Ariella Sharf was first prescribed antidepressants when she was a college student more than a decade ago. When she decided to stop taking them last year, Sharf says she wasn’t sure how to do it safely. She was disappointed when her longtime psychiatrist didn’t help her find a new doctor after she moved across the country, and she thought her primary care physician wasn’t equipped for the task. Sharf decided instead to try Outro Health, a telehealth startup that CEO and cofounder Brandon Goode describes as “Uber for getting off antidepressants.”
Outro officially launched in the US last month and is currently available in seven states, including California and New York. The startup is betting that many of the growing number of Americans taking antidepressants will eventually want help coming off them. Over 11 percent of US adults took medication for depression in 2023, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health Interview Survey, which found women were more than twice as likely as men to use the drugs.
About one in six people who stop taking antidepressants experience side effects like nausea and dizziness, especially if they do so abruptly, according to one study. Other research has found the prevalence of adverse withdrawal symptoms may be much higher, particularly among patients who have been on them for long periods.
For a monthly fee starting at $125, Outro pairs patients with a clinician who meets with them on a custom schedule—often weekly or monthly—and guides them through a tailored tapering program. Outro currently employs a small group of medical contractors, including nurse practitioners specializing in psychiatry and general nurse practitioners, who are supervised by psychiatrists. For now, patients pay for the service entirely out of pocket, but Goode says Outro plans to start accepting insurance soon.
Outro’s program is currently focused specifically on drugs often prescribed for depression, including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Lexapro and Prozac, and serotonin–norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) like Pristiq and Cymbalta. In the next year, Goode says, the company is planning to expand beyond antidepressants and begin offering tapering programs for stimulants and benzodiazepines, two classes of drug that are commonly prescribed in the US for issues like anxiety and ADHD and are known to cause intense withdrawal symptoms.
“I was kind of waiting for something like Outro to exist,” says Sharf, who became one of the company’s first patients in the United States last June as part of a pilot program in California. “Everything was tailored around how I wanted to do it.” Twelve months later, Sharf says she is still tapering off her medication with help from Outro at a pace that works for her.
When customers sign up for Outro and get matched with clinicians, they then typically follow a tapering method endorsed by one of Outro’s other cofounders, the British academic psychiatrist Mark Horowitz. Known as “hyperbolic tapering,” it’s a substantially more drawn-out process than other methods used to help people get off meds.