Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Paroxetine Withdrawal

Have you gone off paroxetine (also known as Paxil, Seroxat, etc) cold-turkey. If you haven't, you're probably thinking it's a bad idea, and you're absolutely right. It wasn't even on purpose - I was forced into this place by poverty. I literally had no money, not for bread, or milk, or bus trips or pens or pills. I was hungry and in paroxetine withdrawal mode.

It's like...the feeling you get when you have a sugar crash, when you haven't eaten for too long and you feel dizzy, the pavement is like rubber, your eyes throb and it's impossible to concentrate. And then imagine this feeling made worse by a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness, because it's chemically induced and there's nothing you can do about it. All you can do, is endure.

And a lot of the time thats been my mantra for my suicidal moments, and it works because you have respite and you can sleep some of it off and you can cry out the pain, wipe it away from your skin with a tissue; you could dispose of it quite easily. Yet with this enforced, stricken cold turkey process nothing is your own: I've been having fits of tears that won't stop and suicidal thoughts that I don't want, thoughts I barely consider my own and it brings back old scabs from my psychosis and I think the Devil has come after me again...
Sometimes sleep won't come, even when your best state of being is under a soft duvet with pillows cradling you, sleep stays away until dawn and then it's wanting and violent about it. And the dizzyness won't end no matter how much you eat or walk or rest...and it's driving me insane. Not to mention I've decided to write a 5,000 word essay on LGBT activism in the early 1990s instead of something simple and boring like Thatcher, or how shit Blair was... Insanity should be on its way soon :)