American Thought Leaders - The Mental Health Industry Is Incentivized to Keep Patients Medicated: Cooper Davis

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

At a young age, Cooper Davis was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed a low dose of Ritalin, which helped his ability to focus but caused unwanted side effects. To counteract them, he was prescribed other medications. By age 30, Davis was dependent on six different psychiatric drugs at any given time, what’s commonly known in the mental health community as a “prescription cascade.”“It’s complicated enough that the scientific consensus will generally say, ‘We don’t quite understand why these drugs work,’” says Davis.Today, he is executive director of the Inner Compass Initiative, where he addresses America’s mental health crisis and overmedication problem by helping people make informed choices about prescription drugs, diagnoses, and withdrawal.“Once people experience withdrawal symptoms, they get back on the drug. They treat it as confirmation that they are still mentally ill,” says Davis. “Experiential expertise, expertise gained from your own life, is just as valid—and probably more useful in many, many cases than clinical expertise.”Davis says that one out of four adults in America and 6 million children are currently taking at least one psychiatric drug.“That’s going to be inclusive of teenagers, but it is certainly the trend that more and more kids that are younger and younger are being diagnosed and prescribed earlier and earlier.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

It's complicated enough, the scientific consensus will generally say we don't quite understand why these drugs work. At a young age, Cooper Davis was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed a low dose of Ritalin, which helped his ability to focus but had side effects. To counteract them, he was prescribed other medications. By age 30, Davis was dependent on six different psychiatric drugs at any given time. What's commonly known in the mental health community is a prescription cascade. Once people experience withdrawal symptoms, they get back on the drug. They treat it as confirmation that they are still

mentally ill. Today, he is executive director of the Inner Compass Initiative, where he addresses America's mental health crisis and helps people make informed choices about prescription drugs, diagnoses, and withdrawal. Experiential expertise, expertise gained from your own life, is just as valid and probably more useful in many, many cases than clinical expertise. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jankielek. Cooper Davis, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Pleasure to be here. Been a huge shift in medicine since my time when I first sort of encountered the medical system as a kid. I had some serious surgery done, and there's been this huge rise in using medication, to my view, as the solution for a whole suite of things. And something I haven't covered much is the area of mental health. So let's dive in here. Well, I can say, when you talk about pill-popping culture, in the context of mental health, it's sort of this idea that if you have a problem that sort of fits categorically in the bucket of a mental health challenge or mental illness, the default response approach

to handling that problem is to pop a pill, certainly. That's like woven into the culture. You see it in movies, you see it in TV, and you see it all around you in real life. Or you can think of it as around one out of 12. Now, certainly when we're talking about children, we're talking about teenagers there, and that's where a lot of that is. But it is getting younger and younger,

more normalized to Medicaid kids, diagnosed kids and Medicaid kids. And I think there's a ton of different incentives that are bringing us in this direction. But the trend line has only gone up. inside the industry, from inside regulatory agencies, coming out and saying, this ship is going in a direction that nobody, nobody imagines is a good place. Pharmaceutical companies, a lot of fingers get pointed at them. You also have regulatory bodies. You have the media.

You have the doctors, the prescribers. But then you have the guidance counselors, the media, you have the doctors, the prescribers, but then you have the guidance counselors, the therapists, the social workers, and you have the patients themselves and their parents and family members. All these people have various levels of sort of complicity in what some people would describe as an over medication problem. I would say that over medication is a term that I cringe a little bit at just because it implies that there's a right amount of medication. And I don't know if that's necessarily even the case. But essentially, I think everybody knows there's a problem here.

