So autumn of 2009 it had been sort of building up all summer and I was feeling terrible again so I went to see the same GP and this time he prescribed mirtazapine and I’d been having terrible trouble sleeping and so I took it in the evenings and it was just incredible, it was, had quite a strong sedative effect and that was just very, very useful a time where I couldn’t sleep and that kind of, you know, knocked me out for a few weeks and allowed me to kind of sleep off the worst of it and you know, sort of slowly getting back there but I felt after maybe taking it for three or four months just like a completely new person. It had cleared up a lot of stuff that I hadn’t even, that I thought, you know, was my personality that I hadn’t even realised was related to the depression, stuff that I just thought was an intrinsic part of how I was and when I found that stuff kind of lifting and just feeling much more optimistic than I’d ever felt before I was like wow this is, this is pretty good stuff. So I continued taking that more or less straight for three years which have been the three happiest and most productive years of my life.

When you started taking that one did you get any different effects?

I felt like a zombie for the first I felt like almost stoned, it was the sort of cognitive effects were really powerful, I remember thinking it’s great that I can sleep for twelve hours but, you know, if this stuff doesn’t clear up then I’m not going to be able to function long term on this.

So when you were waking up after your long sleep you were still feeling groggy?

Yeah, for about three or four hours, yeah which, which again was useful it was a kind of cushion from all the horrible feelings which, you know, it sort of gave me a couple of weeks to sort of sleep off the worst of it and. But yeah luckily after, I kind of acclimatised to the levels or whatever it, the cognitive stuff got a lot better. I had a bit of, sort of strange short term memory stuff going on as well, the first maybe month that I took it but all that cleared up really quickly.

So yeah, we’ve, we’ve been together since April and he knew before we started going out that I had problems with depression and I took medication for it and he’s, he’s been, he’s been really great about that stuff.

So was that easy or difficult to tell somebody that you barely knew to begin with then.

So we were friends before we started going out so I kind of got to know and trust him like that and we talked about it in that context and then got together later and it was actually, it was, so I when I’d, you know, started dating people before there was always the oh God when I am supposed to tell you moment and I, I’ve never been able, good at being that forthcoming with strangers especially so, you know, I’d think oh God well three dates, is it six dates is it when we’re going out a couple of months or you, yes because, you know, at some point you do, I feel almost, you know, it gets to a point when it’s lying by omission, if it’s still a part of your life then you sort of owe it to that person if you’re dating them to be clean about it. But also you don’t want to drop it in on the first date, by the way [inaudible speech]. I do remember with, with one guy that I’d started seeing I decided the easiest thing to do would be to just, you know, take my medication in front of him and he said is that the pill and I said it’s a pill and that was the end of the conversation.

Have you had any kind of bad reactions to you telling people that’s what you do?

Probably the worst reaction was from my parents.

Right.

Yeah, I said, mentioned it, I think when I was first prescribed fluoxetine my dad said is that really necessary.

Did you talk to him about it?

No because it was much, much easier not to really, yeah we just don’t talk about it.

Actually some people say that when they do tell other people that they’re taking them they can be quite surprised to hear other people say oh I do to or I know someone who is.

Yes, yeah. Now I haven’t, haven’t had a lot of that but what I have had is friends who I’ve, who’ve you know, if I haven’t had long conversations with them about it they’ve at least been aware that that’s my situation and then if they’ve encountered problems themselves later or if they’ve got other close friends that are having those troubles that they come to me to talk about it which I really, really like. I feel like, you know, at least it’s doing other people some good that I’ve had these bad experiences, that you know, and that I’ve had long and extensive enough experience of, you know, treatment and whatever to be able to say look here’s my advice, here’s what I think you should do.

I suppose it also encourages you to be able to talk a bit more as well.

Yeah, yeah it really does and I, I sort of quite, I really like the fact that people feel that they can talk to me about that, that they can, that they have come up to me and said look I’m feeling like this or I’ve got a friend who’s just started taking this and I know you’ve taken this so what would you, what would you recommend to her, that kind of thing.

Yeah, so, so Autumn of 2009 it had been sort of building up all Summer and I was feeling terrible again so I went to see the same GP and this time he prescribed mirtazapine and I’d been having terrible trouble sleeping and so I took it in the evenings and it was just incredible, it was, had quite a strong sedative effect and that was just very, very useful a time where I couldn’t sleep and that kind of, you know, knocked me out for a few weeks and allowed me to kind of sleep off the worst of it and you know, sort of, sort of slowly getting back there but I felt after maybe taking it for three or four months just like a completely new person. It had cleared up a lot of stuff that I hadn’t even, that I thought, you know, was my personality that I hadn’t even realised was related to the depression, stuff that I just thought was an intrinsic part of how I was and when I found that stuff kind of lifting and just feeling much more optimistic than I’d ever felt before I was like wow this is, this is pretty good stuff. So I continued taking that more or less straight for three years which have been the three happiest and most productive years of my life.

When you started taking that one did you get any different effects?

I felt like a zombie for the first few weeks, I felt like almost stoned, it was the sort of cognitive effects were really powerful, I remember thinking it’s great that I can sleep for twelve hours but, you know, if this stuff doesn’t clear up then I’m not going to be able to function long term on this.

