(no subject)

[delight]

Dear readers, people who clicked on my name on network, etc,

Today my neurologist decided she really wanted to be able to make triptans accessible to me because of concerns about my abortive therapy availability. This means she has proposed switching from escitalopram, the 6th in a series of antidepressants I've taken for a long time and failed, to effexor, which ... I only trialed for three weeks and then got switched and was about sixteen at the time.

Because it's not an SSRI it's apparently triptan-friendly.

I'm confident I'd stay on Wellbutrin because I need that for executive functioning things too, the escitalopram is largely there just to counter the anxiety that the Wellbutrin makes worse, but --

But, I know quite a few people who read my DW at times take venlafaxine, so please tell me what you think of it, what the onset period was like, how it works in comparison to other things, &c? Much appreciated in advance!

Comments

[recessional]

- works in comparison to other things: like all these drugs, honestly nobody else's experience is going to be very helpful, because who the hell knows? Escitalopram was my mother's magic drug but only moderately worked for me. If you can't make concrete guesses on a 50%-shared-genetics basis, anything else is pretty iffy.

- onset period was actually better, for me, than any of the other ones were. On the flipside withdrawal symptoms kick in VERY fast if I am even too many hours late with a dose, and are gnarly. For me.

- It's worked better than other things, but on the other hand that's kind of damning with faint praise? It's followed the same general pattern everything else has, which is a marked improvement for about half a year and then a slow slide back to Really Bad, which is where I'm kind of at now. But the fact that that's happened with four different antidepressants now is, I think, kind of indicative: this is apparently a trick my brain pulls, and will not necessarily have any bearing on what it does for you?

[delight]

I had the same experience with my mom, actually, we generally have an identical response to like ... everything except (es)citalopram where we flip-flopped.

Effexor was for some reason totally not covered in any of my eight psychopharmacology classes so this is the one I'm kind of considering more blindly than all the stuff I've read tons of research on. And I've had the same backsliding experience with everything eventually, hence all the drug changes in the past ... while lexapro is still working I'm scared to go off it, but also kind of willing to consider.

Faint praise is higher than no praise, and so far no one has said DON'T DO IT IT HAS HORRIBLE SIDE EFFECT X THAT EVERYONE GETS so, thank you ♥

[recessional]

Yeah no the closest I know of to that is that for the vast majority of people it is a shitty one to taper off of later. But I even know someone who had no discontinuiation problems with it even though she did it in the Unapproved Way, so.

Its weird quirk is that it functions the same as an ssri at lower doses, then at medium/standard doses inhibits reuptake of both serotonin and norepinephrine, and then at high doses adds dopamine.

It's possible that a higher dose is the answer for me, but I'm at the point where my GP isn't comfortable going higher and I'm not interested in fucking around with meds anymore without having a psychiatrist monitoring it so I'm waiting for my referral to go through. Sigh.

Also it's one of those pain in the ass things where it is shown by studies to both significantly decrease migraines . . . in some people, and trigger more of them in others. Which, like: in the people that it TREATS migraines in, it does as well as a lot of the actual designated treatments! But I'm concerned that it may be increasing mine. *headdesk*