What Is SSRI Withdrawal Syndrome?
My first use of Zoloft, prescribed for chronic fatigue syndrome (fibromyalgia), produced an alarming mental event. Shortly after I swallowed the pill, I had total recall of words arriving very fast into my consciousness from my memory with only a dim awareness that I should know what they mean. I was incapable of ordering them to produce coherent thought or to control the randomized dictionary downloading into my consciousness. The frightening incident lasted for a couple of minutes. I now understand that experience as a sudden loss of left-brain dominance that disconnected the normal activity of Wernicke’s area in my left-brain from using the store of words in my right-brain. Wernicke’s area organizes words into sentences. Whatever else Zoloft had done to my brain, it had disabled the muscle in my right middle ear that controls left-brain dominance. I was so alarmed by this experience that I stopped taking the drug after a few days. I had no trouble discontinuing it. What would have happened to my ear and my brain if I had continued taking the drug?
People have been lured into thinking about the chemistry of the brain without knowing the physics of how sound energy impacts the ears and the brain. Even doctors and psychiatrists do not know the ways that the ear controls the body’s neurology, although basic knowledge about the right ear’s influence on the nervous system has been available to researchers for half a century. Alfred Tomatis’s description of the ear’s control of the muscles of the larynx in his book, The Ear and the Voice, helped me to understand in neurological terms the observations I had made of our son Daniel’s schizophrenia symptoms. I saw the relevance of his discoveries to the neurological paradigm I had discovered by using Focused Listening music therapy to cure Daniel’s schizophrenia.
The rise of pharmaceutical companies’ “easy answers” to mental illnesses and behavior problems dampened the search for the origins of the kinds of behavior I had been studying to try to understand our son’s illness. We now have a state of psychiatric patient care that is like walking into a dark house while knowing about the chemistry of light as fire but not about the physics of electricity. As Robert Whitaker1 informs us, psychoactive medications have vastly increased the incidence of mental illness.
If any medication is too much for the ears, how do those people feel who have gotten themselves off the drugs? Often, they experience symptoms of SSRI withdrawal syndrome, which may be worse than the condition for which the drugs were prescribed in the first place. Those symptoms, according to my knowledge, are the symptoms of stapedius muscle damage (see Ear Function in SSRI Withdrawal). We have a therapy for that. We can apply Focused Listening during the withdrawal process. It might allow more rapid withdrawal protocols for others tapering off drugs, the way it did for Daniel. Those withdrawal protocols that take years might be dramatically shortened, as has been demonstrated in Daniel’s three recoveries from schizophrenia that entailed his getting off street drugs as well as off Risperdal.
[1] Robert Whitaker elaborates on the damage done to people by SSRIs and other psychoactive medications in Anatomy of an Epidemic (New York: Crown, 2010).