Irene van de Giessen took a cocktail of medicines for 30 years. When she quit cold turkey without professional help, she started feeling again. “I was also quite afraid that I was psychotic at the time.” That is precisely why, according to her, more guidance is needed when weaning off medication.
She had a traumatic childhood, heard voices, saw things that others did not see, and because of this started the medication early in her life. Almost all types of antipsychotics are reviewed in the following thirty years. Admissions to psychiatry follow one another, but with the help of all kinds of therapies and the help of her foster father, Irene picks up again.
To stop or not?
When she asked her psychiatrist if it wasn’t even time to taper off her medication, because it had been going well for a long time, she got no response. “No no, that is not the intention,” Irene said to her, “because then you could get psychosis again.” For a long time she doubts whether stopping is a good idea. The possibility of a relapse frightens her, but she still gives in. “I started to feel that the medication was no longer helping me, and that it was even starting to work against me.” After all these years, Irene had suffered from side effects such as weight gain, an “indescribable stiffness” and a significant decline in her vision.
Despite the lack of support from her doctor, Irene stops taking her medication. All at once, cold turkey – something she wouldn’t recommend to anyone. The withdrawal of antipsychotics is sometimes accompanied by severe withdrawal symptoms, such as anxiety, insomnia, nausea and a feeling of restlessness. In general, the slower you taper off, the fewer complaints you experience. But Irene had never heard of tapering schedules at the time and the manufacturer of the antipsychotics couldn’t tell her how to stop them either.
Emotions
“I expected dramas, but I didn’t notice anything.” It was only in the months that she started to notice a difference. “I felt like a kind of separation between my head and my body was being lifted. I felt for the first time that I was shy, that I was nervous about a speech I had to give. And I got all those feelings back, so I fell in love too. Then I thought, wow, is this me? I was also quite afraid that I was psychotic at the time.”
At first, Irene doesn’t know what to do with all these emotions. No one had prepared her for this. “People really had to say to me: hey Irene, just act normal, you’re just in love, you’re just shy or you’re sad. I really needed people to recognize that I had feelings, and that sometimes it’s complicated to deal with them.” That is precisely why you need therapy when stopping medication, Irene believes, something she herself missed terribly at the time. The idea that people around the world have been stopping medication for decades — with or without the support of a psychiatrist — dragged her through.
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