Does anyone ever recover? At what point do you just accept that it's over?
My childhood was completely fucked, my mother is a sociopath whose only joy came from emotionally torturing and manipulating her children and coercing my viloent father to punish us. My parents kept regular appointments with counselors and psychiatrists for years, essentially doctor shopping trying to find the ones who would believe that they were helpless victims of their horrible children. This had been happening our whole lives, we would move from one counselor and psychiatrist to the next every time my parents were held accountable in any way we were banned from seeing that psychiatrist/counselor and they moved onto the next one. This happened for my entire childhood until they finally found a Dr and psychiatrist just as evil as them.
When my sister started high school she started to stand up for herself which led to her being beaten almost every night until she attempted suicide and then ran away from home at 16 and never looked back.
I was next. When I was 12 I started standing up for myself so my parents convinced a Dr to prescribe me amitryptaline to fix my "aggression".
I've only recently realized that that was the point where my life ended. I never even had a chance. The amitryptaline effectively turned me into an asexual zombie with no interest in anything. I lost my will and I became dull and empty. I complained about the side effects but I didn't really know what was happening. The Drs dismissed my complaints and worst of all my parents ridiculed and punished me for the side effects and told me that it wasn't the meds, it was me, there was something wrong with me. I was physically sick with nausea, vomiting, generally feeling unwell all the time, pissing every 30 mins and sleeping all the time.
My parents loved to punish me for being sick by doing things like making me sleep in the shed because how ******* dare I throw up in their house! I was always in a daze and their lifelong campaign to punish me and convince me that there was someting wrong with me had me confused. I built my identity as a freak who wasn't all there, convinced that everything from my inability to get out of bed in the morning to vomiting every day and stumbling around in a daze was because my parents were right.
By the time I was 15 I was extremely depressed and I started smoking weed, I told my Dr and he immediately stopped the amitryptaline telling me that it interacted with weed and it could kill me. I started to come out of the daze I had been in for the last 3 years and I became very angry and once again started standing up to my parents. They found this intolerable and started a campaign to have me sent to prison. They would constantly be searching through my room looking for drugs and they would immediately call the police if they found anything. Luckily weed is decriminalized where I live, you just get the equivalent of a speeding fine and no criminal conviction. My parents tried this for a while but never got anywhere with it. It ended with my mother literally crying hysterically to a police officer in my room screaming, "Why won't you arrest him, it's DRUGS!"
Then they tried a new tactic, they would provoke me, harass me and push me around until I hit my dad and then immediately call the police and try to have me charged with assault. They only ever got this to stick once and I was given a formal caution. When they realized that wasn't going to work they started taking all of my stuff for no reason. I was working at McDonald's which gave me some freedom so my parents took my bank card and locked it in a safe in their room. They had it for over two weeks and I was at breaking point and I wanted to get away so I smashed their bedroom window when they weren't home and went in to get my bank card back. The safe was steel but it had a sh*tty plastic handle which I smashed with a hammer, I couldn't find my bank card but there was a small amount of cash in the safe so I took it and left. Next thing I know I'm being arrested and charged with serious criminal tresspass. ******* *****. I got a good behavior bond and I left home. I was 16.
At this point I wasn't going to school anymore and I was homeless. I stayed at youth centers for a while, I lost my job and I was hanging out with dole bludgers and junkies with no ambition to do anything. I rented a house with some of my new friends and just smoked weed all day. After a while I started to become very depressed due to the fucked up circumstances I was in. I tried to get a job and after a couple of months I got hired by a fast food place.
Then **** hit the fan. I dropped two and a half tabs of acid and I freaked the **** out. I had a nervous breakdown and I was taken to hospital. I was diagnosed with toxic psychosis and started on olanzapine. The olanzapine didn't work very well so i was hospitalised and put on 2mg of risperdone. I was 17.
My parents were suddenly interested in me again and made sure to be in the hospital every day to complain about all the things that were wrong with me. I was once again in that same daze, I wish I had died. I was discharged to my parents house, heavily medicated and confused and it started again. My parents had lined the inside of the shed with plaster-board, this was my new home. They wouldn't allow me in the house, I had to stay in the shed. I was a zombie, cold and empty, void of emotion. I stopped caring.
