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I need help and didn't know where to turn Today is 16 days off of Ecsotalipram. I was on 10mg of Ecsotalipram for 11 years I started when I was 15 and I am now 26. I started tapering off in December of 2018 and all went well except for the brain shocks. I tapered all the way down to 2.5mg and then stopped 16 days ago. This has been the hardest thing I have ever gone through mentally. The brain zaps have actually gone away now I am left with the nausea and dizziness if I move my head around, depression the literally makes me feel physically ill and weak, I'm experiencing feelings and emotions I remember having as a child and not good ones, the feeling of being trapped in a dream and not present in my body. I thought my anxiety and panic attacks would be through the roof but I'm feeling everything else. Has anyone experienced this and how long will this last? I just need help. I feel like I've lost who I am.

HI, i am extremely scared and need help. On march 13th I started a panic disorder. It started with 24h of depersonalisation and then more and more anxiety and panic attacks over 2 or 3 weeks that led me to the ER a couple of nights.. I'm 37, always been anxious but nothing that wasn't manageable without medication. I started losing the ability to eat and sleep. I couldn't enter sleep state and had very anxious obsessions/delirium while in pre-sleep phase, like my brain was going mad with crazy over the roof anxious ideas and fantasies. Every time I would quit trying to sleep i felt better and not too anxious but i was absolutely exhausted and needed to sleep. I started to become very worried and anxious, i lost a lot of weight from not eating or sleeping and couldn't do absolutely nothing because of anxiety. Everything seemed terrifying, wathcing series/movies, reading, social media, showering... nothing could give me relief, everything was painful and terrifying. I'm autistic and pretty isolated. I don't have a family to care for me, few friends who desappear when i'm not good...my pshychologist is nice but not very useful during this kind of extreme situations and has halth problems. I thought it was the end of my life and it made me extremely sad because i'm not a suicidal person, i wasn't even depressed. I was just diagnosed a bunch of stuff that would allow me to ask some financial help from the state but didn't have time to ask because i collapsed in the most unexpected way... My psychiatrist suggested i take seroplex (escitalopram) and alprazolam. I have a massive medical phobia and medicines phobia, never had anti depressants before and never wanted to even try them because i am very sensitive to everything and often have weird/bad reactions to certain substance so i hate trying something new. Plus I have anxiety, so... But i was so affraid to die i said ok. He started me on 1mg and told me to add 1mg every three days (it was the drinkable version) until i reach 10mg. He told me it would take several weeks to do me good and would probably make me feel worst at the begining. But i was already at my worst, like i couldn't imagine getting worst than that really, i was really sure i was dying. After a week and no significative improvement (still wasn't sleeping and suffering as hell every night and most days, my chest hurting from the billion crisis per night every time i tried to sleep...) i went to the psychiatric ward, which was, by the way, my biggest phobia. I stayed there for 2 days, some doctors were nice, but older ones said the dosage my psychatrist recommend was stupid and i needed to change either the dose or my meds. I was at 3mg at this time, they put me on 50mg sertraline and gave me a valium. I had adverse reaction to the valium and was in hell until the day after, i had agitation, was all over the place, feeling extremely agitated and angry and aggressive inside and paranoid and scared and nauseous. i had panic attacks all night and been throwing up in the morning. They told me i wasn't cooperating and didn't trust them and should go back home. I did and had my first night of sleep in so long... I was at 4mg escitalopram. They scared me so much by saying this med is totally ineffective under 10mg that i asked my psychiatrist if i could up the dose faster to get some relief. By this time i was unable to take any benzodiazepine and had bad reaction previously to seresta and valium and now even alprazolam so i stopped taking it. He agreed and told me to add 1mg every day. I started to do that. Was able to sleep one night out of two for a few days, started to eat again... It was still mostly horrible everyday but i started to believe i had hope... My dosage from the begining was 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 (50mg zoloft) 4 5 7 7 8 9 (each number representing one day of treatement) When I reached 9mg i had the most horrendous violent crisis ever, i was feeling enraged like i wanted to destroy everything and couldn't stand any sound or person around, it was so strong and kept going up and up. I hated it and was terrifyed, never felt that before. I had nausea and