On 47 Meds Over 28 Years. Here's How She Healed.

I want to introduce you to my friend Elissa.

We met in a withdrawal support group, and I knew pretty quickly that she was someone I wanted to stay close to. The things she said in that group, I was writing them down and repeating them to myself. She has a way of cutting through the fog and handing you something solid to hold onto.

Elissa has been through a lot. And she has come through it, which is why I asked her to sit down and tell her story here. She is also going to be coaching here at Life After Meds, and I think once you hear what she has lived and what she has learned, you will understand why.

If you are deep in it right now, afraid that your medication history is too long or too complicated, I want you to read or watch this. Forty-seven medications. Twenty-eight years. Five hospitalizations. She is on the other side. Real healing happened. And I believe it can happen for you too.

This is her story, in her own words.

Transcript of our conversation

(Lightly edited for readability)

Joanna: When did mental health diagnosis first come into your life?

Elissa: That would be 1996. I was newly married and had moved to a different state where I knew no one. My husband moved to Florida for a job, and I was extremely anxious about that. I started having panic attacks and didn't have a whole lot of support, not any real community. The panic attacks just kept going on, and so who do you go to? You go to a doctor. A walk-in clinic, actually. And I got put on Paxil and Xanax. That was my introduction into the medicalization of mental health.

Joanna: How did they explain medication to you at that point?

Elissa: There wasn't a whole lot of explanation. It was a clinic. I think I might have been referred to a psychiatrist at that point, I can't even remember that far back. But not a whole lot of explanation. It was just a diagnosis of panic disorder, and I thought, this is what I have, this is what's wrong with me. That's what got me introduced into this system.

I did go to counseling at that time and went to anxiety support groups. I feel like that helped more than the medication. And that's really where this desire to get into social work started, way back then, from that experience.

I started getting a little better from the counseling, and then years went by and I was shifted from Paxil to a couple of different medications. I went through infertility during that time, some depression coming on, surgeries, all kinds of things. I was on Wellbutrin when I was pregnant.

Joanna: And then after your son was born?

Elissa: I had a traumatic pregnancy with a lot of preterm labor, but a normal birth and delivery. It wasn't until my son was about four or five months old that I just started getting really depressed. This is a typical postpartum time for a lot of women. I was still on Wellbutrin, started having insomnia problems. The baby was sleeping fine. I was not. And then I started getting some psychosis from the insomnia, and my husband said we may need a psychiatrist.

That was my first real psychiatric re-evaluation. That would have been 2002. The psychiatrist acknowledged the postpartum, but going by the DSM and my symptoms, he diagnosed me with bipolar one. He thought the insomnia indicated mania. And he had the conversation with me at that time that I would have to take medications for the rest of my life.

One of the questions he asked me was whether I had any family history of mental illness. The only history I had was that my dad had been on medication for depression for several years. And when I mentioned that, that was the flag. That was when my lifelong journey really started.

Joanna: What do you wish had happened instead?

Elissa: I'm not against psychiatry. I just wish there had been more community around me at that time, that maybe people would have recognized the situation instead of giving me a bipolar one diagnosis. And the finalizing of it, saying this is a lifelong thing that has just now revealed itself because you had a baby. I had already lived an adult life up to that point. The only thing that changed was having a baby.

I wish I had not gone to a psychiatrist. But that's just kind of what you did. And them asking about my family history, I think that really did it.

Joanna: Tell me what happened during those years when you were medicated. The good and the bad.

Elissa: This started many decades of being medicated. Once you get the bipolar one diagnosis and someone in a white coat tells you that you're going to be on medication for the rest of your life, you think, okay, I'm just going to be on this one medication. That's not the way it happened.

I was on a couple of different medicines, Seroquel being the main one, and then an antidepressant. And then after about a year or so of functioning, I'd stop functioning. Symptoms would break through and come back, and I'd go back to my psychiatrist and they'd switch meds. I went on that treadmill for a very long time. The medicines would either stop working after about a year and they'd increase the dose, or they'd stop working and they'd take me off and put me on something else. They usually kept me on the Seroquel because of the bipolar.

Over the 28 years I was on the meds, I was hospitalized five times. The hospitalizations usually involved them taking me off whatever I was on cold turkey, putting me in the hospital, and putting me on something new. So I've literally experienced withdrawal many times. I just didn't know that's what it was. It was always told to me that anything I was experiencing was probably bipolar. Withdrawal was never acknowledged.

