Hi there! 16 years of antidepressants and other medication...

[sterre]

Thank you Barbara!

[Sheila]

It’s really good you did your research about the SJW and are listening to your body.

You’re doing great detective work trying to figure this all out. It’s hard to discern what causes what.

I’m glad you got so much out the stabilization training. Yes, sleeping plans are a very good idea.

You have a great diet.

When did you finish taking the alprazolam (Xanax)?

I think it’s probably best to wait awhile before you start tapering nicotine. You may find that your desire for nicotine decreases automatically as you recover from the SSRI. That’s what happened to me.

Regarding stopping the Fevarin (Luvox, fluvoxamine) at 6.5 mg – I only really know about tapering Paxil. That’s a very small dose of Luvox, and it might be OK for you to stop there. But, you say you’ve been having a hard time towards the end of the taper, so another possibility is to still take 2 or 3 steps to finish the taper. I really don’t know.

If you want more opinions on tapering, let us know, and we will give you some referrals to other sites where you might be able to get more opinions.

[sterre]

Thank you Sheila!

I dont think alprazolam is the same as Xanax? I am not sure about it, but I believe it is only used as sleep medication.( alprazolam)
I tapered it of, almost one year from today. I did not have any specific promblems with the tapering or the final stopping, but in hindsight it might be covered up by an increased AD dosage at the time.

Yeah, I think 6,5 mg is the smallest I can go with Fevarine ( fluvoxamine), so no tapering from this point on.

I decided to highten my intake of fish oil, when I am quitting the last dose of AD.

I will see how it goes from there.

Thanks again for your concern.

[stan]

xanax is alprazolam, it is a benzodiazépine, it is often difficult to taper it, you are lucky all seems ok;

maybe the AD will be the same thing;
for people who have difficulties with ADs, the symptoms appear after first months off, first times seem good, so always slowly taper, even good feelings;
Young people seem to recover more easily than older

[sterre]

Hi Stan!

Thanks for the information.

Now i am doubting if the brand name of the sleeping pills I took was alprazolam or not. It wouldnt make much sense to descibe me xanax to fall asleep?

I have used xanax for anxiety and it had not the same effect as the sleeping pills had on me, so it could be that I am mixing up the name of the sleeping pills with the xanax.

I did a quick research, and remembered the name of the sleeping pills I took for over 5 years: Zolpidem ( ambien, stilnox, sublinox)
Sorry for the mix up guys!

I took so many pills in the last 16 years that I tend to forget the name of them or mix them up.

What I noticed with the sleeping pills and also with the xanax is that they tend to worsen my depressed mood. They lift up anxiety but the next day I would feel more sad and depressed. I believe there is a name for that...but I forgot what its called.( backlash or kickback....or something)

I am not very young anymore. I do beleive that maybe when being very young you may recover faster from WD... maybe...I dont know.

I am 42 years old now.

Today was not such a good day. I felt very tired yesterday and today and that makes me irritable. Maybe it is the WD of the tapering to the last dose of 6,5 mg.
I started the 6,5 mg more than a week ago, and felt reasonably good the last week, but yesterday and today...bleghhh, not very well.

Tired,tired,tired, and irritable.

[Luc]

What I noticed with the sleeping pills and also with the xanax is that they tend to worsen my depressed mood. They lift up anxiety but the next day I would feel more sad and depressed. I believe there is a name for that...but I forgot what its called.( backlash or kickback....or something

Yes, it's a "rebound", Sterre. Benzos work very fast, wear off fast, and, since nature abhors vacuum, what they give us one day, they take away the very next. Also, the benzo WD is equally hellish to SSRIs WD - I'm a double c/t person - first I c/t'd Xanax, then, 5-6 months later, SSRIs - little did I know what I would be in for. If only possible, stay away from benzos, unless it's a small and a few and far between dose. Keep walking! It will be improving!

[sterre]

Ah..rebound was the word I was searching for, thanks Luc!

It must be very hard to withdraw from from benzo's and AD's almost at the same time! Brhhhh!
I had a benzo WD just before I started the AD. Befonre I got my first decription I calmed down my anxiety attacks with a benzo ( forgot the name, will pop up later I suppose..sigh) and then quit cold turkey. Not much did I know about stopping after daily use for a long period. In hindsight I could have been the reason for me to have started the AD, because my aniety went trough the roofe at that point in time. I could have been benzo WD that triggerd the crazy overdrive anxiety attacks?

