TURNING IT AROUND
A difficult chapter
This is a personal story about my experience with psychiatric medication, withdrawal and recovery. I’m sharing it privately with people who may find it meaningful. If my story resonates with you, you’re welcome to share the link with anyone who might benefit from reading it.
This is not a story about mental illness.
It is a story about a woman trying to protect her children and her marriage while her nervous system was slowly destabilized, and about what happens when fear, authority, and medication erode a person’s trust in herself.
Fifteen years ago, I was not trying to escape my life. I was trying to survive it- responsibly, carefully, obediently. I was a young mother: anxious, overwhelmed, and deeply committed to doing the “right thing.”
What follows is a record of how I tried to protect my family, even when I did not yet know how to protect myself.
A missed lesson
Being a full-time medical patient was not a role I ever imagined for myself. Growing up, I saw doctors no more often than most people. But as a young adult, after being prescribed the birth control pill, that began to change. About a year later, I found myself returning regularly with a cluster of physical complaints: recurrent yeast infections, skin issues, dizziness, and several episodes of fainting. The symptoms were not presented as connected to one another, or to the pill. After tests came back normal, the skin issues were labeled benign and I was advised to sit down quickly whenever I felt faint so I wouldn’t hit my head. I stayed on the pill for years.
In 2007, I was married and working a challenging job that I loved. When I began to struggle with daily crying spells and mental fog, I searched for an explanation and assumed the high-pressure work environment was the problem. I quit my dream job and began seeing a therapist. I was still struggling but I enjoyed having an audience for my ruminations.
A few months later, a friend of my sister’s who was a doctor suggested that I stop taking hormonal birth control and try addressing the yeast infections through diet and exercise. I began to feel much better and stopped seeing the therapist. At the time, I understood this simply as relief. I did not recognize it as evidence that my emotional symptoms might have been physiologically driven - or that the pill could have played a role.
In early 2009, my daughter was born and I felt genuinely happy to be a mother; attentive, careful, and deeply engaged. At the time, ordinary parenting choices that I still believe were right were framed as signs of anxiety. I held my newborn daughter constantly, including while she napped because I liked it and believed it helped her feel secure. I fed her responsively, followed her cues, and trusted closeness over schedules.
Some people described me as “too anxious” or “overprotective,” but my choices felt reasonable to me. Years later, many of these same practices would be given trendy names - “contact napping,” “baby-led weaning.” At the time, they were taken as evidence that I was too much. That feedback planted doubt, and I eventually returned to the therapist, unsure whether my instincts could be trusted.
When my daughter was one, I became pregnant again. I was excited about the pregnancy but deeply unhappy about leaving my toddler each day for a job I found boring and meaningless. I was hormonal and exhausted, not sleeping through the night or eating well.
In that context, my therapist told me I had major depressive disorder. I reported this to my doctor.
My doctor reacted urgently, referring me to the Reproductive Life Stages Program at Women’s College Hospital. She told me we needed to address this immediately to protect myself and my children. I didn’t feel unsafe until I was told that I was.
Entering the System
I remember arriving at the hospital, taking the elevator up to the ninth floor, and feeling shock seeing a large sign that said “Psychiatric Unit”. I hadn’t realized that my feelings were that unwell.
I was given the PHQ-9 questionnaire and asked to rate my internal experience using numbered scales. Based on my answers to these 9 questions, I was offered an appointment that same week, bypassing the months-long waiting list.
I took this as confirmation that something must be seriously wrong. No one spoke much about context. About exhaustion. About pregnancy. About hormones. About how recently my body and life had changed. What mattered was the score.
At the time, this felt reassuring. The process was orderly, professional, and decisive. I believed I was being taken seriously, and that whatever came next would help keep my children safe.
Zoloft
I was hesitant to take antidepressants. I had a friend who had become miserable after starting them, and I didn’t trust that anyone truly understood their effects on a fetus or a nursing baby. I voiced these concerns clearly to the doctors involved in my care. Each time, I was reassured that antidepressants were safe, and that my untreated low mood posed a greater risk to my children than the medication itself. Nevertheless I resisted taking them during my pregnancy.
When my son was six weeks old, my family doctor urged me to get a copper IUD, telling me I was not emotionally strong enough to handle another pregnancy. Soon after it was inserted into my body, I began experiencing panic attacks, visual overstimulation, and a growing sense of depersonalization.
