I had a pretty bad experience with Lexapro back in 2009. I was prescribed a 20 mg dosage for anxiety and depression and took it daily for about 3 months. Things were going pretty well at first, besides losing a bit of my appetite and being slightly more sluggish and fatigued than usual. About two weeks into using it, things stared to get crazy.
The first thing I noticed was my becoming extremely apathetic. It actually reached a point where I made people cry from how cold I was being. I don't remember much of the things I said to people but I do remember a particular moment when I said something to a good friend of mine at the time that drove her to smack me across the face in the middle of the schoolyard and storm off in tears.
After that my appetite continued to steadily decrease, although I started gaining weight on and off and then suddenly losing weight a bit too fast to be considered normal. My insomnia got a lot worse too and with what little sleep I got lead to very vivid and terrifying dreams that I can't even put into words. Most of the time it was difficult to differentiate between reality and my dreams. Like I would feel like I was awake but the things I saw simply couldn't be real. They were like visions from hell almost. The creepiest thing was whenever people would try to talk to me right after waking up I would see their faces all warped and disfigured. It was just freaky.
An old friend of mine was also taking Lexapro at the time and was going through similar, if not worse side effects. Me and her would discuss our side effects during lunch at school and I remember her always complaining about how she had difficulty achieving climax while being intimate with her boyfriend. I didn't have a boyfriend at the time and I've never been intimate with anyone so I certainly wouldn't know about that, but I could relate to her other side affects though like insomnia, vivid dreams, hallucinations, loss of appetite, unbalanced weight loss and gain, etc, as I mentioned before.
Me and her also had biology together at the time and I remember the day when she fell asleep in the middle of class and suddenly woke up screaming bloody murder and started to violently fight off the teacher like she was going to kill her or something. It really freaked me out because I knew it was the Lexapro's doing so when I got home I told my mom about it and she immediately threw the Lexapro out and refused to take me back to the psychologist. Instead she started taking me to see this lady she met at work that used to work as a physical therapist. Thankfully I didn't go through any withdrawals from the medication and that lady helped regulate my metabolism and sleeping cycle which were all left seriously out of whack by that godforsaken medication.
So after reading all of that, please heed my advice: if your psychologist (or anyone for that matter) prescribes you Lexapro, burn it. It will completely destroy your world and throw you into one of emotional, mental, and physical demise.
