Something Terrifying Today - Hallucination

Post Reply New Topic

I was in therapy today. I've recently started an SSRI, and I've become emotionally numb as a side effect. I was pretty tired, and I was staring at the floor.
The conversation was rather dull, and I realized things didn't seem right. Things looked off. The floor (a dark blue carpet) looked like waves below me.
At first, I thought it was just my eyes being weird. Then something came on, water in a pipe, or heating, and was making a lot of white noise. My brain interpreted it as the sound of waves crashing, and suddenly I was overwhelmed with this fear that I was about to drown.

I closed my eyes, and covered my ears out of fear. After about 30 seconds I looked around and everything was normal again. He asked me if I was ok, and I just said yes.
So freaking scary, and I don't know what caused it.

Maybe the medication you just started caused it.

I have a neuro-cardiac condition that makes passing out likely. Perhaps the meds as well... so hard to say.

Just read about Menieres, also a possibility.

I used to live near a train track. The slowly approaching train engine I got used to, but the sudden and unpredictable train whistles I never got used to. On at least one occasion, I incorporated the train whistle into a dream! And I think this is a relatively common sleep phenomenon.

Okay, so you were tired and the conversation was dull. Plain ol' sleep deprivation might well be a contributing factor. (And the SSRI might contribute both directly and indirectly by interfering with sleep, or maybe just interfering with REM sleep.)

I think it's entirely normal not to tell your therapist while it's happening. It's a self protective reaction. Now, that said, it might be a good idea to tell him the next time.

And your therapist just needs to realize, you tell him a lot, but you are a real person and you do have rights of privacy. That is, you get to determine the pace and timing of what you tell him.

It could be the SSRI, I know they can cause unpleasant and weird side effects for some people.

In his book Hello to All That: A Memoir of Zoloft, War, and Peace, John Falk talks a little about how Zoloft worked for him, whereas Prozac did not, even though both are SSRIs.

And like Sweetleaf says, side effects can vary widely.

And I'll add the standard proviso that it's sometimes important to come off a medication in steps.

A mere panic attack can be that weird.

They can be extremely unpleasant, but it's way short of going crazy.

There are a zillion ways to deal with it, and most of them work except for spending endless hours talking to a therapist about the deep-seated reasons you might have for having one.

My favorite is to focus closely on the somatic and sensory features of it while keeping in mind that it's only something your body is doing and you don't have to mentally agree with it right now.

I'm getting VERY strong episodic one-sided tinnitus with vertigo pretty regularly. Ménière's disease is very likely, or possibly a side effect of the high doses of Propranalol I take for Dysautonomia. I also have a condition that can cause subluxations of the inner ear which causes these things. It's pretty clear that what I experienced was a Ménière's disease esque attack that my brain didn't know how to deal with. Nothing certain though.