I started taking Escitalopram (Lexapro) on 4/27/2022. One 10 mg tablet every day. At the two month mark I contacted my doc and told her I'm not really finding relief for my anxiety. Don't get me wrong anxiety was never worse than before (except for during the first week, which is to be expected), but anxiety was not really any better either. I asked her if it's okay to take twice the dosage (so two 10 mg tablets per day i.e. 20 mg per day instead of 10 mg) and she said that's fine and if that didn't work than we'd go back to the drawing board.

I slowly weened off of 20 mg of lexapro back down to 10 mg these last few weeks, and I'm literally down to my very last tablet tomorrow. All in all, I was on Lexapro for approximately three months and two days (never missed a single dose either). Last week when I saw her she recommended I switch to Trintellix 10 mg per day (and then double the dose to 20 mg within a few weeks to a month if symptoms get better just from 10 mg). I guess many doctors have some faith in Trintellix and it is commonly prescribed for people who didn't respond much to Lexapro?

So basically I literally have a 90 day supply of Trintellix sitting in my medicine cabinet and I'm going to be taking the very first 10 mg tablet on Sunday.

As we all know, there is no uniform concensus on the amount of time it takes for any antidepressant to start working. EVERYONE is different. For some people it works within a week, for others it takes 6 months, and everything in between. However, I think it's fair to say that for most people, it takes 6 - 8 weeks for any given antidepressant to stabilize in the system (the moment when you basically "feel" something). I'm sure some people might tell me "ahhh no you should have given just ONE more month!" or some other amount of time but I've made my decision and it's FINAL 🤣 after 3 months of taking Lexapro I didn't feel any different than I did before I started and that's really sad if you think about it. I had high hopes in Lexapro to be my new one size fits all medication to treat my GAD without having to depend on taking my prescribed benzos but here I am still needing my Ativan (I even had a taper schedule and everything to get off of it but didn't know the Lexapro was going to let me down SMH).

Okay....so my question is: since it takes 6 - 8 weeks for antidepressants to start working (not the full therapeutic effect, I know that takes 6 months if I'm not mistaken...), do you think it will still take that same amount of time for Trintellix to work on me, or might I notice benefits sooner? And the ONLY reason I'm asking this question is from a purely biochemical/chemistry standpoint, because TECHNICALLY Lexapro has been preserving serotonin in my body for the last 90 days, and now I'm just adding more by taking Trintellix....OR do you think it will be like starting ALL OVER AGAIN in spite of that?

Thank you! :)