Social media analysis

What People Report Online: A Social Media Analysis of Anxiety Medicines

A crowdsourced look at 139,521 public Reddit posts written between October 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026: which anxiety medicines people mentioned, and how often they said a medicine helped. These are self-reported experiences, not clinical results.

Social media analysis, not a clinical study

Read this first

An analysis of public online posts. It is not a clinical trial, and it is not a meta-analysis of clinical trials. Nobody's diagnosis, dose, other treatment, or outcome was checked.
Self-selected experiences. People choose whether to post. Those who are struggling, switching, or very pleased are more likely to write than people who are simply doing fine.
Online ratings favor habit-forming medicines. A 2015 study of 103,411 consumer drug reviews on WebMD found that drugs with addictive properties were rated higher online than the drugs they were compared with, even though online ratings agreed with published research for 62% of the drug pairs that could be checked. Expect benzodiazepines and other habit-forming medicines to look better here than the clinical evidence supports. Adusumalli and colleagues, 2015
Not a recommendation. Benzodiazepines carry a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) boxed warning about addiction, dependence, and withdrawal. Talk with a health care provider before starting, stopping, or changing any medicine. FDA benzodiazepine warning

What the research and FDA labels say How this was done What published studies found

Posts collected: 139,521
About anxiety: 98,755
Naming a medicine: 34,694
People and medicines with a first-person report: 35,138
Read by the language model (random sample): 5,408

Reported benefit

How often people said a medicine helped their anxiety

For each medicine, up to 200 people who wrote about taking it were picked at random, and a language model read each person's most recent post about it. The percentage is the share of people with a clear outcome (helped, did not help, or mixed) who said the medicine helped. The shaded bar is the 95% confidence interval, the range that fits the data given how many people posted. A medicine needs at least 50 people with a clear outcome to be ranked. Groups: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) are the usual first medicines for anxiety disorders.

How much to trust these percentages

The labels come from a small language model, checked against a fresh random sample of 200 reports that were labeled by hand without seeing its answers. It agreed with the hand labels 78% of the time on the outcome (Cohen's kappa 0.52, where 0 is chance and 1 is perfect agreement), which is moderate agreement and short of the target of 0.6 we set before checking. Of the reports it called "helped", 62.1% were read the same way by hand. In that sample the hand labels marked 50% of clear outcomes as helped and the model marked 45.3%. The intervals below show only the uncertainty from sampling, not from labeling, so most gaps between neighboring medicines are smaller than the combined error. Read the table as a rough picture of what people wrote, not a scoreboard. In this data the benzodiazepines ranked Lorazepam 1, Clonazepam 4, Diazepam 5 out of 20. They act within hours, so people can tell quickly whether a dose helped, and they also have some of the highest dependence and withdrawal shares in the table, so a high place here is not a recommendation.

