Why are you coming off of Lexapro?

My husband and I are trying to get pregnant.

Get hydrated, stay hydrated, and keep moving.

Sometimes, as we change medication levels, we forget to keep our physical balance in tune, so we have what you mention.

Take time to distract your pattern of thought to something else.

Best wishes.

That crosses my mind from time to time. But we can't let it stop us from enjoying the moment. Don't let it steal your joy.

that's a glitch. The fact that you're affected makes me wonder about your reduction in dose.

Half the dose, twice the time. Don't try to get pregnant till you're off it. God knows what it would do to a baby to either have you on it while its brain is forming - or else have you in a state of psychosis because you came off your drugs too fast. Psychoactive drugs are psychoactive. You can't go off them fast. It takes six months or a year.

Bridgie101 you have now scared the living crap out of me. I came off the Lexapro under the advisement of my doctor whom I have seen since I was a child. Psychosis is one of my biggest fears and now I'm even more worried about it. Lexapro has been under many studies with pregnancy and there have been ZERO effects on women who have taken it while pregnant, do you think my doctor would risk the wellness of a possible child? I have seen my primary doctor and OBGYN who have both given me the green light to try and get pregnant while weening off the medication. I have NEVER heard of half the dose, twice the time. Everyone is different, and I've never heard of anyone entering a state of psychosis because of weening off medication too fast. People go off cold turkey even though it is a terrible idea all the time and do not get in that state.
Please be cautious about how you reply to messages. I thought this was a safe place to get kind advice not to scare me further which I now am.

Keeping in mind that I've never been on Lexapro before, have you considered that you may not be ready to get off it yet, or that the reduced dose you're trying may be too big a cut for you?? Could you try each dose reduction for 5 to 10 days each, then drop it further til you are no longer on it? My pdoc would reduce and eliminate my meds that way. Hope this helps.

I am sorry I scared you, but I am now scared. Half the dose, twice the time, is a respected and normal comment for a psychological health professional to give. I have no idea what a GP would give as advice.

what you have to understand is that psychoactive drugs are marketed as 'not addictive' and the word they choose instead is 'forms a dependency.'

which basically means, they are addictive. They change the brain. Over time, you can see the scans, and see the changes in the brain. This is all known stuff. There is nothing contentious in what I am saying at this point.

Well apart from the cutesy semantics about addictiveness/dependency. What this is to do with is that they prefer to define addictive as 'requires more and more to have the same effect'. This is a specialised definition as I am sure you can see.

it is exceedingly dangerous to go off psychoactive medications quickly. Exceedingly. Anyone here gone cold turkey and gone off the deep end put your hands up now.

(Bridgie puts hand up and personally knows many people who have.)

if you were on a low dose, then maybe you're alright. But don't imagine your GP has a clue, because they just fling psychoactive pills as though they were antibiotics. which is to say, start, stop, end of story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luKsQaj0hzs

here. Start with this. This stuff is all out there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgCpa1RlSdQ

Sorry, this one is a far better one. Far better. It goes through the history of psychiatric drugs, it shows the difference between a brain before, and a brain after.

You get physical changes in your brain from psychiatric medication. And you have to give your brain time to readapt. You can't go off as fast as you went on.

And your GP is unlikely to know that.

You know, I have had issues like this off and on over the course of my anxiety and what I have found is that these issues are not "real".

They are just things that our minds latch onto as an outlet for our anxiety.

They feel real, and maybe they are of a concern to you.....but not in the dramatic way that you think its a concern to you.

What I do is just resist the urge to analyze these thoughts....they are just junk floating around in your head and don't mean anything. if you ignore them....they will stop...so ignore that compulsive urge you have to pick them apart and dissect them and make sense of them. They mean NOTHING.

As far as the anxiety being worse off the Lexapro, I don't know anything about that as I have never taken meds before but it sounds like the other posters know something about that so I will just wish you luck and hope it gets better soon for you.

it was citalopram that I stopped cold turkey, that sent me into the most severe tailspin of my life, and I had no idea from my GP that it was this that was the problem. He didn't have a clue.

I found it out years later from another psychologist, who was very adamant: half the dose, twice the time.

when you swop medications they tell you to drop 1 2 weeks before, and then pick up the 2nd - and that's nothing like the necessary time to clean yourself out. nothing like it.

I am currently reducing from Buproprion. I have been on half the dose for a year now. I am about to go down to a quarter.

This could be because I have been burned so badly by the crash caused by going off the citalopram the way I did. I am now watching my emotional balance carefully, and I watch my anxiety carefully. I live a quiet life, i try to avoid too much interaction.

I suppose I reacted to your post too quickly, I did not ask how much you were on, how long you had been on it: how slow your coming off was. That sort of thing. But i do know that it changes the physical shape of the synapses in your brain after time, and they have to grow back. Because you are no longer creating much seratonin, you need time to start creating it again. your body has adjusted, and you need seratonin for every single thing your body does - you need it in all your joints, for instance. You can't just drop it.

Sure, I can relate to that, a fear of the unknown, a fear of change. What's so scary about the present becoming the past? Do you like the way things are now, want things to stay the way they are now, and it's the unknown FUTURE, a fear of CHANGE, that's really scaring you? If so, try to embrace the concept that change doesn't have to mean a change for the worse, that change can be GOOD, teaches flexibility, so that life can be BETTER.