Coming off antidepressants

Around one in six adults in the UK experience moderate to severe depressive symptoms, with antidepressants often prescribed to help treat them. 8 million people are currently taking them among a population of about 65 million. Mark Horowitz is a clinical research fellow at University College London and spoke about his own run-in with depression and taking antidepressants…

Mark - I was diagnosed with depression when I was 21. I had a number of things going on in my life. Wasn't very happy with my course. I'd had a reasonably difficult time during my education fitting in. Came from an immigrant family. I was prescribed antidepressants by my GP. I've always asked what the effect was. I can't really remember whether it had a positive effect on my mood or not, but I do remember a number of side effects. I felt dizzy. I had a sort of change in sensations. I eventually decided to stop them after being on them for 15 years. And the reason why I wanted to stop them was I was very tired all the time and I started to develop trouble with memory and concentration, and I wondered whether it was due to the medication and that's why I wanted to try to stop it.

Will - And so what happened next when you came off them?

Mark - What happened next was actually the most troubling experience of my life. Soon after reducing, which I did over a few months, I had trouble sleeping and I would wake up in the mornings with incredible panic, like I was being chased by a wild animal, you know, with a cold sweat. And I would be in a state of panic for hours and hours. It would eventually get a bit of relief in the evenings. I'm a little bit of a couch potato, but I took up running quite a few kilometres a day until my feet bled just because it gave me a little bit of relief from that terrifying sensation that I had. I also felt dizzy and things around me seemed quite dreamlike. And that went on for weeks and weeks and weeks. And eventually I couldn't handle it anymore. I understood it was withdrawal symptoms because it wasn't anything like the kind of neurotic symptoms that put me on the drugs in the first place. And I ended up going back to the medication in order to resolve those withdrawal symptoms. I learned a few years later a better technique for coming off, which involves going off even more slowly, down to very low doses. I am using a liquid version of the drug, and I'm currently in the tail end of coming off the drugs at the moment.