This is part three of my ongoing antidepressant series. I again want to get my story out there, to make even one person feel less alone. While medications can help people, there are many who may benefit from them. However, I seemingly had the opposite experience. I know I’m not the only one.
After my dad died in February of 2024, I didn’t know what to do with myself. For the previous 5 months my entire world had become him. Seeing him, taking care of him, trying to figure out what was wrong and how to make him better. So when that was over, I found that I had a massive void in my life and I had no clue how to deal with it. I didn’t understand that it would have been best to just be for a little while. To let the dust settle so to speak.
Instead, I decided I wanted to come off lexapro. I had never wanted to continue to take it, I just never felt like I was able to handle the fallout of not taking it. My boyfriend introduced me to the 75 hard challenge, and sent me a video of the creator talking about how he developed it after he came off of lexapro and needed something to keep him going and keep him on track (as one of many reasons it was created). I thought that this was perfect, this was a great time to do this.
I thought I was being smart this time.
I messaged my doctor and had a plan in place. I told myself that I could overcome any emotions that came up and that they were just temporary. That I’m stronger than I used to be, and I’m much better prepared. I did tons of research on supplements to take that would help to balance the withdrawal effects of the lexapro, and spent more money than I should have buying them.
I thought I was prepared. I realized later that I was simply filling the emotional void of losing my dad with something equally as emotionally damaging. I didn’t know how to not live a life with regulated emotions, and so I looked for the next emotional roller coaster.
I started the tapering process in March of 2024, and started 75 hard and taking all my supplements. It was going really well at first. I was proud of myself, going to the gym and accomplishing my daily tasks. I started feeling more and more anxious though. Things started feeling a little bit harder, and the thoughts and doubts started crawling into my head. I stopped taking the supplements after reading online that people had tons of negative reactions to them, and I thought I had solved the problem. I just needed to do this naturally, without the aid of anything else. It seemed to fit, I had bad reactions to lexapro and already knew some supplements caused my anxiety to raise. So, I kept going with 75 hard. For anyone that doesn’t know what that is, it’s a program designed for mental toughness where for 75 days you have multiple physical and mental tasks to complete including workouts, diet, and reading.
But, I was still feeling anxious. I was still getting more and more tense, starting to spiral in my thoughts. I was getting the “brain zaps”, my digestion got messed up, and my sleep problems got worse. By May, I had gone down to 5MG of Lexapro. In June, my mom and I were going to spend a weekend away in a little mountain town to celebrate my aunt’s birthday. It was about an hour and a half away. I’d started getting very anxious driving again, but thought that this would be a good exercise in combating that anxiety. It backfired in my face, I had to pull off on the side of the turnpike to have my mom drive. It started pouring down raining, and that ignited an immediate panic inside myself. That was the start of my real struggle with driving again. I can narrow it down to that one moment. The rest of that weekend I spent trying to enjoy the time with my family, but it was increasingly difficult.
I was still doing 75 hard, but decided to stop thinking that this program was what was causing my anxiety, that I needed to take a step back and not push myself as hard. That didn’t seem to help either and later that month I had a complete breakdown. I started experiencing intrusive thoughts, and just undiluted and complete panic and fear for no specific reason. I was afraid to be alone, I was afraid to go anywhere. I felt completely broken. I took a leave of work, and spent the week essentially just crying. It was as if every emotion of the last year was coming out, and I didn’t know how to cope. I felt like I had absolutely no control over my emotions whatsoever. I couldn’t get the logical or rational side of my brain to kick in, and I didn’t know what I was so afraid of or why I was suddenly so panicked. I just was, and I didn’t know how to cope with it.
After a week of that I pulled myself together enough to be able to work. I have a work from home job that I was, and am, fairly comfortable at. For the next 3 months I just continued to struggle more and more and more. I would cry to my mom every night, I stopped working out all together and was focused on simply getting through the day without breaking down. To be completely honest, a lot of the time between June to November of that year is a blur. I spent a lot of time researching the effects and implications of SSRI withdrawal, trying to figure out which part of my anxiety was the lexapro, which part was just me trying to deal with the events of the last year.
