Paxil Free

April 7th, 2001.

I was prescribed Paxil (20mg/daily) for depression and post-traumatic stress in November of 1999. At the same time I began to see a therapist who helped me deal with the symptoms of the post-traumatic stress (which included flashbacks; no fun there, let me tell ya). More than Paxil, more than anything or anyone else, the benefits of this communicative therapy (a.k.a. talking) were immeasurable.

However, the Paxil did provide a certain calm which allowed me to deal more effectively with the emotional trauma of the experience I had gone through. (For my own privacy, I’ve chosen to withhold the exact details of that experience.) It seems to me that Paxil regulates one’s emotions so that they are more manageable. How exactly it does this nobody really knows, but there are a few theories out there which I think have some validity to them.

The most obvious theory is that paroxetine, like most anti-depressants, masks one’s emotions — it has a ‘dulling’ effect. The emotions, whatever they happen to be, are still there, but they’re so numbed out by the Paxil that you hardly notice them, which makes them easier to deal with — or, in some cases, to completely ignore.

There may be some truth to this, but I didn’t take Paxil to ignore what I was feeling. I took it to help me deal with my feelings which, for a few months after my big bad traumatic experience, were so powerful and overwhelming that I could barely function.

My theory on Paxil goes something like this: If you think of your nervous system as the electrical wiring in a house, paroxetine acts on your nervous system in the same way the fuse box operates (keeping in mind that I’m not an electrician). When the fuse box — which regulates the voltage — isn’t working properly, you begin to experience overloads and short circuits all the time. Simple actions like plugging in two things at once can short circuit the whole house, causing everything to shut down. An emotionally traumatic experience, and/or a clinical depression of some kind, can have exactly the same effect on your nervous system. Common daily stresses become too much to cope with and everything can gradually, if not suddenly, shut down. When it works, Paxil, under these circumstances, helps to regulate your emotional reactions to these stresses so that they’re not overwhelming, so that you can function again. (The process of getting off Paxil is akin to tearing out all the wiring in your house and then trying to put it all back exactly where it used to be. It’s like completely having to rewire your nervous system. In other words, it hurts.)

So according to my big theory, Paxil doesn’t necessarily mask your feelings, but it regulates the speed at which they come at you, so that under circumstances of unusually high stress (e.g., post-traumatic stress or clinical depression), the emotions are manageable.

How paroxetine really works, though, nobody knows — not even the doctors who prescribe it every day.

I eventually got my life back on track, and the Paxil did help along the way. It wasn’t the one and only solution to my situation, but it was a part of it. I had dealt with the trauma I had experienced and I was feeling settled and confident in how I was going forward with my life.

It was at this point that my doctor told me it would be okay to stop taking the Paxil. I asked him about weaning off it, but he said:

“The great thing about Paxil is that you don’t have to wean yourself off it. You can stop cold turkey.”

I questioned this at first, but I trusted my doctor and I followed his orders. (I consider this the biggest mistake of my life.) The next seven months of my life were entirely consumed in trying to get off this drug.

Within a day of discontinuing the Paxil cold turkey, I experienced severe withdrawal, accumulating in what I’ve come to recognize now as a type of seizure. These seizures, which may coincide with paresthesia, numbness, headaches, abnormal and unexplained sensations, are remarkably similar to those of certain types of epilespsy. It feels like this:

An electrical current building up behind the eyes which then surges through the temples and the rest of the head. Then a second later there’s another surge but slightly weaker, and then another and another until it gradually fades away, but not without leaving one feeling completely exhausted and fatigued.

For three days I experienced a seizure like this approximately every 20 seconds. This was the most physically and mentally debilitating — and disturbing — effect of the Paxil withdrawal. It persisted in varying degrees right to the very last day of my withdrawal seven months later. When I reached the point during that first week where I wanted to kill myself, I decided to start taking the Paxil again.

I had followed my doctor’s orders and had stopped taking the Paxil cold turkey, and it was a pure living hell. It lasted only a week, but the experience nearly killed me.

It was at this time I discovered support groups on the internet such as paxilprogress.org for people going through the same thing — and I wouldn’t have made it without their support. Just knowing I wasn’t alone made all the difference. The person I felt closest to at this time seemed to disappear off the face of the earth the second I told her about my withdrawal experience. I realized afterwards that I was never as close to this person as I had thought or hoped I was. But when you’re going through something as horrible as Paxil withdrawal, it’s easy, out of pure desperation, to slip into certain forms of denial. Only now, having survived this experience mostly alone, do I recognize the simple but profound healing that comes from feeling the presence of another person, from our caring contact with one another. To have lost this particular contact during my withdrawal — even if it was one big misconception all along — was discouraging to say the least. It made me feel not just cut off from her, but cut off from the world. It also made the support of the people in groups like paxilprogress.org especially important to me.

Most of my kinship, and my healing, came through the internet supports groups such as paxilprogress.org. Those are the people who were there for me. I’m talking about people I have never met in the flesh, but who were better friends to me than any person in my life at the time. In a way that’s pathetic, but it’s also kind of amazing. The stupid internet saved my life.

After my cold turkey experience, it would be another two months of feeling scared out of my skull before I found the courage to begin weaning myself off the Paxil. The actual weaning process took about two and a half months (which is quick), but the total withdrawal experience lasted much longer.

I seem to have had a particularly difficult withdrawal, both physically and emotionally. If there’s anything anyone could experience while withdrawing from this stupid drug, chances are I’ve had it in one form or another. The #1 thing to remember, though, is that everyone is different. Just because I had a bad ride doesn’t mean you will. I recently received an email from a woman who summed it up nicely:

These medications are much more person-specific than some people think. My own history with Paxil lasted four days and was not at all happy. I had muscle spasms to the point where I could not cross a room dependably. I was like a child learning to walk whose eyes are fixed on the door but arrives at the wall next to it instead. But I was lucky — when I went to the doctor and reported my response, she told me it was “probably only a temporary stage” because Paxil doesn’t have its full effect for about two weeks and that I should “hang in there,” but I insisted that she get me off it now. The symptoms went away within 72 hours and that was the end of my story — except that she “wrote me up” as an “exception” and sent it off to some project-group or another that was evaluating a whole set of “new” stress-related medications [probably SSRIs -- Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors -- of which Paxil is one].

Everyone will have a different experience while on Paxil and while trying to get off it. I’ve heard of plenty of people who had nothing but positive experiences with Paxil and had no problems at all getting off it. (Okay, maybe not “plenty,” but a few). My initial experience with Paxil was a beneficial one. In terms of having no problems at all getting off it, though, forget about it. That’s one experience I simply cannot relate to — and my experience is not that uncommon. Which brings me back to the reason I’ve written this web site:

To let those of you who can relate to what I am saying know that you are not alone. That may not sound like much right now, but when the withdrawal really kicks into high gear and you feel like you’re going to die, blogs like this and websites like paxilprogress.org become lifelines.

That’s how it was for me, anyway.