danielle gansky

mental health advocate 🤍TikTok @daniellegansky (270k+) 🤍Instagram @dannygansky (50k+) 🤍

[danielle gansky @DanielleGansky]

ANTIDEPRESSANT WITHDRAWAL INJURY is a serious neurological brain injury that happens even when you stop an SSRI following “standard” doctor tapering advice.

After long-term use, the brain & nervous system adapt and change but the rushed 2-4 week one-size-fits-all tapers doctors still use are dangerously fast and actively causing brain injuries on a massive scale.

Right now, thousands of people are being harmed simply by doing exactly what their doctors tell them and end up with long-term neurological damage and years of disability.

The system gaslights victims, denies the harm, and hides the truth.
This rivals the opioid crisis.

If you've been affected, you're not alone. Share your story. #antidepressantwithdrawal #pssd

[Mikhaila Peterson @MikhailaFuller]

My experience with psych med withdrawal/akathisia from lexapro.

There are over 600 stories at https://t.co/0fGkbw131S now. Worse than mine. Like my dad’s. If you want you can add your story, if you’ve been injured by medications, and I’ll add to it to the site too.

[danielle gansky @DanielleGansky]

@ChrisWillx here’s a video sharing my story and the brain injury I experienced following antidepressant withdrawal.

Truly appreciate you shedding light on these issues that affect so many suffering in silence 🤍 @PSSDNetwork

https://t.co/d4aWvXcBUi

[danielle gansky @DanielleGansky]

ANTIDEPRESSANT WITHDRAWAL INJURY is a serious neurological brain injury that happens even when you stop an SSRI following “standard” doctor tapering advice.

After long-term use, the brain & nervous system adapt and change but the rushed 2-4 week one-size-fits-all tapers doctors still use are dangerously fast and actively causing brain injuries on a massive scale.

Right now, thousands of people are being harmed simply by doing exactly what their doctors tell them and end up with long-term neurological damage and years of disability.

The system gaslights victims, denies the harm, and hides the truth.
This rivals the opioid crisis.

If you've been affected, you're not alone. Share your story. #antidepressantwithdrawal #pssd

[danielle gansky @DanielleGansky]

Thank you for sharing my story of harm from antidepressants 🙏🏻🫶🏻
@theisabelb & @ChrisWillx

[Daily Wire @realDailyWire]

"You're watching a lot of the same downstream effects as the trans movement with over prescription of SSRIs."

@theisabelb tells @ChrisWillx that doctors are using the same playbook with SSRIs that they used with so-called "gender-affirming care" for kids.

[danielle gansky @DanielleGansky]

@RachelZader @_innercompass @ACE_CoalitionEd @DrMcFillin @physiologyfirst why?

[danielle gansky @DanielleGansky]

As a child, I was publicly celebrated for being diagnosed with ADHD. Sharing my diagnosis proudly in the newspaper.
Ironically 22 years later I found myself in another newspaper. This time about the devastating harm and that followed from entering the psychiatric system in the first place.

The Article Reveals The Contradiction:
I was labeled with an “attention disorder,” yet I become intensely focused when engaged in something meaningful to me.
I did not lack the capacity for attention.
My attention was context-dependent:

I don’t see a “disordered” child.
I see a child whose mind and behavior did not conform to narrow institutional and societal expectations of how children are expected to think, learn, behave, and focus within the conventional school system:

• Sitting still for hours at a time with sustained attention
• One-size-fits-all learning styles
• Memorization and regurgitation of information.

I struggled within systems that treated one narrow model as the standard for intelligence and success.

I never fit neatly within that mold.

My differences were interpreted through subjective diagnostic frameworks built around symptom checklists and socially constructed ideas of what constitutes “normal” behavior.

The standards used to define “success,” “intelligence,” and “normal” behavior are not objective laws of nature, but human-made subjective social constructs.

Children who deviate from that framework often become pathologized.
My behavior that deviated from institutional expectations was seen as evidence of a brain pathology requiring pharmaceutical correction.

One childhood diagnosis spiraled into a cascade of psychiatric drugs I never truly needed.

And In trying to chemically “fix” what was never defective in me to begin with, the system ultimately created profound dysfunction and neurological harm.

To this day, I am still fighting to get my brain, health, and life back after the devastating harm psychiatric drugs caused.

Are we truly diagnosing “disorder” or are we enforcing conformity?

Difference is not disorder. #adhd

[danielle gansky @DanielleGansky]

@rovingchloe What is ADHD?

