Withdrawing from SSRI antidepressants: practical help is needed

[摘要] As a person who has endured a lengthy and complicated withdrawal process from an antidepressant, I am delighted to see this issue gaining recognition. I thank the authors for their work.1We are starting to move from a position where antidepressant withdrawal is seen as rare and self-limiting, to one where we can acknowledge that, for a proportion of people, the withdrawal process can be extremely difficult. Further, some people will continue to have problems long past the point that they got off the antidepressant. Some psychopharmacologists believe this is due to the adaptation that the brain has made to the drug. Examples of this are often seen in online fora where some people report difficulties for months or years after tapering.While I welcome this work, more needs to be done to practically aid both prescribers and patients in safely stopping antidepressants. As noted in other letters, liquid forms are available for some drugs but not all, and they tend to be expensive.The Netherlands has led the way in developing tapering strips that can provide a precise and reliable way to gradually taper. In the UK, we should be learning from such groundbreaking work, and I got the chance to speak with Professor Wendy Burn, the then President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, about this issue.2Some readers might be interested to know about tapering strips and how they can aid the prescriber in guiding patients safely and slowly off their antidepressants.2© British Journal of General Practice 2023REFERENCES 1.↵Palmer EG, Sornalingam S, Page L, Cooper M (2023) Withdrawing from SSRI antidepressants: advice for primary care. Br J Gen Pract, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp23X732273.

[学科分类] 卫生学