Almost No Research Explains How to Stop Taking Antidepressants.

In a powerfully reported essay by a member of its editorial board, the New York Times looked at an issue that has long plagued users of antidepressants and other mood-altering medications: It’s a lot harder to stop taking them than it is to start.

We’ve spent four decades learning which people to put on these medications while dedicating almost no time to studying how to get them off. Patient Cameron LaBar was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety early in his life, and became so “knotted up” he couldn’t take a deep breath, his mother told doctors. He was prescribed Paxil, an antidepressant in the class known as SSRI’s, at just 9 years old – the start of “a prolonged pharmaceutical spiral that kept him on medication without egress.” It continues today, more than 20 years after that first pill.

Through his teens, LaBar cycled through medication after medication to quiet his tics, trading a set of side effects for temporary relief from symptoms. He had a “chemical imbalance,” his doctors said, and the pills would fix it. The phrase, made popular by pharmaceutical marketing, brought comfort. If the brain has a disorder that needs ongoing chemical correction, there’s no reason to ever stop.

The drugs do help many people, at least for a time. But by age 29, LaBar felt himself falling apart. Hit with mood swings he couldn’t explain and emotional blunting in his attempts at romantic love, he traced the symptoms back to his medications — a common side effect of SSRIs. After watching a three-hour interview featuring Dr. Mark Horowitz, a psychiatry professor in Adelaide University in Australia and a leading voice in what has become known as the deprescribing movement, LaBar resolved to wean himself fully from the medication. He followed the method that Horowitz described, known as a hyperbolic taper, with his psychiatrist’s support. He wanted to tap into a full, authentic life, which felt possible only once he was free from antidepressants. But he experienced a withdrawal — or relapse — so brutal that it included worsening depression and suicidal thoughts so persistent that he quit his job.

Still, LeBar’s conviction to end use of his meds remains high, flowing from the same current pulling thousands out of the medical system and into online communities where members trade tapering advice that many doctors are ill-equipped to provide.

“The withdrawal community knows so much more about this process than psychiatrists because they have done it for decades,” said Dr. Swapnil Gupta, a psychiatrist who helped write the first book about psychiatric deprescribing in 2019. Unfortunately, the dearth of scientific study leaves patients sifting through a mixed, sometimes harmful bag. The same forums that offer real help can sometimes lean into antipsychiatry, convincing people that the medications never worked, that their suffering was never real, or that their depression was never “real.”

The status quo leaves patients stuck. Even as the push to deprescribe gains momentum, there are no standard protocols on how to do so safely because too little research exists to arrive at a medical consensus. What we know is that careful tapering requires time, attention and collaboration between patient and prescriber, something few traditional doctor visits allow.

Inklings of change are coming: Gupta was part of a 2025 international Task Force convened by the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology, which published its findings in February of this year, delineating the first steps towards a consensus protocol for deprescribing SSRIs and other psychotropic drugs.