I was prescribed Paxil (20mg/daily) for depression and post-traumatic stress in November of 1999. At the same time I began to see a therapist who helped me deal with the symptoms of the post-traumatic stress (which included flashbacks; no fun there, let me tell ya). More than Paxil, more than anything or anyone else, the benefits of this communicative therapy (a.k.a. talking) were immeasurable.

However, the Paxil did provide a certain calm which allowed me to deal more effectively with the emotional trauma of the experience I had gone through. (For my own privacy, I’ve chosen to withhold the exact details of that experience.) It seems to me that Paxil regulates one’s emotions so that they are more manageable. How exactly it does this nobody really knows, but there are a few theories out there which I think have some validity to them.

The most obvious theory is that paroxetine, like most anti-depressants, masks one’s emotions — it has a ‘dulling’ effect. The emotions, whatever they happen to be, are still there, but they’re so numbed out by the Paxil that you hardly notice them, which makes them easier to deal with — or, in some cases, to completely ignore.

There may be some truth to this, but I didn’t take Paxil to ignore what I was feeling. I took it to help me deal with my feelings which, for a few months after my big bad traumatic experience, were so powerful and overwhelming that I could barely function.

My theory on Paxil goes something like this: If you think of your nervous system as the electrical wiring in a house, paroxetine acts on your nervous system in the same way the fuse box operates (keeping in mind that I’m not an electrician). When the fuse box — which regulates the voltage — isn’t working properly, you begin to experience overloads and short circuits all the time. Simple actions like plugging in two things at once can short circuit the whole house, causing everything to shut down. An emotionally traumatic experience, and/or a clinical depression of some kind, can have exactly the same effect on your nervous system. Common daily stresses become too much to cope with and everything can gradually, if not suddenly, shut down. When it works, Paxil, under these circumstances, helps to regulate your emotional reactions to these stresses so that they’re not overwhelming, so that you can function again. (The process of getting off Paxil is akin to tearing out all the wiring in your house and then trying to put it all back exactly where it used to be. It’s like completely having to rewire your nervous system. In other words, it hurts.)

So according to my big theory, Paxil doesn’t necessarily mask your feelings, but it regulates the speed at which they come at you, so that under circumstances of unusually high stress (e.g., post-traumatic stress or clinical depression), the emotions are manageable.

How paroxetine really works, though, nobody knows — not even the doctors who prescribe it every day.

I eventually got my life back on track, and the Paxil did help along the way. It wasn’t the one and only solution to my situation, but it was a part of it. I had dealt with the trauma I had experienced and I was feeling settled and confident in how I was going forward with my life.

It was at this point that my doctor told me it would be okay to stop taking the Paxil. I asked him about weaning off it, but he said:

“The great thing about Paxil is that you don’t have to wean yourself off it. You can stop cold turkey.”

I questioned this at first, but I trusted my doctor and I followed his orders. (I consider this the biggest mistake of my life.) The next seven months of my life were entirely consumed in trying to get off this drug.

Within a day of discontinuing the Paxil cold turkey, I experienced severe withdrawal, accumulating in what I’ve come to recognize now as a type of seizure. These seizures, which may coincide with paresthesia, numbness, headaches, abnormal and unexplained sensations, are remarkably similar to those of certain types of epilespsy. It feels like this:

An electrical current building up behind the eyes which then surges through the temples and the rest of the head. Then a second later there’s another surge but slightly weaker, and then another and another until it gradually fades away, but not without leaving one feeling completely exhausted and fatigued.

For three days I experienced a seizure like this approximately every 20 seconds. This was the most physically and mentally debilitating — and disturbing — effect of the Paxil withdrawal. It persisted in varying degrees right to the very last day of my withdrawal seven months later. When I reached the point during that first week where I wanted to kill myself, I decided to start taking the Paxil again.

I had followed my doctor’s orders and had stopped taking the Paxil cold turkey, and it was a pure living hell. It lasted only a week, but the experience nearly killed me.

