Prozac
It worked pretty well. It helped me to be able to break that circular thinking of all things horrible. That and the talking thearpy. I did have some side effects. Lack of interest in sex and delayed or no orgasm when I did, and some sweating issues. I can be a sweaty person but while on Prozac it was ridiculous. However, I was willing to put with the side effects because it was working.
I’m off it now. I have to make sure I get a good nights sleep and I’ll be OK.
Wellbutrin, for smoking cessation.
I had almost stopped smoking (down to maybe 2 a day) but then I had an extremely severe panic attack and never took one again.
The question is not have I taken meds, but how many! (I joke that I’ve done almost the entire med sampler platter in the 18 years that I’ve been taking them.)
Started on notryptiline (spelling? no clue). Brought me out of my suicidal ideation. Was on this one for a long time in 1991.
Switched to Prozac at some point. Nudged my depression, yes, but also made me sweat like crazy and wrecked my sleep.
Then a series of meds that keep me hovering at normal, so I’d fiddle with the doses and the meds themselves. The only one that I hated was Serzone, which put me to sleep. Otherwise during this period (most of the nineties) I was on Effexor, Paxil, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, and probably one or two others that I’ve forgotten.
I was on Zoloft, I think when I ended up in the hospital and they switched me to Celexa. That one really, really worked for me and within days. Eventually I added another med (can’t remember which) to help boost the Celexa. In 2004 or 2005 (?) I switched to Lexapro and it is what I am on today.
Meds don’t make me happy. Meds make me normal. The only one that had an intolerable side effect for me was Serzone. I have never really had any sexual side effects from meds. I’m sure the meds have contributed to my weight gain over the years, but I’d rather be fat than dead.
Yep. I think most people who’ve found relief from them have tried more than one, since finding the one that works for you on the first try is rare.
Paxil: worked great on my mood, some sexual interference early on. After a month or so it started giving me constant diarrhea - that was fun. Getting off it sucked too.
Serzone: kept my head above water, but I didn’t feel great.
Zoloft: best so far - good mood elevation, noticeably more energy. Delayed orgasm, but I could still get there without getting too frustrated. The best antidepressant for nursing mothers, so that worked well for me. However, I went off it when I wanted to get pregnant, as they are finding some heart defects in babies whose moms took some SSRIs while pregnant.
Wellbutrin: not much noticeable effect. I went off it since I was still having anxiety symptoms, and it’s not meant to treat that.
Now I’m not taking anything, other than fish oil supplements. When my depression is not hitting hard, I prefer to manage it with supplements, exercise, and cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. But given my PPD last time, I’m getting a scrip for Zoloft and keeping it on hand just in case for after the baby comes.
Are Cheetos an antidepressant? If not, the answer is no, I haven’t.
Celexa. Turned me into pure mush. Thank God I got off it quickly.
Prozac. Started 8.5 years ago and had some extended breaks in-between. Last year I realised the extended breaks were not a good idea. I’d generally be OK for 6 months and then start spiralling down again.
But yeah, when I actually take it, works like a treat!
Was prescribed something for some mild depression when going through my divorce, but then realized “I’m going through a divorce - I’m supposed to feel shitty.” Poured the rest down the toilet and haven’t had anything since.
No, but I may be put on them. I hope I don’t get some of these side effects.
Zoloft here. Seemed to do the trick. I don’t really remember when the transition occured. I just remembered waking up one day and noticing that I was actually feeling great and was happy again. Could have been a damn sugar pill though for all I know.
Prozac: Had sexual side effects
Effexor: Effective but getting off it is a bitch
Lexapro: Minimal side effects.
(in sequence, not all together)
In all cases they seemed to work.
On the anti-depressents, during the worst parts of the marriage’s disintegration, I feel I spent less time “spinning” in my head, locked up endlessly cycling my thoughts around some event that acted as that day’s big concern.
I weened myself off the last antidepressant right about the time my wife and I separated and, so far, I’ve been doing OK without. I guess I have a bit of clinical depression complicated by “situational” depression and the situation has changed. I feel I’ve been managing the remaining clinical part pretty well by myself. One of the side effects of my hormone issues can be depression so I credit my HRT regimen with helping, too.
It’s hard to see the differences sometimes, in my opinion, to being on and off it. There’s still lows and highs. It’s not artificial happiness. It’s just that the lows don’t seem as low and the mental path away from that low point doesn’t seem as impossible as without it. The anti-depressants weren’t magic, just enabling, in my opinion.
I still have hard times - usually after my ex- and I have another disagreement. I often end up dropping back to my feelings of frustrated powerlessness. I have to find ways to distract myself, to interrupt that spiral down, to keep from dropping to some of the hard-to-escape low points.
So far so good.
Now if I could just learn to fall asleep.
St John’s Wort is somewhat like that. Not so much the drunkenness, although there is a bit of that as I think it does something to serotonin levels. But it makes colors a bit stranger, more vivid, and there’s an unreal quality about the 3-d aspect of the world sometimes with it, like it’s so vivid it’s coming from a movie or 3-d glasses.
