I was a member of Surviving Antidepressants. I was put on SSRIs at the age of 10 or 11 (I don't remember exactly when), started on Zoloft and switched to Prozac, stayed on until age 25 (in 2020), came off CT then reinstated a small dose and tapered off slowly. I posted my Success Story in April 2025 on Surviving Antidepressants after 1 year completely off of Prozac. 

 

Here's a link to my old intro thread:

https://www.survivingantidepressants.org/forums/topic/24016-toast-looking-for-peer-support/

 

Here's a link to my success story: 

https://www.survivingantidepressants.org/forums/topic/32469-toast-recovery-after-19-years-on-ssris-including-since-childhood/

 

Healing is always happening! There were many times I thought I wouldn't heal but I did and my life is wonderful now. Never give up hope!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Luke: "A copy of the text in Toast's success story linked above is below"

 

 

Like many on this website, I have dreamt of this day. I spent hours reading and rereading the Success Stories during my withdrawal and now it is my turn to add my own.

 

It was not always clear to me that I would get to add a "Success Story". By that I mean there were many points where I did not necessarily think I could make it through to the other side. I thought that my particular situation meant my brain was too damaged. I spent nearly every day for a full year debating whether that would be the day I would end things. Making it through all of that and not only surviving, but reaching the point where I am not actively experiencing intense and debilitating emotional pain every single day has changed me so profoundly. I thought I was a lost cause. But, I was not, and this means none of you are. We can all make it through and reach the point where living is no longer a burden and is a joy again.

 

 

My history:

 

I was put on Zoloft at about the age of 11 for childhood anxiety. I was told the drug was completely harmless, it would only help me if I needed it and if I didn't actually need it, it would not hurt me to take it. Looking back, my problems at the time were developmentally normal and I did not need to be medicated. My parents reached for medication as the easiest solution, as they also did for other members of my family that they medicated unnecessarily for other reasons. However, although I do think there was some level of Munchhousen by proxy at play here, I don't blame them, because I don't think they realized they were setting me up for years of torment in my future. They were being sold a lie by the doctors: that SSRIs are mild, safe and harmless.

 

I stayed on Zoloft, eventually switching to Prozac, throughout my childhood and into my early adulthood. Ironically, my anxiety got a lot worse in the years AFTER I started taking the medication, going to doctors, and having them tell me my anxiety was a clinical disease. Hmmm. I also experienced periods of being "down" throughout my adolescence, periods which at the time I thought were "depression", and more proof I needed to stay on the SSRIs (though I never felt suicidal during these times and my functionality in my day to day life was not affected. In retrospect these were normal teenage moods). No doctors suggested I come off, except for one single doctor I saw when I was 20 who said something like, "You seem to be doing well, you might want to try to come off of the SSRI", to which I responded, very brainwashed, "I think I need it, I can always come off of it later". He was the one who switched me to Prozac; he said it would be easier to come off of than Zoloft because Prozac has a much longer half-life.

 

When I turned 24, I felt like my life was in a place where I was ready to come off of Prozac. I had always thought I would come off of the SSRIs eventually, I just was in no rush, and so I had never tried to discontinue the medication at any point between the ages of 11 and 24. I took my pills every day, as I was supposed to and as the doctors had prescribed. But at age 24, I felt ready. From age 24 to 25, under the approval of my psychiatrist who I greatly respected, I tapered from 40 mg to 10 mg of Prozac. I felt no adverse affects. In retrospect, there is only a small difference between a dose of 40 mg Prozac and 10 mg Prozac if you look at the dose-response curve, which is hyperbolic. Your brain sees an extremely similar effect from 10 mg Prozac as it will from 40 mg Prozac. There are scientific papers which quantify this using PET scans. [Later, from fitting a hyperbolic curve to data from one of these papers, I estimated that at a dose of 40 mg Prozac the brain will see about 83% serotonin reuptake transporters occupied, and at 10 mg of Prozac the brain will see about 75% of serotonin reuptake transporters occupied -- not a huge difference between the two doses].

 

When I was 25, I asked my psychiatrist if I could try completely coming off of Prozac and she said yes. At this point in my life, I had no symptoms of "depression" and relatively mild symptoms of my "anxiety". She told me to simply stop taking the 10 mg, which she said was a tiny subtherapeutic dose which should have not been affecting me at all anyway. I stopped and psychologically all Hell broke loose for me within weeks.