Although I had been wary of psychiatric medication, the severity of the panic and the repeated messages that my fear itself was dangerous, eventually pushed me to agree to start Zoloft when my son was just five months old. Looking back, I suspect that the panic and depersonalization that led me to take Zoloft were physiological reactions to the IUD. At the time, I trusted the doctors when they said the medication would protect my children, and that refusing it might put them at risk.
The first few days on Zoloft seemed better. I felt it helped because I was less bothered by my newborn crying in the car while I drove alone with both of my kids. In retrospect, this was a very strange metric of success.
After taking the Zoloft for a week, the doctor suggested a dose increase and I had a terrifying reaction: debilitating dizziness, a spinning room, agitation, intrusive urges, and tinnitus I had never had before. The dose was lowered, but the medication was not stopped.
I stayed on the Zoloft and I continued to feel unwell.
When Compliance Became Safety
When I told my doctor how frightened I was by what I experienced when we increased the Zoloft, I was told that if I felt this bad on the medication, I would feel much worse without it, and that stopping it could make me a danger to myself and my children. This didn’t entirely make sense, but I was scared and the drugs made me foggy.
After a few months on the Zoloft, I started feeling much worse. I described frightening intrusive thoughts to three different psychiatrists, including one in the emergency department, at two major hospitals. I had remembered reading somewhere that antidepressants could cause suicidal thoughts and I wondered if that’s why was happening to me.
Each time, I was given the same explanation: what I was experiencing could not be caused by the medication. The black-box warning on the drug I was taking specifically said that this was only a problem for people under twenty-six years old. I was twenty-eight years old. I trusted the science and accepted this. I continued to doubt my own perceptions.
Still, I knew something was not right. When I went to the emergency room terrified of the thoughts and seeking help, I was met with shame, blame, and threats involving child protective services. After that experience, I stopped asking questions. I stopped talking about the thoughts.
As I moved deeper into the maternal mental health system, I was told repeatedly that untreated depression was dangerous, that my thoughts were signs of illness, and that medication was the only responsible choice for my family. I was made to believe that the only thing keeping my children safe was a pill, and that I could not trust my own mind.
I internalized that belief. From then on, I spent enormous internal energy monitoring myself, being afraid of thoughts I had been told proved I was ill, and making sure my children were always in safe hands, especially when my own felt unsafe. I was not trying to escape my life. I was trying to protect my children.
Escalation
Roughly a year after starting Zoloft, I developed mastitis from breastfeeding and was prescribed antibiotics. Almost immediately, I felt wrong. I told multiple doctors that I thought the antibiotic was interacting with the Zoloft. I was told this was impossible.
Instead, I was told that my mental illness symptoms were flaring. I was told I was anxious. I was advised to talk to my therapist.
The next day, on the way to that therapy appointment, I began having intense intrusive thoughts, buzzing sensations throughout my body, and racing speech. Alarmed, the therapist sent me directly to the psychiatrist for help.
Seroquel was prescribed “as needed.”
What followed was a cycle of heavy sedation followed by withdrawal, fog and fear. I would take a dose of seroquel and sleep for twelve hours. After a time I would feel dizzy and agitated. I would take more. This went on for months. No one explained withdrawal. No one suggested stopping the original medication that had preceded the crisis.
Instead, this pattern was framed as my mental illness worsening. Daily seroquel was prescribed.
The medication stack grew. Side effects were reframed as symptoms. Withdrawal was reframed as relapse. Each new reaction became further evidence that something was fundamentally wrong with me…evidence that I needed more medication, more monitoring, and less trust in my own perceptions.
Living inside the Diagnosis
Over time, medications were added one on top of another: Zoloft, Seroquel, Lamotrigine, Abilify - each introduced as protection. I was told that the right combination could give me a “good life” despite my illness.
I was tired. I was foggy. I believed I was lazy, broken, unintelligent. I pushed through physical pain. I cut people out of my life, not because I didn’t love them, but because I didn’t recognize myself around them anymore.
At the same time, I was deeply afraid.
I had been frightened by stories like Andrea Yates - stories that framed mothers as dangerous if their mental health wasn’t controlled (even though she was actually heavily medicated). At the time, the message was simple: maternal illness is dangerous to children. My psychiatrist reinforced this often. I was told that untreated depression could harm my children, that my thoughts were symptoms, and that I could not fully trust my own mind or instincts.
