A Positive Sertraline Story - Stick with it, it takes time.

First off, this post is aimed directly at you. Speaking as a man approaching 60 (in the UK) who has suffered the horrendous illness that is anxiety and depression for a very long time I can tell you there is hope. This will be a positive story about the trials and tribulations of taking Setraline. It took me many years before I accepted that I needed medical help to alter the short-tempered person I had become. Everything seemed to be a struggle, and the motivation to do the simplest things was low. However, I had a couple of kids and a working wife who needed me to, in simple terms, carry on. That’s what I did. Throughout all of this I never gave in to it, never had time off work, I just kept going. It wasn’t easy but I didn’t know what else I could do.

It was all the harder to understand because my life was pretty much perfect. Happy marriage, great kids, good job, nice house, but still something wasn’t right. I eventually took myself to see my local GP (around 15 years ago I guess), not something I took to particularly comfortably, but ultimately worthwhile. He explained that he thought I’d benefit from taking an SSRI, in my case sertraline, he said to picture the peaks and troughs of a sine wave and imagine them being squashed closer together. The highs and lows would lessen as a result.

I went home, put the box in a drawer and took to the minefield that is Google. Unavoidable in our position, unfortunately. Google can be useful if you search selectively and carefully. What I haven’t mentioned is that most of my anxieties during that time were health-related. Google is not your friend if this is the case. Literally, every symptom you type in is cancer. After seeing the doctor, rather than searching for a particular symptom on its own, I’d ‘google it’ with the word anxiety. Bingo. Not only was every symptom I had cancer, but it was also down to anxiety. I was properly done for.

Spoiler Alert….I wasn’t.

About 6 weeks after seeing the Doc, I was on a family holiday with the family. Without work to distract me I became agitated. I’d bought the Sertraline with me, thinking if there were going to be symptoms a two-week holiday may be the best time to start.

At this point, I’m going to cut to how I think Sertraline works. I might add I’m no GP. These are my well-experienced and personal thoughts. Like you, I’d read, heard or been told that Sertraline may take 6-8 weeks to work. The symptoms could vary, in some cases dramatically. I started at 25mg. From what I can remember I didn’t experience any symptoms as a result of taking the drug. To be honest, as a health anxiety sufferer how the hell would I know anyway, I already had every symptom going.

I don’t want to get drawn into what dose I was taking, because I don’t think it’s relevant, only to say in the time I’ve been taking it, I’ve never exceeded 100mg. This is the key part of what I want to try and get over in this post - I, like I say, my thoughts, don’t think how much you take matters as much as how long you take it for. Believe me, I’ve read a lot of posts from people and they can confuse your thinking considerably. That’s not to denigrate their experiences in any way, I just believe the 6-8 weeks timescale is way off the mark. To recover will take months on sertraline. That’s no bad thing, for me it’s just a fact. To pin your hopes on this 6-8-week cycle that will see you recover is fanciful. Give it 6 months I’d say, even if you can only stand a low dose. I think it’s a case of low and slow wins the race.

Anyway, I could drag on and on but to cut a long story shorter my health anxiety subsided, I’d say recovery took 6 months and I subsequently carried on taking the drug, mostly at 50mg until I thought a couple of years ago I didn’t need it anymore and I weened myself off.

Six months on, a new job, and I began to see a decline in my mental health. Not health anxiety this time, that stayed away but just a more generalised anxiety. It steadily got worse. Around 10 weeks ago, because the prescription was still on repeat, I began taking it again. I spoke to another GP prior, by phone, because here in the UK, post-COVID, they don’t want anyone to actually see them directly.

Ten 10 days at 50mg made me feel worse, with heightened anxiety, so I increased it to 100mg. I felt as bad, on some days worse. That’s when I did what you are doing and frantically ‘googled’ looking for positive stories. They were there too and held on to one or two that gave me the most hope. Thank you to those nameless people. At the ‘famous’ 8-week mark, I didn’t know whether to increase to 150mg and risk the heightened anxiety getting worse or drop back. I self-doctored myself and did the latter.

At 10 weeks now, I feel I am finally coming back to some kind of normality, whatever that is. I’m by no means there yet though. It’s quite a journey. I’ll add I also tried CBT during the last 6 months, but it didn’t help me. Mindfulness, I have no doubt works for some but again not me.

As I’ve repeated, this was just my sertraline story, I hope it helps you. To summarise, take the drug, at whatever dose you think suits you and keep going. People need you to be strong and if you’re living and surviving with this nightmare you most definitely are. Do whatever you can to get through the day. Distraction was best for me but if curling up on the sofa in front of TV (as I still do) works do that. Good luck, keep on carrying on, you’ve got this.

Afterthought - one symptom that has always been a problem for me with Sert was, from the very beginning, and the main reason I dropped back to 50mg rather than up to 150mg was a decrease in libido and an inability to finish the task, quite often in hand.

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