But I don’t take it anymore, as I was trying to use it to cut down on caffiene, since it make caffiene intake less pleasant and more effective, so it would incentivize me to cut back. It also cuts back on the withdrawal headache and craving somewhat, although ironically not on the tiredness and depression that come from caffiene withdrawals (although if I have other forms of it is up for debate.) So I’d think I was doing fine, and couldn’t have caffiene as it would be like 4 times as effective as pumping up my heartrate, but all of a sudden I’d be slammed.
Same here, plus it helps with social anxiety and takes the edge off so I don’t spiral into panic attacks. I’ve been through Paxil and Celexa and am on Lexapro. They all worked fine; I guess it was doc preference and Lexapro being more refined that made them change over the years.
I’m celibate anyway so any lowered libido actually helps. 
Hmm. That’s one of the most surprising things I’ve read on the SDMB in a long time.
Effexor made me sluggish and I put on quite a few pounds.
Celexa didn’t help, actually pushed me towards suicidal thoughts and anxiety.
Wellbutrin was better, but I think it’s stopped working. At least it doesn’t kill my sex drive, that’s one good thing.
I wish they would hurry up and learn more about the mechanisms of action of these drugs, and make it easier for people to get on one that works, quickly. These games of jumping from drug to drug are frustrating, especially when you need to wait a month or two to see if it’s doing anything. When you’re already depressed and only seeing the negative side of things, convinced that you’re never going to have any joy in your life, the last thing you need is to have failure after failure as they try to find a drug that will help you. It just sort of reinforces the “see, nothing will ever get better, I’m stuck like this for life, why did I even bother trying to ask a doctor for help” mentality.
For short term, minor, self diagnosed depression, alcohol has worked wonders for me.
I have two friends who do kinda OK on Prozac, but do far better self medicating with cannabis. Consistency of supply is their main problem.
The first anti-depressant I took I cannot recall the name of it for the life of me. But it’s no biggie, since it had no effect on my depression whatsoever. To be fair, I was still an active alcoholic, pot-head, ‘occasional’ coke & meth user.
The next anti-depressant I was on was Remiron which improved my mood dramatically, albiet with some wacky side-effects. The first time I took it, the sh*t knocked me out for 48 hours, no exaggeration. After that, I felt intensely weird shocks, like getting a sudden jolt of electricity coursing through my nervous system, at the slightest jostling. For the first week, even a slight breeze blowing against me was enough to trigger a shock. These settled down after a while, but strangely the sound of the phone ringing always triggered a shock for me.
After that I was on Symbalta for nearly two years. That stabilized my mood, but tended to make me feel robotic - with no emotion. It also completely stifled my libido, despite my shrink’s insistence that it wouldn’t. (I didn’t have a hard-on the entire time I was on it, and started having them again as soon as I discontinued it.) Also, there were severe withdrawal effects as soon as I discontinued taking it - extreme headaches and vertigo. Even if I just missed one day’s dosage, I’d suffer from withdrawal.
I’m on no meds now, and based on my experiences, I don’t imagine I will be taking them ever again!
Zoloft – worked pretty good, kept me from feeling overwhelmed by life. I started taking it because one day my wife came home to find me crying at the kitchen sink because I wasn’t able to replace the faucet. :rolleyes: Turns out there is a history of depression in my family but nobody talked about it. Yeah, that really helps. Only side effects I noticed were putting on weight and it took longer to get aroused. Not impossible, just delayed.
Wellbutrin – switched to this when I was trying to quit smoking. Removed the urge to smoke, felt emotionally stable and I was sprouting wood like I was 18 again. My wife found that entertaining at first, then annoying. “Oh jeez, not again? Point that thing somewhere else.”
Lexapro – My wife has been taking that for a number of years. It keeps her emotionally stable; no crashing lows, no raging highs, no nasty outbursts at minor inconveniences. Has problems sleeping with it. Sexual side effects are horrible. No interest at all and, if I initiate, it takes forever for her to climax. I’m working every trick I know until I have cramped fingers, lockjaw and friction burns even after using half a bottle of KY. Every couple weeks she takes a Lexapro holiday where she stops taking it for a few days so she can feel in the mood and more physically responsive. Of course she is as emotionally stable as a ping pong ball in the lottery machine but that’s the price we gotta pay. No other meds she tried including Wellbutrin, Prozac, Effexor and Celexa worked for her.
I took Celexa for a few months. It helped me break my cycle of depression to the point that I was able to wean myself off of them with no ill effects.
While I was on them, I slept a little more poorly than usual (the opposite of what usually happens, according to my then-psychiatrist) and actually had greater sex drive (also the opposite of the norm). (Actually, I think it was my same ol’ sex drive, seemingly amplified because I could, because of the anti-depressants, be bothered to get off my ass and grab someone else’s.)
In '05 I had a bad incident in the hospital. I’ve mentioned enough elsewhere on these boards that I won’t go into it, but it was touch and go for several weeks.
There for a while, when I wasn’t sure if I would live or not, I went into a deep despair. I asked for and as given an anti-depressant. It appeared to work, but I had what I called a “drug hangover” in the morning. For the first hour or two I was like a zombie. They concluded that the should give it to me earlier in the evening so it would wear off by morning.
After I left the hospital I stopped taking it. The psych consult there told me not to stop, but I deemed I was ready. I am sure now that I was.