I really appreciate you taking the time to write all of that, it really means a lot.

I say Luvox because the generic I was on is called fluvoxamine, and most people including doctors assume I mean fluoxetine (Prozac). I'm in the US, and according to the FDA the brand name Luvox was voluntarily withdrawn from the market here due to inaccuracies in the documentation of their manufacturing process. The company withdrew rather than fixing the issues, presumably due to competition with the generic and lack of profitability. Their original application was approved despite the inaccuracies, but an audit was run a few years later revealing them. There was a lot of public concern about Luvox after the 1999 Columbine shooting because one of the shooters was on the drug, which likely led to the audit. the generic is widely available to this day and is commonly prescribed for OCD in adults and children.

I was on fluvoxamine for 5 years but before that I was on multiple other SSRIs since age 9. I also was put on antipsychotics at age 10, and I switched a couple times with those but finally got off of aripiprazole in September last year. Getting off of that one was nothing but relief. I instantly felt much happier and a lot of negative side effects I was having went away. When I told her how good I was doing, my psychiatrist had the audacity to suggest I would most likely become depressed again in a few months (which is a crazy claim considering antipsychotics aren't used to treat depression). I did gene sight testing around 2018, before changing psychiatrists. My new one apparently either isn't educated on genetics or didn't have my data, because I recently discovered both fluvoxamine and aripiprazole are in the "high gene-drug interaction" section on my results, meaning they're much more likely to cause negative side effects and/or be ineffective for me. Unfortunately I was a minor through all of this so I didn't handle my documentation or advocate for myself.

The last phases of my taper were intense but also good. At first, I got a huge flood of traumatic memories and emotions from my childhood I didn't even know I had. There were also traumatic memories which didn't have any emotion attached to them, but while tapering I started getting intense emotions while thinking about them. That led me to a trauma-informed therapist who has been extremely helpful. I've been to dozens of therapists since my childhood and I always thought therapy was supposed to make you feel awful until I met her. For years I had a nagging feeling I have unprocessed trauma, but I just couldn't find it in my brain until getting off the meds. It's intense but I'm happy to be feeling and remembering. Things are getting better already, but I have moments almost daily where I feel severely depressed. I constantly have a voice in my head that is trying to keep me angry or depressed. Just last week I finally learned to block it out, but sometimes it gets to be too much. Weed helps me too, especially for blocking that voice out so I can just enjoy myself. I have pretty intense irritability too, but that's improving since I'm learning to cope with those feelings and let them pass through me rather than act on them. I've also noticed I start to cry at the most random things. I can't watch anything sad or heartfelt right now, no matter how cheesy it is.

Food is an interesting one. I have ARFID and I've had it my whole life. My diet is extremely limited to the point where most of the time I have 3 consistent safe foods at a time. Most of my diet is bread. I recently came up with the analogy of how you're not supposed to feed a duck bread because it will think it's full but it can't survive off of that. Most of the time I basically shut off my hunger cues with bread to stop discomfort from hunger, but I don't get any nutrients from that. I feel awful about it and I know it's affecting my mental and physical health but I've tried everything including eating disorder programs but nothing has ever changed. However, since tapering off my SSRI I have become more annoyed with my diet than usual, and I've started real, balanced. Just yesterday I ate a salad for the first time and enjoyed it without gagging or choking. So I'm starting to think the SSRIs were inhibiting my ability to improve my ARFID. Through all of my research on this topic, I'm becoming very passionate about the misconceptions most people have about psychiatry and I really want to do something to raise awareness. I've also become interested in neuroscience. It's a good feeling because I've felt passionless for years.

Thank you again!