couldn't eat anymore again... My psychiatrist said ok to going down and try a stabilization at 5mg. As soon as i started getting down i started to feel better, (not good, just less terrible), more eating, sleeping and moments of hope... But after 3 days at 5mg things started to get very bad. No appetite, nausea, insomnia, anxiety more and more and more... and then the violent agitation crisis came back, sentenses and ideas and bits of songs in high speed in my brain, intrusive thoughts (not that it was totally new but it was stronger and horrible), couldn't stand any sound or light or whatever, i felt pure rage and pain... I told my psychiatrist i had been suffering hell for a month and a half and couldn't take it anymore. I was too scared and not the kind of profile to be able to wait for a whole month to get the good effects while living the worst moment of tjei life every second of everyday. I had lost 10kg and was in severe crisis all of the time, had a full meltdown in his cabinet. He said ok you can stop it if you want, it's a low dose and you've only been taking it a month or so. I said i don't thing it's a good idea to do like that when i see how sensitive i am. He suggested i reduce 1mg every three days. The day after that i was so traumatised i couldn't touch the bottle and take my medicine. I skipped a dose. He told me i could take 3mg the next day and not to worry too much. The day i skipped the dose i felt a lot better at first but then i entered a state of exhaustion i never felt and suddenly lost any will to live or fight, i couldn't even move or try to force myself to eat. It was the same the next day but slowly better... The second day at 3mg was an amazing day, never felt better, i was happy, energetic, singing, eating, full of joy and wonder. The next day not so goo but bearable. The first week at 3mg was wonderfull, the first time i was feeling so good with this med, and feeling myself again. I was SO SURPRISED. The doc said maybe it's my comfort dose. I believed so so i decieded to keep it a little to gain strenght and weel being to face going down again, i even was doubting if i should keep it. One day of the second week i drank my med but left a little drop at the end. The next day i had a terrible evening with the same symptomes like the day i skipped a dose but milder. The day after i took good care to drink aaall the 3mg and started to feel better in the evening. But the next day it went all bad again. I thought ok i made a mistake, i'll wait for stabilization again. It got worst everyday. A lot of anxiety and no eating or sleeping and a rage/agitation crisis all day on one of the days and overall pretty bad, with suicidal thoughts more and more presents and negative thougts all the time bullying me saying horrendous things to me in my head... But i was really hoping to get back to the good week and waited while suffering... everyday...crying, having anxiety, nausea all day everyday, weak legs and arms and hands, shaking....amnesia, unable to use my brain correclty. It's my third week at 3mg, i thought it was slightly progressing the past few days even if it's hard to tell because i'm still very bad.. i hate this medicine and i wish i had never taken it. I cant' take benzos. I can't take tercian or any meds that make the QT longer because i already have a sligtly longer QT due to a heart condition and my cardiologist told me not to take several meds that act on the heart... I need to sleep again, it's driving me crazy, i'm losing all hopes. Tonigt was the worst of my life, everytime i was about to fall asleep i had the most horrendous pre-sleep crisis and my chest and heart hurts everytime and the lask of sleep make me crazy. I have no strenght in my limbs, i only feel pain. Yesterday i felt ahedonia for several hours and it freaked me out. I am scared to go to 2mg but my MG and psychiatrist say they think it will be ok if i do. Should I ? What should i do ?? It's true that everytime i went down it felt like a huge relief so i guess my brain hates the medicine, and my anxious self can't stand the idea of taking something so scary and wants it out... But i'mso scared because i feel like i'm going to die... this night i thought maybe i should write goodbye letters to my loved ones. But i love life !! i've just never been that miserable and in pain in my whole life, and i'm such a sentitive person... autism doesn't help at all here... I'm not going back to the psychiatric ward ever. I wanted to get rid of seroplex and maybe try cyamemazine (tercian) at very low doses to try to sleep while starting a therapy (i am poor and i'm on waiting lists for therapy but won't have appointemnts before months) but i can't mix the two (too scared for my heart) and i'm very scared of trying it, like scared to death actually. I bought doxylamine (donormyl) but scared to try it... I'm terrified of all molecules (meds or supplements actually) What should i do ? I know you're no doctors but my doctors don'y know and my psychiatrist is going one month on holidays, plus he won't let me contact him outside of the very few office hours he has at work every week....

