zoloft stopped working and numbness in head!

[michaelmyers24]

Hi everyone, i am a 20 year old male and i was prescribed 50mg of zoloft. So far i have been taking it for 5 months
and it basically got rid of my generalized anxiety disorder. Before i took the medication i have been having weird symptoms from my anxiety such as my whole body being tense from head to toe, my eyes not focusing properly and everything looking unreal or fake around me like i was high. Also it felt like there was a pressure on top of my head like if someone put a blanket on my head. It also felt like the skin on my head was moving and i couldn't just sit still, i had to touch my head all the time or put my sweater hood up.

It all started after i smoked weed about 4 years ago, i had a bad panic attack and ever since then i haven't felt normal. Not even my doctor has answers for me but he did give me zoloft. The zoloft has basically made me feel normal again like i was before i smoked the weed. But i made a huge mistake, Just about 4 days ago i drank alot of alcohol on the weekend and also on the weekend before that. The first couple of times i drank on zoloft nothing happened. But after this weekend i noticed the zoloft has completely stopped working and all my weird anxiety symptoms are coming back, Will the zoloft kick back in soon? did i make it permanently stop working? I am never drinking again for a very very long time. I'm just stressed out that the zoloft will never work again :(. Also the symptoms from my anxiety are so strange, I didn't know anxiety could do all these weird things to the mind and body, Thanks for listening and i am really looking forward to replys. Very scared :(

[michaelmyers24]

i'm planning on getting a psychiatrist, but i didn't felt the need to when i started to take the pills because they worked so well, thank you for responding. I am not going to drink every again while on these pills.

[Paxiled]

Oops, sorry about the double post, it didn't show up so I wrote a second one.  Pick the one you like best!

[Paxiled]

Taking a pill, any pill, will not completely get rid of your problems all the time.  Unrealistic expectations can only hurt you.  For the vast majority of people, medication helps most of the time when it helps at all, but not all the time -- you will still have times when you feel anxious or depressed.  Unless the drug stops working in all situations, in which case you need to adjust the dose or find a different med, it might be in this case drinking too much caused you to feel much like you did when you first got anxious -- drinking can make us feel disoriented, which is a lot like we feel when we're having a panic attack.  If otherwise you're still doing better than you were, then it probably has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the medication.  Which brings the question:  are you in therapy, did you try therapy before medication, and is your doctor a psychiatrist?  

[Paxiled]

I want to add just one thing -- the notion that taking a pill, any pill, will forever and ever get rid of every one of your problems just isn't true.  These meds make us feel better, but they don't completely get rid of the problem the vast majority of the time -- we'll still get anxious sometimes, depressed sometimes.  You know when a drug has stopped working at the current dose when it stops working at all, not just because you did something (in this case, drinking too much) that caused you disorientation and triggered an automatic response of anxiety because it felt like it did when you first got anxious.  Are you in therapy?  Did you try therapy before you tried medication?  

[RubyWitch]

I have heard that young people who begin smoking weed, especially the incredibly strong stuff that's out there now, sometimes begin to experience anxiety. I don't know if the weed triggers anxiety that is already there or if it can somehow create it. Just sayin' this is what I've heard more than once.

You're 20 years old, so I'm not going to lecture you, but drinking, especially binge drinking, is a massive no-no when you're taking Zoloft. It's a very bad idea even if you're NOT on any meds. I am not a pharmacist, so I can't say this with any professional certainty, but I doubt even the binge drinking would cause the Zoloft to completely stop working.......but, like I said, I don't really know.

Anxiety can cause so many symptoms, entire books have been written on that subject. Yours sound pretty classic.

Please try to calm down. You're on a very low dose of Zoloft and you haven't been on it for very long and while the drinking needs to stop while you're taking this medication, you haven't caused yourself any kind of permanent brain damage!

More than likely, after 5 months at only 50mg, your dose of Zoloft needs to be increased if your anxiety is no longer under control.

Please speak with your prescribing doctor and first and foremost, be TOTALLY honest about any use of weed and especially the drinking. The doctor is not going to send you to your room, but he/she needs this information to treat your anxiety correctly AND safely.

You're going to be fine. Talk to your doctor!
RubyWitch