They loved this new psychiatrist, he was a pediatric psychiatrist who was a huge advocate of drugging children into submission. They complained that I was lazy, that I was sleeping all day and throwing up in the mornings and that I had the nerve to have diarrhea. How ******* dare I burden them like this. The risperidone should have been stopped then, I had been clean for weeks and my symptoms were drug induced, but this Dr decided that my sedation and apathy were indicative of depression so he continued the risperidone (2mg) and added venlafaxine.
Everything after that is a blur. I was very sick, gaining weight quickly and out of it. I was on autopilot and I got a job at a supermarket, still living in the shed. I would just sleep 10-18 hours a day, eat and go to work. My parents continued to blame me, to the point that my mum made signs saying "Watch your step my son Vomits here", "Health Hazard", etc. to put up when people came over.
I'm still very foggy but I remember I started developing severe extrapiramidal side effects, breathing problems, tachycardia, excessive sweating, memory problems, concentration problems and i was becoming extremely restless and unable to sleep. I spoke to my psychiatrist and the genius was confident that these were symptoms of bipolar type 2 and swapped out the venlafaxine for lithium, and kept the risperidone because apparently it's a cure for everything. I was 20.
I kept getting worse to the point that I went to the emergency room with my tremor. They suspected lithium toxicity and put me on a drip and ran blood tests. The blood tests came back in the high end of the therapeutic range and I was told that my lithium levels weren't toxic but they were they highest they had ever been and the tremor was certainly a side effect of the lithium. They monitored me for a while, made sure I had and appointment with my psychiatrist and discharged me.
When I saw that fucker he came to the conclusion that I was now suffering from anxiety which was to be treated by increasing the dose of my risperidone. This started a cycle where the dose would be increased, I'd become more ill which would be labeled anxiety and treated with another dose increase. This continued until I was on 4mg of risperidone and 1000mg of lithium.
At this point I was literally drooling all the time, I had put on a lot of weight, I was losing bladder control and losing control of my bowels and I had what was essentially Parkinsons disease but I just kept going to work too out of it to care.
I then started to become extremely disassociated and I had a severe panic attack at work because nothing seem real anymore. I started having frequent panic attacks and went to my family Dr and he added oxazepam to the mix and referred me to a psychologist for CBT. The CBT helped me overcome the panic attacks so my genius psche decided that I could reduce the risperidone. He reduced my dose to 3mg and my "anxiety" almost immediately improved so I stopped the oxazepam. My psyche then decided to taper off the risperidone completely which he did over the course of six months and he increased my lithium to 1500mg. I was 22.
As the risperidone was tapered I started to come out of the haze but I was so very sick. Sick doesn't even begin to describe it, I had no idea this kind of hell was even possible. I went to my doctor and he prescribed me mirtazapine, this made me so much worse. I was starting to realize what was happening and I spoke to my Dr about the mirtazapine. I told him it was making me suicidal and I knew that was a side effect, he just told me it doesn't do that and told me to increase the dose.
I stopped the lithium and mirtazapine cold turkey and I was bedridden and I stopped going to work. Then I was detained. I was 23.
As usual in the hospital the doctors were adamant that there is no such thing as withdrawals and their drugs don't have any side effects, I repeatedly told them that I was sick and I wanted to see a doctor but as usual I was ignored. I asked them why they had detained me, they said that they wanted to monitor me to see if I had schizophrenia. I told them I was fine and i wanted to see a doctor, I asked them why they were monitoring me, did I have any psychiatric symptoms? They said no I didn't have any psychiatric symptoms, that they wanted to monitor me to see if I did because I had stopped going to work etc. I told them it was because I was sick. They wouldn't listen. I still had tachycardia which I brought up when I had my ops done and I was just told yes your bpm is a bit high but it's normal for you. I was so obviously sick, I was sweating non stop, pissing non stop, shaking etc but it was ignored.
After one week in the ER waiting for a bed and 1 week in the psyche ward I was deemed asymptomatic. The head psyche told me my old psyche thinks I have bipolar type 2 so he put me on a baby dose of sodium valproate (250mg) and discharged me.
