Loopydude,
You and your mom sound smart, but that whole thing just confused me. Go ask her what medicince I should take to help me get back on that orgasm train. I’ll try anything once. 
I know when it’s taking 30 min. with a vibrator that I have a problem. 
When my boyfriend stopped taking Effexor, he had side effects for nearly 3 months. The side effects ranged from terrible drymouth to insomnia (caused by what John referred to as the “jimmy legs” - restless legs that wouldn’t let him sleep) to a sound like whirring helicopters in his ears for hours at a time. I don’t know how anybody can say these drugs aren’t addictive.
Well, I can’t really do that, and I’m not at all an MD. I know what I know through anecdote and the fact my mom gives me all her old textbooks to borrow or keep, which I’ve always found fascinating to read. I also have some family members who have struggled with depression, so it’s a personal concern as well. My background/job helps a bit with understanding, but only so much.
I think the key, perhaps, with some of these drugs is to keep trying and, as they say, start low and go slow (at least, that’s the philosophy I’ve been exposed to). If you’re not actively suicidal or something drastic like that, and can be patient through the process of elimination and experiment, there may be good rewards for your efforts. There are lots of things out there that can be tried, which your doctor knows all about, and if you can keep up a good relationship with him or her, there should be a reasonably good chance to find a decent fit. My guess is it will be bit of a compromise between full sexual functioning and optimal improvement in mood. I think the important thing is to be open with your doctor…“Hey doc, I’m not exactly jumping for joy here, and my sex life stinks. Can we try something better?” Maybe you’ve already done that, and it’s easy to get discouraged, especially when you’re depressed. But nothing inspires a doctor to try harder like a motivated, communicative, and compliant patient. At least, that’s what my mom says (she’s not a doc, but a nurse practitioner, so she can prescribe meds under the supervision of a pdoc).
I’d never taken anything for depression before I was prescribed Lexapro. I had the same concerns. I knew things were not going well for me and that I needed to do something, but didn’t like the idea of going on medication at all. I felt I had run out of options when I finally sat down and discussed the depression with a doctor. I told her I wasn’t happy with the way things were, but felt afraid of taking something that might make me a different person.
She told me that though there is a certain trial period suggested, if I felt like I wasn’t myself, to give her a call and we’d switch to something else sooner rather than later. She added that the whole idea behind the medication, was to help me get back to where I was before the depression took over. In other words, if the medication was making me into a person I felt I wasn’t, it wasn’t the right medication for me, and we’d try something else. I was still wary about taking the first pill, a lot of it was the already mentioned concerns, combined with the misguided idea that everyone seems to be taking some form of medication these days and that I was weak as a person. I think if I had not exhausted my other options, I probably would not have taken the first pill.
I experienced improvement quite quickly, and my side effects were increased perspiration, dry mouth, and forgetfullness. The forgetfullness would be things like, while dusting the house, I would forget to put a picture back on the shelf and not notice for two minutes or so while it sat on the floor. I didn’t feel zoned out or anything scary, and the forgetfullness passed in less than two weeks. The increased perspiration and dry mouth stayed, but the tradeoff of having a realistic sense of perspective and a return to my former self was worth it. I knew things were bad before the medication, I just didn’t realize how far things had progressed until I got out of it.
One last thing that encouraged me, besides the results, was that the doctor and I discussed the medication as not necessarily being a permanent thing. She told me to think of it more as pressing a reset button. Once I had a certain amount of time on the medication, it was possible things would reset and I wouldn’t need to take the mediation any longer. A year was the agreed upon trial once we knew it was working for me, and though the year isn’t up, I am happy about the time without the depression, and don’t see it as the end of the world if I need to stay on longer.
Did he dose down, or did he just stop taking it cold turkey?
I have nothing useful to add, except that I only recently started taking Lexapro as well. I’ve been taking half a pill with dinner for the last week or so (although I missed a night here and there, I plan to keep trying it nightly until I use up my samples). I’ve been on Prozac and Paxil in the past, neither of which seemed to have any effect. But I’ve got an uncomfortable living situation at home, a few professional-related failures in the last year, a long period of unemployment, and a new job and impending move both on the horizon, so I figure it couldn’t hurt to try something.
Indygrrl, have you tried taking a combination of drugs? There’s been several recent studies which have shown that a combination of anti-depressants work better than one anti-depressant alone. Even in patients who’ve felt that they were perfectly normal taking one anti-depressant discovered that they suddenly felt “more like themselves” when they began taking a combination of meds. They’ve also found that it eliminated some of the side effects of the medications.
In my own case, I’ve found that Effexor handles my depression fairly well, but doesn’t eliminate my anxiety, so I take Buspar in combination with it. Not a perfect solution, but given the nasty emotional roller coaster I’ve been on of late, I’m not going to tinker with anything for awhile.
I’ve been taking Lexapro for about a year now. I started taking it for post partum depression and it has worked well for me. The first couple of weeks were a bit off but once I adjusted to it I’ve been so much better.
I haven’t noticed any side effects from it so I have been really lucky.
I was also pretty resistant to the idea of taking an antidepressant. I ended up roaming the streets in the middle of the night in the snow crying before I admitted I needed help. I joke that I will never give up my happy pills but the doctor and I have a plan to try weaning me off in a few months. We shall see how things go.
