Why So Many People Can't Get Off Their Antidepressants | Laura Delano

How much testing has been done for SSRIs with long-term use? The average length of a trial is about six to eight weeks that tests the safety and efficacy. One of the Ambien trials that the drug was approved on the basis of was one night. Whatever the drug class is, whether it's SSRI, SNRI, MAOI, tricyclic, anti-psychotic, benzodiazepines, Z-drugs, stimulant, they're all approved on the basis of short-term trials. It is literally an experiment to take these drugs long-term. Imagine if Taylor Swift would have been put on an SSRI as a teenager. If she would have been numbed out by Lexaprove, we would not have this level of art that we have from her. Angry teenage girls aren't meant to be singing front of their screens in a dark room. On the internet, they're meant to be experimenting with fashion and painting and music. They're meant to be channeling their emotions into art. [music] Laura Delano spent 14 years inside the psychiatric system. Diagnosed, medicated, hospitalized. Told her brain was fundamentally broken before realizing the symptoms that she thought proved she was mentally ill might actually have been caused by the drugs themselves. And once you hear what happened to Laura after trying to get off anti-depressants, you start looking at America's so-called mental health crisis very differently. Laura Delano is a speaker, founder of Inter-Compass Initiative and author of Unshrunk. But this conversation goes way beyond our anti-depressants' bad. What Laura is really challenging is the entire modern identity framework around suffering. You know, this idea that every painful emotion, every season of despair, every uncomfortable human experience must automatically be labeled disorder and medically managed forever. We talk about what happens when children are taught their brains are defective. Why getting off SSRIs can sometimes take years, whether withdrawal is being mistaken for relapse and how an entire generation may have built identities around diagnoses that they were never meant to carry for life. Watch this episode on the Real Alex Clark YouTube channel or Culture Pathocary on Spotify. Whether this is your first time ever listening to my podcast or your 100th, please leave us a five-star review. This helps the show tremendously and takes three seconds to do. Please welcome author of Unshrunk Laura Delano to Culture a Pathocary. The most common explanation for this rapid decline that we're seeing in society today is that we're in a mental health crisis. But you're actually arguing something even more controversial, which is that millions of Americans may not actually be mentally ill. Millions of Americans may be in drug withdrawal. Yes, a controversial statement to make. And I think it's a combination of long-term medication adverse effects and people trying time after time to come off their medications and feeling horrible, leading them to go back on. I think it's a multifaceted source that's behind this crisis, but it's not what we've been told. It's, you know, and what I realized for myself is that the treatment itself might be fueling what we're thinking of as a mental health crisis. How could that be mistaken for one another? I mean, drug withdrawal symptoms that can look like mental illness? Drug withdrawal symptoms can mimic the symptoms of the diagnoses in the DSM, the diagnostic and statistical manual, mental disorders, and also long-term adverse effects can as well. So we're in this situation where our culture has these, this lens over our eyes, where we see people who are told they have chronic, you know, mental health conditions, month after month, year after year, not getting better or even getting worse. And we're all trained to see that as, you know, their illness is progressing. And what I found in my own experience, and now having been doing this work for 15 years, have heard from thousands and thousands of other people is that it was actually the long-term polypharmacy regimen that we were on that was fueling what we were being told was our own illness inside of our, inside of our brains, you know, you have a chemical imbalance and just unfortunate. This treatment isn't helping. Getting worse, you know, I eventually realized, oh my gosh, it's largely the treatment itself. How many people in the US are on anti-psychotic meds right now, approximately? Broadly speaking, around 65 million Americans are on some kind of psychiatric medication, according to CDC numbers from 2022. So I would estimate the numbers are actually higher. That's 61 million adults and 4 million kids around there. You know, tens of millions of people are on anti-depressants alone. And, you know, older women have really high rates of anti-depressant prescriptions. Obviously, foster kids have really high rates of all kinds of psychiatric prescriptions. You know, more people are on these meds than ever before at the same time as more people than ever before are suffering and struggling and thinking about killing themselves, trying to kill themselves, actually killing themselves. Who's writing the most scripts for these anti-psychotic medications? Broadly speaking, it's actually not psychiatrists, interestingly enough, most psychiatric prescriptions are written by primary care doctors. And then a lot of APRNs are now writing prescriptions. And so it isn't, you know, a problem with psychiatry itself. It's with this kind of quick fix. Here's a, here's a script you're feeling sad about, you know, your stress at work. Here's, and we're in our annual physical. Here's a prescription. I'll see you next year kind of thing. We've just lost touch with how serious these medications are. These are powerful psychoactive chemicals that profoundly alter all the functions in our body. And yet these prescriptions are thrown around like, like they're nothing. And I don't blame anyone in particular for that. It's really just the, the, in part, it's direct consumer advertising. And this kind of decades, decades now of us being desensitized through drug ads and through the infusion into Hollywood and culture that meds are like candy. It just no trade-offs. The one time that I was prescribed lexapro, it came from a 10-minute, 15-minute wellness checkup with my general practitioner. She just said, like, how's work going? And I said, I mean, it's like a really stressful time right now. I don't know. I was working on something, building a show or whatever. And she was just like, oh, well, you know, we just put you on a low dose of lexapro. That'll probably really help. And I was like, oh, okay, this is before. Obviously, I was doing any of this or knew anything about health and wellness and the side effects of SSRIs. I didn't even know when an SSRI was. She put me on five milligrams. And luckily, it was easy for me to get off of it. I just decided I didn't want to be on this anymore. And I did kind of strategically taper myself, but I didn't work with anyone on doing that. I just did it myself, but did okay. But I know that that is not the case for millions of Americans. And you've kind of become this, basically accidental whistleblower for people who are feeling trapped by psychiatric drugs. So what are the types of stories that people have shared with you? Thousands at this point, all very similar to my own, which is we all found our way onto these medications for a reason. You know, in my case, I was a teenage girl. I was in retrospect, I see, hitting puberty. I was waking up to myself, waking up to my body, to my sexuality, to how I related to other people, to school. And I just, I was really struggling with figuring out who I was. And I was in so much pain, you know, feeling like I didn't belong. And what was the point to this life? It's all a performance. I'm just meant to go to school and play sports and be polite, but who am I? What do I really care about? And like, like me, I think so many people have some kind of, whether it's a crisis or, you know, a bump in the road or some kind of difficult life chapter that always has a story behind it. You know, we don't suffer, break down, or go crazy just out of the blue. There's always a story behind it. But I think because the current mental health industry is set up in such a way that there isn't oftentimes space to explore those stories. Doctors are stressed. They don't have a lot of time. They have a lot of paperwork to do. So you come in, you describe the so-called symptoms that you're experiencing. And instead of stepping back to say, like, what's the context here? You know, what's happened to you? What's happening around you? It's, okay, those symptoms look like this illness. Unfortunately, these illnesses are incurable, but manageable with medications. So, you know, here's my prescription pad. And, you know, this is going to help. I don't blame doctors for behaving this way. We have a system, the system itself is fundamentally corrupted and has is full of perverse incentive structures that lead people, lead doctors and mental health professionals away from taking time and making space. But the thousands of stories I've heard are all of people who were in pain, turned to the mental health system for help, mostly encountered really well-meaning mental health professionals. We're doing the best they could with the toolkit they had at their disposal and then ended up on one or usually more than one medication with no off-ramping site, no end game, no no discussion at the outset of, you know, just, you know, these drugs have only been studied for six to eight weeks, you know, prior to getting approved. So if you stay on them longer than that, we don't really have much evidence base for what could happen here. And also just so you You know, if you try to get off them one day, you might have a really hard time. - So hold on a minute. That's what the FDA reviews are, very short-term trials. Sometimes a week long, one of the ambient trials that the drug was approved on the basis of was one night, one night for ambient. And they used a normal population who didn't even have sleep problems. And the premise was, if they're in a sleep lab, they'll have disturbed sleep, and they followed them for one night. That was one of the three total trials that the FDA based its decision to approve ambient on. I'm blown away by this. What is the average length that people are on SSRIs? Most people are on them for years. A