How long does Zoloft, Paxil, Lexapro or similar depression drugs take to kick in?
My experience: Zoloft: gave me a strange, metallic Godspliiter of a headache for the first 24 hours; other than that, nothing for four weeks. Then, at the beginning of week 5, I felt unexplainably lighter, perky, and almost giddy; this lasted for several days. By the end of week five I settled in to feeling normal, i.e., not depressed. The overall experience was like i had taken a welder’s mask off and could finally breathe again. Downside: I felt sleepy much of the time, and orgasms were, well, interesting. Paxil: Similar to Zoloft without the headache or the perkiness phase. Downside: overall lethargy, and a non-existent libido. Lexapro: been on it non-stop for a little more than 5 years. No noticeable side-effects at the 10mg dose. Effect felt at 2 weeks. A GP suggested upping the dose to 20mg with the explanation that “If you feel OK at 10mg, you’ll feel a LOT better if you take 20.” Yes, I’m serious. I took 20mg for several months and found myself unable to concentrate, or to thin
It may take a while, depending. I’ve been on Prozac, Paxil, Wellbutrin, and now, Lexapro. All for seasonal depression. The first winter, Prozac worked just fine. The second winter, it didn’t work, so we tried Paxil. That one made me strangely nihlistic, so the following winter we tried Wellbutrin. Despite the claims that side effects would show up within a week, it took a month before the horrifyingly itchy welts showed up. It was a shame, too, because the Wellbutrin didn’t have the “sexual side effects” that Paxil and Prozac had. I was on Lexapro for the rest of last winter, and am starting it again in anticipation of this winter, and I feel great (no sexual side effects either- dogdad is rather grateful for that). What I’m trying to say is, don’t give up if one doesn’t work- even though they’re all SSRIs, one will work for you better than the others. It just might take a bit to find the right one.
IANAD, Tacodog, but I’ve been told that Zoloft (sertraline) has an unusually long biological halflife, not a short one. OTOH, googling for sertraline pharmacokinetics supports your statement, so now I’m confused. (Or maybe a 26-hour halflife is a long one?) For the OP: my understanding matches other posters here, that the rule of thumb is that you should allow two weeks for the drug to really take effect, and six weeks to reach a steady state. You might feel effects faster than that, within a few days (and the side effects of some drugs may come on faster than therapeutic effects, unfortunately). And it varies a bit by drug and by individual. Going a bit beyond the original question: it’s common to have to try several antidepressants before you find one that works for you and doesn’t have some side-effect. This appears to be mostly done by random chance and the doctor’s intuition. This can be be extra sucky because although the common antidepressants aren’t considered addictive, they d
I started with Paxil and had six weeks of various side effects (the weirdest one being a feeling that my teeth were vibrating) before it suddenly *clicked* and I felt my depression leaving me. From what I understand, the reason it takes so long is that the SSRI fixes the serotonin, and the serotonin fixes something else, which fixes something else, and eventually your mood improves. Since doctors don’t yet know what all those ‘something else’s are, they can’t fix them directly, nor can they tell you how long it will take. Maybe the 1-3 day people only have one or two steps in the pathway broken, whereas the 6 week people have quite a bit of the pathway broken. (IANAD and I could be wrong about all of the above. Except the part about me and Paxil. I’m pretty sure I’m right about it taking me six weeks.
