If you’re on SSRI antidepressants, please know that you need to be very careful coming off antidepressants. Even if you’re careful, you may experience side effects that can make it difficult to function normally for a period of time. Here I’ll share my two experiences with coming off SSRIs in the past 10 years.
Disclaimer: The information provided on this blog is for general educational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
Ready to Decrease Meds
It wasn’t until I was almost 6 years postpartum, 5 years after I started my antidepressant medication, that I finally felt I could start weaning off of it.
I have been on antidepressants in the past and had gotten off of them before getting pregnant with my first child. I know how hard it is to get off of antidepressants which is why it took me almost dying to finally get back on them. I really, really, didn’t want to, but it was the lesser of two evils, in a sense.
I will say, I feel they have helped a lot over the past several years. I just know getting off of them is rough.
I always recommend being under the direct supervision of a psychiatrist, or at least a general practitioner, when you’re weaning off of antidepressants.
No matter how slowly you get off of them though, you may experience side effects.
If you want to read more about my experience with postpartum depression, check out this blog post.
My Highest Dose
I started out low on the antidepressant Sertraline (a.k.a. Zoloft) a year after I had my twins and was battling postpartum depression so intense I almost took my own life, several times.
I worked my way up to 150mg and then eventually to 200mg where I stayed for a couple of years. That’s the highest dose typically prescribed.
I felt fine on it, finally felt I wasn’t depressed and could do most things that I needed to throughout the day, including caring for my twins and older singleton.
Lowering My Dose
Last summer when my twins were almost 6 and I had been on antidepressants for almost 5 years, I finally felt it was time to try and lower my dose.
With the help of my psychiatrist, I went from 200mg down to 150mg down to 100mg over several months. I chose to wait until Spring to start decreasing and once fall hit I stopped decreasing.
At that point, it wasn’t my goal to get off of them, I just didn’t want to be on such a high dose and wanted to see how I’d do.
I also know that with the long, grey, cold Minnesota Winters, lowering antidepressant medication over the winter isn’t the best idea for me.
I felt fine at 100mg and was glad that I had gotten down to half the dose I had been on previously. I didn’t experience any symptoms commonly associated with decreasing SSRIs, which was great!
More Lowering…
This Spring I decided I wanted to keep decreasing my dose.
I met with my psychiatrist and we cut my dose from 100mg to 50mg.
I didn’t notice any ill effects from this and was happy to be on less of a dose.
I didn’t notice any emotional or physical effects of lowering the dose which was a great surprise!!
Then It Started…
As we decreased me further from 50mg to 25mg things started to change in my brain.
Within two days of the change, I started having really scary symptoms that made me pause driving for now.
Specifically, I had spells where I could feel a wave coming on of nausea paired with odd recurring thoughts. I kept having the same recurring thoughts yet when I was out of the ‘episode’ I have no idea what the thoughts were.
They weren’t anything bad, like hurting myself, I know that much. But beyond that, I really don’t know. It’s really odd though how I don’t know what the thoughts were yet when I have them I am able to remember in that state that it’s the same thought I had the last time I had an episode.
So bizarre!
This happened a couple times a day for the few days after I made the decrease. A couple times overnight as well which was less than pleasant.
Luckily I never threw up but it was all enough to make me not feel safe driving.
Partially because one happened while my husband was driving and I had to ask him to park quickly because I felt so dizzy and thought I was going to throw up.
Had I been driving I don’t know if I could have safely gotten us to the side of the road.
It’s been over a week since I made the decrease in meds and for the past couple of days I’ve had some nausea on and off but no odd memory episodes where I don’t feel like myself.
I did drive yesterday to pick up my new lower prescription from the pharmacy in town. Only realizing as I was half way there that I had told myself I wasn’t going to drive for a while. Luckily, my kids weren’t with me and everything ended up just fine. I won’t be doing that anytime soon though. Just in case.
More Side Effects
About two weeks after I lowered my dose, the day after I wrote this post, I had more side effects.
I was in the middle of a stressful situation where my kids were fighting with each other, which is typical, but it affected me differently than usual. I yelled at them to stop with the scary rage I felt back when I started my antidepressant years ago.
Then, my husband called and asked me to do something basic with the smoker because he was away, helping my dad with something else. I literally could not conceptualize what he was asking me to do.
He needed me to go out to the smoker, take the ribs off, put water on them, then brown sugar, then wrap them in foil.
Simple, right?
I had to have him repeat it 3 times before I could write it down so I’d remember.
Then when I got out to the smoker, I had no idea how to get the ribs off the smoker.
To give myself a bit of credit, I’d never used the smoker before, but still, it’s pretty basic.
So I called him back. Asking him how the heck I’m supposed to get them off the smoker when they’re just laying on the rack. He instructed me to grab a tongs from the kitchen, put the tin foil on the table outside and put the ribs on them.
I should have been able to figure that out. I’m an intelligent person, but I just couldn’t get my brain to problem solve.
I hung up, in a huff, and got it done.
But my gosh, that was insane. I apologized to him later when he got home for my being upset with him on the phone and told him how I wasn’t able to problem solve which freaked me out.
My brain typically would be able to take a direction and go with it but clearly it couldn’t.
After this episode, I was able to regroup and problem-solve again. I got the kids outside to play and set up their inflatable swimming pool because it was 90+ degrees out. I was able to problem-solve to figure out how to do those things, even when some things didn’t work out as they should have.
Moving Forward
To be honest, I’m not sure if I’ll further decrease from 25mg to 0 with my next visit later this month.