But nobody can agree on what needs to happen in order to address it. And a lot of people want to look towards power and look towards industry own story that brings me to this world, I have come to the point where I think, actually, if we want to see a change in how this happens, it actually starts at the bottom of that list of agents that I just described to you. It actually starts with patients and then family members and then guidance counselors and social workers and then goes all the way up. Asking the people at the top who have sort of led us here to make the changes necessary to lead us away strikes me as a little preposterous, actually. Meanwhile, it's the people at the bottom, the people who are taking these drugs,

who are most incentivized to actually rethink this. So you say that everybody agrees there's a problem, but what is the issue? Some people will say, very smart people, will say with a straight face that we actually have an under-medication problem and that we have a mental health crisis that needs to be addressed. And the way to address that is to

increase access and increase quality of mental health care and mental health treatment. But increasing numbers of people will say that the treatments are either not working or possibly are causing a lot of the harms that we're seeing that we are understanding as, you know, instances of mental illness. There's a lot of different terms for this. Psychiatric iatrogenesis is a pretty clinical term. There are people who identify as being part of something called the prescribed harm community. You have iatrogenic harm exists in medicine, you know, depending on who you listen to. It's a pretty serious problem or a very serious problem.

Statistically, it's in terms of causes of preventable death, it's quite high, and that can be alarming. But if you also consider just the amount of health care that is being quote-unquote consumed, it makes sense that, you know, it's not all going to be gold. Sometimes it's not going to quite go the way you want it to and the way health care tends to work in this country, the incentives tend to run in the direction of more all the time, more, and not necessarily what's needed. And it's more about what is profitable, what is expeditious, or whatever. Tell me very quickly, so how prevalent is the use of psychiatric medication

in this country today? The CDC's numbers say that it's one out of four adults, or maybe just under, is currently taking at least one psychiatric drug and around 6 million kids. And you can define kids, you know, that's going to be inclusive of teenagers. But it is certainly the trend that more and more kids that are younger and younger are being diagnosed and prescribed earlier and earlier. And so I mean that that seems like a huge amount this would include some very simple medications all the way up to some you know antipsychotics or I'm trying to understand what kind of medications we're

talking about here. First of all, the idea of a simple medication is maybe mythological. There are medications that are familiar to us that have been very normalized. The only commonly prescribed psychiatric medication that I personally would consider to be simple would be a stimulant, like what's prescribed for ADHD. So your Adderall and your Ritalin. Those are pretty straightforward drugs. They've been around a pretty long time. They more or less do what it says on the box, what they're going to do. It's complicated enough that the scientific consensus will generally say we don't quite understand why these drugs work. And then, you know, the definition of what do we mean when we say work there, I mean, that's certainly up for debate. But when it comes to antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, sleep drugs, and that there's

increasingly a lot of off-label use as well. So if you are somebody who's taken an antidepressant for a very long period of time, increasingly people are prescribed antipsychotics despite not fitting any diagnostic criteria for which antipsychotics would typically be prescribed. But doctors will use these as an adjunct therapy when your antidepressant is no longer, you're not getting the therapeutic effect that you're looking for generally because tolerance effects or whatever it is. Or you are presenting with what's called treatment-resistant depression.

And so you're trying to find the right cocktail. All these terms that I'm using are pretty common parlance within the realm of mental health care. But every single one of them is a little package that once you start to unwrap it, it maybe flakes away. Like treatment-resistant depression, for example. I was somebody who was diagnosed at one point with treatment-resistant attention deficit disorder. And essentially what that means is that no drug treatment is sufficient. The severity of my disease is so great that I resist treatments that otherwise work for other people. And it's a very unique consumer product, right, where if it doesn't work as promised, you blame the consumer.

You know, there's something uniquely improperly effective or unaligned with this treatment that works for other people. So that's sort of like part and parcel of the overall tendency of this psychiatric paradigm that underlies the entire mental health industry. And everybody, whether you're a psychiatrist or not, the default orientation towards this stuff is this somewhat reductionist biological orientation to human struggle and human pain. So, well, tell me your story. Tell me how you got into this. So when I was in first grade, which would have been 1991, this is around the time that Ritalin

was on the cover of Time Magazine and ADD was something everybody was talking about. Um, and my first grade teacher in a parent-teacher conference told my parents, I think Cooper has ADD, and I think he would benefit from medication. This is a first-grade teacher in, like, sort of provincial, rural, regional elementary school who had probably read that Time magazine article and was also presumably a pretty good teacher with some experience.

