Psycho-Babble Medication | about biological treatments | Framed
This thread | Show all | Post follow-up | Start new thread | List of forums | Search | FAQ

Re: WHEN WILL IT WORK » sb2

Posted by omegon on January 15, 2004, at 20:00:11

In reply to Re: WHEN WILL IT WORK, posted by sb2 on January 15, 2004, at 18:53:49

> > been on 75 mgs for 10 days now...with effexor I cannot take in the morning because Iam to drowsy to drive to work. At night I have all kinds of dreams and jerk alot when Iam about to fall asleep. Does the drowsiness go away. Does sleep ever return to normal. I need to be alert. I need motivation!!! will this one do it?

Your experience is like mine when I started (see earlier post http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040109/msgs/299903.html). Until I got to 225mg, each dosage level made me very sleepy once the initial dose increase side-effects wore off after a week or so. The sleepiness didn't go away with time; it got steadily worse over 5 weeks at 225mg (3 doses 8 hours apart). I then tried 150mg morning and 75mg evening for 2 weeks, which was worse - MORE drowsy, dangerous to drive to work, less motivation, etc. On return to 3 spaced-out doses, the dose-increase side effects returned much worse (adrenaline rush) and it destabilised my mood enough that I had to quit after two more weeks. (crying for no reason, rage at nothing, etc. I may need a mood stabiliser.)

For me the insane dreams did disappear completely once I'd been at the same dose for about three weeks, unless I lay in / slept during the day - you might like to avoid this; for me it gave hellish dreams and worse mood when I eventually got up. Of course, when you're feeling that sleepy it's nearly impossible to get out of bed even with dreams chasing you ;)
The muscle twitching decreased as well, but was never a major problem for me, just irritating.

If you're on a low enough dose not to need to space it out, you could try switching between taking it at night <-> morning. Taking it at night still made me drowsy initially, but I couldn't get a full night's sleep that way - kept waking up - and was still hard to get out of bed in the morning. So I stuck with morning when I was on 75mg.

From the limited experience I've had with this drug, the best advice I can give you is to be absolutely rigid about taking it at the same time every day (set an alarm - seriously) and to be very cautious about changes in dosage or time of dosage. The short half-life seemed to cause major problems for me if I wasn't careful about this. Indeed it seemed to cause problems anyway. Change it slowly if possible and expect it to take at least a week to settle down.

Efexor did help my alertness and motivation a lot - but only some of the time.


Share
Tweet  

Thread

 

Post a new follow-up

Your message only Include above post


Notify the administrators

They will then review this post with the posting guidelines in mind.

To contact them about something other than this post, please use this form instead.

 

Start a new thread

 
Google
dr-bob.org www
Search options and examples
[amazon] for
in

This thread | Show all | Post follow-up | Start new thread | FAQ
Psycho-Babble Medication | Framed

poster:omegon thread:13781
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040114/msgs/301408.html