Emotional and Psychological Addiction to Antidepressants

I took antidepressants for seven years and quit all depression drugs in 2009. I was shocked at the low level to which I had stooped with self-care, while on the antidepressant. Taking better care of myself was one of the reasons I began taking antidepressants in the first place. But in fact what I was doing was systematically sabotaging my own mental health by medicating emotions rather than listening to and dealing with them. 

Prior to beginning the antidepressant Paxil, I had put in about 5 years of solid work on my emotional recovery. I was working my program, not to perfection as no one is perfect, but I was making good progress. Then I suffered some major setbacks and decided that recovery was impossible without medication. I lost two stillborn babies and had some terrible experiences with a house we had purchased. It was too much.

While taking the medication, I told myself and everyone else, that I was keeping up on my mental health homework, journaling, processing emotions, listening to my emotions and body, working my program. I was in fact, slipping deeper and deeper into drug-induced apathy. That's because SSRIs and antidepressants do not treat depression. They mask it. They mask all feelings, positive and negative. I didn't realize how miserable I'd become on medication, because the Paxil was preventing the SOS messages my body was sending from getting through to my brain.

A few weeks off from the anti-depressants showed me that I had let my recovery program severely slip. I was appalled at how good I'd gotten at ignoring my own needs. True I didn't get as angry as I once did. But my fault lay in attributing my own strides in mental health to a pill. Rather than accepting that I had grown was developing healthier habits, I automatically gave all the credit to the little pink pill. 

I began to think that without the Paxil, I would become an emotional basket case, unable to function in a healthy way. I was terrified to quit taking it lest I revert to some sort of mindless, psychotic life-form. I was psychologically addicted to my antidepressant. It took a dear friend to remind me that I wasn't a mindless, psychotic life form before I went on the pills I could not revert to something I had never been. 

We learn a lot from our feelings, perceptions and sensations. Anti-depressants may not be physically addictive, but they can be horribly emotionally and psychologically addictive. For more on health, visit my blogs at Emotional Health Help and Health Help 4U. Follow my recovery journey on this blog.