A Conversation w/ Brooke Siem: "MAY CAUSE SIDE EFFECTS"
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- čas přidán 11. 09. 2022
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Guest Bio: Brooke Siem is an award-winning chef and writer. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, EatingWell magazine, Esquire, The Rumpus, the New York Post, Fast Company, and more. She is a Food Network Chopped champion and was named as one of Zagat’s 30 Under 30 in 2014. She is also the creator of Happiness is a Skill, a newsletter devoted to educating people on antidepressant withdrawal, safe deprescribing, and learning the skill of happiness.
Her memoir, MAY CAUSE SIDE EFFECTS (Central Recovery Press, September 2022) is available NOW wherever books are sold: www.brookesiem.com/books/
Relevant Links:
Trailer for Brooke’s book: • MAY CAUSE SIDE EFFECTS...
Brooke’s writing at Mad in America: www.madinamerica.com/2022/08/...
Brooke’s NY Post article, “Why We Should Stop Casually Prescribing Antidepressants to Teens” nypost.com/2022/08/27/why-we-...
Brooke's article at Insider, "I was in severe antidepressant withdrawal when I won 'Chopped.' Here's what you didn't see on TV": www.insider.com/brooke-siem-c...
Brooke’s “Happiness is a Skill” newsletter: learnhappy.substack.com/
Brooke was a panelist at the ‘Preventing Overdiagnosis Conference 2022’ after a screening of “Medicating Normal”: • 'Preventing Overdiagno...
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CZcams: / bsiem
Website: www.brookesiem.com
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This happened to me in my youth 30’s I am 74 and I totally 💯 % are with you on your journey to TRUE health. Thank God for people like you, and sharing your truth. 🙏🏼
For fuck sake finally someone talking about intrusive thoughts being one of the worse things. Thank you and I’m so proud of you Brooke
God work 🙏🏽
Mental health is the development of a mental + emotional dedication - a cathexis!
Goodness gracious. It should be possible to sue the physicians proscribing this shit cocktail to a non-mental ill teenager for compensations for the suffering and health damage she experienced because of these medications.
@petrairene - I share your feelings. It seems ridiculously unfair that many of us have to suffer so long & so intense without the tiniest bit of compensation. But, I can see it something that would be impossible to prove in court .....
What the Mental Health system is effectively doing to people...
2nd Degree Assault?@@montesa9136
Brooke Siem's talk is so well done. She is so intelligent, down to earth, honest, relatable, & articulate.
Thanks for this amazing interview!
We agree! She's wonderful.
@@MedicatingNormal Anyone can develop a loving dedication - which is what mental health is!
courageous!
indeed!
I have been talking about this situation with friends and family about these drugs ; America is acountry where there is a pill for everything, yet these drugs are not always needed.
Wow, fascinating story and I relate to so much of it. I'm tapering off of paxil at age 34 after being put on it at 10 years old. I too felt "broken" and that the medication was helping me. I was very sheltered and trusted any and all adults well into my own adulthood. I also always felt like a little boy deep down inside (which I recently realized was simply a part of my psyche that was "stuck" at 10 years old). When I first started to taper in early 2021, I had many months of what I called "emotional flashbacks." I would be struck with a feeling or memory of me being 9 or 10, right before I started my SSRI. Also I've had moments in my tapering journey where I experience a feeling of suddenly "waking up" and realizing I'm 34. It's sheer panic mixed with grief of time lost.
However, I'm now far less angry at what happened to me and I'm so grateful for what my life has become. I'm really starting to wake up and get back to myself.
There were many things over a period of years that led me to finally decide to taper off (my belief in my "chemical imbalance" was SO strong). One was smoking cannabis for the first time at age 30. I had never taken any kind of drug (other than psych drugs) and cannabis made me realize what I now know is obvious: I've been "on drugs" since I was 10.
I'm now more sober than I've been in decades. I'm still on a low dose of paxil and it'll take some time to be completely off. But I'm 18 months into this journey and I can't believe how far I've come. I cry tears of joy and gratitude every morning and I truly look forward to my future. Withdrawal has taught me that we are all so much stronger than we think.