Details of the check

Anxiety medicines ranked by the share of people who said the medicine helped, with 95% confidence intervals
Rank	Medicine	People with a clear outcome	Said it helped (95% interval)	Dependence or withdrawal mentioned	Side effects mentioned (any, then most common)
1	LorazepamAtivan · Benzodiazepine	54of 122 people the model read as describing their own use	72.2%59.1% to 82.4%	6.5%	Any 12.5% · Tiredness or drowsiness 5.5% · Sleep problems 3.5%
2	PregabalinLyrica · Other anxiety medicine	64of 128 people the model read as describing their own use	68.8%56.6% to 78.8%	5%	Any 20% · Tiredness or drowsiness 5.5% · Sleep problems 3%
3	EscitalopramLexapro · SSRI	85of 149 people the model read as describing their own use	62.4%51.7% to 71.9%	4.5%	Any 35.5% · Tiredness or drowsiness 11% · Nausea or stomach upset 10%
4	ClonazepamKlonopin · Benzodiazepine	63of 125 people the model read as describing their own use	61.9%49.6% to 72.9%	16%	Any 14% · Tiredness or drowsiness 3.5% · Nausea or stomach upset 2.5%
5	DiazepamValium · Benzodiazepine	64of 123 people the model read as describing their own use	60.9%48.7% to 71.9%	9.5%	Any 13% · Tiredness or drowsiness 5.5% · Nausea or stomach upset 2%
6	SertralineZoloft · SSRI	88of 153 people the model read as describing their own use	59.1%48.6% to 68.8%	2.5%	Any 32.5% · Nausea or stomach upset 8.5% · Tiredness or drowsiness 6%
7	GabapentinNeurontin · Other anxiety medicine	61of 131 people the model read as describing their own use	52.5%40.2% to 64.5%	6%	Any 30.5% · Brain fog or memory problems 8.5% · Tiredness or drowsiness 7.5%
8	ParoxetinePaxil · SSRI	92of 137 people the model read as describing their own use	52.2%42.1% to 62.1%	6.5%	Any 31.5% · Tiredness or drowsiness 8.5% · Emotional numbness 5.5%
9	DuloxetineCymbalta · SNRI	77of 140 people the model read as describing their own use	51.9%41% to 62.7%	6.5%	Any 36.5% · Nausea or stomach upset 12% · Tiredness or drowsiness 11%
10	VenlafaxineEffexor · SNRI	60of 141 people the model read as describing their own use	48.3%36.2% to 60.7%	14.5%	Any 33% · Nausea or stomach upset 7.5% · Brain fog or memory problems 6%
11	MirtazapineRemeron · Other antidepressant	67of 130 people the model read as describing their own use	46.3%34.9% to 58.1%	2%	Any 31.5% · Tiredness or drowsiness 10% · Weight gain or appetite change 10%
12	HydroxyzineVistaril, Atarax · Other anxiety medicine	62of 133 people the model read as describing their own use	45.2%33.4% to 57.5%	1%	Any 29% · Tiredness or drowsiness 13.5% · Nausea or stomach upset 4%
13	FluoxetineProzac · SSRI	76of 144 people the model read as describing their own use	44.7%34.1% to 55.9%	1%	Any 39% · Tiredness or drowsiness 10.5% · Weight gain or appetite change 9%
14	PropranololInderal · Beta-blocker	53of 121 people the model read as describing their own use	43.4%31% to 56.7%	2%	Any 21.5% · Tiredness or drowsiness 3% · Nausea or stomach upset 2%
15	DesvenlafaxinePristiq · SNRI	65of 121 people the model read as describing their own use	43.1%31.8% to 55.2%	6%	Any 21% · Tiredness or drowsiness 4% · Nausea or stomach upset 3%
16	BuspironeBuspar · Other anxiety medicine	65of 124 people the model read as describing their own use	38.5%27.6% to 50.6%	1%	Any 19% · Sleep problems 3% · Tiredness or drowsiness 2.5%
17	FluvoxamineLuvox · SSRI	67of 122 people the model read as describing their own use	35.8%25.4% to 47.8%	1.5%	Any 27% · Tiredness or drowsiness 5.5% · Nausea or stomach upset 5.5%
18	AripiprazoleAbilify · Antipsychotic	54of 104 people the model read as describing their own use	35.2%23.8% to 48.5%	1%	Any 23% · Tiredness or drowsiness 6% · Emotional numbness 3%
19	CitalopramCelexa · SSRI	73of 130 people the model read as describing their own use	30.1%20.8% to 41.4%	3.5%	Any 29% · Sexual side effects 6% · Tiredness or drowsiness 5.5%
20	VortioxetineTrintellix · Other antidepressant	72of 131 people the model read as describing their own use	22.2%14.2% to 33.1%	0%	Any 26.5% · Nausea or stomach upset 7% · Sexual side effects 5.5%

Overlapping intervals mean the difference between two medicines could be chance. Rankings reflect what posters wrote, not how well a medicine works.

Mentioned, but too few clear outcomes to rank

Trazodone: 39 clear outcomes from 137 people
Quetiapine: 49 clear outcomes from 110 people
Alprazolam: 38 clear outcomes from 106 people
Lamotrigine: 43 clear outcomes from 96 people
Bupropion: 48 clear outcomes from 88 people
Amitriptyline: 35 clear outcomes from 72 people
Clonidine: 35 clear outcomes from 70 people
Other beta-blockers: 20 clear outcomes from 52 people
Guanfacine: 17 clear outcomes from 34 people

Side effects and dependence

What else people mentioned

Share of all sampled people for each medicine whose post described each problem with their own use of it. The language model decided whether the post describes any side effect, and whether it mentions dependence, tolerance, or withdrawal; the kind of side effect was then tagged by keywords in the posts where the model found one. A mention is not a confirmed side effect, and people often post because something went wrong, so these are not side effect rates. FDA labels list the side effects found in studies.

