Symptoms: Brain zaps, emotional blunting, sexual dysfunction, cognitive impairment, insomnia, suicidal ideation, neuropathy, GI disturbances, intense permanent headache, persistent genital arousal disorder, bladder dysfunction
During COVID, I was living alone without access to family or friends. My workplace experienced substantial budget cuts, leading to an increased workload for me without adequate support. Due to the anxiety I felt constantly during this time, I talked with my GP about my mental health. He didn’t refer me to a counsellor or psychiatrist but simply prescribed me escitalopram, saying that the side effects would be limited to some mild nausea and some sexual dysfunction, and then he invited me to experiment with my own dosage so that I wouldn’t need to come back to see him.
I didn’t know anything about the harms of these meds, and so at the time I thought that this advice felt freeing and empowering. The intense nausea I experienced when starting the medication should have been my first sign that something unhealthy was happening in my brain. But I kept taking it. It didn’t help my mental health symptoms at the prescribed dosage, so I started to increase. After two increases, a year and a half later, I realised this wasn’t working for me at all.
I started to taper very quickly on my own and ended up having heart-attack-like symptoms. So I consulted another doctor and a pharmacist, both of whom told me to taper off by 5mg every two weeks, which I found out later was completely wrong. I did this, and for about 2.5 weeks after my last dose I felt fine.
And then everything fell apart. Overnight, an intense headache started, along with brain zaps, dizziness, the ability to hear my eyes move, feelings of insanity, and irregular heartbeats. These symptoms all lasted for four months, and then my bladder symptoms, where I felt like I had to urinate 100% of the time and urinating actually intensified the feeling, were added to the growing list of what I was constantly experiencing.
I found out about Dr Mark Horowitz and scheduled a consultation with him. He confirmed that everything I was experiencing was connected to cessation of the medication and that I had a neurological injury.
For over 2.5 years now, I have had the same symptoms and it has been excruciating. I had mould exposure 1.5 years ago which substantially added to the autonomic nervous system dysfunction and contributed to me developing multiple chemical sensitivity. I was off work for two years because of this without any medical support, as no one else believed me. I was never even remotely informed that these things would be possibilities. I would never have tried the medication if I had known.