Lb11: Effexor and Prozac

[Lb11]

Okay thank you! 

[Lb11]

@brassmonkey hello, so I spoke with you several months ago when I first began my slow tapering. Before I was educated on what the damage of withdrawals could do to your body I went from 75mg to 37.5 mg of effexor in July 2019. I have had waves of depression ever since which i believe is a withdrawal symptoms because I was never depressed before getting off this med. (was on this med for OCD).  I am currently doing 10% taper each month of effexor and do not feel much drastic difference. I still feel depressed but no worse than from when I started the slow taper. I am currently now to 25.3 mg of effexor and I hold the 10% taper for four weeks at a time. I am trying to have a rough estimate of how long it will be until I am totally off this med and was reading the forum where it was talking about the "Endgame taper" and was having a hard time understanding at what point would I start at that and reduce at 25%? I know it may be awhile and that is okay with me but I was curious on what point with mgai I would be technically at that point? Thanks very much for reading 

[brassmonkey]

Hi Lb11-- The Endgame Taper article is still hung up in the approval cycle. The new article goes into a lot more detail than the current one.

 

Because you are doing our recommended taper it is pretty easy to calculate a rough estimate of how long a taper will take. For a 10% every four weeks taper the half life is 6 months. That means that every 6 months you will have cut your dose in half. If you are currently at 37.5mgai then in June you should reach 18.75 and by this time next year you would be at 9.375mgai. It follows that progression until you get to 1.875mgai. If everything goes smoothly you should be getting there in about two and a half years.

 

The 1.8mgai dose would be the start of the Endgame Zone where it is time to think about switching to the Endgame Taper. From there you would be looking to taper to 0.05mgai which would be the Theoretical Exit Dose for your medication. The Endgame Taper is driven by how a persons body reacts to each reduction and is not based on a time table. If all goes well the schedule outlined in the article takes about another year. However, that taper schedule is not the best one to follow. That's a while in the future though, so we don't need to go into details now, but that will give you some estimates.