Re: Re: Re: EFFEXOR SUCKS!!

Thursday, Jun 24, 2004

Re: Re: Re: EFFEXOR SUCKS!!
Posted by Bibi on 04/11/04 at 09:49 AM

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Fellow ‘SidEffexor’ sufferers… I’ve never responded to one of these threads, but I’ve been doing some research on line about getting OFF the effexor I am so sick of being physically addicted to – you all know what I’m talking about – and came across this discussion… and had to reply. I’ve been on this stuff for over three years, and ironically enough, I don’t regret the fact that I was initially put on it; I was a very sick girl in a psych hospital who needed to get out of the dark I had locked myself into, if I planned on sticking around. Effexor works FAST, because it has an extremely short half-life, which is also why it leaves your system so quickly and brings with it such horrendous withdrawal symptoms. I take 375 mg (XR)at bedtime, and if I miss that for whatever reason or crash before I pop it, I can barely get out of bed the next day; “Efflu”” on day one feels headache-y, nauseated, off-balance, fuzzy, thick, heavy-headed…equilibrium’s all off – and nothing remedies it, except just taking the dose ASAP and waitin it out for about 10-12 hours (so basically day is shot). Two days without Effexor and I can hardly move… I learned this the hard way one Christmas when I spaced bringing meds to my Dad’s house one weekend. I’d skipped a few days of meds before, but not since I’d been on Effexor – I was so ill by the second day that my Dad ended up making the four hour drive home FOR me -while I puked all the way. It took me a while to even make the connection that it was the absence of the meds that could make me THAT sick – I’d never experienced anything like it. Not long after that came the zaps… first to the head, a few at first, then several times a day… then the body twitches, not quite so often thank God. The brain buzzers got so bad at one point that I was getting six or seven of them in a row and they felt like seizures – and I still get them that severely on occasion. Last november I went on something called Zonegran – an anti-convulsant that is found to act as a mood stabiliser in many bipolar peeps – and interestingly enough, that reduced the zaps quite a bit. I still get them with regularity, and admittedly I’m somewhat conditioned to them at this point (not sure how I feel ’bout that), but the Zonegran has made them manageable – also I’ve found that their frequency has less to do with how consistently I take my meds on time (although that always helps), and more to do with getting enough sleep and avoiding major triggers. When I’ve been up too long, or when something is “”sprung”” on me that I don’t see coming (or stress level is off the charts), is when the zaps get really bad. Regardless, I want OFF this shit. Whether or not docs/pdocs/tdocs knew what the hell they were giving us when they started doling this shit out, I don’t know… although I have my suspicions (c’mon… even the DSM is published in part by commercial drug manufacturers). What isn’t cool (or MORAL) is how they can look us in the eye and tell us there is no physiological explanation for what we are feeling, that by weaning ourselves slowly enough there is no problem, and that there are drugs that can take the edge off the withdrawal effects. I’ve tried all these things and I’ve yet to find any success. I know very, very few people who have successfully gotten off Effexor, but I know many people who have attempted it one or more times and have buckled – and started swallowing their initial dose again, out of sheer misery. I’ve fought too hard to control the addictions that I already fight, to be physically dependent on a psychotropic prescribed for my depression. Something just ain’t right here. It’s terribly unjust that I now potentially face months of suffering because of something i would have thought twice about had I been properly informed. I’m seriously looking into some kind of accelerated detox program – not sure if rapid detox works with the kind of chemicals in venlafexine, but i know there’s got to be an alternative to just toughing it out. My pdoc prescribed something called Zofran – a