A psychiatrist started all of this fifteen years ago. He prescribed what I call the big dogs, 450mg, of buproprion and venelafaxine along with 900mg of lithium. I had never been on meds before and these were my starting doses.
I became manic, got arrested. The jail took everything away cold turkey. After nineteen days I got out and went to a hospital where the psychiatrist put me back on the same meds. Two additional psychiatrist maintained the same meds.
The people treating me now, a local Mental Health clinic added the extra stuff and ordered the ECT and Ketamine treatments. My provider there is a psychiatric nurse and a therapist. In June I told them I wanted off the meds, they agreed to help.
Initially I got a lot better, the best I'd been in decades. It lasted two months. Ultimately when I stopped the venlafaxine the bottom dropped out and I've been in hell ever since. They are now bring drugs back online, albeit slowly and painfully.
I don't know what is happening. Am I feeling discontinuation effects, the reoccurrence of symptoms or both? One thing is for sure I came off the medication way to fast and am paying the price for it.
I despair that I will ever be well.
Those initial doses sound high to me (but I'm no expert). The fact that four psychiatrists put or kept you on those doses--I can understand why you trusted the decision, having had it reinforced multiple times.
It's great that you found professionals at a mental health clinic who agreed to help you off the medications; unfortunate that they did not know that one must go S-L-O-W-L-Y down that path.
Now that we know to go slow, however, there is another opportunity to do it right. The important thing now, it seems to me, is to get you at helpful levels of the drug(s), whatever that may be, and stabilized for an appropriate period of time before you attempt a slow withdrawal process.
If you have not already received a caring pharmacist's opinion, you might inquire about possible drug interactions of all your medications--unless your psychiatric nurse is qualified in that regard. Then again, a second opinion is often worthwhile. The pharmacist I consulted happens to own an independent pharmacy that is not part of a chain, though I am sure valued pharmacists can be found at both.
You once wrote "I wish peace for everyone who suffers. It increasingly seems to me that is everyone." Indeed. My grandmother, at 103 and unhappy in the nursing home in which my aunt had placed her, said to me, "I don't know why I'm still here." I suggested she might have something yet to learn or, more likely, more to teach others. We all learn from each other's experiences on here, and I thank you for sharing yours. I look forward to learning from your progress, and wish you the peace and happiness you deserve--which you so graciously wish others.