Posted by Steffany on February 23, 2001, at 19:24:08
hi. i stumbled upon this site kind of randomly this afternoon, and read through some of the postings. this seems like maybe what i need. my depression/anxiety get worse every spring, and this past week i've been seriously considering looking for a therapist. i've had some really bad luck with them before, plus there's the money, and my general fear/distrust of professional strangers. the thing is, i'm no longer quite sure what i'd even want from therapy. i guess i'd want my terror of people and various other quirks acknowledged in a truly nonjudgmental way, and i'd want to be reassured by someone who is not a daily part of my life, like friends/parents/boyfriend/books.
i often have imaginary conversations with my imaginary therapist in my head. i suppose that he'd start with at least a cursory overview of my life, i.e. what do i think made me so fucked up? so i guess i'll start with telling something about myself and my history.
i just turned 25; i live with my boyfriend in a small midwestern college town where neither of us really knows anyone. i've just applied to grad school and am waiting for a decision there.
i've been on psychotropic medication since i was 19. zoloft, luvox, serzone, buspar, ativan, perphenezine, depakote (not prescribed), ritalin (not prescribed), and adderall (not prescribed). currently i'm taking a combination of wellbutrin and klonopin--i've been on that since my last suicide attempt, about 2 1/2 yrs ago. it was working remarkably well for a long time, but now i'm not so sure, but even admitting that really frightens me. i don't want anyone to know my medication might not be working anymore. somehow i'd feel like i'd failed. also, i don't want to be put on effexor, ever.
i'm also just interested in pharmaceuticals as a hobby. i'm thinking of writing a zine about the various psychotropic drugs out there, based on personal experience, reading, and friends' stories (i think almost everyone i know has been on medication for at least some time.)i'm really afraid that this is somehow vain. writing about myself. does anyone else have this problem? i sort of feel like writing about my childhood and growing up and all of that, but it seems narcissistic. but i also want to do it.
i was born in russia and came to the u.s w/my parents when i was 3. they started out as rather freewheeling graduate students but the cultural conflict in my house escalated rapidly. i'm an only child, so all the attention was focused on me. my parents were very concerned that i not be 'infected' with american values such as materialism, commercialism, relativism, etc. they switched the tv off during the commercials. i think this made me overly conscious of the need to fit in, to keep the secret of my 'weird' family hidden.
what most stands out in my mind as the point where i first became aware of being depressed was the year i was 13, when my parents took me out of my junior high and enrolled me in a catholic school in another town b/c they didn't like the influence my friends were having on me. it was the most miserable year of my life up until then. i was completely isolated; hated the school & its hypocrisy; was just totally invisible there. despite my hysterical pleas, my parents would not move me back to my old school. this was the first year i began to think seriously about suicide; i experimented by
taking 3 or 4 of my father's fiorinals (migraine medication containing a barbituate) and making myself pass out, or holding razors to my wrists. mostly i think i just listened to a lot of pink floyd and cried. i always feel like this seems a pretty trivial "trauma," compared with hostile divorces, sexual abuse, death of a loved one, everything else that could possibly turn a child against herself. but it was just truly a frightening, horrible experience. i felt betrayed and abandoned by my parents, and although our relationship now is good, i don't think i ever regained my trust in them.after that year i was allowed to return to public school. i was basically a 'geek' until a certain point during junior year when that stopped being bad and became sort of enjoyable. i always had a few close friends. my senior year my parents received an anonymous letter from someone (i still don't know whom) saying that i was doing lsd and really needed help, etc. i don't think i've fully processed how scary it was that someone was "watching" me; i still have NO clue who's well-meaning parent wrote that. anyway, my parents freaked out and told me i could no longer live in their house. i spent
