Advocating for Your Anxious Self with your doctor
It is so hard to realize when I need a change in my medication. Now that my depression and anxiety disorders have been stabilized, problems do not jump out at me. Bad feelings creep up slowly, and I find myself being sucked down without realizing I need a rope. And/or I question my own judgement, accusing myself of being dramatic or overreacting. If I discuss this with my now part time therapist, she will focus on my reactions to daily life. While this is relevant, I know that it is more than just life’s bumps. It is my inability to deal with them. And not because I need …
Don’t stop taking your anti anxiety medication if you feel good!
My daughter, who I have written extensively about here (see the post My Daughter Got Help with her Anxiety) had been doing soooo well. Anti anxiety medication alone was not enough for her. With the addition of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, she began to have many anxiety free days and was sleeping well. In addition, she started acupuncture for her migraine headaches which had not been responding to medication (and are connected to her anxiety). The acupuncture was working well for her too! And then her therapist and her psychiatrist decided that maybe Beth should try to wean off of some …
Paxil Withdrawal
I added a 4th Celexa, bringing my dose to 80 mg. In the US, that is considered too much but in Europe, according to my doctor, they use as much as 100 mg. Since I was on a high dose of Paxil, I probably will need the 100 mg eventually. My psychiatrist said that although the Paxil is now out of my system, my body is craving the Paxil and the Celexa does not satisfy the craving. Therefore, it will be about 6 more weeks until the craving is gone. In the meantime, I will continue to have days where …
Off Paxil CR and On Celexa
So it took about a month but I did it. So far so good. I have some morning drowsiness which one cup of coffee is taking care of. I am feeling pretty good, despite some unusual stress happening right now. This is just a quick entry to let you know the switch went well.
Third Week Switching from Paxil CR to Celexa
I am now taking 60 mg of Celexa and only 25 mg of Paxil CR. I am doing fine except I was drowsy the first few mornings of taking the 3rd Celexa for the first time. The psychiatrist told me to cut the morning pill in half and add it to the night dose. He always tells me to spread out the anti-anxiety medication into 3 doses a day. I think some doctors tell people to take it all at once. What does your doctor tell you to do?
When anti-anxiety medication is not enough to control anxiety.
My daughter suffers from a very very severe case of anxiety disorder. (Read post My daughter needed help for her anxiety disorder.) She has lived a life controlled by worry and depression. At age 34, Beth is finally seeing the light. She is successfully using a cocktail of anti-anxiety medications (prozac, neurontin, klonopin) which have definitely decreased her anxiety. But the medication has not completed the task of controlling Beth’s anxiety sufficiently. She continues to be functioning in a limited capacity both in her personal and business life.
For 2 years her psychiatrist has been begging Beth to see a Cognitive …
When anxiety clouds my head
While I was taking my shower this morning, I was thinking about the fact that I am missing my therapy appointment this week since my therapist will be away. I feel fine about that since right now I have no outstanding issues that I feel frantic about. Then I began to think about that franticness, and how it affects my thinking.
When I am worried (as in becoming panicky) about something, it can be hard to have an appropriate reaction to that “thing”. Appropriate is a loose term, I know, but I think you realize that I mean a “not off the …
My Daughter Got Help for her Anxiety.
Once Beth was willing to admit that her anxiety was interfering with her life in a major way, she visited a psychiatrist who prescribed Prozac. Beth used Prozac for about 5 years and it raised her into a new reality. She became productive in her work (home computer business) and her social life improved. She was not so needy and did not obsess about every little thing that went wrong in her daily life. For the first time in her life, Beth was finally able to achieve a level of calm and contentedness that she never knew before.
However, as the …
Psychotherapy was my first attempt to free myself from anxiety and depression.
So once my second child Evan was in the picture, I think I really operated on pure adrenalin in a robotic manner. I would never let anything happen to my babies. They now became the reason for waking up each day. I focussed on them completely. If I had any other life before, it no longer existed. I felt like a juggler. I can’t imagine how mothers of twins manage. After all, my kids were 3 1/2 years apart. That should not have been so difficult. But it was. I was not able to cope like a normal mother. I …
I suffered from anxiety as far back as I can remember.
Looking back, I realize that I was nervous even as a kid. I am 58 years old, by the way. It is a very sad irony that my mother (may she rest in peace) passed away suddenly when I was 12 years old. This might make you think that trauma caused me to have severe anxiety. Well it did, and certainly the course of my life was horribly altered, but I know that I was an anxiety sufferer before she died. I was one of those children that almost literally hung onto mom’s apron strings. (Women wore aprons all day long in those days). I can remember …
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