was brushed to the side. I can’t be upset about that, I was a child.

Around the age of 17 I saw a psychiatrist for the first time who prescribed me Zoloft. I remember that was the very first antidepressant I ever fully experienced. I’ll never forget him telling me that a way to alleviate my anxiety is to do something that really scares me. He asked me what my biggest fear was and I of course said “heights.” So he told me “I want you to go ride a rollercoaster. The tallest one you can find. I want you to experience something scary and then the feeling that comes after when you finished doing the scary thing” — I never went to ride the rollercoaster. However, what he was trying to say to me began to sink in. The more we overcome what we’re afraid of, the more we see that the anxiety was often “for nothing” and we realize that we really can do scary things, whether it’s telling someone how you feel about them, flying in planes, riding a rollercoaster, trying something new, the list goes on... That really changed the way that I saw things moving forward. And while the anxiety never went away, I experienced a new sense of bravery I never saw before.

Today I exhibited that same bravery I learned about all those years ago. Today has been extremely hard and my depression is in full force. I sat in my bed and I just cried. Only this time I knew exactly what I was crying about. Which inherently made it worse because I had to feel that pain on another level. The important thing here, is that I knew I had a work meeting within fifteen minutes of the peak of my breakdown so I had to quickly force myself together. I was afraid to jump into this meeting because I knew I looked horrible with my puffy, red eyes. At that point I had a choice, cancel the meeting and reschedule. Or get out of the bed, wash my face, and pull myself together enough to pull through it. I’m really proud that I made the choice to “ride the rollercoaster” so to speak, and pull myself together even though I was scared that my current vulnerabilities would show, even though I was scared of looking the way I did, and even though I was scared to go into a meeting where I didn’t know what to expect... I did it. Today, this very moment was my “heights” and I conquered it. While it is a small accomplishment to some, it was a huge accomplishment to me. But really though, do “small accomplishments” really even exist?

Pictured here is me after crying, breaking down, and then choosing to go splash water on my face, take a deep breath, and do what I had to do for my job. It’s what anxiety and depression all wrapped up into one looks like for me today. It is the reality of my day, but it is also the top of the mountain that I made myself climb. It’s the rollercoaster I didn’t want to ride. It is reality.

[feelingfreak]

of monsters and moms

When I was a child, elementary and middle school ages, my mother was crazy.  In fact, she was emotionally abusive and negligent of my needs.  I was terrified of her.  It wasn’t until my younger brother was born that she started to change.  I was 12 when he was born.

My older brother and I, like many children our age, had chores to complete before Mom came home.  If we didn’t finish, she would yell and scream at us.  She’d throw and break things.  One time, she broke all the dirty dishes in the sink because we hadn’t cleaned them.  After she was finished yelling, she’d usually go to her bedroom, then come out and apologize, tell us she loved us, that we made her go crazy, and make us tell her that we forgave her.

Sometimes she’d just snap and start yelling without a cause that I know of.  We never knew what kind of mood she’d be in when she got home.  I was always afraid.  Always.

When I was in 6th grade, I remember being pulled out of my math class by the guidance counselor.  She took me to her office, where Mom was waiting.  My teachers were concerned that I seemed depressed.  I was.  I had already been cutting myself, not that Mom knew.  She never knew until I told her when I was 16.  They asked me if I’d like to talk to someone about feeling sad.  I said yes.  Mom promised me she’d take me to see someone.  She didn’t. 

When I was younger, I fell frequently and got hurt.  Mom took me to the doctor.  I remember him asking me if, deep down inside me, there was a smiley face or a sad face.  I told him a sad face.  He told Mom that he thought I needed a psychological evaluation.  She scoffed and never got me one.

Mom married an alcoholic when I was 11.  He made things even more miserable, especially when he WASN’T drinking and had no work.  It wasn’t all bad.  I gained some cousins and we spent time at a lake during the summer.  But I was extremely unhappy.  My step-father had some kind of violent outburst and ended up slamming a door on my mom’s arm.  She kicked him out and promised to never let him come back.  Another broken promise.  She took him back, but it didn’t last long.

By this time, my little brother was born and Mom started to be less unpredictable.  More happy.  Sometimes, I’m jealous of my little brother for the mother he grew up with.  She was always there for him.  I guess she learned from her mistakes.  Overall, I’m extremely glad that he didn’t have to experience what I did.

Fast forward several years.  I’m 16, a junior in high school.  I start to scare myself with how much I’m considering taking my own life.  I think about it almost every day.  I cut myself frequently.  Desperate for help, I finally tell Mom that I’ve been hurting myself and that I need help.  I saw the family physician who prescribed me an antidepressant.  Mom also got me in to see a counselor, but it was through a church service and I was going through a Wicca phase.  The counselor had me play with toys and asked what they were feeling and even made a comment about Wicca when I told her I was exploring my spirituality.  Obviously, I was very uncomfortable with her and never went back to see her.  Mom never took me to see anyone else.  Well, not until I was 21 and in the midst of a crisis away at college.  Those are details for another time, though.

