Democracy Dies in DarknessAfter years in the shadows, doctors and health officials are reckoning with the challenges of getting off antidepressants.May 14, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. EDTMay 14, 2026(Illustration by Zachary Balcoff/The Washington Post; iStock)Jamie Pearse was 14 when she started taking SSRIs, in the 1990s, as antidepressants were becoming a cultural fixture. She stayed on them for decades. When she decided to stop, she discovered it wasn’t as simple as she had been led to believe.