Karen’s experience with prescription drugs
Before psychiatric drugs, I was a 50-something, educated woman who was hard-working, out-going, adventurous, creative, sensitive, and healthy. I was employed as an office manager in four different travel agency offices over a period of twenty-eight years, and those offices ran efficiently in providing travel services to their respective communities. With the advent of doctor-prescribed psychiatric drugs, I became a perfectly broken child of God, confined to my home in dark and noiseless rooms, unable to perform any functions as a human being. This is where my story begins.
One thing that I have such difficulty with is trying to describe what I experienced with my ordeal using doctor-prescribed psychiatric drugs. It’s been nearly five years since I took my last pill and I still can’t find the words to describe the horror that I traveled through while taking the drugs. And even today, the lifelong residual effects of the drugs continue to attack my body.
My original symptom that resulted in psychiatric drugs being prescribed to me was “anxiety” as a result of my becoming a caregiver for my mother who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and my father who had Parkinson’s disease. Caring for my parents in this devastating family health situation drove my anxiety levels up to where I was continually anxious and had trouble sleeping. Ensuing visits to doctors resulted in Xanax (a Benzodiazepine), Zoloft (an antidepressant), and Zeprexa (an antipsychotic) being prescribed to me. Due to trusting the doctor and my complete ignorance of the drugs and their effects, I took the drugs in various dosages for the next several years under a doctor’s care…what a mistake!
From these drugs, tolerance and dependency can develop very quickly, thus creating a world of agony within the human body and mind. Over a period of two years and numerous trips back to the doctor, the anxiety was manifested many times over, along with so many other horrendous symptoms. I found my life an unrelenting darkness of physical pain and mental torture, literally destroyed by this “toxic psychiatry” as the doctor prescribed more and more psychiatric drugs to try to counteract the symptoms generated from ingesting the first drugs.
On subsequent visits, the doctor assured me that the severe health problems being experienced were not caused by the psychiatric drugs (I trusted him because he was “the professional”) and for two years I was led down his “psychiatric drug path” by his medical deceptions and irresponsibility.
A few of the numerous symptoms I experienced from taking the drugs were: abdominal pains and cramps, agoraphobia (social phobia), depression, dizziness, extreme lethargy, fears, flu-like symptoms, hypersensitivity to light and sound, tinnitus, metallic taste, insomnia, irritability, lack of concentration, lack of coordination, loss of memory, muscular spasms, muscle aches and pains, nightmares, panic attacks, rapid mood changes, restlessness, severe headaches, sore eyes, sweating, tightness in the chest, tightness in the head, morbid thoughts, hallucinations, satanic voices, numbness in all parts of the body, indigestion, constipation, nausea, diarrhea, and pins and needles all over the body.
As I took the drugs over a period of time, my body created “tolerance” and “dependency” for them, and needed more and more drugs to function. I had originally gone to the doctor only for help with “anxiety” and ended up with dozens of debilitating health problems and symptoms. The psychiatric drugs caused multiple physical illnesses and various psychological (mental) tortures. Physical pain and mental agonies controlled every aspect of my life. In one period of time I spent 61 days bedfast, unable to stand or even sit due to the severe nausea that I was experiencing at that time. The agonies and the fears are so deeply embedded in the mind and body it’s as if you are trapped in a burning house with no available windows or doors to escape, and every attempt to find a way out results in being burned again and again. The pain is so deep and dominant that you can’t escape from it no matter where you go or what you try to do.
As time went by and the conditions persisted day after day, my husband and I became certain that the drugs were causing my severe health problems. With a quest so strong and driven to help our fractured lives, he set out to see exactly what psychiatric drugs do within the human body and mind. This led to over four hundred hours of internet research, reading psychiatric drug books, and contacts with hundreds of other people worldwide via the internet that were experiencing the same symptoms that I was experiencing. The results of his research are to say the least, mind-chilling……………..
His research led to the description and explanation of what a “psychiatric drug” does within the human body and mind — a psychiatric drug is a chemical substance formulated to cross the blood brain barrier and attach to the brain cells (neurons) where it acts primarily in the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord), resulting in altering brain function by causing brain “dysfunction.” This results in changes in perception, mood, consciousness, cognition, awareness, concentration, memory, behavior, and physical wellness. The secondary function takes place in the enteric nervous system (gastrointestinal system), where it alters bodily processes associated with food digestion. Only in psychiatry is dysfunction/damage to the brain used as a “treatment” for anxiety, stress, fear, muscle aches, etc.
With the hundreds of hours of psychiatric drug education completed, we now knew that the drugs were causing the devastating health problems that I was experiencing. It took me over two years of tapering off the drugs with the help of four doctors to become psychiatric drug free and regain a semblance of my life again. One of the four doctors told me that while attending medical school he received 3½ hours of training on psychiatric drugs, yet he was able to prescribe these drugs to any patient.
Prior to taking psychiatric drugs, I had a very healthy, drug-free, pain-free life. At the present time the drugs have been gone from my body for five years, but I continue to have residual symptoms from the trauma that my body endured during the psychiatric drug years, such as tinnitus (ringing in the ears), neuropathy pain in my feet, and fibromyalgia pain in all my muscle groups. The residual symptoms that I experience daily are a result of brain cells that were changed and/or damaged by ingesting psychiatric drugs. Enduring these residual symptoms has become a way of life.
Much of what I went through in those drug-induced years is a blur in my mind, but in the last five years it has been my goal to help educate other patients that are going through psychiatric drug dependency and have no idea why their health has been devastated so badly. I hope this article helps someone, somewhere.
Editor’s Note: Karen has chosen to tell the story of her battle with prescription drugs in order to help readers who may find themselves in the same position. We have agreed to keep her last name and the names of her treating physicians confidential.
Addicted to Prescription Drugs