I’m angry.  My older brother had physical issues that Mom took care of.  She never took care of me.  She never gave me what I needed.  Never.  My therapist thinks my anger has worked as a defense mechanism to protect me from the pain my mother has caused me.  I think she’s right.  When I think about it and start to feel the pain, I immediately get angry and end up not feeling the pain and sorrow.  I never get to the point where I can heal.  Even typing this out, I’ve been getting angrier and angrier, pounding my fingers on the keyboard.

My childhood wasn’t all horrible, of course.  There were good moments.  Maybe more than the few I can remember.  But I mostly remember the fear and the sorrow and loneliness I felt.  When my little brother was born, I didn’t feel quite as lonely.  He was a light in my darkness.

I often think of my mother, as she was, as a “monster.”  I equate expressing anger with being a monster.  I do not like expressing anger.  I’ve always felt like it was unacceptable, because of how my mother made me feel--unloved, insignificant, afraid, useless.  I tend to ignore anger and bottle it up.  I actually have done this with most emotions over the years.  I’m just uncomfortable with emotions.  Even joy, once it reaches a certain point, makes me uncomfortable.

So here I am, almost 36-years-old, trying to learn how to healthily handle emotions.  Something a little ironic is that my mom was a social worker and had a degree in psychology.  You’d think things would’ve been different.  I don’t blame Mom for all my problems.  There’s another, smaller, part of my childhood that I don’t deal with well and was afraid to tell her about, which actually made things worse.  I also have bipolar disorder.  They aren’t too sure about the causes, so it could be related to the trauma I experienced, but I don’t blame Mom for that.

Anyway, I’ve cried while writing this and that felt good.  I’m trying to allow myself to experiences emotions.  Only by experiencing them, can I heal.  I’m just realizing how true that this is.  I wanted to share all of this anonymously, which is why I’ve written it down here.

[talix18]

November 19

(Fiction)

I know it’s my house – I know that I live here, but I have no emotional attachment to the place at all. The landscaping is half-hearted at best – black mulch with a few flowers whose tops have already become deer food. There are sticks piled everywhere – next to the wood pile, next to the shed, and filling a trash can at the back of the driveway. At least the siding on the house is new. That’s all I notice before Mom has the patio door open and I follow her in. This *is* a great patio, I think as she opens the back door, and I have visions of my two gray cats lounging in the sunlight. The two gray cats are standing in the dining room watching us. I haven’t been home for a few weeks but Mom’s been taking care of them, so they know the sound of her car. When they see me, they get excited. Their tails are twitching, Lily is making little cooing noises, and Jack waits to see where I’m going to settle so he can be at my side. It’s easy to be loving with them; I like animals better than most people.

“Where do you want to set up – in bed or on the couch?” Mom asks. “The couch, I think,” I answer. “The bed probably needs clean sheets.”

“Do you want me to change them for you?”

I chuckle. “I think I’m up to changing the sheets, Ma.”

“What about food? I brought you some chili and some vegetable soup but I imagine the refrigerator is empty…”

“But the freezer isn’t; neither is the pantry. I certainly have enough pasta and tuna fish to get me through until I go to the store.”

Mom sighs. I grab my phone charger and tablet from the bedroom and settle on the couch. “Are you sure I can’t get you anything?” she asks.

“Mom, I’m fine. I just want to snuggle with my cats and breathe for a little while. I promise I’ll let you know if there’s something I need.”

She scratches Jack’s head – he’s already jumped on the couch at my feet.“Okay. I’ll go. I’m sure it feels good to be home.”

Feel? I’m not sure I feel anything about being here, but it will be refreshing to have some alone time. “It does. I’m sure we’ll be fine.” Mom kissed my forehead. “I’m sure you will. Remember I have my kitties tomorrow but I’ll be home after that. Do you think you’re going to go to your home group?”

I thought about it. “Don’t see why not. Assuming I’m not asleep. It will be good to get out.”

“Probably. Don’t push yourself. Call me if you need anything.” Mom went over to Lily, who’d taken her place on top of the cat tower. “Take care of your mommy. I’ll see you later.” Mom threw her tote bag over her shoulder and walked to the back door. “Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you. For everything.”

Mom shrugged, but I could see her eyes fill. “That’s what moms are for.” She pulled the back door closed behind her.

I looked around. “Well,” I said to Jack, who was looking up at me. “Here we are.” I looked around the room at the bookcases crowded with books and tchotkes, the unfinished floors, the dusty TV stand, and sighed. I laid back and picked up my phone to see what was happening on the Internet, scrolled comments for a few minutes, put it back down and closed my eyes. Now what?

--------------------------------------------------

I woke up about an hour later – the sun was close to setting, so I got up and turned some lights on. I thought about unpacking, but couldn’t stop looking around at the disarray I’d left behind. Vacation souvenirs strewn across the desk and dining room table, bare nails on the walls, and so much stuff. SO much stuff.

