It may be easy to find a doctor to prescribe antidepressants, but not so easy to find one who is willing to help you stop.
Before I terrorize you about the dangers of abruptly stopping an antidepressant regimen, I cannot state enough how important it is to work with a skilled physician in weaning yourself from any type of antidepressant. Please don't go at it alone as I did unless you truly know what you are doing.
Now that I have put that disclaimer in place, let's flash back 20 years to a bitter cold autumn day in Chicago. I was twenty-one, and regularly suffering from terrible bouts of premenstrual depression a week or two before my period, which literally robbed me of my zest for life.
I sat snug in my bed sipping on a cup of Lipton tea when I saw an advertisement in the newspaper for a free clinical trial study at a research institute. It was for depressed men and women between the ages of 21 and 55 who suffered from depressive symptoms. Candidates who qualified would receive an investigative drug for their participation.
Well, I jumped all over that right away.
After enthusiastically scheduling an appointment, which was fortunately only a few days away, I was set to go.
I arrived at the research institute with high hopes. I was to undergo a psychological written test and an intense interview with the clinic's psychologist. If I qualified, I was to begin a regimen of the investigative drug, Tofranil. Tofranil belonged to the family of drugs called tricyclics, and Tofranil was one of the more popular ones to hit the market.
During the 80s, tricyclics were the most commonly prescribed antidepressants. It would be several years before the family of drugs known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), which included the drug Prozac, would knock tricyclics from their throne.
Desperate for relief from my premenstrual depression, I naively signed up to be a human guinea pig, something I would never take part in today. But at that time, it was what I believed I needed.
Even though my depression seemed to be mostly confined to the week or two before my menstrual cycle, it was advised that I take Tofranil daily.
So, I began taking Tofranil daily, and I am not afraid to admit the cold-hard truth. It worked. I don't recall the milligrams prescribed, but I do recall that after being on the drug for about four weeks my premenstrual blue mood was transformed into hope and happiness.
And I felt great!
Every morning as I drew my bath before work, I would smile as I had not smiled in a long time, because I felt so good. I celebrated in my mind how good life was, and how much life offered for those with the will to experience it all.
There was so much I wanted to accomplish. I was going to take advantage of this surge of feel good aroma that surrounded me. Things were definitely looking up for me. And I was so pleased.
All was going well in my new perfect world.
That feel-good-I-can-conquer-the-world feeling lasted for all of about eight or nine weeks then it ABRUPTLY STOPPED, and my high spirits came crashing downward. To say I was disappointed was an understatement. I was crushed. Tofranil was supposed to be the true answer I was in search of; but it seemed, as my mood continued downwards, that it was no answer at all. I likened my mood to a heroin or cocaine crash in that I felt worse then than I did before I began the treatment.
But how could this be?
How could something that had made me feel so wonderful, have the exact opposite effect? There was no doubt in my mind that this drug was the culprit for my crashing emotions.
As I drove home from work that evening with tears in my eyes, I felt hopeless, like my world was coming to an end.
What was I going to do?
The cure that I believed Tofranil was was not.
With uncontrollable sobs welling from my mouth, it took everything inside of me to keep from swerving my car into ongoing traffic.
I arrived home, still in one piece, and immediately called the clinic. I was able to speak with the on-call nurse available to all the participants and explain to her what was going on.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I said, "I don't know what's happening to me. But I am feeling more depressed now than I did before I began the drug."
"Have you been taking your medication regularly?" the nurse asked.
"Yes," I said. "Every day, as I have been all along."
"So what is the problem?" she asked, as if she didn't hear me the first time.
"I don't think it's working anymore because I am feeling worse now and more depressed."
"You must be doing something wrong or something."
"I've been taking the medication the same as always. But now, it doesn't seem to be working any more."
In the nastiest attitude imaginable, she said "That's impossible!"
She informed me that it was impossible for me to feel worse while taking the antidepressant Tofranil.
It was as if I were making the whole thing up. My repeated complaints of the worsening depression fell completely on deaf ears. Basically, she did not believe me and offered me no help at all.
So what did I do?
I took matters into my own hands. At the time, I was still living with my parents; and they knew nothing of this investigational drug that had been administered to me. Looking back, I could have gone to my mother and told her the whole story, but I chose not to.
After deciding not to tell my mother about my condition, I flushed the remaining brown tablets down the toilet. The clinic was not offering me any help, or sympathy for that matter. I was forced to help myself. Little did I know of the horrific withdrawal symptoms which were soon to follow as a result of my radical cessation of the drug.
My brain had become dependent on those chemicals, and when I stopped unexpectedly, my brain reacted with a vengeance. It would have been nice if the clinic could have helped me through this terrible ordeal. After all, it was the clinic that placed me on this drug in the first place. But that was neither here nor there.
The first severe symptom I encountered a few days later was a crippling intolerable-can't-stand-up-or-sit-down nausea.
It was bad!
So bad that after a couple days of it, I asked my friend to drive me to the emergency room. My friend was the only person who knew about my experience as a human guinea pig. Who would have thought that nausea could be so troubling that it would require a visit to the emergency room?
