Around the time Bob Whitaker asked me to do a Webinar on Stopping Antidepressants, K filed a RxISK Report on her efforts to get off Prozac. Like many Reports, in her case it seemed clear she should never have been put in the situation she is now in – she didn’t have a mental illness. She got sucked into a situation not of her own making.
Some wonderful touches to her report – like being startled at the sound of her own laughter at one point and fantasizing about unleashing a drone attack on Eli Lilly headquarters – prompted me to drop her an email and ask her to convert the report into the post below.
Why? Because for me her report and the Shadowlands post below beautifully illustrate a key point about the Antidepressant Public Health Crisis we have. Completely normal people have been badly damaged by poor clinical practice.
Never for one moment doubt that the Company and Political stance on all this is captured in Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows, caught more succinctly in apparently a favorite phrase of Helmut Kohn, the German Chancellor at the time the Berlin Wall came down:
The Dogs Bark the Caravan Moves on.
This is what happened with the benzodiazepines. Companies converted cases of Benzos to Cases of Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft and moved on, leaving anyone ‘barking’ about their Benzo damage to their own devices. The only reason we haven’t seen a repeat with the SSRIs is because companies have not come up with anything new.
You should never for one minute think there is a company or political party who is in any way inclined to call halt – we can’t just leave people in a state like this behind. In fact all the signs now are that some people in a position of power are waking up to the fact people are on too many drugs and as part of an effort to sort this out doctors will be told to whip people off their unnecessary Benzos and SSRIs without us really knowing much about the damage these drugs can cause and the lethal risks in just stopping even when tapered – see Potentially Inappropriate Deprescribing and Deprescribing Where Does Responsibility Lie. The harms will be viewed as unavoidable Collateral Damage.
Shadowlands
This is not a mental illness. It’s a chemical poisoning, in which we have all become grim and lonely pioneers that seek not new worlds, but old ones. How I used to be, at least a sovereign owner if not a complete operator of that dizzying and beautiful internal universe that seems to parallel and inform that of our galaxy and all the mysteries beyond.
But now I’ve been colonized, and I can’t help but draw parallels to the military bases America has set up around the world, in which culture and history of a land mean nothing. Prozac has entered my brain and reformed it until it sees only itself. It’s very American that way.
I trusted a psychiatrist once and if hope is a thing with feathers, trust is a thing with light. It originates in light and ends in a darkness in which laughter is elusive and tears have been taken as some kind of dowry—the inability of people on SSRI’s to cry when there is so much more to cry about is one of its many underreported outrages.
My withdrawal under her “guidance” began in what I later recognized as mania, culminating in a trek to Louisiana where I was going to buy land as a sanctuary for a tribe of woodland fairies known as the “little people.” She not only let me go but advised me instead of the tobacco I was bringing as a gift that I should bring something healthier.
After the mania, the downward slide began, culminating in a terrible crash and the resulting disaster, with all its physical and emotional miseries. I wrenched myself away from her and flung myself toward other gurus and idiots, some well-meaning, others predatory. Plus all the modalities that a desperate mind can explore. Acupuncture, kambo, holotropic breathwork, oxygen therapy, Craniosacral therapy, amino acids, the carnivore diet, Qigong, Feldenkrais, neurofeedback, meditation, ketamine, a holistic psychiatrist more concerned with unleashing his neo Freudian therapy at $340/45 minutes that helped with the ferocious withdrawal symptoms, but not the tapering.
Yesterday was a surreal experience—the desire to sleep my way out of this latest nightmare, where I am on 15 mg of a medicine that makes me too sick to plan or work on any given day, without rhyme or reason and offers me no promises except the one it always keeps—that it will make me violently ill if I give it up. Prozac reminds me of my aunt—it’s all fun and games until someone tries to leave her. And then hell has no fury.
