The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
an open letter to Frederick S. Barrett, Ph.D., cognitive neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 23, 2024
Dear Dr. Barrett:
My name is Brian... and I am a 65-year-old chronic depressive who has been on Effexor 1 for the last 30 years. I was initially excited by the psychedelic renaissance when I read about it over a decade ago now, but I soon found out that it had nothing to offer me. It turned out that, due to liability issues surrounding a rare side effect known as Serotonin Syndrome, antidepressant users like myself were ineligible for all the benefits of psychedelic medicine, whether from stateside clinical trials or from overseas retreats.
I personally feel that psychiatric science has a debt to folks like myself, for I would contend that we have been turned into eternal patients thanks to the War on Drugs, which outlawed for us all obvious mood-improving substances, shunting us off instead onto SSRIs and SNRIs, which turn out to cause strong chemical dependence and some of which can be harder to quit than heroin 2 (Julie Holland). Thus 1 in 4 American women, in my view, have been turned into wards of the healthcare state.
But I am not writing to slam materialist medicine but rather to suggest a way that it can undo some of the harm that it has caused by turning folks like myself into eternal patients.
Could we please meet for an hour -- or at least a half-hour -- so that I can outline a suggested clinical trial to test a withdrawal process for SNRIs & SSRIs, one which is designed to take advantage of the mind-focusing and incentivizing qualities of psychedelic use in order to strengthen the withdrawing person's resolve to "stay the course" and get off of the antidepressants 3 in question -- and to stay off them thanks to the follow-up use of entheogens and psychedelics?
I fear that such a protocol will not be looked kindly upon by Big Pharma , but perhaps we could at least discuss it. It also depends on common sense psychology like anticipation, something that I fear that materialist science tends to pooh-pooh, in the same way that Dr. Robert Glatter maintained in Forbes magazine in 2021 that he was not sure if laughing gas could help the depressed! In my opinion, this distrust of "merely" subjective results, such as laughter of all things, makes scientists think and reason like Dr. Spock of Star Trek, completely ignoring the truths of common sense psychology.
I am available to meet with you on the day, time and location of your choice. I am also ready to be your first guinea pig in such a clinical trial as I propose, should it become finalized and approved. I am even ready to relocate if necessary to become part of such a study.
I am not writing out of an abstract interest in psychedelic science, but rather because I have "skin in this game." That is, I wish to enjoy and study the effects of psychedelics before I die, for reasons of a psychological, spiritual and philosophical nature (bearing in mind that William James himself urged us to study altered states). I also want to finally become free of antidepressants so that I no longer have to experience those humiliating and expensive tri-monthly visits to a mental health clinic in which I am urged to divulge the details of my psychological life to someone who is one-third my age.
Given that 1 in 4 American women are also dependent on the daily use of antidepressants, I would suggest that someone in the psychedelic renaissance has a duty to help this demographic of eternal patients. Otherwise, the benefits of the psychedelic renaissance will remain unavailable to precisely those who need and deserve them the most.
Please let me know if we can meet so that I can present the outlines of a clinical trial, one that will help veteran antidepressant users like myself to get off of these dependence-causing drugs with the psychological and spiritual support of psychedelic and entheogenic medicine, medicine to be monitored such that Serotonin Syndrome can be avoided and/or quickly treated should its symptoms present.
Thanks for your time and I look forward to your response!
Author's Follow-up: October 27, 2024
And I am still looking forward to that response! Any second now, right? Ooh, I can't wait!
Author's Follow-up:
May 20, 2025
I look forward to WHAT?! It's amazing that I was so naive just so much as a year ago as to think that I would hear back Fred -- or from anybody else when it comes to a protocol that suggests itself merely via common sense.
Author's Follow-up:
June 17, 2025
Someone please cue "Dream On" by Aerosmith.
It is always interesting when re-reading one's timeworn adumbrations to notice certain aspects of one's personality about which one had been blissfully unaware in the past. God love me, I never properly credited myself for my apparently almost boundless naivete. It's really quite touching! Awww! Did I actually think that Dr. Barrett was going to say something like, "By all means, Brian, pop in any time!"?
Maybe I will not meet with Dr. Barrett in this lifetime, then, but I have since moved on with respect to the topics raised above. I am now more or less "off" of antidepressants entirely. (No need to applaud, but thanks.) To be precise, I am on a self-determined tapering campaign that will have me off of Big Pharma 45 drugs entirely by September of this year. At this moment, I am down to roughly 25mg of Effexor per day, using pills that I managed to obtain from a compounding pharmacist after jumping through a variety of bureaucratic and conceptual hoops. It seems that companies like Wyeth Pharmaceuticals do not even make the kinds of low doses required to get off their drugs. Gee, I wonder why not! Surely, this is just a simple oversight on their part -- or am I being ridiculously naive again? (Let's keep these details between you and myself, by the way-- these are personal health-related matters and are not to be bandied about the Internet by just anybody.)
As for psilocybin, I have since discovered on my own that there is a "there" there when it comes to psychological healing.
Finally, let me put on my schoolmarm cap now and criticize my above essay pedantically, as if I were a complete stranger with respect to the human being who indited this open letter some 14 months ago. My principal scruple is the fact that the essay is mistitled. The author does not really tell the reader about a "common-sense way to get off of antidepressants" but rather sets forth some of his philosophical grievances with the drug investigation protocols of modern science and their problematic reliance on materialist presuppositions.
