Ep 983 ｜ What Doctors Aren’t Telling You About Antidepressants ｜ Guest： Brooke Siem
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Summary
Brooke Seem 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.
Transcript
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Contrary to popular and expert opinion, antidepressants are not a fix-all and they can actually have
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very serious and deadly ramifications. Today with us is Brooke Seem. She is the author of
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May Cause Side Effects, a memoir of antidepressant withdrawal. She is going to tell us her story of
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getting on antidepressants, getting off antidepressants, and what she wishes people,
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especially parents, knew about the prescribing of antidepressants to children. This episode is
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brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to goodranchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout.
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That's goodranchers.com, code Allie. Brooke, thanks so much for taking the time to join us.
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Could you tell everyone who you are and what you do? Sure. My name is Brooke Seem, and I'm actually
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a professional chef by trade, but I also do a lot of work in patient advocacy and doctor education for
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safety prescribing practices of psychiatric drugs. Yeah, I think I first heard your name or saw your
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name when I read an article by you in the Washington Examiner. It was in 2022, so it was a little while
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ago now. And the title is What I Wish I Had Known Before I Stopped Taking Antidepressants and Before I
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Started. You wrote a book called May Cause Side Effects. It's a memoir of antidepressant withdrawal.
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So I just want to hear about your story. Like, let's go back to what led you to start talking about this.
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Yeah, so I was 15 years old and my father suddenly passed away. And this was 2001, so we were in
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quite a different world, especially, you know, the internet was basically dial-up. And there just
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wasn't quite the amount of information we had at the time, for better or worse, perhaps. But
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my mom took me to a child psychologist a couple months after my dad died because I was a very stoic kid.
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I wasn't outwardly grieving. And there was just some concern that maybe I needed some help. And
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so how old were you? I was 15. 15. Okay. And so the child psychologist, she and I didn't really
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click. It wasn't a good match. And she called my mom up one day and said, you're wasting your money.
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What your kid needs is a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. I'm diagnosing a depressive and
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anxiety disorder and recommending medication. And that was pretty much it. I mean, what was my mom
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supposed to do at that point, right? She's a widow. She's grieving her husband. It was just the three
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of us. And now we were down to two. And the only person she ever had to really bounce ideas off of
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when it came to me was gone. And why should she question the recommendation of a professional? So she
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took me to the child psychiatrist and I walked out with a prescription for some antidepressant. We tried
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a few before we landed on a combination of Effexor XR and Wellbutrin XL, which weren't approved for use
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in children's and teens in 2001 and still aren't today. But I ended up staying on that combination
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of drugs. And then about four more were added on over the course of the next couple of years. And I was
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on that until I was 30 and no one questioned it. Okay. And you said that you were a stoic kid. Before
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I was a very serious ballet dancer. So I was taught to smile through the pain and, you know,
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you're bleeding into your pointe shoes, but got to look pretty and make sure that you don't,
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you know, you don't offend anyone, right? That's kind of the nature of ballet. So,
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you know, and I think there was also a level of shock as well, because my father died suddenly. It
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was, and we were out of the country at the time. So it was basically the call that said,
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you have to come home. You know, my dad's gone. You and your mom were out of the country.
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We were trying to visit family. And so we were in Italy and then had to get home and he was
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pretty much gone by the time we got back. So you were already a pretty stoic, serious person that
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had learned to kind of suppress your emotions and reactions in some ways. And then when your dad died,
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obviously you're going to be sad about that. But what led your mom to thinking that you actually
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need to go to a psychologist? It was a child psychologist.
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A child psychologist. Why did she think that you needed that?
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I think it was a combination of things. One is just that I wasn't, you know, I wasn't,
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I wasn't crying. I wasn't outwardly grieving in a way that, I don't even know if appropriate,
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it's the right word. I think it was just a little weird to people. Also, my grades started slipping a
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little bit. I wasn't going from, you know, getting A's to hanging out in the back alleys and getting
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F's. It wasn't that bad, but there was a little bit of detachment there. And then also because I
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was a serious ballet dancer, I started dropping weight. So I definitely adopted some kind of eating
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disorder tendencies. And so I think all those things together, my mom just straight up got scared.
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Yeah. And she's told me, you know, recently, because we talk about this a lot and we're so
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close and I don't begrudge any of the decisions she made because I know she was just doing the best
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she thought she could do at the time. But she said to me, I had just lost one third of my family and I
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was terrified I was going to lose another third too. Yeah. So it was, I think, at the end of the day,
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an act of fear. Yeah. And like you said, it's not like she had someone to bounce these ideas off of.
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Yeah. She just needed another adult to come alongside her and help with you as she was
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grieving herself. Right? Yeah, she wasn't. And she had other adults, but they were all in the
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world of psychology and therapy. And so they looked at the situation and basically said the same thing.
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My clinical expertise says that, yeah, give her some antidepressants. Because again, this was 2001.
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Prozac had been on the market at that point for 10, 12 years and came on the market in the late 80s.
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It had recently been approved for use in children and teens. And then Zoloft was also on the market
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for children and teens at the time. So we were really in the infancy of this medication strategy.
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Yeah. And I was just kind of got wrapped up into it at a time when these things were looked at as
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completely innocuous. And you said that most of the adults in her life were in the psychology,
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psychiatry world. Why was that? Well, just the ones she talked to. She went to a friend of hers who's
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been a psychologist for 40 years and another friend of hers who had experience there too. So your parents
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weren't in that field professionally? No, no, no, no. Not at all. Okay. That was just kind of who she was
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getting advice from, which I'm sure she felt like, okay, well, I'm getting advice from the experts.
