I'm just see-through, faded, super-jaded, out of my mind

So my psych has got me on Strattera, the norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, again. For a month. If it doesn't work, she said the next course of action would be stimulants.

This comes as a relief.

That's an understatement.

Anyway, I'm on the Strattera right now--10 mg for the past five days, and tomorrow I go up to 18. Five days later I'll go up to 25, and then five days after that I'll go up to 40 for the remainder of the month. As I did last time I was on Strattera, I'm having a feeling of detachment, dissociation, disembodiment. Even on 10 mg. I feel like my body is...not quite mine. I look at my arms and they look far away. Sometimes everything in the room looks far away. I feel somewhat cut off from my emotions some of the time too. Which is not to say I cease having emotions, but they feel...I don't know, detached from me. I'm at a distance from them.

It's more weird than anything else. It doesn't upset me, thus far (when I went off the Strattera last time, it went away). I don't have a clue what's going to happen when my dose goes up, if even 10 mg can do this to me. Maybe I'll have an out-of-body experience? That would be fascinating.

Whatever the case may be, canoeing is over, so now I have...a week and a day of summer vacation before I go back to class until Thanksgiving break.

Edit: In doing some research, I found this:

"A high variety of factors have been implicated in the emergence of depersonalisation and derealisation episodes, including different drugs. A case abruptly induced by two applications of reboxetine, a selective and specific norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, is reported occurring in a 50-year-old woman treated for a major depressive episode. The episode rapidly remitted after discontinuation of reboxetine. Previous data having indicated a role of the serotonin system in the pathophysiology of the phenomenon, a noradrenaline induced serotonin liberation of Raphe neurons is suggested as possible underlying mechanism."

(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12947529)

So maybe this is something akin to that? I don't know. Depersonalization is reported as an occasional side effect of all of the meds that affect norepinephrine reuptake, as far as I can tell. Is this related? Will it become more related as my dose goes up? Who knows.

Here, have some music.

(You need to be viewing this in an RSS reader, like Google Reader or something, to be able to stream the audio. Sorry, but I don't know any other way to do this in Blogger yet. Or you can just go listen to it on http://hmmcclish.xanga.com.)

So a while back I took some songs that I strongly identified with and stuck them together in Audacity into one song to describe myself. It's been over a year since I did that, so I decided to make a new one. It doesn't quite describe the present--it describes the time period I just went through, namely, clinical depression and the trip to the hospital. Usually it's the lyrics; sometimes it's also the tone. 


These are the songs, in order (and sometimes the rest of the song besides the bit I pulled out has no relevance):


"It's All Your Fault" - Pink
"Bring Me to Life" - Evanescence
"Hospital" - The Used
"Fscene8" - The Medic Droid
"Wind Up Toy" - Alice Cooper
"Hospital" - The Used (again! It just happens to coincide well with this period of my life in more than one section)
"A Perfect Sonnet" - Bright Eyes
"Wave Motion Gun" - Marcy Playground (oh so much.)
"The Bird and the Worm" - The Used (they're just a good band for this kind of mood)
"Soldier Side" - System of a Down

Several of these helped me get through this time in my life...so thank you to the people who gave them to me. Namely...Vivian, Crow, Sarah, Rachel, and Henry. And my own searching.

Will probably get around to making one for my present state eventually.

Things that made me feel a little better #2

Yup! I got a job. Freed-Hardeman's iKnow program is the program that gives us MacBooks and iPods/iPhones (and, of course, charges us for them). Basically? I get to work for the IT department.