Tardive dysphoria - AKA how Zoloft ruined my life

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...dive-dysphoria

Anyone else had this happen to them? I started out with anxiety issues and was put of a hefty dosage of Zoloft. When three years had passed and I lost basically all emotion, I opted to quit the med. At first things went well. I even felt good about feeling bad and vulnerable, because I had feelings.

After a while, I slipped into depression that went pretty deep. It didn't only come with the feeling of being tortured in hell and totally tired all the time, I also couldn't think or reason. I couldn't even add single digits.

Struggling without SSRI's for three years I caved and went on another one and partially came back. So now I have to be on meds for life for a depression I didn't have before meds.

Tell me if I sound whiny for thinking this is really unfair? What is worse, every doc claims this is just a coincidence, and my depression had nothing to do with the med. I wish I could be told someone is sorry they ruined my life.

Anxiety disorders cause depression and I agree with your doctors that it probably wasn't the antidepressant that caused it. If you've continued to have anxiety problems for that long, you're chances of being depressed are extremely high.

Your reasoning to blame the drug and insist it has ruined your life is at least partially your depression and anxiety talking.

Zoloft made me psychotic.

I highly doubt it was the medication that caused your depression. Anxiety and depression are related and can even be interchangable. SSRIs are used to treat both ailments.

I've dealt with Fibromyalgia, depression, and anxiety for almost 12 years. I've been on several different medications for treatment as one medication will work for a while and then stop working, so I have to switch to another. Throughout the years, I've experienced periods of time when depression was more prominent, when anxiety was more prominent, and also when I've had both depression and anxiety together --during which time the anxiety came on more during the evenings.

I don't think you are being whiny. I think you may not quite understand anxiety and depression being related and can involve the same dysfunction of the neurotransmitters in the brain. Zoloft isn't just an anxiety medication, it can also be used to treat depression. I was first put on Celexa for chronic pain and depression, but I had a friend who was put on that same drug for anxiety/panic disorder. The same drug can be used to treat both depression and anxiety. Can you catch a glimpse that the two disorders are related?

I don't think any "someone" is responsible for "ruining your life." You have a dysfunction of the neurotransmitters of the brain like many of us here have. Sometimes it causes symptoms of anxiety and sometimes depression. Why? It's the nature of the beast. It's not a cave-in to take SSRIs, it's a treatment much like the treatment of any other chronic disorder.

By the way, I'm not saying that SSRIs are completely innocent, but Tardive Dysphoria involves chronic depression that is treatment resistant. It sounds like yours is treatable.

After trying 20 different meds, yea....

I know my body and I know what happened. Of course I had the right genes to be depressed, but I'd rather not have a strong trigger that the original med was.

Yea... coincidence I plunged into my first depression as I stopped meds.. I'm in touch with someone else this happened to now, and try to be a good support to them.

Hi Jimrat,
I've never taken Zoloft that I recall, but I've had similar lasting side-effects from other psych drugs. I've been off the drugs now for three years (was on them for five - a range of things, anti-psychotics and anti-depressants especially), and the physical symptoms have never left. I get a very severe anxiety sometimes that exactly correlates with heart palpitations I first experienced on an antipsychotic, that drug was stopped due to the heart issues but neither the anxiety nor the tremors ever left.
To quote you, "I know my body and I know what happened". Nobody has ever acknowledged these things; I doubt they ever will. It hurts. I don't have any advice how to deal with it, except to say that you're not on your own. hugs, eh?

Thanx. I appreciate your post.

Its called serotonin withdrawal syndrome or something like that. Meditation may help the depression and anxiety and your not putting anything into your body.

Zoloft was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I went on for Post partum after I had my son and it made me into this awful person. Since going off it, I have been really depressed. I don't know that it was the Zoloft, but I hated it. Zoloft is the only pill I've heard more than one person say ruined their life.
Cas

I had heard that it takes the brain a while to up-regulate its neurotransmitters after one stops taking anti-depressants and that it is expected to feel depressed for a few months while your brain is ramping up production again. But I hadn't heard that this state could be permanent! Very scary.

