Tag Archives: blogging

Anxiety Medication Withdrawal Fail

As discussed before, I have been on medication to treat my GAD for the past few years. I was lucky to have found a doctor who prescribed me medication instead of sending me to therapy. The medication had been working beautifully, but I always assumed that I won’t take them forever. When I moved to Bangkok, I decided to quit, as I won’t find a doctor here to continue the prescription. I put it off for many months fearing medication withdrawal. Running low on supplies, few weeks ago, I decided that that time was here.

I had been on the following medication to treat my GAD

Medication withdrawal

With high optimism and hope in my heart, I started the process of quitting, one medication at a time.

Levowave

Getting off Levowave was relatively easy. First I halved my dose for a week and then changed it to 3 days a week, then stopped completely. I had some confusion, irritability, anxiety, tremors for a couple of days but after that I was back to normal. No impact on sleep at all.

I assumed that the withdrawal for the other medications would be as easy. How wrong I was!

Buspin

I assumed this one would be the easiest to stop, but I was dead wrong. I halved the dose and in just 2 days, shit hit the fan.

  • Night 1/Day 2 – Uneventful
  • Night 2 – On night 2, suddenly I woke up at 01:00 AM with my heart beating fast, for no apparent reason. I was up for an hour, but was able to go back to (restless) sleep afterwards.
  • Day 2 – The entire day I was full of anxiety, irritable and confused. Lost my appetite. There was also a phase where I had to abuse random strangers on twitter for no reason.
  • Night 3 – Night 3 was horrible. I slept at 21:30 but woke up at 23:00. After that whatever I tried, I couldn’t go back to sleep. I either felt too hot (sweating) or too cold (shivering). After tossing and turning for hours and rousing the rest of my family, I think I finally managed to fall asleep at 04:00. Libido was also up 10x. Heart rate was above 90 bpm throughout.
  • Day 3 – Day 3 started slightly better than Day 2. I started running again, which brought back my appetite. But later in the day, my heart rate rose above 100bps doing nothing. A sense of doom & gloom pervaded my brain and I had only negative thoughts.

I Quit

Sometime in the afternoon of Day 3, I realised that I cannot go through with this and decided to go back on my remaining pills. I booked a doctor’s appointment to get a prescription to resume the medication.

Day 4 – I woke up refreshed after 10 hours of beautiful sleep. The world seemed brighter, and life seemed more beautiful.

After resuming my medication, I finally saw a doctor here. Fortunately, he was kind and patient and prescribed me medication to continue. Unfortunately, not all my medication is available in Thailand, so I have to switch medication.

After all this, I am extremely grateful for my medicines and medical science in general. I will never again take them for granted.

I Miss College Days

I frequently dream about my college days in Nagpur. Although most of those dreams are actually nightmares with a recurring theme, some are actually pleasant. Last night I dreamt that my daughter took admission in some Nagpur college & me and my wife also moved there to be closer to her. There, I was roaming around on my motorcycle and made acquaintance of some college students.

Although I have been to Nagpur many times since I graduated, it is not the same going back as an adult.

College days in Nagpur
Nagpur, PC: Kayak

What I miss about college days

  1. Seeing my friends everyday.
  2. Going to college but not going into the classroom.
  3. The widespread excellent food cheaper than anywhere else.
  4. Finding a new bar to drink for cheap every day of the week with friends.
  5. Once in a while staying at home blogging while friends are outside partying.
  6. Going to Buldi to buy cheap clothes, drink fruit juice and buy mobile phones.
  7. Drinking beer with Sood sahab at home listening to music while it is raining outside.
  8. Riding around on my motorcycle (RIP).
  9. Going on dates with my girlfriend (now wife) & spending hours talking on the phone on the terrace.
  10. Filling ₹10 worth of petrol in my motorcycle.
  11. The feeling of returning from holidays at home.
  12. Not having a single female friend.
  13. Hanging out at Shanky PP with friends and drinking coffee.
  14. Going to Pyramid and not buying anything.
  15. Our very first home.
  16. Going to Westside and not buying anything.
  17. Going to Poonam Chambers & playing video games.
  18. Knowing exactly what 2-wheeler everyone had & judging them for it.
  19. Attending college rock concerts without being judged for being single and poor.
  20. Sitting at Cafe Coffee Day staring at girls without a single worry in life. Also purchasing Q-Jam coupons for ₹5 and playing our favourite songs.
  21. Going to localites’ house and not relating to their culture, but appreciating a home cooked meal nonetheless.
  22. Consuming cannabis with friends at the hostel on Holi and then spending the next few days wasted.
  23. Drinking beer at Telangkhedi lake and pissing in the lake standing on the retaining wall.
  24. Watching English movies with shitty Hindi dubbing.
  25. Sleeping in on exam day.

