Anti depressants

I was on Effexor XR for around 8 months and I never had any problems when I stopped.

Morning: 150mg Effexor XR and 100mg Epillim EC
Lunch: 100mg Epillim EC
Night: 30mg Avanza and 100mg Epillim EC

Avanza would knock me out in 50-60 minutes and I could sleep all night and day on it. Waking up was a real bitch though because it felt like I had been up all night drinking and then had 3 hours sleep. The doctors’ solution? Double the dose. The dick head. This is when I stopped because I lost trust in my doctor and couldn’t financially afford it. ?I admit when I was on this combo I was acing every test at college and when I was working I would do the work of 2 men (or 5 women :p ). After around 12 months when I was more financially secure I saw a reputable Psychiatrist who specialised in Depressive Illness and he put me back on the same cycle except half the dose of Avanza and I felt nothing that time around. Then came around 4 years of mixing and matching until I finally thought fuck it.

Anti depressive drugs are a peculiar thing.

@ bohm: I can’t remember the name of the anti-anxiety drug I was on but I think it started with a ‘Z’.

Audicia, docs do pass out these things like candy nowdays and frankly I’m surprised the doc didn’t throw in some Lortabs, just in case you have pain. Tomorrow night the doc probably has a nice dinner, with lots of wine, at the nicest restaurant in town, from a drug company.

So that’s a little unfair of me to say, but seriously (not that I wasn’t being before), I’d highly recommend re-tooling your schedule, and integrating at least 30m of exercise basically everyday, changing your diet slowly but significantly over a month or so, and giving CBT a try alongside relaxation exercises, which can make a huge difference in anxiety, depression, and lots of other issues, if practiced correctly and routinely.

I doubt pills are the answer for you, but am pretty certain some behavioral modifications like I mentioned above or other ideas folks have are probably more up your alley. Less a rare disorder, most mild mental health issues seem to respond better to this track of treatment than popping a pill. And it’s way more empowering as a side effect.

Good luck man, make good choices and encourage and support the same of others.

If it was Zoloft, I also took that. I never experienced any side-effects on SSRIs (except maybe a bit of a headache). I just didn’t find them very useful. I’m currently taking a placebo dose (5 mg) of cipralex here in Canada (known as lexapro in the US). This is very low dose for anxiety. Typically SSRIs for anxiety tend to be somewhat higher than for depression. Again it feels like I’m taking jelly beans. No side-effects but not much in the way of major anxiety relief benefits, although my anxiety is pretty limited to performing situations.

If I don’t include side-effects, the best medication for my anxiety was benzodiazepines, particularly clonazepam but it led to tolerance and eventually drug abuse. I also misinterpreted inter-dose withdrawal for anxiety, as tolerance became an issue for me after about 4 years of using it. But I did manage to finish my degree and work for ~ 3 years in my field while on clonazepam. Side effects: it made me stupid, sleepy, tired and gave me some memory problems while I was taking it. There are times when I had to lecture in front of groups of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, etc. where I was so wasted on it and a few other drugs that I can’t believe they didn’t notice it. They actually thought I gave a good lecture and I sometimes, I can’t even recall in much detail what I talked about??

Did they check thyroid hormones? Hypothyroidism often leaves you tired and depressed.

I have taken Seroxat (Paxil) and Efexor. Seroxat worked, Efexor didn’t do much. Omega3, 2000-3000 mg EPA/DHA daily (the good stuff in the fish oil) does me good, but won’t do it alone. I have now quit SSRI’s and take 5-HTP (100 mg/day) along with a vitamin B-combo pill to rule out risk for deficiency. No real sideeffects.

Check out the thread “The depression workshop”.

Utter rubbish. And I know that from first hand experience.

I use 5-HTP instead now. No real side effects, but I do miss the side effect from Seroxat of being able to fuck without abandon for hours… :)

I never got into 5-HTP, but sunlight therapy and modafinil worked a lot better without killing my body (for some insane reason my doctor had prescribed me 375mg of non-XR effexor daily). Also years of cognitive therapy. I’m looking forward to experimenting with NMDA antagonists (ketamine, memantine, etc.) as a short-term 2-week antidepressant that kicks in within an hour (plenty of trials now out that are blinded), it’d be a lot more useful than SSRIs where you wait weeks/months for a promised effect that never seems to arrive.

And if it doesn’t work, it’s because you’re on the “wrong antidepressant”. I’m glad other people here had some positive experiences, I’ve seen a lot of ugliness behind those drugs.

SSRIs often do not work that effectively for many but ketamine, memantine?