 

My work life became stressful around this time. I did not immediately put two and two together that I was experiencing withdrawal (in fact, I was told by my psychiatrist that withdrawal was not possible to experience for SSRIs). I blamed work, even as my entire face broke out in acne worse than I had ever experienced, as I lost weight. Even as I felt levels of aggression which my previously zonked out Prozac'd brain had never known. Even as I experienced my first ever panic attack. Even as every waking moment felt like existing in a horror film.

 

Months passed. I reached a state of torment I had never known was even possible for a human to experience, making all of the time I had thought I had been "depressed" as a teenager seem completely trivial. The mental agony and anguish was indescribable; although most on this forum will know what I'm talking about. I also felt uncharacteristically helpless, like an old person in a life alert commercial, "I've fallen and I can't get up!". My psychiatrist urged me to reinstate the Prozac, at a higher dose than before. "Some people just need medication. There is no shame in it. Would a diabetic be ashamed of needing insulin?" Despite being stubborn, I was also confused and desperate. Perhaps they were right? They were my doctors, after all.

 

I reinstated my Prozac. Almost immediately, after only a few days, I felt better. I felt relief from the tormented thoughts constantly torturing my brain. My acne, which had only started after I had ceased taking the medication, and which had persisted for months, finally cleared. But... something felt weird. I also felt *drugged*. I had been drugged for so long as a child, *drugged* had felt *normal* for me. But, being off of the Prozac for a few months and then coming back on, I could feel that on Prozac my mental state was now drugged, a little bit cloudy, a touch hazy. I did not like this feeling. Suddenly, back on Prozac, my problems at work didn't seem so severe. But was that a real signal? Shouldn't I be taking my work problems seriously, to the extent at least where I should do something about them? I didn't think undrugged me had been wrong to be concerned about work, the problem was undrugged me was just non-functional. Not only that, but the fact that taking the Prozac nearly immediately relieved my anguish raised a red flag for me. I had always been told SSRIs can take a few weeks to start working. Why did it only take a few days for me when I had reinstated? Even though reinstating the Prozac (at 10 mg for a few days) gave me relief and made me feel basically "normal" again, I quickly stopped taking it again because I felt like something was deeply sinister about the way that I had suddenly felt better after reinstating.

 

I told my psychiatrist, "I think I was experiencing withdrawal from coming off of the Prozac". In response, my psychiatrist told me that was completely impossible, and Prozac did not have withdrawal associated. She said it was however possible I needed to switch to another drug. She prescribed me Effexor. At a desperate moment, and feeling tormented again as I had stopped the Prozac, I took it. It made me weirdly sleepy during the afternoons (to the point where I involuntarily fell asleep and I have never been a person to nap during the day), but it did make my problems fade away again. I remember lying in bed, feeling doped up and unbothered again by any of my problems. I didn't like the feeling of being drugged, so I stopped taking it after only two days without telling my psychiatrist. For a week after I stopped the Effexor, at random points throughout the day I felt brain zaps, weird tingly jolts in my skull that I had never felt before in my life.

 

I still believed if I could find the right psychiatrist, they would tell me exactly what to do. I saw a second psychiatrist who told me that any withdrawal I would have experienced from the Prozac would have only lasted one to two months maximum. She told me it was possible that stopping the Prozac had "uncovered" a new mental illness I might have, though she wasn't going to diagnose me quite yet at this point. I was able to speak with Mark Horowitz during this time and he told me this is a common move that psychiatrists will do with people experiencing withdrawal, deny the withdrawal and blame the symptoms on an "emergent" new disorder. I had never before in my life been diagnosed with this mental illness, I have no family history of it, and no other doctor had ever suggested it as a diagnosis. This psychiatrist prescribed me Abilify. When I expressed concerns that I didn't think I needed to take an antipsychotic, she told me if I did not take it, I might not be able to get our sessions reimbursed by my insurance. I told her I was taking it. I never took it.

