The doctor just prescribed me antidepressants for the first time. Advice needed. Citalopram.

Originally posted by Scope and a Beam
Hi,

I've been feeling down and pretty depressed recently so I went to the doctor and he prescribed me Citalopram.

I've taken one and already feel shaky and a bit dizzy. I've read that the side effects get better after 1 or 2 weeks so I'll probably stick it out.

I was just wondering if there's anything people would suggest I do whilst on them? I have never been this depressed before and don't know anyone close enough who has been to ask them about it, so I thought I'd ask here to get some advice.

I've been started on 20mg, after taking only one I feel dizzy, a bit like I'm floating and I'm also shaky. I've seen online that a lot of people also have had this problem, maybe 30% say it gets better. I'm kind of worried these will make me worse.

Is there any way to try and gauge if they're working, other than you suddenly feeling a bit better?

edit on 4-7-2012 by Scope and a Beam because: (no reason given)

Sometimes it doesn't even take that long. I took them and had the same feeling, I was real worried while it happened.

Mine got better not in a week or 2 weeks, but within 2 DAYS.

And when I was on citalopram it worked wonders, so don't worry too much. It will wear off very soon and then you'll noticeably feel better

my main tip is when they start working and they will, don't think after a few months that you're fixed and you no longer need them, it doesn't necessarily work like that

Originally posted by ThinkingCap
Doctors love to just hand out pills as the "heal all cure". But it is my strong belief that there are always alternative methods to dealing with illnesses; depression.

Is that right? Because my doctor refused to give me anything last time I went up there, and still won't. You know what these evil doctors have been telling me? eat more fruit and veg, don't eat processed foods, go to sleep and wake up in a reasonable routine, be more active, stop smoking - these evil doctors!

Stop over generalising, many doctors these days take the same stance towards pumping people with chemicals as you do. If you went to a doctor you might know this

the best advice is to ignore most people on here though, because if you believe their shenanigans then I'll tell you what will happen, you'll convince yourself you're going to have a negative experience and needlessly worry and stress yourself, then you'll say "oh they're not working", not realising that you're worrying and making yourself anxious, rather than it being the citalopram

Citalopram doesn't numb you or make you into an emotionless robot like people are saying, i became a vegetarian when I was on citalopram, hardly the trait of somebody without dulled emotions to care about such an issue

be positive, when it starts working you should feel better, but don't leave it at that, use it to explore other more natural solutions. I started meditation while on citalopam and believe it helped me to eventually come off of medication and good diet is also important as is exercise

Yeah i wouldnt get advice from people on here.

id recommend, Exercise, Prober diet, Vitamins... Dont take prescribed #... WE DONT THRUST IT!:

Originally posted by JailTales

Originally posted by ThinkingCap
Doctors love to just hand out pills as the "heal all cure". But it is my strong belief that there are always alternative methods to dealing with illnesses; depression.

Is that right? Because my doctor refused to give me anything last time I went up there, and still won't. You know what these evil doctors have been telling me? eat more fruit and veg, don't eat processed foods, go to sleep and wake up in a reasonable routine, be more active, stop smoking - these evil doctors!

Stop over generalising, many doctors these days take the same stance towards pumping people with chemicals as you do. If you went to a doctor you might know this

Well ure maybe one of the lucky few... Im betting 19/20 doc's just go by the book... In Denmark 5000 people die anually from stuff that could be avoided... Fx they move a patient to another place, and the place they arrive they get mistaken for some other patient and get wrong medication and die... And were suppose to have DECENT hospitals / doc's in Denmark.

Worth mentioning were only 5-6 million in Denmark.

Originally posted by Johnkie

Originally posted by JailTales

Originally posted by ThinkingCap
Doctors love to just hand out pills as the "heal all cure". But it is my strong belief that there are always alternative methods to dealing with illnesses; depression.

Is that right? Because my doctor refused to give me anything last time I went up there, and still won't. You know what these evil doctors have been telling me? eat more fruit and veg, don't eat processed foods, go to sleep and wake up in a reasonable routine, be more active, stop smoking - these evil doctors!

Stop over generalising, many doctors these days take the same stance towards pumping people with chemicals as you do. If you went to a doctor you might know this

Well ure maybe one of the lucky few... Im betting 19/20 doc's just go by the book... In Denmark 5000 people die anually from stuff that could be avoided... Fx they move a patient to another place, and the place they arrive they get mistaken for some other patient and get wrong medication and die... And were suppose to have DECENT hospitals / doc's in Denmark.