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And so that's just what I need to do. So you were put on these medications, combination of medications.
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And then you said a few years later, you had more added. Why was that? What happened after you were
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prescribed these medications? So I can tell you what happened in real time. And then I can also
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tell you my retrospective knowledge of it. But in real time, what happened is I was put on the
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combination of Effexor and Welbutrin. And within about a year was having a series of physical side
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effects. So I was having thyroid issues. I developed something called bile reflex disease. And I was
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having really bad, you know, acne and female problems and all these things where some of it is just being
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a teenager. Yeah. And then the rest of it was, well, if your thyroid's not going so well, you go to an
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endocrinologist and they give you thyroid medication. If you have bile reflex disease, they give you
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something called sucral fate. So the next thing you know, I just had a series of four more medications
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that were put on to deal with these other side effects. And no one connected the dots between
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maybe this has to do with the antidepressants. Never, literally never occurred to anyone. It didn't
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even occur to me until 15 years later when I hit a point where it was time to get off these drugs for
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a variety of reasons. I got off everything and none of my symptoms came back for the thyroid problems
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or the bile reflex disease, which was baffling to me because I had been under the assumption that
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these were lifelong chronic illnesses. Yeah. And did anyone connect it to, because I know you said that
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you had some disordered eating. I know with ballet, you're made to stay very thin. Sometimes that can
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cause thyroid problems. Did anyone connect it to those things? You know, I mean, not really and not
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in a way that would have, you know, made sense. I felt like we were looking for zebras when we really
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should have been looking at horses, right? To me, it's obvious in retrospect, my nutrition was not
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great. So yeah. And I was grieving still and it was coming out in physical manifestations and I was
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under the stress of, you know, there was still the pressure to take the SATs and go to college and
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get a prom date and all these normal things. It's already a hard time in life. Yeah. It's the worst
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time anyway. Yeah. So how did these antidepressants make you feel emotionally? I actually have a lot
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of memory loss too around this time. Some of it has to do, I think, with the trauma of losing my dad
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the way I did. And others, antidepressants are known to cause memory problems and cognitive
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problems. So I think it's the combination. But look, I wasn't thriving before and I wasn't
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thriving after. But what I do know is 15 years later, I was more depressed than I had ever
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been. Yeah. And so clearly they weren't working anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about that. So you
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were on this medication. You stayed on the medication just because it's just what you were told you
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needed to do, right? Yeah. If the doctor tells you, you know, you need insulin because you have
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diabetes. You don't question it. Yeah. Doctor told me I was depressed. So he told me to take an
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antidepressant. I didn't question that. Why would I? Right. Yeah. And that was the framework that was
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kind of programmed into me very early, right at that time when I was forming the foundation of my
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identity. So I just carried that. And then I carried that, you know, three years later, I'm in
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charge of my own medical care when I turned 18. So at that point, I had fully just believed that I was
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this kind of fundamentally broken brain walking around in a body and that I needed this. And there
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was nothing reflecting back in my life questioning that. But by the time I turned 30, I had spent
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the better part of my 20s in New York City. I was objectively miserable. I was really depressed. I was
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having a lot of suicidal ideation. I had no emotion to anything. And it just kind of dawned on me that
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I had spent my entire adult life on powerful psychiatric drugs and that if they were working,
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I wouldn't be thinking about these things. And on top of that, it just bothered me that
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I clearly was so deeply unhappy in my life and I had made the decision
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that led me to that point through the lens of a powerful psychoactive agent. So I kind of started to
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wonder if I would have made the same decisions had I not been medicated. And at the same time,
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I got an opportunity to travel around the world for a year. And this was I basically won this weird
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little lottery. And I physically could not take the amount of prescription drugs I had in a suitcase
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with me and drag it around the world. Wow. And I also would not have been able to get reliable
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refills in a lot of the places we were going to since they were kind of, you know, not wasn't London or
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Paris. We were in other countries. So I didn't trust it. And so I said, OK, well, I guess I have
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to get off of these and discover my baseline, which I thought would be an easy process.
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All your medications. So not just the antidepressants, but all the medications you
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wanted to get off of them at the time. I only wanted to get off the antidepressants to begin with
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and figured everything else was a completely unrelated, you know, chronic issue. Yeah.
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But then once I started going through, I got off the antidepressants and was in antidepressant
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withdrawal. There was just kind of something in me that just wondered if if maybe I didn't need this
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stuff anymore, if it was all somehow connected. So at that point, I was in such hell from having
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pulled the antidepressants out of my system that I just kind of said, screw it, let's just stop
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everything else, which, you know, don't recommend that to a friend, perhaps definitely talk with
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your doctor and all those sorts of things. But I just stopped. And as it turned out,
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none of the symptoms came back for any of the physical ailments.
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Tell us about what it was like. What did it feel like physically, emotionally to completely stop
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your antidepressants cold turkey? Okay. Yeah. So let's start with the cold turkey thing. So I did
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what I was supposed to do. I saw a doctor. That's what the commercials say to do. They say, talk to
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your doctor. So I did. I went and I and I talked to her and I told her what the situation was. And
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she was really not supportive of it at all. And she wanted me to wait for a better time. And I just
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kind of said, but this is the time. There is no better time. This is what we're dealing with. And
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so she said, okay, fine. Well, I was on 37.5 milligrams of Effaxor XR, which is the lowest dose on
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the market. So she said, I can't prescribe you a lower dose. Basically, just stop and good luck.
