Now let’s talk about the drugs. They are called drugs for a reason, and when it comes to sedation and addiction, there are very few drugs worse than the ones used under psychiatric “treatment”. The biggest danger of these drugs is the fact that they will (usually) not kill you, even if you take them every day for decades; the danger lies in the fact that the more you use it, the more addicted you become. The danger is also in thinking that the drug is harmless, and that side effects are actually symptoms of the mental disorder people say you have, instead of being directly caused by the medication.
I started taking antipsychotic medication at age 19 and only managed to stop at age 29. Before I started taking it, I’ve never had any trouble falling asleep, and never had the kind of anxiety outbreaks I had after taking it. But when doctors told me that these were symptoms of a disease I had, it seemed ok to start taking even more medication in order to deal with these symptoms.
There’s one thing called withdrawal that, surprisingly, even doctors don’t understand. It happens when your biology gets so used to a given substance that it will start behaving erratically until it’s taken again. What doctors don’t understand is that the medication they are prescribing actually causes a lot of the symptoms related to a given mental disorder. Even if you take medication every day you will feel withdrawal. You will feel it mostly just before the time you usually take it and if you take medication during the night, this means it will become impossible to sleep without it. This is a very serious problem, and one I had to face when I decided to quit. So what I did was try to tamper
it out, by reducing the dosage little by little within the timeframe of about 2 years. I had done this without being instructed by doctors, who told me the medication will be necessary for the rest of my life. During the last 6 months of tampering, I got to the point where I was able to sleep while taking less than the minimum dosage of only 1 medication. So what I did after that was to get the pills to be manipulated by a specialised pharmacy, so that they are half or ¼ less powerful than the minimum dose available.
After getting to ¼, I stopped taking it. Even all the years of withdrawal did not prepare me for what happened next. I suffered incredible anxiety, disorganized thought and was unable to sleep for about 4 days. I suffered all that alone, just after becoming well enough to leave my parent’s house and go live by myself. Wonder if would have survived quitting it cold turkey.