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Comment by dbt00 | Hacker News Reader

I was up to 10mg/daily of Lexapro for two years. When my doctor and I agreed it was time to stop taking it, his advice was to go down to 5mg for a week, then stop.

When I tried stopping after the 5mg dose I had constant vertigo symptoms and incredible difficulty sleeping.

What I ended up doing was cutting the pills in half for a few weeks, then quarters, then removing one day a week from the schedule until I was down 2.5mg/wk. Finally I was able to stop, and only was mildly affected for 3 weeks after that.

That stuff does weird things to your brain. On the flip side, I couldn't have gotten through some really rough times without it.

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I had the same issues coming off of Lexapro. Weird brain shocks. Bupropion (Wellbutrin) has been better for me all around, but I worry about what it will be like coming down off of it too. The good news is that I'm overall in a good place and feel like I probably don't need it anymore.

For what it's worth, from my anecdotal experience, Bupropion is much, much milder in terms of withdrawal, and the symptoms are more in the realm of energy than paresthesia - groggy and listless, but not vertiginous and electrified.

I had no problems stopping Wellbutrin after 3.5 years. More or less went cold turkey when I ran out of prescription.

Bupropion is marketed as Zyban as a smoking cessation aid meaning that people are coming down on it when they quit Zyban, after they quit smoking. I've done this, twice. I've also used Ritalin in the past. It works similar, and from my memory the coming down is also similar.

I tried Zyban years ago. After 7 days I stopped smoking and then had this weird time slowing down effect. I guess most people don't have that effect but I wonder how many do.

I had the same thing. I was so used to time flying by, it was going slower, which I consider a great thing :).

Same thing happened to me going off of Lexapro. I called it "the zaps".

That's exactly how I felt getting off of Effexor. I stopped taking them completely one day and after trying to push past the zaps for two weeks I got back on them. I had to get of them gradually by splitting the pills open and splitting up the little balls instead.

Okay, this is way too much information, but I googled furiously to try to discover what awful parasite had laid its eggs in my intestinal track when I started noticing those tiny white balls in the toilet.

Glad you are in a better place than before, hope the process will go well!

I wonder if there is a form of research that could done by following patients who are receiving this treatment, and track how they wean themselves off of it.

Same experience for me, and in fact I had the brain-zapping withdrawal symptoms while I was taking a steady dosage. The zapping happened with both Zoloft and Lexapro. It happened regularly many times per hour.

When asked to describe it, I tell people the zapping feels like my mind is lost for a fraction of a second. For that tiny moment I really think I'm completely non-functional, and the thought of this condition lasting for a non-trivial amount of time is frightening, although I've never heard of that happening.

Zoloft was beneficial for me, but not enough to outweigh the discomfort of the brain zapping.

The brain zapping and some other symptoms were impossible to describe accurately and I have trouble even remembering them properly. The feeling was alien.

Intense vertigo is the same for sertaline / zoloft, It lasted more than a month for me. But I needed the energy and initiative to get a new job.

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