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Wellbutrin SR

Bupropion Hydrobromide

User Ratings
Out of 10
Satisfaction
5.4
3.5  Effectiveness
5.6  Side Effects
5.1  Holistic Benefits

RateADrug users have reported 8 Wellbutrin SR side effects and 4 Wellbutrin SR benefits.

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BrandsEffectivenessHolistic BenefitsSide
Effects		Number of Ratings
Lexapro 5.79 6.18 3.68 42 Get Info
Prozac 5.39 5.71 4.64 54 Get Info
Pristiq 4.35 5.25 5.67 57 Get Info
Wellbutrin SR 4.25 5.27 4.17 16 Get Info
Cymbalta 4.16 5.01 5.57 49 Get Info
Citalopram Hydrobromide 3.28 4.76 5.86 60 Get Info
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Effectiveness of Wellbutrin SR by Condition
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Effectiveness on "Depression"
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Not at all Mildly Moderately Very Extremely
How effective is Wellbutrin SR?  Get Your Score
Reported Changes in Health and Well-Being
Since taking Wellbutrin SR, RateADrug survey participants noticed these changes in their health:
Effect on:Much WorseWorseNo ChangeBetterMuch Better
Appetite 0% 24% 52% 20% 4%
Balance/Equilibrium 0% 8.3% 87.5% 4.2% 0%
Blood Pressure 0% 0% 100% 0% 0%
Breathing 4.2% 0% 87.5% 4.2% 4.2%
Confidence 0% 23.1% 53.8% 19.2% 3.8%
Coordination/Motor Skills 0% 20.8% 66.7% 8.3% 4.2%
Digestion 0% 11.5% 76.9% 11.5% 0%
Emotional Well-being 3.6% 21.4% 28.6% 32.1% 14.3%
Energy 7.4% 25.9% 25.9% 29.6% 11.1%
Eyesight 0% 4.2% 95.8% 0% 0%
Memory 4% 16% 56% 20% 4%
Mental Clarity 0% 23.1% 46.2% 26.9% 3.8%
Pain 0% 8.3% 87.5% 4.2% 0%
Patience 3.8% 19.2% 57.7% 15.4% 3.8%
Sexual Health 3.7% 14.8% 63% 14.8% 3.7%
Skin Complexion 0% 4.2% 91.7% 4.2% 0%
Sleep 0% 32.1% 39.3% 25% 3.6%
Stress Level 3.8% 15.4% 53.8% 26.9% 0%
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Commonly Reported Wellbutrin SR Side Effects
RateADrug survey participants experienced these commonly reported side effects:
Effect on:NoneMildModerateStrongSevere
Abdominal Pain 69.2% 30.8% 0% 0% 0%
Allergic Reaction 95.7% 0% 4.3% 0% 0%
Anxiety 65.2% 21.7% 13% 0% 0%
Blurred Vision 88.9% 11.1% 0% 0% 0%
Breathing Difficulties 88.9% 11.1% 0% 0% 0%
Change in Sex Drive 72% 16% 8% 4% 0%
Change in Weight 75% 0% 25% 0% 0%
Constipation 60% 13.3% 26.7% 0% 0%
Depression 60% 20% 20% 0% 0%
Diarrhea 86.4% 9.1% 4.5% 0% 0%
Dizziness 75% 16.7% 8.3% 0% 0%
Drowsiness 88.9% 11.1% 0% 0% 0%
Dry Mouth 28% 36% 32% 4% 0%
Fatigue 78.3% 4.3% 13% 4.3% 0%
Gas 88.9% 11.1% 0% 0% 0%
Headache 66.7% 20.8% 8.3% 4.2% 0%
Insomnia 64% 20% 8% 4% 4%
Irregular Heartbeat 88.9% 11.1% 0% 0% 0%
Irritability / Impatience 66.7% 11.1% 16.7% 5.6% 0%
Mood Swings 66.7% 33.3% 0% 0% 0%
Muscle Cramping 77.8% 22.2% 0% 0% 0%
Nausea 63.6% 31.8% 4.5% 0% 0%
Nervousness 50% 50% 0% 0% 0%
Relaxed / Calming Sensation 77.8% 22.2% 0% 0% 0%
Sensitivity to Light 77.8% 22.2% 0% 0% 0%
Stomach Ache 66.7% 22.2% 0% 11.1% 0%
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Less Commonly Reported Wellbutrin SR Side Effects
RateADrug survey participants experienced less commonly reported side effects:
Effect on:NoneMildModerateStrongSevere
Blurred Vision 73.3% 26.7% 0% 0% 0%
Change in Weight 60% 25% 15% 0% 0%
Fever 0% 100% 0% 0% 0%
Flu-Like Symptoms 75% 0% 25% 0% 0%
Increased Depression 89.5% 5.3% 5.3% 0% 0%
Irregular Heartbeat 0% 100% 0% 0% 0%
Irritability / Impatience 80% 20% 0% 0% 0%
Liver Damage 94.7% 5.3% 0% 0% 0%
Rapid Heartbeat 0% 100% 0% 0% 0%
Suicidal Tendencies 94.7% 0% 5.3% 0% 0%
Sweating 75% 25% 0% 0% 0%
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Episodes since taking Wellbutrin SR
Since taking Wellbutrin SR Rate a Drug survey participants reported these episodes:
Auto Accident 1.5%
About these Results  
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User Comments about Wellbutrin SR
23 Jun 2010 HAVE BEEN TAKING 300 MG SR FOR 5 WEEKS AND DONT SEEM TO BE ALOT BETTER. HAVE TAKEN MANY ADS DURING MY LIFE . USUALLY HAVE SOONER RESULTS THAN THIS.WANT TO SLEEP ALL THE TIME. DROWSY AND SHORT TEMPERED. DONT KNOW WHAT TO DO. DR ADDED ANOTHER MED, REMERON 15MG AT BEDTIME AND I FOR SURE COULDNT GET UP THEN. I HAVE TO WORK.I CANT SLEEP ALL THE TIM
   —Posted by TRICIA
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20 May 2010 I am currently on day 14 of Wellbutrin sr 100 mg per day. Right now I am not feeling alot better. I have had some dizziness, nausea and a few days of extreme headaches. I am still struggling....still depressed, and anxious. Wondering if the Wellbutrin will kick in shortly , or if I should try something else? Should I give it some more time?? Also on Lyrica 75mg 4x day and Remeron 45mg. in the evening. Thanks
   —Posted by Kitty
