Medication Tapering/Withdrawal

Psychiatric Times is offering an online continuing medical education (CME) course designed to "present information on why a patient might decide to discontinue psychotropics...

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

“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.

I live a slow paced life. I meditate every morning, refuse to get a smart phone (yet), and it takes me generous amounts of time to do things. This isn't because I am “stupid” or slow to get things. Sometimes I wonder how others get so much done each day - yet the quality and vibration of what I do is unique. It needs time. How does this relate with psychiatric drugs? Psych drugs are rooted in impatience, urgency, emergency.

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.

The world-wide first book about the issue of coming off psychiatric drugs. "Successful coming down from psychiatric drugs primarily addresses treated people who want...

"Recovery and Renewal is an essential guide for overcoming dependency and withdrawal from sleeping pills, other benzodiazepine tranquillisers and antidepressants. It is a useful, insightful...

Written by Peter Breggin, MD and David Cohen, PhD in 2007, this book seeks to "expose the shortcomings of psychiatric drugs and to guide...

This 39-minute video by therapist and activist Will Hall provides some basic guidance for anyone considering reducing or coming off psychiatric medications and their...

Rock climber, author, and MIA Blogger Matt Samet discusses his experience becoming addicted to, and subsequently coming off of, benzodiazepines.

If you haven't been labeled mentally ill by the American Psychiatric Association, you have to ask yourself what's wrong. Perhaps you were ahead of the game: you knew not to reveal yourself to them, you knew how to avoid them, you found other social support, and if so, a big congratulations. If not, what's wrong? Why have you conformed?

Psych meds can not only put weight on regardless of how you otherwise care for yourself, they also tend to make people feel gravely lethargic and vaguely sick all the time. I could not exercise as I had before. Could not. It doesn't matter how much mental health professionals try to tell us that if we just exercised we'd be okay in the face of neurotoxic drugs that cause weight gain, because the fact is the drugs impede that capacity. This is not widely appreciated or understood and people on psych meds are again traumatized and made to feel guilty for something that is truly outside of their control as long as they are taking these medications.

German author and activist Peter Lehmann presents "Recovery by Taking Psychiatric Drugs versus Recovery by Coming Off of Psychiatric Drugs" at the 2012 International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry (ISEPP) Conference in Philadelphia, PA.

The United States desperately needs good programs to help people withdraw from neuroleptic drugs. From all I have seen and heard, there aren’t any - none at least that can reputably claim to get good results on a fairly consistent basis. Again and again I find myself challenged to envision such a program, and in reply to the challenge I have broken down this hypothetical program into various components.

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.

What do you when medications for your emotional problems become worse than the problems themselves? Laura Delano went to a psychiatrist at age 18, and for the next decade was prescribed nineteen different psychiatric drugs. After devastating physical and emotional effects, she began a journey to become medication free -- and re-discover who she is.

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

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) involves tapping on stress-relieving points of the body while reciting affirmations to help manage withdrawal symptoms. This approach has been...

M.W. Agelink, A Zitselsberger, E. Kleiser, Withdrawal symptoms after discontinuation of Venlafaxine (letter), Am. J. Psychiatry, 154, 10, October 1997, 1473-1474. G.W. Amsden, F. Georgian,...

Alt Therapies for Bipolar Alternative to Meds (Safe Harbor) BenzoBuddies — Benzo Withdrawal Med Free or Working on It Paxil Progress (SSRI withdrawal forum) Surviving Antidepressants (help withdrawing from...

Researchers from the Cochrane Center and University of Copenhagen in Denmark, publishing in the May issue of Addiction, "explore the rationale for claiming that...

In a review of the evidence regarding benzodiazepines, researchers from the University of Michigan find that benzodiazepines used in the treatment of PTSD are...

The May issue of Addiction includes a review of pharmacological and phenomenological issues around benzodiazepine (BZD) and SSRI discontinuation.  Definitions, perceptions and management of the...

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.

Discontinuation of Chemotherapy for Chronic Schizophrenics. Prien, R. Hospital and Community Psychiatry, 22 (1971), 20-23. In this NIMH study, the earlier finding that relapse rates rose in...