survey, I think, is something like 70% of people are like five or more years, if I'm remembering correctly, but it's years. And I have yet to meet a person who has been on these medications for years who was told they were taking a drug that was only ever looked at over a matter of weeks. I have no one I've ever met knew that upfront. I certainly didn't. The other thing too that has never been studied ever is polypharmacy, taking multiple psych meds at the same time. I assumed when I was prescribed five medications by one prescriber, not multiple, that there must be an evidence base for this. Otherwise, they wouldn't do it. And now I have long since known that these drugs have never been studied in combination with each other for their safety or effectiveness. So we basically are conducting a massive societal experiment on a population of people who are in pain who do often need help. None of us have been told this. I think now our culture is waking up to this and realizing something isn't working here. Something isn't right. Maybe this isn't actually the one size fits all answer for all people to just put you on a prescription that you'll be on potentially for the rest of your your life with zero evidence base. So some of these people that are experiencing horrific adverse side effects from long term use of anti-psychotic meds or SSRIs or what have you. What are the types of things that they're telling you? Well, people, I mean, depending on the drug class, common adverse effects that often mimic the diagnoses themselves are, you know, brain fog, memory issues, fatigue, you know, for certain drug classes, people often get ramped up anxiety, panic, you know, stress responses to things, sleep problems, obviously metabolic problems, especially anti-psychotics. When I was on anti-psychotics, I mean, my multi-drug regimen always had at least one anti-psychotic on it. I eventually, my weight fluctuated 70 pounds. For years, I was almost 200 pounds and I remember being told basically that I was shallow and like, and vain for caring about weight gain when, you know, my life was at stake. I just like, I'm like, that's just so wild to me. And the realities I took that in as feedback to actually, in court, I was like, maybe I am. Maybe I am being shallow, you know, I do have this serious illness. So people experience all kinds of adverse effects that mimic the diagnoses. And when they try to come off their meds, because they don't know how to tapers slowly, because their doctors don't know, because they're literally zero safe tapering protocols that aren't, you know, now is changing, of course, with Secretary Kennedy. People think how they feel when they come off their meds is their so-called baseline. Is, you know, their untreated condition and basically how they would feel for the rest of their lives, which is why they so often go up, go back on, because they're told, see, you don't want to live this way. It was a mistake to come off and they go back on and they feel better, because they're not in withdrawal anymore. And then they think, oh, wow, my med really helps me, because I would feel so much worse if I wasn't on it. When you were 13 years old, doctors were basically telling you there was something wrong with your brain. Your brain was defective. What exactly were they telling you was wrong with you? At 13, I was sent to a therapist. The therapist eventually sent me to a psychiatrist. So at 14, I saw my first MD, my first psychiatrist. And in one session, first appointment with her after I poured out my heart and just how angry I was and I was cutting myself and I was thinking about death and I was acting out at home and I was, you know, my thoughts wouldn't stop, you know, spinning around in my head about how meaningless life was. She said to me, you know, this all sounds like something called bipolar disorder. And it's an incurable illness that can be managed with meds. She didn't look in my brain. She didn't conduct any tests. She didn't, you know, scan anything. Nor did it occur to me as a 14 year old girl to ask her, like, how do you know? I just took this in and heard, you know, yeah, your brain's defective and will be for the rest of your life. And it profoundly impacted my sense of self and really began what ended up becoming this decade and a half Odyssey through the mental health system that I talk about in my book on trunk. And then God, I eventually found my way out of it because a lot of people don't. I have many, many friends who feel stuck or who aren't even here anymore because they gave up hope and trying to get off these meds that they were on for years. And doctors are routinely telling people, you know, antidepressants are totally safe for long term use. They're totally safe. But if that was true, why does it take people years to get off of these drugs? Yeah, I mean, it's a similar playbook to the opiate crisis that we are still, you know, reckoning with as a country. I think we've been taught to view these drugs as, you know, benevolent, gentle tools that really have limited trade-offs, you know, maybe some headaches, maybe some digestive issues, but they should wear off in a few weeks. And in reality, these are psychoactive chemicals that our brains become dependent on. And so I don't think it's necessarily a nefarious, I don't think there have been nefarious motives here, at least among the doctors themselves. I think there certainly is corrupt industry influence, you know, at play here. And drug companies knew from the beginning that these were dependence forming and their whistleblower. They've been documents leaked that show that internally they knew these drugs caused discontinuation, quote, unquote, when you, you know, symptoms when you stop them. So there are nefarious actors. But most people in this crisis here, I think just haven't had good information. Doctors too. We've all been kind of betrayed here, I think, by corrupt motives and incentives that haven't given us good information. We've known for years that teenage girls are moody. You've got hormone fluctuations. It seems like every single big emotion, they're trying to medicalize it. What do you think happens to a generation of girls where every single intense emotion they experience gets framed as pathology? I was the beginning of this phenomenon that is now, you know, I'm an elder millennial, so I was in therapy as a teen in the 90s. And this was just taking off, you know, what is now just everywhere where your diagnosis is your identity. It's how you feel seen and heard and understood, tell you, you feel like your pain can be validated. I remember what that felt like. I remember, I was just, I was so desperate to feel like I belong somewhere and like I understood myself and other people around me understood me. And eventually that diagnostic framework came, became the kind of single meaning-making apparatus that I had for myself. And it helped me feel like I was understood. And I think now young girls and young women in our culture have grown up infused in that messaging that to feel valid in this world, you need to have your pain, recognize, you need to have something wrong with you that, you know, you can pursue treatment to manage, like that's your purpose. It's how you're going to find your tribe, you know, look, we all have the same diagnosis. I'll look, we're all on the same med. I think just symbolically, the mental health industry has really kind of laid claim to the way we make sense of what it means to be human, especially for girls and young women. And I think what's happened as a result of this is that we've really surrendered our power in many ways. I think now about the emotional pain I was feeling that got me diagnosed as so-called mentally ill, it was wise. I was waking up to the intense pressures in my all girls' private school that were just not sustainable. And I was waking up to how destructive it is to have to have your sense of self-tight up in performance. And if I had had the chance to listen to that pain and actually make sense of what it was trying to tell me, which is that who you are has nothing to do with how you look and how you perform. I think I could have avoided all the the psychiatrization to follow, but I didn't have that space. And I don't think girls today have that space. But I do think something's changing. I think women are waking up to the ways they've been betrayed by medical authority, whether it's with psychiatric drugs or oral contraception, we're realizing we've surrendered like an understanding of our bodies and how they work and understanding of our emotions and how wise they are. and how much we need to use them to change the world, to grow and evolve as people. I feel optimistic that we're gonna start trending away from a medicalized culture. We might be at the tipping point right now. (upbeat music) - Do you remember when Furbies came out and people were convinced they were possessed? Like they would just turn on in the middle of the night, speaking in tongues, staring in your soul. Parents were like, "We need to remove this "from the home immediately, national panic." And honestly, fair, but here's the thing, we're adults now. Also, nobody gave answers to that. Like this was a national phenomenon, it was so scary. And like, they just pretended it didn't happen. I'm still traumatized by that. But you know what, we don't need to live in fear anymore, except when you walk into CVS and look into deodorant because that is where the real horror lives. You pick one up and it's like aluminum paraben, synthetic fragrance, things that you can't pronounce. It's basically a chemistry set for your armpits. And you're just like, well, I guess this is fine to rub onto my body every day, go right into my bloodstream. No, this is why zebra exists. Their deodorant is actually clean, no aluminum, no parabens, no fake fragrance, but it still works in real life. I'm talking air and stress, summer heat, freaky time, sports, even freaky sports. It goes on clear, does it ruin your clothes? And they even have a baking soda and non-baking soda version depending on your skin. And while you're upgrading your life, their floss and toothpaste tablets are also clean, simple, and actually makes sense. No chemicals, just normal stuff. Go to jezebra.com, use code Alex410% off. That's jezebra.com, jezebra.com, code Alex410% off. I'm incredibly particular about where I buy meat. In