I'm on the same medicine, but coffee is significantly easier to quit for me. If I take a single day off meds, then I feel it, and that feeling compounds for about a week. The withdrawals, in my opinion, while not particularly painful in a physical sense, and still fucking brutal.

I'm on a child's dosage too, which is crazy. Yeah yeah, I know everyone is different and all that, but I can see why this drug is a Schedule II Controlled Substance in the US. I am not sure how addicting it is from a psychological point of view at therapeutic dosages, but it's damn easy to build a dependence in my experience.

Physical dependence and addiction is a very different thing. If you’re physically dependent then you’ll just plan accordingly (taper if necessary) and ride it out, but if you’re addicted then you won’t be capable of doing that and 90% (or more) of the attempts will fail because of the behavioral overrides. This can turn something that could be tapered in couple months into multi-year struggle. I’ve learned this the hard way.

Based on that description, maybe I am addicted lol.

I can technically go without, but what I crave more than the feeling of the meds is the ability to be semi-functional. I do not respond super positively to the meds to begin with, but they are definitely better than nothing... and perhaps sometimes detrimental (focus on the wrong thing).

I always try to take breaks when I can, but life rarely allows for me to do such anymore. On weekends now, I typically just half-dose or take a day off. Seems to be enough to help with the burnout.