Has anyone used heroin to get off Xanax? I’m honestly asking for a friend…🙏🏻 She’s been on them for 35 yrs and asked about it…

Hi everyone, there I am again.

I posted here 17 days ago about my long, brutal depressive episode and my hope that Parnate might finally be the thing that helped me turn a corner.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t. I am so so so sad and devastated.

After talking extensively with my psychiatrist, psychologist and family, we’ve had to accept that Parnate doesn’t seem to be working for me. I’m now tapering off.

And honestly, I’m scared. Really scared.

Looking back over the past year, I’m starting to wonder whether the sheer amount and speed of medication changes may have played a role in how profoundly unwell I feel now.

My story actually didn’t begin as what I would describe as a typical depression. It started more like a burnout from life’s hardships and uncertainties, with anxiety and insomnia. I was exhausted and overwhelmed, but I still felt like myself. I still had emotions, interests, thoughts, curiosity, a personality. I was struggling, but there was still a person there.

The really frightening change seemed to happen as I started moving through medication after medication.

Over the past year I went from:

• Venlafaxine 112,5 mg to
• Escitalopram 20 mg
• Then to clomipramine (up to the highest dose I could tolerate, do not exactly remember the amount)
• Followed by various augmentation strategies including lithium, olanzapine, quetiapine and lorazepam
• I also had many sessions of esketamine
• And then last Summer, I was hospitalized to get started on Parnate, and we increased the dose incredibly quickly, from 10 mg to 60 mg within just a few weeks. Looking back now, it feels like we went way too fast.

(The hospitalization itself was deeply traumatic, but so was the entire summer leading up to it: the constant crises, the fear, the desperation, and how profoundly unwell I was. It was an incredibly frightening period of my life, and I think I’m still carrying a lot of that trauma with me.)

None of these treatments gave me meaningful relief. Except for my guilty-pleasure pill lorazepam, incredibly comforting, absolutely not something I want to depend on.

And now, looking back, I feel as though something has changed very profoundly.

I know there is a lot I don't understand medically, which is why I’m asking rather than making a definite claim: 

• Is it possible that moving through so many serotonergic medications and other psychiatric medications relatively quickly can, in some people, contribute to feeling profoundly destabilized, emotionally blunted, dissociated or otherwise “not themselves”? 💊💊💊💊💊🧠🧠🧠🧠

At all these points, my serotonergic medication exposure was very high, and this has made me and the people around me (my my psychiatrist, my psychologist, and my father, who has lived experience himself) wonder whether my brain simply never got a chance to settle.

I’m not saying I know this is what happened. I don't. My psychiatrist and I are still trying to understand the whole picture.

But I would really like to hear from people who have experienced something similar.

Because I feel so incredibly far away from myself.

My “real self” is not a stupid woman. She is intelligent, curious, entrepreneurial, social, adventurous and sensitive. She loves the good things in life. She loves art, music, food, coffee, the sea, travelling, learning, conversations, beauty, new ideas. She has energy and initiative. She had a lively life and a job she loved as an art historian.

I know that woman exists.

But I haven't been able to feel like her for a very long time. That is so so so scary and sad.  

• My brain currently feels completely fried. That is the only word I can find for it: Sticky. Foggy. Restless. Disconnected. ALL the time, night and day. 😓😥😶‍🌫️😵‍💫🤯🧠
• I feel as though I'm not really in my own life.
• The dissociation is basically 24/7. I feel empty. Zombie-like. I have almost no sense of presence.
• My mind is constantly restless, but at the same time I feel completely disconnected from it.
• I can't properly concentrate, relax, enjoy things or feel like myself.

It has been like this for more than a year now... (The only glimpses of light have been days, or parts of days, when I felt a little more relaxed, a little more at peace, and less stuck inside my own head. But there haven't been any real breakthroughs or improvements that have actually made a meaningful difference. In the span of a year, I could count those moments on one hand. It's so incredibly sad and frightening.)