fact, I'm probably more obsessive about sourcing meat than almost anything else in my kitchen. Because if I'm spending money on high quality food, I don't just want to know what animal it came from. I want to know how it was raised, what it ate, whether it's spent its life on pasture, and whether I'm supporting the kind of farming that I actually want more of in the world, and also getting the most for such expensive meat, right? Meat is in cheap. So if I'm going to be spending a lot of money, I want to make sure that I'm getting all of the nutrients that I want to get for me and my family, that's why I love wild pastures. Their beef is 100% grass-fed and grass-finished, certified by the American Grass-fed Association, by the way, and raised right here in the United States. These cattle spend their lives rotationally grazing on pasture, not standing in feed lots, eating grain. Their pork is truly pasture-raised, which is much harder to find than people realize. These wild pasture pigs spend their lives outdoors rooting, and foraging, and moving naturally instead of being confined indoors. They're raised without antibiotics, hormones, or steroids, and are supplemented with non-GMO foods, like pumpkins, apples, and turnips. We love a pig with a turnip, and their chicken is regenerative, certified, and genuinely pasture-raised, not just free range, which is the biggest fraud of all. That can mean a tiny door to a concrete yard. These chickens, with wild pastures, spend their days outdoors on fresh pasture eating bugs, and foraging the way chickens are supposed to. Everything at wild pastures is sourced from American family farms. Everything is non-GMO. Everything is raised using regenerative farming practices that helps restore soil instead of depleting it. What really impressed me is that wild pastures makes this level of quality very affordable. Typically, 25% to 40% less than what you'd expect to pay for premium regenerative meat because they cut out the middle man. Guys, this is the cleanest, best meat and the least expensive that you can find shipped right to you. Honestly, once you've tasted truly pasture-raised meat from wild pastures, you're not going to want to ever go back. Go to wildpastures.com/allix, use code Alex to get 20% off for life, free shipping for life, and then a bonus $15 off. They're setting us up, guys. That's wildpastures.com/allix because when it comes to feeding your family, sourcing matters. American girls used to find their tribe or their sense of community through things like sports. Okay, hobbies. Now are they kind of finding their friends and tribes based on all being prescribed the same medication? - I think so, and I think that in combination with the performative nature of their lives now on social media, thinking I can imagine how hard it is to grow up thinking about every action you're taking as is this going to be something I can make a video out of or how will people receive this? I think it's a combination of having this awareness that you're constantly being perceived and judged and analyzed in combination with this dominant medicalized framework for communication. And no wonder we're where we are right now where one in three high school girls like seriously thinks about killing herself. We're not designed as human beings to live this way. We're designed to be in tribes. We're designed to move our bodies. We're designed to make art, use our hands, help each other, especially as women, I think, our hearts are called to serve especially vulnerable people, children, people in pain. And we're taking all that energy now and bringing it to a therapist's office and learning to just think about, I grew up so narcissistic, so focused on myself because I just sat in therapy week after week and talked about my pain all the time and how anxious I was and how depressed I was, just ruminating on yourself. - Totally, totally. And my therapist, God bless them, they're really nice people but they weren't incentivized to help me realize I didn't actually need them. So just years, years of focusing on myself. - I hear that a lot too, is that especially women in their 20s, they're like, oh, I love my therapist, I've been going to her for six years. I mean, to me, that's a huge red flag. Like, I am just throwing this out there. In my opinion, therapy should be for like the most severe cases you've gone through a sexual assault or some sort of actual trauma, not how we label trauma today, which I just, I don't even think it's trauma. I think it's like any sense of being uncomfortable, they're like, that was trauma. If you have gone through something significant, okay, the loss of a loved one or whatever, a short-term stint in therapy seems healthy to me. But continuing to go to a therapist for years and years is that a red flag that you're not getting better? And two, shouldn't a therapist like fire you basically as a client? Like, you need to get out there and get on your own and I can't just be holding your hand your whole life. - Yeah, I mean, but they're not incentivized because they'll lose a client. But nobody thinks about that. Nobody's considering that they're getting this regular very expensive paycheck monthly from you continually going. Like, why would they get you better? - Totally. And I don't even think they're consciously thinking this. I think the norm has become indefinite therapy for many people just like the norm has become indefinite meds. I'm not saying it's always like this. I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions, but it never once crossed my mind as a young woman in once to twice weekly therapy that I might one day not need to be in therapy. I just took it as a given. I'm on meds for the rest of my life and I'm in therapy for the rest of my life. And I think the reason why that has become the norm is because medicalizing our culture doesn't just mean turning, suffering, and pain into a list of symptoms of a diagnosis needing pills. It also means viewing help as something that you can only find from someone with letters after their name, like a trained professional. The number of times I've heard people say, oh, so and so came to me and they were in this intense crisis. And I said, I'm not a mental health professional. Like maybe you should go find someone who knows what they're doing. To me, that speaks to how profoundly disconnected we are from the power we each have as humans to be with each other through dark nights of the soul. So I think the professionalization of help has also become this monolithic taken on this monolithic force in our culture where here I am as a former patient. My expertise is the experiences that I've had navigating all this stuff. And I can sit with someone in suicidal despair and not be afraid of it because I've been there. And I can walk next to someone who's trying to figure out something in their life. And because I've had to do that in my own life, it feels organic and innate to be able to do that for someone else. But a lot of people out there would say, that's dangerous. She's not qualified. And that to me is at the heart of this medicalization crisis like we have to take back that power to help ourselves and each other. Not to say no one should ever go to therapists again, but we've forgotten that that's just one way of getting help. If you think about who you were at 13 when all of this was going on and the emotional turmoil that you were in and what so many teenage girls are experiencing, I think to them, they hear this conversation and they're like, well, if suffering is an automatic pathology, then what is suffering for? Even more tragic, I think a lot of girls and young women would hear this idea of suffering as not pathology as an insult. Like, how dare you tell me I'm not sick? Like, I would have 16 years ago if you had said, you know, Laura, maybe this intense pain you're in is because you're awake and sensitive. And you've been through hard stuff. I would be like, how dare you invalidate me? Like, my brain is sick, do you not understand Alex? The road ahead is going to require us, not just girls and women, but all of us to. sit with mystery and uncertainty because what I have found the most helpful for me in my journey away from being a professional psychiatric patient as I like to say is trying to have an answer to and an explanation for everything about who I am and why I feel the way I feel has actually, it's a prison and there's a lot of freedom in letting go of needing to know why all the time and needing to have a box that you can fit yourself in and needing to have an answer to every question. Sometimes it's just, you know, just being with the uncertainty and the mystery and the discomfort in that that actually enables you to like find what you're meant to do next. Right now, I think for so many people who are on meds and who are in, you know, kind of, you know, week after week, month after month, year after year of therapy, they've lost this opportunity to just like not need to figure it out all the time. Yeah. And fix the pain and stop, stop the discomfort. It's into me the more we wake up to this and realize like, wait, I can be with myself in this, in this pain like that, that to me is the biggest threat to the mental health industry. You've said that coming off of meds made you feel life again, even the painful parts. Is there a danger that modern culture has become obsessed with emotional comfort at all costs? Totally. We are so, and it's so much bigger than just the mental health industry. I think consumerism more broadly, just this, we're just bombarded constantly with messages about, you know, if you don't feel good, something's wrong with you. Like buy this, take this, do this. And I think it's so embedded in us that pain and discomfort is a problem to fix that we've lost literacy in, in being with pain. Literacy isn't the exact right word for it. But in some ways it is because the language of pain, pain is telling us something about our lives that sometimes requires action and sometimes just requires listening, but quick fix, consumerist culture, quick fix mental health culture, you know, robs you of that opportunity to actually listen. And so I know for me coming off the meds, which I did way too fast, and I'm sure we'll talk more about tapering and all of that, but I had no idea what I was doing. I put myself through a lot of unnecessary pain because of how quickly I