The other night I woke up so terrified my teeth chattered. This feeling of being dreadfully and intermittently ill with no rhyme or reason. If it was any other illness, there would be articles and medicines and protocols. Instead I’m invited to self care, exercise, journaling, chamomile tea. If I were a heroin addict, I’d be given a hospital bed and palliatives. But society is all for people getting off heroin. Around our cultural campfires, there is no urgency around SSRI damage to the brain and nervous system. It’s like having an arm blown off and someone knits you a scarf.
I used to write voluminously and passionately. Now I mostly wait. For the hours to go by, for the day to end. Whatever frailties I had as a human were at least my own. Now they are common to a crowd.
I’ve heard withdrawal “symptoms” (a hilariously downplayed word) are neither depression nor anxiety but its own beast, and that’s true. Not exactly sadness, not exactly despair, not exactly restlessness or fear or apathy but all of these mixed together into some kind of alien and chemical state of non-being and at the same time, subject to exquisite reminders of just how much the body and mind can suffer. That fly in amber feeling of being held in some kind of indefinite punishment for which the original crime is long forgotten and not even relevant.
It’s a new form of illness, a new form of pain. I’d argue that it’s created a new kind of human—one who misses themselves every day, one whose memories have grown fond for a flawed, non medicated self hovering back there in time, fingertips outstretched, reaching.
Prozac had colonized me, somehow. Set up a base from which it operates in clear disdain of my internal culture, everything I am as a human. Just like the native Americans were reduced to beads and blankets, I am just a forever patient, someone doomed to walking around trying to get back to myself while Pharma bros use a badly lit room in my brain to print money. All my colors mean nothing next to the pure chemical white of that tiny pill I hold in my palm that controls my life and mind and future.
I’m Captain Ahab, the pill is Moby Dick and it’s turned around and trashed my boat, and anyone reading our history can clearly see it’s won. But it forgot about my ferocious will. That sovereignty it can’t take away. I’ll always come back. I’ll always keep trying to find a way to independence until I die.
My life is organized around it. I wake up scanning myself for clues on whether I’ll be attacked on this day or not. Plans are close to impossible, whether it’s to go out on a boat or leave this country. The specter of endless withdrawals hangs over every hour and day. I’ll either be normal or so sick I should be in hospital, or somewhere in between.
What can stop it? I don’t know.
In general I operate about at 70 percent and its from this weakened state that I now fight this lonely, constant battle with millions of my compatriots, out there somewhere measuring and dosing and scrolling and hoping and waiting. Always waiting.
Intolerance to noise, intestinal pains that feel “chemical” (reminds me of chlorine somehow) despair, disinterest in friends and activities, lack of appetite and weight loss, pressure in head, restlessness, trouble processing information. Low energy. Morbid fears of living in this world indefinitely. Desire to drone Eli Lilly’s building.
I tapered slowly from 40 mg to 4.5 over a period of 18 months. Experienced withdrawal symptoms throughout. After the taper went below five, side effects became extreme, and I reinstated at 15 mg and continue to experience severe side effects. Not sure if I didn’t go high enough? And now wondering if some of the antihistamines I’ve taken are complicating the withdrawal. I seem to have developed a histamine response– eating spinach can set off symptoms.
It gave me a lifelong rage against the phrase “talk to your healthcare provider.” One response in the forums sticks out to me: “What if they don’t know what they’re doing or give a shit?” I don’t understand why there are protocols to relieve heroin withdrawal, meth withdrawal, and alcohol withdrawal, but people experiencing SSRI withdrawal can all die. Maybe it’s punishment for attempting to get off this mind altering medication?
I used to have enormous energy. I’ve written 23 novels and sold eight, all while holding down a full time career in Advertising. I don’t write any more, and on bad withdrawal days it’s very hard to even read. It’s simply waiting for the day to pass.
It’s affected my ability to feel joy and it has served well as a killer of laughter. One night at a gathering of women I heard my laughter and was startled by it.
I try to forge connections and participate in social activities– often I feel that I am just “faking it” and acting out what normal life must be.