So she made the case for my parents, and she also informed them that a decent number of the other boys in my class were already on Ritalin, and she was basically endorsing it. Today, people would be horrified that a teacher would take liberties to say such a thing and whatever. But at the time, my parents were horrified even then. And they were quite crunchy, and they were very thoughtful parents. I mean, my parents are wonderful. And they made the decision.

They said, well, it does sound like he does fit the criteria for this ADD thing, but we're absolutely not putting him on these drugs. And what I did grow up with was this sense that I probably have a thing called ADD, which is something about the way my brain is wired by default that makes it more difficult for me to perform in an academic setting or follow through on certain tasks or make myself do things that I don't want to do. My parents always said, when you're 18, you can make the decision for yourself if you want to go on the Easter Exit Council. It ended up being age 17 when I made that decision alone with my primary care doctor,

family doctor. I basically said, Doc, lots of people have told me I probably have ADD. I want to try the drugs. This doctor was a very sweet man, 80 years old at the time, still practicing. Called up a friend, probably another 80-year-old guy who was a psychiatrist. Hey, I got this kid in here. It says, blah, blah, blah. What do you think?

Yeah, okay, 10 milligrams. And that was the beginning of my career as a psychiatrist. Hey, I got this kid in here. It says, blah, blah, blah. What do you think? Yeah, okay, 10 milligrams. And that was the beginning of my career as a psychiatric patient. Started on Ritalin, five milligrams in the morning before school, and then a booster dose, although after lunchtime. And did it help? I went from a C student to an A student overnight. My entire life, every report card I ever got was does not work to potential, underperformed, distracted, class clown, all this stuff. Like the classic profile of a hyperactive kid. I was daydreaming a lot. There's an aversion to sitting down and doing a thing until it's done, unless it's a thing that I'm interested in. It's almost like a physical force field keeping me away. Sometimes I find myself like I'm forcing myself to write an email that feels so tedious,

and I realize I'm not breathing. It's that painful to be bored for me. And what the drug did is it took that away, and it made basically anything I chose to focus on equally engaging. Everything felt like it was interesting to me. And so once I was able to direct that, I could, I took great pleasure in directing it at the things that was supposed to do and that were necessary in order to achieve academically. And like within an institutional setting, I went from feeling

like a liability, a problem, to feeling like an example that a teacher could say, feeling that for the first time in high school was a revelation for me. It was a thrilling experience. And it confirmed the idea that whatever's going on here is a chemical issue in my brain. Because if it can be corrected so demonstrably, how could it be anything else? And why would I even be curious to find out if there's more to it? The problem is solved. I can finally be who I'm supposed to be. The world can finally see me for what I really have to offer. And this was not a high dose.

But even in the beginning, there were other things that changed. And I'll describe one thing. So when I was prescribed, and I think a lot of people have this experience, the doctor is required to tell you you might have you know, you might have dry mouth, you might have difficulty sleeping, you might have appetite decrease or whatever. They're required to give you, there's informed incentives required. So they basically tell you, you know, the top line side effects of whatever the drug is. But what he couldn't have told me, because there's no studies for this,

but what I would have known very quickly if I had talked to somebody else who had taken the same drug at this time in their life, who was of a similar type of person to myself, the drug does what it's, you know, it's really active for the first two, three hours after you take it. You have that morning dose and you have like a lunchtime dose. But by three, four o'clock, five o'clock in high school and in college, you're done with class. You're done with school for the day. And now you're going to go socialize with your friends. At that time of day, the drug is now wearing off and I'm experiencing what is widely known a crash. There's a stimulant crash once it wears off.

And it looks a little bit like an inversion in some ways of the effect of the drug. So you're feeling a little less gregarious or you're feeling a little more withdrawn. You're grumpy. You're a little more anxious maybe. And so that was the person that was showing up in all these social environments for me, which cumulatively had an effect on who my friends were throughout high school, into college. And then who your friends are matters a great deal for how your life ends up unfolding. The way that that played out for me would never have played out that way if I had never gone on the drug. There's no reason the doctor would even think to talk about that at all.