came off, but as I navigated withdrawal, like then the real work began, because the drugs were out of my system now. And now I had to like actually learn how to be with myself and be with my mind and be with my pain after running from it for like half my life at that point. I feel like we have an entire generation of people that do not even feel real emotions. Like they aren't experiencing high highs, but they're also not experiencing low lows, and sadness and anger and joy, joy is, you know, so important as an emotion. All of this is part of the human experience. And we've just kind of me capped people. So they're not experiencing this at all. And I think that's why you have this epidemic of young people, especially going, I don't know, I'm not passionate about anything. I don't really know what I'm good at. I don't know what I love to do. I don't know what I want to do with my life. I just feel like I don't have a calling. I don't know how to find my calling. It's like, how many medications are you on? That's like the one thing that I wonder is I think a lot of that feeling of like listlessness, I guess, through life is coming from being overly medicated from a young age. I think so. And I think we are in a disembodying culture. So between the meds and the screens and the processed food, we are all set up by default to basically disconnect from from our bodies, from our senses, from our full capacities as vital human beings. And it takes effort to, you know, like opt out of the default setting to not start that med, to not, you know, go for that box of processed food because you feel too tired to cook yourself. I think it's weird. People actually get pissed off when you tell them, just change your food. Get morning sun. Don't use your phone for a couple hours or try to wear blue like glasses or whatever, but try to avoid blue light a couple hours before you go to bed. People get mad like, well, it can't be that simple. Like it has to be something that's complex. It has to be a drug that you're prescribed or else they don't think that it's real helpful advice. It's such a stewed observation that I would have been that person, you know, like I think it's weird people and this is not about medication, but like people have been genuinely like violently angry with me online when I've talked about, you know, my skin or different things improving. And I'm like, I just changed my food. I stopped drinking five doctor peppers a day. They're like, well, it can't be that. Like it can't be that easy. It's like, what if it is? What the real story is here, because this is a symptom, what you're describing is a, not to use a medicalized word, but like a symptom of a much deeper crisis that we're in. And that is modern industrialized society is like not sustainable for human thriving. And I think we are all from a young age in so much discomfort and pain and and alienation. We aren't designed to sit in desks under, you know, fluorescent lights hour after hour after hour, day after day after day. And so I think we are all in so much pain and we're tired and we're depleted. And so the, you hear that kind of invitation like, well, maybe if you just get out for a morning walk and it feels impossible. And so I think it's important to see what the root of source is of this crisis that we're in where people are offended by the thought of like getting sunlight. And it's not about those people being like lazy or bad people in any way. It's just we are living in a culture that makes it nearly impossible to to thrive. You have to like really muster the will and the energy and have resources too. You have to have the resources to do these things. And so it's on I see the same kind of polarized conversation that that it sounds like you're you're having to where people are it's like this us and them thing. And if you're not, you know, on board with lifestyle changes, then you're the then you're the enemy or vice versa. To me, we have to like find a way to meet in the middle and recognize like we're all struggling in this in this, you know, alienating modern world that we live in. We have to come together and like step into each other's shoes and see the world through each other's eyes if we're actually going to figure out how to like find our way out of this again so that it is I we can go back to how, you know, I think about my childhood in the 80s and 90s, no internet, let alone, you know, like no cell phones, none of it. I didn't know anything besides like just being in the woods after school for hours every day, like that was my norm. I have to think it's possible that even with all this technology and screens and all of it that we can help, especially our kids, help that become innate to them again. We have to believe it's possible. But we're only going to get there. I think if we just really understand the pain and the wounds at the heart of why people are so angry when you when you say these things, it's not going to be an easy road to meet each other, but we have to. One thing I always keep on hand, especially this time of year, is active skin repair. Actually, it became a stable for me after one of those days where you think I'm fine. I don't really need to reapply sunscreen and then you get home and you realize you're absolutely cooked. You know, that really like hot, tight, angry feeling that your skin gets after too much sun. So I sprayed active skin repair on it. And ever since then, I've kept a bottle around it all times. What's cool is that active skin repair works using hypochlorous acid. That's a molecule that your body naturally produces as part of its own immune response. So when that's applied to the skin, it helps cleanse, so the irritation, reduce inflammation and support healing. And it's not only for sunburns. You can use it on cuts and scrapes and burns, rashes, bug bites, random skin irritations, you name it. It's also safe for sensitive skin and can be used on eczema-prone, rosacea-prone, and acne-prone skin. You can use it on a baby, you can use it on a pet. I love that it is medical grade, but also completely nontoxic. No harsh ingredients, no weird chemicals, and it's safe for everyone in the family from little kids to grandparents. More than half a million people use active skin repair and have given it five star reviews. So once you have a bottle in your house, you're going to start reaching for it constantly. It solves so many skin issues. Go to activeskinrepair.com, use code Alex for 20% off. That's activeskinrepair.com, code Alex. I'm not saying I'm a llama, but if I wore a llama, just spitball in here. And I was headed to a concert put on by other llamas. And I wanted my skin to look incredible under stage lighting, then I'm wearing the loose foundation powder by Adele Natural Cosmetics, completely clean and nontoxic. And it actually lets your skin look like skin while also being lightweight, breathable, buildable. It's really great for oily skin. We're getting into warmer months. You can do a shear layer or you can build it up where you need it, which is exactly what you want when you're a llama at a concert. Natural radiant, not cakey. No one wants cakey llama energy. And the best part, if you don't even know your shade, Adele does a free color match. You literally just email them and they will help you find your perfect llama match. Give you tips on how to apply it on your llama skin. And if it's not right, they're going to fix it for free. Try getting that kind of service from literally any giant llama makeup corporation. You can't. They'd rather set your house on fire. Adele Natural Cosmetics is a Christian-founded family own company making handcraft and clean cosmetics in central Texas for llamas or people. Everything is small batch made with nontoxic and greedy and sourced from sustainable farm, so you're not just buying makeup. You're supporting actual people, not llamas, who still believe in things like integrity. Also, if you want that extra glow, their bronzing cream and blush are so good and just brings your skin back to life without looking heavy. Go to AdeleNaturalCosmetics.com and use code Alex for 25% off your first order because beauty comes from the heart, but let's not ignore the face. That's AdeleNaturalCosmetics.com code Alex for 25% off your first order. You've talked about how psych meds really affected your cognition. Do you ever grieve the version of yourself that existed underneath all those medications for all those years of your childhood? I came off of everything in 2010, I was 27. I think the loss that I grieved the most was the fact that I had no sexuality through my teens and 20s, no ability to have an orgasm, no sensory activation, really, of any kind. And then God, I got that back. A lot of people haven't been so lucky and PSSD, post-SSRI sexual dysfunction is a serious issue. I grieved that more than anything because who we are as sexual beings is about so much more than sex. It's about your creativity and your friendships and your appreciation of beauty. Grief, I think, is perhaps the most important emotion to reckon with when you're trying to leave behind psych meds and diagnoses and all of it and it brings anger with it and it brings shock and denial, like the whole thing. Now I wouldn't change, when I look back, I wouldn't change a minute of it because it's given me my life's purpose and it's filled my life with such joy and meaning because I know intimately what a life not worth living feels like. But it took me a while to get to that place. I think PSSD is one of the most complex, shocking medication side effects I've ever heard just because of how it can completely ruin any ability to feel anything sexual. That's horrific. I just saw this video of this girl on a panel and she was talking about how she feels no sensation in her clitoris. She's like 23 years old. She doesn't feel anything when she listens to music and she doesn't feel anything when her mother hugs her. Yeah. Her name's Lauren Friedman and my organization in her Compass Initiative helped organize that summit, some May 4th, 2026 summit that you're referring to. That testimony was so powerful. I get Terry just thinking about seeing her up there on that stage. It took so much courage to put herself out there in such a vulnerable way and I think the community of PSSD people are just so steadfast in getting the word out about this and in trying to make changes happen, starting with