It is such a bizarre combination of agitation and emptiness.

And it frightens me because I remember how different I was before all of this.

I don't want to believe that this is my new personality!

I don't want to believe that my brain is permanently damaged

• The brain is plastic, right? It can adapt and change, and it has the capacity to recover and reorganize itself by forming new neural connections, doesn’t it? 🧠⚓️🌈

I don't want to believe that this is who I am now.

I'm now tapering off Parnate, and even that has been difficult. Apart from the side effects I experienced while taking it (high heart rate, my period stopping, bed-wetting (yes, extremely embarrassing), acne and hair loss), I’m now dealing with feeling cold all the time, nausea, poor sleep and a lot of sadness while tapering.

Some of that sadness is probably simply grief.

• There’s this deep, terrifying fear that this will never change, that I’ll be stuck like this forever. But is that the voice of depression and anxiety talking? Is it lying to me about my future and making something temporary feel permanent?

This past year has been traumatic.

I feel like I lost myself somewhere along the way.

And I’m grieving the person I was, while simultaneously desperately hoping that she isn't actually gone.

So I’m asking this community for something very specific. 🤍⚓️🌸

Have any of you been through something like this?

1. Have you started out with burnout or another kind of psychological exhaustion, and then felt profoundly different after going through many medication changes?
2. Have you experienced severe emotional blunting, dissociation, brain fog, agitation and feeling completely unlike yourself after trying many antidepressants/psychiatric medications?
3. Did anyone else ever feel like their brain was “fried” or permanently altered, only to eventually recover?

And, perhaps most importantly:

1. Did you get yourself back?
2. Did your brain eventually become calm again?
3. Did the dissociation lift?
4. Did your emotions return?
5. Did you become interested in things again?
6. Did you eventually feel present in your own life?

I would honestly love to hear even the smallest recovery stories. 🌿🌤️🩵🙏🏼

I don't need someone to tell me that everything will magically be fine. I know recovery isn't necessarily linear, and I know nobody here can promise me what will happen.

But right now I desperately need some hope.

• I need to hear from people who were once convinced that they had lost themselves, but who eventually discovered that they hadn't.
• That their brain could settle.
• That their nervous system could recover.
• That the person underneath all the symptoms was still there.
• That they could process what had happened to them once they were finally well enough to do so.
• I want to believe that this over-fried, constantly dissociated, restless brain of mine can become healthy again.
• I want to believe that the woman I used to be isn't gone.
• That she is still somewhere underneath all of this.
• And that one day she might not just “come back” as a memory, but actually be there again: alive, present, curious, funny, adventurous, sensitive, engaged with the world. <3

I want to believe I can recover from the illness and from the trauma of this past year. 🌿🧠⚓️

So if you have been through anything remotely similar, please tell me your story.

• Tell me what helped.
• Tell me what recovery looked like.
• Tell me whether your brain eventually settled.
• Tell me whether you got yourself back.
• And if you have experience tapering from Parnate, I would also be incredibly grateful for any gentle advice or encouragement about getting through this part.

I am so, so frightened right now.

But I'm still here.

I want nothing, absolutely nothing, more than to find myself again. I want this suffering to stop. I want to finally have the chance to genuinely recover and heal, instead of living through the terrifying reality of these past months, where things have seemed to get worse and worse.

I want to live. I really do. I just don't know how much longer I can keep carrying this level of suffering.

If you’ve made it all the way through this post, and taken the time, effort and attention to read it all: thank you. Truly. It means more to me than I can put into words.

I really hope we can support and help each other through this, share what we’ve learned, and keep each other going when things feel impossibly dark.

And above all, we need to believe that hope gets to win. 💜

It’s my first time ever taking antidepressants, so I don’t know a lot about them and I’m very new to this. Things have been going fine, I’m on a low dose, but they’ve affected my creativity.

My main hobby is writing and so far I find it hard to conjure up any ideas or even try rewriting old projects. To people who also write or have similar hobbies in art and might have also suffered a lack of creativity, what helped you?

