Jodie Fisher from Minnesota, my good friend for 10 years, talks about her experiences with getting off psychiatric drugs. She experienced this long before the YouTube video diaries and various blogs dedicated to this issue. She was totally alone during her process, and at first she had no idea what she was dealing with. She realized the strange and frightening sensations were withdrawal symptoms when she took a pill and the withdrawals stopped almost immediately. She got no support from her doctor or therapist; in fact, when she refused to take Zoloft anymore because she was nursing her daughter, her therapist insisted she be hospitalized and called an ambulance. There were other issues going on with her, of course, but the power struggle over the medication was the deciding factor behind her involuntary hospitalization. Today she knows without a doubt that it had nothing to do with psychosis, but she was having a spiritual crisis that she truly needed to deal with on that level. She did not need any medication, nor did she need to be hospitalized. She was not a danger to herself or others, yet that wasn't considered when the ambulance was called. I plan to post more of her story with the mental health system, but for now her withdrawal story is a good start. I also posted another video on Faces of Recovery called Peter Ashendon Speaks Out. He was a keynote speaker at the Network conference, and his story is compelling, inspiring, and well worth your time.
