Introduction
To safely stop taking psychiatric drugs (medication) we need to follow advice we can trust.
Most general practitioners and psychiatrists do not know how to stop these drugs safely because the information they are given about the safety and effectiveness of the drugs comes from the pharmaceutical industry who make the drugs.
The people in the pharmaceutical industry are primarily concerned with making profit by selling as many dugs as possible.
The information and advice on these pages comes from valid scientific studies done by the foremost research workers and organisations. They have done their own research independent of the makers and suppliers of the drugs. Being unbiased independent experts makes them trustworthy.
All this information can be overwhelming for those who are new to the subject of safely stopping psychiatric drugs. It is therefore arranged here from basic to more detailed information with links to relevant sites.
General advice
If you wish to stop taking prescribed psychiatric drugs you need to take the following advice serioiusly.
Are you sure you want to stop taking the psychiatric drug(s) a doctor put you on? You can discuss this with Dr Sherlock (contact here) or, if you can contact them, one of the other doctors mentioned below.
Do not try to reduce the dose too quickly.
The lower the dose the greater the unwanted withdrawal effects can be. This is the opposite to what you would expect. It is explained by Dr Peter Groot and by Dr Mark Horowitz (see below).
Even if you want to stop immediately because the side effects are so bad, you will need to be patient because if you reduce the dose too quickly you risk worse symptoms because of withdrawal – it would be like going ‘cold turkey’ when coming off drugs like heroin.
Be patient – it might take weeks, months or years before you can safely stop the drugs completely depending on which drug, how long you have been taking it and at what dose, and particularly important is whether you feel strong enough to make the next reduction.
The 10% rule
The general rule is to reduce the dose by no more than 10% of the dose you last took and then wait for at least one to two weeks or more for the body’s natural ability to heal itself.
How long it will take depends on which drug you are taking, the dose, how long you have been taking it, your body’s fitness and ability to recover from the harmful effects of the drug and on how you can cope with the emotional onslaught – fear, anxiety, resentment, anger, helplessness, and more …
If you can find one, you should discuss tapering (reducing gradually) with a registered medical doctor who has experience with tapering these drugs – most doctors, including psychiatrists, are not well-informed; in fact they have been wrongly informed. They are likely to advise you to reduce the dose too quickly or to take different doses alternate days – this is wrong: do not do it. Or, worse, doctors will be against you tapering and stopping the drug.
Relapse
Many doctors still tell patients that withdrawal symptoms when tapering the drug are due to relapse of their condition when in fact they are due to withdrawal of the drug.
Withdrawal symptoms are often far worse than the reason a doctor put you on the drug in the first place.
Dependence
Psychiatric drugs are harmful to nerve cells throughout the whole nervous system and probably also to cells in the heart, the liver, muscles, kidneys, stomach and intestine, and this makes the cells in your body dependent on the drugs.
Doctors are responsible for dependency on psychiatric drugs – you are not.
Doctors intend to help you but have been badly taught and given false information – it is a doctor’s duty to keep up to date with the research but most doctors follow advice from the pharmaceutical industry (see above) and refuse to read advice and studies from the experts mentioned above (see also below).
Dependence is not the same as addiction to drugs like cocaine, opiod painkillers, morphine and heroin. Both have a psychological element as well. With addiction cells you want to increase the dose to get the desired effect. With delpendence this does not happen but your body cannot function normally without the drug because it has damaged the normal function in the cells and therefor caused malfunctions.
Dependence gives rise to side effects and withdrawal effects without the desire to increase the dose. The withdrawal effects can be very hard to bear and can take months or even years to finally stop as the body heals itself.