Thanks for writing this up, and sorry to hear you had to suffer through this Luisa!
Some things I recently learned about antidepressants:
To limit withdrawal effects, hyperbolic tapering (reducing by x% per week) > slow tapering (reducing by fixed amount over months) > fast tapering (fixed amount over 2-4weeks) > cold turkey. https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/03/slow-tapering-best-antidepressant-withdrawal/
In addition, there’s cross-tapering (introducing a new SSRI while tapering off an old one) that’s supposedly helpful.
Some people become permanently disabled from (stopping) antidepressants. It ranges from sexual dysfunction to 9⁄10 severity and not being able to work. The risk seems to increase with duration of taking it. I don’t know how many people experience this, but it was enough to create an All-Party Parliamentary Group in the UK for it (http://prescribeddrug.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/APPG-PDD-Survey-of-antidepressant-withdrawal-experiences.pdf). This implies a risk of 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 or something? It definitely makes me wary to recommend antidepressants to anyone, especially for an indefinite period of time.
(Note: the survey linked above has a very strong selection bias, so we can’t glean much from the actual numbers besides the fact that the phenomenon exists)
Thanks for writing this up, and sorry to hear you had to suffer through this Luisa!
Some things I recently learned about antidepressants:
To limit withdrawal effects, hyperbolic tapering (reducing by x% per week) > slow tapering (reducing by fixed amount over months) > fast tapering (fixed amount over 2-4weeks) > cold turkey. https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/03/slow-tapering-best-antidepressant-withdrawal/ In addition, there’s cross-tapering (introducing a new SSRI while tapering off an old one) that’s supposedly helpful.
Some people become permanently disabled from (stopping) antidepressants. It ranges from sexual dysfunction to 9⁄10 severity and not being able to work. The risk seems to increase with duration of taking it. I don’t know how many people experience this, but it was enough to create an All-Party Parliamentary Group in the UK for it (http://prescribeddrug.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/APPG-PDD-Survey-of-antidepressant-withdrawal-experiences.pdf). This implies a risk of 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 or something? It definitely makes me wary to recommend antidepressants to anyone, especially for an indefinite period of time.
(Note: the survey linked above has a very strong selection bias, so we can’t glean much from the actual numbers besides the fact that the phenomenon exists)