Antidepressants

Wow, I keep having these long hiatuses, cheating on this blog with other blogs, vlogs, forums, and projects. That's the Internet for you!

I'm mostly active on The Crazy Addict, which is in Season Two now, and my Wordpress, 17seventeen17eight.

...now for the updates on my life!

I am still basically over Other Man.

I discovered www.superbetter.com, and am now playing it every day. (There's a Crazy Addict video about this.)

I am back in Boston.

And I have gone off my antidepressants. I forgot to go to a psychiatrist appointment, and whenever I either do that or arrive so late that the psychiatrist doesn't see me, I don't get more refills and my prescription runs out. This has been my general pattern with my antidepressants ever since I started taking them -- I will get forced to start with a new psychiatrist by someone with the authority to do that, I will go through the several-month ordeal of finding a psychiatrist who has an opening any time this year, and is willing to actually work with me (very few mental health professionals feel comfortable taking me as a patient - actually, none of them do, even the ones who eventually do take me - because my case is severe enough that I'm a liability and "beyond their expertise" and "outside their specialty" et cetera et cetera)... I will FINALLY get an appointment, I may or may not go to it but I make new ones until I finally go to one, I will get a few refills' worth of antidepressants so I'll be able to take them for 2-4 months in a row, then I'll miss the appointment to get more refills written for me, and I won't make another appointment because my track record with going to appointments is so bad that I figure, what's the point in making another appointment, I won't go to it either, so I fall off the face of the earth until I get another treatment team and they force me to go find another psychiatrist. My latest psychiatrist actually switched me to an antidepressant with a much shorter withdrawal phase in order to help me have a much easier withdrawal the next time I missed an appointment, because he knew it was going to happen and that's the best he could do for me.

When I was new to the cycle, I tried to argue that surely psychiatrists see patients all the time who chronically miss appointments because they're mentally ill, so they must have some sort of strategy for dealing with these patients. The response: "All of my other patients are mentally ill, but they still care enough to make the effort to keep their appointments. If you can't do that, you should be in a residential treatment setting." All my treatment team members say this, actually, it's the Medical Consensus about me. And I completely agree! But there is no "getting better" from dysthymia - you're born with it; you die with it - so I'd be in that residential treatment setting for life. I'm all for this because it is what I need and I have no business trying to live on the outside, but any non-medical-professional people in my life will hold out hope forever that I'll get better someday because that's how silly sentimental humans work, and fight tooth and nail against "giving up" and putting me in an asylum or a hospice. Plus there's insurance to think of.

My boyfriend tries to act as a live-in caregiver, but my own shame gets in the way a lot. He only helps me when I ask him for help. And asking for help is really not a thing I'm good at. I was way too ashamed tell him about the missed appointment. When he asked recently if I'd been taking my antidepressants, I lied and said yes. I pretend I have no idea why I became an anhedonic vegetable practically overnight.

On the bright-ish side, going off my antidepressants has been helping me lose weight. All the memories of my vast catalog of failures gained valence and clarity and now I need to kill them, in the most passive way I can -- by wasting away. Can't have memories if my body is eating its own myelin.