Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 983 | What Doctors Aren’t Telling You About Antidepressants | Guest: Brooke Siem

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

Today on this Wellness Wednesday, we're sitting down with Brooke Siem, professional chef, 2017 champion of cooking competition show "Chopped," and author of "May Cause Side Effects: A Memoir." Brooke was put on antidepressants when she was 15, and stayed on them for the next 15 years of her life. She explains the debilitating side effects she endured, her experiences with doctors, and the severe withdrawal she underwent while finally coming off the drugs. She shares her warning to those being put on these drugs, and explains why being an informed patient is so important. You can buy her memoir here: https://www.amazon.com/May-Cause-Side-Effects-Memoir/dp/1949481700 --- Timecodes: (01:48) Starting antidepressants (07:00) How antidepressants affected Brooke (14:00) Antidepressant withdrawal (31:03) Winning 'Chopped' (34:16) Pharmaceutical industry & managing emotions (53:00) Brooke’s mental health now --- Today's Sponsors: Good Ranchers — Go to GoodRanchers.com and use code 'ALLIE' when you subscribe to get free jumbo chicken wings for a year! Jase Medical — get up to a year’s worth of many of your prescription medications delivered in advance. Go to JaseMedical.com today and use promo code “ALLIE". Carly Jean Los Angeles — use promo code RELATABLE to get 20% off your entire order at CarlyJeanLosAngeles.com! CrowdHealth — get your first 6 months for just $99/month. Use promo code 'ALLIE' when you sign up at JoinCrowdHealth.com. --- Relevant Episodes: Ep 857 | Is ADHD Real? | Guest: Dr. Roger McFillin (Part One) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-857-is-adhd-real-guest-dr-roger-mcfillin-part-one/id1359249098?i=1000624680025 Ep 858 | The Disturbing Origins of Adderall | Guest: Dr. Roger McFillin (Part Two) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-858-the-disturbing-origins-of-adderall-guest-dr/id1359249098?i=1000624797989 Ep 821 | Why Antidepressants Don’t Fix Depression | Guest: Dr. Roger McFillin https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-821-why-antidepressants-dont-fix-depression-guest/id1359249098?i=1000616890403 Ep 822 | The Big Money Behind Big Medicine | Guest: Dr. Roger McFillin https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-822-the-big-money-behind-big-medicine-guest-dr/id1359249098?i=1000617050991 --- Links: Washington Examiner: "What I wish I had known before I stopped taking antidepressants, and before I started" https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2685253/what-i-wish-i-had-known-before-i-stopped-taking-antidepressants-and-before-i-started/ --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Contrary to popular and expert opinion, antidepressants are not a fix-all, and they can actually have very serious and deadly ramifications. Today with us is Brooke Seam. She is the author of May Cause Side Effects, a memoir of antidepressant withdrawal. She is going to tell us her story of getting on antidepressants, getting off antidepressants, and what she wishes people, especially parents knew about the prescribing of antidepressants to children. This episode is brought to by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com. Use Code Alley at checkout. That's good ranchers.com Code Alley. Brooke, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Could you tell everyone who you are and what you do? Sure. My name is Brooke Seam. And I'm actually a professional chef by trade,

but I also do a lot of work in patient advocacy and doctor education for safety prescribing practices of psychiatric drugs. Yeah, I think I first heard your name or saw your name when I read an article by you in the Washington Examiner. It was in 2022. So it was a little while ago now. And the title is what I wish I had known before I stopped taking antidepressants and before I started.

You wrote a book called May Cause Side Effects. It's a memoir of antidepressant withdrawal. So I just want to hear about your story. Like, let's go back to what led you to. start talking about this. Yeah, so I was 15 years old and my father suddenly passed away. And this was 2001. So we were in quite a different world, especially, you know, the internet was basically

dial-up. And there just wasn't quite the amount of information we had at the time for better or worse, perhaps. But my mom took me to a child psychologist a couple of months after my dad died because I was a very stoic kid. I wasn't outwardly grieving. and there was just some concern that maybe I needed some help. And how old were you?

I was 15. 15. Okay. And so the child psychologist, she and I didn't really click. It wasn't a good match. And she called my mom up one day and said, you're wasting your money. What your kid needs is a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. I'm diagnosing a depressive and anxiety disorder and recommending medication.

And that was pretty much it. I mean, what was my mom supposed to do at that point, right? She's a widow. She's grieving. her husband. It was just the three of us and now we were down to two. And the only person she ever had to really bounce ideas off of when it came to me was gone. And why should she question the recommendation of a professional? So she took me to the child psychiatrist and I walked out with a prescription for some antidepressant. We tried a few before we landed on a combination of

FXR and Wobutron XL, which weren't approved for use in children's and teens in 2001 and still aren't today. But I ended up staying on that combination of drugs and then about four more were added on over the course of the next couple years. And I was on that until I was 30 and no one questioned it. Okay. And you said that you were a stoic kid. Before your dad died, you were a stoic kid. I was a very serious ballet dancer. So I was taught to smile through the pain and, you know, you're bleeding into your point shoes, but got to look pretty and make sure that you don't, you know, you don't offend anyone, right? That's kind of the nature of about. LA. So, you know, and I think there was also a level of shock as well because my father died suddenly.

