Fifth Day After Starting Work:
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Last night I went to the
doctor. I told him everything, we talked for an hour and a half and I
wept for every minute of it. He diagnosed me with
clinical depression,
prescribed me
Paxil, and booked a meeting with a
psychiatrist. I've never been so
scared in my life.
I'm not going to
work anymore now. The
doctor recommended 4 - 6 weeks off. That seemed a bit
excessive at first, but now I don't know... I only talked to my
office manager about it, and she seemed to understand, but it's a really crappy thing to do, show up at a
job, find out they need you, and four days later take a month off.
Sigh... I just hope my
treatment will help me out of this
dumb hole.
I've been reading the
literature that the
doctor gave me. It's kinda
scary too. Some of the
rare side effects of
Paxil are pretty
nasty, and I'm already feeling some of the
common ones,
tremors,
dizziness and
nausea. The thing is, the
literature also explains that
depression is a
biological and not a
mental disease.
Clinical depression is not someone just feeling
bad for a while. It's also not necessarily caused by real world
troubles, they just tend to help it become
consuming. It's actually something that happens
chemically inside of their
brain, and that's why the
pills are necessarily.
Paxil is a type of
selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or
SSRI. It's kinda the same thing as
prozac, but it has less
nasty side effects. The
drug stops
serotonin (a
chemical linked to
mood, and found in the
brain) from being too quickly
absorbed back into the
brain cells after it's produced. This means that more of the
chemical stays in my
brain, and I don't always feel like a piece of
shit. The thing is, the
drug takes up to two weeks to start working, so right now, I don't just feel really because of the
depression, but also because of the
pill's side effects.
Not cool.
My next step is to start talking to a
counselor. I'm really
afraid of that, but I'm not sure why. I know anything I tell them will be kept in
strict confidence, but it's the
idea that gets to me... For some reason, I find it easier to tell people something over the
Internet than to tell it to one person I don't know.