EPISODE 10: ANGELA PEACOCK

Hello and welcome to “Akathisia Stories,” a podcast co-production of MISSD and Studio C.

MISSD, the Medication-Induced Suicide Prevention and Education Foundation in Memory of Stewart Dolin, is a unique nonprofit organization dedicated to honoring the memory of Stewart and other victims of akathisia by raising awareness and educating the public about the dangers of akathisia. MISSD aims to ensure that people suffering from akathisia's symptoms are accurately diagnosed so that needless deaths are prevented. The foundation advocates truth in disclosure, honesty in reporting, and legitimate drug trials.

On this episode, we hear from Angela Peacock.

At age 18, Angela went into the United States Army, where she rose to the rank of sergeant. Five years into her service, the U.S. invaded Iraq and Angela was deployed to Baghdad. For a variety of reasons, the deployment took a physical and mental toll on her, and within six months she was medevacked out of Iraq to recover in Germany. A day after her evacuation, one of the soldiers in the platoon was badly injured, requiring medical assistance in the same military hospital where she was recovering.

[Angela Peacock] And he was like clearly traumatized; you know, it had just happened 48 hours prior. I don’t know how to explain it. I just felt, like, out of control. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to handle it. I just said OK, I can’t hear any more; I’ve got to go. And I just walked out of his room and I walked down the hall, and I didn’t have anything in my mind at that point, to, like, go get help; I just saw the sign; it said “Psychiatry,” arrow. I was like, I need to talk to somebody right now, and I just walked straight into the office and I was like, “My soldier just told me what happened; I don’t know what to do; I’m having a hard time as it is, readjusting to Iraq — or back to Germany. I feel like I almost died,” and then the answer was, here’s a prescription.

We’ll have Angela’s full story in a moment.

September 20th is International Akathisia Awareness Day and an excellent opportunity to talk with friends and family about prescription drugs that can cause akathisia and other severe psychiatric side effects. September is also Suicide Awareness Month and MISSD calls on mental health and suicide prevention organizations to take akathisia out of the darkness and save lives.

[Studio C promotion]

Angela Peacock is a former U.S. Army sergeant and subject of the documentary film “Medicating Normal.” Diagnosed with PTSD after one deployment to Iraq in 2003, she was overmedicated for it for over a decade and a half. She suffered from akathisia during a medically supervised taper and during withdrawal. Angie is part of the “Medicating Normal” outreach team, having already facilitated more than 150 post-screening panel discussions with communities worldwide.  Her past roles include Veterans of Foreign Wars Legislative Fellow, Wounded Warrior Project Courage Award recipient, and finalist for Student Veteran of the Year with Student Veterans of America. She is a mental health advocate, writer, and YouTube creator who travels in her campervan across the United States with her service dog, Raider, in an effort to improve the mental health care system for veterans and civilians alike.

Before we get to my interview with Angela, we’re going to hear an excerpt from the 2019 documentary “Medicating Normal.” In it you’ll hear Angela in an on-screen consultation with military psychologist Mary Neal Vieten, who in the second part of the excerpt is leading a PTSD workshop that includes Angela as one of the attendees.

[From video.]

Angela: Like, I feel I’m waking up from a nightmare, like what the [expletive deleted] just happened to my life?

Mary Neal Vieten: You lost years of your life. You lost years of your career. There’s just so many things that are losses in here. That’s part of the situation that we’re in right now as a culture is that if you run to the doctor and cry about this, they’re going to say, oh, you have major depression and stick you on the next pill.

[Addressing PTSD workshop] Not one thing in the DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual, the 5th edition, the bible of psychiatry, not one thing in there is isolated by science. There’s no physical findings. There’s no PET scan; there’s no MRI; there’s no blood test. There’s just behavior that has been described by psychiatry and labeled aberrant and they set a cutoff and then they vote it into this book. The power that I had as a military psychologist to say you are not normal, I could destroy your career; I can send you home; I can label you with something that you can never overcome.

[End video clip.]

AM: My thanks to the filmmakers for the use of that clip. You can stream the full documentary at medicatingnormal.com.

