Reacción a "One in six people who stop taking antidepressants experience symptoms after stopping them"

The discontinuation syndrome at the moment of stopping antidepressants has always been a topic of discussion among psychiatrists, from their training to their practice, generating debate between theoretical understanding and day-to-day clinical practice. Positions within the discipline vary, ranging from those who deny its existence to those who take extreme measures to mitigate it due to its very high frequency. More recently, the topic has been addressed by patients themselves, thanks to social media, offering diverse perspectives, which has added value to the discussion and highlighted the need for further study.

In this sense, this study comes at a good time and in good form: it scientifically rigorously covers the topic, aiming to objectify this potential problem by including all clinical trials and studies that have reported this issue. The study compares the frequency in patients who received the active antidepressant with those who received a placebo, a design that aims to clarify the prevalence of this discontinuation syndrome in a straightforward manner, leaving little room for error.

Although it has the main limitation that the definition of discontinuation syndrome has varied among different studies, the study clearly concludes its prevalence in approximately 15% of patients who discontinue an antidepressant. Additionally, it identifies those antidepressants that are more likely to produce it, especially with severe symptoms.

In some way, this study validates what has been done from training to clinical practice in psychiatry and has been a subject of discussion in recent years. However, it still does not address one of the main concerns in this regard, which is to have strong and clinically valuable arguments to discern whether the anxious-depressive symptoms that frequently arise upon discontinuing antidepressants are due to discontinuation syndrome or the reappearance of the underlying disorder's symptoms.

The authors and commentators of this article point precisely in this direction as a future line of research to be followed by studies to try to find an answer that can help psychiatrists and patients make joint decisions about starting and discontinuing the medication with a greater degree of certainty.