updating drug labels to even warn that this is a thing, which literally right now there are no warnings about it on American drug labels. There are in other countries. It's such a profound betrayal of what it means to be human to have this taken from you and I think it happens to far more people. I think a lot of people don't even realize that they're lack of desire, you know, that's a symptom of depression, for example. So a lot of people just don't even link the dots. This is a hot take. You may or may not agree, which is fine. My hot take is any one, any young person who claims to be asexual is experiencing drug side effects. I don't even think that's humanly possible to be asexual. I think it's completely false, which you can disagree. I think it's false. I think it is a mind trick from medications or you've been completely numbed out by medications and so you think I'm not capable of feeling a sexual attraction towards anyone. I just think there's no way. I think the med piece is a huge part of it, for sure. I definitely agree. I think also there's a social contagion phenomenon too, and also the food that is disconnecting people from their bodies and all the hormonal disruption from toxins and of course the cultural caches now at being, because it's a new identity box to put yourself in, because people are just desperate to stand out. Being normal is uncool, like if you are not some form of minority group or whatever, you know, if you're not LGBT, if you don't have some sort of like serious mental illness, it's like you're not cool because you've got to have something wrong with you. Yeah. I mean, I fell prey to it myself and I think it speaks to again, like this deep existential spiritual crisis that our culture is in where young people grow up a drift and without, you know, we've lost, I think, American culture, you know, we don't grow up with rituals with, you know, when you're entering transitions and like I think about my puberty, you know, I had no opportunity to learn from, you know, I was embarrassed to talk about it with my mom, let alone, you know, be surrounded and embraced and celebrated for, you know, reaching men arc. And I think about how so many, there's so many missing rituals, especially like intergenerational rituals in American culture now that I think leave young people, especially a drift in searching for that sense of belonging, hence why these identity boxes feel so tantalizing, because you just want to know who you are and how you fit in here, oh, and here, oh, I can be bipolar, awesome, or like I can be a sexual, awesome, or whatever the box is. And I love, it's like we need to make like normal boring, just ordinaryness. You know what I mean? We need to bring emo back because this is a thing, every teenage girl wants to feel unique and special and stand out, right? Avril Lavigne, I mean, I'm a millennial too, I'm a little younger than you, but Avril Lavigne came out with her losing my grip album and she had that song, "Anything But Ordinary." And I was in fourth grade listening to that like, oh my gosh, this is me, I want to be anything but ordinary. Like that's like the worst thing that could ever happen is just be boring and bland and like everyone else. And it's like usually you would see teenagers would go into these bouts of self-expression with how they dress and cool haircuts and makeup and things like that. You would see that. But now the way that they're finding this uniqueness about them is through perceived mental illnesses. And so my question for you is you said it yourself that if somebody would have came to you and said you need to change your diet, what are you eating? How are we sleeping at night? How much outside time? How much sunlight are we getting? Things like that. As a teenager, when you were going through all of these different emotional changes and hormonal fluctuations, you would have totally rejected that and been like, how dare you? Not see me and understand what I'm going through. So for other parents listening who know that if they were to come to their teenager, they'd be like, we are going to be tapering you off these drugs, you don't need this. There's other things that we could do like exercise, what have you. They know that they're going to have an absolute, absolute conniption. So like, how should parents be handling this with teenagers, especially girls? Yeah. I think it's all about the connection and as much as possible, sinking deeper than the words that are being exchanged and like, what's the emotion here? It's fear. It's insecurity. It's a sense of inadequacy. It's a sense of feeling invisible. Like, when parents reach out for help all often say, you know, the real communication isn't in the words your kid is saying to you, it's something deeper. So I think it requires the parent to first themselves get, make sure they're connected to their own emotional capacities, because I think a lot of parents, God bless them grow up themselves, compartmentalizing the full spectrum of their emotions. So I think it starts with, am I as a parent actually in touch with my own emotions? Am I actually listening to what my instincts are telling me? And am I taking care of myself? Am I eating? It's really starting there so that you can get yourself a centered as possible to then be able to really listen, pass the noise and pass the arguments with your kid to like, hear what they're actually saying, which is, I don't feel like I belong here. I don't know who I am. I don't know how to navigate this life. And that's where the connection needs to be forged and maintained. Good point about the parent needs to have their stuff together because the first person who's going to call you out for being hypocritical is going to be your 16-year-old daughter. Oh yeah. Because I was that. I was a nightmare teenager. And I would have immediately been like, you know, you don't need to tell me that like with you doing the XYZ. So I would have not, I would have been so resistant. Yeah. Oh my, me too. First of all. And yeah, I think, I think the other thing that parents can do, because you know, I'm a parent. I have a stepson and a son, 12 and 5. I mess up all the time, especially the past year. My book came out. I'm working really hard. I'm stressed. I'm depleted. I'm not doing the things that I need. I know I need all the time. But in the very least, I own it and I model, you know, what it looks like to say, like, I messed up here and I'm going to do better next time. So I think as parents, you know, we're all doing the best we can. It's really hard to juggle, you know, if you're if you're working full time with kids. It's hard to juggle at all. So it's also about modeling how you move through making mistakes and like owning that. I think for parents who have kids who are already on meds. One thing to keep in mind, and this is also for any family member who has a loved one on a psych med. And the family member is seeing, you know, these meds aren't serving this person I love. I think it's important to remember how powerful the stories that we get taught as psychiatric patients are about our so-called broken brains. And, you know, this medicine is like, you know, someone with diabetes needs insulin, I need this for me. And recognizing that the last thing you want to do is, is give off a coercive energy, as much as you can make peace with the fact that this might take a while to help your, if it's a kid, you obviously, like a under 18 kid, you can do whatever you want as a parent, obviously. But if it's an adult, this is about staying by the person's side, helping them, and as gentle ways you can connect with information that maybe they weren't given about the meds, like the whole six to eight week, you know, trials, yet, you know, Tom, you've been on this for seven years, just planting seeds, sharing resources, reminding them that you're there by their side, and also helping them recognize that, you know, I think a lot of the reason why people stay on these meds for years is because every time they try to stop, they feel horrible. So they're really afraid of trying again. I, you know, I gave it a shot getting off my Lex Pro a couple of years ago, it didn't go well. When you're supporting someone in that place, reminding them, well, maybe you didn't have good information about how to taper safely, but you know what, now we can get access to that. So this time might look different, because I think a lot of people stay on these meds because they're afraid. Oh, yeah. So how do you help them realize this has been an information problem? We didn't have good information before about how to taper. Now we do. It might well look very different. What are some other lesser known side effects when it comes to antidepressants that people don't talk about enough? I think one of the craziest, it's like, hello, is that one of the main side effects of antidepressants are depression and anxiety and increased risk of suicide. Yes. So also, if you've been on these drugs and you're not getting better and you still feel depressed and anxious, it could be the side effect of the medication. I also saw something recently about hearing loss. You could be experiencing hearing loss from long-term SSRI use. For anyone not familiar, SSRI, selective serotonin, reuptake inhibitor. And that's just one of multiple different kinds of antidepressants or SNRIs or MAOIs or, you know, tricyclic, they're all different kinds of antidepressants. The serotonin system is, you know, we've been taught this BS mythology that, oh, serotonin is a happy chemical. People just throw the little, zooloft bubble, serotonin is responsible for like basic human functioning, you know, especially in you, starting in utero through your life. It controls all kinds of like essential functions of the body. So when you're interfering with that by taking a drug that basically disables how your serotonergic system is functioning, like they're going to be systemic effects. So I don't think it gets talked about enough. It's something like 95% of our serotonin receptors are in the gut. So when you're taking an SSRI, it's not just like going straight to your brain. It's literally interfering with your entire like metabolic system. So a lot of people who think they have irritable bowel syndrome, you know, or who have leaky gut syndrome or who have all kinds of digestive issues, you know, if they're on any depressants, it's worth