My Struggles with the Antidepressant Lexapro
I’ve recently been suffering a personal battle weaning myself off the antidepressant drug lexapro. I know I’m not alone, and I’m also not putting all the blame on lexapro. Type in the antidepressant of your choice and add the word ‘withdrawal’ into google, and you’ll find yourself upon pages and pages of people talking about the havoc that getting off antidepressants can cause.
Alternative Options for Depression
Still, I, unlike some others, am not advocating that antidepressants are evil and should be avoided at all costs. Rather, I simply know from personal experience that if alternative methods can help to ease your emotional suffering, it’s a much healthier option. Better yet, if you find that a practice like yoga or meditation works for you, it can continue to do so throughout your life, with both emotional and physical benefits on your body. Students of both these practices report lower levels of stress and anxiety, and an overall improvement in physical health.
The Side Effects of Stopping Your Medication
When I finally stopped taking lexapro after weaning down to the lowest dose for several months, my doctor warned me that I might experience some serious side effects – and I did. I couldn’t imagine what I might have gone through if I hadn’t gone off the medication gradually.
Antidepressants Are the New Candy
After this stint, the possibility of joining a psychiatric detox no longer sounded so far-fetched. It did make me wonder, however, why doctors are not more up front about the very real and serious side effects that stopping an antidepressant can cause when they’re prescribing it. As difficult as depression and anxiety might be, knowing that getting off this medication can be as serious a struggle, both emotionally and physically, might have an effect on the number of prescriptions filled each year. Based on figures from 2005, approximately 118 million prescriptions for antidepressant medications are written each year.
by Mommy Skrewtips
deal
What? You have nothing to say?
Now is not the time to be silent. These issues affect us all
January 19th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
that is a scary statistic!!!
January 21st, 2008 at 12:32 pm
I know. I would hope that anyone considering any medication (chemical or natural) will read up on side effects as well as detoxing symptoms. This is why we really need to be more in-tune to our own bodies and more responsible for our own health.
Gina