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Coming off SSRIs made my dreams WILD. (Images by Tina Tiller, assisted by AI)
Coming off SSRIs made my dreams WILD. (Images by Tina Tiller, assisted by AI)

SocietyJuly 19, 2024

Bye, SSRI: A farewell to my antidepressants

Coming off SSRIs made my dreams WILD. (Images by Tina Tiller, assisted by AI)
Coming off SSRIs made my dreams WILD. (Images by Tina Tiller, assisted by AI)

Brain fireworks, a date with Jacob Elordi and a zillion open tabs: this is my story about coming off meds.

It’s 4am, I’m 16 days into coming off my antidepressants, and I’m researching how best to preserve lemons.

Cooking sites. Food bloggers. Doomsday preppers. In the blue light of my laptop, I scroll feverishly through image after image of citrus fruit, scanning information at a rapid pace. 

I’m not here for long – another thought is calling. I open another tab, fingers flying over the keys. Direct flights auckland tokyo. Results fill the screen. I barely have time to glance before another idea grips me. Half marathon entry fees. Then, just as quickly, another: Sydney Sweeney single?

I’ve been at this for hours. My browser: a mosaic of tiny icons, a collection of seemingly random rabbit holes, all of which are equally urgent and immediately abandoned. My laptop is radioactive hot. Proven benefits of breathwork. DIY curtain bangs. How best to make money if suddenly immortal. Cat fur dye ethical? Pixar’s highest grossing film. Can you rent out the whole zoo? MacBooks weren’t built for this level of speedy intellectual fervour.

Finally, in a rare moment of clarity, I open one more tab and enter sheepishly into the search bar: can coming off antidepressants cause mania?

Ten days earlier, I sat in a doctor’s office as we discussed my medication.

For the past eight years, the lion’s share of my 20s, I had been one of the over 550,000 New Zealanders prescribed antidepressants.

I’d come to my initial prescriber as a 21-year-old freshly out of a relationship, about to move overseas, and decidedly Not Coping. I was put on a low dose of paroxetine, a common medication used to treat depression. No medication works for everyone, and sometimes adjustments need to be made, but I was lucky. For me – alongside therapy and some lifestyle changes – it worked.

Now, months shy of my 30th birthday, I see that past version of myself as you would a stranger crying on the train. Sympathetic, but at a distance. I was ready to try life post-paroxetine: 30, flirty, and unmedicated.

My new doctor clicked his pen rapidly as he talked. You may experience some withdrawal symptoms, he said, advising me to drop my dosage in half for the next six weeks before stopping altogether. 

Withdrawal. My categorical aversion to routine and a tendency to forget my meds for days at a time meant I knew it well. Nausea. Mood swings. Brain zaps, like tiny fireworks exploding across the inside of my skull. Recently, on an overseas work trip, I got the zaps so badly I fainted in a Brisbane supermarket, slumped over a pile of red cabbage.

I knew what I was in for – at least I thought I did. I’d done some research and I’d talked to a guy who’d been to medical school. Following the plan for a gradual taper would give my body plenty of time to adjust to a new chemical normal. I was going to stick the landing.

I start every morning by biting a pill in half. It’s white, with an embossed ‘O’, like a power button. Turn on. Turn off. I tuck the remaining semi-circle back inside the silver foil. 

At first, I feel normal. Day five comes with a slight headache, but I put it down to the iced coffee I had on an empty stomach. However, by day six, it’s raging and impossible to ignore. When I arrive home from work to discover my cat has used the new couch as a litterbox, I’m annoyed – potentially a fair reaction, but I can’t shake it off. My sister calls and I snap at her down the phone line. The feeling is stickier than normal. It follows me into sleep and is waiting for me the next day.

A week later, I’m in a VTNZ carpark. I put my car into reverse and move without looking, crunching into the passenger door of a car parked directly behind me, waiting patiently for its WOF. I’m immediately bawling. Big, heavy tears, sucking air in between sobs. The other driver is very understanding, if not slightly and sweetly concerned for my wellbeing. I plug my name and number into her phone and get out of there as quickly as I can.

By week three, I’m routinely sleeping less than four hours a night. Time feels too precious to waste. There are too many things to get done. There are the fervent late-night internet searches, yes. But there are also the frantic messages to friends, family, the group chat – 10, 11, 12 at a time. And the sudden obsession with genealogy, building out a family tree of over 1,000 in the space of 48 hours. 

‘He mea tautoko nā ngā mema atawhai. Supported by our generous members.’
Liam Rātana
— Ātea editor

When I do manage to sleep, the dreams are technicolour. I fly over fields of shimmering purple grass. I jump through a portal in space-time and meet a roller-skating Princess Diana. I’m escorted to a ball by Jacob Elordi, wearing a white linen shirt and a sparkly tooth gem.

The internet, my ever-faithful companion, tells me I’m likely experiencing hypomania – mania’s milder cousin – a rare but not unprecedented occurrence in antidepressant withdrawal. A period of abnormally elevated, extreme changes in your mood or emotions, energy level or activity level. 

I reach out to friends and family and let them know what’s likely going on. They promise to keep an eye out, and I promise to revisit my doctor if it escalates further.

Thankfully, a few days later, I feel myself gradually come back to earth. My sleeping returns to normal. I step away from actively planning three different overseas trips. I put down the hair scissors.

Over 10% of New Zealanders are prescribed antidepressants, and yet, beyond the medical jargon in scientific journals, there’s a gap where our stories should be. 

My story is just one. It’s not a guide, nor is it a cautionary tale. It’s certainly not medical advice. 

If it’s anything, I hope it’s an invitation to share more openly the nitty-gritty details of our mental health – the good, the bad, and the bizarre. 

