My 'takes antidepressant for 30 years' story:
I was 26 when our first son was born. I had a couple of 'seeing things' instances, but I'm level headed enough to know they couldn't be real. I was happy. I stopped working and put myself 90% into being a mom.
2 yrs later our daughter was born, I was super happy, our family was complete.
3 mos later I found out I was pregnant again. I really wanted to name the baby with Oops as his middle name.
I was not sleeping. It would take me 3 hours to fall asleep, then wake up for baby. Another 3 hours to get to sleep. Then, it's morning, time to be a mom.
Somehow, I did this. I was never depressed, just couldn't sleep. Then, when youngest was 10 days old, I felt someone in my head was pounding a hammer on the right side of my head, from the inside. My blood pressure was high. My dr put me in the hospital, I was there for 5 days. He did a bunch of tests, mostly to rule stuff out, and put me on an antidepressant. I don't remember which one, I still had the hammer pounding. It got a little better with the med, but was still there. My blood pressure still high. Then the dr switched me to Amitriptyline (generic for Elavil). I was prescribed 50 mg, which worked for years, and am now on 75 mg, an hour before bed. If I remember right, this is a low dose. When I saw him 3 week later, he said he could tell when I walked in, that this was the right med.
This is what I remember from 30 yr old research:
Some of the side effects I like - it acts as antihistamine (yay, seasonal allergies gone), my sister works in pain management and there have been a few times when that has been true for me. I remember it said it can make one crave sweets so I still have to work really hard at avoiding them because I craved sweets before I took the med.
"Amitriptyline acts primarily as a serotonin–norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI), with strong actions on the serotonin transporter (SERT) and moderate effects on the norepinephrine transporter (NET"
I copied that from the internet and I remember all that is important in falling asleep. I don't remember the details, but I did quite a bit of research years ago.
I think it turns my brain off when I try to sleep, my brain just never turned off. Ever.
Funny to me:
I had a traumatic brain injury 10 years ago and the oops son told me he notices I'm a lot more easy going than I was before the accident. I think I also got a mild case of ADD that day too.
I think about my brain a lot, the whole thing is interesting. Like I said earlier, I'm so glad it is not included on the list of antidepressants associated with bone thinning. After the accident I remember I was put on another, but I started grinding my teeth at night (did that as a teen) so my dr went back to the Amitriptyline, I guess it's a really old drug and has some tolerance problems, but I have never had any problems.
One thing I found out this year, it's no longer made in the US, so it's now about $29.00/mo. I started out paying $2 /mo and it gradually went up
Like I said, I was never depressed, in fact, I'm basically an optimistic person.
Just remembered another thing I learned over the course of all this happening:
I think it had something to do with my hormones too. I breastfed my first 2 kids, but not the third at all, so maybe my body went through a kind of shock. For years, I would get 1 head bang and knew that my period was going to start within 12 hours.