What I don’t miss

  1. The sweltering heat & the ever present dust.
  2. The constant/ever present lack of monies.
  3. The shit fountain at the hostel.
  4. My immature behaviour.
  5. Exam result nights.

For anyone else feeling nostalgic about college days, suggest watching this excellent show on Prime.

A Note on Mental Health

I have documented my struggles with mental health on this blog before. Considering the focus of the media on the mental health of famous people these days, I decided to write a longer rant about my own struggles.

During my college days I was a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Although I did get depressed once in a while, I was never-ever worried about things. After college, while working a job I didn’t like, I also went through bouts of depression, but got over it quickly once I found a better job.

My second job was the best job, mentally, of my career. I had friends at work, I enjoyed what I was doing and I never even thought about work outside office. It was a shift-job where you could switch off completely after work.

It was in 2012 that I realized something was wrong. I suffered from IBS for almost 2 years. During this time I also turned lactose intolerant. I did read about the close connection between the gut and the brain, but I couldn’t figure out which affected which. After 2 years, I suddenly got better and didn’t think about it again.

Things started to go south again around 2016-17, when I wasn’t able to handle non-stresses from my work. I would lay awake at night thinking about trivial things from work, lost weight rapidly and couldn’t concentrate on non-work things. I tried things like meditation and mindfulness but nothing helped much. The mind just won’t stop racing and over-thinking.

This was the first time I decided to go see a shrink, at a hospital. I was hoping for a quick solution to all my troubles, but she prescribed me with very-expensive counselling sessions. The cost of the sessions made my issues worse, so I never went back. Thankfully, the shrink did give me a diagnosis, that of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Eventually, this phase also passed and I forgot all about it.

I switched jobs again in 2020 and this time anxiety came back to attack me with a vengeance. It was clear that this time it was worse than before. It was so bad that I couldn’t sleep for more than 3 hours for a week straight. Sleeping aids didn’t help either.

Eventually, I decided to go to another shrink. This one was in a busy market popular with people I knew. I was ashamed to go see him. This doctor also confirmed the diagnosis of GAD and decided to prescribe me medications immediately. Within a few days, I was feeling much better. Although anxiety never went away completely, it is now quite under control, thankfully, to this day.

What I do

I use the following techniques to keep my anxiety under control

  1. Medication, which I am slowly weaning myself off of.
  2. Exercise – Even a short run helps a lot. Even walking is better than nothing.
  3. Listen to music I love everyday, without fail.
  4. Writing (Blogging)
  5. Whenever I have too many thoughts at night, I write them on a piece of paper before I go to bed. Next day I action all the items on that piece of paper and then tear it away. I found this strangely therapeutic.
  6. Stay as far away from Social Networks as possible.

I know many people have found relief with mindfulness, but for me it tended to make things worse. Maybe I was not using the tool correctly.

The Rich

On the news, I repeatedly hear stories about the struggle of famous people with mental health, especially sportspersons. Although I am happy that they are raising more awareness for mental health, the impact of mental illnesses on them is much different than it is on regular people like us.

For them, quitting means an outpouring of support and being called “brave”. For people like me, quitting would mean being called a failure, losing my house and not being able to feed my family. So no, I don’t think these sportspersons are brave for quitting. They quit because they are filthy rich & can afford to.

Not everyone can.