It was and we were out of the country at the time. So it was basically the call that said, you have to come home. You know, my dad's gone. You and your mom were out of the country. We were trying to visit family. And so we were in Italy and then had to get home. And he was pretty much gone by the time we got back. So you were already a pretty stoic, serious person that had learned to kind of suppress your emotion. and reactions in some ways. And then when your dad died, obviously, you're going to be sad about that. But what led your mom to thinking that you actually need to go to a psychologist? It was a child psychologist.

A child psychologist. Why did she think that you needed that? I think it was a combination of things. One is just that I wasn't, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't crying. I wasn't outwardly grieving in a way that. I don't even know if appropriate it's the right word. I think it was just a little weird to people. Also, my grades started slipping a little bit. I wasn't going from, you know, getting A's to hanging out in the back alleys and getting Fs. It wasn't that bad, but there was a little bit of detachment there. And then also, because I was a serious ballet dancer, I started dropping weight. So I definitely adopted some kind of eating disorder tendencies.

And so I think all those things together, my mom just straight up got scared. And she's told me, you know, recently because we talk about this a lot and we're so close. And I don't begrudge any of the decisions she made because I know she was just doing the best she thought she could do at the time. But she said to me, I had just lost one third of my family and I was terrified. I was going to lose another third too. Yeah. So it was, I think, at the end of the day, an act of fear. Yeah.

And like you said, it's not like she had someone to bounce these ideas off of. She just needed another adult to come alongside her and help with you as she was grieving herself, right? Yeah, she wasn't. And she had other adults, but they were all in the world of psychology and therapy. And so they looked at the situation and basically said the same thing. My clinical expertise says that, yeah, give her some antidepressants. Because again, this was 2001. Prozac had been on the market at that point for 10, 12 years. came on the market in the late 80s. It had recently been approved for use in children and teens.

And then Zoloft was also on the market for children and teens at the time. So we were really in the infancy of this medication strategy. Yeah. And I was just kind of got wrapped up into it at a time when these things were looked at as completely innocuous. And you said that most of the adults in her life were in the psychology psychiatry world. Why was that? Well, just the one she talked to. She went to a friend of hers who's been a psychologist for 40 years and another friend of hers who had experienced there too.

So your parents weren't in that field professionally. No, no, no, no, not at all. Okay. That was just kind of who she was getting advice from, which I'm sure she felt like, okay, well, I'm getting advice from the experts. And so that's just what I need to do. So you were put on these medications, a combination of medications. And then you said a few years later, you had more added. Why was that? What happened after you were prescribed these medications? So I can tell you what happened in real time, and then I can also tell you my retrospective knowledge of it. But in real time, what happened is I was put on the combination of the effectsor and wellbutrin, and within about a year was having a series of physical side effects. So I was having thyroid issues. I developed something called bile reflex disease, and I was having really bad, you know, acne and female problems and all these things where some of it is just being a teenager. Yeah. And then the rest of it was, well, if your thyroid's not going so well, you go to an endocrinologist and they give you thyroid medication. If you have bile reflux disease,

they give you something called sucralphate. So the next thing you know, I just had a series of four more medications that were put on to deal with these other side effects. And no one connected the dots between maybe this has to do with the antidepressants. Never, literally never occurred to anyone. It didn't even occur to me until 15 years later when I hit a point where it was time to get off these drugs for a variety of reasons. I got off everything and none of my symptoms came back for the thyroid problems or the bio-reflux disease, which was baffling to me because I had been under the assumption that these were lifelong chronic illnesses. Yeah. And did anyone,

connected to, because I know you said that you had some disordered eating. I know with ballet, you're made to stay very thin. Sometimes that can cause, you know, thyroid problems. Did anyone connect it to those things? You know, I mean, not really, not in a way that would have, you know, made sense. I felt like we were looking for zebras when we really should have been looking at horses, right? To me, it's obvious in retrospect. My nutrition was not great. So, yeah, and I was grieving. And I was grieving still and it was coming out in physical manifestations. And I was under the stress of, you know, there was still the pressure to take the SATs and go to college and get a prom date and all these normal things. Yeah, it's the worst time anyway. Yeah. So how did these antidepressants

make you feel emotionally? I actually have a lot of memory loss too around this time. Some of it has to do, I think, with the trauma of losing my dad the way I did. And others, antidepressants are known to cause memory problems and cognitive problems. So I think it's the combination. But look, I wasn't thriving before and I wasn't thriving after. But what I do know is 15 years later, I was more depressed than I had ever been. Yeah. And so clearly they weren't working any. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about that. So you were on this medication. You just stayed on the medication just because it's just what you were told you needed to do, right? Yeah. If the doctor tells you know, you need insulin, you have, because you have diabetes, you don't question it.

Yeah. Doctor told me I was depressed, so he told me to take an antidepressant. And question that. Why would I? Right. And that was the framework that was kind of programmed into me very early, right at that time when I was forming the foundation of my identity. So I just carried that.

