Meds Experiences Thread!!

More anecdata: Both antidepressants and amphetamines can promote restlessness. A bit of twitching may well just be a thing where you decide whether it's a side effect you can reasonably live with.

For me it was the thing that comes before muscle clenching and cramps, unbearable restlessness, agitation and mood swings, sweating, shivering, confusion with an option on headaches. That is serotonin syndrome. The antidepressant is too high. Immediate medical attention is required to assess whether intervention is necessary (it wasn't) and to instruct on the best method to quickly yet safely lower the medication to a sub-toxic level.

I've been toxic twice, on two different meds. The first time (I forget the med) it turned out I had anxiety and not depression. The second time (the medication formerly known as Brintellix), well, I seem to be pretty sensitive to antidepressants. Noped back down to the introductory dose, did well there.

 

@pixels I looked up the prescribing info for gabapentin. Unfortunately I did not see any information on whether the sedation may decrease with time. They did say it appeared to be dose dependent. Gabapentin for anxiety strikes me as a rather bold move?

Sorry about the sleep and appetite issues. That's no fun.

 

@pixels My bf was on gabapentin for neuropathy, and after a few weeks, the sedating effects decreased.

 

Hey guys. I've started up a thread in BrainBent to *try* to keep a better record of what Wellbutrin does to my body and see if I can manage a) quitting smoking again and b) becoming less of a Wicked Witch of the West character. If I knew how to link things, I would link things, but alas ... I am the slow on computer stuff.

<3

 

The quote ought to link back to Natasha's thread, but here's an actual link just in case:

https://kintsugi.seebs.net/threads/med-tracking.5010/

 

@Verily thank you!

 

Has anyone else taken montelukast / Singulair? It seems to be working okay for me so far (got prescribed it as an allergy med, doc said that my chest sounded tight but not congested, and I am breathing more easily so far), but I'm not sure if it isn't making me more anxious.

 

Huh, might as well add my experiences here.

I went on focalinXR/dexmethylphenidate hydrochloride back in high school, towards the end of my junior year for ADHD. On the one hand, I could finally get shit done and it seriously helped with my executive function, but on the other, it jacked my anxiety waaaaaaay up and also didn't play nicely at all with my undiagnosed depression/bipolar. Prior to this, I was self medicating with caffeine and nicotine (caffeine pills and nicotine patches).

I stopped taking focalin my freshman year of college because I just could not handle the anxiety. I actually did alright my first semester off of it, but we started messing around with other meds my spring semester (finally diagnosed with bipolar II, primarily depressive) and between changing my meds for that and being unmedicated for the ADHD, it just didn't go well. I know I was started out on an SSRI, because at first we thought it was just depression, but it really did not work, so I got switched to abilify/aripiprazole. That made me sleep all the time, so after like three weeks and failing a class, I got switched to latuda/lurasidone.

I love latuda. It quite literally has saved my life. I had to go off it once in the summer and once about two months ago, because issues with getting my prescription refilled, but I am very serious about taking it on time otherwise. It works so well for me. I was taking it in the morning, and it didn't really make me drowsy (a little drowsy, but weirdly enough, if I took it early enough it actually made me less drowsy??? so I'd take it at like 6:30am). But I'm a night owl, and hate getting up early, and sleep in literally whenever I get the chance, and eventually decided to switch to taking it at night because I didn't feel like getting up early for it anymore. Taking it at night works just fine for me.

As a note, when I had to go off the latuda twice, I went cold turkey both times. No side effects from that though.

We're still feeling out what the right dosage is and I predict it going up again, but currently I'm on 60mg for the latuda. I was also back on the focalin because of ADHD for the end of the semester, but the anxiety is really so bad, so my psychiatrist and I are gonna fiddle with new drugs starting in January. While I was still on the focalin, I was also on klonopin/clonazepam for the anxiety. That worked okay, but I've heard nothing but horror stories about how addictive benzos are, so I wasn't thrilled and couldn't wait to stop taking it.

I plan on trying out a non-stimulant med for the ADHD starting in January, and maybe bringing up wanting an anxiety med, because the klonopin actually really helped.

 

Strattera which is what we're currently throwing at my ADHD is a non-stimulant med and is actually an SNRI, so it is a double hitter for the anxiety too. That's an option to discuss if you've got both. I take Cymbalta too. We're lowering my Strat dose to see if heart shenanigans are affected which they probably aren't but non-stimulant meds are the equivalent of taking a fly swatter to a fly the size of a semi since basically the whole time I've been in academia I've been on stimulant meds so all my coping mechanisms for academia are built around them. It's been a fun two years of heart too speedy 3 stimulants and trying to academia at the same time. But since I'm on an academic break again, it's safe to mess with adhd meds again.

 

Turns out, montelukast does have the known side-effect of "might cause anxiety". (Also a bunch of other 'that's Unpleasant' mental health side-effects such as "suicidal ideation and attempts" and "depression", so I'll be keeping an eye on my mental health as best I can.) But also I might be anxious for reasons unrelated to the montelukast!