Ketamine:

http://www.camh .net/About_Addi … etamine_dyk.pdf

Memantine:

(emphasis added)

CBT= Cognitive Behavior Therapy, I take it, and not Cock and Ball Torture (the #1 result found at CBT - Definition by AcronymFinder)?

Awesome post BG. SSRI’s are known for killing libidos across America. What they do exactly is delay and numb orgasm and possibly weaken erections, and rarely cause impotence to be exact. I remember my brief stint with Zoloft and I didn’t get any side effects except delayed orgasm which I sort of enjoyed. My erections were still hard from what I remember, but I was 18 when I took it and in the peak of my cock-hood.

Marijuana is a great escape from reality as opposed to alcohol, but marijuana shouldn’t be used all day everyday; you will get burned out eventually and a quarter ounce a week of fire weed gets expensive. I had a hundred dollar a week weed habit and it adds up to a Lexus payment.

The only anti-depressant on the market that doesn’t effect libido in a negative way is Wellbutrin (bupropion HCL).

I pulled up some info from wikipedia about bupropion the active ingredient in Wellbutrin because a lot of guys on this forum are interested in this med and may be interested in knowing about it more.

I copy-pasted the paragraphs of interest about bupropion. Sexual dysfunction, anxiety, and attention-deficit disorder. The reason why I like bupropion so much is because it never has lost its edge since I started taking it almost 3 years ago. It works just as good as it did since it first became effective. Just like anything in life you have to be productive in life in order for it to help. Bupropion will not benefit negative people with “born to lose” tattoos on their chest’s.

It is an atypical antidepressant and smoking cessation aid. Bupropion is different than most anti-depressants commonly prescribed in that it primarily acts as a dopamine reuptake inhibitor. It also acts as a norepinephrine, as well as α3β4-nicotinic receptor antagonist. Bupropion belongs to the chemical class of aminoketones and is similar in structure to stimulants cathinone and diethylpropion, and to phenethylamines in general.

Sexual dysfunction
Bupropion is one of few antidepressants that does not cause sexual dysfunction. According to a survey of psychiatrists, it is the drug of choice for the treatment of SSRI-induced sexual dysfunction, although this is not an FDA-approved indication. Thirty-six percent of psychiatrists preferred switching patients with SSRI-induced sexual dysfunction to bupropion, and 43 percent favored the augmentation of the current medication with bupropion. There are studies demonstrating the efficacy of both approaches; improvement of the desire and orgasm components of sexual function were the most often noted. For the augmentation approach, the addition of at least 200 mg/day of bupropion to the SSRI regimen may be necessary to achieve an improvement since the addition of 150 mg/day of bupropion did not produce a statistically significant difference from placebo.

Several studies have indicated that bupropion also relieves sexual dysfunction in people who do not have depression. In a mixed-gender double-blind study, 63% of subjects on a 12-week course of bupropion rated their condition as improved or much improved, versus 3% of subjects on placebo. Two studies, one of which was placebo-controlled, demonstrated the efficacy of bupropion for women with hypoactive sexual desire, resulting in significant improvement of arousal, orgasm and overall satisfaction. Bupropion also showed promise as a treatment for sexual dysfunction caused by chemotherapy for breast cancer and for orgasmic dysfunction. As with the treatment of SSRI-induced sexual disorder, a higher dose of bupropion (300 mg) may be necessary: a randomized study employing a lower dose (150 mg) failed to find a significant difference between bupropion, sexual therapy or combined treatment. Bupropion does not adversely affect any measures of sexual functioning in healthy men

Anxiety
Bupropion has shown some success in treating social phobia and anxiety comorbid with depression, but not panic disorder with agoraphobia. Its anxiolytic potential has been compared to that of sertraline and doxepin. However, it can cause agitation in some patients, especially at higher doses, and often increases anxiety, much like methylphenidate. As a psychostimulant, it is inherently an anxiogenic compound and contrary benefits are poorly understood and seemingly paradoxical.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder
Although attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is not an approved indication, bupropion was found to be effective for adult ADHD. There have been many positive case studies and other uncontrolled clinical studies of bupropion for ADHD in minors. However, in the largest to date double-blind study, which was conducted by GlaxoSmithKline, the results were inconclusive. Aggression and hyperactivity as rated by the children’s teachers were significantly improved in comparison to placebo; in contrast, parents and clinicians could not distinguish between the effects of bupropion and placebo. The 2007 guideline on the ADHD treatment from American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry notes that the evidence for bupropion is “far weaker” than for the FDA-approved treatments. Its effect may also be “considerably less than of the approved agents… Thus it may be prudent for the clinician to recommend a trial of behavior therapy at this point, before moving to these second-line agents.” Similarly, the 2006 guideline from the Texas Department of State Health Services recommends considering bupropion or a tricyclic antidepressant as a fourth-line treatment after trying two different stimulants and atomoxetine (Strattera).

