Disillusionment

Whenever anyone asks my why I don't take antidepressants anymore, the simple answer is always difficult to give. If anyone wants a long answer, then this is something that I felt that I had to type out:

For as long as I can remember, Ive been told that I was the perfect child until I started eating table food. Everything went wrong from there. As a baby I would scream for no reason, and as a child I was extremely irritable and explosive. Im certain that this was brought on by chemicals and additives in foods, but there really wasnt much I could do about it at the time. My family was never really the richest, so its not like my parents could have consulted health or food experts. They just let me be. Around the familiar, my family environment, I was explosive and sensitive, and came off as very needy and selfish. However, I was always described by my mom as perfect in public. I was always very shy with new people, and Im guessing it was because I was overwhelmed by new people. That, and, because of my reputation at home, I always strived to make myself look my best for others.

I never really felt any control over myself. I never had any coping mechanisms, ways to calm down, or any emotional outlets, aside from, maybe physical exercise. Whenever I acted out, I was sent to my room, and, contrary to my repetition of mistakes and shortcomings, I was actually one of those kids who thought about what I did. Quite heavily. Id spend that time dwelling on the past, wondering where that perfect child was that I got switched with at 6 months.

What I was about 9 or 10, my mom finally came and told me that she thought I had a mental disorder. Finally, an explanation of what could be wrong with me. At first it was speculated that I was Bipolar, then the conclusion came to ADHD. Since this whole mess was brought on by food additives, I tried eating organic for a while, but nothing seemed to work. I guess this was the start of my mentality that I could one day be fixed and feel normal.

Once I was old enough, I was taken to someone, I can barely remember, who diagnosed me with the latter of the two that mom suspected of me having. Coincidentally I wasnt paying attention to their conversation, which only furthered the fact that I had ADHD. Not too many days after that visit, I remember me being scheduled for an appointment with a psychiatrist. I remember anticipating the possibility to communicate my feelings and emotions with someone, along with finding a miracle cure for it. We drove to what looked very little like a facility, and was actually a Victorian house, which, despite thinking ill of it at the time, I remember very fondly for its historical value. Always having taken much longer to be ready than was scheduled, the psychiatrist lead my parents and I to his office in the basement of the old house, to discuss medication.

There were other details of the visit, like a reward system, since I was still young enough to be rewarded with perks like toys, but, more prominently, I was prescribed with two medications. One was an anti-depressant, and the other would allegedly help me concentrate. For the first few years everything seemed perfect. I wasnt exploding, I was focusing on schoolwork, I was that good little child I wanted to be. I felt for sure I would grow up normal, get a job, go to college, get married and be a great mom. Then, for one reason after the next, everything spiraled back down.

The only thing worse than being in a bad situation, is having had a taste of what seems like the good life only for it to be taken away. After a while of taking the pill for concentration, it started to make my heart beat too fast, and my mind race, so I stopped taking it, as I was almost done with High School anyway. Perhaps I should have tapered off it gradually, but I guess I didnt experience any ill side effects from quitting cold turkey. However, with that pill gone, I would become prone to forgetting again, which meant that Id eventually forget to take my anti-depressant, which I did, in 2011.

That was a rough year for me. Life was getting worse, society was changing, I was maturing, and also slipping. My ADHD brain had simply forgotten to take my pill for a day, then a few days, then a week, then long enough to where I felt like my old, disastrous self again. This time around, though, I began to think that maybe my pill was just a band-aid solution,something installed in my brain to me that perfect girl that I knew everyone wanted back. Unfortunately, that came with terrible consequences. I was exactly what I was years ago, and my parents werent having it. I was going to instead try to get over it myself, but that wasnt an easy task, given my situation. At this point in my life, the environmental factors were starting to weigh more and more heavily on me. Finally, after months of rebelling, tired and just wanting to be tolerated and maybe even enjoyed, I had finally given into taking medication again. Despite what I was dreaming of, things got even worse from here.

