THE BAD NEWS IS...

 You can get akathisia from Cannabis. I’ll just leave it at that for now, but will expound later.

FRIENDS! Hi!! Hi!!

I’ve missed you. Have you missed me? I thought not.

Before I expound on the statement above, I wanted to brief you on my experience with getting off prescribed medications.

Let me tell you, it was not an easy process. I knew there would be bumps in the road, but I was not prepared for the size & shape of said bumps. Downhill, craterous, unpaved moonrock roads into the warzone of your own skull.

In May of 2022, I realized i was so goddamned happy & content & joyous & grateful in my life! I could barely contain all the happiness I felt. I was on top of the world!

I was also on way too many medications:

Testosterone (for gender dysphoria)

Gabapentin (for anxiety)

Cymbalta (for depression)

Seroquel (for akathisia)

Atorvastatin (for high cholesterol)

I was taking pills or injecting oils all day long. I thought, surely I don’t need ALL of this shit to live a good life.

So I made the executive decision to do a slow taper off the Cymbalta & the Seroquel. I had been advised in March 2021 to get off the Seroquel as soon as possible. I stayed on it for a year & 1/2 because I loved the sleep!!

But on Jun 1, 2022 I began to taper off the Seroquel. This was relatively easy. It was a two week taper, which is kind of fast, but I didn’t have too many side effects except insomnia for a week or two.

I gave myself a few weeks without Seroquel before I started to taper off the Cymbalta. I started around Aug 15 and knew immediately that getting off the SSRI would be more difficult. There was dizziness, nausea, and one night of vomiting in the first week. Then came about 10 days of brain zaps & shivers. These are just what they sound like — your brain literally feels cold & does a little shiver. Every few minutes. Then there would be surges of electric-shock sensations. Like lightning inside your skull.

Your brain is the original electronic device.

And that was made illustriously clear to me as I felt all my electricity going haywire for weeks. I was tempted to stop the taper & just stay on Cymbalta for the rest of my life. But I persisted. I thought…this will go away eventually. And it did. The brain shivers, the zaps, the dizziness all went away by Sept 15.

But then I was left managing mood swings that were way out of my control. Mania, rage, deep sorrow all swirling senselessly…non stop…and fast. One to the other to the other in a matter of seconds. As a Water Sign, I’m used to feeling my moods swing but this was not a normal pace, nor a normal weight of emotions. The pendulum was hitting every extreme and there was no “reasoning with it.” There was no self-talk that could’ve slowed it down or relieved it in any way. Trust me, I tried.

And I wanted so badly to just get back on the drugs and feel as happy as I did in May & June & July. But I thought…these terrible mood swings will go away eventually. You just have to be strong for a little while.

I knew I could create my own happiness. I had been doing it all my life. Fighting the horrible sadness of being human with my own tricky imagination. I wanted to be in charge of manufacturing my own solace. I knew I had that capability & just had to remember how to do it.

But friends, October & November were barely survivable. There were many occasions where I seriously thought of ending my life because the sorrow or rage were too much to bear even for 10 minutes. 

The 10 minute increment has worked for me over the years. To get through bouts of depression. To get through akathisia. Even to get sober! I used to look at the clock when I first quit drinking & tell myself “Congratulations, you’ve been sober for another  10 minutes!”

But I got tired of counting minutes. In the early a.m. hours of Nov 5, I walked to the cemetery alone with intentions of ending my life. There I conferred with the spirits for an hour or two, and decided to keep counting the minutes until I got through all this awful, unpredictable brain activity.

I was not getting the proper help from medical professionals. Their only advice — the only option they offered me — was to get back on an SSRI. It was clear they were only interested in selling me a name brand drug, and profiling me as a drug addict of course. They were not interested in “listening to my history, or hearing me as someone who had educated himself on his own mental health needs”.

After deciding to live through it, I did reach out to a few friends who had offered to help. For them I am eternally grateful. You know who you are, if you’re reading this.

