MIA Articles about Psychiatric Drugs and Withdrawal

A new study reveals that withdrawal symptoms from antidepressants can last years, disrupting lives and relationships.

New research by Jim van Os and Peter Groot finds that using hyperbolic tapering to discontinue antidepressants reduces withdrawal effects.

Mental health nursing has a key role to play in helping people discontinue the drugs, writes Timothy Wand.

Tapering should be tailored and adjusted to the patient, slowed and more hyperbolic in people who have severe and longstanding reactions.

If I thought that it was possible, I would have opened a string of clinics all over the country to help get people off of antidepressants.  Unfortunately, the problems that sometimes occur when people try to stop an SSRI antidepressant are much more severe and long-lasting than the medical profession acknowledges, and there is no antidote to these problems. The truth is, giving people information about taking antidepressants is like giving information to people who are enroute to a casino; they go because they hear that some people win (at least for a time), but the losers are the ones who ultimately pay for it all — and the odds are not in their favor.

In an interview with MIA, Dr. Horowitz discusses his recent article on why tapering off antidepressants can take months or even years.

After long-term use, most people are going to have serious symptoms when stopping SSRIs. Many people are going to have transient, mild to moderate difficulty and some are going to end up falling down the akathisia rabbit hole. That is a long, difficult drop.

In the first systematic review of withdrawal problems that patients experience when trying to get off SSRI antidepressant medications, researchers found that withdrawing from SSRIs was comparable to trying to quit addictive benzodiazepines.

The conventional wisdom is that antidepressant medications are effective and safe. However, the scientific literature shows that the conventional wisdom is flawed. While all prescription medications have side effects, antidepressant medications appear to do more harm than good as treatments for depression.

Mark Horowitz and David Taylor provide advice on how to tell the difference between antidepressant withdrawal and depression relapse.

The New Yorker's story on Laura Delano and psychiatric drug withdrawal is a glass-half-full story: It addresses a problem in psychiatry and yet hides the deeper story to be told. A story of how her recovery resulted from seeing herself within a counter-narrative that tells of the harm that psychiatry can do.

Patient advocates join with researchers and service users to present first-hand experiences of antidepressant withdrawal.

Three recently published papers, along with a report by a Minnesota group on health outcomes in that state, provide new reason to mull over...

A psychiatrist with lived experience advocates for a more humane, collaborative approach to antipsychotic discontinuation that respects diverse ways of knowing.

In the wake of the new study by Dutch researcher Lex Wunderink, it is time for psychiatry to do the right thing and acknowledge that, if it wants to do best by its patients, it must change its protocols for using antipsychotics. The current standard of care, which—in practice—involves continual use of antipsychotics for all patients diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, clearly reduces the opportunity for long-term functional recovery.

Psychiatrists argue that current practice fails to account for the interaction of biological, psychosocial and iatrogenic factors.

Peter Gøtzsche and Anders Sørensen on trying to get a review of methods for safe antidepressant withdrawal published in Cochrane: "They sent us on a mission that was impossible to accomplish" to "protect the psychiatric guild."

A new study by Peter Groot and Jim van Os has found that tapering strips help people successfully discontinue antidepressant medications.

A new study reveals that more than two-thirds of patients experiencing antidepressant withdrawal were misdiagnosed with psychiatric disorders.

A third of patients who have taken the common psychiatric medication lithium for over ten years have developed "chronic renal failure" from the drug.

Tapering antipsychotics slowly and with supported decision-making may improve care for patients with psychosis.

Protracted Withdrawal Syndrome characterized by long-term adverse experiences after coming off of antidepressants.

The problems related to the use of antidepressants cannot be solved by an oversimplified psychiatry brainwashed by the pharmaceutical industry.

Research suggests that slowly tapering off an antipsychotic reduces the risk of withdrawal psychosis compared to abrupt discontinuation.

Effects of discontinuing SSRIs and SNRIs reported on an online forum indicate significant and long-lasting withdrawal symptoms.