 

It was not long before I began to question everything I had believed all of my life about psychiatry and mental illness. I began to read articles and books by Mark Horowitz, Joanna Moncreiff, Peter Breggin, Robert Whittaker. I found this website. At this point, I knew what I was experiencing was withdrawal. The severity and types of symptoms were unlike any thing I had experienced prior to being medicated or while on medication, and they resolved for me when the medication was reinstated. Given I had not had any symptoms at all right before I tried to come off of the SSRI, this was a clear hallmark of a withdrawal syndrome, not a "relapse" or the onset of a new condition. But I had never been warned withdrawal could happen. At any rate, I had no desire to be physiologically dependent on a substance which was probably bad for me [i asked Mark Horowitz about some studies which show that taking SSRIs result in neurogenesis in the hippocampus and he pointed out that this is a hallmark of brain damage; there is also neurogenesis immediately following a stroke] and caused me to feel drugged when taking it. I resolved to come off of the Prozac, even if it took a while. Reading about others' experiences, I felt devastated to think it could take years to come off of the medication through proper tapering. Before all this I had never thought I would have any problems coming off of the medication.

 

I realized I would have to take matters into my own hands if I ever wanted to come off of the Prozac. I found another psychiatrist who was more open to the idea that I was experiencing withdrawal, and agreed to prescribe me Prozac. However, this psychiatrist suggested tapering down 1 mg at a time, rather than doing a hyperbolic taper. Rather than try to get them to understand, I lied about the dose I was actually taking and implemented my own tapering protocol. I ordered a scale and pill capsules and started to make my own tapered pills. I felt scared and sad and alone. I was still in a terrible mental state. But I knew I would rather die than live my life dependent on this drug.

 

As a side note, what I went through at work during this time is its own story and its own trauma. Outside of the medical gaslighting happening, I was also being heavily gaslit at work. And I don't use the word gaslit lightly. This is a situation where in the past (while on SSRIs) I naively said the wrong things to the wrong people at the wrong times, and then during my withdrawals I had to suffer terribly for it (social rejection, negative gossip, gaslighting). I am not a political person. Being Machiavellian does not come naturally to me, but unfortunately it's an essential trait for my field of work. Even minus the SSRI withdrawal, this would have been a difficult time. But with the SSRI withdrawal on top of it, it almost ended my life.

 

 

My withdrawal experience:

 

The next two years were agony, unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life. My introduction thread lists out much of what I experienced, but one thing I was always too paranoid to post about there was the level of SI I had constantly during this time. I never told anyone because I was terrified I would be forced to take medication against my will. Again, ironically, I NEVER had any of these thoughts before I started SSRIs, back when I was first prescribed them at the ripe old age of 11, or even while I was on SSRIs! So much for "SSRIs save lives"! During withdrawal I had these thoughts nonstop for over a year. For me, they were on some level a comfort, to know that that option remained open. However, the reason I want to mention them here is in case anyone is reading this and also having SI. If you are and you think this is proof you are truly a lost cause and you won't ever recover, I am proof that that is not true.

 

What helped and what I learned:

 

After two years, I very gradually began to feel better, day by day. The improvement was incredibly slow and not monotonic, but very steady. Whenever I got discouraged, it helped to remind myself that how I felt at that moment was better than how I felt three months ago, which was in turn better than I had felt six months ago, etc. Even at the two year mark, I still felt miserable more than half of the days of the year. But I was doing much better than I had been. I completed my taper to 0 in April of 2024. At that point I felt well enough to be generally enjoying my life again and already basically considered myself to be recovered, although I still struggled with intrusive thoughts which left me feeling miserable 10-20% of the time. I became aware of a woman named Lauren Kennedy who has a youtube channel called Living Well with Schizophrenia. That year she tried the keto diet and this put her schizophrenia into remission and allowed her to completely come off of her antipsychotics. I decided to try keto as well as I was finally coming off of the last bit of Prozac. There is some evidence that the keto diet can help people with traumatic brain injuries, which I think is close to what I have from taking this drug for 15+ years. I believe the keto diet helped me immensely to banish the last remaining intrusive thoughts that were making me miserable. If you try this diet, I would recommend getting a blood monitor, otherwise it's hard to tell if you're actually in ketosis. I don't know if I would necessarily recommend it unless you have enough resources and you are in a good enough place mentally to not cheat on the diet, because it is expensive and very hard to follow (I'm not sure if I could have followed it during the worst of withdrawal) but I believe it did help me a lot and so I wanted to mention it here.

 

Other tips and things that helped me:

 

• Avoid sugar and caffeine
  
• Exercise, even if only a small amount
  
• Find ways to remain social
  
• Taper slowly! Genuinely, if you have been on SSRIs for 10+ years, it will take several years to come off. I think it might actually hurt your brain if your taper is not adiabatic enough.
  
