TaperCommunityFind Support in California
Looking for a therapist in California who understands psychiatric medication withdrawal? Cecily Longo (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT), Santa Barbara) is the featured tapering and withdrawal therapist serving California on TaperCommunity — offering talk therapy alongside a taper, taking withdrawal seriously and never pushing you to "just go back on".
1 featured listing
Featured listing
California
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT)
Paid placement
Based in: Santa Barbara, California, USA
Approach: Trauma-informed talk therapy with somatic and nervous-system work, including IFS and EFT tapping
Insurance: In network through Rula and Headway
Not a prescriber — psychotherapy alongside your taper, not medication advice.
No account needed — TaperCommunity passes your request to the clinician.
Therapist profile: Cecily Longo
These are talk therapists and counsellors who understand what coming off psychiatric medication actually does to a nervous system. They know that withdrawal can surface weeks after a dose reduction, that it can look exactly like the condition the drug was prescribed for, and that reading it as relapse is how a lot of tapers get derailed.
They do not manage your dose — that stays with your prescriber. What they hold is everything around it: the anxiety and insomnia, the emotional volatility, the grief and anger that often arrive with an iatrogenic injury, and the long work of staying steady through a taper that can run for months or years. In California, the featured therapist above offers exactly that kind of support.
Taper-informed therapists are rare enough that almost nobody has one locally, so this work is nearly always done online. Therapists can generally only see clients who are physically in a state where they are licensed, so start with the practitioners listed here. Cecily sees Clients anywhere in California, by telehealth.
Look for someone who treats withdrawal as a real physiological process rather than a return of the original condition. The featured therapist listed above works with people in California who are tapering, in protracted withdrawal, or recovering from a fast taper.
Nearly all of this work happens online. Therapists can generally only see clients who are physically in a state where they are licensed, so start with the therapist listed for California.
No. Therapists and counsellors are not prescribers — they cannot start, stop, or adjust a dose. What they can do is support you through the psychological and nervous-system side of a taper: anxiety, sleep, grief, destabilised emotions, and the work of staying steady while your prescriber manages the dose.
Any therapist can listen. One who understands withdrawal knows that withdrawal symptoms can appear weeks after a dose reduction, that they are often misread as relapse, and that the answer is rarely "go back up." That difference decides whether therapy steadies your taper or quietly undermines it.
Usually alongside, not instead. A deprescribing clinician manages the dose and the schedule; a therapist supports you through what the taper stirs up. Many people work with both.
TaperCommunity is free — build a gradual taper plan with the planner and get peer support from people tapering the same medication in the forums.
Therapists cannot prescribe. If you need a clinician to write and manage the taper itself, browse the deprescribing clinician directory — many people work with both.
TaperCommunity is free: build a gradual taper plan with our planner, and get support from people tapering the same medication in the forums.
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Every region below has at least one featured tapering and withdrawal therapist — no empty pages.