US Brand Name: Celexa
A link here will take you to the official website for the drug.

Other Forms: Oral solution

Class: Antidepressant, specifically SSRI.
Read up on these sections if you haven't done so already, because they cover a lot of information about multiple medications that I'm not going to repeat on many pages.  I'm just autistic that way about not repeating myself.

FDA Approved Use: Depression

Off-Label Uses: Panic/Anxiety, Bipolar Depression, ADD/ADHD, OCD, Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, Arthritis, Lupus, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, Eating Disorders, Autistic Spectrum Disorders

Celexa's pros and cons:

Pros: Works well on the combination of anxiety & depression, is a good med to switch to if Prozac doesn't work or poops out on you as you typically avoid the short-term side effects during the switch.

Cons: The weight gain is bad for an SSRI.

Celexa's Typical Side Effects: The usual for SSRIs - headache, nausea, dry mouth, sweating, sleepiness or insomnia, and diarrhea or constipation, weight gain, loss of libido. Most everything but the weight gain and loss of libido usually goes away within a couple of weeks.

For tips on how to cope with these side effects, please see our side effects page.

Celexa's Not So Common Side Effects: Tremor, acne, disruption in your menstrual cycle.

 These may or may not happen to you don't, so don't be surprised one way or the other.

 You aren't going to get these. I promise.

Interesting Stuff Your Doctor Probably Won't Tell You about Celexa: For whatever reason people switching from Prozac to Celexa seem to avoid repeat visits from many of the side effects common to SSRIs. So if you're going to switch from Prozac to Lexapro (the new & improved version of Celexa), you may want to go to Celexa first, then Lexapro. But only if you can get samples or your meds are covered by insurance.

Celexa's Dosage and How to Take Celexa: Initial dosage of 20mg a day that can be increased to 40mg a day after at least one week. You can go up to 60mg a day, although there is little evidence from the clinical trials to support effectiveness at that dosage. Like any SSRI I recommend starting out with 10mg and then increasing to 20mg after a week. If you don't feel anything go up to 30mg, but stay there until you've given it a try for a month, otherwise it'll just be a pain in the ass to stop it. Even at 30mg you'll know after a month if it's going to do something for you.

Days to Reach a Steady State: About a week.

When you're fully saturated with the medication and less prone to peaks and valleys of effects. You still might have peaks of effect after taking many meds, but with a lot of the meds you'll have fewer valleys after this point. In theory anyway.

How Long Celexa Takes to Work: Like all SSRIs anywhere from a couple days to over a month. If you don't feel any positive benefit after six weeks, then you should talk to your doctor about either another SSRI or trying a med that hits another neurotransmitter.

Celexa's Half-Life & Average Time to Clear Out of Your System: Half-life is 35 hours. So it's out of your system within 6-8 days.

How to Stop Taking Celexa: Your doctor should be recommending that you reduce your dosage by by 10-20mg a day every 6-8 days if you need to stop taking it if you need to stop taking it, if not more slowly than that.  Make that 10-20mg a day every week just to make things easier on everyone.  Based on the 35 hour half-life.  For more information, please see the page on how to safely stop taking these crazy meds. 
If you've worked your way up to a particular dosage, it's usually best to spend this many days at the next lowest dosage before going down the next lowest dosage before that and so forth. This is the least sucky way to avoid problems when stopping any psychiatric medication. Presuming you have the option of slowly tapering off them.

How Celexa Works In Your Brain:  Like all SSRIs Celexa (citalopram hydrobromide) doesn't make you produce more serotonin, rather it makes your neurons soak for a longer period of time in the serotonin you already produce.  Serotonin is one of the big three neurotransmitters responsible for depression, along with norepinephrine and dopamine.  My wild-ass guess / rule of thumb is that imbalances of one or more of the three are responsible for 80% of the depression issues.  It's all just a matter of figuring out exactly the extent of the tweaking and what neurotransmitters you exactly need to tweak.

Comments: Mouse gained some noticeable weight on Celexa, but not as much as on the TCAs or other meds. It did wonders for her complexion as well. She would also wake up at 5:30 every morning in a state of hypomania. As one of those freaky morning people, I could go along with that. Ultimately, like any other med that messes with serotonin, Celexa was a bust for her. Hypomania is just not good. However, for many people in the bipolar 2 part of the spectrum, Celexa has been found to be a helpful SSRI. For people with unipolar depression, OCD, and panic/anxiety, it's just like any other SSRI, it might be the one for you, it might not. You'll have to try it and see. It's pretty much been supplanted by its sibling Lexapro, which is showing to have better effects and fewer side effects than most SSRIs. Celexa's only real advantage over Lexapro is that its size and dosage makes its much easier to discontinue than Lexapro.

