Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Warning: this story discusses mental health and the experiences of some people | Subscribe: youtube.com/RNZVideo?sub_confirmation=1
A growing movement is challenging how antidepressants are prescribed and stopped. Sue Purdie has a daily ritual that has been part of her life for more than six months.
Each morning, the 64-year-old gets out her pill cutter and her pharmacist scale, a highly sensitive scale more at home in a laboratory than a Christchurch apartment. She gets to work weighing a specific dose of Venlafaxine, a common antidepressant prescribed in New Zealand.
She decreases that dose by 10 percent of the previous dose every three weeks, in the hopes of avoiding common deprescribing side effects of nausea, dizziness and the infamous “brain zaps”.
Purdie is part of a growing international movement of people deprescribing, also called tapering, from antidepressant medication.
Full story: rnz.co.nz/life/wellbeing/deprescribing-the-patients-ditching-antidepressants
Warning: this story discusses mental health and the experiences of some people | Subscribe: youtube.com/RNZVideo?sub_confirmation=1
A growing movement is challenging how antidepressants are prescribed and stopped. Sue Purdie has a daily ritual that has been part of her life for more than six months.
Each morning, the 64-year-old gets out her pill cutter and her pharmacist scale, a highly sensitive scale more at home in a laboratory than a Christchurch apartment. She gets to work weighing a specific dose of Venlafaxine, a common antidepressant prescribed in New Zealand.
She decreases that dose by 10 percent of the previous dose every three weeks, in the hopes of avoiding common deprescribing side effects of nausea, dizziness and the infamous “brain zaps”.
Purdie is part of a growing international movement of people deprescribing, also called tapering, from antidepressant medication.
Full story: rnz.co.nz/life/wellbeing/deprescribing-the-patients-ditching-antidepressants