And then I carried that, you know, three years later, I'm in charge of my own medical care when I turned 18. So at that point, I had full. just believed that I was this kind of fundamentally broken brain walking around in a body and that I needed this. And there was nothing reflecting back in my life questioning that. But by the time I turned 30, I had spent the better part of my 20s in New York City. I was objectively miserable. I was really depressed. I was having a lot of suicidal ideation. I had no emotion to anything. And it just kind of dawned on me.

that I had spent my entire adult life on powerful psychiatric drugs and that if they were working, I wouldn't be thinking about these things. And on top of that, it just bothered me that I clearly was so deeply unhappy in my life and I had made the decision that led me to that point through the lens of a powerful psychoactive agent. So I kind of started to wonder if I would have made the same decisions had I not been medicated. And at the same time, I got an opportunity to travel around the world for a year. And this was, I basically won this weird little lottery. And I physically could not take the amount of prescription drugs I had in a suitcase with me and drag it around the world. Wow. And I also would not have been able to get reliable refills in a lot of the places we were

going to since they were kind of, you know, not, wasn't London or Paris. We were in other countries. So I didn't trust it. And so I said, okay, well, I guess I have to get off of these and discover my baseline, which I thought would be an easy process. All your medications, so not just the antidepressants, but all the medications you wanted to get off of them at the time? I only wanted to get off the antidepressants to begin with and figured everything else was a completely unrelated, you know, chronic issue. Yeah. But then once I started going through, I got off the antidepressants and was in antidepressant withdrawal. there was just kind of something in me that just wondered if maybe I didn't need this stuff anymore,

if it was all somehow connected. So at that point, I was in such health from having pulled the antidepressants out of my system that I just kind of said, screw it, let's just stop everything else, which, you know, don't recommend that to a friend, perhaps. Definitely talk with your doctor and all those sorts of things. But I just stopped. And as it turned out, none of the symptoms came back for any of the physical ailments. Tell us about what it was like, what did it feel like physically emotionally to completely stop your antidepressants cold turkey?

Okay. Yeah. So let's start with the cold turkey thing. So I did what I was supposed to do. I saw a doctor. That's what the commercials say to do. They say, talk to your doctor. So I did. I went and I talked to her and I told her what the situation was. And she was really not supportive of it at all. And she wanted me to wait for a better time. And I just kind of said, but this is the time. There is no better. time. This is what we're dealing with. And so she said, okay, fine. Well, I was on 37.5 milligrams of effects or XR, which is the lowest dose on the market. So she said, I can't prescribe you a lower dose. Basic, just stop. And good luck. She actually used the word good luck. She said, stop the effects are first. We'll deal with the wellbutrin later. And again, in retrospect, now knowing what I know and doing all the safety prescribing work, I know that there were other strategies that she could have employed or she could have used, but she didn't, whether or not, because she was ignorant or chose not to, I don't know. Again, this was also 2016. We didn't

get the first systematic review of antidepressant withdrawal in research until 2015. So this was still kind of new, barely new. But she told me I would have the flu for a couple days, maybe. That's kind of what it would feel like. Flu-like symptoms. Yeah, maybe hot and cold, a little on edge. But instead it was what happened to me was far worse than the depression had ever ever ever been or anything I had experienced it was a full on psychological assault of of violent thoughts and images at all hours of the day all my senses changed so I literally started seeing color more vibrantly and things went from a little softer on the edges to super sharp I developed really severe noise sensitivity.

My skin got something called nodular vascularisculitis, which is basically an autoimmune response in the blood vessels. And it is because of extreme physical stress on the body. So my taste changed, you know, like literally what I liked and didn't like to eat changed. Gut issues, huge mood swings that, you know, ranged from rage to actually feeling joy for the first time in 15 years. And it was all so fickle and precarious and there was no logic to it. And it was so intense. And I literally thought I was going crazy because I had never felt like this in my entire life.

And then all of a sudden I stopped taking these drugs. I didn't have the flu. Something else was going on. And I thought to myself, well. Much worse than the flu. Yeah. I thought this must be me without the drugs. I must really actually be someone who's really ill.

Wow. Wow. So you thought, okay, I'm a crazy person and this pill has basically been helping me maintain my crazy. Yes. And but I was too scared to tell my psychiatrist about it because I thought that if I told her what I was experiencing, she would put me on an involuntary psychiatric cold. And there was- You felt that out of your mind. What?

You felt that out of your mind that you were afraid that that would be the measure that she would take. Yeah, because here's the thing. is that, yes, I was having these awful, awful thoughts and physical experiences and the emotion in my body was just completely off the charts and often inappropriate. Like the reactions would be to something very small. But I was also having these moments of, like I said, color. It was like I could finally see color for the first time. And I could laugh at something and feel true joy.

