Last week I published an interview for my podcast series,
Behind the Grind. The guest of that interview was Trevor
Millar, Board Chair of MAPS Canada and Founder of the
Canadian Psychedelic Association.
I was especially excited about that interview because I know
some of you guys have expressed an interest in micro dosing
and in medicinal psychedelics in general. I was so baffled,
then (if you follow me on Instagram, you'll know what happened),
-5 seconds after I released that video,
I got an instant "dislike"
and a disapproving comment from, I guess, one of my subscribers.
What bothered me wasn't the fact that I got a "dislike" on
my video or a negative comment.
It was the fact that it seemed like I had gotten it from somebody
who, before even watching the video itself and understanding
why we had felt it was important to release such content (especially
in this day and age) the person simply resorted to their
pre-existing biases against recreational drugs
as a moral philosophy. As unfortunate as that incident was, it
sort of got me thinking and it inspired me to make this video
today. Some of you have (especially if you've been following
since the very beginning from my first video 3 months ago)
-you know bits and pieces of my story.
But today, I wanted to share another piece of my story that
will hopefully help you understand why I've become so passionate
about holistic treatments to mental health issues.
In a different life,
I had my own small business.
I ran a marketing agency for almost 4 years between 2015
and 2019 at its peak.
I had about six people working for me on payroll.
You know, I was young, I was ambitious, I had ideas and for
the most part, I enjoyed the work. But there was another side
to that kind of work, especially after we started growing
so quickly, so fast, the pressure to maintain what I had built...
A lot of that pressure
fell on me, of course, as the CEO of the company -the
person bringing in contracts and the person sort of laying
out the groundwork for our clients. In July 2017,
I started noticing that I was finding it difficult to get
out of bed and I started noticing that I was living with
so much anxiety that even small tasks like going to the grocery
store or being seen out and about aside from having to be
at work.
It was a battle for me. Being no stranger to depression
and anxiety (because I've had a history of such), I immediately
recognized those symptoms to be symptoms of depression and
anxiety. So I went to see my doctor and he prescribed me
Effexor. This is a drug that I had already been on once
before in my younger years and coming off this antidepressant
was not fun at all for me.
I knew what Effexor could do and I knew how coming off
it would be a terrible experience.
It's at this point I was willing to try anything, including
an antidepressant that I had already tried before. I asked
my doctor to give me the lowest dose possible, which is
37.5 mg.
So that's what we did for a while. Being on this dose worked.
I was able to get back to normal and I was able to function,
but about five months later in January 2018, the depression
and anxiety came back and I was again back in my doctor's
office. This time, he suggested that I up my dose to 75 mg,
which to most people was a "standard dose." Again, feeling
the pressures of my business and seeing as I needed a solution
pronto, I agreed to have my dosage bumped up to 75 mg.
For a while,
once again, it worked and I was able to function normally
and go about my life as an entrepreneur. Then, April 2018 came
and I remember this because it marked the beginning of the
single most turbulent year of my business.
We had gone from a fifty percent
year-over-year top line revenue growth to all of a sudden, two
big contracts that I'd bet on didn't pull through. My co-founder
-I found out she was pregnant and then within the same two-week
period, we found out that our marketing lead (someone whom
we had spent the last two years investing in and training)
-our marketing lead got poached by another company.
So this was a lot of stress for me for so many reasons. Having
the entrepreneur mentality at the time,
I was determined not to let this series of unfortunate
events get the better of me.
I decided to put my head down and hustle harder than I've
ever hustled before but before doing so, one of the things
that I did was I went back to my doctor and told him, once
again, of the symptoms that I had been experiencing and symptoms
that I refused to live with.
He suggested that I bump up my antidepressants 150mg,
which would be double the dose that I had been on before.
I said yes.
And for a while, I felt like the antidepressants helped. I
was able to function, I was able to put my head down, and I
was able to do what I needed to do as an entrepreneur in
survival mode. By October 2019,
I'd brought in a number of wins that we could celebrate.
We had a new all-star member to the team, we were working
on contracts that could sustain us again, my co-founder
left for maternity leave, and it felt like the coast was clear.
