I took antidepressants for more than 25 years. Getting off them was harder than I ever imagined.

I was 19 when I started taking antidepressants.

I was in college, and while school came easily to me, I carried around a lot of sadness and loneliness. I felt like everyone else knew how to be in the world and I didn’t.

Around that time in the late ‘90s, I read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s memoir “Prozac Nation.” For the first time, depression seemed to explain what my inner world never had the words for. I went to my primary care doctor, told her I was depressed, and left with a prescription for Prozac.

The medication helped. But it also made me incredibly tired and emotionally numb. I used to describe it as living my life behind a screen door: I could see the world … but I didn’t feel fully inside of it.

Still, I believed I needed antidepressants. Over the next two decades, I tried Prozac, Lexapro, Zoloft and Wellbutrin, searching for the drug that would work without the side effects.

Every 5 years or so, I would get frustrated and try to stop taking them. Each time, I felt terrible. My symptoms returned, and my doctors told me that was evidence I still needed medication.

Then, after getting divorced at 45, I decided to try again. It felt like a good time to find out who I was without antidepressants.

The first thing I noticed after I started tapering was the crying.

There was a lot of crying – often I didn’t even know why. I started recording audio diaries because I was trying to make sense of what was happening.

“Is this withdrawal?” I wondered in the diary . “It is just so painful to be in my brain.”

Soon, I was also dealing with severe insomnia, dizziness and a racing heart. I could barely work or leave the house.

I went online looking for answers and found thousands of people describing remarkably similar experiences. And one resource kept coming up: “The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines,” a book offering detailed instructions for tapering psychiatric medications.

I tracked down its lead author, psychiatrist Mark Horowitz, who studies psychiatric drug withdrawal and had his own difficult experience coming off antidepressants after taking them for 20 years.

“I wrote them for one reason,” he told me, “which was to prevent other people going through the hell that I went through coming off these drugs.”

For years, patients have often been advised to taper antidepressants over several weeks. But Horowitz says that for some people – particularly those who have taken the drugs long-term – that can be far too fast.

Instead, he recommends what’s called hyperbolic tapering: reducing the medication by progressively smaller amounts as the dose gets lower. Small doses, he explained, can have much bigger effects than people realize, which means the final few milligrams can sometimes be the hardest to stop.

That helped me understand something about my own history.
All those times I’d tried to stop antidepressants and fallen apart, I had assumed – and had been told – that my depression was returning. Now I realized that much of what I’d experienced was likely withdrawal.

I hadn’t necessarily failed. I just tapered too quickly.

So this time, I slowed way down. With the help of my doctor and a compounding pharmacy, I began reducing my medication in tiny increments.

And gradually, my emotions started coming back. In noticeable ways such as my motivation, creativity and drive; but also in more subtle ways that caught me by surprise.

One day, I was riding the subway in New York when I noticed the last stop was Forest Hills in Queens, where my grandmother had lived. I used to take that train to visit her every week before she died.

Suddenly, I started crying.

But this time, I knew why.

I missed her.

And I realized I hadn’t been able to cry about the loss before. The grief hurt, but it also felt strangely good. It felt appropriate. It felt human.

Two years after beginning this process, I’m still tapering the last of my medication in tiny increments. I’m almost there!

And things are as good as they’ve ever been in my life. I’m happy. I’m healthy. I even fell in love.

For a long time, I thought recovery meant not feeling the painful things.

Now I think maybe it means being able to feel all of it – grief, joy, fear, love – and knowing that I can handle it.

It’s nice to feel like I’m inside my own life again – no filter applied.