I don't think anyone one person can give you a date, time, and place to stop taking anti-depressants. It's like telling an infant what age to start walking... But I will share my experience and thoughts. Take it with a grain of salt, I guess.
I started taking medications when I was 8. In middle school (three years on meds at this time) they evaluated me to see if I was depressed, because I seemed normal in terms of mental development. After asking me a series of questions, it was mutually agreed among my mother, my teachers, and the person evaluating me that I had experienced trauma (surprise, right?). No one ever asked me if I needed to talk to someone or if I wanted help, which to this day I just want to storm out of the room screaming, "Nope Nope Nope!"
At age 18 I started to evaluate my life, a sort of 'what do I want in life' kind of evaluation. This came when the Lexapro that I had taken for years, my holy grail of medications, had stopped working (quite abruptly, might I add). I just kinda had the thought occur to me, "I really don't want to be that depressed girl anymore." After that I slowly weened myself off (which I don't recommend now that I'm an adult). I found someone to talk, I spent a lot of time combing through my past one year at a time starting as far back as I could remember. It seemed like I constantly found knots that I had been carrying with me for years and years, never really aware of it. With help, support and a lot of mental energy, I found a way to move past it.
I truly believe there are two types of depression; one situational (common) and one is a chemical deficiency of serotonin in the brain (rare).
There are people out there taking anti-depressants who are just like me, women and men of various ages with trauma that never got dealt with. Anti-depressants in this case tend to work as a wall, nothing more nothing less. It puts a block up so you don't have to deal with your issues or work past them. When you stop taking the meds, wall falls down and bad feelings come back. This might be your case.
There are people out there who have a chemical imbalance of the brain and never have a true way of pinpointing why they're depressed. It might be like having a weight on the other side of a seesaw, keeping you in balance. If you go off the meds, I imagine you would fall down back into depression. This might be your case.
Perhaps, you should evaluate yourself thoroughly and/or maybe talk it out with a therapist or a counselor (not a family physician, please!) and first see which of the categories you fit into? Then you can go from there and decide what's best.
When I first went off of medication there was a lot of forced optimism when it came to viewing life. I wasn't thinking the world was sunshine and rainbows but I did try to find a positive in everything. I purged myself of a lot of negative energy and people, and to this day I
still get depressed like every other human in the world. Luckily, I have equipped myself with the 'mental tools' to fight off the nasty feelings when I get them.
(Longer than I wanted to, but my first draft of this post was nearing 2k
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