Wood pecker feeding her baby
If antidepressant withdrawal is like building a house, then antipsychotic withdrawal is like building a space station.
So, don’t be surprised if many people underestimate the amount of planning and experience needed for a successful antipsychotic withdrawal. I should know, I’ve underestimated the process plenty of times.
Today, I want to share an updated and simplified summary of my 18-year wrestle with antipsychotic withdrawal to help you understand some of the issues involved in a safe tapering process.
Have a wonderful week.
A Basic Understanding of Antipsychotic Withdrawal
What to do and what not to do
Waiting for dinner to be ready
Don’t hold your breath for science to discover the one underlying cause for psychosis, because I’m pretty sure there isn’t one.
I believe, when it comes to mental illness, one cause can result in many symptoms and/or many causes can result in one symptom.
Taking a thorough psychiatric history helps to direct me to the combination of causes that increase inflammation and oxidative stress to the point of psychosis, such as:
emotional trigger(s)
food sensitivities
infections
toxins
detoxification difficulties
genetic issues
exposure to harmful chemicals/medications
The energy testing approach that I’ve created then allows me to look at the patient’s function over the course of treatment and check the physiological terrain that the patient will need to navigate in order to get off an antipsychotic safely.
Without healing the underlying stressors, dysfunctions, or deficiencies that compromise the patient’s health, it is not possible to have a successful antipsychotic withdrawal. Instead, if one is lucky, the patient might be able to come off their antipsychotic, but within three months disturbing symptoms will return and become unbearable, and the patient will need to restart the medication again.
This is why I have come to accept antipsychotic medications as a buffering system between the underlying problems/symptoms and the neurotransmitter’s ability to deliver the experience of pain and suffering to the patient’s awareness. This buffering system buys us some time, but it is not healing or eliminating the underlying causes.
To heal the underlying causes, a clinician needs a lot of training in integrative medicine, and the patient needs to have a healthy lifestyle. People who start lowering their antipsychotic medications on their own just because they don’t feel well on them inevitably feel worse by doing so. It’s because the underlying causes have not been healed by the buffering system.
Recovery from withdrawal will not occur simply by waiting for the symptoms to go away. Withdrawal symptoms are an indication of oxidative stress and inflammation that damage the body. The longer the person suffers during withdrawal, the greater the damage to the body. A successful withdrawal is characterized by mental stability and ease during and after the withdrawal process.
Let’s assume that the patient is stable and has a healthy lifestyle but is still dependent on an antipsychotic medication. At this point, with the right supplements and energy medicine interventions, it may be possible to lower the medications slowly over time.
The patient should lower the medication only when s/he feels a little overdosed on the medication: a little tired, sleeping more than 9 hours per night, and/or a little emotionally flat. Once the medication is lowered a little, the patient will go back to a state of balance rather than a state of withdrawal.
Currently, in addition to creating a regimen that includes: vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, amino acids, GI support (probiotics and digestive enzymes), antioxidants, and anti-inflammatories, I use energy medicine techniques to help reduce the negative functional impact of infections, toxins, traumas, and genetic causes. When it comes to psychosis, there are often many infections and many toxins, so adding energy techniques helps to shorten the healing process.
Antipsychotic medications block many different kinds of receptors simultaneously (dopamine, muscarinic, histamine, adrenergic, and serotonin receptors). In order to support the functional and nutritional needs of the withdrawal process, many different kinds of supplements may be necessary to help mitigate the withdrawal symptoms. See my article, “An Overview of Antipsychotic Withdrawal” for more information. These supplements typically decrease over the course of treatment.
I also use EET + Logosynthesis on the homeostatic response of the body to the medication prior to lowering the dosage. In addition, I ask my patients to use my guided visualization audio track “Minimizing Withdrawal Problems” (long version) once per week to support withdrawal at the information/energy level of function. After all, supplements can’t tell a cell to reduce the number of unblocked receptors on the cell membrane. Only the intelligence of the cell can facilitate that.
Hopefully this summary helps people understand that coming off of an antipsychotic medication requires more than just lowering the dosage gradually.
Have a wonderful week!