This Is What Happened When I Tried To Quit Antidepressants

In a recent New York Times article, “Many People Taking Antidepressants Discover They Cannot Quit,” the authors detail how the withdrawal effects can be so severe, Americans would rather keep using these drugs than suffer the consequences of getting off of them. This finding may come as a surprise to many, but not to me. I had recently tried to sever my own six-year affair with my antidepressant of choice, Zoloft, and the consequences were nearly tragic. 

My doctor prescribed Zoloft to me after a deep bout of postpartum depression and anxiety following the birth of my first son. It was, for me, a miracle drug. After weeks of crying for more hours of the day than not and irrational thoughts spanning from, “Does my baby want to kill me?” to “Is my baby evil?”, I was a person again. I had every intention of staying on the drug forever (why mess with a good thing?), until a surgery earlier this year required that I cease taking any SSRI’s to decrease the risk of a hematoma. 

My psychiatrist put me on a somewhat abbreviated weaning schedule to time with my surgery — which we knew would be risky, but I still was not prepared for what was to come. As the authors of the aforementioned New York Times article point out, the medical profession lacks scientifically backed guidelines or strategies for people struggling to stop taking antidepressants.

My doctor prescribed Zoloft to me after a deep bout of postpartum depression and anxiety following the birth of my first son. It was, for me, a miracle drug.

One morning, I woke up feeling like I was at the bottom of a black hole coated slick with oil, and couldn’t crawl out. I couldn’t will myself to leave the house. My children couldn’t make me smile. Sometimes my own voice felt like it was coming from somewhere eight feet below the ground whenever I spoke. I tried to tell my children that I wasn’t feeling well, because that’s how you explain when Mommy is Weaning Off of Zoloft to people under seven. 

If it were possible at the time, I would have laughed at how much my symptoms made me feel like an advertisement in a magazine – some sad sack woman sitting on a park bench, staring at her kids having fun in a park. The text above her head says something like, “You’re not yourself when you’re not on [insert drug of choice here].” 

By week three or so, things were abysmal. My whole body ached, like the worst flu I ever had, and no pain reliever could alleviate it. Several times a day, I wanted to tear off my flesh, or rip off my head – anything to take away this bad feeling. 

One morning, I woke up feeling like I was at the bottom of a black hole coated slick with oil, and couldn’t crawl out. I couldn’t will myself to leave the house.

Around that time, my family and I were walking down the avenue by our house. I’d made the mistake of finishing my husband’s Greyhound at brunch, hoping it would help take the edge off a little. My older son was being kind of a jerk that day, and as we were walking home, we were fighting about his iPad time and I lost it. My younger son started joining in on the whine-fest, and I screamed at them both, and they both continued not listening to me, and all my pain felt amplified. I walked ahead of them a bit, trying to relieve them of my wildness.

I looked at the cars and trucks rushing frantically down the avenue, leaving a slight tremble under my feet in their wake. The most bizarre idea came into my head: What if I just turned to my left, and began walking, Virginia Woolf-like, into the flow of traffic? No announcement, no farewell, just a straightforward decision to turn away from everything else and turn instead towards nothing. I could see my body as if I were observing from some distant place, like the tree next to the overpass where I had been standing, and could picture myself walking onto the avenue. In that fantasy, there was no suffering – no crushing limbs, no gore, no grieving family – just the feeling of being freed from pain. The option seemed so straightforward.

It was one of those feelings like when you’ve been sick for so long, you forget what healthy feels like, and then you finally feel healthy and you can finally say, “Wow. Life feels so damn good.”

But before I could dip my toe off the edge of the sidewalk, my older son came running up to me, asking about when he would get his iPad minutes back. Bam. My strange impulse and vision from moments before was gone, and I was reminded of my purpose and duty – to continue to be a mother and wife and child and friend – in spite of my own personal pain. I’d never before that moment, imagined in my wildest dreams, taking my own life.

After my surgery, I was given the go-ahead to go back on Zoloft. At first, I resisted – thinking, well, I made it this far. If, for some reason I ever needed to go off of this drug again in the future, I would never be able to face the withdrawal effects that go with it a second time. When I told my doctor about my “Virginia Woolf” moment, she insisted I go back on it immediately. And since martyrdom never looked good on me anyway, I took her advice. Within a week, I was back to myself. A whole person. It was one of those feelings like when you’ve been sick for so long, you forget what healthy feels like, and then you finally feel healthy and you can finally say, “Wow. Life feels so damn good.”

I am in good company when it comes to failing at quitting antidepressant use. As Carey and Gebeloff note in their New York Times piece, a recent study of 250 long-term users of psychiatric drugs revealed that nearly half of those in the study who tried to quit could not do so because of withdrawal symptoms. In another study, 130 of 180 long-term antidepressant users reported withdrawal symptoms. 

As mothers, we need all the help we can get by way of support systems. This system can look different for many people. My support system includes antidepressants – a fact of which I am certain won’t change for me anytime soon if ever. I’m frustrated that I don’t seem to have a viable way out of getting off of this particular antidepressant, and fully switching to something else. But that likely still would not have changed my original decision to have gone on it in the first place. All things being equal, this isn’t all a bad story. Zoloft saved my life once, back when I first became a mother; when I thought it wouldn’t be possible to see the brightness in motherhood. Zoloft allowed me to experience joy again and helped me finally fall in love with my baby. And when I tried to walk away from Zoloft, the effects of that nearly ended my life. So I guess, like many kinds of relationships, ours is complicated. 