considering like maybe that's not a coincidence. I had years and years and years of what I thought was IBS. Got off my five psych meds, gave my body like a couple years to really recover and realized like, wow, I never had IBS actually. It was like totally just the metabolic effects of phrase drugs. What I would say to anyone listening right now is, you know, don't take our word for any of this because I could imagine someone saying, neither of these women are doctors. Google it. Oh, that's their favorite thing. The peer reviewed literature, you can find, you know, psych drugs can lead to autoimmune conditions. They can lead to heart issues, kidney issues, liver issues, vision issues, like the list goes on and on and on because these neurotransmitter systems are like essential to like basic human function. Speaking of how hard it is to get off these drugs, you've got women that are on these since teenagers, sometimes even earlier. And then, you know, they're in their mid late 20s, early 30s, they they get married, they want to get pregnant. It's like impossible. You can't just stop taking the drug. Oh, I'm pregnant. So I'm just not going to take my lexipronia or no, no, no, that's not how it works. So they're getting pregnant on SSRIs. And what do we know about babies who are developing in the womb while their mother is taking any type of antidepressant or anti-anxiety med? There are well-documented effects on postpartum outcomes on developmental issues and kids. These drugs cross the blood brain barrier. They cross the placental wall. They infuse every part of us. And when you have a delicate little baby growing, who's so susceptible to the environment around them in the mother's womb, you know, any, this idea that a synthetic pharmaceutical produced in a lab would like have no effect on that. It's just, it's just illogical. And what's wild is, you know, the medical profession, they know that this is not new. But I think because the psychiatric drug conversation has become so politicized in our culture, there's now this like knee-jerk reaction to any kind of questioning of a pharmaceutical product, like you're suddenly a political issue. Why have we taken it here? Because it, it shouldn't be. Right. And this is nothing new. Our SNRIs, any safer for long term use. Whatever the drug classes, whether it's SSRI, SNRI, MAOI, tricyclic, antipsychotic, you know, any convulsant, benzodiazepines, Z drugs, stimulant, they're all approved on the basis of short-term trials. So it is literally an experiment to take these drugs long term. And our SNRIs just is hard to get off of as SSRIs? I would say roughly speaking, they're all as difficult, the antidepressants. I mean, the drug class that seems to be the least hard, with a caveat that some people have a really hard time getting off them, our stimulants, like Adderall, Ritalin, five ends. Every single college kid I know is on Adderall. What do you know about Adderall? Anything approved on the basis of short-term trials? I mean, these drugs that are given for so-called ADD, ADHD, they're largely inf-phetamines, methamphetamine, they're speed. They're very, they're basically speed. If you give any human being speed, they're going to be able to focus on mundane monotonous tasks that they're not interested in, at least for a short period of time. So one of the things that happens often with people on stimulants, especially for people who grew up on stimulants, is that they, first of all, become dependent on them fast, so they develop tolerance. So the drug, the dosage that they were previously on, stops working. So they're steadily increasing doses over years or adding a second stimulant. That happens often. But the tragedy here is, and there needs to be, there will be a reckoning around this, I think. Soon, I feel it coming, is that you now have, you know, 30-somethings, 40-somethings who've been on stimulants, sent high school, since college, they've built careers based on their prescriptions, you know, and the terror they must feel, my god, I'm a lawyer, I've built this career for myself based on getting my, my out-of-all, like, I can't ever come off it, because what if I can't do my job? I think we have a serious, like, professional crisis here, especially for men too. My husband Cooper, this was his story. He was put on stimulants as a teenager, and in his 20s, became a journalist. He's not a kind of guy, the kind of guy who can handle, like, deadlines and stress and pressure. He's, like, more expansive. He's an artist. He's a creative. Totally. And he paid deadlines. I freaking hate deadlines too. Oh, they're brutal. And he was on speed, prescribed speed, doing his job. When he quit, when he realized he needed to get off this stuff, he stopped, he couldn't be a journalist anymore. So like, it's serious here. What we're talking about, when it comes to stimulants, but that drug class, I would say, I hear the least issue, relatively speaking, the least issues getting off of it. That being said, it's still really hard to get off. I saw a story recently about a woman who gave birth and then got hit with a bill because her insurance company denied part of her maternity stay years later, years later. Imagine bringing a baby into the world, thinking you're covered, and then finding out that you're on your own. And honestly, stories like that make you wonder, if health insurance can leave families fighting over childbirth bills, what exactly are we sending all that money to insurance companies for? We have been taught that health insurance is our safety net. But every year, hundreds of thousands of families face medical bankruptcy despite having health insurance. And health insurers deny a significant number of claims. That's why more people are rethinking the entire system, opting out of health insurance and switching to crowd health. Crowd health is not insurance. It's a community of more than 30,000 members helping each other handle major medical expenses of 30,000 people. So for the routine stuff, many members will pay And then they'll find dramatically lower prices by cutting out the middleman. And for the big stuff, like cancer, major accidents, unexpected diagnoses, the crowd will step in. And what I love is that you get to choose your doctor, crowd health, even supports functional medicine providers, birthing centers, and home births, plus you get a dedicated care advocate, a prescription discount, help negotiating bills, and $300 available annually for wellness support. It's healthcare built around people instead of corporations, like they're literally doing this the most maha way I've ever heard. Join crowd health today, get started for only $99 for your first three months with code culture at join crowd health dot com. That's join crowd health dot com code culture. Crowd health is not insurance, opt out, take your power back. If you have additional questions about like the logistics of switching, they have the most amazing customer service, call them up, email them up, and ask whatever you need to ask and they will be able to answer for you. Being an adult is basically just finding out that everything important requires follow-up. You think that you've handled something once and then five years later, someone's like, no, that expired, that change, that was never processed, good luck, that's voter registration. People assume that they're fine because they registered once in college or because they voted a few years ago, or because they have this touching faith in administrative competence. Meanwhile, all it takes is moving homes, even within the same state, changing your name, voting in a while, or some random outdated info, and suddenly you've got a problem. Here's what's wild, tens of millions of eligible Americans either aren't registered or aren't even sure if they are. So let's not do the thing where we find out too late and then act shocked, let's just be adults for 30 seconds, go to realalexclark.com/vote. I made it really simple, you can check your registration status, that's all it does. Just tell you if you're registered to vote or not, and if you're not, register you to vote. Not even telling you who to vote for, realalexclark.com/vote. I saw Roger McFillin post another side effect that they're finding with antidepressants, is that they reduce your ability to feel the suffering of others. That brain scans confirmed it, you can see pain in somebody else, but you just stop feeling it. I guess you don't feel bad for them, you don't feel anything. I've been wondering why Lely, it seems like nobody has empathy for others, look, I look at Turning Point USA, this isn't a secret, I see how people online are treating and talking about Erika Kirk. I'm like, what is happening, how do you not feel pain for somebody else anyway, there's a whole thing, but was that shocking to you to hear this? I mean, experientially that was certainly what happened for me, and I was just interpreting it as, I'm just so mentally ill that I can't bond with people and I can't feel connected. I think when you put that in combination with immediate, with the screen and this virtual realm that we spend so much of our time in, I think it is no surprise that people treat each other in the way you're describing. Did you just look at the broader polarization of our cultural moment that we're in and I can't help but wonder how much of it is being fueled by the fact that basically one and four of us are on psych meds and I'm telling you from a screen all day. I think this contributes to so many different issues that we're seeing in society. Where are we on getting a black box warning on SSRIs? The FCA is aware of the five active citizen petitions that have been filed in recent years around various issues tied to any depressions between PSSD, dependence and withdrawal, pregnancy risks. And I know that they recently had a listening session with the authors of these petitions to really hear what it is that they're concerned about and what they think needs to change. I hope that the FDA is able to update the labels because I think there's a robust evidence base for PSSD and certainly for dependence and withdrawal. It may be seen but I'm optimistic that HHS more broadly is really taking this issue seriously and working hard to take action to. The secretary of Kennedy really cares about this. He cares about it a lot and I think the media and ex etc often whether deliberately or