Beware. I’d taken Lexapro two months in 2019 when suddenly in the morning something was terribly wrong: skull pressure and throbbing, face esp upper lip tingling, dissociative — meaning my own identity was totally missing, absolutely no will power, yet although I could barely move for hours, I was wide awake. I was merely a camcorder with no personality. Part of the syndrome is that you cannot envision ever escaping it. Suicidal thoughts. Mouth is numb, tendency is to hang open, and it’s an effort to form words. This repeated daily for several weeks, then the level of intensity began to vary when onsets occurred. I had begun diminishing dosage at my doctor’s instructions immediately after the first episode. The frequency of onsets diminished. I recorded the days it happened and assigned percentages to the intensity of the onsets. At 10% I could manage. At 25%, my normal range of thinking and planning shrunk, narrowed. Huge depressive thoughts are part of this. You are down about yourself. At 40% or 50% there’s little to do but lie down and sleep. A woman friend who visited me could tell from across the room when an onset was occurring. And they are still occurring after four years of being off the drug. I’ve had many medical tests to get to the root of this: heart monitors, scans, bloodwork, and more. I’ve seen a well regarded neurologist a number of times who doesn’t doubt my problem exists, but refuses to lay any responsibility on Lexapro. “It simply cannot still be in the system,” he says. I can concur with that. But all this began with that drug, and I feel it must have — at least for some people — a mind altering affect that persists. It has changed my life. I know it when my face begins getting numb, or I wake up with a narrow range of focus, or my head has pressure and cranial pulsating as my heart beats, and I’m having thoughts of inadequacy. It is all too real, and even with excellent medical advice and trust that I am telling the truth of this, there is no diagnosis or cause ascribed, and never to Lexapro. I disagree. Whatever areas of the mind are susceptible to being affected can be potentially damaging long term. One doctor likened my syndrome to panic attacks. That may be, although the severity can be extreme and some elements don’t quite match. Whatever is the truth here, it is hard to think that Lexapro didn’t trigger them.