Online support for psychiatric drug withdrawal
Support is vitally important in the process of withdrawal. Often one of the best places for information and support is online as there are rarely people in our lives who truly understand what we are undertaking. It’s important to have people supporting you at home too and ultimately better if you can manage that. The best case scenario is to have both, along with professionals that also support you. I never found professionals who really knew what to do, but I did find wonderful people who cooperated with me and learned with me about the whole process. That is often the best one can do. It’s critical that the professionals you work with are willing to listen to your particular experience.
In preparing to withdraw diet and nutrition is very important. A good multi-vitamin, minerals, magnesium, vitamin C and fish oil is a good place to start. Other supplements may be helpful as well and often finding what you need is a research project–if one is lucky they may find a good alternative health care provider, but that is often hard to find. I’ve found most of my care online with very careful research.
See also: Drug withdrawal and emotional recovery – By John Breeding
Some online support groups are listed here (I am no longer involved with these groups and cannot speak to the quality of the support or information in general at this time save Surviving Antidepressants which is one of the best boards I’ve ever come across):
- Surviving Antidepressants (information and help available for all classes of psych drugs)
- Recovery Road – benzodiazpines
- BenzoBuddies.org
Updated Feb 2014 — Chaya Grossberg recently made a list of facebook groups that I have never participated on…check them out.
here they are:
Mad Pride
Society for Humanistic Psychology, Division 32
Psychiatric Drugs destroy Life
ALL AGAINST PSYCHIATRIST ABUSES
MENTAL HEALTH ACTION REFORM GROUP AUSTRALIA (MHARG)
Stop the psychiatric drugging of the elderly
Free Thinking About Psychiatric Drugs
Repealing Mental Health Laws
Mad Pride India
Psychs
Speak Out Against Psychiatry
OccuPsy: Critical Psychology for Decolonization
Recovering our Stories
Un-Diagnosing Emotional Distress
Please also read the below cautions about all online support:
I’ve found that all support groups and forums have their own particular culture and dogma. Please use your own best judgment. The most important thing to remember is that you are an individual and withdrawal manifests differently for everyone.
Some support groups are dogmatically opposed to all supplementation. This is probably because once in withdrawal many people react to and develop sensitivities to many things, including foods and natural things. (see here for a detailed explanation — Multiple drug sensitivity (the outcome of grossly over-prescribed medications)
What I’ve observed is that if one starts a carefully thought out program of supplementation BEFORE they get sick from withdrawal it goes a long way in supporting good health. In fact, if one is able the best thing to do is clean up diet and nutrition before one starts withdrawing. In these cases it seems less reactivity to supplements, food etc happens, at least some of the time, but not always. One must be aware of developing sensitivities as they can cause problems. “Vacations” from supplements are a good idea from time to time.
If you’ve already begun to withdraw it’s important to be VERY careful when adding supplements as people can certainly react to all sorts of things. Getting professional help or help from others who have done this is really quite necessary if you’ve not used supplements before. Caution is always warranted. The flip side of this is there are people who recommend supplements for mental health concerns that can be very risky especially during withdrawal. It’s very common for alternative doctors to do this prescribing sometimes. One must learn adequate discrimination as most of these doctors have never seen someone in acute withdrawal.
There are many more online groups and boards if you do a google search. There are also lots of videos on youtube that have been made by people coping with withdrawal.
I found it helpful to join several groups and learn all I could from as many sources as possible since the dogma in each group sometimes precludes good sense and you may find what you need elsewhere. This is especially important if you are on multiple drugs as groups that specialize with one class of drug are generally quite unknowledgeable about the other classes.
The single drug boards have a strength in that they have a very large collective knowledge about their particular class of drug. (Benzo and SSRI boards) Boards that deal with all drugs often have much less collective knowledge about safe withdrawal, so it’s actually quite helpful to join the single drug boards even if you’re on multiple meds. Most of the best withdrawal tips are applicable to all the psych drugs.
