I came across an interesting piece in the Guardian the other day written by Deborah Orr, who had just taken antidepressants for the first time (with unpleasant consequences). This was followed by an explanatory article by blogger and author Dean Burnett who explains that nobody really knows how anti-depressants work, and why it is not surprising that they can have unexpected side effects. I hope that the articles I mentioned above help make it clearer what is involved being on medication of this sort. These drugs are in widespread use, but ignorance about them is spread even wider.
I remember a while ago, when I was working at the University of Sussex, sitting on a bus in Brighton with two people behind me talking – in a very unhelpful and ill-informed way – about depression, and how anti-depressant drugs were a `soft option’. It made me quite angry listening to some of the comments they made but I didn’t intervene. I toyed with the idea of writing a blog then but I didn’t get round to it, partly because I didn’t really want all the staff and students in the School of which I was Head to know I was taking heavy medication for much of the time I was working there. I only told a handful of people at the time. Now I am no longer in that job I think it’s safe to be a bit more open, and add a little bit here from my own experience to the articles mentioned above.
The most widespread anti-depressant drugs currently available are called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (the best-known of which, Fluoxetine, is known by the trade name Prozac). Deborah Orr’s article concerned her experience with an SSRI called Citalopram, which I was using about five years years ago. More recently, for much of the time I was at Sussex I was taking Paroxetine (trade name: Seroxat). The latter is not available on the National Health Service through a General Practioner, but must instead be prescribed by a consultant psychiatrist.
Anti-depressants are not only prescribed for the treatment of clinical depression but also for, e.g., anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Nobody really knows why anti-depressants work against depression (although there is clinical evidence that they do), and there is even less understanding why (and, in some cases, evidence that) they are effective for these other conditions. Like many treatments they seem to have been discovered empirically, by trial and error.
As Dean Burnett explains in his article, SSRIs work by increasing the level of Serotonin (a monoamine neurotransmitter). However, taking an SSRI increases the level of Serotonin almost immediately whereas the effect on depression takes weeks to register. While low Serotonin levels may play a part in depressive illness, they’re clearly not the whole story.
My experience contrasts a bit with Deborah Orr’s, in that I have never experienced significant problems going onto this sort of medication – the worst by far has been when I’ve tried to quit. I had awful problems in the summer of 2012 largely as a result of trying to come off the medication I had been on since the previous autumn. The withdrawal symptoms then included shaking fits, insomnia, visual and auditory hallucinations, nausea, and hypervigilance.
The effect of this extreme collection of withdrawal symptoms was that I didn’t eat or sleep for a couple of weeks, and ended up in a high-dependency unit at a psychiatric hospital under sedation while they figured out what to do with me. Fortunately, I recovered well enough to return to work after a couple of months.
At the end of the summer of 2012, I was offered the job of Head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at Sussex University. I moved from Cardiff to Brighton in early 2013 to take up this new position. I hadn’t been there for long when my old problem returned. The stress of the job obviously played a role in this, and I soon realised that I couldn’t keep going without help from medication. It was then that I was tried out on Paroxetine, the dose being gradually increased until I was at the maximum recommended level (60mg daily).
While this medication was effective in controlling the panic disorder, it had some unpleasant side-effects, including: digestive problems; dizziness; difficulty in concentrating; fatigue; and the weirdest of all, a thing called depersonalisation. Deborah Orr describes the latter very well in her piece but she seems to have experienced it as soon as she started taking medication, whereas in my case it came on gradually.
I found myself living a kind of half-life, functioning reasonably well at work but not having the energy or enthusiasm to do very much else outside of working hours. Eventually I got fed up with it. I felt I had to choose between staying in my job as Head of School (which meant carrying on taking the drugs indefinitely) or leaving to do something else (which would mean I might be able to quit the drugs). I picked the latter. The desire to come off medication wasn’t the only factor behind my decision to stand down from my job, but it played a big part.
I knew however that Paroxetine is associated with notoriously difficult withdrawal symptoms so, mindful of my previous experience in 2012, I followed the medical instructions to the letter, gradually cutting down my dose over a couple of months during the course of the Autumn in 2016. I still had significant withdrawal symptoms, especially the insomnia, but not as bad as five years ago. I’m hoping that my current (part-time) job allows me to manage for the foreseeable future without the need for any medication – apart, perhaps, from the odd glass of fine wine!
So those are my experiences. All I can say that I hope I’ve convinced you that anti-depressants are not a `soft option’!
In the Dark 