What a mess, and how brave of you to decide to stop the medicine.
Are you slowly getting better Luc?

Last few days I am reading some journals here on the forum, and it strikes me how much we all have in common regarding the symptoms.

It is really weird for me to acknowledge that my symptoms could be psychical instead of mental. Because I took AD's for so long, my doctor never takes me seriuos whenever I visit him. He believes everything must be mental with me. I went to his office to ask for a cortisol measure but he wont prescribe the test to me. He wont describe a glucose test for me either.
It must be stress he says.

Ever since I started taking AD's I got very tired and overly sensitive to stimulus from the outside world. Noise, smell, sight and such, are enough to leave me broken and exhausted.
I have a very small social live mostly because I am to tired to hang out or attend to a party.

I take care of my young child, and do volenteer work once a week. Every night I am drained, and most a the time it starts during the day.
I loose my concentration, get fogged up, muscles hurt, and my eyes get really dry. I mix up words when I am very tired and cant come up with the proper words to pronounce.

I start to believe it is a medical thing instead of a mental thing. After all I am an such a low dose of AD's now for quite some time, I cant be the AD's anymore?

When I am in places with a lot of noise, and action I get tired very easily. All the impressions seem to much to proces or something like that? It is hard when you have to raise a lively five year old, who wants action all the time. I have to pee a lot, and my muscle strenght is just gone. I used to be very strong and used to have a lot of stamina.
My seksdrive is gone also....just dissapeared into nowhere.
Whenever I have a busy day with a lot of physical action, my muscles and back start to hurt right away. I never had that problem, but maybe it is due to age.
I feel really old and crippled.

I seem to have less tolerance for stressful situations. Whenever something is slighty stressfull, my stress levels go trough the roof, and my whole body is wired with stress. It is really annoying to me.

I cant believe this is all from the AD's? But on the other hand I can see how other people my age are doing and there is a big gap between their energy levels and mine.
How does it work? Why do we all have similair symptoms?

[stan]

after 16 years, your body tried to live with these poisons and has made chemical changes to reach his homeostasis; and this gives a people who feels 95 years old;
and to have a new chemical balance without the poison, it often takes time, many time; and doctor deny all this, for them it is in your head, it is stress!...and they want add new magical pills

[Luc]

Are you slowly getting better Luc?

Yes, Sterre. The improvement is there, even it sometimes takes quite long. All the symptoms you mentioned are so 'withdrawal'; feeling drained, painful, intolerant of the outside stimuli. But it will be getting better. My advice would be that you don't put any time frame on it - just stay patient. The whole point is to just accept it the way it is - if we push things, we make us feel worse. There's one thing that always helps in WD, and that's time. The more of it passes, the more you'll be realizing that despite the sometimes downs, when you experience the worsening of symptoms (we call them "waves'), there, too, happen the "windows", when the symptoms improve. Usually, the next of the waves is slightly less severe than the one preceding it, and at some point the waves are no more.

[sterre]

Hi There!

Yesterday evening I forgot to take my daily dose of 6,5 mg fevarine. This almost never happens, but since I was very busy to take care of my sick little child
( just the flu), I just forgot to take in my meds.

I didnt notice it after this morning, when I was trying to figure out why I slept so lousy and had a terrible nightmare.
I didnt feel good yeterday evening, but though I was coming down with the flu also.

Just this morning I realised that it must be the missed dose.

A hardly ever mis a dose, so now I am thinking that maybe this is the moment for me to quit the tapering and to stop taking the last small dosage of AD's.

I feel scared after reading all the story's of how much the WD can efffect your system, and after my slow tapering proces and the WD egfeects it has on me.....brhhhhhh..... I feel scared to have reach this point.

