Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines - an Overview with Audience Q&A
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April 25, 2025
Please note this webinar is 2 hours long, and begins at 8am PDT / 9am MDT / 11am EDT / 4pm BST / 5pm CEST. To check your local time, this is a useful site.
About the event
This online webinar starts off with the authors of the Maudsley Deprescribing Guideline, Professor David Taylor and Dr Mark Horowitz, speaking for a short time on key aspects of the Guideline - withdrawal from antidepressants, benzodiazepines, gabapentinoids and Z-drugs, hyperbolic tapering, what this looks like in theory and in practice.
Then David and Mark will be joined by a panel of experts - Dr Khalid Zaman, a GP in the north of England and Stevie Lewis, a UK campaigner with personal experience of withdrawal, who will share their thoughts, and the panel will answer questions live from the audience. The Q&A will be moderated by IIPDW Chair, Professor John Read.
About IIPDW
The International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal is a not-for-profit organisation, founded in 2017, working towards greater understanding of withdrawal from psychiatric drugs and better services for those wanting to reduce or stop their drugs.
IIPDW is at its heart a group of experts in psychiatric drug withdrawal from over 20 countries. Among us are those who've withdrawn from psychiatric drugs or supported others on their journey, as well as researchers, mental health professionals and writers.
We aim to support the development of research and of practice-based knowledge to inform service design, clinical guidelines and policy internationally. Central to our ethos is the human right to informed choice, and the importance of friends, families and supportive professionals in psychiatric drug withdrawal.
About the speakers
Professor David Taylor is the Director of Pharmacy and Pathology at the Maudsley Hospital, Professor of Psychopharmacology at King’s College, London, UK and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology.
He’s authored around 450 clinical papers in journals such as the Lancet, BMJ, British Journal of Psychiatry and Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. His papers have been cited over 25,000 times.
He is currently a member of the UK government’s Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs, he was a Member of the UK Department of Transport expert panel that introduced drug-driving regulation, and he’s the only pharmacist to have been made an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Professor Taylor has been the lead author of the Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines since their inception in 1993. The Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines have sold over 300,000 copies in fourteen editions and twelve languages, and he co-authored the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines (2024).
Dr Mark Horowitz MBBS PhD is Clinical Research Fellow in Psychiatry in North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT), Visiting Lecturer in Psychopharmacology at King’s College London, and a trainee psychiatrist. He has a PhD from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London in the neurobiology of depression and antidepressant action. He is the lead author of the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines, which provides the basis for national guidance from the NHS on how to safely stop psychiatric drugs and has been endorsed by the College of General Practice in Australia, and the Pharmacist Society in the UK.
He co-authored the recent Royal College of Psychiatrists’ guidance on ‘Stopping Antidepressants’, and his work informed the recent NICE guidelines on safe tapering of psychiatric medications, including antidepressants, benzodiazepines and z-drugs. He has worked with the NHS to develop national guidance for safe deprescribing for clinicians and has been commissioned by Health Education England to prepare a teaching module on how to safely stop antidepressants for the NHS.
He has written several papers about safe approaches to tapering psychiatric medications including publications in The Lancet Psychiatry, JAMA Psychiatry and Schizophrenia Bulletin. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology. He has an interest in rational psychopharmacology and deprescribing psychiatric medication. He has experienced the difficulty of coming off psychiatric medications first hand which has informed much of his work.
Dr Khalid Zaman is a GP in the northeast of England with over 25 years of experience in primary care. He developed an interest in safe prescribing and deprescribing of antidepressant medication six years ago after his wife developed severe acute anti-depressant withdrawal and subsequently a protracted withdrawal syndrome. Since then, he has had to unlearn conventional teaching and relearn a different approach based on up-to-date research, guidance from experts in the field and truly listening to his patients. As a result, he has helped many patients successfully taper off antidepressants safely.
He remains passionate about continued learning for himself and colleagues in primary care. To this effect, he is actively involved in organising teaching on safe deprescribing of psychotropic medication, promoting psycho-social models of managing mental distress and restoring the patient narrative at the core of their care.
He is a GP partner in a busy inner city training practice where he is the mental health lead and mentor to his colleagues. His other areas of interest include chronic pain management, neurology musculoskeletal medicine and traditional Chinese medicine. These interests continue to inform his perspectives on health and wellbeing.
Stevie Lewis is a campaigner based in the UK who, having experienced SSRI antidepressant dependence and a gruelling, protracted withdrawal, has been trying for the past 6 years to bring to the attention of the public, UK governments and the NHS the potential for patients to become dependent on antidepressants, and how to recognise and support people in withdrawal. to bring to the attention of the public, UK governments and the NHS the potential for patients to become dependent on antidepressants, and how to recognise and support people in withdrawal.
She is a co-author of “The Patient Voice: patients who experience antidepressant withdrawal symptoms are often dismissed, or misdiagnosed with relapse, or a new medical condition” published in Therapeutic Advances in Pharmacology in 2020. The original research for this paper was an analysis on behalf of the Westminster All Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence of the stories written by people of their experiences of prescribed drug dependence, which had been submitted as evidence to public petitions raised in Wales and Scotland. (Stevie raised the Welsh petition.) The resulting analysis was submitted as evidence to the 2019 Public Health England review of prescribed drug dependence.
Following on from this review, Stevie became a member of the Withdrawal Services Working Group convened to define patient needs for the implementation of PHE’s recommendations for action. Most recently she has had published in the British Journal of GPs “Four research papers I wish my GP had read before prescribing antidepressants.”