Sharing My Taper Schedule

To mark the recent two year anniversary of completing my taper off of the SSRI Celexa, I decided to share my taper schedule. I sat with the idea of whether or not to publish this publicly this for quite some time before ultimately deciding that it might be helpful for someone. It’s very important for you who are reading this to understand that I share it purely as my own lived experience, and I do not intend it as a roadmap for anyone else. I believe that the more we inform ourselves in both general terms and from the lived experiences of others, the better positioned we are to find our own unique way forward. What worked for me may not work for you. What works for you may not work for anyone else in the same way. I believe we are most empowered when we do our own research, think critically, consult with our support system, and trust our own inner wisdom about what is right for us.

When I was actually tapering, I didn’t track all of my dates and dose reductions in a spreadsheet or chart. Instead I marked everything in a calendar app on my phone. It was only recently that I decided I wanted to go back and consolidate everything plus add info about each amount/percentage reduced, into what you will see below. If you are just embarking on your journey (or even if you’re mid-journey), it might be helpful to consider using a spreadsheet or chart if you think you might ever want to go back and revisit when you did what. It was certainly informative for me to see it all in one place even two years later!

I began my taper in May of 2015, but I didn’t start tracking my dose reductions at all until two years in. What you will see starts when I found the online layperson withdrawal community and began to learn about safer tapering practices. Prior to what is below, I managed to reduce down from 40mg… messily and too fast, with massive 50% cuts and subsequent updosing before attempting again, because I hadn’t a clue what I was doing at the time. These big reductions coupled with up-and-down dosing really did a number on my nervous system and for the rest of my taper and beyond was healing from that damage. It was in March of 2017 that I attempted to go from 10mg to 5mg (yet again), and in desperate agony found a Facebook support group where I was first  informed about the existence of liquid drug preparations and truly slow tapering strategies. I went back up from 5mg to 8mg in March of 2017. I would have reduced by about 10% from 8mg to 7.2mg, and again by about 10% from 7.2mg to 6.3mg, which is where the spreadsheet picks up in July of 2017.

You will also see that the majority of my documented taper was not in fact hyperbolic, even though hyperbolic tapering is the gold standard among the layperson withdrawal community at the time of this writing (and it is backed up by peer-reviewed published research). For most of what is documented, I was reducing my dose by a tiny fixed amount–0.04mg–each time. The reason for this is because my itty bitty 1ml oral syringes didn’t have units of measurement smaller than 0.02ml, equivalent to 0.04mg of my drug. When I began this weekly(ish) micro-taper, 0.04mg was about 1% of my current dose. As my dose got lower I couldn’t really reduce by a smaller amount unless I were to dilute my drug liquid or start working with a compounding pharmacy. I didn’t want to have to do either of these things unless it was necessary, so I decided to stick with the fixed 0.04mg each time and only adapt if it became clear that I needed to–which it never did. My body tolerated this 0.04mg reduction strategy very much better than anything else that I tried and I was successfully able to reach 0mg this way!

Hopefully it will be clear from looking at the chart that while I had a general schedule in mind, I did my best to listen to my body and hold my taper when I felt that I needed to. THIS is the takeaway, friends: let YOUR body be your guide! It will tell you what you need to know to navigate your way through, if you are listening.

Disclaimer: Everything shared here is for informational purposes only and is not medical or personal advice.