As the title suggests, does anyone have any experiences with the medication Lexapro that they can share? It’s been prescribed for my sister and she’s scared to death about taking a “drug that will mess with (my) brain.”
Can anyone alleviate her fears that this drug will turn her into some not-quite-right facsimile of herself?
I’ve been on Lex for about 8 months now and I hardly even notice I’m on it. The “messing with your brain” effects only lasted for a couple days for me. It’s really a pretty mild drug as far as SSRIs go.
A friend of mine was on it for a year so and it was wonderful for her. Now’s she’s having to go off it for financial reasons and it’s been very difficult.
On the other hand, I tried it for a month and it wound me up like a watch spring to the breaking point, and made me so nervous I’d drop things when the phone rang. A lot of people have to try several different drugs before they find one that works for them - this one definately didn’t work for me. You just have to work with your doctor and keep trying, sometimes.
What’s wrong with getting your brain “messed with” if you wind up feeling better and being more productive? Ask her that.
I have had wonderful sucess with Lexapro. It doesn’t make me feel in the least bit loopy or not myself. The only flaw is that I feel so normal that I think I can stop taking it; don’t let it fool you
I take it this is your sis’s first experience with anti-depressants?
I’ll assume that you know or can easily find out what SSRI’s do, in a literal sense. They are not happy drugs. They are not addictive. They help to balance mood, which has been shown to be connected to the efficacy of certain brain chemicals. They do not make you into something you are not. You do not get “high” on them. They don’t change your ethics or lower your inhibitions or remove your will.
Now, onto your question. I have tried them all - pretty much. I have done the anti-depressant sampler platter. I started taking medication at 21. I am now 35, and have been on many different meds. Most recently, I was on a combination of Celexa and Effexor. Three weeks ago I switched to 20 mgs of Lexapro.
My combo worked for me, but the Lexapro works much better, and it was immediate. (As it was when I initially went on Celexa.) It’s as if my brain was clouded, shrouded in fog, and within days, I felt as if my brain was “clear”. I could think and concentrate. My anxiety disappated dramatically. I felt motivated to do things around my house than had been neglected for weeks. I feel more energetic, and am sleeping better. I can make decisions and come up with solutions. I feel realistically optimistic.
Depression makes me feel like everything, everything, requires a herculian effort. One of the suckiest things about it is wanting to do something, make a change, and just not being able to. It’s like a nightmare where the hallway just keeps getting longer and longer and the door to freedom further and further from your grasp. It’s like being up to your nostrils in heavy, viscous fluid.
Now I have my life, the same life I had before, but without all of that other crap. I always say, dealing with depression is like having to scale a steep mountain wearing a backpack full of heavy rocks. It’s hard enough as it is. If meds can remove that backpack from your shoulders, why not?
Wow. This was really long! Sorry!
Anybody know a good editor?
I took Lexapro a couple of months back, and while it wasn’t the right med for me, I didn’t have any problems with it. IOW, I didn’t turn into a homicidal loon while on it. It also doesn’t kick in right away. It took five days before I really started noticing the effects, so even if it’s not what she needs to be on, it’s not like she’ll be instantly in the total thrawl of the drug and unable to realize she needs to quit taking it. And unlike Zoloft, it didn’t make me feel like my skin was on backwards or make me insanely irritable (mind you, I was able to keep myself under control while under the Zoloft). Reassure her that you’ll be keeping tabs on her, so that if she starts acting out of sorts, that you’ll let her know.
Like your sister, I was terrified of going on medication, and I put it off for years, until circumstances forced me to start taking it. I wish I’d started sooner, then perhaps I wouldn’t have pissed away so many things that were valuable to me, like friendships.
Also, I’ve found that it’s best to take your dose right before you go to bed. That seems to eliminate the initial “rollercoaster” effect it can have emotionally.
Zsofia, I feel for your friend. Today I had the choice of paying my lightbill or refilling my meds. I chose to refill my meds, since I quickly realized after not taking them for a couple of days that I could live without electricity, but I wouldn’t make it without my meds. If I’m lucky, they won’t cut the power until Wednesday (I’ll be able to get the money to pay it by then), but I’m betting it’ll be off tomorrow.
