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From: Tanya Knighton
Date: 25/06/03
Time: 23:21:20
Remote Name: 195.92.67.67
This is my experience of SEROXAT. I went cold turkey 8 days ago.
I'd been suffering from PTSD since an accident at the age of eight. Twenty five years during which I'd had an ostensibly happy, successful life, although no-one has ever quite worked out why I haven't achieved more. Three and a half to four years ago I couldn't cope any longer and fell into a very bad depression. This was just after I'd achieved a Head of Department job I'd coveted for years. PTSD was finally diagnosed as the cause of the depression, treated with trauma counselling and I was well on the way to getting better. I made a career change from Secondary to Primary teaching and had got back into full time work. I was also off drugs! I was still vulnerable when a parent, known in the staff room as being a brick short of a load, wrote a letter of complaint about nothing in particular, which was basically a horrible letter of total character assassination, a lot of which was prima facie libel. A better, more confident and experienced Headteacher would have binned it without even bothering me with it. Not this one who handled a bad situation in a manner she can't be proud of, and I was back almost to the bottom.
I was well on the way to recovery again when, reacting with a horror of mental illness coming from ignorance that a school ought to be above, my employers tried to pull the plug on my job. I still had over half of my minimum leave of absence to which I was contractually entitled left and, as the Union Rep. pointed out with great glee to them, it was contrary to Disabled Employment Law. On his advice I requested a consultation with a Consultant Physiatrist, thinking that he would basically say that there wasn't anything seriously wrong with me and we could use it to save my job. He did. He told me quite categorically that with "the right dose of the right drug" I would get better ... and then wrote out a recommendation for SEROXAT higher that GSK's own recommended maximum dose. 60mg when GSK recommend 50mg. That was the beginning of my hell with Seroxat.
Initially it wasn't too bad. Mentally I still think it was helping. My sensible GP started me on 20mg. We went to 30 without mishap and I was still feeling better. At 40mg I developed an appalling stutter. In my job, that makes me unemployable and I was supposed to be taking them for a year after I was completely well. My GP immediately lowered the dose. Thank heavens she did.
Side effects were there almost from the beginning. I started to suffer from headaches on the first day I took them and to sleep for England. I literally fell asleep walking across a car park and daren't drive anymore than short distances. I began to get feelings of nervousness as though I were about to sit an exam or an interview or undergo some of the ghastly examinations I'd had in hospital the previous summer to investigate what appeared to be a serious bowel complaint but ended up being a side effect of my previous drugs. Sometimes these feelings were so bad I couldn't get out of bed. My appetite disappeared and yet I still kept piling on weight. Thanks to a combination of citalapram and Seroxat my weight has more than doubled, my thighs are so fat they chafe so I can't even walk more than a few yards. All this is on a very tiny skeleton that used to wear size 8s. It can't cope with the fat and it falls in folds which chafe and become uncomfortable. My once 32Bs are now 42Es and I hate them. I want them chopped off. I sweated so profusely I was scared I'd started the menopause. Why had I ever been a career girl who was going to have her family later? My facial appearance changed. A few days before the below happened, I was looking through some photos with my gran and found one that was definitely of my cat being held by some slim, pretty young woman wearing a dress similar to one I was once given by my sister-in-law. At least my gran can still recognise me.
Last Tuesday morning I was sitting on the sofa drinking a cup of coffee when suddenly, totally out of the blue, I was an hysterical, sobbing wreck. Then the thoughts came into my head. Why was I still alive? I wish I were dead. My saving grace was that I'd read the recent expose in the Observer and I recognised what was happening to me - even the thoughts of suicide.
That was it. No more Seroxat. I haven't swallowed another since. I'm not taking any more drugs. At the moment I couldn't take a paracetamol for a headache. I've thrown them all out. I have the support of my GP. We are going to try cognitive therapy instead. There is an alternative!
What's it like? It can be hell. I've been back to hysterical sobbing fits with thoughts of suicide and total worthlessness and then within fifteen minutes rationally explained to someone else that in my natural state I could never do it because I'm too sensible and in any case I wouldn't know how. I've still removed every drug from the house and checked to make sure my kitchen knives aren't in a condition to do me any damage. As I said to my dad, this is a drug that makes you act and I'm going to make sure I'm safe. That was yesterday. Today I can do this and other feelings and aspects of my character that I thought were lost for good are coming back. I've found a libido again. Its only been a week.
The future? Don't know, long term or short term. How will I feel tomorrow? Don't know. Will I ever be able to hold down a responsible, stressful, professional job again? Don't know, but I'm sure I'll find something else. Can I be strong enough to beat this? Yes. When the Capos cleared the bodies out of the gas chamber they found them in a pyramid as the last few to be left alive had climbed to the top to find the last breath of air. I have to be the one who knows that the only way out is in an air pocket at the bottom and keeps their head to find it.
I have to change totally. I have to become a user and use people for what I need. When you suffer from a mental illness you discover who your friends are and at both ends of the spectrum I've found them in some very odd places. A very good friend, I thought, who I helped a great deal though a bad patch after a failed relationship, will walk off without speaking if she sees me in the supermarket. Then again acquaintances have become friends because they cared enough to be kind.
Tanya Knighton.