I can tell you from bitter experience that they fucking suck. I’m currently trying to get off after a solid 8 years on them. You don’t realise how much they affect you until you start to drop the dosage - your brain works completely differently.
Withdrawals are awful, but I finally decided pushing through it was worth it. Give it another few months and hopefully I’ll be 100% free of this crap.
Well I’m not fully off yet, but down to 5mg which is pretty much as low as you can get, with the next step being zero.
There’s a lot of physical differences, tiredness and needing to sleep a lot when I’m on them being the main ones. The tiredness isn’t like normal tiredness though. Most people can function when they’re tired from, say, a bad night’s sleep, they just feel rough while they’re doing it. This is like, massively mentally taxing to make myself a sandwich tired. Weird things that I’d taken for granted like just cleaning up pots after myself immediately, I just do it without thinking about it now, whereas 6 months ago that’d be a genuine effort. It sounds ridiculous, I know.
And I can get by on much less sleep now and stay awake all day.
The more subtle stuff is things like clarity of thought and motivation. One of the most noticeable things for me was my ability to concentrate in the gym - I’ve been getting injured a lot over the past few years and not making a whole lot of progress, and I’ve got no doubt now that it’s been due to the SSRIs. I just couldn’t concentrate and focus on what I was doing, and I was literally physically weaker. Motivation wise, they definitely make you feel completely ok with doing nothing, which is probably not a bad thing if you’re suicidal, but absolutely sucks if you actually want to get out of the rut that may have made you depressed in the first place. These sorts of things are really hard to get a grasp of, too, since once you’ve been on them for long enough, you forget what ‘normal’ even feels like.
I had to look up what an SSRI is, lol. I don't know what that says about me, but hopefully it is a good thing.
I can tell you from bitter experience that they fucking suck. I’m currently trying to get off after a solid 8 years on them. You don’t realise how much they affect you until you start to drop the dosage - your brain works completely differently.
Withdrawals are awful, but I finally decided pushing through it was worth it. Give it another few months and hopefully I’ll be 100% free of this crap.
Whats the difference(s) you noticed with your brain on them vs off?
Well I’m not fully off yet, but down to 5mg which is pretty much as low as you can get, with the next step being zero.
There’s a lot of physical differences, tiredness and needing to sleep a lot when I’m on them being the main ones. The tiredness isn’t like normal tiredness though. Most people can function when they’re tired from, say, a bad night’s sleep, they just feel rough while they’re doing it. This is like, massively mentally taxing to make myself a sandwich tired. Weird things that I’d taken for granted like just cleaning up pots after myself immediately, I just do it without thinking about it now, whereas 6 months ago that’d be a genuine effort. It sounds ridiculous, I know.
And I can get by on much less sleep now and stay awake all day.
The more subtle stuff is things like clarity of thought and motivation. One of the most noticeable things for me was my ability to concentrate in the gym - I’ve been getting injured a lot over the past few years and not making a whole lot of progress, and I’ve got no doubt now that it’s been due to the SSRIs. I just couldn’t concentrate and focus on what I was doing, and I was literally physically weaker. Motivation wise, they definitely make you feel completely ok with doing nothing, which is probably not a bad thing if you’re suicidal, but absolutely sucks if you actually want to get out of the rut that may have made you depressed in the first place. These sorts of things are really hard to get a grasp of, too, since once you’ve been on them for long enough, you forget what ‘normal’ even feels like.