Lexapro worked fine for me, but it made me gain 20 pounds, even though I was bicycling every day.
But everything makes me gain weight. If your sis doesn’t have a weight problem it should be OK.
ZJ
I’ve been taking Lexapro for about seven months now, and it took a while for it to settle in, but since it did I’ve been fine with it – and it works.
It messed with my sleep for the first three weeks – I’d wake up after an hour-and-a- half’s sleep feeling fully awake and strangely caffeinated. That wasn’t fun, but it passed, and if anything I’m sleeping better now than before Lexapro.
My hands and feet seemed to sweat for a couple of weeks, but that was just a minor oddity, which passed too.
There were a scary couple of weeks of “delayed” orgasm (meaning unattainable) when I began to imagine *never coming again. But that fixed itself as well, and while I’m a bit less of a horndog than I was before taking Lexapro, I’m not sure whether that’s due to the drug or to my current feeling that, as Divine once said, “I can’t stand no more trouble!”. Anyway, it’s fine with me. YMMV.
After about five weeks of these shifting side effects, they all went away and I started feeling the benefits of the drug. For the first time in a long while I’m able to feel optimism. I don’t worry constantly about small things now, so it no longer feels as if life itself is about to smack up against some fearsome wall of doom.
I do feel at times that Lexapro’s enhanced my already prodigious capacity for procrastination, but at the same time I don’t get whipped-up anymore when things fall a little behind, so I guess that works out okay. 
TeaElle, undeniably, a drug like Lexapro works on the brain’s chemistry and that’s probably what your sister’s afraid of. For the same reason, I resisted the suggestion that I take it for several months. But it hasn’t “messed with” my brain so much as cleared some space in it. Works for me, anyway. I hope your sister will give it a try – for at least five or six weeks, or what her doctor recommends – and see if it works for her. And I hope it will.
Thank you, everyone. My sister is set to arrive here today for Thanksgiving, and she promised to bring the medication with her, though (as of Saturday night) she had resisted beginning to take it. I’m going to show her this thread and hope that it will encourage her; it took a lot just to get her to go to a doctor, I pray that your positive stories will help her feel able to just give it a try.
I’ve been on it for over a month, and while I feel better emotionally, I’ve had to say goodbye to my wonderful sex life. I still have the sex, I just don’t feel it very much anymore and can’t get off. I figure I’ll stay on it through the holidays so I don’t slit my wrists and then try to go off it in the spring. I am not willing to sacrifice my sex life, I’d rather be depressed.
Also, tell her to just take a half a pill for the first week or so. I think Lexapro is hard to get adjusted to, it gives you a weird feeling. I took a half for a week and then went up to a whole pill.
I’ve been on Lexapro since it came out (almost 2 years) - my doc gave me samples. It has done a number on my sex drive and ability to reach the Big O, but it keeps me on an even keel. I still have “episodes” on occasion, when I’m under a whole lotta stress, or there’s a particularly tragic event in my life. However, I am a whole different person without it! Anxious, worrying, convinced that everything that can go wrong will go wrong, etc. I’m not some sort of emotionless zombie (which is what some people are concerned about). I’m able to cope a whole lot better with daily ups and downs.
Have you tried looking at other options, or lowering the dose so that you still get some relief from depression, but don’t suffer as many sexual side-effects?
In women, anorgasmia is THE biggest reason my mom’s patients quit taking their meds (if you narrow down the subset in which the drug worked for them in the first place). The result is almost always relapse. She’s had some luck lowering doses, or switching out of class. You may have some options besides just quitting antidepressant therapy altogether.
I can see why women want to quit the drug. If it happens to guys, they have Viagra and a hundred other sex-enhancing drugs to try. Women have nothing.