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03 Apr 2010 I switched to Wellbutrin after weaning myself from Cymbalta. I started taking Wellbutrin two weeks ago, 150 mg. Twice a day. I do smoke, but really wasn't my goal at this time to quit. One day during the first week, cigarettes tasted a little different. Life has become more stressful, losing job due to plant closure and break-up of 2 year relationship. I find my self on the verge of tears quite often during the day. I have no motivation nor energy. No suicidal thoughts, just more depressed and a increased feeling in hopelessness.
   —Posted by tomkat
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24 May 2009 I've been on Wellbutrin SR for several years, and have a lot of useful experience to share. For background, I am a chemical engineer, working in R&D for 25 years, with expertise in experimental design and statistical interpretation of results. I’ve also read in health science for just as long. Since the mid 1990s, I have been personally acquainted with depression, and therefore, have read a fair amount on its causes and treatment. I have also applied my strong orientation to experimental methodology to my own treatment. My thoroughness derives not from any OCD, but from simply having found myself in a hole, and having certain tools with which to climb out. So while my level of detail may seem abnormal, it comes from countless repetition of: taking a bite, digesting it, gaining some benefit, then moving on to the next bite. If I am obsessive about anything, it is about not misassigning cause and effect, since I want solutions, not scapegoats. Overall, my advice (below) on Wellbutrin is: it acts like coffee, so take it as such; doses are very individual; most side-effects are dose-dependent; tailoring the doses & timing at a fine-level makes all the difference; and it works best in concert with Remeron. The details follow. Two very experienced psychologists and one psychiatrist told me when their patients find the right medication, there is no “4-6 weeks delay before relief kicks in.” Instead, the relief occurs with the first pill. That was my experience with Wellbutrin. I also had, right away, some of the reported side-effects, but I dialed all of those out, completely, over time as I got more sophisticated in my use of Wellbutrin. Wellbutrin reportedly acts via dopamine re-uptake inhibition. Dopamine is associated with alertness, ambition, and initiative. Coffee acts similarly, and in my experience, has a much more positive mood effect than does pure caffeine. My first brush with depression came in early college, and it was relieved quite nicely when I took up drinking coffee. I was amazed then how my outlook brightened on drinking my first cup. By talking to others over the years since, I am convinced that some people are strong responders to coffee (neurochemically), and others are not. Unfortunately, I developed an unusual and severe prostate sensitivity to coffee -- and to related things like tea, cola, and chocolate -- in my mid 20s. So, by my early 30s, I had quit all of these things, which I had been semi-consciously using to manage my daily mood. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that I fell into a depression upon coffee withdrawal. That depression never felt driven by emotional outlook. I had a healthy self-image and a relatively optimistic outlook on my world. No, this depression felt solely like an illness. I could not sleep well, and this left me increasingly exhausted by day. Extended sleep deprivation is well-known to foster depression. Two or three years of lifestyle tweaking failed to restore my sleep, and I was unwilling to try sedatives, Instead, I tried several SSRIs, without much benefit – the best gave me a swimmy kind of peacefulness similar to the effect of codeine (the narcotic painkiller) which hardly felt like a restoration of normalcy, and it came at the cost of a COMPLETE loss sex drive and function. (My contacts with mental health care professionals on this are utterly consistent: the SSRI manufacturer’s claims that only 6-8% of the test subjects suffered loss of sexual functioning is absurd; the real number is virtually 100%. Just ask anyone who has tried them.) I then tried Wellbutrin. To my delight, I was instantly reminded of drinking my first cup of coffee. That is, I felt better within 20-30 minutes of swallowing the first pill. I also got side-effects: dry-mouth, agitation, constipation, and insomnia. But all of these went away completely under some combination of my body’s natural adjustment and by finding the precise dosing -- meaning both AMOUNT and TIMING -- for me. Most doctors give some (limited) advice about finding the right dose for you, and some may even talk about finding the right timing (what time of day to take the pills). But they don’t go nearly far enough. My