Each appointment carried weight, reinforced by tools like the PHQ-9 questionnaire, which reduced my inner life to numbers and scores that felt authoritative and final. Each new side effect was reframed as a symptom. Each withdrawal effect was reframed as relapse.
I was told I had affect regulation disorder (all the while being given drugs that made it impossible to regulate my affect). I was eventually labeled bipolar II, while medicated, without ever fully meeting the criteria. I was told this was something I’d always had - something that explained my past and justified my future treatment. I accepted the label because it explained why I felt so unlike myself, and because rejecting it felt dangerous.
Nothing made sense. I couldn’t trust myself, and the people I loved were scared of me, unsure what to do. I monitored my mood constantly. I tracked symptoms. I tried to be responsible. I tried to be safe.
Meanwhile, my body was changing in ways no one seemed to notice. My hair fell out. My joints hurt. I gained weight. I felt lightheaded and dizzy often. I had constant tinnitus. My memory slipped. I was told it was mental illness.
During the years when I doubted myself most, I often avoided being alone with my children. My husband and my mother-in-law were steady presences. The children’s needs were met consistently and lovingly, even when I did not trust myself to meet them fully.
I spent a decade raising and loving my children while at the same time shrinking into a smaller, quieter version of myself, diligently taking my meds, always believing the problem was me.
Doubt without Permission
In 2019, after getting a new copper IUD with a ten year copper load, my health deteriorated further. I was prescribed higher doses of Seroquel and became largely bed-bound during the first months of the COVID pandemic (not related to the pandemic). I went on disability from work for the first time. I was heavily sedated and marked time through daily virtual appointments with therapists and doctors, attending them from my bed.
I was trying to get better, but I was too sedated and foggy to recognize that these “experts” didn’t have the answers. Between the medication and the global shutdown, I slid further into the sidelines of my own life.
Later in 2020, I finally finished a three year taper off Zoloft which began because the psychiatrist said she didn’t think it was doing anything, but took so long because I had severe withdrawal effects that were never explained to me. After my final dose, the awful intrusive thoughts I had lived with for years finally disappeared.
Still largely bedridden after nearly five months on the highest daily dose of Seroquel, I began to question why I was taking it - but only after my husband said aloud how sedated I seemed. When I asked my psychiatrist whether the medication might be sedating me, she said she didn’t think so, but also warned that I might not be able to sleep if I stopped.
The contradiction unsettled me.
It was the first time I sensed that deferring completely to psychiatric authority might not be protecting me - a realization I may only have been capable of once I was off Zoloft. I reduced the Seroquel dose and was able to get out of bed.
This was only a crack.
Cracks in the Story
In April of 2022, I got bloodwork done and it became clear that the paralyzing “anxiety” I had been suffering with for months was not psychiatric at all. It was severe anemia. My iron levels were so low that I was instructed to watch for signs of a heart attack while waiting for an infusion.
For months, my doctors and I had interpreted my symptoms through a psychiatric lens. That was the only lens I had been given. As my physical health deteriorated, it was assumed I was failing mentally.
Later that summer, I contracted COVID and my health worsened rapidly. I struggled to stand for more than a few seconds. I couldn’t walk more than a few feet without becoming dizzy. My vision became unreliable. Despite these clearly physical symptoms, I continued to understand them as mental illness.
Over time, I began to consider that I was being prescribed psychiatric medications for physical symptoms- dizziness, faintness, agitation - rather than for mood. One night, as I lay with my feet in the air trying to keep from passing out and told my husband I would take a Seroquel, my husband looked at me and said, “You don’t look manic.”
I dismissed him as not knowing what I was feeling, but the truth of his words stayed with me.
Around the same time, I watched a close friend’s eleven-year-old son be prescribed an SSRI for COVID-related anxiety. When he developed clear medication side effects, benzodiazepines were added, without any discussion of dependence or long-term risk. For the first time, I wondered whether the carelessness I was witnessing in someone else’s treatment might also apply to mine.
At the time, I didn’t know what to make of this. I only noticed that the story I had been told - that I was intrinsically unable to cope with life - no longer felt quite as solid.
