Areas › Low mood and hard feelings
Low mood and hard feelings
Feelings are information before they are problems. The practices here are about naming what you feel accurately, sitting with what will not move yet, and acting on what matters to you even on the days nothing feels like anything.
Narrowed down
8 practicesTheme · When everything feels flat
How long you have
When · In a change
Stopping suddenly can bring lethargy, nausea, irritability and headache within a few days. That is discontinuation, not the illness coming back.
Timing is the giveaway. Withdrawal starts within days of the last dose and often has a particular feel to it: dizziness, odd electrical zaps, a…
Discontinuation gets mistaken for relapse constantly, by clients and by clinicians. The mistake runs in both directions and both directions cost something.
Read withdrawal as relapse and a person concludes they will need the tablet for life, when what they needed was a slower taper. Read a real relapse…
Never come off an antidepressant on your own. The taper belongs to the prescriber, and for some drugs it needs to be slower and longer than people expect.
The moment to raise this is before anybody acts, not afterwards. If a client is feeling better and starting to think about stopping, that thought is…
Some antidepressants take weeks to build up and weeks to clear, so both the improvement and the aftermath run on a slower clock than you would expect.
Fluoxetine is the usual example. It and the substance it turns into stay around a long time, which means a fair trial is counted in weeks and…
Raising a dose does not simply raise the benefit. It raises everything the drug does, including the parts nobody was asking for.
As the amount climbs, a medicine begins touching things it barely touched before, which is why new side effects can appear at a higher dose of…
Coming off an antidepressant is a piece of work in itself. Plan it slowly with the prescriber rather than stopping on the day you feel well.
Some, venlafaxine especially, leave the body fast enough that a missed dose is felt within a day: dizziness, strange electrical sensations, a mood…
With the fast acting treatments, the plan for what happens afterwards matters as much as the treatment itself.
Electroconvulsive therapy can shift severe depression quickly, and without something in place afterwards the relapse rate is high, which is why…
Sometimes the honest answer is that there is nothing in your surroundings to feel good about. Changing them counts as treatment, not as running away.
A life with no friends nearby, no work that means anything and a steady drip of criticism will produce low mood in most people, and skills practised…