Published on 12, July, 2020
Please fucking help. I've been on Citalopram 10mg and that made me really sick and even more suicidal. I've been prescribed Fluoxetine recently which has scary side effects still, but is it more likely to make me worse because of its sensitivity? The sexual side effects are scariest, then nausea and vomiting is second.
In my experience, pharma meds don't cut the mustard and have weird and horrible side effects. Especially (on me fluoexidine (prozac) and certraline. I really don't like them.
I did however try an "E" back in the late nineties and found one decent rave gave about a week off from being miserable. I've done it about three times, in total over the last thirty years, as I see it as an emergency measure.
HOWEVER for me an "e" changes me fundamentally, in ways that I don't like, as well as blowing away the blues, so my own personal drug compromise is to dull the pain with Cannabis (especially as cannabis is also an excellent antagonist to the ADD impulse control issue). whilst looking for a more "drug free" solution.
Mine is not an approved or even legal management strategy, but it seems to work well enough to keep me out of the clutches of doctors and policemen.
Interesting. The author of Uncomfortable Labels (a book about being autistic) says the same thing about E, that it turns off the sensory stuff related to autism for a while, although she doesn't recommend regular use either.
I personally find that SSRIs even at half the lowest dose give me symptoms similar to serotonin syndrome. I recently started taking a medication that blocks the effects of serotonin (kind of the opposite to an SSRI) to treat IBS and am feeling good on that. The only side effect is that I'm sleeping longer and deeper at night, waking after 8-10 hours instead of 6-8. My mood is better and calmer than usual, so I'm very skeptical about the idea that more serotonin is what autistic depressed people need.
MrSolo said:I personally find that SSRIs even at half the lowest dose give me symptoms similar to serotonin syndrome. I recently started taking a medication that blocks the effects of serotonin (kind of the opposite to an SSRI) to treat IBS and am feeling good on that. The only side effect is that I'm sleeping longer and deeper at night, waking after 8-10 hours instead of 6-8. My mood is better and calmer than usual, so I'm very skeptical about the idea that more serotonin is what autistic depressed people need.
That's interesting. If you don't mind sharing, what is the medication?
It ties in with the link I posted yesterday, the scientific research showing that 1 in 4 autistic people actually have high levels of serotonin in their blood. I'm curious if there has been any further research into what happens if those people are prescribed SSRIs. I do share your scepticism in that respect.
Maybe SSRI induced activation syndrome is actually a milder case of serotonin syndrome. The symptoms are remarkably similar. It would certainly explain why the side effects got progressively worse every day that I was on them, rather than gradually subsiding as my GP kept telling me they would.
Periactin (cyproheptadine) is an antihistamine. Purely anecdotal, I took prescribed antihistamines (mainly promethazine HCl) for hay fever when I was a kid. Summer was the peak allergy season, it was also the end-of-year exam season. This was the 1960s UK, so I was not being treated for ADHD, although I had been previously diagnosed as "hyperactive". I noted some improvement in my ability to focus when I was taking antihistamines. As I say, purely anecdotal and I would not recommend this to anyone else without proper clinical supervision. There is an interesting paper on the links between allergies and ADHD [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10455974/]
That's true. It's sometimes used to counteract SSRI overdoses.
Periactin 2mg before bed