Exciting Announcements from ICI– And a Call to Those Looking to Share Their Stories of Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal

After a very busy 2018 and lots of time spent planning for 2019, we are excited to be reconnecting with our community here to share some of our plans for what lies ahead.

For starters, we’re ramping up efforts to bring people together in person in the greater Hartford, Connecticut area, where some of our team is located these days. We’ve just announced plans for our weekly, in-person “Preparing to Come Off Psych Drugs” workshop that we’ll be piloting in West Hartford, Connecticut starting March 26th (click here to learn more!). And in April, Executive Director Laura Delano will be one of the speakers at Advocacy Unlimited’s annual Karuna conference (click here to learn more and register), where she’ll share about her experiences becoming an ex-patient as well as the mission and vision of Inner Compass Initiative. 

But our focus is not just on local events. We have big plans for our online community, as well, and in particular, the News and Blog section of Inner Compass Initiative website. Our intention for this year is to bring this virtual space to life by making it a more dynamic, engaging resource for our visitors and community members. We plan to publish blogs more regularly, and feature posts that draw attention to withdrawal-related news items, highlight different pages and sections of our site (we know there are a lot of them!), and feature personal writing about various aspects of psychiatric medication withdrawal from our staff as well as from our community.

This last part is where you come in: we are currently accepting personal essays of 1500 words or fewer focusing on any specific aspect of withdrawal. If you are considering or in the process of going off your medication, have finished withdrawal and are at any phase of healing, or have helped a loved one during their withdrawal process, we would love to hear from you. For full submissions guidelines, follow this link. The number of people questioning their relationship to psychiatric drugs is rapidly growing, and for those who choose to reduce or come off their meds, there is no more valuable resource for them than hearing about the experiences of those who’ve forged the withdrawal path ahead.

If you’re not in a position to share your story right now, there are other ways to contribute.  First and foremost, you can comment on our posts (in order to do so, you’ll first need to join ICI Connect, our free networking platform for folks on the withdrawal journey). We’re eager to make our blog a place for active conversation, and we can’t do that without you. You can also share our blog posts via your social media accounts and help to facilitate conversations on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Finally, feel free to send us links to stories related to withdrawal from antidepressants, benzodiazepines, and other psychiatric drugs in the news. (You can do so by writing to editor@theinnercompass.org.) Though we won’t be able to reply to all the emails we receive, we’ll make sure to give a hat tip to anyone whose lead we follow! The Internet is a vast place and we can’t monitor it all, so we hope you can be our eyes and ears out there!

Stay tuned for more updates here in the near future on our plans, including rolling out our newsletter, engaging with the members in our Connect communities (ICI Connect and ICI Connect), improving and adding different types of resources to Inner Compass Initiative’s website, and an exciting media appearance by Laura in a few weeks that will draw a lot of attention to our organization and to the vital matter of psychiatric drug withdrawal! 

-The ICI/ICI Team