Now, here’s my interview with Angela Peacock.

AM: Will you begin by talking about the sense of self that you had prior to being medicated? In our previous conversation, you told me that you were happy and energetic and good at your job, and that you had thrived in high school.

AP: So in high school I played a lot of sports. I was in all the leadership clubs. I did student council, Amnesty International. I was always engaged in a lot of activities, sports, always in good health, cheery, lots of friends, things to do on the weekends. And the military was much the same. I was really good at my job. I was physically active, physically fit. You know, I had a boyfriend. We would take weekend trips to the beach.

AM: How old were you when you went into the military? Were you 18?

AP: I went in at 18 and came out at 24.

AM: And why did you go into the military? This was during the high point of the Iraq war?

AP: Oh, no, I went in 1998, about six months after I graduated high school. And it was a couple of things. It was my grandparents were both in World War II. My grandma was an air traffic controller. My grandfather did sheet metal work for all the aircraft in the air force. So it was kind of like a family tradition and I was the oldest granddaughter, so it wasn’t, like, it’s expected but it was that I had the most exposure to it and I would see my grandpa in uniform and I just thought that would be something really cool to do. The second reason was I’m a very adventurous kind of person. I like to live life and have these experiences and meet people from other cultures. And I thought I was helping. And I was patriotic. And then the third reason was kind of — I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri; it’s kind of like if you grew up there you don’t leave and you get kind of stuck, and I didn’t have a lot of college money or a lot of opportunity, so I thought, well, if I could join the military and get some opportunity and make that career, that would be awesome. If not, I would get some college money and that would be awesome too. So that’s why I joined the military.

AM: Yeah. So you were in the military for several years —

AP: Seven years.

AM: — yeah, and eventually — I mean, if you started in ’98, you spent five years not seeing combat, and then —

AP: Yes. You train for it.

AM: — yeah, and then, all of a sudden, you’re in this cauldron.

AP: Yeah. And you train for, you know, warzones, but it’s not anything like training. You get there it’s completely different. You can train to an extent, and then when you’re there and it’s in your face and you’re, like, threat of your life is flashing before your eyes and you realize, like, this is not training; this is real. You know?

AM: Yeah. So you’re in the military and you were sent to Iraq, to Baghdad.

AP: Yes.

AM: You lost a lot of weight in Iraq and experienced a lot of trauma, and eventually you were medevacked out of Iraq when your convoy was hit?

AP: Well, it was the day before my convoy was hit, actually. I was medically evacuated for all the, like, rapid weight loss. I had nose bleeds. I was fainting. I had low-grade fevers, which slowly turned into, like, panic attacks because I was like I’m going to die in this place and I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I had gastrointestinal problems, migraines, all kinds of weird symptoms, fast heart rate, things like that.

AM: Were any of those things symptoms that you had ever experienced prior to going into —

AP: No. When I went into Baghdad, Iraq, I was healthy. I was just promoted to sergeant. I led a bunch of soldiers. I had lots of awards. I was completely healthy, 100 percent healthy. You can’t even enter a warzone without passing what’s called a pre-deployment screening, so you go through this whole physical; you get all your immunizations; you go to the doctor; you have a checkup; you know, they run blood work, everything. I was completely normal going into Iraq and then I quickly deteriorated very quick, and I think it was a mixture between, like, lots of vaccines, lots of antimalarial drugs that we were given, birth control shot I was given, environmental hazards, burn pits, just germs that my body wasn’t used to. I drank water that was probably not as safe but when you’re — it’s 130 degrees and there’s no water and they give you the water that you’re supposed to drink, you drink it. So a combination of all those things I think is what led to me being medically evacuated. And the day after I was medically evacuated is when my convoy was hit and my soldier came back on a gurney and landed in the same hospital that I was at back in Germany, and that is what led to me walking to the psychiatrist’s office because I had just thought I had so much trauma in such a short period of time I couldn’t contain it and the feelings that I was having and I was terrified and just like — I don’t know; I just felt like a boiling pot of tea and I blew. You know, the sound was coming out; I couldn’t contain what I was feeling anymore.