accidentally. It's deliberate. Right. So for those of you who don't know because I know a lot of my audience are millennial moms and so they are not on X which I always tell them they need to be because I mean maybe you don't because it'll ruin your life but also it's like I don't know how you keep up with breaking news. But anyway on X right now it's like every single headline is like secretary of Kennedy wants to ban SSRIs. He wants to take SSRIs away from people. What is the truth? The truth couldn't be any further different from that completely ridiculous claim. Secretary of Kennedy has zero interest in removing access or you know stripping people of meds that they want to take. This is all about informed choice and this is all about providing safe reliable information and resources for whatever percentage of people end up deciding they don't want to take these anymore. I was saying the other day you know talking about the importance of giving people good information about how to safely taper off psych meds when that's what they want is not the same as saying you should taper off antidepressants also like user freaking brain. I guess you must be on a SSRI so you can't because the point is is that secretary Kennedy knows how damaging they are and how hard it is to taper off so he's not going to rip them away from you because you know that's going to send to everybody like I mean oh my gosh can you imagine what would happen to us as a culture if overnight SSRIs were banned. It's a really good point literally we would see like homicidal maniacs like crazy stuff would happen. And so nobody's going to do that. That's the whole point is he knows how dangerous it is and how tough it is to get off of them so he wants to help people have that option in a safe way if they want to just give people information. What is the correct way to taper off antidepressants? I mean there is no one answer to that question because it totally depends on how you're feeling as you're coming off. Some people can come off psych meds faster and have minimal problems but others can't and the challenge is that right now there's no way to know because there's no research that's been done on this yet. There's no way to know up front if you are one of the lucky ones who can stop quickly. And just to paint a picture of what slow actually means, people think that slow usually means cut your dose in half for a couple of weeks or cut it by a quarter every week for a month, that's basically cool turkey. What we have found in the lay person withdrawal community which I should say right now is the world's leading expert on this. Those of us who've had to figure this out for ourselves because we had no safe guidance from our doctors, what we found is that making increasingly smaller cuts around 5 to 10% of your dose each month is generally the rate that minimizes the risk that you'll have disabling withdrawal symptoms. So to paint a picture of that, if you're on 100 milligrams of a drug and you want to come off at a rate of 10% a month, does that have what people are on 100 milligrams of antidepressants? Well, all the different drugs have different dose like some, for some drugs, you're on one milligram, for others, you're on a thousand milligrams at all, it all varies depending on which drug it is. Okay. But some antidepressants 100 would be totally standard, like not for lexapro like you were on. So let's say you're on 100 milligrams and you've decided, you know what, I'm going to come off at 10% per month. So in month one, you would cut 10 milligrams, 10% of 100. In month two, you would cut 10% of 90, so you'd cut 9 milligrams, so you're down to 81. And then in month three, you'd cut 8.1%, 10% of 81. So you end up making reductions that get progressively smaller over time. So it has what's called a hyperbolic curve. This is a critical distinction between how most of conventional psychiatrists who do prescribing, you know, most of them don't do it hyperbolicly, they do it in a linear way. So you would just cut 10, 10, 10, 10. The problem with this is that what research is now starting to reveal is that the way these drugs interfere with your neurotransmitter receptors, it doesn't happen in a linear fashion. So the impact of a drug on your brain is not directly correlated with the amount of drugs. So if you're on like the 5 milligrams of lexapro that you were put on, which any doctor would say is like subtherapeutic, that's like a tiny dose, it's barely doing anything, is having a dramatic effect on receptor function. The higher the dose you go up on, the less of an effect over time. So people find when they're on higher doses, they can taper down faster, but the lower the dose, the harder it gets to come off. Which if you say that to a standard prescriber, they'll say that's all in your head, you know, like you're on a low dose, you should be able to jump off, but it's actually the opposite. So this hyperbolic tapering is what helps minimize those increasing disruptions that happen when you're getting to lower and lower dosages. I know that sounds dense and technical, but basically like 5 to 10 percent a month based on whatever dose you were on the previous month is generally the rate that people find leads to the least disruptive withdrawal symptoms. like trying to tape off and you're taking down 10% 10% is this something that you can just do in your kitchen with a knife. That's a really good question. Okay. Right now you have no choice basically but to do it in your kitchen whether it's with a knife or you're making a liquid mixture with water and using syringes because currently these drugs are not manufactured in doses sizes that enable you to taper safely. So people have had no choice but to become basically their own pharmacists at home doing like kitchen experiments. What I hope will you know one of the reform efforts underway at HHS I think what would be really helpful to the American public is to find a way to ensure these drugs are manufactured as liquids so that you can make reductions you know with a liquid which is much easier to do than with a solid tablet. Exactly. Yeah. Or making them available in tablets in like a wide range of doses sizes. Currently you cannot taper safely unless you pay for a compounded prescription or use a liquid and that needs to change because as more people wake up to the fact that they don't necessarily want to take these drugs for the long haul if they don't have the ability to do it safely. It will be a public health crisis. And somebody listening that's like I just want to be done with this. I just want to stop taking it. What's your message to them? I hear you and that was me in 2010 and what I often say to people is the fastest way to come off and stay off a psychiatric medication is to go very very very slowly as slow as your body needs to avoid disabling withdrawal symptoms. So it might feel like it's going to take a lot longer. If you come off too fast a lot of people end up back on meds or even on more meds and then it ends up taking even longer than if they had just done it slowly. So let's say somebody's been I'm just going to throw this out there on an antidepressant for eight years. I mean on average if you were just going to guess and everybody's different I know and it depends on the drug. But if you were going to guess how long should that tapering process probably take them? Yeah. Like you said bearing in mind that everyone's different I would say it if it took 18 to 30 18 to 36 months would probably be what I imagine would you know it would need maybe faster but like I was saying before there's no way to know up front. And so the best way to minimize risk is to start out going slowly and just slowly build up the speed until you start to feel problematic withdrawal symptoms. And then that's your body saying this is the fastest you can do this at. Instead of starting faster and then getting yourself destabilized and then you have to wait until you restabilize and then you've lost all this time. People talk about how hard it is to get off an SSRI and that you might experience withdrawal symptoms. What I don't think they talk about is that those withdrawal symptoms are not necessarily immediate after getting off an SSRI that they could appear what years later. Possibly years but what I've seen is months later and and it's again because there's no research into this we don't really understand why this is the case like I've heard some maybe it's just still in your body. The drug leaves your body you know these drugs are usually have half lives that are you know the anywhere from like eight hours to I don't know I'm in the guess like 30 hours they're they're out of your the drug is out of your bloodstream in a short matter of time but that's actually not even relevant for the issue of withdrawal because withdrawal is the byproduct of physical dependence and physical dependence is basically what happens when your body has changed itself to accommodate this this drug so like anyone who drinks you know coffee every day and quits it cold turkey you know you know that migraine. So I think because we don't understand the full extent of what these drugs are doing to the nervous system there's some theories that the delayed withdrawal symptoms people have are you know maybe tied into there's some kind of maybe there's some kind of sensitization that happens to neurotransmitter function when you're off these drugs and so you're more susceptible to stress so it's just a black box of understanding but people not infrequently report being basically fine after coming off their meds abruptly for weeks or even months and then they get walloped like three months in and of course they're going to be told that has nothing to do that's not withdrawal you're having a relapse this conflation of withdrawal and relapse is like a massive distorting variable here that we have to help our culture tease apart mm-hmm how you feel when you stop your medication is not necessarily you or your baseline or your so-called illness like it may well be withdrawal and once you make that switch and you see it that way you're like whoa whoa and then you see it everywhere like all the stories of your friends and family you know who try to get off and then they had the horrible crisis and they ended up in the hospital you're like oh my gosh it's all withdrawal that horrific story of that New England mother oh you know