> When I started taking Escitalopram, I stopped being depressed. Ooh, anecdotes, and ignoring your own quoted text, I can do that too! When I started taking i

> When I started taking Escitalopram, I stopped being depressed. Ooh, anecdotes, and ignoring your own quoted text, I can do that too! When I started taking it, I became numb, lost my sex drive, and basically exacerbated my underlying anxiety problem related to the depression. When I stopped taking it, I had extreme, severe withdrawal symptoms, orders of magnitude worse than any other withdrawal I've ever been through. When I stopped taking it, I had been practicing meditation and going to therapy. I also threw in real commitment to the gym for the first time in my life. Took a while for the sexual side effects to wear off too. Needless to say, I have extreme resentment for the doc that put me on that with zero guidance, warning, options, etc. I know have a beta blocker prescribed that I can take to prevent the physical symptoms of anxiety from exacerbating into a mini panic attack, but I basically don't need to take those anymore. I can find a non-trivial number of studies that (happy to link them, don't want to spam or be over the top right now), either: 1. Show it's barely more effective than a placebo. 2. Show it's barely more effective than a placebo, except for about 15% of those taking it, who had a measurable improvement. I'm not a doctor but I'm going to sublty imply that there are other treatments for depression, with more impressive statistics, that don't cause bi-minutely head-to-toe "body zaps" when trying to go off it.