I’m guessing my psychiatrist will suggest I go straight from 25 to 0 but if I do lower I’m going to try to split the 25s in half again…
This will be difficult because I’m already splitting a 50mg in half to make 25mg so splitting 25mg in half will be even more difficult to get the correct dosing but I’m afraid the jump from 25 to 0 will be too much for my brain.
Different for Everyone
Getting off of SSRI antidepressants is different for everyone.
I just wanted to share my experience since I’ve shared my postpartum depression experience with you, I thought it was only fair to share the end of it as well.
Be careful when you’re decreasing on medications. I suggest keeping a diary or at least notes on the notes app of your phone (like I’ve been doing) to write down any side effects you notice.
Nicely enough, a lot of providers are able to be communicated with between appointments if needed to tell our medical professionals what’s going on and see if there is anything they can suggest.
Keep yourself and your loved ones safe during this as well.
Let your partner or family members know that you’re decreasing and ask for their help and grace as you work your way through this.
Heck, I’ve even told my children what’s going on so they know what’s happening and if something were to happen they’d be able to explain to EMS the cause of if something goes wrong (my kids are currently almost 7, 7, and 9).
There is no timetable on these things, you don’t have to get off of them, it’s just my choice that I don’t want to continue to be on antidepressants if I don’t have to be.
Cautionary Tale/What Happened Last Time
As I mentioned earlier, I have been on Sertraline/Zoloft before. I struggled with severe depression as a teen and started antidepressants around age 14 or so. Over the years, the psychiatrist I was working with was no longer in network so I went to my regular doctor for medication management.
Then I moved around for college and graduate school. Going to different doctors over the years.
All of them saw I was on Zoloft/Sertraline, refilled my prescription, and moved on.
I was on them for 14 years before I finally was like, ‘hey, I feel rather happy and want to have a kid soon…maybe I should get off these things!’ I worked with my doctor at the time to get off of them.
We did a good job at decreasing slowly but from what my husband and I remember, I went a little rouge at the end. Either I went from 50mg to 0 or 25mg to 0. I don’t remember which. I should have gone more slowly.
What ended up happening is like what’s happening now, but worse. Of course, I was a school psychologist back then and did this over the summer so I didn’t need to drive or worry about side effects as much. Which was good.
I couldn’t drive for at least a few weeks while I kept having odd sensations in my brain and dizziness that made me not feel comfortable driving.
Many months after that, my health took the worst turn it’s ever taken. Now, I don’t know if it was getting off of my medication or if it was the flu shot I got, the mold we found in our new home and had to eradicate, or the many different life stressors that had occurred in the year leading up to it. I may have been everything all together.
Quick aside: the life stressors were mainly good ones, but even good stress can be hard on the body. In the year prior to getting off my meds and my resulting flare I had gotten married, we bought our first home which was 90 miles from our old one, we moved, and we both switched jobs to be closer to the new home. The bad: we had to remediate undisclosed mold in the new home in 3 places, we also had $50K in repairs we had to do to our NON fixer upper house within the first year. This is while I was making less than that a year. Yet we did it without incurring debt. All that to say…a lot had happened over a year.
Either way, that’s how I discovered I not only have Hypothyroidism but that my Hypothyroidism is caused by Hashimoto’s Disease which is an autoimmune disease. This means my body is constantly attacking my thyroid, trying to destroy it. Once my body destroys it, my body will start attacking another organ. I now know that I was likely entering into an autoimmune flare that took me almost a year to recover from.
Quite simply, it was hell.
This was back when I was working full time as a school psychologist and once the school year began I couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours a night, I woke up with intense anxiety like I’d never had before in my life, in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep.
I had such bad cystic acne I had to stop wearing make up (which I’m fine not wearing now) and did so much research to discover what was going on with me as my doctor didn’t know.
I asked for the test to check for Hashimoto’s disease and she did it though she told me that she wouldn’t do anything different in terms of my treatment (my doctor was great but that’s just common within Western medicine). I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Disease and that week I drastically changed how I lived and ate. Removed all gluten, dairy, soy, processed foods, and anything that wasn’t high quality meats, vegetables, and some fruits. Basically, I started the Autoimmune Protocol.
I’ve gone deeper into this in other blog posts but this finally got me healthy. I can’t believe this all was 10 years ago this summer already. Wow.
Within a month of this drastic change, my husband and I started trying to have a baby and despite the bad odds that come with having Hashimoto’s disease, I got pregnant the first month we tried! Even better, it was a healthy pregnancy and I carried him beyond full term! Little bugger did not want to come out. I finally delivered him at 41+2 after 27 hours of induction which ended in an emergency c-section due to failure to progress and him being in distress.
All that to say…I’ve got my reasons to be super cautious about getting off SSRIs again.
Why Am I Sharing This?
Because I can 🙂 Really, I feel it’s important that we show the good AND the bad when blogging and sharing our lives with each other.
I want you to know if you’re in a similar situation and getting of SSRIs that you should be careful, take it slow, and watch for reactions.
Sure, you can read all the medical pages about this but I’m guessing there aren’t a lot of people out there sharing their actual experiences with getting of SSRIs twice in their life!
Outside Resources
- Stopping Antidepressants by the Royal College of Psychiatrists
- Going Off Antidepressants by Harvard Health
- Antidepressant Withdrawal: Is there such a thing? By the Mayo Clinic
- Antidepressant Discontinuation Syndrome by the Cleveland Clinic
As a mom of identical twins and a son two years older, I have gained invaluable experience in the realm, and chaos, of parenting. With a Master's Degree and Education Specialist Degree in School Psychology, I spent years as a school psychologist, helping children navigate through their educational and emotional challenges. Now as a stay at home mom and professional blogger, I combine my areas of expertise to help you in your parenting journey.