Hi guys,

Newbie here, hope you're all as well as possible. I've lurked and read a few posts with great interest.

I tend to ramble once I get talking about mental health so i'll do my best to edit myself here. Basically i've come off citalopram that I was on for about 3 1/2 years. I'd gone through a bad time last year losing my father quickly to brutal cancer and dealt with it very well, all the good side effects had stopped so I figured id grown tolerant to it and didn't need it anymore.

I tapered off with a liquid dose, over the years i've been up and down from 20mg to 40mg (without any issues) but I was on 20mg at the end and tapering off that on the pills, so probably about 16mg once I started the drops. I reduce one liquid drop every two weeks which was 2mg. I got a bit silly near the end as I was on 3 drops and I figured it was nothing, quickly jumped to 2 and then stopped it. A few days later even though I was on such a low dose and had had virtually no withdrawal symptoms during the taper I was hit with the dizzy head and space out feeling which turned into a very low mood for a few days.

I might just add that about 18 months earlier someone I was seeing told me I needed to swap to a new one as I was having strong anxiety with her and to be honest after the first 6 months on citalopram it kept my mood very stable but the anxiety came back in social situations just a strong so this was not something it consistently helped me with, though I knew if I just 'did more' I could helped this myself to a degree.

If I remember correctly I think it was paroxetine I swapped to, I was told to do it without a break with the doctor and apart from a slightly dizzy head for a couple of days id barely noticed Id changed. The symptoms remained the same, i felt no different except now I was needing to nap for 2-3 hours on most days. After about 6 months I thought it was ridiculous so I swapped back to citalopram and that was a week of flu like hell but once that wore off I still had the sleeping problem.

The day the dizzy head kicked in (to show id stopped putting it in my body) the sleeping problem instantly stopped, I didn't have the insatiable desire to nap once. Once the dizzy head went away after about a week my mood increase, i felt emotions that had been dulled come back and then I felt amazing again. Ironically I felt like how I felt when I first started taking the SSRI's.

This lasted 3 weeks, I was also manic i was that up, all my confidence was in full effect, I had a spring in my step, I wanted to socialise and I was really happy. Then about 10 days ago, I crashed. It was almost to the day a month after id stopped the dose completely - and it was the worse feeling of depression you can get, the sort where every single emotion you can feel had been replaced with dread and thinking of doing anything just made the dread stronger. Awful.

I was dead set on going back on them after two days of that as it was terrifying to think I could be stuck like that for months as I was through 2011/12. But the Easter holidays stopped me visiting the doctor, by the time they reopened a few days later I was feeling a bit more normal.

So after all that rambling my question really is how long should I let me brain try and settle itself down before I introduce anything? At the moment i feel somewhere between bad and ok. Just sitting down doing nothing I feel relatively normal, but i don't want to socialise or anything, so nothing on par with how I felt in those 3 weeks.

I don't want to introduce something like St Johns Wort, which in all honesty i've had little benefit from in the past anyway - I'm willing to try it again as I think I understand my emotions better now and have some way of rationalising them but I do think it might be no where near strong enough to have an effect on me (like most herbs...i cant even tell if I've taken them) but at the same time I don't want to introduce serotonin messing substances if its going to actually cause more damage as my current issues are not due to a relapse but maybe because my brain is trying to settle back to a normal state (after being a bit too "up" for the first three weeks)

Anyone any input? If I went back onto the SSRI's I also wouldn't want the sleepiness to come back but I feel like just coming off them and clearing my system out my have rectified that, I never had it when I first started the citalopram so I think after whatever paroxetine did to me it remained when I switched back and I just needed a break to make it stop. So one way or another tapering off them this time wont be a waste and I think id enquire about escitalopram next time anyway.