More than 1 in 10 people in the United States take an antidepressant. And the most commonly prescribed type of antidepressant are SSRIs – or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. That's like Zoloft. Prozac. Lexapro.
Emily Corwin is one of millions of people who has taken an SSRI.
She says she was prescribed Lexapro, "Really because of circumstantial reasons, probably had mild depression."
She stayed on the drug for about 15 years.
Until, around 2022, Corwin decided she wanted to stop taking Lexapro. She talked to her doctor and they made a plan to decrease her dose over the course of a month.
"I just, for the first time in my life, experienced a kind of excruciating existential dread that didn't make any sense to me," she says. "I never had anything like that before."
Corwin eventually went back on Lexapro. But she's an investigative journalist at APM Reports, so she decided to look into the experience to see if others had similar problems getting off their SSRIs.
She found tens of thousands of people who'd turned to online forums to discuss health problems after stopping their antidepressants. And while doctors know stopping SSRIs can sometimes cause unpleasant side effects like dizziness, anxiety, insomnia and nausea, some people described symptoms that went further – that lasted months, even years.
Michael Hengartner has looked into some of the side effects of stopping SSRIs as part of his work as a professor of clinical psychology at Kalaidos University of Applied Sciences in Zurich, Switzerland. He says that this lack of formal diagnosis is a symptom of missing research. Experts still disagree on how common this problem is, how to prevent it and even what to call it.
"The whole problem starts with this lack of definition," he says. "So actually, we are left quite in a void."
Hengartner is not saying people should abruptly stop taking their medications or that SSRIs are dangerous. But there is a patient movement calling for more research on the long-term effects of going off antidepressants. And some researchers are starting to pay more attention.
Read more of Emily Corwin's reporting on the topic here.
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This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, edited by Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Special thanks to Jon Hamilton. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer.
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