Posted by wcfrench on October 16, 2002, at 15:13:19
In reply to Re: my experience; from zoloft to prozac and then some, posted by tai on October 15, 2002, at 11:10:40
in response to your question about the Effexor from Social Babble...
I don't know why we stopped it. Looking back on the situation, we probably should have kept it going. What happened was we added Lithium and after a few days I started feeling really good.. I had lots of energy and I was driving really fast and listening to party music with full vigor. I was pretty emotionless, and my empathy and warm emotion was kind of gone. It's hard to explain, but I worked out really hard, and didn't care about much because I felt really good, which seemed, in retrospect, to not be who I really was. So I'm not sure if that was purely an effect of the Lithium that was going to subside, or if that truly was the benefit of augmenting Effexor with Lithium. The Effexor never seemed to make me feel that way alone, but some people claim that it makes you very energetic and crazy, so maybe once I augmented it that's what I was experiencing. Just for the record, though, I was happy.
My next doctor's visit he saw me in this state, and I was definitely feeling good. I remember playing around with the glass models in his office while I was waiting for him to come in. It was a duck, and I was moving him around like he was swimming, having lots of fun mind you, and that's when the doc came in. Well, I had been fairly unsuccessful for about 1 year and 4 months now with him, during which we tried mood stabilizers and antipsychotics with some success, but terrible side effects. That's another story I'll tell later-- it was terrible. So needless to say he was happy to see me this way. Then he says he wants to wean me off the Effexor and go with just Lithium. I mean, I had no idea so I was trusting him, and I wasn't big onto psychobabble yet so I had very limited knowledge. I guess he thought all I needed was Lithium. That's when I left him for another doctor, because I got very bad again, and it was the last straw. My new doc questioned why he took me off, and so do I, looking back. I mean, for people who aren't manic depressive, Lithium is strictly an adjunctive treatment. I was taking 300mg twice a day, which is not what you take when you are using it as monotherapy. I think it's more like 1000-2000mg a day when you're using it alone. So here I was having to start over in terms of antidepressants, and from then on has just been trial and error. Paxil, Remeron, now Zoloft. Paxil stopped working and made me shake, sweat, grind my teeth, and have a bad stomach. Remeron made me sleep too much and just didn't really "work." No interest in anything. And I'm waiting on the Zoloft. If it doesn't work, I'm going to have to do something else, like maybe that treatment-resistant depression study. I saw it on a show, and I'm going to write a thread about it just to make sure people know about it. The closest location is an hour and a half away though, so it would be a pain.
So I don't know why we stopped the Effexor, and neither does my current doctor.. it was probably a mistake. In terms of sexual side effects, I didn't really know how much, if at all, it was affecting me until I came off it. Once I did, I could tell that it did diminish my sex drive and lengthen the time to orgasm. But overall it wasn't too bad, we had more time to play around. I didn't get those strong instinctive sexual urges but was still very much interested. It was fine, a minor inconvenience for me, if any. How about the Zoloft for you? If it's similar to what the Effexor did I'd take it in a second. Feeling good seems most important.
See ya,
Charlie
poster:wcfrench
thread:123411
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20021012/msgs/123901.html