Back up to 20mg again

[manx_kitty]

I went to the doctors yesterday as my anxiety and depression have come back full force, he has put my up to 20mg, I am currently on 10mg and have been for the last year or so. I have been on Citalopram for just over 9 years now with varying doses. I just feel annoyed that I can't seem to shake this depression and i'm going backwards instead of forwards :weep:

[nippy70]

Hey hun, dont worry about it. Take the 20mg and let it work for u x

[Britabb]

Feel for u. Been on 20mg for 10 yrs and my symptoms have returned full force. I've been taking 30mg a day for 4 days now so hoping I will pull through soon. Feel pretty rubbish atm though :( xx

[DELIBY99]

I don't mean to down play your anguish but is it so bad to have to take 20MG comparred to the alternative. I've come to the conclusion that i don't careif i have to take 20MG for the rest of my days as long as I feel OK. Lots of people seem to think being on meds is a bad thing. If they work and keep your anxiety/depression at bay i say keep going. I may attempt to reduce my dose again in the coming months but if if my mood begins to drop i 'll be straight back up to 20. Don't be too hard on yourself.

[Britabb]

^^ agree ... It really doesn't matter what dose u on as long as it works for u. I been to see my gp today. Told him I self medicated for 6 days by upping my dose to 30mg. He was great. Said I did right thing and now he actually wants me to increase yo 40mg so I am. I'm scared of SE but I know from past experience this drug works. I've actually been referred for counselling too. ( first time I ever been offered this in 20 yrs of Gad!!) x

[Emphyrio]

You could try an ultra-slow taper to see how you do? There have been studies which show that for some people at least, the brain takes a while to return to its 'pre-medication' state. I seem to be one of these people whose brain requires a lot of time to readjust to decreases in medication.

I've come off citalopram and fluoxetine cold turkey in the past. With citalopram, I was only on 10mg for 6 weeks but suffered intense anxiety around 6 weeks after stopping. I thought that on such a low dose things wouldn't take long to recover, but how wrong I was. I ended up going back on meds after a few months because the anxiety was too much to bear.

I've also stopped taking 5mg of fluoxetine in the past. What happened? Bad depression around 3 months after stopping. This was more depression than anxiety - after all, I found that citalopram has the greatest effect on anxiety, whereas prozac had the greatest effect on depression. So its interesting that I suffered increased anxiety after stopping citalopram and increased depression after prozac.

I've still to find a medication that gets me back on track, but when I do, and put positive things in place in my life, then I'll think about a slow taper. If you're happy on meds and don't experience any nasty side effects like libido issues or sedation/memory loss, then why not stay on them? If you don't like certain side effects, then consider a very very slow taper - around 10% of your current dosage every month. So taking maybe 2 years in total to come off it. It does seem to work well though judging from what people have said about it on other support groups - enabling your brain to slowly up-regulate its serotonin receptors again.

[NoPoet]

This is a question that might seem rude but isn't intended that way.

If you've relapsed, do you think you ever actually recovered in the first place? My personal view of recovery means you've developed coping strategies that will be effective into the future, or you have the knowledge and experience to create new ones should you ever need them.

Did you have some kind of life event to cause the relapse, or did it suddenly just spring up on you?

I'm firing blind here but it could be you had an unconscious thought from an unresolved problem that's been dormant or suppressed for months. Even though you didn't hear it consciously, the thought triggered a fear response in you.

We all experience something called "mood memory". This is where you not only remember a life event, your body also recalls how it felt during that moment, and as you're sensitive to feelings of anx and dep (in other words you're still scared of them), the whole anxiety cycle just kicked back in like a bad habit.

There is something that was not fixed during your first recovery - some problem or hidden fear that remained hidden - this could simply be a fear of what you have been through. Whatever this fear is, you need to bring it into the light of day, which is destructive to lurking fear.