• Try your best to improve what you can about your life, externally! I believe this was huge for my recovery. You may not be able to change the chemical depression, but you can try to make your life more tolerable by setting and meeting little goals. When in withdrawal, it is easy to allow your life become worse and worse because it is harder and harder to keep up with what you used to be able to do. Try not to let this happen to the extent you are able to, because if your external circumstances become objectively bad this can lead to being depressed both because of withdrawal and also because of external factors.
  
• Take charge of your own tapering/recovery. We are taught to place a lot of trust in doctors, and the impulse that I had initially which I suspect many other may as well was to find a trained professional and do whatever they said. Unfortunately, as I found out the hard way, this will only always lead to you being prescribed more drugs. If you want to lead a drug-free life, you may have to coordinate a lot of it yourself. I remember thinking how unfair this was, like people don't expect people with broken bones to set their own limbs. Unfortunately modern psychiatry is Broken and this is the current state of affairs. Life isn't fair and getting off these drugs may be the hardest thing you ever do, but it will also be the most rewarding.
  
• Time
  

 

 

Ways I changed:

 

This is going to sound dramatic but I believe my old self literally died when I came off of the Prozac. Effectively my brain "grew in wrong" because I grew up on Prozac. Coming off of it also altered my brain in a nontrivial way. If you see someone addicted to opiates who is high all of the time, and you see them after they've gotten clean, they look like two entirely different people. The same is true for SSRIs.

 

I kept a list of ways I felt I was different off SSRIs compared to on SSRIs, which I started shortly after I realized I was experiencing withdrawal. I'm not going to list everything here but a lot of these things are more related to personality than mood. For instance I was a lot more trusting and socially a little bit goofy on the drugs. To me that makes sense because the mechanism of action for SSRIs is similar to MDMA (increase extracellular serotonin in the brain) and MDMA users can be overly trusting/feeling inappropriately connected to strangers.

 

Ironically, I also had a lot more anxiety ON SSRIs, throughout my late childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, than off (not counting the period of immediate withdrawal where I had a panic attack). I remember, while ON SSRIs, I used to feel anxiety so intensely I would constantly get a severely upset stomach over relatively trivial things or from the most random worries, like worrying will I go blind from trying to dye my eyebrows. Coming OFF of the SSRI blunted this anxiety! Now (and for a few years now), I only get anxiety before things it is normal to get anxious about, like job interviews. And when I do have anxiety, it doesn't cripple me like it used to and I don't get nauseous or stomach aches. Ironically, my anxiety was at its worst while I was taking the drug that was supposedly treating it!

 

When I look at old pictures of myself from when I was most drugged I don't recognize myself because my eyes look weird and glazed over. I had that thousand yard SSRI stare. I would daydream a LOT -- and when I came off the SSRI my ratio of "doing" to "thinking" increased a TON. I also used to cry much more easily while on the SSRI. Coming off of the SSRI improved the way emotions are processed in my brain, so they aren't immediately shunted down the "start crying" pathway. In his book "Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal", Peter Breggin talks about chronic brain impairment, injury to the brain that happens to psych patients who have been medicated for a long time. While I was taking the SSRI, I was suffering from this - I had affective dysregulation and anosognosia, two hallmark symptoms.

 

I feel embarrassed more easily now, which is a good thing, because I think my inhibitions were too low due to the drug before. I even used to dress differently (more sloppily, as I was more careless in how I was perceived, due to lowered inhibitions) while on the SSRI and my style changed slightly when I came off of it!

 

I can say though that I'm now a better person than I ever was. In a way it was like I never fully grew up until I came off the drug.  It's like coming off of the drug gave me a step to stand on so I can see further and see more than I ever could before. I can see more clearly; the drug haze is gone and the fog of withdrawal has cleared.

 

 

Rethinking mental illness:

 

Psychiatry is modern-day bloodletting. In the old days, when you were sick, the doctor would come and drain out some of your "bad blood". If you recovered, it was because the technique of draining the blood worked (and not that you healed in spite of the blood draining making you weaker). If you didn't recover, it meant you were too sick and too far gone for the bloodletting to ever help you (and not because the blood letting weakened you and helped kill you). Psychiatry follows the same logic. If you go to the doctor and they prescribe you an SSRI and and you feel better from your depression, the SSRI helped you. If you go to the doctor and you take an SSRI and you don't improve or you have long term problems, you were just too sick to be helped by the drug.