I take Wellbutrin, an antidepressant, for ADHD. (I also take a stimulant.) Wellbutrin acts on dopamine and norepinephrine. I have never taken an antidepressant for depression. Last year I decided to try stopping the Wellbutrin. I became completely unmotivated to do anything. I sat at home and had a hard time getting up off the couch to do the most normal things. It was horrible. I can't say I felt depressed, but just very unmotivated. For example, I was unemployed and needed a job but couldn't bring myself to look for jobs, much less apply for them. I told my prescriber about this and she was surprised. She expected me to have problems with ADHD symptoms. She said, "this isn't the type of problem you were having before."

I stuck it out for several months, but eventually I just needed to get a move on in my life again and so I started taking the Wellbutrin again, but at a lower dose. I take just 100 mg (300 mg is considered therapeutic for depression). This is enough so I can be motivated and not sit around like a couch potato. I guess if I was at a place in my life where I could afford to be unmotivated for a year, I might try stopping again and giving my brain more time to adjust.

Once my prescriber suggested to me that I take Viibryd, a new SSRI. Why? I asked. (I was not depressed and this was not during my unmotivated time when I wasn't taking Wellbutrin.) She said several of her patients took it and it made them feel "brighter." I told her I didn't want to take it. She wanted to know why. I said because there is nothing wrong with my serotonin! Sheesh, I am not going to see this prescriber because my "brightness" needs tweaking. Why would she push this serotonin drug on me when I am having no symptoms of a serotonin deficiency? I think the answer is drug companies. This is a brand new, expensive SSRI, and the drug companies are probably giving the prescribers incentives. This drug got suggested to me when I had absolutely no need for it. It is hard for an expensive new SSRI to succeed in a world filled with cheap generic SSRIs that do as good a job (according to clinical trials).

Jim, thanks for sharing your story and providing the link to the article. Makes me even more feel that I did the right thing by turning down the Viibryd prescription.

My first mental illness i got was panic disorder. I was put on Zoloft for it, and it really did the job, but a couple years later I slipped into a severe depression for years and was diagnosed with severe recurring major depressive disorder, and was hospitalized 7 times. Now i am dx with bipolar disorder ...

I think it comes down to two things. How sensitive your brain is and which of the meds.

I remember many, many years ago reading my med book, this was when SSRI's started getting popular. And it seemed like some SSRI's caused downregulation (mainly not in the serotonin system but the norepinephrine one) and some didn't. I recall Zoloft caused a severe downregulation while Celexa caused none. These were very early studies so I'm sure this has been updated many times over, I don't know what today's science says.

I wish it would only take me a few months to go back to normal, I sort of took for granted my brain was going to repair itself, but after three agonizing years, I gave up and went back on meds.

In animal studies, they overdose baby rats on antidepressants to make them depressed, to study depression. I wonder if I sort of have an immature brain (being autistic=said to resemble a childs brain), and that my med sensitivity also played a part. They thought back then it was safe to put exactly anyone on the max dosage and they did that with me, they didn't even know some people could be sensitive.

WHEN you go on med,s ,let,s say ssri,s sertraline -zoloft , do you take what the doc or shrink tells you or do you find your own theraputic dose an cruise on it. A lot rides on this, a doc could have you on 150mg when 50 mg is your right dose. Lets take side effects , 50mg hardly any if not reactive to this med in a bad way an your treating depression - anxierty. 100MG delay in orgasm an weight gain long term. 200mg compleat loss of sex drive an a few other nasty side effect thrown in. So in therory if you can cut it on 50mg your cool,no need to stop the med when feeling ok just maintain a safe level. Anxierty does get helped but that take a a long while to kick in. Me i take 100mg in winter an get away with 50mg in the summer months, my shrink thinks i take 150mg. But f*** him he is just the drug dispencer im the one who knows my body. Sertraline thats just one med but you do the same with any , less is more if you can manage , an for depression zoloft an lexapro are the top 2meds to work , so they print.What im saying is make the drug work for its money not pump to many mg that just produce more side effects.

