Will any anti depressants work for me? Desperate.

[angelsonbareskin]

Hi all. I've name changed but have used this part of the forum a few times. I started sertraline about 2 months ago.. started on a tiny amount 12.5mg. It felt like it worked well for a while and my mood improved and my anxiety lessened. Then lockdown happened and I started having panic attacks.

I increased to half a tablet - 25mg and I started feeling awful.. I had awful weakness and couldn't eat a thing. The anxiety was absolutely horrendous. I stuck it out for 10 days before I had to stop as I felt like I was going to faint despite sitting down, and couldn't get up off the sofa due to weakness.

I've gone back down to 12.5mg but my mood and anxiety are bad. I feel the need to try something else. Citalopram I've tried before and it gave me strong suicidal ideations, also made me feel like I was on LSD - hallucination type stuff, so I had to stop.

I am scared nothing will work for me. I have been so low in the last few weeks that my thoughts have got very dark. I don't want to bother my GP but feel like I am going up have to.

Anyone been in a similar situation and did you find an AD that worked for you? Thanks

Hi @angelsonbareskin
Sorry to hear you’re having a hard time.
I was prescribed Fluoexetine (Prozac) initially when I was out onto anti depressants. It didn’t agree with me at all and made things worse. I was eventually put on 50mg of sertraline, which for the first few weeks led me to doing very little but sleeping at first, but I saw a real improvement in my mood not long after. To this day I don’t know if it was the medication that improved things, or the fact that my circumstances began to change for the better. Probably a combination of both. After 4 months (I think) I reduced to 25mg and came off it completely after 9/10 months.
I had a really bad experience with the first ADs I was described, but the second seemed to work.

I think a lot of times ADs are prescribed it’s very much trial and error and require some tweaking, and even the right ones take some getting used to, there is no one size fits all solution unfortunately.

I went through some really difficult times and things seemed completely hopeless, it may not seem like it now but things can and will get better. I never thought that was possible but with time they did.

PLEASE get in touch with your GP, this is NOT a trivial matter. I hope you feel better soon

Sertraline did nothing for my mood I went up to 100mg and all it did was cause jaw problems by me clenching my jaw. I switched then to Venlafaxine which has helped in combination with another drug