After 12 years on the anti-depressant Citalopram I decided to come off of it.
Obviously, if you’re here reading this, you’re considering doing the same. I want to preface this by saying I’m not a medical expert, and if you want to come off of an SSRI consult your doctor and put together a proper plan. While my way of doing it worked for me, I really did it too quickly.
For the sake of transparency, I want to share this story though. Those pills were apart of my life for a long while and I’ve managed to put an end to it. Just please don’t do it the way that I did.
In April ‘24 (about 9 months before the time of writing) I changed jobs into a much less stressful environment with a much better work/life balance.
The job I left was the last thing that I really felt I needed the Citalopram to get me through, so for 6 – 7 months I’d been taking the medicine purely as a crutch. I didn’t really feel I needed it, and had been considering stopping, but in all honesty I just wasn’t brave enough to do it.
In early October the medication came up for review. I only had a dozen or so tablets left but I couldn’t get an appointment to review the prescription. So I decided that now would be the best time to start cutting back.
With an SSRI your best bet is to ‘ween’ yourself off of them. I was on 20mg everyday, so I decided to start by cutting them in half and taking 10mg everyday. After doing that for a week or so I cut back to 10mg every other day until I ran out of tablets.
Realistically, that was probably too quick. Weening off of an SSRI is supposed to be a process that takes months.
One thing I would say, is that every source I could find on the internet said that withdrawal symptoms would come on about a week after stopping the medication and last about a week. In my experience they came on about 3 weeks after stopping the meds and lasted about 10 days
The withdrawal symptoms are the sort of thing that vary massively from person to person. From what I’ve read some people don’t get any at all and some get really nasty symptoms.
Personally I had vertigo and dizziness, pins and needles in my face and I was easily irritable. It was kinda rough for that time but now that I’m through it, everything’s totally fine.
Thanks for reading. You can probably tell that this post wasn’t at all scripted or really planned in anyway. I just felt I needed to share this story.
Again, I’m not a medical professional, and the way I came off of these meds wasn’t correct and won’t work for everyone. Please see a doctor before making any changes to your medication.
Rich
