Difficulty rating: pregnant and grieving mom's suicide and other mom's slow death from cancer.
I've been on SSRIs for many years. I've experienced a couple of terrible episodes of depression when I've been off my SSRI, including one scary episode where I stopped eating as a way to die slowly, about seven years ago. I have a very significant family history of depression, including my mother completing suicide in March.
I'm well looked after by a therapist and family doctor who I trust to manage my psych meds. I also go to acupuncture even though I think it's a bit wooey, and I get a massage from time to time. I hike and swim a couple times a week for exercise. I have a supportive partner who is also a mental health nurse and is well attuned to signs of decompensation.
I've been doing quite well, mental-health-wise, for some years, and have only needed minor adjustments to my self-care plan and medications when I've noticed intrusive thoughts ramp up or mood start to get low, mostly in response to normal life stuff.
Back in June, I decided to try to conceive a baby. My doctor said I had been on SSRIs for long enough since my last episode that it would be a reasonable time to trial being off SSRIs. My aged reproductive system was mysteriously efficient at baby-having, and I was pregnant by July. I gave being unmedicated a shot between June and now, and it looks like it is a no-go. I am plagued by obsessional, intrusive thoughts, passive ideation about self-harm (no plan to act on it), fatigue, tearfulness, lability, and general misery. My doctor swiftly prescribed a new SSRI which is safer for pregnancy, and also advised that as the placenta takes over production of pregnancy hormones, I should notice decreased lability. Go-go gadget placenta!
I am taking the new med as prescribed, but my mood is the same to worse, which my doctor told me to expect for a few weeks. I am in close contact with him, seeing my therapist, acupuncturist, massage therapist, being open with my partner, trying to stay active, reducing hours at work for a few weeks so all I need to to do is focus on getting well and 3D printing a baby...
I guess my question is, besides what I'm already doing, how do I care for myself while I wait for the meds to work?
My surrogate mom, who took care of me when my mom was too ill to look after me when I was little, was given a few weeks to live a few weeks ago.
My depression often takes the form of obsessive thoughts. I am obsessed with a past relationship with someone I didn't even like being in a relationship with. They don't hate me; they sent me a nice message when my mom died. They recently unfriended me on social media and I'm obsessed with understanding why. We've both been in happy, new relationships for several years. I wouldn't want to get back together with them, but I feel so overwhelmingly rejected by them anyway and I can't let it go, no matter how much I talk about it in therapy. I think posted about it here several questions ago. I am also sad about vapid stuff like getting fat, RBG, and not being able to go on a tropical vacation this December.
I have terrible violent thoughts about harming myself and seeing my body injured or mangled in different ways, which I have no impulse to act on, but which keep me up at night because they are so grotesque.
I'm scared of alienating the people I love by being this way. I actually need them so badly right now, but I'm tearful and irritable and rigid and generally difficult. I don't recognize myself.
How can I take the edge off of this long enough to let the meds do their thing? |
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