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

00:00:00.420 Contrary to popular and expert opinion, antidepressants are not a fix-all and they can actually have

00:00:07.240 very serious and deadly ramifications. Today with us is Brooke Seem. She is the author of

00:00:14.420 May Cause Side Effects, a memoir of antidepressant withdrawal. She is going to tell us her story of

00:00:21.220 getting on antidepressants, getting off antidepressants, and what she wishes people,

00:00:27.080 especially parents, knew about the prescribing of antidepressants to children. This episode is

00:00:35.240 brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to goodranchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout.

00:00:39.600 That's goodranchers.com, code Allie. Brooke, thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

00:00:53.440 Could you tell everyone who you are and what you do? Sure. My name is Brooke Seem, and I'm actually

00:00:58.920 a professional chef by trade, but I also do a lot of work in patient advocacy and doctor education for

00:01:05.420 safety prescribing practices of psychiatric drugs. Yeah, I think I first heard your name or saw your

00:01:11.480 name when I read an article by you in the Washington Examiner. It was in 2022, so it was a little while

00:01:16.620 ago now. And the title is What I Wish I Had Known Before I Stopped Taking Antidepressants and Before I

00:01:23.460 Started. You wrote a book called May Cause Side Effects. It's a memoir of antidepressant withdrawal.

00:01:31.040 So I just want to hear about your story. Like, let's go back to what led you to start talking about this.

00:01:37.960 Yeah, so I was 15 years old and my father suddenly passed away. And this was 2001, so we were in

00:01:45.680 quite a different world, especially, you know, the internet was basically dial-up. And there just

00:01:51.640 wasn't quite the amount of information we had at the time, for better or worse, perhaps. But

00:01:56.100 my mom took me to a child psychologist a couple months after my dad died because I was a very stoic kid.

00:02:03.960 I wasn't outwardly grieving. And there was just some concern that maybe I needed some help. And

00:02:11.700 so how old were you? I was 15. 15. Okay. And so the child psychologist, she and I didn't really

00:02:18.080 click. It wasn't a good match. And she called my mom up one day and said, you're wasting your money. 1.00

00:02:22.860 What your kid needs is a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. I'm diagnosing a depressive and

00:02:28.120 anxiety disorder and recommending medication. And that was pretty much it. I mean, what was my mom

00:02:33.200 supposed to do at that point, right? She's a widow. She's grieving her husband. It was just the three

00:02:38.580 of us. And now we were down to two. And the only person she ever had to really bounce ideas off of

00:02:44.980 when it came to me was gone. And why should she question the recommendation of a professional? So she

00:02:51.220 took me to the child psychiatrist and I walked out with a prescription for some antidepressant. We tried

00:02:57.360 a few before we landed on a combination of Effexor XR and Wellbutrin XL, which weren't approved for use

00:03:03.460 in children's and teens in 2001 and still aren't today. But I ended up staying on that combination

00:03:08.420 of drugs. And then about four more were added on over the course of the next couple of years. And I was

00:03:13.400 on that until I was 30 and no one questioned it. Okay. And you said that you were a stoic kid. Before

00:03:19.260 your dad died, you were a stoic kid.

00:03:20.960 I was a very serious ballet dancer. So I was taught to smile through the pain and, you know,

00:03:27.240 you're bleeding into your pointe shoes, but got to look pretty and make sure that you don't,

00:03:32.780 you know, you don't offend anyone, right? That's kind of the nature of ballet. So,

00:03:36.800 you know, and I think there was also a level of shock as well, because my father died suddenly. It

00:03:42.720 was, and we were out of the country at the time. So it was basically the call that said,

00:03:47.140 you have to come home. You know, my dad's gone. You and your mom were out of the country.

00:03:52.240 We were trying to visit family. And so we were in Italy and then had to get home and he was

00:03:57.520 pretty much gone by the time we got back. So you were already a pretty stoic, serious person that

00:04:03.020 had learned to kind of suppress your emotions and reactions in some ways. And then when your dad died,

00:04:09.420 obviously you're going to be sad about that. But what led your mom to thinking that you actually

00:04:14.860 need to go to a psychologist? It was a child psychologist.

