Adele Framer - Surviving Antidepressants

Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Mad in America

Mental Health, Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 212 Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2020

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

dele Framer, also known by her online handle Altostrata, is the founder of SurvivingAntidepressants.org, a critical and comprehensive peer-support website that features several thousand case histories of psychiatric drug withdrawal. The site is a hub of information on the topic, highlighting methods of safe drug tapering and recovery and underscoring the humanity of those in the grips of withdrawal.

Framer arrived at her expertise through personal experience. In 2004, after three years on 10 mg of paroxetine, she went off under medical supervision and suffered symptoms of withdrawal that her doctor discounted as relapse. She then went on to visit more than 50 psychiatrists, trying and failing to find someone knowledgeable in antidepressant withdrawal. Her own research into the topic, including close readings of journals and FDA recommendations, led her to the creation of SurvivingAntidepressants.org in 2011.

Registered members now stand at roughly 14,000, with around 56,000 visitors per month. The site features 6,000 case histories and contains more than 60 topics covering tips on the gradual tapering off of specific drugs. All of the site's information is pulled from scientific papers, governmental advisories, and package inserts, and much of it has been shared across Facebook and other platforms on the web. The site has received mentions in scientific journals and mainstream outlets such as Psychiatric Times and Psychology Today.

Framer, who grew up in New York, has lived in San Francisco for more than 40 years. She's now retired from a career in software user design.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.
0:14.0	Greetings and welcome to the Mad in America podcast. I'm Amy Biancoly, staff reporter for
0:20.2	madinamerica.com. Today I'm grateful to be speaking
0:24.8	with Adele Framer, also known by her online handle, Alto Strata. She founded Survivingantidepressants.org,
0:32.8	a critical and comprehensive peer support website that features several thousand case histories of psychiatric
0:39.1	drug withdrawal. The site is a hub of information on the topic, highlighting methods of safe
0:45.2	drug tapering and recovery and underscoring the humanity of those in the grips of withdrawal.
0:51.3	So our guest today is a hugely knowledgeable lay expert, having gone through an 11-year
0:58.0	withdrawal herself and researched the topic in depth. She speaks to us from her home in San
1:04.4	Francisco, where she's lived for more than 40 years. So Adele Framer, thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me today.
1:13.3	I so look forward to hearing your story and the story behind the site's creation.
1:18.9	We will get to that in very short order.
1:21.9	But first off, a why.
1:25.0	Why is surviving antidepressants.org so important? Why was it necessary? What role does it play?
1:33.5	What gap does it fill? Hi, Amy. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. When I went off of Paxil in 2004, I was under the care of what I thought was an elite
1:51.6	psychiatry department up at the University of California, San Francisco.
1:56.1	And I went off over a few weeks in October, which is the usual way of going off. And I immediately
2:05.2	got severe withdrawal syndrome, which was misdiagnosed and not properly treated. So after
2:14.5	that, I experienced post-acit withdrawal syndrome, which took 11 years for me to recover.
2:21.7	And at that time, of course, in 2004, I had these symptoms.
2:29.7	My doctors didn't seem to know what they were.
2:32.6	And I did some Googling. I've always been a kind of a ferocious
	...

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