Worth mentioning were only 5-6 million in Denmark.

edit on 4-7-2012 by Johnkie because: (no reason given)

What book. Is there a book that says if someone has illness A that they must be given a tablet? I'm not familiar with this book

I was on Citalolpram for years. Way longer than I needed to be. My circumstances were quite different and my depression may have been caused by radiotherapy I had had on my brain.

It was a strange experience starting them. I definitely felt a bit weird, a bit unsteady, but after a while my mood definitely lifted and they got me out of a rut. I just got used to being on them and didn't really feel the need to come off them. I didn't want to go through the depression again, so was a bit fearful of coming off them. I did come off them a few years ago. I can't say I've noticed any change . I was on them for too long, they should be seen as a short term fix and then weened off sensibly. They are not the answer, but can give you a the boost you may need.

Just make sure you speak to your doc about when you should take them and when and how you should come off.

reply to post by Scope and a Beam


I can only talk from my own experience on them, that you will feel a bit shaky and dizzy for a week or so, but I didn't have any suicidal thoughts, I actually got a bit of a kick from them. Sorted me out quite quickly.

reply to post by Johnkie


Every Doctor, Nurse and person in the medical field are Human and we humans make mistakes, it is unfortunate but it happens.
I bet they cure many times more people than they mistakenly kill.
Medication has improved our live's, we live longer because of it and can get cured from nasty illness's because of it.

What do some of you want eh? no medicine? so we all die at the age of 35.

My mom was depressed and couldn't sleep without her cocktail of antidepressants and sleeping pills. She was a very sensitive person also, emotionally speaking This situation was running for the last 30 years. I told her about the present time we never live in, the trust we put in people in uniforms for no reason, the way we always try to push an external button to resolve our inner issues, how big pharma has great financial interest in keeping people sick/addict and about the effectiveness of the medicine being relative to the amount of trust/"faith" you have in it.

It took a certain time for her to digest this. But she knew it all made sense. Now she's done with all that crap, she sleeps perfectly well and she told me lately she even dreams now. She told me she understood the key of her problems was inside her, not outside. She understood that the way we talk and convince ourself with a statement like "I can't sleep. It has always been like this" make your eyes indeed stay wide open at night.

Long story short. She changed her negative thoughts and her convictions about herself. Then everything got alright for her. The pills were actually the problem.

I'm really proud that these ideas many would consider ignorantly like new age BS or whatever, made my mom feel better and sleep after 30 years of insomnia.

So OP, my advise would be that you read a few books about your Self and about positive thinking, set your inner house in order before you take external drugs that might make you feel worse.

I'm just telling her experience. IMO all this won't ever work for anyone who laughs of this in advance. It has to make sense, then the solution comes to you by itself.

Get well OP, whatever you decide to do/think/swallow/...

Peace

Hello OP,

I don't have any personal experience with that particular drug so I can't offer any advice there. But I have experienced crippling depression and understand how debilitating it can be. One of the most powerful tools I found in overcoming depression is to keep a journal. In your journal you only write about the positive things you experienced throughout the day. Even if you are having the most F'ed up day of your life you can always find one positive thing to write about, even if it's just "The weather was really nice today." Depressed people tend to focus a lot on the negative. You mentioned you were having concerns about your job and now other things are weighing on you. When you focus on negativity it grows. The journal will help shift your focus to more positive things and this will snowball. It helped me more than any pill.

Originally posted by Erowynn
Hello OP,

I don't have any personal experience with that particular drug so I can't offer any advice there. But I have experienced crippling depression and understand how debilitating it can be. One of the most powerful tools I found in overcoming depression is to keep a journal. In your journal you only write about the positive things you experienced throughout the day. Even if you are having the most F'ed up day of your life you can always find one positive thing to write about, even if it's just "The weather was really nice today." Depressed people tend to focus a lot on the negative. You mentioned you were having concerns about your job and now other things are weighing on you. When you focus on negativity it grows. The journal will help shift your focus to more positive things and this will snowball. It helped me more than any pill.

Interesting I actually found it was the reverse for me, I kept a diary of my negative emotions. It helped me channel all the negative stuff out of my head and onto the page, sort of like talking therapy I suppose but putting it to paper.

Originally posted by sad_eyed_lady

Actually, when you are bi-polar and experiencing depression, not mania, anti-depressants can help.

If you don't start feeling better soon (2 weeks tops) tell your doctor.

Do a little research on a couple amino acids take you can use to treat depression: 5HTP (tryptophan) and N-Acetyl Cysteine.

I take them and don't need anti-depressants anymore.

What are Amino Acids?
www.wisegeek.com...