Not to derail this thread but are you getting deep sleep?

There are safer things like melatonin and exercise that would help out with that.

Serotonin releasing agent - Wikipedia

http://en.wikip edia.org/wiki/S … uptake_enhancer works Synergistically with provigil

Scopolamine - Wikipedia

New Generation of Rapid-Acting Antidepressants?

ScienceDaily (Mar. 6, 2010) — Conventional antidepressant treatments generally require three to four weeks to become effective, thus the discovery of treatments with a more rapid onset is a major goal of biological psychiatry. The first drug found to produce rapid improvement in mood was the NMDA glutamate receptor antagonist, ketamine.

In a new issue of Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier, researchers from the National Institutes of Health report that another medication, scopolamine, also appears to produce replicable rapid improvement in mood. Scopolamine temporarily blocks the muscarinic cholinergic receptor, thought to be overactive in people suffering from depression.

Drs. Wayne Drevets and Maura Furey recruited outpatients with major depressive disorder who were randomly assigned to receive placebo and then scopolamine treatment, or vice versa, in a double-blinded design so that neither the researchers nor the patients knew which treatment they were receiving.

"Scopolamine was found to reduce symptoms of depression within three days of the first administration. In fact, participants reported that they experienced relief from their symptoms by the morning after the first administration of drug," explained Dr. Furey. "Moreover, one-half of participants experienced full symptom remission by the end of the treatment period. Finally, participants remained well during a subsequent placebo period, indicating that the antidepressant effects persist for at least two weeks in the absence of further treatment."

The efficacy of scopolamine is very interesting because the potent blockade of muscarinic receptors was a property of tricyclic antidepressant medications, the oldest type of antidepressants. With these medications, the muscarinic receptor blockade was mostly viewed as the cause of unwanted side effects, such as constipation, sedation, and memory impairments. Newer antidepressants, such as serotonin reuptake inhibitors or serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, were explicitly designed to avoid blocking muscarinic receptors. Yet, the current data raise the possibility that this strategy may have increased safety and tolerability of these medications at the expense of providing effective and timely relief for depression symptoms.

Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry, commented that these findings "have the potential to raise expectations for new antidepressant treatments. Three-to-six weeks is a long time to wait for depression symptoms to be alleviated. Depressed people describe their emotional state using terms like ‘agony’ and others compare their condition to ‘living in hell’. Further, depression is a life-threatening condition for some, preventing them from performing basic self-care functions or causing them to exhibit self-destructive behavior."

Although these findings open the door to a conceptually different approach to the treatment of depression, it remains to be seen whether rapid acting antidepressant effects will be viable clinically. One could imagine that they might mitigate hospitalization in some patients and enhance the overall effectiveness of the treatment of depression. However, this possibility remains to be demonstrated empirically in studies that show that a rapid-acting antidepressant treatment can be smoothly transitioned to definitive long-term treatment for depression.

New generation of rapid-acting antidepressants? — ScienceDaily

Yeah, so we`ve all had our bouts with ssris and mao inhibitors that mostly blanket problems and exacerbate others.

MY ex convinced me that I was too anxious 17 years ago and I went through the usual psychiatric gauntlet of new ssri meds every six weeks or so to “dial in”.

This happy horse shit left me with little sex drive and a minor psychotic break going cold turkey from nearly a year of different medications (brain tremor doesn`t describe it.earthquake more like.)

I wonder I still have artifacts of damage from those drugs when I have sleepless nights and occasional loss of erections with my wife (every six or eight weeks or so I go through ED in the evenings)

I have taken DHEA for the past 17 years and it was the only thing that allowed me the relief from the damage of coming off those pills.

Occasionally I will not have the DHEA for a few days as my healthfood guy sometimes runs out, and it`s a restricted substance in canada, and so I find myself having minor “rumours” without the DHEA.

I have to say though that recently I have been off DHEA for as long as a week and the tremours aren`t as bad.

I think everyone`s neuro-chemistry is slightly different and that some may actually see improvements in thier mood with these things, but from what I`ve seen and read (I`m a therapist and at least 75% of my clients are on one form of ssri, mao inhibitor or the like) most see negative results over time.