the rest of my senior year between my aunt's house in a differnt state and various friends' houses, as well as brief stints at home. i was getting really into anarchism and drug philosophy, and i self-consciously lost my virginity to a preppy boy whom i'd considered a friend until he completely ignored me afterward. my AP/honors class girl friends and i played at being 'sex goddesses' a la anais nin, but i don't know if any of us ever felt comfortable in the role.i went away to an ivy league college in new england, far away from where i'd grown up. my freshman year i made a lot of seemingly close friends, all of whom seemed to have psychiatrists or psychologists for parents (even the 'player' boy i was sleeping with was the product of two hyper-intellectual new york city jewish psychologists). suddenly everyone and their mother (literally) was telling me about my psychological problems--that i had no 'healthy sense of self' or 'boundaries,' that i was 'self-destructive' and just basically didn't know when to stop. i felt particularly betrayed when i returned
for my sophomore year and my best friend informed me that we could no longer be close because i had been spending too much time with her ex-boyfriend (which was an honestly platonic friendship on my part). i felt really isolated again that year, just... condemned somehow. i knew that i used guys for attention, that i had sex with a lot of people--boys and girls--basically in order to have a good story to tell at the breakfast table in the dining hall the next morning. but soon, in place of meaningless and basically un-enjoyable sexual encounters, i discovered heroin, which became my new best friend for the
next two years. at first it was almost a joke--my friend matt and i taking the train into new york city and buying bags of dope on the outskirts of alphabet city with a bunch of frat boys and club kids and elderly ladies in fur coats. eventually it was no longer recreational. an acquaintance died of an overdose and matt and i just went on with it. at christmas of junior year matt dropped out of school because he could no longer handle the life we were living, and i was alone again. things went downhill rapidly--everything but my grades, oddly. by spring i was working for my dealer in the city in the mornings
before my first class, stealing and cashing my neighbors' checks, and hooking off the street (it somehow seemed okay b/c matt had worked as a high-end call boy in new york). i was shooting up about eight times a day and picked up a crack habit, yet surprisingly no one seemed to notice much. at some point one of my friends from childhood had 'informed' on me in the hope that i would get some real help, but i just ended up seeing a completely ineffectual school counselor whom i lied to about everything. they put me on zoloft, which didn't seem to help. at one point i know that i attempted to kill myself by
overdose. finally i called my parents and told them that i was a junkie and needed to come home. they were surprisingly understanding--i guess their fear had just reached a certain limit. i came home and checked into rehab and never went back to that school or that town again.rehab was my first 'real' encounter with therapists and social workers and other drug addicts. when i look back on it now, i feel like there wasn't really enough emphasis placed on the underlying conditions which precipitated self-medication and often, addiction. they had a really "outcomes-based" approach. twelve-step programs and the whole bit. it was actually helpful for a time, for what it was. i went in there voluntarily and tried to really believe in the 'addiction' theory of mental illness, which basically boiled down to: addiction is a physiological illness caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.
the only way to overcome it is to realize you are helpless against it, etc etc. i spent about 4 or 5 months being a good little girl "in recovery" and actually not even drinking alcohol. i began a relationship with a guy whom i'd been sort of obsessed with in high school. i got a job in a cool vintage clothing store, and i eventually graduated from the local state university. i tried to convince myself that i was doing as well as i could under the circumstances, but there were definetely times when i couldn't help feeling deeply ashamed that i hadn't stuck it out at school, lived up to my "gifted child" potential,
etc. my parents were struggling to accept a whole new worldview--all the "psychiatric jargon" which they had dismissed all their lives was suddenly the philosophy that was keeping me alive. but when my father asked me to be sure to wear long sleeved shirts when i came by his office to hide my track marks, i just felt like an alien. yet it was at this same time that i started cutting myself on a regular basis. i think on some level i was afraid of the needle-scars fading away, because the first cuts i made were vertical ones along my arms. i later moved on to legs and stomach as favorite spots. i still do this
