man they really aint joking about one of the side effects of zoloft (sertraline) (ssri) (antidepressant/antianxiety) being suicidal thoughts. and, well, as expected, tw for depression/anxiety/suicidal thoughts/selfharm thoughts!
so fun thing about meee is i am on sertraline! for social anxiety and frequent panic attacks :) and it is a wonderful and lovely time if im being honest like my life pre-medication and post-medication for my freakass anxiety is night and day but whats interesting is that most or all of what changed was internal
before meds when i got stressed it was like i lost control of my brain or mentally checked out. i went through life like a zombie. i did not feel alive. weirdly enough this resulted in me still getting good grades. yknow how overworked plowhorses sometimes start to look dead inside but they keep on trudging along, sometimes right up until they keel over and die of exhaustion, because they don't know any other way to exist. yea thats how i went to class and took notes n shit n studied n all that. twas a miserable existence but at no point did i ever contemplate self-harm, even idly. and the closest i ever got to suicidal ideation was wanting to sleep for ages
after meds when i get stressed its like Wouf my body is experiencing a lot of Feelings. thoughts of gouging my eyes out or choking myself or making a holepunch in my cheek or knife between the fingers like the EEAAO papercuts. not serious contemplation but thoughts that spring up or bodily sensations like weird tingling in the places i think bout harming. lots and lots of mental and/or external murmurings that include "what if i killed myself" when i never thought about that before meds at all. not that im actually contemplating it now but i do think that jokingly saying it does indicate something unsettled in my psyche!
and like it really does make you wonder. clearly the meds have given me much more energy and a closer attachment to and awareness of my body, and i always feel like i am in control of it now. but suicidal attempts/thoughts/actions is a known side effect of many ssris. theres some speculation in the literature that this could be caused by the meds working just well enough to give depressed people the energy to actually commit, but there's no real good way to like judge that. yknow. like anecdotally i think thats totally true for me like before meds i didn't want to think about doing actions at all but after meds i am able to think about doing actions which may include selfharm.
TO BE CLEAR I AM OKAY! mostly. like all the fucked up shit is in my brain im not hurting myself or suicidal (but if u know someone who is also on antidepressants or in terapy. give em a hello from me <3) but yea sometimes it makes ya think.
anyway it's time to double these issues and give them to william eklund in a fic. yay <3