What Precautions Should I Take if I Want to Stop Taking an Antidepressant? (0:50)
When patients feel better, they often want to stop taking their antidepressants. In this WisePatient video, psychiatrist Sudeepta Varma, MD, explains why it's important to taper off an antidpressant slowly.
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When a patient says that they want to stop taking medication, I think the key is to try to decrease the patients slowly. We often see that for some of the medication not all of them but some that have shorter half-life so they leave the body much quicker a person can have withdrawal symptoms they are called discontinuation symptoms.
So they are self limited, they are symptoms that a person may feel it's just over a few week period of time however they can be minimized by decreasing the medication slowly, few of the medications have longer half lives, so if you were to stop abruptly, it would still be in your system for another week or two, so it wouldn't be that much of an issue.
Sudeepta Varma, MD, is a board certified psychiatrist at the NYU Langone Medical Center. She was also the founding medical director and attending psychiatrist to a prestigious mental health program at NYU Langone.
