Are you thinking of getting off an SSRI? I wrote this for you because I struggled to find any good resources online from people who had actually done it. Also, this is not medical advice so please speak with your doctor or psychiatrist.

I was on Prozac for more than a decade, and getting off it was much harder than I thought it would be.

I’m not ungrateful for Prozac; it undoubtedly saved my life, but man, the side effects are something else.

So why did I decide to get off Prozac?

Like many other anti-depressant users, I’ve tried to stop before, but without a plan. It’s no secret that when you stop taking SSRIs abruptly, it’s nightmare juice for the brain. I’ve ended up in some pretty dark places by deciding for some stupid reason that stopping quickly (again) was a good idea.

This time, it was different, and by ‘it’, I mean ‘I’ was different. You see, I’m not just ‘out of the darkness.’ I’m calm. I like myself. I have an identity. Those were the things that I always had this internal back-and-forth about, and for the first time since I was a small child, that conversation wasn’t there anymore.

Importantly, this was after a lot of work. Meditation, yoga, exercise, introspection, counselling, stopping bad habits, finding a spiritual output, studying thought processes…I’m only putting an ellipsis there because this article could be my list and that would be boring.

So, I was ready to stop, but I needed a plan. My thinking was to go really slowly. I’d recently moved from three tablets (60mg) a day to two (40mg), so I needed to get to one(20mg) and then hang out there for a while.

I made a simple calendar out of a series of PostIts and stuck it inside my bathroom cabinet. Here it is (please don’t be intimidated by my fancy design) —

Moving from two tablets to one was pretty effortless. I didn’t get any brain zaps, and my mood was stable. I paid close attention to my moods and thoughts as part of this process. I told my wife about my plan and warned her there may be more mediation and ‘introspection’ (a nice way of saying I’ll be really quiet and borderline rude) than usual. She was encouraging, which helped a lot. I could not have done this without her being awesome.

Speaking of which, I do mindfulness meditation and ‘aware of awareness’ meditation. The latter put me in the mindset I mentioned earlier and changed my life—or got it back.

In week five, I moved from one tablet a day to one tablet every second day.

The start of week six was the killer. I guess that’s due to the lag of getting fluoxetine into and out of your system. I was experiencing brain zaps and anxiety from the reductions from a few weeks earlier.

Not gonna lie — it sucked.

In saying that, it was nowhere near as bad as when I first went on Prozac (originally I was on Lovan) or when I’d tried to get off the meds quickly. But, the brain zaps were prevalent. Dozens each day.

On that, I experience brain zaps as annoying thuds in my head. I know people who are crippled by them and describe them as ‘painful.’ If that was me, I probably wouldn’t have been able to soldier through.

I’m also aware that nobody knows what causes brain zaps, which I find a bit scary. I chose to think of them as a positive — my brain starting up again or something like that. My brain sparking? I dunno, it made me feel better.

As you will see from my clumsy little planner, I stopped using Prozac entirely when I was supposed to move to two pills per week. I felt like my brain zaps were worse on my off days and I just wanted it out of my system. This is just me going against medical advice, and I don’t recommend it. But it worked for me.

I’m now at week 13, and I’m still experiencing some brain zaps, but no ongoing anxiety. My meditation is helping a lot. I see a marked decrease in brain zaps after meditation, and I’ve got a 3-minute routine that I can use if things are getting grim.

As for the results, my thinking is much clearer. I am calm, and I find myself able to focus more. Again, I’m still getting zaps, but they seem to be reducing over time; we’ll see.

Would I do it again? Yes, but only if I was in the right headspace. SSRIs are a clumsy medication that we don’t fully understand, but they helped me and kept me here, and I’m grateful for that, but I’m also happy they’re not part of my life anymore.