Coming off ADs?

[thesootherfairy]

Anyone tried coming off ADs?

How hard was it? How long did it take? Side effects? Drug craving? How long were you in it?

Worried about starting ADs. Worried about addiction and withdrawal. Even the leaflet in package states to inform your doctor if you feel signs of physical addition. List of withdrawal symptoms on there and that's before the mahossive list of side effects.
It seems to me that you'll get hooks whilst puking and crapping none stop for weeks with achy muscles,
Twitching before graduating to stomach issues. And if you take sumatriptan for migraines and codeine you will develop serotonin syndrome before struggling with cravings for them.
It doesn't sound attractive.

Were you helped by ADs or if you were not, please let me here it. The more opinions and experiences the better please.

I took a couple of months to come off escitalopram by slowly reducing the dose. It was manageable but I had a few symptoms like the ‘brain zap’ sensations and negative thoughts.

I went back on them six weeks ago after a few years and other than a little nausea on the first three days I feel great. I avoided AD’s for years but my only regret is not trying them sooner and coming off them at all. I know they don’t work for everyone but they work miracles for some people.

You need to bear in mind that the leaflets included in these medications is there largely for legal arse-coverage. The list of side-effects is always the length of your arm, but it's rare that anyone experiences more than a few of them at any one time.

Personally speaking, Fluoxetine gave me involuntary clenched jaw, occasional nausea, and raging hypersexuality, but I was on the maximum dosage, and even then I didn't experience any problems when coming off it. Citalopram did absolutely nothing at all. No side-effects, no discernible beneficial effect either. Again, no problems coming off it either. Been on umpteen other atypical AD's including anticonvulsants and antipsychotics, again, all with either very mild side-effects or no effect at all, never had any issues coming off any of them. The issue was I was misdiagnosed for years and should never have been on AD's in any case, which I think goes some way to explaining the majority having no noticeable effect.

Thank you both.

I'm not great with side effects. I had to trial a load of different anti inflammatory medication recently and it was an endless array of nasty side effects and symptoms. Vomiting nausea headache muscle pain very high increases in blood pressure and most of them did sod all for the arthritis.

Not feeling particularly motivated to go through another round of this. The side effects of these sound even worse. At least with the anti inflammatory medication once you've stopped taking them, side effects disappear within 12 hours. ADs sound like they have more effects and you're stuck with that for a while after you stopped.

Might give it a miss altogether.