From Paxil to Forced Electroshock: The Prescribing Cascade Nobody Warned Me About

As a teenager in the 1990s, I was very shy and my mood was often low. I struggled emotionally in high school but became academically ambitious in my first year of college — still mostly isolated, with hardly any friends. My parents kept sending me to a psychiatrist. Although I initially refused her suggestion to start Paxil after she diagnosed me with depression, near the end of freshman year in 2002, I decided to try it. I gained a lot of weight, became sleepy and lethargic, and my personality was subtly changed. By the end of college in 2005, I decided the Paxil hadn’t really helped and I didn’t like not feeling like myself. My primary care physician said I could taper off by halving the dose a few times over a few weeks. I did, and things seemed fine at first.

A few months after graduation, under stress from employment and family pressures, I reached a breaking point. Verbal abuse from an aunt I was living with triggered feelings of total failure and suicidal thoughts. I attempted suicide by overdose, went into cardiac arrest and nearly died, and was hospitalized at San Francisco General Hospital. After recovering, I was placed on Celexa and returned to my parents in Connecticut — but I still felt agitated and suicidal. I jumped off an overpass, breaking my feet, lower legs, and fracturing my spine and skull.

I was hospitalized at Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living, put on lithium and Seroquel (mainly for insomnia I hadn’t had before — which, in hindsight, was likely triggered by Celexa). I still wanted to die and was declared to have “treatment-resistant depression.” Not once was it suggested that I might be suffering from Paxil withdrawal syndrome, or that SSRIs could be causing suicidal ideation in someone my age. The doctors became threatening, saying ECT was my last resort, and obtained a probate court order to force it on me. They did it 16 times.

It was the most traumatic experience of my life. It cognitively impaired me significantly — I had been an English major and voracious reader, but afterward it was difficult to get through a single page of text. Following conversations and watching TV became difficult. I also had memory loss. I resisted at points, screaming, even swallowing a napkin in front of nurses to try to stop the procedure — because eating before anesthesia is forbidden. They did it anyway. I aspirated and had to be taken to the emergency room to have my breathing corrected. At one point I said it felt like being raped. Each time, they treated me like a crazy person who shouldn’t be taken seriously. Eventually I started lying — pretending the ECT had helped, that I no longer wanted to die — and only then did they agree to stop.

I continued taking lithium, Seroquel, and Celexa because I genuinely believed I was severely mentally ill. I got off lithium after a few years, but every time I tried to stop Seroquel or my antidepressant, I developed overwhelming insomnia, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. I interpreted this as proof I had severe depression that required medication. Briefly I also tried Abilify and developed restless akathisia for 1-2 weeks but was able to recognize it and stopped it quickly, and it went away. For a few years, I took the benzodiazepine Klonopin, developed tolerance and dependence-related panic attacks I never had before, and had to be weaned off of it in a hospital. I lived on disability benefits, food stamps, subsidized housing, and other welfare programs — despite having been a high-achieving college student with excellent grades and several academic awards.

In 2018, a severe flu and neurological disorder forced me to stop Seroquel because I had become oversensitive to it, and it made me so drowsy I couldn’t get out of bed until the late afternoon. The withdrawal was brutal — I couldn’t sleep for about three days, and my sleep remained very poor. In 2021, still on Lexapro, I learned about antidepressant dependence and withdrawal syndromes. It became clear that back in 2005, what I had suffered was Paxil withdrawal — and that it’s unlikely I would have become suicidal from ordinary life stressors alone, had my nervous system not been in that state. I learned about hyperbolic tapering and began a taper that took about three years, finishing near the end of 2024. It was still difficult — triggering anxiety and insomnia — but far more manageable than my previous attempts.

Coming off the medication felt like emerging from a fog and a time machine. I had lost myself at around age 19 when I first took Paxil. As my baseline emotions and former personality slowly returned, I found myself in my 40s, mentally in many ways still catching up from where I had been as a teenager, but physically feeling decades older from everything my body had been through. Over months, my emotions became more grounded. An underlying nervous agitation that had seemed chronic slowly dissipated, probably a residual symptom from medication that I didn’t even recognize before.

I have had to come to terms with the profound injustice of what the mental healthcare system did to me — turning a formerly healthy, high-functioning teenager into a physically and cognitively disabled adult who never got to develop socially and emotionally the way most people do. I feel half-alive. I was betrayed and abused by psychiatry, and there is little legal or financial recourse available: statutes of limitations, the difficulty of proving adverse effects in court, and attorneys who generally won’t take mental health cases. I remain dependent on government welfare to survive.

I now know that the study used to get Paxil approved for adolescent depression was fraudulent. Psychiatry is deeply corrupted by pharmaceutical companies that minimize adverse effects and attribute them to patients’ alleged mental illnesses. When I think back to how much healthier I was as a teenager — and how the psychiatrist rolled her eyes when I said I was angry at the world’s injustices — I feel a bitter recognition: my teenage self was right, the world is even more unjust than I understood then, and psychiatry is one of the worst parts of it.