• The Dark Side 💕 Welcome Guest 💕
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
    Notable Threads Urgent Hotlines
    Bereavement Mindfulness
    Suicide Support Anger Management
  • TDS Moderators: AlphaMethylPhenyl | Eligiu | deficiT

Mental Health Quitting citalopram

bipolair

bipolair

Bluelighter
Joined
Jun 12, 2003
Messages
645
I want to quit citalopram/celexa. I've been on it for 3 months. My dose was 20mg before bedtime, which is considered a low dose, the lowest therapeutic dose in fact.

How should I build off? I was thinking about taking 15mg for 5 days, 10mg for 5days, 5mg for 5 days and then quit.

Should I do it slower? Any ideas?
 
Last edited:
yeah, that sounds good ,but you might want to space it out a little longer.

i've been tapering down of lezapro myself and i just switched from 5mg to 2.5mg. I've got s more weeks of 2.5mg tabs and then i'm going off. good luck, withdrawl should be minimal to non existentif you taper slow enough.
 
I personally quit celexa with no problems at all. I do believe i had the shocks for a couple of days though. Depends what your on it for?
I had barely no depression, and i knew it wasnt from the meds, so i just stopped taking them.
 
Talk to your doctor about it? That's my first suggestion.
The second one, is do it as slowly as you can be fucked. If you cant split the pills some more, so you you don't drop from 10 to 5mg...
And the third suggestion, is go as slow as you feel you need to, i.e. if when you go from 20 to 15, you feel shitey... try 17mg if you can split the pills that fine.
 
My doctor first just said to quit them :S.
Then I asked if I shouldn't build them off, then he said; uhh yea sounds like a good idea, go with 10mg for a week and then just quit.

But personally I think I should do it slower.

I am now just trying 15 and doing fine.
 
I was on Celexa for 2 months (20mg) and I just quit without tapering... I didn't notice any negative effects, but I could have just been lucky or maybe 2 months isn't long enough.
 
Hmm oke, well probably I wouldn't notice any harmful effects either, but oh well, tapering (that's the word I was looking for!) won't do any harm
 
dude ive been off celexa for maybe a week now, and i fucking cry i never used to it freaks me out. i didn't taper i feel suicidal. prolly not the best choice if your thinking about quitting dont quit all at once like i did. ive been on different ssri's for years for i quit celexa cold turkey and i shouldnt have
 
a friend of mine is on citalopram and has no insurance so sometimes he doesn't have enough money to get his pills so he goes "cold turkey" and sais the W/D are really not that bad, its unpleasant for a few days, but bareable...
 
bipolair said:
My doctor first just said to quit them :S.
Then I asked if I shouldn't build them off, then he said; uhh yea sounds like a good idea, go with 10mg for a week and then just quit.

But personally I think I should do it slower.

I am now just trying 15 and doing fine.
Click to expand...

your doctor sounds like he has little knowledge on the subject. taper slowly to avoid brain zapps. a friend of mine used to come off citalopram at 40mg when she ran out and hadn't organised a doctor trip in time and it made her dizzy and faint like she was coming up on an e but in a bad way and also made her angry and aggressive in the extreme. come off slowly to avoid all the symptoms of low serotonin; aggression/impulsiveness/mood swings/ocd type feelings of needing to be extremely clean/anxiety/paranoia/phobia style feelings about random events/etc...

good luck with your taper, ive done this one myself and it is doable but still you need to watch out that its not affecting you too negatively
 
Space it out. Celexa isn't immediate release, and actually has to build up in your system. As such, you'll have it easier if you draw out your taper a little bit to help your body slowly get it out. Prepare for depression and general shitty-feeling-ness. Benzos can help as can tramadol (which has SNRI effects), but just make sure you don't trade one crutch* for another.

*: I don't mean anything offensive by this. I'm on Celexa myself.
 
Space it out. Celexa isn't immediate release, and actually has to build up in your system. As such, you'll have it easier if you draw out your taper a little bit to help your body slowly get it out. Prepare for depression and general shitty-feeling-ness. Benzos can help as can tramadol (which has SNRI effects), but just make sure you don't trade one crutch* for another.

*: I don't mean anything offensive by this. I'm on Celexa myself.
 
on the subject of not being instant release it is more slouble in fat than water which means when you stop a lot will be swiming in your fatty brain. i also think this accounts for the rush it produces when alcohol is introduced as alcohol and fats are soluble in one another(thc vodka). if that last statement is not always true lt me know as it would help me develop my own personal ideas on fats and alcohol in relation to the brain.
 
Thank you all for commenting on this subject! I've been weening off for about a month now, but I've been on it for years. Recently I wanted to become pregnant, so I'm coming off all of my med.'s, it's so horrible. Last night i almost hit my boyfriend more than once and threatened suicide all night. Can't sleep, hardly eating, neurotransmitters misfiring, gaps in consciousness, ect. Hopefully weening is better than cold turkey because I ended up in the looney bin for a few days.

Much luv,
~librash420~
 
I was on the same exact dose also for 3 months, and felt absolutely nothing when I quit it cold turkey. You will be fine, that is a small dose and a short period of time.
 
On this, I tried to stop and got damn near suicidal. I'm on 10mg a day, which is technically a SUPER low dose, but when I tried to up it I ended up passing out in a parking lot, and 10mg keeps me relatively sane especially when paired with as-needed-which-is-sorta-often alprazolam.
 
Celexa has a fairly short half-life and so the only good way to do it is to taper slowly. Some people get pretty bad discontinuation syndromes from SSRIs. I've never experienced the "shocks" that a lot of people mention, but when I abruptly quit 15 mg Celexa, my depression immediately came back worse than it ever had and I felt mentally foggy and out of it.

Another time coming off of it, I tapered down to like 2.5 mg over a couple weeks and had no problems whatsoever, and felt good. Another thing you can do is ask your doctor to switch to you to Prozac. It has a very long half life, so there's no abrupt drop in serotonin when you stop taking it. I'd really suggest doing one of these--getting off SSRIs can either be very uncomfortable or painless, it just depends on how you do it.

Bottom line just don't rush it...as Bliz0r said, go as slow as you need to. You're body/brain will let you know if you're tapering too fast.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top