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She actually used the word good luck. She said, stop the Effaxor first. We'll deal with the
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Wellbutrin later. And again, in retrospect, now knowing what I know and doing all the safety
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prescribing work, I know that there were other strategies that she could have employed or she
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could have used, but she didn't, whether or not because she was ignorant or chose not to, I don't
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know. Yeah. Again, this was also 2016. We didn't get the first systematic review of antidepressant
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withdrawal in research until 2015. So this was still kind of new, fairly new. But she told me I
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would have the flu for a couple days. Maybe that's kind of what it would feel like. Like flu-like
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symptoms. Yeah. Maybe hot and cold, a little on edge. But instead, it was, what happened to me was
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far worse than the depression had ever, ever, ever been or anything I had experienced. It was a full
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on psychological assault of violent thoughts and images at all hours of the day. All my senses
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changed. So I literally started seeing color more vibrantly and things went from a little softer on
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the edges to super sharp. I developed really severe noise sensitivity. Uh, my skin got something called
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nodular vasculitis, which is basically an autoimmune response in the blood vessels. And it is because of
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extreme physical stress on the body. So my taste changed, you know, like literally what I liked and
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didn't like to eat changed. Gut issues, uh, huge mood swings that, you know, ranged from rage to
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actually feeling joy for the first time in 15 years. And it was all so fickle and precarious and
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there was no logic to it. And it was so intense. And I literally thought I was going crazy because
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I had never felt like this in my entire life. And then all of a sudden I stopped taking these drugs.
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I didn't have the flu. Something else was going on. And I thought to myself, well, yeah, I thought
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I'm, this must be me without the drugs. I must really actually be someone who's really ill.
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Wow. So you thought, okay, I'm a crazy person and this pill has basically been helping me maintain
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my crazy. Yes. And, but, um, I was too scared to tell my psychiatrist to about it because I thought
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that if I told her what I was experiencing, she would put me on an involuntary psychiatric hold.
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Hmm. And there was that out of your mind. What? You felt that out of your mind that you were afraid
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that that would be the measure that she would take. Yeah. Because here's the thing is that, yes,
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I was having these awful, awful thoughts and physical experiences and the emotion in my body was just
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completely off the charts and often inappropriate. Like, like the reactions would be to something very
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small, but I was also having these moments of, like I said, color. It was like, I could finally see
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color for the first time and I could laugh at something and feel true joy. And so there was
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also this expansion on the other side too. Yeah. And that was so curious to me because I had just,
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I had so believed I was a person who was never, ever, ever going to get better and that I was just
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depressed and that was it. Yeah. And so the fact that I was, you know, feeling some joy and some
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excitement and some curiosity for the first time as an adult was so attractive to me that I,
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I just, there was something in me that just did not believe that there was something wrong with that
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part. And so, you know, in addition to being scared that if I told her about the bad stuff,
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she would commit me and then I'd end up, you know, drugged up in some awful psychiatric hospital
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in Manhattan, I just didn't want to give up this little teeny glimmers of beauty I was experiencing.
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And so I ended up talking to a different, a psychologist friend of mine who was based in
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another state, so she couldn't commit me. And she said, I think that you're having a withdrawal
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reaction to coming off this drug. And that was enough to convince me that not only was I never
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going to take these drugs again, but that I was just going to ride it out because I was so mad all
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of a sudden that I had been robbed of the feeling of joy or curiosity for my entire adult life.
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That's what I was thinking for 15 years. It's like, I don't know, as you're talking,
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I'm thinking of like a metaphor of you are looking through a window and it's been fogged your entire
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life and everyone's telling you, no, this is just how it is. This is how you can see. You can't see
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any differently. And then someone starts like rubbing away the fog little by little. And you're
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like, wait, that's what trees look like. That's what the world is like. And you're like someone for 15
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years has been fogging this window and not even allowing me to see what real light looks like.
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I mean, I imagine you felt robbed. Yeah, that's exactly what I felt like. And it's like you just
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suddenly Windex the window. Yeah. And OK, but what happens, right? Yes, you can see the beauty. You can
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see the trees. You can see the flowers. You can also see the dirt. You can also see the pain and the
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light is blinding your eyes. Right. So and it was so sudden. This was not a gradual thing. And it's so
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overwhelming to suddenly have all of that input coming into your system and absolutely no tools
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to deal with it because you'd spent, you know, since puberty, I'd just been walking around in a
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state of making choices based on the path of least resistance because I didn't want to be alive.
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Yeah. So you came off that drug and then your doctor who told you to go cold turkey, she said,
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we'll deal with the Wellbutrin later. So what happened with that?
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Well, I mean, look, I wasn't a great patient either. So what happened at that point is I had
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had a follow up appointment scheduled. And at this point, I had been in withdrawal for a good
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six weeks, probably. And I went to my follow up appointment and somehow we got our wires crossed
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where, you know, I thought I was showing up on Tuesday and they had it in for Thursday or something.
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But basically, I was in the lobby and she came out of her office and she said, you were supposed to be
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here on Tuesday or whatever. And I said, well, I had it in for my schedule today. And I said, I just
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wanted to let you know I'm stopping the Wellbutrin. And she just kind of went, okay, and then walked
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Oh, my goodness. So then I just stopped the Wellbutrin cold turkey, which again, probably
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stupid. But at that point, I don't I didn't know what I was doing. And I didn't think things could
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get worse. And frankly, they didn't. Why? I don't know. There's a theory that different drugs have
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different half lives and and antidepressants with shorter half lives typically are more likely to
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cause more severe symptoms. And Wellbutrin had a longer half life. So the theory is that maybe that's
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why it didn't affect me as much. But I was also in such dire straits at that point. It was like,
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So how long did that last? The kind of just like undulating emotions and extremes that resulted
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from the withdrawal or the cessation of the first drug?