It wasn’t that I had forgotten my life, exactly. I knew in my head I was a collector and a saver and ridiculously sentimental, and I could picture my house in my mind before I got home. I knew what I would be walking into. I didn’t know how I’d react to it – I was almost uncomfortable. Disgusted, even. I couldn’t remember ever feeling comfortable there – how could I with all the clutter? All the chaos? Why didn’t it bother me before?

Because that was Before, I told myself. Before the break, Before the treatment, Before they turned my brain off and on, hoping to break the hold my depression had on me. Before the hospital, Before the study, Before the blackness.

And this was After.

My depression had been part of me my entire life – I don’t remember ever not feeling sad around the edges or overly concerned about death or loss or just feeling things way too deeply. I never felt like I fit in at school, despite having friends and getting – well, grades – and graduating and going to college. I was always wondering what I should be doing and saying to look normal to everyone else, sure that I was giving myself away somehow. As what? I didn’t know. It was just that everyone around me went through their days making it look easy and it was so damn hard for me just to get out of bed.

It got worse as I got older, but I was also hungover a lot of the time. I was a late bloomer, but filled my college years and those immediately after with plenty of pot and alcohol. The pot made it easier to sit still in my own skin; the alcohol shut my mind off entirely. Especially once I started taking antidepressants. They tell you not to drink on those things, but no one told me my body would continue to function long after my consciousness had switched off. Luckily the police stopped me before I did any damage to anyone else, and the idea of a year behind bars was enough to scare me straight.

But my depression was still there. Twenty years and twelve steps didn’t take that away. Neither did talking or med changes or EMDR. And it was getting worse – now I was twenty years older and not so confident in my ability to make someone love me or even like me. I had plenty of acquaintances and even some good friends but still felt fundamentally alone. Everyone I knew was married or had kids and always had something to do. I did everything alone. It became easier to just do nothing.

Just leaving the house became work – something I made myself do because I was supposed to. I was supposed to show up at work to earn the money that paid the mortgage and kept the lights on and made me look like a productive member of society. I felt like a robot that didn’t have the luxury of being on autopilot. I gave myself directions in small bits: Go into the bathroom. Open the medicine chest. Pick up the toothbrush and toothpaste. Turn the water on. Put the toothpaste on the toothbrush. Brush your teeth. Upper and lower, inside and outside, gums and tongue. Rinse the brush. Clean your retainers. Rinse them off. Rinse off the toothbrush and put it back. Rinse your mouth out. Wipe your face. There. Was that so bad?

Yes, actually, it was that bad, and it was exhausting having to coax myself through every step of every day. And that was doing the bare minimum. Washing dishes, scooping litterboxes, taking showers, doing laundry, going to the grocery store – just enough to keep everything looking normal to everyone else. I rarely invited people over to my house because I was ashamed of the chaos, but never had the energy or motivation to do anything about it. I wanted my house to be cozy and inviting, but as the disorder escalated, it became harder to think about reversing. The broken dresser drawers sat on the floor in the middle of the bedroom. The furniture from the spare room stayed piled in the front. The hole in the wall in the spare room stayed unpatched.

And then I just stopped. I stopped walking myself through every step of every day. I stopped doing the laundry until I had literally nothing left to wear and then it never got put away. I stopped washing dishes and grocery shopping and defaulted to pizza and Chinese food. I stopped looking in the mirror at what I was wearing before I went to work. I stopped going to meetings. I didn’t want to use, because using meant not showing up for the people who loved me. I just didn’t want to do anything else either. My psychiatrist tried switching my meds around and I kept taking everything as prescribed until that became too much work too. Once I quit my meds the spiral was quick – I called out of work for a week and didn’t leave my house or answer the phone and cried when I realized I hadn’t emptied the litter boxes all week.

They were supposed to keep me from letting go – they needed me to take care of them and didn’t ask to be here. I still cared about their comfort. I cried and said I was sorry and finally called my mother and begged her to come do it for me. She and my step-father walked into my house, saw the state it was in, and got scared. “Have you been taking your meds?”

“No,” I wailed. Then we were in the car and in the emergency room and finally in the psych ward. Once my mother started crying so did I. I couldn’t stop crying even when the snot was running down my face. I didn’t stop crying until they left me there in the hospital bed, hooked up to saline and pumped with something that switched everything to flat. This was it. I no longer had any choices. I had finally let go. And it was almost a relief.

[endlesssummer77]

CICO works (with help from Contrave)

I'm never doing a fad diet again. Over the course of the past 5 months, I've slowly, but surely, lost a little over 30 lbs. How? CICO and contrave.

Contrave has changed my life. I know that sounds a little dramatic, but it's true. I can't believe it took me so long to get started on it. I'd had an almost-full bottle (120 pills) that Mom let me have last year when I visited for Christmas. She had gotten them prescribed because she wanted to try them out, but couldn't tolerate the side effects (she said they made her really irritable 😒).

