Citalopram and hallucinations

[bonjour16]

Hi, I'm really stressed out and hoping for some advice. Has anyone taken a SSRI antidepressant and had a bad reaction to them in terms of experiencing hallucinations? My doc is now withdrawing me off them and I'm going through horrible sickness withdrawal. Did switching antidepressants or SSRI cause the same problem or could it be that citalopram is just not for me.

Hope you can help and share any experience/s.

Thank you x

You can be unwell physically when withdrawing (slowly I hope) from anti depressants but ive not heard of anyone hallucinating because of it.

However hallucinations can be a sign of mental illness for example if you have bad depression you can also suffer from psychosis.

I have hallucinations when I'm tired but I have schizoaffective disorder which I'm medicated for & hope to get them under control.

I think you should tell your doctor about the hallucinations on Monday.
If things are really bad this weekend you could call the out of hours gp on 111.
If you are under the community mental health team then call the crisis team.

Hi I got insomnia on citalopram but no hallucinations.I was switched over to escitalopram which is a purer version of the drug and had no more problems

Thank you both. Just looking for reassurance and if anyone has experienced something similar. Its made my anxiety hit the roof x

I got hallucinations on citalopram. Much better when switched to venlafaxine.

How is he grading you off them? I hope its very slowly - too quickly and things can get very problematic. Ime GPs are cavalier about reducing ADs and seem to do it willy nilly with little care. ADs are powerful psychotropic drugs and need to be handled with care.

Sorry, I've assumed your GP is male.

Yes to checking it's slowly. A Gp got me to stop sertraline immediately and it was dreadful. In their defence they had to because of the side effects.

visual, audio or both? i’m on a lot of medication including anti-psychotics but if i don’t get enough sleep or eat properly i get voices, or have days where i constantly think i recognise people but i don’t know them at all (not explaining that very well - it’s like constantly thinking oh! that’s so-and-so! but they are complete strangers).

this is also a fun feature when i’ve done med changes. effexor to sertraline then vortioxetine in a year was particularly brutal.

Just wondering what kind of hallucinations did you experience? I've had visual when my eyes were closed and what sounded like a radio in the background when no radio was playing x

I am tapering off slowly with the help of a doctor. 10mg every second day. I hope the hallucinations stop on discontinuation x

yep, like a radio playing very quietly and slightly between stations so i can’t make out what’s being said. sounds benign but very unsettling.

I had visual hallucinations (like a cartoon character just inside my field of vision, a bit like something you might dream) when I was changing over from one AD to another. Speak to the GP.

So glad I'm not alone. Thank you

I take citalopram but, thankfully, no hallucinations so far. Weird, far out and downright bonkers dreams are, however, very much the order of the night. Every night, my unconscious state finds new ways to surprise me.

10mg every second day is far too quick!!

It should be done much more slowly than that. It took me 4-6 weeks to come down 10mg on citalopram.

How fast you can reduce them is going to be very individual. I swapped from citalopram to sertraline and actually stopped the sertraline cold turkey without any side effects at all. Both used to give me insomnia or vivid dreams, when I actually did manage to sleep, while I was taking them.

My husband had his anxiety medications messed about with and he hallucinated. We all got treated for worms but later realised he must have hallucinated!

That's a very fast taper down. Is it in order to change medication to another anti depressants in the very near future. A locum GP had me do similar over a week and I ended up in A&E with very vivid intrusive thoughts and suicidal impulses. It wasn't hallucinations as such but more that I had very clear mental pictures of self harming and how and what it would look like.
I switched to venlafaxine and it's been a very positive experience for me. Previously I was on citalopram on and off for the best part of 10 years but it was no longer effective. It was the cessation not the drug that made me so unwell

This is a reliable site for drug information & "seeing, hearing or feeling things that are not there" is on the much rarer side effects list...

www.drugs.com/sfx/citalopram-side-effects.html

www.drugs.com/sfx/citalopram-side-effects.html

Those are some cheery links there Hippy 😉

Tis why I stay away from Dr Google..

Springy that link was given to me by a senior hospital pharmacist when I was on a pain management course. So hardly Dr Google 🙄

I've had visual hallucinations for a few seconds on waking up. It's happened a handful of times since being on citalopram, never before that. I could see what looked like a small 3d scribble, kind of dancing about like an animation.