Then my psychiatrist retired - without telling me, and without transitioning my care. If I was as fragile and dangerous as I had been led to believe, why was I being left without support?
When I found a new psychiatrist and was asked to describe my psychiatric history, I told the story from the beginning. Hearing it aloud, in one piece, I realized it didn’t make sense.
Naming Withdrawal
By 2022, I was taking two daily psychiatric medications: Lamotrigine and Abilify, and taking low doses of Seroquel as needed. I had been so used to increasing my meds when I had physical symptoms, as I continued to experience new physical symptoms, like postural hypotension and autonomic dysregulation, I increased my Abilify dose.
The increased Abilify made me dizzy, so with my doctor’s awareness, I decided to reduce it.
As the dose decreased, I became intensely dizzy and nauseated. My thinking slowed. My vision blurred. When I reported this, I was told my anxiety was returning because I had lowered my medication.
I had been anxious many times in my life. I had never felt nauseated from it. At that point I didn’t have the insight to recognize the difference, but my sister did. That discrepancy stood out to her. She began looking online for information about medication withdrawal, and found accounts from people whose experiences sounded disturbingly familiar. For the first time in all the years I had been on psychiatric medication, someone said, maybe this is withdrawal.
That word didn’t stop the symptoms. But it changed the story I was telling myself. My suffering no longer required me to believe I was fundamentally broken.
Withdrawal had a name. And suddenly, maybe there was a version of this story where I wasn’t crazy.
The Abilify taper was frightening, but I completed it in September of 2022. I could feel that the only way out of it was through. When I asked my doctor about tapering the Lamotrigine next, I was told we should wait until my “physical symptoms resolved.”
They didn’t.
Florida
On January 2, 2023, a photo was taken of me sitting by the pool in our Florida hotel looking bloated and fat. Inside, I was barely holding on.
The night before, I had walked on the beach with my family. We wandered the boardwalk. I didn’t collapse. I ate at a restaurant without feeling completely sick. Then I kicked off my shoes and played tag with my son on the sand.
I ran. He laughed. We smiled at each other.
It lasted only a few minutes, but it was the best I had felt in at least a year. I am grateful for that moment not only because it was joyful, but because it reminded me of me. My children didn’t need me to be happy or productive in the abstract. They needed me to play with them - to be present and silly. Running on the beach in that moment I felt like I was the mom I had somehow forgotten how to be.
Then my body collapsed again.
For the rest of the trip, I lay in dark hotel rooms with towels over my eyes. Curtains drawn on ocean views we had paid extra for. Balcony doors shut because the heat made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. I was afraid to go down the stairs to eat in case I fell, and afraid to stay in bed in case my blood sugar dropped and I passed out. I weighed which medical emergency would be less frightening for my children and less stressful for my husband. I was out of breath from opening my eyes.
At some point, lying there unable to lift my head, I stopped crying. I realized: This is my life now. This is how it ends.
And then something shifted.
I realized this was not going to resolve on its own. Time had not healed me. Compliance had not protected my family. The only moments of improvement I could point to had come when I insisted on stopping something that was making me worse.
I was still waiting for permission, for a doctor to tell me it was safe to act, and that permission was never coming.
I wasn’t willing to let it end this way.
Running on the beach with my son had lasted only minutes, but it was enough to show me that my life was still there. That glimpse became a reference point in the months that followed. I didn’t need certainty. I needed agency.
On the 3 day drive home to Toronto, I made my recovery plan.
Florida wasn’t the beginning of healing.
It was the moment I stopped waiting to be rescued.
Stopping the Drugs (withdrawal)
By the time we returned home from Florida, I had already decided that I needed to stop all the psychiatric medications. What remained was how.
I still wanted medical guidance. I asked my doctors for it repeatedly. What I received instead were half-answers: permission to “monitor,” warnings without instruction, and tapering advice that was dangerously rapid. None of it felt safe or helpful.
So my sister and I began learning on our own. We read medical papers and patient accounts. We joined online forums where people described tapering slowly and carefully - in ways that matched what my body seemed to need.
I began tapering Lamotrigine on January 10, 2023. The plan that I came up with (which my doctor said was fine and my sister warned was too fast) was to reduce the dose by 25mg or 50mg every 2-4 weeks.
