Posted by finelinebob on May 7, 2004, at 11:33:14
In reply to Effexor, Suicide Tapering Off Meds, posted by Laurie S on May 7, 2004, at 9:53:09
Laurie, after working on my PhD, a number of my best friends in the same program agreed that all grad students NEED to be medicated ... ;^)
I'm just throwing this out as a possibility ... maybe someone else out there has a better experience or more experience and can add to it or poopoo it:
I had a pretty horrific experience coming off Paxil. Not as bad as yours, but the hallucinations were enough for me. My pdoc was going to switch me to Wellbutrin at the time and he wanted my system to flush the Paxil out first, but after a few days of withdrawal he started me on a low dose. The withdrawal symptoms disappeared.
Now, what Wellbutrin did to me at my full dosage is another horror story, but for that short time when I was tapering off Paxil with a low dose of Wellbutrin, I was actually quite sane.
I know that as Zyban, Wellbutrin is used to deal with nicotine withdrawal. Methadone for Heroin withdrawal (more problems there as well). But maybe there is something to it.
Does anyone else have any experience taking a low dose of a different med to help with withdrawal? Maybe its something you can bring up with your pdoc as another approach, Laurie. I know -- when you're trying to get off one med, starting up another may seem like the dumbest idea around ... but if its something you can use to help ease you off, it may be worth it. Not all meds are going to give you fits coming off them -- I took just about every SSRI, and Paxil was the only one to do it to me.
Here's another idea -- again, maybe someone else has more experience with it: acupuncture. I got hit hard by PTSD after 9/11, and if it wasn't for acupuncture I don't think I would have been able to leave my apartment. Some insurance plans actually pay for acupuncture treatments in smoking cessation and in treating chemical dependencies, and my MD used it for that quite frequently (yes, my regular, western-trained MD was also my Chinese-trained acupuncturist).
There's an answer out there for you. Have faith that you'll find it.
flb
poster:finelinebob
thread:344345
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040505/msgs/344380.html