The enemy within

Depression and anxiety are a terrible disease. Mental illness in whatever form is a terrible thing to experience. You can't see it, you can't pinpoint symptoms to a concrete disease, and diagnosis and treatments are, at best, good guess work by you and your doctor.

Medication for mental illness is dicey. Sometimes it will turn you into an emotionless robot, incapable of feeling, tasting, thinking, living. Sometimes it will make you so physically sick that the mental pain becomes secondary to the physical problems. Sometimes it will result in increased depression, anxiety, thoughts of suicide. It's a mixed bag that almost always comes with bad more than good.

I take a drug called dothep for my anxiety. It's a Tricyclic antidepressant, which basically means it blocks the reuptake of serotonin in the brain, resulting in an increase in its levels. Serotonin being one of the things in your brain that results in happy, it helps you cope with stress by helping you relax. Serotonin is the stuff that makes you feel good after a block of chocolate, or post orgasm, so more is better.

I'm on a really low dose. Like really low. It's basically enough to help me sleep at night, because I'm one f those people that doesn't do that much. I stress a lot. I spend all night tossing and turning and everything is a thousand times worse the next day because I didn't sleep.

The dothep works. Its great, I guess, in that I sleep most nights. I don't hear my phone chime that I have email ever, so I'm clearly totally dead to the world, but I wake up every morning exhausted, regardless of the apparent good nights rest.

I also struggle to function a lot of days. I'm angry at work, I'm sad at home, I feel like everywhere I go out of the house I'm wearing the angry face, because I am angry. All the time. And I hate it. This irrational anger is what drove me to cave on taking something for my anxiety in the first place. And then drove me to a slightly increased dose. And here we are, 9 months later, and wondering if it's time again to increase the dose.

Is this just a period of stress? Or do I need more help? Should that help involve therapy? Am I feeling so off kilter that I need more help than I get from my family? I really don't know lately.

The questions in my head make it hard for me to settle to sleep lately. Even with the pills the ability to actually drift off to sleep is harder than it was.

And I write blog posts in my head to try and stop the swirling questions. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I have to type them out to find a quiet place in my brain.

Mental illness is still so misunderstood. Confessing you have it is hard. Finding the right medication is hard. Finding the right therapist is hard. And sleeping, apparently is pretty hard too.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad