Personal Stories

I am now a few months off of Gabapentin, and my withdrawal problems have not passed. I still deal daily with internal tremors throughout my head and back.

If the sum of my experience exists only as fractured memories that never happened, who am I? It has led me to a near-constant questioning of every aspect in my life.

I watched my son’s life change almost overnight. He developed akathisia from antidepressants, taken as prescribed for just a few weeks for garden-variety anxiety.

Richard was more than a therapist; he was a faithful witness to my spiritual transformation. His faith in me is the sturdy banister I hold on to as I move forward.

What my doctor had told me would be a two-week withdrawal from Seroquel turned into a 14-month nightmare with lasting repercussions: the movement disorder tardive dyskinesia.

Even though I was only on the medication for a little over six months, I am still traveling down the long road of psychiatric drug withdrawal. This is the hardest thing I have ever endured.

After suffering PTSD in the late 1980s, I reluctantly accepted antidepressants. In time, I had resolved the trauma, but when I tried to stop the antidepressants (Prozac, and later Zoloft), I assumed my desperate feelings and “return” of depression were an indication I had an imbalance and needed those drugs. I didn’t understand I was experiencing withdrawal. (I was never told that for most people, psychiatric medications need to be tapered.)

Despite the majority of the individuals being sent to DBT having histories of severe childhood trauma, little about DBT treatment is “trauma-informed.”

I had a chemical brain injury from medications. The only help doctors could offer was more medications: treating the failed treatment with other dangerous treatments.

I lost 20 years of my life and everyone and everything I held dear, including myself, due to psychiatric medicine. Why did doctors not see how drastically I changed and how rapid and brutal my descent was?

Take every horrific feeling you’ve ever had in your life, all at once. Now, times them by 200, right in your gut. That is how akathisia pain feels. When I tell doctors I have drug-induced akathisia, and that it's incredibly painful, they do not believe me. They say my pain is a mental health issue, and they have all methodically undermined my credibility in my permanent record.

Medication support groups are saving lives and brains because doctors do not know how to safely taper off psych meds.

Ketamine treatment, which was being hailed as a ‘miracle cure’, backfired so spectacularly that it very nearly cost me my life.

It’s easy to tell a dead person they mattered. Humans are great at writing eulogies. But we are shit at making people feel like they matter while they are alive.

I'm a licensed psychotherapist in private practice. I'm also diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

The Detroit Free Press did an excellent job in bringing to light the conditions at Pontiac, its loss of accreditation, and closing. Still, they didn't quite grasp the severity of violence there.

The amount of anxiety I felt on these medications — and for a couple of years after — was unfathomable. I felt as though I was trapped in an air-tight vat, constantly gasping for breath. And my thoughts were guided by my state of constant worry and panic.

I was unaware that metoclopramide is in the same drug class as antipsychotics with the same potential for serious side effects.

"What’s going on? Is the idea for me to live in a locked facility forever?” A silent wail of despair wells up inside me. What’s happening to my life?

I was face down on a cold hospital floor. My submissiveness came before the needle made contact. The shock and shame of such a violation silenced me.

If I would have read a story like this before I entered into psychedelic-assisted therapy, I would have been more careful, which might have prevented a lot of unnecessary hurt.

Dr. W.’s description of me, that I was agitated, insulting, uncooperative, did not match the emotions I was feeling. I felt distraught, hopeless, terrified, and desperate.

I’m alive. More than 30,000 veterans in the past decade alone are not. I was not warned of the risks of this drug. I was not told that once on it, I might never be able to get off it, or the nightmare that would ensue when I tried. I know millions of others were not told either.

If you don't realize that you are autistic, your intellectual, sensory, social, and emotional differences are a mystery, even to you.

There was a time when I could think of nothing else but pills and prescriptions, pain and panic. Psychiatry shrank my world.