Medical Doctor. Ungovernable. Building a platform for Deprescribing: TaperCommunity
Joined February 2025
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BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
A normal day at Taper Community looks like this:
"I was only pushed this drug as I had a normal breakup with a girl and was upset. Should never have been left on it so long. My current doctor has no knowledge of the need to taper and said just stop?"
See the problem here?
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
This is so needed. I wish I had known of this tapering community when I withdrew from psych meds.
A few short months ago, Taper Community didn’t exist.
Now we have hundreds of people helping each other, and growing like crazy.
Every day someone posts a message like the 2nd photo.
People who felt dismissed, isolated, or scared, now learning, sharing, and getting off psych meds together.
If that's you, join us 👇!
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
Noteworthy that the lead author of this trial which induced suicidality in children with escitalopram (Jeffrey Strawn) is also the coauthor of the 2nd major deprescribing textbook. Should someone educating other MDs in deprescribing not have some concern for patient safety??
Our analysis of the FDA approval of escitalopram in children with anxiety is finally published. In the approval trial, children were more likely to become suicidal on escitalopram than to improve, yet the drug was approved. We reveal the pro-drug bias of the regulatory system which is not protecting children's welfare. @markhoro @NaudetFlorian. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.…
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
“Anything MAHA touches today will be studied by scholars in coming decades as the health rhetoric of twenty-first-century American fascism.”
Did Awais suggest that those of us who are concerned with overprescribing and overmedicalizing are fascist adjacent?
Look, I get how a critique of overdiagnosing would be on a spectrum where Szasz represents one pole. However, I personally do not find it hard to admit that mental illness exists, is prevalent, and benefits from treatment while simultaneously decrying the current state of psychiatry.
But “fascist”? If fascism means authoritarian, I don’t see a movement empowering people to see themselves as less mentally ill, more resilient, and able to live with less chemistry as particularly fascist.
What particularly concerns me is how he suggests that MAHA is using the “right” words yet means the opposite. He claims that MAHA using reasonable and moderate language is somehow evidence of their deeper-seated distrust. While anything is possible, if we no longer trust that people mean what they say, we don’t have much left, do we?
The Szaszian Heart of MAHA Psychiatry
Moderate-sounding entry points to an unpopular agenda
psychiatrymargins.com/p/the-…
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
There're many doctors, clinics and communities forming to get people off these drugs. It's harder than just going cold turkey.
Highly recommend looking at taper.community (I have no affiliation or financial interest. I know the founder @BasedPsychMD through x)
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
Paging @BasedPsychMD and taper.community ! Honestly start getting the word out there.
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
Taper Community has a new Informed Consent Generator for 59 different drugs. Give it a try. This is what true "informed consent" looks like: taper.community/consent
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
Behold the latest plot twist in modern psychiatry: @tylerblack32, the same psychiatrist who loudly dismissed SSRI withdrawal as a “fabricated crisis,” has now created his very own Deprescribing resource. You really can’t make this stuff up. The brass neck on this man could deflect bullets.
For years, Dr Black has made a hobby of goading, mocking and belittling patients and clinicians who’ve reported severe, prolonged withdrawal from SSRIs and other psych drugs, often blocking them when they challenge his views. He’s been quick to pathologise their suffering, accuse them of exaggeration and paint any discussion of harms as dangerous “anti psychiatry” or alarmists linked to Scientology or fringe movements. All while positioning himself as the calm, data driven adult in the room.
This is peak psychiatry 2026: deny the problem exists, attack the people screaming in pain for years and then rebrand as the “thoughtful reformer” offering solutions once the tide turns and the denial becomes professionally untenable.
The hypocrisy isn’t just glaring, it’s grotesque. Psychiatry doesn’t get to spend a decade kicking patients in the teeth for reporting harms and then waltz in as the compassionate experts on safe tapering.
We see you, Dr. Black. The mask slips further with every pivot.
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
Important read from a psychiatric survivor 👇
Behold the latest plot twist in modern psychiatry: @tylerblack32, the same psychiatrist who loudly dismissed SSRI withdrawal as a “fabricated crisis,” has now created his very own Deprescribing resource. You really can’t make this stuff up. The brass neck on this man could deflect bullets.