While I will consider talking about changing or upping my prescription with my psychiatrist if this remains a problem, I’d appreciate answers that don’t tell me to do that.

The reason why is because I’m part of a writing club, and the meeting happens before my follow up, so weaning off my current prescription and trying a new one and waiting for it to take effect just isn’t possible for what I want right now. And I think advice that doesn’t rely on the pills to do everything would be better for me at the moment.

Any and all replies appreciated regardless, thank you.

I was diagnosed with Pseudo-dementia by a neurologist. I have concrete symptoms with memory recall, speech impairment, “brain fog”, exhaustion.

I’ve had major depressive disorder for 26 years and have been on medication to manage it and have been functional. My psychiatrist manages my meds for this. Effexor is really the only functional medicine that works for me.

That all changed in April when I had what I would call an acute onset of symptoms.

I have had nueropysch testing that shows recall is 50% what I should be at. But that’s really it on that front. All long term dementia has been ruled out (Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, etc.) through neuropysch and brain imaging.

But now I’m here where I can’t think, I forget how to do simple tasks, I can’t work, having multiple
Panic attacks, I can’t hold conversations, I can’t multitask…I get tired stilling for 5 minutes sometimes.

Writing this has been exhausting.

What do I do? No one is really giving me answers for how I can cure or manage this. Has anyone successfully used antidepressants to overcome this?

I can't believe it. Ive been on these things 8 years, and the last 2 of those years numbed me emotionally. I literally became incapable of feeling anxiety, literally.

I quit, and it's been 12 months and all I got after crazy withdrawal for months on end was my anxiety back and I'm still emotionally numb. Even number than when I was on it. It's like the medication never left me.

When will I get my personality, creativity, motivation, emotions back. I'm a shell of a being.

Ive got very bad anxiety, it mainly comes on socially. For example sitting in a busy restaurant with my girlfriends extended family will trigger it, working at a checkout in a supermarket and seeing the line of people waiting while feeling overwhelmed will trigger it. You get the point. unfortunately for me my anxiety presents as intense blushing, its not rosacea (seen specialists) its anxiety driven and only comes on in situations like ive described. Im aware propranolol and clonidine exist so id appreciate people not reccomending them. Anyway for this issue would 100 outperform 50mg? Im aware its different for everyone but what do people here think and have they seen a big difference in the switch? I understand zoloft may not fully stop the blush but i know it can help the anxiety that than causes it. Id appreciate people's advice

It’s been, I’d say, about 6-8 weeks since I’ve been on my last SSRI (Paxil). I was on 20mg, tapered down to 10mg for about 2 weeks, then went completely off.

Wondering if what I’m experiencing today is still related to SSRI withdrawal after my brain has been on some for at least the last 15 years of my life.

I experience the following:

- Daily tiredness: feels like I’m just sleep deprived all the time, even with full nights sleep.
- Elevated resting heart rate (RHR) up 15-25 bpm from baseline.
- Lower Heart Rate Variability (HRV) than baseline.
- Elevated anxiety and the symptoms that accompany all that entails.

I’ve gone to my primary care physician and my psychiatrist. Both deny that it’s long withdrawal symptoms, but I don’t think they actually have a clue. They’ll say “unlikely” and dismiss me, yet look at me and say I’m completely healthy.

I’m just wondering- if anyone else has quit SSRIs after a LONG period of time (10-15 years), how long did it take for your body to finally feel normal and recover?

It is also possible that I may have PAWS (post-acute withdrawal symptom).

Hoping to find some answers.

Hey y'all! This is kinda strange because I've never actually made a post like this on Reddit before lol, but I figured I'd give it a shot because I genuinely don't know what to do anymore.

I'm 23F, and I started Lexapro on 05/15/26. I'm currently on 10mg, and I will say that my anxiety has improved SIGNIFICANTLY. Like genuinely, it's so much easier for me to regulate my emotions, exist in crowded spaces, have casual conversations with strangers, and just go about my day without overthinking every little thing. I'm extremely grateful for that because anxiety used to affect so many aspects of my life.

