Any experience with Zoloft/SSRI's?

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We are about to start my 10 yr. old on Zoloft for anxiety/OCD issues and I'm a little nervous about it. Does anyone have experience with this? Would love to hear any pros and cons, thanks!!

I'm on it, I haven't had any negative side effectss.

Any drugs like that should always be used with some psycatric supervision, as long as you do that he should be fine .

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i had bad bad horrible experiences with Lexapro

though i had no supervision or support of any sort, my medication was being provided in the form of free samples from my mother's primary care doctor. I ended up having a lot of problems, as i was lonely, desperate and unable to say 'no' in spite of how i really felt due to the medication.

i guess my experience doesnt apply to your situation specifically, but it could serve as a warning.

do your very best to stay in touch with the child's feelings........... if possible....

I took Sertraline (Zoloft/) twice and had a horrible reaction - I recognised some of the symptoms (from LSD use!) as being serotonergic, otherwise it would have scared the s**t out of me and id probably have freaked out and gone straight to hospital. Ive since met someone else on the net who had a similar experience, but it turned into a 'good' trip after the first few hours and they decided to stay on it and sit out the first few days of side-effects.

Personally, if i had a child that young i wouldnt even consider it until literally everything else had been investigated. That might include traditional remedies that the medical corporations dont benefit from and wish to prmote . The company behind the closely related drug paroxetine (paxil/seroxat) deliberately hid evidence of its suicidal links in order to get the patent renewed for use in children- these are not people to be trusted! Who knows what the LONG-term effects of taking these things everyday will be?

If that hasnt deterred you, then please consider ignoring the instructions and taking a lower dose than suggested (this might involve breaking up tablets etc) - theres much less chance of a bad reaction and you can always increase the dose to suggested levels later (IF necessary), but you cant go back and reduce a dose thats already been taken The other person i mentioned who had a scary reaction only took half the recommended dose and says they might have panicked had it not been for my warning beforehand - and that was an adult.

Last year I was first prescribed Paxil which did absolutely nothing, though the doctor didn't believe that and accused me of not taking it (! !). He then prescribed Zoloft and I had absolutely horrible effects from it! It took away my anxiety but killed what I call my "passion" as I started to not care about much of anything that I did before and couldn't focus or finish anything, but the worst part was that it made me very irritable, angry, and aggressive! I then gave up trying these types of meds.

no no no no NO! I was on Paxil for eight years, it RUINED MY LIFE! They don't even really know what exactly the stuff does to people's brains- I know it did HORRIBLE things to mine in the long run. Giving it to a child is a HORRIBLE idea!

At first it seemed like a godsend. I didn't mind being miserable anymore. Eventually I realized I didn't really have emotions anymore- ANY kind of emotions. But, I didn't care that I didn't care. I stopped going out. I stopped doing ANYTHING. I stopped going to work and school. I flunked out of university. I gained fifty pounds. I slept 12-15 hours a day. I didn't get nervous in front of crowds anymore, I didn't feel bad about hurting people, I didn't love anyone, I didn't feel any kind of fear or desire or joy or misery.

I won't even go into all the awful things that happened. I can't begin to give you all the information here.

When I finally decided to quit, I found the drug was so addictive that I was actually incapable of working for two months. I was INCREDIBLY sick, and my withdrawal went very very well compared to most. My brain will never fully recover. Worst of all, I am actually less intelligent than I was before I started taking the pills. That might sound extreme, but if you look into it you will find that a lot of people have experienced this problem. I don't learn as easily anymore; I can't juggle concepts in my mind the way I used to. I forget things more often- my memory is shot. Everything is just a little bit blurry.

For more accounts of what it's like to be on (and get off) SSRIs like Paxil, take a look at http://www.paxilprogress.org/ . Beware the information sites and forums that are run by the companies that produce the drugs!! !

Drugs should ONLY be used as an absolute LAST resort, like if you really believe the only other option is letting the person KILL HIMSELF. And even then they should be used as sparingly as possible and for as short a period of time as possible. It looks innocent. It looks like a nice helpful little pill, like Tylenol, and it's given to you by a doctor- how can it be bad? Don't underestimate what it can do to you! Don't overestimate what doctors know about it!

Do NOT make the same mistake I did. DEPRESSION, OCD AND ANXIETY ARE NOT THAT SIMPLE. A PILL WILL NOT SOLVE YOUR PROBLEM.

As a 20 year old, I was on Zoloft, did not really seem to do much. I went off it and did not notice any changes in my level of anxiety.

My sister was on Paxil, she seemed to benifit a little from it, but cold turkied it when she quit, became suicidal! So if you do start this with your son, make sure you wean him off it nice and slowly if you decide to discontinue treatment.

My 12 year old is on Strattera for ADD, however I have found it does more for his anxiety, he is a changed boy! The more the Anxiety is controlled, the less the ADD seems to come into play! I guess if you are not freaking out about the world coming to an immediate end, the easier it is to concentrate on your math!

My sons doctor said it is not at all uncommon for Strattera to help with anxiety. I would highly recommend it as an alternative!

Helen, from the bottom of my heart, I am begging you to reconsider doing this to your son. SSRIs are very dangerous drugs. I'm not trying to be alarmist here- well, actually I am, because I honestly believe that giving your son Zoloft is a very very dangerous thing to do.

