Do antidepressants help clear thinking or does it just dull strong thoughts/feeling - will I lose ME?

[RedorangeyellowBLACK]

I have had issues with my mental health for most of my life.

I am now 50 and when I say most of my life, it literally is. I have had anxiety, strange obsessional thoughts and processes, panic and fear of living since I was a small child in primary school. I recall nothing triggering this, I think it’s just my basic make up.

It has been a rollercoaster of an emotional journey over the last 50 years of my life.

I have tried everything (non-pharmaceutical) that I could physically afford. From endless CBT sessions, counselling, relaxation therapies, hypnotherapy, other talking therapies and weird whacky alternative stuff………….none have had lasting positive impacts on my MH because here I am still struggling (and not helped at all by the fact I am now in the throes of perimenopause).

One thing that I have never tried long term are antidepressants. That is simply because, and I’ll be frankly honest, I am absolutely terrified of them.

I am scared of ending up woolly headed, unable to think clearly, to have my senses, emotions and personality deadened and my brain and mind to be ‘taken over’ by pharmaceuticals (I know, even writing that down looks ridiculous but that is genuinely how my brain thinks).
I am also worried they will contribute long term to something terrible such as Alzheimer’s (my poor dm suffers and it’s hell).

Maybe they may deaden my senses and personality and I won’t know or care, maybe they will help turn down this internal dial I have on my mental and emotional health, the one that has been ramped up to overdrive since I was a small child and has left me in a state of permanent exhaustion.

I am scared (petrified) but nothing else has helped me. I just don’t want to carry on into my older years feeling this way anymore.

What will/could these meds do for me? Will I still be me? I don’t want to lose ME but to turn down everything else about me, if that makes any sense.

I tried the patches, then utrogestan which was just awful on my digestive system (even vaginally). Sadly I can’t have a Mirena as I have a failed ablation and scarring (currently awaiting mri’s for this). Needless to say, my gynae issues have just added to my woes lol!

@RedorangeyellowBLACK gosh you’ve really given it a good shot! How about combined Everol patch, it uses norethisterone I think as the progesterone part (absorbed through the skin).

Thank you CrystalMaisie, I’ll ask my gp about that one.

i only took a low dose and it made me feel able to be myself without the angst. My day to day life is much better with a little medication.

Sertraline, swinging between 50mg and 25mg, although went up to 100mg when I lost family

I'm struck by your opening post because that is always what I have looked for in anti-depressants and failed to find -- an improvementnin the clarity of my thinking.
I don't find that ADs 'deaden' me cognitively or make my thinking woolly. Thy blur emotion but not thought.
On the other hand, I don't think they improve my thinking either. Racing thoughts, agitation, lack of concentration, cognitive overload and switch-off have always been for me the most distressing feature of my depresssion and time and again I have tried one AD or another and found that they lift my mood slightly without touching these cognitive symptpms at all. I've come off them recently (yet again). I'm having psychotherapy and I think that this may be the only way forward that might help a bit.
Everyone is different though, and I guess that this thread is full of very diverse accounts of what ADs can and can't do! I hope it will be of some benefit to you anyway, as you decide what to do. xx