to relieve stress, and despite what i've read i can't really accept that it's an utterly harmful and sick behavior. i would rather cut myself as a response to stress than get drunk any day.i ended up becoming friends with the local "indie-punk kids," who were comfortable b/c generally non-judgmental and hard to shock. yet in the next year i continued to get worse. my psychiatrist switched me from one medication to another but nothing seemed to work and everything was frustrating b/c of the whole ssri/orgasm problem. my new drug of choice became dextromethorphan cough syrup, which produced a pleasant ecstasy-like high, allowing me to open up and dance around and goof off. i became close friends with another girl whose psychological problems were very similar to mine, and it helped a lot to have someone
there who was not horrified by my thoughts of suicide or the increasing episodes of dissociation i was experiencing, in which i heard auditory hallucinations and could not distinguish between dreaming and reality. however, that friendship ended badly when i started sleeping w/her boyfriend--who was about as messed up as we were--and the whole thing degenerated into a sad mess.about a year later i decided to go off all medication. i was convinced that i could no longer write or do anything creative on it. i tried taking st. john's wort and gingko biloba for a while, but it didn't seem to help. my relationship with my new boyfriend was a series of extreme ups and downs, with lots of tearful fights, threats, break-ups, and dramatic reconciliations. i was constantly terrified. it still strikes me as... weird, surprising, the way i sunk so deeply into depression that year off my medications without ever being aware that that was what was happening. i didn't associate my obsessive relationship
or my morning panic attacks with my previous feelings of absolute hopelessness. the summer after graduating from college i was accepted into a summer program at nyu, but as soon as i got to new york i immediately resumed daily heroin use. the more i thought about it, the more convinced i was that without my boyfriend i literally did not exist. he was dealing with his own mental problems and did not handle my every-few-hours long distance phone calls, checking up to make sure he still loved me. i was offered a good job in new york but instead came home after the program was over, which just seemed like another failure, but
by that point i just no longer cared. a month later my boyfriend broke up with me and i overdosed on my roommate's tranquilizers and my father's migraine medication. by some miracle of my mother's intervention i was not committed to the state mental hospital, as was required by law, and allowed to go home. that's when i started on the wellbutrin/klonopin combination--august of 1998. it seemed to help miraculously. within a week i was hit by the overwhelming feeling of being "back," of being myself and having that be tolerable.my boyfriend and i eventually got back together after about a year and moved to chicago together. now we're here. our relationship is good but i think we're both maybe a little too wary of "becoming each other's therapist" again, so while we give each other unlimited comfort, we don't spend a lot of time analyzing our problems and personalities.
anyway... that's about where i am now. there is nothing especially wrong except that i can feel the fear coming back on and i don't want to deal with it in the ways that have proven ineffectual year after year--large quantities of 'recreational' drugs. there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it doesn't help me. i would like to finally approach some understanding of why i can't talk to anyone except the oldest friends or the most superficial acquaintances, and why i haven't been picking up the phone for the past year and a half (the phone just really scares me--does anyone else have this problem?) in the past few days
i've become obsessed with saving the life of a racoon who lives in our roof, whom the landlord wants to trap and kill. but literally anything--like hearing someone say "that's an ugly car"--makes me burst into tears of this horrible pity and anger. it's just like an extreme sensitivity, i guess. and it does come on every spring, and i've learned to expect it. i'm still taking my medication, though like i've said, i'm secretly afraid that it's finally worn itself out, and i hate to think of the alternatives. i've been reading this book called "prozac backlash" by joseph (?) glenmullen, whose basic premise is that ssri's (he
somehow manages to include wellbutrin with these, although it's not) are overprescribed and carry a much greater risk of permanent brain damage--tardive dyskenisia & such--than previously thought. a part of me wishes i could just be off medication, that i could be exercising and running and doing yoga and writing zines and that somehow everything would turn out all right. but i don't believe that at all.i'm not really sure how this works... i think i need to read more of what other people have written. but if anyone has any advice or related experiences or suggestions on free mental health or any information whatsoever on "social panic," please write me. thanks for listening to me.
poster:Steffany
thread:54711
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20010221/msgs/54711.html