Trying to quit has evolved into Trying to Quit Chantix. There are some early, but disturbing, bits of anecdotal information out there on the mental side effects of this drug for a small subset of people.
The indie music world lost guitarist/keyboardist Jeffrey Carter Albrecht on Sept. 3 of this year in Dallas, Texas. Carter Albrecht, best known for his work with Edie Brickell, was shot by a gun-toting neighbor when he was mistaken for a burglar. He had recently begun Chantix and in a life unmarked (as far as we can know right now) by domestic abuse, on that night he got into a physical altercation with his girlfriend, and then ran out of his house. Evidently, the pounding and noise prompted the neighbor to shoot-to-kill.
The girlfriend, Ryan Rathbone, has come out in her grief to point to Chantix as a potential variable which resulted in such foreign behavior by Carter Albrecht.
Closer to home, mental health professionals are seeing effects of Chantix in some acute situations, and quit smoking blogs are rife with odd stories of changes in internal states of being.
I have mentioned here before that the pill has visited me with some strange effects. In detail, I can tell you that my Chantix odyssey has been a burst in creativity, sleeplessness and the kind of energy that is just shy of scary.
These effects were not immediately noticeable in either the first or second trials of the drug. What was immediately apparent is that the desire to and thoughts of smoking became, well, unimportant.
Three weeks or so in, I began to eschew sleep and write with a vengeance. Once the writing was done, I was still not able to quiet my brain enough to put head to pillow and slumber. I would catch a few hours, and be ready to go again in the morning. I am sure this tendency to wake immediately and fully is partly inherited; I hold dear my sweet stepfather's description of sleepily watching my mother wake up in the morning. He was a big one for substituting noises for words. His noise for this daily visual? Doink!
Back to Chantix; the brain buzz got to be too much, and I quit it, only to pick up the weed.
Which I hated. This resulted in my experiment of modifying the dose. I halved the pill, and took it once a day. All went well, again for about three weeks, when my internal engine again ramped up. Creative juices flowed, ideas were rampant and the midnight oil was burned, most often in service to getting my thoughts down, sketching out ideas and sending out queries.
I am currently four days off the pill, but its after-effects persist. I know, because of the last time, that it should be about another five days until my being is back to its homeostasis. A boring homeostasis; predictable routine, amid long bouts of staring at a blank word document taunting me to write something, anything.
Hypergraphia is a condition in which the need and urge to write is untrammeled. My friend, neurologist Alice Flaherty, wrote an entire book about hypergraphia. It was born of her experience after losing twins postpartum and suffering a breakdown of all the mental constructs we take for granted on a day to day basis. The book is a wonderful read, peppered not only with the brain basis for writing and other high-level (read: human) functions, but with well-researched and interpreted stories about writers with whom we are all familiar: Dostoevsky, Plath and James, both William and Henry.
I am loathe, on the one hand, to give up the sheer production value that has come with this drug. On the other hand, I just want some good dreamless sleep.
The fine print on Chantix, which was fast-tracked through the FDA because of the promise it showed in clinical trials, lists as infrequent the following side effects: aggression, agitation, disorientation, dissociation, abnormal thinking and mood swings. Rare side effects are listed as euphoria, hallucination, psychotic disorder and suicidal ideation.
One wonders if Carter Albrecht's chemistry was of the kind to invite both the infrequent and rare side effects of this new compound. A compound born in a laboratory, new but targeted at specific receptors. Problem is, we humans are enough divine that chemistry, with its lockstep logic, falls short of predictable; a predictability that may only become apparent when applied to the population at large. We are all part of clinical trials these days.
It is far from hard science, but personal experience with a change in internal state because of a drug leads me to mourn this musician, Jeffrey Carter Albrecht, in a personal way, as a casualty of the desire to try to quit.
Google Carter Albrecht on myspace to hear his music. It's good stuff. I remain suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.
