The Loneliness of This Misery

Besides all the pain, anxiety, sleeplessness and other somatic and psychological symptoms of tapering off these meds the loneliness of it all can be overwhelming, for me at least it is. I thought maybe it might be a good thing for some of us here to talk about.

I’m currently on 7.5mg of mirtazapine. In January 2025 I was put on, or should I say allowed myself, stupidly, be put on 50mg of doxepin. Since I’d been on it before it was thought by my psych doc it would be ok to try a low dose of it for the off label use to address pain & sleep. Well the long story short it did not help AT ALL and it was agreed that I should taper off. I’d tapered before and had no problems doing so. WELL!!! this time has turned out to be VERY DIFFERENT. I’m having a miserable time of it. Lots of awful symptoms, poor sleep being the worst of them all. I’m waking up multiple times a night with a number of other symptoms that I won’t bore anyone with here.

But the awakenings force me to get up in the middle of the night into a dark, tomb silent house & im alone in the house. The quiet, the dark and knowing it’s just me here, it all comes crashing in on me. It’s a heavy & frightening loneliness at times.

As many have shared here: family and friends have no understanding of what the misery of getting off these drugs is truly like. You can do your best to try and explain but without actually experiencing it there’s no way they will ever fully understand. That only adds to the loneliness, at least it does for me.

And other thing I’ve noticed that I have to do my best to resist- I tend to withdraw from life. Either I’m too tired and feeling to unwell to participate or I think who would want to be around someone that feels as. crappy as I do?? So I retreat.

Just saying this tapering hell can make one feel pretty damned lonely at times.