Share of people whose posts mentioned each side effect, or dependence or withdrawal
Medicine	Any side effect	Sexual side effects	Tiredness or drowsiness	Weight gain or appetite change	Nausea or stomach upset	Sleep problems	Emotional numbness	Headaches	Dizziness	Worse anxiety at the start	Brain fog or memory problems	Dependence or withdrawal
Lorazepam	12.5%	0.5%	5.5%	1.5%	3%	3.5%	1.5%	0.5%	2.5%	0%	0.5%	6.5%
Pregabalin	20%	1%	5.5%	2%	2%	3%	1.5%	1%	1%	0.5%	1%	5%
Escitalopram	35.5%	7.5%	11%	4.5%	10%	5.5%	2.5%	2.5%	2%	1.5%	3%	4.5%
Clonazepam	14%	0.5%	3.5%	0.5%	2.5%	2%	1.5%	1%	1.5%	0%	0.5%	16%
Diazepam	13%	0%	5.5%	0.5%	2%	0.5%	0%	1.5%	0.5%	0%	0.5%	9.5%
Sertraline	32.5%	4.5%	6%	4.5%	8.5%	6%	4.5%	2%	3%	1%	2%	2.5%
Gabapentin	30.5%	1%	7.5%	2%	2.5%	3.5%	1.5%	2.5%	1%	0.5%	8.5%	6%
Paroxetine	31.5%	5%	8.5%	5%	4.5%	4.5%	5.5%	3%	2%	0%	1%	6.5%
Duloxetine	36.5%	4%	11%	4.5%	12%	4%	3.5%	3.5%	4.5%	0%	4%	6.5%
Venlafaxine	33%	4%	4.5%	2.5%	7.5%	3.5%	4.5%	3.5%	5.5%	1%	6%	14.5%
Mirtazapine	31.5%	0%	10%	10%	7%	6.5%	3%	1.5%	3%	0%	1%	2%
Hydroxyzine	29%	0%	13.5%	0.5%	4%	4%	2%	1.5%	2%	0%	0.5%	1%
Fluoxetine	39%	4%	10.5%	9%	7%	9%	7.5%	1.5%	3%	0%	5%	1%
Propranolol	21.5%	1.5%	3%	0.5%	2%	1%	0.5%	0.5%	1.5%	0%	1.5%	2%
Desvenlafaxine	21%	1%	4%	1%	3%	2%	3%	2%	3%	0%	1%	6%
Buspirone	19%	1%	2.5%	0.5%	2.5%	3%	1%	0%	1.5%	1.5%	0.5%	1%
Fluvoxamine	27%	2.5%	5.5%	2%	5.5%	4%	1.5%	3%	2.5%	0%	1.5%	1.5%
Aripiprazole	23%	2%	6%	1%	2.5%	0.5%	3%	0.5%	1%	0%	0%	1%
Citalopram	29%	6%	5.5%	4%	5.5%	3.5%	5.5%	1%	2.5%	0%	0.5%	3.5%
Vortioxetine	26.5%	5.5%	4.5%	2%	7%	2.5%	4.5%	1.5%	1.5%	0%	0.5%	0%

Method

How this was done

Data

Public Reddit posts written between October 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026, downloaded on October 8, 2026 from Project Arctic Shift, an archive of Reddit data made for researchers. Every post in each community for the period, except r/Anxiety, where the first 100 posts of each calendar day (in Coordinated Universal Time) were kept because of its size. Only posts were used, not comments.

