Huge numbers of Americans take psychiatric medications to treat mental health conditions. I’m one of them, and maybe you are, too. One-quarter of all adults experience a diagnosable mental health condition in any given year, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine. According to the CDC, in 2020, 16.5 percent of American adults took prescription medication for their mental health within the previous year. It would behoove us to know as much as we can about these chemicals so many of us are putting into our bodies. In this article, I’ll focus on the question, what happens when you stop taking psych meds?
What happens when you stop taking psych meds? Laura Delano’s story
Laura Delano, who is related in some way to FDR, has written the memoir I’ve been hoping she would write. She came across my radar when I read a profile of her in The New Yorker in 2019. The original article is titled “Bitter Pill.” It’s online as The Challenge of Going Off Psychiatric Drugs.
The article (as well as her 2025 memoir) describes Delano’s mental health struggles throughout her teens and 20s. Tragically, she got caught up in America’s mental-health-industrial complex (my term, not The New Yorker’s). She became a full-time patient, taking large dosages of numerous psych meds and moving in and out of mental health hospitals and treatment programs.
At the same time, she was a gifted and privileged young person who, despite her immense struggles, graduated from Harvard. She had a personal awakening when she stumbled upon a book about psych meds and started to educate herself about her situation within the context of human biology, chemicals that affect the brain, and the American mental-health-industrial complex.
With support from her family and friends, including involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous, she was able to get off and stay off all her meds, without spiraling back into severe depression, anxiety, or suicidality. Then, she founded a nonprofit called the Inner Compass Initiative. The nonprofit aims to support people who have questions about psych meds. It helps ordinary people understand the answer to the question, what happens when you stop taking psych meds?
What happens when you stop taking psych meds? Why Laura Delano’s memoir is so great
As I said, I was thrilled to hear that Laura Delano had published a memoir. It lived up to my expectations, going much deeper into her story than the New Yorker article did. I appreciated that she wrote about not only her own experiences, but also the science behind taking psych meds; what happens when you stop taking psych meds; and how money influences everything as it is exchanged between doctors, clinics, patients, and huge pharmaceutical corporations.
I sped through my reading of this book like a manic tornado!
(Not really. I just thought that would be a fun sentence to write. In reality, I read the book at a normal, quick, excited, but emphasis on very normal and definitely not batshit crazy pace.)
Another thing that’s fabulous about this book: Delano does not, not, not say that everyone should get off their meds. Her perspective is extremely nuanced, which is why it takes an entire book to explain. What she says is, she got caught up in America’s mental-health-industrial complex (my term, not hers) and, for many years, didn’t have access to the information she needed to make an informed decision about her own situation.
Her goal in writing her memoir and founding her nonprofit is to give other people the information they need to make an informed decision about their own unique situations. And she fully acknowledges that she was immensely privileged in having the financial resources, emotional support systems, cognitive abilities, educational background, plain old luck, and so on to make the leap from dependency on the system to dependency on herself.
What happens when you stop taking psych meds? Insights from Laura Delano
Speaking of cognitive abilities, Delano explains that her psych meds diminished her capacity to think. This includes thinking in general, for example at school or a job, as well as thinking about her situation of being trapped in the mental-health-industrial complex. She writes:
“Years of cognitive impairment had made it nearly impossible for me to fully absorb words, to piece together meaning, often to remember what I’d read at all. I’d get through a paragraph, realize that I’d taken nothing in, and start over. And then I’d give up and turn the TV on instead. I blamed these issues on the progression of my bipolar disorder.”
Later, she discovers that her increasing cognitive impairment was not innate to herself, but caused by her psych meds.
She also discovers that when people try to get off their psych meds, they often experience withdrawal symptoms—such as anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, brain fog, and physical symptoms like restlessness—but assume that these symptoms are innate to themselves and their mental disorder. They, and often also their doctors and therapists, take this as evidence that they need to stay on their meds.
But what happens when you stop taking psych meds—what really happens biochemically? Delano explains, “There is a hyperbolic relationship between the dose of a psychiatric drug and the effect it has on neurotransmitter receptors. To put this in more straightforward terms: the amount of drug that one takes does not correlate directly with the amount of neurotransmitter receptors that drug will interfere with; small doses can have very large effects on one’s body, and vice versa.”
That’s why tapering by percentage is so important. Do not try to go from 1 pill to 3/4 pill to 1/2 pill to 1/4 pill to nothing. Your body is likely to freak out with a linear schedule like that. You might be able to handle moving from 1 pill to 3/4 pill; that’s a 25 percent reduction. Moving from 3/4 pill to 1/2 pill might go okay or it might not; that’s a 33 percent reduction. Moving from 1/2 pill to 1/4 pill is a 50 percent reduction; that’s generally way too much for most people.
And so, when Delano talks about a hyperbolic relationship, she means that you need to decrease the dosage by percentage, based on your current dosage. At the beginning of a taper, you will be able to reduce by relatively large amounts. By the end of a taper, you will be measuring tiny slivers or beads.
She recommends an extremely slow tapering schedule to anyone trying to lower their dosage or get off their meds entirely. She says, to be safe, if you are aiming for no or little noticeable reactions, stick to 5 to 10 percent reductions per month. And, she says, listen to your body:
“I share how important it is to pay attention to how they feel during their taper. If while reducing their dose they notice new or intensified problems—especially ones that feel unmanageable—I suggest this may well be a physiological sign that they’re going too fast.”
She points out that the longer you are on psych meds, the longer it will likely take to taper down without experiencing disruptive withdrawal symptoms. Also important to remember: every human body is different. Some human bodies might be able to go cold turkey without any issues whatsoever. Other human bodies might need years to adjust. You won’t know which you are unless you try it. But trying it is a very bad idea, because experiencing and recovering from a severe withdrawal reaction is a nightmare, and it might set your mental health back for months or even years.
Keep in mind that all human bodies will need support systems in place—family, friends, financial resources, etc.—in order to have success in tapering off medication.
(As a side note: learning to meditate has helped me personally in being able to reduce my dosage and the number of psych meds I take without experiencing withdrawal or relapse.)
What happens when you stop taking psych meds? Conculsion
Laura Delano’s brilliant 2025 memoir is called Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance. The subtitle is great because it can be taken two ways. Her doctors told her at one point that she had treatment-resistant bipolar; she wasn’t getting better, despite taking her meds. Later, she resists her treatment and is able to heal herself.
Here’s an especially powerful sentence from her book:
“The more I read, the more I could see that the personal mess I’d gotten myself into with psychiatric drug dependence and withdrawal was actually a complex, politicized, society-wide mess in which millions of people had gotten lost.”
Again, Delano is not saying ignore your doctor or therapist. She is not saying get off your meds. She is saying, it’s important to get accurate information about psychiatric meds, if you are taking them. They might be helping you, or they might be preventing you from living up to your potential. She is saying, use the information you find to make your own informed decisions about whether to stay on your meds or not.
I have only been able to scratch the surface of this information here in this blog post. If you or someone you love is struggling with mental health issues, I highly recommend you read Unshrunk to get a more complete picture of what happens when you stop taking psych meds, and related topics.
Are you a happy turkey? An anxious turkey?
Whatever you do, don’t be a cold turkey!
Featured in this post: Unshrunk by Laura Delano Buy it now
