My name is Jørgen Kjønø, though most people know me as Dex Carrington. I’m a Norwegian-American stand-up comedian, actor, and podcast host based in Oslo. I first became known internationally as the host of Dexpedition, a travel show that aired on MTV in more than 30 countries, and later through stand up and stage entertainment.

I was born in Norway, but I grew up in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Canada, attending American schools my entire childhood. English became my first language. When I started doing stand-up comedy, I knew I couldn’t perform under a name that felt impossible for English-speaking audiences to pronounce. Around that time, I was sponsored by the clothing brand DC as a lifestyle representative, which required a name starting with “D” and ending with “C.” That’s how Dex Carrington came to be, and all my comedy has lived under that name ever since.

As a teenager and young adult, I lived a pretty conventional life. In high school and college, I drank a little and smoked some weed, but nothing extreme. I was focused on getting good grades and making good choices for my future. After university though, the transition into adult life overwhelmed me. Anxiety and depression hit hard, and I was prescribed benzodiazepines. At first, it felt like a solution. But very quickly, I noticed how much they interfered with my ability to judge risk and think clearly.

Realising things were escalating, I went to a psychiatrist and told him I didn’t want to become addicted to drugs but I needed something to help me deal with these difficult emotions of low self-worth and impending doom. He framed it in a way that completely disarmed me: good people take psychiatric medication; bad people take narcotics. I trusted that logic. Like many people, I believed the story that psychiatric medications somehow existed outside the normal rules of biology—that they were impossible to get addicted to and could never cause lasting harm.

Over the next several years, I was put on roughly 30 to 40 different psychiatric drugs—Zoloft, Cymbalta, Prozac, Abilify, Lamictal and many others. Every single one made me feel worse. Each was a nightmare. But there was always a doctor in a white coat with a medical degree emanating an aura of authority telling me that all these medications were safe and effective and could not possibly be worsening my condition. I assumed the problem must be my “treatment resistant mental illness” getting worse for no apparent reason.

Eventually, living in Norway, I ended up on Zyprexa and Lyrica. Zyprexa left me sedated and foggy. Lyrica was marketed at the time as low-risk and non-addictive. I ended up on these two drugs because they were the only ones that seem to “work” in the sense that they seemed to help with sleep and anxiety initially, and by around 2011, after years of cycling through medications, that’s where I landed.

By 2013, I really wanted to stop taking both medications. I stopped the benzos and sleeping pills first. Then I went back to my psychiatrist and asked for his help to come off the two remaining “medications”. He told me to taper both Zyprexa and Lyrica at the same time over two weeks. I followed his instructions and I completely lost my mind.

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t think or function. It felt like every neurological disorder on earth had turned on at once. The suffering was unbearable. I reinstated the drugs, and the symptoms disappeared. From that moment on, I learned something deep in my nervous system: never do that again. Never meddle with these drugs. That experience was the most terrifying thing I had ever experienced in my life so far.

At the time, I thought I was already at maximum suffering. I didn’t have the life experience to know how much worse things could get. Doctors kept telling me the medications were safe and effective. When I first saw a psychiatrist I had zero diagnoses but the longer I was on the so-called “medicine” the more mental illnesses I was diagnosed with.

Once I accepted that I could never get off Zyprexa and Lyrica, staying “clean” felt pointless. My life unraveled. I was using several narcotics, drinking heavily and taking anything that promised relief. Eventually, after an intervention, I went to rehab in Thailand in 2019.

In rehab, they stopped all narcotics immediately or tapered them rapidly with no problem. Then the psychiatrist reviewed saw that I was still on zyprexa and Lyrica and said, “You’ve been on these meds for eight years? Just quit them cold turkey.” The fear was overwhelming. I was still heavily traumatised from all my previous attempts to taper these medications. My experience is that it’s hard to get off narcotics because you love them so much, but it’s hard to get off psychiatric drugs because you fear them so much.

Eventually after 9 months off everything else, I committed to getting off both medications properly. I tapered off Lyrica first, which took years. The defining feature wasn’t just pain—it was terror beyond language. Not fear, but neurological horror that convinced me I was permanently broken. Today, I’ve been off Lyrica for almost five years and I can safely say that all that suffering is so worth it on the other side. The most important thing I want people to know (which I would have given anything to hear while I was going through it) is this:
the fear goes away. It fades. It dissipates. No matter how real it feels, it is not permanent.

Six months after getting of Lyrica, I tapered off the Zyprexa as well. The withdrawal symptoms of these two mind-altering drugs (which is what they really are) overlapped for many years and at one point, I had over 10,000 symptoms. Now I have fewer than ten. For two years, I couldn’t even speak. Recovery only became visible when I looked back months or years and noticed what had quietly returned.

During the worst of it, hope didn’t keep me going because I wasn’t capable of feeling it. Discipline didn’t exist. Resilience was chemically unavailable. What kept me alive was fear because I learned that once you reach a certain point in withdrawal, especially with Lyrica, reinstating often makes things worse. Commitment and faith in God became the only thing I could lean on.

I was incredibly lucky to have support. My girlfriend at the time and my parents stood by me and to my luck COVID shut the world down, which gave me space to hide away survive the ordeal. I had a partner who essentially became my full-time caregiver. Later, connecting with Anders Sørensen finally gave me what I had needed all along: calm guidance, practical tapering advice, and someone who could look at me and say, “It’s going to be okay.”

More than five years of psychiatric drug withdrawal fundamentally changed me as a person. It humbled me and made me grateful to just be alive, healthy and not in psychiatric drug withdrawal. I no longer trust authority simply because it wears a white coat. I question anything presented to me as an established fact because trusting the system almost killed me.

Today, I don’t care about status, money, or achievements. All I want is serenity. The ability to sit quietly in a room. To walk to the grocery store. To exist without terror. Psychiatric drug withdrawal became such an extreme internal reference point that everything else in life feels manageable by comparison.

As a kid, I was rigid, hyper-responsible, and perfectionistic. Alcohol was the first thing that gave me relief from myself, and that search for relief slowly spiraled into drugs, psychiatric medication, and complete self-loss. Coming through the other side, I don’t feel like I’ve erased anything. I’ve integrated it.

That one dream to not be in psychiatric drug withdrawal still grounds me. As long as I’m not there again, I’m grateful. I don’t see myself as an addict. I see myself as a psychiatric drug survivor. And I know this with absolute certainty: I will never again take anything that alters or effects my central nervous system.

What I got back wasn’t just my health. It was humility, wonder, and the quiet miracle of being alive.