But after about a week and a half I started feeling that I was sleeping too much. I actually very quickly got to the stage where I could easily sleep twelve hours at a stretch and still not want to get up and I started feeling quite dazed all of the time that I was awake, and I still couldn’t concentrate on anything, it didn’t help with that at all.I think it was it was two weeks or just over two weeks after I started Seroxat that I got some nasty physical side effects, such as what I’ve heard described as head shocks. Well it would suddenly feel like the whole room just suddenly shook from side to side very, very quickly, and my eyes would unfocus and I’d have to focus them again.

And I would be sure that I’d seen sudden movements out of the corner of my eyes, and often at the same time I would feel that my heart just jumped several inches, you know, it would feel like it would just leap, and stop beating for a second or two and then keep going, you know, it would make me jump.

And I also, during that time, had two hallucinations, which were very unpleasant; they were more or less the samethey both happened when I just glanced at someone, and both times it was one of my friends. I’d been looking at something else and I’d just look up and just for a second as, as I turned my eyes on them, the first time, I thought I saw a skull instead of a face, and it was… it was like I could see the skull under their face, and the face came back again. And the second time, when I looked at someone for a moment I saw them, you know, in my mind, I saw them lying with their head smashed in.

Well, since I was very little I had occasionally had suicide fantasies. When I was little I used to imagine creeping out of the house at night up to the nearby railway tracks, and that was… that was in a way a comfort for me, because you know sometimes I would feel like my life was completely out of my control, and I didn’t have any options.

But then I would always think I did have another option, I could take my life into my own hands and you know sometimes, sometimes I would feel ignored or unloved, and then I could imagine how people would feel if I did kill myself, and you know, it would remind me that people did love me And for many years I hadn’t had any suicide thoughts at all, and I had certainly never thought of cutting myself, but while I was on Seroxat, I did start to get sudden images in my head of you know, cutting long gashes in myself, and just… just seeing the blood running everywhere and, you know, the feeling of compulsion to do it.

You know, feeling a need to see that, and I did used to get images coming in my head of lying in a blood- filled bath or jumping into a river or off a tall building. And those images would just sit in my head for a long time until they just melted away, and…sometimes they left me feeling a bit disturbed, but usually they didn’t cause any emotions in me.It was like… like my personality had been withdrawn and my rational mind had been overwhelmed, or insulated or cut off in some way and I was just purely running on immediate needs…

I got so worried during the last term, before the exams, that I started seeing a university counsellor, and that was very helpful, but I didn’t tell any of my friends about it.

Is it that you didn’t tell your friends about the counsellor, or about being depressed?

Both. I think I felt that I wanted to keep them both apart, and that I was going there to help myself understand what was going on, and you know, get help, but I wanted to keep it separate from my normal life. I was…. I think I was worried about how I might react to… I was worried about people seeing me differently’

You said the counselling was helpful – in what way was it helpful?

It was a big relief to have someone who I could tell anything I wanted, anything that was bothering me, and not worry about what they might think about it or how it might affect our relationship. And you know, it also helped to feel that I was doing something about my problems as well, so…

What did you like about the counselling?

Just the friendliness, and I always looked forward to the weekly session, and it, you know, helped me sort out my thoughts and feelings, describing them to someone else.

Well when my mum found out that I’d been on Seroxat when it happened she referred me to the Panorama website. She told me a little bit about it, but I felt quite sceptical about it because I hadn’t related what had happened to the Seroxat. I’d felt that that was just how my depression had developed. And when I went and read the descriptions other people had given of their experiences on Seroxat, it was absolutely stunning. I was amazed to find descriptions of very similar feelings and physical side-effects that I’d had. And it was, it was a big relief, to feel that maybe it wasn’t just my head being that messed up, maybe there had been this outside influence, and you know, that other people had experienced it and had got better.

So when you discovered this website, what did you do next?

Well I read through a whole lot of descriptions by other people and went away and thought about it a lot. And I kept going back to see if there were any updates or anything, and in the end I sent an email with my experiences, just to, you know, add my contribution and back up what the other people were saying.

And because all the experiences were slightly different, because some people had some side-effects, and other people had others and some had a mixture, you know perhaps, perhaps it was in some ways significant, the precise reaction that I’d had. And it… it did help me to think much more clearly about what had happened, and to think from stage to stage, and to… actually I hadn’t thought about the fact that all this had happened so quickly after I’d started to take Seroxat. It was just like I hadn’t been thinking.

Well shes been ever so nice. Shes been really, really kind and helpful, but I’ve always felt that she focused so much concern on me every time I went to see her that I got completely nervous and flustered. And my voice would just get quieter and quieter while I talked to her and anything I’d been thinking of talking to her about would just go out of my head.

It was just unnerving having that amount of attention focused on me.