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March 26, 2025 - Epoch Times
06:14
Psychiatrist Shares Horrific Side Effects and Injuries from Antidepressant Withdrawal
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Doctors can only disclose the risks that they've been informed about.
And so we're in a situation right now where some of the most important risks that you would want a loved one to know about these medications are not being disclosed.
And I think if we're talking about antidepressants, there's two main ones.
There's PSSD, incredibly important for people to know.
And the other thing is a condition called protracted withdrawal.
Protracted withdrawal, something that I see a lot in my practice, essentially it's, and I'm being purposeful with my words, it's a brain injury.
So there is a proportion of people that when they come off these medications too quickly, a neurotoxicity takes place.
You have someone, they're on the drug for several decades, they go and see the doctor, the doctor says, just halve the dose, wait two weeks, halve the dose again, wait two weeks, and then stop.
Some of those people will be in quite bad withdrawal and they'll call up the doctor and they'll say, this feels pretty bad.
What should I do?
And then the doctor will say, well, it's a self-limiting problem, you know, because that's what they've been told to do.
And then so the person says, well, I don't want to lose this progress.
I just want to white knuckle it through through this.
And they do that.
And then maybe a month or two months later, the withdrawal hasn't gone away and they start to develop.
Global neurological problems.
They start to get ringing in their ears.
They get light sensitivity.
Some people will have gastrointestinal problems like constipation and diarrhea.
Some people will even have a neuropathy where they get tingling in their hands and feet.
But the symptoms that people complain about the most and which are the most devastating and troubling to them and their families is a severe form of anxiety.
Catastrophic anxiety that almost never leaves them.
It completely hijacks them, and they also have cognitive dysfunction.
By the time this sets in, the person is ready to quit.
They say, whatever, I can't come off this medication.
I don't want to anymore.
They will go and they will reinstate the drug, thinking that it's going to curb the withdrawal, but the symptoms don't go away, or only some of them partially improve.
And after this has happened to them, they will endure sometimes for years.
From what I see, people just walking into my office, most people are pretty sick for the first 18 months to two years before they start to improve.
But there are some people where this goes on for years.
It's as if they've had a severe concussion or a brain injury.
It's in that realm.
And I want to be really clear about something.
This is not a common thing.
There are a lot of people who can come off these medications even quite quickly, and their brains are just elastic.
They're able to kind of bounce back despite the severe withdrawal and get on with their lives.
They don't think twice about it.
There's a small group of people where this happens, and there's now hundreds of thousands of them.
They're on websites like Surviving Antidepressants, like Benzobuddies for the benzodiazepine ones, and there's Facebook groups.
I mean, for Cymbalta, you know, one of the common SNRIs, an antidepressant, there's 40,000 people in a Facebook group called Cymbalta Hurts Worse talking about protracted injuries from these medications.
And so the most important thing I think that doctors really should be telling people about these medications is not just that you need to come off them gradually because otherwise the taper will fail and you might end up on them.
Forever when you didn't need to and you just needed to go slower.
It's that if you come off too quickly, you can cause a form of brain damage that may take years to recover.
And I understand that it's a rare thing and it's not going to happen to everyone, but we can't predict who this happens to.
And for something that's substantial, it is much safer to just taper everyone gradually in a way, in a very gradual way, just to avoid that.
Right now, the only group that really informs people about the severity of protracted withdrawal injury is the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the UK, and so-so in their NICE guidelines.
That's another interesting story because it goes into Luke Montague, who was the son of the late Earl of Sandwich, and this happened to him, and so there was actually a lot of political pressure over there to get this type of withdrawal injury recognised.
But again, just like with PSSD, it's not a common thing, but when you have potentially 15-16% of the population on these medications, it's enough people for it to be a serious problem nationally.
Right. Well, and then, of course, that goes back to our initial discussion around root causes and the question of how much do you really need to be prescribing these things at the outset?
There's other methods that can be...
Can be tried and can be, as it sounds, quite effective that don't involve a drug even in some cases.
It's a serious problem where the people who are prescribing these medications, especially in the United States, have not been informed about the potential for these serious problems like the difficulty getting off, the withdrawal injuries, PSSD, because... If they knew it, we wouldn't be in a situation where, you know, probably like 20% of women are on these medications now.
And there's some differences in the guidelines out there.
For instance, in the UK, antidepressants aren't recommended for the treatment of mild depression, and it's often encouraged that you should try lifestyle interventions first before going to these medications and things like therapy.
But in the United States, the APA says that Antidepressants are first-line therapy.
And if we were to learn from some of these other places, we wouldn't be doing what the American Psychiatric Association guidelines say where we should use these as first-line treatments.
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