[yuck39]

As someone taking Lexapro for similar reasons, do you have any plans to taper off of Zoloft? I tried to stop taking it cold turkey once and had wild side effects ranging from fatigue to the inability to keep my balance standing up.

My psych seems to be okay with keeping me on it indefinitely but I'm not sure how long I _should_ be taking this stuff.

[phphphphp]

Do whatever feels right for you. There are some people for whom there is a psychological cost to being on medication and medication for them is a step towards being "normal" but for many other people (like myself) medication is a tool I'll continue to use for as long as it feels helpful.

That said, if you do wish to stop taking medication like Lexapro or Zoloft, try to frame it as an experiment in finding the ideal dose for yourself: you hope it'll be 0 but it may not be. Stopping cold turkey is a very bad idea for the obvious side effects you experienced, but you're also missing out on the opportunity to understand whether you can live well without the medication (i.e: your entire quitting Lexapro experience becomes consumed by the horrible side effects, rather than the change in your mental health, which is difficult to measure when you're suffering an inability to stand up right).

I am not a doctor or the parent commentor, just a Zoloft consumer, so take this with a spoonful of salt, but... the standard dose of Zoloft is anywhere from 50mg to 200mg: if you're on 200mg and feel that maybe now is the time to come off Zoloft, then gradually reducing down from 200 to 150 to 100 to 75 to 50 to 25 to 0 will give you many helpful checkpoints to determine whether the medication is required, e.g: if you get down to 100mg from 200mg and start to struggle, you know that 100mg isn't enough, but 200mg is more than you need, so maybe a good new dose for you is 150mg. Repeat every time you feel like quitting. Swap those numbers for whatever Lexapro's dosage range is.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Strange, Lexapro is typically one of the easier SSRIs to stop taking; it has a long enough half life that it tends to be self-tapering.

It's certainly possible to do a slow taper off it, though. In general there should be no super long term side effects to worry about though.

If you absolutely insist, your psychiatrist would probably help set up a tapering schedule.

[thehappypm]

No plans to taper off, I’m much happier with my quality of life on it and the side effects are pretty manageable.

[seunosewa]

Take it as long as it helps you.