I tried this, but it heavily backfired on me. My confused half asleep brain wouldn’t understand the mystery symbols on my screen and I would end up holding down the power button and falling back asleep…

Love the shot! Whatcha drinking?

I don’t know. That’s the problem. I have never felt like anything had much of an effect beyond some obvious intitial negative side effects. I think because mental health medications are so slowly acting that I just cannot for the life of me me tell anything.

Here are my experiences:

DAILY MED TRIALS:

Escitalopram (Lexapro), an SSRI, 10 mg - Initial intense fatigue that sucked major ass. After about 1-2 months, the fatigue faded and my mood got a bit elevated and my anxiety lessened a little bit…but I’m not sure how much of that was the medication versus natural mood cycles. A major life stressor happened though and my mood and reactivity started to go all over the goddamn place again, but even worse than before because of the greater stressor. I discontinued the medication after several months.

Lamotrigine (Lamictal), an anticonvulsant, 200 mg - The titration process is incredibly, painfully slow so you don’t have a dangerous reaction to it. I experienced very intense itching almost every time I would step up the titration process, but after a while on any given dose, it went away. And then when I had bigger step ups near the end, I didn’t get the itching side effect any more. I was in the depths of my major life stressor and found that it didn’t seem to help a ton with my mood fluctuations and reactivity. It is really hard for me to tell what sort of effects it may have had if at all…sometimes I would think that I felt a lot calmer, but other times not at all. I was on it for much longer than escitalopram, and am almost off of it. The step down from this takes a while too, but not as long as the step up.

Quetiapine XR (Seroquel XR), an antipsychotic, 50 mg - This one scares me and I don’t like the idea of being on it long term. I am on a very low dose… generally at this level it is only used for sleep and anxiety, so the negative long term effects are mitigated a bunch. Like escitalopram, I noticed initial fatigue on this which really sucks, but it went away after a while. I also experienced intense hunger initially (which is how many gain weight on it), which again seems to have gone down after a while. I have been on it since late January and I have been objectively way more stable than I have been in the past year. I am less reactive and am baseline a bit more chilled out and less anxious about some things. But I’m not sure if that has to do with more distance between the life stressor and having gone through more intensive therapy while on it. Needless to say, I guess I’ll be sticking with it for a while, even if I’m not sure about the long run.

Many people comment on sexual dysfunction with SSRIs and antipsychotics. I had sexual dysfunction before these meds, so this has not impacted me to my knowledge, but it’s something to think about. Lamotrigine does not affect sexual function.

“AS NEEDED” (NOT DAILY) MED TRIALS (taken for anxiety and acute distress):

Propranolol, a beta blocker/high blood pressure medication, 10 mg - I found it useful before a job interview once, but otherwise I did not find it of much benefit or noticeable effect.

Hydroxyzine (Atarax, Vistaril), an antihistamine - I was initially given 25 mg but found it way too sedating. I now have 10 mg pills which aren’t very sedating, but I’m not sure how helpful they are.

Clonidine (Catapress), an alpha agonist/high blood pressure medication, 0.1 mg - This is incredibly sedating. I split the pills in half to 0.05 mg, but it still can be pretty sedating. I found the sedative effect a bit desired when I have been freaking out, but other times it makes me more depressed when I am already not feeling good.

Overall, I have not found “as needed”/prn medications too useful to me. If I am having an acute anxiety attack, they take too long to “kick in” to have much benefit. (Can be like an hour to start noticing an effect). And if I take one at the wrong time, I can get depressed from them tbh. They are useful if you can anticipate when you are going to be anxious (like the job interview I said).

Good luck out there.

Thank you. That’s very kind of you, but I think if I wasn’t going to figure out anything at this point in my life that it’s just not going to happen. To describe things to people, I describe any sort of sensation that I feel in my crotch region as no different than if you were to touch your own elbow. You can touch or rub or lick or suck your elbow any which way you want, but it’s not going to feel at all pleasurable (I’m sure there are some people but that’s not really the point of my analogy).

It won’t necessarily feel uncomfortable, just won’t have any pleasure associated with it. If it’s so complicated that I can’t even figure out where to begin with finding even mild pleasure, then I don’t think there’s hope. It’s likely broken. Idk. I’m 32 btw.

As someone with a clitoris, sadly a (likely rather small) population of us still will never know. Mine seems to have come out nonfunctional from the factory. Sometimes I wish I could feel sexual pleasure like how a majority of the planet seems to.

Huh? Hasn’t this been known for years and years already? This isn’t groundbreaking. I was taught this in school many years ago.

Right??? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here that no one else is noticing the problem with that comment.