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And then it was another year before I started to trust that I was coming out of it. So one to two
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And how did you have the strength to keep enduring such intense episodes of emotion, especially after
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15 years of basically feeling nothing? I mean, it would be hard for the like non-medicated person
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to go a full year of feeling that strongly and trying to remind yourself that you're not crazy.
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But for you going from like stoicism for almost your whole life, basically, in some ways to that,
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like what was your narrative inside your head? I just imagine that you kept on having to remind
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yourself like, I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm okay. This is temporary.
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Oh, ignorance played a big part. And by that, I mean, I was not aware of what I'm aware of now.
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So I didn't have any idea that withdrawal could last for the year that I experienced it. So there
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was part of me that just kind of thought, well, this is going to get better soon. Right. And so I
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think having that a little, that kind of dumb approach to it was helpful. And even now I'm really
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wary when people reach out to me to talk to them about how long these things could last, because
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we don't know. It can spontaneously disappear for people and weeks or months. Other people,
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I've heard terrible stories of people being in severe protracted withdrawal for years. And so
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I don't know why one or the other, we don't know anything about that. But for me, not putting a date
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on it helped me to put one foot in front of the other. I was also just so pissed off that
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I felt like my only options were to either reinstate the drug or not. And I wasn't going
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to reinstate because I was so angry. And so that anger fueled me to just say, well, if I have to
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deal with this for the rest of my life, I guess I will. Yeah. And then finally, and I think that this
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is, you know, I had some really good kind of counseling support and I was able to start working
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through the emotion. And I made a conscious choice not to ascribe the emotion to any one
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thing. It wasn't about withdrawal. It wasn't about the fact that my dad was dead or that I was having
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a fight with my business partner or whatever. It was just whatever I was feeling in that day.
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And so I just really tried to dissociate myself from the identity of being a depressed person or
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someone like someone in withdrawal or, you know, the girl whose dad died, whatever it was,
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I said, it doesn't matter what that is. I'm just going to address what's coming up today.
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And I think that really helped me actively deal with the issue as quickly as possible and move on
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as opposed to staying stuck in the story that I could tell myself. Does that make sense?
00:24:18.200
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I imagine that was really hard. And then what was it like when you felt yourself
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start to kind of even out? Yeah. So there's a term called windows and waves that you hear of in the
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world of psychiatric drug withdrawal. And it basically means that you have periods of
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using your window analogy where the windows really clear and you can see out and you feel calm and the
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sun is shining. And then there's a period of waves where the windows just completely shut and you are
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just in a state of huge inner turmoil. And for me, I started to notice that the windows were getting
00:24:58.240
wider. So in the very beginning, in the first few months, I mean, if I even had a literal one
00:25:03.700
second of not thinking about withdrawal, that was a one second long window. And then I noticed at one
00:25:11.500
point, oh God, it's been 10 minutes and this hasn't run my life. And so they just started to get
00:25:17.760
incrementally wider until after about a year, then I started to get to a point where it's like,
00:25:23.260
okay, we're having a good week and then good two weeks and then a good month. And then it just got
00:25:29.600
to be long enough where I said, okay, this is not, it kind of just petered out. It's not part of my
00:25:33.940
life anymore, but. And you said your other health symptoms that you were on medication for that those
00:25:38.980
resolved after you got off. Disappeared. Wow. Disappeared. I got a blood test because we were trying
00:25:44.420
to figure out what the, all the bumps in my arms and my legs were. And I asked them to run a thyroid
00:25:53.680
panel while we were doing it and it came back completely normal. Wow. And I hadn't had any of
00:26:00.360
the GI symptoms either. So it was just like, all right, well, okay. That's good. So, okay. During this
00:26:07.500
time, cause you mentioned that you were traveling for a year. So how, what's the timeline? Like,
00:26:14.960
how does that overlap with you withdrawing and you traveling? Okay. So I found out that I had this
00:26:19.680
opportunity to travel in, let's say early 2016, January, February. I got off the first antidepressant,
00:26:27.920
the effects are in March. And I thought I would have plenty of time before I got on a one way,
00:26:32.940
a one way flight to Malaysia at the very end of August. I thought I'd have plenty of time to,
00:26:39.500
you know, find my baseline, get on a new drug that I assumed was the answer to all my problems
00:26:44.500
and we'd be fine. And of course that's not what happened. So I was still in severe withdrawal when
00:26:49.680
I got on that plane and just traveled while this was happening. And, uh, for me, I think it was a huge
00:26:57.380
positive because as it turns out, when you completely leave everything in your life and
00:27:03.160
you can't blame your problems on the fact that New York city is expensive or your business partner
00:27:07.660
or your business, or the fact that there's, you know, was no men to date and you move from country
00:27:13.920
to country with nothing but a teeny little suitcase and you still have problems. Well, the only common
00:27:18.860
denominator is you. And so for me, that was ended up being such a gift as frustrating as it was,
00:27:25.960
because I recognized very early that like, Oh, this is me. I need to deal with this. And it was
00:27:32.300
so clear what the issues were that were being triggered by the outside versus, versus ones that
00:27:37.600
weren't because I literally took them with me to an entirely different culture and country. And I think
00:27:42.720
it very much accelerated my healing. Tell us about how you were on chopped while you were dealing with
00:28:03.060
all of this. Yeah. It was a, it was a really big bad week. What had happened was, so I'm a professional
00:28:08.460
chef by trade. It's still what I, it's still what I do to make money because you know, most writers
00:28:14.080
aren't rolling in money, but, uh, I had met the casting director of chopped at a party and like
00:28:21.420
you do in New York. And she said, Oh, this was in October of 2015. So this was before any of this was
00:28:27.060
on my radar. And she said, we're always looking for local female chefs to compete. And I looked at her
00:28:33.840
and I said, basically, you don't want me. This is not what I do. Yeah. And, and, uh, forgot about
00:28:39.960
it. And they just didn't get back to me for another four or five months. And then what happened was,
00:28:44.380
is I'd gotten this opportunity to travel. I had realized I needed to get off the antidepressants.
