‘Withdrawal symptoms were indescribably horrendous’

KATINKA NEWMAN descended into psychosis after being prescribed antidepressants to help her cope with a divorce.

Mrs Newman, 53, an award-winning filmmaker from London, began to have hallucinations after being prescribed escitalopram. At one point she thought she had been filmed killing her children on national TV. In fact, she had taken a kitchen knife and lacerated her own left arm.

A diagnosis of psychotic depression was followed by a cascade of further prescriptions, and soon she was taking seven drugs. She spent the next year in a near-catatonic state, in and out of hospital. At one stage she moved into a flat on her own, effectively abandoning her two children, Oscar, 15, and Lily, 16. She was drinking heavily and smoking 70 cigarettes a day.

In September 2013, Mrs Newman was sectioned at St Charles Hospital in West London, where she began a month-long process of weaning herself off the drugs. The withdrawal symptoms were ‘indescribably horrendous’, she said. She now campaigns against the destructive potential of antidepressants.

Calling the Oxford study ‘highly misleading’ she added: ‘Many of the five million people prescribed antidepressants in the UK are not acutely depressed, they are reacting to an adverse life event such as divorce or stress at work. Psychiatrists aren’t warning people they can be impossibly difficult to get off, and the side-effects can last even after you come off them.’