[Roy21]

My doctor is starting me on Zoloft soon at my own request as the medication im on now (Avanza) dosnt seem to help me with anything except my sleep. I have stopped taking the avanza for the last 3 nights and have not been able to sleep propperly at all. the 1st night i was awake for 40 hours before finally falling sleep, my sleep was disturbed and i woke up alot of times, the 2nd night i didnt get to sleep until 6am and then i was only half asleep and continually woke up and tonight i can not sleep. Has anyone else experienced this when comming off avanza?

Also a question about zoloft. When comming off Zoloft has anyone ever suffered from any major problems with withdrawl or negative discontinuation symptoms. I wanted to go on zoloft because it helped my friend alot with his agoraphobia and thought it may benefit me with my phobia but i have heard that paxil is very hard to get off once you are on it and also i had a bad experience in the past with efexor xr the whole time i was on it. Any help would be most appreciated.

Roy.

[Larry_Hoover]

If you stopped the mirtazapine without tapering the dose downwards, slowly, slowly, then you're going through a rebound effect and withdrawal.

In my own experience, I never had any withdrawal as severe as the one from mirtazapine. I seriously feared I'd never sleep again. Talk about messed up!

After three days, you could probably jump in at about half your old dose, and try to taper the dose down from there. It took me about three weeks, slowly reducing the dose, to get off the stuff. I broke a bunch of pills in halves and quarters, then sorted them on size. They never break evenly, so you can approximate the drug dose based on the size of the fragment.

Zoloft was much easier to get off, for me. The withdrawal was much easier, but you still have to taper the dose. Don't just stop taking it, all at once.

Good luck with it,
Lar