So…here I am…it’s the end of November, a month that began with an ending in mind. I can confidently say that I’m feeling much better than I did even a week ago. My brain is much quieter and slower now. I have control over my thoughts & emotions that I didn’t have for the past 3 months.

I know I’m not out of the woods yet. I am on guard. The sadness and rage are my mortal enemies and I’m ready to do battle at any time of day. Waking up from sleep is the most dangerous moment of the day.

I tell you all this stuff not so you feel sorry for me, not so you can profile me as a crazy person just like the doctors do, but so that you can gauge your own experiences with Big Pharma & Corporate Medicine. 

If you are a person who is thinking of going on medication to manage feelings of depression or anxiety, look at my experience. Are you sure this is something you can’t get through without drugs? Because the drugs will help for awhile, but when you feel like maybe you can do without the drugs, you will have to go through an even worse experience than regular old depression & anxiety.

If you are a person who is currently taking a medication like Cymbalta (an SSRI, serotonin re-uptake inhibitor), do you realize how hard it will be to stop taking this medication? Do you know that many of these medications will cause akathisia if you are on them for too long, and the only thing doctors will tell you about that is that you need to switch medications? They may even tell you that your depression/anxiety/bipolar is getting worse & you will have to take medication forever.

I wanted off that runaway train. I finally feel like I am off the train, but I’m still too close to the tracks. There is relief, but I’m still very scared. My time at the cemetery on Nov 5 was a spiritual revelation that has given me strength & hope over the last few weeks. I know you all laugh at my spiritual experiences because they are unquantifiable by you, unfounded in facts that you can look up online, and unlike anything you’ve ever sought after in your life. 

But…I still say everyone should pursue the spirit realm for answers rather than the medical realm. The medical realm is there for emergencies of the body…the spirit realm is there for emergencies of the spirit. The trick is to know yourself well enough to decipher the difference.

Alright…now I’m kind of tired. I may have to expound on my opening statement another time. I promise I won’t wait 3 weeks or whatever it’s been…

Stay well, friends! Seek those spirits. I’m serious.

P.S. I forgot to mention that just by going off anti depressant/anti psychotic meds I lost 10 pounds. These drugs do make you kind of fat & unhealthy. I had much more energy — actually way too much energy for awhile — to ride my bike or sing, just more energy for daily activities as well. Then I lost even more weight.

So I was also able to stop taking my cholesterol medication. No harmful side effects felt from that.

Now I’m only on:

Testosterone (for gender dysphoria)

Gabapentin (for anxiety, too low a dose to go through those pharma withdrawals, but okay now)

If you can, read my blog Adventures in Akathisia 2014, before I expound on the cannabis/akathisia connection.

AKATHISIA (aka torture)

 Dear Friends on the Internet & In Real Life,

From Dec 2020 to Mar 2021 I had akathisia. What is akathisia you ask? Well, I’ll tell you — it’s something that I don’t wish on anyone, even Marjorie Taylor Green. 

But what is it? Well I’ll tell you…it’s nothing good. It is hypothesized to have been the cause of David Foster Wallace’s suicide when he quit taking anti-depressants after 20 years. It is also wildly speculated to have played a part in the Sandy Hook shooting, as Adam Lanza was prescribed an anti-depressant that he only took sporadically (ie, not as prescribed.) It is also well documented that Bruce Springsteen and my youtube nemesis Dr Jordan Peterson experienced akathisia after taking/quitting prescribed medication.*

*the main cause of akathisia is taking Abilify (a drug prescribed for Tourette’s, schizophrenia and sometimes depression). The second main cause of akathisia is withdrawing from benzodiazapines (Xanax, Klonopin,etc…). The other main cause is being on any SSRI or anti-psychotic or anti-nausea medication.

