Escitalopram Sickness

I took 80mg brand name Lexapro for several years and it was a great experience. I had no adverse side effects besides it keeping me a bit more on the manic side, but i liked that. Dare i say i felt as close to happy as i ever had. During some difficult financial times my doc suggested i try the much cheaper Celexa (citalopram) which he claimed was absolutely interchangeable with Lexapro. It wasn't. It didn't do a godamn thing for me. I gave it a couple months then asked for my Lexapro back, but again decided to go the cheaper route and get the generic. What a nightmare! Within the hour after ingesting 20mg of escitalopram i became violently ill. It creeped up with dizziness and a rapidly increasing heart rate, which got worse and worse until my heart was throbbing inside of my chest, my stomach ached with painful tension and knots, my extremities felt cold and numb, but i was hot and sweating profusely, my pupils were slightly dilated and i vomited until i was spent. I spent the rest of the day in bed trying to keep my heart rate down. It was frightening. I tried again over a year later, taking only 5mg this time, the same thing happened although the symptoms were slightly less severe on the smaller dose. Everyone says the generic and the brand name are exactly the same, but how did this happen? Has anyone out there had an experience like this one? Even my doctor didn't know why i would get so sick, unless it was some unknown difference between these 2 drugs. I need to get back on the medication that improved my life so much, but the fear of this is keeping me from trying the brand name. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

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Hello, Kate! How are you doing?

Why don't you consider trying a different medication, perhaps something like Prozac? It is an old, tried and true SSRI that has successfully helped many people.

Its usual side effects may include nausea, dizziness, dry mouth, headache and weight loss.

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From a chemical perspective, the active ingredients/ active molecules are and have to be completely identical. That is the only way that a generic medication can exist.
What does not have to be the same is the filler ingredients. For example, the colour added to tint the pill, the carrier that binds the active molecule in, and the coating on the outside.
There is a possibility that you are allergic to a 'filler' ingredient in one, and that 'filler' doesn't exist in the other.

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