The process was not linear. Each dose reduction came with new symptoms; dizziness, neurological instability, food sensitivities, vision disturbances, numbness, fear combined with autonomic dysfunction that manifested in various ways. My body behaved in ways I couldn’t predict or explain.
In January I stopped driving. My vision was unreliable and my coordination untrustworthy. In February, I stopped leaving the house unless absolutely necessary. I continued working remotely for a time, but my cognitive abilities were deteriorating. Reading, writing, and speaking became difficult. In March, I cancelled meetings because I could not muster the focus for a 30 minute conversation. Some days I could jog on my treadmill, but other days my heart was racing when I walked up the stairs and an arm or leg would randomly go numb for hours. By April, I could barely tolerate looking at the computer screen and struggled for two weeks to write a simple slide deck. Eventually I asked a colleague to complete it. My employer suggested medical leave. In May I took disability leave from work and I took my final dose of Lamotrigine.
Throughout the taper, I struggled to understand and articulate the cognitive difficulties I was experiencing. I could talk to my sister on the phone for hours, but when she was in front of me, I could barely speak. It took effort to hold her face in view, to perceive where her body was in space and understand who she was and where the boundary of her ended and me began. But on the phone, it was like I was just talking into air. It became the only way I could connect.
What I cannot fully describe is the depth and constancy of the physical and emotional suffering that filled these months. Much of it exceeded language, and some of it I still cannot revisit directly. What appears on the page is only what can be named without returning me to that place.
Doctors continued to search for explanations. I told my doctor that I felt like I had Parkinson’s (like my dad) but she said it was unlikely for a young woman and suspected that I might have multiple sclerosis. I was referred to specialists - cardiology, neurology, hematology - but no one connected what was happening to medication withdrawal. Luckily I wasn’t expecting the doctors to have the answers anymore. I was just continuing on my path to get off the meds. When I carefully described my symptoms, I was told, again and again, that the problem was impacting but did not originate in the part of the body being examined. I was sent onward.
As sick as I was when I ended the taper, something was starting to clear in my brain. But I was still physically so unwell. My sister insisted that I get the last remnants of pharmaceuticals out of my body, and remove the copper IUD.
At the end of May, rather than waiting weeks for my doctor, my mother drove me to an abortion clinic to have the IUD removed. On the drive there, I could barely tolerate the sensations of movement of the car. But as we pulled out of the parking lot afterward, I became aware of something subtle but unmistakable: I felt present in the car with her.
I watched my mom calmly narrate her thought process as she slowly looked for the parking receipt, seemingly unhastened by the row of honking cars behind us. For a brief moment, I stopped monitoring myself and simply noticed the quiet humor of the situation, without fear or urgency.
In that moment, a fog lifted. I saw my mom with warmth, the way I used to, and felt connected to her again. I remembered what life felt like when it wasn’t a problem to solve - just riding around in the car with my mom.
I finally felt how much my perception of people and ordinary moments had been narrowed for years. Something was beginning to unblock.
I knew then, with a steadiness I hadn’t felt in years, that turning back to psychiatry to learn how to live my life was no longer an option.
Living in Protracted Withdrawal
After my last dose of Lamotrigine, I expected things to settle.
They didn’t.
What followed was protracted withdrawal; a prolonged period in which my nervous system seemed unable to regulate itself after years of psychiatric medication. There were no longer dose changes to explain what was happening. Symptoms arrived without warning and without clear cause. Nothing felt buffered. Nothing resolved cleanly.
My days became very small.
I spent much of my day on a yoga mat on my back porch, or on my parents patio, listening to guided meditations because being indoors was too stimulating and silence felt too exposed. I did chair-based yoga videos meant for the elderly, not for strength but to remind my body that movement was still possible. I knew I could not stop moving altogether as stillness made everything worse, but movement felt dangerous and difficult.
When I could manage it, I paced slowly on the grass in my backyard. I hesitated at the ten steps leading down to it, unsure whether I would fall or whether I’d be able to climb back up in time if my bladder suddenly failed me. Every action required calculation.
Symptoms came in waves. Dizziness. Visual distortion. Peripheral neuropathy. Confusion. Depersonalization. Sudden terror that arrived without thought or story. There were periods when forming words felt impossible, when language seemed to recede. At my worst, even sitting upright required effort and concentration. I couldn’t explain what was wrong because my thinking itself felt compromised.
