Visual disturbances - Visual snow, palinopsia (after images), oscillopsia (vibrating patterns)??
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Hi, has anyone else had these visual issues start when taking mirtazapine? A few days after starting on 15mg I started noticing lots of moving dots in my vision when looking at the sky or bright white walls etc (visual snow), plus a lot more floaters than normal. I put it down to my anxiety and tried to ignore it. This went on for 10 weeks until I contacted my doctors who said it must be my anxiety, had eye tests (all ok), and increased my dose to 30mg. A week after going up, I started noticing very pronounced after images (look at google logo for a split second then look at plain white part of the screen and can see a negative version of the logo for a couple of seconds). I've also noticed flickering florescent lighting that isn't actually flickering and when looking at striped patterns for a few seconds they start to vibrate. I had NONE of this before starting mirtazapine. I went back down to 15mg for a few days then stopped taking them, but have had terrible muscle twitching since so am back on them. However, I'm really worried that the tablets could be doing long term damage to my vision so am wondering whether I should stay on them for a bit longer in the hope that when I stabilise the twitching goes away, or whether I should come off them again asap because of the vision issues. Has anyone else experienced this? I have found a few things on google linking mirtazapine with these types of visual disturbances but not much on forums with people talking about it?
Anyone?... please?!
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steven51038 RobbieP1
Posted
Consult your GP/Psychiatrist as son as possible if you haven't done so already. Never simply stop taking psychiatric medications; reduce the dose slowly in consultation with your GP/Psychiatrist. The muscle twitching was most probably due to your abrupt withdrawal from taking Mirtazapine. There are many different drugs prescribed for the same psychiatric conditions and it can take a while to find the one that is going to be most effective with the least side-effects. It is your health and your body; stick to your guns and get the most appropriate meds for you; we all react differently to them. Side effects with Mirtazapine do seem to be more adverse in my experience but not of any particularly greater incidence. Depending on the severity of your psychiatric symptoms I would leave a good interval if you can, say a month, between coming off Mirtazapine and taking a new prescription so that you can be sure of distinguishing between the efects of the two.
Hope that helps,
Good luck,
Steve