 

This unnecessary mass drugging of millions worldwide is a tragedy at an unfathomable scale. These drugs have been approved without any long term studies, and they do not "fix" pathology in the brain, instead they create an abnormal state. Paraphrasing Joanna Moncrieff, you can also "treat" social anxiety with alcohol, but are you really "treating" the disorder, or using a drug to alleviate symptoms? After going through what I went through, I know that I never actually *needed* the drug for "anxiety" or "depression", and instead it gave me iatrogenic brain damage. There is a VAST overdiagnosis of psychiatric conditions in America today. The CDC says that in 2020, 18.4% of U.S. adults reported ever having been diagnosed with depression. Do we really believe that evolution works so poorly that 1 in 5 people is doomed to experience a clinical disease which requires them to be potentially medicated for life? These numbers do not add up. Even among those who genuinely could be said to have a mental illness; do psychiatric drugs really help them? Or could this be modern-day bloodletting, aided and abetted by the pharmaceutical industry, the same people who brought us the opioid epidemic?

 

A year has passed since I finished my taper, and I can say I consider myself to be completely healed. More than that, my life is so much better than it would have been were I to have stayed on my SSRI, in ways I never could have imagined or hoped. I have significantly less anxiety and I am so much more clear-headed. I have literally transformed into the person I was always supposed to be. It's like I was an alcoholic for 15+ years and I finally got sober. Life is beautiful for me now and I am finally productive, happy, healthy and functional. And now I am here to tell you that you can get there too.

Thank you for posting this, Toast.

 

Would you mind if I edited this post to include the text from your success story over there in case SA ever does go down? I'm sure future members would find it useful to read.

Thanks for adding this Toast! Congrats on being the first to post here. Gives others such hope!

Great to see everyone here

Hi @Luke,

 

Yes, feel free to edit my post to copy and paste my original post from Surviving Antidepressants in. Looking forward to seeing many more Success Stories in this section!

Hi @Luke,

 

Yes, feel free to edit my post to copy and paste my original post from Surviving Antidepressants in. Looking forward to seeing many more Success Stories in this section!

 

Thank you.

 

I've done that now.

 

So am I.

Thank you so much @Toast for your beautiful and touching success story!
I have taken those meds more than 10 years myself. I can imagine very well that a young person is affected by them , in the sense that it alters your personality, much more than I was. I’m so happy you got rid of this stuff! Well done! ❤️🤩

Edited February 10Feb 10 by Nemina

Thanks @Nemina! It was far from easy, but it was more than worth it in the end. I'm a completely different person now than I would have been if I'd stayed on Prozac. It's a weird experience to have, feeling like you lived half your life literally as a different person, that few people beyond this community can relate to. Best wishes to you on your journey. ❤️ 

The forum looks amazing. Huge shout out to @Luke and @Chippy. This is incredible. Thanks for creating this space for the community and in such a short period of time. 

3 hours ago, Toast said:

The forum looks amazing. Huge shout out to @Luke and @Chippy. This is incredible. Thanks for creating this space for the community and in such a short period of time. 

Pleasure Toast. Thanks for being here.

Hi @Toast

 

any chance I can pick your brain on how your anhedonia was? I see you suffered with it. Did it go away while on medication and was it continuous? I feel mine is pretty constant I might have it lift late at night sometimes to then go asleep and it be back full on In the morning. 
 

so glad your fully recovered.

 

kind regards 

@Richie, I had anhedonia for over a year and it was by far the worst time of my life. Nothing could bring even the smallest amount of happiness or pleasure, not listening to music, any of my old hobbies, completing things on my to do list, or a conversation with a friend. It was continuous even when I reinstated medication but it eventually went away, and when it went away it did not come back (although even after it went away I still struggled with other symptoms like depression, lack of motivation, difficulty concentrating, poor memory, and poor sleep). I remember at the two year mark of my taper I felt like the anhedonia had completely gone and even though I wasn't close to being healed at that point, it helped a LOT to lose that symptom. 

 

My advice for anyone suffering from anhedonia is never believe that this symptom will last forever. It is not sustainable for a human being to suffer from anhedonia forever because it is simply such an extreme symptom that affects things too important to human survival. Eventually the brain finds a way to fix the symptom, just like eventually the brain will flip back the vision of someone who wears special glasses which invert the world and turn it upside down (https://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/mar97/858984531.Ns.r.html). Even if eventually is ~years like it was for me, I don't think anyone's brain can be "stuck forever" in anhedonia. I know if I would have known I would eventually completely heal from anhedonia, it would have helped a lot while I was going through it. So this is me telling you, you will heal someday too!!

