Medication Tapering/Withdrawal

My study, in which I slowly withdrew people from prescribed antipsychotics and antidepressants, found that it is possible to decrease both spending on psychiatric drugs and patients' chronic exposure to them. In general, the drug-reduction process was well-tolerated and well-accepted among those treated.

From The Herald: MSP (Member of the Scottish Parliament) Michelle Ballantyne has spoken out about the epidemic of withdrawal effects of prescription pills, critiquing physicians'...

Jenna Fogle discusses her experience struggling with depression as a teenager, and the consequent harm done by psychiatric drug treatment.

David Cohen's work begins to address a paradox: medication effects are not simply chemical impacts on a biological brain, but rather the complex interactions of social factors, expectation, placebo, "nocebo," and learning. As a harm reduction approach to withdrawal emphasizes, empowerment may be the most important consideration for supporting people's wellness.

In this piece for Medium, Michael E. Lee tells his story of experiencing the horrific withdrawal effects of Effexor, and how he healed from his...

Abrupt discontinuation can paradoxically cause the same effects as both medications and illness itself, this study in the Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental...

From The Times: In an age in which benzodiazepine dependence is increasingly becoming a global problem, online forums serve as a lifeline for numerous benzodiazepine...

A variety of scenarios of social and economic collapse have gone through many of our minds since Election Day. Insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies want to keep people on drugs, but what if there was no government subsidy for those who can’t pay?

Researchers suggest that the pharmaceutical industry had a vested interest in using the term “discontinuation” in order to hide the severity of physical dependence and withdrawal reactions many people experience from antidepressants.

Sometimes I get so sick of the lies of biological psychiatry that I must speak out. At these moments I find silence to be a kind of emotional death: a death of my spirit, a death of my critical faculties, a death of my courage. I speak out because I am alive and I wish to align with life.

My name is Leah Harris and I'm a survivor. I am a survivor of psychiatric abuse and trauma. My parents died largely as a result of terrible psychiatric practice. Psychiatric practice that took them when they were young adults and struggling with experiences they didn’t understand. Experiences that were labeled as schizophrenia. Bipolar disorder. My parents were turned from people into permanent patients. They suffered the indignities of forced treatment. Seclusion and restraint. Forced electroshock. Involuntary outpatient commitment. And a shocking amount of disabling heavy-duty psychiatric drugs. And they died young, from a combination of the toxic effects of overmedication, and broken spirits.

Researchers interviewed doctors about the barriers that prevent them from being able to decrease excess medications.

In this piece for Psych Central, Dr. Viatcheslav Wlassoff discusses some of the safety issues and adverse effects of antidepressants. "When it comes to side effects, anticholinergic...

Review study compares outcomes of gradual vs. immediate antipsychotic discontinuation when switching from one drug to another.

“What I’d really like to do is stop everything,” I say. The reality is that psychiatrists are not the experts when it comes to getting people off psychiatric drugs.

The Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs, written by Will Hall and published by The Icarus Project and Freedom Center five years...

This week we launch Mad In America Continuing Education. It is an enormous privilege to be a part of this project and to proudly announce that the first course offering is a series of lectures by me on neuroleptic drugs. I review the history of the development of these drugs as well as their short and long term effects. I discuss what conclusions I have drawn from the data; I recommend that we need to work harder to keep people off these drugs or – if we use them – to minimize the dose and stop them as soon as possible. But there remain other pressing concerns for those individuals who are currently taking these drugs.

The Daily Beast reports that Brooklyn artist Marni Kotak is weaning herself off a cocktail of antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs in a Brooklyn gallery...

From Pacific Standard: A new study surveyed people who have come off psychiatric medications to come up with information doctors can use to help support their...

Whether it’s the Nurtured Heart Approach, or any other method that’s truly up to the task, we need these effective strategies and ways of thinking to be more widespread so we can lessen the pitfalls of the medical model’s limited prospective which has no idea of how to turn intense into immensely great.

Protocol for the Treatment of Benzodiazepine Withdrawal, written by Dr. C. Heather Ashton ("The Ashton Manual"), published and available free of charge on Benzo.org. This...

The phrase "medication tapering" is being used more and more as the preferred term for the psychiatric medication withdrawal or coming off process. Based on my years of work educating many people around coming off medications -- clients, support groups, and in workshops and trainings -- I think that term is misleading, and let me explain why.

Seven years ago, I completed a six-year process of withdrawing from six psychiatric drugs. That process was the impetus to start speaking up about what is happening in psychiatry with far too many of us being gravely harmed.

My mother was once a bright, creative, beautiful young woman, a promising artist and a poet, who was captivated by the hippie movement. She was a creative bohemian artist, defying the conventions of our middle-class Jewish Midwestern family, which had carried a tradition of holding emotions inside and acting stoic. One day, soon after my grandparents’ divorce, she left. She hitched a ride to California, and from that point on, was never the same. The police picked her up on a park bench in Arizona, and she was committed for the first time at age 18. She rotated in and out of mental hospitals, the streets, and jail until her death.

One of the first things I heard from Bob Whitaker when I joined Mad In America was this, "I get emails every single day from people asking if I know where they can get help coming off their medication, and I don't know what to tell them. We need to do something about this."Since then, I've received many messages with the same question myself, and rarely have I been able to offer concrete advice. Thankfully, that has changed! Today, we are pleased to announce the Mad In America directory of service providers featuring practitioners and programs who support withdrawal from psychiatric drugs, as well as other alternatives to the mainstream paradigm of care.