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by biturd 3749 days ago
I suspect you need not go that slow. I am NOT a Dr., but have talked at length with mine about this. I won't go into specifics or detail as people need to talk to their Dr.s about these methods.

All meds have a half life, your taper rate will be based on that and your personal metabolism rate, which can and almost always is altered by the meds themselves.

Further confused that a huge percentage of people who suffer depression need no meds and instead need a thyroid test, and not just a "give blood and see where you were at that moment" test, but a real, pain in the butt, complicated test, which I suspect is why they don't give them as a first line test. I was blown away I was never offered one.

As you get down to the lower doses, it gets harder, some you will have to take to a compounding pharmacy, others you can crush and get a good scale and weigh out what milligram or microgram you need; others, if you feel safe doing so can be taken intranasaly via a Flonase sprayer depending on if the med is water soluble and what the mixed shelf life is, which can be hard data to get at times.

I can say there is no worse kick than Effexor, that is for damn sure, and that was only 2-3 weeks in. That had a permanent change on me for life, instilling a bit of timidness in me regarding certain things that happened as I was detoxing.

Good Luck, hope you get off them and manage to learn how to manage your life without them, that is exactly where I am as well. They work, but I don't like the fake happy feeling. They try to tell me that is what my normal is, and I am just not remembering my true normal, that I don't buy, I remember my youth before this all started.

2 comments

effexor, aka venlafaxine, gave me some amazingly horrible vertigo if I missed more than 1 dose in a row. I was off antidepressants for about 2 years, and then I was hit with severe depression. I'm on the generic for paxil now, and it has made a huge difference. The impact was a night and day contrast.
Someone I know who took it said they got what they could only describe as "head shocks" - the effect of small pulses of electricity flowing through their brain during withdrawal.
I got these when I first began taking antidepressants with fluoxetine/Prozac, never felt myself for a very long time afterwards.
Ah yes, those jolts of electricity. I got those for a month after escitalopram.
> Further confused that a huge percentage of people who suffer depression need no meds and instead need a thyroid test

You can't say things like "huge percentage" without citation.

10% of the us population on antidepressants, even 1% is 350,000 people...

According to this [1] about 12 million people have a thyroid problem and don't know it. (maybe a bad source?)

Given there's no test for depression, and it's a pretty unreliable judgement call [2], it's a pretty reasonable claim.

[1] http://www.thyroid.org/media-main/about-hypothyroidism/ [2] http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/706714