Discussion How much did antidepressants help you?

[rih]

Just a general conversation about prescribed meds and effects, i've been on 3 or 4 different kinds(All SSRI's despite asking for different ones) and have been on the fence about going back on them due to SH reasons reappearing. Just fearing it'd dampen my will to ctb, the added side effects also when I took them were so erratic/all over the place. I just don't want to be coated in scars.

How's everyone else doing with them?
Have you tried many?
Any weird side effects etc?

 

[hopelesswanderer]

Tried SSRIs, SNRIs, Lithium, atypical antidepressants, ketamine infusion therapy. All of them w the exception of K caused me to have MORE suicidal thoughts not less. I also gained a shit ton of weight despite maintaining a decent fitness level in terms of exercise. Lithium makes me puke like a bitch at least once a day unless I'm drowning myself in water. Hopefully they work better for you if that's what you're looking for. I will say ketamine infusion brought a lot of relief initially.

 

[CantDoIt]

As a teen they worked. I took them again and they stopped working. In my early 20s I took an anti OCD SSRI medicine and it worked (luvox) .Later it stopped working and increased suicidal ideation. I've taken several SSRIs - Zoloft being the main one I remember. A bunch of different things during outpatient.
Side effects were insomnia, increased suicidal ideation especially in the morning with feelings of doom / panic.
So they seem to work but kind of only at first, at least for me. The more severe the episode the less it works.

I took Xanax and it worked to calm me down immediately. Unfortunately it would have to be the Benzos.

 

[rih]

Tried SSRIs, SNRIs, Lithium, atypical antidepressants, ketamine infusion therapy. All of them w the exception of K caused me to have MORE suicidal thoughts not less. I also gained a shit ton of weight despite maintaining a decent fitness level in terms of exercise. Lithium makes me puke like a bitch at least once a day unless I'm drowning myself in water. Hopefully they work better for you if that's what you're looking for. I will say ketamine infusion brought a lot of relief initially.

Thanks for the reply! Ketamine infusion seems unique, i feel if i brought it up they'd just think i'm looking to get high, Weight gain is scary for me as I have body image issues anyways which is a big fear going on anti depressants. I don't really understand how weight gain happens as I've always been careful what I eat even while on them. I might try bring it up and see if I can get one of those methods to help. Thanks again

As a teen they worked. I took them again and they stopped working. In my early 20s I took an anti OCD SSRI medicine and it worked (luvox) .Later it stopped working and increased suicidal ideation. I've taken several SSRIs - Zoloft being the main one I remember. A bunch of different things during outpatient.
Side effects were insomnia, increased suicidal ideation especially in the morning with feelings of doom / panic.
So they seem to work but kind of only at first, at least for me. The more severe the episode the less it works.

I took Xanax and it worked to calm me down immediately. Unfortunately it would have to be the Benzos.

Yeah i have great experience on benzos but then i'm taking benzos again... lol back in my early twenties late teens when I wasn't on prescribed meds I took painkillers pretty frequently

 

[hopelesswanderer]

Thanks for the reply! Ketamine infusion seems unique, i feel if i brought it up they'd just think i'm looking to get high, Weight gain is scary for me as I have body image issues anyways which is a big fear going on anti depressants. I don't really understand how weight gain happens as I've always been careful what I eat even while on them. I might try bring it up and see if I can get one of those methods to help. Thanks again

I would say don't hesitate to bring up K, I have a history of substance abuse and my psych was still fine with it. It may depend on where you reside as I live in a more progressive part of the country. I never experienced any cravings for the drug outside of clinical setting and never relapsed on other drugs/alcohol. So I consider it a moderate success!

Weight gain doesn't happen to everyone but it did to me. I certainly wouldn't attribute every single pound gained to the med, I'm sure I was binge eating at times too, but it really feels like a futile effort when you're on the meds and trying to diet and exercise and the scale never going down :/. I hope that's not the case for you and like I said many people never experience that side effect. The side effects vary so much as I'm sure you know.

