4 Years of Antidepressants

Mirtazapine chemical structure

I’ve just checked my notes and it seems last week was the 4th anniversary of me starting a course of antidepressants. It’s been a strange experience. 

I think, to a degree, being on these different medications has helped, although to compare we’d need to look at a period of my life that has long passed. A lot has happened. Is my life better? 

Before I get into this, I’m a dude who does admin. I am not a doctor. This is a blog post about my thoughts, not a form of advice that you should follow. If you want advice, see your GP. 

I guess my life is better. My anxiety is a lot lower than it was, and my mood hasn’t dipped in a long time. But then, we’ve been in lockdown for nearly a year. It’s social situations, particularly around women, that spike my anxiety, and there haven’t been any of these situations all year due to staying at home. It will be interesting to see how I feel when the country opens back up, which, realistically, will be in another 12 months. 

The time I’ve spent on Sertraline (didn’t help enough), Citalopram (backfired, made me feel worse) Mirtazapine (helped better than the others, although didn’t prevent the occasional horrific dip; I still returned to it and stuck at it to this day) and Duloxetine (induced horrendous nausea) has had its ups and downs, but my current prescription has allowed me to maintain a little normality. This year hasn’t been great for any of us, but the last thing I wanted to do was take a risk of changing something with which I’ve had reasonable success, at a time when everyone else’s anxiety has been heightened. I don’t want to join them. 

So, as much as I want to come off Mirtazapine (my appetite has meant I’ve ballooned in weight), now is not the time. I’m expecting the vaccine rollout to last the rest of this year. 7 million have had their first dose, 57 million to go. Then there’s the top-up dose that we’ll all need. 

And then there are the anti-vaxxers, whom we need to encourage to change their minds. That will be the turning point- the bottle-neck before in-person events can begin again. And we do need to coerce them as these vaccines only reach efficacy if we have herd immunity, meaning that the vast majority of us are vaccinated and COVID has literally nowhere to go. 

My plan is to carry on as normal with Mirtazapine, then in 2022, people should be going out to social events again. When things start to open up, I’ll start to wean off.