Well, it was a shitshow. I took notes throughout as I knew my brain wouldn’t hold the information, so I thought I’d write something for other people doom-Googling wtf is wrong with their brain when coming off Citalopram.

I first started on Citalopram at 19 after a very hard start at university, but I fell into an abusive relationship shortly after and stopped taking it. I can’t remember the circumstances but as I was distanced from my family, friends and university, it seems like this probably had the same cause: coercive control.

I started back on it a year later when I dropped out and kept taking it until my mid-20s. I then quit cold-turkey because of hippy peer pressure. Madness. It wasn’t so awful then that I can remember it now, but I was only on about 20mg.

Maybe a year after that, I was back on it. Over the years I went up and down in dosage and added various other medications for panic attacks and teeth grinding, then in 2023 I decided I’d reduce my dose to 20mg as I was in therapy and doing well. Six months later: crash, mental health crisis team. Went back up to 40mg.

Things have been better since then but the psychiatrist that reviewed my case last year recommended Venlafaxine, which has been prescribed as a non-meth medication option for ADHD. At the time, I was too desperate and exhausted to even consider a change.

I deal with Citalopram OK but recently I’d been thinking about how I could do with better than OK, actually. It affects my sleep, it makes me SWEAT in the mornings (why?!), it’s an absolute libido killer. At 36, it feels like time to go after ‘good’ rather than ‘fine’ before peri-menopause does whatever damage it’s going to do.

So, I told the mental health nurse that’s what I wanted to do. They were bemused that I wasn’t satisfied with fine, of course. Why should women demand happiness????? They went along with it and agreed the usual tapering off schedule. And that was the first error. I’d been taking Citalopram for a very long time. The longer it’s been in use, the worse withdrawal will be and so the longer tapering should take. No one mentioned that to me.

And yes – it was SHITE. I felt a bit wobbly over the first few weeks but the week on 0mg, I felt like a junkie. My vision was crazy, I felt sick and dizzy, my brain was electric and skipping beats, I cried constantly, no patience, no resilience and I could feel smells in my brain like pain. I could smell something in one of our rooms and I was worried it was damp under the floorboards but Phil couldn’t smell anything. I eventually realised I was smelling the wood of one of my small find trays. It’s obviously always smelled like that but I could smell everything in HD. Came in handy when the washing machine motor burned out and Phil thought I was imagining it.

After a month, the mental health nurse called, two days into starting Venlafaxine and, of course, no positive results to report at that point. I mentioned that I think halving the Citalopram each week was too fast for how long I’ve been taking it and she just said that’s usually slow enough. So…’shrug’.

However, I did start to feel a little more normal in the brain so the worst of the withdrawal was over. Venlafaxine (and any other anti-depressant, really) takes two to six weeks to full efficacy but generally I start feeling the benefits of medication quite quickly. Withdrawal can take weeks or even months to recover from – another thing I wasn’t told – but being able to talk on the phone and type this was a promising improvement.

I’m now two months in with Venlafaxine and I just feel the same as on Citalopram, but now I have to be more careful of taking it at the same time every day. Wasn’t warned: it has a much shorter half-life than Citalopram, so missing a dose one morning made me feel back to junkie again. Great!

So, that’s it. My experience of tapering off Citalopram and on to Venlafaxine. I hope if you’re in the trenches right now, you can take some comfort from this. It will end, things will get better.