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  1. 1. Why Stop Now?
    1. 1.1 Stop in the Name of…
    2. 1.2 Don’t Stop the Music
  2. 2. I Can Stop if I Want to
  3. 3. Quit it.
  4. 4. Rule of Thumb

1.  Why Stop Now?

Lots of people hit this site wanting to know how to stop taking their crazy meds. That’s understandable. There are many good reasons to stop taking the meds. There are also many bad reasons to stop taking them. I’ll try to help you sort out the good from the bad reasons. But if you do have good reasons, you have to quit taking the medications safely. Sudden or rapid discontinuation can lead to many problems. This guide is help you work with your doctor to decide if it’s a good idea or not to stop taking a drug, and, if so, work out a good discontinuation schedule for the med.

1.1  Stop in the Name of…

Some good reasons to quit taking psychiatric / neurological medications

  • Really nasty side effects (adverse reactions) such as
    • Severe allergic reactions.
    • Especially fast-spreading, itchy rashes accompanied with a fever.
    • Fainting (syncope) or otherwise losing consciousness.
    • Blood dyscrasias, which is fancy doctor talk for way too many or too few white or red blood cells, or some other weird problem with your blood. Lots of meds, crazy and otherwise, call for regular blood tests to look for this sort of thing.
    • Inexplicable bruises all over the place, especially lots of little bruises in clusters that look sort of like a big rash.
    • The whites of your eyes turning yellow and/or your skin looking waxy and yellowish. Along with all the bruising this is a symptom of jaundice.
    • Your hair falling out in clumps, and not just thinning.
    • Seizures if you’re not epileptic or your epilepsy was under control. Otherwise you and your doctor can figure out if the med in question had anything to do with it.
    • Irregular heartbeats and similar problems (cardiac dysrhythmia/arrhythmia).
  • Of course you could have actually gotten better.

1.2  Don’t Stop the Music

Bad reasons to stop taking medications:

  • Side effects that are more annoying than dangerous. Especially those that usually go away. Eventually.
  • You’ve felt better for all of three days.
  • You feel really good.
    • You feel really, really good.
    • You’ve never felt so good in your entire life and are ready to finally take that hiking trip across Europe you’ve been wanting to do…
    • This is probably a manic reaction and should be listed as a reason to call your doctor immediately because you need to stop taking this med after all.
  • You, your friends, your family, and society in general consider taking medication for a mental illness and/or neurological condition is a sign of weakness.
  • Tom Cruise says you shouldn’t be taking meds because the ghosts of tortured space aliens channeled by L. Ron Hubbard told him so.

2.  I Can Stop if I Want to

You must work with your doctor, both to figure out if you should be discontinuing the drug and how to quit. We try to provide information on how to discontinue a med, based on information like the half-life of a drug. But it’s your doctor who has experience with taking people off of meds, and you and the people around you have to monitor for the return of any symptoms.
Even if you’re replacing one med with another you have to be on the lookout for symptoms coming back. You’ll want to keep some kind of diary, a blog, something to keep track of how you feel every day. At some point if it starts to suck, then you know you’ve lowered your dosage too far. But, hey, maybe you can get along at a lower dosage. It’s not quitting, but it’s probably better than taking more than you needed.

The most important thing to remember is this - your symptoms have gone away BECAUSE THE MEDS ARE WORKING! It’s not necessarily because you’ve been cured. There is no cure for a lot of these disorders.

3.  Quit it.

While each med will have a unique, or nearly unique discontinuation schedule, classes of medications have similar effects to be aware of when you stop taking them. Especially if you’re discontinuing too rapidly2.

  • Anticonvulsants/antiepileptic drugs (AEDs). With gradual discontinuation the worst most people experience is a headache, slight dizziness, confusion and sensitivity to sound and/or light. In other words, the symptoms of what AEDs treat: migraines and simple partial seizures. Discontinue too quickly, or stop a high dosage suddenly, and you risk seizures, even if you’re not epileptic.
  • SSRIs and SNRIs are notorious for their discontinuation syndromes.
  • Abrupt discontinuation of high doses of benzodiazepines can lead to seizures in addition to dysphoria, insomnia, muscle cramps, vomiting and sweating.
  • The discontinuation of antipsychotics (APs), especially atypical antipsychotics (AAPs), has been likened to taking small amounts of psychedelic drugs. Whether that is a good or bad thing is up to individual experience. Others get rebound symptoms for a day or two, sometimes longer and that’s about it.
    • Abrupt discontinuation of Thorazine (chlorpromazine HCl) and other phenothiazines can lead to one nasty rebound symptom of something you may not have had: severe nausea and vomiting, as they are really good at treating that sort of thing.

4.  Rule of Thumb

Unless there is at least one of:

  • A specific protocol on how to discontinue a drug in the PI sheet.
  • The drug has a generally accepted discontinuation plan, such as Lamictal’s “decrease the dosage at the same rate you increased it.”
  • Your doctor told you something other than, “just stop taking it” without giving you a prescription/samples of a med that works in a very similar fashion (e.g. swapping one SSRI or SNRI for another).

You may have to come up with your own plan on how to stop taking a med, formally known as a discontinuation schedule. We have a rule of thumb on how to stop taking most psych meds that is the basis for a lot of the discontinuation schedules we’ve written up:
Decrease the dosage by the standard titration amount (whatever the PI sheet tells you to increase the dosage by when you start taking it) by the average time it takes to clear from your system. We have clearance time listed for all of our meds, but in case we don’t, or you’re taking a med that we haven’t written up, multiply the half-life by five and round up to the nearest day.3 You should find that in the pharmacology section of the drug’s full prescribing information - the PI sheet. Unfortunately the half-life isn’t known, or firmly established for all medications. If there is no half-life, look for something called “steady state” and use that as the clearance time. Otherwise ask your doctor again and, if you have no other choice, use one week as the clearance time.
For example: with most SSRIs it works out to reducing your dosage by 10–20mg a day every five to six days.

‹ < Tips on How to Take Psychiatric/Neurological Drugs | Common Crazy Med Crap Index | Mixing Your Med Cocktail with Actual Cocktails ›

1 When it comes to kindling, no one has defined "frequent" or "severe," or what constitutes a long time.

2 If you have to stop taking a med because of a severe allergic reaction or equally important reason you're just shit out of luck about a gradual discontinuation. While allergic reactions almost always happen at the very beginning of treatment, every now and then it happens after somebody's been taking a med for years.

3 The half-life times five is known as "plasma clearance," and is based on Julien's calculations from A Primer of Drug Action. It is the generally accepted estimate of how long it takes a med to be eliminated from the system of someone with a normal metabolism.


Page created by: Jerod Poore. Date created: 26 May 2011 Last edited by:


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