Originally Posted by leviathon
I also had the experience where it caused or contributed to my craving booze. I am now on celexa take way less of a dose 10 mg. instead of 75mg or 150 mg and I am much happier and more stable.
Wow! This is one helluva thread. Effexor is an AD I never took. The 'only' ones I have experience with are, and they're in this order over the past dozen years or so, are:
First-generation ADs: amitriptyline (Elavil), imipramine (Trofranil), and nortriptyline (Pamelor). All for very brief periods (under 4 months I'd say). The anticholinergic side effects made these drugs basically intolerable for me.
SSRIs: Prozac (couldn't tolerate it b/c it wound me up like a child's toy! [super hyped]), and then Zoloft, my magic-bullet on which I remained for about 10 years. Cut to the present: over the past 3 months, the wonderful Celexa about which you'll read below.
Leviathon -
Hooray another Celexa user!! LOL
I'm all the time getting the impression that citalopram (Celexa) is the poor man's
escitalopram (Lexapro) since Celexa's patent has expired and the Lexapro they say is just like Celexa only improved b/c of less side-effects.
Well, I've been doing miraculously myself on the 20mg (Celexa) he has me on and amazingly, cannot even tell I'm taking it. In that sense, it is REALLY superior to Zoloft for me.
This is just such a funny-bizarre, uncharted area man.
For one, Effexor's propensity for causing what pts variously describe as "brain-shocks," "brain-shivers," or "brain-zaps" is puzzling as all get-out to me.
If anything, all the discrepant reports of different strokes for different folks and they--the scientific community--don't know why, just tells me that for all the advancements made over the past 60 years, we truly are in psychiatry's infancy stage yet.
When you cannot get a straight answer from the pro's, but instead a humble admission of "we just don't kow why," that sez something right there.
What, I'm sure. LOL
But either we are the guinea-pigs for psychiatry's future
* or just very lucky to have what we have. Hmm.
An inconclusive reflection. *shrug*
Ten
* Explication: We're either better off today than we realize, or Tom Cruise and the whole anti-pyschiatry crowd is right and we're just inventing new diseases every year so that Big Pharma can profit off them to the tune of billions, baby. That possibility -however slim- makes me extremely uneasy. Alas though, tis a bit late in the game for me now and I'm in it for life it would seem.