Sitting on the examining table, holding my stomach and sick to the 11th degree, I informed the attending physician that I had recently stopped taking the antidepressant Tofranil, thinking he might shed some light on the subject. But there was no light. From his response-less response, I gathered he probably knew nothing of Tofranil; and if he did, he knew nothing of the withdrawal symptoms. He did however write me a prescription for Compazine, which I was to have filled immediately. It was to alleviate my nausea which was all I cared about at the moment.
Back then, I didn't even know what a Physicians' Desk Reference book was. If I had, I could have looked up the drug Compazine and learned of the possible side effects of this drug, but that wasn't the case.
I would have to learn the hard way.
After having the prescription for Compazine filled and getting it into my system, I felt fine. The nausea had thankfully subsided, and I felt normal again. And then just when I believed I was on the road to recovery, something mysteriously began to happen as I sat snug in my bed watching my favorite movie, An Officer and a Gentleman.
Only a few hours elapsed since ingesting the drug Compazine before I developed these uncontrollable muscle spasms, which caused my head to involuntarily move back and forth on its own as if I were Lisa Blair in the exorcist. Needless to say, this mysterious aberration freaked me out to no end. Scared senseless, I cried out like a baby and raced into my mother's room. With tears smeared on my face and terrified to the point of no return, I stood in the doorway and said, "I need to go the emergency room NOW!"
"What's wrong?" my mother asked.
"Something's wrong with my neck," I said. "It keeps moving back and forth on its own, and I can't make it stop."
Without further ado, my mother and I headed to the emergency room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, making certain to bring the drug I was taking with me.
Immediately after arriving at the emergency room for the second time in two days, the muscle spasms had stopped, but still the same, I needed to know what had caused them in the first place. Teary eyed and still very shaken, I described to the attending physician and the three interns all the details about the muscle spasms which I endured, then showed them the bottle of Compazine. Without so much as the blink of an eye, the attending physician said, "This is your problem right here." She held up the bottle of Compazine in her hand.
"Really?" I questioned.
"One of the rare side effects of this drug is involuntary muscle spasms," she said.
As my mouth hung open in wonder, I flashbacked in my mind everything that happened to me, which led to this immediate moment. It all started with my taking Tofranil for my premenstrual depression. From there, the Tofranil worked for about eight weeks, then abruptly stopped. That led to my decision to stop taking the Tofranil, which led to severe withdrawal symptoms, one of which was unbearable nausea.
To deal with the nausea, I was prescribed Compazine and lo and behold, though the Compazine did alleviate the nausea, one of its rare side effects is involuntary muscle spasms, which caused me to make another trip to the emergency room. After all of that, I now sat in the emergency room totally taken aback. Only five words came to mind.
ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?
Who could have predicted this?
Still the same, in awe and wonder of it all, I was relieved.
Things are very different now as I write about this memorable experience that happened to me more than 20 years ago. Being the self-described researcher and investigator that I am, I now investigate any and all drugs which are prescribed to me, mostly out of curiosity. But more importantly, it's important for me to always know more than what the doctor shares with me.
On the drive home from the emergency room, my mother asked, "Why were you taking that drug to begin with?"
"The doctor prescribed it for my nausea," I said. "I had no idea that it would turn out like this."
"What was making you so nauseous?" my mother asked.
"I don't know," I said, shameless as I lied through my teeth. "Could have been something that I ate."
My mother didn't ask a lot of questions, and I didn't volunteer a lot of information. Even to this day, I never told her about the investigational drug I used with disaster. It still remains my tight kept little secret.
I threw out the remaining prescription of the Compazine and was forced to deal with the nausea on my own, suffering the consequences every step of the way. Little did I know at the time, nausea was just the beginning of my troubles.
Immediately thereafter, I developed bed-bound flu-like symptoms. With perspiration running down my forehead, I was feverish, cold, fatigued, and nauseated to the nth degree. As I struggled to lie still while shivering like a junkie, all I could do was close my eyes and hope to die. And I am not kidding. I could not work for three weeks and was bedridden, laying up, falling in and out of agitated sleep.
Three long and agonizing weeks later, my symptoms died down, and I was a normal person again and soon returned to work. Being the inquisitive and curious person that I am, I needed to know what had happened to me.
After doing a little research at the public library, I learned that everything I experienced after ceasing to take Tofranil were all part of the withdrawal process. I would later learn that I should have weaned myself from Tofranil to avoid the dangerous side effects. But you live and you learn, and that was what I took from that experience.
After my tumultuous experience with Tofranil, I was determined not to ever experiment with antidepressants ever again, and I never did.
I share this story with you as a message that weaning yourself from antidepressants is serious business. Please act responsibly and seek out a holistic physician who will not only help wean you successfully from your antidepressant but also start you on a regimen of natural medicine to make the experience as comfortable as possible.
It would be many years before I would learn that all antidepressants stop working after a period of time which is why the dosage is either increased or the medication changed every so often. Where there is a struggle between what the medication wants the brain to do and what the brain wants to do, in the end, the brain will always win. And the reason is simple. What the medication wants the brain to do is unnatural, and the brain resists it every step of the way.
Regardless of what you may have been led to believe, antidepressants are addictive and extreme caution should be used when weaning oneself off of them. A great book on the subject of weaning oneself off of antidepressants is The Antidepressant Solution by Joseph Glenmullen, M.D.
