Posted by franco neuro on March 25, 2005, at 12:53:51
In reply to SSRI INDUCED APATHY, posted by greg diamond on March 23, 2005, at 17:35:38
I've had the same experience. It wasn't so bad when I took Paxil, but that was 7 years ago when I had a lot more motivation/energy to begin with. (Probably because I hadn't burned out my dopamine/norepinephrine yet.) My more recent stint on Zoloft, however, made my apathy and anhedonia a lot worse. As a matter of fact, not only did I not have any negative withrawel symptoms when I stopped taking it, I ended up having the best 2 or 3 days that I've had in years. Which has me thinking that I might benefit from Remeron or Trazadone which are selective 5-HT antagonists.
But before I go that route I'm going to try and address what is most likely the uderlying reason for my apathy/anhedonia. Low dopamine and/or norepinephrine. I was thinking of trying desipramine, but I'm a little wary of TCA's. I'm still trying to recover from 3 1/2 years on Elavil and it's been 2 years since I came off of it. (By the way, if you remove the "la" from elavil it spells evil.) Desipramine is a lot "cleaner" than Elavil though. At low to moderate doses it's pretty much a pure NRI. Unfortunately, there's still the TCA cardio-toxicity risk.
So taking all of this into account I picked up a script for 100mg of Wellbutrin SR yesterday. First time I'll be working dopamine/norepinephrine. Hope like hell it works. If it makes my anxiety worse or causes insomnia I can always add a little Remeron to the mix.
poster:franco neuro
thread:474712
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20050322/msgs/475418.html