extensive self-observations and self-studies over the years show a consistent pattern: 1) there is a unique optimal dose for each person; 2) small increases from this optimal dose produce large increases in negative side-effects; 3) small decreases from this optimal dose produce large decreases in mood benefit. Reread those three points. They are the most important observations I have to share. I’ll omit here lengthy speculations of possible metabolic explanations. But this kind of S-shaped curve is common in science. Acid-base titrations for example. Medicine also uses this term: “titrating to the individual” to obtain the desired response. There is also an optimal TIMING between doses. The individual’s optimal dose and timing both depend on numerous variables such as body size and metabolism, but also on things far harder to measure, like individual neurochemistry. I strongly recommend you buy a scale capable of measuring to 0.01 grams. (You can get them on-line for way less than your co-pay for a 3-month maintenance prescription.) Most prescription drugs formulate roughly 10:1 inactive fillers to active chemical. That’s a good thing. It makes pills large enough to handle and to split. And you can vary your dose roughly by 1 milligram of active chemical by shaving a pill by 0.01 grams. (0.01 grams of pill at 10:1 [filler:drug] = 0.001 gm active drug = 1 mg of active drug.) Next, start below the minimum therapeutic dose (currently 100 mg), and build up towards it. When you start to feel side effects, try backing down the dose. When you start to feel loss of mood restoration, try increasing dose slightly. Be patient but persistent. Unfortunately, the data required to assess a given dose can take a few days to collect. Consider one day one data point. You need more than one data point to make an informed assessment of any given dose. As for timing, whatever dose you are using, at any point in time, I suggest splitting it into three UNequal doses: half of your current daily dose upon waking, one quarter late morning (11AM for me), and the last quarter mid afternoon (3PM for me). Never take any Wellbutrin in the evening. (Of course, if you’re a shift-worker, you’d slide the timing accordingly.) You want it out of your system for sleep. (Just like coffee!) I currently take slightly under 150 mg Wellbutrin SR per day. For convenience, I start with a single 150 mg tablet, score it lightly in the middle with a fine file, break it by hand, then repeat that with one of the two halves. I use the file to shave off a bit from the half-pill fragment, to hit my current desired whole-day dose (i.e., shave the 1/2-piece, but weigh all four pieces together). You can apply the same concept to smaller or larger daily doses. The most important thing is to pay careful attention to your body’s response… … Agitation always means too much, or too much at once. You want to feel normally up, not jazzed. Think of the drug as a counterbalance against some inherent neurochemical imbalance, designed to get you back to normal. A manic, over-stimulated state is not balanced, and not sustainable or healthy in the long run. …. Feeling a consistent lack of interest in life is a sign of too little medication, or too long a gap between doses. This can be a little tricky. Even “the right drug for you” cannot replace a healthy lifestyle that includes regular sleep, a healthy diet, regular exercise, and an emotionally-healthy balance between work and social/family life. For example, I notice marked drops in my mood around 48 hours after my last exercise (actually, it’s 48 hours if it was strength training, and only 24 hours if it was aerobic exercise). I also notice marked drops in my mental energy within 30 minutes of eating junk food. So, if you are living well, and still feel no anticipation of joy from anything you might chose to do, try boosting the Welbrutrin slightly until this joylessness decreases to the level of normal ups & downs that everyone gets. If you find that your optimum doses and timing cannot quite eliminate all side-effects, then focus on the minimum dose that relieves the blues, then stick to it, and be patient. This will give you the lowest level of side effects, making them easier for your body to naturally adapt to, and less unpleasant in the meantime. My last advice is about synergy. Wellbutrin is a stimulating anti-depressant, so it’s great by day, but wholly inappropriate at night. If you are like me, you may suffer from being a little too “wired” all day: too much on alert, too much pushing to solve the day’s demands. For most people that makes it hard to sleep at night. Focused relaxation practice can help with that a lot, by resetting the nervous system to a more relaxed state. But it often cannot do the whole job by