Things got nasty for Magie Serpica when she decided to quit Zoloft.
Serpica, a 38-year-old tattoo artist from West Brighton, SI, is no stranger to antidepressants. Since the age of 17, she’s cycled through various medications, including Paxil and Serzone, for diagnoses of acute depression, general anxiety and PTSD. But Zoloft, in particular, she says, caused her to gain weight, and it was making her joints hurt.
So she decided to go off the meds, following general guidelines for tapering — and was met with a litany of unpleasant symptoms, including nausea, extreme fatigue and a jarring phenomenon called “brain zaps,” which Serpica describes as a jolt to the brain.
“I remember having thoughts of, ‘Is this ever going to end?’ ” Serpica tells The Post. “I feel like doctors downplay withdrawal symptoms.”
A new paper suggests that her concerns are warranted. In the report, published in medical journal the Lancet Psychiatry this week, British psychiatrists Dr. Mark Horowitz and Dr. David Taylor argue that the standard recommendation for tapering off antidepressants — about four weeks under a physician’s guidance — is wildly misguided. They believe tapering should take months, not weeks, and consist of ever-smaller doses.
Doing so, they write, has “shown greater success in reducing withdrawal symptoms.”
That’s a big shift in thinking for the millions of Americans who take antidepressants.
But not all doctors are ready to buck the establishment standard.
“I think [the study authors] are exaggerating how pigheaded we are,” says Dr. James Kocsis, professor and psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork Presbyterian. “The research on this topic, as well as my own clinical experience, is that [extreme antidepressant withdrawal] occurs in a minority of patients.”
When patients do have difficulty weaning off the medication, Kocsis says, it’s been his experience that doctors “are very willing to modify the schedule . . . [and] work with people to go more slowly.”
But Serpica says her doctors led her to believe that “residual symptoms” of antidepressant withdrawal were no big deal. Moreover, they had never really talked with her about long-term goals in taking these drugs.
“If I had known coming off of Zoloft would be this hard, I’m not sure I would have started,” says Serpica, who hopes sharing her struggle will prevent others from making hasty decisions about their mental health. “Make sure you ask a lot of questions: Do the benefits outweigh the negative? … I wish I would have known how intense it would be.”
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