About Reverse Psychiatry

Reverse Psychiatry is a psychiatric medication tapering calculator, created by iSimon.

Antidepressant withdrawal

When attempting to discontinue using antidepressants withdrawal symptoms can occur in some people. In some cases these symptoms can be very extreme, and a certain portion of patients can have what amounts to an injury in that they experience symptoms for a long time, even after reinstating the drug. This is known as withdrawal syndrome.

Read more on thedrugclassroom.com.

The complexities of tapering

Tapering – the practice of withdrawing from dependence-forming medication – is not easy, also from a practical perspective.

Practically, based on our own experiences, one has to prepare for the possibility of holding, reinstating, or adjusting the amounts, which means there must be extra individual doses available at any given dosage in the schedule.

It can take up to two weeks to complete the round trip of obtaining the prescription from a doctor and forwarding it to a compounding pharmacy, who must then prepare it, and get back to you, upon which you will need to fetch it.

Most of these extra pills will inevitably be discarded, depending on whether a taper was held or re-reversed aka reinstated.

All of this can amount to needing to replan schedules at a moment’s notice.

The calculator

The simple calculator on the home page of this website outputs a schedule of doses on demand.

Enter the dose you are currently on as the start dose, and the dose you intend to stop at as the end dose.

The calculator will output a list of numbers. Each number represents a dose which should be held for a period of 3 to 4 weeks. As mentioned above, you might consider obtaining extra doses – say 2 week’s worth – in case you need to reinstate a previous dose.

In other words you would order 21 (or 28) capsules, plus an extra 14 for safety for each dose in the schedule. For example if your start dose is 20mg, then order:

Instructions

Enter your start dosage and desired end dosage. The calculator will produce a schedule of decreasing dosages for your taper at a 10% decrease per step, calculated on the last dosage.

Each increment – 1, 2, 3 etc. – is a dose level, which should be held-at for a period, usually of 3 to 4 weeks.

For a rate of taper less than 10%, change Taper Percent at the bottom.
Set the Decimal Precision to your needs.

Copy and paste the result into a spreadsheet or a calendar.
Use Style the Result to include the line numbers in your copy / paste.

Caution & Disclaimer