On 12/23/2025 at 2:38 PM, Toast said:

A year has passed since I finished my taper, and I can say I consider myself to be completely healed. More than that, my life is so much better than it would have been were I to have stayed on my SSRI, in ways I never could have imagined or hoped. I have significantly less anxiety and I am so much more clear-headed. I have literally transformed into the person I was always supposed to be. It's like I was an alcoholic for 15+ years and I finally got sober. Life is beautiful for me now and I am finally productive, happy, healthy and functional. And now I am here to tell you that you can get there too.

@Toast thank you for the time and effort you put into your success story. I'm sure it will help countless people now and into the future. It's both sad and inspirational.  So glad to hear you're through to the other side. I look forward to the day when I can write my own success story. Best wishes 🤗🙏

Thanks @Catbird! You'll make it to the other side too and I look forward to reading your future Success Story. ❤️ 

Thanks for sharing!

Do you remember any big dips or waves when you reached 0, or was it pretty much like your other drops? 

Hi @Dee12h,

 

By the time I reached 0, I was already feeling much better and nearly completely recovered. I also started the keto diet when I went to 0 and stayed on for over a year. So, no big dips or waves when I reached 0. I think it's partly because of keto but also partly because I think most of my healing happened in the first two years when I was holding at around 2 mg. Also, my external life circumstances improved at the 3 year mark for me (before I reached 0) as well and this helped a lot too. Hope that's helpful!

 

1 hour ago, Toast said:

Hi @Dee12h,

 

By the time I reached 0, I was already feeling much better and nearly completely recovered. I also started the keto diet when I went to 0 and stayed on for over a year. So, no big dips or waves when I reached 0. I think it's partly because of keto but also partly because I think most of my healing happened in the first two years when I was holding at around 2 mg. Also, my external life circumstances improved at the 3 year mark for me (before I reached 0) as well and this helped a lot too. Hope that's helpful!

 

So optimistic @Toast

I agree with @Catbird, your story makes me really hopeful,  thank you!

this has giving me such hope!!!! thank you 

On 12/22/2025 at 7:38 PM, Toast said:

This unnecessary mass drugging of millions worldwide is a tragedy at an unfathomable scale. These drugs have been approved without any long term studies, and they do not "fix" pathology in the brain, instead they create an abnormal state. Paraphrasing Joanna Moncrieff, you can also "treat" social anxiety with alcohol, but are you really "treating" the disorder, or using a drug to alleviate symptoms? After going through what I went through, I know that I never actually *needed* the drug for "anxiety" or "depression", and instead it gave me iatrogenic brain damage. There is a VAST overdiagnosis of psychiatric conditions in America today. The CDC says that in 2020, 18.4% of U.S. adults reported ever having been diagnosed with depression. Do we really believe that evolution works so poorly that 1 in 5 people is doomed to experience a clinical disease which requires them to be potentially medicated for life? These numbers do not add up. Even among those who genuinely could be said to have a mental illness; do psychiatric drugs really help them? Or could this be modern-day bloodletting, aided and abetted by the pharmaceutical industry, the same people who brought us the opioid epidemic?

 

A year has passed since I finished my taper, and I can say I consider myself to be completely healed. More than that, my life is so much better than it would have been were I to have stayed on my SSRI, in ways I never could have imagined or hoped. I have significantly less anxiety and I am so much more clear-headed. I have literally transformed into the person I was always supposed to be. It's like I was an alcoholic for 15+ years and I finally got sober. Life is beautiful for me now and I am finally productive, happy, healthy and functional. And now I am here to tell you that you can get there too.

Thank you for sharing your story. I just want to point out how poignant this is. I have been trying and failing to find ways to express the grief and loss that I feel, not just for my own experience, but for the fact that this is happening on a mass scale to vulnerable people. I am hopeful that I can reach full recovery as you have. Thank you.

@OpNoZac I’m glad my story was helpful. You can and will reach a full recovery.

Hey @Toast,

Your story really sticks out to me as one of the most hopeful. You really detail the horror of this whole ordeal well. I had a few questions if that’s ok.

First, how did you deal with the SI? Do you ever get those feelings now? Does it feel possible to even return to that state? It’s such a backwards thing. I will have a good moment but then it can turn around and those thoughts and feelings are so strong, even though proof of healing or this whole ordeal being “worth it” are there. I know I don’t feel that way intellectually, but my mind and body will go there so easily. I can’t really envision how these thoughts can go away for me and would really appreciate your input.