I've been on every class of medication except the MAOI. And around 2012 or so, my diagnosis was changed from bipolar to treatment-resistant depression. After that they tried ECT. I did 12 treatments in 2011 and another 12 in 2014. I also had TMS, two separate rounds. And then ketamine infusions in 2018 and again in 2020.

Joanna: You tried everything.

Elissa: In the box and out of the box. So the ketamine, that was the last thing I did. At the end of 2022 I decided to try more ketamine infusions at a different clinic. I told my husband at the beginning of those treatments, "I don't know what I'm going to do if this doesn't work," because I was just kind of at the end of my rope after 20-something years.

It did not help at all.

At that point I sat down with my husband and said, "The only thing I haven't tried is no meds. And I haven't tried going to a nutritionist. I haven't really tried that route yet." I thought, if I get my diet in order and get on the supplements and try to come off these meds, that's the only thing I haven't tried. So I'm going to do that at the beginning of 2023, no matter what that looks like.

Joanna: You had turned over every rock they had for you. And finally it was like, this solution can't be here, because I've tried every single thing they have.

Elissa: I felt deep inside, and I couldn't really voice it at the time, but I felt deep down that the medications were making me sick. The whole pattern of feeling stable and then not, stable and then not, just kept getting worse and worse and worse. And I prayed about this a lot over the years. Many times I prayed that God would just take my bipolar away, take my treatment-resistant depression away, that there had to be a better quality of life than what I was experiencing. And his answer was wait. I had to wait many, many years before that prayer was answered. And of course he didn't answer it in the way I thought he was going to. He answered it in a better way.

Joanna: And what do you think now of those diagnoses?

Elissa: I think I never had bipolar. I think I never had panic disorder. I did have a problem with anxiety in 1996, but it could have been dealt with in a different way. I was never bipolar. Treatment-resistant depression is only something you give to somebody when they don't know what to do with you. I believe I had really bad postpartum depression. That's what was going on with me at that time. And postpartum is temporary. I feel now that I'm not mentally ill, I never was mentally ill. I just got caught up in a system where somebody was telling me that was what was going on. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Joanna: And now you really do have freedom from those labels.

Elissa: Yes. Absolutely.

Joanna: Tell me about the tapering part of that journey. When you finally made that decision, how did you go about it?

Elissa: I was trying to find a natural path in my area. It's hard to find a functional medicine doctor here. But I went online and found a holistic practitioner in Huntsville, Alabama, about 30 minutes from where I live. She had never really helped anybody taper before. She did a lot of things outside of western medicine, auricular therapy, acupuncture. Her first focus was trying to educate me about the microbiome, gut health, nutritional eating, candida overgrowth. She was trying to give me education. And she referred me to a supplement company that had a psychiatrist on board and helped guide tapers through a customer support line.

My psychiatrist, when I spoke with him about coming off the meds, was not really on board. He wanted to taper me onto an MAOI, the only class I hadn't been on. But he did write me enough prescriptions to taper. I was trying to get away from psychiatry, so I kind of put myself into her hands and went with the supplement company. And they tapered me off all three meds at the same time, over a year. From February 2023 to February 2024.

I didn't know about hyperbolic tapering at that time. I wanted those medications out of my body. I thought a year was a really long time to taper. For someone who had been on these meds for 28 years, tapering in a year, and in a linear way, and all three at once, that was not the right approach. But I didn't know. She was doing the best she could. I was kind of a guinea pig. We did the best we could with all of it.

Joanna: Were you still working during the taper?

Elissa: I was a social worker with hospice and I was still working when I started tapering. And then a lot of things happened in my family that summer. My dad was not doing well. My sister had been diagnosed with cancer. The symptoms kept getting more intense as I went further down on the doses. Everything kind of came to a head in June of 2023 and I talked to my husband and said, "I'm not going to be able to do this anymore. I'm trying to keep up with this job and I'm trying to take care of my family who don't even live in the same state." I quit my job that June.

The symptoms were rough during the taper, but they didn't get really bad until the medications were completely out of my system. At the end of the taper I came off, I think it was around 12.5 of Gabapentin, 12.5 of Wellbutrin, and maybe 6.25 of Seroquel, and then from that to zero. That last section should have been done the slowest, but it was done the fastest. A few days after that big jump, the symptoms all just started ramping up. Physical, cognitive, mental, emotional. All kinds of things were going on.

