Hey ppl…thanx for a lil insight on my other thread…im really diggiing this hole msg board…ive hung around here for a while but i havent felt like joining…but now i have and here a im…yay me…anyways anyone know ALL the effect that anti’s like protazic, paxil, have on you. I mean like mental and physical ones here…my mum wants me to go on them so I dont shoot myself and so she dosent have to pay a furnul bill. Any insight, humor…or umm…misc comments would be nice…latez
Well, I’m always happy to share some of my more embarrassing things about myself :o
Well, don’t dig too far. ooooh, bad pun… dodges flying fruit
With a name like CandiBoi, who could not like you? :rolleyes:
Well, why don’t you ask your doctor when you have that zit on you penis checked out? 
I seriously hope you’re kidding here.
You should check with your doctor, who will prescribe the medication he/she thinks is right for you… and will describe the potential side effects.
One thing to remember: the pharmaceutical companies are out to make a fortune and to protect their arses. They don’t wanna get sued. Therefore, the pharmacy print-out will list every possible side effect, no matter how rare or remote. The last one that I had included power outages as a possible side effect; turns out that someone who took the drug was at home during a thunderstorm and the whole block lost electric power, so that’s recorded as a possible side effect of the drug. (Just kidding, but I wanted to make the point, that even if 0.001% of people taking the drug might have a side effect, they will report it in their warnings.)
Dexter Haven is right - it’s best to ask a pharmacist or doctor. But right off hand, the ones I remember:
delayed orgasm
headaches
dry mouth
dizziness
Not all of these effect all people, of course. I vaguely remember a side effects info sheet on one of the serotonin reuptake inhibitors, where it said that the side effects were similar to the effect of too much black coffee (dry mouth, dizziness, etc.), but they usually went away after being on the drug for a little while.
In general, the modern anti-depressants have much less in the way of nasty side-effects than the old school cyclic and MAOI drugs do.
Ahem… complete and utter lack of sexual desire. I know that comes from Prozac. I think the worst part is the complete and overwhelming sense of numbness
“Ahem… complete and utter lack of sexual desire. I know that comes from Prozac.”
—Really? That settles it—I’m gettin’ me some o’ that Prozac!
Not that it was meant to be a troll but:
CKDextHavn, I work in the pharmaceutical field my entire professional career and can tell you that:
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Any statistically significant side effect that occurs in clinical testing must be listed according to the FDA. And if power outages occured a significant amount of the time they’d probably be listed too
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The high cost of pharmaceuticals is due to the lengthy development process for drugs. You patent at the phase where the drug is first discovered, but it can take up to 14 years to get the drug through clinical trials, leaving a minimal 6 years left on your 20 year patent to recoup the $50 - $100 million development cost and make a profit. After 20 years, generics hit the market and 95% of the drug’s market share (for the inventor) disappears. The result? High drug costs. Don’t like it? Ask your congressman to petition the FDA for longer drug patents.
[rant] [/ end rant]
No one can tell you ** every ** side effect you yourself may have from any given drug. Everyone reacts differently to different things.
Now to the rest of what you said that I didn’t snip out. I hope you you aren’t really thinking of shooting yourself.
Let me clue you in on a few things. If you do something like that , believe me, the people you leave behind will suffer, but you know what. They will go on. I’m telling this because I know it’s true. My first husband killed himself 24 years ago. You know what ? All these years later, I am still here, I remarried and have been married for 22 years. I have a son who is graduating high school in June. I rarely think of my first husband anymore. I have a life, what does he have, execpt for his grave, nothing.
And I can’t tell you that I know for a fact what happens to you after you die, because I haven’t died yet. But I can say this, if God is real (and I believe He is, but that’s not my point) I would hate to have to face Him after I had been stupid enough to throw away a gift as precious as life.
Ayesha…thats kinda sad 
I dont think id shoot myself…no gun 
But anyways thx to the following peeps: Yarkser, eve, boris, poyspin, CKDextHavn, and louie…now i know something about them…“no sexual desire” would probuly make me be more depressing then its worth…HAH…for real though thx looks like when we get some $$ i’ll go score some.
I’ve been on Prozac for a prolong period of time (around 9 years) for sever cronic depression and OCD. First of all, I want to say that it’s not a “happy pill”. Some people think that if you are feeling sad and take a prozac that it immeadiately lifts your spirits. That is not the case. All it does is increase the levels of seratonin (a neurotransmitter)in your brain.
I’ve heard that one of the risks of taking Prozac is an increased risk of suicide. I find that a little hard to believe. That’s like saying that taking blood thinners makes you prone to have a heart attack (uh, excuse me; that’s WHY you were taking the blood thinners in the first place, because you were at risk for heart disease).
