After reading a New Yorker article about how psychiatric drugs can escalate issues if not prescribed responsibly, I wrote a note detailing why I think things got as bad as they did.
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I legitimately believe this is what happened:
* I was stressed because of a whole bunch of stuff (law school, missing family, friends, work waking me up, Ben not accepting, etc), and that was causing stomach stuff. Then I started getting stressed just because of the stomach stuff, and it snowballed.
* When I started that line of thinking "you're losing your mind", and the side effects of the first drugs, that's when things started getting really bad, like not sleeping from the nausea, which was causing me to lose it.
* This just makes sense. I was fine before this, how could I have descended that far into being mentally ill.
* Once I was told/started thinking "I'm crazy/have a neurochemical imbalance", I started thinking every bad emotion I felt was because of this imbalance, which caused me to just get worse.
* I never should have gone on drugs, I should have just seen a psychotherapist to talk about the issues I was having.
* Now this is what I need to do:
* Continue seeing psychotherapist.
* Try to get off all of the drugs, or at least the SSRI and Remron. Can stay on Wellbutrin for a while.
* Biggest things that help:
* Exercise when you’re feeling down
* Having work to look forward to. I think this is huge, because so much of my brain has been focused on getting satisfaction out of work, and even in the last couple years, if I felt like I didn’t have work to look forward to my motivation suffered a lot.
* Should set some long-term goals that I'm excited about, like the college comparison stuff or something.
* Taking Remron at 10pm and going to bed at 1am or later. Working at night before bed might help too.