For years, Dr Black has made a hobby of goading, mocking and belittling patients and clinicians who’ve reported severe, prolonged withdrawal from SSRIs and other psych drugs, often blocking them when they challenge his views. He’s been quick to pathologise their suffering, accuse them of exaggeration and paint any discussion of harms as dangerous “anti psychiatry” or alarmists linked to Scientology or fringe movements. All while positioning himself as the calm, data driven adult in the room.
This is peak psychiatry 2026: deny the problem exists, attack the people screaming in pain for years and then rebrand as the “thoughtful reformer” offering solutions once the tide turns and the denial becomes professionally untenable.
The hypocrisy isn’t just glaring, it’s grotesque. Psychiatry doesn’t get to spend a decade kicking patients in the teeth for reporting harms and then waltz in as the compassionate experts on safe tapering.
We see you, Dr. Black. The mask slips further with every pivot.
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
Always gratifying to see someone who has criticised and dismissed your work then copy it (without attribution).
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
Prolonged water fasting also treated seizures effectively long before this, but you’ll die if you do it forever, so the Mayo Clinic invented the ketogenic diet in 1929 as a way to achieve the same effect while keeping someone well fed.
The keto diet works by raising GABA levels in the brain but doesn’t *force* synaptic GABA effects like the drugs do, so it didn’t make people as zombified as phenobarbital, a barbiturate, the then-leading treatment for seizures.
Mayo invented the keto diet as an alternative to phenobarbital.
In the 1970s barbiturates were largely replaced with benzodiazepines, which have a lower side effect profile, have a lower risk of fatal overdose, and are less zombifying.
Big Pharma got the keto diet reclassified as for “refractory epilepsy” meaning it is the last resort when all the drugs fail, but that is not why it was invented.
Keto diets likely have broad efficacy where fasting and GABAergic drugs have efficacy.
They have downsides and limitations and not everyone is a good candidate for them but they are profoundly under-utilized in psychiatry.
In the 1950s, Yuri Nikolaev, a Russian psychiatrist, started treating mentally ill patients with prolonged water fasting.
He went on to treat over 8,000 people. Reports suggest that over 70% of patients showed significant improvement, with many returning to normal functioning and work.
Nikolaev’s work was documented by Western doctors, such as Dr. Allan Cott, who visited the Soviet Union to study these methods and later published findings that hailed the results as an "unparalleled achievement".
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
Fiscally expansive pseudomorality.
>Big pharma creates the notion that everyone is sick and everyone needs medication.
>Clinicians feel virtuous treating “disease”
>Patients self-diagnose into the funnel.
>”Socially Responsible” revenue growth
Some psychiatrists suggest that there is no harm in raising awareness and educating the public on mental illness.
Over the past few years, a series of studies have question some of those assumptions. A new publication by Foulkes et al. puts it together.
They highlight (1) high school studies where universal mental health intervention in school worsened outcomes, (2) information studies that leads to increase self-diagnoses and symptoms.
Mental illness sucks and I get the desire to intervene, but the assumption that all of those endeavors are a net-good is silly to me.
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
This is happening to thousands of people all over the world. Lives are being destroyed and lost. I'm grateful for sites such as taper.community that are teaching people about Hyperbolic tapering and helping them find a desprescribing provider.
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
Metabolic Psychiatry is helping people.
open.substack.com/pub/basedp…
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
There are psychiatrists I call peers and psychiatrists I call drug dealers. The difference is taking the time to discuss informed consent and willingness to tell their patients to lower their expectations of how far a meds-only approach to living might take them.
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
I’m checking this out right now.
Tapering of Pysch drugs is hard.
💪👏💕💊
If you’re trying to get OFF psychiatric medications,
Taper Community is a FREE platform built for exactly this.
Share and track your taper, visualize your dose vs mood over time and never do it alone.
Taper.community
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
Antidepressants and Suicide
In 2019, @HengartnerMP and @PloederlM analyzed all phase II and III trials for antidepressants approved from 1991 to 2013.
They found suicide rates of 0.12% in the medication arm and 0.04% in the placebo arm (p=0.02), and suicide attempt rates of 0.71% in the medication arm and 0.30% in the placebo arm (p<0.001).
DOI: 10.1159/000501215
BASED PSYCHIATRIST retweeted
For many patients, SurvivingAntidepressants .org was a place to empathize and learn from one another. I have spoken with and learned from its founder, @Altostrata, on many occasions. However, the site is now read-only.
It is interesting to see @BasedPsychMD starting a new community and website for people to share: taper.community. It is just beginning, but I already see people helping and sharing. That is community.