Please seek medical advice before taking any antidepressants. All opinions in this article are those of the author.

Originally published here.

When Self-Care Is Not The Answer

It’s hard to read any women-marketed websites without seeing the words, “self-care” sprinkled across multiple headlines and advertising, or crammed among social media hashtags. You often see these two words in ads and articles featuring images of  toned, slim, (usually white) women, mid-yoga-pose; or a perfectly staged cup of tea next to an expensive looking candle. Today’s industry of self-care seems to have led to a near cult-like belief that the act of engaging in it will relieve us of any physical, emotional, or spiritual pains. But what happens when self-care isn’t the miracle cure-all, but in fact, is damaging to our health? What if, as I recently experienced, trying to practice self-care makes us feel worse than before?

I’d undergone what should have been a straightforward surgery, that resulted in some major medical complications requiring a couple weeks of recovery. The recovery entailed a lot of laying low, very limited physical activity, lots of popping painkillers, and a lot of sleeping. “Pamper yourself,” the ER recovery nurse had said, as I was sent on my way home. “Do whatever it takes to feel good, OK?” All I could think about was the opportunity I’d have to catch up on the six years of sleep I’d lost since having kids. As a working mother of two very “spirited” boys, the idea of resting and sitting on my ass for a week or two sounded like just what the doctor ordered.

When loved ones called to check on me, I’d trot out all the gory details that led me to the operating table twice in an 8-hour-period (fun!), and tell them about the pain I was currently experiencing from the surgery site itself. Then I’d get to what was really hurting me — on a more emotional level: Feeling guilty about not being able to play with my kids while I was recovering, and feeling guilty for not being able to work. To this, people would almost all say, “But you just had surgery! You should be taking care of yourself!” And then that would often be followed by orders to, “Rest! Pamper! Practice self-care!”

I decided to give in and take their advice, plus that of literally every health and beauty Influencer on the ‘Gram. Because what better time to do all those ubiquitously listed self-care type things than when you’re stuck inside, unable to care for your own children, and unable to work? In the first week that I could barely move without wincing in pain, I tried to busy myself in a never-ending loop of lovely-sounding activities: napping, spending time with my dog, trying a variety of face masks, binging on magazines, watching daytime TV, and dipping my toes in meditation apps.

As a working mother of two very “spirited” boys, the idea of resting and sitting on my ass for a week or two sounded like just what the doctor ordered.

As my many days of recovery wore on, and trips to the doctor multiplied, my mood worsened. Things weren’t healing as they should have been, and every procedure I endured at my doctor’s visits felt like the most painful thing I’d ever experienced, until the next procedure would top that one. It seemed that no matter what I did, my body was rebelling against me.

I still was not able to fully participate in the everyday care of my boys. I couldn’t pick them up from school, or take them to any classes, I couldn’t rough house, I couldn’t do their bath-time. The painkillers I was on made it near-impossible to concentrate on work long enough to produce anything meaningful. (In an act of self-care, I wrote to all my editors and pushed my deadlines out.) I’d wake from a Percocet-induced nap to the joyful sounds of my kids coming home from school, and see that somehow it was already dark outside – a marker of the day I’d spent selfishly succumbing to and caring for a body that seemed to refuse to heal. Still, I remained hopeful that meditation and aggressive use of Matcha tea (the most “self caring” of teas, in my opinion) would get me through the doldrums I was feeling.

I felt like I was losing my “self” in all that self-care. I wasn’t a mom. I wasn’t a professional writer. I was a bandaged, patchwork, couch potato in a twelve-dollar facemask and I was depressed. “Screw self-care,” I remember thinking to myself. “I just want to get back to my goddamn regular life.“ And as fun as it had sounded in theory to spend most of my day taking care of my body and having the opportunity for quiet and an excuse to not have to go anywhere or take care of anyone, I did not want any of it. I decided that, in the end, self-care just wasn’t for me. And for a long while, I carried around the idea that I wasn’t “the self-care type”. Even the two words themselves made me roll my eyes whenever I heard or read them.

I would have been better served to practice accepting where I was in life at that moment in time – and that place was “recovery”. 

What I realize now, many months later, is that there actually can be room for self-care in my life, if I change how I look at and define it. Self-care can have a far wider-ranging definition than a lot of the “lady” sites (whose tones are largely influenced by the way products and brands market to women) typically attribute to it. Self-care can mean pampering, meditation, yoga, or coffee-dates with girlfriends, sure. But it can also be defined as doing whatever the hell you need to do so you feel like the best version of YOU, and in order to feel good and whole.

When I was going through recovery from my surgery, the self-care that may have worked better for me probably would have been to work on accepting that life was out of my control at that time. Despite my desire to be a “Mother” and “Professional”, I simply could not embody either of those roles while I was trying to heal. The pampering and indulging types of self-care I was engaging in were escapist at best, and frustrated me every time I came back to reality. I would have been better served to practice accepting where I was in life at that moment in time – and that place was “recovery”.  

If I had really been able to have been kind and generous to myself during that period, I would have allowed myself to see that being unable to participate in my life in my usual ways did not make me less of a mother or less of a writer. To have given myself permission to hold onto my identity – to have freed myself of all that guilt during that time– now that would have been the ultimate act of self-care.

Originally published here.