“It’s like being in a torture chamber all your life.”
That’s how Brenda, a young woman from the southeast of England, describes her experience with prescription antidepressants.
Two years ago, Brenda was a young professional with a career she enjoyed and an active social life. “I also started to write a novel,” she recalls. “I was really creative. I had a lot of friends.”
All this changed in the summer of 2013 when Brenda experienced a minor medical problem and was prescribed Augmentin, an antibiotic. Immediately she began experiencing suicidal ideation, along with nausea, anxiety, and akathisia, or uncontrollable restlessness. Her doctor prescribed Valium, which made her symptoms worse, and then the antidepressant citalopram. He dismissed her concerns about possible side effects.
“We wouldn’t give them if they weren’t safe,” he assured her. “In two weeks come back and you’ll be a different person. You’ll be much better. They’re very safe. Don’t read the side effects because you’ll think you’ll get them all.”
The results were disastrous. “It literally blew my brains out. Just dreadful. I became suicidal around the clock. The suicidal ideation was just unbearable. Just darkness in my head. It wasn’t like there was anything wrong with my life or I had a reason to be depressed. [It was] a terror like I’ve never known. I was just terrified. I’m still living like this, by the way, fifteen months later. I was in bed, curled up in this ball, just too scared to do anything.”
Brenda describes the thoughts that were going through her head: “I want to kill myself. I want to kill myself. I can’t stand to stay alive. I have to die. I have to die. For no logical reason. It was just a feeling – I had to end my life.”
In addition, Brenda experienced other side effects, including uncontrollable jerking movements, tremors, feelings of feverishness, excessive perspiration, numbness, insomnia, and rapid heartbeat. “The nausea was worse than ever before,” she recalls. “All of this 24-7, no breaks. Absolutely no breaks, apart from the two or three hours of sleep I was getting. I couldn’t hold any thoughts in my head for more than two or three seconds.”
With her doctor’s assistance, Brenda tapered off the citalopram. The feelings of suicidality intensified, along with the agitation, anxiety, and rapid heartbeat. Her doctor referred her to a “crisis team” which included a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with agitated depression and prescribed quetiapine, an antipsychotic drug, along with another antidepressant, sertraline.
The suicidal ideation got worse than ever, Brenda recalls. “I was just lying in bed and all I could think of was finding a cliff to jump off.” She told the members of her crisis team that the drugs were making her condition worse. “I am sure of it,” she explained. “Please listen to me.”
The crisis team members insisted that she must stay on the drugs. “You must do what the doctor says,” they admonished. Soon after, Brenda tried to commit suicide by drowning herself in a bathtub.
“It wasn’t a cry for help,” she says. “I did want to die.”
Next: Part 2: “Better than well”
