Tomorrow will be one week. I’ve visited her nearly every day since I found out on Saturday, and I call at least twice a day. So far I’ve been the one with all the side effects. Extreme anxiety, nausea, sleeplessness, lol.
She’s been a bit more active than usual, which is good because the natural offset to that would be weight loss. I’ve never asked her what she weighs, but I would guess it is around 270 and she can’t be more than five foot three.
Just writing to chime in that it can be possible to go cold-turkey off an SSRI without horrible side-effects. I’ll save everyone the details, but I know because I did once. The depression and anxiety was still there but that was it as far as I could tell. Like your friend, I was taking the lowest dose or close to it.
Of course, the important thing is that you are being an awesome friend. Keep being awesome.
I’ve never heard that before. I’m not challenging what you say but could you provide a cite?
There have been two recorded cases.
Same here, though I wasn’t on antidepressants for anywhere near as long. I was taking Prozac for about 3-4 months, stopped, and was fine. I was on the lowest dose myself. Same thing with my brief stint with Xanax (which I found to be wayyyyyy more obvious than Prozac.) Hated that shit, dropped it, no problem. Of course, YMMV. I would not recommend doing so without the advice of a doctor, but going cold turkey off it doesn’t mean you’re going to go crazy.
If she gets withdrawal symptoms, they will be unpleasant, but so far as I know they are not physically dangerous, beyond the usual incidence of walking into coffee tables and the like if she gets dizzy.
Pristiq is an antidepressant. If that’s the only thing she’s on – no antipsychotics, no mood stabilizers, no sleeping pills or sedatives – then her diagnosis is likely to just be “major depressive disorder” or something like that. Quitting Pristiq is not going to send her into mania or a psychotic episode, so you can stop worrying that she’ll be baking cookies one moment and spitting at loose demons the next. IF anything bad happens, it’s not going to come on in a sudden storm that will have you hiding under the table and phoning the local EMTs.
It’s entirely possible that she’s decided she’s done with doctors and medication because they weren’t helping. People who are depressed will hang on to anything that makes it even a little better, believe me. If she’s quitting because she’s decided to, and not under financial or social duress, then quite likely it’s because she feels she’s wasting her time and money. In that case, she’s not going to do any worse off the drugs than she did on the drugs, and if the side effects were grinding her down, she might do better.
Of course, the best way to find out is to ask her. She’ll either tell you the truth or she won’t. Plus that’s the best way to keep tabs on her state of mind, if you’re worried.
Not all of the stories online are written up by frothing lunatics, incidentally. Psychiatric drugs are at best, poorly understood. You can give pretty good odds that someone might get “either X or Y” out of them, but every so often you find someone who gets hammered with reaction Z out of east hyperspace. I tried antidepressants once, and I got every side effect on the insert short of seizures and death, and that on the quarter dose they were planning on titrating me up from. The same occasionally happens to people coming off of them. Most drugs have side effects that only occur 0.0001% of the time, but the internet has a kajillion people on it, and they all want to talk at the same time.
Well, it’s been two weeks and she’s ok. Thanks for all the good advice. I was white knuckle scared for the first week.
Some people just don’t feel anything, or can cope really well. I was one of those before my benzo withdrawal. I mean, I’d get a bit cranky, but I was fine otherwise. Now the slightest dosage deviation bugs me–I’m even having to cross taper between generics, due to the stupidity of the FDA mandating equal effectiveness instead of equal content.
If she goes on another serotonin drug in the future, I wouldn’t suggest doing anything like that again. The more you do it, the worse it gets.