Zoloft

My son had been on a low dosage of Zoloft for several years.  The intent was to help assuage feelings of anxiety and mild obsessive tendencies.  He was anxious about change, in general.  Any disruption of of his life was always upsetting. Any new experience was greeted with an immediate dislike - even if he did really enjoy it.  The Zoloft seemed to help mitigate that.  In addition, he had a habit of asking the same questions over and over again.  Even the most patient eventually came to get annoyed by this behavior."I already answered that question!" and, of course, he would then ask it again.  The Zoloft, again, appeared to make this behavior a little more controllable.

With the advent of the "death spiral", our psychiatrist chose to start upping the dosage of Zoloft.  The strategy was to slowly increase the dosage of Zoloft staying at each new level for several days to check the outcome.  This strategy took us through about 4 weeks.  What we learned was that higher levels of Zoloft did nothing.  Also, because we filled prescriptions for a variety of dosage amounts, I can now make Zoloft change for friends ("I'll give you a 40 for a 20, a 10 and two fives.") and thus began our collection of popular psychiatric prescription drugs.

During this period (and still to this day), my son, completely aware that he was "not normal" began to speak openly about wanting to return to the "old me".  The visits to the psychiatrist appeared to lead him to believe that there would be some magical medication that could facilitate the return.  He really wanted each new dosage level to work and would briefly convince himself that it did.  That placebo effect would be effective for anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 hours.  He would then land with a thud understanding that there was no magic in "that" medication.  He desires for relief and healing were complicated by impatience. "I want to get back to the old me - now" he would say.  Even the understanding that it took many weeks to get away from the old me did not lead to a more patient approach.

We, of course, did not rely on pharmacology alone (and still do not) but more on this later...