Wishing you luck on your journey. :)

 

[divinemistress36]

Tried SSRIs, SNRIs, Lithium, atypical antidepressants, ketamine infusion therapy. All of them w the exception of K caused me to have MORE suicidal thoughts not less. I also gained a shit ton of weight despite maintaining a decent fitness level in terms of exercise. Lithium makes me puke like a bitch at least once a day unless I'm drowning myself in water. Hopefully they work better for you if that's what you're looking for. I will say ketamine infusion brought a lot of relief initially.

Did lithium make you gain weight
They helped in my 20s. Since my stroke at 29 now 36 I've been on pretty much every psych med out there and most mad me worse . A few of them helped for a little bit

 

[username12345]

Just a general conversation about prescribed meds and effects, i've been on 3 or 4 different kinds(All SSRI's despite asking for different ones) and have been on the fence about going back on them due to SH reasons reappearing. Just fearing it'd dampen my will to ctb, the added side effects also when I took them were so erratic/all over the place. I just don't want to be coated in scars.

How's everyone else doing with them?
Have you tried many?
Any weird side effects etc?

It depends on the disorder that you are taking the medicine for. Unfortunately there is no specific medicine for PTSD so they really don't help with my PTSD specific symptoms. They help a little bit with anxiety and depression at first but since it doesn't help my actual PTSD that causes more anxiety and depression. Someone tried to get me to take topiramate for PTSD and it actually gave me seizures and I couldn't eat to the point of almost passing out. I tried Paroxetine 20mg and that gave me a terrible panic attack all day. Really anxiety and depression in PTSD is not a main disorder like it is for people who have anxiety or depression. It's kind of more like the problems of PTSD and symptoms specific to it causes anxiety and depression so I think more serious therapy is more beneficial than medication. Like EMDR and such but it varies by person, and since a lot of therapists are online it is difficult to get EMDR or I ask for EMDR and they say okay and we just talk and never do EMDR.

Sorry that was a lot but yeah the effect of the medicine depends on the disorder whether suicidal or not.

 

[rih]

I would say don't hesitate to bring up K, I have a history of substance abuse and my psych was still fine with it. It may depend on where you reside as I live in a more progressive part of the country. I never experienced any cravings for the drug outside of clinical setting and never relapsed on other drugs/alcohol. So I consider it a moderate success!

Weight gain doesn't happen to everyone but it did to me. I certainly wouldn't attribute every single pound gained to the med, I'm sure I was binge eating at times too, but it really feels like a futile effort when you're on the meds and trying to diet and exercise and the scale never going down :/. I hope that's not the case for you and like I said many people never experience that side effect. The side effects vary so much as I'm sure you know.

Wishing you luck on your journey. :)

Yeah i definitely might give it a try i'm in a small enough community so I feel they won't be as progressive as other places but I'd try at least, yeah I used to binge a lot which just emphasized my body hate so I'm a little scared it was due to the antidepressants baha, Wishing you luck as well! thank you.

It depends on the disorder that you are taking the medicine for. Unfortunately there is no specific medicine for PTSD so they really don't help with my PTSD specific symptoms. They help a little bit with anxiety and depression at first but since it doesn't help my actual PTSD that causes more anxiety and depression. Someone tried to get me to take topiramate for PTSD and it actually gave me seizures and I couldn't eat to the point of almost passing out. I tried Paroxetine 20mg and that gave me a terrible panic attack all day. Really anxiety and depression in PTSD is not a main disorder like it is for people who have anxiety or depression. It's kind of more like the problems of PTSD and symptoms specific to it causes anxiety and depression so I think more serious therapy is more beneficial than medication. Like EMDR and such but it varies by person, and since a lot of therapists are online it is difficult to get EMDR or I ask for EMDR and they say okay and we just talk and never do EMDR.

Sorry that was a lot but yeah the effect of the medicine depends on the disorder whether suicidal or not.

i'm sorry nothing is helping to treat PTSD, couldn't imagine how rough it must be, i'm glad therapy helps but finding specific things to help like that is always so difficult

 

[SVEN]

Not much.

