Medications

JHP - i was in the exact same boat. zoloft 8 years and was looking for something else. but it was more out of vanity and curiosity. i had gained a lot of weight over the years and thought maybe i should try something else. and even though i felt fine, i thought maybe another medication might make me feel even better. and i always worried about taking anything for such a long period of time. so i switched to lexapro all at once. it was seamless. i had no withdrawals and no bad feelings at all and felt the same for a good year and a half probably. but a few months after my dad died i started having major issues again. probably had nothing to do with the lexapro but i thout maybe it wasn't working as well as the zoloft did. so i switched back and i am on zoloft again, though i recently had another bad episode after a bunch of stuff happaned in my life. i feel just fine at the moment but i started going to a psychologist and will see if he recommends upping my dose or switching to something else. i have always been on 200mg of zoloft. i actually tried celexa (older version of lexapro) for about 3 days curing my most recent bad spell, but i felt so much like a zombie (not tired but almost like i was high but not really) that i stopped and went back to zoloft. i am sure i would have eventually felt better if i gave it time since you usually need to allow 4-8 weeks at least to see how you'll do on something (though most major side effects subside long before that). but i did find it interesting that i had that reaction with celexa and not lexapro. but lexapro is basically the new version of celexa that has been kind of 'cleaned up' to minimize these initial side-effects. i think both ultimately are supposed to work equally well for most people though. but everyone is different.