Joanna: How did you make sense of that?

Elissa: I learned about hyperbolic tapering not long after I had gotten completely off the meds. And when I started learning about it, about how slow you should go, how gradual, one medication at a time, never come off too fast at the end, I realized why I was feeling so much worse after the taper. And at that point I thought, I'm either going to go back on the med, or I'm going to go forward no matter what it takes. I decided to go forward.

At that time the only support I had was my holistic practitioner. No one in this community, because I just didn't know it existed. It was horrific. Like a nightmare.

Joanna: What did you do to get through it?

Elissa: About six months off, I started learning about Angie Peacock. I watched some documentaries, I watched Medicating Normal, and then I found Angie's videos. And when I started watching them I thought, this is a literal thing. I can't believe this is out there. I started going to her support groups, I think July or August of 2024. And that's where Joanna and I met, around October or November of that year.

Once I started those support groups and started learning what this community was, I started realizing I could use my social work degree. Angie kept talking in the group about being a social worker, and I thought, maybe my hospice career is completely over, maybe I can be a coach.

But connecting with others, that was the most important thing. Healing buddies, being in a group, the co-regulation piece. That helps more than anything. No matter what symptoms you're having, it will help keep you going.

Joanna: What else got you through the worst of it?

Elissa: Self-compassion was a big part of my recovery. I first heard Angie mention an app called I Am, these little positive self-compassion phrases. She kind of described them as cheesy, but I thought, what do I have to lose? I got on there and started reading them and thought, this is really helpful. And then I thought, I'm going to start putting all these on Post-it notes and posting them all over the place so I can look at them.

In this process you're so negatively focused, and you can't really do anything about that. But you can choose what you put into your brain. That is something you can do. I started writing these things out on Post-it notes and putting them everywhere, all over my room. If I'm not able to generate a positive thought, I might as well read one. That really helped. And then it transformed into something more, any kind of self-compassion and self-love. I started making my own notes and putting them up. When my brain got used to one and stopped really reading it, I'd take it down and put a new one up. I was shoving these into my brain as many times as I was looping.

It didn't change my symptoms. You have to accept the symptoms for what they are. But you can change the way you think about the symptoms, and you can change the way you think about yourself.

I also tried to focus on facts rather than the neuro-emotions. Things like: this is something that is happening to me, this is not something I'm choosing, this has an ending. That's something Angie had taught us in the groups. I would put those neutral, factual reminders up alongside the compassion notes. And one of the big ones for me was: I'm doing the best I can today, and that's all I can ask of myself.

I also rested a lot. I had no choice. A lot of exhaustion, a lot of not getting out of the house. And I journaled. I've been a journaler since I was a teenager. I would literally ask myself in the journal, what would you like to hear right now, what are the words you would love to hear that you can't create? And I would go back to the I Am app and write the answer down in my journal. Here's what you need to be thinking right now, here's what you're unable to think that I'm going to write down. I did that every single day.

Joanna: Tell me about windows and waves and learning how much you could push yourself.

Elissa: My first window was around nine or ten months off, and I got to see my true self on that day. I didn't have my next window for a while after that. But when I started getting more regular windows, I'd get my motivation back, the anhedonia got better, and I would just try to do everything. Yes, okay, now I can do this, I haven't done that in a long time, come on, let's go, we gotta hurry before the next wave. And then that would put me into a really bad wave. That's the trial and error that everyone goes through. You have to dip your toe in and see what you can do and what doesn't make the wave go up the next day.

Joanna: Did you experience the forgetting, where in a wave you can't remember ever having a window?

Elissa: Yes. In a window you sort of forget the wave because you're so relieved. In a wave you can't believe you ever had a window. I called them my Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde days, how different I was on a window day compared to a wave day.

The word I use is hijacking. Your brain gets hijacked on wave days. You're not able to think a positive thought on your own. You have to get that externally, whether from another person or from something you're reading. You get sucked into the neuro-emotions and you believe you're never going to get well, or that you'll never have another positive day, or, did I really have a window? I don't remember. And you have so many cognitive issues. I would forget days at a time.

I call it brain damage that's healing. Your brain is damaged, your central nervous system is damaged, but they're in a state of healing. Angie told us in one of the groups that it's like a person who's been in a car wreck and has brain damage. People like that go through a windows and waves process as well. That's literally what's happening to us. But that doesn't mean it's not healing. This is what you have to experience to get to the other side.