AM: Yeah. And what period of time was that between the time that you arrived in Baghdad and —

AP: Yeah, I would say six months. It was every single every day you’re driving in convoys through horrible neighborhoods, small arms fire all around you. You have to pay attention to every little movement in the crowd. You know, there are stories of people throwing grenades off of an overpass, like roadkill that had bombs in it, children carrying bombs and you didn’t want kids to get close to you, so you’re constantly, like, scanning to make sure you’re safe and, like, nobody’s going to get killed today. And then on top of that, I’m physically ill and I’m having all these, like, problems and I’m losing weight and I can feel my ribs and see my cheekbones in the mirror and I’m horrified and thinking I’m not going to ever see my family again. So it was like threat of constant death, either from the war or from this illness that I had contracted that nobody was going to help me with and being trapped in a warzone with no medical treatment. It was all that that kind of led up to — and then my soldier gets injured and he comes back on a gurney and I’m like, I can’t feel this anymore; like, it’s too much.

So what happened was after the soldier came back to Germany and I talked to his nurse and she said he’s going to go surgery; you can come by in like 48 hours; once he’s in the recovery room, you can talk to him then. I went to talk to him and I said, you know, like, what happened? And he told me, you know, we were driving through this very dangerous part and all of a sudden I heard an explosion and a bomb went off, and apparently some of the shrapnel went through my back, and I was bleeding out.

So he started getting really upset about it and he started yelling and, like, “I just want to go back there and I want to get revenge and I can’t believe that I almost died,” and he was like clearly traumatized; you know, it had just happened 48 hours prior. It was like — I don’t know how to explain it. I just felt, like, out of control. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to handle it. I just said OK, I can’t hear any more; I’ve got to go. And I just walked out of his room and I walked down the hall, and I didn’t have anything in my mind at that point, to, like, go get help; I just saw the sign; it said “Psychiatry,” arrow. I was like, I need to talk to somebody right now, and I just walked straight into the office and I was like, “My soldier just told me what happened; I don’t know what to do; I’m having a hard time as it is, readjusting to Iraq — or back to Germany. I feel like I almost died,” and then the answer was, here’s a prescription.

AM: And was that a pretty short conversation that led to that prescription being given?

AP: Yeah. I think 10 minutes. I remember sitting down and him closing the door. I mean, before he even closed the door it was — the conversation was over.

AM: Yeah. And so you went on Klonopin, and what happened and how long did it take before you started to get that sense that, you know what, these drugs are not only not helping me, they seem to be making things worse?

AP: Oh, that’s a good question. I started getting worse right away. But those symptoms were told to me to be — that’s post-traumatic stress disorder; that’s what’s wrong with you; you have post-traumatic stress. You know, and then I was like — I felt like I had caught this, like, brain disease or something. You know, so all my symptoms then went into this nice little box of that’s what PTSD is; this is what you’re suffering from. So, you know, I remember having, like, more panic attacks, not being able to sleep. I was scared to go outside. I lived in a barracks room really close to an airfield, and when the airplanes would land, I would get scared and, like, hunker down and it was like a startle response. So at the time, I thought it was post-traumatic stress disorder and I reported those symptoms and they told me that’s what it was. But now, looking back all these years, I’m like, no, that was a reaction to the drug immediately; that’s what was happening. You know?

So it took me — I mean, I think I started getting doubts a couple years later, like, why am I on all these meds; they don’t seem to be working? Why don’t I have friends? I’m not going out anymore. Why am I stuck in my house all the time? If these drugs work, why am I not better? These doubts started kind of coming up and I just happened to meet a psychiatrist who said, you know, who put you on all these medications? I was on 18 at the same time at this point and this was 2006. And he said, if I get you a hospital room, can I take you off a lot of them? And I said sure. So I went into the hospital for like 30 days; he took me off like 10 of the drugs. I don’t even remember how many, but — so I was left with like six or eight or something. I experienced withdrawal during that point in time. It wasn’t severe, though, but, again, I was still on a lot of other drugs. Then it just slowly over the years — I’d slowly taper one thing and then taper the next thing, and I think I was just taking like a harm-reduction approach, not that I had a goal in mind that I would get off of everything, but just slowly to see kind of would I feel better if I took less.

