Please Help! After stopping Prozac I’m actually kind of scared. I stopped taking Prozac recently and I was on a very very low dose. And to be honest Prozac was actually helping me a lot with my anxiety. However I began feeling Apathetic after a while. So my Doctor told me to stop. BUT it’s been 5 days ever since I stopped and I think I’m having Withdrawal. My intrusive thoughts are coming in big time and I’m starting to feel scared, paranoid, depressed, and crazy. I think I’m getting new intrusive thoughts and I keep thinking what if my brain is talking to me and I’m developing schizophrenia or what if I go crazy and listen to the thoughts when I know they are not true. What should I do?

My mind keeps telling me “something is wrong with you. the weird feeling you are feeling or the weird tingling you are feeling or there is a weird mark on your body. Those are actually a severe symptom and by ignoring it you could die!” Or especially the constant, “go to the emergency room because this impending doom you are feeling, yeah that’s because your gonna die shortly” It doesn’t help whenever people say “well if something was wrong your body would tell you” because my mind keeps telling me that what I’m feeling is proof something is wrong and I need to get it checked out. That I actually am severely sick and that I need to get it checked out as soon as possible, that if I get one more test than I’ll be okay because it will prove nothing is wrong. How do I tell my mind that it’s just anxiety whenever my mind keeps telling me “well if you keep saying that you could be ignoring something more serious.” Or “the doctors are just brushing you off..something is wrong with you” It’s hard to live with my thoughts whenever they are constantly coming up with ways to challenge me and challenge logic. New reasons on why I need to get this checked out because “I’m just being ignored” or “no one is listening to me so I’ll just end up dying” My symptoms range from weak and shaking legs and body to dizzy and unbalanced and dissociated. Recently I’ve been getting this tingling feeling inside my head and on the back of my neck. And my temples have pressure on them. My body keeps coming up with new symptoms I need to worry about, whenever most of them are probably caused by severe and constant anxiety. So severe I can’t even leave the house because I constantly worry about whether this is severe and something will happen if I leave the house. I need immediate ways to start fixing this because it’s especially horrible whenever my period comes around and my anxiety/depression is already higher than usual. I’ve even started considering taking medication (Zoloft, 25mg) which is another trigger for me, I worry about the symptoms I might get from taking it. That’s how you know it’s gotten pretty bad whenever I’ve come to taking something that I’ve been actively avoiding. What are your thoughts? Do I take the medication? What are ways I can deal with my symptoms that seem so severe in the moment but pass by once I’m not anxious? What are ways my thoughts can ease and I stop taking every symptom as something serious, because at the end of the day my anxiety is most likely the reason I have these horrible symptoms. I’ve always been extremely healthy and everytime I go to the doctors they express how healthy I am with all the tests I’ve had.

This is kind of a weird question, but I recently increased my SSRI dosage and have experienced tremendous relief. It has quieted my intrusive thoughts so much and my compulsions are no longer as all-consuming. However, I don’t want to be on this high of a dosage forever and know that medication alone shouldn’t be my only fix. I’m seeing a new psychiatrist on Wednesday and am wondering if the recent decrease in frequency of my symptoms will be a bar to my getting ocd treatment? In other words, if in this present moment I’m doing better, but up until a few days ago my compulsions were taking up pretty much every moment of my waking day, will I still be classified as having ocd? I start getting worried when I feel better that I don’t actually have ocd and just use it as a defense mechanism to avoid consequences of my actions/I’m secretly a terrible person

Hi everyone, I’m 23 and have been on Zoloft since I was 16. For the past couple months I’ve been having panic attacks more and I’m sick of feeling like a zombie everyday. My boyfriend said I’m very sad and unhappy then when I first met him 2 years ago…. He thinks it’s the medicine. Throughout the years I have upped and lowered my medication, but now, I feel as though it’s not helping. Either it was too much where I didn’t feel emotions at all like very scary stuff or it wasn’t enough to help me. I was given 5mg of Lexapro to try…. I’m scared to take it. All I know is how Zoloft is. I don’t want to go crazy on it, be allergic to it, etc. I feel like I’m going to trip myself out when I take it and not actually feel the difference. I could really use some positive feedback I really just want to be a normal human😭