I’ve been on almost every kind of anti-depressant there is, and this has been a side effect with all of them. It’s not worth it to me. It’s counterproductive to anything the drug does to help my emotional status. It’s terrible. As for options, I haven’t heard of any except taking Wellbutrin instead, which makes me feel like I’m on dirty speed.
Lexapro doesn’t even make me entirely well, it just barely helps. Like I said, I’d rather be depressed than give up the one thing in life that really brings me joy.
I’d probably quit it if I had that side effect, too. But fortunately I don’t.
As with all SSRI’s they effect different people in different ways. The worst effect I ever had from one was from Paxil and the effect was only to make my thinking a little slower than usual. I noticed that, but people I worked with in a highly technical job did not, so the effect wasn’t much.
Currently I’m taking Lexapro (30mg) and Zoloft (10mg) a day, together they work very well for me. Without the Zoloft I find the Lexapro makes me a little sleepy in the early afternoon. The positive effect is that I can get things done outside of work, so I’m working for a living and not just living to work. It helps me to be able to releive my stress levels, and gives me enough feeling of worthwhileness that I have been able to keep on a low fat diet for the last few months and lost over 16 lbs so far. Without a good working SSRI I wouldn’t care enough about my self and my appearence to worry that I was losing my athletic build and starting to get a ‘beer belly’, I would also more than likely stay indoors whenever I was not at work, playing DVD’s and computer games, and doing nothing much else.
TeaElle, also some more anecdotal info for you:
I have two sisters that also take Lexapro. Both of them have been very, very resistant to taking any kind of anti-depressant for years. Finally, one sister starting taking it after going through an exceptionally rough patch. It worked so well for her and made such a difference that it convinced the other to give medications a try.
They both now say that there is no way they will ever stop taking it, it has made such a tremendous positive impact in their lives. They finally feel normal and happy (even though they both have Life Crap to deal with).
Their resistance to taking anti-depressants were the standards: meddling with brain chemicals, expense, being seen as weak, fear that something really was “wrong” with them, etc.
My husband just went back off Lexapro after a month on. He couldn’t stand it any longer because he said it made him feel like he was wearing a wetsuit all the time. The sensations in his skin felt deadened. I wonder if a similar thing is why some people find sex isn’t working as well or at all.
I think he’s been on almost everything by now. He’s on Wellbutrin, which definitely helps, but we haven’t been able to find another drug to push him over a threshold into bearable depression.
Let’s see, it’s been Zoloft, Effexor, Cymbalta, Paxil, Neurontin, and Lexapro. Frustrating.
From what I understand, men also suffer from reduced libido and anorgasmia while on serotonergic antidepressants. Some have further problems with erectile dysfunction. Viagra can help with the latter, but not with the former. So, even with Viagra, it may be that you can point, but you can’t shoot.
My mom has had some good luck switching people from an SSRI to Effexor XR, and using a relatively low dose of it (like no more than 150mg). She’s had some success keeping people euthymic while minimizing (though not eliminating) sexual side-effects. There’s a newer drug on the market, Cymbalta, which is similar in some respects to Effexor, but supposedly does a better job of balanceing serotonin and norepinephrine potentiation. In other words, you get better noradrenergic bang for your serotonergic buck. There’s a growing sentiment that the dual-acting SNRIs are superior in overall efficacy and applicability to SSRIs (though I don’t think there’s much good head-to-head data available to prove this). Anyhow, say an SNRI is, pound-for-pound, better than an SSRI for some people. And say the sexual side-effects are mostly due to the drug’s serotonergic action. And say you could get satisfactory results out of something that was dosed less potently at the serotonin reuptake pump than a vanilla SSRI. It might have fewer negative effects on sexual response.
It’s not a hypothesis with a lot of hard data to back it up, of course. Based on what I’ve seen of my mom and the pdoc she works with, these are the kinds of intuitive leaps psychopharmacologists often have to make, in the absense of good information (in fact, I lifted it right from her). It doesn’t necessarily hurt to try yet again, as they say. Many patients feel they’ve exhausted the psych pharmacopia, but often a good pdoc has another trick or two up his or her sleeve.