How Can I Quit Psychoactive Medication?
Psychoactive medication likely has damaged your ears, both of them. Simply quitting or tapering off the drug or drugs may be healthier in some ways, but your ears, which were the likely cause of your prescriptions, may be in worse shape than ever. It is dangerous to quit a psychoactive drug suddenly (cold turkey). You can support the ears with music while you are thinking about whether or not to quit. The safe way to quit is to taper the dosage slowly.
Information about tapering off psychoactive drugs without the support of Focused Listening is available on Mad in America.com and on Altostrata’s website Surviving Antidepressants. People at those venues delve into such brain chemical issues as “the serotonin transporter occupancy curve.” According to one source, the brain loses 80 percent of its reuptake capacity at minimum doses of most SSRIs. This means that an abrupt withdrawal of the minimum dosage of the drug is going to force the brain suddenly to use up its natural source of serotonin without leaving much for the brain “to feel good” with. You can taper that excessive dosage over the minimum more rapidly without feeling strong effects.
When you consider that schizophrenics are considered “sicker” than people with less extreme aberrant behavior, you can understand why they often have been prescribed exponentially more than the minimum doses of those drugs, even though that strategy contravenes research findings. Quite apart from ear muscles left stunned in the wake of the drugs, SSRI withdrawal is a shock to the brain. Less shock is involved during the early stages of withdrawal of an excessive dose. Greater discomfort is likely when reduction approaches the level of “the minimum dose.”
The strategy of 10 percent withdrawals with four weeks “holds,” i.e., maintenance of the dosage at the reduced level for four weeks, has gotten many people off way too much medication. It’s hard to do, and there is no guarantee of feeling well when the goal of “drug-free” has been attained. The chemistry has improved but the sound energy requirements of the brain remain deficient because, more often than not, the ears have been damaged.
After Daniel’s release from hospitalization, my first surprise was his family doctor’s intention to reduce Daniel’s medication. Daniel’s several medications were reduced very quickly to only one drug (Risperdal) and, then, gradually to 1/96 of the psychiatrist’s prescribed dosage, which had been 6 mg. That process of trial and error took three or four years. It could have taken only three months, but we did not have access to the research of other doctors during most of that time. For two years, Daniel had been abusing alcohol, cannabis, and amphetamines regularly, and various hallucinogens sporadically. His continuing substance abuse complicated the reductions in Risperdal dosages.
After 2006, Daniel’s sudden withdrawals from non-prescribed drugs were cushioned by his Focused Listening therapy. However, during two of his recoveries, he used extremely low doses of Risperdal (1/16 mg and 1/8 mg). Focused Listening supported his ears during illicit drug withdrawal and continued to support them under the influence of Risperdal. He regained normal cerebral integration and normal behavior when the very low amount of Risperdal was withdrawn. Likely, he would have recovered faster during his first two healings if medication had not been used because that is what happened during his third recovery in 2016.
The drugs most often prescribed to control mood and behavior not only weaken the ear muscles but have significant side effects that harm other parts of the body. Withdrawal symptoms should be understood from the standpoint of stapedius muscle damage that deprives the brain of normal flows of sound energy and of chemical changes in the brain and of organ damage directly attributable to the drugs (P.W. Andrews, J.A. Thomson, Jr., A. Amstadter, and M.C. Neale, [2012] Primum non nocere: an evolutionary analysis of whether antidepressants do more harm than good. Frontiers in Psychology 3:117. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00117).