“I Made it Through the Horrors of Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal” A Conversation with Comedian Dex Carrington

Jørgen Kjønø, whose stage name is Dex Carrington, is a Norwegian-American stand-up comedian based in Oslo, Norway. He is also an actor, host of the Truth Train podcast, and former travel show host who gained international recognition as the host of Dexpedition, which aired on MTV in over 30 countries.

Today, he joins us on the Mad In America podcast to talk about his experience with Lyrica and Zyprexa, including a five-and-a-half-year taper after 10 years on the drugs.

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

Brooke Siem: Thanks for being here. Who is Dex Carrington, as opposed to Jørgen?

Dex Carrington: I was born in Norway but I grew up in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Canada, going to American schools my whole life, so English became my first language. When I started doing stand-up, I needed a stage name. I couldn’t go on stage with a name that sounded like a tongue-twister in English.

Around that time, I got sponsored by the clothing brand DC — they do skateboarding, snowboarding, that kind of stuff. They wanted a lifestyle representative, and I had to pick a name that began with “D” and ended with “C.” So I became Dex Carrington.

Siem: And all your comedy is under Dex Carrington?

Carrington: That’s it, yeah.

Siem: While this isn’t a comedy podcast — let’s find a little humor in the tragedy here. You and I connected over Instagram through the psychiatric drug withdrawal world. Can you walk us through your psychiatric drug history?

Carrington: Throughout college and high school, I drank a little, and smoked a little pot. Nothing major. I was focused on getting good grades and I was just a really upstanding citizen if you will. Then after university, I moved into adult life and the transition was too much for me. I got benzos from my doctor and thought, this is brilliant. But I noticed very quickly how intense the consequences were — they’re narcotics, and they mess with your ability to calculate risk.

Things started unraveling pretty fast, so I went to a psychiatrist and said, “Listen, I don’t want to become a drug addict but I have so much anxiety and depression. Please help me.” And the way he framed it was basically: If you’re a good person, you take psychiatric medication. If you’re a bad person, you take narcotics. What do you want to be?
It’s funny, right? Because every mood-altering substance affects your brain — but somehow, these pills are magical! They’re beyond the laws of physics!

Siem: Benevolent!

Carrington: Oh my goodness — divine, even! Homeostasis doesn’t apply, logic doesn’t apply, nothing applies. It’s just fairy tales all around.

So I started taking these pills and I went through the whole list — Zoloft, Cymbalta, Prozac. Every one of them made me sick. Each one was a nightmare. But there’s a doctor there with a diploma and the outfit and the credibility, and you’re trained your whole life to trust these people. You think, Why would this person be destroying my life? That’s not possible, right? How can this person’s ignorance be ruining my psyche even more?

Eventually, I ended up on two drugs that did something — Zyprexa, which makes you extremely groggy, and Lyrica, which at the time was still considered low-risk with the same addiction profile as Tylenol. Those were the two drugs I was on by 2011, after having tried something like 30 or 40 different ones.

Siem: What country were you in when all of this was happening?

Carrington: I was in Norway. I stayed on [Zyprexa and Lyrica] for a year or two, but the drug use kept escalating. By 2013, I needed to get clean. I got off the narcotics first. Then I went to my psychiatrist and said, “I want to get off these, too.” He said, “No problem — taper both at the same time over two weeks.” So I did. And I went insane.

It was like being rigged with a kill switch. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t think and couldn’t function. It felt like I had every neurological disorder known to man at once. The suffering was unbearable so I reinstated, and the pain went away. Subconsciously, I decided that the most important thing in my life is to never get off these drugs — and never question their efficacy because that was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced.

Siem: What was your mindset during the time when you were being shuffled around the initial 30 to 40 drugs, in terms of how you viewed yourself and your mental state?

Carrington: I thought I was at max suffering—because I didn’t have enough life experience to know how bad things could get. I didn’t have any resilience, either. But there was a doctor telling me, “This is totally safe and harmless.”