Good stuff. Like you I was medicated good and early and I had a similar realization comparing psych drugs to cannabis. I became addicted to cannabis among other things while I was on psych drugs, constantly on and off about a million of them. I kept saying to my doctors, 'I don't get it, how are the psych drugs any different? They numb out my emotions, they don't treat an underlying condition and only just barely manage symptoms at great cost, the relief is transitory and then I develop tolerance and have to go up and up, the relief barely comes back for a second while the 'side effects' just get worse and worse, there are long term negative effects on my mood and health, and when I finally throw up my hands with what I'm on I try to go off and get awful protracted withdrawal, only to start the cycle over again with another drug. This is literally just drug addiction, what I've been through with cannabis, with alcohol, with nicotine: it's the same.' I had doctors and shrinks and my abusive parents get so mad and defensive about the comparison: these are GOOD drugs and TREATMENT, you just want an excuse to use the BAD drugs!
But it really is just the same: the psychiatric drugs are no more or less psychoactive, no safer or less addictive; it's the same cycle. I think it was a nail in the coffin for the paradigm for me when my same doctor began prescribing my mother cannabis and only then did he change his rhetoric: now cannabis is GOOD, it's TREATMENT, you SHOULD get addicted to it. In fact, now the psychiatrists are saying you should do shrooms and use LSD and ketamine as well, even opiates are on the menu! When you were using these before you were an addict and needed us to intervene and get you on the right 'medicines.' Now all of these are 'medicines.' I guess it turns out I was never an addict and was just ahead of my time! I mean, we really all should have known that this was institutionalized drug pushing with amphetamine and ritalin, which is a cocaine analog with the same devastating short and long term harm profile. Meanwhile cocaine addicts are stupid and scum of the Earth, but if your doc gives you rittalin it's healthy!
Anyway off I go on a rant. I think a big step towards freedom for me will be when I'm off the final drug. I'm off most of the cocktail they had me on now and haven't used anything illicit or drank in years, but like you I'm still on a low dose of one last med, a TCA. I have to go down 1 mg at a time and even then the withdrawal is horrific. But I'm making my way there with the help of a great trauma therapist. Anyway best of luck t you and so glad you're getting out on the other side.
@@ryanschwartz1593 Wow, thanks for sharing. It really is crazy how backwards-thinking many psychiatrists are. It's maddening to grow up hearing about DARE in the 90s and seeing "this is your brain on drugs" ads, only to go to a doctor who then encourages psychotropic drug use. Regardless, I'm just happy to be exiting psychiatry.
A huge congratulations to you for tapering off almost all your prescriptions as well as staying sober from alcohol/weed/etc. That's amazing!!
Thanks for sharing. I also had very bad intrusive thoughts during the withdrawal among many other symptoms. After several years I was in a better place and starting to see an improvement in my physical and mental health, which turned in more self-confidence and will-power which in turn had a positive impact in my social and profesional life (all of that possible thanks to all the info and guide I found on the internet about withdrawal, neurotoxicity and how to tapper safely), although still experiencing cognitive impairment. The pandemic though hit hard and I experienced a major depression due to a very precarious balance in many aspects of my life. It sent me back to a hopeless state and didn't want to see a psycotherapist because I thought wasn't going to understand the magnitud of my suffering or what I went through and that it wouldn't change anything as nobody was going to give me back all those years that I lost (I can totally relate to the reality of not having the maturity and experience of people of the same age, thanks for sharing that) alongside my interrupted recent progress. I refused agresively to see any psychiatrist. After my family insisted on seeing a family friend psychiatrist to have a casual conversation with (he came to visit us because I didn't leave my parents house, and my bed, for almost a year) I was in such a hopeless state that I wasn't able to articulate my pain and my concerns and put them in a comprehensible context or express them in a meaningful way. I have never felt very articulate or confident when talking when feeling vulnerable, specially inside the mental health system or context. I told him I was really depressed, didn't feel like my life was worth living for and I was really angry, that I had a profound feeling of anger. I also mentioned him how hard had been the benzo withdrawal. He didn't made any comment about that. Nothing. Absolute silence. I wasn't surprised. I didn't feel the strength to initiate a conversation about the topic to test if he was open to discuss it as a real phenomenon. Instead he told me he was surprised my mental health hadn't improved for so many years and labeled my depression as "narcissistic depression" referring to the anger I mentioned him. If this happened few years ago, his comment would impact me a lot, retraumatizing me, I would question myself and would feel like a bad person, internalizing the shame. I didn't answer back, I didn't try to explain myself (I think this is an example of the internalized, subtle but very pervasive power imbalance of doctor-patien that happens in the mental health system, that I have experienced many times but wans't able to name it, or give myself permission to considerate was happenning. It conditions the interaction of patient-doctor and the outcome of it, and leaves the patient in a passive/ submissive place without the capacity to question things, self-advocate and take informed decissions).
