Here's some friendly midnight advice from your crazy Uncle Jake:

If any doctor tries to prescribe a psychotropic drug for you, the FIRST thing you need to ask about are the withdrawal side effects you'll endure when you stop taking it, which—trust me—you eventually will. The ramp-up and day-to-day side effects of taking psychotropics definitely come with their challenges, most of which are a welcome trade-off for eliminating the mental-illness symptoms they were prescribed for. But eventually something in your head will change for the worse and your doctor will start to tinker (rather blindly) with the drug or cocktail of drugs you've been having success with. And the fallout can be unpredictable and devastating.

I ended a seven-year relationship with Abilify over a week ago because within the last year I'd developed a hefty case of tardive dyskinesia that made my legs shake involuntarily, uncontrollably and—most important—embarrassingly. And my current doctor was pretty maybe kinda sure Abilify was the culprit. And at first it seemed she was right. The leg shaking started disappearing almost from the moment I started tapering my dosage.

But.

The leg shaking seems to have been replaced with a three-ring circus of embarrassing side effects: involuntary eye rolling, power squinting, face rubbing, scalp swirling, nose pinching, beard rubbing, chomping, grunting, hyperventilating, spasms down the back of my neck, and an increasingly obvious sense of fogginess and confusion—all of which started manifesting themselves since I took my final tapered dose of Abilify. I'm so miserable I can hardly stand it. And my face is raw from the constant rubbing.

I have two choices: Go back on Abilify and (maybe) trade back my new side effects for my old ones, or stay the course and endure the withdrawal side effects until they (hopefully) go away. I have NO intention of reliving the withdrawal side effects I've survived to date so I'm going to stick with the plan and hope for the best. But I can honesty say that if the doctor who first prescribed Abilify for me could have impressed on me the degree of severity and misery I'd have to endure in my eventual withdrawal, there's no way I would have started taking it. There have been entire days over this last week where depression seemed exponentially easier to endure than withdrawal. Hands down.

You know that fogginess and confusion I mentioned two paragraphs ago? And you also know how in real life I'm a professional writer with (if I may indulge in some immodest immodesty) a quick wit and some mad typing skilz?

It took me almost two hours of intense concentration and multiple fits of intense face rubbing to write this, what should have been a 20-minute post. And I'm beyond the capability of proofing it.