Why Doesn’t the Medical System Recognize Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal and Injury?

This experience—psychiatric drug withdrawal or injury—can feel terrifying, confusing, and invisible to almost everyone around you.

And one of the most painful questions so many of us ask is:

Why don’t doctors believe me? Why doesn’t the system recognize what’s happening to my body and my mind?

Woman in a white nightgown sits on the edge of her bed looking out the window in what looks like a psychiatric hospital bedroom.

Here’s what I’ve learned, both from my own journey and from helping others through this.

1. Most providers aren’t trained in adverse effects or deprescribing

The truth is, doctors and therapists usually aren’t taught how psychiatric medications affect the body over time—let alone what happens when people try to come off them. They are rarely told more than that some people may experience mild and self-limiting “discontinuation syndrome,” which is a clever term created by pharmaceutical companies to minimize withdrawal problems. Doctors are told that their medications are safe, necessary for life, and not addictive.So when someone starts having withdrawal symptoms—or even a full-on injury—the system often mislabels it as a relapse, or worse, a new diagnosis.

2. Pharma has shaped the entire narrative

So much of what gets taught in medical schools, written in journals, and passed down through practice is influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. Studies that show harm or long-term risks rarely get funding or attention. In fact, no one is studying those of us who have been harmed or what happens when people take psychotropic medications long-term. This isn’t some conspiracy—it’s about profit and power and controlling the narrative about what is known, taught, and told. 

3. The system is afraid to admit it caused harm

If psychiatry as a whole acknowledged that these medications have deeply hurt people, it would shake the foundation of what we think and believe about global mental health. It would force a collective reckoning—and that’s terrifying for a system that’s built its credibility on “helping” people in distress. So instead of looking inward and soul-searching about how it’s been influenced, it protects itself, and projects the problem back on the individual. That their drugs and treatments can’t possibly harm people, it’s YOU that hasn’t found the right treatment or doctor or drug combo.

4. The medical model is too limited

Mental health care tends to focus on managing symptoms with diagnoses and meds. It rarely looks at trauma, systemic oppression, spirituality, nervous system dysregulation, or what it actually means to be human. When everything is seen as “disorder” or a medical illness that needs to be treated, and all they have is a hammer, we are all nails. Your complaint of the drugs making you feel worse, or your withdrawal syndrome may be improperly diagnosed as Functional Neurological Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, Post-traumatic stress disorder, or Borderline Personality Disorder. Us patients either believe this and are led back to more medications, or we figure out that the drugs made us worse and we find online peer communities who help lead us back to health.

5. And then there’s the gaslighting…

This one’s personal for so many of us. You try to speak up—you say something doesn’t feel right, that your nervous system is on fire, that your body is unraveling.

And instead of being believed, you’re told “it’s just anxiety,” “it’s your illness coming back,” or “you need to go back on meds.” This is medical gaslighting. And after a few times, most people just… stop. They stop advocating for themselves. They shut down. They leave appointments in tears or avoid them entirely. The damage from not being believed—especially when you’re in that much pain—is real. It’s a trauma all its own and it’s happened to almost every single client I’ve seen in the last several years.

6. This challenges everything the system is built on

To truly listen to people who’ve been harmed by psychiatric drugs would mean rethinking the entire paradigm of mental health care. It would require humility, accountability, and change on a massive scale. And systems—especially ones backed by money and prestige—don’t change easily.

7. Patients have stopped trying to convince their providers

After enough dismissals, many patients simply stop trying to explain what’s happening to them. Once it becomes clear that their provider doesn’t understand—or worse, doesn’t believe them—they seek out support elsewhere, often turning to online communities or peer networks where they are understood. This creates a self-reinforcing loop: providers claim they’ve “never seen this before” or that none of their patients have been harmed by medications, but that’s because those patients quietly leave.

Meanwhile, providers aren’t trained to recognize psychiatric drug injury or withdrawal. They don’t ask the right questions, don’t know the signs to look for, and often misattribute symptoms to relapse or a new disorder. The gap widens. Patients stop speaking up. Providers don’t know what they don’t know. And the cycle of harm continues.

Here’s what I want you to know:

You are not broken.

You are not imagining this.

You were harmed. And your body is doing its best to find its way back to safety.

You don’t have to prove anything to anyone here.

You don’t have to convince us that what you’re feeling is real.

We believe you.

We have been through it ourselves.

This is a space for healing, for truth, and for community. I’m so grateful you found your way to find us.