Also be aware that the benzo and/or SSRI boards in general know very little about the particular risks and dangers of other drugs one may be on along with the drug that group concentrates on and in fact often give very bad information regarding other drugs and their use. This is a generalization but it pays to be aware of a lack of knowledge and experience by people who sometimes act as if they know more than they do. Multiple drug situations get extremely complicated and most benzo folks think it’s benzos are always at fault when speaking about withdrawal issues when it may or may not be true in any individual situation.
One benzo board made it explicit to me that I was NOT ALLOWED to talk about other drugs at all after I gave some information to someone who had started a thread about antidepressants. The information I gave was limited to responding to a direct inquiry about a particular documented risk involved in taking antidepressants. This silence about another class of drugs in a benzo forum is a dangerous precedent to set and so if you have any other drugs involved in your taper I would recommend going somewhere you can freely talk about all of them.
The same thing happens on antidepressant withdrawal boards where people are routinely on benzos and no one realizes how dangerous the benzos are. Just be aware all the psychotropics have serious issues as well as withdrawal problems. That some people sometimes choose to take other drugs to mitigate withdrawal from a drug is fine…it is their right to do so, but if information is withheld about the risks involved in doing so how is the board different than a psychiatrist saying everything will be fine while they feed us benzos.
As always informed choice is what is missing. Once the information is available people should have the right to make whatever decision is right for them.
This is provided so that you might be aware that ultimately you need to vet your information and not take anything at face value. I’m sorry it’s complicated sometimes.
And for my own brief description on what I’ve learned about withdrawal and what I did for the most part see here.
More posts on psychiatric drug withdrawal:
Please do not attempt to discontinue psych drugs without first very carefully educating yourself on the risks involved so that you might minimize the chances of developing grave iatrogenic illness if you decide to withdraw: Psychiatric drug withdrawal and protracted withdrawal syndrome round-up
● Psychiatric drug withdrawal and protracted withdrawal syndrome round-up
● Online Support in Withdrawal
See also: Peer support? This is the real thing. Free of institutionalization. (psych drug withdrawal)
*it is potentially dangerous to come off medications without careful planning. Please be sure to be well educated before undertaking any sort of discontinuation of medications. If your MD agrees to help you do so, do not assume they know how to do it well even if they claim to have experience. They are generally not trained in discontinuation and may not know how to recognize withdrawal issues. A lot of withdrawal issues are misdiagnosed to be psychiatric problems. This is why it’s good to educate oneself and find a doctor who is willing to learn with you as your partner in care. Really all doctors should always be willing to do this as we are all individuals and need to be treated as such. See: Psychiatric drug withdrawal and protracted withdrawal syndrome round-up
For a multitude of ideas about how to create a life filled with safe alternatives to psychiatric drugs visit the drop-down menus at the top of this page.
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Yes, Mark, you’re right. Gluten is one among several potential food allergies that can lead to mental health symptoms. In another post I talk about doing an elimination diet to figure out what you might be allergic to. Besides gluten the next big offender is cows milk products. A book I’ve recommended before, “The Mood Cure” goes into detail about how to do an elimination diet. You can probably also do a search on the net and get instructions on how to do one to rule out all possible food allergies. Thanks for bringing that up!
Exception note for Diet. Many people with mental illness have a gluten allergy and don’t know it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celiac_disease
old time book(before the pesent day huge rise in mental illnes) in a library that I can’t source said up to 30% of schizophrenics have gluten intolerence.
http://www.fabresearch.org/view_item.aspx?item_id=635
This is the first case in which, in an undiagnosed and untreated coeliac patient with psychiatric manifestations, the (99mTc)HMPAO SPECT demonstrated a dysfunction of frontal cortex disappearing after a gluten-free diet.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=9408073&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum
Just read your withdrawal for beginners post… The link below includes a spreadsheet that is helpful in calculating dosages when tapering. Here’s a description….
“Here’s a spreadsheet my hubby created to use when tapering. All you have to do is enter the current date, the current dose you’re on, the percentage you want to taper, and the number of days of each taper cycle. It will calculate everything else for you.”
http://www.paxilprogress.org/forums/showthread.php?t=22916
Mike
Gianna,
Thanks for the link to Mind. I’ve added it to my helpful resources listings at my site.