Side effects are going to be different from person to person, but here’s what I have experienced:
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Little nagging headaches. Not full-blown ones, but ones where you question, “Should I take something for this headache or not…?” I noticed them after being on prozac for about 3 weeks and after about 2 years have subsided to being only a rare occurance.
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My driving skills have been affected. My wife noticed that I’m not the driver I used to be since I am on Prozac. I don’t know if it is co-incidence or the prozac has somehow dulled my co-ordination.
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I’ve also noticed that it takes me longer to orgasm. I can go for almost twice as long as I could before (this IS one of the listed possible side effects)
Finally, all I can say is that my experience with prozac has been positive. I was in a severe depression (and I mean SEVERE)for 2 and a half years. My wife finally convinced me to go for help and the doc put me on prozac. After about 3 weeks I started to feel better. I wish that I had gone sooner; I consider those 2 and a half years a wasted part of my life…
Hope this helps someone…
Most antidepressants like Prozac or Paxil are SSRI, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. In other words they keep the serotonin in your brain circulating longer. Everyone I know who’s taken Paxil has lost their libido and getting aroused is very very difficult.
Do 2 things: Do a websearch for depression or anti-depressants and see a therapist or a psychiatrist for possible treatment.
Now this is very interesting. I went through a phase of, shall we say, moderate glumness recently, and I found myself drinking an awful lot of double cappuccinos. Coffee seemed to be the only thing that lifted my mood. Mind you, I didn’t actually go in for professional treatment or take any kind of medication, so I’m not talking about relative effectiveness of chemicals here. Watching TV, going for walks, exercise, conversation, music, food, etc., all failed to cheer me up, but caffeine did the trick. Can any stimulant have an antidepressant effect commensurate with its strength?
Welcome CandiBoi!
Don’t shoot yourself, think of the mess some poor sod will have to clean up.
One long term side effect of SSRIs (such as Prozac) others have not mentioned is that long term use reduces brain serotonin levels (because they keep serotonin in the system longer your brain adjusts by permanently making less). This is ok if your serotonin levels are already deficient (someone said they had been taking an SSRI for 9 years for OCD and depression, so one would guess he already had low serotonin levels, and thus this would not be a problem). But if you depression is due to external events (loss of relationship, fired from job, etc.) long term use of SSRIs could actually induce a biochemical depression.
As far as suicide, actually empirically speaking the best treatment for preventing suicide remains ECT (electro-convulsive therapy).
As always, consult a psychiatrist or psychologist
Heh. That sounds sarcastic, huh?
My knowledge of the subject comes from flipping through books on the history of psychiatry and psychopharmaceuticals, and chatting with a friend of mine who was a neuropsychology major. So don’t take what I say as gospel (“Boris 3:14” would look funny, huh?)
The syndrome (that sounds very serious, but I’m just using syndrome to mean “group of symptoms”) that caffiene has in common with the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are called “anticholinergic effects”. They both affect the same system, which is described here:
http://www.onu.edu/pharmacy/toxicology/antichol.html
I think caffeine does have mild anti-depressant effects. Is it a coincidence that SSRIs and caffiene both have anticholinergic and anti-depressant effect? I don’t know, but I bet it’s not.
Usually people get dizzy and jittery at much lower doses than would really help depression, though, so it can’t be considered a serious treatment. Caffeine overdoses can give you heart attacks, I think. What I’m saying is, caffeine has much nastier side effects at a dosage of equivalent effectiveness than an SSRI. That doesn’t mean it’s bad to drink coffee to break up glumness, though, since coffee is hardly concentrated caffeine. I’m just saying this so sad people won’t go and eat a whole bottle No Doz to try and feel better.
Once I went to a bipolar support group with an old friend of mine (she invited a bunch of us to come along to prove her condition was real; I had always believed her but I was interested and wanted to support her). The group leader, a manic-depressive himself, said he knew of lots of people with that condition who self-medicated their depressive sides with Super Big Gulps of cola or Mountain Dew. He said that tended to provoke the hypomanic side. He wasn’t recommending this; obviously being hypomanic is no better than being depressed if it means you tend to run around on the freeway convinced you can outrun cars. He was just saying, don’t self-medicate serious conditions. If he’s right, caffiene does have something to do with depression.
Other stimulants used to be tried to help with depression. They generally resulted in active, jittery sad people. So mood doesn’t have too much to do with activity level, per se. Again, there is probably some primitive self-medication going on, with people hoping to help out there depression with diet pills or whatever, thinking that if they at least got out of bed they must be better off.
The point is, if you’re not seriously depressed, and caffeine helps you feel less blah, feel free to have a mocha or a Jolt. Thinking I was a big coffee drinker, I read somewhere that “more than 10 cups of coffee a day is too much” - I never have more than three or four! Stimulants have been shown to be a fairly blunt weapon against depression; old-fashioned cyclic anti-depressants less so; Prozac/Paxil/Zoloft look like the best ones yet developed.