I’m not advocating on tolerating the intolerant. I’m simply not pro-eugenics…

It’s just odd to me that you are advocating for genetic control over others who want to use genetic control over others…

CBT always felt invalidating to me. I felt DBT was a lot more palatable and non-judgmental/non-invalidating. I’m not sure if it works for rumination specifically though.

I have always been a very socially anxious person. I can look incredibly confident in settings when I get comfortable. But then random things trip me up. I’ll be having a conversation with my friend/coworker and then just randomly clam up at a random question like “what did you have for breakfast?” I’ll like stammer and instinctively avoid the question because it catches me off guard and I have mega anxieties about feeling judged or rejected. But most of the time I’m fine lol. I even have talked about a lot of incredibly personal things with her! Yet I still do this on occasion with random basic things hahaha!

There was this one time where I got to attend a conference for work in a nice hotel. The first night I got there, I was so hungry and I was freaking out because I didn’t know how to find the hotel restaurant and it was the only thing open late. I asked the person at the check in desk where it was and they gave me general directions. I just for the life of me could not figure it out and could not bring myself to ask anyone else. I was straight up panicking. I went up to the hotel room and thought maybe I’ll just order room service but I was continuing to panic from earlier and couldn’t bring myself to call and try to figure out how to do that. I was so fucking starving but my terror of unknown social situations was preventing me from fucking eating of all things. I cried for like 20 minutes in the hotel room.

Then I mustered up the courage to go back downstairs and look for the restaurant again. Turns out it was outside and that’s why I couldn’t figure it out earlier. Had dinner and felt totally fine and comfortable and relieved. I interacted very normally with the wait staff!

It’s just random things like that. A lot of things go along find but then random things will put me in a panic for dumb reasons lol.

It’s weird because I feel like I have experienced that before. Before I was a daily coffee drinker, I would have a large one only very occasionally. Absolutely wrecked my stomach but sometimes I felt almost…euphoric? I always wondered if that was at all related to the coffee or was just random euphoria. Once I started drinking it more often, it never seemed to happen anymore.

You’d think I could just one day drink an amount excess of what I normally do, but that doesn’t seem to work either.

Is this ragebait?

Thank you. I’ve been on a journey this past year. So far I have finally started to accept myself and feel like my struggles and experiences are still valid and important. Been doing ok with it lately. But my coworker’s father has been in very ill health over many months and at this point he very well never make it back to being healthy. It’s slow and horrific and I fear he will die.

Obviously this is huge and traumatic and painful for her. I cannot imagine what she is going through.

But that little voice in my head is creeping back in telling myself that I should feel bad for making a big deal out of things in my life when people are going through shit like my coworker. Idk man.

So far this has been working for me! Didn’t figure this out until my 30s lol.

But what’s the approach for when you go to bed and wake up and it’s a mess? Because brushing it at that point just turns into the OP also.

Hmm I dunno then. Interestingly, there are actually a couple of drugs out there for women with low sexual desire if it bothers them in an attempt to help it. Idk how well they work and to my knowledge, I don’t know if there are any for men. I mean, obviously there are erectile dysfunction meds for men, but I don’t know that they impact desire.

Ah ok. If this happened in later life, then I wouldn’t say it has anything related to the asexuality label. Reads a bit more like depression to me tbh.

I relate to this so much. Sometimes in my happy periods, I get very anxious. Because I know how hard I crash. I know how painful it feels and how difficult it is to function when it occurs. And while I always feel “cured” when I’m happy again, the back of my mind knows that the next ride of the rollercoaster is inevitable.

I guess I just wish the valleys weren’t so steep and deep. A lot of people irl seem to have a smaller amplitude than I do.

I very much relate to this. Been in an intensive group DBT program and idk if it’s helping, but it’s way more than a one on one therapist has ever done for me. It’s not solving all my problems, but it does help.

I’m not neurodivergent tho, just born too sensitive I guess. It sucks sometimes because it seems like most people don’t feel pain as intensely as some of us do. I probably have BPD traits.

I almost lost my job several months ago when a period of extreme ongoing workplace stress exacerbated my natural predisposition for this. Been many months now and I’m still employed. :)

Did you used to be able to and now you can’t?

I’ve never in my whole life been able to feel pleasure masturbating (and so I’ve never tried sex). I only seem to get turned on in very niche circumstances, and it has always been fleeting. Been like that my whole life. I’ve always had FOMO with it. Yeah, there is the label “asexual” and blah blah blah…but it’s like every piece of media and every human in your life seems to be able to get this amazing rush of endorphins and I can’t. I just wish I could experience it.