Sharing is how we remind ourselves we’re all just hairless apes on a spinning rock, trying to make a go of it, in the best way we know how. Sharing means realising we don’t have to do it alone. 

My story might not look like yours, and yours may have significantly less Jacob Elordi than mine, but that, I think, is the point.

Keep going!
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SocietyJuly 18, 2024

Help Me Hera: Should I publish a creative essay about my ex?

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I’m worried my musings will be less Richard Gadd and more Martha.

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

Dear Hera,

Last year I left a relationship with my ex-girlfriend to date someone else. This decision, as she had predicted, was the wrong one; at the time I stood by my decision but recognised that the way I went about it wasn’t the greatest. My ex fairly and understandably blocked me on social media.

A couple months ago, someone let it slip that my ex had been making music, and despite avoiding looking into it in the past, I let them play the music for me. There was one particular song that stood out to me in that I could see myself in some of the metaphors and musings, catching a hinted potential for some lingering fond feelings. 

My issue is that I’m a writer and want to explore and pick apart my feelings in a creative essay and add it to my site of self-published works. To really delve into the politics of being perceived, of watching and reacting to art that people make inspired by events you witnessed or took part in and reactions in turn. However, I worry that my musings and reflections won’t come across like Richard Gadd’s critically-acclaimed reflective mini-series and will instead be more like an obsessed, self-absorbed email from Martha. 

I can’t even Sabrina Carpenter ‘All because I liked a boy’ my way out of this one, I can’t turn my potential essay into a song filled with vague metaphors. It’s especially awkward because I might be making a big fuss about nothing and reading too far into a song I wasn’t supposed to hear. But maybe that’s my medicine to swallow, to know a little but not enough and expose myself as some vapid person who can’t let the past go.

I just want to know, should I write my personal essay and pick this apart, or will I give off Martha from Baby Reindeer having pried where I shouldn’t have?

Sincerely and dramatically, 

Mini Martha

A line of fluorescent green card suit symbols – hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades

Dear Mini Martha,

I spent the morning “researching your letter” by watching a long and complicated explainer about Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter and Joshua Bassett by a young woman holding a big red leather handbag, and periodically advertising gut health supplements, and it was an enlightening and enjoyable part of my morning, so thank you. Prior to this, the entirety of my Sabrina Carpenter knowledge came from the Joel Golby tweet: 

sabrina carpenter: so what’s the joker?

barry keoghan: he’s sart of like an evil porson

There’s a lot going on in your letter. But I’m struggling to figure out what you want out of all this. Do you want to get back together with your ex? Do you want to write a fascinating and nuanced essay on forgiveness, loss, desire, forgiveness (again) and the haunted mirror which is memory? Do you want to get back together with your ex by writing a fascinating and nuanced essay about forgiveness, loss, desire, the fallibility of etc, etc. 

First off, is your ex’s music publicly available? If it isn’t, don’t publish a piece of writing about it unless you want to completely torpedo your relationship with that person. But if it’s out there on the internet, whatever. Once you publish something you forfeit the ability to control what it means to other people, and that goes for the both of you. 

Just because you broke up with your ex for someone who didn’t work out, it doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision. Unless it was the wrong decision, in which case it was totally the wrong decision. Leaving someone for someone else doesn’t have to “work out” to result in an accidental net good. Either way, you’re blocked. The best way to recover from accusations of love-rattery, is just to shrug handsomely and cop to it. 

It seems like what you’re really asking is how to make a good and emotionally revealing piece of art based on your own life, without being perceived as embarrassing, and boy do I have bad news for you. Being willing to risk humiliation is the price of entry. And the only way to mitigate the harm is by making something which is better than it has any right to be. 

‘Love The Spinoff? Its future depends on your support. Become a member today.’
Madeleine Chapman
— Editor

I think you should just write it and see what happens. Not necessarily with the intention of publishing it. But you should always write anything you’re interested in. It’s the best way to become a better writer. 

If, after you have written and workshopped it, you decide that you’re proud enough to publish it, you can start to overthink the consequences. If you’re worried about hurting someone’s feelings, that’s reasonable. You also have to prepare for your ex to turn around and say “that had absolutely nothing to do with you.” But like capitalism, a good personal essay can subsume all critiques into itself and profit from them. You can make your feelings of trepidation a literary feature, not a bug. 

If you want to know whether this essay will bring shame or glory upon you, all I will say is there’s no way to tell until it exists. When it’s all down on paper, you can give your critical ear free reign. You can interrogate an emotionally insincere confession, or cut a self-important anecdote. You can change your ex’s favourite drink to “grape blast” if it improves the cadence of the sentence. You could also share it with a writing group, or a friend, and seek some impartial feedback. But it’s hard to productively worry about the future of something which is only, at this stage, a concept. 

My advice is to do the work, for your own enjoyment, with whatever cognitive dissonance you can muster. In this scenario, cognitive dissonance means trying as hard as you can not to think about the possibility of it ever being read. Write it for yourself, with as much vulnerability and intelligence as you can bring to the page. I stopped watching Baby Reindeer after the first episode, but from what I gather, the thing that people who liked it liked about it was the emotional honesty and the willingness of the creator to expose himself, in addition to Martha, and his own unresolved trauma and complicity in the unfolding situation. Or at least that’s what the reviews seem to suggest. 

After you’ve finished writing it, and sat with it for a few weeks, you can begin asking the awkward questions. Does this bring harm to anyone? Have I said anything criminal or stupid? Am I in a hurry to publish this, or could it use longer to cook? In short: are these the words of a evil porson? Above all, you should trust your own taste and judgement, because that’s a skill to be refined, just like any other. It’s also not the end of the world if you publish something bad. But take an evidence-based approach, and see what you’re working with first. 

Best of luck, 

Hera

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