Jamie Stinchcombe
01-23-2013, 01:22 PM
I'm an 18 year old male who attends university and is studying psychology, my anxiety started in July 2012 when flying home from lanzarote. It was the strangest and scariest sensation i've ever experienced. I had no clue what was happening to me, i thought I was going to die to be honest! I was seated with my girlfriend, sister and her boyfriend and they were very worried about me. Once I returned home I was feeling the effects of the anxiety for a few days but still was unaware of what had actually happened to me. Nothing seemed to happen for the next month or so, although for some reason I felt very ill when drinking alcohol, and for this reason I went to the doctors. He prescribed me a drug which I am unaware of the name of it, trusting my doctor I took it. I started taking it on the monday, on the tuesday night I was out for dinner with my family and anxiety just hit me in the face, my family thought that i was going crazy and so did I. I am still unaware of whether that was side effects from the pills that I was taking or if it was just general anxiety. The next day I felt awful, I couldnt move without feeling sick, I couldnt eat anything and I generally thought that I had some sort of mental illness ( eg Schizophrenia ). On the wednesday me and my girlfriend had ended our 4 year relationship due to moving away from eachother ( university ) I sunk into depression within that week, I was in bed for 5 days and in them 5 days I could not eat a thing, I had to force down a few scoops of baked beans just to stay alive! The purpose of me telling you about my experience with a drug that I cannot name is to warn people out there to ensure that you do a bit of your own research prior to taking a drug. I came off of the drug in the end as I could not handle being in bed and not being able to eat, it was hard enough going through the break up but not being able to see my friends or even more for that matter made things 10 times worst. My depression was getting worst and there was no way i could handle being in bed any longer. Once off the pills my anxiety appeared to subside for a while, but still I went back to the doctors and he gave me 20mg prozac, which I was told to watch out for side effects. At the time my anxiety had appeared to have gone and so I made the decision to not take the Prozac. I came to university in september and was surpisingly calm considering I'd moved 300 miles from a nice sea side town to Coventry. The second day of being there we had a whole year group meeting, and thats when it hit me again, full blown panic and not being able to move as I was situated in a crowded lecture hall with no way of escaping, not a good time. My anxiety continued to ruin my life in loads of different ways, going to dinner with my friends and lectures were nearly impossible. I decided that I should take the 20mg prozac, I was very worried about taking it because of my previous experiences with pills for anxiety. I took it and experienced some side effects but nothing compared to the previous experience. Personally, Prozac didnt really help me, and for someone who is an 18 year old boy in his first year at uni they are not ideal as you cannot drink alcohol. I took them for about 4 weeks, and yes some people say they take a while to work but I had been getting depressed because I couldnt go out with my friends and ended up sitting at home alone on the weekends. I returned back home from christmas not in a good state, pretty depressed and axniety high. I went to see a local CBT practioner, and within one session, he taught me the neccesary skills for dealing with anxiety, even one day later I felt an unusual calmness inside me. If I can give any long term anxiety sufferers any advice, it would be to not treat anxiety as the enemy, accept it for what it is. I have found that educating yourself on the subject of Anxiety and why it occurs helps to understand what can be done to control it. My life is now a lot more calm, Am I cured? No, but I have been able to develop ways of coping which have unlocked avenues within my life that I thought impossible before. Thanks for reading this, good luck.