Bitter irony: I wanted to speak out about mental health but my anxiety stopped me | Marian Faa

Mental health week came and went and I stayed silent. Thats the thing about mental illness often we cant talk about it when the world wants us to I think and write a lot about mental health. Since being diagnosed with anxiety and clinical perfectionism, writing has become an important way of Read more...

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[Online apotheek]

Here’s a really quick recap of my experiences with anxiety drugs. If you’re looking for info in this subject, and you’re intimidated by the lengthy anxiety medications list you might have come across, then I think this story will be helpful to you.

When I was about 25 I went to my doctor to ask if she thought I should start taking anti anxiety medication. At this stage, I knew nothing about drugs for anxiety, or if they would help me, but by this time I’d been living with severe anxiety and panic attacks for about 15 years, and I just wanted to try something new to improve the quality of my life.

I’d tried over the counter anxiety medication in the form of St. John’s Wort, and I’d even tried a herbal remedy for anxiety, but it had done no good at all, and after telling all this to my doctor she said to me that I might be a good candidate for anxiety medication, since I was having no luck treating anxiety naturally.

So at first my doctor prescribed a drug called Anafranil, which I took for just one day before the side effects were so terrible that I was forced to stop (the main problems were nausea and hallucinations).

My doctor told me that this was common to react negatively to this type of drug, so she prescribed me another one instead, this time Prozac. Once again, my reaction to this medication was not good, and after about a week of taking it I was forced to stop again.

Amazingly, my doctor prescribed be a third drug, this one called Citalopram. I say “amazingly” because I had no idea that there were this many anti anxiety medications, but my doctor informed me that there are dozens of them, and that because there are so many there is usually at least one for everyone that won’t cause unpleasant side effects.

I had this confirmed when I came home and did a search online to learn more, and what I found was an anxiety medications list as long as my arm!

Anyway, I started taking the Citalopram, and thankfully I didn’t have any real side effects with this one. So I continued to take it for about a year. Eventually, I stopped taking this one too. My anxiety was no better off, and the medication was starting to make me gain weight, so I just thought I was better off without it.

After an all time low with my anxiety a year or so later, I took Citalopram again for a few months. Again, it did little to help and I stopped taking it for good.

Since all this happened, I discovered some natural treatments for anxiety that have worked very well for me, so my relationship with anti anxiety medication is hopefully over for good.