MIA Articles about Psychiatric Drugs and Withdrawal

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

New research highlights the ethical responsibilities of clinicians in supporting patients who choose to reduce or discontinue antipsychotic medication.

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

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

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

New research finds that the non-physical aspects of withdrawal from SSRIs are often overlooked.

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.

A new study shows how different patients respond to tapering antipsychotic medication under expert guidance, highlighting personal empowerment and the complexities of withdrawal.

New research finds the negative drug effects most commonly associated with initiating antidepressant discontinuation are anxiety, suicidal thoughts, vomiting, and rashes.

New research finds insomnia, anxiety, and depression are common symptoms of antipsychotic withdrawal, highlighting difficulties of discontinuation.

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.

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.

A new article in Lancet Psychiatry finds that slower tapering of SSRIs is better for preventing antidepressant withdrawal effects.

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

Researchers interviewed people who were given medical advice to discontinue antidepressants.

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

Anti-stigma campaigns reinforce a belief that people with mental health issues must have treatment and thus, push discussion of withdrawal and negative aspects of psychiatric drugs into anonymous spaces.

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.

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

Common second-generation antipsychotic medications are causing symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder to emerge in many people who previously only had schizophrenia symptoms, according to a...

New guidance on how to taper and discontinue from psychiatric drugs from leading researchers Mark Horowitz and David Taylor.

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

Medically-induced harm—affecting tens of millions of people worldwide—has taken the field decades to take seriously.

Adverse physiological symptoms of antidepressant withdrawal are regularly mistaken to be other problems to the detriment of the patient.

A review of clinical practice guidelines for antidepressant discontinuation from across the English-speaking world reveals major pitfalls.