(((((Fayerody))))))
Sweetie...
I really don't think that people meant to come across as undermining or being invalidating or dismissive of your experiences.

I think that it is great that you shared your experience with the med, and I think that it is great that others have shared their experience with the med too.

Because some people have negative experiences with it (like you did) and some people have positive experiences with it. It is nice to get a bit of a range of responses so one gets some idea of possible side effects and the like and also some idea of things to minimise withdrawal and so forth.

> if i prevent one person from going through what i went through......99.9% of the others are safe, right?

Sure. But the trouble is that EVERY medication has some nasty side effects. Asprin, for example, can thin the blood. In some instances that can lead to people bleeding to death. That side effect is sufficiently rare, however, that the potential benefits outweigh the potential harms for the people who choose to use the drug. Similarly with Effexor. I'm not at all doubting your experience. The concern, however, was that someone might not take the drug because of your experience with the drug when it is highly unlikely that they will have a similar experience. You were really very unlucky with your experience there :-( But if we banned every medication that affected a small percentage of people badly then there wouldn't be any medications at all.

That is why I provided links to a number of threads (with a number of posts). Seems that negative experiences aren't all that uncommon on Effexor (though I do think it is fair to say that such and INTENSELY negative experience, like yours, is indeed much rarer).

Some people take medication as something of a 'last resort' strategy. They have tried everything else and they are reluctant to take it but they are at the point where they are willing to try about anything in order to get a little relief. Some people have found that Effexor is the drug that gives them that relief. If the drug was banned then these people would have to go back on the drug hunt trying to find something that worked for them that didn't give them horrible side effects.

I think there is a balance between looking at what statistics are available (and yeah, there are some) and thinking critically about those... And looking at anecdotal reports of peoples experiences and thinking critically about those (not in the sense of doubting the persons experience but in the sense of thinking about how likely it is that ones experience will be similar).

Of course that goes for positive and negative experiences too...