AM: Well, if we could back up. So we went from you being prescribed Klonopin to you being on this mix of 18 drugs.

AP: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

AM: How did that happen and what was the period of time over which that did happen? I assume that, you know, you’re on the drugs and then you’re having trouble sleeping and they prescribe something for that and then you’re anxious and they prescribe something else for that.

AP: Exactly.

AM: Yeah.

AP: Exactly. I started on one drug; it started with Klonopin. Then it went to 18 drugs within two years, so it was — first it was just the benzo. Then a new psychiatrist prescribed an SSRI. Then I couldn’t sleep, so then I went to like an Ambien kind of drug, like a sleep drug, Trazodone or something, and then I remember — I still had this rapid heart rate so they sent me to cardiology; then they put me on a betablocker. Then I started having stomach problems so then it was a pill for your stomach, another pill for headaches, another pill for chronic pain. And then that antidepressant didn’t really work so let’s switch to a new one. It just, like, slowly snowballed into 18 drugs. It was an antidepressant, a stimulant, a sleep drug, panic attacks, you know, a benzo for anxiety, pain medicine, headache medicine, stomach medicine, all of it together was 18.

AM: And as the number of medications multiplied, so did the diagnoses that they were giving you —

AP: Yeah.

AM: — to include major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, PTSD, panic disorder. And you say in the film that you wondered what all those labels did for you.

AP: Yeah. I think when I got that last diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder, by that time I was just so angry and so over it, it just felt like a ridiculous caricature of what help was supposed to be. It was, here’s a bunch of pills and here’s a bunch of diagnoses, and none of them really work for you but here’s another one; let’s just see if this one fits or sticks or whatever. And it just felt ridiculous to me at that point. That was a new therapist; I had just started going to him; I had a lot of hope. I was like, I got a new one; maybe this will really be the one that helps. And then he had me fill out a little quiz about my symptoms and then he pulled the DSM out, he looked in the DSM, and he was like, well, you scored high for generalized anxiety disorder. And I just thought, like, that’s not what I came here for. I came here to get help, not to get another label; you’re not even listening to me; you’re not even talking to me; you’re having me fill out a quiz. You know? And by that time, I was just so disillusioned by the whole thing.

AM: And by that time, as you say, you’re long out of the military.

AP: Yeah.

AM: But while you were still in the military, they declared you disabled and you recall in the documentary that you didn’t know how you went from this super soldier and sergeant to disabled at 25.

AP: Yeah. I mean, it was very drastic. It was I was winning boards, I was getting promoted, I reenlisted, I went into a war zone, I was taking care of my soldiers, to I can’t leave my bedroom, I can’t sleep, I’m panicking at every — every little noise makes me think it’s a gunshot. Everything is reminding me of war; everything is like I’m being traumatized just sitting here in my body. It was, like, overnight. It was so drastic. I mean, I just remember the last day I laid on the couch and I watched my husband at the time leaving for work and so he put his uniform on and he walked out the door and it was the first time that I didn’t have to put my uniform on and walk out the door in seven years and I was like, what am I supposed to do now? Like, I’m disabled. I was medically retired with an honorable discharge from the military after seven years of service. That was all I knew. I had all my eggs in that basket. And now I’m like completely medicated, can’t leave my couch, don’t leave the house, no friends, no relationships, no job; what am I supposed to do? Now I’m disabled.

AM: Yeah. You just mentioned your husband and he eventually left your marriage and you lost your career and in fact, you say, you lost your 30s.