The effects are so subtle, and it's hard to think that a little pill your doctor recommends could possibly do much damage. They can, Helen, and they do. Pharmaceutical companies are making mind-boggling amounts of money on SSRIs, and they will do anything to promote their use (seen an "Are You Depressed?" pamphlet or commercial lately?) and cover up their well-known ill effects.

Research. Read. Consider where you're getting your information, and consider where your doctor gets his information. Doctors are not infallible. We're talking about your son's BRAIN. We're talking about PERMANENT EFFECTS.

my son is on Celexa @ 60mg/day. At one time they switched him to Lexapro but it was not as effective at managing his anxiety according to his feedback.

When we discuss the effects of the Celexa he says that it helps him "stop worrying, stop thinking about things that I want to stop thinking about".

From my observations, my son retains his ability to love, to feel sadness or laugh. He has been diagnosed with AS (obviously), but also with depression and anxiety.

I think for him, the answer at this time in his life is continued anti-anxiety medications and therapy. I hope that someday he will want to come off of them, but that decision will be his and the doctor's, and I hope that it will be when he is ready.

My advice would be to speak very frankly about the meds, how they make your child feel, and to wait for the full effect to be in place (I think up to 3 months IIRC) before making decisions of its effectiveness.

Good luck ! !

Children are always growing and changing. When you give a powerful psychoactive drug to someone who is constantly changing, it's difficult to discern which changes are caused by the drug and which changes would have happened anyway. Furthermore, when a person is on a psychoactive drug during formative years, any permanent effects are almost impossible to detect. That is, how will you know if the drug makes him just a little bit slower to learn, or less empathetic, or less ambitious than he would have been?



*This is a true story; names have been changed for the sake of privacy*

In high school I dated a bright, funny guy named Jeremy for about a year and a half when I was 16-17. His mom ran her own business and his dad was a lawyer (but his dad didn't live with them). He had two younger brothers- Mike and David. David was twelve or thirteen, and Mike was 15 or 16. I really liked David- he was smart, curious and a little bit cynical. Mike, on the other hand, was a slug. He lived in the basement, he didn't talk to people, he rarely showered, and he had no apparent interest in girls (or guys, for that matter.) He shuffled around the house like a zombie, and he flat out refused to go to school most of the time. (Last I heard, he still hadn't graduated from high school when he was 21.) His eyes looked glazed over all the time. It was weird and creepy.

Mike had OCD and was depressed, and he was on a modest cocktail of drugs that were supposed to be helping him. I was baffled that he could be so different from his brothers, and I asked Jeremy about it. Jeremy told me that Mike hadn't been like this before his diagnosis. He had been OCD, sure, and depressed, and he had some kind of back problem I wasn't too clear on (some kind of malformation or something), but he had had a life and friends and good marks in school. Jeremy said Mike didn't want to stop taking the drugs because he didn't like obsessing (I can't blame him) and because he was really depressed (failing school, never leaving the house, and having no friends will not do much to solve that problem.)

I don't know how much of Mike's problem was caused by the drugs and how much of it was the way he would have been anyway. Their parents had a messy divorce, and it was pretty hard on the guys. So maybe Mike would have been better off if he hadn't taken all those drugs, and maybe he wouldn't have. Maybe he'd have gotten through high school if he hadn't taken them, or maybe he'd have killed himself. I'll never know.

But that's the point, isn't it? No one will ever know what Mike would have been like. By the time I met him his mother appeared to have written him off as defective. She had a lot on her plate and didn't seem to have it in her to pay more attention to what was happening to him. (Can you imagine running your own business, raising three teen-aged boys by yourself and struggling through a very nasty divorce when the person you're splitting up with is a lawyer?) She was probably glad that Mike wasn't rowdy!



Anyway, I don't know how your son or how anyone else's son will react to any kind of drug. I just know that after what I've seen, experienced and read, I would never give my child an SSRI.

Medications are very individual in terms of response and every med question that you post here or at other sites will likely yield both positive and negative reactions. I have known people who have had wonderful results with Zoloft and the other SSRI's, to the point where they say it has changed their life. I've also seen in my own family the results of bad reactions to SSRI and it ain't pretty.

Zoloft is a medication that if kids are going to react poorly to it, they usually react hard and fast. If you see anything that seems to be negative to you: increased anxiety, hyperactivity, depression, increased anger/explosiveness you need to report that to the doctor immediately. You also need to be ready to advocate for a child in such a situation. It's always a good idea to walk out of the office with not only the trial med but also a plan of how to discontinue it should that be necessary and you cannot get a hold of the doctor. Also, some doctors will respond to the side effects by wanting to add additional meds to counter the side effects. That's not a good idea on a first med trial since there are so many other options available.

They say 3 months but usually within 2-3 weeks you'll get a preliminary idea of which way things are going to go.

Good luck and keep us posted.

I'd be leary of the combinations too. However I think the key is having good lines of communication between your doctor and your child.

As an aside, some amount of angst is a integral part of the human condition. I would not want to take that away from my child or yours as it plays a role in the development of responsibility, planning, and the like. But when anxiety and worry paralyze, a chemical reason for that may exist and then psychotropic medications are appropriate. They just have to be monitored.