Unmedicated Clarity: How I Reclaimed My Voice After Psychiatry Silenced It

I remember the moment the psychiatrist handed me the script. It was not a dramatic moment. No shouting, no crying. Just a quiet, firm assertion that if I didn’t take the medication, I would not get better. Paroxetine, 20 mg. “You’re highly anxious,” she said. “This will help regulate the serotonin levels in your brain. You’ll think more clearly.”

The irony? I was a counselor. A trauma-informed, art-based, deeply invested-in-people kind of counselor. I had trained for this. Believed in the body-mind-spirit connection. Supported others in processing grief, trauma, disconnection. Yet here I was, being told that what I felt, what I thought, what I knew to be true, was just chemistry. I was, in her eyes, a brain in imbalance.

I protested at first. I said I wanted to heal, not numb. I had explored the roots of the anxiety for years in therapy—from childhood abuse to unresolved grief—but was told this was something I would simply have to manage for the rest of my life. There was no talk of overcoming it, only of keeping it under control. I said I believed in neuroplasticity, in meaning-making, in connection. But I was tired. So tired. I had been fighting for so long to stay afloat while counseling others, managing family, and trying to survive my own trauma history. I was told this was the “therapeutic level” I needed to reach before therapy could even begin. And then the familiar script: “You wouldn’t deny insulin to a diabetic, would you?”

I swallowed the first pill reluctantly. The first few days were surreal. Side effects, yes. But more than that, a sense of unease in my spirit. Like I had just betrayed something sacred inside myself. My clarity. My knowing. My voice.

Over time, the fog set in. Not all at once. But slowly, almost imperceptibly. My thoughts became duller, my reactions slower, my feelings muted. I still painted, but the work lacked the depth and risk it once held. My journal entries flattened. My body felt foreign. I lost the wildness, the spark, the ability to cry freely or laugh uncontrollably. My clients noticed too. I withdrew from my practice, telling myself I needed a break, when in fact I no longer trusted my own intuition.

The most painful part? I started to believe the diagnosis. Maybe I was just broken. Maybe this was as good as it got.

But something inside me never stopped whispering. Something primal. Spirit-breathed. It came alive in the quiet hours, in the presence of trees, in the pull of the paintbrush across canvas. I began to question. Not loudly, not defiantly. Just gently. I asked: What if this isn’t the truth? What if this pill is a cage, not a cure?

The decision to taper was mine. No doctor encouraged it. In fact, I was warned. Told that the symptoms I experienced upon reducing the dosage would be “proof” that I needed to stay on it. But I had read enough by then. I had listened to stories. I had felt the flicker of my own soul returning. And I wanted out.

Withdrawal was brutal. The “brain zaps,” the vertigo, the emotional waves, the shallow breathing. I also experienced dissociation—like I was floating outside myself, watching from a distance as I moved through daily life. But alongside the suffering came moments of breathtaking clarity. My memory returned. My sense of humor. My voice. I painted again—bold, risky strokes. I cried deeply. I laughed till my stomach hurt. I found my feet on the earth, barefoot, breathing, remembering.

And I realized something terrifying and beautiful: I was never ill in the way they claimed. I was traumatized. I was grieving. I was carrying the weight of stories and wounds that had never been held with care.

Psychiatry never asked me about that. Not really. They didn’t ask about the abuse, or the medical gaslighting, or the years of survival. They asked if I had trouble sleeping, if I felt overwhelmed, if I had panic attacks. I said yes. They said, “chemical imbalance.”

I say now: trauma response.

My healing didn’t begin with that pill. It began the moment I stopped handing over my truth for someone else to interpret. It began when I chose to feel again—all of it. The raw, the real, the terrifying, the holy.

The day I left the psychiatric hospital, I signed myself out against medical advice. I remember standing by the window with my packed bag, waiting for my husband. The staff avoided my eyes. I wasn’t combative; I was simply done. My voice was quiet, but firm. I walked down the hallway with dignity, not as a defeated patient, but as a woman reclaiming her life. My husband opened the car door, and as I climbed in, I felt the weight of freedom settle in my chest. I was terrified. I was elated. And I was finally on my way home—not just physically, but to myself.

And now, I speak. Not as a victim, not as a rebel. But as a woman who reclaimed her knowing.

We need to rethink psychiatry. Not because it is all wrong. But because it is not enough. Because it often silences the very voices that hold the key to healing. Because it fears what it cannot quantify. Because it pathologizes pain rather than honoring it.

There is a place for science. For medicine. But there must also be room for mystery, for story, for the wisdom of the body and spirit. There must be room for the barefoot woman walking in the veld, weeping and laughing and finally, finally coming home.

My story is not over. But it is mine again.

And that is where the healing truly begins.