Siem: You bought into that?

Carrington: Yes, 100%.

Siem: Did you think you had a mental illness?

Carrington: That wasn’t so important to me. I had symptoms, and if I had to admit to being bipolar or whatever just to get some help, fine. I thought, People way smarter than me have figured this out. I imagined geniuses in Geneva with beakers and all this experimental stuff, wearing lab coats. I figured they were very smart, and we could trust them. I believed in modern science—blah blah blah.

I think I ended up with nine diagnoses or something like that. Today I have none—because I just decided not to have them. Looking back, it’s just madness. And it’s all so simple.

I think what gets me the most is remembering how certain that psychiatrist was. The kind of certainty he had—you can only have that if you have very little information. But even if someone had tried to tell me the truth back then, I wouldn’t have been able to grasp it. There’s just no reference point for how much suffering these pills can cause.

Once I gave up on getting off Lyrica and Zyprexa, there was no point in trying to stay clean. I mean, how can you call yourself “clean” when you’re taking Lyrica every morning and night, plus Zyprexa? If you don’t take them, you die.

Eventually, my life just spun out of control. I was on cocaine and OxyContin, on Adderall, tons and tons of benzos, powders—everything. Testosterone injections, you name it. Then there was an intervention, and I went to rehab in Thailand in 2019.

The first thing that happened in rehab was they took me off all the narcotics—either stopped them or tapered me on methadone for 10 days. But then I saw the psychiatrist there, and he said, “Oh, you’ve been on those meds for eight years? Just quit them. Cold turkey.”

Oh man—the fear. At that point, the only thing that mattered to me was staying on those drugs. Never tamper with them. I was terrified of what would happen if I did. I’ve always said: that it’s hard to get off narcotics because you love them so much—but it’s hard to get off psychiatric drugs because you fear them so much. If you’ve ever tried to reduce the dose and really felt that impact… oh my God.

I’ve had death threats. I had to live at a secret address for four years. I’ve lost people I’ve loved. The love of my life left me. My dog was stolen. I’ve been suicidal—over and over again. But all of that? It’s nothing. I’d rather live through all that every day for the rest of my life than experience one minute of psychiatric drug withdrawal.

Siem: Where are you at now, just from a symptom standpoint?

Carrington: I’ve been off Lyrica for over four years. I took a six-month break, then did the Zyprexa taper. And this part is really important for me to communicate—because I would’ve given everything I owned in the world to hear this when I was in Lyrica withdrawal: The fear disappears.

That overwhelming, body-wide terror—when your amygdala’s on fire, when fear isn’t even the right word because it’s not fear, it’s horror, terror. There are no human words to describe how bad it feels. But it fades. It dissipates. Everything gets better. The fear from Lyrica withdrawal goes away. That might be the most important message on planet Earth.

Two years ago, I had 10,000 symptoms. Now I have about 10. But your brain doesn’t spend time thinking about the symptoms that are gone—it fixates on the ones that are still there. There’s always one that steps into the spotlight. Right now it’s some digestive stuff but the big difference is that I can talk again. For two years coming off Lyrica, I couldn’t even talk.

What really matters is looking back six months, a year, and noticing the changes. You need people around you who’ve witnessed the journey and say things like, “Whoa, you’ve got a spark in your eye again,” or “Your skin is glowing,” or “Your hair looks thicker.” Whatever it is—those markers show you’re coming back to life.

Siem: How did you weigh the math of being in that place of unbelievable pain and suffering versus just going back on the Lyrica and Zyprexa?

Carrington: When I got clean and sober—funny enough—everyone at rehab was saying, “If you can get off Oxy, you can do anything.” And for most people who are just on Oxy, that might be true.

But in my case, the Oxy, cocaine, amphetamines—all that stuff was counteracting the side effects of the psych meds. So once I got off the narcotics, I was sicker than I’d ever been in my entire life. If I didn’t find a way to get off those pills, I would’ve ended up handicapped—on government benefits, probably needing someone to take care of me full-time.

My back pain was so debilitating I couldn’t get in or out of a car at age 36. And I’ve said this on stage many times: nothing can make you more mentally ill than a psychiatric drug. Because once you’re messing with the nervous system, the amount of pain you can generate is incredible.

I remember giving a talk about a year ago and a nurse came up to me afterward. She said, “How can you say Lyrica causes pain? We give it to patients every day for pain.” So I asked, “Do you have a single patient who is only on Lyrica—and not also on Codeine, Oxy, Ketarax, or Benzos?” And she said, “No.” That had never even occurred to her.

But for me, Lyrica caused anxiety, pain, and dysfunction. If I hadn’t gotten off of it, I would have been permanently disabled. So I started the taper and thought, Hey, I went off Oxy, I can do anything.

Siem: What kept you going?

Carrington: There are two kinds of people in this world, Brooke: those who are humble, and those who are about to be humbled.

What got me through it was that once you get down to a certain dose, and for me that was around 100 milligrams, it stops feeling like withdrawal and starts feeling like a bad acid trip beyond your worst nightmare. And it feels like it’s never going to end.

But then I started noticing that people in the Lyrica support group were saying they’d reinstated—and it didn’t help. Some said they actually felt worse. And that’s when I realized: once you commit to the withdrawal—especially with Lyrica—you can’t mess with it. You can destroy yourself if you don’t follow through.

Fear kept me going. Say what you will about fear—it’s maybe not the most inspiring motivator, but it worked. It kept me alive.

Siem: Fear kept me going too—and anger. Once I realized what was happening, I was so pissed off. I got into this headspace where I was like, I will not give the pharmaceutical industry one more dollar after what they did to me.

Carrington: I can relate to that completely—just not having to go to the pharmacy and take something I didn’t want to take. That kind of anger—it was just unhinged. And then on top of that, all the doctors would do was deny my experience.

Siem: What was your support system like during this time?

Carrington: I had the best support system in the world. I had my parents, and it was COVID. Everything was shut down and I had a girlfriend at the time who was just obsessed with getting me off these drugs. She was basically like my personal nurse.

Siem: You said something before we got on this call that stuck with me—that there’s just an unacceptable amount of doom and gloom in this space. That’s something I’ve struggled with too.

It’s tricky. On one hand, I think one reason I was able to make it through withdrawal—even though it was horrible and lasted a few years—was because I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t have anyone in my ear from social media listing off all the symptoms I might get. I wasn’t constantly being bombarded with worst-case scenarios. I think that ignorance helped me.

On the other hand, I feel a real obligation to share what I’ve learned and to contribute to advocacy, to help make this whole process safer and less destructive for other people. But I’ve seen how sharing too many specific symptoms can backfire. They might hear about a symptom they didn’t even have—and suddenly, they develop it.

We’re doing so much important work to raise awareness, but at the same time, I worry that we’re also making people more scared. What are your thoughts on that? How do we steer this in the direction of recovery, while still making sure people are fully informed?

Carrington: In April of last year, I was volunteering with an organization called We Shall Overcome, an anti-psychiatry NGO here in Norway. With a little funding from them, I went down to Copenhagen and sat down with Anders Sørensen, and I asked him all the questions I had been terrified to face—like, “Is this permanent?”

Anders turned out to be the best support I ever had—not just for protracted Lyrica withdrawal, but also for actually tapering Zyprexa. He walked me through everything: how to use the diamond scale, what kind of dosages to use, when to drop to zero, what percentage of the original dose you reduce to. All of it.

What I needed at the time was to be treated like a terrified five-year-old going on a roller coaster for the first time. You can’t look that kid in the eyes and say, “We could die, you know.” That’s trauma for life. You have to stroke their head and say, “It’s going to be fine. It’s only two more minutes. You’re safe.” That’s what I needed. I needed someone to say, “It’s going to be fine.”

