The Conversation – A new review of antidepressant withdrawal effects – written by academics, many of whom have close ties to drug manufacturers – risks underestimating the potential harms to long-term antidepressant users by focusing on short-term, industry-funded studies.
There is growing recognition that stopping antidepressants – especially after long-term use – can cause severe and sometimes debilitating withdrawal symptoms, and it is now acknowledged by the UK government as a public health issue.
One of the main reasons this issue took decades to recognise after the release of modern antidepressants onto the market is because medical guidelines, such as those produced by Nice (England’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence), had for many years declared withdrawal effects to be “brief and mild”.
This description was based on studies run by drug companies, where people had only taken the medication for eight to 12 weeks.
As a result, when patients later showed up with severe, long-lasting symptoms, many doctors didn’t take them seriously because these experiences contradicted what the guidelines led them to expect.
Our recent research helps explain this mismatch. We found a clear link between how long someone takes antidepressants and how likely they are to experience withdrawal symptoms – and how severe these symptoms are.
We surveyed NHS patients and found that people who had used antidepressants for more than two years were ten times more likely to have withdrawal effects, five times more likely for those effects to be severe, and 18 times more likely for them to be long lasting compared with those who had taken the drugs for six months or less …