Original title: 6 month Lexapro for sleep/anxiety, tapered on my own, after 3 months off of bliss symptoms are back and HC Hi dear brave people. I've ben lurking the website for a while now, finally decided to ask for opinions, as I am unsure what I am going through right now, nor what I can do to stop my life from sliding down into even worse despair. I apologize in advance for a chaotic post, my mind feels very hazy due to chronic lack of sleep now. I am a 31y old female, have been prescribed Lexapro for issues with sleep due to an array of stressful situations in my life that happened during end of 2020/ first half of 2021: I moved to another country mid-Covid 2020 (best part - it is the country of fjords, mountains, northern lights - and! With one of the highest anxiety rates, Norway) I moved for a job; broke up my then longest relationship, job company then crashed exactly as my first Norwegian winter begun. I come from the South of Europe so the cold and darkness really hit me additionally. By July 2021 I was having progressively worse insomnia due to job situation, with awakenings every few hours, sometimes even after 30minutes of sleep. Only reason I was able to stay in the new country was due to a new relationship, and the fact that my new boyfriend convinced me to move in with him, and really took fantastic care of me. My anxiety was still through the roof, and I finally visited my home country after a full year away from family and friends - and went straight to a psychiatrist. She prescribed escitalopram and clonazepam History of the meds: 24.07.21 got prescribed escitalopram 5mg, clonazepam 0,25x3 01.08. 10mg escitalopram (raised the dose as prescribed), clonazepam per occasion on my own after reading on dangers of addiction 17.08 dropped back to 5mg escit due to anxieties, 24.08 psychiatrist insisted back on 10mg Started tapering on my own somewhere in November/December '21 - as I was feeling really fantastic and thought I had it all figured out now. Additional motivation was that my boyfriend and me started discussing starting a family. My sleep was better than in years, and in parallel I discovered HubermanLab podcast and episodes on sleep, depression and anxieties, and started applying everything I could there. I thought I had control over the situation. So tapering begun, thinking I am doing it slow enough - cutting pills in half - first stayed back on 5mg for a while, then 2.5mg for 3-4 weeks, then 1.25 some weeks with day skipping in the end. Speaking with some friends they confirmed skipping doses worked for them. 01.02.2022 last 1.25mg dose after a 3day interval, hopped off Blissful 3 months begun. I even got engaged mid-April. And then: 05.05 sudden anxiety return, sleep disturbances worsening again, month by month. And month by month I started to feel horrible about more and more of my life spheres 4 months in, now waking up every night between 2:30 and 4am with jolts of anxiety in my stomach, self confidence crushed, my mind feeling useless due to tiredness and stress, various anxieties every day, social anxiety, depression and severe hopelessness. I started even questioning my relationship and engagement and possibility to ever be a parent given my state of mind, which hit me as a final slap across the face and brought the feeling that I am standing on very thin glass, about to shatter at any second - since that was the only stable thing I have in my life. And I depend on him fully now, for both shelter, food, a bit of nurture - which in addition paradoxically deepens the feeling of desperation and ruined my confidence to manage adult life. I am still jobless, I don't feel good in the climate of the new country, my home country is in political problems so it is not exactly appealing to go back now, winter is coming (no GoT joke intended), my expat crisis continued, I have started worrying all my friends and family and feel part of them have distanced themselves from me. Which I understand, but social anxiety then makes me ruminate over all of that regularly on top of joblessness. I also know how much my fiance is suffering, even though he's still placing my struggles as a priority - I feel like I am ruining a life of a really, really good and kind man who didn't deserve this. Main and continuous thought I have is - if only I could sleep more hours, I could at least a little bit better manage this mess. On the days when I sleep more, I definitely feel more clarity and calm, ven though the depression is ongoing. For sleep in the meantime, I shyly tried on random low doses of Ambien, Remeron, sometimes Xanax 0.125 or clonazepam 0.25 per need for sleep or when very anxious. And in the end, finally and recently - I also 2x tried 1.25mg escitalopram dose again, a week apart. First time my mind felt like it was cut of, I couldn't access any deeper thought until tomorrow morning (took it previous morning) - this scared me, but as all the internal chaos continued, I once again thought - maybe I should just get back onto it, stabilize myself, stop worrying my people, figure out how to solve job/country/relationship situation - so I took it again few days ago, but then AGAIN read a few stories here and realized that I might just make a far worse problem for myself in the long run. I am now trying out a mindset that medication is simply not an option. So, finally, main issue and questions are: - all of these symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression are also very much due to the life circumstances mentioned above, so I am unsure if this is a withdrawal, or a relapse, or both? - what on earth could I do to set my sleep better, as that brought me to all of this in the first place? I have tried so many things - meditation, recorded hypnosis sssions, NSDR, a bit of CBT I as well - and I don't want to reach out for benzodiazepines anymore, nor sedatives, nor antidepressants if I can help it. But if only course of action IS going back on medication, I would like to just make that decision finally. It is going to hinder my possibility of starting a family though, and I feel my clock is ticking. My days have become just flows of different types of anxieties - something that I had aptitude for before as well, but I think never like this. I think in parallel I have anhedonia that is growing worse. I make myself go out for a walk every day, try to run as well, I drink my omegas and magnesiums and am trying to meditate. I managed to keep a bit of savings and am trying a DBT/schema therapy. I go to sleep around 22/23 every night. I never thought my 30ies would start like this. I remember the glow I felt in April, and how life seemed orderly, how i had joy and plans for the next 5 years at least, As I am writing my chest is filled with lowkey drone of dread, anxiety is lurking and I feel like there's not a single thing in my life that can make me happy. Thank you for reading, and I apologize once again for erratic thoughts.

