know your basics ·
2 June 07

It was extremely unpleasant and difficult to stop taking my medication. Initially, the first day, I was quite impressed at how easy it was. I even enjoyed a sort of bounce in my energy and my difficulties in sleeping. I felt able to do anything, energy wise, with nothing being limiting.

Two and more days in, and I felt awful. My mind was all over the shop, my body was fighting against the lack of medication, and I was mentally and physically craving the meds to balance me out.

I feel devastated in some senses that the medication has become such a part of my life that it’s so difficult for me to remove it from my life. I feel incapable of managing my life without it now, and that I can’t seem to function without it. There’s a level of patheticism in my situation, and embarrassment at my weakness. I guess that’s what I am: weak and pathetic.

To be honest I feel at the mercy of the medication now, I don’t know if there is some gradual step or method that I can take to wean myself off the medication safely, without the possibility of making me feel worse. The strange thing is that I had stopped taking my medication before, not as long in period, but I never felt this level of withdrawal from not taking the medication.

I don’t know what to do now, and I don’t know what my options are. It’s difficult to conceive whether I would be able to continue with a modicum of normality without the need for meds. If the meds are going to be a part of my life, then how to accept it. I feel like an invalid, incapable of action without putting chemicals into my body which shouldn’t really be there.

Yesterday I had taken my first dose of medication, less than a whole week having gone without it. I don’t know if the effects of the medication was a psychological difference, or whether there was a genuine difference of reintroducing the chemicals back into my body. What I mean by that is, had I taken a placebo, would the result have been the same? I don’t know how I can find that out, and whether it would perhaps be a risk to even attempt that. I do know that within four or five hours I felt more at ease, my sleep pattern returned to normal, and I no longer had the buoyant energy that I had initially from ceasing my medication.

I guess I’ve come down to acceptance of my condition, with regards to needing medication for it. I thought I could, at some point, be weaned off the medication, that I could continue with life without being a “patient”. It doesn’t look like it’s going to go the way I want it to. I might have thought that I could replace my medication with therapy, although it would be limited. I accept that this won’t be a possibility either. So I’m resigned to the fact that I will remain, for the foreseeable future, medicated and that voice hearing and depression will remain a part of my life. How big a part of my life they are is how big I make it, I think.

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