I'm currently taking 2 x Lyrica 225 mg a day for anxiety. Sometimes I feel particularly anxious - would it do any good to take e.g. 900 mg at once in these kind of situations?
Hey Survival, I was prescribed 600mg Lyrica per day for ~5 years (either 2 x 300 or 3 x 200mg) for a treatment-resistant somatic anxiety disorder. This was in addition to either 30mg diazepam or 2mg clonazepam per day. High dose Lyrica worked well for my anxiety....for about 2 months, and the subsequent years I took 600mg simply to prevent withdrawal.
I highly suggest not to raise your dose to 900mg even occasionally. In my experience doing so might blunt the anxiety once or twice but your tolerance will adjust absurdly quickly and you will only be in a worse state in between doses.
If you are only taking this medication for anxiety (as I was) and not for pain, I'd suggest starting to discuss a plan with your doctor to slowly wean off of it. I regrettably have experience with many types of withdrawal, and as unbelievable as this may sound, I found acute Lyrica withdrawal to be more debilitating than acute benzodiazepine withdrawal.
Don't get me wrong: I would rather have to withdraw from Lyrica 10 more times than to repeat the 2 years it took me to fully heal from benzodiazepine withdrawal.
In my experience the acute withdrawal from 7 years of daily prescribed benzos were a very long, drawn out, cyclical slog. It was 6 months before I felt capable again, another 12 months before I felt mostly back to "normal", and finally 6 more months before I could reliably get a full night's sleep without a handful of clonidine/hydroxyzine. It was a period of hardship to say the least, but it was mostly a mental fight and was rarely completely overwhelming at any one moment.
In comparison, Lyrica withdrawal 'only' took a couple months of a steady taper to free myself and did not have the persistent, nearly unending residual post-acute symptoms that benzos did. Once I had lowered my dose to between 50-75mg/day I was able to jump off with relative ease and never look back. HOWEVER, when I was still on 600mg, if I had to go anymore than 24 hours MAX between doses I was thrown under an unholy freight train of acute W/D that I can only describe as a combination of high dose opiate+benzo withdrawal with additional effects unique only to Lyrica. I could set a clock by it, and it was fucking bad. Not only would I get the restlessness/anxiety/severe depression/nausea/sensory overload of opiates & benzo wd, but also pronounced dissociation of watching these things in 3rd person like watching a car wreck in slow motion while my limbs would literally swell up with fluid and I could barely walk. I do not have any medical conditions that would otherwise put me at risk of dissociation or fluid retention. These only ever happened when stopping high dose Lyrica.
These symptoms were so debilitating that during a brief insurance gap, I actually voluntarily paid for my month supply of Lyrica out of pocket on 2 or 3 occasions. That's over $700 for a 30 day supply. And believe me when I say that I couldn't get to the pharmacy fast enough. My saint of a neighbor drove me the 1/2 mile too, because there's no way I could have physically drove or walked myself. I would not even consider such an act of desperation during a bad morphine withdrawal.
And all of this was when I still had valium. It didn't help.
My point is not to scare you, only to plead with you not to put yourself in a situation where you might run out of a high dose daily Lyrica prescription. Even most doctors that prescribe Lyrica do not realize that it has severe withdrawal symptoms. Most of their patients who do take pregabalin are taking under 300mg per day. I do not know if it is this bad for everyone, but it humbled me and made me realize that I needed to finally get off of it. It was a bad choice as a long-term anxiety medication.
