EFFEXOR Reviews (VENLAFAXINE HYDROCHLORIDE)Average Rating: 3.0 (925 Ratings)Filter ResultsCompare EFFEXOR with similar:
Type: Rx Drug
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Results are sorted by Date added. Key to Ratings: 1=LOW (I would not recommend taking this medicine.) Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 |
More on EFFEXOR: Reviews Summary | Drug Safety Information
| RATING | REASON | SIDE EFFECTS FOR EFFEXOR | COMMENTS | SEX | AGE | DURATION/ DOSAGE | DATE ADDED |
| 1 | Depression/anxiety | Took effexor 2 years ago. started out on 150mg a day. it was the 1st med to have an effect on my anxiety, bit couldnt tell if it was good or bad so i raised it to 300mg. after 2 weeks i woke up in the morning feeling completely emotionless. penis stopped working too. i stopped taking it right away! has been almost 3 yers and still effed from this drug! | This stuff is an emotion and cock killer!!! | M | 22 | 2 months | 12/9/2009 | 1 | Anxiety | Addiction - Big Pharma marketing calls it " discontinuation syndrom" which the shrinks don't tell you about before you start taking it. Agitation, anger, impulsiveness, memory loss, loss of ocgnative ability and weight gain. The manufacturer stresses the opposite - weight loss - but that is true in young women. It makes it appear that women are getting a feel good pill and a diet pill, when in fact many post menopausal women gain 30 - 50 pounds. | I left my wife a year after she started taking 300MG per day of effexor. We had a great sex life and that completely disappeared withing the first two months. She became angry, impulsive, agitated towards me and the rest of the family. She thinks it is working. She tells her shrink that it is working. If you are thinking of taking this drug, give yourself a going away party because you will be leaving everyone who knows and loves you you will be replaced by an entirely different personality. Here is how Weyth promoted this drug through falsified testing and paying for positive reports from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/health/17depress.html http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22237 http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/12/18/dear-me-nemeroff-wrote-himself-about-payment-for-effexor-article/ | F | 55 | 2 years | 12/8/2009 | 2 | depression/anxiety | I tried this drug thinking it would help my depression. After three days i felt suicidal and started to self harm. | I am now a coroner's report | M | 36 | 1 weeks | 12/5/2009 | 5 | Post Traumatic Stress Disorder | Dry Mouth in the first 3 days, occasionally have night sweats and strange dreams nothing worth worrying about. | Efexor has made me able to cope with my life in a positive way, I don't feel sad anymore, I have more energy and I can communicate face to face with anyone without feeling nervous. I have been taking Efexor 75mg for 18mths now. | F | 51 | | 11/26/2009 | 3 | bipolar 2 | Very diminished sex drive. | Orgasms are important! I only took this drug for 1 week and I had 1 week of godawful withdrawal symptoms: sleeping all day every day for 5 days, brain zaps (don't know how else to describe it), nausea, headache. | F | 32 | 1 weeks | 11/19/2009 | 5 | Severe clinical depression | Absolutely none | This is my miracle pill. I had depression since I was 12, and it escalated to severe depression by the time I was 16. After testing nearly 11 different medications involving serotonin alone, nothing seemed to help. I failed my junior and senior year of high school and was sent to a psychiatric hospital for a short time due to my depression. When I started Effexor however, I noticed an immediate change to my mood. An increase in dosage had great effects. It cleared away my suicidal thoughts, restored my emotional capabilities to that of a normal person (first thing I said is that I felt like a kid again... the last time that I was not affected by depression) and gave me the motivation to finish up high school. Since my life has gotten back in order I'm in college persuing a career, have a great boyfriend, and a family that's happy to have me back. This pill saved my life. | F | 19 | 18 months | 11/18/2009 | 1 | Anxiety | Turned into a zombie,no emotions whatosever. PERMANENT loss of sex drive & ability to achieve orgasm. | I took Effexor for about a month appx 7 years ago. Within 2 weeks I was a total zombie. Felt like if a family member dropped dead in front of me could not shed a tear. I also had a PERMANENT TOTAL loss of sex drive, loss of all sensitivty in my breasts(which were very sensitive prior),and inability to orgasm. That has not returned and don't expect it ever will. No