00:04:19.640 A child psychologist. Why did she think that you needed that? 0.99

00:04:23.740 I think it was a combination of things. One is just that I wasn't, you know, I wasn't,

00:04:29.820 I wasn't crying. I wasn't outwardly grieving in a way that, I don't even know if appropriate,

00:04:38.240 it's the right word. I think it was just a little weird to people. Also, my grades started slipping a

00:04:44.280 little bit. I wasn't going from, you know, getting A's to hanging out in the back alleys and getting

00:04:49.660 F's. It wasn't that bad, but there was a little bit of detachment there. And then also because I

00:04:54.400 was a serious ballet dancer, I started dropping weight. So I definitely adopted some kind of eating

00:04:59.760 disorder tendencies. And so I think all those things together, my mom just straight up got scared.

00:05:05.520 Yeah. And she's told me, you know, recently, because we talk about this a lot and we're so

00:05:11.340 close and I don't begrudge any of the decisions she made because I know she was just doing the best

00:05:15.940 she thought she could do at the time. But she said to me, I had just lost one third of my family and I

00:05:21.960 was terrified I was going to lose another third too. Yeah. So it was, I think, at the end of the day,

00:05:27.100 an act of fear. Yeah. And like you said, it's not like she had someone to bounce these ideas off of.

00:05:33.340 Yeah. She just needed another adult to come alongside her and help with you as she was 0.99

00:05:38.920 grieving herself. Right? Yeah, she wasn't. And she had other adults, but they were all in the

00:05:44.260 world of psychology and therapy. And so they looked at the situation and basically said the same thing.

00:05:51.280 My clinical expertise says that, yeah, give her some antidepressants. Because again, this was 2001.

00:05:57.580 Prozac had been on the market at that point for 10, 12 years and came on the market in the late 80s.

00:06:05.000 It had recently been approved for use in children and teens. And then Zoloft was also on the market

00:06:10.500 for children and teens at the time. So we were really in the infancy of this medication strategy.

00:06:18.740 Yeah. And I was just kind of got wrapped up into it at a time when these things were looked at as

00:06:25.580 completely innocuous. And you said that most of the adults in her life were in the psychology,

00:06:30.580 psychiatry world. Why was that? Well, just the ones she talked to. She went to a friend of hers who's

00:06:35.620 been a psychologist for 40 years and another friend of hers who had experience there too. So your parents

00:06:40.260 weren't in that field professionally? No, no, no, no. Not at all. Okay. That was just kind of who she was

00:06:44.300 getting advice from, which I'm sure she felt like, okay, well, I'm getting advice from the experts.

00:06:50.140 And so that's just what I need to do. So you were put on these medications, combination of medications.

00:06:55.620 And then you said a few years later, you had more added. Why was that? What happened after you were

00:07:00.940 prescribed these medications? So I can tell you what happened in real time. And then I can also

00:07:05.740 tell you my retrospective knowledge of it. But in real time, what happened is I was put on the

00:07:13.400 combination of Effexor and Welbutrin. And within about a year was having a series of physical side

00:07:19.840 effects. So I was having thyroid issues. I developed something called bile reflex disease. And I was

00:07:26.680 having really bad, you know, acne and female problems and all these things where some of it is just being

00:07:33.260 a teenager. Yeah. And then the rest of it was, well, if your thyroid's not going so well, you go to an

00:07:39.080 endocrinologist and they give you thyroid medication. If you have bile reflex disease, they give you

00:07:43.280 something called sucral fate. So the next thing you know, I just had a series of four more medications

00:07:49.400 that were put on to deal with these other side effects. And no one connected the dots between

00:07:55.160 maybe this has to do with the antidepressants. Never, literally never occurred to anyone. It didn't

00:08:02.800 even occur to me until 15 years later when I hit a point where it was time to get off these drugs for

00:08:10.000 a variety of reasons. I got off everything and none of my symptoms came back for the thyroid problems

00:08:15.300 or the bile reflex disease, which was baffling to me because I had been under the assumption that

00:08:19.620 these were lifelong chronic illnesses. Yeah. And did anyone connect it to, because I know you said that

00:08:25.520 you had some disordered eating. I know with ballet, you're made to stay very thin. Sometimes that can