00:28:50.780
And then I got basically that you're going to be on chopped email all within a very short period of
00:28:56.280
time. And my response to it was, I just had a complete and total, I literally was like on the floor
00:29:02.360
sobbing because it was so much, but I, uh, decided to do it because I'm just not really one to say no
00:29:09.480
to things. And, uh, I got lucky that day I had, I was in a window and so I was able to get through
00:29:18.840
the day. I also got really lucky that the producers took pity on me and didn't cut me into someone who
00:29:24.860
was a complete and total mess because they could have, I spent a lot of that day crying. I had to be
00:29:30.280
calm down a lot. I was, they could have used that. They could have, and they didn't. I'm so glad
00:29:35.660
they didn't. Me too. I don't, I would, I wish I knew who made that choice so I could send them a
00:29:40.040
thank you note because it really, it was a pretty terrifying thing to be in such a fragile state
00:29:47.400
on national TV, representing my business, representing myself and my work and just
00:29:52.620
feeling so vulnerable at the same time. And you, you won. And I imagine that was a lot of
00:29:58.200
emotions in that too. Wow. Yeah. And the thing about winning that day, it was actually a huge
00:30:04.220
turning point in my healing because that was, we filmed in June, about three, four, three, four
00:30:10.820
months after I was in bad withdrawal. I hadn't really had an opportunity to have kind of an
00:30:17.740
exhilarating experience yet. And that was the first time that not only had the day of filming been so
00:30:25.240
emotionally intense, but also because I won, there was this huge sense of, oh, oh my goodness,
00:30:31.000
I did it, you know? And the rush of endorphins and joy and excitement and pride, again, was so
00:30:40.800
overwhelming in me. And I hadn't felt that yet. So it was just like, it just showed me that I was
00:30:47.580
capable of experiencing this and that I held onto that for months because I just, I knew deep within
00:30:55.860
me that if I was capable of experiencing that for a couple of minutes, I could repeat it in my life
00:31:01.940
and that it wasn't a one-off and that my brain wasn't broken and I wasn't destined to feel horrible
00:31:06.840
for the rest of my life because I had proven to myself that I had experienced it. Yeah. And what have
00:31:12.300
you learned about the industry and about antidepressants and especially as they pertain to
00:31:18.940
prescribing children these things since you have now taken this journey? Yeah. Oh, I've learned too
00:31:24.720
much. I think it can best be summed up this way. I'm a professional chef and yet I spend a lot of my
00:31:32.360
time in universities talking to medical students about safety prescribing practices. Why is the chef
00:31:39.420
doing this? Right. Right. Shouldn't this be in the medical textbooks? Shouldn't this be taught to our
00:31:46.500
doctors and prescribers? If you're going to put, if you're going to build a car and you put brakes in
00:31:52.080
the car, you teach people how to slow down and you teach them to accelerate. Why aren't we teaching
00:31:56.180
doctors how to take people off these drugs? Because the bottom line is what I went through and something
00:32:02.760
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
00:32:08.580
avoidable if there was education around safety prescribing practices, if there was true informed
00:32:14.900
consent on the part of not just the patient, but in the case of children, their parents, if people
00:32:20.900
actually knew how flimsy so many of the research studies are, how they're only studied for, you know,
00:32:26.940
what, between four and 12 weeks typically, and yet we have a huge percentage of people in this country
00:32:32.660
who've been on these psychiatric drugs for years. They're, they're operating in a world where we have
00:32:37.720
absolutely no idea what these are doing to their brains and their bodies because the research doesn't
00:32:42.180
exist and who's going to fund that? Yeah. So you have to know that you're basically part of a gigantic
00:32:47.120
social experiment. And if that's the choice you want to make and you're fully informed, then,
00:32:53.080
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
00:32:58.420
call out the fact that we are not fully informing people what's going on. We are not telling them
00:33:05.120
both the pros and cons, and there are serious cons with, with, with these drugs. And then we're not
00:33:11.740
teaching doctors how to take people off of them safely. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people do not
00:33:18.100
know or think about the side effects of being on these medications. And it's become so trendy to talk
00:33:27.080
about being on depression medication. There was a trend on TikTok being, or there was a woman who
00:33:35.040
was calling herself like Alexa Ho because she's on Lexapro. Yeah. Oh, Alexa Ho. And this is something
00:33:43.300
on TikTok, the mental health TikTok, and kind of glorifying and romanticizing having mental health
00:33:49.780
problems, taking medications for those things. And if you criticize it, it's while you're criticizing
00:33:56.060
this drug that is saving this child's life or this person's life. And everything today is now
00:34:03.600
you're depressed, you're anxious, not ever I'm sad or I'm worried. Yeah. And that, I think,
00:34:09.700
is leading to overprescription, especially of young people who are already moody. And it is normal to
00:34:17.380
be moody as a young person, but everything becomes a diagnosis. Yeah. And it also really doesn't match up
00:34:22.820
with any of the literature too, which further frustrates me. I mean, people say, oh, but
00:34:26.820
antidepressants save lives. And I say, okay, well, let's look at the literature. The FDA did a huge
00:34:32.240
study of over 100,000 people and they looked at it and they actually found that in folks under the age
00:34:38.480
of 26, antidepressants increase suicidal instances. And it's not, basically there was no difference in the
00:34:47.540
group between the ages of about 27 to 65. And it only showed some preventative effect in folks over