And so there was also this expansion on the other side too. Yeah. And that was so curious to me because I had just, I had so believed I was a person who was never, ever, ever going to get better and that I was just depressed and that was it. Yeah. And so the fact that I was, you know, feeling some joy and some excitement and some curiosity for the first time as an adult was so attractive to me that I was. I just there was something in me that just did not believe that there was something wrong with that part. And so, you know, in addition to being scared that if I told her about the bad stuff, she would commit me and then I'd end up, you know, drugged up in some awful psychiatric hospital in Manhattan. I just didn't want to give up this little teeny glimmers of beauty I was experiencing.

And so I ended up talking to a different psychologist friend of mine who was based in another state, so she couldn't commit me. And she said, I think that you're having a withdrawal reaction to coming off this drug. And that was enough to convince me that not only was I never going to take these drugs again, but that I was just going to ride it out because I was so mad all of a sudden that I had been robbed of the feeling of joy or curiosity for my entire adult life. That's what I was thinking for 15 years. It's like, I don't know, as you're talking, I'm thinking of like a metaphor of you are looking through a window and it's been fog. Yes. And everyone's telling you, you know, this is just how it is. This is how you can see.

You can't see any differently. And then someone starts like rubbing away the fog little by little. And you're like, wait, that's what trees look like. That's what the world is like. Exactly. And you're like, someone. for 15 years has been fogging this window and not even allowing me to see what real light looks like. I mean, I imagine you felt robbed.

Yeah, that's exactly what I felt like. And it's like you just suddenly windex the window. Yeah. And okay, but what happens, right? Yes, you can see the beauty. You can see the trees. You can see the flowers. You can also see the dirt.

You can also see the pain and the light is blinding your eyes. Right. And it was so sudden. This was not a gradual thing. And it's so overwhelming to suddenly have all of that input coming into your system. And absolutely no tools to deal with it because you'd spent, you know, since puberty, I'd just been walking around in a state of making choices based on the path of least resistance because I didn't want to be alive.

Yeah. So you came off that drug and then your doctor who told you to go cold turkey, she said, we'll deal with the well, butrin later. So what happened with that? Well, I mean, look, I wasn't a great patient either. So what happened at that point is I had had a follow-up appointment scheduled. And at this point, I had been in withdrawal for a good six weeks probably. And I went to my follow-up appointment.

And somehow we got our wires crossed where, you know, I thought I was still showing up on Tuesday and they had it in for Thursday or something. But basically, I was in the lobby. and she came out of her office and she said, you were supposed to be here on Tuesday or whatever, and I said,

well, I had it in for my schedule today. And I said, I just wanted to let you know I'm stopping the Wobutrin. And she just kind of went, okay, and then walked away and I have never talked to her again.

Oh, my goodness. So then I just stopped the Wobutron cold turkey, which again, probably stupid, but at that point, I don't, I didn't know what I was doing and I didn't think things could get worse. And frankly, they didn't.

Why? I don't know. There's a theory that different drugs have different half-lifes and antidepressants with shorter half-lifes, typically are more likely to cause more severe symptoms and while Butrin had a longer half-life. So the theory is that maybe that's why it didn't affect me as much. But I was also in such dire straits at that point. It was like nowhere. Couldn't go down any further. So how long did that last the kind of just like undulating emotions and extremes that resulted

from the withdrawal or the cessation of the first drug? I was in severe withdrawal for about a year. Wow. And then it was another year before I started to trust that I was coming out of it. So one to two years depending on your metric. And how did you have the strength to keep enduring such intense episodes of emotion, especially after 15 years of basically feeling nothing? I mean, it would be hard for the like not.

unmedicated person to go a full year of feeling that strongly and trying to remind yourself that you're not crazy. But for you, going from like stoicism for almost your whole life basically in some ways to that, like what was your narrative inside your head? I just imagine that you kept on having to remind yourself like, I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay, this is temporary. Oh, ignorance played a big part. And by that, I mean, I was not aware of what I'm aware of now. So I didn't have any idea that withdrawal could last for the year that I experienced it. So there was part of me that just kind of thought, well, this is going to get better soon, right? And so I think having that a little, that kind of dumb approach to it was helpful. And even now, I'm really wary when people reach out to me to talk to them about how long these things could last. because we don't know. It can spontaneously disappear for people in weeks or months. Other people, I've heard terrible stories of people being in severe protracted withdrawal for years. And so I don't know why one or the other. We don't know anything about that. But for me, not putting a date on it

helped me to put one foot in front of the other. I was also just so pissed off that I felt like my only options were to either reinstate the drug or not, and I wasn't going to reinstate because I was so angry. And so that anger fueled me to just say, well, if I have to deal with this for the rest of my life, I guess I will. Yeah. And then finally, and I think that this is, you know, I had some really good kind of counseling support, and I was able to start working through the emotion. And I made a conscious choice not to ascribe the emotion to any one thing. It wasn't about withdrawal. It wasn't about the fact that my dad was dead or that I was having a fight with my business partner or whatever. It was just whatever I was feeling in that day. And so I just really