I remember it almost like it was yesterday. Instead of checking back with, perhaps, a doctor, I started taking a full dose, which ended up in nausea and dry heaving after a few days. Concluding that I didn't like anything that gave me such awful side effects, I stopped taking it again, this time returning to the Victorian house to be prescribed another kind of medication. The first prescription I tried was really the most effective, so all of the others simply didnt work at all for me. Or maybe they did. I was at the point of desperation and just wanted that perfect girl back.

The downward spiral was going much deeper now. After the other prescriptions didnt work, I started to wonder, what really was wrong with me? Did I really have ADHD? How could I be fixed? For the longest time I even thought I had hormonal problems that messed with my head. I started to feel like it controlled me. I even went back on my first antidepressant, which didnt seem to work as well this time around. Things were at their worst in 2015 where I started experiencing more physical symptoms that couldn't be explained through anything, no matter how many doctors I saw. The office visits went on until last year where everything tested negative. I believe that around this time I had also forgotten to take my antidepressant for a long enough amount of time to where I would again feel the past creeping up into my mind. Again, I was questioning going back on them at all, but pushed that feeling back, and convinced myself that maybe it was just that this didnt work well enough, and I needed to try more. With the psychiatrist being pricey in his office visits, I visited a regular doctor. This one in particular was older and I could tell that she wasnt completely into her job anymore. She prescribed me with the worst experience in my life, and I must have been desperate enough to come back and try another drug. After that one didnt work, I came back to my original antidepressant, concluding that it not working as well was better than not taking it at all. Besides, now I was just convincing myself that I was just going to take my medication until I can get to the bottom of whats wrong with my brain.

Starting last year, I began looking for jobs more diligently, because I finally concluded that, despite being made to think that Id explode at a job, I would gain self-control and self-discipline from working, along with a sense of fulfillment and ease of several aspects of my life that Ive been anxious about. In the recent years, the search in itself started to feel like work, and after a while with little results, that put a lot of pressure on me. The more pressure and anxiety I felt, the less consistent I was in taking care of daily needs, which meant that, once again, I had forgotten to take my pill.

This time, that feeling of something not being right with taking medication came back stronger than before. I cant even explain completely why it doesnt feel right. After all this time, I feel like it gave me the mentality that I feel fine, and I dont need to look into the causes of my problems. It locked things away in my brain for whenever I should forget, then it would come out of the floodgates, leaving me unprepared. Of course, those floodgates opened once I stopped. It left me feeling harder to control than ever before, yet as bad as I always was. This was around the same time I was really searching my mind, examining my feelings, and becoming more enlightened by the knowledge and resources here on this site and others. Thats when it finally hit me. I finally knew what was wrong with me, and why I was getting worse.

Stress.

I might have ADHD, or depression, or maybe even OCD, but stress is what always sent me over the edge. Usually when a person thinks of stress, its the thing that comes up when youre an adult, you have a job, and youve been working too hard. But really, stress can even appear in childhood, and it comes from anything that can overwhelm you. Stress can make a person act out, scream, cry, and even present physical side effects, a lot of which I had. Now that I'm looking back, stress has been in my life longer than I thought. Because I wasn't hiding behind a pill waiting for things to get better and actually making an effort to break apart my emotions, I've finally realized that that's what was holding me back. I could have been stressed as a kid because of my difficulty concentrating, my being easily overwhelmed, and later on by lack of money, lack of friends, the thought of my own household reputation, and the increasing pressure of time itself. Looking into Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, I know now that I'm not alone in my idea to work out my emotions. Unfortunately this has added yet another negative emotion: disillusionment. That's all I can say to describe how I feel. All these years of trying to make myself better trying to ignore and push back, when I just had to accept and examine. I've been questioning a lot of things now, my own judgement and mentality, my parents never considering therapy for me, and the fact that many other people might be going through the same thing. I can only focus on the future now. I'm going to work towards getting therapy, work on myself, and try my best to set a good example in the future.