Transcription
So today we're going to be talking about what happens if you do a rapid taper. Tapering too quickly is how you can develop protracted withdrawal, which is essentially a brain injury.
Now, I don't want to scare people. If you've been rapid tapered, because the truth is is that the majority of people are not going to develop this. You know, when I was doing this previously, you know, I saw tens of thousands of people who've been essentially withdrawn from their benzodiazepines or their antidepressants within, you know, a period of couple weeks to a couple months, and they've been completely fine and they had no problems.
What I do notice now, especially in my private practice, that I'm seeing a lot of people who were rapidly tapered off their medications, and then they never really recovered. And even if they tried to reintroduce the medication afterwards, they still had severe neurological symptoms and problems, and some of these things lasted for years.
And so, why do you need to do a slow taper? You know, well, one, if this happens to you, if you get protracted withdrawal, it's a a massive deal. It's really disruptive to your life. We're talking about possibly several years recovering from a neurological illness. So even though the risk of that happening to you is is kind of small, I would still advise you to taper gradually because it's going to reduce the chance that that's going to happen to you.
What I think is happening in these rapid withdrawal processes is that you essentially pulled the drug out of your brain, but you haven't pulled it out at a rate where the brain has been able to compensate for its absence. And so you have this imbalance in, um, in whether it's excitation in the brain. Usually, you know, because you're pulling out blockers, a lot of the times like serotonin reuptake inhibitors, these are blocking, um, the reuptake of serotonin, or benzodiazepines, they're blocking the flow of Gaba. And so when you pull those out, you might put your brain into some unbalanced state of excitation. And that excitation can actually be toxic. And so, and by that, I mean it could damage neurons because that's what I'm seeing, you know, people with long-lasting injuries.
And so when you taper it gradually over time, and I'm talking like a minimum of like six to nine months, and some of these things go up to to 18 months, when you do a gradual taper, and sometimes longer, you're actually reducing the medication in a very gradual and controlled way, and you're watching and listening to your body to see whether to to know when you're when your brain has kind of compensated for that next step down. And so you you do this very gradually over a period of time, and that way you don't kind of shock your system by removing everything all at once.
And so coming back to the original question, what happens if I don't do a slow taper? The chances are you're probably going to be just fine. But if you're unlucky, you run a risk of developing something called protracted withdrawal, and it could be devastating for your life. So it's because of this small risk, which is truly unpredictable, you cannot predict if this happens to you, and it's because of that risk that I recommend slow and gradual tapering for anyone who wants to come off a psychiatric medication.