00:08:31.720 cause thyroid problems. Did anyone connect it to those things? You know, I mean, not really and not

00:08:40.060 in a way that would have, you know, made sense. I felt like we were looking for zebras when we really 0.71

00:08:46.900 should have been looking at horses, right? To me, it's obvious in retrospect, my nutrition was not

00:08:51.780 great. So yeah. And I was grieving still and it was coming out in physical manifestations and I was

00:08:58.080 under the stress of, you know, there was still the pressure to take the SATs and go to college and

00:09:02.920 get a prom date and all these normal things. It's already a hard time in life. Yeah. It's the worst

00:09:05.960 time anyway. Yeah. So how did these antidepressants make you feel emotionally? I actually have a lot

00:09:13.920 of memory loss too around this time. Some of it has to do, I think, with the trauma of losing my dad

00:09:18.780 the way I did. And others, antidepressants are known to cause memory problems and cognitive

00:09:23.700 problems. So I think it's the combination. But look, I wasn't thriving before and I wasn't

00:09:29.460 thriving after. But what I do know is 15 years later, I was more depressed than I had ever

00:09:34.060 been. Yeah. And so clearly they weren't working anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about that. So you

00:09:40.080 were on this medication. You stayed on the medication just because it's just what you were told you

00:09:44.880 needed to do, right? Yeah. If the doctor tells you, you know, you need insulin because you have

00:09:50.880 diabetes. You don't question it. Yeah. Doctor told me I was depressed. So he told me to take an

00:09:54.680 antidepressant. I didn't question that. Why would I? Right. Yeah. And that was the framework that was

00:10:02.000 kind of programmed into me very early, right at that time when I was forming the foundation of my

00:10:06.400 identity. So I just carried that. And then I carried that, you know, three years later, I'm in

00:10:12.420 charge of my own medical care when I turned 18. So at that point, I had fully just believed that I was

00:10:19.900 this kind of fundamentally broken brain walking around in a body and that I needed this. And there

00:10:27.180 was nothing reflecting back in my life questioning that. But by the time I turned 30, I had spent

00:10:32.680 the better part of my 20s in New York City. I was objectively miserable. I was really depressed. I was

00:10:39.420 having a lot of suicidal ideation. I had no emotion to anything. And it just kind of dawned on me that

00:10:47.980 I had spent my entire adult life on powerful psychiatric drugs and that if they were working,

00:10:53.920 I wouldn't be thinking about these things. And on top of that, it just bothered me that

00:10:59.880 I clearly was so deeply unhappy in my life and I had made the decision

00:11:05.120 that led me to that point through the lens of a powerful psychoactive agent. So I kind of started to

00:11:12.220 wonder if I would have made the same decisions had I not been medicated. And at the same time,

00:11:17.400 I got an opportunity to travel around the world for a year. And this was I basically won this weird

00:11:22.580 little lottery. And I physically could not take the amount of prescription drugs I had in a suitcase

00:11:30.720 with me and drag it around the world. Wow. And I also would not have been able to get reliable

00:11:35.200 refills in a lot of the places we were going to since they were kind of, you know, not wasn't London or

00:11:40.680 Paris. We were in other countries. So I didn't trust it. And so I said, OK, well, I guess I have

00:11:47.280 to get off of these and discover my baseline, which I thought would be an easy process.

00:11:52.360 All your medications. So not just the antidepressants, but all the medications you

00:11:56.860 wanted to get off of them at the time. I only wanted to get off the antidepressants to begin with

00:12:01.300 and figured everything else was a completely unrelated, you know, chronic issue. Yeah.

00:12:07.560 But then once I started going through, I got off the antidepressants and was in antidepressant

00:12:12.780 withdrawal. There was just kind of something in me that just wondered if if maybe I didn't need this

00:12:20.380 stuff anymore, if it was all somehow connected. So at that point, I was in such hell from having

00:12:25.240 pulled the antidepressants out of my system that I just kind of said, screw it, let's just stop

00:12:29.680 everything else, which, you know, don't recommend that to a friend, perhaps definitely talk with

00:12:35.240 your doctor and all those sorts of things. But I just stopped. And as it turned out,

00:12:39.900 none of the symptoms came back for any of the physical ailments.