AP: Yeah. The losses here are enormous. I lost my Army career. I lost my husband at the time, you know, ex-husband. I lost many relationships, like all my high school friends; I really broke contact with them because I’d been away for so long. Then I started to lose, like, my sexual feelings, my femininity. You know, I stopped, like, caring about personal hygiene. This is all from being in the mental health system, being on all these medications. I stopped leaving the house, disengaged from my community. My family — I stopped, like, talking to my sisters and brothers, like everything — I was just this person that lived in a house that read books and watched TV all day and chased, you know, doctors and therapists and told people what was wrong with me all the time and got new prescriptions all the time. And I just did what I was told. That’s what I thought I was supposed to do. You know? And I thought these people are going to help me and I’m going to get my life back. And I mean, looking back on it, it’s a blur. I’m like, what did I do for 10 years? I don’t even remember. I can’t even remember. There’s no memory there. And then you — as I slowly started coming off the drugs, I start, like, waking up, like, wait a minute, like, why don’t I have friends? It’s been 10 years. I’ve been home for 10 years and I don’t know anybody in St. Louis? Like, what is — I don’t understand what happened to my life. You know?

AM: Yeah. You’ve also said that the drugs made you feel numbed and anxious and depressed but never happy, grateful, or loving.

AP: No. Like, I had friends that would say, Angie, you just need to do a gratitude journal, and I would try and try and try and it’s like I could not even feel that emotion. I don’t know what that feeling feels like. I’m trying to pull it up. I’m really trying to be grateful; you know, even when I would, like, calm myself down or something, I would look for it; like, is there any gratitude in there? Like, nothing. I didn’t have any happy feelings. It was always, like, depression, anxiety, sadness, grief, panic, fear. Those were all the emotions that I had. And I remember telling a psychiatrist about that and she was like, oh, that’s just your PTSD; you know, that’s — you’re cut off from other people; you don’t have sexual feelings; that’s your trauma. It was never the drug could be causing this or the cocktails of drugs you’re on could be the cause.

AM: So you eventually were off of all of these drugs through a long process of tapering, and then the sort of combination of tapering and cold turkey created a lot of new symptoms for you and some of those were — would probably be categorized as more psychotic.

AP: Yeah.

AM: In fact, you describe it as chemical mental torture.

AP: Yeah, so I tapered for many years, always under the medical supervision and then I had one drug left and that was a benzodiazepine called Lorazepam; the brand name is Ativan. So as I tapered lower and lower on that, I started getting more anxiety. I started having, like, these seizure-like episodes where my body would just, like, jerk and my arms would fly out like a snow angel or something. You know, I would get blood pressure spikes; I’d get, like, periods of vertigo where the entire room was spinning, all these physical, weird symptoms — pain in my spine; I couldn’t sit down for about two years, like, on a toilet. My spine hurt so bad it was like this burning and any little bend in my spine would cause it to — just excruciating.

So I started seeking out doctors, getting all this medical testing. They couldn’t find anything wrong with me and I didn’t know it was the drug or the — I didn’t know it was, like, could be symptoms of tolerance. As I was getting lower, these withdrawal symptoms were peaking out. I had no idea about any of this. No doctor recognized that. So then there came a period where I got down to like 1 milligram of Ativan and I started getting suicidal thoughts, and then the suicidal thoughts turned into, like, this urges where I felt like I was going to do it and I wouldn’t have any control over my body. So one day I was in the kitchen chopping carrots — I was making pot roast or something — and I just had this indescribable urge to stab myself in the stomach, and that had never happened to me before. And for me to have this thought about a knife going through my stomach, I just — it scared me so bad because I was like, this is not of me; like, this is not something that I would think about. You know?

So I drove myself to the hospital and voluntarily was admitted, and then when I got to see the doctor the next day, I said, you know, obviously this antianxiety medication isn’t working because I have more anxiety than I’ve ever had in my entire life, and now I’m suicidal on top of it, so can you just take me off of it? And so they obliged and they cold-turkeyed me at that point, and that’s when a few days later I was discharged, I went back home, and it was like the gates of hell opened. First it started with, like, these weird sensations in my calf muscles, like little pin pricks, like shocks, and then my blood pressure went up. I was sensitive to light, sensitive to touch; my skin hurt. And then it was adrenaline, like full-on — like somebody was going to throw me out of a — you know, I’m going skydiving out of an airplane without a parachute at gunpoint. It was just incredible amount of fear that I did not even know existed on this plane of existence. (Laughs.) I don’t know. It was like — I felt like I could rip my skin off and go running down the street and run a marathon. It was like indescribable torture, and that’s the way I — that word isn’t even strong enough.