[Kenneth M Peters MD @KennethMPeters1]

We need better informed consent and more thoughtful use of these drugs that can lead to enduring sexual, physical, and emotional dysfunction after stopping the drug. #PSSD, #PFS, #PAS. @CorewellHealth @BeaumontUrology
https://t.co/WpbPPXvksg

[danielle gansky @DanielleGansky]

PSSD is not simply the loss of sexual function. It extends far beyond that. It involves emotional dissolution, the loss of cognitive abilities, personality loss, identity loss, and profound disruptions to the experience of being human.

it’s a feeling of confinement within your own consciousness. It feels as though my mind had been placed in a chemical straitjacket. My thoughts, emotions, personality, and sense of self all feel restricted. I no longer feel fully able to access, express, or experience who I was ( or life itself) in the way I once could.

My sense of agency has been diminished within my own mind, almost like a loss of free will. I no longer feel free to think in the expansive way I once could. (something I had always taken for granted and never imagined I could lose at such young age.)

How do you describe the loss of something as subjective, invisible, abstract, and intangible as your own mind and consciousness?

Because the injury is invisible unlike a broken bone in a cast or a visible physical wound, others cannot truly grasp the depth of the devastation and damage of someone's internal world.

In the beginning I felt frustrated as words could not fully convey the reality of what was happening to me. The inability for me to communicate the experience made me feel even more trapped.

The very faculty I needed to describe what was happening had itself been affected.

What gets shattered Is the very instrument through which we experienced existence itself.

@PSSDNetwork #PSSD

[USA TODAY @USATODAY]

After stopping antidepressants, this 23-year-old said she experienced a “chemical castration." What to know about PSSD, according to experts. https://t.co/jfG3KoxoMq

[danielle gansky @DanielleGansky]

More than ONE MILLION people are now registered in online antidepressant withdrawal support communities!
(Not including the countless others suffering in silence who never find these groups.)
This is not rare.
This is not fringe.
This is a hidden epidemic.

[Physiologyfirst @physiologyfirst]

An honor to speak with @DanielleGansky about one of the most important issues of our time. https://t.co/fiOdho0TDW

[HHS Rapid Response @HHSResponse]

Last month, @SecKennedy launched a bold action plan to curb psychiatric overprescribing. The national conversation has begun.

[Taylor 🌞 @taperingtay]

I started a TikTok to share my SSRI withdrawal and had 8M views in the first few months.

Since then I've engaged with 100,000s of ppl across the world—each struggling w/ WD. This is a global crisis but patients are left to help each other while Drs debate the severity of it.

[Dr. Roger McFillin @DrMcFillin]

On episode #200 of Radically Genuine, @joannamoncrieff and I discuss the uncomfortable truth about psychiatry: an industry incentivized to keep people sick, antidepressants that cause physical dependence despite being marketed otherwise, and why the majority of mental health problems may need to be moved out of medicine entirely.
Is the psychiatric system built to heal you, or to keep you coming back?

#RadicallyGenuine #Psychiatry #AntidepressantWithdrawal #MentalHealth #PsychiatryReform #SSRIs #JoannaMoncrieff

[danielle gansky @DanielleGansky]

Psychiatric medications carry a kind of "medical halo" effect. Because they are prescribed by doctors, FDA approved, and framed as “treatment,” they are often perceived as fundamentally different from other psychoactive or “street” drugs which society naturally views as risky or potentially harmful.

But the reality is that antidepressants are also powerful psychoactive substances that alter brain and nervous system function and can carry serious risks and long-term consequences, even if they are culturally perceived as safer through a medical lens.

[Mark Horowitz @markhoro.bsky.social @markhoro]

Perhaps 1 in 10 to 1 in 7 people who use antidepressants long term might be incapacitated by severe and long-lasting withdrawal syndromes. This represents millions of people around the world. Is that a problem? Should that maybe affect prescribing rates? Require a public health response?

[danielle gansky @DanielleGansky]

So honored to have shared my story alongside so many other powerful advocates. Grateful I was asked to put together this incredible lived experience panel- such a historic day🙏🏻

[Inner Compass Initiative @_innercompass]

🧵 As an organization founded by and run for people with firsthand experience of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs, one of our goals since day one has been to ensure such people get a seat at the table.

And through years of working toward that goal, that's how we came to join the recent MAHA event on overmedicalization.

From our founder Laura Delano (@LauraDelano) making a profound speech, to convening a panel of people who have experienced severe withdrawal, PSSD, and other serious harms from psychiatric drugs — that’s why we were there, standing with equal footing alongside professionals, some of whom are in these photos.

We would love nothing more than to continue this work alongside professionals, leaders and institutions across the political spectrum.

The same people who’ve been impacted by the mental health industry should be sharing the same essential insights into its limitations and harms.

And most of all, we hope we can all work together to make change happen— change that truly serves all of whom have experience, themselves or otherwise, within the mental health industry.

So that’s what we’ll keep doing—with you, the patients, and professionals who support our work or those who are simply curious and still figuring things out.

And we’ll keep doing that today, tomorrow, and long into the future. 1/2

[Our Own Nation @OurOwnNation]

SSRIS can cause permanent sexual dysfunction and Doctors underestimate the severity and likelihood of side effects