[OT] Effexor

wrote:
wrote:

wrote:

Are you saying she was on Effexor and then stopped taking it, causing
her to go psychotic?

Or are you saying that's what the expert witness said, but that was a
lie - in which case, she was never on Effexor?

Effexor has also been a lifesaver for many, many people. Particularly
it is used as an antidepressant for the geriatric population. IMO I
don't believe it can be proven that Effexor caused Andrea Yates to kill
her children. Her doctor had prescribed *twice* the recommended dose
though.

I wasn't making a comment on Effexor either way - I was just trying to
figure out what Catnipped was trying to say. On one hand, she (CN) seemed
to be saying that Effexor must be potentially very dangerous, since that's
what caused Andrea Yates to have a psychotic break. On the other, she says
that the expert witness - presumably the person who "proved" that Effexor
caused Yates's breakdown - was lying. And if the expert was lying, then
Effexor wasn't to blame after all.

So I was just trying to figure out which it was.

Joyce

Oh, I understood your post Joyce; I'm sorry; I wasn't really replying
specifically to your post.
I just can't see how they can pinpoint Effexor as the specific,
beyond-a-reasonable-doubt cause of that tragedy. Could have been
Effexor, I suppose; but then again it could have been mental illness.
My frame of reference for the remark I made is a specific person I know
who absolutely came back to life after taking Effexor for 8 weeks. For
that person, it truly was a wonder drug. That was one instance I guess
where one person responded to the drug in exactly the way an
antidepressant is supposed to work.

Sherry

"Howard C. Berkowitz" wrote in message
...


Unfortunately, we don't really have good ways of knowing which
psychotropic
drug will work best in each patient.

Exactly. For example, some people swear by Wellbutrin, whereas it did
nothing for me.

I took Effexor for several months, starting during a period when I was on
disability leave. I felt OK until I went back to work, and realized that
the Effexor was making my thinking fuzzy. That wasn't acceptable, so I told
my doctor I needed to get off of it. He started me on a standard schedule
of tapering off, but found we had to slow the tapering way down. Every time
I reduced the dose, I started getting extremely dizzy. That would last a
week or two, at which point we'd reduce the dose again. I ended up on
partial disability for a month or two while this was going on. My doctor
had never seen that kind of problem before, but when he contacted the
manufacturer he found that they had seen it. They suggested adding Prozac
as we reduced the Effexor, so that one of the neurotransmitters would stay
fairly stable while the other readjusted, and that did the trick.

Sandy

Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:

The last choice among the pure antidepressants would
be the MAO inhibitors, not that they are ineffective but that they can have
lethal reactions with an amazingly wide range of drugs and foods. What's the
use of removing the depression if you can't have chocolate...and aged
cheese...and chiati....and smoked fish...

No kidding! That in itself would cause depression! On the other hand,
if the deprivation became too much and you decided to end it all, think
of the wonderful last meal you could have.

Effexor, AFAIK, is unique in that it is nonselective, raising both
serotonin and norepinephrine, but affects reuptake of both.
Originally, it was thought that serotonin was the deficiency in
depression, but that's no longer believed a reliable assumption.

The doctor who first prescribed Effexor for me said it was often his
first choice. Why would you consider it your last choice?

I take a tricyclic, nortriptyline, a benzodiazepine tranquilizer,
clonazepam, and sometimes an anticonvulsant, gabapentin.

Just curious - why do you prefer a tricyclic over an SSRI? (You don't
have to answer, but I wonder because most doctors these days prescribe
SSRIs unless someone can't tolerate them.

Other people can't take
tricyclics due to side effects such as dry mouth -- I get that with another
member of the class, amitriptyline.

I once tried desiprimine (sp?), and my pulse shot up to 140, while my
blood pressure went down. So much for that. From there, my doctor decided
I should try lithium. I am not bi-polar, but he didn't want to try another
tricyclic, thinking that my reaction to others in that class would be
even worse.

I was on the lithium for one year. It didn't help much at all with my
depression, frankly. All it did was add 80 lbs to my body weight (within
that one year), and cause all sorts of inflammations in my joints -
EVERYTHING hurt! Not just my weight-bearing joints, but also my elbows,
neck and shoulders, joints in my hands, etc. It was traumatic! I could
barely do anything without pain, and I thought I was going to be disabled
for life. Eventually my body righted itself, about a year after I went
off that stuff, and I'm no longer in that kind of pain.

Joyce

Sandy wrote:

I took Effexor for several months, starting during a period when I
was on disability leave. I felt OK until I went back to work, and
realized that the Effexor was making my thinking fuzzy.

I don't have fuzzy thinking (at least, I don't find it fuzzy ), but
my memory is worthless, and I suspect the medication, because I used to
have an excellent memory.

