Throughout my life, I’ve experienced several types of withdrawals, from illegal drugs to prescription drugs used appropriately. So I thought I’d use today’s musings article to share my experience of going through these withdrawals.
Illegal Drug Withdrawals
I used to take a lot of illegal drugs back in the late 90s and early 00s. That’s how I ended up with drug-induced psychosis. My drug of choice was weed before the psychosis became too much to handle. Then my drug of choice became ecstasy. But I was never one to shy away from cocktailing my drugs, which also didn’t help with my drug-induced psychosis.
However, not all ecstasy pills were ecstasy. Some would have black speckles, which would mean they were ketamine pills, and brown-speckled pills meant heroin. I’m not sure if that’s how it is nowadays, but it was for me in the 00s.
I’m not going to lie. The high on brown-speckled pills was amazing. It would be like floating in the warm embrace of a goddess. But if you take too many over a short space of time, you’ll get your Trainspotting experience. I did about 50 brown-speckled pills over a few days and stopped. I never liked chasing a high, so I never had an issue with just stopping. That was always my rule, and I always followed it.
However, this time when I stopped, I experienced some intense withdrawals. It’s important to note that this was before my psychosis wrecked my life, and I wasn’t having daily psychotic episodes. So when the withdrawals caused full-on visual hallucinations, it got my attention.
However, the worst, for me at least, was the sleep paralysis. I was living in my mate’s living room at the time, and we often had drink and drug sessions with people crashing over. So I’m sleeping on the floor with our friends, and I wake up and see my friend walk up to me and start doing some scary shit.
But I was unable to scream or move, and I was stuck paralysed for several minutes before the hallucinations went away and I could move again. I had several experiences like this over the course of a few days as the heroin in those brown-speckled pills left my system and my body returned to normal.
Cold Turkey
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll likely already be aware of when my Mental Health Trust forced me to go cold turkey off my prescription for sleeping pills and my antidepressants at the same time, which was an utter shitshow. This was at the really early stages of me seeking help for my mental health and when my psychosis was at its most extreme.
My psychosis was so bad that any use of antidepressants would cause a psychotic response that would last until I stopped taking the medication. Even Red Bull would cause a psychotic episode. I was also a chronic insomniac at the time, which often led to sleep deprivation-induced psychotic episodes as well.
In 2003, I went through a lot of trial and error with antidepressants as everything they gave me triggered a psychotic response. However, my GP found that if I took citalopram in the morning and a sleeping tablet at night, it didn’t trigger psychosis. Happy days. I was finally able to sleep, which reduced the number of psychotic episodes I was having and reduced the strength of the ones I did have, but not by much. It was better than nothing, though.
When I changed GP practices in 2005 and fell under a new Mental Health Trust, that’s when the problems started. They wouldn’t give me a repeated prescription for my citalopram or sleeping tablets, so I kept running out of them and experiencing psychosis at a much more intense level until I was able to go back on the medications. This meant a lot of trips to the Mental Health Trust for emergency prescriptions.
One day, they refused to prescribe the sleeping tablets, and without them, the antidepressants would cause my psychosis to be out of control. I explained this to them, but they didn’t care. So I went cold turkey off both the sleeping tablets and the citalopram at the same time and had the worst few months of my life.
My psychosis was constant, 24/7, lasting months. I barely left my room even though I was studying for my undergraduate degree. It was that relentless. I can’t put into words just how goddamn awful it was, but the film I created with Artangle does a very good job of showing the horrors.
Who would have guessed that I’d experience far worse withdrawals from prescription medication rather than from the illegal drugs I used to take?
My Recent Experiences With Withdrawals
Let me first outline the kind of withdrawals I get when coming off an antidepressant, before talking about my wider experiences with withdrawals. Depending on the antidepressant, my withdrawals normally come in the form of brain and body zaps. Every few minutes, I’ll get a zap in my brain, or less often, somewhere else in my body, and that’ll last a few weeks.
Over the last five years or so, I’ve been trying different antidepressants to help with my dizziness disorders, namely my persistent postural-perceptual dizziness (PPPD) and episodes of vertigo. So I experienced these brain zaps several times when switching between antidepressants.
The main reason I started taking antidepressants was to help with the dizziness caused by my PPPD. However, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also hoping it’d affect my feelings of emptiness as well. My depression has been with me since I was a child, and if I could hit two birds with one stone, then I thought it was worth trying.
For the better part of a year, I took sertraline, changing from 50mg to 100mg and then back down to 50mg. The problem I found with sertraline was that it didn’t really do much to help with my dizziness, but this wasn’t the most annoying part.
My doctor issued me a small course of sleeping tablets because, since starting on antidepressants again, I hadn’t been sleeping. By this point, I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in about four years.
That’s not where things get annoying, by the way. This is. I had my prescriptions delivered by Lloyds Pharmacy, and they didn’t have the sleeping tablets or my antidepressant in stock at first. Not ideal when you’re withdrawing from your previous antidepressant.
Luckily, the withdrawals weren’t causing me to have a psychotic episode, as that was always a worry since what happened when I was forced to go cold turkey. I just constantly had brain zaps that travelled halfway down my body. Not great, but not as bad as it could be for me.
For some reason, Lloyds Pharmacy thought it’d be a good idea to hold on to the antidepressant when it came into stock while they waited for the sleeping tablets to get in stock. However, they told me they had no idea when that might be. Obviously, I complained because I was withdrawing and because this was unethical with such medications.
I had to make two separate complaints before they’d send my antidepressant on their own. Two. Because of this shocking behaviour, I switched to Pharmacy2U, which had both prescriptions in stock. However, I ran into a similar issue with them as well, so I switched to another prescription delivery service with a local pharmacy, which has been really on the ball.
Even when there was an issue with my GP sending one of my prescriptions over to this new pharmacy, I told the pharmacy they could wait until they had both prescriptions from my GP before making a delivery, as I had enough of my antidepressant to keep me going. But they insisted on delivering them separately. That’s the response you want from a pharmacy.