 

[SocialSoil]

Ohh, my favorite topic.
My first antidepressant was escitalopram, I started taking it somewhere at the winter. Then I got spring flare-up. My psychiatrist at that time persuaded me to go to a psychiatric hospital. To do that, I needed first go to our main town psychiatrist (cuz mine wasn't living at the same place) so they will write me referral to hospital.
Towm psychiatrist didn't write it, instead she literally sat there, scratched her head while mumbling "What do I prescribe you..." and wrote receipts for amitriptyline and chlorprotixen at the same time, telling me to quit escitalopram. These didn't work.
At last summer, I got to another good psychiatrist, and she prescribed me venlafaxin. It worked a bit, then I witnessed death of my pet, got fall flare-up. She added teraligen. Didn't work. Switched to lamotrigine and added mirtazapin. It worked! Got spring flare-up... she switched gosages to 2 times bigger, added quetiapine, it worked and now she tells me to use it at flare-ups. At June, one event happened, got flare-up. I take now at day 225mg of venlafaxine, 200mg of lamotrigine, 30mg of mirtazapine. Except for venla it's almost maximum dosages per day. I should take quetiapine but I am just done with everything and will ctb.
She also gave me receipt for 25mg atarax, and for some time it worked. Then I got heavy breakdown and drank 3 pills, was a little dizzy, slept for around 3 hours and woke up good. Now it barely works. My psychiatrist thinks I have resistancy for antidepressants.

So... tl;dr: escitalopram, amytriptyline, chlorprotixen, venlafaxin, teraligen, lamotrigine, mirtazapine, quetiapine, atarax. They eventually just stop working for me.

 

[VeryShy]

No psych med that I've ever taken has helped me significantly enough, and I was on a vast amount of them.

 

[iamanavalanche]

ive had sertraline in the past and i currently use citalopram. these are prescribed mainly for my social anxiety disorder :)
sertraline frankly made me feel worse despite how high they kept increasing my dose. i had frequent, or even worse, panic attacks and felt even more deeply depressed.
citalopram has been working well on me though, or at least has helped me function as a human. it stops me from feeling nearly as anxious as i used to be but suicidal thoughts still run through my head. i just dont feel depressed about it. its almost like the sensation of always being tired/bleak but not often feeling sad.

 

[lizzywizzy09]

Not at all. I never needed them. I have asd and physical health problems, both of which were falsely attributed to mental health issues and a whole lot of pill pushing that made everything worse.

 

[BojackH]

I was on ssri and anti-anxiety meds at the same time. Initially, it helped a lot. I was feeling a lot better and my social anxiety was completely gone(this was the best thing).It was as if I were a completely new person. Then after a while my doctor told me to discontinue anti-anxiety meds and continue with ssri. Slowly my social anxiety came back and it was hard for me to cry(I used to cry very easily whenever somebody talked to me. So this side effect was good for me). After a year or two, I felt like the meds had stopped working. My doctor tried different combinations of meds but nothing seemed to work. Eventually I discontinued my meds and stopped going to my doctor.

 

[Plentiful_Despair]

Barely helped. They just made it easier to sleep, if I take 2 Seroquel I sleep for 12 hours.

 

[imflo_pink]

Seemed to help a lot at first, but really they haven't seemed to do anything.

 

[LunarLight]

Tried many, many SSRIs and SNRIs which didn't do shit. Now I'm on mianserine and it seems to work quite well, my suicidal urges become blunt and I sleep much much better, although I'm not in great shape.

 

[Cress]

Not a whole lot. However you should also be aware that there's modern genetic testing available by taking a buckle swab of your saliva and sending it in. They are able to determine if you even have receptors in your brain to accept some of the more popular SSRIs.

I did it a few months ago and sure enough it turns out nearly all the antidepressants that I've tried and medications I didn't have receptors for. Your psychiatrist can potentially use this Genetic testing information to identify better medications for you in the future.

 

[dramatizelist]

I think the best for me was desvenlafaxine but a big part of that was that it gave me wicked vivid dreams.