The med I take now, I started at the lowest dosage, and it helped! Then it got a little worse so I had to up it one notch, or rather half a notch. I've not upped the med since. I'm on a low dosage. Because when I started on it, there was more info available, the Internet was here, and everyone was wiser.

When I started on SSRI's, there was this myth that for some types of issues, a lower dosage would not help. They started me on 100 mg to up to 200 within just a week. Today this sounds like madness, but this was the very early 90s and what we know today, we didn't back then. Also, just to find anything at all, you had to track down medical magazines and articles, which was really time consuming. The info was almost impossible to get. I did my best and spent hours at the library.

Today the world comes to us at the on switch of the computer.

I trusted my docs back then and what they said about dosage, because I was young and thought they actually knew what they were doing. Also the side effects of the SSRI's, even on max dosage were mild compared to the Anafranil they had me on before, so the side effects sort of didn't give me enough warning.

On the Anafranil my body was covered with red blotches, I suddenly had sleep attacks and had to sleep three hours in the day always, still I couldn't sleep in in the morning, I sweated, I had no saliva and no eye fluid, my eyes were all scratched up and red and inflamed, when I moved I felt I was dragging my body through mud. And when I wanted to pee, I had to sit for ten minutes until anything happened.

So this was what I was used to when I changed to SSRI's....

Sounds a rough ride??? tell me about it to this day i take 4mg of ativan a day it used to be 12mg. Effexor bumped up over 300mg in 1 month in them days,try getting off that baby at that dose . they still script me high, but at shrink mg,s it would be zombie planet blues

I've been on a bunch of meds, can't remember them all (thanks to the meds!) but I developed TD. Effects have mostly disappeared but still have the occasional tongue thrusts and lip rolling. I'm somewhat bitter about it. My pdoc had me on 13 meds at one point when I was first diagnosed six years ago - felt like a guinea pig - he just kept piling on the meds until I refused to take them and actually started discontinuing them myself. I am now on only three and doing well.

Sometimes I'm suspicious that pdoc's for all their training are just taking a shot in the dark like any other human being. Mine gets his back up when I try to make suggestions or talk about side effects - it really irks him when I do research - he takes that as an affront to his MD. I used to keep quiet but I don't let him bulldoze me anymore. He actually wrote in my chart that I was right when I stopped Paxil on my own because it was making me like a zombie.

Sorry for the rant. Guess you got me on a bad day! Hope things get better for you Jimrat

My story is similar... 12 years on pills (zoloft, serzone, wellbutrin, effexor...) leading to increasingly severe depression and anxiety no longer responsive to meds. Finally realized I had to find alternatives or I was going down...

Here is what pulled me out of my crisis and helped me through the worst of my withdrawal:

--EMDR therapy. This is a technology-aided talk therapy backed by solid research. It is much more scripted and to the point than traditional talk therapy--the therapist knows exactly what cues and responses she is looking for to "defuse" one's issues. My EMDR therapist was great. I felt better after only a few sessions, and a full year of sessions ended with my severe depression and severe social anxiety in remission. The word on the street among EMDR therapists is that antidepressants tend to get in the way of true recovery. So my EMDR therapist was very supportive of my tapering off medication. I do not think I could have done it without her.

--A sound and light neurotherapy system. Another research-backed alternative to medication. I got the top-rated system on Amazon.com. It was a HUGE help to me in reducing anxiety and getting to sleep (sleeping pills never worked for me and were a suicide hazard).

--neurofeedback. Another solid research-backed alternative. Can be expensive. In my view, it was worth it. This may be the best of the bunch, frankly, but I did not find this method until I was already through the worst of my crisis.

I also added exercise (early morning in natural light preferred) and certain supplements (Vitamin D, B12, Omega 3 (EPA and DHA--I use a vegan source to avoid the chemical instability problems of fish oil)). I have since added choline and selenium, just for fun.

Good luck.