Buddy52: Potential Bad Prozac Withdrawal

[Buddy52]

I started Prozac in the end of the summer of 2018 at 19yrs old for my OCD. I had never been on anti depressants before and it over all worked the first time. I think we started me at 20mg or 30 mg then after a month went up to 40mg. Overall I took to it well. My only side effects were less sexual desire, harder to orgasm, and very very vivid dreams to the point that every morning I had to go over and figure out what was reality and what was a dream. The sexual side effects mostly stayed the whole time I’ve been taking it. The vivid dreams started to get a little better about a year into taking it but around the same time I started getting night terrors from a traumatic event that occurred a couple months before. The dreams finally got manageable maybe two and a half years after starting Prozac but they still were vivid and happened multiple times a night. At around 2yrs on Prozac, I started playing around with going down to 30 mg. I stayed on that for a while until about two years later my ocd really flared and I went back up to 40mg. I never noticed any side effects from my switch just that the higher dose at hard times in my life made my ocd go away whereas when I was on 30mg and dealing with a really stressful event, I had to be a little more thoughtful in managing my ocd. For about another year and 8 months, I stayed at 40mg.
 

Then in about January of 2024, I decided I wanted to stop Prozac completely by slowly titrating down. The reason for this is I was diagnosed with health problems that are exasterbated by certain medicines like antidepressants. Most of my doctors agreed with me that in the long run getting off antidepressants would be an overall beneficial thing.  So in total, I was on Prozac from about August or July 2018 to January 2024 at about 40mg. In January 2024, I went back down to 30mg. At the end of April, I went down 20mg. At the end of June, I went down to 10mg. And at the end of August, I completely stopped taking Prozac.

 

I noticed changes in myself sometime in September. I was crying more and more. At first it seemed healthy because I felt like I had been in a freeze state for a long time that made it hard to cry unless super upset. That is something I had been working on with my therapist that did both talk therapy and Nerostimulation and neurofeedback since may 2023. But the crying started becoming a daily thing over every small thing until it truly hit to a destabilizing level in the first weekend of October. I had some back to back small triggering events that left me feeling so destabilized I felt like a kid reliving my trauma. I tried to get myself back together and sometimes it would work, only for things to destabilize me a bit again easily. I attributed this mostly to my life stressors, my previous trauma, and my neurostimulation treatment changing my brain to a less frozen state. I did a new brainscan with my therapist the second week of October (the last one we did was December 2023) and it did show that my brain had changed a lot in ways she found positive but in ways that made emotions feel more intense to my brain. I tried to do everything I could to mitigate that effect like meditating 2x a day and journaling once. It seemed to help at times but this low period overall continued. A week and a half ago is where things got so deeply bad I started to wonder if anything medicine wise could be causing it and I looked back and realized that some of these feeling might be effects I'm having from going off prozac. I don't know for sure. I'm not exactly sure how I can.

 

My questions are if this is prozac withdrawals how do I known? what is a good next step of action? And how long do the effects of prozac withdrawals last?

 

I have used three strands of saffron in my tea a few times in the last two months to help with the depression and have seen improvements those days. So much so, in the last week I have started doing so daily and I do think it has had a slightly positive effect. I don't know if its enough though but I worry about going back on prozac to an amount under 10mg just to titrated down from again because I have been off it for about 3 months now. I worry that it might cause the side effects it originally caused in my life like vivid dreams that drove me crazy and made my mental health harder to handle while maybe not even fixing the withdrawals.
 

I would love to hear your input on my situation. I know my case is a little confusing but Im really struggling to put the pieces of my life back together. If you have any thoughts on St johns wort or saffron or other more natural and less strong options for transitional treatment I would also love that perspective. Also let me know if you need anymore information to understand the situation! Thank you

Edited December 2, 2024 by Emonda
Name to title

[FireflyFyte]

Hi Buddy52,

 

Welcome to SA. Please summarize your drug history in your signature by following the instructions at How to Summarize Your Drug History in Your Signature. You may need to be on a computer to complete this.

 

14 hours ago, Buddy52 said:

My questions are if this is prozac withdrawals how do I known?

 

We have a few resources on determining if experiences are withdrawals at Daily Checklist of Antidepressant Withdrawal Symptoms and What is withdrawal syndrome?

 

14 hours ago, Buddy52 said:

what is a good next step of action?

 

We can better inform on this once you have updated your signature and have a better understanding of your current symptoms and their severity.

 

14 hours ago, Buddy52 said:

And how long do the effects of prozac withdrawals last?

 

This differs from person to person. 

 

Thanks,

 

Firefly