The anger that I feel is not pathological, it has a cause, it has a reason, a meaning. I refuse to be brainwashed again.
So thank you for sharing these testimonies as they validate the stories and experiences of so many.
Surprised your mental health hadn't improved?? 'Oh you're still unhappy you must be REALLY sick!' LOL. What an ASSHAT. Most of the studies out nowadays show that even with aggressive 'treatment,' i.e. opportunity to try a bunch of different medications and 'gold standard' therapies, the recovery rate for people is abysmally low. A recent study I read says for aggressively treated depression with the opportunity to try as many meds as you want and intensive CBT you get symptom reduction -- not full recovery, mind you, just statistically significant symptom reduction -- in 25ish percent of people, literally no better than nothing at all (actually nothing at all usually gets 30%, so WORSE than nothing at all). MOST people dealing with distress in this country are NOT getting better in the short or long term, and the longer they're in the mental health system actually the WORSE off their odds are! You even have people like Thomas Insel admitting that our outcomes are terrible and getting worse; that psychiatry and standard mental health treatments are garbage. And take a look at the Star D trial, which is suppose to be their gold standard: in the short term once the data is sorted they get 'remission' rates in the mid twenty percent's; long term their percentage of medication treated patients in 'remission' (I hate this medical language but it's what they use) is in the SINGLE DIGITS. This psychiatrist friend of the family is doing what psychiatrists are wont to do: foisting the failures of the system onto the suffering individual.
What I really want to say is, you're not alone; you're not 'especially ill' or even ill at all; your anger IS valid and meaningful and coherent -- not something to fear and extinguish with drugs, but an important part of your being you can hold and integrate and even grow from; and you are very strong not to be brainwashed and to hold your ground and boundaries with what basically amounted to a powerful person debasing you.
@@ryanschwartz1593 thank you very much, your words mean a lot
The word bipolar was mostly used to describe transistors, by the early 2000s there was some approval to describe people as "Bipolar". The famous episode of "The Case of the Frozen Addict" WGBH Boston video vault, would have gotten some notice. 'Eureka, to control dopamine, is to control the mind!' I got damaged by psychiatry in late 2006, and I get to struggle with Drug Induced Parkinson's.
Excited to have Brooke on my podcast as well. Was lucky enough to befriend her in CrossFit many years ago.
Btw, I think you meant “food network” 👌
Yes! A typo that stuck. Thanks for pointing it out
Thank you for your story! How did you feel coming off of Wellbutrin? I have been on it for years and after listening to your story, I want to tape her off. I have no emotions and everything feels blah.
Nobody seems to care about antidepressants withdrawals it’s not a high topic or a trend and people been taking these and being a slave for it for decades just because they can’t get off it in an effective and safe and less painful way it’s really sad and miserable
Would CR love to find a in person support group in Lis Angeles . If anyone know how to search this out . Thank you for all the great information on Medicating Normal
You may have to form one yourself. You could try signing up for The Withdrawal Project's 'Connect' to see if you can search for others in your zip and start one: withdrawal.theinnercompass.org