More Cold Turkey Withdrawal Effects
Tuesday, July 11th, 2000 (continued). This is an excerpt from an email I sent to someone who has also gone through Paxil withdrawal:
Most of the stories I’ve read on various bulletin boards are not happy stories, but nonetheless, from what I can tell there are varying degrees of the “brain zaps,” depending on how long someone was initially on the drug, how much they took, and how fast they tried to get off the Paxil. It’s easy to do the math: cold turkey will always put you through hell (not one single person said their cold turkey withdrawal wasn’t a living hell), and the more you take and the longer you’ve been on it, the worse the withdrawal (cold turkey) will be.
My withdrawal was a “horror” like Brando says at the end of Apocalypse Now. And to avoid coming anywhere close to that kind of experience again, I’ll be weaning myself off Paxil very slowly. That means, for me, lowering my dosage from 20mg to 15mg every other day, alternating between 20 and 15 until I’m feeling brave enough to lower it by another 5mg. And then I plan to keep going like that however long it takes. I don’t care about a decreased sex drive or any of the other side effects; compared to the withdrawal I experienced, it’s a walk in the park. I’m not going to try to go off the Paxil for at least another week or two, not until I start feeling completely myself again; then I’ll probably stay there for awhile before I find the guts to try to wean myself off the Paxil. But I’m guessing, for me, starting from the first day I lower the dosage by 5mg, it’ll take me at least three months to get off it.
Your weaning off it may not have to be as slow though. I think you’ll know how fast you can go by how well you’re reacting to the withdrawal. You might want to get through it as fast as you can, but don’t. Take it as slow as you can; that seems to be the least traumatic way for everybody who has successful gotten off it.
I’m not overweight (although I think I may have put on some love handles while on Paxil) and I’m in good heath and good spirits (except for the withdrawal), and my side effects were extreme dizziness and the brain zaps. Sleeping was almost impossible; my appetite was totally whacked; I had flu symptoms; my bowels weren’t very pleasant; and I kept sweating through the sheets whenever I tried to sleep or whenever I walked around for more than 15 minutes. When I wasn’t walking or sleeping, I didn’t sweat. When I did sweat, I stunk like an open sewer.