Anxiety relapse now involves panic attacks over fear of non recovery.
I have severe GAD and now am experiencing extended excruciating anxiety which over the past week now seems to involve panic attacks. I actually wish these episodes just all culminated in panic, because instead I just endure slightly lower than panic symptoms all day into the evening. I couldn't take it any more and after my fourth panic episode, I took 1mg of Lorazepam my psychiatrist proscribed.
My past:
After an extended period of mental health stability of about seven years, mainly managed by my longstanding psychiatrist in my hometown , I ventured to another part of the country to live. Two years in, I was so confident in my stability I consulted a psychiatrist there (with minimal background into my case) if I could go off my Remeron 60mg. The doctor acquiesed and gave a 15mg/month titration schedule, which I cut short ; I eventually cut from 30 to 0 at the two-month point.
When transpired after was a full mental health breakdown, with SEVERE INSOMNIA. Though the ER physicians tried to restore my mental health, they could not. Nor would they restore my full dosage of Remeron as it is considered off label. It just became a pharmacological mess, involving 15 ER visits, a lot of sedatives, and an endless feelings of desperation and constant thoughts of suicide. I had no choice but to shut down my life and go home.
That change in December, 2015 devastated my life. While I was able to go back to work for two months in 2016 using sedatives, the insomnia resumes and I strated to degrade.
I now live a very tenuous life back in my hometown in my parents basement, on medical leave for the second time from work and attempting to stabilize under the care of my longstanding psychiatrist, who is seeing me bi-weekly.
Having undergone a brutal stabilization process with the right meds in my 20s, now 36 I find myself back in a the stabilization process (which initially took five years). Though my long-standing psychiatrist has resumed treatment, resumed the full 60mg dosage, and is attempting to restabilize me and control my anxiety and insomnia, I struggle with the anxiety symptoms, setbacks, and uncertainty.
What has made this process seem just seem impossible now is that I am having panic attacks. After multiple days of panic, I am reliving extreme anxiety the likes of from the worst period of my life.
I know enough about panic to know that this fear of never recovering is the thought is at the crux of the panic cycle. But how do I disbelieve a thought which I obsess over that is hard to prove or negate. 'I will not recover. I am suffering so much.' And then panic happens.
