[Note: Even if you don’t care about my mental state, you engineering types might enjoy my explanation of how certain anti-depressants work that appears in the second half of this post – just scroll halfway down to find it.]

It’s another week, which means another mental/medical party extravaganza with the Rodawgg (that’s me).

This time, I’m getting off the anti-depressants I started taking almost ten months ago. The drug in question is called “Lexapro,” and I’ve had a very fine almost-year on it, thankyouverymuch.

Now that the year is almost up, I don’t need the stuff. When I go see my shrink nowadays, I just sit there, smile, and wait for her to call me an asshole. I think I’ll be able to get by on psychotherapy alone now.

The lame bit is that there’s a period of withdrawal with this stuff, and I’ve been going through it for about two weeks now. You wouldn’t think that it would be such a big deal, but I feel like I’ve been tossed around like an emotional ping-pong ball in a tsunami (<– timely allusion).

I’ve found that the best way to deal with the rougher periods is to distract myself, and, right now, I’m choosing to distract myself by writing a blog post. I’ve been feeling weird all day – like my brain is in one place and my body is in another.

It’s been one hell of an experience. The class of drug I’m taking, known as an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) is, I think, misunderstood by most people. Some drugs with which you might be familiar (Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Paxil, etc.) fall into this family of drug. I remember being in high school and talking to friends who had taken three or four Prozac at a time, expecting to feel really, really happy.

What they didn’t get is that SSRIs don’t make you feel happy – at all. Prozac, known by some as a “happy pill,” is anything but.

What you do get is a lessened emotional response to things. Rather than making you really happy, SSRIs tend to work by preventing you from feeling really bad. However, at the same time, they can put a lower ceiling on your positive emotions as well. It’s almost as though your positive and negative emotions are attached to unusually short bungee cords, preventing them from ever getting completely out of control. The idea is that you should be able to get a handle on the problems in your life while taking the SSRI, get over the larger humps, get off the drug, and move on.

But there’s still this crazy period when the drug is leaving your system. I’ve been tapering off, which is to say that I’ve been reducing the dosage little by little over a couple weeks, but it only helps so much. I’m currently, even as I write, going through one of those periods when I’m having side-effects that call for treatment from other drugs with their own long lists of side-effects. The one I’m treating today is dizziness, which set in about forty-eight hours ago, and I’ve taken some meclizine (a long lasting anti-histamine meant to lessen the effects of vertigo and nausea), and it’s made me so tired that the only thing keeping me awake right now is typing (along with the pitcher of black tea I drank a few minutes ago).

In part, I’m leaving this post here so that other people who are going through anti-depressant withdrawal can find it, read it, and understand that, no, there’s nothing unusual about wanting to fall flat on your face and have a one-person barf-party when you’re coming off of this stuff. It sucks, but I guess that’s part of the cost of going on it in the first place and benefiting from the drug.

Some of you are software geek types, and I thought you might be interested in how the drug works. It might just be me, but I find the brain utterly, utterly fascinating, very much in the same way I find programming to be fascinating.

Basically, your brain isn’t just one consistent piece of thinkmeat, but rather a collection of components that work together to effect some outcome. There are autonomous bits which work on their own (the bits that keep you alive, like the brain stem), but the much more interesting hunks of thoughtflesh are the ones which aren’t there to keep you breathing.

The individual parts of your brain which operate your “higher” cognitive brain functions operate in some ways like a democracy, where the systems with the most votes are the systems that get activated (for the Educated brain-lover out there, I know that this is a gross oversimplification, but I’m trying to explain something simply here). The way votes are cast is with neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that cause the activation (or inhibition) of the different types of neurons you have up in your noggin. The neurons that are in your noggin are almost like little individual CPUs, making your brain one hell of a network cluster.

There are some neurons which will only be activated once a certain level of stimulation has been reached (called an “Action Potential” in smarty-pants terms), and this level of stimulation is dependent on the activity of neurotransmitters.

OK. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but that’s a simple way to introduce the idea, and I’m sure someone will follow up in the comments with a more detailed explanation.

Another way to think of your “higher” brain is as a small city of different buildings, or businesses, each with its own set of duties for which it is responsible to the city.

There’s a business that handles the “executive planning” for the city, a business that handles the maintenance of the city’s language, a business that handles foreign languages, a business that processes all data related to spatial problems, and many more.

There are also some businesses which handle the processing of data that might either make you happy or totally flipping looney depressed.

Now imagine that one of those businesses isn’t doing so well – stock prices are down, morale is down, and employees just stop showing up for work. Eventually, there aren’t enough people coming in to keep the business running efficiently. It’s a tough problem, too, because as the business goes down the tubes, fewer and fewer people feel inclined to come into work, and the business does even worse, eventually leading to a sort of localized economic depression.

See where I’m going with this?

We have a company (brain component) which is part of the “I feel GOOD!” vertical, it’s going down the tubes, and the company’s employees (neurotransmitters) aren’t coming in to do their jobs.

So, what do you do? The answer is simple: you outsource your problem to an organization which can help your business get back on its feet.

In this case, the consulting agency, known as “Lexapro” (which, when you think about it, wouldn’t be a bad name for an agency), comes in and helps bridge the gap. There are fewer employees (neurotransmitters) around, and Lexapro teaches the ones who are still there how to do their jobs more efficiently. The workers eventually get really good at what they’re doing, and they begin staying at work longer, helping to get the business back on its feet. Over time, the business regains lost ground, gets its books in the black, and is performing as well as ever. Gradually, the missing employees start filing back into work, wanting to take part in the business that’s beginning to kick ass again. Once that process is complete, Lexapro says “My work here is finished,” takes off, and leaves the business to operate on its own, but this time doing well.

I don’t know if you care or not, but you now have a decent understanding of how an SSRI works.

When a neurotransmitter hops from one neuron to another, it passes through a very small gap between the neurons called a “synapse.” The neurotransmitter then attaches itself to its target neuron’s receptor, causes a chemical change to occur in that neuron, and is then recycled so that it can be used again. The process of snatching that neurotransmitter from the synaptic cleft is known as “reuptake.”

What an SSRI does is delay reuptake of the neurotransmitter. This causes the chemical to remain a little longer than normal (like an employee doing overtime), rendering it slightly more effective than before. The result is more productivity from the neurotransmitter.

Eventually, or so I’ve been told, the brain is supposed to adapt and attempt to keep up with production of needed neurotransmitters (serotonin in this case) on its own after the SSRI is withdrawn. It doesn’t always work, and some people need to stay on these drugs for their entire lives, but I’m hoping not to be one of them.

However, as with any great shift in activity at a business, there’s a period of confusion and upheaval that takes place, and it typically occurs twice: during the beginning of the change, and at the end of the change.

I’m in the end right now, and hoping that everything transfers smoothly.

So, yeah. That’s what I did today :)

Now it’s time to get back to freaking out. I no longer have this post to distract me…