Waking up three times with the thought of "oh god, I slept through my alarm and I'm Late and have Failed" is relatively new though; usually my anxiety is less productive than that (I was waking up well before the alarm each time).

It might also explain the eye-twitching I've had recently, but that's more 'mildly annoying' than anything and...I was gonna say "it's not an especially new thing, that happened when I was a teenager too" but for some length of time while I was a teenager, I was on Singulair, so the two may be linked; it's still not a symptom that especially bothers me. I'll be keeping a weather-eye on things just to be safe, though.

 

So I just started Trintellix like... four hours ago, whose most common side effect is nausea, and since I have a bit of a finnicky stomach anyways I 100% expected to get this, but so far the main thing i've experienced is the much less common side effect of gas l : body, wtf?

 

Just started taking Welbutrin. It makes me tired and just slightly nauseas. Also I'm a bit irritable. Does anyone know if the irritability goes away?

 

I take Concerta (methylphenidate) for ADHD. It helps me focus. But. It exacerbates the other problems with my brain, specifically the Asperger's, depression, and a possible personality disorder. (side note, how common are personality disorders where my grandfather was bipolar and my sister has something, possibly also bipolar (takes mood stabilizers) because I think I might have a personality disorder and genetically it's quite likely). It also sort of "locks in" my focus at the time when I take them to whatever it is that I'm thinking about. I don't exactly know how to explain it but it sort of just makes it hard to switch focus easily. And so I get stuck on whatever I'm thinking about when I take them. I've been off my meds for the past few weeks, since I don't need to focus on break. I've noticed I've been happier and more sociable. I asked my parents about changing my medication and I may be getting a different drug, hopefully one that doesn't bring out the other problems I have.

 

In case it might help anyone, here is my personal Wellbutrin experience, plus a little bit of additional input from what reference material I happen to have on hand.

My doctor prescribed this particular antidepressant for me because it has similar side effects to amphetamines, which I tolerate well. My doctor is awesome, so he got out a book which I'm guessing was a prescribing guide, and we went through the entire entry on Wellbutrin and he explained various things so I could make an informed decision about whether it sounded like something I wanted to try. I'm really pretty bad at judging my own mental state, but I liked Wellbutrin. The side effects weren't too bad and I felt like it probably helped.

He started me on half of the lowest available XR dose because I'm tiny and he wanted to be as safe as possible since it does lower the seizure threshold a little. However, he added that the big seizure warnings had to do with an unfortunate incident involving patients with anorexia. Apparently Wellbutrin is stored in fatty tissue, and if you don't have much body fat that means it ends up concentrated in the brain and liver, which makes seizures a much bigger risk. I think seizures are most likely to be a problem if large amounts are introduced into your system without giving your body time to adjust, hence starting off at a low dose and gradually increasing it.

I've had problems with weight gain on some antidepressants. I can't remember if it's the tricyclic class or the SSRI class that tends to do that, but Wellbutrin is atypical. I don't think I experienced anything much in the way of weight changes. In trials, a percentage of patients gained some weight, but apparently it was a totally normal percentage of human beings gaining a very average amount of weight for the length of time the trial ran. I think he said it was not statistically significant. The same went for weight loss. He said it was possible, but not likely to be a big thing. I think overall slightly more people lost weight than gained, but again possibly not statistically significant?

One side effect he told me to look out for, no pun intended, was blurred vision. At the time I didn't realize I was experiencing it. I did eventually end up complaining to my eye doctor that I thought I was having trouble cleaning my contacts effectively, because at night I saw halos around lights. It wasn't until much later that I put two and two together and realized the halos were almost certainly related to the med. It honestly did make it rather difficult to see in low-light situations, which sucked because those are my favorite. It was not a side effect that seemed to improve at all with time, as I believe my psychiatrist suggested it would not, but it didn't persist after I stopped taking the med. I'm not sure if there's any implication for overall eye health, particularly with a relatively minor effect like that. I do know that I had an eye exam during the halo era because I wouldn't have been able to complain about my contacts if I hadn't, and I believe they always do a glaucoma test, and I guess nothing turned up. The eye doctor told me it wasn't abnormal for people to experience that problem naturally as they got older. I feel like I was oddly young for that to be the most likely scenario, but maybe I'm wrong and/or the eye doctor didn't know about that potential side effect of Wellbutrin either. I'm pretty sure I made a point of informing the eye doctor later, in case other people show up with the same complaint.

@ZeroEsper, I have a rather old psychotropic prescribing guide that keeps ending up under my bed. (Where else would one keep such a tome?) Their drug trials did not find any remotely statistically significant issues with irritability versus placebo (3% at 300 mg/day, 2% at 400 mg/day, 2% with placebo). I do really think Wellbutrin made me more irritable though. I'm not sure whether it improved at all with time, but I did notice that many months out I seemed to be more irritable than was normal for me or warranted by circumstances. I found myself snapping at my boyfriend at the time. We were having some issues, but I felt like my reactions were not regular compared to my usual behavior.