Project Arctic Shift

Anxiety communities count every post. Posts in medicine communities count only when they also mention anxiety, panic, worry, or nervousness, because those communities also discuss depression, pain, and sleep.

r/Anxiety32,827
r/zoloft15,719
r/lexapro13,620
r/socialanxiety13,278
r/Anxietyhelp13,016
r/antidepressants12,693
r/Prozac10,202
r/benzodiazepines6,554
r/PanicAttack6,491
r/Effexor5,016
r/cymbalta3,169
r/SSRIs2,709
r/AnxietyDepression2,301
r/pregabalin1,091
r/gabapentin778
r/GAD56
r/hydroxyzine1

Steps

Find medicine names, counting generic names, brand names, and common nicknames and misspellings (for example Lexapro, Cipralex, and escitalopram all count as escitalopram).
Keep candidate first-person reports: the part of the post about that medicine is written in the first person and talks about taking it. Usernames were replaced with a one-way code as soon as posts were downloaded.
For each medicine, pick up to 200 people at random and take each person's most recent candidate report. Reading all 48,520 candidate reports with a language model on one laptop would have taken more than half a day, so the model read this sample of 5,408 instead.
A language model (Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 (4-bit, run locally with llama.cpp), temperature 0) reads each report and answers for that one medicine: is the writer describing their own use, and if so, did it help their anxiety, not help, give a mixed result, or is the outcome unclear. It must first copy the phrase that supports its answer. It also says how long the person had been taking it, and whether they mention any side effect and any dependence or withdrawal. One rule is applied afterward: “did not help” during the first two weeks counts as unclear, because these medicines can take weeks to work.
Tag the kind of side effect by keyword, only in reports where the model found a side effect.
Compute the share who said it helped, with a Wilson 95% confidence interval, and rank medicines with at least 50 people with a clear outcome.

Checking the labels

Sample C: 200 reports picked at random from the sampled people, excluding every report used in earlier checks. Each report was labeled by the artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that built this page, reading each report without seeing the model's answer; not a clinician, using the same written definitions the model was given. None of these reports was used in earlier checks, and the prompt was not changed after seeing the model's answers on them.

Outcome only (the labels that feed the percentages, with “not their own use” and “unclear” counted together): 78% agreement, Cohen's kappa 0.52.
All five labels, including whether it was the writer's own use: 55% agreement, kappa 0.38.
“Helped” or not: kappa 0.58. Of the 29 reports the model called “helped”, 62.1% were read the same way by hand (the positive predictive value).
Own use or not: 74% agreement.

The target was a kappa of at least 0.6. The final version fell short of it, so treat the percentages with caution. Earlier rounds, each checked on its own sample of 200:

Phrase rules (first version of this page) (First random sample): agreement 52%, kappa 0.24, "helped" read the same way 46.3%
Language model, prompt version 4 (Tuning sample A (used to write the prompt)): agreement 64.5%, kappa 0.48, outcome-only kappa 0.56, "helped" read the same way 61.3%
Language model, prompt version 5 (Fresh sample B (then used to tune version 7)): agreement 65.5%, kappa 0.49, outcome-only kappa 0.59, "helped" read the same way 66.7%

The biggest disagreement was about own use: the model often marked a first-person report that gave no outcome as not the writer's own use. That does not change the percentages, because neither label counts toward them, but it makes the counts of people describing their own use too low, which is why the side effect shares below are divided by everyone sampled. Among outcomes, the model more often saw a clear result where the hand labels saw none (for example, reading a rough first few weeks as “did not help”) than the reverse, and it rarely agreed with the hand labels on “mixed”.

Privacy

Only counts are published. No usernames, post links, or quotes appear on this site or in its code, and the downloaded post text is kept off the public repository. The scripts that rebuild these numbers are in the site's source code (scripts/social), and the results file is src/data/social-analysis.json.

