Treatment Records

Evening.  Day 111 on Lexapro.  Mood: 6 in the field, ~4 in my room.  Today was another field day, only of the more interesting variety. My team surveyed all inventory sites and opportunistic roadsides (more or less places we pass and go "hey that's a good place to look for bees"), and those kinds of sites are far more enjoyable than agricultural fields. There's a much higher diversity of plants, and that greater plant diversity supports greater insect diversity. Plus, they tend to be just plain more interesting locations than fields of wheat or clover.  Ah, I paused for a long while as I was writing and I lost whatever train of thought I had.  The sites were interesting, I saw a ton of cool plants (but didn't catch a lot of bees). One of the sites was adjacent to a pasture where cows where grazing, and during some downtime, I walked up to the fence separating them from me. The level of intelligence in their wary faces as they watched this strange new...

Evening.  Day 62 on Lexapro.  Mood: 5ish. I guess.  I have really been unable to focus today; my mind feels like it's full of dandelion fluff and cattail fuzz. A lot of potential productivity, both in class and outside, was inaccessible as a result. Today was largely spent looking at specimens and trying to think of something productive to write. Or trying to find the motivation to do what I need to do, like call airlines to confirm seat assignments. Or email people to confirm classes to enroll in.  My brain just feels like it's made of smoke and kitten fur.  In other news, I feel like my terrible eating habits are just getting worse, oscillating between periods where I eat little to nothing at all and periods where I grossly overeat. It's getting to the point again that it's hard to tell when I'm hungry, or when I've had enough to eat, and I always, always  feel like I've consumed too much. Sometimes, it feels like a severe lack of control over ...

Hello everyone! Hope your days were good.  Today marks the end of my first week on Lexapro, and I'm quite happy with my progress - I no longer feel like garbage all the time, my outlook is less pessimistic, and I'm just generally more hopeful about life than I have been in a while. It's probably too early to draw any conclusions, but I think that the drug is doing exactly what it's supposed to, and with minimal side effects.  I've come to the conclusion that the increase in appetite I've noted over the past few days isn't due to some direct action of the drug. It's the result of my being significantly less depressed, and my depression acted to suppress my appetite. I'm not sure why it took me days to realize this, since I've known for about a year now that sudden decreases in appetite are a sure sign of an impending depressive episode. Feeling strongly compelled to eat more frequently than every twelve hours is strange for now, though eventua...