00:34:52.920
65. And that's the FDA. So that statement's kind of false if we want to throw some research at it.
00:35:02.540
But yeah, I understand the need to belong. And I think that what's happening is kids want
00:35:14.040
to belong. And this is what they see. I mean, I know that for me, you know, in the mid 2000s,
00:35:20.680
it was very trendy to have an eating disorder. And that's certainly impacted the fact that I developed
00:35:28.060
one. Right. Because it was, you know, all over when you had a rail thin Lindsay Lohan,
00:35:33.780
Paris Hilton, then live journal. Diet culture was totally accepted. I remember in high school,
00:35:41.160
it was, we did a special K diet where it was literally, you just ate special K every day.
00:35:47.840
Yeah. I'm sure big cereal loved that. But it was like, you know, your ninth, your ninth grade,
00:35:53.440
you're already 115 pounds, but you think that you need to lose 10 more pounds by only eating special K
00:35:59.600
bars all day. And that was like, that was totally seen as normal and a fun thing to do with your
00:36:04.240
friends. And it's taken, you know, me 15 years to be like, to look back and say, oh, that probably
00:36:09.880
wasn't. Like if my, if my daughters came home and said that they were doing that, I would be
00:36:14.460
absolutely appalled and sad. But I mean, you're right. People will do all sorts of things, healthy,
00:36:19.620
unhealthy, to feel like they're a part of something and that they're going to be accepted and praised.
00:36:25.700
And I think that's what we're seeing now. And it's just the availability of it is so
00:36:30.560
easy for kids. TikTok and Instagram and whatever it is. And I think is, I'm not a parent, so I don't
00:36:40.000
have any idea how you counter that, but it seems very difficult. Yeah. And awareness is the first
00:36:47.280
step, I think. Yeah. I mean, I think as parents, we do have a natural and good propensity to want to
00:36:53.040
protect our kids from bad feelings and bad thoughts. And we don't want our kids to be uncomfortable.
00:36:58.800
We don't want our kids to feel bad. But the truth is, and I know that there's a, there's a balance
00:37:04.620
here, but having dealt with, you know, bad feelings, feelings of sadness, feelings of happiness,
00:37:10.480
feelings of disappointment, feelings of rejection as a teenager, like in learning how to manage those
00:37:17.040
and to work through them and to have self-control that even if you feel something really strongly,
00:37:22.760
doesn't mean that you act out on a feeling. Like all of those produce character. Yeah. They produce
00:37:28.460
your personality. They produce strength. They produce endurance. They prepare you for problems
00:37:33.300
in the future. Yes. When the stakes are much higher. The stakes are low when you live with
00:37:37.160
your parents. The stakes are much higher when everything depends on you. And so robbing kids
00:37:41.720
of that by basically saying, you don't even have any feelings to control and we're going to take that
00:37:47.060
from you. You are robbing kids of the most formative years of maturation. Yep. And building
00:37:53.420
character and self-control that they will ever have. Yep. I don't even think we realize what
00:37:58.660
we're taking from kids when we like, we just completely clamp down on that part of their
00:38:05.420
mental faculties, you know? And I can tell you from personal experience that it would have been a
00:38:11.660
whole hell of a lot easier to deal with the grief of my father specifically in the eating disorder when
00:38:17.280
I was 15 and 16 than having to do it at 30 when I also had to, you know, pay bills and manage a
00:38:24.660
business and a whole life and deal with all of this crap that I hadn't dealt with when I was
00:38:30.160
a kid. I mean, I, you know, I think we do talk about that we, you know, God only gives us what we
00:38:36.260
can handle, right? And so some people don't like that because they think it's, you know, a cop-out or
00:38:41.880
that, you know, people are given different strengths of terribleness. But the bottom line is if something
00:38:48.620
is coming up, it's coming up for you to address it and learn how to deal with it and how to learn
00:38:53.860
how to not make it a pattern. And so if a kid is really struggling and, you know, the first line
00:39:01.680
of defense certainly, in my opinion, just shouldn't ever be medication. But if a kid is struggling, I think
00:39:06.900
we really have to zoom out. We got to look at the parents. We got to look at what's happening
00:39:10.600
in the home, what's happening in the schools. More often than not, when a parent comes to me
00:39:16.360
and says, my kid is struggling, what do I do? I say, get help for yourself. Don't even worry about
00:39:21.320
the kid. You get help for you. You figure out what your role is in this. And I promise the kid will
00:39:40.600
And this is not, at least from my perspective, I can't speak for you, always like a 100%
00:39:46.280
anti-therapy approach. There can be healthy forms of therapy. There can be times when professional
00:39:52.260
help is needed. I don't want it to seem like I'm indicting all forms of professional help. But as we
00:39:58.220
said, I do think that the hastiness and prescribing medications and managing inconvenient behaviors in
00:40:07.680
the kids through medication because no one wants to be uncomfortable. No one wants their kid to be
00:40:14.560
different. No one wants to think about the possibility that, okay, maybe my kid just can't
00:40:18.460
go to like standard public school or private school. Like maybe this is going to be a little bit harder
00:40:22.980
rather than just like suppressing the difficult parts of their emotions. I mean, you're right.
00:40:29.540
There's a lot there that in some ways has more to do with the parents and how we parent than what's
00:40:38.040
Yeah. And that's not to say that any of this is easy or that different people have different
00:40:44.540
stresses that will make it far more difficult for some than others.
