30mg citalopram not working so lowered to 20mg but still not good 😭
Posted , 2 users are following.
Hello fellow warriors who have to endure these awful conditions! First time posting here.
My background:
had panic attacks and anxiety since age 13.
Was giving citalopram by the doc at age 26 fot the first time as i was having a meltdown about my upcoming wedding.
Started off on 10mg and went to 20mg and don't remember any terrible side effects and after a few months my life got so much better. i was able to go shopping and out with friends which is something that i couldn't do in my younger years. Over the years i decreased back to 10mg when i was feeling great and also went back up to 20mg after a divorce but always pretty easy transitions and worked quite quickly.
Last February I was advised to take HRT as one test showed low Oestrogen levels even though the second level was normal. the only symptoms that were a little bothersome were the hot flushes but i thought i would give it a try. After a few months of using the Sandrena gel and Progesterone tablets I started having the odd panic attack here and there. Told my GP and she advised to increase the dose of the gel. Pretty much overnight my anxiety was awful so i slowly stopped the HRT in August last year. the doc also increased my Citalopram doseage to 30mg to help with the anxiety. in the following weeks i was feeling even worse. The doc wouldn't prescribe me diazepam even thought i have had these in the past but gave me Propranolol. i started taking a small amount of Propranolol and slowly increased the doseage until i was taking 120mg a day. i was feeling horrific after a few weeks so stopped the Propranolol and slowly started to feel better. over December I was a lot better than i had been.
Then in the second week of January after being on 30mg of the Citalopram for 17 weeks, I felt dreadful again. I decided to drop back down to 20mg as i had done so well on this dose for many years and now I had stopped the HRT it made sense to me. It has been 3 weeks now and i am feeling awful. Feeling sick, shaking, not much of an appetite, constant anxiety, panic in the mornings etc. Can anyone relate to any of my story and offer me some desperatlely needed hope?
Thank you so much if you read my story. I wish you all love and strength on your journeys.
Nic x
0 likes, 2 replies
Liripipe nicola33733
Posted
I'm not in exactly the same situation as you - sort of the opposite, in fact: I'm a week and a half into upping my 20mg dose to 30mg. Pretty much every day for the last 7 days, I have been STRONGLY tempted to go back down to 20mg as the anxiety has been really bad. But I think the best approach is to give it time; messing around with it is only going to confuse my body further. While I'm not a doctor, I think it stands to reason that your body will be adjusting to the lowering (by a third) of the medication it expects to receive daily. How long were you feeling rubbish on the 30mg for before you dropped to 20mg?
Hang in there. You feel as if you're broken, but you're not. The way I think of it is that it's like a hallucination: part of your brain is telling you that something's there (danger), when it isn't. Eventually, that part of your brain will calm down.
nicola33733 Liripipe
Posted
thanks for the reply. I was on 30mg for 17 weeks and as it was so up and down decided to go back to the dose i was good on before i tried HRT. its a hard journey isn't it and you definitely feel broken.
I hope you feel better soon