Anyway, I was curious but skeptical. Contrave contains bupropion (antidepressant) and naltrexone (opioid antagonist), and not a single stimulant - or anything else that's been well-studied for weight loss. I'm not one to bother with OTC diet pills (they're pretty much all the same anyway) because they're unregulated and unproven, but I have been on phentermine a few times. Unfortunately, phentermine treatment is limited to 12 weeks at a time, and the awesome appetite suppressant effects diminishes quite a bit after the first few weeks, anyway.

I had a general idea of how contrave could work (background info: I have a formal education in human anatomy & physiology, biochemistry, introductory pharmacology, and human pathophysiology):

1. Naltrexone blocks endogenous opioids from attaching to opiate receptors, an action which mediates a dopamine response (dopamine is fundamental to the brain's reward center and the development of addiction). By blocking these receptors, one could theoretically reduce or eliminate the biochemical process that reinforces addictive behavior. This has already been extensively researched as a treatment for alcoholism.

2. Bupropion is an NE (aka adrenaline) and dopamine reuptake inhibitor. This means that bupropion prevents the "stop" of NE and dopamine activity, which leads to a whole bunch of other effects. Bupropion is chemically related to amphetamines, which explains this effect on certain neurotransmitters, but it also stimulates the release of 2 other molecules, alpha MSH and AGRP, which are involved in a lot of autonomic processes in the body, including regulation of appetite and energy expenditure. Most research that exists has focused on the psychological effects of bupropion as it is normally used to treat depression and to help people quit smoking.

So here's the interesting part:

Those 2 other molecules that are stimulated by bupropion? They each play a vital role in explaining how bupropion could be effective for weight loss:

a) alpha MSH does a lot of things, including appetite reduction and increases in energy expenditure (metabolism). Theoretically then, you could take just bupropion for weight loss right? Well, no. Like nearly every physiological process in our bodies, the cells that release a-MSH have a self-limiting feature to stop the whole process from going on indefinitely. Otherwise, humans could run out of energy needed to live.

b) This limiting feature works because cells release AGRP at the same time as a-MSH. AGRP's only function is to attach back to the cell that released it. When enough AGRP has attached, a signal is sent inside the cell telling it to stop producing both a-MSH and AGRP.

This basically means that no matter how much bupropion you take, its weight loss effects are going to be limited by your body's natural processes.

So back to my point, how does contrave work, exactly? I've already explained how it can help reduce appetite and increases metabolism via release of a-MSH, and how this process is self-limited by the concurrent release of AGRP. Theoretically, if we could find a way to eliminate or block AGRP without affecting a-MSH, then the potential of bupropion for weight control could be significant.

Well, here's the kicker... AGRP IS A TYPE OF BETA ENDORPHIN!

It's an endogenous opioid! This means that the sites AGRP attach to on a cell can be blocked by naltrexone without limiting a-MSH!

FYI, I didn't know any of this stuff until this past weekend, when I basically gave myself a mini neurochemistry lesson using articles available on PubMed. And sorry, I didn't bookmark any of them to use as references here.

Back to the story -

When I began contrave, I wasn't expecting much of anything. The bottle sat in my kitchen for a few months before I gave it a go, and even then it wasn't for weight loss. My psych was planning on possibly adding bupropion to my regimen anyway, so I figured I may as well try it out. Here's how things went:

Side effects are minimal due to the titration (slow increase) in dose that is prescribed to most people. The only thing I noticed was a short period of GI discomfort (nausea mostly) a few hours after taking a pill, but this stopped happening after about a week. It's probably due to the opioid receptors found in intestinal walls (something new I learned from my weekend of "research" lol) which affect intestinal motility. This is why opioids cause constipation, while opioid withdrawal produces nausea and diarrhea.

Price: you can go to the contrave website and get connected to a teledoctor who can write you a Rx (I used this service when I ran out of the bottle my mom had given me; consultation was $45). You can choose to have it sent to a local pharmacy, or use their preferred mail pharmacy, which charges $99 total to ship you a month's worth of medication. I chose this option because retail pharmacy prices are much higher. Total price: $144.00 first month, $99 monthly afterwards.

Insurance: most plans do not cover weight loss medications; mine certainly doesn't. The teledoctors they use also do not accept any insurance.

Regimen: you titrate up every week, starting with 1 pill/day during the first week (90mg bupropion+8mg naltrexone) until you get to 4 pills a day (360mg bupropion + 32mg naltrexone, all extended release).