Once you got off the Effexor, did you then go off the Prozac? And has
your thinking improved? That's what I really want to know.

Joyce

wrote:

My frame of reference for the remark I made is a specific person I know
who absolutely came back to life after taking Effexor for 8 weeks. For
that person, it truly was a wonder drug. That was one instance I guess
where one person responded to the drug in exactly the way an
antidepressant is supposed to work.

That's great to hear. You hear a lot of negative stuff about these drugs,
but the truth is, a lot of people are helped, perhaps their lives are even
saved, because of them.

I still worry about whether Effexor is deteriorating my memory, though.

Joyce

wrote in message
...
Sandy wrote:

I took Effexor for several months, starting during a period when I
was on disability leave. I felt OK until I went back to work, and
realized that the Effexor was making my thinking fuzzy.

I don't have fuzzy thinking (at least, I don't find it fuzzy ), but
my memory is worthless, and I suspect the medication, because I used to
have an excellent memory.

Once you got off the Effexor, did you then go off the Prozac? And has
your thinking improved? That's what I really want to know.

Joyce

I stayed on the Prozac, because it seemed to be controlling my depression
after I got off the Effexor. My thinking did improve. The reason I even
tried the Effexor was that I'd been on Prozac before and it had seemed to
stop working, even after increasing the dose to the maximum my doctor wanted
to do (80 mg/day). I'm still on Prozac today, about 10 years later, on a
dose of 60 mg/day.

Sandy

wrote in message
oups.com...

wrote:
CatNipped penned:

Do you guys remember the Andr?a Yates case (she drowned her five
children) here in Houston? She is being retried because and expert
witness lied on the stand the first time. A big part of her defense
is post-partum depression and discontinuing the medication she was
on for depression. Anyone want to take a guess what medication she
was on and had stopped taking??? You got it in one - Effexor. That
stuff is literally deadly!

Are you saying she was on Effexor and then stopped taking it, causing
her to go psychotic?

Or are you saying that's what the expert witness said, but that was a
lie - in which case, she was never on Effexor?

You're concluding from this that Effexor can be deadly. But if it was
all a lie, how could it cause her to commit murder? A drug can only be
deadly if you take it, after all. (Or in this case, withdraw from it,
which you also can't do unless you took it first.)

Anyway, I thought someone couldn't be retried for the same crime. On
what legal ground are they able to do it in this case?

Joyce

Effexor has also been a lifesaver for many, many people. Particularly
it is used as an antidepressant for the geriatric population. IMO I
don't believe it can be proven that Effexor caused Andrea Yates to kill
her children. Her doctor had prescribed *twice* the recommended dose
though. That mug shot of her just haunts me. Her eyes have the look of
a tortured soul.

Sherry

Oh I freely admit I an *VERY* prejudiced when it comes to Effexor - it
almost killed me. I went for three weeks puking my guts up (along with
"electric shocks", cold sweats, insomnia, hallucinations, and inability to
eat or drink more than a sip at a time - and then threw it up). At the end
of the three weeks I ended up in the emergency room and they had to get 3
different nurses to try to stick me 27 times before they called in an EMT to
put an IV directly into my wrist vein - that's how dehydrated I was.

My opinion is that if even *ONE* person (me) has that kind of withdrawal
effects from Effexor, then the drug company has to stop "pushing" it for
every condition from depression to fibromyalgia (the reason it was
prescribed to me).

--

Hugs,

CatNipped

See all my masters at: http://www.PossiblePlaces.com/CatNipped/

"Monique Y. Mudama" wrote in message
...
On 2006-07-11, CatNipped penned:

No, no. The name of the drug, Effexor, is just coming out now (the
original defense was the depression and psychosis she went into when
she stopped taking the medication, but in this second trial the name
of the medication, Effexor, came out). She is being retried because
a witness, during the first trial, said that she wasn't psychotic
that she got the idea for the crime from an episode of Law and Order
- which was untrue, there was never such an episode. This doesn't
involve double-jeopardy because the first verdict was thrown out
rather than she served her time or was acquitted.

I'm saying that, if you go online (which I did) and read the stories
of people having bazaar withdrawal symptoms after stopping the
Effexor, you will see just how devastating those side effects can be
(black-outs, electric shock-like tingling all over the body, deep,
deep depression, hallucinations, psychosis, insomnia, etc.). [There
is a class-action law suit against the drug company.] What I'm
saying is that, given she had 5 children *VERY* close together, she
was known to have suffered from severe post-partum depression, her
husband was an absent father who insisted she keep churning out baby
after baby because of his religious beliefs and that she home school
them so that she got *NO* break from caring for them(!!!!), and
having experienced myself the withdrawal symptoms of Effexor, I can
somewhat sympathize with what she was going through (but not what
she did).