00:40:47.700
Yeah. It's not a place of judgment. It's just a reality.
00:40:50.600
I think it's kind of the world that the world that we live in. And, you know, as you said,
00:40:54.600
your mom, like she was doing the best that she knew to do at the time. And I think that is the
00:40:59.200
vast majority of parents doing the best that they know how to do. But your point, I think, is like,
00:41:09.100
Yeah. They're doing it in a vacuum. They're not realizing, I think, just because especially when
00:41:16.840
it's become so normalized, you know, if all the kids on the block are on Adderall or Lexapro or
00:41:24.460
whatever it is, because Lexapro is now approved for use in seven-year-olds, even though six times,
00:41:31.020
the research, the study that was used as part of the approval process showed a six-fold increase
00:41:38.080
in suicidal ideation amongst kids, and they still approved it. But, you know.
00:41:42.100
So forget that. But that's not being told to the parent, right?
00:41:44.880
Instead, there are doctors just saying, oh, great. Guess what? We have this new one.
00:41:49.360
Here you go. And with all the pressure elsewhere. And so, you know, I can come across a lot of the
00:41:56.060
times, like I'm doctor bashing, and that's not so much of it either. It's just like the doctors are
00:42:00.460
under a huge amount of pressure themselves. They're not getting paid unless something is
00:42:07.860
Yeah. And it's not even an incentive sometimes. It's just how the system works.
00:42:12.520
And so if the doctor can only get paid if they code, there's no code for we need to get you,
00:42:21.300
you know, there's no code for your dad died or you're being bullied at school or your parents
00:42:28.360
You mean insurance coding, just so everyone knows.
00:42:30.240
Depression, anxiety, something that's cut and dry.
00:42:33.720
They have to have a cut and dry code that the doctor applies for the doctor to get reimbursed.
00:42:38.560
And then there's standard of care. And the standard of care is, well, if you have this
00:42:43.520
particular diagnosis, then you prescribe this particular pill for it. And if you don't, not
00:42:49.480
only are you not against standard of care, which could get you sued, but then you're ostracized
00:42:55.840
in your community, you can't speak out if you're a prescriber. Like, it's just, it's an absolutely
00:43:01.220
wicked problem. And so there's a thousand fingers to a point, but it really doesn't fall on any
00:43:11.300
So it's the whole structure of everything. And then parents are kind of almost the most
00:43:15.900
helpless in this situation. I mean, kids, first of all, but parents also being told as they're
00:43:20.600
told in a lot of different scenarios today, if you do not do this and listen to the quote unquote
00:43:24.360
experts, your child will die. Your child will commit suicide. Of course the parent is going
00:43:33.240
I mean, your mom said, I was scared of losing you too. And so if you're told this is what you
00:43:38.340
have to do to save your child, a parent will do anything to save their child.
00:43:42.320
Yep. The language is very important in how that is given to people. And that's the language that
00:43:47.620
is used. And it's not the actual data. It's not the flip side of all the children who are fine.
00:43:58.520
And, you know, I've done two episodes with Dr. Roger McFellin, who is very anti-antidepressants.
00:44:04.340
Nancy's very anti-ADHD medication. And I got a lot of feedback after.
00:44:10.540
It's a sensitive topic. And so I understand and have sympathy for people who don't like
00:44:15.080
to hear this because they feel like either in their lives or in the lives of someone that
00:44:19.960
they love that an antidepressant saved them from suicide themselves or someone else in their
00:44:26.180
life. Or I know people who have gone through very serious postpartum depression and they were
00:44:30.500
put on like a low dose of an anti-anxiety medication or anti-depressant and they really
00:44:37.580
feel like it helps them. And look, I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. And so I can't
00:44:43.820
diagnose and I can't say for sure what someone experienced and why they experienced that.
00:44:50.900
And of course, I never want to be negative about someone's positive outcome. I'm excited and
00:44:57.200
grateful if you tell me that you were, you know, pulled back from the brink of suicide. Of course,
00:45:02.160
I want to like rejoice in that. But at the same time, I am also fearful of amplifying those kinds
00:45:11.360
of testimonies because of the horrible, awful side effects that so often happen when people take
00:45:21.860
Yes. Just because millions of people swear by them doesn't make them any less dangerous.
00:45:25.160
Yeah. And I mean, millions of people swear by smoking. And the same thing, right? I mean,
00:45:31.100
but a cigarette is probably gonna make you feel better. Yeah. At certain times. And so the point
00:45:35.600
is just, I agree with you. It's, I don't know why that this is happening specifically in this
00:45:43.940
vertical of medicine. You don't hear this with other things, right? Like if you have someone who has a
00:45:51.000
cardiac episode and they're prescribed some drug, you don't hear people say, well, you, you can't have
00:45:56.640
a good response to statins because this person didn't. Like there's, it's, it's a lot more
00:46:01.560
balanced. And again, I think it's because we're working in a fear-based place here where people are
00:46:07.780
just terrified of losing a loved one. But that's why I'm a full proponent of just true informed
00:46:15.400
consent. Like we, the, the people who, you know, effectively give it five stars on Yelp, let them
00:46:21.300
do it. But the people who give it one star on Yelp and three stars need to be heard too. You can't
00:46:25.920
cut off those voices when it comes to individual health choices. Yeah. And, but that's kind of what's
00:46:32.920
happening. Right. Right. These drugs are very powerful. And for every one message I've gotten
00:46:39.900
saying this antidepressant saved my life, I've probably gotten five from people since those
00:46:44.900
episodes came out saying either I or my husband or some, or my father became a completely different
00:46:50.960
person when they were on the, or my child became a completely different person, became more suicidal
00:46:56.200
after that. Which is consistent with the literature. Which is very consistent. I mean, these are powerful
00:47:01.400
drugs messing with your mind. And the point is, is that we are so often, just like with so many other
00:47:06.480
medications, hormonal birth control, so many things, we are not told the side effects. We are
00:47:12.040
told, trust the experts, trust the science. This will save your life. If you're against it, then you're
00:47:18.180
some kind of hippie kook that thinks that you're better than everyone. And, you know, you just get
00:47:26.640
your information from holisticsally.com or something. And so it can be very intimidating because, but I do
00:47:34.440
think one good thing that has happened in the past few years since COVID is that people have started
00:47:38.460
to realize, oh, I can question things. Yeah. I don't have to have white coat syndrome. Like I can,
00:47:44.120
I can ask questions and these are valid questions and these are good questions. And I can take charge
00:47:49.140
of my own health and I can push back when a doctor says that I have to do X, Y, Z and really ask why.