Weight loss: at first, I had almost no faith that contrave would be effective for weight loss. I started off eating a 1200 cal/day (loosely tracked) and working out 1x a week. I'm still doing that, actually. I should also add that I used to crash diet a lot, often restricting myself to 500 cal a day, so I honestly didn't believe that staying under 1200 cal a day would actually do anything. Because of this irrational belief, I avoided the scale a lot. At some point - when I was up to 2-3 pills/day - I began to notice that I could go long periods of time without wanting or needing food. Even when I was physically hungry, eating felt like more of a chore. A few weeks after that started happening, some coworkers began commenting on my weight loss, which totally surprised me. I finally got the courage to weigh myself, and I was DOWN. 15. POUNDS. This all over the course of about 3 months.

Obviously, I was very encouraged by that, so I decided to continue with it. I'm basically doing the same now as I was then - 1200 cal/day (loosely) plus 1-2 days/week intense workouts (mostly CrossFit). It's now been 5 months and I'm down 32.6 lbs, to be exact.

Contrave has changed my life. It's like my brain has been reset; the damage done by all those years of starving and bingeing has been reversed. I have a normal relationship with food now: I eat when I'm hungry and stop when I'm satiated. I prepare nearly every meal I eat, which has eliminated almost all unhealthy, overprocessed foods from my diet. I'm trying to up my activity level, but I'm extremely busy with a full time job and another degree that I'm pursuing, leaving me pretty sleep-deprived during the weekdays. But weight loss is mostly diet, anyway.

I am more hopeful now than ever that I can achieve lasting weight loss. And the best part is that there's really no reason I can't be on contrave indefinitely, or for at least a few years. Bupropion is a medication that's already taken on a long term basis without issue. Naltrexone can damage the liver so it is typically not used long term; however, this effect has mostly been observed in people taking much higher doses of naltrexone (300mg+). Contrave contains a much smaller, extended release dose (32mg in 4 pills) that is even less than the dose used to treat alcoholism (50mg).

I'll update again when I remember to, lol. Hopefully I'll be down another 30 lbs 😁

[theparadoxmachine]

Update

I’m finally back home and chilling for a while before I go back to work. The headaches are at a minimum now, and I just took the last of my prescription antivirals. 

So here’s what happened. 

Friday I woke up with an absolutely awful headache. I just assumed it was one of the headaches I get and go to work. I had been off my herbal antidepressant for over a week because of the steroid I was taking for my shoulder bursitis, and I assumed the steroid was causing everything. I woke up Saturday and still had a headache. I called my mom and asked if she’d be willing to take me to the urgent care clinic Sunday. That night I woke up every hour or so and threw up. The next morning I told my mom we should go to the emergency room instead. 

We get the the ER and they tell me I am hella dehydrated (duh) and have a UTI. ...’kay....They load me up with several bags of fluids, give me antibiotics, tell me to take tylenol for my head, and send me home. But I’m still not keeping anything down, the anti-nausea stuff is a dissolvable tablet so gross that it’s just making the nausea worse, and the headache isn’t budging. 

My mom called the urgent care place that sent me to the orthopedist who prescribed the steroid. At this point, we’re still thinking the steroids are causing this. Urgent Care hears that I have a headache, I’m vomiting and can’t turn my head, and says no, you need to go back to the ER. I make sure to emphasize that I have had an ungodly headache for 4 straight days at this point. This time I see an actual doctor and not a PA and he sends me for a CT scan and does a spinal tap. 

Now let me pause and say that the spinal tap was hands down the worst part of this experience and holy shit I do not ever want that to happen again, and I probably am going to have to have another this week and holy shit I don’t want it. 

So anyway, that’s when they tell me I have meningitis. I still have a UTI but everything I’m complaining about is caused by the meningitis. They take a bunch of blood trying to figure out why I have it. 

Now let me be clear, since this literally showed up on my dash today. There are a few different types of meningitis. The most common and most dangerous is bacterial meningitis. There is a vaccine for it which I have received. What I have is VIRAL meningitis, which there is no vaccine for. They’re still not sure how I got this. 

Needless to say, they admitted me. 

At one point while I was in the hospital, I took a shower. As my mom was helping me back into a hospital gown, she noticed I had a rash on my back. 

It was shingles. I got goddamn shingles. 

Shingles is basically when you get chicken pox as a kid, then when you’re an adult, the virus suddenly comes back to life to come in and kick your ass. Fortunately I was on like 8 different drugs so I didn’t feel it at all. But interestingly enough, the hospital seemed way more concerned about me spreading shingles around than the meningitis. I kinda get it, but it was weird to see my nurses go from wearing masks to wearing masks and gowns. 

Anyway, because I still had a migraine and now had shingles, my infectious disease doctor sent me for an mri to make sure nothing was wrong with my brain. 

They found something wrong with my brain.

I have something called Arnold-Chiari malformation Type 1. Basically, where your brain meets your spinal cord, there’s a funnel shaped structure where your brain sits in the funnel and your spine comes up from the bottom. Well, instead of just sitting in the funnel, my brain is sinking into it. It causes headaches, poor balance, tinnitus, spinal herniation, all kinds of stuff. It’s not immediately life threatening but it’s serious enough that we need to do something about it, which means surgery.

