A fairly positive story about quiting citalopram.

I just thought I'd share this as there's a lot of real horror stories about quitting this drug out there and my experience wasn't that bad so maybe you're experience won't be either!

So background: I was moved onto Mirtazipine to help me sleep so had to quit the citalopram. Bringing my dosage of Cirt wasn't hard for me at all, no ill effects at all, but trying to quite after getting to the point of taking 10mg every other day was pretty hellish...I think I lasted about a week.

So I was then put on the liquid citalopram. Had a little bit of feeling bad when I went from 2 drops a day to one drop a day but nothing too awful. I got down to one drop every other day and tried to quit from there but lasted about a week again. I think that was more to do with my anxiety though. I'd read a lot of horror stories about people trying to quit it and after just a couple of days of feeling bad started again.

So then I just stayed on a drop every other day for a month or two. That become a drop every three days then every four. Basically I was just having one drop whenever I felt the start of withdrawal symptoms. But then one week I realized I was on day five and not feeling too bad so I thought "what the hell, I'll just stop".

Days 6, 7 and 8 without were pretty s**t. But not totally unbearable. The symptoms were what I was expecting, Brain zaps mood swings....that type of thing. But it ended pretty quickly and days nine to fourteen were pretty much fine.

I then had 2 weeks of more physical symptoms. Stomach pain, headaches, feeling like I had the flu sometimes. It actually took me a little bit of time to realize it was withdrawal still. That was probably the worst part of it. But after about 4 weeks that all cleared up.

Now I've been about six weeks and I've had 2 weeks of basically feeling fine. I still get just some very mild brain zaps first thing when I wake up, but it really is very mild and goes away as a soon as I get up.

So all in all going from 40mg a day, a dose I'd been on for about 8 years, to nothing I probably all told had about 4 weeks of feeling bad. But It was important I went down pretty slowly and got my dose as low as humanly possible before stopping completely. It really was easier stopping from a drop every four days compared to a drop every 2.

Everyone's different of course and I'm certainly not trying to invalidate the experience of people who've had a really hellish time...but if you're worried about having to do this just remember that there's also people who quit without feeling any kind of problem whatsoever and then other people who quit and just have a bit of a s****y time but nothing really terrible.

2 likes, 7 replies