00:12:43.020 Tell us about what it was like. What did it feel like physically, emotionally to completely stop

00:13:00.920 your antidepressants cold turkey? Okay. Yeah. So let's start with the cold turkey thing. So I did

00:13:06.080 what I was supposed to do. I saw a doctor. That's what the commercials say to do. They say, talk to

00:13:10.060 your doctor. So I did. I went and I and I talked to her and I told her what the situation was. And

00:13:15.540 she was really not supportive of it at all. And she wanted me to wait for a better time. And I just

00:13:22.400 kind of said, but this is the time. There is no better time. This is what we're dealing with. And

00:13:27.480 so she said, okay, fine. Well, I was on 37.5 milligrams of Effaxor XR, which is the lowest dose on

00:13:34.220 the market. So she said, I can't prescribe you a lower dose. Basically, just stop and good luck.

00:13:40.940 She actually used the word good luck. She said, stop the Effaxor first. We'll deal with the

00:13:45.920 Wellbutrin later. And again, in retrospect, now knowing what I know and doing all the safety

00:13:51.280 prescribing work, I know that there were other strategies that she could have employed or she 0.81

00:13:55.360 could have used, but she didn't, whether or not because she was ignorant or chose not to, I don't 0.88

00:13:59.880 know. Yeah. Again, this was also 2016. We didn't get the first systematic review of antidepressant 0.97

00:14:05.980 withdrawal in research until 2015. So this was still kind of new, fairly new. But she told me I

00:14:14.100 would have the flu for a couple days. Maybe that's kind of what it would feel like. Like flu-like

00:14:18.100 symptoms. Yeah. Maybe hot and cold, a little on edge. But instead, it was, what happened to me was

00:14:25.500 far worse than the depression had ever, ever, ever been or anything I had experienced. It was a full

00:14:32.080 on psychological assault of violent thoughts and images at all hours of the day. All my senses

00:14:41.660 changed. So I literally started seeing color more vibrantly and things went from a little softer on

00:14:49.620 the edges to super sharp. I developed really severe noise sensitivity. Uh, my skin got something called

00:14:56.920 nodular vasculitis, which is basically an autoimmune response in the blood vessels. And it is because of

00:15:03.280 extreme physical stress on the body. So my taste changed, you know, like literally what I liked and

00:15:09.220 didn't like to eat changed. Gut issues, uh, huge mood swings that, you know, ranged from rage to

00:15:17.680 actually feeling joy for the first time in 15 years. And it was all so fickle and precarious and

00:15:26.020 there was no logic to it. And it was so intense. And I literally thought I was going crazy because

00:15:32.900 I had never felt like this in my entire life. And then all of a sudden I stopped taking these drugs.

00:15:38.580 I didn't have the flu. Something else was going on. And I thought to myself, well, yeah, I thought

00:15:44.340 I'm, this must be me without the drugs. I must really actually be someone who's really ill.

00:15:49.880 Wow. So you thought, okay, I'm a crazy person and this pill has basically been helping me maintain

00:15:56.440 my crazy. Yes. And, but, um, I was too scared to tell my psychiatrist to about it because I thought

00:16:06.880 that if I told her what I was experiencing, she would put me on an involuntary psychiatric hold.

00:16:10.640 Hmm. And there was that out of your mind. What? You felt that out of your mind that you were afraid

00:16:16.740 that that would be the measure that she would take. Yeah. Because here's the thing is that, yes,

00:16:21.740 I was having these awful, awful thoughts and physical experiences and the emotion in my body was just

00:16:29.660 completely off the charts and often inappropriate. Like, like the reactions would be to something very

00:16:36.480 small, but I was also having these moments of, like I said, color. It was like, I could finally see

00:16:43.500 color for the first time and I could laugh at something and feel true joy. And so there was

00:16:50.580 also this expansion on the other side too. Yeah. And that was so curious to me because I had just,

00:16:57.520 I had so believed I was a person who was never, ever, ever going to get better and that I was just

00:17:03.060 depressed and that was it. Yeah. And so the fact that I was, you know, feeling some joy and some

00:17:10.280 excitement and some curiosity for the first time as an adult was so attractive to me that I,

00:17:20.560 I just, there was something in me that just did not believe that there was something wrong with that

00:17:26.020 part. And so, you know, in addition to being scared that if I told her about the bad stuff,

00:17:31.140 she would commit me and then I'd end up, you know, drugged up in some awful psychiatric hospital

00:17:37.620 in Manhattan, I just didn't want to give up this little teeny glimmers of beauty I was experiencing.