It’s so hard to find someone to listen. I am a well balanced sane person, suffering a physical response to a psychiatric drug. But since it is a psychiatric drug, I am forced into the role of unreliable narrator forever doomed to appearing in any doctor’s office with the fervent desire to first, be believed. I’m not a psychiatric patient. I’m a woman of sensibility and intelligence who, 21 years ago, woke up excessively human a few too many days in a row and got on this drug.
All SSRI’s eventually lead to the red pill. And with it, a disheartening look at our medical reality.
Like many others, I’ve tried to quit many times in the past and was gaslighted by my doctor urging me to stay on this drug.
I’d love to quit this drug. I’d love it to quit me. I want to be a free woman, a free human being.
Song of the Partizans
For me K joins the company of lot of others from Bob Fiddaman decades ago through Mark Horowitz and David Taylor, Peter Groot, Angie Peacock, James Moore and others as someone whose company it would be great to have for a meal or on a trip – ideally without any mention of antidepressants – just because they seem so normal and decent, maybe even a little wiser than most of the rest of us because of the things we should not have to discuss.
Lived Experience gets mentioned in medical circles – where it is supposedly valued. These words are too tame to capture the horror of being hooked to SSRIs and the extraordinary qualities of the many people who not only remain sane in the midst of these horrors but who get involved in helping others into whatever lifeboat is around.
There are ironies in the Shadow theme here. Google it and you find the the people who dwell in the Shadow of the Almighty are Blessed. Politicians who are sponsored by Lilly, Pfizer or GSK seem to figure it would be similarly a good thing for most of us to Dwell in the Shadow of these Almighty Corporations.
Googling also throws up The people who Dwell in Darkness have seen a Great Light. Darkness in this case refers to our Deviance or the Benighted pre-Pharma state.
Fifteen per cent of the populations of most Western Countries are aching to have a Great Light shine upon them and put a stop to this Nightmare. But Dawn comes later in the West.
I have often wondered whether companies might ever worry that people so mistreated with their products might Rise Up – see What would happen if Patients Radicalize or Je Suis Charlie.
Meanwhile there is no option but to be Partizans:
For a Soundtrack see The Partizan.
annie says
I have already got my Ticket.
This is a Terrific write-up, not least because of K, Shadowlands and ‘Leading Light’ Leonard Cohen
‘Completely normal people have been badly damaged by poor clinical practice. ‘
Completely normal people.
There are thousand of instances of harms,, violence and deaths, from Antidepressants. From what I have read, since 2000 on, it is the clarity and lucidity from most reports, either on programmes like the Panorama Series of 4, or 5, with Holmes, and more –
antidepressantrisks
https://www.antidepressantrisks.org/stolenlives
Written Submissions:
https://webarchive.nrscotland.gov.uk/20240327083620/http://archive2021.parliament.scot/GettingInvolved/Petitions/PE01651
Completely normal people.
‘I trusted a psychiatrist once and if hope is a thing with feathers, trust is a thing with light. It originates in light and ends in a darkness in which laughter is elusive and tears have been taken as some kind of dowry—the inability of people on SSRI’s to cry when there is so much more to cry about is one of its many underreported outrages.
That fly in amber feeling of being held in some kind of indefinite punishment for which the original crime is long forgotten and not even relevant.
It’s a new form of illness, a new form of pain. I’d argue that it’s created a new kind of human—one who misses themselves every day, one whose memories have grown fond for a flawed, non medicated self hovering back there in time, fingertips outstretched, reaching.
I’m Captain Ahab, the pill is Moby Dick and it’s turned around and trashed my boat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8-BT6y_wYg
We have to have this, to give to K…
tim says
‘Completely normal people have been badly damaged by poor clinical practice’.
‘Completely normal people’
‘Badly damaged’ understates our experience.
Killed, maimed, multi-systems – lifelong injuries. No career. No partner. No marriage. No hope of companionship in a lonely, potentially destitute old age: (When those who loved and treasured what was left of them are gone).