So as soon as I’m done with the meningitis, I have to have brain surgery. 

So let’s assess. I have had scapular bursitis, a UTI, meningitis, shingles, and need brain surgery all in the span of about a month. 

I swear to any and every god that if my coworker ever calls me “sweet summer child” ever again I am going to give him a goddamn swirly. 

[lupusresearcher-blog]

Believe Her

The “Believe Her” movement surrounding the survivors of sexual assault has become a banner for women around the world in the recent months. However, this problem of disbelief of women has been around for centuries. Throughout history, women have been taken advantage of, called liars, and told that they just have a weak disposition and brain capacity. Believing her does not only apply to the survivors of sexual assault, but all the women around the world that have been dismissed because of their sex.

After I was born, my mom started feeling…off. She described it as a constant weight on her shoulders, a feeling of crushing fatigue and ongoing pain. Like when you have a pinched nerve- except all over your body. She even started feeling faint and sometimes passed out at the slightest exertion. Soon, she began breaking out in a red scaly rash around her neck, hands, and cheeks. Thinking she had allergies or maybe an ongoing infection, she visited her primary care physician.

When describing her symptoms, her doctor wasn’t really even listening. And after she finished, he didn’t even conduct a physical exam. He smiled at her, nodded, and proceeded to tell her he was prescribing antidepressants because women who have just had a baby often feel this way. My mom told me she just sat there in shock as he continued on, talking about his wife who had 6 children and how she never had postpartum depression but that she was a special breed. He even went as far to insinuate that my mom shouldn’t have had children if she wasn’t prepared to deal with the stress.

Listening to my mom tell that story makes my blood boil. She presented with classic signs of lupus and wasn’t even given a physical exam, let alone a blood test. Sadly, it took 4 doctors, 2 misdiagnoses, and 3 years to finally diagnose her correctly with lupus. By then, my mom had given birth to my sister, was dealing with 2 kids under 3 by herself since my dad worked all day, and was exhibiting the severe symptoms of untreated lupus: bright red rashes, extreme fatigue, pain all over her body, and swelling of the joints.

Its hard to imagine that this happened to my mom, let alone that this is a common occurrence. The Lupus Foundation of America just released a study showing the 47% of lupus patients report being misdiagnosed, and 55% report being told that there was nothing wrong with them or that their symptoms were psychological. Previous studies have shown that it can take six years to obtain a correct diagnosis with lupus. In that time, the disease could be ravaging the patient’s body, progressing to kidney failure and even death unnoticed.

The common rates of misdiagnosis are mostly due to the initial nonspecific symptoms that can be associated with a range of diseases or not mean anything at all. The only way to get definitive lupus diagnosis is through specific blood tests, including ANA (antinuclear antibodies), which tests for the self-antibodies signature of lupus, and CRP (C-reactive protein), which is a level of chronic inflammation inherent of the disease. Without those specific tests or advancement of the disease, it is impossible to tell if you have lupus.

But I think the high rates of misdiagnosis might also reflect on our society. Too often do we hear about women being called liars in the news for reporting sexual assault, or women dying from heart attacks that doctors don’t recognize the signs of. I’m not saying that the doctors are sexist or incompetent (I want to be a doctor myself one day!), but what I am saying is that our society has a flawed view of women. We have known this for a long time, but in the case of lupus and heart attacks, these flaws in perspective could lead to death.

The only way to start changing these views, at least in the medical field, is to teach the upcoming medical students more about the presentation of these diseases in women specifically. What this means is that more research must be funded examining the disease processes in women, allowing the medical schools to teach the correct information.

Of course, I’m not the expert and there are thousands of hoops to jump through to change this, but the more awareness that we can bring to lupus can only help the next person be diagnosed. And the more people that know and are affected by lupus, the more people like me who want to be doctors to help people like their moms, their aunts, their friends through this difficult disease.

Citations: 

Study Reveals Shockingly High Rates of Incorrect Lupus Diagnosis. (2017, November 4). Retrieved from https://www.lupus.org/research-news/entry/study-reveals-high-rates-of-incorrect-lupus-diagnosis

[fortuitousmind]

World Suicide Prevention Day: Sharing my Story

Contains material strongly centered around suicidality.

September 10th is World Suicide Prevention Day and I am deciding to use this as an opportunity to tell a story that few people know and is excruciatingly difficult to tell. I am not sure how my extended family or new friends will receive it. I have some old friends who have a general idea but have never known the details. People know I am a strong advocate for positive mental health without really knowing why. Here I am, about to be brutally honest about my story publicly for the first time. I apologize for how long this post is going to be.

I want to begin by saying that I am in no way looking for pity or apologies. I do not want anybody to feel bad for me, or to feel like they could have done better. I am simply sharing this because it has truly shaped me as a person and allowed me to transform into who I am today.

On May 5, 2013, I attempted to end my life.