Only, I had completely burnt out. I was a shell of a human
being at this
point. I don't know what it was,
but when the proposition of going back to normal came, I
didn't want to take it.
I didn't feel anything for it. I didn't feel passionate about
my marketing agency anymore and doing the work that I had
been doing.
The thing that I had spent so much time building,
I felt nothing of it and all I could remember was seeing everybody
on my team go about their lives and moving on with their
lives - starting families, starting new jobs, going on vacations,
and yet
I was the person there watching them, watching it all go by, sort
of just peering through a window from a room that I couldn't leave.
That was the moment
I decided that the work wasn't for me and by then, I physically
had lost 20lbs under the stress.
I wasn't working out.
I wasn't eating properly. I was so physically, mentally, and
emotionally weak that I couldn't take it anymore.
So I made the call to close my marketing agency and we transitioned
people out. By January 2019, we moved the last of our furniture
out and I closed the last great chapter of my life.
2019 was the year
I learned to slow down for the first time in my life.
I shifted my focus back on healing myself, getting my full
night's sleep, exercising, eating right, reading all the books
that I had always wanted to read but never had time for. I
knew that I couldn't have an indefinite amount of time to
just be figuring myself out because I lived in the real world
after all. But I knew I had a little bit of time so I didn't
want to squander that time. What I felt was so weird was,
this whole time I'm still on my antidepressants. 150
milligrams of Effexor, for the most part.
I didn't think much of it until I had a realization in March
when I looked back on the last two years of my life and I
knew on paper, so many things had happened. So many changes
had happened, but yet, emotionally, I felt like nothing. Like
nothing provoked any feelings in me and I looked back as
if I had existed through the events of my life of the last
two years, but I didn't live through them.
It was as if I had spent the last two years merely existing
for other people and for external circumstances and not living
for myself. I don't know how to describe it any other
way, but I was certain it was the antidepressants.
What antidepressants do is that they take your
normal range of emotion
So, let's say, it's like this and then they narrow that range.
So when you are going through a crisis, when you are in a
trough (an emotional trough), they can be helpful because they
can bring that emotional trough and raise it a little
bit so that you feel like it's more manageable. But long-term,
and this is what I felt intuitively at the time but
it turns out there are studies to suggest this and there
are thought leaders
- more holistically minded psychiatrists will vouch
that most of the benefits of antidepressants are shown in
short-term studies and not necessarily long-term studies.
It seems to be that antidepressants has an effect of blunting
your emotions in the long run and whether that's good or
bad, the only thing I can say is that based on my own experience,
it felt like I had gotten to the point where the antidepressants
were sort of robbing me of my livelihood.
So March of last year,
I went back to my doctor and I told him I was ready to begin
tapering off my antidepressants.
He recommended a tapering schedule for me. Knowing my
previous experience of coming off Effexor years ago,
I said to him
I insisted that I wanted the regular schedule that he was ready
to put me on and I wanted him to taper it out even more. He
obliged. At the time,
I felt like, I felt good about the schedule that I was
on. I felt that it was going to allow my body enough time
to adjust to a new chemical normal. In May of 2019,
I took my last dose of Effexor and I braced myself for a
short period of withdrawal symptoms because I had been here
before. I knew
what to expect for the most part. What ended up happening
was two weeks of brain zaps, agitation, anxiety
-so nothing out of the ordinary. Once I got through it,
I thought I was in the clear.
This is a part that I didn't expect. It ended up baffling
my primary care physician that he didn't even immediately
trace the experience back to the antidepressants.
But what happened after the last of my brain zaps was a two-week
grace period where I thought I had gone back to normal, but
then after that, I started getting migraines. If anybody has ever
gotten a migraine, you will know that it's not just a more
intense version of a headache. A migraine is a cluster of
neurological symptoms that can be debilitating.
You're hyper sensitive to light and sound, the pain is
unlike any headache that you've ever had before.
I just kept getting migraines every single day.
There was vomiting, there was nausea.
