Thanks newgal...he did say to take it with food. I had great success with Lexapro a couple of years back; I'm hoping for similar results with this. My main challenge will be to stay off of the websites that deal with side-effects and negative reviews. That usually gets me to thinking that this won't work for me either. As I recall, when I first took Lexapro, I just simply took it, and, not surprisingly, it worked. In retrospect, Effexor was probably working for me, too; I just gave up on it because I thought that it was dulling my emotions. After a couple of weeks of weeping and crying, I think I might actually prefer emotional "blunting". So, when I'm not here for a while, it's due to my self-imposed hiatus from the web in general. Reading about medications is never a good idea for me.