Depressed and No Motivation--Need Help!

I'm currently taking 40 mg of Prozac. From your experience, what is the dosing that is optimal for an adult male to decrease depression and increase motivation?

I've been on this medicine for four weeks now and every day after taking it my head becomes fuzzy and my body becomes heavy and slow. I know this is a side effect but I thought this would decrease after four weeks.

Can I add something for motivation (I can't take Wellbutrin)? If I make a change, do you have any recommendations for meds that increase motivation? It's my biggest challenge with depression!

Many thanks!

I'm so sorry these things are happening to you. I've heard that it can take five to six weeks for full symptom relief from antidepressants and that even this timeline isn't written into stone.

Is this your first antidepressant? What were the symptoms of your depression and have any of these improved? How is your sleep and appetite, for example? Is it better than before?

Some side effects from antidepressant can eventually diminish and go away. Others can hang on. I am on Celexa and experience some side effects even after decades of use. I find these more tolerable than depression itself which was absolutely brutal.

Are you under any stress? External stressors in home or work life? Health stress? Money stress? Internal stressors like high expectations, perfectionism and so on. These can inhibit the effects of antidepressant meds as you probably already know.

If you got full remission of depression symptoms but still had the side effects you mentioned, would that be a tolerable trade off for you or would you want to try a different med?

Depression is awful but some med side effect can be dealbreakers when it comes to meds.

So very sorry that I do not know how to be helpful to you in this. Hopefully others here will see your post and respond with practical and really helpful ideas!

Thank you for your kind thoughts and words! It's not my first but it's the only one that seems to work at any reasonable level. To be fair, I've not given the others a fair shake--my doctor initially didn't tell me it that takes weeks to really kick in and before I switch so all the side effects were an indicator that it wasn't working. So in essence, I'm starting all over after trying multiple other meds but nothing gave me motivation like prozac. So I'm back to it but what I mentioned before has been difficult to deal with--not as bad as depression--but tough.

I'll stick with it for a few more weeks and hopefully it'll lighten up a bit.

Thanks again!

It takes at least 6 weeks for your medication to get to the desired level in your body. Fingers crossed that as you get used to is the side effects will ease off.