After I got out I immediately stopped the sodium valproate, then I went to the outpatient clinic I had been refereed to, told them my story and then I told them that I'm done with the mental health system and I politely told them to go **** themselves and I WAS DISCHARGED!
The next thing I did was to go to my family doctor and I was almost immediately diagnosed with hyperthyroidism which was confirmed by blood tests.
I have now been off all meds for about 10 months and I'm fucked. I am physically and mentally ruined. My body has become its own torture chamber and there is no ******* way that I'm seeing another Dr.
I keep seeing people say that yes you will recover and yes there are lots of stories of recovery, but I'm yet to see one. It just seems like everyone is desperate for a light at the end of the tunnel, but maybe there isn't. In that case I think it is cruel and cowardly to encourage people to prolong their suffering. I'm starting to think this hope that everyone is clinging to is just a cruel sadistic lie.
I've been trying to find some sort of hope, I just want to know that it is still possible for me to feel something and not be in pain. I just want to know that it is possible, it may not work out but at least there would be hope. I've been trying to find out if it's still possible.
I've tried taking some drugs just to see if I can still experience pleasure, I just want to prove to myself that there is still something there to find, that it isn't lost forever. I tried smoking weed, it didn't help. I tried taking oxycodone and it just made me feel like ****. It didn't give me any euphoria or comfort, all it did was make me want to sit or lie down but I couldn't stand the pain of being still. If oxycodone can't make me feel any pleasure there is something very wrong.
I tried eating some mushrooms and for a few fleeting moments when my focus was completely on something beautiful I almost felt something but it was more of a deep longing to feel something than actual connection and I was still trapped in my horrible painful body. It was like my environment was beautiful but I was hyper aware of the fact that I couldn't appreciate anything because my body was the cause of my suffering. It was like I could almost touch the beauty of life, but it was no longer within me.
So now what? Is anyone honestly going to say that I will get better? Has anyone ever gotten better from even a fraction of what I've been through? I feel like I just need to accept that there is no hope. I wish I had died a long time ago and if I keep going is there anything to accomplish other than prolonging my suffering?
My childhood was completely fucked, my mother is a sociopath whose only joy came from emotionally torturing and manipulating her children and coercing my viloent father to punish us. My parents kept regular appointments with counselors and psychiatrists for years, essentially doctor shopping trying to find the ones who would believe that they were helpless victims of their horrible children. This had been happening our whole lives, we would move from one counselor and psychiatrist to the next every time my parents were held accountable in any way we were banned from seeing that psychiatrist/counselor and they moved onto the next one. This happened for my entire childhood until they finally found a Dr and psychiatrist just as evil as them.
When my sister started high school she started to stand up for herself which led to her being beaten almost every night until she attempted suicide and then ran away from home at 16 and never looked back.
I was next. When I was 12 I started standing up for myself so my parents convinced a Dr to prescribe me amitryptaline to fix my "aggression".
I've only recently realized that that was the point where my life ended. I never even had a chance. The amitryptaline effectively turned me into an asexual zombie with no interest in anything. I lost my will and I became dull and empty. I complained about the side effects but I didn't really know what was happening. The Drs dismissed my complaints and worst of all my parents ridiculed and punished me for the side effects and told me that it wasn't the meds, it was me, there was something wrong with me. I was physically sick with nausea, vomiting, generally feeling unwell all the time, pissing every 30 mins and sleeping all the time.
My parents loved to punish me for being sick by doing things like making me sleep in the shed because how ******* dare I throw up in their house! I was always in a daze and their lifelong campaign to punish me and convince me that there was someting wrong with me had me confused. I built my identity as a freak who wasn't all there, convinced that everything from my inability to get out of bed in the morning to vomiting every day and stumbling around in a daze was because my parents were right.
By the time I was 15 I was extremely depressed and I started smoking weed, I told my Dr and he immediately stopped the amitryptaline telling me that it interacted with weed and it could kill me. I started to come out of the daze I had been in for the last 3 years and I became very angry and once again started standing up to my parents. They found this intolerable and started a campaign to have me sent to prison. They would constantly be searching through my room looking for drugs and they would immediately call the police if they found anything. Luckily weed is decriminalized where I live, you just get the equivalent of a speeding fine and no criminal conviction. My parents tried this for a while but never got anywhere with it. It ended with my mother literally crying hysterically to a police officer in my room screaming, "Why won't you arrest him, it's DRUGS!"
