Can Antidepressants do more harm than good?

In an article on May 3, 2025, in The New York Times onthe deleterious effects of long-term usage of antidepressants, Dr. Awais Aftab, a psychiatrist, stated that he has had patients who find them to be transformative and even lifesaving. However, some of his patients experience manic episodes or suicidal thoughts with specific antidepressants, and patients who no longer need or want to take the drugs have serious withdrawal symptoms that are debilitating.

Dr. Aftab argues that the effectiveness of antidepressants varies from person to person and that medications for depression work well for many people, but a similar proportion experience no real benefit even after trying multiple meds. One best study the doctor cited found that 39 percent of people who stay on their antidepressants experienced worsening depression over a year compared to 56 percent of those who went off an antidepressant.

One of the major issues that is a contributing factor to the challenges of withdrawal is that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or S.S.R.I.s were originally studied for short-term use and were approved based on trials that lasted only a few months. However, people quickly began taking them for extended periods of time. Now patients are likely to stay on them for years, even decades. Of those who try to quit, about 1 in 6 experience withdrawal, with 1 in 35 having severe symptoms. With 43.8 million people on antidepressants, this adds up to negatively affecting many.  

Dr. Aftab decries the fact that nearly four decades after approval of Prozac, there is not one high-quality, randomized controlled trial that can guide clinicians in safely tapering off antidepressants. The official US guidelines are sparse, and there is no allocated funding on this topic. He denounces the fact that patients prescribed antidepressants are not always informed of side effects, like sexual dysfunction.

Organizations, such as the American Psychiatric Association and five others, do not acknowledge that harm from antidepressants is real. Instead, they publicly defend their time-worn position that they are safe and effective. This supports Big Pharma and Big Medicine and their profits, without honoring what people are experiencing with severe withdrawal symptoms, and there is no evidence-based protocol to follow that helps them break free of debilitating drugs.

To add to the problems of withdrawal of drugs in the past, during the “Decade of the Brain,” in the 1990s, public awareness was enhanced to show the benefits to be derived from brain research and to decrease stigma. Neuroscientists at that time developed the Serotonin Hypothesis of Depression that promoted the myth of chemical imbalance of serotonin, a neurotransmitter, as a causative factor.

Hypothesis Debunked

Since then, psychotropic drugs were developed and touted as being promising, which further supported the medicalization of psychiatry, that is until a paper published in Molecular Psychiatry on July 20, 2022, by Joanna Moncrieff et al. In their meta-analysis of research findings that supported the long-held but not yet proven, hypothesis, the authors found that the primary areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of or association between serotonin and depression and do not support the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations. In fact, evidence was found that long-term antidepressant usage reduces serotonin concentration.

Click on the video link above to watch a short discussion about the DSM.

The news of the debunked hypothesis shocked the world when the house of cards collapsed, especially for those who prescribed SSRI medications and by mental healthcare providers who whispered doubts about the validity of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and silently condemned the chemical lobotomization of patients’ brains by these drugs. These research findings dramatically upset psychiatric survivors whose lives were negatively affected by their treatments, as expressed below by Karin and Marnie.

Psychiatric survivors speak out

Karin, an artist and author, talked about the trauma of being locked up without any say in her care and asked us to imagine what it was like for her to walk in her world since the age of 21 when she was not free to get angry, sad, or frustrated and had no power to speak up. She said her experience with withdrawal feels like a grenade in her mouth—a trauma bomb—and the pain is real and horrific that never ends.

Marnie, a psychologist, questioned how she was supposed to think about her understanding of thoughts and feelings when everything was dictated by those in charge, and she spoke about the brutality of coercion. She felt that no one genuinely wanted to know her, so she internalized the belief that she did not count.  

The nightmare of client withdrawal

There are many examples I could give here in working as a peak performance coach  and RN to help my clients overcome withdrawal from a cacophony of psychotropic drugs. One is a woman, nearing 70, who lives with pounding pain in her head and exhaustion so bad she cannot stand up after years of drug withdrawal, or a woman of 40 who can’t function in her life or job because of severe withdrawal symptoms. She feels she has no future. Or a man nearing his 60s who stumbled into my office because of withdrawal symptoms after blacking out in his garden, left for dead.

A Case Story: Maggie’s Sixth Sense and how I helped her bloom

When Maggie was 32, she first entered my office while clinging to her mother’s arm, so she could walk. Born with a gene deletion, she had a cleft palate, cleft lip, and heart defects for which she had surgeries. Many children with this condition don’t live beyond 10. When she was four, she expressed her “sixth sense” to her dad, who promptly brought her to a psychiatrist because she talked to imaginary entities, which is normal behavior. The doctor prescribed psychotropic drugs that she took since then, which accounted for her physical imbalances. In school, she did not learn basic English grammar or math skills so she could function on her own.

Maggie was ridiculed at school by her classmates and her teacher who derogatorily called her “Spic and Span” because of her Hispanic background. She was abused sexually in a system of special services. When we first met, she could not walk in her kitchen or climb stairs in her apartment. Her mother wanted her daughter to become more independent. We worked on Plans A, B, and C, and she began to take psychic classes, and had already acquired a certificate as a massage therapist. I taught her Mindful Toughness ® skillsets, such as self-hypnosis, Breathing Easy, mental rehearsal, positive self-talk, and feedback loop analysis. We used the Affect Bridge Technique, a hypnotherapeutic intervention, to rid her of past traumas and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), as she visualized herself giving massages.

She began to walk up stairs, one-by-one, and to draw artwork and write. In addition, she secured a job as a massage therapist. Her new psychiatrist, who did not understand why she was prescribed drugs, wanted her to withdraw from them, which she found difficult. During COViD-19, she told me that she was managing, but the traumas from ACEs still left scars. However, with Hypno-Coaching short-term, a new world of possibilities had opened her up to bloom.

Hope for a drug-free treatment for depression

Today, we have to remember the glaring problems of withdrawal that Dr. Aftab informed us about and suicidality of long-term use of antidepressants that triple the risk of suicide and quadruple the risk of attempting suicide. This is true for teens and adults as well. Healthcare professionals must heed the black box warnings by seeing the light and the current evidence-based research on antidepressants.

Based on his extensive research, Dr. Irving Kirsch, a psychologist and hypnotherapist, is one expert who posits that antidepressants are clinically on par with placebos. When clinical trials indicate that only about 15 percent of participants show a substantial antidepressant effect beyond placebo, we must seek predictors of meaningful, treatment-specific responses. This is so as we create new drug-free clinical interventions that promote mental health beyond talk therapy and hypnosis that are already effectively used.

You can learn more about my peak performance coaching practice on my website, https://www.idealperformance.net and about my book: Wrestling Through Adversity: Empowering Children, Teens, & Young Adults To Win In Life, on https://www.drchristinesilverstein.com.

The book is available on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and Audiobook. It contains other case stories of interest from my practice and details on how to use Mindful Toughness® skillsets to improve your performance and meet your goals.

I invite you to follow me on my Facebook page, The Summit Center for Ideal Performance and subscribe to my educational YouTube channel, The Young Navigator, to meet me face-to-face.