I still was determined to come off of it, despite the major impacts doing so was having on my life. I knew I would never get to the point I wanted to be at if I was still on this medication. I knew that this medication wasn’t helping me, and the only function it had was to numb my emotions and cause disruption in my body and my mind on a biological level.
I don’t believe that anxiety is simply just a chemical imbalance, and this selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor was going to be the fix to this imbalance. The serotonin theory of anxiety and depression is just that, a theory. Do I believe that some people do suffer from serious mental illnesses? Of course. Do I think that everyone experiencing anxiety and depression needs to be on medication? Absolutely not. I also don’t believe that I was relapsing like some circles say, I believe this was a withdrawal and then subsequently having to learn how to handle emotions after the medication had numbed them for years. I also just knew in my gut that this was something extra, that my reactions were not just the normal levels of anxiety I would have to cope with for the rest of my life. A lot of this was chemically induced, even if the manifestations were built around previous fear and lack of coping skills.
I’m not a doctor though, so I can only speak to the experiences that I’ve had and the research that I have done. I became obsessed though, at scouring the internet for research and timelines for how long this withdrawal experience was supposed to last. I had to stop doing that, I had to stop looking at the reddit threads and facebook groups, as it was only serving to make me more anxious and scared. It was putting the belief in my mind that I would never overcome this and I would be stuck in this loop forever.
Around that time is also when it hit me how many people I had lost. Half of the people that were always in my corner, that I could depend upon and rely on, were dead. My grandma died a few years earlier, my aunt died, my dad died. All these constants that were in my life, they were just gone. The foundation of my life had been shifted, and I had been numbed out by medications and hadn’t felt it until that moment.
It was devastating, and I no longer felt like I knew who I was.
By November of 2024, I was a ball of fear and anxiety. I couldn’t stop thinking that something absolutely terrible was going to happen. That I was going to actually lose my mind and lose control of my life. The black box warning that comes with taking SSRIs became terrifying to me. I thought that all the warnings that came with it would suddenly happen to me, and since I had read online that other people had terrible experiences that it was a foregone conclusion for me. My mind was in the anxiety spiral at all times, and I would ruminate and obsess over thoughts without being able to get myself to stop.
I assumed that since other people experienced horrific side effects, that it was going to happen to me. I became absolutely terrified. I already felt despaired and hopeless with my anxiety and panic, and in my (not logical) mind I jumped to the conclusion that those side effects were going to be next. It caused me to absolutely panic out of control. It became my greatest fear, that I would somehow lose my mind, lose control of myself. I had no evidence for this other than the fact that I couldn’t control my anxiety, so this would just be another situation like that. Something outside of my control. I no longer had any concept of trusting myself, because at this point I wasn’t even able to drive 3 minutes down the road by myself.
In my simplest understanding, lexapro hijacked the natural rhythm of my neurotransmitter system and hormonal pathways. This caused fluctuations in hormones among other chemicals, which is what led to these extreme emotions and lack of trust in anything. I physically was unable to emotionally regulate myself, and coupled with lack of experience even trying to do so, led to a chaotic whirlwind of emotions and fears.
Between September and November, I had jumped down to 2.5MG of Lexapro and then back up to 5MG and felt no difference. Just utter and complete panic and fear at everything. The lexapro was doing nothing but making everything worse, and I was at a total loss for what to do. My physician, who had been helping me this whole time, wasn’t very helpful anymore. I decided to seek out a therapist and a psychiatrist. I don’t have great insurance, and so I hadn’t wanted to pay out of pocket to see either of them until that point when I just felt so desperate for any kind of relief.
I hit rock bottom again, and wouldn’t see light until a few months later. I didn’t feel like I had any sense of self anymore. I described it once as feeling as if I needed to just take off a coat. I knew I was still in there; I had to somehow remove this layer of panic and fear, but I just couldn’t figure out how to do so. Lexapro was no longer helping to even numb me, and I needed to figure out how to deal.
So, I will leave it here and pick it up in part 4. I want to remind anyone reading, that if they’re experiencing anything similar to talk to someone about it. As cliche as it is, you aren’t alone and that you know your body best. In the moments when you feel like you are drowning, hold onto the people that willingly help to keep you afloat.