Bleed Like Me: Medication Meltdown

It didn’t make sense why the antidepressants weren’t working this time around. They had done wonders for me when I got my HIV diagnosis back in 2007. But in the summer of 2012, a new wave of depression seemed to get worse by the day. My partner Luke kept warning me that medications only had a 50 percent success rate when used without therapy.

After my physician switched me over to Cymbalta, the depression still didn’t lift and I got a whole new set of side effects. Eventually I had to work with a specialist — a psychiatrist — who increased the dose in order to achieve its desired effects. But my head felt even more fogged over and I couldn’t pay attention to anything anymore.

When I complained, he had a new solution: Ritalin (the classic ADD drug). I figured it couldn’t hurt. The Ritalin definitely gave me energy, but it manifested itself in all the wrong ways. I had giant mood swings, feeling on top of the world one minute … then wanting to curl up and die the next.

Instead of taking me off these drugs, another drug was added yet again. The doc prescribed me Risperidone, an antipsychotic. Apparently, antipsychotics aren’t just for psychos and can actually help mood swings.

But the mood swings didn’t go away and neither did the rest of the side effects. In fact, things went from bad to worse. The world looked like an even uglier, more depressing place. I started having paranoia which resulted in isolation. A mere trip to the grocery store sent me into an unbearable tailspin.

I started losing touch with reality and my therapist wondered if I suffered from bipolar disorder. I, however, knew she was wrong. I worked many years with people dealing with bipolar and this wasn’t the same. Sure, my brain felt like it was getting pulled a hundred different directions, but I knew deep down in my heart that these medications were the real culprit.

I begged my psychiatrist to take me off all of them. Instead he increased them, saying that we just needed to find the right chemical balance. And like clockwork, the symptoms got even worse. I began having mild hallucinations. Strange sensations pulsated all over my body, similar to that tingling feeling you get when a limb goes numb. I actually started feeling psychotic.

This cycle continued for months until I finally put my foot down. I told both Luke and my therapist that I would no longer take all of these medications. They were terrified. And that made sense. Logically, if I was doing this bad while taking the medications, then how much worse would I get if I stopped? They asked me to discuss this with the psychiatrist but I refused. He hadn’t listened to me before and I decided to never see him again.

To the best of our ability, we created a “weaning schedule” so I could stop at an appropriate pace. But the side effects weren’t subsiding fast enough. I got impatient, took all of the medications, and dumped them down the toilet. Now I had no choice but to quit cold turkey.

The psychotic side effects did start to go away — but not without a price. My body went into withdrawal. For the next couple weeks I suffered from terrible body aches and head spins. I worried that I had done permanent damage to myself and that I would feel like this forever.

Ultimately, these dark clouds did start to clear. My psychotic episodes went away and I came back to being your average, everyday (depressed) person. Looking back, all of us had been so quick to blame my depression on a chemical imbalance. But what if there never was any chemical imbalance? There’s a time and a place for medication intervention, but as it turned out, I was just another person burned out by overloading themselves in this fast-paced world.

I have seen these exact drugs work amazingly for most others, but these were probably people who truly did suffer from chemical imbalance. In a world where prescriptions become the answer all too quickly, I decided I needed a different approach to solving my depression: hard work and a holistic means. It would take time, but the depression would go away too.

And one day I would become the man that I used to be.