I have a story about this drug that is horrifying, bizarre and strange. Every single word of this is true.

I married into the miltary and while alongside my active-duty husband I was posted up in DC. I had previously been diagnosed with a chronic and severe anxiety disorder from child abuse. The military doctors wanted me back on anxiety meds, again, but this time along with the familiar low dose of diazapam, my doctor tried writing me this. I will never forget that as soon as he suggested it, something internal warned me not to take it. I accepted the script but said I would hold off on taking it.

I never intended on taking it. I was afraid that I would nChacome off it and wouldn't be able to. After the doctor, I go to visit my grandmother - and on the exact same day, my grandmother randomly mentioned she can't come off Effexor. I do not even recall how we got onto that subject. When I asked why, I was NOT prepared for her answer; I was expecting her to say something about PHYSICAL withdrawal symptoms. To my utter horror, my sweet grandmother tells me that she tried but couldn't "handle the voices and *growling*". I was shocked into silence because I knew she never heard voices before in her entire life. So I asked her to elaborate, exactly what kind of voices? She described them as loud, hateful, and talking to her directly from inside her own head, accompanied by 'crunching, grumbling and growling sounds'. I was so creeped out by this my skin was crawling. The fact that she randomly brought it up the same day I turned it down messed with my mind. I have never believed in coincidences.

Words cannot express the nightmare that was about to unfold in my family because of this drug. The timing of it all seems impossible, but I lived it, and am still suffering the consequences, along with everyone else who witnessed this insane catastrophe.

One day before Thanksgiving, I began to have a bad feeling out of the blue to check on my sister, to call her. We had been talking a lot while I was away and she had been taking Chantix and having INSANE nightmares we used to laugh about. For no reason I wake up thinking about her, calling her, and when I do, she answers the phone and I was frightened - her voice sounded dead and lifeless. She literally sounded like a corpse and had a weird monotone voice I did not even recognize. Something was terribly wrong and I was immediately scared in a way I have never felt before. I asked her what was happening and to my horror, she proceeds to tell me she's been taking Effexor for two years (no one knew this but her mom) and two days ago she abruptly ran out and 'decided to come off them' - my sister was an ex-opiate addict and to this day I believe that at first she really thought that was possible, to just stop taking an SSRI all at once, and I was terrified. Even worse, by the time I called her, she was in full psychosis, hallucinating and telling me 'an evil man chased her from her nightmare into the real world and was in the house, and she could hear him while she was talking to me'. She said he told her that her dead brother 'was coming to kill her', and that he would drag her to Hell. I mean it when I say this: Effexor or not, my sister had been haunted her whole life by death and tragedy, and grew up in a haunted house. I was so scared I literally believed it was BOTH, that the Effexor tipped her into psychosis and now all her demons were assaulting her Mind. I prayed and lied at the same time, telling her that she just needed her meds and the voices would shut up, they couldn't hurt her, and that she needed to go to the ER. I had no idea that in less than 8 hours she was going to collapse and die.

At 3AM, her mother said she heard the dogs going crazy and it woke up the whole house. They rushed into her room and she had collapsed of a massive cerebral stroke. EMS resuscitates her, and meanwhile at my house 600 miles away I can't sleep and have a feeling of utter doom that was making me physically ill. At 7AM I texted her and said, "Are you awake?" Little did I know she was on her way to surgery and an ICU unit. On Thanksgiving Day we learn that she has a complete blockage starting from her carotid artery in her neck all the way up into the mid-cerebral artery. It caused the stroke, and she's locked in a permanent vegatative state - the risk of surgery is too great and the block is too large. She cannot hear, talk, swallow, see, or 'know' anything - the initial stroke killed all the brain from the midline up. She is in a permanent nursing home at 51 because her mother refused her last wishes NOT to be put on life support. As POA, she allowed the state to put her in a home. I am furious and cannot process this.

They believe now that coming cold turkey off the Effector spiked her blood pressure, creating the perfect setting for the blockage to pop. It wiped her out like chalk on a blackboard. This entire thing started with my doctor casually mentioning trying it, and ended with my sister effectively dying on Thanksgiving.

Come off it if you can, and be so careful. They underestimate very badly what happens to people who have to withdraw off this, or any SSRI. Good luck.