So when you were waking up after your long sleep you were still feeling groggy?

Yeah, for about three or four hours, yeah which, which again was useful it was a kind of cushion from all the horrible feelings which, you know, it sort of gave me a couple of weeks to sort of sleep off the worst of it and. But yeah luckily after, I kind of acclimatised to the levels or whatever it, the cognitive stuff got a lot better. I had a bit of, sort of strange short term memory stuff going on as well, the first maybe month that I took it but all that cleared up really quickly.

And so you said that you felt really good on that one.

Yes, yeah.

And how different was the feeling from fluoxetine then?

Yeah it felt like, it felt like I was finally, you know, my true self and living my own life and able to do the things that I wanted to do, you know, for, for the first time in years since I, since childhood almost I felt like this was how normal was supposed to feel and this was, you know, how to be happy, it was yeah, which I never quite got on fluoxetine, I kind of felt, you know.

Functioning?

Yes functioning but not really good whereas on the mirtazapine I felt incredibly high achieving.

It was very helpful to me in terms of sleeping the whole time I took it, not as powerful an effect as in the first couple of weeks but you know, I went from maybe having two or three nights a week when I couldn’t sleep very well to having I think only four nights when I couldn’t sleep in those three years on mirtazapine, so the only thing that it did do, it was very much, it did sort of feel like I was drugging myself to sleep a bit.

Did you pass out, not pass out but did you just fall into a very deep sleep?

Yeah about half an hour after taking it so, but it meant that I didn’t really feel properly tired so, you know, I’d look at the clock and think oh it’s 10 o’ clock, I’m not tired but if I want to go to sleep, at half ten I’d better take the pill now, job done. So I used to take it every night because if I didn’t I wouldn’t have slept.

He was very good about repeat prescriptions and things, he’d give me, you know, between three and six months’ supply and say just come back to me when you need a repeat and we’ll check that everything’s okay and that worked quite well. I mean during that time I did move cities twice, I moved from where I lived in University back to where my parents live and again when, when I ran out of repeat prescriptions I found a GP there, who was also very helpful, and yep continued reviewing that with me.

So when you start on the new one did you do some looking up to find out more about that one?

Yeah, yeah I have done for everything I’ve taken. Just so, the leaflets you get with them are useful but also there’s some, a couple of websites where they do some crowd sourcing on side-effects and get, you know, people’s own experiences of them. And I’m, I’m quite wary about anecdotal evidence generally but there’s a couple of sort of pretty good aggregators which say here are all the side-effects I’ll tell you about, here are some things that people have had happen to them that might be related to.

Yeah so they, somebody will start a site or a forum or something and say look I’m looking for people’s experiences of X and, you know, presumably as much as you’ve had that kind of response with this, there are lots of people who have got opinions about this stuff and want to.

Yes

And, and the whole point is that, you know, so you know, so say someone’s prescribed something and they got this weird side effect that wasn’t really on the labels and the doctor said yes it could have been that but they have no way of telling. They give that information to the person who’s aggregating it all and that gets put on the list of things, so if you know, if find yourself taking that drug and this weird thing has happened to you and oh somebody else had that.

I’m interested in other people’s experiences but only if they meet a certain bar of articulacy which is very unfair to a lot of people who’ve got intricate experience that they’re sharing in the best way that they can but I, you know, I tend more to sort of read books about people’s experiences than to go on the internet.

And so have you also read kind of books?

Yeah I’ve read quite a lot of stuff around this, I’ve read, you know, the sort of sad girl classics, the girl interrupted, bell jar and that type of stuff and also a couple of the sort of older men with depression, there’s Darkness Visible, a William Styron book, there’s a couple of others there. And I don’t know if you know the Noonday Demon but that’s incredibly, it’s huge, it’s a thousand page turner and its half experience and half kind of social and historical cultural interpretations of depression.

I mean and how do they, do they make you feel, how does it make you feel reading those kinds of accounts?

It’s interesting, some of its.

Does it help you to understand yourself more or does it make it?

Yeah, well no some of it’s very much, especially when I first started discovering these books when I was in my mid-teens, it was like how are other people, you know, not only have they had this experience but they’ve also written books, this is really inspiring. And also sometimes you think, you think oh God that person was so much worse than I am, what am I complaining about, you know, kind of the tendency to compare yourself to others is always there. And it took me a sort of a long time to properly appreciate that everyone’s experience is different and just because mine isn’t quite like that it’s still valid, that kind of sense of validation took a long time to come.

I’ve had friends who’ve tried one drug and it hasn’t worked for them and that’s put them off the whole experience. I mean for me the big things was, and yeah, there were, there were times when I thought this isn’t, you know the day my doctor prescribed mirtazapine first of all, I went back to him and just, was not expecting him to be able to suggest anything that would help I was, you know, kind of, in despair about the chances of anything working or even you know prescribing a different drug or doing it, or being able to do anything that would usefully make me feel better and then when he, he suggested something I hadn’t heard of and I thought that could be interesting and gave it a try and just, you know, within a couple of months felt incredibly good.

I suppose it’s quite easy to, to kind of fall in that belief that when you’re trying something and it hasn’t worked so nothing else will, they could all be pretty similar really.

It plays into the mentality of depression as well, the kind of hopelessness of it all.