tried to dissociate myself from the identity of being a depressed person or someone, like someone in withdrawal or, you know, the girl whose dad died, whatever it was. I said, it doesn't matter what that is. I'm just going to address what's coming up today. And I think that really helped me actively deal with the issue as quickly as possible and move on as opposed to staying stuck in the story that I could tell myself. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I imagine that was really hard. And then what was it like when you felt yourself start to kind of even out? Yeah. So there's a term called windows and waves that you hear of in the world of psychiatric drug withdrawal. And it basically means that you have periods of using your window analogy where the window is really clear and you can

see out and you feel calm and the sun is shining and then there's a period of waves where the windows just completely shut and you are just in a state of huge inner turmoil and for me I started to notice that the windows were getting wider so in the very beginning in the first few months I mean if I even had a literal one second of not thinking about withdrawal, that was a one second long window. And then I noticed at one point, oh, God, it's been 10 minutes. And this hasn't run my life. And so they just started to get incrementally wider until after about a year, then I started to get to a point where it's like, okay, we're having a good week. And then good two weeks and then a good month.

And then it just got to be long enough for I said, okay, this is not. it kind of just petered out. It's not part of my life anymore. And you said your other health symptoms that you were on medication for that those resolved after you got off. Disappeared. Wow. Disappeared. I got a blood test because we were trying to figure out what all the bumps in my arms and my legs were. And I asked them to run a thyroid panel while we were doing it. And it came back completely normal. Wow. And I hadn't had any of the GI symptoms either. So it was just. just like all right well okay that's good so okay during this time because you mentioned that you were traveling for a year so how what's the timeline like how does that overlap with you withdrawing

and you traveling so I found out that I had this opportunity to travel in let's say early 2016 January February I got off the first and depressive the effects are in March and I thought I would have plenty of time before I got on a one-way flight to Malaysia at the very end of August. I thought I'd have plenty of time to find my baseline, get on a new drug that I assumed was the answer to all my problems, and we'd be fine. And of course, that's not what happened. So I was still in severe withdrawal when I got on that plane and just traveled while this was happening. And for me, I think it was a huge positive because as it turns out, when you completely leave everything in your life and you can't blame your problems on the fact that New York City is expensive or your business partner or your business or the fact that there was no men to date and you move from country to country with nothing but a teeny little suitcase and you still have problems. Well, the only common denominator is you.

And so for me, that ended up being such a gift as frustrating as it was because I recognized very early that like, oh, this is me. I need to deal with this. And it was so clear what the issues were that were being triggered by the outside versus ones that weren't because I literally took them with me to an entirely different culture and country. And I think it very much accelerated my healing. Tell us about how you were on chopped. While you were dealing with all of this. Yeah, it was a really bad week. What had happened was so I'm a professional chef by trade.

It's still what I do to make money because, you know, most writers aren't rolling in money. But I had met the casting director of Chopt at a party and like you do in New York. And she said, oh, this was in October of 2015. So this was before any of this was on my radar. And she said, we're always looking for local female chefs. to compete. And I looked at her and I said, basically, you don't want me. This is not what I do. And forgot about it. And they just didn't get back to me for another four or five months. And then what

happened was, is I'd gotten this opportunity to travel. I had realized I needed to get out the end of depressants. And then I got basically that you're going to be on chopped email all within a very short period of time. And my response to it was, I just had a complete in total. I literally was like on the floor sobbing because it was so much. But I decided to do it because I'm just not really one to say no to things. And I got lucky that day I was in a window. And so I was able to get through the day. I also got really lucky that the producers took pity on me and didn't cut me into someone

who was a complete and total mess because they could have. I spent a lot of that day crying. I had to be calmed down. a lot. Yeah, they could have used that for views. And they didn't. I'm so glad they didn't. Me too.

I don't, I wish I knew who made that choice. I could send them a thank you note because it really, it was a pretty terrifying thing to be in such a fragile state on national TV, representing my business, representing myself and my work, and just feeling so vulnerable at the same time. And you, you won. And I imagine that was a lot of emotions in that, too. Wow. Yeah.

And the thing about winning that day, it was actually a huge turning point in my healing because that was, we filmed in June, about three, four months after I was in bad withdrawal. I hadn't really had an opportunity to have kind of an exhilarating experience yet. And that was the first time that not only had the day of filming been so emotionally intense, but also because I won, there was this huge sense of a whole, my goodness, I did it, you know? And the rush of endorphins and joy and excitement and pride, again, was so overwhelming in me. And I hadn't felt that yet. So it was just like, it just showed me that I was capable of experiencing this. And that I held on to that for months because I just, I knew deep within me that if I was capable of experiencing that for a couple of minutes, I could repeat it in my life and that it wasn't a one-off and that my brain wasn't broken

and I wasn't destined to feel horrible for the rest of my life because I had proven to myself that I had experienced it. Yeah. And what have you learned about the industry and about antidepressants and especially as they pertain to prescribing children these things since you have now taken this journey? Yeah. Oh, I've learned too much. I think it can best be summed up this way.