Like there's not a lot of like quantifiables in there to build studies around to capture evidence or define this as a risk of any kind um and so i think i offered that very particular example because this is all these different drugs they have effects and then they have indirect effects side effects is a marketing term all direct all effects are primary effects there's a desired effect, and then there's everything else, which is generally understood to be a side effect. You're trying, when you're prescribing or when you're taking the drug, you're trying to get that desired effect and then minimize those undesired effects as much as possible.

But some of those undesired effects, you don't even know what they are until you are quite a few years down the road. I think that is something that when we are talking about what needs to change on this whole issue, a big part of it is how do we expand the knowledge base from which we are making decisions about whether to go on these drugs or stay on these drugs or how many to be on. How do we expand that knowledge base beyond what is sort of the received expertise, the clinical, academic, the training of the clinician, the prescriber? How do we expand the awareness of the average person to seek out the expertise of people who have actually lived this for themselves. And this, of course, speaks to your Intercompass initiative, of course.

But before we jump into that, I mean, just looking at it very much from the outside, it sounds like you got this drug, you were able to perform well, it helped with your ability to learn. Maybe you didn't get the friends that you wanted, but that's like some people would say hashtag first world problem. I'm joking, right? But I mean, okay, so that's a side effect. But man, this thing changed your life in such a positive way. What's the issue? The issue revealed itself over time. You wouldn't think necessarily that a drug at a minimum dose like that could have some sort of hidden downstream effects. As you take a drug, if you're taking a drug every day,

we all understand that these drugs, generally speaking, what they do is they are making changes to the levels of different neurotransmitters in the brain. Any psychotropic drug, anything psychoactive, if you're taking it habitually, the brain is always looking for homeostasis. It's always looking to rebalance itself. So eventually, it changes its own sort of neurotransmitter activity to accommodate the presence of the drug. This manifests as something called tolerance. So whether you're a heroin user or an antidepressant user or whatever it is, and different drugs can have different rates of tolerance and it can, you know, come and go in different ways. But fundamentally, what happens is

over time, the therapeutic effect that you're looking for generally diminishes. And sometimes the non-therapeutic or undesired effects do not diminish. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't. Like the appetite suppression with stimulants, for example, that's something that pretty much sticks around for a lot of people, and it's different for everybody. So what happened in my experience was as I, you know, year after year taking these every single day, my brain is quite used to having these chemicals present.

It's accommodating for their presence. And I start to become more and more anxious. My sleep is more and more disruptive. And I'm already seeing a psychiatrist every month because I have to get my refills. And the psychiatrist, how's everything going? And so after a few appointments where I responded to that question, like, oh, well, you know, I'm still having trouble sleeping, and, you know, I get really worked up and stressed out about A, B, and C, and it's, you know, it's starting to affect your relationships,

it's starting to affect your schoolwork. You know, why don't we just try something you can take? And so for me, that was a benzodiazepine called Ativan. And so that was my second drug. So I'm taking a stimulant, and then to counteract and also kind of help with that come down as well, where you tend to get extra jittery, I'm taking a benzodiazepine. It's like Valium is one.

Xanax is another benzodiazepine for me. I started with Ativan. And so now I've got something that kind of speeds me up and something that slows me down. I was prescribed the benzodiazepine as needed, not to exceed, you know, to a day. I can take it when I feel I need it. So now I'm like, okay, well, I have this going on later. I know in an hour I have to be there, but I have this schoolwork due at such and such a time. So now I'm using these two little levers to kind of show up to life in like a custom Superman costume.

Like I'm ready. I'm like prepared because I can literally toggle the orientation of my brain towards the demands of my environment. Again, it doesn't sound so bad, right? Academically, it was an enormous help. So because of these drugs, I think because I was on these drugs, it allowed me to get grades I wouldn't have otherwise gotten, which got me into the school of my choice for college. And I was able to move into the career of my choice after that because these drugs allowed me to, it felt like superpowers. I could turn down the things about myself where I would get in my own way

and turn up my gifts is what it really felt like. But again, tolerance. way and turn up my gifts is what it really felt like but again tolerance so over time tolerance is going up the side effects they're real and when you're toggling yourself up and down like this for a while eventually that that does a number on you on your psyche on your biochemistry on your appetite on your, like the feedback system where your body is telling you what it needs. It's like very muted. I'm overriding my body signals constantly. So eventually it's like, I'm starting to get kind of sad. I'm not feeling great. So then the antidepressants come in. And then from there, this is called prescription cascade, and it's very common.

