After Half My Life on Antidepressants, I’m Off the Meds and Feel All Right

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From The Washington Post: “At age 30, I found myself hanging halfway out my Manhattan high-rise window, calculating the time it would take to hit the ground. Still depressed despite my antidepressants — possibly caused by the possible decrease in antidepressants’ efficacy over time or because I’d never properly dealt with loss and trauma — I regularly considered suicide. As I looked for breaks in the pedestrian traffic patterns, a thought dawned on me: I’ve spent half my life — and my entire adult life — on antidepressants. Who might I be without them?

The suicidal gears in my mind came to a screeching halt.

I pulled myself back inside my apartment, scheduled an appointment with a new psychiatrist and made the decision to get off all the drugs before deciding whether to take my life. I needed to figure out my true baseline. If I didn’t like what I found, well, the window was always open.”

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5 COMMENTS

    • Well, furies, the withdrawals can make you feel like you’re dying.

      Glad to see more articles like this. And commenters willing to speak the truth. Despite the gas lighting.

      Like the writer I had digestive problems when young. Shrinks messed my gut up royally.

      Wonder when a shrink will show up to scream “pill shamers” at those managing to survive without their next fix from dealers like him. 🙂

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  2. Brain drugs were the most simplistic drug ever to be invented. A pill based on theory is not true medicine, and it should by now be an embarrassment.
    I was just recently offered Wellbutrin for a situation I am in. On my record it says “I offered her Wellbutrin, but she declined”.
    Even the comments in reports are laughable. They bank on either everyone being on the same page, or ignorant, or knowingly deceitful. For the most part, consumers remain ignorant until years later, doctors operate either ignorantly or deceitful….and I really can’t imagine anyone educated being ignorant, at least not if one is a bit curious.
    I have no doubt that often when people first take anti-depressants and their brain scrambles enough that they present as changed. But it’s because the brain does not know itself in the same way. The new way soon enough turns out not to be “better”, but simply different.

    One reason more and more neuroleptics are used is that people won’t be aware.
    I remember 28 years ago being prescribed amytriptiline for muscle spasms, by a sports doc.
    I got pregnant while on them and since I knew nothing about drugs, I quit them.
    I developed severe brain shocks a few months later, but never tied it to anything.
    A few med people looked at me funny when I described it being as if someone was shocking my brain with electricity.
    They were not the little zaps, but shocks. “exploding head syndrome”, so I talked to my doc and we talked about an antidepressant, since she thought there might be some electrical misfiring.
    So I went on the lowest 37.5 of Effexor and it almost instantly took away those shocks.
    I could not believe it.
    I stayed on them for years and years, and once in a while I would try to go off and immediately would get the zappy withdrawal, plus my explosions.
    I wanted off so I could see if in the meantime my explosions had left. My doc denied I could possibly feel it if I went off the Effexor.
    I got so tired of being on the drug and really wanted to know if my head explosions had gone, but how would I know while on the Effexor. So I went online, started counting beads and it just was too much, because I knew that those beads were not identical.
    I went to a pharmacist plus online and the pharmacist suggested an every other day, to every two days and so on.
    I followed that but did the taper much slower, like maintaining the every other day for two weeks or more, then every three days for 4 weeks etc. Eventually I was off and to my amazement suffered few symptoms PLUS, my head explosions were gone.
    It was a slow realization that quite possibly my amytriptiline usage and stopping had caused the head explosions to begin with.
    Bottom line is, we the consumers, know nothing. We are too stupid to tie things together. We might be irrational and imagining. Actually I realized they give a lot of people no escape.

    If it takes adults such a long time to tie things together, how much longer would it take a child? I think psychiatrists also take a long time or perhaps never to make conclusions, one reason is, they never experimented with them and are also of the mind that their patients know nothing.
    There is a lack of intelligence in docs if they are so fixed and rigid that they believe themselves to be experts. If they ever do become insightful enough to incorporate their clients truths and experiences, by that time, their career is done and they would not want to have been involved in a global experiment.
    Many just squeak by, by telling themselves the same lies.
    I think much of that is a personal human attempt at staying “sane”. After all, to invoke doubt creates an “imbalance” and that imbalance IS what causes discontent.
    Which proves that one can be wholly insane and never know it. The people that doubt are the ones seeking help, which is the healthiest state one could ever be in.
    It has been most profitable to throw meds at normal human emotion LOL. It is so simplistic that in hindsight one can only be amazed that anyone believes this.
    The fixes are about environments and time, those are the “chemical” changers. To try and replicate money, love, thrills, green grass, etc etc etc with pills is beyond nutter thinking.
    It is not easy to change environments. Not for Johnny who is the 3rd child in his family structure, nor his mom, nor his teacher or school.
    Not easy for a girl to change recess gossip, not easy to change ones job, vocation, marriage or relationships.
    It’s not even easy to identify what we are dealing with or who is part of issues.
    The most convenient way to address this was to invent the craziest labels and the chemicals and actually pass them off as something valid.
    It is ASTOUNDING that this is happening in an educated world.
    Hopefully there is a gene that would be beneficial to world, but look around. Does it exist in our politicians? Our medicines? Our psychiatrists?
    They did gene studies on mental illness. No one ever considered psychiatry to be ill. They do not for a minute believe themselves to be ill or disordered in their thought process.
    Having a “psychotic” response to life or meds are NOT illnesses and cannot be defined. The absence of suffering is NOT a proof of mental health. Just existing without doubts, existing with a fixed and rigid belief about others is NOT a sign of mental health.
    Psychiatry and it’s chemicals and theories are absolutely nothing more than a social construct which we all have bought into. None of it, if thought about at any length has common sense, validity.
    It is a system of constant harms and lies, and any such system that is destructive to it’s clients, is not part of “HEALTH”.
    We are all questioning more, and we know that questioning is the sign that things are changing.
    So what if it is slow. Who knows what change will bring.
    We should really focus on the present and past harms that psychiatry keeps repeating and hopefully there will be trials, not of chemicals, but of the practice itself.
    They laugh at us, they scoff with either cockiness or a bit of nervousness. But I do believe them digging in more is a good sign.
    Hopefully some people who have influence will expose harms, not just from chemicals but from entrenched, fixed, rigid beliefs. It is after all the foundation of beliefs that cause the harms.

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