MIA Blogger Monica Cassani reposts a piece from the Surviving Antidepressants website about slow tapering and safer withdrawal from psychiatric medications at Beyond Meds. Monica says, “Below I’m sharing an article written by Rhi Griffith for the withdrawal board, Surviving Antidepressants. It is republished here with her permission.
Certainly this is something anyone with trouble tapering and withdrawing from psychotropics should consider — a very very slow taper. Rarely are people able to have such patience but it can clearly help and often it will be the only way one is successful. To be clear, without further clinical research we can’t ultimately know exactly what goes wrong with tapers when people fall iatrogenically ill — especially relatively slow ones that still go bad (mine took 6 years after all and I’m very physically ill anyway. The argument could perhaps also be made that I should have doubled the time). Frankly it may or may not have been the pace of withdrawal that was the problem for me. I was, in fact, already sickened by the drugs before I even started the withdrawal and that is not unusual. That said it’s always worth considering and paying attention to what your body wants and needs when you’re doing a taper and certainly far too many people taper too quickly and that is very clear.”
Read the original piece, ‘The Slowness of Slow Tapers’, at Beyond Meds here.