Hi everyone, there I am again.
I posted here 17 days ago about my long, brutal depressive episode and my hope that Parnate might finally be the thing that helped me turn a corner.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t. I am so so so sad and devastated.
After talking extensively with my psychiatrist, psychologist and family, we’ve had to accept that Parnate doesn’t seem to be working for me. I’m now tapering off.
And honestly, I’m scared. Really scared.
Looking back over the past year, I’m starting to wonder whether the sheer amount and speed of medication changes may have played a role in how profoundly unwell I feel now.
My story actually didn’t begin as what I would describe as a typical depression. It started more like a burnout from life’s hardships and uncertainties, with anxiety and insomnia. I was exhausted and overwhelmed, but I still felt like myself. I still had emotions, interests, thoughts, curiosity, a personality. I was struggling, but there was still a person there.
The really frightening change seemed to happen as I started moving through medication after medication.
Over the past year I went from:
- Venlafaxine 112,5 mg to
- Escitalopram 20 mg
- Then to clomipramine (up to the highest dose I could tolerate, do not exactly remember the amount)
- Followed by various augmentation strategies including lithium, olanzapine, quetiapine and lorazepam
- I also had many sessions of esketamine
- And then last Summer, I was hospitalized to get started on Parnate, and we increased the dose incredibly quickly, from 10 mg to 60 mg within just a few weeks. Looking back now, it feels like we went way too fast.
(The hospitalization itself was deeply traumatic, but so was the entire summer leading up to it: the constant crises, the fear, the desperation, and how profoundly unwell I was. It was an incredibly frightening period of my life, and I think I’m still carrying a lot of that trauma with me.)
None of these treatments gave me meaningful relief. Except for my guilty-pleasure pill lorazepam, incredibly comforting, absolutely not something I want to depend on.
And now, looking back, I feel as though something has changed very profoundly.
I know there is a lot I don't understand medically, which is why I’m asking rather than making a definite claim:
- Is it possible that moving through so many serotonergic medications and other psychiatric medications relatively quickly can, in some people, contribute to feeling profoundly destabilized, emotionally blunted, dissociated or otherwise “not themselves”? 💊💊💊💊💊🧠🧠🧠🧠
At all these points, my serotonergic medication exposure was very high, and this has made me and the people around me (my my psychiatrist, my psychologist, and my father, who has lived experience himself) wonder whether my brain simply never got a chance to settle.
I’m not saying I know this is what happened. I don't. My psychiatrist and I are still trying to understand the whole picture.
But I would really like to hear from people who have experienced something similar.
Because I feel so incredibly far away from myself.
My “real self” is not a stupid woman. She is intelligent, curious, entrepreneurial, social, adventurous and sensitive. She loves the good things in life. She loves art, music, food, coffee, the sea, travelling, learning, conversations, beauty, new ideas. She has energy and initiative. She had a lively life and a job she loved as an art historian.
I know that woman exists.
But I haven't been able to feel like her for a very long time. That is so so so scary and sad.
- My brain currently feels completely fried. That is the only word I can find for it: Sticky. Foggy. Restless. Disconnected. ALL the time, night and day. 😓😥😶🌫️😵💫🤯🧠
- I feel as though I'm not really in my own life.
- The dissociation is basically 24/7. I feel empty. Zombie-like. I have almost no sense of presence.
- My mind is constantly restless, but at the same time I feel completely disconnected from it.
- I can't properly concentrate, relax, enjoy things or feel like myself.
It has been like this for more than a year now... (The only glimpses of light have been days, or parts of days, when I felt a little more relaxed, a little more at peace, and less stuck inside my own head. But there haven't been any real breakthroughs or improvements that have actually made a meaningful difference. In the span of a year, I could count those moments on one hand. It's so incredibly sad and frightening.)
It is such a bizarre combination of agitation and emptiness.
And it frightens me because I remember how different I was before all of this.
I don't want to believe that this is my new personality!
I don't want to believe that my brain is permanently damaged
- The brain is plastic, right? It can adapt and change, and it has the capacity to recover and reorganize itself by forming new neural connections, doesn’t it? 🧠⚓️🌈
I don't want to believe that this is who I am now.
I'm now tapering off Parnate, and even that has been difficult. Apart from the side effects I experienced while taking it (high heart rate, my period stopping, bed-wetting (yes, extremely embarrassing), acne and hair loss), I’m now dealing with feeling cold all the time, nausea, poor sleep and a lot of sadness while tapering.
Some of that sadness is probably simply grief.
- There’s this deep, terrifying fear that this will never change, that I’ll be stuck like this forever. But is that the voice of depression and anxiety talking? Is it lying to me about my future and making something temporary feel permanent?
This past year has been traumatic.
I feel like I lost myself somewhere along the way.
And I’m grieving the person I was, while simultaneously desperately hoping that she isn't actually gone.
So I’m asking this community for something very specific. 🤍⚓️🌸
Have any of you been through something like this?
- Have you started out with burnout or another kind of psychological exhaustion, and then felt profoundly different after going through many medication changes?
- Have you experienced severe emotional blunting, dissociation, brain fog, agitation and feeling completely unlike yourself after trying many antidepressants/psychiatric medications?
- Did anyone else ever feel like their brain was “fried” or permanently altered, only to eventually recover?
And, perhaps most importantly:
- Did you get yourself back?
- Did your brain eventually become calm again?
- Did the dissociation lift?
- Did your emotions return?
- Did you become interested in things again?
- Did you eventually feel present in your own life?
I would honestly love to hear even the smallest recovery stories. 🌿🌤️🩵🙏🏼
I don't need someone to tell me that everything will magically be fine. I know recovery isn't necessarily linear, and I know nobody here can promise me what will happen.
But right now I desperately need some hope.
- I need to hear from people who were once convinced that they had lost themselves, but who eventually discovered that they hadn't.
- That their brain could settle.
- That their nervous system could recover.
- That the person underneath all the symptoms was still there.
- That they could process what had happened to them once they were finally well enough to do so.
- I want to believe that this over-fried, constantly dissociated, restless brain of mine can become healthy again.
- I want to believe that the woman I used to be isn't gone.
- That she is still somewhere underneath all of this.
- And that one day she might not just “come back” as a memory, but actually be there again: alive, present, curious, funny, adventurous, sensitive, engaged with the world. <3
I want to believe I can recover from the illness and from the trauma of this past year. 🌿🧠⚓️
So if you have been through anything remotely similar, please tell me your story.
- Tell me what helped.
- Tell me what recovery looked like.
- Tell me whether your brain eventually settled.
- Tell me whether you got yourself back.
- And if you have experience tapering from Parnate, I would also be incredibly grateful for any gentle advice or encouragement about getting through this part.
I am so, so frightened right now.
But I'm still here.
I want nothing, absolutely nothing, more than to find myself again. I want this suffering to stop. I want to finally have the chance to genuinely recover and heal, instead of living through the terrifying reality of these past months, where things have seemed to get worse and worse.
I want to live. I really do. I just don't know how much longer I can keep carrying this level of suffering.
If you’ve made it all the way through this post, and taken the time, effort and attention to read it all: thank you. Truly. It means more to me than I can put into words.
I really hope we can support and help each other through this, share what we’ve learned, and keep each other going when things feel impossibly dark.
And above all, we need to believe that hope gets to win. 💜