I mean, I had weeks where I had uninterrupted heart attack symptoms—like a full-blown heart attack—for two weeks. So you sit there wondering, Do I go to the hospital? But then you remember, Wait—they did this to me. So what the hell do you do? All I needed was for someone to tell me, “It’s going to be fine.”

What’s so crazy is that when you go to a doctor and say, “I feel broken. I’m in pain. I have these symptoms,” not only do they deny your entire experience—they make you the enemy. You become the enemy of the establishment. And people need to feel understood. We need someone to say, “That sounds horrible. I believe you.” So when doctors won’t do that, people go online. That’s where they go to be seen, acknowledged and heard.

But in this misguided effort to help or raise awareness, what we end up doing is presenting horror stories. And a lot of those stories haven’t even run their course yet. I remember reading one on Surviving Antidepressants—a so-called “success story” from someone who had been on Zyprexa for 20 years at 30mg, tapered it in six weeks, and started five new drugs. They were four weeks off that six-week taper and called it a success. That’s not a success story.

As you said—the last thing someone needs to hear in that state are words like permanent, damaged, or irreversible. This is already a nightmare. You have to be so careful with who you listen to and where you get your information from.

When you’re coming off a psychiatric drug, every single mental faculty that allows you to do hard things is gone. Your brain is stripped of those tools. You don’t have access to discipline or resilience. You’re like a newborn, plunged into one of the hardest human experiences imaginable. It’s like being halfway up Everest and suddenly losing the ability to walk or think—and then someone says, “Good luck.”

Siem: What have you taken from this, from a more spiritual perspective?

Carrington: I remember talking to my sponsor in recovery and asking, “What do you think prolonged suffering actually does to people?” Because let’s be honest—it doesn’t always improve people. Sometimes they just double down on their delusions. And he said, “Humility.” That stuck with me. All the other stuff—curiosity, openness, flexibility—it’s all rooted in humility. And I think the opposite of humility is certainty. That mindset of, I know for sure this is how it is.

But I don’t know anything for sure anymore. Everything’s fluid now. If someone has an opinion I don’t agree with, my first instinct is to ask them to tell me more. Sell me on it. Convince me. That combativeness I used to have? It’s gone. I’m not interested in fighting for ideas. I’m not even that interested in talking about myself anymore. I just want to know what other people think. That curiosity—that’s what stayed with me.

Siem: It’ll keep changing, too. It’s been nine years since I got off my meds, and about seven since I felt like I was truly healed—or out of withdrawal, whatever that means. And the further I get from it, the less I feel like I know.

It’s this lovely inverse relationship—where I’m becoming more childlike and more enamored with the basics of existence, while simultaneously becoming less and less sure of anything. And then I find myself sitting there, shocked at how deeply this experience shaped me—how much it continues to influence my life in ways I still can’t put into words.

Carrington: When my girlfriend of seven years—my best friend, the person I spent every single day with—left, took the dog, packed up the apartment, and I never heard from her again… the only thought I had was, At least it’s not psychiatric drug withdrawal.

That’s happened again and again. I’ll go through something hard, and my brain just immediately compares it: Yeah, but it’s not withdrawal. It’s like I’ve got this internal reference point that’s so extreme, nothing else really registers the same way. Other people talk about wanting to go to Thailand or Dubai, check off their bucket lists, get married, go to cool parties—and I just think, I don’t care about any of that.

All I want is serenity. I want the opposite of psychiatric drug withdrawal. I want to be able to sit in a quiet room and stare at a wall. I take a walk and it’s like, Wow. I go to the grocery store and I’m like, Imagine that we can just buy this. That we can just walk in here, and other people are doing it too. And it works. That’s wild.

Siem: I think it goes hand-in-hand with spirituality—or maybe whatever’s left when all the constructs fall away. I like the word spirituality, but I don’t love religion, and I especially don’t love God because that word brings so much baggage with it.