Have questions about Celexa?  Want to read about experiences other people have had with Celexa? Check out our Lexapro & Celexa Board.

As of 11/03/2003. Full retail for the uninsured. Go ahead and gloat, citizens of civilized countries and all of you with full medical coverage.

Sample Canadian Cost: $55 for 30 40mg tablets

As of 11/03/2003. In US dollars, for re-importation to the US. Does not include any shipping charges. 

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Celexa in the News

Depression in the News

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Take care, and keep taking your crazy meds!

Jerod

If you still have unanswered questions about this or other medications, including which one is, or combination of meds are the best for you, your best bet is to ask on Crazy Meds Talk.  Better yet, if you want to let the world know how they worked out for you and want to help out others in their quest for the correct meds, join the party.
If you  want to discuss your issues, I suggest checking out one of the various support groups online.  
Otherwise, if you're letting me know about how much you like or hate the site, or  need to let me know about medication effects in private, then just drop a note to jerod23 at gmail dot com  Honestly, I usually don't have a lot of time to answer e-mail these days.  The snide autoresponse message that may or may not hit your mailbox is going to tell you the same thing.
Another problem is that you may not get a response even if I wanted to send you one.  You see, so many dickweeds with malicious intents and too much time on their hands have appropriated the crazymeds.org domain name to use for their spam, viruses and the like.  Subsequently some lazy-ass e-mail protection software authors just go by the domain name, and not the IP address.  So I've been blacklisted because of the actions of others.  Or the software just doesn't like the domain name because of the "crazy" and/or "meds."  Or your question about a particular medication will set off spam flags.  So the e-mail just wouldn't go through regardless.  Sorry.

Hey, did you find this page all by itself through Google or some other search engine? Great! But to really appreciate the entire site, you need to start here.

Copyright © 2003 - 2010 Jerod Poore. All rights reserved.

Almost all of the material on this site is copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 Jerod Poore. Except, of course, the PI sheets, those are the property of the drug companies who developed the drugs the sheets are about.  And any documents that are written by other people which may be posted to this site will remain the property of the original authors.  You cannot reproduce this page or any other material on this site outside of the boundaries of fair use copying without the express permission of the copyright holder.  That's usually me, so just ask first.  That means if want to print out a few pages to take to your doctor, therapist, counselor, support group, non-understanding family members or something like that - then that's OK to just do.  Go for it!  Please.  As long as you include this copyright notice and the following disclaimer, I'm cool with it.

All rights reserved. No warranty is expressed or implied in this information. Consult one or more doctors and pharmacists before taking, or changing how you take any neurological and/or psychiatric medication. Your mileage may vary. What happened to us won't necessarily happen to you. Nobody on this site is a doctor, therapist, or a pharmacist. We don't portray them either here or on TV. Only doctors can diagnose and treat an illness. Some doctors tend to get pissed off by patients who know too much about medications, so tread lightly when and where appropriate. Diagnosing yourself from a website is like defending yourself in court, you suddenly have a fool for a doctor. Don't be a cyberchondriac, thinking you have every disease you see a website about, or that you'll get every side effect from every medication. Self-prescribing is just as dangerous.  All information on this site has been obtained through personal experience, the experiences of my friends, the experiences of people reported on online support groups, and from sources that are referenced throughout the site.  Know your sources!  As such the information presented here is not a substitute for real medical advice from your real doctor, just a compliment to it.  No neurologists, psychiatrists, therapists or pharmacists were harmed in the production of this website. All brand names of the drugs listed in this site are the trademarks of the companies listed after them in the pages about the drugs, even though those companies may or may not have been acquired by other companies who may or may not be listed in this site by the time you read this. Always read the PI sheet that comes with your medications and never ever throw them away.  If you didn't get a PI sheet, demand one.  Loudly.  Crazy Meds is not responsible for the content of sites we provide links to.  We like them, or they're paid advertisements, or they're something you should read to make an informed decision about a particular med.  Sometimes they're more than one of those things.  But what's on those sites is their business, not ours.  Very little information about visitors to this site is collected or saved. And from time to time I do look at search terms used to find it in an effort to make the information I present more relevant. Use only as directed. Void where prohibited.

"Everything is true, nothing is permitted." - Jerod Poore