“Then the patient says, ‘Holy moly, my depression or anxiety is back.’ They think they’re sick again, so they go back on the drug. Mark Berber, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine. “Unfortunately, many patients, without the doctor’s advice, stop the medications themselves once they feel better and then have withdrawal syndrome,” explained Dr. According to Surviving Antidepressants, a peer-to-peer support platform, other common symptoms discussed include everything from vertigo to suicidal ideation and occasionally homicidal thoughts. Like Tara, Laura’s symptoms have included feeling like she had the flu, a throbbing sensation in her face, nausea and “brain zaps,” which feel like electric shock sensations in the head. “Every time I went on the medication, I hated it because I knew that I was going to have to go through withdrawal,” said Laura*, a Toronto entrepreneur and educator who has been on and off antidepressants for 25 years, since she was a teenager. What should, for most people, be a short-term prescription often turns into a quagmire of drug dependence, as they deal with the hamster wheel of withdrawal. While antidepressants can help many of the people who take them, many Canadians remain unaware of how to safely get off them. In addition to depression, SSRIs are prescribed for anxiety disorders, panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks. In 2021 (the most recent year for which data is available), Statistics Canada reported that 14 per cent of women and seven per cent of men took prescription medication for mood disorders between 20. Precise numbers are lacking in Canada, but SSRI consumption has doubled over the last 20 years in most developed countries. Tara’s experience with antidepressants is depressingly common: get a prescription for a short-term mental health issue, then find yourself still on the drugs years, even decades, later. Thirty years later, Tara is still on - and off - them. ![]() “My doctor said that (medical professionals) were starting to hear that withdrawal was a challenge for people who stopped taking SSRIs” - selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most commonly prescribed antidepressants. When she went to the doctor, he told her she was likely experiencing “antidepressant withdrawal syndrome,” a term that her doctor had never brought up during Tara’s initial prescription appointment. “The only way to describe it is that I felt terribly hungover,” said Tara. But on day four, Tara had terrible headaches and was dizzy, sleepy and nauseous. “I started taking Paxil when I was 23, when it first came on the market in Canada,” said Tara, who started using antidepressants to combat “an anxiety slump.” After a few months, she started to “feel normal” and stopped taking the drug.Īt first, Tara felt like her old self. The first time Tara* went off antidepressants in the early ’90s, she barely thought about it.
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