Then they tried a new tactic, they would provoke me, harass me and push me around until I hit my dad and then immediately call the police and try to have me charged with assault. They only ever got this to stick once and I was given a formal caution. When they realized that wasn't going to work they started taking all of my stuff for no reason. I was working at McDonald's which gave me some freedom so my parents took my bank card and locked it in a safe in their room. They had it for over two weeks and I was at breaking point and I wanted to get away so I smashed their bedroom window when they weren't home and went in to get my bank card back. The safe was steel but it had a sh*tty plastic handle which I smashed with a hammer, I couldn't find my bank card but there was a small amount of cash in the safe so I took it and left. Next thing I know I'm being arrested and charged with serious criminal tresspass. ******* *****. I got a good behavior bond and I left home. I was 16.
At this point I wasn't going to school anymore and I was homeless. I stayed at youth centers for a while, I lost my job and I was hanging out with dole bludgers and junkies with no ambition to do anything. I rented a house with some of my new friends and just smoked weed all day. After a while I started to become very depressed due to the fucked up circumstances I was in. I tried to get a job and after a couple of months I got hired by a fast food place.
Then **** hit the fan. I dropped two and a half tabs of acid and I freaked the **** out. I had a nervous breakdown and I was taken to hospital. I was diagnosed with toxic psychosis and started on olanzapine. The olanzapine didn't work very well so i was hospitalised and put on 2mg of risperdone. I was 17.
My parents were suddenly interested in me again and made sure to be in the hospital every day to complain about all the things that were wrong with me. I was once again in that same daze, I wish I had died. I was discharged to my parents house, heavily medicated and confused and it started again. My parents had lined the inside of the shed with plaster-board, this was my new home. They wouldn't allow me in the house, I had to stay in the shed. I was a zombie, cold and empty, void of emotion. I stopped caring.
They loved this new psychiatrist, he was a pediatric psychiatrist who was a huge advocate of drugging children into submission. They complained that I was lazy, that I was sleeping all day and throwing up in the mornings and that I had the nerve to have diarrhea. How ******* dare I burden them like this. The risperidone should have been stopped then, I had been clean for weeks and my symptoms were drug induced, but this Dr decided that my sedation and apathy were indicative of depression so he continued the risperidone (2mg) and added venlafaxine.
Everything after that is a blur. I was very sick, gaining weight quickly and out of it. I was on autopilot and I got a job at a supermarket, still living in the shed. I would just sleep 10-18 hours a day, eat and go to work. My parents continued to blame me, to the point that my mum made signs saying "Watch your step my son Vomits here", "Health Hazard", etc. to put up when people came over.
I'm still very foggy but I remember I started developing severe extrapiramidal side effects, breathing problems, tachycardia, excessive sweating, memory problems, concentration problems and i was becoming extremely restless and unable to sleep. I spoke to my psychiatrist and the genius was confident that these were symptoms of bipolar type 2 and swapped out the venlafaxine for lithium, and kept the risperidone because apparently it's a cure for everything. I was 20.
I kept getting worse to the point that I went to the emergency room with my tremor. They suspected lithium toxicity and put me on a drip and ran blood tests. The blood tests came back in the high end of the therapeutic range and I was told that my lithium levels weren't toxic but they were they highest they had ever been and the tremor was certainly a side effect of the lithium. They monitored me for a while, made sure I had and appointment with my psychiatrist and discharged me.
When I saw that fucker he came to the conclusion that I was now suffering from anxiety which was to be treated by increasing the dose of my risperidone. This started a cycle where the dose would be increased, I'd become more ill which would be labeled anxiety and treated with another dose increase. This continued until I was on 4mg of risperidone and 1000mg of lithium.
At this point I was literally drooling all the time, I had put on a lot of weight, I was losing bladder control and losing control of my bowels and I had what was essentially Parkinsons disease but I just kept going to work too out of it to care.
