Going to a psychiatrist and starting meds was the best decision I ever made. Every person's experience is different, I can only share my own. The hardest thing about psychotropic medication is that it is usually not a quick fix, more like a scavenger hunt. You have to find the "right" medication for you, the one that works for you is unique to your disorder, genes and brain chemistry. If you take the wrong one, it may work but have intolerable side effects or may in fact actually make your anxiety worse even after the first few weeks of adjustment have passed (some only temporarily worsen anxiety, but that stops after a few weeks and then it improves past baseline).

I'd been in therapy for about nine months before I took the plunge and gone through two therapists. Both of my therapists were upfront with me after I'd been in treatment for a while, like "in your case therapy is not likely to be sufficient", they told me they could only be so helpful when anxiety is very severe. Does therapy help me manage my anxiety? Yes. Does it help me stop it? Hell no. I wanted my anxiety gone and that's not something CBT is capable of, that's not what it's designed to do. It just teaches you to cope with your illness.

Because of that, on therapy alone it's basically an endless, futile, fruitless fight between my coping skills and reframing and whatnot...and my brain. My anxiety has a huge impact on my functioning. Therapy, exercise, meditation, all those things have their place, but they also have their limits. It's not a panacea. None of that shit could stop the infinite storm of anxiety in my brain, the ruminating, the panic attacks, the nightmares and insomnia and compulsive hair pulling to the point of bleeding. Medication was the missing piece for me. I work at a mental health agency IRL so I don't have the fear of treatment and medication that some seem to. Medication and therapy combined are clinically proven to be the most effective treatment for anxiety. Taking medication reduces your anxiety enough that you find that you are more receptive to therapeutic techniques, therapy becomes more useful and you're able to make more progress in therapy.

I take Citalopram/Celexa and it's magic. I have zero irrational anxiety - the sickening pit of dread is gone. I also take hydroxyzine for insomnia and for occasional panic attacks with success. Whatever is wrong with my brain that causes this intolerable anxiety and panic - Celexa fixes it. It's basically magic. Sometimes there's a biological cause, a difference in your brain, and medication gets to the root of the problem, and therapy and lifestyle changes only help manage the symptoms.

No amount of CBT in the world could do what Celexa does for me. The only problems I still have are my trichotillomania and uncontrollable nightmares, both of which have been my constant companion for sixteen years now. I have nightmares all night, every night, and wake up every 60-90 minutes usually in a cold sweat, shaking or crying, I've woken myself up by screaming, I've been convinced someone is in my room standing over me. They even reoccur throughout the night, when I wake up and calm down enough to go back to sleep, the dreams will often either reoccur or simply continue where they left off. I am so tired of it. I do not want to go to sleep. I just recently had my very first good dreams in sixteen years and I suppose I can thank my Celexa for that (honestly a miracle), but before that I couldn't remember the last dream I had that wasn't a horribly disturbing nightmare. Therapy was useless for it. I have found nothing to help.

SSRIs typically take 4-6 weeks to work and for the first few weeks, Citalopram did nothing. Nothing good, nothing bad. And then all of a sudden one day it worked, I realized...I'm calm. I'd forgotten what that felt like. It had been sixteen years since I'd known that feeling. And I'm going on four months and that feeling has persisted. It's beautiful. I feel normal. I feel like me and I'd forgotten who that was, the person who isn't constantly hounded and crippled by anxiety and panic. I still get stressed in situations that would cause a normal, non-anxious person anxiety, but the constant, sickening pit of dread is gone thanks to my medication. I can't say enough good things about my experience with Celexa. The day I went to the psychiatrist for the first time is the best day of my life, no contest.