Can a Company Help People Withdraw from SSRIs?
A new digital health clinic aims to slowly taper people off their antidepressants.
For years, I’ve been interested in the reasons that an ever-increasing number of Americans, and people across the globe, are on antidepressants. When I first started researching the topic, I frequently came across the work of Mark Horowitz, an Australian doctor who had a horrible experience getting off SSRIs and who has done a lot of scientific research on antidepressant withdrawal.
Recently, Horowitz co-founded an online clinic called Outro, which will attempt to help people safely get off antidepressants and other psychotropic medications with the guidance of trained doctors.
I spoke with Brandon Goode, the other co-founder of Outro, to talk about this burgeoning field of research and practice.
The following Q+A has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
How did you get to this place of launching Outro?
I used to work in pharma, and I wanted to know how it worked, and from what I learned, I didn’t see it as a perfect way to fix people’s problems. It’s a business. I saw how much people’s need for drugs—whether obesity drugs or SSRIs or whatever—was related to trauma and life circumstances rather than purely biological.
I started getting interested in those root causes of people’s suffering rather than just giving them medication. At the same time, I started working in the psychedelic space and started realizing that many people were having a hard time getting off SSRIs. A lot of people would use psychedelics because they couldn’t manage to get off their antidepressants. And it dawned on me one day that antidepressants are not these benign multivitamins that we’ve been led to believe they are.
The more I Googled around, I started coming across Mark Horowitz’s work. He was one of the only people looking at evidence-based ways to get off antidepressants, exploring withdrawal symptoms, the benefits of tapering, all that.
What exactly is Outro?
It’s like an inverse Hims. The backbone of the practice is hyperbolic tapering, which is the method Mark brought to light through his research. Before that research and the guidelines he helped develop, people were left to fend for themselves on internet forums and peer support groups online. So we wanted to be the first online clinic to help people safely get off these drugs—first antidepressants and then other medication classes in the future like benzodiazepines.
When you meet people who are trying to stop taking antidepressants, are there any commonalities?
The first is the reasons they were put on them: there was a situational life event, where one could argue that feeling depressed or anxious was a natural response—like how putting your hand on a stove, pain would be a natural response to that; a good, adaptive response. So, there are these acute events like someone losing a loved one, or going through a hard breakup, or transitioning to a different phase of life—puberty, moving away from home, starting a new job. That’s often when people are put on these drugs.