This blog post is not intended as medical advice. If you want to quit taking a prescribed medication, consult your doctor and refer that physician to this website.
Is there a way of quitting drugs that is safe, painless, and cures the underlying condition of psychosis for which they were prescribed? That is exactly what Focused Listening has done for Daniel (three times) and for Ian, who were schizophrenic. And for Susan, who was bipolar; and for two unmedicated bipolar women, Marybeth and Nan. Five young men with schizophrenia are using Focused Listening and all of them are showing signs of increasing left-brain dominance; two of them have begun tapering their medication.
People taking psychiatric drugs are told repeatedly to take those medications interminably. However, not all of them do so. Why would you quit taking psychiatric medications prescribed by a doctor? The simple answer is that they are not good for your brain or for the rest of your body and most people who take them are aware that they are being harmed. This study describes how SSRIs cause harm and concludes:[1]
Because serotonin regulates many adaptive processes, antidepressants could have many adverse health effects. For instance, while antidepressants are modestly effective in reducing depressive symptoms, they increase the brain’s susceptibility to future episodes after they have been discontinued. Contrary to a widely held belief in psychiatry, studies that purport to show that antidepressants promote neurogenesis [nerve growth]are flawed because they all use a method that cannot, by itself, distinguish between neurogenesis and neuronal death. In fact, antidepressants cause neuronal damage and mature neurons to revert to an immature state, both of which may explain why antidepressants also cause neurons to undergo apoptosis (programmed death). Antidepressants can also cause developmental problems, they have adverse effects on sexual and romantic life, and they increase the risk of hyponatremia (low sodium in the blood plasma), bleeding, stroke, and death in the elderly. Our review supports the conclusion that antidepressants generally do more harm than good by disrupting a number of adaptive processes regulated by serotonin.
A person with a minor episode of mental illness may spontaneously recover despite the medication if the dosage is low. Others are left in worse health as a result of their medications.[2] Robert Whitaker describes the harm psychiatric drugs can do to people in Mad in America,[3] which became the name for his website[4] that informs people about psychiatric drugs and about a harm reduction program begun in Finland called “Open Dialogue” that tries to support a person in psychosis without resorting to psychiatric drugs. However, that intervention may not cure the conditions that lead to psychosis.
If psychiatric drugs are harmful, why would you be afraid to quit?
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“Medications heal you of psychosis.”
Not true. Psychiatric drugs suppress your behavior so that other people will not be afraid of what you might do and so other people are not so stressed and tired taking care of you. It is easier to care for a baby or a small child than to care for an uncontrolled teenager or adult. It is easier to take care of someone chemically subdued than it is to tolerate uncontrolled behavior and the inability to learn that is an aspect of mental illness. Psychiatric drugs make you behave more like a small child.
Here are the conclusions of a 20-year longitudinal study of 139 schizophrenic or schizophreniform (bipolar I) patients, referred to in the study as “SZ.”[5]
Results. At each follow-up assessment over the 20 years, a surprisingly high percentage of SZ treated with antipsychotics longitudinally had psychotic activity. More than 70% of SZ continuously prescribed antipsychotics experienced psychotic activity at four or more of six follow-up assessments over 20 years. Longitudinally, SZ not prescribed antipsychotics showed significantly less psychotic activity than those prescribed antipsychotics (p<0.05).
Conclusions. The 20-year data indicate that, longitudinally, after the first few years, antipsychotic medications do not eliminate or reduce the frequency of psychosis in schizophrenia, or reduce the severity of post-acute psychosis, . . . the condition of the majority of SZ prescribed antipsychotics for multiple years would raise questions as to how many of them are truly in remission.
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Medications help me learn how to control my behavior.
Not true. You are not learning to behave; the drugs are forcing you to be quiet. Your right ear is essential to transmitting sound energy that drives the dominance of your left-brain in cerebral integration. If that normal process is interrupted—which is the true definition of mental illness—further harming the ear with a drug makes the condition much worse. Your brain’s integration speeds slow down almost to the point of sleep. Under those conditions learning anything is extremely difficult.
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My drugs supply a chemical my body needs and cannot produce itself.
Not true. That lie told by some drug companies has been repeated by some doctors to their patients. No study has ever proven that serotonin or dopamine deficiency is the cause of mental illness.
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My drugs help me to sleep.
Our ears are the organ that awakens us and puts us to sleep. Our ears control the amount of sound-energy getting to the brain, which is what keeps it awake. A much better idea is to exercise your ears into a healthier condition so they can do their job of making you alert or making you sleep normally. Melatonin, which occurs naturally in the body, can be taken safely by some people to promote sleep, but is not recommended for people with schizophrenia or schizophreniform illness.[6]
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My drugs protect other people from my dangerous behavior.
True. Although some psychiatric survivors[7] ignore the dangers of psychosis, medications are a strategy for reducing harm to your family and community. Although schizophrenic and bipolar people sometimes commit major crimes, including murder and suicide, such crimes are rare.[8] They more often commit minor assault, bizarre harm to themselves and others that can lead to accidental death, and minor destruction of property. Without medication, those kinds of harmful behavior can be very frequent so there is an accumulation of harm to the schizophrenic person and mounting costs of many kinds to the family and community. A danger, to the psychotic person, is being shot and killed by the police.[9] Another danger is being forcibly restrained in jail or in a hospital.
