That's probably part of what scares me, Dianne. I was on Effexor at the beginning of my last bout of depression, for close to a year I think. At one point the doctor and I decided to switch to Wellbutrin. She looked it up in some book she had and then told me I could stop taking the Effexor one day, skip a day, and start taking the Wellbutrin the third day.

WELL, words cannot possibly express how utterly horrific that was...my skin felt extremely jittery, I became bizarrely agitated, enraged and very suicidal...it was one of the worst experiences of my life. It was right about then that I finally got in to see my therapist. He told me that coming off Effexor cold turkey was reputed to be worse than coming cold turkey off heroin and/or crack and he was amazed that I survived without being admitted to hospital.

It makes me very leery of going back on any drugs for an extended length of time again.