Now I’m bent over our end table sorting through bottles with pills and labels, searching for my seroquel. This month the dosage has also changed—from 300mg to 200mg. Seroquel was originally used to treat only schizophrenia, and is considered to be an antipsychotic. But, again, they’ve found it works in treating acute mania in bipolar patients. So, again, it’s also now being used to treat post traumatic stress disorder. It’s mainly for the unbearable insomnia associated with both mania and post traumatic stress disorder.
Sometimes the old recordings in my head get so loud I can’t think, or sleep. But, sometimes I’m too scared to sleep. Sleep brings the nightmares of the things that happened. Replaying, replaying. But, at the same time, being awake isn’t much easier. Fifty mg of seroquel usually knocks someone out within 10 – 15 minutes. It took 400 mg to finally get me to sleep at night, knocking me out—past the noise in my head, and the feeling that I was about to be attacked at any moment … by someone who was no longer there to hurt me. That was over a year ago, during my last and what I wish to be my final hospitalization. Now I’m at 200 mg.
Then there is the klonopin—two pills that equal 1 mg. These two tiny, white pills don’t really do much for me as far as I can tell, but I take them anyway. Klonopin is used to treat the anxiety that is so intrinsic to PTSD which is still considered to be a type of anxiety disorder. I take them for good measure, though when I run out that will be it. My doctors finally started weaning me off of them. Perhaps if I suddenly stopped taking them some strange, primitive part of my mind would miss them. And that could keep me up for an hour more than I can afford to spend on another night, doing all I can to fall asleep. Another night spent feeling alone, though I’m not.
PTSD is not a new disorder. There are written accounts of similar symptoms that go back to ancient times, and there is clear documentation in existing, historical medical literature starting with the Civil War, when a PTSD-like disorder was known as “Da Costa’s Syndrome.” There are particularly good descriptions of post-traumatic stress symptoms in the medical literature on combat veterans of World War II and on Holocaust survivors (National Center for PTSD).