Then I started having, like, I guess you would call psychotic thoughts about — I would see, like, bloody images in my mind of me being hurt, of my family being hurt, of my niece and her school and things happening, and shootings and school shootings. And I was like, oh, my god, like, why am I thinking these things? And then I would — the thoughts themselves would scare me, and so then I would have like a spike of adrenaline because I was scared. Like, why are you thinking about these things? Stop. You know? And then, because I would have that spike of adrenaline, then I would think, oh, my god, are you going to be the one that does it? And I was like no! I don’t want to do anything like that to anybody’s kids; it’s my niece; you know, I love her; I just want to drive her to school; why am I thinking all this stuff? I was like only by the grit of my own teeth and the reason that I knew that it was the drug that did this; that is the only reason nothing bad ever happened, I think, is I had just enough sanity in me to hold onto reality 1 percent, and that kept me from anything bad happening, either killing myself or harming somebody else. And I got through by the skin of my teeth one second at a time, I swear to god, because it was the scariest thing I’ve ever been through. And speaking of which, that lasted about two years.

AM: And was it relentless, around the clock?

AP: Around the clock. I mean, the first 11 months I didn’t sleep more than two hours. It was constant suicidal, homicidal, psychotic thoughts, images, you know, things like “kill yourself, kill yourself, you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die, you’re having a stroke, you’re having a seizure” — like constant repeating in my head, combined with that indescribable — like a pressure inside my body trying to push its way out, combined with being on fire with pure fear and adrenaline and needing to run or — I did everything except pace. I had the feeling that I needed to pace but it never — I remember thinking, Angie, if you start pacing you’re not going to stop. I have no idea what that means but I had everything else that is characterized as akathisia except that, the walking part, and I was just terrified.

AM: And you said that at the time you didn’t have that in your vocabulary —

AP: No.

AM: — the term akathisia.

AP: I didn’t know what that was.

AM: And in fact, I mean, as we talk about a lot of this stuff, sitting here in 2021, you have the vocabulary and the information that allows you to kind of contextualize everything that happened, but during the time that you were experiencing all of this, you didn’t know about, you know, the potential harms of tapering and cold turkey.

AP: Yeah. I mean, what happened was I — when I was about a week off of everything is when I did a Google: “Benzo withdrawal.” And when it popped up, it said all these symptoms, and I was like, oh, my god, that’s what’s happening to me. But before that moment, I had no idea that was a thing. I had a psychology degree. I had been to AA meetings, NA meetings, retreats, therapists, all kinds of people. Nobody ever said anything about oh, you know all those drugs that you’re on? You might experience withdrawal when you try to come off of them. Nobody ever mentioned that. I never was exposed to a thing antidepressant withdrawal or benzo withdrawal in a psychology degree program. That was never mentioned. So I had no idea that a drug could do that — zero.

And then — the first two months when I got cut off of the drug abruptly, I could not even speak. It was like my brain just blew up. I couldn’t hardly look at my phone. If I saw anybody’s face I was terrified of their face. So I did find a benzo support group that didn’t have any pictures on it, which, like, really helped me.

AM: It didn’t have any pictures, you said?

AP: Yeah, it didn’t have, like, pictures of people’s faces, so that, like, was the only thing I could access, and I would write a sentence and say, like, I don’t know what’s happening to me, and then I would skip a line and I would write, my brain feels like it blew up, you know. You know, like, I couldn’t even, like, write a coherent sentence because that’s how, like, impaired I was. So it wasn’t until I was four months off when I found the other support groups and I was a little bit well enough to be able to read them and, like, comprehend what was happening to me and realize, oh, my gosh, this is the drug that’s doing it; it’s not you; you’re going to get better; people get better from this but it’s going to take a really long time, you know, and be careful; stay away from doctors because they might make you worse. You know, don’t take anything else; just stay home and survive.

AM: And one of the symptoms you described or one of the feelings that you described was you felt like you were plugged into a light socket, which is — you know, getting back to the topic of akathisia, that’s one of the common things that I’ve heard and also that feeling of wanting to rip your skin off.