00:17:45.360 And so I ended up talking to a different, a psychologist friend of mine who was based in

00:17:51.620 another state, so she couldn't commit me. And she said, I think that you're having a withdrawal

00:17:57.060 reaction to coming off this drug. And that was enough to convince me that not only was I never

00:18:05.440 going to take these drugs again, but that I was just going to ride it out because I was so mad all

00:18:09.720 of a sudden that I had been robbed of the feeling of joy or curiosity for my entire adult life.

00:18:14.540 That's what I was thinking for 15 years. It's like, I don't know, as you're talking,

00:18:21.160 I'm thinking of like a metaphor of you are looking through a window and it's been fogged your entire

00:18:28.840 life and everyone's telling you, no, this is just how it is. This is how you can see. You can't see

00:18:33.860 any differently. And then someone starts like rubbing away the fog little by little. And you're

00:18:39.140 like, wait, that's what trees look like. That's what the world is like. And you're like someone for 15

00:18:45.560 years has been fogging this window and not even allowing me to see what real light looks like.

00:18:51.720 I mean, I imagine you felt robbed. Yeah, that's exactly what I felt like. And it's like you just

00:18:56.160 suddenly Windex the window. Yeah. And OK, but what happens, right? Yes, you can see the beauty. You can

00:19:02.600 see the trees. You can see the flowers. You can also see the dirt. You can also see the pain and the

00:19:08.500 light is blinding your eyes. Right. So and it was so sudden. This was not a gradual thing. And it's so

00:19:14.900 overwhelming to suddenly have all of that input coming into your system and absolutely no tools

00:19:21.040 to deal with it because you'd spent, you know, since puberty, I'd just been walking around in a

00:19:26.400 state of making choices based on the path of least resistance because I didn't want to be alive.

00:19:33.040 Yeah. So you came off that drug and then your doctor who told you to go cold turkey, she said,

00:19:40.220 we'll deal with the Wellbutrin later. So what happened with that?

00:19:43.960 Well, I mean, look, I wasn't a great patient either. So what happened at that point is I had

00:19:51.140 had a follow up appointment scheduled. And at this point, I had been in withdrawal for a good

00:19:56.640 six weeks, probably. And I went to my follow up appointment and somehow we got our wires crossed

00:20:04.020 where, you know, I thought I was showing up on Tuesday and they had it in for Thursday or something.

00:20:08.100 But basically, I was in the lobby and she came out of her office and she said, you were supposed to be

00:20:15.160 here on Tuesday or whatever. And I said, well, I had it in for my schedule today. And I said, I just

00:20:20.560 wanted to let you know I'm stopping the Wellbutrin. And she just kind of went, okay, and then walked

00:20:24.740 away. And I have never talked to her again.

00:20:26.740 Oh, my goodness. So then I just stopped the Wellbutrin cold turkey, which again, probably

00:20:30.740 stupid. But at that point, I don't I didn't know what I was doing. And I didn't think things could 0.98

00:20:35.220 get worse. And frankly, they didn't. Why? I don't know. There's a theory that different drugs have

00:20:42.360 different half lives and and antidepressants with shorter half lives typically are more likely to

00:20:48.960 cause more severe symptoms. And Wellbutrin had a longer half life. So the theory is that maybe that's

00:20:53.680 why it didn't affect me as much. But I was also in such dire straits at that point. It was like,

00:20:58.660 nowhere. Couldn't go down any further.

00:21:12.920 So how long did that last? The kind of just like undulating emotions and extremes that resulted

00:21:22.760 from the withdrawal or the cessation of the first drug?

00:21:27.740 I was in severe withdrawal for about a year.

00:21:29.760 Wow.

00:21:30.280 And then it was another year before I started to trust that I was coming out of it. So one to two

00:21:37.320 years, depending on your metric.