You know, the antidepressants, and then you're jumping around, different dosages, different stimulants, different benzodiazepines. Some doctors didn't want me on benzodiazepines, they put me on gabapentinoids, which are similar but less addictive. You're starting to have more trouble sleeping, why don't we add a sleep drug to the mix? Might as well. I'm already at the doctor's office. I'm already at the pharmacy. Insurance makes this all sort of a negligible cost. And by age 30, I have, you know, at any given time,

I'm on five or six different psychiatric drugs. I am also inconstant, unreliable, and I feel completely dependent on being able to use these drugs in order to fulfill the responsibilities and the roles of the life I create for myself. So this thing that the drugs enabled me to build, I now felt, whether it's true or not, I now truly felt that the drugs also enabled me to keep it. And therefore, without them, I would not be able to kind of fulfill the promises

that I had been able to make while taking these drugs. It was clearly, to me and everyone around me, it was not helping me. I was not well. But at the same time, I felt like if I did not do it, everything that I had built and my identity as an adult person in the world. So age 17 to age 30 is when you figure out, hopefully, how you fit into society. And for me, it was 100% predicated on access to all of these levers that I could push and pull. So I ended up coming off of all of them. But because there was a crisis, because you realized that you can't do this

anymore. I mean, there must've been something that really... Well, there were, there were, there were many, many crises. I had, I lost jobs. I had lost relationships. I had made bad decisions about where I would live or what, you know, make plans that I could not follow through on. I was disorganized. And so there were many crises along the road. I would say that maybe if there was one thing that finally triggered the enough is enough, like I have to figure out, I have to start over, was when my girlfriend at the time became pregnant. And in that moment, I think a lot of people out there can relate to this, I understood

myself in the third person a little bit. I got out of myself a little bit and realized I am now going to be responsible for another soul in the world. And the way I am today, that won't go well for that person. I couldn't be responsible for a goldfish at the moment. So it was at that point that I was sort of forced to make a decision that I knew was going to have to get made. I had known for a while. Interestingly, every time leading up to that, that I had talked to my prescriber. And I had different prescribers.

I moved around a lot. I lived in different places. I had a lot of brief stints of employment. When I would go to a prescriber and say, I think I want to find out who I would be off of all of these things, there was trepidation. They were not eager to scaffold that experience, to guide me through it, to get specific about how that might be done. It was something, well, we should talk about that some more.

In hindsight, I can understand why now there was a hesitation. And that's when, you know, I also was able to look around and say, I really had nothing to lose here also. Like at that point, this stuff that I thought I needed to stay on the drugs in order to keep, it was already gone. And so that was like sort of the beginning of this next chapter of my life, which then ultimately led to the work that we do at Intercompass. Well, so tell me and tell me about that. I mean, we got a bit of a hint, but you've developed a whole kind of structure around that.

Yeah. So I think what Intercompass initiative, you know, it was founded in 2017 and fundamentally, you know, it's mission statement is helping people make more informed choices about psychiatric drugs, diagnoses, and withdrawal. And when I say withdrawal, I'm referring to the experience of coming off of these drugs. By the way, none of which are explicitly approved for long-term use. Just a side note, so when the FDA is approving these drugs so that doctors can prescribe them, generally it's on the basis of studies that run from six to eight weeks. Very rarely is anybody taking a psychiatric drug of any kind for eight weeks. People take them for years, sometimes decades. Very often, once you start, it is extremely unlikely you will ever come off.

You might change. You might reduce dose or whatever. And part of the reason that is, when you're coming off of this drug that you're habituated to, that your brain is now, you know, whether you had a chemical imbalance in the first place is up for debate. There's no way to measure that really. But certainly once you're taking this drug and your brain, you know, sort of up or down regulates its own neurotransmitter production to accommodate the presence of the drug, now you have a chemical imbalance.