AP: Yeah.

AM: And at some point you did learn this term akathisia.

AP: Yep.

AM: Was that after you had experienced it?

AP: Yeah. I would see that word flash up when I would read through the groups and then I would see, like, little things about, like, this person killed themselves because they had it. I would see, you know, most people don’t heal from it; it takes years. I would see like a little snippet here and I would, like, purposely, like, “turn it off, turn it off, don’t read about it because I don’t want to know”; like, I just didn’t want to know. And I didn’t want to read more to scare me. Already I was terrified and I was like I don’t think I’m going to make it till tomorrow. I didn’t want to have another reason to, like, maybe kill myself. Do you know what I mean? Like, I can’t, I can’t, I don’t know want to know, I don’t want to know. And then when Wendy Dolin came to our film screening, it was July 2019 and we were in Chicago. And Wendy Dolin of MISSD came and she stood up and said, you know, why didn’t you all mention akathisia in the film? This is when she came to the “Medicating Normal” screening and she said why didn’t you mention akathisia? That’s what you and Dave were suffering from. And I was like, oh, my gosh, she recognized it. You know?

And there’s another, you know, misconception; like, in our support groups people say, like, if you didn’t pace then you didn’t have it; it’s like they try to say that it’s only pacing. And so then I thought, well, I didn’t have it because I didn’t pace. And so then I, like, took myself out of the equation, you know — but even now, like, when I stand at a grocery store and I’m at the checkout, I can’t stop rocking back and forth. So it’s like now I have that weird manifestation of not being able to sit still or moving too much. I have that now, but that didn’t manifest until like two years later, you know. So I think it comes in different forms for different people in their experiences.

AM: And in those support groups that you mentioned, you were trying to help others and you told me previously that you thought that if you didn’t help others that you would kill yourself.

AP: Yeah. It really was a big distraction to just read all day long. I literally would lay on my phone, underneath the blanket and try to focus all of my attention, as much as I could, just on the words that I was reading and on the people that I was talking to. And you know, sometimes I needed help; like, I couldn’t go grocery shopping because I was filled with that terror and that pain in my body and I just could not — I couldn’t even get in the car to drive down the street; I was, like, just out of my mind. And so people would help me, but then in return, I would just lay there and read and give them comments of support and help as much as I could, and it just was a good distraction and it kind of kept me alive. And there was people that had akathisia that I was talking to that literally could not stop moving and were — like, one girl in Canada was, like, cutting down brush in her yard because she couldn’t stop moving. Another girl, she couldn’t even put her clothes on because she was constantly, like, moving and just anything touching her skin was, like, extremely painful. So it was like we all got each other through that experience together. You know, people around us didn’t believe us. Our doctors didn’t believe us. And meanwhile, we were, like, hanging by the edge of a thread to not die.

AM: Did you lose anyone, though, in that —

AP: Yeah, I lost, yeah, one person that I was kind of close to, I would message a lot. And you’d always hear of others that maybe you’d talked to in passing or you left a comment of support here or there. Yeah, there’s a few.

AM: So the film that we’ve been talking about: Going back to the beginning of how that came to be, how you came to be featured in it, you told me that you saw some filmmaker ads and a filmmaker actually DM’d you.

AP: Yes.

AM: You started talking and she wore you down and finally you consented to be in the film.

AP: Yeah.

AM: And they would come to do more video every few months and you said that this kind of saved you because you didn’t want to die while being in this film.

AP: Yeah. Yeah. I just remember one of the filmmakers flew into St. Louis and we went for a walk and I told her a little bit more of my story. You know, I hadn’t gone as far as telling her, like, the psychotic stuff I was feeling or the intense suicidal stuff that I was going through, but I told her a little bit more kind of what was happening and I dropped her off at her hotel room and she closed the car door and I remember thinking, OK, well, Angie, you cannot kill yourself because you can’t be in a movie and then at the end of the movie they’re going to say, oh, Angela Peacock was a great person but she ended up, you know, succumbing to the injury and killed herself. And so it gave me something to look forward to.

AM: And they do have that in the closing —

AP: Yeah.