00:21:39.160 And how did you have the strength to keep enduring such intense episodes of emotion, especially after

00:21:47.720 15 years of basically feeling nothing? I mean, it would be hard for the like non-medicated person

00:21:53.840 to go a full year of feeling that strongly and trying to remind yourself that you're not crazy.

00:22:01.200 Yeah.

00:22:01.900 But for you going from like stoicism for almost your whole life, basically, in some ways to that,

00:22:09.700 like what was your narrative inside your head? I just imagine that you kept on having to remind

00:22:14.440 yourself like, I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm okay. This is temporary.

00:22:17.700 Oh, ignorance played a big part. And by that, I mean, I was not aware of what I'm aware of now.

00:22:25.620 So I didn't have any idea that withdrawal could last for the year that I experienced it. So there

00:22:32.500 was part of me that just kind of thought, well, this is going to get better soon. Right. And so I

00:22:36.980 think having that a little, that kind of dumb approach to it was helpful. And even now I'm really 0.91

00:22:42.880 wary when people reach out to me to talk to them about how long these things could last, because

00:22:47.580 we don't know. It can spontaneously disappear for people and weeks or months. Other people,

00:22:54.900 I've heard terrible stories of people being in severe protracted withdrawal for years. And so

00:22:59.660 I don't know why one or the other, we don't know anything about that. But for me, not putting a date

00:23:05.140 on it helped me to put one foot in front of the other. I was also just so pissed off that

00:23:11.480 I felt like my only options were to either reinstate the drug or not. And I wasn't going

00:23:17.540 to reinstate because I was so angry. And so that anger fueled me to just say, well, if I have to

00:23:24.000 deal with this for the rest of my life, I guess I will. Yeah. And then finally, and I think that this

00:23:29.560 is, you know, I had some really good kind of counseling support and I was able to start working

00:23:34.980 through the emotion. And I made a conscious choice not to ascribe the emotion to any one

00:23:40.980 thing. It wasn't about withdrawal. It wasn't about the fact that my dad was dead or that I was having

00:23:46.580 a fight with my business partner or whatever. It was just whatever I was feeling in that day.

00:23:51.520 And so I just really tried to dissociate myself from the identity of being a depressed person or

00:23:57.020 someone like someone in withdrawal or, you know, the girl whose dad died, whatever it was,

00:24:02.700 I said, it doesn't matter what that is. I'm just going to address what's coming up today.

00:24:07.600 And I think that really helped me actively deal with the issue as quickly as possible and move on

00:24:14.000 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

00:24:22.820 start to kind of even out? Yeah. So there's a term called windows and waves that you hear of in the

00:24:29.400 world of psychiatric drug withdrawal. And it basically means that you have periods of

00:24:36.380 using your window analogy where the windows really clear and you can see out and you feel calm and the

00:24:43.640 sun is shining. And then there's a period of waves where the windows just completely shut and you are

00:24:50.040 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

00:39:27.080 start to work out.

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

00:40:36.680 going on with the kid.

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.

00:40:49.880 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,

00:41:06.180 okay, but let's look at everything here.

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.

00:41:41.360 Oh, my gosh.

00:41:42.100 So forget that. But that's not being told to the parent, right?

00:41:44.480 Right.

00:41:44.880 Instead, there are doctors just saying, oh, great. Guess what? We have this new one.

00:41:49.040 Yeah.

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

00:42:04.240 billed to insurance.

00:42:05.780 There's a financial incentive, too.

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

00:42:27.200 are getting a divorce.

00:42:28.360 You mean insurance coding, just so everyone knows.

00:42:29.560 Insurance coding.

00:42:30.240 Depression, anxiety, something that's cut and dry.

00:42:33.480 Yeah.

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

00:43:08.920 one organization or person.

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

00:43:29.440 to be like, okay, whatever it takes.

00:43:32.240 Yeah. It's just fear.

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.

00:43:55.960 Yeah.

00:43:56.160 You know, it's just manipulative.

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.

00:44:09.540 Yeah. What was that like?

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

00:45:19.360 these pills thinking that they will be magic.

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 0.86

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

00:52:55.640 you so much for having me.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - April 10, 2024

Ep 983 ｜ What Doctors Aren’t Telling You About Antidepressants ｜ Guest： Brooke Siem

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