I'm a 40 year old male with Fibromyalgia and I believe also that I'm suffering from Depression....?

Question

I would like to take something for depression but Prozac 20mg in the morning caused horrific sleep disturbance at night ...I woke up feeling unrefreshed...and the Nortriptyline 100mg caused me to gain a great deal of weight....any suggestions?

Answer 1

Depression is a normal reaction to chronic illness, fatigue and pain. Depression, unless it is biochemical, is anger turned inward. The hard thing with fibro is that there is no where to aim your anger. What, are you going to get mad at your muscles or bones? You have lost your hopes and dreams, and your sense of identity. This is a loss just like a death. Depression is part of the process and part of the journey.

You are probably thinking things like: Who am I now? What can I do? Will I get worse? Will I lose my independence? Why bother? I have no future. I will always be miserable.

Am I on target here?

I have SLE (systemic lupus erythematosus). I have a pretty good idea. Feel free to write me. You are not crazy. Find a copy of "Sick and Tired of Being (or feeling I don't remember) Sick and Tired." I think it is by Donoghue but I have lupus fog tonight.

There is life on the other side of this. Maybe not a cure, but there is a healing. They are quite different.

My thoughts are with you.

Answer 2

Over the last five years I had begun to have increasingly withdraw into a downward spiral of depression..

But now with the method I can fully focus my energy and thoughts into a decisive line on how to make my life better constantly. And it works like magic! I'm beginning to attract people to me once again and things have just been looking up since then.

Helping you eliminate depression?

Answer 3

I worked for several years for a Rheumatologist (doctor who cares for joints). I am very familiar with Fibromyalgia and yes, is frequently goes hand in hand with depression.
Anyone who is in constant pain will easily get depression and also have difficulty sleeping.
What the doctor I worked for did for his patients is prescribe a prescription for Trazedone. Generally 50mg/day. It is taken at night about one hour before you want to be asleep.
You will sleep soundly, wake refreshed and a bonus is that trazedone is a mild form of anti-depressant and assists with anxiety too. You can take it along with Prozac or you may wish to speak to your MD about switching to an alternative.
You can feel better and have a better qualilty of life!
Take care & I wish you well.

Answer 4

Boy are you in luck (If you're willing to follow my lead). I've been there and done that... plus, I wrote a non-commercial website on these things:
Depression:
http://www.geocities.com/seabulls69/AntidepressantThatWorks.html
Fibromyalgia:
http://www.geocities.com/seabulls69/fibromyalgia.html

I'm also winning the battle over diabetes:
http://www.geocities.com/seabulls69/Type_II_Diabetes.html

It's all about positive thinking, healthy diet, some exercise, and a handful of inexpensive supplements. Here's another tip (if you haven't figured this out)... the drugs don't fix anything. But you are probably drawing that conclusion by now, huh?

OMG, all these folks are asking you to try more drugs. Forgive me, but that is just plain goofy. Drugs cure nothing. The side affects often outweigh any benefit they might offer. Plus, there's the expense, the dependency, the realization that you're stuck with them for life, etc. Trust me, you don't want to fall into that rut. I was there and it sucks.

Answer 5

I have had depression accompanied by night terrors for close to 50 years (I'm 59) with all manner of therapy and drug treatment along the way, so I'm not sure how much ANY medication has to do with the connection between the two. Effexor seems to alleviate my depression without making my nights even worse, however, everyone's different, so this needs to be worked out between you and your psychopharmacologist.

Answer 6

I am a massage therapist, and I have worked with numerous people who suffer from fibromyalgia and depression. Getting a professional, relaxation massage is one of the best forms of treatment anyone can give themselves. There is a certain magic in the human touch. I would suggest researching someone in your area who does chakra balancing and also someone who can give a fantastic relaxation massage (not all massage therapists give the same massage... you wouldn't want to see me, I like to give deep tissue massages and you do NOT want that due to your condition!). Chakra balancing is fascinating... a little bit on the KOOKY side if you are not familiar with it! But it is lovely and works. Read into it if nothing else. There are so many natural ways to heal yourself, and most westerners do not know about them.

Answer 7

Perhaps you could try St. John's Wort?
If that doesn't work for you ask your Dr. for Cymbalta . It's one of the newer antidepressants with few side effects but is very hard to come off of due to severe withdrawal symptoms.
I would try a natural herb first and maybe some yoga for both the physical and mental difficulty you're having.

Answer 8

You might talk to your doc about prescribing Effexor XR 75mg. It is an anti-depressant/anti-anxiety. It works pretty well for my mom and she says it does not cause her any sleep disturbance... and trust me it doesn't because I can stay up all night watching tv and she doesn't have a clue...and when she's up...let me tell you...she's up and at 'em and thinks everyone else should be too!

Answer 9

consult your doctor and to see what's best before taking anything else. explain to your doctor that the other med you were taking cause weight gain.