Whole families destroyed. Friends (once) find it impossible to believe that ‘doctors’ could misuse prescribing of psychotropic drugs in such abundance, with absence of ADR awareness and in such a careless and cavalier manner. Without informed consent.
Relatives, as well as our doctors misdiagnose the once completely normal person. ‘He/she must be autistic’ is one example. They never had the joy of knowing them when they were completely normal people.
NO. This is Iatrogenic Dysregulation.
Why won’t our doctors listen to us, read the expert reports that would help them to prescribe less dangerously? Why can’t they accept that something has gone, continues to go, terribly wrong.
Even if we have a collection of medical qualifications ourselves, they still will not listen, will not, cannot believe.
Our loved ones, and ourselves were once completely normal people. We trusted a doctor. We will never know ‘normal’ again, but are thankful if our loved ones are still with us.
Osler taught his medical students: – Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.
But you won’t listen to us, and it is so sad that you cannot believe us. We can tell you the diagnosis, and you could learn so much.
Bob Fiddaman says
Brilliantly written post:
Many points stick out for me, not least these three:
“Intolerance to noise.”
“It gave me a lifelong rage against the phrase “talk to your healthcare provider.” One response in the forums sticks out to me: “What if they don’t know what they’re doing or give a shit?” I don’t understand why there are protocols to relieve heroin withdrawal, meth withdrawal, and alcohol withdrawal, but people experiencing SSRI withdrawal can all die.”
“Like many others, I’ve tried to quit many times in the past and was gaslighted by my doctor urging me to stay on this drug.”
The noise intolerance really needs to be investigated further.. I still, despite being Paxil free for almost 20 years, suffer with it.
Maybe GSK knew that anyone banging drums loudly about the Paxil pitfalls would have a limited audience. due to its propensity to make sufferers leave the arena when such loud noises occur..
K, from one author to another, I salute you.
mary H. says
Wow! what else can I say. When I started reading K’s story I was back in 2002 when Shane went through the Seroxat punishment. At that point I knew nothing at all about mental health drugs – the fact that so many were suffering the same torture blew me away. Reading this account, although the details differ, I am sucked back in time and relive the whole lot. I can hardly imagine how much harder it must be for the ones who actually did the suffering – just watching it happening has completely changed my view of the whole sorry state of Care of the Vulnerable in the UK and elsewhere.
Saddest of all, is the fact that our vocabulary just does not cover the extent of the suffering that goes on. I have the choice of two languages – neither gets anywhere near the utter depth of the despair that follows the ingestion of these drugs for some people. Yet, NOONE CARES. that just makes it all so much worse. Noone CAN fully believe what goes on unless they have witnessed it. I could never have believed that a human body could possibly suffer so much and still be a living being. I almost wrote “and still be alive” but that is not true – you simply exist. Nothing that once was a part of you is visible any more – you don’t understand it; those who care for you don’t understand it; your prescribers state that yours is the first case that they have seen – which they take as an excuse to not have a clue what to do to help you out.
If you are really lucky, then you come across a “professional person” in the true sense of the word who explains it all to you, it suddenly makes sense but what then do you do to get yourself out of that really deep, dark hole?
Withdrawal is just another slippery slope where much the same attitudes face you yet again.
What can we do to awaken the general public, especially the younger generation where they seem to view these drugs as nothing stronger than a tube of sweets, so that they will stop and think before rushing to their doctors? I just wish that we had been able to video some of Shane’s worst rage bouts – surely watching that would have broken the hardest heart. Or would it? I guess not – they would just consider it all an act for attention.
So, what CAN we do? I suppose that all we can really do is to make sure that those of us who know, never, ever stop shouting about it. Maybe persistence will win in the end?
annie says
The young son, threw himself under a train –
Antidep Effects@antidepeffects
“Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows …
Antidep Effects@antidepeffects
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died …”
https://x.com/antidepeffects
The dog – Dan has shown us how his dog is always waiting for Dexter.