doctor I have ever talked to has ever heard of this reaction. If anyone else has experienced this please contact me. | F | 43 | 1 months | 11/14/2009 | 4 | Mild depression - anger management | The only negative side-effect I've experienced is waking up after only 3-4 hours and being unable to get back to sleep. | I am the biggest sceptic in the world when it comes to taking any type of AD drugs. But, out of concern for the effect my anger was having on my family (and myself), I agreed to take this medication. I took 37.5 for the first week and then 75 after that. I've been taking it for 3 weeks now, and my life has done a complete turnaround. I'm happy at home, I'm focused at work, I have energy, I'm interested in the world around me...these are all things I've struggled with in the last 3 years. I can honestly say that this drug has done exactly what I needed it to do...it's given me my life back. I know it probably doesn't work as well for everyone, but I think that if I feel this good because of Effexor, there have to be thousands of others who are feeling the benefits of it as well. | F | 51 | 3 weeks | 11/9/2009 | 1 | Depression | Jerky muscles, sexual side effect, upper right sided discomfort, VERY elevated blood pressure, BAD headaches, sweating, nausea. Horrible withdrawal!!! | My doctor told me she doesn't like to tell people about the side effects because patients are more likely to get them. She also claims side effects are very rare with this medication. I am furious with her because I had no idea this medication would spike my blood pressure that bad nor did I realize the other effects were all from this medication. I would rather suffer with depression than to go through what I have with this medication. I wish I had been smart enough to look up potential side effect prior to taking it. This has been a horrible experience! | F | 45 | 35 days | 11/9/2009 | 4 | Depression, Anxiety | Restless leg syndrome, burning feet at night (don't see this anywhere else so weird), wake up in the middle of the night wide awake, tired!! | When I first started this med I freaked out bc I read all the horror stories online & this is my first experience with an AD. At first I had tons of energy and couldn't sleep well at all, but now I am tired during the day and sometimes I can sleep all night, but as far as sadness goes I feel NONE...I still don't think I'm "myself" again, but I feel like everything will be ok for the first time in my life. I drank 2 ounces of wine on Halloween and felt very dizzy so I don't think I can drink on this and medicine which is disappointing. Also my sex drive is gone and this really sucks! Hopefully in a month these side effects will decrease... | F | 23 | 8 days | 11/3/2009 | 4 | Depression, anxiety, OCD | extreme sensitivity to light at night, loss of libido, vivid dreams, clenching of teeth while asleep, indifference, inability to cry | I find it best to take Effexor in the morning with food. It has a tendency to upset my stomach. You will be a highly functioning individual for the rest of the day if the drug is taken in the A.M. Do your research before taking this drug. It has assisted mostly with my depression and anxiety, not my OCD. | F | 25 | 9 months | 11/2/2009 | 1 | Depression/Bi-polar disorder | Anxiety, agitation, hypomania, weight gain, insomnia and bizarre vivid nightmares, high blood pressure, dehydrating night sweats, memory problems, low thyroid level. | I had thought that the side effects I listed were caused by my body doing quirky things on its own. My doctor was constantly giving me new medications for anxiety, agitation, night sweats, high blood pressure and thyroid levels. I assumed that my ever increasing weight was somehow my issue that I hadn't resolved (yet no matter how much I exercised or ate a low calorie/fat diet my weight still increased pound by pound). My current doctor, and my previous three medication doctors, did not tell me that these were actually SIDE EFFECTS OF EFFEXOR. I will be getting off of this medication slowly… ever so slowly. I had once tried to get off of it under the supervision of psychiatrist number one, and the withdrawal symptoms then were hideous and that was nine years ago! Be forewarned, if you have any of the symptoms I described, talk to your doctor about them. For more information on side effects of Effexor, see www.petitiononline.com/effexor. | F | 43 | 10 years | 11/2/2009 | 2 | depression | body aches and pain. Malaise. Flu like symptoms. Numbness in limbs/joints. Horrible feelings of doom. | M | 57 | 3 years | 10/22/2009 | 5 | Depression | Night Sweats, weight gain, dizziness if I was so much as a couple hours