Symptoms: Akathisia, Suicidal ideation
My then 23-year-old stepson, Jonathan, wanted to get off Prozac. He felt blunted and slept all day and stayed up all night since he first started to take it in 2018. Mind you, Jonathan was also diagnosed with autism.
In August of 2025, without telling my husband or me, he stopped taking his 20mg of Prozac. He was on 40mg originally and his doctor was on board with him getting off. He was fine for about five weeks.
Then on November 25, 2025, he attempted to take his life. He'd taken about 20 pills of his Prozac. I woke up for some reason in the middle of the night and discovered his note. It had luckily been a few minutes since he'd taken the pills. We made him vomit them out and rushed him to the ER.
He ended up in an inpatient psychiatric care facility for about two months. Without informing his doctor or us, the doctors at the facility put him on sertraline (Zoloft). He was in the psychiatric facility for two months, with ups and downs.
He was suicidal the whole time. The team of doctors kept telling us he needs more than medication, yet they were medication managers. They told us antidepressants may stabilize him for a short while, but other things like therapy will be needed to keep him stable. The analogy of holding your head above water while treading water was given to us. This, apparently, was the best antidepressants could do for those like Jonathan.
We constantly questioned the use of sertraline for Jonathan and did our own research which suggested that it may have adverse effects for those under the age of 24. The doctors kept saying, "You will see a parabolic upward curve," and so on. We never really saw this uptick at all.
Even the slightest dose change was creating major upheaval in his personality, putting him right back into that restlessness, a relentless desire to kill himself. He kept saying sorry, but I must die. I can't live anymore. He was threatening to walk in front of an eighteen-wheeler. At this point I was already questioning if these doctors should be messing with a person's serotonin like this, if it is creating such instability within that individual.
There were moments when I felt like I was talking to the drug, not my son. He was totally irrational. There was no way anyone could talk to him. It was like he was in a trance. Yet, I knew this was not Jonathan.
We decided to bring him home. We thought it would be in Jonathan's best interest for us to manage this crisis on our own. However, they did mention Esketamine (Spravato) for treatment-resistant depression. I had already been researching Ketamine for depression, PTSD, and OCD. The track record for Ketamine looked far more promising than any I found on the antidepressants, though the only FDA approved version was Spravato.
Meanwhile, we put away all our sharp objects, locked up medications and power tools and all forms of blades. We switched to eating out of paper plates, drinking from plastic cups. Many nights my husband and I took turns sleeping on the couch blocking the front door. Locked all the doors. I slept very little during this time. To this day, I don't know how we got through these months. It felt like a lifetime.
We had every intention of pursuing Spravato. It was difficult to get providers to really help us much, but we found one. Let me tell you, it was a gamechanger for Jonathan. Within a week his suicidal ideations vanished. He has been better than he's ever been. He gets 86mg nasal spray twice a week. He's now in his sixth week as of this writing. His doctor and we have every intention of tapering him from the sertraline.
Jonathan now is up during the day and asleep during the night. He's not overwhelmed by the lethargy he had during the period he was on SSRIs. He's more social and more talkative. Even the autism symptoms have become less prominent in just six weeks. So, tell me which is the superior drug? Psychedelics seem like the promising future for mental health.