I didn’t come close to death by any means, but in the moment I genuinely believed it was enough for me to not wake up in the morning. I didn’t want to wake up in the morning. I hadn’t in a long time.

I am not going to share how because I refuse to give other people ideas as to how they can make my mistakes. I am just going to say that it happened, and leave it at that.

I had only been out of my intensive outpatient treatment for three months. While my anxiety improved tremendously after completing the program, my depression worsened significantly. I am not sure if it was triggered by being placed on a new medication (a major side effect to watch for when starting psychiatric medication is suicidality), or if I just couldn’t handle the pressure of living anymore. It was probably a combination of the two. Mix that with dangerously low self-esteem, few genuine friendships, constant feelings of inadequacy and failure, and mental illnesses that were improperly treated— it was the perfect storm.

It’s not to say that my treatment wasn’t helpful; my anxiety was finally under control. The other treatments just weren’t targeting the correct problems. I was on the same antidepressant for five years and had to stop taking it on my own when I realized that it was only making me worse. It took five years to finally receive the diagnosis of Bipolar II disorder (instead of Major Depressive Disorder) that allowed me to understand why the antidepressants weren’t working. I was struggling with disordered eating. I had Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) that wasn’t even acknowledged by a mental health professional until I was 20. In short, I was a mess.

I had convinced myself that I wasn’t worthy of anybody’s time, that I wasn’t worthy of help, that I wasn’t worthy of survival. I felt like a burden to my family. I spent most of my time alone in my room because I couldn’t have conversations without having them turn into screaming matches. I had absolutely no social supports because I isolated myself from everybody I knew in order to minimize any damage I would have caused with my company. I didn’t even say goodbye.

On May 5, 2013, I woke up in the middle of the night and decided I couldn’t take it anymore. It was time for me to go. So I tried.

And I failed.

The next morning was a Monday. I think my mom knew something was wrong because I just came and sat on the couch instead of getting ready for school. I don’t remember how the conversation went— I don’t even remember if there was a conversation. I just remember my mom calling my psychiatrist and telling her I’d hurt myself pretty badly, but then having to call my psychiatrist back myself because it was an attempt to die, and then having to go to the hospital to get checked out before they could ship me off to a psychiatric facility.

The medical hospital decided I was fine, so they decided to send me to a psychiatric hospital for further treatment. They wouldn’t let my mom drive me; I had to ride there in an ambulance by myself. There was no music. The person in the back didn’t even speak to me. Facing backwards while driving made me nauseous.

I waited in the psych hospital’s emergency department for hours. My parents drove and met me there. I didn’t want them to. I didn’t want to see my mom sad. I didn’t want to fight with my dad. It happened anyway. I was not a good person.

When they finally admitted me, there was no room on the general adolescent unit, so they placed me on a unit meant for adolescents with eating disorders. I was up there for a week and my journal indicates that my head was all over the place. One moment I was writing about how much I loved it and wanted help and wanted to get better, the next I was talking about how much I hated it and needed to leave, the next I was talking about how much I wanted to die and that it would never get better for me. It was cyclical and constantly flipping back and forth. Looking back on it, it was a major indicator of my BPD.

The doctor up there could not help me. The only things he did were prescribe me acne medication, tell me that yawns are contagious across cats, dogs, and humans, and increase the antidepressant I had just started to quickly that it made me physically ill. It took days to get antibiotic medication for my injuries. It was gross.

After about a week, I was transferred to the general adolescent unit. The transition was not smooth. They did not tell me I would be leaving the other floor until the time came for it to happen. I had to pack all of my things to be moved. I was having a panic attack as it happened and when you hyperventilate for so long, the lack of oxygen to your extremities makes it nearly impossible to move your hands. They saw it as an act of resisting so they had security closing in on me (at least it felt like it), which made my panic attack even worse. I had a genuine fear of men and it was terrifying to have someone so large and strong be so close when I was completely vulnerable.

Downstairs probably would have been fine if my roommate hadn’t threatened to hurt me the first time I saw her. She didn’t, but it was a constant fear of mine. We had a lot more therapeutic groups and less free time than upstairs.

My visits were not good. I truly believed that I was not worthy of love from my parents and unconsciously did things to try to prove it to them (thanks, BPD). I was a horrible daughter. I said horrible things. I physically and verbally lashed out at home. I needed them to hate me to the extent that I felt like I deserved. They never did. One of the worst feelings in life is looking back on how many times I made them cry.

While I seemed to be doing better (to my doctors, my family, the milieu staff), I was still fighting suicidal thoughts on the inside. Pretending to be okay became my default setting, as I had already spent two and a half years perfecting the art. It really sucks when people only see the outside and then don’t believe the truth. Working in a psychiatric hospital now, I can say that it probably seemed like I was trying to sabotage my discharge and get them to keep me longer. In reality, I just wanted more help.

