Akathisia

My descent into complete madness continues, ironically – I am convinced – as a result of anti-psychotic medication.  I am fairly certain that I am experiencing, and have been experiencing, the phenomenon of akathisia.

It is so difficult – impossible, I believe – to describe this thing of complete awfulness in any coherent or accessible way, but let me try.

I can’t stay still – I am experiencing severe anatomical discomfort, from the very core of my physical being.  I keep trying to move to combat it, but it never quite seems to work; the discomfort simply moves, or wasn’t where I thought it was.  Breathing is difficult, as if perpetually on the verge of a full-blown panic attack.  I am incredibly anxious and am almost completely consumed by a sense of terrified foreboding and/or danger.  Even that feels physical, which I know doesn’t make any sense, but I don’t know how else to put it.  Concentrating on this post (and anything else) is profoundly difficult.  My mind is racing – the pressure inside it again feels physical.  It literally feels like it is going to explode and on top of that, I keep feeling ‘zaps’ in my head (and elsewhere at times), a bit like if I had missed a dose of Venlafaxine, only much worse in severity.  I want to scream and shout and run around and bang my head off the wall and stab myself and cry.  Earlier I considered going to the petrol station, with a view to purchasing flammable liquid to set myself on fire.  Extreme perhaps (well…there’s no ‘perhaps’ about it, I suppose), but in a way I cannot explain, even the indescribable agony of burning (normally one of my room-101 style fears) seems preferable to the indescribable somethingness of this.

In a sense this could be described as a mixed episode with anxiety or something.  It is a bit like that, I suppose, except that it’s more.  So much horribly more.  It effects every conceivable part of me; mentally, physically, everything.  It burns through me, every vein, every nerve – it feels like much more than a mixed episode (as if they were not unpleasant enough), but in a way that has a very elusive and unobtainable description.

The aforelinked Wikipedia article on akathisia quotes some bloke called Jack Henry Abbot, who describes this horrific state much more eloquently than I have or can:

These drugs, in this family, do not calm or sedate the nerves. They attack. They attack from so deep inside you, you cannot locate the source of the pain … The muscles of your jawbone go berserk, so that you bite the inside of your mouth and your jaw locks and the pain throbs. For hours every day this will occur. Your spinal column stiffens so that you can hardly move your head or your neck and sometimes your back bends like a bow and you cannot stand up. The pain grinds into your fiber … You ache with restlessness, so you feel you have to walk, to pace. And then as soon as you start pacing, the opposite occurs to you; you must sit and rest. Back and forth, up and down you go in pain you cannot locate, in such wretched anxiety you are overwhelmed, because you cannot get relief even in breathing.

(c) Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast, 1981

That about sums it up, and yet it doesn’t, because it can’t be summed up.  There are no words of magnitude great enough to describe this, or so it presently feels to me.

I could stop taking the anti-psychotics, but what if ‘They’ start being all volatile again?  What if the gnome shows up and turns out to be some sort of manifestation of the evil ‘They’, or some equally belligerent being?  I am utterly terrified of what could happen if the hallucinations are allowed to continue to develop, and to that end I am fairly sure that I will just keep taking the tablets – though I may have to raid my stockpiles of Diazepam and Zopiclone to help me from completely losing the plot (as if it wasn’t lost enough!).

It is possible that it will pass (isn’t it?) – 300mg of Quetiapine, whilst not a terribly high dose overall, is quite high for a starting dose.  Maybe my body will inure itself to the drug.  I do hope so, because this is unbearable.

I’ve been incredibly whingy on this blog of late.  I’m sorry.  I suck.  On the bright side, I might have found myself a group of suitable psychoanalytic therapists to help to try and make me sane when C condemns me to my dubious fate in a few months.  But it’s hard to think beyond right now at the minute.  I’m sorry.

Related posts:

1. Until It Sleeps
2. The Beauty of Blood
3. The Malice of the Voices of 'They'