I'm a professional chef, and yet I spend a lot of my time in universities talking to medical students about safety prescribing practices. Why is the chef doing this? Right. Right? Shouldn't this be in the medical textbooks? Shouldn't this be taught to our doctors and prescribers? If you're going to put, if you're going to build a car and you put brakes in the car, you teach people how to slow down and you teach them to accelerate, why aren't we teaching doctors how to take people off these drugs? because the bottom line is what I went through

and something that was so bad that I had to write a book about it in order to get the word out was avoidable. And it was avoidable if there was education around safety prescribing practices, if there was true informed consent on the part of not just the patient, but in the case of children, their parents, if people actually knew how flimsy so many of the research studies are, how they're only studied for, you know, what,

between four and 12 weeks typically, and yet we have a huge percentage of people in this country who have been on these psychiatric drugs for years, they're operating in a world where we have absolutely no idea what these are doing to their brains and their bodies because the research doesn't exist and who's going to fund that? So you have to know that you're basically part of a gigantic social experiment. And if that's the choice you want to make and you're fully informed, then, you know, it's not my place to tell you what to do with your life. but I do think it's my place to call out the fact that we are not fully informing people what's going on. We are not telling them both the pros and cons and there are serious cons with these drugs.

And then we're not teaching doctors how to take people off of them safely. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people do not know or think about the side effects of being on these medications. and it's become so trendy to talk about being on depression medication. There was a trend on TikTok being or there was a woman who was calling herself like Alexa Ho. Because she's on Lexa Pro. Oh, Lexa Ho.

And this is something on TikTok, the mental health TikTok, and kind of glorifying and romanticizing, having mental health problems, taking medications for those things. And if you criticize it, it's while you're criticizing this drug that is saving this child's life or this person's life. And everything today is now you're depressed, you're anxious. Not ever I'm sad or I'm worried. And that I think is leading to over prescription, especially of young people who are already moody. And it is normal to be moody as a young person, but everything becomes a diagnosis. Yeah. And it also really doesn't match up with any of the literature, too, which further frustrates me. I mean, people say, oh, but antidepressants save lives. And I say, okay, well, let's look at the literature. The FDA did a huge study of over 100,000 people, and they looked at it, and they actually found that in folks under the age of 26, antidepressants increase suicidal instances. And it's not, basically, there was no difference in the group between the ages of about 27 to 65. And it only showed some preventative effect in folks over 65. And that's the FDA.

So that statement's kind of false if we want to throw some research at it. But yeah, I understand the need to belong. And I think that what's happening is kids want to belong. And this is what they see. I mean, I know that for me, you know, in the mid-2000s, it was very trendy to have an eating disorder. And that certainly impacted the fact that I developed one. Right. Because it was, you know, all over when you had a rail thin, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton,

then live journal. Diet culture was. Diet culture. Yeah. I remember in high school, it was we did a special K diet where it was literally you just ate special K every day. Yeah. I'm sure big cereal loved that.

Yeah. But it was like, you know, your ninth grade, you're already 115 pounds, but you think that you need to lose 10 more pounds by only eating special K bars all day. And that was like, that was totally seen as normal and a fun thing to do with your friends. And it's taken, you know, me 15 years to be like to look back and say, oh, that probably wasn't. Like if my, if my daughters came home and said that they were doing that, I would be absolutely appalled and sad. But I mean, you're right. People will do all sorts of things, healthy, unhealthy. to feel like they're a part of something and that they're going to be accepted and praised.

And I think that's what we're seeing now. And it's just the availability of it is so easy for kids with TikTok and Instagram and whatever it is. And the thing is, I'm not a parent, so I don't have any idea how you counter that. But it seems very difficult. Yeah. And awareness is the first step, I think. Yeah. I mean, I think as parents, we do have a natural and good propensity to want to protect our kids from bad feelings and bad thoughts.

And we don't want our kids to be uncomfortable. We don't want our kids to feel bad. But the truth is, and I know that there's a balance here, but having dealt with, you know, bad feelings, feelings of sadness, feelings of happiness, feelings of disappointment, feelings of rejection as a teenager, like in learning how to manage those and to work through them and to. have self-control that even if you feel something really strongly doesn't mean that you act out on a feeling like all of those produce character yeah they produce your personality they produce strength they produce endurance they prepare you for problems in the future yes when the stakes are much higher the stakes are low when you live with your parents the stakes are much higher when everything depends on you and so robbing kids of that by basically saying you don't even have any feelings to control

and we're going to take that from you, you are robbing kids of the most formative years of maturation and building character and self-control that they will ever have. I don't even think we realize what we're taking from kids when we just completely clamp down on that part of their mental faculties, you know? And I can tell you from personal experience that it would have been a whole hell of a lot easier to deal with the grief of my father, specifically in the eating disorder when I was 15 and 16, then having to do it at 30 when I also had to, you know, pay bills and manage a business

and a whole life and deal with all of this crap that I hadn't dealt with when I was a kid. I mean, you know, I think we do talk about that we, you know, God only gives us what we can handle, right? And so some people don't like that because they think it's, you know, a cop-out or that, you know, people are given different strengths of terribleness. But the bottom line is if something is coming up, it's coming up for you to address it and learn how to deal with it and how to learn how to not make it a pattern. And so

if a kid is really struggling and, you know, the first line of defense certainly, in my opinion, just shouldn't ever be medication. But if a kid is struggling, I think we really have to zoom out. We got to look at the parents. We've got to look at what's happening in the home. what's happening in the schools. More often than not, when a parent comes to me and says my kid is struggling, what do I do? I say get help for yourself.