I knew my dog was in exquisite pain – only I could keep him alive. I called a vet, from Oban, who I didn’t know. The dog and I had lived in perfect harmony, through thick and thin. When he dropped his heavy head on my knee, I knew his time was up. Caravanners came to comfort. They sat with me as the vet injected him. He told me to talk to him. Someone dug a hole for the dog with a digger. Someone put a home-made bench of logs, on top of the grave, a lovely spot by a river.
I was on my own now – the dog had gone.
Progress has regressed; this will always be my absolute favourite
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGorjBVag0I
Dance me to the end of love
Patrick D Hahn says
Is this woman going to write the next book for Samizdat?
mary H. says
What a fantastic idea!
In reply to other comments – Tim’s in particular, I feel your pain, every breathing moment of it. The pain, not only of the past and present but of the future – THEIR futures when all support ( mainly us!) has vanished, what becomes of them then?
I class myself and our family as being ever so lucky – Shane is able to cope fairly independently, apart from the intense fatigue, but this is with the knowledge of background support when needed. Do they, the ones that we worry about, do they worry about their futures? I guess most of their ‘worry time’ goes into dealing with ‘today’, nevertheless, I have no doubt that it crosses their minds from time to time.
What of the ones who prescribed, without a care about unexpected outcomes, do they ever care – about the burden on society in general, in health, in social care, in the benefits system, in lack of employment placings etc. ? Do they care? In the main, the answer has to be a loud, resounding “no”! Thankfully, we know of the few who do care – it would take a massive change of attitude for those few to become a majority. If a doctor cannot convince another doctor of the reality of this suffering then what chance do we have?
However, let’s hope that the “light” shining from these brave few suddenly becomes a lightning strike to outshine all the doubts of which we daily hear.
Patrick – your suggestion could be a start, a wonderful chance to start rolling out these horrendous stories for all of society to hear, understand and BELIEVE!
tim says
Thank you Mary H.
Your insight and your understanding are sincerely appreciated. If only our doctors could develop a similar awareness of what has happened to our loved ones and their families.
Then perhaps they could help us, instead of adding to our trauma, our adversity and our isolation.
annie says
Kim Witczak @woodymatters
Why are antidepressants so hard to get off?
@DrDavidHealyand @Mad_In_America hosting a webinar on Saturday 9/7.
The drug companies have long known about the withdrawal issues and failed to tell the public and doctors alike.
recovery&renewal reposted
Kim Witczak @woodymatters
Just look at the internal drug company documents obtained in litigation to see why they didn’t want to tell the public or doctors about withdrawal from antidepressants.
1) Email from Pfizer Norway shows that they don’t want to volunteer list of Zoloft withdrawal symptoms, but be prepared in case regulators insist.
2) The other is from GSK and why Paxil discontinuation is a big deal.. $1B
$$$
https://x.com/woodymatters/status/1831039259525947457
annie says
Antidep Effects@antidepeffects9h
“Antidepressants were an underlying cause of death in 5,863 overdoses that year – a number on par with heroin-involved overdoses, which killed 5,871 people in the same year. ”
Antidepressant-linked overdose deaths in US have climbed for two decades
Number of US deaths involving antidepressants (5,863) in a year on par with those involving heroin (5,871)
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/sep/03/antidepressants-overdose-deaths-increasing
David Healy, a psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist at Bangor University who monitors the safety of prescription drugs, has a few theories as to why overdoses have increased.
Previously, it was common to take antidepressants for just a few months. Now, many patients have been on them for many years, he says, which can elevate the risk for severe withdrawal and suicide attempts if they try to get off them. He added that doctors are increasingly unlikely to take patients seriously or take them off the medication when they report negative experiences on the medication.
Instead, Healy said, they are now prescribing additional psychotropic medications on top of the antidepressants. Sometimes patients will add alcohol or non-prescription opioids to the mix to balance out the negative effects of a cocktail of meds. All of these factors can increase the risk of accidental overdose or suicide attempt, Healy says, adding: “Between one thing or another, maybe being a little bit stuporous, they’ve taken more than they should and they end up dead.”