There was so much pain that the only relief that I found
was laying my head on the pillow.
So I went to see my primary care physician numerous times.
He prescribed me several medications.
Nothing worked.
I went to the hospital twice.
I ended up living like this for a straight month. For a
straight month,
I couldn't get anything done.
I didn't see my friends.
I was essentially debilitated and then I started researching
online and I wondered if (because I'd never had migraines
before) -I wondered if all the symptoms that I had been experiencing
could be ascribed
to the fact that I had recently tapered off my antidepressants.
I went online.
I looked on forums and I read other people's experiences,
especially people who had taken Effexor, and they reported
very similar experiences. Some had reported that their withdrawal
symptoms were so bad,
they ended up just going back on the antidepressants. Some
had compared the antidepressant withdrawal to opioid withdrawal.
I was mortified because this was nothing that anybody had told
me about. This is nothing like anything
I'd ever experienced.
When you go through depression and you're in your doctor's
office and you're talking about being put on an antidepressant,
this is stuff that they don't tell you.
My doctor didn't even know that antidepressant withdrawal,
Effexor withdrawal, could lead to the symptoms that I had
been experiencing. How I knew that my month-long experience
of having daily migraines could be ascribed to my antidepressant
withdrawal was that once I finally got better,
I immediately signed up for a care clinic. For those of you
who don't know,
I live in Canada.
Here, we have universal healthcare, which is great.
I am so grateful for that but it has its pros and cons. For
the most part,
it has more pros than cons, which is why I'm very happy for
it. But I had gotten to the point where I felt like my
primary care physician wasn't giving me the quality of care
that I needed for the specific problem that I had.
So I paid $5,000 at a private care clinic, where they did
top-to-bottom tests on me and I could meet with a new family
physician who could spend all the time with me in the
world. She confirmed that my month-long experience of
having migraines was the result of tapering off my antidepressants.
It's been a year now since all of that happened and I have
not been back on antidepressants since. Knowing myself and
knowing my history,
I know I feel like I'm perhaps more prone to symptoms of
depression and anxiety than other people are, so I wouldn't
be surprised if in the future I found myself experiencing similar
symptoms. At this point,
I don't feel like I ever want to go back on antidepressants
and maybe that's a topic I can parse out in another video
but it was the fact that for me, antidepressants were so easy
to get on and so difficult to get off and the fact that I
knew that even as somebody who is more prone to depression,
there are more drawbacks to staying on depression medication
long-term than there are benefits.
I don't feel like it's my place to make a claim about antidepressants.
I'm simply sharing my experience here, but I guess this kind
of explains why I am
so passionate about plant medicine and so passionate about
promoting the effects of plant medicine here on this channel.
It's because I look back on what I went through and it's not
lost on me the amount of privilege
I had to just be able to suffer through a month of daily
migraines and to give myself permission
to bear through it,
hoping that I would get to a point where my body could adjust
to a new normal.
I know most people have jobs to go to and bills to pay and
for a lot of people (and I've since learned through the the
discussions that I've had with people), most people choose
to just stay on their antidepressants as opposed to dealing
with the withdrawal symptoms.
Basically, that's all I wanted to make this video today to
talk to you about, was I wanted to open up about my experience
on antidepressants and my experience coming off them. Hopefully
this will give you more perspective about why I am passionate
about the topics that I'm passionate about here on this channel.
I hope this place can continue to be a judgment-free zone
where we can open up about our experiences because the last
statistic I read about Americans on antidepressants is that
11 percent of Americans are on antidepressants. Over quarantine
(so February to March), that number increased by almost 20%
That's a lot of people on antidepressants. Again,
I'm not criticizing antidepressants as a resource and as
a tool for the people who are suffering and going through
crisis situations -you know, very low points in their lives,
but we need to be having more holistic conversations about
antidepressants so that every single one of us can make the
best choice for ourselves regardless of what that choice
might be.
Thank you so much for sitting with me
through this video.
I would be curious to learn about your personal experiences.
If you're open to sharing them in the comment section below.
Give this video a "like" if you enjoyed it.
I will see you in my next video.