Can Forums PROLONG Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs?

Well, I think they did for me . . .

Introduction

Hi welcome to my very niche Substack I’m Gustav and I talk about how it’s possible protracted withdrawal sensations are a learned syndrome fuelled by emotional stress. Now I’m not a medical professional but in my experience withdrawal sensations can completely resolve by rejecting the concept of protracted withdrawal syndrome and instead acknowledging the role of our emotional stress in maintaining the sensations we’re feeling.

My topic today is withdrawal forums and how they can increase our stress to prolong withdrawal sensations. Now when I say forums I just mean the forums, groups, organizations out there, not one in particular. And before I get into this I’ll just say when I first stumbled on withdrawal forums quite some years ago years ago I initially felt seen. It was refreshing to hear criticism of psychiatry, of their drugs, and some of the tapering information was useful—some of it. But for me to ultimately resolve protracted withdrawal sensations I had to go beyond the forums because of their significant limitations in understanding why the sensations can go on and on for some people. So here are five ways I think forums can perpetuate withdrawal. 

1. The “Diagnosis” of Protracted Withdrawal Syndrome

So when I first discovered these forums, I had no idea what was happening to me. I’d stopped psychiatric drugs months prior yet I felt worse and worse. Now I had already disposed of the idea of “psychiatric disorders”—even the American Psychiatric Association admits they don’t exist—so why did I feel so sick? Well the explanation from the forums is that I had “protracted withdrawal syndrome”, a drug sickness which I could do very little about. Time, they say, is the healer—that’s their most classic line—and usually it’s a lot of time. So when a terrified newbie comes along I’ve seen it said oh maybe you’ll heal in a year if you’re a fast healer. A year, at best. I read this stuff and it’s like, oh, this isn’t good. But also: where are forum members getting the authority to make such profoundly predictive statements on peoples’ lives?

In particular moderators don’t always inform us that protracted withdrawal syndrome is a concept, a model of reality, not reality itself nor necessarily our reality. This is a key philosophical distinction and people deserve informed consent on this to make the best decision for themselves. To tell someone on the internet that they have this dire syndrome with no proof can have a very negative effect. For instance in both chronic pain and Long COVID research shows that when people interpret themselves as sick, when it becomes their identity, it can fuel the distressing sensations that they’re feeling—not just make them worse, but cause them to keep going. When a withdrawal forum accepts this dire model as the truth, as their fate, it can create a toxic environment that traps people in perceived sickness.

2. Encourages Obsession over “Symptoms”

I remember when I used to just see the home pages of these forums, I would feel dread. It was a reminder that I was sick and the content of these forums is mostly people talking about very, very scary “symptoms.” I have this, I have that—do you have this, do have that? Now sometimes documenting symptoms might be necessary, say, to understand a particular drug reaction. But it seems like all forum members are indiscriminately writing their own body-horror novels. Moderators tell people to regularly record “symptoms”, maybe even score them on a scale of 1 to 10. This encourages us to preoccupy ourselves with withdrawal sensations, to get absorbed into them and fear-cycles are created around ourselves and the drugs—our focus on sensations can take over our entire lives.

Now, significantly, recent research and clinical trials show that what causes unwanted persistent sensations to persist is our fear and preoccupation with them. This is because it’s an emotional danger signal that can get stuck on and become the basis, the driver of the sensations over time. When we focus on the sensations, think about them, write about them, rank them, read about them, research them, we’re feeding this danger signal, we’re feeding the sensations. Again, it just doesn’t make them worse, it actually maintains them. Also, I might add, that beneath the danger signal can be deeper emotions, oftentimes people are really upset or angry about something and this might need to be acknowledged as well. One simple step in this general direction is maybe getting off the forums and away from the horror and victimhood that pervades them. 

3. Invalidation

So forums use a biomedical model to explain protracted withdrawal sensations; that is there’s a drug injury of an unknown nature and all we can do is wait for that unknown, mysterious injury to heal. It’s a traditional medical idea: something’s broken or diseased and you have to wait to heal. That makes sense for a broken arm or a cold or even acute withdrawal. It does not always make sense for non-structural chronic pain, for Long COVID without tissue damage, for chronic fatigue, for protracted withdrawal sensations, all these persistent mysterious things. It doesn’t make sense because biomedical approaches usually fail to help while mindbody approaches are working and even proven to work. But forums can be hostile toward anyone who takes an active role in resolving their situation as opposed to waiting around.

