Anyone have experience with trying prozac, then switching to trazodone?

Advice Needed

Moved to a new city, new vet, I told her about my 6yo doodle's very hard to control reactivity (lunging barking at everything, not to the point of biting/aggression though) and she prescribed prozac right away.

My dog was (and probably still is) going through a very traumatic moment but the prozac seemed to hit hard... she has low appetite but she almost stopped eating entirely. Wasn't interested in any type of playing, etc. just lay on her bed all day. Very depressing to see her that way (and it didn't even solve her reactivity when we saw especially dogs on our walks). So overall, all bad.

So I'm a bit nervous to ask the vet about trazodone since I don't want to put her through all that again. I know there's only one way to find out, and I want her to feel calm and secure on our walks (I do all the R+ training recommended and have been very strict with that after getting off prozac).

I'm hoping and praying trazodone + R+ structure on walks will be the magic bullet for her reactivity.

Anyone have any experience of success with trazodone despite not having any success with prozac?

in reactivedogsby [deleted]

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3mo

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[deleted]

3mo

Okay this is good to know, thank you. I can bring it up with a different vet, I guess, a reduced dosage maybe. No other options were given to me by the vet when I raised concerns and she totally just assented to me saying I wanted to taper off because of the side effects.

I guess the one caveat was that she was already very underweight because of the traumatic incident so I/maybe the vet didn't want to stress her body out even more with weight loss/loss of appetite side effects. But the vet def didn't engage me in a conversation about it.

pokey072020

3mo

I called my vet when I became uncomfortable with the effects, and we talked it out: stopping or reducing. We figured reducing was a good first step, and if he continued showing lethargy and loss of appetite we’d stop completely and regroup.

You’re in charge, my friend - don’t do something that doesn’t feel right, communicate your concerns to the vet, and if the vet doesn’t take you seriously or you feel at all hinky about it, change vets. I don’t think that’s the case here, but with many dogs there is nuance to dosage or even selected pharmaceutical approach, and they can only guide you based on your feedback.

[deleted]

3mo

Thanks for this, I may have a discussion with the vet again about restarting maybe.

Some context I left out was that I had just gotten her after her very traumatic event (being stuck in an apartment with my ex who passed away for 1 week) so I was very concerned about her weight and possible damage to her other organs if she continued to refuse to eat while adjusting to prozac.

Now that she's had time to recover, put weight back on and stabilize a bit, it may be worth another shot. Maybe I shouldn't have started her on meds right away but her reactivity was off the wall back then. Could have been the trauma, and coming to a new place, etc. but at least Iwas familiar to her.

pokey072020

3mo

Absolutely - no way to really isolate cause with all of that, and poor baby just needs to feel safe for a few weeks and adjust to new surroundings before you can really see what might need treatment. Can take a pup a few months to settle in before they let you see their true personality.

Hang in there, and thank you for caring for her!