Limitations

Reddit users skew younger and more online than the people who take these medicines, and medicine communities attract people with strong experiences.
Medicines with their own active community (such as escitalopram, venlafaxine, and fluoxetine) get many more reports than medicines without one, such as buspirone, hydroxyzine, and propranolol, whose communities had few or no posts in the archive for this period.
Benzodiazepines and beta-blockers are used as needed for short-term relief, while antidepressants used for anxiety may take several weeks to start working, so people judge them on different timescales. Source: National Institute of Mental Health · Mental health medications Source: National Institute of Mental Health · Generalized anxiety disorder
The labels come from a small language model run on a laptop. A hand check of 200 reports found moderate agreement, and the hand labels were made by the AI assistant that built this page, not by a clinician. Posts often describe several medicines at once, and the model can attach an outcome to the wrong one.
The model read a random sample of up to 200 people per medicine, not every report, so medicines with thousands of posts have intervals about as wide as smaller ones. Each person's most recent report was used, even when an earlier one stated a clearer outcome.
“Helped” is whatever the person meant by it. It does not mean remission, and short-term relief and long-term results are counted the same way.
Comments, private messages, and deleted or removed posts are not included, and r/Anxiety was sampled.

Other researchers' work, not our data

What published studies of patient reviews found

Four other groups have studied what patients write about their medicines online. Their results are shown as reported, on their own scales. They are not directly comparable with our table above or with each other: they used different websites, years, conditions, and methods, and two of them did not study anxiety at all.

Peer-reviewedMany conditions

Online drug ratings often matched the research, with exceptions

Online ratings differed by half a point or more62%

48 of 77 drug pairs agreed with published studies

Online ratings differed by a full point or more68%

15 of 22 drug pairs agreed with published studies

Data: 103,411 consumer reviews of 615 drugs for 249 conditions on the WebMD health website. Alprazolam (Xanax) had the highest rating of the drugs reviewed for panic disorder.

Caveat: Drugs with addictive properties were rated higher online than the drugs they were compared with, even where the research favored the other drug, and drugs with a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) boxed warning were rated lower.

Adusumalli and colleagues, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2015

Not peer-reviewedAnxiety

What people with anxiety rated most effective

1Exercise
2Yoga
3Xanax (alprazolam)
4Spending time with animals
5Spending time outdoors
6Cognitive behavioral therapy
7Meditation
8Ativan (lorazepam)
9Clonazepam
10Inspiring music

Data: 10,980 people with anxiety rated 95 treatments on CureTogether, a free patient community owned by 23andMe. Filled rows are medicines (all three are benzodiazepines).

Caveat: A company blog post, not a peer-reviewed study. Treatments were suggested by patients, the post gives ranks but no scores, and how ratings were combined is not described.

CureTogether and 23andMe, 2013

PreprintDepression, not anxiety

Reddit posts about hard-to-treat depression

Data: 5,059 Reddit posts about treatment-resistant depression (depression that has not improved after several treatments), with 23,399 medicine mentions sorted by a computer model as positive, neutral, or negative. Counts show the positive and negative mentions only; 72.1% of all mentions were neutral.

Caveat: Not yet peer-reviewed, about depression rather than anxiety, and the model was not checked against hand labels on Reddit posts. People in this group have, by definition, already had medicines that did not work.

Zhu and colleagues, arXiv preprint 2603.12343, 2026

Peer-reviewedAntidepressants

Satisfaction with nine antidepressants

Bupropion50 reviews · little blunting
Citalopram50 reviews
Venlafaxine50 reviews
Duloxetine50 reviews
Escitalopram50 reviews
Mirtazapine50 reviews
Fluoxetine50 reviews · much blunting
Paroxetine50 reviews · much blunting
Sertraline50 reviews · much blunting

Filled boxes: the three with the highest overall satisfaction. “Blunting” means emotional blunting, feeling emotionally flat.

Data: 450 reviews on the AskaPatient website, 50 for each of nine widely used antidepressants, analyzed by the researchers.

Caveat: The reviews cover any reason the medicine was taken, not anxiety in particular, and fifty reviews per medicine is a small sample.

Camino and colleagues, Psychological Medicine, 2023

Figures we could not confirm in the sources, so left out

Camino and colleagues: the satisfaction score for each antidepressant. The abstract names the three highest but gives no scores, and the full text is behind a paywall, so no scores are shown.
CureTogether: an effectiveness score for each treatment. The post lists the order of the top 10 only (its interactive chart could not be checked), so only ranks are shown.
Adusumalli and colleagues: a rating for alprazolam. The paper says alprazolam had the highest rating of the drugs reviewed for panic disorder but does not give the number in the text.

Treatments and their sources When a medicine isn't working Questions for your next appointment