Second, I want to hear how recovery feels for you. I’ve been having a very hard time conceptualizing the idea of feeling better and not having to fight this battle every day. I can imagine it’s not an easy feeling to grasp while you’re in the middle of it all. How did it look for you when you started getting better? What did you feel? I’ve seen some people say that it seems impossible for them to experience those same WD feelings and that it’s almost hard to remember for that reason. Do you feel safe in your body and mind again? I’d love to hear your description of this.

Thanks, and know that your story really helps me out when things get hard.

Hi @alexalv ,

I'm happy to answer any questions!

One strategy I had for dealing with SI was postponement. I would tell myself, things may be bad now, but, what if they do improve? Then I would tell myself, if things don't improve in [1 year, 2 year, insert time frame], then I would allow myself to consider more drastic actions. Even in my darkest days, I could feel tiny improvements which gave me a lot of hope to keep going. Every day that I chose not to act on SI feelings, I would tell myself, because I'm actively making the choice every day to keep living, I also need to actively keep making choices to improve my life. If the three options are 1. ending things, 2. Keep going and life continues to be unbearable, and 3. Keep going but things improve for me, 2 seemed the worst option to me, so every day that I did not choose 1, I needed to do whatever I could to choose 3, and improve the things that I actually had control over (even though, the most major thing -- i.e., how quickly my brain would heal -- I did not have control over). For me that meant keeping up with my job, continuing to meet small goals, getting exercise, etc.

These are only my strategies, but I think it is always possible to find many other good reasons to keep living.

I also did updose a very small amount (2 mg to 2.25 mg Prozac) when things were really bad for me which was in retrospect very helpful for me and did not really delay my taper.

To answer your question of if it feels possible to return to the state I was in in withdrawal when I had strong SI: I don't think I could ever return to that same state again, with the same intensity as I had experienced it. I can definitely say that all withdrawal-related SI has vanished for me, along with my withdrawal-induced anhedonia and depression. That said, I think if things got bad enough in my life, I could see myself having SI again. But I think this is because (non medication-withdrawal induced) SI is a natural response to trauma/loss/grief. If [insert tragedy here] happened to me, I can't say I wouldn't experience SI. But it doesn't mean I would act on it, and it also doesn't mean I'm not healed from antidepressants. Having healed, my emotions now feel very different, and I can't see myself ever going back to that very raw, chemically altered state that defines withdrawal.

You mention that you can't see how the thoughts could ever go away for you. I know this feeling. I was there when I was in withdrawal, still hoping but dealing with the doubts when you're one or two years in and life is still impossibly hard. But the thoughts did go away for me. <3 and they will go away for you!! It's so worth fighting through, I promise you. Do whatever you can to trick your mind and body to keep going. I'm so glad that I did.

For me, recovery now feels like just getting to live a normal life, all of the ups and downs. And it feels wonderful. If you picture the scale of human emotions, our emotions are normally along a scale of say 10 to -10. 10 is the highest high you would naturally experience in life, and -10 is the lowest low you would naturally experience in life. Let's say with drugs you could experience a positive emotion as high as 100 and a negative emotion as low as -100. The first year of withdrawal brought me down to -98 basically non stop (I really did not have any windows... it was agony). The second year of withdrawal, I hovered around -95; I felt slightly better but I was still so broken. The third year of withdrawal I was around a -60, and starting to have windows, and by the time I healed, I was back to having emotions between 10 and -10. For me, starting to feel better was realizing my symptoms, while still initially bad, were actually improving.

Now that I am healed, it does feel hard sometimes to put myself back into the terrible mental state I was in in withdrawal, because my brain just doesn't do that mental state anymore. Which I'm so grateful for! I know what people mean when they say it's almost hard to remember those feelings. When your emotions are back at -10 instead of -99, you just can't access the -99 anymore. I do feel safe in my mind and body now, but that doesn't mean I don't struggle occasionally now. It just means my struggles are now normal :D, they are no longer chemical/drug-induced, and that difficult feelings are at a much, much easier-to-cope-with scale.

I hope that's helpful. <3

9 hours ago, Toast said:

Hi @alexalv ,

I'm happy to answer any questions!