late taking my dose | It was a God send for me. I suffered from depression since my teens. Didn't know that there was anything that could be done for it. Had tryed Prozac many years earlier and hated the disconncted feeling it gave me. Effexor has never made me feel like I can't feel. It has calmed me (my husband says I yell much less since I started using the Effexor. It has taken the extreme lows out of the equation and made me a more patient person. I still feel joy. I still feel pain as well but it is when it makes sense to feel it... not angry or deppressed at the drop of a pin or spilled milk. I recently stopped taking due to the effectiveness decreasing. I had to increase my dose every couple of years to keep feeling good. I am now trying the Pristiq. | F | 39 | 5 years | 10/10/2009 | 5 | Severe Depression | vivid dreams | I was at the brink of suicide. My depression was treatment resistant as I've failed to have any relief from the other anti-depressants (Cymbalta / Prozac / Zoloft /Seroquel/Zyprexa/ etc). Suicidal thoughts and suicidal feelings ravaged my mind continously so badly that I practically laid in bed for months. Then my doc prescribed Effexor XR 75mg. I left his clinic thinking that it will never work. That I will be committing suicide pretty soon. Nothing helps. Took it for two days and then immediately felt the lift. My negative thoughts were gone and my mood improved tremendously. It saved me from jumping off a building at the very last moment. Effexor really helped me. I know about the discontinuation symptoms but I am willing to take it, else I'd be dead. | M | 37 | 2 weeks | 10/3/2009 | 1 | Depression | Increased Depression, sweating, cold chills, difficulty sleeping, feeling like I had the flu, weird thoughts, irritability | Hate this medicine! As soon as I stopped taking it I didn't feel sick anymore and my depression lifted | F | 30 | 7 days | 9/14/2009 | 4 | difficulty sleeping, mild depressio | Possibly dry mouth Slight decrease in libido | My doctor switched me from Zoloft. I had not slept well for decades. He told me it could be from depression. Zoloft helped a lot for sleeping, energy, and decreased anxiety. Effexor has been slightly better. I feel great with 7 1/2 hours sleep. Before I felt tired after 8 1/2 hr sleep (or time in bed half asleep). | M | 59 | 3 months | 9/1/2009 | 1 | high blood pressure, palpitations, tachycardia, insomnia, diarrhea | worst drug ever, avoid it, it will ruin your life. | M | 31 | 3 days | 8/29/2009 | 3 | depression | fluctuating body weight, lack of emotion, lack of motivation, difficulty sleeping, difficulty waking back up, can't cry | while this drug has helped stave off suicidal thoughts and depression it has also left me feeling like I'm lacking something. Its hard to sleep and wake up and I almost always feel tired. If I miss a dose my head will sometimes ring and my vision will blur especially when moving. I have very strange and vivid dreams. | M | 21 | 2 years | 8/21/2009 | 5 | depression, anxiety | originally had been taking the ssri lexapro for about nine days prior to switching to the snri effexor. lexapro made me very lethargic and tired. my brain was in kind of a haze for the first week no lexapro and after switching to effexor i still had that effect but it went away after a couple of days. the first month on effexor was somewhat of a mental rollercoaster. i had few physical side effects, most notably delayed ejaculation. i experienced suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety, imsonia, and increased heart rate. blood pressure has been slightly elevated so it's important that you limit caffeine intake and maintain a healthy active lifestyle. most of these effects subsided dramatically after a month of use. as of now i have no side effects other than slight delayed sexual response (which actually helps to improve my sex life) and imsomnia due to increased energy. | almost immediately after beginning effexor i had much much more energy and have lost a lot of weight because i can exercise more and for longer periods now. that's really amazing to me. the first month is a little shaky but remember the drug takes time to become effective. i now have few side effects and my depression is completely gone. i am much more active, outgoing, confident and positive about life. i like what a previous poster said about changing from waiting to die to actually living. the negative thought patterns seem to have ceased entirely. i would have never have thought that life could be so comfortable. i had been suffering needlessly and stubbornly for several years beforehand. don't give up! | M | 30 | 2 months | 8/20/2009 |