Once, trying to help with dinner, I broke down while peeling carrots. The peeler felt impossibly heavy. My hand wouldn’t coordinate with my intention. I stood there crying, shocked by how little I could do.
I developed bladder and bowel urgency and episodes of loss of control. I had extreme food sensitivities but had to eat every 2-4 hours. I lost my sense of smell and taste. I couldn’t understand colours or music. Progress was measured in sensations. Some days, in minutes.
What I was experiencing did not move in straight lines. There were days of relative calm followed by sudden collapse. Small improvements did not accumulate reliably. There was no timeline offered, no reassurance given, no framework that made sense of what was happening.
During the worst months, I could not work, drive, or meaningfully participate in family life. I meditated not for insight or growth, but to survive the sensations in my body. I tried to keep my suffering contained so my children would not see me unravel. They resented the yoga mat because it seemed to take me away from them, even though I was physically present. I preferred this to them realizing the truth…that I could not follow their conversation.
I did not know whether I would recover.
What I did know was that this was not relapse, and it was not mental illness returning. It did not resemble anything I had been told to expect.
It felt like a nervous system that had been pushed beyond its limits for 12 years, now trying -slowly, imperfectly, and without guidance - to find its way back to equilibrium.
In the moments when my mind was clear enough to focus, I searched for information. I read about nervous system regulation, withdrawal physiology, sensory integration, and rehabilitation. I learned about somatic yoga, feldenkrais, meditation, and mindfulness. I gathered tools the way someone lost gathers landmarks, not knowing which would help, only knowing I needed a way forward.
Healing Without a Map
When I think about the moment decline gave way to recovery, July 1, 2023 stands out. It was two months after my last psychiatric dose, one month after my IUD was removed, and two weeks after my third iron infusion restored my depleted hemoglobin. From then on, each month was generally better than the last. The only major exception was July 2024, when I contracted COVID again. It was a setback, but by then, I knew how to heal, and I did.
Recovery felt like stroke rehabilitation: slow, painstaking, and uneven. My senses returned in stages. First smell, then the ability to see shadows and reflections, then learning how to see clearly again. Auditory processing of music and a second language that I had understood since childhood slowly became accessible again. Television remained overstimulating for years.
By mid-July 2023, my strength began returning in small, surprising ways. I could walk more confidently across the yard. I followed the healing wherever it led. I didn’t know if I would recover fully. I couldn’t let myself think too much about that. I was grateful for any improvement.
I began finding podcasts and videos that described experiences uncannily similar to mine. When I found other people’s stories, they made sense of what doctors could not.
One woman described recovery as giving birth to your adult self - learning how to think, feel, regulate, and inhabit your body again. It resonated. Like stroke rehabilitation. Like learning to read my own signals from scratch.
What I’ve written here reflects only what can be named. Much of what happened during those months remains outside language - and still does.
By this point, I knew that what I was experiencing was not relapse or the emergence of a psychiatric condition. These symptoms - autonomic instability, sensory disturbance, and affective dysregulation following dose reduction - are well documented in clinical accounts of antipsychotic withdrawal. None of my doctors named this as what was happening. But my body made sense to me in a way it never had before.
And slowly, painfully, things began to return.
Not perfectly. Not linearly. Not with certainty.
But enough.
Enough to know that the story I was told was wrong.
What I learned
The thoughts I had been so afraid of were not proof of a broken brain. They were drug effects.
The danger I had been warned about was amplified by the very system meant to protect me. I had taken psychiatric medication to be a “good enough mother,” but what my children needed was not a sedated, compliant version of me.
They needed my presence.
I saw it clearly that night on the beach. Not in a dramatic way, just in the way my son looked at me. What mattered to him was not that I was managed or correct, but that I was there with him. Smiling. Engaged. Alive.
My story is not about diagnoses or labels. It is not about being iatrogenic.
While I was still medicated, I heard Sadhguru define responsibility as simply the ability to respond. I knew - even though I didn’t yet understand why - that I wasn’t able to respond in the way I wanted to. That was what made me nervous.
It wasn’t that I feared responsibility. I wanted my responsiveness back. And looking back, that nervousness was sane. It wasn’t anxiety about the world, it was a protest from the part of me that wanted to be awake, available, and alive again.