You can look all this stuff up on the Internet. The Internet will tell you all sorts of awful things about akathisia, but what it won’t tell you is how awful it really is. There is no way of describing it, but I will try…in a minute. First though, I wrote this semi automatic poem about it & I’d appreciate if you read it — 

You left to solve a celtic cable knot 

So I felt around for ghosts in my suitcase,

Not having dragged them from Florida

But acquiring them upon arrival

Already striking cords in my

Backpack’s secret chambers, already

Papering the attic with their cut-out voices

I tune into one host w/ a tremorous

                                     androgynous

                                             tone

I ask it to tell me

The story of akathisia &

It gives me the director’s cut,

                     the 3D version

                        the prequel 

                  and the score all@once

It turns out our nerves are twined of

           finest lavender silk strands

It turns out they have worms of their own

Microscopic,

          dangerous, like the virus

              but worse? Maybe?

Capable of embedding

  glassy fibers in our greyest zones,

Capable of wielding bigger shards & burning

    the homes of butterflies

Then came 

           the holding onto doorframes & crying for angels —

              who are not people, and not as busy as God—

                 to end my recurring

                   1st day of school 

The trust in chemicals, mine & others,

           mined & othered, mind &

                       authored

        out of pure desperation to 

return to chapter one & rewrite & edit & rewrite

                       & edit

I moaned & groaned like these new

Indiana ghosts as my maggoty core was chewed

Silk worms gone wild w/ their art bombs in my legs

My map redrawn in hard-to-read lilac

Every mistake a returned message

From life’s analog-to-digital delivery systems,

Long decades of unpaid postage

Against a century of political outrage

Long hot miles to Main Street

But that’s where you & I agreed to meet

7-28-21

Thank you. 

Akathisia for me started out as terrifying & invasive thoughts racing through my mind at inappropriate times (ie, when life was going just fine) I thought I was just “being negative” or a worry-wort or a Virgo. But when I say terrifying & invasive, I mean way beyond normal human worries.  About a month after that, some physical symptoms began — I couldn’t sit still, I felt like “jumping out of my skin” , like I had drunk 8 cups of coffee when I hadn’t even drunk one, like someone was pointing a gun at my head, like the butterflies in my stomach had invaded my shoulders & hips & vertebrae…and the only solution was to keep moving. Changing positions. Rocking back & forth. Rubbing hands together. Pacing. Vocalizing sadly. Walking. Running. Cleaning the shower with a toothbrush.

By the third month I was really just looking for a way to end it. I couldn’t bear to be tortured by my own nervous system any longer. I was mentally attenuated by the terrifying thoughts. And I constantly felt like I was about to start crying, yet I was unable to. That is a surprisingly uncomfortable feeling when it happens all day, every day.

Despite the severity of my symptoms, I still regarded it as only an episode of severe depression/anxiety. I never thought it could be the Abilify I had started taking in the Fall of ’20. I had never even heard of akathisia (shocking — i thought I knew EVerything). Tony was pretty scared & kept saying “I feel like I should take you to the hospital.”

And maybe he should have. It took my doctor about 3 months to figure out what was going on. And as soon as I stopped taking the Abilify I felt “normal” again.

Those long lists of side effects they reel off in pharmaceutical commercials are no joke. “Restless leg syndrome” can be more unpleasant than it sounds. And “suicidal ideation” can be overwhelming. If you are on any medication and something changes drastically w/ your mood/health, always make sure it’s not the medication causing your symptoms.

After my experience, I scoured the internet for more info on akathisia and found it lurking in the bios of more people than I expected. The overall consensus is that it is unbelievably horrible. At least if I ever have it again, I’ll know what I’m dealing with and be able to get help quicker.

And hopefully this terrific blog is shedding light on something that isn’t well-known but is happening more & more often now that practically everyone is on some kind of prescribed meds. Have any of you experienced the kind of symptoms I described after taking a prescribed medication? Let me know. 

Here’s some further reading you can do on the subject

https://www.akathisia.life/drugs-that-cause-akathisia