Um, I saw exactly this plot on Law and Order. I think it was Criminal
Intent, might have been SVU. I don't know if it came out before or
after that trial, though.

I don't know if it came after the trial, but it did come after the murders
(those "ripped from the headlines" plots that L&O always boast of, I guess).
They did an extensive search of television libraries and they didn't find
*any* show that had *any* even similar plot before the murders.

Andrea was just really, really messed up. She had been hospitalized for
post-partum depression for the last two children before the youngest. Her
husband's "religious beliefs" kept her churning them out, however, and then
he forced her to home school them (and I believe he was instrumental in
getting her to stop taking the drugs and "let God handle" her depression).
He is currently remarried.

--

Hugs,

CatNipped

See all my masters at: http://www.PossiblePlaces.com/CatNipped/



--
monique, who spoils Oscar unmercifully

pictures: http://www.bounceswoosh.org/rpca

CatNipped wrote:

Oh I freely admit I an *VERY* prejudiced when it comes to Effexor - it
almost killed me. I went for three weeks puking my guts up (along with
"electric shocks", cold sweats, insomnia, hallucinations, and inability to
eat or drink more than a sip at a time - and then threw it up). At the end
of the three weeks I ended up in the emergency room and they had to get 3
different nurses to try to stick me 27 times before they called in an EMT to
put an IV directly into my wrist vein - that's how dehydrated I was.

My opinion is that if even *ONE* person (me) has that kind of withdrawal
effects from Effexor, then the drug company has to stop "pushing" it for
every condition from depression to fibromyalgia (the reason it was
prescribed to me).

Hugs,

CatNipped

That is horrible. How long did you take it? Did your dr. put you on a
tapering program to get off of it?
Drug companies *and* doctors push too many drugs at us, I think. I
remember when Bextra was the wonder drug for arthritis. Nobody knew it
was killing people. Or hormone replacement therapy. I actually had a
doctor tell me once that Premarin was "more like a vitamin than a
drug."
I still think the Andrea Yates story is heartbreaking. She must be a
woman living in her own personal Hell on earth right now. From what you
have posted, it sounds like her husband was just as indirectly
responsible as anything.

Sherry

wrote in message
ps.com...

CatNipped wrote:

Oh I freely admit I an *VERY* prejudiced when it comes to Effexor - it
almost killed me. I went for three weeks puking my guts up (along with
"electric shocks", cold sweats, insomnia, hallucinations, and inability
to
eat or drink more than a sip at a time - and then threw it up). At the
end
of the three weeks I ended up in the emergency room and they had to get 3
different nurses to try to stick me 27 times before they called in an EMT
to
put an IV directly into my wrist vein - that's how dehydrated I was.

My opinion is that if even *ONE* person (me) has that kind of withdrawal
effects from Effexor, then the drug company has to stop "pushing" it for
every condition from depression to fibromyalgia (the reason it was
prescribed to me).

Hugs,

CatNipped

That is horrible. How long did you take it? Did your dr. put you on a
tapering program to get off of it?

I was on it for 2 years and my doctor refused to discuss taking me off of
it - even though I was *NOT* depressed and I *TOLD* him that I was losing my
job (all our income at the time) and losing my insurance so I *SURELY*
couldn't afford almost $2000 in medicines a month. So after cutting back in
a "step" program on my own, with no good results, there came a time that I
*had* to quit cold turkey.

As a result of that experience I will *NEVER* again take any drug that
changes my brain chemistry - I would prefer the risk of suicide to what I
went through with that drug (again, I admit I am very angry with the drug
company about that experience). I have cut my medications down to Ambien,
for sleep, and Armour thyroid for my underactive thyroid. I live in
constant, horrible pain from the fibromyalgia, degenerative disk disease and
osteoarthritis, but I refuse to take any medications for it - even OTCs
other than the occasional Bayer - I'd rather not deal with side effects and
withdrawals.

Drug companies *and* doctors push too many drugs at us, I think. I
remember when Bextra was the wonder drug for arthritis. Nobody knew it
was killing people. Or hormone replacement therapy. I actually had a
doctor tell me once that Premarin was "more like a vitamin than a
drug."

I think too many doctors buy into the drug company salesmen's spiels - and
too many take "gifts" from the drug companies for prescribing certain
medications to their patients.

I still think the Andrea Yates story is heartbreaking. She must be a
woman living in her own personal Hell on earth right now. From what you
have posted, it sounds like her husband was just as indirectly
responsible as anything.

I really think he should have been charged as an accessory before the fact!

--

Hugs,

CatNipped

See all my masters at: http://www.PossiblePlaces.com/CatNipped/




Sherry