what I'm talking about but she put on 12 different like psych meds yeah she was in pay she was at the same hospital that I was a patient at two she really yeah and it's you know McLean hospital it's like one of the country's most prestigious private psychiatric institution she killed her what three kids I can't remember if it was two or three and then tried to kill herself jumped out of a window and it's now paralyzed and so now she's going she's in in the middle of trial for murder for her children you know her husband's left or whatever of course but this is such an interesting case I mean it's obviously horrific but just knowing what we know about these drugs I just think this is such an interesting case where I almost feel like she has a massive lawsuit you know herself how much blame do you put on a person in that type of situation where you again they've never studied how these drugs interact with each other she's put on like a dozen of them at once I mean what does your take on that story in the drug labels themselves adverse events can include increased risk of suicidal and homicidal ideation so I think there's enough evidence that these drug companies are required to put these risks on the label I think you know there there are previous cases you know a man in Canada named David Carmichael was put on I can't remember what it was an antidepressant of some kind I think for work stress and he ended up killing his child his son because the drug made him completely psychotic he had no history of psychosis he ended up winning I don't know enough about the case but whether they settled or he he want he was found not guilty by reason of insanity I don't remember if they actually linked it to the drug but I know he tried he made a tried to make a really strong case that that it was a drug and I think it I think it clearly was what is the correlation we see between antidepressants and mass shootings we need to take a closer look we need to be foying medical records we need to pass laws that require any mass shooting map mass shooting to you know in the autopsy to drug to drug test for all pharmaceuticals I think it's completely within the realm of possibility that these drugs play a role I think it's obviously like more complicated and because if it you know not everyone is a mass shooter who's on polypharmacy so I think it's it's an issue that needs more research and attention but I also think it's an issue that isn't necessarily the most important one to be focusing the cultural conversation on because it's so polarizing and because it's relative to how many people are on these drugs like such a small obviously a significant issue of course but to me the the issue of dependence and withdrawal is like the most obvious no brainer like this is a neutral this should be a neutral issue talking about the fact that these drugs are dependence forming and we don't have safe tapering protocols is not saying anything about whether people should or shouldn't take these drugs like we should just have safe offerings like who can disagree with that all the facets of the psychiatric drug issue need attention yeah but to me the least polarizing one to start with is this dependence and tapering issue you use the phrase rehumanized future what does that mean between the the medicalization of every facet of our emotional selves and the professionalization of help and just how disembodied and disconnected so many of us are to our bodies through these medications or through screens or through whatever you know other kind of toxic aspects of our culture to me the future is about just like how do we come back to what it means to be human how do we remember that suffering is in a symptom of an illness to drug away suffering has meaning and purpose it's what like you were saying it's what you're meant to make art out of and angry teenage girls aren't meant to be seeing in front of their screens in a dark room on the internet they're meant to be you know experimenting with fashion and painting and music and musicals like they're meant to be channeling their emotions into art and into creative and expression and into construction of beauty and to me that's what it means to be human this psychiatric medication issue is is a linchpin in this broader crisis that we're in where we've lost touch with ourselves and each other and and just the power of of like a neighborhood to help to help you know people in need like I have friends who will come and stay if they're in a crisis they'll come and stay with us, and you know, your average person might say, "That's irresponsible, you're not a, you know, they should go to a hospital." No. It's the opposite, they need to be with, they just, they need to be enveloped with love and, and a safe home and a respite from the storm of life. A asylum in the true sense of the word asylum, which is refuge, and it's a safe haven. That to me is what it means to be human, and we've lost touch with that. And it's, it's simple, but it's not easy to rebuild it. But I'm very optimistic, especially with Secretary Kennedy at the helm of HHS right now that our country is like ready to finally have this conversation and do something about it. Imagine if Taylor Swift would have been put on an SSRIs a teenager. And you know, Taylor Swift has talked about how she's never been to a therapist, and people were like, "Well, why not?" She's like, "Because I don't need to." Wow, I didn't know that. Amazing. So she's talked about how, and I've never been to therapy, you know, her art is her therapy. That is how she's therapeutic. But imagine if 1516-year-old Taylor Swift, who wrote Love Story, and 15, and all of these incredible coming-of-age songs about girlhood, if she would have been numbed out by Lexapro, we would not have this level of art that we have from her. And her just navigating life and the ups and downs, the reason her music is so good is because you feel her intense lows and her super high highs. The best moments of a relationship and the worst moments of a relationship completely splitting apart. We would not have Taylor Swift if she would have been medicalized. And I think that is a powerful antidote to share with your teenage daughter who's on an SSRI, or wants to get on an SSRI. Is that, again, the spectrum of human emotion that makes someone like her so phenomenal, so relatable, so talented, we can't get rid of that, because yeah, we lose humanity. Oh, it's so beautiful, Alex. Yeah, I mean, when I wrote my book on shrunk, I knew I had to take everything that was coming alive inside of me, and all the grief, and all the anger, and an outrage, and the regret, and the shame, because of course there's all of that, and I had to take all of it, and turn it into something that I could offer to the world. And I think that message, while right now, like we've talked about, there may be young people who are offended by this idea of taking your pain and building something with it. I think it's a message that more and more people are waking up to, and I just, I hear from more and more people every day who say, I'm realizing that true freedom isn't the absence of pain, or even like being happy. About having a sense of meaning and purpose, and feeling connected to myself, to my body, to nature, to God, to my family, to my pets, you know, I just, I want to feel, and I hear more and more people every day, kind of tapping into this. And I've never felt more optimistic that we're actually finally like reaching some kind of awakening might be too dramatic of a word, but at least reckoning with just how far out of touch and disconnected we've been, and how the only way forward is to come back into ourselves, and to not be afraid of our emotions. Your life story is in your book, Unshrunk, a story of psychiatric treatment, resistance, phenomenal book, by the way. Absolutely. I'm so proud of you. It is so well done. It is truly the story of our age right now of this just medicated time that we're in. You are really like the warning sign and you're just sounding it out there, and I think it will absolutely save lives and all the work that you're doing is saving lives just kudos to you and everybody needs to read Unshrunk, where can people follow more of your work and find you on social media. Find me on x at Laura Delano on my website Laura Delano.com and then the nonprofit organization that I founded inter compass initiative you can find at the inter compass dot org. We have a free step by step tapering manual. We have a community of people who are supporting each other through this process. We have tons of free information and resources. So that's a great starting point if you want to learn more. And yeah, if you read my book, let me know what you think. I ask every guest this on the show when they come on. If you could offer one remedy to heal a sick culture physically emotionally or spiritually, what would that remedy be? Make time to just be with yourself to just be to not do just sit with yourself on a couch for 10 minutes and just fully feel. Yeah, we're not feeling we have to distract all the time with things. Yeah, I think that's a muscle to build. The more you can be with yourself, the more you see what needs to be done in the world, the more you you click with what you are meant to do what your partner is meant to be, but if you're running, running, trying to get relief. You'll never know what what you're meant to actually do to help heal the world. So beautifully said Laura, thank you for coming on culture. Thank you for having me. I like so good to be here. If you're currently on psychiatric medication, this episode is not telling you that you need to stop taking anything. The point of this conversation is inform consent asking better questions and realizing how much nuance has been missing from this entire cultural conversation. New episodes come out every Monday and Thursday at 6 p.m. Pacific 9 p.m. Eastern anywhere you get your podcast. Please leave us a five star review on Apple or Spotify and let my team know what episode has been your favorite. It also just takes two seconds to leave that five star review. So there's really no excuse. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be taken as medical advice. Always consult with a qualified health care professional regarding any questions or decisions related to your health or medical care. Mouth's Clark and this is Culture of Poverty Carey.