Starting Prozac (Fluoxitine) for anxiety

Rain_Dog_Brian

Hi there. After years of avoiding, I feel the need to try medication to improve my anxiety, which has been buildings slowly for a few years I guess.
I’m starting week 6 of 20mg fluoxitine and, so far, my anxiety has significantly increased, especially last few days.

I know this is common Side effect for SSRIs, but the general advice is that the increased anxiety side effect is usually weeks 2 to 4, and I should be seeing improvements by now (although certain websites say cud take to week 12).

Spoke to my GP a week ago and he said try to stick it out Another month, to give it its best shot.

Has anyone had similar difficult long lead-in times with Prozac, and ultimate success? (Just hoping that I don’t waste another difficult month on this and then have to try other types..)

Also therapies like CBT, DBT, ACT, Mindfulness, based stuff etc.

Thanks for reading, And any advice appreciated.

Gremlinertia

That's what I started on, after eight weeks I felt the same as the start so my gp upped the dosage, it does take time to find both the medication and the dosage that suits you. Stick with it and well done for tackling it too.

bo0li5eumx12kp

Research prozac pharmacokinetics.

the brain concentration of fluoxetine and its metabolites keeps increasing through at least the first five weeks of treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoxetine#Pharmacokinetics

It inhibits its own metabolism to accumulate so takes waaaaay longer to reach steady state than other drugs in that class.

Past week 6 one tends to be looking at more "downstream" neural effects (inside the cell, gene expression etc) of drug therapeutics, but "upstream" signalling (receptor activation on the cell surface) would be in full effect at 6 weeks+.

Rain_Dog_Brian

Thanks both for your input and support. Appreciate you taking the time out to respond. We’ll stick with it a while longer and hopefully find a noticeable improvement at some point. The last few days have been back to “middling”, so hopefully build on that. ðŸ‘