I did not experience nausea, but it seems like it's not that usual based again on the old prescribing guide. 13% at 300 mg/day, 18% at 400 mg/day, 8% with placebo. I'm not gonna do the statistical significance calculation because I forget how and I'm too lazy to look it up, but based on that data they go on to list nausea as a commonly observed adverse event for 400mg/day but not 300mg/day. I'm not sure if it improves with time.

Somnolence (sleepiness) is listed at 2% at 300 mg/day, 3% at 400 mg/day, 2% with placebo, so no particularly helpful info there. The lack of statistically significant occurrence in clinical trials definitely does not mean you can't experience the side effect, just that it's possibly rare.

I'd be interested to hear your experiences with side effects, and whether you notice any improvement.

 

I had that problem when I took Adderall! It made me able to focus, but unable to control or direct my focus. I'd get stuck on little details or in increasingly tiny thought loops. I already have problems with task-switching, so it was pretty much a disaster. For me, it turned out Adderall was just too strong.

I'm doing much better with Daytrana transdermal patches, which are ritalin. The administration via patch creates a time release effect, which is important to me. They keep having manufacturing issues, though. :P

 

I've had very limited experience with antidepressants because the first one that I tried seemed to work pretty well so I never tried anything else.

I've taken citalopram (generic for Celexa) at various doses for over 10 years now. I think I started at 20 mg, moved to 40 mg for a number of years, then recently-ish switched back to 20 mg. Most of my side effects have been transient, either at the very beginning of taking the med or when I've stupidly stopped taking it and let plasma levels fall (for various reasons, including dumb teenage "I'm fine, I don't need medication" to "I forgot to refill my prescription for two weeks", I've suddenly stopped taking the drug a couple of times during the past ten-ish years and experienced mild versions of the starting-up side effects again).

Early side effects, for me, included energy changes (generally I remember having more energy, but I believe I also had sudden dips where I'd get very tired), mood swings, dizziness, lots of yawning, and some sexual stuff (both sudden arousal and complete lack of any sex drive). These lasted for the first 2~4 weeks at the very beginning, and a couple of days when I had stopped the drug for a while and then started again. I didn't really notice any side effects when decreasing the dosage from 40 to 20.

The main, persistent side effect for me has been loss of sex drive, which is why I decreased my dose recently-ish, which has helped, although not as much as I'd have hoped. Unfortunately, it just seems to be how citalopram affects me. This is a pretty common side effect of SSRIs, so I haven't really felt the need to try any others. I can definitely see it being a problem for people, although there are ways to get around it (there are other meds you can take to help counteract the lowered sex drive, for example, at least according to the psychiatrist I spoke to).

Pretty boring experience, but feel free to ask any questions about citalopram/my experiences if it might help!

ETA: When I switched from 40 to 20, I did notice a spike in my anxiety, so I think that the med had been working to help with both depression and anxiety at 40 but doesn't do so hot at 20 for anxiety, at least for me.

 

Let's see... I took prozac freshman year of highschool for six months, which turned me into a zombie who apparently was very rude to people, but I have very little memory of that year in general, and that all turned me off to meds for a long while.

I was on a very low does of topamax from senior year of highschool to sophomore year of college for migraine prevention, which I eventually went off because it stopped preventing the migraines, and I had noticed I was developing aphasia from it.

My depression got very severe my junior year of college, and at the start of my senior year I briefly went on paxil, which made me want to sleep for sixteen hours a day right before finals, so I went off that.

This year I tried welbutrin after finally being diagnosed with ADHD, which seemed to help a little at first and then tapered off, and also seemed to come with much more painful acne, which is already a problem for me. Whether it actually was the cause or not, I dealt with an EXTREMELY painful thing that required minor surgery and I was very disinterested in taking something that even had a change of causing that again.

Soooo then I was switched to ritalin in october, and it's been incredibly effective. I still have some depression issues that may or may not be handled fully by CBT, in time, but I'll see.

 

Hey yall; I have some medical anxiety so i figured this would be a good place to ask a question.

I started 10mg daily of Trintellix ~48 hours ago and the first night I noticed a bit of restlessness, the type where you need to bounce a leg for a minute and then it's all good. The next day I had the same restlessness about twice in the day, and today I had it 3ish times and also my hands have had a sliiiight tremor all day (the type where I can do activities, including drawing (except for detail drawing) just fine, but when I hold my hands up in the air still they twitch a bit).
Is this worrying?? My brain keeps telling me its serotonin syndrome and I'm at the moment feeling like if it increases again tomorrow (I just took my third dose) I might stop the drug and talk to my doctor about it

 

@ZeroEsper I've got an entire thread dedicated to my latest attempt of Wellbutrin, if you're interested.

The irritability did go away for me - but I'm one experience out of a million :)

 

Idk if this would work better in the adhd thread, but has anyone been told to avoid vitamin C right before or after taking concerta/ritalin? Googling gets me lots of anecdotes about how it's a "well known" interaction but i asked my pharmacist and he said he found nothing in any publication?

I mean, i could ask my parents to ask my old pharmacist who they still see, but yeah. I drank this ridiculously vit. C-fortified drink like an hour after taking my concerta and i did feel sort of spacey for the rest of the day. Could be confirmation bias tho