has anyone caved into medication before?

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you can buy psychiatric drugs at Walmart? LOL I hope thats not over the counter :S

I'm taking 'Celexa.' It's cheap. I've started it recently and the side-effects were incredibly awful for the first couple of weeks, but have reduced.

I'd suggest, instead of almonds, you get your 'placebo effect' from B-vitamins and fish-oil capsules. People claim that those are actually effective, so you're more likely to fool yourself. Or maybe actually get some benefit.

Cyanide is in almonds, apple seeds/skin loads of things. But you are going to have to eat an awful lot to get poisoned.

Blanched almonds should contain less Cyanide than he fresh ones with skin.

I've been on an old tricyclic antidepressant called Amitryptiline for over 20 years and it literally saved my life. I don't like taking any medication either, but it was either go crazy from lack of sleep and depression or take the damn stuff. So I did, and the next morning, I actually felt like getting out of bed for the first time in my life. (I was in my late 20s.) I have not had any side effects from it, and it's really cheap because few people take it anymore.

Usually, I'm very sensitive to meds, and I do not like feeling doped up, but the amitryptiline doesn't have a doping effect because it's not a narcotic and it's not addictive. It just gives me a bit of detachment from the cacophany in my brain so that I can sort things out a bit without panicking or sinking into despair.

yes, I hate allergies

It helps people get into delta-wave sleep. Some people can't do that, and it creates all kinds of psychiatric and physical fallout. By helping people achieve the deep sleep phase, amitryptiline does a lot of good if that is something your brain has a problem with. It's also a general antidepressant, not just a sleep one. But it is supposed to have rough side effects...

I took antidepressants but never got much good from them. I have a serious discomfort with having my mind working better when the dose is high and working poorer as time to take the next dose approaches. They are working on lots of slow-release versions of anti-depressants all the time. But I'm so disoriented by the shifts in my cognitive function as the dosage in the bloodstream (which indirectly fluctuates the neurotransmitter levels in the brain) that I get depressed and derailed by having my mind fluctuate on me day after day. On the SSRI's (zoloft, prozac, et al), I got something I used to call a "serotonin buzz" where my mind felt like white noise and I whited out and stopped thinking when the dose had recently been taken. I couldn't really do anything meaningful during the serotonin buzz.

There are MAOI (MAO inhibitor) antidepressants that are getting a lot of new attention lately because they work for a lot of things the SSRIs don't work for. MAOI antidepressants work on lots of neurotransmitters, not just serotonin. So they increase the transmitting chemicals in the brain across a whole spectrum of transmitter chemicals, not just one. But there are really bad side effects to MAOIs.

There are a lot of foods you can take to bump up your neurotransmitter levels. Doctors and medical industry don't broadcast those, of course, because they don't make money when people help themselves.

I just googled on "neurotransmitter foods" and a few sites came up.

If you want to increase neurotransmitters that have an antidepressant effect, I seem to recall that dark red kidney beans, molasses, and a bunch of other foods are "antidepressant".

Here's a page that mentions ome basics: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~studskl/food.html

It's almost always better try do a diet check to see if there are natural things you can do before getting into the drug scene with prescription pushers.

Running, exercise and the visual stimulation of sunlight are powerful mood enhancers. Being out in the sunlight is a natural antidepressant, because of how it stimulates the visual centers of the brain.

I'm surprised your doctor hasn't put you on lexapro. I used to take celexa. When I stopped taking celexa, I had hallucinations and stuff.

I don't see taking psychiatric medications as caving in. I used to think that way, and I took myself off the drugs without telling anyone. My quality of life always decreased. Eventually I ended up in a psych ward. Now I'm on two antidepressants and an antipsychotic, and I can get through each day. And that's enough, for the time being.

Same here. I take one antidepressant and two antipsychotics.Psychiatrist recently diagnosed me with Borderline Personality Disorder

Yipe. They totally overmedicated me with BPD--I think I had something like seven different medications. Why TWO antipsychotics? I can see one, if you're having a lot of the "transient minor psychosis under stress" stuff, but two?

Dokken--lemme guess; you stopped Lexapro cold-turkey, or took less than a week to come off it? Yeah, baaad idea. I took a month and still had some light-headedness. It's quite safe to take; you just have to be gradual about coming off or else you'll shock your brain.

Bitter almonds have cyanide in them. The normal sweet almonds don't.

Only once, beta blockers for anxiety, just for a week or two. It was out of desperation, I'd never felt so wound up before. Didn't notice any side effects, but I don't think they helped, maybe a bit of a placebo effect at first, but that's all. I don't believe in meds except as a last resort.

Sometimes, though, taking medication can keep things from getting worse. To me, hospitalization, not medication, is a last resort. If things are headed that way, you can bet I'll be popping pills--trust me, the hospital is a very not-nice place. It's boring and people treat you like a two-year-old--and that's if you're lucky. I'd much rather take pills than go back.

I wasn't reckoning with hospitalisation - but I don't doubt it could be even worse than pills.

I, too, do not consider taking psychiatric medications as caving in. All neuropsych disorders have neurobiological/neurochemical causes, so I'm all for helping that problem with medication. I currently take Lamictal (for AS mood swings), Anafranil (for OCD), and Klonopin (for panic attacks; as needed, not daily). In the past, I tried Zoloft, Lexapro, Prozac, and Abilify for my OCD, as well as undergoing CBT twice, and none of them worked. I started taking Anafranil this summer, and it's been a miracle drug for me.

I've had OCD since age three, and it's been moderate-severe since age 11 1/2. I didn't start taking medication until I was 15 1/2, and it was long overdue. Plus, I didn't find an OCD medication that worked until this year, so I've suffered much too long. I never want to go back to how I used to be. Nobody deserves to live that way.
-OddDuckNash99-

Including the lives of its employees, it seems.

I've just begun to take Zoloft. First went on it a few years ago, and it helped my state of mind some. Later it seemed to lose its potency, so I weaned myself off it and tried the more selective Luvox. That wasn't so effective - it seems that I needed a drug that acts on more parts of the brain, so Zoloft is probably more helpful in my case.

Before trying anti-depressants, I had concerns that they might turn you into a zombie, or deprive you of your free will. But neither turned out to be the case; in fact, it's made me less zombie-like. It also seems to be a cognitive lubricant.

My doc said she thinks 'Celexa' is better for co-morbid anxiety with the depression than 'Lexapro.' But I know somebody who's on 'Lexapro' for the same problems as mine, whose doc thinks its the other way 'round. I understand that they're chemically so similar that a lot of cynics think that 'Lexapro' is just a way to extend 'Celexa's patent anyway.

Did you taper off or just stop taking it?