Posted by firstname on May 24, 2008, at 13:38:46
i'm posting for two reasons: first to provide my own cautionary tale. I have benefited SO much from reading other people's experience over the past few months. Second, I am hoping any of y'all might be kind enough to offer any thoughts/theories/advice re: my communicative disorder and possible causes/fixes....
Theoretically, I am a writer, but I can no longer write a simple sentence. The words & thoughts get hopelessly muddled & mangled somewhere between my brain and the screen. I frequently have trouble recalling, spelling and typing words.
Problems started -- but were MUCH more mild -- soon after I was diagnosed with depression and ADHD about 6 years ago. I was put on adderall & and a series of SSRIs that seemed not to do much, which were eventually replaced by effexor XR in 2005.
It was a HORRIBLE two years -- that culminated in what felt like near-psychotic break last spring. At that point, my reg. daily regimen included:
* 450 mg Effexor ER
* 200 mg Provigil
* 30 mg Adderall XR
* Lunesta and/or Ambien every night
Because i am naturally pretty flaky and strongly ambivalent about being on medicine, I would often forget/skip effexor & provigil, esp on weekends, so i was basically going through ever-intensifying Effexor withdrawl for over a year: sleeping 2 hours a night during the week and 48 hours straight through the weekends. Intense brain zaps, epic nightmares, and dizziness eventually made it difficult for me to feel difference between wake and sleep. It is one thing to think you are awake when you are really dreaming, but it is VERY weird to feel like you are still sleeping and you are actually awake.I was a mess -- emotionally, mentally & physically.
Clearly this all made work very challenging & I was so frantic & preoccupied, i barely managed to get to pharm to pick up medication, let alone research side-effects. And while i repeatedly confessed to "doctor" i was often missing doses, she never seemed to suspect withdrawl. She just kept increasing dosage and added two new medications: Focalin for 1 month, followed by 6 weeks of lamictal, which was proverbial psycho-tropic straw.
Since starting the effexor i had also gained quite a bit of weight, but two weeks into lamictil, new bulk appeared so suddenly, I actually decided to google Lamictal,then effexor, etc.
It was beginning of horrifying epiphany that chemical cocktails had essentially been melting my brain for 2-4 years.
I gave notice & went off everything except adderall & ambien pretty much as cold turkey as i could manage without puking on my desk or the car. As i 'm sure many of you with any experience with effexor know, it was a hell of a few months.
But i newfound resolve to do a total brain cleanse, hoping an unadulterated baseline state would help determine what if anything was truly wrong with me versus were simply side effects of meds. I gradually weened myself off sleeping pills and adderall.
No longer working, just focusing on detox & mental recovery & writing paralysis.
Soon after i started on effexor, what had already become a painstakingly slow & labored writing process -- gradually ground to complete halt. i was no longer rearranging sentences and sharpening paragraphs, but really struggling to arrange words in coherent and complete sentences. I began to "write out" whole passages in my head and transcribed thoughts, but soon was unable to remember sentences in my head long enough to transcribe them. Every sentence had to pieced together from mess of fragments and re-read over and over to ensure essential grammatical components are present/ in correct order.
I did some research and found out there is no such thing as late on-set acute dyslexia. But writing paralysis was so pronounced, I began to suspect that drugs/anxiety had altered neural pathways or something and consulted with three separate ADHD specialists.Each administered litany of multi-choice questionnaires & performed battery of neuro-testing, but inattention to biographical details and reliance on pre-fab medical diagnostics did not inspire much confidence. None were particularly interested in communicative impariment -- chalking it up to anxiety - and i left with exact same diagnoses & prescriptions I had been skeptical about since day 1 -- adhd, depression, anxiety; adderall, ambien & anti-depressant.
After the effexor psychosis, i will NEVER take another anti-depressant again. I also happily kicked ambien habit & even adderall for a while. But when i started searching for job a couple months ago, started adderall again and now taking 30 mg xl a day.
It has been 13 months now since that fateful google search for effexor. My memory of the past three years in spotty and impressionistic at best, but generally i feel MUCH MUCH better -- mind, body & spirit -- I am back to regular weight, verbal alacrity feel practical almost normal, thinking is fairly clear and coherent - but my biggest problem & fear remains: i still can not write. there are momentary breaks in thick fog, but producing clear declarative sentences requires obscene amount of time and effort.Sentence as simple as: "I went to the book store yesterday" for instance will come out naturally like: "Book store yesterday, i was there yesterday."
I can't recall even the most basic words -- such as "steep" or "ally" when i finally think of approximate alternatives, i can't spell them; when i can manage to settle on correct collection of letters, i can't type them in order.
As you can imagine - this mysterious & mental impairment is not only quite distressing emotionally but also pracitcally a big hurdle for writer seeking employment....
Wondering if anyone has any insights as to whether this problem sounds like:
1.late on-set brain damage or disability
2. calcified anxiety that somehow infected pre-conscious basic linguistic cognition, or
3. side effect/damage of psychotropic drugs.
Thanks so much!ps (this description came out MUCH/ easier than normal for some reason, but still took hours and quite a bit of cutting and pasting)
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