Antidepressent side effects and withdrawl!

I dont even know where to start.  Over and over again I hear of people young and old committing suicide, murder etc while on these “legal drugs”.  A very good friend of mine had a battle straight from hell during withdrawl of anitdepressents which lasted close to a year.  My friend survived where alot don’t.  If you or somebody you know have taken or is currently taken antidepressents please research into the side effects .  Remember Prozac??  Zoloft, Paxil, Effexor and many more are no better!
 

Hey, I agree with you!!!

I also agree that these types of prescriptions are overly prescribed and others too, but in some cases they are needed for depression.  Also some people have easily addicted personalities that can lead to over the counter addiction, I would think that a Doctor could screen out those with addictive personalities and treat those people differently.  But really it’s the drug companies that push there multi billion dollar business to the Doctors.

Yes I agree Astrothug, some people do seem to  benefit from these drugs for awhile at least, like anything else they don’t work forever and then the patient is in trouble.

One documentry I watched asked how family doctors are quailfied to diagnose true mental illness from the normal emotions we as human beings live through, like the death of a family member.  What qualifactions do our family doctors have to prescribe these mind altering drugs?  A five minute visit in the doctors office and a few tears will get us a perscription that effects our brains.  When you think about it it doesn’t make sense.

I took Effexor for a year ending a year ago, the withdrawl from them was brutal I felt like I was going to go out of my mind along with  bizarre electric shock type of feelings for the first month or so. While its nothing at all like an opiate withdrawl it certainly isnt a picnic either, the bullshit is the doctors dont tell you when they put you onto that crap that eventually thats whats going to happen to you, pricks! The profits for the drug dealers, er I mean companies is astronomical, you wouldnt believe it. They put alot of preasure on doctors to prescribe with all kinds of perks combined with what can only be called “sketchy” research backing up their claims, more pricks! First week I was taking effexor I remember thinking “I cant believe this shit is legal”, you get literally wasted from them, a real nice floaty, dreamy buzz that lasts all day, great fun till you come off them. Ohya, just under a hundred bucks a month for them.

If you saw how cute the drug reps were, you’d understand why doctors prescribe this stuff.

I have dealt with depression but have never taken anti-depressants.  I feel that too often people are taking these drugs to deal with a problem that could be solved by other means.  Go for a walk, read a book, get out and breathe some fresh air.  It’s amazing how breaking out of one’s normal routines and doing something different can be fun and empowering.  It not only helps with depression but can lift up your self esteem.  As far as I’m concerned, anti-depressants only mask a problem. Although I am not a medical professional I don’t think that anti-depressants should ever be prescibed before exercise.  Perhaps someone with more extensive medical knowledge can add something to this discussion.

The true clinical trails where hidden for years with Paxil.  Now they are saying that teens have a higher sucicide rate on paxil and the true trails came out in the open along with major lawsuits.  Too late for many.  Plus it isnt just teens.

As far as someone with more medical knowledge speaking against these drugs, good luck, they where lied to about the side effects also.  When people have bad side effects or withdrawl they are quick to say your condition is coming back and you will have to be on the pills the rest of your life. 

I agree the exercise and councilling can be benificial for the majority of the population however trying to get somebody help is dam near impossible and the health care system while my friend was going through the hard time, said there is no such thing as withdrawl, I was even told I was “enabling her”.  I had Doctors phoning me wanting me to get councilling because my friend was such “High Risk”, in the mean time they where doing nothing for her.  She was the one that needed all the support she could get.  If she had have heard from a doctor that what she was going through was withdrawl and she would get better in time it would have helped her cope.  One nurse even told her she would have to live like this the rest of her life.  Boy that sure made her feel like going on. 

I would like to see the doctors take these meds for like six months and then cold turkey off them.  Now that would be a reality show worth watching.

What really scares me is I have been told that here in town and outlaying villages there are alot of people on these meds becasue of the lack of sunshine in the area.  How many people are going through this nightmare in our area without any help right now? How many didn’t make it through? Unless the people close to us know about the side effects and damage these pills cause it isolates us when we need all the support we can get.

These drugs don’t work forever and then you are thrown into “poop out”.  It might take 2 years, 3 ,8 or 10 but eventually you can still be taking them and your “condition” will come back on you ten fold with added syptoms from hell.

There is help out there on the internet for getting off these pills and coping with the side effects. 

