Hello, I have had depression and anxiety and ADHD my entire life, but was never treated; due to my family s stigma against mental illness and my own self denial about the need to be medicated. I recently had an extreme life crisis (that caused heartbreak, beginning of new job and moving to the other side of a city in 2 weeks time. It was so traumatic, that it increased the above issues. I had been abusing alcohol for about a year and a half. Then realized I had to stop. (just in the past 3 months), I ceased using alcohol but tried substituting with other medications, including suboxone, percocet, heroin (would never shoot, just orally ingested). I have always had a very high tolerance to these things. Even being prescribed pain killers in the past for a few operations, I would need to take 5 (instead of 1) to relieve pain, the amount of anesthesia it takes to knock me out confuses doctors etc. Even Novocane at the dentist, took 3x more to numb me than average patients. When I took the suboxone for extreme depression and anxiety (before going to a psych doc), I took 8mg (as a person never addicted to opiates) and had no side effects! I was told I should have been vomiting and should have gotten very ill from taking that much for the first time. Since I had gone to see a psych doctor, she prescribed me Celexa (after a month, depression and anxiety didn t change), Neurontin (after 2 days of use, didn t help, even if I took more), Xanax (.25; didn t help, so I HAD to take at least 1.5 or 2mg for my anxiety and depression to subside). Then, after about 2 weeks of taking Xanax, it stopped working!. I am now on Wellbutrin and it is NOT helping. My depression, anxiety and ability to focus is getting WORSE! I have 2 questions: 1) Is there an existing condition where some people are extremely tolerant of medications for no apparent reason (i.e never having been an addict?) I was honest with my psych doctor about abusing the .25 prescription of Xanax, but I was telling truth (and not abusing the drug itself. Meaning, I wasn t getting high or anything). Reluctantly she upped my dose to .5mg. I m going to tell her we need to try other things because I m not getting better. I m just afraid to tell her that I am very tolerant and build tolerance to medications very quickly. I don t want her to think I m a drug seeker, because I m not. I just want to feel normal and get better. 2) Based on my brief description of what I m going through, are there any medication combinations that you could reccomened?
Excellent questions. First things first: if you are abusing any substance, whether an illegal Chat Doctor.