![]() Unfortunately, a few people will still experience side effects, even at this slow rate. This conservative approach causes the least harm to the greatest number of people. This 10% taper is a “harm reduction” approach to going off psychiatric drugs. This 10% rule holds for Celexa, as well as for other psychiatric drugs. Once your nervous system falls off that wall, there’s not much that can be done to put it together again.” (3)Ī good rule of thumb is to taper your dose by 10% per month. Thus, a wiser approach is to do a slow taper in the first place than to try to put your nervous system back together again after you have wrecked it by too fast a taper. The problem is, no one knows in advance how their nervous systems will respond to any speed of taper until they try it-and then it can be too late. When you do this, you (hopefully) can finally get off Citalopram without experiencing the negative side effects that faster tapers cause. You need to do a much slower taper that can take a year or more to complete. However, there are numbers of people like you that cannot follow this fast taper without problems such as you have been experiencing. Thus, they usually advise tapers that are much too fast. It seems that most doctors don’t appreciate the need for a greater margin of safety in reducing the risk of side effects by gradually reducing the dosage. However, a minority suffer severe symptoms for much longer. Doctors therefore expect everyone can do this. Many people seem to be able to taper off psychiatric medications in a couple of weeks or even cold-turkey with minor withdrawal symptoms perhaps for a month or so. To be sure, this taper speed works for numbers of people. Be prepared to stop the reduction or increase your dose again if needed.” (2) after 6-8 months treatment, taper off over 6-8 weeks. Unfortunately, their idea of slowly is this: “if treatment has lasted less than 8 weeks, stopping over 1-2 weeks should be OK. The Royal College of Psychiatrists recommends that you reduce slowly. That’s how common tinnitus is from taking Citalopram. I have received more anecdotal reports of side effects (mostly of tinnitus) from people taking Citalopram than for almost any other drug. And for many of them, their loud tinnitus never goes away. A good number of people get tinnitus soon after they start taking this drug. You are also fortunate that you only got tinnitus when you tried to get off the Citalopram. A slow taper would take you somewhere between a year and 4 years to complete. However, in actual fact, you did a very fast taper. This stems from the fact that you thought you were doing a slow taper over 3 weeks. These are all indications that you tapered off the Citalopram much too fast. (1)īesides your tinnitus, you are specifically experiencing three of the above-mentioned side effects, namely irritability, agitation and paresthesias (abnormal sensations typically tingling or pricking) such as the electric shock sensations you are experiencing that you describe as “brain zaps”. When you try to come off Citalopram too fast you open yourself up to all sorts of side effects including “irritability, agitation, dizziness, sensory disturbances (e.g., paresthesias such as electric shock sensations), anxiety, confusion, headache” among other things. The brain zaps are intermittent but constant. The tinnitus is mild and only really noticeable when sitting quietly. Also very irritable/angry for the first few days after stopping. Again, I gradually reduced the dose and now tinnitus and brain zaps are back. As soon as I started taking it again, the symptoms went.ĭue to other problems, my doctor has switched me to another SSRI. I also got extremely and undeservedly irritable when I came off, so I went back on slowly building the dose back up. I can only describe this as a pulse that races inside from the top of the head to the neck, maybe down one arm, maybe both or maybe down the spine as well. ![]() At the end I developed tinnitus and a strange “brain zap”. Having discussed with my doctor, I did this slowly over 3 weeks. Three months ago I thought I was ready to come off. I’ve never had tinnitus other than in my younger days for a few hours after going to a nightclub! I was on Citalopram for 2 years and had no noticeable side effects-no tinnitus.
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