One evening, the roommate that I was afraid of changed rooms. I woke up to a new person sitting at the end of my bed staring at me. She had taken my glasses from my cubby and placed them on my chest. It was the most uncomfortable moment I have ever experienced in my life. I had nightmares about it. Luckily, that was the day I ended up getting released.

My discharge didn’t go smoothly. I was not ready. I clawed at myself. I yelled at my parents. I cried a lot. The only good thing was that I got to breathe fresh air for the first time in two weeks. When I got home, I barricaded myself in my room. I screamed. I cried. I pushed my dresser over and it destroyed all of the knick knacks my grandmother had gifted me over the years. I still haven’t forgiven myself for this.

Once the two weeks were up, I went back to school as if nothing happened. I don’t think many people noticed I was gone. Those who did notice didn’t ask questions. I went to therapy twice a week. I finished the school year. A month later, I moved away from the only place I’d ever known.

There are still days where things are bad. There are still days that I wish everything would end. Now I am on the right medication, am actively involved in my treatment, and am pushing to be the best I can be so I can use my experiences to help other people. I have the skills to push past these feelings and the resources to turn to if I feel that I can’t. I am no longer afraid to reach out for help before I am in too deep.

For anyone who is struggling, I can truly say that things get better. Without this experience, I would have never realized how desperately I want to help others get through similar struggles. I would have never found who I really was. I would have never found who I wanted to become.

If you are still reading, thank you for listening to my story. If you need support, resources, or don’t know where to start with getting help, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. If you need a friend who gets it, I got you. I’m here to listen to anybody who needs it. My goal is to spread hope.

I survived. Back then, I truly wished I hadn’t. Now, I am eternally grateful that I did.

[headless-horsepossum]

so uhh chaboy is...... having a real bad time

SO the backstory is that among various other maladies i have been working for Several Years on trying to combat the combination of depression and narcolepsy that makes me physically exhausted at all times and keeps me from performing basic maintenance of my physical form, let alone doing any of the things an adult in a capitalist country needs to do.

so in our monthly gambit to trick my body into Cutting That Shit Out, my psychiatrist recommended that we drop one of my current medications (which may be causing weight gain and tiredness) and increase the dose of my narcolepsy meds to compensate. which i’m excited about! i’m willing to try anything that might give me even a tiny bit of energy, i’m dying squirtle

HOWEVER the pharmacy refused to fill the script for the increased dose, because even though i’m already on the damn medication, they need a prior authorization from my doc to get the increased dose. which is bullshit, but whatever, i don’t make the rules, so i call my psych and tell her i need a prior auth.

and i hear. Nothing

so i call again a few days later and leave a slightly bitchy message, and almost immediately get a call back from her secretary saying they tried to call me back day of but my voicemail wasn’t set up, and anyway since my sleep doctor is the one who originally prescribed the narcolepsy meds he’s the one who’s gotta give the prior auth.

which. okay. first of all. i immediately have my mom call my phone and successfully leave a message in my very-much-set-up voicemail box. so there’s fuckin that. but more importantly my sleep doctor is kind of a dick who doesn’t listen to a word i say so i’m not excited about calling him. But. I want to be able to shower and do laundry. so i suck it up and i call his office and leave a nice message about how my psych recommended a dose increase, and i’d REALLY LOVE IT if he could just call that into the pharmacy please, but i understand if i need an appointment, just give me a call back and we’ll work it out.

and iiiiii call again two days later when i dont hear a fucken peep

and meanwhile im off the med she recommended dropping, which was a boost for my antidepressant, and without the corresponding increase i am Suffering in a way i haven’t in a couple fucken years. but i don’t hear a Goddamn Peep from the sleep doctor. I have my parents call my phone from a billion different sources in a billion different ways, so that’s not the Fucking problem. so finally i call the psych again and say Hey, we’re probably going to be switching sleep doctors because he won’t Fucking call me, what should i do in the meantime?

AND I HEAR,,, UHHHHH,,,,, NOTHING?????

SO. that was yesterday. so today i called the sleep doctor and went through to the receptionist like. Hi :’) I’m Just Wondering If You Got The Messages I Left Two Times Last Week :’) What’s Up and she looks through her files and is literally like. ‘huh. well it looks like your request went through but i don’t have any record that your doctor filled it, that’s weird’ and i’m over here like 8′) OH. NICE. GREAT.

and the other Nice and Great thing is that my parents, who are lovely and supportive people, still..... they uhhhhh........ like. when i say ‘i literally cannot do this thing, i am too exhausted to stand for any period of time’ they’re like Yeah We Understand You’re Sick. Until. The thing needs to get done???? and then they’re like. welp, nothing else for it, you’ll just have to do the thing! and like. IF THE THING BEING NECESSARY. GAVE ME THE ABILITY TO DO THE THING. I WOULD HAVE DONE LAUNDRY A FULL WEEK AGO MY DUDES.

so uhhhhhh That’s Where We’re At Atm. thanks for reading and uhhhhhh kill me maybe