Hello Tim,

I am sort of a maverick when it comes to these medical matters, but after having consulted with over a hundred doctors for various medical issues (no I am not exaggerating) and examined all aspects including medical, biological, political, scientific, economic, psychological etc. that affect a patient's outcome I feel entitled to make some statements.

The first statement I must stress as the most important (and you absolutely must keep this in perspective at all times)...

Doctors lie. They do it all the time. I have caught nearly every doctor I have consulted with telling me flat-out lies, over and over it happens. I have also caught them writing lies in their medical reports about me, putting words in my mouth, inventing things, omitting things, distorting things, quite deliberately and in many cases maliciously, especially when I question or criticize their obvious ignorance, prejudice, or in some cases stupidity.

It is unfortunate but true that the only way to avoid getting maligned or even savaged by doctors is to stay away from them. Very few doctors have the personal integrity to tell the truth and even if they do have some degree of integrity they still fudge to protect their licenses and incomes even if they know they will cause you problems.

Truthfulness appears even more savaged when we take into account the lies that are promulgated by organizations such as pharmaceutical corporations, the AMA, the APA, the DEA, the congress, etc.

The plain fact of the matter is that if anyone gets cured of anything, especially here in the US where our financial wizards cannot even tell the difference between stocks, loans, and toxic waste, it is usually in spite of (rather than because of) the medical system. Canada is maybe not so corrupt but as our next-door-neighbor there is plenty of spill-over.

So, in a system where both your livelihood and your health have been irreparably damaged by liars in positions of power over you, why are you still playing the rigged game of monopoly according to the rules that the liars wrote to keep you down?

Here is my recommendation to you. Erect your own boilerplate. Invent your own shield of plausible deniability. Protect yourself while striking a blow for freedom.

From this day forward, you need to concoct an official story to tell your psychiatrist. Everything is fine and you are taking your drugs exactly as prescribed.

But you also have to make sure that all the evidence is consistent, so you need to do some other things too.

Watch a funny video and tell yourself jokes before going in to your appointments. Dress smartly and make sure you are clean. Avoid coming in hung over. If you are in a bad mood or upset about something, invent a story about being sick and pinch your nose when you call in to reschedule your appointment for a better time. If you have to, just skip the appointment and call in later explaining that you got hung up in traffic or delayed at the office or mugged by a thief.

Make sure that you are in a good, happy mood when you see that jerk who will not listen to your valid concerns and who is practicing dogma to protect his income and his professional reputation by keeping you hopped up on drugs to keep the world safe from your unrestrained ego.

If you have to, take a tranquilizer or a small dose of your antidepressant poison to flatten your affect and induce a slight hypermanic episode before going in to your appointment.

Another thing you can do is to smile inwardly with the serene knowledge that you are now playing the game of life intelligently instead of falling into the traps this jerk is digging all around you. When he asks you how you are feeling and you tell him 'fine, fine, everything is OK doctor jerky", you will be able to muster a genuine smile as you lie right back at him when he tells you how important it is to keep poisoning yourself daily and enrich him with regular useless checkups.

But that is not enough. Most doctors are not stupid and they occasionally enlist others to spy on you, especially psychiatrists. They sometimes call police, employers, pharmacists, friends and family, without disclosing what they are doing or why, and ask about you. It is not a violation of confidentiality to ask questions, only to give out information, and in this case there is already a legal path of two-way communication with your employer. If they suspect that anyone is in danger they will intervene. It is their legal responsibility to do so.

You need to make sure that your story is consistent no matter who is consulted about you.

Always tell the same story to everyone else you meet, or say nothing at all. You are taking your meds as prescribed and they are working fine.

Buy your prescriptions on schedule (even if you have medicine left over) so that the records at the pharmacy match your story.

Most difficult is to keep watch over your own tongue. Psychiatrists make a living off the tongues of their patients. From now on, your tongue is classified. You cannot disclose anything to anyone and you repeat your cover story as consistently as a spy working for the CIA or whatever the acronym is in Canada for 'intelligence'.

