# So tired of all this crap!



## hanniballexster (Jun 13, 2010)

In Sep of 2010 I started tapering off clonazepam. There were some hiccups but it went easier than I expected. I am still on .5 mg of the original 2 mg a day. Right now I am also tapering off epival- I never needed to be on it as I am not bipolar or epilpetic, but my doc thought (I think about last April) that it might help. It didn't, just gave me vertigo and made me drowsier. So I am coming off it. He said I could taper down 250 mg every two weeks, or faster if I could tolerate it. I started olff at 1250 mg and now, Feb 6, 2011, I am on 750 mg. SO I tapered off aabout 500 mg in a little over two weeks instead of 250 mg. I feel like climbing the walls, but I really want the grogginess and vertigo that the epival brought on to go, in case it is making me feel more unreal. My doc thinks my unreality is NOT derealization, but stictly med-related and sleep-deprivation related (I have interstitial cystitis, a bladder condition, and it wakes me up all the time... I haven't had a proper night's sleep in years, and some nights I get NO sleep because I am up and down to the washroom every few minutes). Seeing my GP this friday to see if there is a new medication I can try for IC that will help, since the first one they tried me on did nothing. Maybe if I can find a med that helps the IC and I can get some real sleep, I will start to feel better.

When I first started tapering off the clonazepam I had periods of feeling slightly more normal for up to 30 minutes at a time, sometimes several times a day. I felt nowhere near normal, but slightly more normal.

Now- I feel so out of it again, I am getting discouraged. I also am getting akathisia from coming off the epival... feel like climbing the walls but I cna't find much info on the net about epival withdrawal and the side effects. I know from experience that my brain is very sensitive to medication and usually meds don't do anything.... or they make me feel worse. Also, I pretty much always have trouble getting off them because of side effects, so I am really wary of ever going on another "medication" again.

I felt more optimistic when I first started to get glimpses of feeling more real, shortly before christmas, but since christmas to the present, I have felt completely zoned out again. I am also under a lot of stress (am supposed to move to subsidized housing but my moving date keeps being messed up by my current building, am tapering and have side effects- like akathisia and exhaustion, have a "friend"- who I don't think will be my friend much longer deliberately trying to push my buttons to test me- long story, etc....)

I know this unreality isn't dissociation or just stress. I had severe anxiety my entire life, as long as I could remember, and this never started until paxil withdrawal in late may 2008 and then when I was put on clonazepam it got worse. I am convinced, like my shrink, that it's meds, and not brain damage or stress, but I still don't know what to do to make it go, when it will go or IF it will go. Besides full-fledged panic attacks, this unreal feeling is the scariest thing I have ever experienced and for the most part, it's constant. I just woke up about half an hour ago after spending close to 24 hours in bed, trying to shut the world out.

I also feel a lot like crying these days. it's not clinical depression...it's frustration and fear. I feel like my life is passing me by because feeling like this, I don't feel present or even awake, even though I know technically I am awake and that days are flickering by. It's hard to enjoy anything because I feel so scared from this unreality state. I know this last paragraph sounds like clinical depression, but it's not. I am just so TIRED and scared of this symptom/state of mind that it's getting me down, but not in the sense that I need antidepressents (I was on them, and I still felt like crap because what is getting me down isn't clinical depression but feeling like I am in a dream world 24-7 and the antidepressents never touched that sensation).

I am not sure why it was slightly better before christmas and now is back to being so intense again. I was really hoping that, when I started to feel more real, that was the beginning of the end of this unreality BS, but apparently not.

Just feel so low. :**( Want this gone SO BADLY. Am running out of ideas for what to do.

Alex


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## Emir (Nov 20, 2010)

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## Emir (Nov 20, 2010)

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## brian83 (Jan 14, 2011)

j4mtj said:


> I also feel a lot like crying these days. it's not clinical depression...it's frustration and fear.


I feel you on that, nobody believes me either, they think im being "dramatic". They'll see how dramatic I get if it gets any worse.


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## hanniballexster (Jun 13, 2010)

brian83 said:


> I feel you on that, nobody believes me either, they think im being "dramatic". They'll see how dramatic I get if it gets any worse.


Yeah. Nobody thinks I am being dramatic because I stay to myself and even though I feel like crying, I don't cry. I just feel like it. This stuff sucks.

As for the first person to respond (thanks)...um, I can't just go back up on my meds, I am not in control of that. I know my shrink won't put me back up. I don't know if it's withdrawal or not since this whole thing started only after I was put on meds, not before. It got better the lower I got, then seemed to stagger off. Maybe I just feel weird because I still, technically, have this junk in my system.

Epival withdrawal doesn't include feelings of unreality that I know of (I know benzo withdrawal can do it, but not epival withdrawal- it's an anticonvulsant). It's ffrustrating, too, because there is no one cure that will help everybody here.... what may help me may not help you, and vice versa.

This junk is so frustrating. My buddy is reading a book called "The brain that changes itself" by Norman Doidge. It's about brain plasticity and my friend is really certain that this will go.

But some days you just feel so discouraged. Thanks for the replies guys.


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