| I went through this, too---I felt there were good reasons to get off my antidepressants, so I began tapering off of them at what I thought was a reasonable rate, something like 10% of the original dose per month (I was at 250mg so that was 25mg per month). Things proceeded smoothly for a long time---getting down to 100mg I felt great. But the closer I got to zero the more sensitive I was to the dose changes, and things started to fall apart for me emotionally. I had terrible withdrawal effects, becoming severely depressed and even developing OCD-like symptoms that I had never experienced before. My anxiety was also through the roof. And so I concluded that I did, indeed, need the antidepressants, and I went back on them at nearly my original doses, and things seemed to go back to normal. (Which wasn't great, but at least wasn't hell either.) But after learning more about other people's successful attempts at antidepressant withdrawal I decided a few years later to try it again. I'm currently in the midst of that tapering process, taking things much more slowly. The important thing seems to be that as you approach a dose of zero your rate of tapering should also diminish. So going from 200mg down to 100mg I did it in 25mg/month increments. From 100mg to 50mg I did it in 10mg/month increments. And now going from 50mg to 25mg I'm doing it in 5mg/month increments. I'm right at the point where things fell apart last time, but so far things are going great. The dose->blood serum concentration response curves for this medication are non-linear, suggesting that something other than constant incremental tapering is needed in order to keep the rate of change to brain chemistry constant. The rate of taper must be decreased as the dose comes down. Of course, in theory you'd have to live infinitely long in order for such an approach to get you to zero. So at some low dose like 12.5mg or 6.25mg I'll just have to cold-turkey it and drop down to zero. I think people underestimate the degree to which their brain chemistry has adapted to the presence of the drugs. When they fail to do well emotionally when off the drugs, they blame it on their native brain chemistry being broken---it's seen as proof that the original "illness" was real and the drugs were needed. But my belief now is that this is an artifact of the brain being given insufficient time to adapt to the absence of the drugs. Slow, slow tapering is the way to go. Regarding antidepressants saving lives, I also believed that mine saved mine in my darkest hours. And perhaps they did, but I now consider that to be only due to the placebo effect. The physical symptoms such as dry mouth made it feel like the drugs were really doing something. But ultimately I think their power was only that which I gave them by believing they were a miracle cure. |