Don't even worry about the kid. You get help for you. You figure out what your role is in this. And I promise the kid will start to work out. And this is not, at least from my perspective, I can't speak for you, always like a 100% anti-therapy approach. There can be healthy forms of therapy. There can be times when professional help is needed.

I don't want it to seem like I'm indicting all forms of professional help. But as we said, I do think that the hastiness and prescribing medications and managing inconvenient behaviors and kids through medication because no one wants to be uncomfortable, no one wants their kid to be different, no one wants to think about the possibility that, okay, maybe my kid just can't go to like standard public school or private school. Like maybe this is going to be a little bit harder. rather than just like suppressing the difficult parts of their emotions. I mean, you're right.

There's a lot there that in some ways has more to do with the parents and how we parent than what's going on with the kid. Yeah. And that's not to say that any of this is easy or that different people have different stresses that will make it far more difficult for some than others. Yeah. It's not a place of judgment. It's just a reality.

It's just a reality. I think it's kind of the world that the world that we live in. And, you know, as you said, your mom, like, she was doing the best that she knew to do at the time. And I think that is the vast majority of parents. Yeah. Doing the best that they know how to do. But your point, I think, is like, okay, but let's look at everything here. Yeah.

They're doing it in a vacuum. They're not, they're not realizing, I think, just because especially when it's become so normalized, you know, if all the kids on the block are on Adderall. or Lexapro or whatever it is, because Lexapro is now approved for use in seven-year-olds, even though six time, the research, the study that was used as part of the approval process showed a six-fold increase in suicidal ideation amongst kids, and they still approved it. But, you know. My gosh. So forget that, but that's not being told to the parent, right?

Right. Instead, there are doctors just saying, oh, great, guess what? We have this new one. Yeah. Here you go. And with all the pressure elsewhere. And so, you know, I can come across a lot of the times like I'm doctor bashing and that's not so much of it either. It's just like the doctors are under a huge amount of pressure themselves.

They're not getting paid unless something is billed to insurance. There's a financial incentive too. Yeah. And it's not even an incentive sometimes. It's just how the system works. And so if the doctor can only get paid if they code, there's no code for we need to get you, you know, there's no code. for your dad died or you're being bullied at school or your parents are getting a divorce. You mean insurance coding just so everyone knows.

Insurance coding. Yeah. It has to be depression, anxiety, something that's cut and dry. Yeah. They have to have a cut and dry code that the doctor applies for the doctor to get reimbursed. And then there's standard of care. And the standard of care is, well, if you have this particular diagnosis, then you prescribe this particular pill for it. And if you don't, not only are you not against standard of care, which could get you

sued, but then you're ostracized in your community. You can't speak out if you're a prescriber. Like, it's just, it's an absolutely wicked problem. And so there's, there's a thousand fingers to point, but it really doesn't fall on any one organization or person. So it's the, it's the whole structure of everything. And then parents are kind of almost the most helpless in this situation. I mean, kids, first of all, but parents also being told is they're told in a lot of different scenarios today. if you do not do this and listen to the quote unquote experts, your child will die. Yeah.

Your child will commit suicide. Of course the parent is going to be like, okay, yeah, whatever it takes. Yeah, it's just fear. I mean, your mom said I was scared of losing you too. And so if you're told this is what you have to do to save your child, a parent will do anything to save their child. Yep. The language is very important in how that is given to people.

And that's the language that is used. And it's not the actual data. It's not the flip side of all the children who are fine. Yeah. You know, it's just manipulative. And you know, I've done two episodes with Dr. Roger McPhillan, who is very anti-antidepressants. He's very anti- ADHD medication. And I got a lot of feedback after.

Yeah. What was that like? It's a sensitive topic. And so I understand and have sympathy for people who don't like to hear this because they feel like either in their lives or in the lives of someone that they love, that an antidepressant saved them from suicide themselves or someone else in their life. Or I know people who have gone through very serious postpartum depression and they were put on like a low dose of an anxiety medication or antidepressant and they really feel like it helps them. And look, I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist.

And so I can't diagnose and I can't say for sure what someone experienced and why the experience. that and of course I never want to be negative about someone's positive outcome. I'm excited and grateful if you tell me that you were pulled back from the brink of suicide. Of course. I want to like rejoice in that. But at the same time, I am also fearful of amplifying those kinds of testimonies because of the horrible, awful side effects that so often happen when people take these pills thinking that they will be magic. Yes. Just because millions of people swear by them doesn't make them any less dangerous. Yeah.

And I mean, millions of people swear by smoking. And the same thing, right? I mean, but a cigarette's probably going to make you feel better at certain times. And so the point is just, I agree with you. It's, I don't know why that this is happening specifically in this vertical of medicine. You don't hear this with other things, right? Like if you have someone who has a cardiac episode and they're prescribed some drug, you don't hear people say, well, you can't have a good response to statins because this person didn't. Like there's, it's, it's a lot more balanced.

