hello!

Hi everyone. To be honest, I haven't been on the app these past few days. It kept slipping my mind, and I've been feeling worse and worse. I don't know if anyone else is in the same situation. I'm 33, I'm from Spain, and I've been on psychiatric drugs since I was 19 or 20. After having panic attacks and a lot of social anxiety, I went to see a psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrist, who prescribed me paroxetine. I was on paroxetine for about two or three years, and then I had a horrible relapse and couldn't understand what it was. I didn't know what was happening to me. Since then I've been through about 13 different medications, and every time I've tried to come off them I've had very severe withdrawal. Right now I feel hopeless. I live at my mother's house, in a small city that isn't the one I grew up in. I have no friends, and I'm trying to taper off fluoxetine. I'm at 4.6 ml. But I feel like I'm living in a constant purgatory, because in all these years I've hardly ever been well. I always have these ongoing depressions, feelings of worthlessness, deep hopelessness. It's as if my mind sabotages me whenever something comes along that could bring me something good, like a job, a partner or a new experience, so that I can't enjoy what life is offering me. I should also say that I'm finding it harder to trust my own thoughts and emotions. The recurring obsessions I have even when I'm calmer have become much stronger now that I'm in withdrawal and tapering. For example, if my father is a narcissist, then I constantly have it in my head that my father is a narcissist, that I'll only ever be able to play the role of the people-pleasing daughter, that I'll never be able to have a life of my own. And I'm stuck in that loop all the time. It isn't always that exact thought, but it shows up in me not making adult decisions, constantly sabotaging myself, and repeating things my parents said to me in the past, as if those were the truth about my life. I don't know what to do. This is why I've always ended up going back to antidepressants: whenever I go back to see a psychiatrist, or, for example, last year when I was admitted to a clinic, they end up giving me more antidepressants, and I end up in a circle that never ends. Right now I do feel desperate, although I can tell that getting this off my chest is helping, so maybe it's a good way to try to get better. I don't know if anyone else feels this way. Maybe they feel they've lost many years of their life, that they no longer know how to relate to people, that they're in a constant state of helplessness. For me it's as if I were still a little girl and couldn't get out of that role. Anyway, sending you all a hug, and thank you for creating this space.