Symptoms: Emotional blunting, cognitive impairment, depersonalization/derealization, severe anxiety/panic, muscle/joint pain, GI disturbances
When I was 21 years old in 2016, I was deeply unhappy with my life. I worked a terrible retail job bringing in shopping carts (on top of 15 other things at any given time) for $9/hr just to pay for college. I started to realize that it was more of an indoctrination center than a place to prepare for a career, but I felt stuck because my father said he'd only let me live with him if I was in school. On top of that, I was overweight, thought very little of myself as a person, and there was no hope in my mind that any woman would ever find me attractive.
My doctor prescribed me Lexapro. For the first few weeks, I was happier, but it felt artificial. Life felt the way that dreams do; you feel something resembling the emotion it should trigger, but it's almost as if it exists outside of you.
My life started to fall apart shortly afterwards. I started to notice that the catastrophizing and habitual negativity I experienced got out of control. Instead of something that would happen every week or two, it became an everyday thing. I was also angry every day about the situation I was in. I was in a worse place than when I started the meds.
Because I didn't care if I lived or died, I was speeding in a freezing rainstorm. I felt no sense of danger nor did I care about the consequences of crashing. I didn't want to take my life per se, but I was indifferent to the possibility of it ending then. Predictably, I got in a severe accident where I suffered a concussion. I never went to the doctor to get it officially diagnosed, but I think it's pretty safe to say that if you hit a concrete barrier at 45 MPH and lose consciousness, you probably were concussed.
Sometimes, I felt numb. Most of the time, I was anxious and angry. I hated life and it felt like, "If this is the best it gets, why look forward to the future?" I ragequit that job a few months later without having another job lined up. I quit my meds at the same time. I'm not sure how much of that was immaturity and how much was the medication affecting my brain chemistry.
What I do know is that the next six weeks panicking, trying to find a job, were unbearable. I want to say that I just made a bad choice, but the further I get from those times, the more I believe that I was acting this way because my brain couldn't handle the drugs being put into it.
Shortly after stopping completely, no tapering, I got brain zaps so bad that I almost passed out every day. I would cry out of nowhere when I would never cry about anything at all before taking the meds. I was in pain all over from how anxious I felt.
Even when I found a job, the anxiety didn't go away. It persisted. I was exhausted all the time. I lashed out at everybody. Even though I'm quite intelligent, I couldn't make simple, rational judgments about anything. Simple tasks felt impossible. I went from being near the top of the class at an advanced learning school just three years before, handling a rough home life with my mom with as much grace as you could possibly expect from a high school student, to struggling to form a coherent thought or control my rage at mundane annoyances.
I'm starting to improve in all of these areas, but since I quit, I haven't felt the same. There's a feeling I have all over my body at all times. Calling it a malaise is selling it short. It's a constant discomfort. I can't fully relax anymore, which was not the case pre-meds. I wish I knew then what I know now about these meds. I'd insist to my younger self that proper diet, exercise, and rationally working through my problems is the only way to fix my life, not drugs that will still be affecting me negatively ten years later.