I’m new to this website/forum, but I’ve been researching and finding great information about people getting off their psychiatric medication. I’m 46, and I was 20 years old in college when I experienced my first full blown panic attack (official diagnosis, panic disorder without agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, depression). Looking back (after lots of therapy), I can now understand the stress I was under at that time. But the main point is that I was put on zoloft and lorazepam which, combined with lots of “social drinking” seemed to put a lockdown on the panic attacks (though I would still wake up with some varying degrees of anxiety most mornings). I put my head down and just sort of pushed my way through life, graduating from college with honors, holding a job doing community education / organizing / speaking, shifting gears and going back to school, and then starting my own successful business. Jump to about 4 years ago, 2012 and things just seemed to begin falling apart. The successful company I had created was now failing, a relationship I actually felt invested in was failing, and the hangovers from drinking had become really intense. In short, I ran out of steam. I gave up drinking in the spring of 2014, and that summer decided I was going to get off the damn meds. I did it the “right way,” tapering off the benzos first, and then the SSRI. And though the anxiety would increase while tapering and it was tough, by the end of the summer (early September) I was actually med free! Unfortunately, mid-October the panic attacks returned full force. Again, I can see now that this was a particularly stressful period of my life, but of course I was really disappointed when I decided I just had to get back on the meds (the panic attacks were relentless and excruciating). The problem was that the meds no longer seemed to work like they did before. And now I’m on MORE meds (add in remeron and extra 50 mg of zoloft). I have made some changes, doing lots of therapy, ACA support groups (and looking at childhood issues generally), exercising again regularly, EMDR, meditation, etc. And I want OFF the meds! I know I need to do this slowly, and at this point, I cut the remeron from 15 mg to 7.5 (about 1.5 months ago) and I’ve cut the benzo (now clonazepam) from 2 mg to 1.5 per day (just started that 3 days ago). My thought is to cut the benzos first, then the last of the remeron. I know with the relatively long half-life of the clonazepam, I need to take it slowly. I’m thinking .5 mg every 2 weeks. From the information I've come across, it seems like some taper off even more slowly than that? I'm looking for others to share their experiences with their own clonazepam withdrawal schedules (for panic disorder, preferably). I just don’t know what to do about the SSRI (zoloft). I realize this website is about benzo withdrawal, but I’m hoping to find others with experience on panic disorder and SSRI withdrawal too (as well as benzo withdrawal support). I hope this is OK on this forum? I’ve been “working with the anxiety” (trying to “make friends” with it as they say in the meditation circles). I know I’m less scared of it now, but I'm also not experiencing the full blown panic attacks. My concern is that I would get off everything (including the SSRI/zoloft) and then the panic attacks return, and it takes SO LONG for the SSRI to build up in one’s system. Do I just prepare myself to weather that storm? Will that storm really pass eventually without the meds? After years of trying to make my physiology match the lifestyle I felt I should lead, I’m now accepting the idea that I need to make my lifestyle match my physiology. The panic attacks are just so damn awful when they hit relentlessly all day long, day after day. I’m scared. Is there anyone out there that has had any experience with the meds and panic attacks along the lines that I have had? Are there other resources out there I should know about? Is it really possible that I can live a purposeful (and perhaps at least semi-peaceful) life without meds after 25 years of being on them? Much gratitude . . .