My friend has recovered totally from the hell she was in as others can, it takes time and understanding. 

I think it depends on the severity of the depression.  For example, if a psychiatrist determines that a person is suffering from clinical depression then I think anti-depressants may be a useful tool along with therapy.  True clinical depression can  render a person incapable of functioning.  I am not a medical professional, but I have a BA in Psychology.
Agreed.  Exercise is a great way to kick the blues:-)

[quote=“beth”]
The true clinical trails where hidden for years with Paxil.  Now they are saying that teens have a higher sucicide rate on paxil and the true trails came out in the open along with major lawsuits.  Too late for many.  Plus it isnt just teens.[/quote]

Why would anybody (especially teens) be depressed in the first place?

Life is awesome!

The other thing is too that people who are bipolar or have a mental health problems are on medication sometimes these individuals think that their depression is gone and go off their medications which in turns has a negative impacted on their psychosis,  they become depressed once again, or after a few years the medications don’t work as they once did.

So when we look at depression we also have to look at what is the cause of the depression, is it medical in nature or is it environmental. And then treat depression I hear some people say exercise is great for helping you get out of depression which I’m sure in cases is true, but when you are so depressed, you can’t function properly, eating, sleeping mood swings will make everyday living hell and those decisions are almost impossible to make when you are in that kind of rut, you’re so in the hole you can’t see the light.

I’m sure all of us hear has a friend or family member who fights with clinical depression and I’m sure you noticed when someone is out of their depression they can be fine for years and for whatever reason they can slip into depression. Most likely it’s an imbalance of chemicals in the brain or different hormones.

There are of course different types of depression, like the loss of a loved one, or a break up can cause people to become depressed but I think a physiologist is better than medications for these individuals who are feeling blue for those reason mentioned above.

in my field of work  I have worked with dual diagnosis individuals who suffer from clinical depression and these people do need medications and also a physiologist, who help them maintain a healthy standard of living. 

Great post.

I was listening to Laura Schlessinger the other day on the radio.  Normally I’m about as willing to quote her as I am willing to gargle with battery acid, but then again even a broken clock is right twice a day.

She read a letter from a woman whose child was stillborn.  This woman said that her doctor prescribed her antidepressants to deal with the grief.  She said she felt fine, as if nothing was wrong.

But there really was something wrong: she never dealt with the sadness that would naturally stem from such a loss.  Everyone around her was treating her strangely because she didn’t seem to be affected by her loss.

Eventually she asked the doctor to take her off the medication.  When she did, she finally really felt the grief that she should have dealt with at the time, and which the medication simply delayed.  But then she was able to truly deal with it, feel it like she should have, and eventually recover and cope with her loss.

Schlessinger commented–and again, this is in no way an endorsement of her views in general–that the world wants us to get over our grief as quickly as possible so that we don’t burden others.  People also believe that the so-called “miracles of modern medicine” can cure anything. 

But there are some things that it just can’t treat.

Sadness and grief are part of being human.  Without them, we’d lose that part of us that makes us who we are: loving, caring people who feel sadness when we lose someone we care about, or when something else tragic happens to us.

Now I do believe that antidepressants have their place.  I don’t believe at all that they’re inherently dangerous, any more than morphine is inherently dangerous just because it’s easy to get addicted to it.  The important point is that they should be used only by people who truly need them due to an inherent chemical imbalance or other medical condition that makes them incapable of being happy even when there’s nothing wrong.

But people these days want things to be easy.  They want quick fixes.  They don’t want to put off having that really cool plasma screen TV, so they pay for it on credit and accumulate debt that they can never pay off.  They don’t want to work hard to get ahead in their jobs, so they take the shortcut by playing politics and stepping all over people who end up hating them for it.  And they don’t want to deal with feelings of sadness and grief, so they run to the pharmaceutical industry, which is all too eager to help.

I agree that people want quick fixes for everything as the last post stated, however we are not informed of the side effects these meds can cause or I am sure we would not take them. 

I agree that there are some people that have a true need for antidepressents and there are others that have no side effects.  I have not found out anywhere though that there is a blood test or any other kind of medical test that can prove that our seriton levels are not normal or any prove of a chemical inbalance in our brains.

