When drugs to treat depression can wreck patients’ lives
WEANING yourself off antidepressants can be as harrowing as getting off ben-zodiazepines, as an ever-growing number of Britons are discovering.
For years, it was thought these drugs don’t cause dependency, but some experts and patients disagree, and point to severe withdrawal problems.
It is to Public Health England’s credit that its new review will include antidepressants.
Seven million GP prescriptions for antidepressants were written in England in 2016 — double that of a decade before.
Research published last year in the British Medical Journal says the main reason for this is a vast increase in the proportion of patients who are parked on the drugs long-term.
What this can mean for those affected is graphically illustrated by 43-year-old Kerryann Hobbs.
Kerryann, a single mother from Ilkeston, Derbyshire, became addicted to the prescribed antidepressant venlafaxine she was first given two decades ago.
For the past 15 years she’s been trying to stop taking it but the withdrawal symptoms she’s experienced — severe head pains, confusion and exhaustion — have made it impossible.
‘I have battled but have failed every time,’ she says.
She was prescribed the drug for anxiety and depression following the trauma of her parents’ divorce. ‘I was not warned of any possible side-effects,’ she says.
But after four years, the drug ceased working for Kerryann, leaving her with only the sideeffects of dizziness and nausea.
‘I have been trying to wean myself off ever since by cutting the dose,’ she says. ‘I get down to the last bit of the tablet, but at that point my life crumbles, like I’ve suddenly gone cold turkey.
‘I lose all concept of where I am and what is happening. I get angry at the slightest thing. The pain in my head is horrendous if I even just nod.
‘I lose all interest in life and can’t get out of bed some days.’
According to the NHS Choices patient-advice website, venlafaxine ‘is safe to take for a long time. There don’t seem to be any lasting harmful effects from taking it for years’.
Furthermore, it says: ‘Withdrawal symptoms will be harmless and over in a few days.’
Yet expert reports in the Dutch psychology journal, Tijd-schrift Voor Psychiatrie, spanning from 2002 to 2013, warn that withdrawal can cause severe delirium and mania, even when patients are trying to withdraw slowly by tapering their dose.
A further report by sleep-medicine specialists at New York’s Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine in 2013, highlighted another bizarre symptom of withdrawal — a rare type of narcolepsy called status cataplecticus, where people fall into a deep and unresponsive sleep for hours or even days.
And when investigators at the French National Institute of Health Research (INSERM) analysed nearly 2,500 online discussions about antidepressants, venlafaxine withdrawal was one of the most common subjects, they reported last October in the Journal of Medical Internet Research — Mental Health.
KERRYANN says three months ago she lost the specialist cake-baking business she’d built from a home-kitchen concern into a High Street shop because she ‘couldn’t put my all into it any longer’.
‘The drug had made me so poorly,’ she says. ‘I had so many plans for my life but my willpower and enthusiasm are demolished. In the past year, I have piled on six stone and lost my business.’
She is now trying again to wean herself off it but she’s been unable to find support from the NHS or voluntary organisations.
‘Doctors don’t recognise this as a problem,’ she says. ‘All I am told is to re-start the venlafaxine because my depression is back.’
Kerryann has now turned to Facebook forums for help.
‘There’s a lot of support from people who’ve had problems themselves,’ she says.
‘Most advise to taper off the drug incredibly slowly. I am hopeful that with their support I will get there.’