Posted by fuzz54 on August 21, 2007, at 13:32:38
In reply to Re: Lost years-fuzz54, posted by jhj on August 21, 2007, at 10:18:12
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> Absolutely correct.But could you have achieved the success if therepy and paxil had not been helpful?I think I could have been succesful without the paxil, but it would have taken longer and been much harder. Therapy was working for me to understand myself, but it didn't really lower my anxiety levels too much. The trick was to find a way to keep the depression away long enough that my brain chemistry and hardwired thought process started to change away from a depression prone state. The meds and personal efforts on analyzing and changing how I think (aka CBT) helped me keep me from having any prolonged severe depressions. I found that I was less and less of a depressed person in general as time went on. S******l ideation slowly went away over the course of 3 years. Anxiety is still present in my daily life, but it is maybe %60 reduced from what it was before treatment.
It sounds like you have treatment resistant anxiety. That's probably a complicated situation that I'm not qualified to talk too much about. However, the three prescription drugs that I have found that reduced my anxiety are SSRI's (paxil and celexa worked, cymbalta and lexapro didn't), Benzo's (Klonopin and Xanax worked), and Lamictal. I took the Lamictal even though I wasn't diagnosed bipolar. It helped a great deal with anxiety but at the expense of a much narrower emotional range. I was almost too stable on the Lamictal, but it was great at numbing me from the emotional pain of my past long enough for me to put the past behind me a bit. I only took it for 4 months but am glad that I did. And as for herbal supplements which almost never work and are fairly mild, I have found Suntheanine, Rosavin, and Valerian root to help when no other herbal supplements have. Again, they are all fairly mild drugs, but you might find some reduction of anxiety on one of those. My girlfriend is helped quite a bit by the Suntheanine when she is having a high anxiety day. It works for me sometimes, but not as well as it does for her.
Also, in the next 10 or 15 years there will finally be some new classes of drugs coming out to combat anxiety and depression. Stuff that works completely different than the SSRIs, Tricyclics, or Benzos. That's a long time to wait, I know, but it gives me hope that we'll eventually find more effective bandaids to help us through the hard times.
poster:fuzz54
thread:777020
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070815/msgs/777580.html