My Pharmacist Is Trying To Kill Me

So I go pick up my Celexa yesterday. (And to answer your question, Robin, the reason I'm on that and not Lexapro is that Lexapro is supposed to be stronger, with fewer side effects. We don't want stronger. Stronger was too much for me. And my psychiatrist isn't sure that Lexapro really has fewer side effects than Celexa, though he does say it has fewer side effects than you'd expect for a drug that's as strong as it is.) Before I'd dropped it off, I"d looked at the presciption, just out of curiosity, so I knew what I was supposed to be getting: 20-mg tablets that I could break in half so that I start slow, with 10 mg, and then titrate up to 20 until I see Dr. Oui again in a month.

Here is what I got: a bottle of clearly-marked 20-mg tablets of Celexa, with a label on it that says, "Take one tablet each morning for seven days, then take two tablets (20 mg) each morning." Um...Two tablets would be 40 mg. Which would be way too much, way more than I'm supposed to be taking. And for someone like me, who responds rather, shall we say, robustly to these meds, that might just have blown the top of my head off, much like what happened to me when I went from 50 to 100 mg of zoloft way back when and really thought I was going to die from the shaking and the diarrhea and the panic.

Thank goodness I bother looking. What happens to people who don't? Or who just read the instructions and follow them? They become statistics, is what happens.

(And yes, I'm taking them with me to the drug store this afternoon to pick up a second prescription, and I'm going to ask them what the hell happened there, because really, there's just no excuse.)