My name is Carrie Clark. I’m from the UK, and I was first prescribed an antidepressant at the age of 15. I was struggling after a series of traumatic events, including my parent’s divorce and the sudden death of my father. A child and adolescent psychiatrist diagnosed me with ‘bipolar disorder’ and prescribed me Fluoxetine after an appointment that lasted less than an hour.
Over the next 20 years I would be prescribed 11 different psychiatric medications and given a variety of different diagnoses. I have a permanent resting tremor, one of the many side effects of psychiatric drugs that I was not advised of by my prescribing doctors. Overall, I felt sedated, somewhat emotionally numbed and dissociated from my body and feelings, but I never experienced any substantial benefit from taking psychiatric medications. Nonetheless, my doctors strongly encouraged me to keep taking them in order to prevent a ‘relapse’.
In 2023, when I was 35, I was taking the antidepressant Sertraline and the antipsychotic Quetiapine (prescribed as a sleep aide) when my partner and I became aware that I had a physical health problem which was likely to leave me infertile within a few years. I decided to come off my medications so that we could try for pregnancy. I felt quite optimistic about this, because I had not experienced any withdrawal symptoms, or even any noticeable change in mood, when I had stopped taking a mood stabiliser cold turkey a few years previously.
Three months after taking my last dose of Sertraline, I developed a series of bizarre and apparently inexplicable symptoms. I felt like I had vertigo, became painfully sensitive to light and experienced weird visual distortions that made it hard for me to see straight. Brain zaps and full body muscle spasms at night began to disturb my sleep, but then I developed akathisia and stopped sleeping altogether. Akathisia is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced, but it was made all the more terrifying at the time by the fact that I didn’t know that that was what I was experiencing. I only knew that I could feel burning pins and needles all over my body, and that I was compelled to keep myself in constant motion by a rushing, aching sensation in my pelvis. I began to hear a high pitched whining sound, which I eventually realised was tinnitus.
In total, I was in withdrawal for nine months and my memories of that time are like a weird, hallucinatory nightmare. I lived with extreme terror, hugely exaggerated, paranoid anxiety that was like nothing I had ever experienced before. My GP was baffled. She believed the conventional wisdom that antidepressant withdrawal is mild and brief. The possibility that I was experiencing delayed withdrawal was never even considered, but my symptoms were so obviously debilitating and so completely dissimilar to anything that had ever happened to me previously, that she believed I must be experiencing the onset of a completely new medical condition. I was given blood tests, MRI scans, blood pressure monitoring and referred for neurological testing. Over the course of nine months I was misdiagnosed three times, first with new onset of panic attacks, then with migraine and finally with Functional Neurological Disorder.
In the end, I didn’t reinstate Sertraline on my doctor’s recommendation, or because I knew that I was experiencing antidepressant withdrawal. I did it because I was ready to try anything that might bring me relief. Being in a state of unrelenting pain and fear had left me feeling acutely suicidal. To my amazement, my symptoms resolved almost entirely within three months of reinstatement. All except the tinnitus. I still live with a ceaseless whining in my ears. It varies in intensity, but often feels like someone playing xylophone on my nervous system.
When I realised that my recovery was clearly linked to reinstatement, I took to the internet and discovered the stories of the prescribed harm community. Sites like Antidepressant Risks and Surviving Antidepressants made me realise that I had unwittingly become caught up in a medical scandal. There were hundreds of thousands of people just like me, people who had been prescribed psychiatric drugs without being given properly informed consent. Without our knowledge, we had been made dependent on medications that hadn’t been effective treatments for our emotional distress, but which we now found ourselves forced to keep taking in order to avoid debilitating withdrawal symptoms.
Thankfully, I also discovered the work of Mark Horowitz, David Healy and Joanna Moncrieff. They showed me the there was a pathway towards recovery from prescribed harm. I’m fortunate that my GP has been open to learning more about safe deprescribing, and I’m now planning a gradual hyperbolic taper. In a few years, I hope to be drug free and writing up my story anew for the ‘RECOVERED’ section of this website.