I had a horrific experience with venlafaxine. It made me suicidal, subject to uncontrollable rages, paranoid, I had violent fantasies, sleep and eating disorders, engaged in self-destructive behavior, and the list goes on. There are studies in both PubMed and the British Journal of Medicine that document rare but confirmed cases of this occurring with antidepressants, and in the PubMed one I found, venlafaxine was singled out as particularly problematic. I checked off all the boxes in the BMJ article I found. I took myself off of venlafaxine in a suicidal fit and within days the extreme problems I had been experiencing began to recede, and this despite the brutal withdrawal symptoms.

I quit it in February, and other than a brief bout of suicidal ideation that I saw coming and fought off a couple of weeks later, everything has returned to normal. Everything. My psychiatrist expressed skepticism when I first told her I'd quit the drug and had begun feeling better, but a month later she couldn't deny the changes she was seeing right before her eyes. On my last visit, the discussion wasn't what I needed, it was what she could learn from me so that if she sees it again, she'll recognize the warning signs. And she's pretty much cut me loose. I'm going to continue with visits every three months because it's all too recent and raw and I want to keep a lifeline there. I have also continued with counseling, although this has shifted from discussing why I felt so suicidal to how I'm going to come to terms with what that drug did to me.

I did start taking lamotrigine, an anticonvulsant that has shown success with bipolar 2 patients, a condition I do believe I've been properly diagnosed with, and I do feel it has aided my recovery. But the turnaround was happening before I began it, and you have to slowly introduce it, so it can't fully explain why all the symptoms I was riddled with vanished so suddenly.

I do NOT recommend stopping venlafaxine on your own like I did. It was miserable even as the depression, rage, paranoia, and all the rest lifted. But I would consider looking to see if the venlafaxine is driving you downward. It does happen. It happened to me. I will not return to antidepressants ever again after what I endured. It went on for three years. I never want to return to that place.