Posted by Madnate on September 17, 2013, at 7:52:46
Hi everyone.
Thanks to this forum and your many postings and information I have gotten familiar with Parnate which I'm on since >2 years with amazing success (80mg/d) after everything else had failed during the last 10 years.
I was only able to get a pdoc to presribe it by providing a lot of information from Gillman and articles of magazines I had collected, because it's not directly available in my country and generally not used and even unknown (to the 3 pdocs I have spoken to at least).
This is one of the reasons for my post since we (see below) are pretty much on our own.I'm posting because of a friend of mine who suffers from Depression and OCD since about 15 years.
Always on and off of SSRIs, SNRIs, NRIs, TCAs and combos with atypical antipsychotics nothing had helped.This was very difficult to look at from my perspective since Parnate was this great success for myself and I had made the same experience with those newer, widely-used antidepressants.
During the past 2 years I have tried to convince her that it would make sense to give it a try.And finally she decided to do that.
She started Parnate 4 weeks ago.Since about 3 weeks she's on 20mg.
It's difficult for her to increase the dosage because she has to work and fears that the side effects would increase.
They are what you would expect from Parnate at the beginning:
weakness/tiredness, sometimes a little nausea that leads to appetite loss.
However she's still trying to increase the dosage and upped it to 25mg 2 days ago (plan is to at least reach 30-40mg if possible)I'm not sure whether my experience with the first weeks Parnate is so typical and would like to know what you think:
When I started it I was completely out for the first 2 weeks and could only lie down the whole day.
I'm not sure anymore which dose I took at that time. It was either 10mg or 20mg.
I already wanted to give up and was disappointed because it seemed to me that I couldn't tolerate it.
But since I didn't have to work and I was very desparate I decided to double the dose as a last resort and to discontinue if the next day was awful.
This is when it happened: It kicked in from one day to the next!
It was amazing.. I went from weakness/tiredness to feeling extremely well and motivated and had no tiredness at all anymore (except for the late afternoon phase).Did some of you experience it similarily?
Those typical Parnate side effects (weakness/tiredness) that went away from one day to another at the very same time it kicked in?
Or was it more of a steady progress (lessening of side effects while slowly improving?)
Of course it has to be different from case to case, it always is with those kinds of meds, but I'd be interested to know whether my experience was kinda weird or if that happens often.This experience leads me to believe that it's possible that for some people the side effects only disappear when Parnate kicks in, which might indicate that they won't go away when it does not, which is more likely to happen when you stay at a very low dose (or let's say a dosage that is too low for you).
Does this make sense to anyone? Also it's strange that side effects of Parnate don't seem to be completely related to the dose you take as it's with many other meds.
I just so hope that although it's already been 4 weeks, she will still have success at a higher dose. It's just so damn difficult to think about increasing it if you have to function during the day, already experience side effects and fear that they'd get worse.
Thank you very much for reading and your opinions :)
Have a nice day everyone,
Madnate
poster:Madnate
thread:1050853
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20130828/msgs/1050853.html