itself. For me, Remeron is the indispensable other half of Wellbutrin. Where Welby wakes you up, Remeron puts you down (pleasantly). I’ll omit a detailed discussion of its mechanism here. The most important thing to note is that it is NOT a classic sedative. It is an antidepressant that works overnight. Like Welby, you have to titrate the dose. Unlike Welby, I normally only take one dose: at bed. On rare occasions, when sleep becomes more elusive (such as after eating a food that contained MSG, or was spicey-hot), I have occasionally resorted to taking a few extra crumbs of a Remeronn tablet as a wee hour dose-booster for that night. I find Remeron soltabs ideal, because they are so easy to break up and to shave. Forget the fine file here; just use your fingernails. Currently, I take about 38 mg nightly, as fractions off a 45 mg sol-tablet. For both drugs, I have tweaked my doses and timing here and there over the years, always in following the guidelines I described above: listen closely to your body; be self-honest about assigning cause and effect (e.g., if I am not getting to bed on time, then the problem is not too little Wellbutrin); and make small changes at a time. I have NOT noticed any significant drift (increase) in my optimal dose over time. There are reports, which I consider irresponsible, of people needing higher doses over time, as if one develops an immunity to the drugs. That’s just silly. If you rely on the drugs as crutches to compensate for not taking good care of yourself, and if your expectations become increasingly jaded about how intensely positive life should feel, then yes, you may wind up taking higher and higher doses, until the side effects develop such fearsome teeth that you to (mistakenly) conclude the whole drug intervention strategy was a mistake to begin with. In my experience, the drugs helped to restore an normal emotional balance that lifestyle alone could not. But likewise the drugs alone are clearly insufficient (I have reams of personal data on that). Using the two (drugs & a healthy responsible lifestyle) together has given me back a full and rich life, that only gets better then longer I stick with it. Disclaimer: I have no associations with the companies that make these drugs what-so-ever (except of course that I buy their products for self use). I have no political or other biases for or against drug treatments for depression. Rather, I am deeply committed to the scientific principle of the evolving hypothesis, tested and refined by on-going experimentation in the real world. I also am deeply committed to a reasonable and positive outlook on life, having had a grandfather who decided too young (at 51) that life was not worth the trouble. My goal in writing this has been solely to share what has helped me, with others who may be in similar circumstances. I know how long I had to struggle to figure out this much, and am grateful to those who shared their experiences, before me, making my climb that much easier. Terms of use disclaimer: This website is free to use my above information for all purposes described in their terms of use, EXCEPT the sole copyright ownership. Since this is my personal information, I reserve the right to share it with any other on-line website for non-commercial purposes, or to use it myself for any personal purposes, non-commercial or otherwise, and that right shall not be infringed by any claims made explicitly or implied by any current or future modification of this site's terms of use. If this site does not agree to these terms, they are free to not post my above feedback, though I believe that would be counter to the site's claimed goals.
   —Posted by Dose Optimization Advocate
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02 Nov 2012 This is one of the most helpful reviews/comments i have ever come across! Wonder if you can help me out with this: have taken WB 150 XL for years. Worked great, no side effects. Life happens, and after a rough patch, a psychiatrist wanted me to take more WB, but said you couldn't split the XL in half pill-wise, to take more, without doubling it. He prescribed 100 mg. of WB SR twice a day (AM & NOON) and I feel like crap on it. Creepy hyped-up feeling, after only one pill, couldn't sleep that night at all. My regular doc is willing to put me back on the old 150 XL, but of course I am out the $$$$. Why the difference in the 2 kinds of WB?
   —Posted by Questioning in CA
26 Apr 2009 Hand tremor is the most obnoxious side effect of this for me. I take less of the med because of it, which means it doesn't work quite as well. Wellbutrin XL doesn't cause the hand tremors so I can take enough to be fully effective, but I can't afford it.
   —Posted by Immi
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