Sometimes I wonder if ‘wonder’ is a better word. It captures the weirdness. Being human is weird. Everything we’re doing is so strange when you stop to think about it. And over the past year or so, that sense of weirdness has just intensified.

Carrington: Do you think it was the withdrawal experience itself that changed you—or was it returning to your natural baseline that brought that childlike wonder back?

Siem: I think it’s a little of both. I’ve always been an extremely sensitive person. As a kid, I was emotional, reactive, constantly moving, and sensitive to everything—foods, fabrics, and smells. But the drugs totally dampened that. They flattened everything. I became stoic and “tough,” and you get rewarded for that in society. So I leaned into it.

The drugs made it possible to go deeper into the pain cave and act like nothing bothered me. And then, when I came off them—especially since I did it cold turkey from Effexor—it was like I got dropped into a scalding hot tub straight out of the snow. There was no time to adjust. No buffer. Just overwhelming sensation.

And I think that kind of sudden, intense contrast encodes itself into your body. And after that, your baseline sensitivity changes. It expands. Like you’ve been cracked open, and now your container is just bigger. So yes, part of me thinks I returned to my original sensitivity—but I also think withdrawal blew the edges off what I thought was possible to feel. And now, I live with more range than I ever did before.

Carrington: It’s lonely. To be in this space where you see it—that the world isn’t what you thought it was—but most people are still asleep. Still stuck in that loop of trusting the system to the bitter end. That has to be worse, honestly. At least I’m not there anymore.

So I try to find gratitude in everything. And I think the biggest lesson of this whole experience is to question authority. To question anything presented as an “established fact.”

A friend of mine went through this—his kid is seven. His ex-wife is a psychiatric nurse, and she insisted the kid had ADHD. So they took him to a psychiatrist. I gave my friend all the literature he needed—counter-arguments to the ADHD/amphetamine model. And he was relentless. Every time the psychiatrist said something, he had data and he kept saying, “No, no, no”. Eventually, the psychiatrist said, “You know what we’ll do? We’ll put the ADHD diagnosis on hold and come back to it in six months.”

I mean—imagine if an oncologist said that. “You have stage four cancer, but hey, we’ll just put that diagnosis on hold for a year and circle back.” It’s absurd, Brooke. It’s crazy.

Now, I question everything. And I don’t mean I’m naive or falling for every conspiracy theory—I just stay open. If someone says the earth is flat, I’m not jumping on board, but I’ll say, “Okay, sell me on it. I’m listening.” No one has convinced me yet, but that openness? That wasn’t there before.

The truth is that most people I meet have done an excellent job avoiding pain for most of their lives. And I get it—that’s the most human instinct. But people can only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves. Pain and suffering rip your illusions away.

When I was younger, I had all these luxury beliefs. Like, “If I ever had to amputate my arm, I’d kill myself.” That kind of thing. But when you get into actual hardship, real survival-mode suffering, all that talk disappears. You realize how much of life is just noise. You discover the real you.

On one hand, it’s incredibly lonely trying to talk to people who’ve never been through something like this. But at the same time, I’m so grateful I’m not where I used to be. Does that make sense?

Siem: Oh yeah. In my experience, psych drug withdrawal forced me to figure out the difference between what money could fix, what it couldn’t fix, what I could fix, and what I couldn’t. When I started to get really deep into the realization that doing what was best for me—not in a selfish, way, but truly what my soul needed—that’s when I started to turn the corner in recovery.

It wasn’t fun. There was a lot of crying. A lot of vulnerability. A lot of saying things out loud to a counselor that I was terrified to admit—because of the shame I felt. Shame about a bad experience, about how far I’d fallen, about what I’d done. But I walked into that fire. And the more I did it, the easier it became to turn away from the garbage. I stopped clinging to the things that weren’t serving me.

