Quitting my antidepressant.

It's been four or five days, I believe, since I've taken my citalopram. I haven't been keeping close track. I missed a day, and I decided to run with it and quit entirely, as the idea of quitting had been crossing my mind anyway. I've been on the stuff for a bit over two years, if I'm doing my math right, and now I've quit.

There have certainly been some noticeable effects, though mood crash isn't one of them. I wouldn't say I'm depressed, even if I can identify reasons I perhaps "should" be (the human world isn't an entirely wonderful place). I can cope. I've learned to cope, I should say, and that's a major reason I decided to quit. I have a few other reasons I quit, too, and without those reasons, I may have stayed on the citalopram, as why rock the boat and risk my stability (such as it is)?

But it became a matter of worldview and adhering to my values. I'm a minimalist, and I have some spiritual/religious and even political beliefs alongside that which encourage me to be as detached and free as I can possibly manage. I don't like the idea of needing to take an antidepressant for the rest of my life, and thus be dependent upon particular companies and (perhaps) government systems to maintain that regimen. If it were crucial for my survival, that would be one thing. But I have reached a point where I felt I no longer needed the medication. A friend of mine told me several months ago that I would reach a point where I naturally began to move away from the medication. Well, he was right. And it's interesting, as that has happened with nearly every tool or system and the like that I've utilized in my mental health recovery and my sobriety. My intentions are to be free of dependence on as much as I can. One of my favorite quotes is from Thoreau: " . . . for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."

I've been adjusting and simplifying my diet a lot as well, and as a result have been undergoing intermittent fasting, and I think I can attribute some of what I've been experiencing to that . . . but the onset of some of these new "symptoms" with the timing of quitting my antidepressant, and the kinds of symptoms they are, has me convinced it's mostly the absence of the drug. It's something kind of like light-headedness occasionally, and little . . . hmm, like zaps of electricity in my brain. Were they much more frequent and severe than they are, I might be concerned. But I'm not worried. Quite the opposite, if these are the effects of going without after such a low dosage (20 mg) for a couple years, I'm glad I quit when I did.

(I'm not a doctor, this is my personal anecdotal experience, blah blah blah.)

Image: By Fimpelman (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons