Posted by Mr Cushing on December 2, 2002, at 18:53:29
In reply to Re: How psychiatry ruined my life, posted by utopizen on December 2, 2002, at 18:21:07
I've actually tried just about every illegal drug that's out there except for sticking a needle into my arm, and yes, withdrawal from every one of them was easier than with most SSRIs. When I took Celexa for 2 years, 20mg a day, that wasn't that bad. I would compare that with say, quitting smoking tobacco. However, the Effexor, while only being on 75mg of it for about 3 months every day, try cocaine... Much easier to get off of lol...Take for example that you're using cocaine daily for a while, and you're starting to get addicted to it. It's not that you're scared of what will happen once your buzz ends while you're still high, it's that feeling that you get once you come down that makes you 'need' to take it again. It starts off as sort of an unpleasant tingling feeling throughout your body which within hours is incredibly painful and agonizing to endure. The only way to get this feeling to go away, which will continually get worse till you feel as if you're basically going to lose your mind, is to take the drug again. That's addiction. To me, that was the same effect as taking SSRIs. I could pretty much tell by the hour when it was time to take my medication because I could feel that feeling starting up. If, say, I fell asleep at night without taking my medication, I'll wake up in a complete cold sweat in the middle of the night shaking because my body was P'd off that it didn't have the medication. If I took my pill, then fine, within say another hour, I was starting to feel pretty leveled out again.
That is completely comparable to addiction.... that's why I said that in the first place. Taking SSRIs is almost like you become addicted to them.
Now, on the other hand, I've NEVER had that feeling with Clonazepam. I use it basically when my body starts to freak out on me. If I start to feel like I'm having a panic attack, for example. It's never at the same time of the day, it's never when the drug starts to leave my system, and I usually don't require the same amount of the drug every day. I still use .5mg every night to help me get my sleep, but when you're Bi-Polar and you're trying out a ton of medications to try and keep yourself stabilized, hoping to find something that will work, then you 'need' your sleep or else you're completely off the wall.
Personally, I believe that the only reason that benzo's have that "addiction" stigma attached to them is because if a "normal" person were to take them, it would feel pretty damned good. As you probably know, SSRIs don't do that. In fact, most SSRIs make you feel worse before you started to get better. And for a normal person to be so desperate for a buzz that they would endure all the side effects of SSRIs in order to finally reach that peak after a few weeks, then that's just sick.
Don't get me wrong though, SSRIs are EXTREMELY helpful for the people that need them. I'm back on Celexa again, and I don't mind the side effects that are attached to it or the "addiction" that I will go through coming off of it because while I'm on it, it helps me to lead a normal life. Benzos, on the other hand, also help you out incredibly and don't need to be increased too frequently unless you're relying on them as your sole source of medication. Say for example the person that pops a handful of Xanax every night because of insomnia and is only popping the Xanax in hopes that it will knock them out cold and keep them out cold. They will probably need to increase their dosage frequently to get that same effect. However, when it comes time to quit taking the Benzos, other than the "emotional withdrawal" that you get from say, quitting smoking marijuana, the physical withdrawal symptoms are very minor.
Some Docs get away with saying that they're "addictive" while not labelling any other medication that way is because it makes normal people feel the same thing that people that actually need the drug are feeling. If they created an SSRI that would immediately make you feel good about everything upon taking it, and was that way for everybody, not just the people that needed it, it would be labelled the exact same.
poster:Mr Cushing
thread:130130
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20021127/msgs/130303.html