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If I quit my medication, my symptoms will come back.
True, they probably will unless you have a plan to heal your ears while you are quitting the medications. Focused Listening may prevent that relapse. The Harrow study shows that people who have been on medication for a long time usually remain psychotic, therefore, going off the medication is likely to allow those symptoms to return. Furthermore, the drugs have harmed the ears, so the symptoms may be worse.
Focused Listening strengthens the ear, which has made tapering and withdrawal safer for the people who have tried it. Following your achievement of normal left-brain dominance you should continue to use Focused Listening, but on a less intense schedule, to maintain your ear health.
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I can’t get along without my psychiatrist.
Do you have a dependency that would end if you could be cured? You may wonder why you trust your psychiatrist if the prescribed drugs are harming you, will never cure you, and may have been offered to you under claims that are not true. Psychiatrists have been given great legal and social power. Some of the ways they try to help people are by using drugs, hospitalization, electrical and chemical shock treatments, and talk therapy to alter dangerous behavior patterns.[10] However, those methods rarely if ever cure schizophrenia or schizophreniform disease; they control it largely to the long-term detriment of the patient.[11]
Ask your psychiatrist, “What is the cause of schizophrenia or any other mental illness?” The only truthful answer is “We don’t know.” A few people do know, including a couple of doctors and psychiatrists.[12] But most psychiatrists do not know yet and have not tried very hard to find out. They expect neurologists to come up with that answer.[13] Meanwhile, they usually recognize the symptoms so they can label and categorize mental illnesses (using the DSM-5). They are allowed by law, more or less, to prescribe dangerous chemicals and other means to subdue behavior, emotions, and thought processes. As one psychiatrist told me, psychiatrists are looking for non-drug answers to mental illness because an increasing number of lawsuits have been brought successfully against doctors as well as against pharmaceutical companies for the harm done by psychiatric drugs.[14]
You can ask your psychiatrist about a non-drug therapy that might replace chemical controls and you can refer your doctor to this website and my publications.
8. What about withdrawal symptoms?
Some people decide to quit taking their psychiatric drugs because they don’t like feeling tired or gaining weight or other side effects. Whether they stop suddenly or taper slowly, they often still feel miserable. I have written a study of SSRI withdrawal symptoms that concludes most (not all) psychiatric drug withdrawal symptoms are ear-related. Especially important is the link between vestibular malfunction and suicidal depression.[15] Strengthening the ear with Focused Listening during medication withdrawal decreases withdrawal symptoms and may make them disappear entirely.
Our son Daniel had already tapered his medication (risperidone) to a very low dosage before he started Focused Listening. We learned that he could not completely recover from his symptoms of psychosis until he stopped taking any medication. Since his last healing (2016) he has used Focused Listening fairly often to maintain his right-ear strength.
[1] Paul W. Andrews, Ananda Amstadter, Michael C. Neale, “Primum Non Nocere: An Evolutionary Analysis of Whether Antidepressants Do More Harm than Good.” https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00117/full
[2] You can meet dozens of such individuals at “Surviving Antidepressants” at https://www.survivingantidepressants.org/
[3] Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010).
[4] https://www.madinamerica.com .
[5] M. Harrow, T. H. Jobe, and R. N. Faull, Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois College of Medicine, Chicago, IL, USA, “Does treatment of schizophrenia with antipsychotic medications eliminate or reduce psychosis? A 20-year multi-follow-up study,” (Psychological Medicine, Page 1 of 10. © Cambridge University Press 2014 doi:10.1017/S0033291714000610). http://www.mentalhealthexcellence.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/HarrowJobePsychMedMarch2014.pdf
[6] https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-940/melatonin
[7] For example, Will Hall in the Icarus Projects’ “Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs Harm Reduction Guide,” p. 11, that insists in its “Universal Declaration of Mental Rights and Freedoms” that psychotic individuals have “a right” to their aberrant states of consciousness. http://www.willhall.net/files/ComingOffPsychDrugsHarmReductGuide2Edonline.pdf
[8] But no less horrific when they do occur, for example, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/greyhound-killer-believed-man-he-beheaded-was-an-alien-1.1131575; https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/02/26/board-oks-plan-for-man-who-beheaded-bus-passenger-to-eventually-live-on-his-own_n_9321924.html .
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_Canada
[10] “But aren’t there any psychiatrists that do therapy?”
“There are a few,” I said, “but not many. They’re hard to find these days.” Daniel Carlat, Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelations about a Profession in Crisis (New York: Free Press), 4
[11] I discuss the issue of talking therapy in the book review of No Language but a Cry under the Reviews tab.
[12] For example, Norman Doidge discusses cures of dyslexic syndrome, autism, and suicidal depression using the Tomatis Method of binaural music therapy in The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Recoveries and Discoveries from the Fontiers of Neuroplasticity(New York: Viking, The Penguin Group, 2015), Ch.8.
[13] Ibid., Ch. 1.
[14] https://breggin.com/legal-page/
[15] Laurna Tallman, Ear Function in SSRI Withdrawal Syndrome: A Comparison of Symptoms with Other Ear-Related Syndromes (Marmora, Ont.: Northern Light Books, 2012), 20–22.