Greetings: As i read your message i questioned if the meds made you feel brain-mushy or if that feeling was due to the intense panic and horrible experience you had. I have only been on one med-trazavir(spelling?) that made me zone out. I took it only for a few weeks and then i got off of it. I am currently on quite a few psych meds, a very high dose of effexor (300 mg), lexipro(20mg) and gabitril (24mg). Try to keep in mind that the pharmocological treatment of panic is really more of an art form and less of a science. We are all differnt, both in terms of our brain and body chemistries as well as the underlying issues. I wish you the best of luck and remember, you are not alone. With love and admiration of your strength.

Thanks Mel, that€™s exactly what I need, to feel energized. Right now I just feel DRAINED! For me it€™s worse in the morning. Sometimes I wake up already in a sweat, already panicking, at others I open my eyes fine, then a second later my heart jerks, begins to pound and I€™m swamped with fear and depression. I find it hard getting out of bed €“ stupid, because I know when I do the symptoms will ease. It€™s still hard though. Crazy, huh? I€™d much prefer to get through this without meds but things are getting desperate. If I do, knowing what others go through in the first weeks, and what symptoms I might expect, is a real help. I€™ve been looking back through some old posts and am realising just how much different meds affect different people, so I guess there€™s no easy answer €“ and that€™s what I find so scary, the fact that it€™s so hit and miss. I can€™t face being mushy-headed again. Depression/phobias/panic are hell, but at least now I feel alive. Before I was like the walking dead! Anyway, thanks for replying, Henna

Hi HennaUK, I too was very afraid of meds. I think most of us here are, due our sensitivity to our body's reactions to things. I eventually started taking paxil at a low dose 10mg's. It made me worse the first 2 weeks but after that I realized I wasn't having nearly as many panic attacks and i generally felt more energized. That gave me the confidence to do more things which I believe helped me get better. I believe the meds (if they work right) give you the confidence it takes and so they are not the only solution but definitly a help along with your perseverance. Now dont get me wrong, I still have my bad days, and if I push myself too much, I pay for it. I still have the random panic episode, but mostly at night when I wake up in them. But over all they have decreased significanlty duing the day (and evening which was the worst for me) and I don't feel as tired, or scared. I do have some side effects like light tremors (shaking)sometimes, but I had that from the anxiety so it could be the meds or the anxiety? and I have weird feelings of tingling and electricity (like adrenaline) running through my body when I wake up in the morning, but when I get up and move around it goes away. I take the pill at night because initailly it made me drowsy, but now that I have gone up to 20mg's it doesn't seem to. Also have had some sexual side effects, but those are common with SSRI's and they actually seem to be getting better (with practice and if you have an understanding partner). Hope any of this helped.

HI everyone, Just wondered if any of you know of any meds for depression/anxiety that don€™t turn your brain to mush during the day? I work from home (avoidant) and what I do involves brainwork so I need a clear head. Except right now I€™m hardly doing anything, too depressed, anxious, permanently exhausted, can€™t concentrate - and I need to work cus money€™s a real issue. I€™m asking because I€™ve had a bad experience with meds in the past. A few years back things got really bad and I tried to end it, but got found and ended up in hospital. They said I€™d had a nervous breakdown and put me on Effexor plus a mood stabiliser €“ don€™t ask what doses, I don€™t remember. I don€™t remember much about the whole following year. I slept for most of it, zonked out of my head, so I guess the dose was a high one. In total, I took the stuff for about four years and I€™ve huge memory gaps for all that time. My husband tells me about things we did, films we saw on tv etc, and I€™ve no recollection which is really scary. Truth is I was a total zombie, couldn€™t work, couldn€™t do anything really, just kept dragging myself around the house, putting on more and more weight (about 40lbs). None of which was due to the meds, they assured me. Yeah, right! I kept trying to reduce the dose, the doctors kept trying to up it, but eventually, against their advice, I got it together enough to cut down. Slowly I reduced it more and more, always against their wishes, cut out the mood stabiliser (which helped, I suspect that was the main culprit) and continued for a while on Effexor. By now it was a tiny dose, too small they said to be having any effect, and finally I stopped that too. I immediately went hyper. I was rushing around the house, gabbling non-stop, working, working, working and unable to sleep. I continued like that for about ten days, then dropped and slept about 24 hours. I think I did more work in those ten days than in the previous four years! Now when I look back it seems like four wasted years, especially as the meds helped neither my depression nor my phobias/anxiety. If anything they made them worse. Not achieving anything FED the depression (as I kept telling the docs but they wouldn€™t listen), and not being able to drive fed the phobias. Where I live,