Trying to come off the drugs left me suicidal

JAMES MOORE, a former high-level civil servant from Bristol, knows only too well how ready doctors can be to attribute withdrawal symptoms from coming off antidepressants to the ‘depression’ worsening.

James was prescribed the antidepressant mirtazapine in 2012 after he began having panic attacks. After spending six years on the drug, he has been battling to get off it for the past year.

Mirtazapine is a type of antidepressant known as a noradrenaline and specific serotonergic, thought to work by boosting mood-regulating brain chemicals noradrenaline and serotonin.

James’s problems began when he had to make thousands of people redundant in the department where he worked. It was, he recalls, ‘an extremely pressured time’ — compounded by the fact that he and his wife, Miranda, were juggling caring for their two-year-old.

Then, at the end of 2011, aged 41, ‘all of a sudden I found myself experiencing daily panic attacks at work, panic that was all consuming and unbearable’, he says.

His GP diagnosed anxiety and depression, signed him off work and, in February 2012, prescribed James 15mg mirtazapine. Like Stevie Lewis (see main story), James was told he had a chemical imbalance. When he felt the medication was actually increasing his anxiety — a common side-effect of some antidepressants — he paid to see a psychiatrist privately, who increased his dose to 30mg.

In 2013, after a year of treatment, he told his GP he wanted to stop. ‘His advice was “just take half a tablet for a week, then stop completely”, and that’s what I did,’ James recalls. The result was worse than the problem that had taken him to the doctor in the first place.

‘I ended up barely able to function and losing touch with reality,’ he told Good Health. He had severe insomnia, relentless anxiety, headaches, sweating, shaking spells, dizziness, confusion and agitation. ‘I thought I was becoming seriously ill with an undiagnosed condition.’

To his shock, he also began to have suicidal thoughts.

Repeated attempts to reduce his dose resulted in increasingly worse panic attacks. ‘After only a few days of reducing the dose, I would be bedridden, unable to eat, experiencing relentless anxiety and depression — unable to function at all.’

But instead of identifying withdrawal as the problem, James’s doctor insisted he was experiencing a return of his original symptoms. James (below) knew that his chronic insomnia and appalling headaches were not part of his original condition, so he went online to find out more — and came across others experiencing the same problems when trying to come off antidepressants. As he fought to lower his dose, James made several unsuccessful attempts to return to work, but was eventually made redundant on health grounds in 2013. ‘I felt broken and lost, that I would never work again and never contribute to society. ‘For a long time I felt withdrawal was impossible and that I would remain on the drugs for life, but not by choice.’ Fortunately he’s found a supportive GP who is helping him to withdraw slowly, using a liquid form of mirtazapine and special syringes that, unlike pills, allow doses to be tapered by tiny amounts. He is now down to 40per cent of his starting dose. James, who has started a podcast, Let’s Talk Withdrawal, which has been downloaded more than 150,000 times, is grateful that he had the chance to try this method, as many don’t, but adds: ‘It is the most difficult and gruelling thing I have done.’