Your body does become dependent on them, which is why you shouldn’t stop without Dr’s supervision (or titrate off them over a period of 2-4 weeks if you can’t see a Dr soon enough).
TeaElle, I was on Lexapro for one year after stopping DepoProvera (which made me depressed). I had never been on any medication more powerful than Claritin before. It did what it was supposed to, with minimal side effects (very occasional insomnia, small weight gain), and I’ve been off it for 2 months now. It got me though a rough patch, and now I don’t know what I was so worried about.
Good luck to her! Depression sucks the big one, and I’m impressed that she was able to go for help in the first place. It took my mother driving up here, calling the Dr, and nagging at me until I went in for an appointment.
Yep, I took it for a few months. It was exactly like every other SSRI - made me feel weird and not much else. To elaborate, they kill my internal emotions, leaving my reactions to external stimuli intact… i.e. you would never notice that I was not genuinely enjoying or detesting our conversation, should you speak to me at length. The fact being that I would have felt nothing at all, no matter how animated my speech or gestures.
Eventually I got sick of taking it, and tried to taper my remaining dosage so that there’d be no withdrawal. That didn’t work. I spent about 3 weeks laying in bed trying to ignore the tingling(feels like your whole body fell asleep), vertigo and nausea.
nintypercent you sound like the poster child for when SSRI’s don’t work for someone. I am sorry to hear they had such a bad effect, and hope you are getting something else (perhapse non seritonin reuptake inhibiting medicine) that is healing what the SSRI’s failed to heal. Roughly how many different SSRI’s did you try? and did they all have a very similar effect?
I LOVE LEXAPRO!!!
No(t much) anxiety!! No(t as many) sexual problems!! Yay!!!
Apparently even tapering off of SSRIs can lead to “the zaps”. I don’t know what these “zaps” feel like, but I hear they’re mighty unpleasant, sort of a nauseating total-body “electric shock” feeling. It’s not a good idea to just quit.
I’m taking an MAOI now, which feels a LOT more natural. The dosage is very low, so dietary concerns are pretty much irrelevant. The problem with SSRIs, in my case, is that they are too mood-stabilizing… in a bad way. I felt exactly the same all the time. It might have been alright if suicidal ideation had been eliminated. Instead, I experienced a strangeness that was never punctuated by even the slightest interval of happiness. I suppose even feeling odd can help depressed people.
I’ve tried 4(5 if you include celexa) different SSRIs and Effexor, multiple times for 3 of them. The only one that differed from the those was Zoloft. It was extra-weird, and that’s all I can say about it.
These medications are actually designed to suppress our body’s natural response to stress and its physical consequences. IMO, they are successful in that respect. Assuming you get up and go to work every day, they are better than placebo.
Progress == Statistical Cruelty
I was prescribed Lexapro after giving birth, for post partum depression. I had it really bad. (Not the kind where you want to die and take the kid with you, but the kind where you cry all day, don’t want to leave the house, and have constant fear of something bad happening).
I had the same fears that your sister had. I had never taken any kind of drugs like this before. I put the sample packs in the baby’s diaper bag and carried them around with me. I never took them. Just knowing they were there if I needed them made me feel secure and now my depression is gone. The sample pack is still in her diaper bag and she’s 6 months old.
What I’m saying is, if your sister is going through something that might be temporary, sometimes just admitting to yourself that something’s up with you, going to the doctor, and then discussing it with others helps.
I realize that it takes several weeks for Lexapro to kick in and start working, but I didn’t let myself think about that, only that I had something in the diaper bag to help if I felt overly depressed.
Are you having any problems with MAOI’s and other medication? You probably have noticed that a huge number of drugs (as well as grapefruit juice) mention not to be taken with MAOIs.
Quite honestly SSRI’s don’t have a mood neutralising effect on everyone. I only really experience sadness or happyness when on SSRI’s without them I feel some things, but they basicly tend to the morose or indifferent. I am interested because your feelings on SSRIs sound very similar to my feelings without them. Without them everything feels a similar morose pointless grey for me.
Your reaction to MAOI interests me because I find after time I get resistant to the benifit from any SSRI I have been on, so I might suggest to my psychiatrist to give MAOIs a try at some point when the Lexapro no longer works for me.
I’ve been on Lexapro for over a year now. It took quite some time for me to see any results from it, but once it kicked in, my mood has been much more stable. Other anti-depressants had affected my sex-life, making orgasm difficult. While Lexapro does have a bit of a side-effect in that area, it’s not nearly as pronounced, and I am able to orgasm while taking it. In fact, I sometimes suffer from a “quickdraw” problem, and while on Lexapro, that has not been an issue.
So I would have to give it a positive rating…
No consistent problems. The only thing I can think of is a very bad interaction with ephedrine. I was up for 3 days, completely unable to eat, feeling like shit the whole time. The only other thing I take, on occassion, is a benzodiazepine, which seems strongly potentiated when combined with the MAOI. No complaints there 
I haven’t noticed any slackening of the drug’s effect… The opposite, actually. I take 1/4 of the dosage I started at; that’s been working fine for the last two years. It’s as close to happiness-inducing as any psychiatric chemical I’ve tried. Not that that is very close, but it’s better than nothing.
I’m waiting for the opiates that cause no tolerance and are non-addictive. Hell, if they’d prescribe me an archaic version, I’m sure my mental illness would be non-existant. I guess that’s too much to hope for…