Paranoia

One of the worst things about suffering a mental illness is the level of paranoia you start to feel with things like medication changes. Now, in the age of the internet, you can feed that paranoia by over-researching.

Having just started my new medication Effexor, I have been doing lots of reading about it to know what I might be in for regarding possible side effects. What I also discover was that I had been given a generic brand of the drug by the pharmacy, which a lot of people have noted seems to have much worse potential side effects than the brand name version of the drug.

So in my paranoia I asked my Mum if she would go to the pharmacy today to see if she could exchange the generic one for the brand name version, which they were happy to do.

Great!

Except the brand name version capsules contain a number of tiny beads instead of the two tablets that were in the generic version, which made taking a half dose easy (as recommended by my doctor for the first four days to allow my body to get used to the medication).

More internet research. Apparently you can open the brand name capsule and sprinkle the beads on food if you don’t want to swallow the capsule. The challenge for me tomorrow will be trying to measure out just half the beads to take. It will be impossible to work out exactly half as the beads are apparently very small and numerous, but this is what I will try.

Hopefully all will go well and after the next two days I can just go straight to taking the full dose capsule as my doctor recommended.