Going Off Antidepressants Harvard Health Publishing
Antidepressants help boost your levels of naturally occurring, mood-regulating substances in your brain, called neurotransmitters, including serotonin and norepinephrine. Researchers don’t know exactly what causes the symptoms of antidepressant withdrawal. But they think it may be because serotonin drops quickly when you stop taking a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) or serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI).
What is the most important information I should know about antidepressant withdrawal?
In some cases, you can use a pill cutter to create smaller-dose pills, though be sure to check with your clinician or pharmacist to find out if your antidepressant can be cut. You may also be able to use a liquid formulation for smaller dose adjustments. In general, it can take several months for your brain to regulate itself. Your best strategy for going off your medicine is to taper your doses down slowly.
Taper Off Slowly
Sometimes going off your antidepressants can even feel like a recurrence of your depression symptoms, which can be confusing. A depression recurrence will usually take more than a few days to appear. For example, if you’re in school, you may want to plan to start your tapering off schedule at the end of the semester instead of at the beginning. This gives you time to manage the effects without worrying about your grades slipping. A doctor may suggest tapering the medication over 6 to 8 weeks to help reduce the risk or severity of symptoms.
Warnings for Antidepressant Withdrawal
- If you’ve been taking medication to manage your depression, there may come a time when you want to stop using it.
- Then start a conversation with your doctor, who can work with you to determine the best course of action.
- Once you decide to quit, you and your physician should take steps to minimize or avoid the discontinuation symptoms that can occur if such medications are withdrawn too quickly.
- If you want to go off, talk to your doctor about tapering your dose down gradually over time.
Some estimates suggest that at least one in five people who stop taking an antidepressant abruptly experience these symptoms. There are many reasons you may decide to stop taking antidepressants. Or maybe your condition has improved, and you no longer need medication. To be in a position where you feel ready to come off antidepressants is a good thing. There’s no rule book for when to go off antidepressants, and the reasons to do so are as varied as the patients who use them in the first place. The first course of action, though, is to figure out why you want to stop.
Research indicates that discontinuation symptoms are common, affecting over half of people who stop taking antidepressants. Withdrawal symptoms usually come on within 5 days of stopping the medicine and generally last 1 to 2 weeks. Some people have severe withdrawal symptoms that last for several months or more.
It is important to work with your healthcare provider to weigh these risks against the potential risks of continuing Prozac. Fluoxetine has a number of side effects that can negatively impact your life. While many of these dissipate over time, sexual side effects may continue even after you have stopped taking the drug. A drug’s half-life is the time it takes for 50% of how to wean off prozac the drug to be removed from your body. Most SSRIs have a half-life of approximately one day, but Prozac’s half-life is four to six days. This is important because withdrawal symptoms typically begin when a drug is about 90% out of your body.
A doctor can evaluate your current prescription dosage and make a plan with you to taper off your medication. What we know about treating antidepressant withdrawal naturally is mostly anecdotal, or not proven. Symptoms that show up within a week of quitting your medication are more likely to be withdrawal-related and will likely subside within 1 to 2 weeks, according to research from 2017.
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