boojit

My crazydoctor started me on a new crazymed yesterday: Remeron. Here's what crazymeds has to say about it:

Pros: If serotonin and/or norepinephrine are the answer for you, Remeron will pull you out of the deepest, blackest depression like no other medication will.

Cons: You will literally eat sugar straight out of the bag to satisfy your cravings for sweets and carbohydrates.

Remeron's Typical Side Effects: Most of the anticholinergic effects common with psychiatric medications are infrequent with Remeron. Instead you get intense hunger for the wrong foods, and with that comes weight gain, dry mouth and constipation. Then you want to sleep a lot. It's like you may as well be smoking pot when you take Remeron.

and:

At any dosage it will make you crave doughnuts. Seriously. You will want to invest in Krispy Kreme stock (or maybe something along similar lines that isn't tanking); as Remeron's antagonism of the H1 receptor and stimulation of your serotonin production gives you the munchies for carbohydrates and sugars like you were 16 and smoking the best pot ever in the parking lot of a strip mall with a 24-hour doughnut shop beckoning you with glazed and jelly-filled ecstasy. People dipping spoons into a bag of sugar and eating it as is - not unheard of when on Remeron. This stuff is nothing more than legal marijuana, and if I knew crap about biochemistry I could probably prove that crazy statement. From a purely molecular-chemical perspective THC and mirtazapine are nothing alike. But there's just something about how the two drugs work that is really close. And people who have self-medicated with pot respond really well to meds that really push the norepinephrine, and hard. Strattera, reboxetine, Cymbalta, and the more potent TCAs. And Remeron.

So anyway, i don't know how to feel about that. All i know is I agree with my doctor on one thing: the Effexor hasn't been working. I'm slowly weaning myself off of Effexor, and it's a slow go because of Effexor's discontinuation effects which suck ass. Also, I know that I don't get anything from seritonin action but stuff that works on norepinepherine really seems to do something, which is probably why Wellbutrin worked so well I think (except for the migraines). That's why I've been on Effexor but the going theory is while Effexor does work on norepinephrine, it doesn't do nearly as much for that as it does for seritonin. Hence me being all crazy and depressed.

I still plan to write more about what's going on and what happened. Suffice it to say for the meantime: I quit my job, almost left my wife (thank god she is too crazy herself to get out when the getting is good), and basically went down the tubes. Detox, crazy hospital, blargh blargh blargh. Now I'm just kinda sitting at home trying to figure out what I'm going to do with my life. One thing is for sure, things they are changin'. The nice thing about being all super-depressed and full of misery is that the idea of just completely changing everything doesn't scare you very much. Hey, you can't be any more miserable than you are now, right?

This entry was posted on Friday, November 4th, 2005 at 10:29 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.