In 2009 I quitted AD's ( Wellbutrin and lexapro cocktail) amost cold turkey, and suffered a nightmarisch three months of the most bizarre physical and psychological symptoms, wich I now know where WD symptoms, but at that time tought I was going crazy.
I felt very violent and almost homocidal, I suffered bouts of derealision and depresonalasation, wich I never did before. ( at least not in that amount, or with such force)
There where days where I was in a kind of hypnotised ( almost as a drug high) mood or something, it was very bizarre and very nasty!

Off course I believed my P-doc at the time, who told me my symptoms had returned with full force and that I immedialty had to return to taking the AD's again.
I discussed with her that I never suffered those symptoms before, and that I was estranged that all of a sudden I suffered these symptoms so badly.
She was under the impression that it was psychological, while I was slowly getting some awareness about the fact that It could have something to so with stopping the AD's. She denied it in every way, and I got convinced that it must have been my "mental illness" ( C-PTSD) that was getting out of control.

The argument she used to convince me was that the symptoms only started to raise about 1,5 month after quitting the meds, and slowly got worse.
If it was WD, she said, it must have occured in the first two weeks! Not after 1,5 month.

Because I have to take care of my child and dont want her to have a crazy mother, I started taking AD's again, and my symptoms were gone within a week.
I also felt that if i didnt take the AD's the contact with my P-doc ( who was also my therapist for six years) was at stake. So I started again, and the symptoms dissapeared like snow on a sunny day.

That was very strange, because to me it proved that it was the meds that caused the symptoms, and not my "mental illness". I kind of compared it with a drug addict, once they are in WD, all they have to do to make it stop immidiatly is to take the drugs again. that was how it worked for me.

If it truly would have been a psychological problem that was arrising, it would have never solved itself so quickly as it did, after starting the meds again. We all know that these meds take some time to do their chemical work, and for it to work so quickly, was suspect.


So I started AD's again, this time I went back to the brand I started with 16 years ago ( fevarine) and I refused a cocktail of different AD's. My P-doc wanted me to take some AP's and benzo's, to ad to the cocktail.

Because I previously had taperd of the use of sleeping pills, and slowly got convinced that my "mental problems" where for 70 % caused by the meds, I refused with all my might.
AP's! Why the hell would I take AP's? I wasnt psychotic,never have been, probably never will be. She explained to me that the AP's where "under the counter" drugs ( also used for people who dont suffer psychosis, but to help them sleep for instance) to calm me down,and that it would work great with the AD's and the benzo"s.
Sure!

I never took them, and started tapering off the AD's, without the consent of my P-doc. So, after a while I got crying spells, and became very tired and hypersensitive. For my P-doc that was again the proof that I really really needed the pills.
I argued with her that it was WD, because I started to recognize a pattern in the symptoms taht where arising. When the symptoms got to bad, I took a prevouis dose, and POOF, within a day, the symptoms where gone!

How is that for some psychological magic huh?

I notice that I still get very angry thinking back at her disblief and her religiuos mania to get me back on those pills!

After 5 months of tapering, my P-doc and me, could go on with our therapeutic talk anymore. She refused to help me any longer if I would refuse to take the bloody pills.
She argued everything and every single symptom with me. In her mind none of my problems had any correlation to the tapering. I was amazed by her unwiilingness to admit that it where WD symptoms that where causing problems.
I did a lot of research and found a lot of proof that confirmed my experience. I took it with me when I went to see my P-doc, and still she refused to aknowlegde it were WD symptoms.

So, our contact ended, abrubtly,six months ago. She said she could help me anymore. So there I was, on my own, no help,no support.

In the mean time I was so convinced that what I thought was the truth about my psychological and physical problems, ( WD) that I contineud the tapering. To my surprise, I didnt suffer from my frequent chronic depressions, they were just not there! They havent returned ever since I started tapering off medication!

I have gone trough panic attacks, crying spells, dyziness, derealisation, tiredness, introusive thougths, the neurological problems,the whole ordeal, but did not suffer depression!

I am under the impression that my AD's caused the chronic depressions. Before taking the AD's I suffered panic attacks, not depresion. The depressions came when I used the AD's for over 5 years or so.

So now I am here, at this pointof no return.

No more AD's after 16 years! brhhhhh...... I am scared for the road ahead, but I dont want to return to the chemicalstate I was in for 16 years!

Here in this diary I will keep track of the symptoms and the severity of them.