And again, I think it's because we're working in a fear-based place here where people are just terrified of losing a loved one. But that's why I'm a full proponent of just true informed consent. And the people who effectively give it five stars on Yelp, let them do it. But the people who give it one star on Yelp and three stars need to be heard too. You can't cut off those voices when it comes to individual health choices. Yeah. But that's kind of what's happening. Right, right.

These drugs are very powerful. And for every one message I've gotten saying, this antidepressant saved my life, I've probably gotten five from people since those episodes came out. saying either I or my husband or my father became a completely different person. When they were on the, or my child became a completely different person, became more suicidal. Yeah. After that. Which is consistent with the literature.

Which is very consistent. I mean, these are powerful drugs. Yeah. Messing with your mind. And the point is, is that we are so often, just like with so many other medications, hormonal birth control, so many things. We are not told the side effects. We are told trust the experts.

Trust the science. This will save your life. If you're against it, then you're some kind of hippie kook that thinks that you're better than everyone. And, you know, you just get your information from holistic sally.com or something. And so it can be very intimidating. Yeah. Because, but I do think one good thing that has happened in the past few years since COVID is that people have started to realize, oh, I can question things. Yeah. I don't have to have white coat syndrome. Like, I can, I can ask questions and these are valid questions and these are good questions and I can take charge of my own help and I can push back when a doctor says that I have to do XYZ and really ask why.

It's a really good litmus test too because if you push back and they are highly defensive and that's a pretty good sign that maybe it's time to find a new doctor. Because there are plenty of doctors out there who will say, you know, I need to learn more about this. Let me go learn more about this and then we'll work together or there's others who will say, I'm glad you brought me this. Let's, again, let's work together. So I think it's great because we have to take a lot more control of our own health now than we ever had to in part because of the sheer amount of information in the system. And so let it be your guide.

Let it be your litmus test. If something's not feeling right in your body and it's okay to change course, it's okay to change doctors and any one decision you made in the past doesn't have to dictate the rest of your health future. Yeah. So how are you feeling now? How are you dealing with either any mental health challenges that you might have or any feelings of having been robbed for so long of just normal emotional experiences? Yeah. I'll start with the first question. As far as how I deal with things now, you know, I actually really use, I guess I'll call mental health stuff. I think mental health has just been so overused because it's just your whole experience,

it's your emotional awareness. But I use it, it's a, again, it's a litmus test. If I'm having a few periods where I'm feeling down or where I can feel my body is in a really state of, you know, anxiety or worry, that's a sign for me to look around at what's going on in my life. say, what's off balance here? You know, and it could be as simple as realizing I'm holding my breath when it comes to anxiety and needing to breathe better. It could be, you know, getting off my phone. It could be firing a client. It could be stop hanging out with someone, right? But it's a sign. It is my little warning light that goes off. And if I address it and I've gained so many tools over the years, then I can usually notice it come really fast and stop it just as quickly.

And then as far as how I'm dealing with the frustration and anger of basically losing my entire 20s and half my teens, I'm just obsessive curiosity in learning. I'm trying to do as much as I can with the time I have on earth. I mean, my father died at 53 and I'm 38. So there's part of me that kind of messes with my head a little bit because I am like, I don't know how much time I have left. If I die when he did, I'm more than halfway through. Yeah. So I'm just trying to do as much as I can and learn as much as I can and enjoy the fact

that I finally love that I'm alive. Yeah. Wow. Is there any encouragement that you would give to people who are either considering, okay, taking this dive of getting off medication or, I don't know, struggling. in the same way that you have? What would you say to them? The first thing is I would encourage everyone to do a Google search, do some research on something called hyperbolic tapering. Now, this is, at this point, this is what we think is probably the best way for people to taper off

these drugs. It's a much slower taper. It doesn't go from 100 to 75 to 50. It follows a much slower curve and the literature is all out there and that has been for the most part shown to help people step down in a less aggressive way and in there tend to be fewer side effects not always but in general so that's that's something for people to take to their doctor and if we just taught that to medical schools i think we would have a much better outcome so that's this probably the main thing as far as technique and then as far as encouragement goes i think it really this is a time for you to reach down inside yourself and really listen to that inner voice. Because if there's something nagging at you, telling you that these drugs aren't right for you,

even if everybody else in your life is disagreeing, there's something that needs to be uncovered there. It's trying to teach you something. It's trying to show you something. And it's time to look at it. Tell people where they can buy your book and what they can expect. So my book is called May Cause Side Effects. It won an award. for 2023, which is pretty cool. That is awesome. And you can buy it wherever books are sold. The paperback is coming out in April of 2024.

Awesome. There's an audiobook everywhere. You can find me all over the internet at Brooksim, B-R-O-O-K-E-S-I-E-M. Feel free to send a message, say hello. I'll send resources when possible, but I'm not a doctor. I cannot give medical advice. Yeah, you're just talking from your experiences, which is really helpful. So thank you so much, Brooke.

I really appreciate you taking the time to come on. Thank you. Thank you so much for having. me.