When It’s Psych Meds, Too Much Is More Than Enough
Batshit Insane, Lots of Meds, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
My psychiatrist retired before Thanksgiving, so it’s time to break in another one. He asks me what my current meds are. Being my new psychiatrist, he’s going to want to change my meds. It’s a given.
He asks me if I have been hospitalized. Since 1999 I have been in a lot of mental hospitals. And day programs, which are essentially mental hospitals from 8–4 so they don’t have to feed you and keep you overnight. I have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, major depressive disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, PTSD, and a host of others. Recently my mother mentioned in passing that I was diagnosed schizophrenic at age 5.
I have been prescribed every psychiatric drug short of Thorazine. Antipsychotics, atypical antipsychotics, anti-depressants, mood stabilizers, anxiety meds, and beta blockers. Also barbiturates. And amphetamines.
Oddly enough, it was only after I stopped drinking and got sober that I went insane. Unlike most other alcoholics, I never dabbled in recreational drugs. I’m what is known as a “pure alcoholic” in AA. However since then, I’ll match the amount of drugs I’ve downed with any burnout hanging around on the Haight.
In 1999, while my husband was away for a week on business, my therapist ordered me to outpatient detox. Either comply or lose my health insurance. I was given a tiny dose of Librium, to prevent an alcohol withdrawal seizures. I already had a seizure disorder — what did they call all of this stuff before they used the words “disorder” — and had given myself several alcohol withdrawal seizures already. The reaction I had to Librium was swift and complete. I lost almost complete motor control and the ability to speak coherently. When I sat on the couch, I slid off. Which was hilarious to me. With my husband away, my friends took care of me; driving me to the detox center and staying with me in the evenings. Much of that week is kind of a blur. Dr. D, the clinic doctor, was astounded by my sensitivity to drugs. He was the first of many. I was also given Antabuse. It’s a drug that makes you sicker than an alligator with stomach cancer if you drink. And it has a half-life of two weeks. If you drink, you get a migraine, nausea, possible seizures, and other things that send you to the emergency room. If you so much as smell alcohol, you drop to your knees, feeling like your head will explode. I was on Antabuse for the year that I went to the outpatient clinic. Today, even though I’ve been sober for years, there is a bottle of Antabuse in my little home pharmacy.
A week into detox, I flipped out, attempted suicide, and went to St. Vincent’s in the West Village, my first mental hospital. I was given some new drugs, although the coffee was decaffeinated. “You think you’re gonna get a free drug in here?” one of the orderlies said when I asked.
Dr. D tried various diagnoses on me, including OCD, which I emphatically don’t have. (You’d know if you saw how rarely I change my cat’s litterbox.) He also said many of the drug side effects were “psychotic breakthrough symptoms”. When I disagreed with him, he diagnosed me with oppositional defiance disorder.
After I left the outpatient clinic in 2000, I was given prescription after prescription. The new psychiatrist at my original mental health clinic said at our first meeting back, “I haven’t had time to read your chart. So fill me in.” At the end of our session, she told me I was manic and gave me a drug to try over the weekend. Since Welbutrin had caused a grand mal seizure in less than 24 hours, I looked up the new drug. It was contraindicated for seizures. When I told her the following Monday, she said, “it’s great that you caught that!”
Every time I had another side effect from another med, my therapist would intone in a heavy Queens accent: “Elisa, you are a child of trauma. As a child of trauma, you somatize.” (That’s psych-speak for hypochondria.) “You think these are side effects. They are not.”
Changing medications constantly meant nausea, headaches, foggy thinking, vomiting, and exhaustion. Between being physically ill and psychotic, this was, to put it politely, a fucking nightmare. My husband had come home to find me in the mental hospital, virtually incoherent. I hallucinated. I rocked back and forth on the bed in the dark. I cried for hours. How he coped, I’ll never know. But he is in the Husband Hall of Fame for sure.
I was up to ten medications when in 2001 I found Dr. P at the New York Psychiatric Institute. He gave me a real diagnosis: Bipolar disorder with explosive impulsivity, PTSD, and alcoholism. By the time I saw him, I was a shambling mass of side effects. We spent weeks weaning me off multiple medications and replacing them with others. He put me on a mix of Depakote, a bipolar and seizure drug; amphetamines; two antidepressants; and Klonopin, a benzodiazepine for anxiety. So down from ten only five. Later I had to take thyroid pills, because all of the medications I’d been on busted my thyroid.
During one of my two stays at Lenox Hill Hospital, I was given Abilify to taper off my mania. (I had threatened to punch one of my neighbors in the face.) Like Librium, I lost complete motor control. The only way I could walk was by half-dragging myself by the padded rails along the walls. One of the orderlies had to hold me up when I needed to walk across the room. The head of psychiatry remarked, “You have an exquisitely sensitive system.” Uh, thanks?
Dr. P got a job in California in 2007 so I changed psychiatrists again. Dr. K changed me over to Lamictal for bipolar and seizures, and asked why I was on amphetamines. My honest answer was that I had no idea, but with a cup of coffee in the morning I was REALLY good to go! So, weaned off Depakote, amphetamines, one of the antidepressants, my Klonopin dose lowered. Another few months of constant queasiness, light-headedness, loss of motor control, rinse and repeat.
In 2012 that psychiatrist got a job as the head of psychiatry at one of the few mental hospitals where I haven’t been a patient. I moved on to Dr. T, who kept me on the same regime: Lamictal, Klonopin, Zoloft. During a hospital stay at Roosevelt over the 2014 Christmas holidays I was given Benadryl, Haldol and Ativan, even though I wasn’t violent. The doctor there changed me over to Prozac, which knocked me sideways. I constantly wanted to puke. I couldn’t eat. My head hurt. I couldn’t think. My legs wouldn’t obey me. My primary care doctor thought I needed a battery of tests; I thought I needed to get the hell off of Prozac. Within three days of going back on Zoloft my health returned.
If my new doctor wants to change my meds, he has a hell of a fight on his hands. I am DONE.