It was at this time I discovered support groups on the internet similar to paxilprogress.org for people going through the same thing — and I wouldn’t have made it without their support. Just knowing I wasn’t alone made all the difference. The person I felt closest to at this time seemed to disappear off the face of the earth the second I told her about my withdrawal experience. I realized afterwards that I was never as close to this person as I had thought or hoped I was. But when you’re going through something as horrible as Paxil withdrawal, it’s easy, out of pure desperation, to slip into certain forms of denial. Only now, having survived this experience mostly alone, do I recognize the simple but profound healing that comes from feeling the presence of another person, from our caring contact with one another. To have lost this particular contact during my withdrawal — even if it was one big misconception all along — was discouraging to say the least. It made me feel not just cut off from her, but cut off from the world. It also made the support of the people in groups similar to paxilprogress.org especially important to me.

Most of my kinship, and my healing, came through the internet supports groups. Those are the people who were there for me. I’m talking about people I have never met in the flesh, but who were better friends to me than any person in my life at the time. In a way that’s pathetic, but it’s also kind of amazing. The stupid internet saved my life.

After my cold turkey experience, it would be another two months of feeling scared out of my skull before I found the courage to begin weaning myself off the Paxil. The actual weaning process took about two and a half months (which is quick), but the total withdrawal experience lasted much longer.

I seem to have had a particularly difficult withdrawal, both physically and emotionally. If there’s anything anyone could experience while withdrawing from this stupid drug, chances are I’ve had it in one form or another. The #1 thing to remember, though, is that everyone is different. Just because I had a bad ride doesn’t mean you will. I recently received an email from a woman who summed it up nicely:

These medications are much more person-specific than some people think. My own history with Paxil lasted four days and was not at all happy. I had muscle spasms to the point where I could not cross a room dependably. I was like a child learning to walk whose eyes are fixed on the door but arrives at the wall next to it instead. But I was lucky — when I went to the doctor and reported my response, she told me it was “probably only a temporary stage” because Paxil doesn’t have its full effect for about two weeks and that I should “hang in there,” but I insisted that she get me off it now. The symptoms went away within 72 hours and that was the end of my story — except that she “wrote me up” as an “exception” and sent it off to some project-group or another that was evaluating a whole set of “new” stress-related medications [probably SSRIs -- Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors -- of which Paxil is one].

Everyone will have a different experience while on Paxil and while trying to get off it. I’ve heard of plenty of people who had nothing but positive experiences with Paxil and had no problems at all getting off it. (Okay, maybe not “plenty,” but a few). My initial experience with Paxil was a beneficial one. In terms of having no problems at all getting off it, though, forget about it. That’s one experience I simply cannot relate to — and my experience is not that uncommon. Which brings me back to the reason I’ve written this web site:

To let those of you who can relate to what I am saying know that you are not alone. That may not sound like much right now, but when the withdrawal really kicks into high gear and you feel like you’re going to die, blogs like this and websites like paxilprogress.org become lifelines.

That’s how it was for me, anyway.

Postscript (June 9, 2010): The paxilprogress.org forum didn’t exist until near the end of 2000 and didn’t really take off until 2001. I used to visit another Paxil withdrawal forum, but it eventually crashed and burned and became a negative place to hang out. So to keep things simple and point people in the right direction, I only provide links to paxilprogress.org. I often attribute some forum discussions to paxilprogress when they actually occurred on the other forum. I’m slowly working my way through Paxil Free to correct this.

I began taking Paxil, paroxetine hydrochloride, for depression and post-traumatic stress shortly after a traumatic event in November of 1999. By July 2000, ten months later, my doctor and I agreed that I was doing well enough to stop taking the medication. So I followed his medical advice and discontinued the Paxil. Within 24 hours, I experienced such severe paroxetine withdrawal that I eventually became suicidal — and it scared the hell of me. The neurological trauma of paroxetine withdrawal was more physically and mentally debilitating than any kind of depression I had ever experienced.

Most of the records I kept during my withdrawal experience were in the form of messages I posted to Paxil withdrawal support groups similar to paxilprogress.org. Saved on this blog are the most informative of those messages. The postings appear in the order in which they were written, along with all the relevant responses I may have received.

