Taper Off Antidepressants: How Hypnosis Can Help

When antidepressants work, they often make you feel "normal" and make you want to stop again. Some people actually find that the antidepressants totally flatten their feelings and therefore want to stop again, but how do you safely stop antidepressants without falling back into depression?

In this blog article, we discuss how hypnosis can help you quit antidepressants.

Quitting antidepressants

You can’t stop taking antidepressants all at once; instead, you need to taper off gradually to prevent unpleasant side effects from stopping the medication. Always consult your doctor first. Especially if you’ve been taking antidepressants for a long time, stopping the medication all at once can cause withdrawal symptoms.

The annoying thing is that antidepressants are prescribed for an awful lot of problems, more than just depression, namely at:

1. Fears
2. PTSD
3. Compulsive Disorders
4. Panic Disorders
5. Social anxiety[1].

For two-thirds of people with depression , the first-line antidepressant does not work . So, for 67% of people, the first-line antidepressant does not work, and they need to be prescribed a different type of antidepressant.

So you are then stuck in depression even longer than you want, but now with the added problem that you can't just stop or change the type of antidepressants (source 1).

When switching antidepressants, one-quarter of these attempts are successful (source 1).

In addition to antidepressants not working, a loss of sexual function and weight gain can also be reasons for people to switch to a different type of antidepressant. Ultimately, no longer being able to enjoy sex is also very depressing.

These are all problems you won't get with hypnotherapy.

Hypnosis

You may already be experiencing withdrawal symptoms when you are only on antidepressants for 1.5 months. So only 6 weeks left. Most people take antidepressants for 2 years[2]. So most people will experience withdrawal symptoms. Those "withdrawal" symptoms can happen even if you take fewer antidepressants.

Think about:

1. Feverish Complaints
2. Nausea
3. Dizziness
4. languid
5. Ataxia (not being able to move properly, as if you were drunk)
6. Feeling electric shocks
7. Anxiety
8. Irritability
9. Insomnia
10. Living dreams

Then if you want to switch from one antidepressant to another you also run the risk of serotonin syndrome. This also gives you all kinds of symptoms, but it can even be deadly (source 1)!

Stopping antidepressants usually takes between 4 and 8 weeks. So it can take as long as 2 months. That's almost an entire season.

Most people do not quit antidepressants because they fear those "withdrawal" symptoms and because there is not a good psychological treatment to replace the medication. At least that's what they think (source 2).

At the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands, we know better. That is also why we are happy to add hypnosis as a technique to enrich the GGZ in the Netherlands.

Click here and sign our petition.

Hypnosis alongside antidepressant tapering

Because even tapering off can cause withdrawal symptoms, it is important to have psychological help during tapering, which usually consists of cognitive behavioral therapy (source 2).

This form of therapy combines well with hypnosis[3]. The combination also provides better results than when a person receives cognitive behavioral therapy without hypnosis.

In particular, fears about withdrawal symptoms and the idea of whether they can wean off are then addressed to make withdrawal easier.

With hypnosis, for example, you can use visualizations to calm down when withdrawal makes you restless.

In addition, it can strengthen the ego , helping people gain more confidence in their own abilities and realize that they can cope with life even without medication.

Preventing you from needing antidepressants

Because of all these adverse effects, it is important for healthcare scientists to do everything possible to avoid needing antidepressants. Therefore, before taking such a pill, start with therapy, more exercise and healthier eating.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is recommended (source 2). Doing this while under hypnosis often makes the therapy work faster and more powerfully.

Hypnotherapy has also been compared to cognitive behavioral therapy, and those results are similar in the long term[4]. So it is not that CBT is better than hypnosis.

Another study found that hypnotherapy is even better than cognitive behavioral therapy when you look at how people suffering from mild to moderate depression are doing after six months[5].

So it is actually quite crazy that hypnotherapy is not yet something that general practitioners may also refer to.

Despite the long waiting lists, one would say that adding hypnosis to the techniques that may be used in mental health care is a good idea.

So support our petition, make sure the waiting lists get shorter.

How does hypnotherapy work against everything antidepressants are used for?

Depression, anxiety, PTSD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and panic disorder all stem from the beliefs you hold about the world, how it works, and how you’re supposed to function within it.

When dealing with depression, you may have gradually come to believe that nothing matters, or that you can’t change a certain event anyway.

If you suffer from anxiety, one of the main challenges is the belief that you don’t have what it takes to overcome certain obstacles. Whether it’s a fear of heights or, for example, giving a presentation.

Or even go on dates.

Do you have PTSD? If so, you experienced something that was not at all in line with your beliefs and then it is difficult for you to accommodate that intense event in your schema, beliefs, about how the world works.

Compulsive disorders also have a basis in beliefs, because, for example, you are convinced that you have to perform certain actions to accomplish something.

Hypnotherapy to explore beliefs

With hypnotherapy, you actually examine those beliefs you have about the world and how it works.

One way to figure out limiting beliefs is with the regression technique. With the regression technique, you go back to the first moment a person felt a certain something, such as the anxiety or depressed feeling.

This may be a time in childhood, as that is when most people create beliefs about the world.

Because these beliefs often originate in childhood, they aren’t always logical, but they do exist in our subconscious and influence us. With regression , you can consciously examine these beliefs and “repair” them[6], which helps you cope better with, for example, anxiety, depression, or compulsive behaviors.

PTSD is also well treatable with hypnosis. Even a year later, many PTSD symptoms are then gone[7]. In these cases, it is important to give the traumatic event a place in the "scheme of how the world works," so that people again feel that life and the world "makes sense."

Researchers indicate that hypnotherapy, in which intense emotions are triggered, often yields the best results for treating PTSD (source 7). The reaction might be, for example, that you feel the need to cry or that you become very angry for a moment. Perhaps this is precisely because pent-up feelings are briefly released, so they are no longer “stuck” in the body.

This can be an important part of coping with PTSD triggering trauma.

Self-hypnosis

Self-hypnosis can also play a big role in getting rid of the problems that antidepressants also help people with.

For example, a case study describes how someone with compulsive disorder who did not respond well to standard treatment just by listening to a daily hypnotherapy session (a form of self-hypnosis) reduced his score of how compulsive he was by more than half.

So in addition to therapy from a therapist, self-hypnosis using a radio recording can also do a lot to prevent problems and make it easier to quit antidepressants, for example.

Sign the petition

Because hypnosis can have such a big role in helping people with problems, we think it's important to make hypnotherapy available to everyone.

Please support our petition to get this done in the mental health community.

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