TaperMeds Journal
Why We Built the First AI Platform for Tapering Psychiatric Medications
Because ending treatment should be as structured as starting it.
As psychiatrists, we've seen the same story play out too many times. A patient stabilized on medication for years wants to come off; but the moment we try, everything turns into individualized guesswork.
There are clear guidelines for starting medication, and structured protocols for titrating upward. But when it comes to coming off, the guidance becomes fragmented and rarely applied in practice.
Most of the time, the patient isn't being tapered by a psychiatrist. The family doctor, unaware of protracted withdrawal from psychotropic drugs, does their best with limited information. Each taper ends up reinvented from scratch. Improvised, manual, and dangerously dependent on individual memory and experience.
The problem
If you taper too fast, the symptoms that follow can look identical to the original illness. Anxiety, insomnia, irritability, panic; all the same signals that once justified treatment now reappear, leading to the assumption that the disease has returned.
In reality, the nervous system is reacting to the sudden absence of a drug it has adapted to. But because psychiatry rarely distinguishes between withdrawal and relapse, these reactions are often misread as proof that the underlying disorder was chronic all along.
This misinterpretation can be devastating. Patients begin to doubt their own judgment. Clinicians lose confidence in tapering. What should be a temporary physiological adjustment is mistaken for the permanent return of illness; driving people back to the very drugs they were trying to leave behind.
What TaperMeds is
TaperMeds is our attempt to bring structure to that chaos.
It's a platform that generates tapering plans grounded in the logic of the Ashton Manual and the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines; the two most rigorous frameworks for psychotropic withdrawal.
With TaperMeds, doctors can cut taper admin time and take on more deprescribing patients. Patients can generate a structured plan to bring to their clinicians.
Think of it as the missing "off-ramp" in psychiatry's digital infrastructure. A place where dose, duration, and pharmacokinetics are translated into structured, readable plans.
How it works
TaperMeds takes the parameters you enter (medication, dose, duration, taper goal) and generates a plan that mirrors best-practice logic from Ashton and Maudsley.
The design is intentionally minimal: clinicians can export, adjust, and annotate plans freely. Each taper is transparent and auditable. No "black box."
The future of deprescribing
Deprescribing shouldn't depend on hero clinicians or scattered spreadsheets on the internet. If prescribing has an infrastructure then deprescribing deserves the same.
That's what we're working toward.