And so you need to taper very slowly so the brain has time to kind of adjust for the diminishing dosage. So the longer you've been on it, the slower that taper process needs to be in order to avoid withdrawal symptoms. When you do have withdrawal symptoms, they generally look like the mirror of whatever the drug was doing. So in the case of an antidepressant,

it's going to look an awful lot like depression, and it's going to match the diagnostic criteria of depression in the DSM, which is the handbook that prescribers use to decide which drug to give to which person. And so what often happens is, because there's a lack of studies, withdrawal and proper tapering methodology, when people decide they want to come off their drugs, they end up coming off too quickly.

They have withdrawal symptoms. And they and their prescriber experience those symptoms as evidence of mental illness, whether it's their original mental illness is still present or maybe a new one. Maybe they are qualifying for some other mental illness. And if they're on multiple drugs, which is more or less the rule, not the exception at this point, we call it polypharmacy, that picture gets even more complicated. So is this a withdrawal symptom? Is this a side effect of this other drug that has now been revealed as the situation changes? It's very hard to tease it all out. You know, you can get really in the weeds with it, but bottom line is it doesn't feel good. And whatever you need to do in your life,

you need to still do that stuff. So generally speaking, once people experience withdrawal symptoms, they get back on the drug. They treat it as confirmation that they are still mentally ill and that they're meant to be on these drugs. And whatever little voice was saying, maybe we should get off of this, they want to push that away. And it's completely reasonable. We feel like focusing on withdrawal is critically important until such time as the prescribers themselves and the people who fund drug studies get some more data on this stuff. The only thing that you've got is the experience of other people

who have found their way off these drugs. And one of the amazing things the internet has provided is an opportunity for that type of experience to be shared and to be iterated on. And so what Intercompass did at the outset, we wanted to make sure that people had access to all the information, all of it, about what these drugs actually do, what they don't do, what the long-term evidence base looks like, and what do people find helpful when they're thinking about coming off, because a lot of that information they're not getting anywhere else. You can get it online. There's a ton of forums, just like any other sort of subculture online. There are a ton of forums and spaces where people talk endlessly about this stuff.

And so what we did is we kind of like went into what we call the layperson, psychiatric patient community, drug taker community, whatever you want to call it, and try and pick out, you know, the general wisdom that people had collected around. And then take that, take the information provided by the FDA and by the drug manufacturers and the drug fact sheets that come. Every time you pick up a prescription, you get like a book full of information, but it's very hard to parse. Most people just throw them away. We took all of that, and then we tried to lay it out in such a way that it's readable, that you can quickly get to the information

you're looking for, and that you also have an opportunity if you want to dialogue with somebody else about this stuff that you can find somebody else who's interested in talking this through or going through a similar experience. So we have these written resources, everything from mini booklets about every drug class. We have a very granular taper companion guide which walks people through the steps of planning and then implementing a taper

based on harm reduction principles. We have a couple different platforms that we use that allow you to connect with other people in real life. We call them connect platforms, but essentially you put your information in, what drugs you take or took, what you have tapered off of, where you live, all of this stuff, and you can sort of anonymously connect with other people, but filter by geography with the idea that we want to make sure that people have the ability to find each other in real life and support one another. So this is what the nonprofit has been doing for the past, I'd say, 2017.

So it's been quite a while now, seven years. And we've learned an enormous amount of stuff in that period of time. And also the landscape and the dialogue around mental health has changed dramatically. What would you say were the, you know, one or two most important lessons you've learned? I would say the number one most important lesson that we've learned, which is informing sort of the next phase of our work, relaunching, that sort of expanded scope and mission this year, is that there are people who spend a lot of time talking about the lack of evidence for

safety and efficacy for a lot of these drugs that are being prescribed to almost anybody these days. It is not hard to qualify for the DSM criteria for something if you walk into a psychiatrist's office. So basically, all that information is out there, but people generally aren't that interested in it until something bad has happened, right? Until the fact that they didn't know that ahead of time ended up harming them in some way. Tapering is where it happens most often.

