I Take ‘One of the Worst’ Antidepressants for Withdrawal – And Don’t I Know It

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From LancsLive: “The Lancet Psychiatry review, from the Universities of Berlin and Cologne, estimates that only one in every six or seven patients can expect symptoms when stopping antidepressants. However, the review also found that symptoms are more common with some antidepressants than others.

The review of various studies found that the most commonly used antidepressants in the UK – citalopram, sertraline and fluoxetine – had the lowest risk of antidepressant discontinuation symptoms. But venlafaxine, which is also used in the UK, had the second highest, and I’m not at all surprised.

. . . Quite a few years ago I was once (wrongly) advised to suddenly stop taking venlafaxine due to another health condition. The side effects were so severe that I am now convinced that I’ll never be able to come off it because even forgetting to take it for one day results in crippling symptoms.

The first time I began to realise that I was starting to feel strange, having stopped taking venlafaxine, was when I was crossing the road one day. All of a sudden a wave of vertigo came over me and I felt as if I was constantly falling to the ground.

It was so overwhelming that I had to hold onto desks even when simply walking from one end of the office to the other. My head was spinning.

I subsequently began taking venlafaxine again, having been informed that it was safe to do so and that I should never have been told to go ‘cold turkey’. On that advice I assumed I would never again experience such dreadful side effects.

I was wrong.

If I ever forget to take my tablets for a single day I begin to get the most bizarre hearing sensation. It’s like I can hear the blood flowing through my ears. It is truly terrifying and impossible to ignore.”

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  1. It is too surreal to read even critical articles on the use of psychiatric medicines when you consider, as a rational alien might if they came to visit the Earth, the true picture on psychiatric medicines and psychiatry which is nothing but a harmful psuedo-science based on the promotion of a set of pharmaceutical products that target no known disease process, because there are no known or proven disease processes or brain states other then the organic mental disorders such as dementias. All psychiatric drugs produce perturbations of normal brain structure and functioning over time, and this is well known. These drugs target no actual known disease but produce clinically useful effects which come about by blocking or supressing or stimulating certain neurochemical systems. Probably, with all seriousness, if I banged my head with a hammer each day it might WELL produce clinically useful effects on my depression, if I had it, and I could easily believe the results would be better then the SSRI’s which produce such marginal short term benefits that it is questionable whether there is any short term benefit at all compared to an active placebo (indeed research comparing them to active placebos do show the SSRI’s to have no real value but you’ll have to look up Robert Whittaker on this because he cites all the research showing all of this and it seems to me surreal that not every contributor on MIA absorbs not just the research and implications that he painstakingly exposed in his book Anatomy of an Epidemic, but also all the important epidemiological statistics the world over and through time. Otherwise you miss the whole picture, and everything you say has consequently limited relevance and force.

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