Psychiatric Times Offers “Discontinuing Medications:
When, Why, and How-to”

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Psychiatric Times is offering an online continuing medical education (CME) course designed to “present information on why a patient might decide to discontinue psychotropics as well as best strategies for discontinuing, and why medication discontinuation might be necessary.” The course concludes “once the decision has been made by a competent patient to discontinue medication, even if you disagree with the patient’s decision, a thoughtful and gradual tapering strategy should be designed based on the pharmacodynamic, pharmacokinetic, and disorder-specific factors that exist.”

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Kermit Cole
Kermit Cole, MFT, founding editor of Mad in America, works in Santa Fe, New Mexico as a couples and family therapist. Inspired by Open Dialogue, he works as part of a team and consults with couples and families that have members identified as patients. His work in residential treatment — largely with severely traumatized and/or "psychotic" clients — led to an appreciation of the power and beauty of systemic philosophy and practice, as the alternative to the prevailing focus on individual pathology. A former film-maker, he has undergraduate and master's degrees in psychology from Harvard University, as well as an MFT degree from the Council for Relationships in Philadelphia. He is a doctoral candidate with the Taos Institute and the Free University of Brussels. You can reach him at [email protected].

5 COMMENTS

  1. “In disorders such as bipolar I and II disorders and schizophrenia, a strong case can be made for lifelong pharmacotherapy. ”
    “when medication discontinuation creates a risk of danger to the patient or others, legal intervention may be required, including the possibility of requesting a court-appointed guardian to make the final decision. ”
    “There is general agreement that bipolar disorder is a lifelong illness that presents with mood episodes of all types and with significant heterogeneity from person to person”
    “When meeting with a patient who is requesting medication discontinuation, the first step is to engage in a conversation aimed at having the patient reconsider his decision. ”

    I had to just stop reading. Even when they are forced to accept a changes occuring in the mental health world without them, they do so in such a way that they really shouldn’t be trusted to work in that profession any more. If the only way they can respond to data showing higher long-term recovery rates for unmedicated patients is to reluctantly taper them, after trying to persuade them to stay on them, all while considering them genetically inferior idiots, then they don’t belong working in a profession that supposedly exists to “help” people.

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          • I agree with those who were “put off” by this great “medication discontinuation” education. I was increasingly appalled as I read it.

            I think anyone going to a so called doctor given this so called training would risk being forcibly drugged and committed if saying they wanted to go off these poisons rather than helped to go off them given this horrific main stream garbage so called “training.”

            Of course, the mental death profession can’t bear to see anyone doing, thinking or feeling anything from they and Big Pharma can’t profit. Thus, since they know there are lots of web sites, books and other resources for coming off their deadly, dangerous, brain/body damaging poisons they pass off as “good treatment,” just like a psycho battering marriage partner, they are seeking to profit from it while continuing their fraudulent evil brainwashing of the victims already suckered into their more lucrative deadly paradigm to stay on their poisons and continue to believe in their bogus life destroying “invalid” junk science predatory stigmas.

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