Kenilworth Clinic

When I saw the sleep doctor he prescribed me Melatonin, anti-depressants and a muscle relaxant to take at night.  I reluctantly started taking the medication, when I say reluctatly it is because I really wanted to believe up until now that this was a medical problem and not a psychological one.  The pills really didn't help though and so I decided to seek out a psychiatrists help to adjust my meds.  When I went to her, she told me that my medicine was below theraputic quantities, increased my Cipralex and muscle relaxant.  I really didn't feel the difference though and at the same time I had my friendship with my best friend come to an abrupt and unexplained end.  I was really devastated and so moved my follow up appointment with my psychiatrist forward a few days to the same day, and when I went to see her I told her that I had been considering taking myself to hospital as I was being plagued with thoughts of death over the nightmares.  She told me that I needed to be admitted to a psychiatric clinic for at least a week.  A week turned into 3 weeks.  During my time at the clinic I came to realise that my depression was a lot worse than I had thought and that most of my life, the way in which I had dealt with negative emotions was to supress them and distract myself, and that perhaps all these thoughts were manifesting in my nightmares.  I learnt better ways to deal with negative emotions whilst in the clinic, and one really great thing that came out of the time there was that I now have a whole new bunch of friends.  However, my nightmares persisted.  I then got chatting to one of the girls there who suffers from intrustive thoughts disorder.  I asked her to describe her thoughts to me and it was like she was describing my nightmares.  I asked her what medicine they gave her for it and she told me Seroqual.  I brought this up with my psychiatrist in my next session, and she admitted that there is little to no research which has been done on adult nightmares and that perhaps the Seroqual (an anti-psychotic) was worth a try.  So far there has been a minor improvement in the nightmares, but nothing to write home about.  However, the side effects are hectic, I get a very dry mouth, I am very drowsy the first couple of hours of the day and I can't have more than one drink or I get extremely dizzy.  I have had to adjust my work schedule because I can't really drive after 8pm as I take the medication at 5pm.  Also, Seroqual is almost R800 a month.  But I will pay it, because I am willing to do almost anything to make this problem go away.