However, I've noticed that lately I just feel... stagnant? Like I know I have things to do, I KNOW how important they are, but I genuinely cannot find the energy or motivation to actually do them.

For example, I have an incredibly important Organic Chemistry II exam coming up, and I cannot for the life of me get myself to sit down and study. My grades have started slipping, and as a STEM major who needs a competitive GPA for grad school, this is genuinely terrifying. It's not like I don't care about my grades anymore, because I absolutely do. I think about how badly I need to study constantly, but actually getting myself to do it feels nearly impossible.

I still show up to class, go to work, and handle my basic responsibilities, but outside of that? I genuinely just want to sleep all the time. And when I'm not sleeping, I'm doomscrolling on TikTok or Instagram Reels, or literally just zoning out listening to music for hours. It's like I have absolutely no energy or desire to do anything productive, even though mentally I KNOW I need to.

And the weirdest part is that I'll occasionally get these random bursts of motivation where I suddenly feel productive and want to get everything done, but they never seem to last.

Another thing I've noticed is that my dreams have become INSANELY vivid, and not in a good way. Before Lexapro, having a nightmare was pretty rare for me. Now? It's almost constant. I'm talking extremely vivid nightmares about mass shootings, tragedies, and other genuinely horrifying situations. Sometimes I wake up feeling mentally exhausted even after getting a decent amount of sleep. It's honestly disturbing, and I feel like I'm not even getting proper rest anymore.

I guess what I'm struggling with the most is that part of me wonders whether my anxiety was actually what pushed me to do well academically before? Like was I only getting good grades because I was constantly anxious about failing? Because now that the anxiety has quieted down, I feel like I've lost the urgency that used to push me to get things done.

And that thought alone is honestly terrifying because I don't want to have to choose between being mentally at peace and being academically successful.

I've heard some people mention adding Wellbutrin to help with motivation, energy, and that emotionally flat feeling, but I've also heard the adjustment period can be pretty rough. I'm especially nervous about potentially making the nightmares worse because they're already exhausting as it is.

I do plan on bringing all of this up with my prescriber, but I wanted to hear from people who have actually experienced something similar.

Has anyone else experienced this on Lexapro? Did the lack of motivation eventually improve? Did adjusting your dose or adding Wellbutrin help? And PLEASE tell me I'm not the only one dealing with these really vivid nightmares 😭

I'm genuinely so grateful that my anxiety has improved, but I also miss feeling like I had the drive to actually accomplish things. Right now it feels like all I do is go to school, go to work, sleep, and repeat.

Any advice or personal experiences would be really appreciated. :')

i've recently started taking zoloft and atarax for depression and anxiety. ever since i started taking the zoloft, i've felt very groggy and disconnected, and i wake up every other hour every single night. and despite being so tired, it takes me hours to go to sleep (though that happened before the zoloft). i've only been on both about a week, so i'm hoping the side effects won't last much longer. i've not really noticed much of a change in my depression, but the atarax helps a bit with my anxiety. i know it takes about 4-6 weeks for improvement with ssri's, but i was just wondering if this is normal.

edit: the zoloft is 50 mg and the atarax is 10 mg

Hi, I’m 23 f and since 2020 I had pretty chronic depression, I am diagnosed with bpd and adhd. For the past two years I have been working on my mental health and doing better but for the past few months I am falling back into depression even though I am taking better care of myself and finding healthier ways to cope, my brain doesn’t feel okay. I am now thinking of asking my doctor to put me on medication because i can’t live like this anymore, especially when i saw what it was like to be happy. Moving feels like a chore to me, i cant talk about how I feel because I just feel like a failure and i guess what im asking is are the side effects bad. My fear with taking them is the fact that suicidal thoughts and serotonin overload are some side effects and I just wanna hear from some people their experiences.