Have you ever had a menagerie of issues that resulted in a Lexapro prescription? I know I sure have. That was a wild time, taking those little yellow pills every morning. I’d stumble out of bed, make a cup of coffee, and take my Lexapro. That was my morning routine, and it seemed like a good one. Self care is good, treatment compliance is good-- but the effects were far from it.
I’ll preface by saying that Lexapro undoubtedly helps a lot of people. Some even say it changed their lives entirely. I’m not an anti-medication wingnut by any means; I take medication every day. Just not Lexapro. Definitely not Lexapro.
After my third day on the stuff, my heart raced for a solid four hours a day, every day. Every time I drove my car, I very seriously considered rear-ending anyone who was in front of me. Bridges carried a similar appeal; “one sharp pull to the right and I’ll go flying off,” I thought. I didn’t want to injure myself-- I just wanted to break things and cause disaster. This is particularly interesting when you consider that I’m one of the most law-paranoid, passive weenies you could ever have the poor fortune of meeting. I mainly keep to myself, avoid confrontation/destruction, and live my own quiet, removed life. Not on Lexapro, though. On Lexapro, everyone I saw deserved a punch in the head. God help anyone who I caught walking too slow, those poor souls. My head was full of cartoonish violence, basically in the form of aggravated slapstick comedy.
After the first long day of being irate and unable to focus, I laid down in my bed to get some rest. I sat there in the dark, squeezing my eyes shut and trying to make my brain shut up. Surreal sounds echoed in my ears; gruesome images flashed before my closed eyes. This would last until four or five in the morning, at which point I’d spontaneously pass out in a weird position. Around 8 a.m., my alarm clock would ring, and I’d drag myself out of bed, damning reality as a whole while making coffee and desperately trying to do the homework that I couldn’t do the night before because-- here’s another cool Lexapro bonus-- I couldn’t make sense of words. Every sentence I read was a jumbled mess with zero meaning, and every paragraph I typed read like a Charles Manson prison interview. “It must just be the adjustment period,” I thought. So, I would go to class and zone out, ignoring the professor when they told everyone to submit their homework on their desk. There’s nothing like adjusting to freshman year with an absurd carnival of violence, self-harm, and hallucination following you around to keep you from getting lonely.
After a week and a half of this, it occurred to me that Lexapro might not be the right medication for me. This was confirmed when I unconsciously painted my entire dorm room with mud and attempted to sacrifice my roommate to the ghost of Haile Sellassie. I promptly visited my psychiatrist and explained my condition to her.
“That’s not good at all,” she told me. “I can’t allow you to take Lexapro anymore, even if you wanted to.”
She wrote me a new prescription for an entirely different medication and sent me on my way. To this day, I’m still taking the new stuff, and it’s working great. Now that the fog of my psychological menagerie is reduced, I finally have enough motivation to strategically disassemble parked cars.
Lexapro wasn’t right for me. But don’t let that discourage you, a person with an entirely different physiology from myself, from taking it as prescribed. If it makes weird things happen that are out of the range of normal side effects, then you should probably stop taking it. If it works for you, keep taking it. I’m no doctor, after all.