Joanna: How could you tell when you were healing?

Elissa: I had started having a little more regular windows about a year off. And then those windows were gone for about five months. A really long wave through the summer. And then in late fall, around November, it started to shift. The windows that came were crystal clear in a way I hadn't experienced before. And when they say the darkest night comes before the dawn, that was true in my journey. I went through a really long wave over the summer, and then right around Thanksgiving the crystal clear windows started coming. I thought, I don't even remember my windows being this clear before.

Around Thanksgiving is when I knew. I could just feel it. I don't even know how to put that into words. My brain started figuring some things out. It started figuring out how to sleep. I started sleeping through the night. The symptoms started shifting down during the waves. The windows started coming very frequently, and right around Christmas they were really frequent. And I thought, I made it through the storm. I made it through with support, with healing buddies, with community, with my holistic practitioner, with journaling. No one thing really helped me, but a combination of all these things did. And time. Time was the magic.

I used to get irritated at Angie saying in the groups that you're going to have to wait. I wanted to know if there were any shortcuts. There weren't. There are techniques, there are tools, but it's going to take as long as it takes. And that was one of the things I kept trying to tell myself: this healing is going to take as long as it needs to take, and I have to be okay with that.

Joanna: And then it happened. You rounded that bend. For people who have forgotten what it feels like to feel good, how does it feel different from when you were in the worst of the waves? And how does it feel different from being medicated?

Elissa: Being on the medications was very numbing and very limiting. I didn't experience joy. I didn't experience true happiness. I didn't experience severe depression when they were working either, because it puts you in this middle zone. And the first time I experienced joy post-meds was right around Christmas. I went to a Christmas play and I was thinking, what is that? My first thought was, oh no, that was mania. My second thought was, that's withdrawal. And then I had to wait a minute and think, maybe that's not withdrawal anymore. And my third thought was, that was literal actual joy.

I've been on these medicines since I was 24. I don't know how I dealt with life emotionally when I was 23. So it's a new process for me, being 54 and trying to figure out how to navigate life normally. It's like being a child again. You have to relearn what emotions are, what normal emotions are.

The emotions now are raw and beautiful in a way I have never felt that I can remember. The window days are miraculous. There are still a couple of wavier days each week, but the majority are windows. And even though I had some apathy on the meds, my son would have milestones in his life and I'd think, huh, okay. Everyone else seemed to be getting excited and I thought, maybe that's just my personality, maybe I just don't get excited about things. That's how I felt on the meds.

It was like the sun breaking through the clouds, but the sun not completely reaching the ground. Now it does. I'm feeling emotions now that are raw and real and beautiful, like I have never felt them. It's a miraculous life that I live now.

Joanna: How do you see those 28 years looking back? So many people say they've wasted all those years on the meds.

Elissa: Time is never wasted. God created us to be on this planet and whatever we need to go through, we are going to go through it. I believe that suffering is not for zero reason. We have to experience the suffering to know what true joy is. We need comparisons in this life. I have always looked at God's plan for me as on purpose. Even though I had to take the meds and I suffered on and off for 28 years, it brought me right here, right now. That's a blessing. That's how I choose to look at it.

My suffering brought me learning, and my curiosity to get to the other side of these meds kept me going. I wanted to know what it was like to be off these things, what it was like to get past withdrawal. That curiosity got me right here.

Joanna: I love that. And I'm glad you're here. I'm so excited for the journey ahead.

Elissa: Me too.

Joanna: Elissa is starting her own Youtube channel and will be sharing more encouragement there. She'll have a coaching calendar here at Life After Meds. And we're running groups together: one for those who are tapering, and one for those who are off their meds but still dealing with symptoms. We're so glad to be able to offer our stories of help and hope and healing, because healing is there for every one of you.

Elissa: I just feel for everybody in this community. Whatever med you came off of, there is healing. There absolutely is healing in this. It's been a really long journey for me and I made it to the other side. We're here together to support each other and give everybody hope that you can make it. You can.

Joanna: You can make it. That's right. And Elissa, thank you so much. I'm so thankful to have met you in Angie's group.

Elissa: I'm thankful for you and all you've done for this community too.

Joanna: Together.

Elissa: Yes.