MIA Articles about Psychiatric Drugs and Withdrawal

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

Persistent antidepressant withdrawal is a debilitating experience, but little research exists about its prevalence and treatment.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Withdraw from psychiatric drugs at your own speed—according to what you feel. Don’t reduce again before you feel stabilised on the previous dose.

Very few doctors know anything about withdrawal and make horrible mistakes. If they taper at all, they do it far too quickly because the few guidelines that exist recommend far too quick tapering.

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.

A new update to the NICE guideline for depression suggests providers discuss long-term, severe antidepressant withdrawal symptoms.

Despite clear risks, benzos and z-drugs remain widely prescribed to the elderly. New research explores what helps—and what doesn’t—when trying to stop.

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.

Study reveals schizophrenia patients find little support from mental health staff in reducing side effects-heavy drugs.

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

For thirty years, Dr. Giovanni Fava has sounded the alarm on the long-term effects of antidepressants and the risks of withdrawal, pushing back against pharmaceutical narratives.

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

If academic psychiatry is evidence-based, why did it take two decades to recognize SSRI withdrawal as widespread and chronic among patients?

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

Professor John Read and colleagues recently wrote to the President of the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists to raise concerns about statements made in a letter published in the Times newspaper. Having not received a satisfactory response to this letter, Professor Read and colleagues have today lodged a formal complaint with the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

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

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.