Now—seven years later—it’s so easy to see the garbage. I just say, “Nope. Not that.” And I turn the other way. As a result, when I talk to most people here in the U.S.—they say things like, “The world is on fire,” or “Everything’s going to hell,” or they’re deep in political panic. But that’s not my experience. Not at all.

I’m having a great time. My life is beautiful. And it’s not because I’m making millions of dollars. It’s because I’m being intentional about what I consume. I choose the information I let in. I choose the people and the energy and the environments I surround myself with.
I follow that tiny internal compass—just that little flicker of curiosity or peace. And if I start veering off and I feel myself turning toward the garbage, I notice it early and course-correct. The more I do that, the better things get.

And I couldn’t have learned that without psych drug withdrawal. I wouldn’t have been forced to face it. The spotlight was on everything—my thoughts, my values, my relationships. And the only way through was to give up all the old ideas of who I thought I was supposed to be and keep turning toward whatever felt like relief, curiosity, or expansion.

Carrington: What you’re saying is so spot-on—especially the stages involved. First, there’s the technical part: tapering the doses, doing the math, and navigating the mechanics. But then you have to go way back to the beginning—as you said—and realize the drugs are even the problem in the first place. That stage alone can take years.

And then, eventually, you get to where I’m at now—where the withdrawals start to subside—and that’s when the real stuff begins. That’s the part you’re talking about: the reinvention.

For over a decade, I was living as someone I wasn’t. I was going through the motions of a life that didn’t have my soul in it. Now I’m almost three years off—two drugs, cold turkey, June 19th will be my anniversary—and I still have some symptoms, but I’m here. It’s inspiring to hear you talk about what comes next because people who make it through to the other side really do have a responsibility, I think, to go back into the mess—just long enough—to say, It gets better. It really does.

And it’s wild—because these drugs have withdrawal timelines that are inhumane. There’s nothing else in medicine like it.

The fact that you’re nine years off? That’s way more inspiring to me than someone in my recovery group saying they’re 30 years clean from alcohol. Because this—what we went through—is the real stuff. I don’t even think of myself as an addict. I think of myself as a psychiatric drug survivor. And for me, it’s just a given that I’ll never take anything again that alters my central nervous system.

Siem: One last question. Based on everything we’ve talked about…who is Jørgen Kjønø?

Carrington: I just remember being a kid and being so… responsible. Rigid. I was the one who did everything right. Straight A’s. Perfectly organized. Hyper-disciplined. And I remember being around 15 or 16 when I had my first beer—and suddenly, I felt relief. Relief from myself. From the constant mental noise and pressure.

But that moment—that search for relief—was the beginning of a long, slow spiral. Drugs, alcohol, psych meds… it all just snowballed. Eventually, I lost myself completely.
Now, having come through all that, I feel like I’m in a place where I can finally integrate everything—the wildness of that chaotic chapter with the best parts of my original neuroses. I don’t have to erase anything. I’ve learned to use it. I’ve figured out how to squeeze the juice out of it.

I used to be such a perfectionist and I was unbearable to be around. Take cooking, for example—I love it, but no one could be in the kitchen with me. I had to control everything. But now? I’m more balanced. Well-rounded. I’ve let go of the illusion that anything is as important as we make it out to be.

It’s like that old saying: the average person has 10,000 dreams—but a sick person only has one. I was sick for so long. That one dream—just to not be in psychiatric drug withdrawal—still resonates. It keeps me grounded. As long as I’m not in that place again, I’m the most grateful, humble person in the room.

What a humble thing to say, right? “I’m so humble, Brooke.” But you get what I mean.

Siem: I do. Where can people find you?

Carrington: I think @badassdex on Instagram is probably best. But honestly, I urge people to check out the YouTube videos with Anders Sørensen. Just search his name—there are 26 videos covering the most commonly asked questions about tapering.

Siem: Well, thank you so much, Dex. I have a feeling this won’t be the last time we talk.

Carrington: Absolute pleasure, Brooke.

**