One strategy I had for dealing with SI was postponement. I would tell myself, things may be bad now, but, what if they do improve? Then I would tell myself, if things don't improve in [1 year, 2 year, insert time frame], then I would allow myself to consider more drastic actions. Even in my darkest days, I could feel tiny improvements which gave me a lot of hope to keep going. Every day that I chose not to act on SI feelings, I would tell myself, because I'm actively making the choice every day to keep living, I also need to actively keep making choices to improve my life. If the three options are 1. ending things, 2. Keep going and life continues to be unbearable, and 3. Keep going but things improve for me, 2 seemed the worst option to me, so every day that I did not choose 1, I needed to do whatever I could to choose 3, and improve the things that I actually had control over (even though, the most major thing -- i.e., how quickly my brain would heal -- I did not have control over). For me that meant keeping up with my job, continuing to meet small goals, getting exercise, etc.

These are only my strategies, but I think it is always possible to find many other good reasons to keep living.

I also did updose a very small amount (2 mg to 2.25 mg Prozac) when things were really bad for me which was in retrospect very helpful for me and did not really delay my taper.

To answer your question of if it feels possible to return to the state I was in in withdrawal when I had strong SI: I don't think I could ever return to that same state again, with the same intensity as I had experienced it. I can definitely say that all withdrawal-related SI has vanished for me, along with my withdrawal-induced anhedonia and depression. That said, I think if things got bad enough in my life, I could see myself having SI again. But I think this is because (non medication-withdrawal induced) SI is a natural response to trauma/loss/grief. If [insert tragedy here] happened to me, I can't say I wouldn't experience SI. But it doesn't mean I would act on it, and it also doesn't mean I'm not healed from antidepressants. Having healed, my emotions now feel very different, and I can't see myself ever going back to that very raw, chemically altered state that defines withdrawal.

You mention that you can't see how the thoughts could ever go away for you. I know this feeling. I was there when I was in withdrawal, still hoping but dealing with the doubts when you're one or two years in and life is still impossibly hard. But the thoughts did go away for me. <3 and they will go away for you!! It's so worth fighting through, I promise you. Do whatever you can to trick your mind and body to keep going. I'm so glad that I did.

For me, recovery now feels like just getting to live a normal life, all of the ups and downs. And it feels wonderful. If you picture the scale of human emotions, our emotions are normally along a scale of say 10 to -10. 10 is the highest high you would naturally experience in life, and -10 is the lowest low you would naturally experience in life. Let's say with drugs you could experience a positive emotion as high as 100 and a negative emotion as low as -100. The first year of withdrawal brought me down to -98 basically non stop (I really did not have any windows... it was agony). The second year of withdrawal, I hovered around -95; I felt slightly better but I was still so broken. The third year of withdrawal I was around a -60, and starting to have windows, and by the time I healed, I was back to having emotions between 10 and -10. For me, starting to feel better was realizing my symptoms, while still initially bad, were actually improving.

Now that I am healed, it does feel hard sometimes to put myself back into the terrible mental state I was in in withdrawal, because my brain just doesn't do that mental state anymore. Which I'm so grateful for! I know what people mean when they say it's almost hard to remember those feelings. When your emotions are back at -10 instead of -99, you just can't access the -99 anymore. I do feel safe in my mind and body now, but that doesn't mean I don't struggle occasionally now. It just means my struggles are now normal :D, they are no longer chemical/drug-induced, and that difficult feelings are at a much, much easier-to-cope-with scale.

I hope that's helpful. <3

Thanks @Toast. Again, your story is so hopeful for me. If you can survive and enjoy life again, maybe I can too.

As for the “life improvement” part, that’s been hard, and I often feel guilty for not doing more for my life. Granted, I’m not doing too bad. I’m working full time and working on some online classes for my degree. However, things like deliberately exercising, self-discovery, dating etc. have been put on hold. Sometimes I feel the best I can do is just get through the day. One thing that has gotten incredibly hard for me is socializing, which is odd because I was super social and charismatic before WD.

Did things like these come naturally as time went on, or was it more of a discipline/forced thing to get yourself back into it? I feel like I’ve lost the carrot on the end of the stick for some of these activities, and so I only reap the effort of doing them, not the reward. I also feel unusually helpless, like the whole thing is just out of my control. I think it’s almost easier that way, because I don’t know how I’d handle this being my fault. Let me know what you think.

Thank you so much for sharing your success story @Toast. I am tapering from Prozac as well after 30+ years on antidepressants but I still have a ways to go. Your story is very inspiring. Again, I really appreciate you sharing.