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.
All of our problems with opioids and opiates could have been avoided had the busybody Chicken Littles in America left well enough alone and let folks continue to smoke regulated opium peaceably in their own homes.
Someone tweeted that fears about a Christian Science theocracy are "baseless." Tell that to my uncle who was lobotomized because they outlawed meds that could cheer him up -- tell that to myself, a chronic depressive who could be cheered up in an instant with outlawed meds.
I know. I'm on SNRIs. But SSRIs and SNRIs are both made with materialist presumptions in mind: that the best way to change people is with a surgical strike at one-size-fits-all chemistry. That's the opposite of the shamanic holism that I favor.
Drug warriors abuse the English language.
We give kids drugs to improve their concentration -- but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
In 1886, coca enthusiast JJ Tschudi referred to prohibitionists as 'kickers.' He wrote: "If we were to listen to these kickers, most of us would die of hunger, for the reason that nearly everything we eat or drink has fallen under their ban."
Alcohol makes me sleepy. But NOT coca wine. The wine gives you an upbeat feeling of controlled energy, without the jitters of coffee and without the fury of steroids. It increases rather than dulls mental focus.
If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.
As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.
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