ReviewTherapeutic advances in psychopharmacology2020
How user knowledge of psychotropic drug withdrawal resulted in the development of person-specific tapering medication.
Review in Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Benefits and Liabilities of Benzodiazepines and Z-Drugs: What We Know and What We Don't Know.Drugs · 2026Review
- Tapering and withdrawing opioids: guidance informed by fundamental principles to minimise withdrawal symptoms.Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology · 2025Review
- Article
- Deprescribing NSAIDs: The Potential Role of Community Pharmacists.Pharmacy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- From diagnosis to dialogue - reconsidering the DSM as a conversation piece in mental health care: a hypothesis and theory.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Managing withdrawal symptoms using tapering strips.The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners · 2023Article
- Article
- Outcomes of hyperbolic tapering of antidepressants.Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology · 2023Article
- Designing Flexible Longitudinal Regimens: Supporting Clinician Planning for Discontinuation of Psychiatric Drugs.Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. CHI Conference · 2022Article
- "I'm pretty sure it's either food poisoning or Covid-19": Lived experience versus medical knowledge in diagnosing substance use problems.The International journal on drug policy · 2021Article
- Successful use of tapering strips for hyperbolic reduction of antidepressant dose: a cohort study.Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology · 2021Article
- What I have learnt from helping thousands of people taper off antidepressants and other psychotropic medications.Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology · 2021Review
- Service-user efforts to maintain their wellbeing during and after successful withdrawal from antipsychotic medication.Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology · 2021Article
- The role of Facebook groups in the management and raising of awareness of antidepressant withdrawal: is social media filling the void left by health services?Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology · 2021Article
- The 'patient voice': patients who experience antidepressant withdrawal symptoms are often dismissed, or misdiagnosed with relapse, or a new medical condition.Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology · 2020Article
- Protracted withdrawal syndrome after stopping antidepressants: a descriptive quantitative analysis of consumer narratives from a large internet forum.Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology · 2020Article
- Withdrawal effects confounding in clinical trials: another sign of a needed paradigm shift in psychopharmacology research.Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology · 2020Review
- Outcome of antidepressant drug discontinuation with taperingstrips after 1-5 years.Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Coming off psychotropic drugs can cause physical as well as mental withdrawal, resulting in failed withdrawal attempts and unnecessary long-term drug use. The first reports about withdrawal appeared in the 1950s, but although patients have been complaining about psychotropic withdrawal problems for decades, the first tentative acknowledgement by psychiatry only came in 1997 with the introduction of the 'antidepressant-discontinuation syndrome'. It was not until 2019 that the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists, for the first time, acknowledged that withdrawal can be severe and persistent. Given the lack of a systematic professional response, over the years, patients who were experiencing withdrawal started to work out practical ways to safely come off medications themselves. This resulted in an experience-based knowledge base about withdrawal which ultimately, in The Netherlands, gave rise to the development of person-specific tapering medication (so-called tapering strips). Tapering medication enables doctors, for the first time, to flexibly prescribe and adapt the medication required for responsible and person-specific tapering, based on shared decision making and in full agreement with recommendations in existing guidelines. Looking back, it is obvious that the simple practical solution of tapering strips could have been introduced much earlier, and that the traditional academic strategy of comparisons from randomised trials is not the logical first step to help individual patients. While randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for evaluating interventions, they are unable to accommodate the heterogeneity of individual responses. Thus, a more individualised approach, building on RCT knowledge, is required. We propose a roadmap for a more productive way forward, in which patients and academic psychiatry work together to improve the recognition and person-specific management of psychotropic drug withdrawal.
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