Acetyl cysteine? Interesting. Here people use it for sinus congestion - doesn't work for me on that though.
How did you learn about this?
I am not an MD but I am interested.

As for the OP, I recommend a balanced approach. Your doctor is probably well-meaning, but he or she is not an all-knowing god. And there are many other things you can try - therapies, meditation, food etc.
One thing does not exclude another.
There are cases where a person cannot manage their lives and a temporary solution still offers a bridge to the future. (If you are a starving vegetarian, and someone offers you a burger - well I don't blame you if you take it.)
Other times, people are brave and strong enough to try independent things or face a content-based therapy which may eliminate the need for meds. You need to have other things that can help you in their stead.
Be patient with yourself and allow yourself time to heal - it may be a reasonable goal to give meds up after a while.

Pushing drugs onto the population is just one more piece of the stealth agenda to control and depopulate.

Originally posted by Trajan
Look, for everyone who is saying 'take meds' or 'see a therapist' You are all brainwashed into believing Pills make it better. They don't. Meds DO NOT help in anyway, shape or form DO NOT take ANY kind of medication they give you.

Started taking medication... now I feel even more suicidal than before...

Illuminati and our medicine

"So as you can see, there are a number of substances with various psychoactive effects that one can become dependent on to the point of needing it to 'survive' without the possibility of dying in the withdrawal, if it was a substance that can cause death or permanent damage to the brain.

Modern science can easily reshape the molecules and make slight changes to 'turn off' the psycho-activity of the substance they wished to make 'sneaky' for purposes of mass population ingestion daily to the point of mass dependance.

They know their medicines cause dependance and they know that they can charge any price because they know the person will go to any length not to suffer so horribly once addicted and pay any price. But generic companies try to undercut them to get into the market, and this fortunately keeps them at bay. The doctors who prescribe these types of substances liberally know what they do to people and know full well that their patient will likely become dependent as long as the medicine is repeatedly given to them with refills etc. They may often trick a person into thinking they need the medication when in reality a non-addictive one could solve their original problem just the same. These same doctors get throwbacks from the pharmaceutical companies for prescribing their brands you see.

Illuminati and our medicine

Pharmaceutical Drugs Do NOT Work

Doctors are forced to prescribe the drugs pushed onto them by the FDA, which happens to be a puppet of big pharma. The FDA dictates to all doctors what drugs must be prescribed for a particular disease, so the doctors have NO choice.

Useless Sledgehammers

Do these great drugs actually have any use at all, when taking into consideration all their awful side effects? The view of independent scientists (that is to say, independent of pharmaceutical industry) is quite simply: No! There isn’t one single proven case of someone who was cured of their serious depression in a trial –since this was never investigated. The evaluation of terminated and failed tests followed a pattern similar to that of the catalog for detecting depression, which you have already read about.

Questionnaires with ranking scales were implemented. These questionnaires were filled out by the doctors. The patients had to assess themselves, and that led to the result that the patients put themselves into two categories. Those who felt exactly the same after taking a placebo as they did after taking Prozac®. The other group showed a slight ad-vantage for the placebo over Prozac®. Uselessness - Well Known since 1984 The fact that almost no one felt better and also, as had actually been promised, the illness, depression, was not being treated – Eli Lilly already knew all of that in 1984. Likewise, it was also well known, that the side effects were severe, and, in some studies, they occurred in 90 percent of the test subjects.

The German authorities also noticed that the side effects were similar to the illness being treated in 15–20 percent of cases – that is to say, that fluoxetine caused depression. And all that against the background, that patients, who were at risk of suicide, had been excluded from the tests. That’s why the high risk of suicide, found in the test subjects, could be attributed to the drug itself.

“In fact, the average across all drugs is about 50 percent efficacy. And for the 50 percent of the patients who essentially get little or no benefit, whatever they spend is wasted money.” In view of this overt cynicism, appears downright naive to ask the question – why are these medicines then sold to the other 50 percent at all? –. To sum this up: SSRIs such as Prozac®, Fluctin® etc. are useless, expensive and, in addition to that, extremely dangerous. Lives are lost. For the patient, it is a game of Russian roulette; for the healthcare service, it is money frittered away, that is much needed elsewhere. Only the pharmaceutical industry profits from them: a turnover of billions. Every year.

Side Effects: Death

"Side Effects: Death" is the true story of corruption, bribery and fraud written by Dr. John Virapen, who has been called THE Big Pharma Insider. During his 35 years in the pharmaceutical industry internationally (most notably as general manager of Eli Lilly and Company in Sweden), Virapen was responsible for the marketing of several drugs, all of them with side effects."

