Mad In America: Science, Psychiatry And Social Justice

On MIA Radio this week, Akansha Vaswani and Dr Peter Groot discuss Tapering Strips, a novel and practical solution for those who wish to taper gradually from a range of prescription drugs. Akansha is a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and her dissertation research will involve interviewing psychiatrists in the US about their experiences helping people stop or reduce their dose of antidepressant medication. Dr Groot is a researcher and geneticist who has led the development of Tapering Strips. In a recent study, published in the journal Psychosis, Dr Groot, together with Jim van Os, reported on the results of their trial which recorded the experiences of people using Tapering Strips. In this episode we discuss: What motivated Peter to be interested in and study the effects of coming off antidepressants drugs. That the observational study reported in Psychosis was based on questionnaires completed by users who had made use of tapering medication (Tapering Strips) to slowly reduce t