It is a record of my withdrawal experience, not because I’m vain and I like listening to myself talk, but because it’s the only record I kept, and having reviewed all of it recently, I can see that it presents the reality of the experience more accurately than anything else I’d have the energy to put together right now. Along with a support group such as paxilprogress.org, I can’t think of anything more valuable for someone living through paroxetine withdrawal than to read exactly how someone else survived it.

While it’s true that there isn’t a whole lot of fun to be had for someone living through the effects of Paxil withdrawal, the important thing to remember is that you can survive it. That may not sound like much right now, but I have done it and so have many others who had it worse than me. If there’s one thing to learn from the record and testimony on this site, perhaps it’s how to smooth out some of the bumps in the road ahead so that when the worst of it comes at you, it doesn’t knock you so far down that you can never get up again. It can be overcome. As unbearable as it may seem at times, it will eventually go away, and you’ll be all right.

Okay, maybe not all right, but I’m pretty sure you’ll feel at least a thousand times better.

The Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialities (CPS) is the most widely used source of drug information in Canada, and is heavily financed by the pharmaceutical industry. A close examination of its contents comparing a computer-drawn, randomized sample of monographs from its “White Pages” to standard pharmacological reference works demonstrates certain of its characteristics: it uncritically includes many inadequate preparations; it overstates the benefits and understates the adverse qualities of many preparations; and it contains little or no information on relative indications, efficacy, or price. These characteristics serve to promote the marketing goals of the drug manufacturers and severely limit the volume’s usefulness as an objective source of drug information.

And this is where most doctors get their information about the drugs they prescribe. So please be careful when listening to your doctor’s advice. With all due respect to their training, they may not know what they’re talking about, especially in regards to a drug like Paxil whose manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline, has never been too forthcoming about the real side effects of the drug.

September 5th, 2006.

Some of you might actually know who I am from the original version of this blog back when blogs didn’t really exist the way they do today. I first uploaded Paxil Free sometime in 2001; I don’t remember the exact date. I kept the website up for a couple years, then took it down after it became too much to deal with.

I never wanted to become an authority on Paxil withdrawal. My withdrawal experience was thrown in my face, and although I survived it, it made me feel like a different person — except I didn’t ask to feel like a different person.

So it made me angry. I was glad so many people were able to find comfort through reading about my experiences, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I answered all the emails to the best of my ability, but I didn’t feel like a willing participant in any of it — because I was still angry. I was alive and grateful, but I had nothing good to say about the experience. I was not the person to turn to for inspiration and hope. Emailing me to ask how I got through it all, I didn’t have any secrets or words of wisdom to pass on. I was uncomfortable having people turn to me for anything.

I was also embarrassed by much of what I’d written on the site. I subsequently decided to take some time to revise it and get myself out of the loop for a while. So I took the site down, and immediately it felt like a burden had been lifted. I could just leave the whole withdrawal experience in the past and be done with it. I did make some revisions, but I didn’t stick with it. I felt like moving on instead.

So I did.

I moved on to a completely unhappy life. The withdrawal experience disrupted every single aspect of my being. Continuing life from where I’d left off was impossible. Which was not entirely a bad thing, because I’d done plenty of stupid things before my withdrawal that contributed to my misery, and jumping back into some of that crap would have been a bad scene. In fact, it was a bad scene, because like a fool, I actually did try to continue where I left off — and I made a bigger mess of a situation that was already a pretty sad looking scene.

My world didn’t come crashing down…

Scratch that. What am I talking about? My world came crashing down — that’s exactly what happened, and it happened a few times over. I’ll skip the miserable details of those events. But I got through all that, too, and found a good relationship at the end of it all when I wasn’t even looking. No complaints there.

But the thing is, I never did put the withdrawal experience behind me. It’s in my bones. Things inside me got shook up and rearranged and none of the pieces fell back into place. I’m alive and getting on with life, but I live with daily reminders of my Paxil withdrawal, things which I first thought were temporary withdrawal effects but have stayed with me for the long haul. Little things that I notice more than anyone else.