"Dr. John Rengen Virapen worked 35 years for Eli Lilly & Co as an executive. He now speaks out on the many crimes Big Pharma was and is responsible for and he himself also participated in. Unfortunately, many of its crimes go past public awareness as it enjoys the unethical protection from its big allies, the mainstream media, the FDA and governments."

LINK

Big Pharma Whistleblower Speaks Out (Part1 of 4)


For more information, go to johnvirapen.com or sideeffectsdeath.com

reply to post by Murgatroid


Yes you are right in one aspect, the drug companies want us to use these drugs because it will make them richer and I do think some doctors are all to happy to give out drugs willy nilly BUT some people do need them, some people can not cope in todays society (Heck do any of us?) so as long as the right research has been done and they (the meds) do more good than bad I am happy we have the option for these drugs.
So lets get our governments to make sure the drug companies make drugs which do work and help people.
I have seen reps from drug companies come around and they bring hampers/sweets etc to try and sweeten the Doctors so they will try patients with a new drug, and this is so wrong.

Originally posted by boymonkey74
reply to post by Murgatroid

 

Yes you are right in one aspect, the drug companies want us to use these drugs because it will make them richer and I do think some doctors are all to happy to give out drugs willy nilly BUT some people do need them

After seeing my wife's mind totally destroyed, seeing her institutionalized, and my marriage and life completely obliterated I am not so sure if I can agree anymore.

I think EVERYONE who puts their trust in Medicine Doctors NEEDS to watch this video:

Originally posted by Rubinstein
"Big Pharma works hand in hand with the Banking System, it's all part of the same engine..." same people, same plan, same goals...

Originally posted by quackers
Pharma is big business and it make lots of people very rich. These rich people have very powerful friends in government to whom they lobby. It is not in the best interests of pharmaceutical companies to provide cures when their sole aim is generating profit. Get it through your head, their job isn't to make people well, it is to generate revenue. How do they generate revenue? Well, it's from sick people isn't it. No sick people -> no money, no money -> no power. It ain't rocket science."

The government doesn't want cures, they want sickness. SICKNESS = MONEY

"Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religions destroy spirituality." Michael Ellner

Originally posted by Kokatsi

Originally posted by sad_eyed_lady

Actually, when you are bi-polar and experiencing depression, not mania, anti-depressants can help.

If you don't start feeling better soon (2 weeks tops) tell your doctor.

Do a little research on a couple amino acids take you can use to treat depression: 5HTP (tryptophan) and N-Acetyl Cysteine.

I take them and don't need anti-depressants anymore.

What are Amino Acids?
www.wisegeek.com...

Acetyl cysteine? Interesting. Here people use it for sinus congestion - doesn't work for me on that though.
How did you learn about this?
I am not an MD but I am interested.

As for the OP, I recommend a balanced approach. Your doctor is probably well-meaning, but he or she is not an all-knowing god. And there are many other things you can try - therapies, meditation, food etc.
One thing does not exclude another.
There are cases where a person cannot manage their lives and a temporary solution still offers a bridge to the future. (If you are a starving vegetarian, and someone offers you a burger - well I don't blame you if you take it.)
Other times, people are brave and strong enough to try independent things or face a content-based therapy which may eliminate the need for meds. You need to have other things that can help you in their stead.
Be patient with yourself and allow yourself time to heal - it may be a reasonable goal to give meds up after a while.

I heard about N-AC (Acetyl Cysteine) from another ATS member. There are many uses for it is and I have done a bit of research into the use of it for bipolar depression, but have seen articles about treating uni-polar depression - I just haven't studied it. The more you dig, the more surprised you are with it's treatment uses.

www.webmd.com... E

I have suffered from depression, psychosis, delusional parasitosis and psycosymatic injuries for aproching twelve years. Amongst many other drugs, citalopram was one of them.

While it was one of the milder drugs in terms of side effects, the benefit, like the many others, were non existant.
Nearly two years now I've refused to take the anti depressants and anti psychotics, most of my symptoms have gone.

When I was taking the meds, I would have hallucinations every few minutes, now its more like once a day, with ZERO side affects due to the drugs.

Educate yourself on what is really going on inside you, understand what it is that you experience that others don't.
Once you have that knowledge, even the worse episode won't scare you anymore, with depression it's knowing that things bother you/have bothered you alot and probably will do again.

When I'm down, I find it beneficial to smile and feel greatfull knowing that there is, and always will be, someone in a worse situation than you, that would be greatfull for your life, warts and all.

Ditch the tabs fast, it really is as simple as changing perspective