I then started to become extremely disassociated and I had a severe panic attack at work because nothing seem real anymore. I started having frequent panic attacks and went to my family Dr and he added oxazepam to the mix and referred me to a psychologist for CBT. The CBT helped me overcome the panic attacks so my genius psche decided that I could reduce the risperidone. He reduced my dose to 3mg and my "anxiety" almost immediately improved so I stopped the oxazepam. My psyche then decided to taper off the risperidone completely which he did over the course of six months and he increased my lithium to 1500mg. I was 22.
As the risperidone was tapered I started to come out of the haze but I was so very sick. Sick doesn't even begin to describe it, I had no idea this kind of hell was even possible. I went to my doctor and he prescribed me mirtazapine, this made me so much worse. I was starting to realize what was happening and I spoke to my Dr about the mirtazapine. I told him it was making me suicidal and I knew that was a side effect, he just told me it doesn't do that and told me to increase the dose.
I stopped the lithium and mirtazapine cold turkey and I was bedridden and I stopped going to work. Then I was detained. I was 23.
As usual in the hospital the doctors were adamant that there is no such thing as withdrawals and their drugs don't have any side effects, I repeatedly told them that I was sick and I wanted to see a doctor but as usual I was ignored. I asked them why they had detained me, they said that they wanted to monitor me to see if I had schizophrenia. I told them I was fine and i wanted to see a doctor, I asked them why they were monitoring me, did I have any psychiatric symptoms? They said no I didn't have any psychiatric symptoms, that they wanted to monitor me to see if I did because I had stopped going to work etc. I told them it was because I was sick. They wouldn't listen. I still had tachycardia which I brought up when I had my ops done and I was just told yes your bpm is a bit high but it's normal for you. I was so obviously sick, I was sweating non stop, pissing non stop, shaking etc but it was ignored.
After one week in the ER waiting for a bed and 1 week in the psyche ward I was deemed asymptomatic. The head psyche told me my old psyche thinks I have bipolar type 2 so he put me on a baby dose of sodium valproate (250mg) and discharged me.
After I got out I immediately stopped the sodium valproate, then I went to the outpatient clinic I had been refereed to, told them my story and then I told them that I'm done with the mental health system and I politely told them to go **** themselves and I WAS DISCHARGED!
The next thing I did was to go to my family doctor and I was almost immediately diagnosed with hyperthyroidism which was confirmed by blood tests.
I have now been off all meds for about 10 months and I'm fucked. I am physically and mentally ruined. My body has become its own torture chamber and there is no ******* way that I'm seeing another Dr.
I keep seeing people say that yes you will recover and yes there are lots of stories of recovery, but I'm yet to see one. It just seems like everyone is desperate for a light at the end of the tunnel, but maybe there isn't. In that case I think it is cruel and cowardly to encourage people to prolong their suffering. I'm starting to think this hope that everyone is clinging to is just a cruel sadistic lie.
I've been trying to find some sort of hope, I just want to know that it is still possible for me to feel something and not be in pain. I just want to know that it is possible, it may not work out but at least there would be hope. I've been trying to find out if it's still possible.
I've tried taking some drugs just to see if I can still experience pleasure, I just want to prove to myself that there is still something there to find, that it isn't lost forever. I tried smoking weed, it didn't help. I tried taking oxycodone and it just made me feel like ****. It didn't give me any euphoria or comfort, all it did was make me want to sit or lie down but I couldn't stand the pain of being still. If oxycodone can't make me feel any pleasure there is something very wrong.
I tried eating some mushrooms and for a few fleeting moments when my focus was completely on something beautiful I almost felt something but it was more of a deep longing to feel something than actual connection and I was still trapped in my horrible painful body. It was like my environment was beautiful but I was hyper aware of the fact that I couldn't appreciate anything because my body was the cause of my suffering. It was like I could almost touch the beauty of life, but it was no longer within me.
So now what? Is anyone honestly going to say that I will get better? Has anyone ever gotten better from even a fraction of what I've been through? I feel like I just need to accept that there is no hope. I wish I had died a long time ago and if I keep going is there anything to accomplish other than prolonging my suffering?
I take Seroquel, which has elevated my cholesterol but I like the effects as an End Of My Day drug 