AM: — and I was glad to see that everyone had survived.

AP: We made it, yeah. (Laughs.) Yeah. You know, they kept me going and the filming kept me going and knowing I was being part of something that would share about what was happening that not a lot of people were talking about; it all really kept me going.

AM: And then during the time of the film’s release, that’s kept you going in a different way because you’ve been very active in participating with these community screenings and speaking to the audiences.

AP: Yeah.

AM: How did that come about?

AP: So originally what happened was, the film was released in July of 2019. I had just graduated college in May of ‘19; believe it or not, I made it through school feeling like this. My lease was up, and the film was all coming out at the same time, and so I approached the film makers and said, “Hey, what would it be like — could I travel with the film and show it in different communities in person; would you all support me in that?” And they said, sure, like, let’s do it, let’s get the film out there. So what I did was I just plotted on the map, like, I think let’s do Arizona and who do we know in Arizona? And I would find somebody in Phoenix and say, like, do you have any connections to any mental health groups in Phoenix and let’s host a screening with them. And then I would drive myself to Phoenix and set up the library and the projector screen and get all the seats prepared and host a little screening and then we would do a discussion after where people could bring their own experiences and I could talk about mine or answer questions, and then I’d move to another city the next week and do it, you know, in Los Angeles or San Francisco.

AM: And this was just you; this wasn’t, like, you traveling with the film makers or anything.

AP: No. Just me and an RV driving across the country and my dog. Yep.

AM: And you’re still doing it.

AP: I’m still doing it. What happened was the pandemic happened and everything kind of screeched to a halt. We no longer had any in-person events; it all went online. But in a way that was cool because we got to record the conversations and we could put them up on YouTube, where in person it was very intimate and there was a lot of crying and it was sad and tragic, the stories that you’d hear. But, you know, now through the pandemic, we’ve been able to, you know, host more screenings abroad where we couldn’t do that before and then we can record them for others to see later.

For a list of upcoming community screenings of “Medicating Normal,” please visit medicatingnormal.com/watch. On that site you can also buy tickets to stream the film and find a variety of helpful resources and research topics.

If you'd like to find out more and get the best information about this important topic of akathisia, the MISSD website is a great place to start.

[Wendy Dolin] "If you go to our website, the section that says What Is Akathisia? you will see the two MISSD videos, as well as we have an educational PDF that you can print off. We also are on Facebook and Twitter. If you like this podcast, learn more about akathisia and just send it to your contacts. And this is the way we spread our message. And I hope that people will really look at the signs and symptoms of akathisia. They’re listed in the videos, listed on the website."

That's MISSD founder Wendy Dolin.

You've been listening to the “Akathisia Stories” podcast. We'll have another episode later this month. It will feature Heather McCarthy.

If you'd like to share your own story for this podcast, please email studio.c.chicago@gmail.com, and please share this podcast and subscribe.

I'm Andy Miles and I'd like to thank Angela Peacock for her time and candor, and I'd like to thank you for listening.

PODCAST EXTRA

AM: When you were spending those two years and you were, you know, as you said, constantly reading and you were in these support groups and all these different things, did you have any semblance of a, quote-unquote, “normal life” at that time? Did you have attempts to work? You said you were in school.

AP: Yeah, I had to stay in school. It was almost like if I didn’t stay in school I was going to lose, like, $100,000 worth of VA benefits toward my education. And once I stopped it I was not going to be able to restart it, so I kind of made a deal with my counselor and my doctor was, you know, watching me too, so he said, you cannot go full time; you can go part time only because of the nature of your disability, so I was able to go part time, sometimes only taking one class; some of it was online. You know, it was like I did as least as possible to help me get through it, and in a way, it saved me because I didn’t have family, I didn’t have children, I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a partner — I had nothing. I had my dog and an apartment. That was it. You know? So it was like I need to stay in reality somehow; I don’t know how I’m going to stay in reality, but I need help staying in reality. So if school helps me, and it’s one class a week, that’s what I have to do to survive this. And so that’s kind of what I did. I was able to finish school in withdrawal. I just graduated two years ago so I was like three years off when I finally graduated.