Had my 2024 avatar fulfilled the remit implicit in his essay title, he would have reminded us that there are a wide variety of drugs out there that can help us get off of antidepressants -- or of any other unwanted substance -- but that we have outlawed all such drugs, thereby legally mandating that dependency should be a big problem, "solvable" only by experts. And yet what is recidivism (the original author should have asked) but the backsliding caused by a few hours of emotional and existential angst of a withdrawing individual, moments that could have easily been "gotten through" if only we had used "drugs to fight drugs." Take myself for instance. When I first attempted to get off Effexor, I did so on a far-too ambitious schedule, with the result that I one day found myself sitting at the top of my stairs at 2 in the morning wishing I were dead -- and yet struggling not to go back to the medicine cabinet for another 75mg dose of the hated substance. Now, had I been able to use laughing gas 6 , or coca, or opium 7 , or phenethylamines, at such a time, I would have easily gotten through that rough patch without heading back to the medicine cabinet (as, alas, I finally did after an hour of leaden-eyed moping). This much is just psychological common sense.
Of course, the exact doses and drugs that should be used in fighting withdrawal pangs may vary from person to person, but my point here is that it is common sense that "withdrawers" could get through rough patches of the withdrawal process without backsliding if we allowed for the use of drugs to fight drugs. Materialist scientists ignore this fact because it is mere common sense -- and therefore not scientific. To be scientific these days, one must be a behaviorist, and that means ignoring all the obvious benefits of drug use and insisting that quantitative data is all that matters about psychoactive substances. And yet the truth is obvious to those who can transcend their lifelong brainwashing on these topics. Getting off of almost any substance would be easy if we were free to use all drugs for human benefit, especially in a world in which we studied best practices for such use based on the safe and beneficial use of others.
In the age of the Drug War, psychiatrists, psychologists and doctors lack all common sense. They are dogmatically blind to the power of drugs that elate and inspire, based on their adherence to reductive materialism, which tells them that such things are not "real" cures. The human being is a biochemical machine, after all, and the scientist's job is to fix the biochemistry, not to make people merely feel good. There are hundreds of millions of victims of this mindset, but the doctors never notice them because these victims are silent: they are the ones who waste their days holed up behind locked doors, contemplating suicide.
Such a materialist mindset completely ignores the power of virtuous circles that a wide variety of pick-me-up drugs could create when properly chosen and scheduled -- on a calendar, I mean, and not by the DEA. Such a mindset completely ignores the power of anticipation. Such a mindset completely ignores the motivating power provided to these individuals of just plain being able to get things done in their lives.
The doctors have no scruples in this regard because, like all Americans, they have been taught since grade-school that drugs must be a dead end, that the creativity of humankind will never find a way to use them wisely.
The cruelty of this modern reductive paradigm is seen in the way that psychiatrists "adjust meds." They insist that the severely depressed patient get off one drug entirely before starting another. Imagine if a drug dealer insisted on the same thing. You would think that he was crazy. But the doctor knows best. He or she needs to be in total control of the variables, if only for insurance and regulatory purposes, and so it is for his or her convenience that the patient must go without anything during drug changes, thereby rendering them absolutely miserable.
Doctors praise antidepressants because they do not cause cravings, but for whom is that a benefit? For the prescribing doctor, of course, because the people whom they force to go without medicine merely suffer in a silent hell and do not pester the doctor to help them out.
This is the mindset that teaches doctors to damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than to give them the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions, as soma inspired the Vedic. This is the mindset that causes whole nations to vote in favor of letting people use drugs to die but will not let those same people use drugs that could make them want to live.
It is a complete perversion of values, all wrought by the anti-scientific, superstitious substance demonization of politically scheming politicians, populist pols who come to power by fearmongering.
This is one of the many reasons why the re-election of Trump is an existential disaster, and not just for drug policy but for democracy itself: Trump is the ultimate fearmonger.
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
Prohibitionists have the same M O they've had for the last 100+ years: blame drugs for everything. Being a drug warrior is never having the decency to say you're sorry -- not to Mexicans, not to inner-city crime victims, not to patients who go without adequate pain relief...
Ann Lemke's case studies make the usual assumptions: getting free from addiction is a morality tale. No reference to how the drug war promotes addiction and how banned drugs could solve such problems. She does not say why daily SSRI use is acceptable while daily opium use is not. Etc.
When folks die in horse-related accidents, we need to be asking: who sold the victim the horse? We've got to crack down on folks who peddle this junk -- and ban books like Black Beauty that glamorize horse use.
The Drug War is the ultimate example of strategic fearmongering by self-interested politicians.
Getting off antidepressants can make things worse for only one reason: because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help with the transition. Right now, getting off any drug basically means becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist. No wonder withdrawal is hard.
Guess who's in charge of protecting us from AI? Chuck Schumer! The same guy who protected us from drugs -- by turning America into a prison camp full of minorities and so handing two presidential elections to Donald Trump.
"The Oprah Winfrey Fallacy": the idea that a statistically insignificant number of cases constitutes a crisis, provided ONLY that the villain of the piece is something that racist politicians have demonized as a "drug."
We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car.
So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.
Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war:
"clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."
