please help validate my experience with akithisia
so last spring, i started taking latuda, really low dose, because abilify was causing minor weight gain and im vain so i had my psych make the switch lol. what followed was EASILY the worst year of my life. I couldn’t function - left work many times, missed appointments, missed school, couldn’t go in public because at any moment it could start, cancelled a trip with a friend, couldn’t sleep, maybe low key got dépendant on xanax bc it was the only thing that stopped the torture?? I thought that it was restless leg and felt so confused about how a common disorder was so extremely suicide-inducing. like why aren’t people killing themselves more? am i just weak? but i didn’t know it was akathisia until i abruptly stopped taking it after about nine months because it was just so unbearable and i was pretty severely suicidal. afterward my psych very casually said “it was provably akathisia,” she just seemed kind of surprised that it was the latuda and not the abilify. I tried to explain to people how much i was suffering but no one seemed to take it seriously. all i could think to describe it as was restless leg. obviously it was much more serious than that but now that I know what it is, i want to explain to my family and friends that I wasn’t crazy and that it actually was THAT bad. it was nearly daily. I actually can’t understand how I survived on it that long, because I thought about suicide daily and I felt like I was in a prison in my own body. I’m shuddering just thinking about it. please help me describe what happened so that i can justify my misery to everyone. thx