I was not broken. My body did not betray me. It tried to protect me for years in the only ways it knew how. What looked like weakness was adaptation. What looked like illness was a system under prolonged strain.
This story is about reclaiming authorship of my life. It is about turning it around.
And it is not over yet.
Moving forward
I am sharing this story for my children. This is not a story meant to blame or to provoke fear. It is a record of how deeply I tried to protect them, even when I did not know how to protect myself.
From 2011 to 2023, I lived with psychiatric medication and a copper IUD in my body. During those years, my health steadily declined despite my persistent efforts to seek help. I saw doctors across nearly every specialty. I underwent extensive testing and invasive procedures. Each specialist could see that something was wrong, yet no one could explain why, or how the pieces fit together.
Specifically, I saw my family doctor almost monthly or more often at times, and, over the years: six psychiatrists, six psychologists, four therapy support groups, a cardiologist, neurologist, otolaryngologist, gastroenterologists, optometrists, a dermatologist, an endocrinologist, internal medicine physicians, hematologists, a rheumatologist, and physiotherapists. I underwent two colonoscopies, an endoscopy, an echocardiogram, two mammograms, a hand X-ray, a Holter monitor, extensive bloodwork, three iron infusions, and an emergency room visit. Each specialist ruled out disease within their field and sent me on.
Eventually, I stopped taking medication. I removed the medical device. I stopped searching for answers from a system that could not see what was happening, and after withdrawal finally passed, my health began to improve.
And slowly, painfully, my body began to recover. I learned to walk and run and live and…
In 2025, my body lovingly made and birthed a beautiful, healthy baby boy and I rejoined my family as a partner in daily life.
This is not a miracle story. It is not a victory story. It is a life story - one that continues.
And it is offered in love.
Additional stories:
This is my story, but it’s not the only one like it. The videos below feature others who have spoken publicly about similar experiences.
Brooke Siem on Antidepressant Withdrawal and her book “May Cause Side Effects” (@AngiePeacockMSW)
Brooke Siem // Brooke Siem: “May Cause Side Effects”
Medicating Normal | An award-winning documentary following several individuals harmed by prescribed psychiatric medications.
“Medicating Normal” | Docu | 76-min | EN (CC in: ES, DA, DE, FR, HE, IT, JA, NL, NO, PL, PT, SV, ZH)
Trudy S. shares a personal account of Stopping Antidepressants After Two Decades illustrating how withdrawal symptoms are often misunderstood or misdiagnosed. (@taperclinic)
Stopping Antidepressants after 2 Decades | An interview with Trudy S.
Laura Delano shares her experience navigating the system and culture of psychiatric diagnosis and medication, and eventually finding recovery outside it. Author of the book “Unshrunk”.
How I Overcame “Treatment-Resistant” Mental Illness: Laura Delano’s Journey
Cooper Davis shares his 13-year journey on psychiatric medications: starting with Ritalin in high school, moving through nearly every stimulant, and eventually adding multiple other drugs. (@taperclinic)
I Was Prescribed Meth… by My Doctor
Katinka shares her personal story of the devastating impact psychiatric medications and withdrawal had on her life and family. (@TheGaslitTruthPodcast)
The Pill That Steals Lives Katinka Newman’s Journey to find the Truth about Antidepressants
Brandalyn describes her experience with psychiatric medications begun as a young mother, withdrawal, and the long process of rebuilding a life and identity after discontinuation. (@AngiePeacockMSW)
Brandalyn // Re-entering the Magic of Life after Psychotropic Drugs
Geraldine Burns shares her experience with benzodiazepine dependence and withdrawal, becoming a pioneering advocate for others navigating recovery. (@AngiePeacockMSW)
Geraldine Burns // The Matriarch of the Benzo Recovery Movement
Drew Linsalata discusses his experience with antidepressant withdrawal and the path that eventually led him to become a medication free anxiety educator and host of The Anxious Truth podcast. (@TheAnxiousTruth)
Podcast EP 147: My Antidepressant Withdrawal Story (Part 3 of a series) (March 2021)
Several psychologists with experience of psychiatric harms discuss advocacy, patient stories, and the growing movement calling for greater transparency about psychiatric drug harms. (@AngiePeacockMSW)
Dr. Teralyn & Therapist Jenn // The Gaslit Truth Podcast