The withdrawal is very important.
Bluebird Singing wrote yesterday:
A friend of ours went berserk going cold turkey off Effexor. You just can’t do that with chemicals. Threatened to kill his wife (he had a concealed weapon permit and a gun) so she ran out of the house and called police from a neighbors house. He had a standoff with the police from the afternoon and thru the night, firing shots out the windows. He ended up killing himself. This was soooo out of character.
________________________________________________
We had a family member commit suicide and were all just shocked until we found an empty bottle of effexor that she just stopped taking. After studying the effects of the withdrawals we had a better understanding of what happened.
If this killer had suddenly stopped taking his Prozac, his thoughts would be worse than when he was on them.
Have followed.. http://%20www@dr-bob.org/babble/wdrawl/
and found a lot of answers there on how people feel on these withdrawals and it is very scary.
That's not necessarily so. In that case, it would be those folks who metabolize Prozac, aka fluoxetine, more quickly, as opposed to the slow metabolizers, who would seem to be the ones most likely to suffer serotonin withdrawal syndrome. Of all the SSRIs, Prozac has the longest half life. Published fluoxetine withdrawal reports are scarce, possibly due to the long half-life of fluoxetine and the active metabolite norfluoxetine.
Fluoxetine is the SSRI of choice to wean a patient off of SSRI treatment with a gradual tapering of the dose. It's the only SSRI that's formulated as a liquid so it permits a prolonged tapering. A tapering regimen is not provided in manufacturers' package inserts. The optimum tapering regimen for each agent has yet to be determined by comparative clinical trials. From a review of the case reports, we suggest the tapering schedules presented in Table 2..
IIRC, serotonin withdrawal syndrome is also known as serotonin discontinuation syndrome and SSRI discontinuation syndrome. These drugs aren't necessarily bad, but docs need to become much more aware of their pharmacology. There was a recent story in the NY Times that said 85 % of docs didn't know about serotonin syndrome. I wonder how many are aware of the serotonin withdrawal syndrome.