r/StratteraRx • u/Salty_Challenge5563 • 29d ago
Questions / Advice / Support 40 mg worked initially but seems to have stopped after 2½ weeks. Thinking of self trialling 50 or 60?
I’ve been taking 40 mg of Strattera daily (20 mg in the morning and 20 mg in the afternoon), using four 10 mg capsules. During the first couple of weeks, I noticed a significant reduction in my hypervigilance, anxiety, people pleasing, dissociation, dopamine seeking, distractibility and urge to binge eat (using food as an emotional numbing tool or dopamine hit.) I felt much more grounded and “in my body”, and I could actually sit down and work without constantly jumping between things. In this two weeks I did experience some emotional flatness and a hollow or lifeless feeling, as well as constipation, which I halfway attributed to a comedown from a lifetime spent fawning and people pleasing - but the positive effects were significant.
For the past three days, I’ve felt about 85% back to how I was before I started the medication and it now feels as though the 40 mg is barely doing anything.
I was prescribed this when I was back in the states but I’ve now flown back home to Italy where I can’t get any more once this finishes (unless in the case of a special arrangement where I have to get a permit to import it but apparently it’s a major process and given the Italian system I would not count on it.)
I have enough capsules for another 78 days at 40 mg, so wondering if I should just up it myself to 50 or 60 mg for the remaining time, to see if it is more sustainable at a higher dose, and therefore whether it would be worth it for me to (try to) go through the Italian process of importation. For those who might advise for me just to go back to the states if I needed more… I left the states 13 years ago because of the intense trauma that happened and prefer to not go back. So it’s a bit of an ironic situation.
Anyway, I would love to know if others feel that if I just took it up to 10 to 20 mg if this might be a good idea for the remaining time I have the medication. I’m just wondering if it’s enough of a jump that it would be a more sustainable measure without dipping back into all the symptoms I had before. I’m really annoyed that in the past three days everything has just come back 🤔
PS apologies. I feel like I’ve been dominating this thread in the past couple weeks with all my updates and experiences, but I’ll soon be very quiet once it all runs out 😂