Withdrawing from Paxil is Far Worse than Withdrawing from Heroin

     In a recent interview with Anders Sorenson posted on Substack, the author of the 2025 book Crossing Zero goes over some of the principles and methods he has learned to design successful tapering programs for those who want to safely get  themselves off antidepressants and other psychotropic medication.

     He explains in some detail his ten year journey to arrive at an effective and safe protocol for reducing someone’s medication intake without triggering the horrific withdrawal symptoms that going cold turkey can bring on. Stopping a medication abruptly, while a laudable intention, is not the least bit practical and can create even greater problems than taking the medication in the first place.

     The need for tapering slowly off a medication has become known, but a regular percentage reduction of a medication is not the most effective way to go about it, Sorenson has found out. He discovered that one can tolerate higher percentage cuts in medication at the beginning, but only lower percentage reductions toward the end of the tapering process because of a body’s “internal allowance” factor for those final increments of reduction. You might do well initially with a ten percent reduction of the original dosage, but that might be too high a percentage drop at the end without causing unpalatable withdrawal effects.

     Sorenson has discovered, too, that people tapering off psychiatric medications need a new lifestyle designed for them once they’re drug free. New behaviors need to be put in place to prevent an overpowering impulse to return to medication as a “solution” to whatever their life problems originally were…or still are.

     Besides explaining the important biochemistry involved in his tapering process, Sorenson makes two “side” comments in his interview which are particularly prescient.

     First, he notes that tapering off psychiatric drugs calls for an utterly different approach than tapering off heroin, alcohol, or even smoking. After detoxing from those substances, the nervous system resets itself fairly quickly. With psychiatric drugs, however, the body’s adaptation of the medication runs much deeper, and therefore the cycle of freeing oneself from it can be significantly longer.

     Second, he notes that there is a hidden mental mine field for some after they have completed their detox. If they have somehow come to believe – courtesy of Big Pharma marketing – that their original mental problems were caused by a biological defect – the “chemical imbalance” theory, for instance – they are much more likely to revert back to medication to handle any future stress in their life.

     These people have apparently been doubly dulled…first by the emotion-numbing effects of the medication itself, but then also by the idea that they are somehow the effect of their own bodies. That’s a falsehood that can prevent them from returning to self-control of their own destiny, if they have come to believe that.