For instance I posted my own success story on a bunch of forums and on one in particular my story was criticized as improbable by a moderator. In other words my successful experience using a mindbody approach— rejecting protracted withdrawal, acknowledging the stress—my experience was invalidated. Then the moderator made some confusing comments that showed they hadn’t even looked at my story and it muddied the waters of the thread. 

These moderators then have the power to dissuade people, to confuse people, to try to shut down perspectives that they don’t approve of even if these alternative approaches are helping people. I remember someone who posted on a forum who resolved protracted withdrawal sensations with brain retraining. Now I don’t know much about brain retraining but I’ve heard of this working for people and this person was attacked and basically forced to retract their own life experience to appease the administrator’s ideology. In this sense these forums remind me of psychiatry and sometimes, although this might sound odd, I think these forums are an extension of psychiatric practice. I mean, what’s the goal here: is it to increase our knowledge base of protracted withdrawal sensations and what can work for people or is defending this biomedical interpretation of protracted withdrawal more important than people getting better? 

4. Co-opted By Psychiatrists

Now kind of to the point I just made, I’ve noticed that withdrawal communities are subtly getting co-opted by quasi-critical psychiatrists; that is these psychiatrists are increasingly seen as “experts” on protracted withdrawal sensations and their “insight” is now a knowledge base on these sites. This was predictable since some of these forums, while many people within them hate psychiatry, they seem set up as if to say: look at us suffering people, where are the psychiatrists to rush in and save us? But psychiatrists are the ones who initiated this problem by prescribing drugs, which overwhelmingly create worse outcomes for people than if they hadn’t taken any drugs at all. Now apparently these same psychiatrists are going to fix a problem that they’ve created and continue to create by still prescribing. Okay. 

So when psychiatrists bring their traditional biomedical model they were trained with to protracted withdrawal, well, if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. To them, everything is a disease or disorder or something wrong with your brain. But, quite frankly, this is probably much ado about nothing because withdrawal communities use the same biomedical models for withdrawal as these particular psychiatrists. So whether it’s community-survivor knowledge or quasi-critical psychiatric knowledge, what’s the difference here?

Now I’m not against other types of professional knowledge but when these psychiatrists set up “withdrawal shops” and say pay me x amount of money and I’ll tell you all about this horrible syndrome you have, well, that sounds like psychiatry as usual to me.

5. Based on Incomplete Information

Finally some of the most common concerns of withdrawal forums—what even the moderators talk about—is that the forums are a collection of the worst horror stories out there which might make us assume that this is the norm and going to happen to us. Some people, as I did, might even read about a “symptom” and then start to get it themselves. Or read negative stories and get thrown into a “wave” because our stress has reached a breaking point. So there is a social contagion element here as well. 

Another critique is the lack of success stories compared to the number of threads started by people. This is accounted for by the fact that most people leave the forums, maybe because they’re so awful or maybe because sensations are resolving, and they never return because they understandably want to leave this withdrawal world behind.  

But I think the most significant missing information is that people are actively resolving withdrawal sensations in mindbody ways or other neuroplastic ways beyond the biomedical scope of the forums. I think it’s common in withdrawal communities to emphasize very long recoveries because this is what they see. But most people in these forums haven’t even heard of stress-related syndromes— I used The Mindbody Syndrome but there are other framings of this as well—yet people can be discouraged from exploring alternative options. 

So the idea it takes x amount of time to heal, that you can have a withdrawal injury resurface years later after you heal, that waves and windows are always a healing pattern, that ongoing hypersensitivity is always a drug injury, that powerful emotions are always withdrawal, that exercise intolerance is always withdrawal, and so on, all of this is all based on incomplete information. It’s biased information. If you are however interested in checking ways that, for some people, help complete their understanding of protracted withdrawal sensations, then I do have a resources page on my Substack here, so feel free to look at that out if you wish.

Conclusion

So those are five reasons that I left withdrawal forums behind. That’s what worked best for me. I will say though that some people use these forums successfully and if they work for you, then by all means, ignore me—this is just only my experience. I’m just a guy on the internet. The point is that the forums aren’t working for everyone and although I thought they initially helped me I think they ultimately kept me in a perceived state of “withdrawal” for years. So, again, I have some resources for people if you want to check otherwise I wish you all the best no matter what path you choose for yourself.