People just cold turkey these drugs or their doctor takes them off over a month or two months, even though they've been taking it for a decade and a half. And then their life flies out of control, and they think, geez, I'm a truly crazy person. Well, no, you're a drug injured. That's what this is. You were tapered too quickly, and your brain has not had time to deal with that trauma. It's just struggling. So the information is there. And yet, the rates of prescription, the rates of unnecessary prescription are climbing. The biggest lesson that we've learned is if this the tide is going to change here, it's not happening, sort of in the scientific discourse, it's not happening based on facts

It's not happening based on an analysis of the trends and the outcomes and and sort of like what? underpins the General dialogue around you know mental health in this country right now It's happening on the basis of individual stories It's sort of in the cultural layer, which is where people realize that this very particularized way of looking at human suffering and human struggle, in a lot of ways, it's kind of arbitrary and even silly at times to imagine that if you are a 16-year-old girl, your boyfriend just broke up with you,

you are so distraught, you can't imagine living, you say, I want to die. The idea that the best expert to turn to in that scenario is some, like, 65-year-old man who went to Tufts or whatever, and is a psychiatrist, that that guy can look at that girl and properly assess what she needs in that moment is kind of silly. And yet, very much the narratives that we're exposed to, there's a sense of risk if you turn to any other sort of type of expertise other than a clinical medical expert for these very complicated problems

that are, I think, calling them medical problems is not obvious to me that that makes any sense. It's become very normal. But what that girl's going through is a very human, like this is what happens when you are a teenager. As soon as you say, I want to die, I want to kill myself, you've now not just triggered a set of policies, depending on who hears it,

if they're a mandated reporter or whatever, policies that could trigger a response that can be really traumatic, more traumatic than the breakup, because now you're a threat to yourself or others potentially, just like a category of person whose rights are not present anymore. You can decide what you want to do with them. But it's like the idea that this is a medical situation that requires medical expertise, that that is what is going to lead you out of this

and lead you towards a sustainable, resilient persona that can handle these types of things. In a lot of ways, it's laughable. But if you can take the results of that teenage girl's breakup and basically convert it into something that you can bill insurance for, then of course it's going to be medicalized. Right. As we finish up, how does your initiative help people in this situation?

Is it just as simple as knowing, hey, there's people that have had this exact issue just like you in the past, and here's how they dealt with it? You know, is that connecting her with someone who's experienced it? There's a few different ways that we aim to do it. But the big picture is you've got to get people to care about this stuff in the first place. And you've also got to get people to kind of approach this with a sense of common sense. Everybody we know has been through difficulties, some more than others. Every single person has their own life experience, which is incredibly rich data to anecdotal. But when you are hearing from one person how they got through a problem that

you're currently dealing with, there is something in there that you just can't get any other way, right? And that common sense and that compassion and that care and that human-to-human connection, this is something that mental health care has a very hard time providing. Everything is transactional. Everything is predicated on some kind of system. There's a larger context to every sort of human-to-human relationship happening there. It makes it kind of difficult for the healing power of human connection and for identification to do its thing. So what we're trying to do at the nonprofit, there's two things.

One is just this larger question of how do you get people to care about this and to realize that experiential wisdom, experiential expertise, expertise gained from your own life is just as valid and probably more useful in many, many cases than clinical expertise. So that's just sort of a messaging thing that we're working on. And we'll be rolling out some more stuff this year, really focused on trying to get that point across in different ways. And then we want to, through our actual programs, go further than what we've already done and

demonstrate ways in which that layperson wisdom, that layperson expertise can be organized, broadcast, presented, made accessible, and to entice people to share what they have, what they've learned in their lives. And so one of the things that we have coming out is something we're calling Stories Library. We've worked with McGill up in Canada. We've worked with their anthropology department. They've looked through some of our databases

and helped us kind of do a qualitative analysis on some of our existing stories, things people have shared with us over the years as part of our other programs. And we've come up with a very straightforward form that people can fill out, just as you would fill out a form in a new Facebook account or whatever. But that's meant to sort of capture what was going on in your life before you encountered the mental health industry. You know, what was it like once you were engaged with it?

