IT’S GONNA HURT –
July 19, 2025 – I was just 21 when I first took antidepressants. I had just been diagnosed with anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder and was convinced I must be going “mad” — whatever that meant. After 20 years on the drugs, the author suffered severe withdrawal. She had no idea how difficult it would be. My mental health had become so bad I’d dropped out of uni and retreated to my parents’ house, where I hid away for months. I couldn’t face telling anyone apart from my immediate family how I was feeling. I certainly didn’t know anyone who took medication for their mental health back in 2004, and the surrounding stigma nearly stopped me from starting, but in the end I was so frightened of the way I was feeling that I popped the foil and swallowed one.
That was the start of a long relationship with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that has been, for the most part, very successful. But it’s one that now, at the age of 41, I want to end. The trouble is, the drugs won’t let me.
SSRIs have helped me live a life mostly free from the very worst symptoms of my mental illness by increasing serotonin levels in the brain. They have helped millions of others to deal with depression and anxiety, and I firmly believe they have a place in the mental health toolkit. But had I known I’d spend this long on them, mainly because I’m scared to come off them, I wonder whether I would have taken them at all.
When I got my initial prescription, the GP said I could come off them when I felt better, but the fear that those terrifying intrusive thoughts might creep back meant that once I felt less anxious, I was in no hurry to give them up. I did try to stop in my mid-twenties after a bad break-up, but I tapered off too quickly and ended up in a depressive funk that scared me (and my family) silly. I requested a new prescription and didn’t try to quit again for a decade.