00:47:56.140
It's a really good litmus test too, because if you push back and they are highly defensive and
00:48:02.160
that's a pretty good sign that maybe it's time to find a new doctor. Because there are plenty of
00:48:07.120
doctors out there who will say, you know, I need to learn more about this. Let me go learn more about
00:48:12.600
this and then we'll work together. Or there's others who will say, I'm glad you brought me this.
00:48:16.100
Let's, again, let's work together. So I think it's great because we have to take a lot more control of
00:48:23.740
our own health now than we ever had to, in part because of the sheer amount of information in the
00:48:29.440
system. And so let it, let it be your guide. Let it be your litmus test. If something's not feeling
00:48:35.700
right in your body and it's okay to change course, it's okay to change doctors. And any one decision
00:48:43.700
you made in the past doesn't have to dictate the rest of your health future. Yeah. So how are you
00:48:49.600
feeling now? How are you dealing with either any mental health challenges that you might have
00:48:55.180
or any feelings of having been robbed for so long of just normal emotional experiences?
00:49:01.900
Yeah. I'll start with the first question. As far as how I deal with things now, you know,
00:49:08.240
I actually really use, I guess I'll call it mental health stuff. I think mental health has just been
00:49:14.100
so overused because it's just your whole experience, your emotional awareness. But I use it,
00:49:22.060
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
00:49:28.420
feel my body is in a really state of, you know, anxiety or worry, that's a sign for me to look
00:49:34.880
around at what's going on in my life and say, what's off balance here? You know, and it could be as
00:49:40.420
simple as realizing I'm holding my breath when it comes to anxiety and needing to breathe better.
00:49:46.640
It could be, you know, getting off my phone. It could be firing a client. It could be stop hanging
00:49:53.820
out with someone. Right. But it's a sign. It is my little warning light that goes off. And if I address
00:49:59.380
it and I've gained so many tools over the years, then I can usually notice it come really fast and
00:50:06.660
stop it just as quickly. And then as far as how I'm dealing with the frustration and anger of basically
00:50:14.720
losing my entire 20s and half my teens, I'm just, just obsessive curiosity and learning. I'm trying
00:50:23.680
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.
00:50:31.820
So there's part of me that, that kind of messes with my head a little bit. Cause I am like, I don't
00:50:36.220
know. I don't know how much time I have left. If I die when he did, I'm more than halfway through.
00:50:40.480
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
00:50:48.260
I finally love that I'm alive. Yeah. Wow. Is there any encouragement that you would give to people
00:50:54.540
who are either considering, okay, taking this dive of getting off medication or I don't know,
00:51:01.420
struggling in the same way that you have, what would you say to them?
00:51:04.020
The first thing is I would, I would encourage everyone to do a Google search, do some research
00:51:09.380
on something called hyperbolic tapering. Now this is at this point, this is what we think is probably
00:51:16.040
the best way for people to taper off these drugs. It's a much slower taper. It doesn't go from a hundred
00:51:22.740
to 75 to 50. It, it, it follows a much slower curve and the literature is all out there. And that has
00:51:30.640
been for the most part shown to help people step down in a, in a less aggressive way. And there
00:51:37.180
tend to be fewer side effects, not always, but in general. So that's, that's something for people
00:51:43.080
to take to their doctor. And if we just taught that to medical schools, I think we would have a
00:51:47.180
much better outcome. So that's, that's probably the main thing as far as technique. And then as far
00:51:54.380
as encouragement goes, I think it really, this isn't, this is a time for you to reach down inside
00:51:59.780
yourself and really listen to that inner voice. Because if there's something nagging, nagging at
00:52:05.060
you, telling you that these drugs aren't right for you, even if everybody else in your life is
00:52:09.940
disagreeing, there's something that needs to be uncovered there. It's trying to teach you
00:52:15.140
something. It's trying to show you something and it's, it's time to look at it. Tell people where they
00:52:19.680
can buy your book and what they can expect. So my book is called May Cause Side Effects. It, uh,
00:52:25.320
it won an award for 2023, which is pretty cool. That is awesome. And, uh, you can buy it wherever
00:52:30.760
books are sold. The paperback's coming out in April of 2024. Awesome. There's an audio book
00:52:36.040
everywhere. You can find me all over the internet at Brooke Seam, B-R-O-O-K-E-S-I-E-M.
00:52:42.940
Feel free to send a message, say hello. I'll send resources when possible, but I'm not a doctor. I
00:52:47.840
cannot give medical advice. Yeah. You're just talking from your experiences, which is really helpful. So
00:52:52.560
thank you so much, Brooke. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on. Thank you. Thank