When “Six Months” Became Three Decades: Postpartum Anxiety (Depression), Antidepressants, and the Long Road Home

If you’re reading this because you’re scared, exhausted, or feel trapped on pills you were told would only be temporary, I want you to know: I’ve been exactly where you are.

In 1991, after my first baby was born, I sat in a psychiatrist’s office barely able to breathe. The panic was physiological—heart pounding, adrenaline flooding, amygdala on fire. It felt like I was in constant danger. My obstetrician explained it perfectly: the sudden plunge in progesterone and other hormones after delivery can do that to a new mother. “Six months on something,” he said, “and you’ll be yourself again.”

The acute terror calmed down with a short course of clonazepam, but one hard day at work—when I cried in the bathroom—led the psychiatrist to suggest an antidepressant “for the broader symptoms.” But I was desperate, and I trusted him. Doctors are supposed to be experts in their fields and to first do no harm.

That “six months” turned into three decades and counting.

I felt better and was enjoying life with our new son for about two years. I tried to stop when my husband and I wanted a second child. I was never told how to stop, so I just abruptly stopped taking them, unwittingly. On a long-awaited beach vacation with our two-year-old, I turned into someone I didn’t recognize—irritable, hostile, finding fault in everything, and angry. The darkness felt chemical, not “me.” My doctor said, “Your depression has returned,” and put me on something else I could “safely” take through pregnancy. Deep down, I knew it was withdrawal, but I had no proof and no alternative. I was told the medication was safe for the developing fetus.

Six months turned into almost six years before we could carry a second child to full term. During the intervening eight years, we had five pregnancies and two live births.

My first child is now over 30. For three decades and counting, I have been unable to entirely stop, though I've tried. I’ve endured side effects that are humiliating and possibly permanent—a movement disorder, sexual dysfunction, emotional numbing, cognitive fog—and every attempt to taper the standard way has been worse hell than the next. Withdrawal symptoms were always labeled “relapse,” and the dose went back up, or more drugs were added. Once, I checked myself into the psychiatric unit because the experience was hell. This was not a relapse.

Only now, finally, do I have a psychiatrist willing to help me do a proper, slow, hyperbolic taper. I've stopped two successfully to date, and I'm working on my third. Doctors like this are rare.

What I Wish I Had Known Then

• Most postpartum depression or anxiety (mood crises) are hormonal and self-limiting—usually gone in 3–6 months. If you need support, look for alternatives to medication. In 1991, there was very little available about alternatives to medication, such as mindfulness meditation or nutrition. Ask for support from family or friends.

• Psychiatry’s own leaders have debunked the “chemical imbalance” theory, yet it’s still the first thing most patients hear. Be prepared for the fact that doctors are not taught safe deprescribing.

• The official tapering schedules suggested by prescribers (50% cuts) and dictated by available doses are far too fast for most of us. Avoiding withdrawal often requires reductions of 5–10% or less per month, in a hyperbolic fashion, sometimes over years, using liquids or compounding pharmacies, or cutting and weighing.

• The entire system—drug companies, treatment guidelines, continuing medical education—is built on the assumption that depression is a chronic brain disease that needs lifelong medication. Transient crises create lifelong customers - follow the money.

  
  

Resources That Are Saving Me Now (and Might Save You)

• SurvivingAntidepressants.org – thousands of people just like us, many on meds for 20–30 years, successfully getting off with slow tapering.

• The Inner Compass Initiative / The Withdrawal Project – free withdrawal guides and a directory of knowledgeable prescribers.

• There is a Facebook Group for many of the most prescribed psychotropics that offer peer-led tapering support
  

Books that finally made me feel sane:

• Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker

• The Antidepressant Solution by Joseph Glenmullen MD

• Crossing Zero: The Art and Science of Coming Off — and Staying off — Psychiatric Drugs by Anders Sorensen

• The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines: Antidepressants, Benzodiazepines, Gabapentinoids and Z-drugs (The Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines Series) 1st Edition by Mark Horowitz & David M. Taylor

• Compounding pharmacies and liquid formulations, weighing or cutting pills, or counting beads—these are often the only way to make tiny, survivable dose cuts.

I’m not free yet. When I first found Surviving Antidepressants, almost 10 years ago, I took the user handle, Freeby60. The pace of safe withdrawal can be daunting, and on some days, the reductions still feel impossible, and I don’t know if my nervous system will ever fully recover from almost three decades of these drugs. But for the first time, I have hope, information, and a doctor who listens. Maybe I'll be Freeby70.

If you’re a new mother drowning in anxiety, if you’ve been on these pills for years and every attempt to stop has failed, if you’ve been told “it’s your illness coming back” one too many times—please hear me:

You are not broken.

You were never the problem.

There is a way out, even after decades.

It’s slower and more complex than any of us expected, but it exists.

I’m still walking it. If I can, so can you.

With love and solidarity,

A mother who’s been on this road

(and is finally, carefully, coming home)