A good Vital Health book that I am reading right now that I would like to recommend to anyone seeking healthy alternatives is Detox and Revitalize: The Holistic Guide for Renewing Your Body, Mind and Spirit by Susana Belen, Founder of the We Care Holistic Health Spa in Desert Hot Springs, CA – http://www.wecarespa.com

In the book she mentions Dr. Mick Hall’s 5 Principles of Balanced Health:
1. Detox and Balance
2. Nutrition
3. Digestion
4. Exercise
5. Focused Attention

I still have a long way to go, but at least I’m working toward a goal.

I don’t, however, ever think of “going back.” It’s not an option in my mind. I will stay still for a while though.

Also, I have to say, it seems that the really dark part of the last month happened when I was premenstrual. I’m actually much better today. I started my period yesterday.

I also realized I had stopped taking a supplement that is a gentle detoxifier that I’ve resumed since yesterday morning–that too has made a difference.

I think I’m going to be fine.

I will indeed have ugly dark times ahead, but this particular time is passing. It was the accumulative effect of several tapers in a short time, the stopping of an important supplement and PMS from hell that took me to the place where I wrote this piece.

I was feeling that bad for a whole month. It wasn’t a fleeting feeling, but I do think it’s past for the most part—this time around.

It was truly the ugliest time I’ve dealt with in decades.

I greatly appreciate your kind words B.E.

I’ll do a post in the next couple of days once I’m sure I’ve stabilized, but I can already tell the tide has turned.

B.E.

Thanks so much for your encouragement.

I suspect I won’t be staying in such a dark place consistently. But I do have this damn PMS so bad. I hope to attend to my hormones once off the drugs. Everything is so confused with the drugs and they mess with hormones too so it seems premature to try to straighten out the hormones just yet.

My perspective gets rather skewed when my hormones are out of whack. I’m sorry for that. Both for myself and for putting you all through it. You might think about that when I’m really going crackers—what time of the month is it?? I don’t always remember…or sometimes it just doesn’t seem to matter that the hormones are coloring everything.

Again thanks to everyone.

As it is I will just say thank you for the gift of your blog. You are such an inspiration. I cannot miss a single instalment, somehow, every development has come to matter to me so much! I am sure you would rather have your health than the blasted blog though!

You have got to be up for some sort of award for services to mental health! Although maybe you are too damn radical for that! Services to the blogosphere then!

Take care of your dear self honey. You really have such a rare gift of reaching out in humanity through this strange technological medium. I will be praying for you and putting you in my loving-kindness meditation! Love, Zoe.

I am with you in spirit. I too have been beaten and broken by psych drug withdrawal. I have felt that I lost everything when ativan withdrawal tore me apart. Sometimes I think about the physical and emotional devastation and wonder, will it ever be worth it? Will I ever recover? Will I ever be able to make something that resembles contentment in my life? Will I ever be able to live a day without thinking about ending it? But I have never gone back to being as sick as I was when I tried to rapidly withdrawal from the ativan. My MIND is recovering from that. Initially, I was devastated mentally, unable to function outside of my bed and I constantly thought of throwing myself out of the window there. I’ve read 2 1/2 books recently, a feat I was unable to accomplish for several years (after having been a lifelong avid reader). I don’t forget things as much. I don’t get instantly overwhelmed by the need to use mathematics. Sometimes something bad happens, like yesterday something bad happened, and I freak out, releasing adrenaline into my body, shaking and crying, but when that happens now, I calm myself within an hour or so. I still spend the day weak and tired, but I can calm MYSELF. These are small signs of recovery, but they ARE recovery. This journey we are both taking will make us stronger and better, YES it will. I am already more loving, more tolerant and a better listener than I was before. I know you are in the worst thick of it right now my friend, but believe and it will happen. Take your time in silence and breathe. Remember who you love and why, and who loves you and why. Don’t feel like you have to make any decisions about your life now, because you mustn’t. You must let yourself rest and recover and rediscover who you are.

I know you can do this.

Pat

ha Gianna, we are on a energy-driven wave length. Maybe we are psychic. How’s that for a topic? LOL

I’m the odd woman out.

He sounds like a great husband and better still, a best friend.

He’s right too.

I left the home I loved and moved to this arse end of the world to be close to family, and I’ve loathed it, virtually from day one.

I’ve never felt I belonged to this community. It’s lonely, insular and isolated.

The only noteworthy event of this particularly gray Sunday, for example, was the air ambulance passing overhead! These days, excitement like that almost calls for an Ativan!

Yet in some ways, moving here has given me some space to think. Time to reflect on life, and how crap it truly is. But most importantly, time to recognise what I must do to remedy things.

I do like Keener’s insight into anger and its usefulness as an emotional counter-balance. Very Jungian! I see it as a crucial mechanism for building inner strength and determination. A process which typically leads to beneficial change. Love to hate, but hate the right things!

Regards,
Sloopy!

Thanks for a bit of a reality check. I still feel like crap though. Slept a whole hour.

Like allotmentjunkies, your words are very much appreciated, however despondent they seem at times. Excepting the agenda-driven shills, we all understand how it feels.

Many of us are in the same boat together. Pooling our experiences of the withdrawal process mitigates the traumas for each of us. So bravo to you!

“I don’t recommend this to anyone. Really. If you’ve been on drugs 20 years maybe you should just stay on them. If you’ve been on twice the recommended highest dose of several different meds for many years think hard and long about making a change of this nature.”

I fancy you will think very differently in 6 months, 12 months, and 10 years time. At each milestone, the reasons for quitting the neuro toxins will look ever clearer, ever more obvious. This is just an early milestone, from where the future still looks hazy.

There’s very good reason for everyone to quit psychiatric drugs. They ruin our brains and our bodies, riddling us with disease and dysfunction, and on an unprecedented scale for modern medicine.

Psychiatric drugs kill, shortening our lives by as much as 25 years, on average. Even the industry acknowledges that much.

I can’t stop or go back.I’ve come too far, but I really don’t know if I would have done this had I known what I was in for. My life may have been problematic, but not nearly as problematic as it is now.

Is life that problematic, or does it just seem so? Your loss of energy is doubtless a transient biochemical issue. Isn’t that the flu-like amotivational syndrome that Breggin documents at length in his books?

“Shit, I even hiked 3 hours a day several times a week before I started tapering. I had energy in spite of the sedation. I had a life. I saw friends. I ran errands. I helped take care of a large yard. I did chores. Now I do nothing.”

Perhaps because of your relentless mental energy, you’re pushing things a little too fast. You’re too eager to effect immediate change, tapering too quickly, and the consequence is an unpleasant discontinuation syndrome, etc. If so, it can’t persist indefinitely.

Besides, it is not as if you are actually doing “nothing”. You’ve just moved house, no small feat, and you are very dedicated to this extraordinary blog, something which many of us appreciate.

Best Wishes,
Sloopy!

Some day you’re going to be able to look back and say this: If I’d stayed in California, I’d still have an OK life but would have spent the rest of it numbed by meds. Every few months, I would have needed to adjust the cocktail, switched an older drug for a newer drug and perpetually hoped to find just the right combination. But instead, I went to North Carolina and I went through misery and hell that I thought I never be released from. It took way too long, but eventually I came out the other side and I got my life back. It’s a life – not a psychiatric condition or the effect of a psychiatric drug cocktail – and now I’m living it. I feel pain, joy, sorrow, longing, disappointment, contentment, anxiety, impatience, strength, weakness, hope and occasionally despair, but now I know that this is the stuff life is made of and I love life more than any of its disguises.

pretty damn good husband, huh. Believes in me even when I can’t.