Mental Health Blogs

A little over a year ago, I wrote of Gianna Kali, author of the Beyond Meds website, and the horrible struggle she’s gone through due to both being wildly over-medicated with just about every psych med under the sun and then by going through huge withdrawal problems. At the time, I made the point that psychiatry really needs to properly research how to properly get people off anti-depressants, benzos, antipsychotics and the like partly because it’s a matter of fairness, partly a matter of human rights and partly because of the very practical matter that with 40 million or so Americans on a psych med of some kind there are going to be a decent percentage of people who’ll need to get off a medication during the course of a year either because the medication doesn’t work or because it’s unsafe for that person or just because it’s time for that particular person to be off that med. Here we are a year later and I see no progress on this front.

Science literally knows more about how to get people off heroin, meth and alcohol than it does Paxil and Effexor. And that’s because withdrawal from the former have been adequately researched and because it’s seen as a social good to get people off said substances while psych med withdrawal remains a taboo subject in the mental health industry–likely because doctors and other caregivers see psych meds as a social good and the underlying diagnoses people take them for as hard, accurate and fixed when there is good evidence of high rates of bad diagnosing afoot in the land.

I bring this up again for three reasons: One, Kali is going through withdrawal hell again, this time at the hands of an alleged detox center (read this recent post of hers for details); two, I’m sick and tired of hearing the ugly withdrawal stories such as I posted on yesterday much less bumping into people in real life who admit to me that they are hooked on Prozac or another anti-depressant and have been for decades despite numerous attempts to get off them; and, three, this site has a fair number of readers for the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, various other government health research agencies, numerous pharma companies and numerous research universities and I’m just wondering if some of you all can put your heads together, drum up some funding and get some research going on this matter. It’s long past time for a STAR*D of psych med withdrawal to happen.

Or perhaps you’d like to explain to me why that doesn’t make any medical or human sense.

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Related posts:

1. Tragic Anti-Depressant Withdrawal, Murder Case In UK
2. LA Times Actually Writes About Anti-Depressant Withdrawal Problems
3. Sen. Grassley Pops Yet Another Psych Researcher Over Pharma Money
4. Little-Known TC-5214 Touted As Effective Anti-Depressant Despite Little Evidence
5. Family Docs Write Most Rxs For Psych Meds