If you're in the thick of tapering, or you've finished and you're still suffering, and you're wondering whether you were ever really okay to begin with, I want to talk with you about that.
Maybe the thought goes something like this: I already had a diagnosis. I already had emotional issues before I started any of this. I might not be okay, ever. I want to speak directly to that, because it is just not true.
I know what it feels like to wonder that. I had multiple diagnoses. I had recurring emotional struggles. I was medicated for ten years and cycled through several different medications. So when I say I know what you mean when you ask, "What if I'm just someone who fundamentally needs meds?" I mean it.
I offer support groups and 1:1 coaching for those going through withdrawal. If you’d like someone to walk with you through this season, I would love to meet with you. My withdrawal was brutal. I know how dark it can get. I also know how real healing is. I’m now in a place of joy, health, and full life, and I want to support you on your way there.
👉 Go here to see my calendar and register
How the system set us up
The psychiatric drug world developed hand-in-hand with the DSM. Diagnostic criteria expanded, more people qualified for diagnoses, and more people were then eligible for medication. Mental health care fell into a medicalized system, and that system has not produced more health and freedom. It has produced dependency, both on the diagnosis and on the drugs.
If you've watched films like Medicating Normal, or read about the serotonin myth, you'll recognize this pattern. These narratives helped promote medication and helped more people identify themselves as having a disorder that required one. The system is real, and you got caught in it.
None of these medications were really designed for long-term use, even though many people are encouraged by their prescribers to stay on them indefinitely. And when people do get off and feel symptoms, they're often told it's the return of their original illness, proof of a deficiency, proof they need to stay on the medication for life.
That's covering up the truth. What's actually happening is dependency. And in dependency, the substance eventually delivers less than it did before. You need more to get the same effect. The dependency deepens, and the suffering during withdrawal deepens with it.
The two-person study
If you take two people with the exact same mental health history, the exact same diagnosis, and put one on medication and one not, for about six weeks, the medicated person does better. Their chart goes up. The unmedicated person recovers more slowly.
But after that six-week mark, the chart flips. The medicated person's mental health declines in a rocky way. The unmedicated person levels out and stays more stable over time.
Many of us have lived that rocky decline, and we've interpreted it as proof that something is wrong with us, that our brains have a chemical imbalance. The irony is that being told you have a chemical imbalance, and taking a medication for it, is what puts you in a state of actual chemical imbalance, where you genuinely need that medication to feel okay.
What the symptoms prove
When you're in withdrawal and the fear and darkness are enormous, everything in you may be saying: This proves I have a disorder. This proves I'm deficient somehow. The truth is, all it proves is that you've been part of a system, and that you've become dependent on a prescribed drug.
It does not prove something persistent and lacking in you.
The thoughts and feelings can seem enormous in the moment. But there is healing, and there is freedom, and the resilience that is actually yours has been there all along. The medication has been hindering it.
The thought that you're uniquely unable to heal
Almost everyone I talk to thinks their situation is uniquely worse. That something about their taper, or their medication combination, or their history means they probably won't heal. That they're one of the few who are just stuck this way.
That is a symptom.
You're dealing with two things at once: the medical paradigm you've been taught, and the withdrawal symptoms themselves. Both tell you the same lie. So hold on to the evidence of people who have healed. I've come through it. I know now, in my bones, that it isn't true, that my brain can heal and restore without any medication. But I was brought to my knees over this. I was flat on my back in misery and agony, doubting everything.
Wherever you are in the process of doubt or fear, those are symptoms. You can ride through them.
A wider view of what it means to be human
There are so many ways to heal from the emotional struggles you had before you ever started medication. If you look through human history, before these diagnoses and these drugs existed, what people experienced would simply have been called suffering. Part of being human.
Sadness, grief, loss, fear, disappointment, trauma, family dysfunction. These are part of the package of being human, just as much as joy, hope, connection, and love. Our bodies and brains can weather those experiences. We can make meaning from them, grow through them, and deepen our relationships and our experience of life, of God, of other people, through those hard seasons.
Zoom out from the narrow view of diagnosis and deficiency, and into the broader view of what it means to be alive. Just as others have healed, your body can come through this.
This dependency is more similar to other dependencies than we sometimes realize. Many, many people heal from dependency on drugs, alcohol, and other substances and come through healthier. We didn't develop an addiction behavior, but we were prescribed a drug and became chemically dependent on it. The same healing is possible for us. We can come out the other side with real hope, and with something to offer others from it.
Something to hold onto
Don't think of this as all loss. Even my worst season of suffering I now treasure, because I can see how much I gained through it. You never know what's happening in you, even in the midst of the pain.
It will not always be this bad. There is so much good ahead. Hold on.