— Trudy Slaght, Taper Coach, Alberta, Canada
At age 16, Trudy Slaght was prescribed her first antidepressant. It would be the beginning of a 24-year journey through misdiagnosis, over-medication, repeated hospitalizations, and profound disconnection from herself and her potential. Labeled with multiple psychiatric diagnoses, including bipolar disorder, PTSD, and borderline personality disorder, Trudy cycled through the mental health system hoping each new prescription might finally bring relief.
Instead, the medications compounded her distress. She experienced emotional blunting, weight gain, gastrointestinal dysfunction, suicidal ideation, and what would later be identified as protracted withdrawal symptoms.
“I was surviving, not living,” she says. “There was never a conversation about root causes. It was always: try the next pill.”
Despite undergoing thyroid panels, colonoscopies, EEGs, and even cardiac workups, Trudy’s clinicians never looked deeper into the origins of her suffering—including childhood trauma and a family history of undiagnosed celiac disease. The underlying inflammation, nutrient malabsorption, and neuropsychiatric symptoms it caused were never connected to her psychiatric symptoms.
“It wasn’t until I went gluten-free at the age of 40 that I realized what a fully functioning brain could feel like,” she shares. “When I accidentally ate gluten again, I spiraled back into paranoid, depressive thinking almost instantly. It was like someone flipped a switch.”
From “Difficult Patient” to Resilient Coach: Functional Insights That Changed Everything
After a profoundly destabilizing cold turkey withdrawal from Straterra, Trudy began researching slower, more structured tapering strategies. Her final taper from her remaining medications —overseen with rigorous planning and supported by nutritional and lifestyle interventions—was completed in 2019. She has now been medication-free for over five years.
Today, Trudy is a Taper Coach at the Taper Clinic, helping others plan and navigate psychiatric medication withdrawal through personalized, data-driven strategies. She co-authored a chapter in Withdrawal from Prescribed Psychotropic Drugs and works closely with clients to minimize withdrawal effects while maintaining their responsibilities, including work and parenting. Her message to clinicians is clear: tapering success is possible when root causes are investigated and the whole person is treated—not just the diagnosis.
“The medications were never the problem or the solution. They were a detour. What I needed was someone to listen to the whole story—someone trained to ask ‘why?’ instead of ‘what next?’”
We share this case study about Trudy because it demonstrates the profound role we play as functional and integrative mental health clinicians in changing the trajectory of care so individuals like Trudy don’t have to endure decades of potential living loss. Our industry is dependent on all mental health providers being trained in functional and integrative psychiatry practices.
Trudy is an inspiring individual, and most especially, we are in awe of her pay-it-forward approach to life as a coach to many.
We owe it to our patients to be properly educated with a whole-person, precision approach to mental healthcare.
