I was started on lithium and gabapentin I’m the psych ward and have had crazy shakiness ever since. I’m also on Zoloft, seraquel and trazadone. I stopped the lithium and gab cold turkey about a week ago but still have the shakes. Makes me want to blow my head off. I didn’t take seraquel last night to see if it helps but I wasnt able to sleep but 1&1/2. Anybody else have this problem? What do I do? Feel like I’m going crazy… again
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I had horrible involuntary spasms when I took anti-depressants. Zoloft was one of the many I tried. It didn’t show up right away and was only intermittent. It was also primarily with my hands, exacerbating a subtle condition into something I could not bear to live with. I had trouble eating with silverware and drinking from a glass. My hands would get so shaky that I would continually drop food back to the plate and then coat it in whatever was in my cup because I would shake most of the contents of a cup out just trying to get the cup the short distance from the table to my mouth. Even just trying to slide it on my table over to me would be more apt to empty the cup in my lap. The worst part was the steadier I tried to be, the worse it seemed to get.
I also would get weird little twitches sometimes for an hour or more on my body. It was particularly irritating when it was in my face. The worst was the hands though. You can’t do much without your hands. Even reading a book was likely to end in accidentally torn out pages.
At least for me, when I stopped taking meds, it lingered on for a little while until it finally went away, so it may not just stop abruptly if you stop taking something.
Are they helping you otherwise? Is the shakiness the only issue? And it sounds as if you haven’t been on these very long, correct? If so, I would give it time, try to hang in there a bit longer, and talk to your prescribing doc about it as soon as you can. Sometimes the initial side effects settle down within a few months, and if you’re feeling better mood-wise, it might be worth waiting it out. If the problem persists, you can consider stopping or reducing one drug at a time to see which is the culprit.
I had the same problem many years ago, while taking Lithium. As Copelessness can attest, SSRIs can cause this too, but I don’t think it’s nearly as common, and I personally had no problems with the shakes while taking SSRIs like Zoloft.
Whatever you do, **inform your doctor**, even if they don’t approve of the decision. It’s completely within your rights to decline medication, and even if they disagree with your choice, they will accept that it’s yours to make. As long as they know what’s going on, they can make suggestions and adjust your treatment accordingly.
Hi, I was on Seroquel and yes, it caused insomnia, yes, it caused hallucinations, kickstarted a severe depression and brought me to suicide. My heart hurt and I felt so dizzy. What’s more, after I had missed one dose of my Sertraline-based med I was shaking like an aspen tree. And when I was on it, I got maniac period.
Advice: try to get rid of Seroquel for longer than one day. It took me a week to be back to normality.
Seroquel gave me terrible shakes. Once I got out and was able to research the side effects (especially what people had to go through during withdrawal), I stopped taking it. It’s an anti-psychotic and they were giving it to me like it was just a sleeping pill. Very irresponsible. Now I’m just on the Wellbutrin XL, no more shakes. Pysch doc also prescribed me Trazadone to help with whatever insomnia the Wellbutrin would cause but i haven’t picked that up yet.
25mg per night, eh? The same had I. It gave me bigger insomnia than I had had. Bleh.
200 mg, actually. They also had Ambien in there (I don’t remember the dosage), but I don’t sleep like a “normal” person. My rhythm is from 4 AM to 11 AM. But I needed to go to sleep at 10 and be up by 8 when I was in the hospital. Groggy as hell all the time because it worked just fine for knocking me the hell out how they wanted but in addition to not being wired to be awake at 8 in the morning anyway, now I had all these depressant drugs swimming in my system and it was bad. Also made me terribly ravenous (pretty much inhaled whatever people sat in front of me whether I actually felt hungry or not), ringing ears like tinnitus, felt like my head was floating. And those damn tremors. They also gave me this anti-anxiety pill called Atarax every 6 hours (as needed). The Wellbutrin is 200mg slow release. I like it for what it is, I just have to get out more to “boost” it (I’m a hermit). It did give me one hell of a case of insomnia when I was first on but the last dose of Seroquel I took the day before, when I laid down, my sinuses closed up and I was like nope nope nope not taking it anymore, especially when I found out withdrawing after being on it for awhile pretty much guarantees you’re going to have a stroke. They wanted to up my dose because I questioned the second psych doc I got in a rather direct way and he interpreted it as me being “agitated” and he neglected to tell me he’d done that. I only found out because I went to say something to a nurse and she started reading off my meds. Was livid. They’re just handing that crap out like it’s candy and it’s actually really bad shit and unnecessary if you don’t have paranoid delusions/see things (I don’t).
*the wellbutrin is actually 300 mg, whoops.
Wellbutrin was another they had me try and I had the same problems there too. It was the last one I tried around the 3 years I gave meds and therapy a shot before I just gave up on them both.
I went through a number of therapists/psychologists/psychiatrists/counselors and they would try something, just keep upping the dose, then have me try something else, then keep upping the dose… It didn’t help at all and the side effects just made everything worse yet.
Of course, I told them that they weren’t helping and that they were continuing to cause me problems but because I didn’t feel so bad I wanted to kill myself (or that is what I had to tell them to avoid having to go back to the hospital again), they would think that they were working at least a little and months later I’d still be taking useless meds that did absolutely nothing at all but subject me to the joys of the side effects. I could deal with everything but the shaky hands, and if they had had a positive effect, I maybe could have looked past that too, even as miserable and as humiliated as it made me feel when people would stare. But it just became pointless…
Well, that’s the same for me. I had to lie in order not to spend whole Christmas time in the walls of psych ward. Now, I’ve got Tegretol and Rispolept, but I am not taking them – I saw people on Rispolept and it messes with the brain not worse than my Escitalopram did (I was very “hahahaha-ohohoho” when I was taking it). Now I am going ahead with therapy, I hope it’s gonna help even a little.
Frankly speaking, I’d be still taking Escitil if I didn’t have bruises in the size of my fist all on my body… ugly, big bruises… So I understand…really understand…
Careful on seraquil! I took it and gained 30lbs in two weeks! Stopped instantly, been several years and still unable to lose the weight it made me gain! Doctor did warn about weight gain at which point I was underweight, but the amount gained in so little time was extremely unhealthy and my back wasn’t strong enough to support the increase so quickly. They gave me seraquil because another med i was taking for a while gave me random sleeping schedule, like sleep for an hour, be awake for three sleep two hours, wake up randomly for five minutes and just another hour of sleep, it was chaotic. So they used seraquil as a sleep aid for me… they really didn’t think it through, should of just gotten a Tylenol pm… or something, but you know all these companies just want to get paid.
I overheard other patients with same doctor getting exact same meds for different problems, added two and two and figured my doctor was just another greedy crook.
Another doctor put me on depekote while I already mentioned me and boyfriend have been discussing pregnancy plans… researched about depekote and found it causes many birth defects, never took them so I have three large containers full of 500mg depekotes, not for me to use though. It’s for any future abusive relationship or situation, since I’ve been off it for years, it can’t be traced back to me.
Thank you everyone. Trying to just hold on.