Answer 10

I'm just trying to help! Based on my own personal experience, and from extensive research on other people's comments and stories, I am very critical of psychiatric drugs. I also agree with Peachy, when she advises not to continue on the drugs. I've been there, done that too, and you just end up going from one drug to another on a neverending quest to find one that works for you, often having to take additional drugs to combat side effects of the depression medication. You could spend years like I did, searching for that perfect combination. I lost my husband because of this and the related problems of my depression and Bipolar. I didn't quite understand my symptoms and how to deal with them and some of the drugs gave me bad side effects, like irritability and also wanting to sleep all the time. My ex-husband just wanted a normal wife and couldn't deal with all of my problems, so he found someone else! I guess I don't really blame him, but it was hard to see him go as I did love him and valued his friendship.

Anyway, hopefully instead of continuing with medication, start researching on freeform amino acids, homeopathic medicine, eating organic foods, and getting some exercise and sunlight. You can also have special tests done to see what amino acids you are lacking. Dr. Robert Eerdman speaks more in detail about this in his book, The Amino Revolution.

Also, there is a great website that Dr. Peter Breggin has about the mounting evidence of psychiatric drugs and the dangerous long term side effects.
http://www.breggin.com/

Actually, if you start looking around on the internet you will come across a lot of this evidence from several different sources. The drug companies are very rich, powerful corporations that have the money to persuade the FDA and the public to see things their way. If people were to become well, then they wouldn't make any money. They want you to take their drugs for the rest of your life. It's the same story with the large agricultural corporations. I've done quite a bit of research myself, reading books and websites, and have listed a bunch below.

I get very frustrated when people will not even look at the opposing side's information. In debate classes, looking at both sides is a requirement to make a logical, informed and fair decision. If you want to let others think for you and follow the crowd - just take the back seat to your health, then by all means, take the psychiatric drugs. They will help for a few years at best, and then you'll have to move on to another drug.

"The PR psychiatric manipulation industry is now enormous. Corporations spend at least $10 billion each year hiring PR propaganda experts (pg. 26) and our federal government spends another $2.3 billion or so (pg. 27) -- and these are no doubt underestimates. But these huge sums are not wasted -- they provide major benefits to the clients. For example, about 40% of all stories that appear in newspapers are planted there by PR firms on behalf of a specific paying client. Because most radio and TV news is simply re-written from newspaper stories, a substantial proportion of the public's "news" originates as PR propaganda. Naturally the connection to the PR source is edited out."
Source:
http://journeytoforever.org/fyi_previous3.html#070701

Peter R. Breggin on Paxil, anti-depressants and the FDA:
"So, after years of prodding by me and more lately by a handful of other professionals, what new point in its journey has the FDA tortoise reached? In a May 2006 release in collaboration with the manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the FDA has acknowledged the antidepressant Paxil causes a statistically significant increased rate of suicidality in depressed adults as measured in controlled clinical trials. [1] The results are based on a re-analysis of all adult controlled clinical trials that compared Paxil with placebo.

Buried in the FDA/GSK release is an astounding fact: Depressed people are 6.4 times more likely to become suicidal while taking an antidepressant than while taking a sugar pill. [2]

No other antidepressants were mentioned in the FDA’s warning but all SSRI antidepressants share a common profile of adverse mental and behavioral effects, including Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Luvox, and Lexapro. Several other relatively new antidepressants have also been implicated in producing similar psychiatric abnormalities, including Wellbutrin, Effexor, Serzone, and Cymbalta. All of the newer antidepressants can produce stimulation or activation with the potential for increased agitation, anxiety, mood instability, disinhibition, irritability, aggression, hostility, mania, and crashing into depression and suicide. They can also cause a flattening of emotional responses, including a loss of caring, that can unleash dangerous actions. [3]

It is hard to cheer the FDA when in books and scientific reports, I’ve been warning about the risk of antidepressant-induced suicide (and violence) for fifteen years, starting in1991 with Toxic Psychiatry. My most comprehensive scientific review of the subject was published in 2003. [4] In more recent years, other professionals have also joined the fray, especially Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen. Scientific reviews confirmed that antidepressants cause suicidality in children and adults, [5] but the FDA delayed acting on mounting evidence. To this day, the agency waffles about the importance of the antidepressant suicide risk. Thus far it has focused only on Paxil in regard to adult suicide and it has hinted that the risk may be slight when it is catastrophic. It also continues to avoid facing evidence that the drugs cause violence.

A few weeks before the FDA and GSK published their recent admission that Paxil can make adults more suicidal, I published a special report in Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry in which I released previously suppressed data indicating that GSK had manipulated its research results to hide the risk of Paxil-induced suicidality [6] (available on http://www.breggin.com/). I based my observations on suppressed company data that I had discovered during a three-day investigation inside the drug company’s secret files, working as a medical expert in a murder-suicide product liability case against the company. Simultaneously, I published on my website the original product liability report with all the scientific data that I had unearthed during those three days. More than a year earlier, I had informed the FDA at two of its public hearings that I possessed this sealed smoking gun. They never responded to me directly. Perhaps they are responding to me now."
Source: http://www.breggin.com/Breggin_Observations_on_Paxil_Suicide_in_Adults._May_2006.html