I used zyban to quit smoking, well I tried it anyways, I didnt know it was a mild anti depressent at the time, 5 days after taking it I was suicidal.  I wasn’t thinking of killing myself, it was a fact!  I was going to kill myself!  I had never had those feelings before.  I was lucky enough to analyze my situation and and come to the conclusion it must be the zyban.  Sure enough when I googled side effects there it was.  It took about a week for the extreme obession of death to leave me.  That was Zyban, a mild dose, I hadn’t even built up to the 2 pills a day.  I have always been very senstive to meds so that was the only reason I thought of the new little “miracle pill”. 

 

You are kinda right Astrothug about the thoughts of killing someone, yeah I had them one time, briefly but to kill myself I never, if thinking I would be better off dead than yeah I have thought that when I was younger a few times but never went so far to have a plan.

I hope this thread does help awareness of antidepressents.  I have not posted the links to the " new clinical trails" the phamecitical companys have been forced to reveal but are easy enough to google.  Just google anitdepressent news.  When one court case is won against pham. companys you will see 10 more “news” articles the pharm. companys have published pushing how good their drugs are.

Prozac is back diguised in a purple pill to beleive it or not.  It isn’t called prozac but some other fancy name aimed at women to help with something similar to PMS the NEW medical  condition hasn’t even been mentioned in medical journals.  I am sure you have seen the ads on TV.  I watched a documentry on anitdepressent and their marketing gimmicks.  That is one of them.

New studies have shown that anitdepressents can cause a person to consumme alcohol more than usual, even to become obessed with the need to drink!  Yet they are perscribed to alcololics to help quit drinking! 

Astrothug the Docs didnt help my friend, beleive me I tried, they kept telling me her “condition” that she was put on the meds for was coming back that is why she needs the meds.  Yeah and about 20 new conditions developed that they totally ignored.  I did find one person here in Prince Rupert with medical backgroud (pharmacist) who had specialized in withdrawl that did help us and confirmed that what my friend was going through was REAL.  He couldnt beleive the meds she had been on little on the fact she had been cold turkeyed ofF them.  He gave us very usefull information to assist in her withdrawl and even more important he knew what we where talking about.  I will not mention his name at his request but if he is reading this he will know who he is and THANK YOU!!

My friends depression started with the death of a family member.  In the old days it was called greif and was worked through by crying, yelling, whatever it took, normal human emotions.  Not a pill that numbs ones mind.

Again I have to stress that my friend has made it!!  She wakes up every morning thankful she is still alive.  She feels love, happiness, excitment, all the emotions that where masked by the pill.  Her eyes twinkle, her voice has emotion.  The real unrealistic thoughts , she had some pretty good ones happening too I will tell you, have gone.  Her hair has even starting to grow back in. 

I have too say Beth I delete my last post it was not because I didn’t think I was wrong I deleted it as I didn’t want people thinking I was debating or belittling anything that you are saying.
  I for one see what your saying and I’m very happy you joined HTMF and are talking and sharing what you have gone through as a friend who has witnessed other persons depression’s
  Your thoughts and insights you have talked and shared with us bring awareness to a problem about over prescribing medication to individuals with out some sort of screening procedure.  Plus the side effects that these type of medications have on ones body and mind.
Again Beth thanks for sharing your thoughts and your personal journey through depression.

Thank you for your support Astrothug. I am hoping to get public awarness out to save even just one person from having to go through this living hell.  I wonder how many of the suicides in this town can be directly realted to anti depressents.  I say the figures are very high but of course there is just no way of proofing it because after all they where on the drugs becasue they where depressed so no big surpise when they take their own live.  That is what the health care system would say. I know that these drugs change the way our brains work, we no longer have emotions such as love for our family which would prevent a person from actually carrying through with a suicide plan.

Currently in the news anitdepressents are finally been looked at in all these school shootings, looks like all the kids holding the guns where on them!

I thought I should add that although I experienced withdrawl symptoms after stopping effexor, they did actually treat the depression, I did feel alot better about  month of taking them, two month later I remember thinking “this must be the way normal people feel, wow what a difference”. They do do what they are supposed to do, least they worked for me, if I had known about the withdrawl I would have asked the doc to do a taper before coming right off them, he should have known and recommended that but he is too stupid or doesnt care.

Actually ChrisJ the doctors where told by the pharm. companys there is no problem coming off them.  Hopefully they have all found out different since then but they still do not taper off them slow enough.  For some patients it may take a year to come off antidepressents with as little discomfort as possible.