Tag: antidepressants

How to Stop Antidepressants While Minimizing Withdrawal

While antidepressants can absolutely be life-saving medications, sometimes antidepressants aren’t the right medication at the right time for you. Or sometimes, it’s just time to try to get off of antidepressants. (For simple depression, this is often done if you have been stable for 6-12 months.)

Can't Get Off Antidepressants

But the key to getting off antidepressants successfully is to minimize withdrawal symptoms because otherwise you may feel like you’re trapped on the antidepressants. Additionally, the withdrawal symptoms may get mistaken for returning illness symptoms, which you do have to watch for, but if possible, it’s best not to get withdrawal and returning symptoms confused.

So, here are some tips on the best way to get off antidepressants while minimizing withdrawal.

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Bipolar Disorder – When to Get Off Antidepressants

I try not to give medical advice here because I am not a doctor. But so many people ask me about this I felt I had to address getting off antidepressants without withdrawal. So many people with bipolar disorder (depression and others) need information about getting off psych meds and they are not getting it from their doctors.

This is the first in a three-part series:

  1. When to Stop Antidepressants in Bipolar Disorder
  2. How to Stop Antidepressants in Bipolar Disorder While Minimizing Withdrawal
  3. How to Stop Taking venlafaxine (Effexor) and Desvenlafaxine (Pristiq) – as they are particularly nasty to get off

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Antidepressants and Addiction, Dependence – Talkback

I recently received a couple of comments on the antidepressants and dependence / addiction post from Tabby. My response to her second comment ended up being so long I decided to put it in it’s own post.

Here is an excerpt from Tabby’s comments (edited for length). If you would like to read them in their entirety, please see here and here. (Symbol […] indicates removed text. Other ellipses are from the original text.)

Antidepressants and Addiction and DependenceComment on Are Antidepressants Addictive?

I know of people who cannot go not 1 day without their medication and the medication not be a life saving med like a blood thinner but be a Anti-depressant. They become all anxiety ridden and panic filled because they just know that if they miss that 1 dose or those 2 doses for that 1 day […]

They can’t sleep and they get agitated and they get quite vile until they get that dose or doses. They resort to sobbing, they resort to melodrama of threatening suicide…

[…] I’m talking a cymbalta, or a lexapro. I work in a MH agency and we have patients call cause they’ve gone 1 day without their prescription. […]

I am also one with Bipolar and when your entire day, or entire life, is solely dependent on whether you took your pill or pills that 1 day… I dare to say, you have a dependence.

Now… you have blood clots and you miss 1 day of your blood thinner.. then we may have a major issue. You miss 1 day of your Seroquel, or your Cymbalta, or your Depakote… seriously, it will be okay… if not, use your psychotherapy techniques. Oh, that’s right… not too many actually do psychotherapy… it’s all the meds baby.

[…] I am well aware of the benefits of medication compared to no medication for those with Mental Illness. My point was – too many people seek out the comfort of the medication to handle their daily life’s issues […] than to try and work on figuring why they are having the problem in the first place.

Folks do not wake up, naturally, anxious. Something has to have occurred to trigger that emotion and anxiety is an emotion that triggers a physical response. Yet, too many run to the cabinet and down pills to “calm” the anxiety rather than try to do something else non-medicated that […] The first reaction is to kill the emotion/feeling… not to try and figure why it’s happening.

No therapy doesn’t work in all settings or all situations but if you never try, then it will certainly never work. In that your blogs are predominately med supporting… I could say that you mock those who try to use more psychotherapy than meds.

Seroquel and Depakote are not equivalent to Warfarin or some of the other medications needed for literal body functioning. Yet, if you have been on a med for a long period of time, for example Seroquel to put you to sleep every night.. and then suddenly you miss a dose or 2… YOU WILL HAVE SYMPTOMS. That’s med dependence and you’ll have a psychological dependence because you’ll become frantic wanting your med.

[…] Many folks suffer with their Bipolar symptoms, or any MI symptom, long before they ever take the 1st pill. So, the life-saving aspect is only a “feeling”.

I  know the meds help but have they literally saved me? No. They take away the uncomfortable and the frightening… but they don’t keep me from dying. If they were the sole and only reason, then I’m a walking med cabinet.

Even folks that take a plethora of meds, every single day and swear on a stack of their most revered book… still kill themselves […]

Thanks Tabby for your response. I think your thoughts on the issue represent a perspective of many.

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Are Psych Meds Addictive? – Antidepressants (Part 1)

Before I started taking psych meds, one of the major concerns I had was addiction.

I didn’t want to be an addict of any sort as I’m quite familiar with the horrors of addiction, having addicts in the family.[push]Will I get addicted to antidepressants?[/push]

And I knew people often took antidepressants for long periods of time, sometimes forever.

So weren’t these people addicted to antidepressants?

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Depressed People Who Take Antidepressants Do Better Long-Term – Part 2

As I mentioned last week, it’s very difficult to measure long-term outcomes of depression treatment due to the confounding depression variables like severity of depression, duration of depression, number of depressions and so on.

In short, the sicker you are, the more depressed you are, the more likely it is you’ll get treatment.

Antidepressant Treatment Outcomes Long-Term, A Study

I discussed the basic outcomes of this study: The association between antidepressant use and depression eight years later: A national cohort study by Colman et al. which tries to take these variables into account.

Colman et al. showed those who took antidepressants had better depression treatment outcomes than those who didn’t, eight years later, once confounding variables were taken into consideration.

I’ll now point out the strengths and weaknesses of this study as well as some other interesting tidbits shown or cited in the study. Oh, and I’ll give my opinion on what it all means.

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Depressed People Who Take Antidepressants Do Better Long-Term

Recently the controversy over long-term outcomes of those who use psychotropic medication has flared up again. Some people argue depression/bipolar/mental illness patients do the same, or better, when they don’t take psychiatric medications long-term. However, the statistics they use to assert this claim are often faulty.

A study from Calgary, Alberta, Canada (yes, we do research up here too) has attempted to fix some of the bias seen in other long-term depression treatment outcome statistics. I’ll cut to the chase for you:

Over the course of eight years people with depression who took antidepressants had better outcomes.

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How To Get Off Pristiq or Reduce Pristiq

Now I’m not a doctor, in fact, I don’t even play one on TV, but I wanted to share a little about me and how I’m handling getting off of, or at least reducing, Pristiq.

Please also read: When to Get Off Antidepressants with Bipolar Disorder

Antidepressant Pristiq – Easy On, Not-So-Easy Off

I’ve been talking the antidepressant Pristiq (desvenlafaxine) for months and it doesn’t seem to be doing much, but honestly, the withdrawal from Pristiq is so bad I didn’t want to attempt getting off of it. As you might know, Pristiq is a metabolite of Effexor and Effexor, another antidepressant, is also a nightmare to get off of. If I would miss a Pristiq dose by even a few hours I would become suicidally depressed. Really. No joke.

No Taper Strategy for Pristiq

So getting off of Pristiq wasn’t on my short list of fun things to do. There is no taper strategy for Pristiq as it only comes in 50 mg and 100 mg tablets and you cannot cut them.

How I’m Getting Off Pristiq

But I seem to be successfully reducing the dose of Pristiq with minimal impact and withdrawal.

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I write a three-time Web Health Award winning column for HealthyPlace called Breaking Bipolar.

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