Few practices in mental health are debated more than the long-term use of antidepressant medications, which are prescribed to roughly one in nine adults in the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A reassessment began in 2019, when two British researchers published a study that found that 56 percent of patients suffered from withdrawal symptoms when they stopped antidepressant medications and that 46 percent of those described their symptoms as severe.

The findings made headlines in Britain and had a powerful ripple effect, forcing changes to psychiatric training and prescribing guidelines. And they fed a growing grass-roots movement calling to rein in the prescription of psychotropic drugs that has, in recent months, gained new influence in the United States with the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary.

A new study, published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, makes the case that these warnings were overblown. The authors of the new paper found that a week after quitting antidepressants, patients reported symptoms like dizziness, nausea and vertigo, but that they remained, on average, “below the threshold for clinically significant” withdrawal.

Dr. Sameer Jauhar, one of the authors, said the new analysis should reassure both patients and prescribers.

“The messaging that came out in 2019 was all antidepressants can cause this and this can happen in this proportion of people, and that just doesn’t survive any scientific scrutiny,” said Dr. Jauhar, a professor of psychiatry at Imperial College London.