Sunday Scribblings: Experimenting Without Drugs

With the arrival of 2008, I thought I'd experiment with not taking the medicine I take to treat my mental health problems.

I don't think I ever thought I would quit taking this medicine forever, but I longed for the range and immediacy of feeling I experienced before coming under the care of these medications. I also longed for the technocolored and wildly erratic dreams I have when I miss a day or two of taking these medications. I longed for a month or more of such dreams.

Without my medication, I do have a wider range of feelings. I'm more alert to beauty, more sharply touched by poetry, more delighted by things my students say: I laugh more heartily and am more easily moved to tears. When not taking medicine, I feel at liberty to have a few alcoholic drinks and I enjoyed a beer and few rum and cokes over the course of these few weeks.

On the other hand, without my medication, I'm grouchier. I snap at students who displease me in ways they haven't heard before. On medication, I'm slow to anger, so slow it rarely happens. Off medication, I'm quick to anger; I do not and cannot roll with things that annoy me and I see my world through a much darker cloud. I feel inferior. I experience things said to me as condescending and my desire for compliments and need for reinforcement from others increases. Off my medication, I think too much about death.

I never think about taking my own life, but I think a lot about death being a comfort.

It confuses me that I experience the world so much differently from within myself outwardly on medication than off.

Predictably, I wonder what's real. Are my grouchiness, snappiness, anger, and sense of being inferior legitimate feelings of outrage? Am I more in touch, when not medicated, to aspects of my marriage, my work, and my relationships with others that are unjust and that ought to be pissing me off? Or are these diseased responses? Ill reactions? And how about pleasure? Without medicine, things give me more pleasure. Is this a diseased response?

Am I healthier when medicated because things don't bother me so much, my emotions are tamer, things are less dramatic, I feel less pleasure and have less access to pleasure, and I don't feel so inferior?

Is living in the midrange of feeling, with little experience toward the extremes the definition of sound mental health?

I don't know.

A week and a half ago I decided to take my medicine again and I'll stay with it. Even if it's not the "real me", I think it's better for my family and students and fellow teachers (and for Snug) for my temper to be more even-keeled. I think it's better to think occasionally about death, but not have it crowding my mind a lot. I think it's better to not be on guard and defensive, not to feel like others are being condescending toward me, or treating me as inferior. It's likely they aren't.

I seem to have decided that the sacrifice of stronger pleasure is worth it. I'll exchange hot salsa for medium or mild. It still tastes pretty good.

About ten days ago, when I started taking my medicine again, my system experienced quite a shock. It was all I could do to get to work in the morning and once I returned home, I went to sleep. I didn't write in my blog, my first gap of more than a couple or three days since I started blogging.

I know my work in the classroom suffered for about a week. The transition has been difficult, but I think I've made it.

My experiment with going off my medication is over.

My ten day absence from my blog is over.

It's time to take Snug for a walk and take some photographs!

I'll post them later.


For other Sunday Scribblings on experiments, go here.