alcoholism caused by paxil?
 

I’m wondering if anyone else out there has had an experience similar to mine. I started taking paxil about 3 years ago to deal with social anxiety disorder. At first it worked really well, my anxiety was almost completely gone and I felt pretty good. I started a new job, made a couple of new friends, and time passed.
Let me mention here that I’m 35 years old, (32 when I started taking paxil), and up until then I had no history of alcohol abuse. I drank like an average person, a couple of beers once in a while, sometimes I bought hard alcohol but it was not a staple in my home. I could go months without drinking and not even think about it. Okay, so I will admit, I liked drinking, but there is a history of addiction in my family and so I’ve always been very careful with alcohol. At least I was, before I started taking paxil.
In the 3 years since I’ve been taking paxil I’ve started seriously abusing alcohol and become someone I never could have foreseen. I’ve gone on binges drinking nearly a liter of hard alcohol a day. Worse still, I can’t go a day without drinking.
My blood pressure has also been high for about 2 and a half years, another problem I didn’t have previously. My doctor prescribed medication for this problem and it worked really well at first. My blood pressure came down to normal for the first time in years.
Please bear with me here. These things sound disconnected but they’re not.
I recently decided to wean myself off of paxil because I realized that over the past 3 years I’ve slowly lost every emotion and every interest I had previously. I’ve died inside. There’s nothing left of who I used to be. I can’t one hundred percent say if this total loss of feeling is the result of alcohol or paxil or both, but I believe it’s mostly the paxil. And so now I’m trying to wean myself off of both.
I’ve been weaning off of paxil for about 3 weeks and a funny thing happened the other day. Even though I’m still drinking my blood pressure (which I’d assumed was high due to alcohol), suddenly dropped from a healthy 128/89 to 100/60. If you don’t know anything about blood pressure, this number is pretty low. At this point I realized that the paxil may have been responsible for my high blood pressure and decided to look it up online. I found a list of “rare” side effects which included high blood pressure and, to my surprise, alcohol abuse. (It also included lack of emotions.)
I’m surprised that a pill could lead to alcohol abuse but it makes sense when I think about it. The paxil erased all my feelings, good and bad. The only time I felt anything was right after a shot of rum or whiskey. It seems that was the only thing I could find to stimulate my mind and emotions. And after all, why would I suddenly become an alcoholic in my 30’s with no negative life event preceding it.
So my question is: has anyone else found themselves drinking too much after starting paxil? I was thinking, people don’t like admitting to alcohol abuse (me included) and so this side effect could be more wide spread than people realize.
Also, if there’s anyone out there who has been in my position I’d like to know if after quitting paxil you managed to get your drinking under control.
Any responses would be appreciated.

Welcome :)

I have no experience with Paxil at all, I'm afraid.

the internet is a great resource but it's no substitute for one on one medical advice.
Have you discussed this at all with your own doctor, or another one?

D

What did your doctor say about this? Did you let him or her know abou your family history of addiction before starting on the Paxil?

Most if what you ask can only be answered by a medical professional, and we can't give medical advice here.

I've never considered it a cause, but 10-11 years ago I went on Paxil. Afterwards I developed a cocaine problem and its when I became a full-fledged alcoholic. Maybe there's something to this.

I'm an alcoholic because of genetics. I'm an alcoholic because of my friends. I'm an alcoholic because of my difficult work schedule. I'm an alcoholic because of peer pressure. I'm an alcoholic because I was given Paxil.

In my experience it does not matter. I hate writing it because it frustrates me to hear it also, but really...what's the difference? At this point it sounds like you're in a pretty dangerous place. It might be best to think about the best way to quit, you can worry about the reasons later with a doctor and therapist. Good luck.

Unfortunately though, at least from my experience, removing Paxil doesnt remove the alcohol addiction.

I took Paxil for 11 years without any alcohol or drug problems. My issues started around 2007, long after starting Paxil. I've heard these anecdotal stories about a correlation between alcoholism and Paxil, but in my case the Paxil doesn't appear to be a factor.

Also my BP is good, and has been for years.

To my knowledge, once you are addicted to anything nothing removes the addiction, no matter what caused it. And no one knows exactly what causes addiction, whether you've taken Paxil, or any drug for that matter. What's important is realizing addiction and getting help.

I understand that. I was stating the obvious.

Rehab psychiatrist prescribed me paxil once. I stopped taking it after a few days and feeling like a piece of paper (nothing felt).

Thank you all for your helpful responses. All Im really looking for here is some idea of how this started.

Just to report that I was a normal take-it-or-leave-it social drinker until my early 40s, at which time I was prescribed Paxil after a major depressive episode. I developed full-blown alcoholism within a year or two.

I can't know for sure that there was a correlation but I always felt intuitively that there was. It seemed like the Paxil was somehow egging on my increasing alcohol consumption.

I agree this is a tangential issue to alcoholism recovery -- causes aren't relevant here; solutions are -- but such data may become useful someday in medical research on alcohol addiction.

Thank you for that reply. That the drinking has to stop is a given. It just seems to be tied into the paxil so much I think it will be easier not to drink without it. As I reduce the paxil I seem to crave less alcohol. Plus I just wanted to see if this is more common than ppl think.

This is a very interesting thread. I say this because before I went onto SSRI's, to my knowledge I did not have an alcohol problem. I never once did the binges that I have in the last couple of years and certainly didn't crave the alcohol like I do now.

Whether or not the medication I was on had anything to do with that, I do not know. I'd be very interested to hear how you get on.

No one has cravings when they start drinking.

I was on Paxil way back in my early 30's but I didn't crave alcohol. I was on it for about 2 years and then went off it. It did help with my depression at the time.

Then about 7-8 years later I started drinking to ease stress and it took off from there. I did go back on Paxil hoping it would help with the drinking, but it didn't. Paxil and alcohol definately don't mix! Sometimes alcohol can counteract against what the Paxil is suppose to do. Or it can intensify the feeling. And because it does this, you just want more alcohol.

Everyone reacts differently to anti-depressant, what works for one person doesn't work for another. And Paxil can have some nasty side effects and nasty withdrawal.

Anti-depressants shouldn't make you feel worse and if they do I truly believe you are on the wrong dose or you need a different one or there is more going on than a chemical imbalance. They are not a "happy" pill. They are to put the chemical imbalance back in place so that you can cope with life.

However I do think that anything is possible, one of the symptoms for menopause is alcohol craving. Whether these are true or not who knows! I know for me I did use these as excuses to drink, not saying that is what you are doing.

Thank you to everyone who has responded. My main reason for this post was to figure out if anyone else had suffered this phenomenon. It's just that I wasn't an alcoholic in my 20's and to suddenly become one in my 30's seems strange. I'm not making excuses. I know alcohol is something I have to leave behind for good because I can never be trusted with it again. I'm just mad this happened. I know no one craves a drink before they've ever had one but imagine you've spent 32 years as a person without alcohol problems and then go on paxil for a social anxiety problem and THEN after you've reached the point where you're just dead inside you have an innocent drink with your friends and for the first time in a while, you feel something. What are you going to want to do the next day?
When you're a zombie you don't care what you're doing to yourself. You'll do anything just to feel. At least this is what I think happened. But please don't get me wrong. There's no excuse for this. But there's always a reason.

I shared this same post on a site called paxilprogress and some of the people who have responded have been very helpful, seeming to have shared the same experience. Thank you for your open minds.

I was on Paxil a number of years ago. It sent me into a hypomanic state (little mania). I didn't realize what was going on, but I felt agitated and weird. I ended up doing some very misguided things in attempts to aleviate that mood/sensation.