You keep watch over what you say about other things too. No manic or depressive confessions to co-workers or lovers. Even keel all the way. If anyone in your life is upsetting you, stay away from that person. Forget about trying to 'fix' anyone. If your lover or your boss or your landlady is broken, get another one.

In the meantime, you have to taper off Effexor and stay off all psychotropic drugs in the future unless they are absolutely essential to your health, which is almost never the case. You will be the ony judge of whether or not psychotropic medications (or any other medication, for that matter) is essential. That is a constitutional and a human right.

I recommend staying away from recreational drugs too. No marijuana, no tobacco, no alcohol, no junk food. You cannot afford a buzz right now. You need to remember what it means to feel human, not run from it.

Here is why you must do these things...

There is no such thing as medicating you against your will for your own good. It is always for the benefit of others and if you also happen to benefit too that is a coincidence. The primary thing that psychiatrists and the laws that support their forcible interventions are concerned with is protecting public safety and they will poison or even kill you if they think that is necessary to protect everyone else from you.

It may sound extreme but if you think about it for a while, you will gradually realize that there is no public interest in protecting people from themselves. Ultimately no one cares if you kill yourself or hack yourself up. The only thing others care about is how your actions impact them, such as the grief your relatives or children may experience or the trouble the police may have writing out the reports and removing the body, the cost of towing your vehicle and cleaning up the debris or the possibility that you may take someone else down with you or throw a spouse and/or children onto the public dole.

You are a free person and what they are doing to you is definitely harming you. They inflict this harm because they fear what you might do if not in a chemical strait jacket and they convince themselves that the harm they are doing to you is minimal or even your paranoid imaginings in order to justify what they do. They are taking advantage of your good nature to calm their own fears so you need to wake up and stop the harm.

Like you said, you are more functional without the poison in your system and with the exception of a few people here and there who would not qualify for your job anyway, basically no one benefits from the drugs you are taking except those whose livelihood depends on the profits from treating you unnecessarily.

The evidence is now in that there never has been and probably never will be an 'antidepressant' medication. 'Depression', along with all the other 'mood disorders', is a purely subjective and culturally defined ailment that has more known, proven causes in the environment than in the blood stream. It is completely inappropriate to medicalize its treatment and the popular remedies have all been proven no more effective than placebo, except for maybe nutrition, exercise, and a supportive environment.

In the meantime, here is how you taper.

Open your capsules and use graph paper to measure out your dose. Buy a pill cutter or use a knife to shave off a fraction of the pill. Invent whatever you need in order to slowly reduce your dose without arousing any suspicion at the psychiatrist's office.

Keep in mind that if you start complaining about withdrawal symptoms you will raise suspicion that either you are lying about taking the pills or that the drug is no longer 'effective' because you have developed a tolerance to it. Once you start to experience withdrawal symptoms, stay at that dose until they go away completely.

If the withdrawal symptoms are not gone after a month on a plateau (FIXED DOSE) of a slow, gradual titration to zero, it is a good bet that they will stay with you for a long time if not permanently. Get used to them before reducing the dose further. Learn to hide and compensate for them. There will be continual gradual improvement for up to two years, but by that time you should be off the drug entirely already anyway. My experience with along with several others has been that withdrawal symptoms never go away entirely. I still have my movement disorder and I quit Effexor in 2004.

In the longer term, you have a decision to make. It is pointless to keep seeing a quack doctor for nothing except to stay out of trouble.

You have to eventually 'come out of the closet' and disclose that you stopped taking the drug over a year ago. Bring along all the unused drug and the copies of your medical records describing your medical condition as 'stable' to prove that you were right all along and do not need any medication.

Either that, or you have to change jobs.

I recommend that you request a copy of your medical records every 3 months. That will help to keep your doctor honest and give him a heads-up that what he is doing to you may eventually come up for official review, possibly in a malpractice lawsuit or at least with regard to your employment.

If you find that he is lying about you, start bringing a video recorder to your appointments. That will give him the message real quick that you are not going to sit there and take it in the rear passively. Psychiatrists make their living off sheep who take it in the rear indefinitely without ever complaining that more is getting stretched than just the truth.