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Long term antidepressant use. Long term damage caused?!

Hi
Please help me. I have been on antidepressants for years since I was 17 and now I'm 31 and stopped a few months ago by tapering. I have tried many different ones but they just either caused bad side effects or stopped working eventually.
I am anxious and depressed daily. I have been reading up on the long term effects of antidepressant use and that it messes up the brain if used long term and then discontinued.
If ANYONE has successfully done this and is now ok I'd love to hear stories from you because right now, I am scared that iv damaged myself permanently and that I'll feel like this forever.
Any insight (apart from comments about me going back on them which I'm not doing) would be soooo appreciated!!!
Thanks in advance
Lola xx
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Avatar universal
I am still going through withdrawal issues from Paxil.   It is one of the hardest ad's to get off of.  Im now seeing a good therapist working with cognitive behavior.  Teaching yourself to re direct your thoughts.  It will be a long road but I'm sticking with it
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Oh I see. I thought PAWS only applied to opiate withdrawal. But anyhow, I hope this gets better because it's ruining my life. And I think doctors should think twice when prescribing these long term to an individual. They seem to not be bothered enough on the individual - after all, it's all too easy to keep signing repeat prescriptions than to make the effort to actually find out more about individual patients. Doctors don't go through the agony of stoping drugs and experiencing how it feels. And then goes the research on how these drugs are poison (including Xanax etc )...
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Avatar universal
Some people go through very long withdrawals -- it's called PAWS, or Protracted Withdrawal Syndrome.  Hopefully you don't have that, but what it means is that even when you taper off some people just don't adapt to coming off the drug.  It has nothing to do with why you took the drug -- it has to do with whether the brain can now function normally again.  Here's hoping it's something else.
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Avatar universal
Hi
Thanks for your message. I went on antidepressants for headaches (psychosomatic so brought on by stress) and recently I tapered down within months, so at an incredibly slow rate. So it's not due to a too fast a taper and I didn't have actual depression to begin with. Which is why I'm worried at this point :(
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Avatar universal
I can't help you with a success story -- I've stopped meds with no problems and stopped one with horrendous problems -- but you might be anxious and depressed, if it's more intense and different than you felt before you stopped your last med, because for you the taper was too quick and you're suffering withdrawal.  If it's the same as you've always felt, then it's not that.  The long-term damage that some researchers are finding is that people once on antidepressants can no longer function without them, as their brains cannot go back to working normally.  This would mean, if it's true, that you might find you're one of the many people who keep having to go back on antidepressants.  Most psychiatrists will say it's because you never solved your underlying problem through therapy or good fortune, or that you developed some mysterious new ailment the drug was covering up, but it does seem clear that if you follow these forums from users we keep ending up back on antidepressants.  So either the illness is episodic, or the drugs have made it impossible to function well without the drugs.  I don't know who's right -- I suspect people differ in how they respond.  As for the problems of discontinuation, that's a bit of a different issue, the issue of withdrawal from stopping a drug too quickly even if you tapered off -- most docs use a standard taper for everyone but none of us is everyone, we're only us and there is no such thing in reality as an average person.  We all react the way we react.  Most doctors simply do not understand the drugs they prescribe and have no desire to treat each person as an individual -- that would require them to see fewer patients.  This isn't any help to you in that nobody can tell you why you're going through what you're going through except to say, the one part of this that is true is that if you haven't solved your underlying problem through therapy or good fortune then it will still be there if you stop taking your medication -- meds don't cure, they only treat symptoms, and were never originally intended or tested for long-term use -- they were supposed to be a bridge to help with symptoms while we get therapy, but since therapy doesn't always or even usually help, at least not easily, we end up on the drugs for a long time, and the body stays on them for a long time, getting used to functioning that way.  
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