I quit everything in a rage, honestly seeking a bad outcome at the time. I was deep in the pit and suicidal again, and I can honestly say that I did it in an attempt at self-harm. My thinking at the time was, "This is the most mentally ill thing I can do as a psych patients, and that's why I'm going to do it." I expected and wanted to get worse. That's where my head was. It's entirely accidental that I hit on what appears to have been a major driver in five year long downward spiral. That doesn't mean doing what I did is the right thing to do as a general rule. I need to stress this. I quit for the wrong reasons, it just by luck turned out well.

It took me over a week to contact my psychiatrist to inform her of my decision. By the time I went in to see her, the fog of despair that had driven me to that point had lifted, and because my bipolar 2 diagnosis was still fairly recent (I, too, was diagnosed well into middle age), and because I do feel, based on my overall life trajectory, that it's probably accurate, I told her I had decided it was in my interest to try something different. That's when she put me on lamotrigine, which is an active ingredient in lamictal. Because lamotrigine has to be eased onto, and because my mind started clearing out prior to being on it, and because lamotrigine has to be introduced slowly and I had seen almost immediate changes after quitting the Effexor, even before I began the new drug, I feel confident in saying that the Effexor had been key to what had driven me down.

I had been started on Effexor a number of years earlier for depression, amidst a period when my entire immediate family except for myself died. It was a difficult period to put it lightly, and all the deaths were expected because of the various medical conditions each was suffering. So for me it meant easing one family member through death and then immediately pivoting to the next, with no real time to process any of the losses. It was a family doc who put me on Effexor, and I held it together during that period of deaths, but after the final one, the spiral began. Over the ensuing period of five years, it got worse and worse, and my behavior went into places it had never been previously. I became very deceptive, developed a violent temper, and thought daily about suicide. And I couldn't see that there might be a way out. It feels like this long nightmare now, one that I'm only even beginning to grasp. I'm still wrapping my head around what sort of person I became. I'm starting to work with my counselor to kind of uncover all that happened. It's actually pretty scary in retrospect.

As I said, the depression began lifting almost immediately after I quit Effexor. And the study I found while tunneling through the internet supported my conclusion that the drug was a major component. That doesn't mean it's wrong for everyone, but based on my own experience, I do advise caution with it, especially with bipolar 2. I've landed in a much better place, but I wouldn't want to be med-free right now. I do think the lamotrigine is working, that it's not just quitting Effexor that started pulling me out of that fog. But quitting Effexor was the turning point for me. I will never take that drug again.