And it still pisses me off.

Little things like being hypersensitive to sharp, sudden sounds. Even the creaking of a floorboard can make my nerves jump; it doesn’t have to be a loud sound. It gives my body a shot of adrenaline, and it takes hours to relax from that kind of jolt to the nervous system. That’s a rare occurrence these days, but it first happened when I was going through Paxil withdrawal.

Another withdrawal effect that’s persisted has to do with my speech patterns and my ability to simply express myself. I developed a stutter at one point during my withdrawal. It didn’t last long, but five years later I still get stuck in a stutter from time to time — and I never used to stutter.

I didn’t have problems expressing myself either. But, again, at one point during my withdrawal, it felt like 50% of my vocabulary simply disappeared from my consciousness. I knew the words were there, but I couldn’t access them when I wanted to. I would get stumped expressing the simplest thoughts because I couldn’t think of the word for what I wanted to say. It happens to everyone from time to time; we can all relate to it. But it happened all the time during my withdrawal, every time I opened my mouth, and it’s still with me today. I feel like a half-illiterate simpleton who can’t express even a slightly sophisticated thought.

This is the one thing that really pisses me off. I want to bomb every Paxil factory on the planet and sue the doctor who didn’t warn me about the withdrawal effects. I want to kick him the balls, and then kick him again. I simply cannot bring myself to put a positive spin on this experience. I wish it had never happened.

When I said before that I didn’t ask to feel like a different person, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about. (Note: I don’t really want to blow up every Paxil factory on the planet or kick my doctor in the balls. I’m just angry. Who wouldn’t be?) I’ve heard of people losing huge chunks of their memory as a result of undergoing shock therapy, and I’m afraid the neurochemical withdrawal of Paxil from my system had a similar, though much less pronounced, effect on my cognitive abilities. This is definitely the one thing that makes me want to go out for blood.

But I’m not dead, and I guess that’s something I should be grateful for, because I’m sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people who have killed themselves while going through the horror of Paxil withdrawal, and probably more who survived it like I did but never found a place to rest during the experience, and they’re probably so mentally exhausted and messed up right now that just being a civilized human being is a struggle for them. These are the people I can relate to. They know the worst kind of loneliness — not having a single soul in your life who can relate to what you’re going through.

It is a horrible and terrifying experience.

This is stuff that scares people off. This is the stuff that makes people look at you like you’re crazy. There’s a good reason I’ve avoided writing about this experience for so long. It’s not a pretty picture. I’m still not sure I have any answers. All I can tell you is that I lived through it, and I’m doing alright now.

If you’re going through Paxil withdrawal, maybe you won’t feel so alone after reading what’s on this site (and there are places like paxilprogress.org where people can relate to what you’re going through).

If you know someone who is in the midst of Paxil withdrawal, maybe this website will bring you closer to understanding what they’re going through.

The original version of this website was read by more people than I can count. I used to get 10 or 20 emails a day from people writing me simply to express how much they appreciated knowing they weren’t crazy, and to say thanks.

I’ve decided to put the website up again because one of those people contacted me recently to say thanks. I realized there is still a need for websites like this. I did some research and discovered the problem of Paxil withdrawal — and the problem of doctors not properly informing their patients about the withdrawal effects — is just as bad today as it was 5 or 6 years ago when I was going through my withdrawal.

How is it doctors still don’t know about the withdrawal effects of Paxil? It’s astounding that they continue to prescribe Paxil without providing adequate warnings about the withdrawal effects.

So starting today, I’m going to re-post the entire Paxil Free website. I will make revisions along the way, and jump in with additional commentary when necessary. Once it’s all done, I’ll probably disappear again. I will not provide my name or email address, because I’m still not comfortable giving advice. I would rather remain anonymous. Go to the paxilprogress.org forums if you have any questions about withdrawal. It’s a great resource and I’m sure they know much more than I do.

This is simply a record of one person’s experience of Paxil withdrawal. It seemed to do some good before. Maybe it’ll do some good again.

Here we go.