Thursday, October 13, 2016

The mix is better for now

My previous post was too early in the process of dosage increase.  I also complicated matters by being impatient and going from the intermediate dose of 125 to the new dose of 150 after only 5 days.

Again not any sort of manic happiness, just a more balanced perspective behind how I feel about things.  I am once again fairly consistently capable of gratitude, yet not completely crushed by shame over having been an ungrateful ass.  The process of making amends where I feel it is needed is often difficult because I have conditioned people to take a defensive and suspicious stance when interacting with me.

My biggest concern is that once again my condition will degrade over the course of very few months, and another 50mg increase puts me at the maximum of 200, and if that doesn't work or last, there is nowhere to go but things like ECT.

Monday, October 3, 2016

Mixed Results

Maybe it is too early to know.

As previously mentioned, I was perceiving a decrease in the efficacy of Zoloft at 100 mg/day.
I wasn't feeling nearly as "done" as before I started, but also not nearly as "glass half full" as I did some time after the increase to 100.

I'm not sure how long it took for the 100 to become fully effective.
I'm not sure how long it lasted before it began to decline.
I am very short on basic data.

After seeing my Psychiatrist, I ramped up to 150, and have been there for nearly a week.
There were a few brief episodes of what I might call "micro-mania", but is really what I believe should be my "normal", spontaneous and often extemporaneous singing during routine activities like driving, and a tendency to make the occasional bad joke or pun.
But those episodes are few and far between, and there may be no more forthcoming.
More importantly, the generalized "glass half full" attitude never came back.
In fact, my glass seems as broken and bloody as it was before the increase.
Maybe, just maybe, a little worse, but not with sufficient drama for certainty.

In the absence of significant external stimuli, my default mode seems that of an empty automaton, slogging through the tasks of existence with neither joy nor despair, thinking, apparently, about nothing most of the time.

My cognition seems to be impaired, and I don't just mean my usual memory problems, both short and long term.  I find myself making absurdly stupid mistakes with increasing frequency.  Things like waiting for a stop sign to change.  I am more easily confused if there is too much incoherent external stimuli, such as more than one person talking at once, or even one person talking while I am attempting to engage in a simple task.  All of these have been general low-grade problems for a long time, but they have become noticeably worse since the increase.

All of this feeds my already ample sense of worthlessness.

Other words and phrases are stumbling around in my head, but they refuse to line up in an orderly fashion and make useful sentences.  Useful.  I find the word almost funny enough right now to make me laugh, but not quite.

Is it possible that writing is not good for me?  Obviously, I am not a particularly good writer, but that isn't the concern I am trying to express.  Writing requires the exhausting effort of translating my chaotic and fragmentary thoughts into English sentences.  It forces me to try to think.  The more I think, the more I examine my own psyche, the more I hate myself.  The hate is twofold, first because thinking is hard and I am stupid, and second because what little I can put together out of what is inside me is boring and ugly.

OK, enough of that for now.  Time to take pills that make me sleep.