And if you are no longer engaged with it, you know, what was that process like? More or less, that's what we're trying to capture for people. And this library will be just a searchable database like any other. And what we hope to do is then take what people share with us, and instead of going out there on our social media and saying stuff like, did you know these drugs are only studied six to eight weeks? Learn more at our website, stuff like that. We want to just grab quotes from people's real stories, with their permission, of course,

and just get that out there. And the idea is we just want to become a conduit for layperson wisdom, layperson expertise, and the compassion we have for one another. And I think that the stories library is one way we can get at that. Another way in which we can get at that is just like longer form interviews like this, where you really give people the opportunity to unpack this, but you're approaching it in a way that is not, you're not using all the terminology of sort of mental health orthodoxy, which tends to cut off the details of people's experience.

I could say anxiety, and people generally understand what I mean by that. There are so many different things that you can describe as anxiety. And so we want to just find more and more ways to engage people and get them to share what they've been through, what's happened to them, without it being focused on their diagnosis or whatever they feel they identify with, whatever, like defect or psychiatric category that they have understood as being an accurate descriptor of themselves. Ask them to actually describe with detail using normal words, not clinical language. So everybody on our team is somebody who has their own experience of taking or coming off

of these drugs. Every single one of us has had the experience of when you tell your story in public, people respond. They write it. A lot of them will crawl over broken glass to just talk to you for a second and say, thank you for sharing your story. What you wrote, this is the first time I feel like I see myself. Through the lens of your own experience, I finally have words for what I've been through. And to which I say, I'm so happy to hear it.

Now you go tell your story and get it out there in as many places as you can. I think that this has the potential. You look at a movement like the Me Too movement. This is a very modern internet-based viral social movement. When somebody goes out there and they start to share something that previously they didn't have the courage or the language or the incentive or the forum to share it and other people see it they speak up and they say this is also my experience. And previously a lot of people only have clinical language or mainstream mental health narratives.

My life was a mess. Then I accepted my diagnosis. I found the right cocktail of drugs that worked for me. And now I manage my illness and live a productive life. That's the template for the mainstream mental health narrative. And for some people, it works beautifully. But for so many many it doesn't. And then they experience the fact that it's not working as a moral failing in themselves of some kind, similar to treatment resistance. Like the best and brightest scientists in the world have figured out the mysteries of the mind and of the soul.

We call it mental health treatment, right? If it doesn't work for me, it's because I'm that sick. Or maybe it doesn't work for you because it's not designed to work for you. It's designed to work for all the other industries and partners and incentives that are flowing through this many, many billions of dollars sloshing around here. This is not something that is truly just isolated on the well-being of the individuals who are reliant on this because there's nowhere else to turn. So we want to, this is what we want to do. And to people who will say, like, this is utopian, this is unrealistic, I would point

to the success of something like Alcoholics Anonymous. That's a peer-to-peer organization. It's also a movement. It changed how we understand addiction completely. It is non-hierarchical. It is decentralized. There are no power players. Anyone can start a meeting wherever they live. There is no reason that this

shouldn't exist for a broader group of people, not just suffering with addiction, but something like this. I'm not saying the 12-step model in particular, but the same template where it's people's own personal experience of getting through this stuff becomes the subject of a meeting you can have with your neighbors in your locality. If one out of four people is currently taking a psychiatric drug, I think we could fill a few rooms in most towns in America. I do think that our organization, because we come from that place of each of us having our own lived experience of this stuff. We're better positioned to Build out this model we have the credibility with the people who are engaged on this stuff

That the mainstream players the pharma funded NGOs and nonprofits out there Certainly, you know the government federal agencies that are concerned with this stuff. We have the ability to create a grassroots movement here, and I don't think it's ideological. And anything that actually can help solve a problem, I think has a real chance of catching on. This is needed. Again, there's a mental health crisis and higher rates of treatment than ever before in history. So either the treatment is causing this crisis

or the treatment is not doing much to slow it down. So obviously we have to start looking in other places and where else to look than people who have actually done it and been through it for themselves. Well, Cooper Davis, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much, Jan. I really appreciate the opportunity. This has been great. Thank you all for joining Cooper Davis and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.