Mental health medication update (Buspirone)
CONTENT NOTICE: This post is an update about my current mental health related medication treatment. It will contain mentions of topics of psychiatry, as well as various mental health related medications such as anti-anxiety and medication.
You don't have to expose yourself to things that hurt you. Stay safe. ♥
So Buspirone has been good for me. It helped with my background anxiety, which was what I wanted it to do. I'm going to up my dosage, so instead of taking a half dose three times a day, I'm going to take a full dose three times a day. After that, it should be good enough.
Alas, it cannot help me in any other way than this. It's a anti-anxiety medication, it's purpose is to eliminate the constant droning of anxiety in my daily life and it does that well. It doesn't help with anxieties that are triggered by something external. That's why I have Xanax, should I need it... and should I actually allow myself to take it when I need, which is still a massive issue.
It also doesn't help at all with depression. Depression isn't as big of an issue than constant background high anxiety, but when it hits, damn does it fucking hits. Today was a good example of that.
This may seem like I'm painting a pretty negative picture and... well, that's the state of my mental health, I'm afraid. However, this is actually quite positive. Buspirone is working as advertised, doing exactly what I wanted from it, nothing more, nothing less. I wasn't seeking a miracle drug that would fix me, I was seeking a "calm the hell down" medication and it seems that I have found it.
Hopefully this won't change when I go up to a full dose, which I'm planning on starting tomorrow (before seeing my psychiatrist the next day but erh, whatever), but so far, I haven't observed any nasty side effects or anything. This experience has been quiute surprising, honestly. I didn't expect it to be effective at such a low dose and I'm quite surprised by the absence of bullshit from it.
I am confident in the fact that I know my brain and body well enough by now, which is why I can determine that this new dosage is going to be the correct one. I'm open to being wrong, of course, but I'm pretty confident.
Overall, my experience with Buspirone after being on it for a few weeks have been consistant with what I've read about it online. A lot of people describe its effect by using the sentence that I'm going to employ to describe it: It takes the edge off.
Now, there is the question of other treatments. I'm less sure about that. I wanted to primarily stop being afraid of everything constantly, as I have no words to describe how miserable and exhausting of an existence that is. And while this has helped a lot, there is still all this other mess that I need to deal with. Should I try an antidepressant added on top of that? I don't know.
I've had poor experiences with anti-depressants so far. Mostly resulting in strong emotional numbing and feeling like I don't feel anything anymore. Of course, now that I'm back to feeling things a bit too intensely, it would be easy for me to say that actually, I'd rather go back to not feeling anything in the end. However, this is very much the easy way out and probably isn't a healthy approach. I'm uncertain as to what to do.
I have so much to think about, and it feel like I have so little time, so little space to self-care when I have to handle so many things with such time constraints. I'm not seeking to be happy, I'm seeking not being miserable all the time, apparently, that is a lot to ask. But, this is a step in the right direction. I found something that I might be able to rely on for a while. Fingers crossed that I won't have to make any unpleasant update about this medication in the future.