we are talking about pills today.
here, have some musical accompaniment to make that more fun (our human has their phone set to play this song when it is time to take our meds because it amuses them).
so. between october 2015 and january 2018 we had a near-fatal psychological breakdown.
there were lots of triggers for this. we won’t go into them, other than to recognise that it was why sian stopped existing for a while, and why we took so long to reclaim our name. the point is that at the time the gp, not really getting the context (ie. we were autistic, had adhd and were trans) (to be fair, at the time neither did we) decided it was depression and put our human on a 30mg and then soon after 60mg dose of a drug called mirtazapine.
mirtazapine is an antidepressant. for many people it is a literal life saver. it is also an antihistamine, and we can confirm that over the summer our human was on mirtazapine they did not get hayfever once, so that was nice. but it turns out that mirtazapine may not be quite as useful for the neurodiverse. what it did for our human was to turn them into a drowsy, drooling, binge-eating zombie, and not the fun kind.
they ballooned in weight and reached a point of near-catalepsy. it was disastrous and the worst part was that you cannot even get high on it. a recreational dose of mirtazapine just sends you to sleep for 24 hours. you do not even have fun dreams. you just lie there like a corpse, unable to think or feel, and you would think that would be fun for a person with a mind control fetish, but it really is not.
do not ask how they know that.
suffice to say that they just stopped taking it. they fought their way to some sort of recovery. returning to sl was some part of that. some therapy too. but not enough.
back in august – and we touched on this in some of our last posts before vanishing – two separate meatspace friends entirely independently approached our fleshly counterpart and said: look, you have been on the nhs waiting list for adhd/autism diagnosis and support for a year and a half now and it is crushing you, and how about i pay for your consultation with a private shrink?
having investigated the cost of this and inevitably gone holy shit, we gratefully accepted both donations, allowing each friend to cover half. because holy shit we could not imagine making either cover the whole thing.
the assessment was… enlightening. “severely impaired.” you never realise how hard you have it until you get some sort of external evidence. severely impaired. that is a label you want, right?
drugs were of course on the table.
first we were prescribed 30mg and then 50mg of elvanse. elvanse is a brand name for lisdexamphetamine. in short, we were microdosing speed. there were side effects. our insomnia, always a problem, became worse than ever. and we had a terrible case of dry mouth, which is worse than it sounds, a condition where, without the ability to generate sufficient saliva, your breath begins to fester and your throat begins to hurt. our human lost their voice entirely partway through the second month. and there was no effect whatsoever on our ability to regulate our concentration.
we did get to be on secondlife a lot at about 4am gmt though, which is a busy time inworld, so there was that, we guess.
it fucked us up pretty badly. so obviously, microdosing speed was a wash.
next up was concerta, a brand name for methylphenidate hydrochloride. you might know it as ritalin. we had that on 27mg, raised to 54mg within the first week. once again, dry mouth. sleep was better though. otherwise, nothing. we had heard magical stories about ritalin, about how the very first pill makes you feel like you are no longer wading against a current, how it makes clouds you never knew were there clear, how it gives you focus for the first time on your life.
we might as well not have been taking it. it did fuck all.
this was a blow, frankly, because those were the quick fixes. now we had to try the long term stuff.
so for the last ten weeks we have been on atomoxetine (aka strattera), starting at 20mg and gradually titrating up to our current 118mg. atomoxetine is apparently a failed antidepressant that turned out to beneficial for regulating the problems inherent to adhd. the side effects are pretty brutal: unless you eat something bready for breakfast before you take the pill, you get a free ride on the nausea rollercoaster. now we are on the top dose, we are also getting a bit of constipation, which is fun*. ginger and fruit help with that.
*this is not fun.
has it so far had any effect on our concentration? no. but we have found that we are enjoying things again (see: we have the spoons to blog once more, for example). we had not realised we were in the thrall of anhedonia, since it was so long since we were not, but there it is. we also found that our human is now almost as horny as sian is, which is not a thing that has happened for literally years in meatspace. it feels weird and new. we feel younger. we feel like we have a body we understand.
maybe it will kick in fully and sort out the dopamine thing. still, it so far having the benefits it is not supposed to be good at is no bad thing. we shall see what happens next. we might even tell you.
in a tenuous link to the pharmaceutical discussion, for the pictures in this post we have turned sian into the fun kind of drooling zombie.
you are welcome.
(featured clothing a&y aglaya cyber boots; aglaya cyber armwarmers; aglaya cyber collar [yes, again. we know. but last time it was the white one and this is the black one, ok? ok] / phy.ka c-string [the bulge one obviously] / dirty secrets bento drool [brave new world such as this that you can make your avatar realistically drool little drops of pixel spit] / livia mixitpro square nails / maxigossamer vallari hoops earrings / r2 hien nip pasties)
