Be careful with these things if anyone ever suggests them to you, guys. I was prescribed citalopram back when I was a depressed teenager to try and get me out of the rut I was in, and they DID work in a certain sense. They kept the intrusive negative thoughts out of my mind for long enough for me to focus on personal improvement, and that naturally helped me get out of the rut I was in.
The doctors will tell you that they are not addictive and there is no danger in taking them long term, however that has not been my experience. I am married now and have a successful career, and my day to day mood is much better than it was back then. Over time I have managed to wean myself off of the pills, but if I don't take at least one a week, I have these awful head rushes that make it hard to concentrate. Perhaps when work dies down a bit I will make the effort to push through the withdrawal symptoms and finally rid myself of them.
Overall takeaway with SSRIs: They CAN help SOME people, but they can also get you hooked if you're not careful (despite what the doctors will say). They are definitely way overprescribed.
I had a similar experience when I stopped taking my Escitalopram after a couple years. The word I found when I looked it up was "brain zaps." I would be sitting normally, playing Warcraft, and then turn my head to grab a drink and I would feel a sort of shock radiating from my brain through my body, very disorienting.
They eventually subsided, but when I reported them to my Doc who I was still occasionally seeing at the time, she denied that was a side-effect from stopping taking them. I found hundreds of people mentioning this feeling when poking around various forums, so guess who I believed? This experience cemented my contempt for shrinks and meds basically permanently. I'll take shrooms or LSD first, and I've never even touched those to begin with.
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who has suffered from this particular withdrawal symptom. That's exactly how it feels, a weird rushing sensation that radiates from my head throughout my body. How long were you off the pills before that subsided? It's hard to pick a time to quit because my work requires a significant amount of concentration and I can't be losing focus like that.
It is shocking how little doctors know about the medicines they're prescribing people. I think it's basically a flow chart for a lot of them; 'If A then B'. You would hope that the brightest among us might have a LITTLE intellectual curiosity, but I think the past few years have proved that is wishful thinking.
It's been at least 5 years since then, so I don't remember very well, but it was less than 1 month before I never had another one again (and I was taking roughly 10-20mg for 2 years). I weened myself down to only 5mg a day, then every other day, then completely off them as my bottle ran out, and they just happened less and less frequently, and less severely as time went on.
Who the FUCK knows what it was doing to my head all that time I was on them, or why that was a withdrawal symptom, but it was so much more bad than good that I'll never be convinced to try it again.
Be careful with these things if anyone ever suggests them to you, guys. I was prescribed citalopram back when I was a depressed teenager to try and get me out of the rut I was in, and they DID work in a certain sense. They kept the intrusive negative thoughts out of my mind for long enough for me to focus on personal improvement, and that naturally helped me get out of the rut I was in.
The doctors will tell you that they are not addictive and there is no danger in taking them long term, however that has not been my experience. I am married now and have a successful career, and my day to day mood is much better than it was back then. Over time I have managed to wean myself off of the pills, but if I don't take at least one a week, I have these awful head rushes that make it hard to concentrate. Perhaps when work dies down a bit I will make the effort to push through the withdrawal symptoms and finally rid myself of them.
Overall takeaway with SSRIs: They CAN help SOME people, but they can also get you hooked if you're not careful (despite what the doctors will say). They are definitely way overprescribed.
I had a similar experience when I stopped taking my Escitalopram after a couple years. The word I found when I looked it up was "brain zaps." I would be sitting normally, playing Warcraft, and then turn my head to grab a drink and I would feel a sort of shock radiating from my brain through my body, very disorienting.
They eventually subsided, but when I reported them to my Doc who I was still occasionally seeing at the time, she denied that was a side-effect from stopping taking them. I found hundreds of people mentioning this feeling when poking around various forums, so guess who I believed? This experience cemented my contempt for shrinks and meds basically permanently. I'll take shrooms or LSD first, and I've never even touched those to begin with.
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who has suffered from this particular withdrawal symptom. That's exactly how it feels, a weird rushing sensation that radiates from my head throughout my body. How long were you off the pills before that subsided? It's hard to pick a time to quit because my work requires a significant amount of concentration and I can't be losing focus like that.
It is shocking how little doctors know about the medicines they're prescribing people. I think it's basically a flow chart for a lot of them; 'If A then B'. You would hope that the brightest among us might have a LITTLE intellectual curiosity, but I think the past few years have proved that is wishful thinking.
It's been at least 5 years since then, so I don't remember very well, but it was less than 1 month before I never had another one again (and I was taking roughly 10-20mg for 2 years). I weened myself down to only 5mg a day, then every other day, then completely off them as my bottle ran out, and they just happened less and less frequently, and less severely as time went on.
Who the FUCK knows what it was doing to my head all that time I was on them, or why that was a withdrawal symptom, but it was so much more bad than good that I'll never be convinced to try it again.