The Year Wasted On Venlafaxine

The venlafaxine debacle certainly deserves more attention than just the few lines I’ve allotted to it so far.

The first few days have been chronicled by this blog, but fact is that the side-effects never got significantly better. Nausea, headaches, muscle pain, and paraesthesia became my steady companions. Very often, it made me so sick that I had to lie down two or three times during the day. At every appointment I told the psychiatrist about it: he would either dismiss my complaints as “I’ve never heard about anyone having this problem with venlafaxine before”, or claim that those were not side-effects, but withdrawal symptoms because my dosage was still too low to last all day.

About fifteen months down the road, he finally cranked the dosage up – and that is where the heart problems started. Actually, I was in the early stages of serotonin syndrome, and it felt like I was on the verge of a heart attack. Before the next appointment was up, I had to lower my dosage again without even consulting him, because I just could not take it anymore. Finally he decided that maybe venlafaxine wasn’t for me and that I should try escitalopram instead.

The idea was that I would reduce venlafaxine over the course of three weeks and then start escitalopram. The withdrawal was so terrible that even though I gave myself six weeks instead, I still became bed-ridden. Other than expected, the most difficult part was not when I first started lowering the dosage, but the second to last step, which made me hallucinate.

Imagine lying in bed, sweating, your heart beating fast. Your head hurts, your teeth hurt, your back, your legs… every single muscle is in pain. Lights are too bright, sounds too loud, everything you eat makes you queasy. Your thoughts race and you cannot do anything to calm them down. And just when you think it cannot possibly get worse, you start hallucinating that the walls of your bedroom, the furniture around you, the ceiling above you are pulsating, bending in and out as if they are breathing.
I knew it was the withdrawal – that it wasn’t real – but that didn’t make it any less unpleasant. I cried like a little child: “I want it to stop! I can’t take it anymore!”

I do not want to badmouth venlafaxine, since there are many people who take it with few or no problems. I wasn’t one of them. By now, I am aware that I have problems with every drug that influences the noradrenaline (norepinephrine) cycle; that I am genetically predisposed to react that heavily to them.

However, I harbour resentments against the psychiatrist for letting me go through this for such a long time. He was friendly, but I feel like he did not take me or my complaints seriously – whatever it was, you don’t drag out a treatment that doesn’t help and causes so many problems for a year and a half. And I was too afraid that I wouldn’t get my sick note for the jobcenter if I complained too much, so I didn’t dare protesting too loudly. Even when giving the drug the benefit of the doubt, he should have stopped after six month. Instead, I wasted a whole year of my life on top of that trial period.

Coincidentally, just as I made the transition from venlafaxine to escitalopram, the practice was also taken over by a new psychiatrist. The options were to either stay at the old location and get a new caregiver, or migrate to the new location and stay with the old psychiatrist. I chose the former, and have been very happy since with the lady who took over. She’s friendly, competent, seems to genuinely care about her patients, and I find it easier to talk to her than her predecessor.

Escitalopram is a walk in the park in comparison. It really helps with the anxiety, and also has reduced the depression by 80%. What was left fell into three categories:
– problems falling / staying asleep
– lack of energy
– lack of motivation.

The psychiatrist’s suggestion was to try a second antidepressant as a booster. Initially I was very hesitant to even consider this option, because I did not want to go through an ordeal like the venlafaxine-regimen again. She promised that if it didn’t work, I could stop any time, and so I started with bupropion – which is how we discovered that I cannot take any SNRIs. It basically felt like a toned-down variety of venlafaxine to me. After three weeks I stopped.

The second booster I tried is valdoxan (agomelatine), which comes with zero side-effects. It’s slower to show results than other antidepressants I’ve taken, but after five months and experimenting with the dosage there is a definite positive trend: fewer days with sleeping problems, gradually increasing productivity, more motivation. There’s still room for improvement, but I am feeling better than I have in over a decade.

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Back From The Psychiatrist

And thus begins the new treatment regimen with Venlafaxine (Effexor), starting tomorrow.

Everything went well; I was a little nervous first and not particularly in the mood for dealing with a stranger, but the psychiatrist turned out nice. He asked: “What leads you here?” I told him that I was in therapy for chronic  depression for two years and generally was really satisfied with it, but couldn’t get a handle on some symptoms like concentration problems and energy, and wanted to see what medication could do for me in that regard. He knows my therapist and has a superficial idea of the CBASP programme I’m in, and I guess that was enough credit to not let me do all the lab tests and ECG again. I also gave him permission to send reports to my general physician.
I recounted a brief history of symptoms and the treatment I received so far: First depressive episode at 12, second at 16 (this time with suicidal ideation), since the age of 19 / 20 only oscillating between different stages of major depression; panic attacks at 30, treated with citalopram, then therapy; therapy major success, but then the start of a slow decline. The psychiatrist asked about living situation, family, family history of depression, school education, what I am studying. Whether I smoke, drink, ever did drugs, take any kinds of medications.
He performed some tests on my cognitive capacities, because I had complained about them:
– “Spell the word ‘radio’ backwards.”
– “What’s the difference between a river and a lake?”
– “What’s the difference between a ladder and stairs?”
He had me memorize the words “street, traffic lights, flower” and asked whether I remembered those in between other questions, and had me do a chain of mathematical exercises: 100 – 7, then subtracting 7 from the result again, and again, and again. I scored 100% and obviously am not demented.
Some questions on differential diagnoses: do I see or hear things nobody else sees or hears, do my thoughts race, do I think I am being watched or that people talk about me behind my back, etc.?
The most difficult question actually was, “How do you feel these days?” I honestly had to think about that, and answered, “On average days, I feel subdued. Pessimistic.” I told him about the insomnia, problems falling asleep and the stomach aches, that I like to withdraw from people, worry a lot and occasionally get anxiety attacks because of the worrying.

All of that took about half an hour, then he proposed that due to my previous experiences with SSRI in the form of citalopram, I should try out what an SNRI does for me. He explained that SNRI give most people more energy, explained possible side-effects and finally gave me a prescription for venlafaxine. Unless I experience really bad side-effects, I’ll see him again in four weeks.

Edited to add: Yikes, maybe I shouldn’t have googled venlafaxine / effexor, because the results sound pretty bad… “The antidepressant everyone loathes to have taken.” Sounds like I am in for a bumpy ride…