Antidepressant Guidelines to Tighten in the UK, Lane, C.,
Psychology Today, May 2019.
After months of reporting by British media on the scale of the problem, with more than 7 million in Britain taking antidepressants (one of the highest per capita among OECD countries), the Royal College of Psychiatrists warned that the effects of ending treatment can, in fact, be “severe” and last for weeks, even months.Antidepressant withdrawal – The tide is finally turning, Hengartner, Davies & Read,
Epidemiology & Psychiatric Sciences, July 2019.
Withdrawal reactions when coming off antidepressants have long been neglected or minimised. It took almost two decades after the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) entered the market for the first systematic review to be published. More reviews have followed, demonstrating that the dominant and long-held view that withdrawal is mostly mild, affects only a small minority and resolves spontaneously within 1 – 2 weeks, was at odds with the sparse but growing evidence base. What the scientific literature reveals is in close agreement with the thousands of service user testimonies available online in large forums. It suggests that withdrawal reactions are quite common, that they may last from a few weeks to several months or even longer, and that they are often severe. These findings are now increasingly acknowledged by official professional bodies and societies.
The International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal (IIPDW) was created to respond to a glaring need in mental health: to develop ways for helping people withdraw from psychiatric drugs. Mental health has failed to provide support to people who want to reduce or withdraw from their psychiatric drugs. Often, people are simply told it is a bad idea, and thus are left to try to reduce or withdraw without the support they need. Indeed, psychiatric drugs have been prescribed for 60 years, there is little research that has been conducted on how to withdraw from these drugs. Most of the withdrawal studies that have been conducted have involved abrupt drug withdrawal, and even in studies where the drugs were more gradually withdrawn, there was no effort to identify the needed supports.
The mission of our institute is to bring together practice-based knowledge and research data to fill in this gap. Our goal is to gather such knowledge and disseminate it to patients, family members, professional helpers, professional organizations, and throughout society.
