Introducing! Deprescribing Digest: A Newsletter on Psych Drug Deprescribing

Hi, I'm Antonia Felicetti Schachter (please know me as Tonia, going forward)—a writer, advocate, and survivor who's spent over three decades navigating the hidden costs of psychiatric drugs. My story isn't one of quick fixes or discovering an improved me; it's a raw reminder that psychiatric healing often starts with questions. Questions about the pills that the pharmaceutical companies, medical establishment, and non-profits told us would save us from our unwanted emotions.

How it Started for Me

It began in the haze of postpartum anxiety after my first son's birth in 1991. Overwhelmed by the constant distress, self-doubt, and weight of new motherhood, I sought help from my OB/GYN—not for a "chemical imbalance," but for practical tools to cope. Instead, a psychiatrist handed me clonazepam for the edges of panic, then antidepressants to dull the weepy days. "These will balance you out," he said. They numbed the storm, but at what price? Postpartum "anxiety" morphed into major depressive disorder.

For 30 years, I danced this dance—escalating doses, cold-turkey crashes that left me bedbound and on disability, tapers too steep that reignited the very symptoms they promised to erase. I lost my edge: my sharp mind and sense of adventure hidden behind the torpor of my medication, a far cry from the "can-do" person I'd always been. Colleagues noticed my "flat affect" at work (I was a working mom by then, with two boys and a life stitched together by sheer will). I never forgot that it all started with postpartum hormones.

Discovering Community

The turning point came when I discovered forums like Adele Framer's Surviving Antidepressants, books by Robert Whitaker that exposed the epidemic of chronicity, and finally, my own voice. In 2019, I broke the silence on Mad in America with "Psychiatric Drugs: Greed, Paternalism, and Dependency," a personal story, and in 2022 on Episode 91. "Antonia Schachter: Postpartum Anxiety and Psychiatric Drugs" of The Tara Bixby's Podcast.

I became driven to show how these "helpers" ambush our emotional autonomy. Launching LifeWithAntidepressants.com became my warning to others and my rebellion against lost autonomy—a space to consider why I experienced fear and a lack of agency over my emotions, from generational Valium echoes (my mom began to slip me pieces of it when I was a teenager) to the paternalism that treats women's hormones like a pharma playground, you can read about it on this blog. That's why I am introducing Deprescribing Digest: A Newsletter on Psych Drug Deprescribing.

Today, I'm tapering mindfully, rebuilding with therapy, community, and unfiltered honesty—I have no moral shame for "failing" at pills that were never designed for forever. If my mess of a journey resonates with you, you're not alone. This newsletter is for us—the ambushed, the awakening, the ones rewriting our stories one hyperbolic taper at a time.

Stay fierce,  

Tonia  

P.S. In Issue #1, I dive into the critics shaking up the system. P.S.S. Please create a login to comment. I do not use your data. Ever.