My experience w/ Sertraline (Zoloft)

[brianALL]

After half a year on Sertraline (75mg), and a few months coming off, I feel comfortable sharing my experience with this medication.

Positives:

Visuals reduced maybe 30-40%

Anxiety reduced maybe 20-30%

Negatives:

Memory was worse

Motivation to do work & to accomplish daily tasks went down the drain

Emotions felt kind of dulled

Became more socially inhibited (meaning, when hanging out with friends, I was totally content in not talking, or engaging socially. I felt comfortable just sitting back and letting others control the flow of conversation. Didn't have much of a desire to talk or be social)

 

Since coming off (slowly tapered down from 75mg to 50mg, then 25mg for a few weeks, then finally 12.5mg before stopping altogether)

My visuals have come back with a vengeance. In fact, they seem twice as worse than before I started Sertraline. It's incredibly distracting & I'm having a tough time focusing on anything. This has really scared me, I'm hoping I'll come back to baseline eventually, but I'm also afraid the Sertraline has made long-term impacts to my brain structure or receptor function.

My memory also still feels really scattered...

 

Final thoughts:

Sertraline definitely reduced some of my HPPD symptoms while I was on it, but the side effects, in my experience, were not conducive to being a productive person. It seems I was trading one symptom for another. (But this might not be your experience)

And now that I'm off of Sertraline, I feel strange, my visual hallucinations are so strong, & I feel more out of it than usual...I have a feeling (although maybe I'm being a bit dramatic/overthinking it) but it's going to take me a long time to get back to my baseline after this.

Has anyone else experienced something similar?

 

 

 

 

Edited August 15, 2022 by brianALL

[Older12345]

On 8/15/2022 at 3:19 AM, brianALL said:

After half a year on Sertraline (75mg), and a few months coming off, I feel comfortable sharing my experience with this medication.

Positives:

Visuals reduced maybe 30-40%

Anxiety reduced maybe 20-30%

Negatives:

Memory was worse

Motivation to do work & to accomplish daily tasks went down the drain

Emotions felt kind of dulled

Became more socially inhibited (meaning, when hanging out with friends, I was totally content in not talking, or engaging socially. I felt comfortable just sitting back and letting others control the flow of conversation. Didn't have much of a desire to talk or be social)

 

Since coming off (slowly tapered down from 75mg to 50mg, then 25mg for a few weeks, then finally 12.5mg before stopping altogether)

My visuals have come back with a vengeance. In fact, they seem twice as worse than before I started Sertraline. It's incredibly distracting & I'm having a tough time focusing on anything. This has really scared me, I'm hoping I'll come back to baseline eventually, but I'm also afraid the Sertraline has made long-term impacts to my brain structure or receptor function.

My memory also still feels really scattered...

 

Final thoughts:

Sertraline definitely reduced some of my HPPD symptoms while I was on it, but the side effects, in my experience, were not conducive to being a productive person. It seems I was trading one symptom for another. (But this might not be your experience)

And now that I'm off of Sertraline, I feel strange, my visual hallucinations are so strong, & I feel more out of it than usual...I have a feeling (although maybe I'm being a bit dramatic/overthinking it) but it's going to take me a long time to get back to my baseline after this.

Has anyone else experienced something similar?

 

 

 

 

Was there such a split of text? gone?

Edited August 16, 2022 by Older12345

[brianALL]

No, my visual symptoms are not like that at all. I don't have any afterimages, trails, halos,

I experience a tiny bit of visual snow if I look really closely at certain textures....

However, my primary visual symptom is harder to describe:

It's kind of like there are all these layers in between me and the object I look at. Sometimes these "layers" look like heat wave distortions, they often are shifting around slightly. My brain will see a shadow, or pick up a random pattern of light, and combine it with a similar pattern on another object, and turn this into a layer that occurs in front of those objects....and this makes it difficult to focus my minds eye on the concrete objects...because there is all these visual disturbances in front of that object...which my mind cannot stop focusing on.

 

 

Edited August 18, 2022 by brianALL

[Older12345]

21 hours ago, brianALL said:

No, my visual symptoms are not like that at all. I don't have any afterimages, trails, halos,

I experience a tiny bit of visual snow if I look really closely at certain textures....however, my primary visual symptom is harder to describe. It's kind of like there are all these layers in between me and the object I look at. Sometimes these "layers" look like heat wave distortions, they often are shifting around slightly. My brain will see a shadow, or pick up a random pattern of light, and combine it with a similar pattern on another object, and turn this into a layer that occurs in front of those objects....and this makes it difficult to focus my minds eye on the concrete objects...because there is all these visual disturbances in front of that object...which my mind cannot stop focusing on.

 

 

yes bro, I am familiar with the complexity of explaining symptoms, such as mine - "the effect of time dilation"