Anonymous Psychologist @anonpsyk

7 YEAR-OLD PUT ON RITALIN. SIDE EFFECTS FOLLOWED. DOCTORS ADDED MORE DRUGS. 23 YEARS LATER, SHE’S STILL TRYING TO GET OFF THEM. At 7 years old, Danielle Gansky was a happy, creative child who sometimes struggled to focus in school. Her mother says she was given an ultimatum by her school: “If you want her to stay in the school, you need to medicate her.” She was put on Ritalin. Her mother says Danielle became “zombified,” moody and agitated. Instead of questioning whether the drug could be causing the changes, doctors prescribed Prozac. Over the years, more psychiatric medications followed. “Every time there was a side effect, they tried to treat it with another medication.” Then Danielle tried to get off them. Her mother says doctors tapered her too quickly, triggering severe withdrawal. She describes watching her daughter shaking on the floor, crying and in pain while doctors insisted it was an underlying psychiatric condition and wanted to prescribe more medication. Today, Danielle is 30 and still slowly tapering off her final psychiatric drug. Her mother says she continues to experience akathisia, shaking, neurological symptoms and periods when she cannot get out of bed. She was 7 when the prescribing started. She is 30 and still dealing with the consequences. How many children are being prescribed another drug to treat what is actually a side effect of the first?

@DrJosefWD Taper

Lexapro ruined my life. Lexapro saved my life. Lexapro doesn't even do anything. Spend five minutes in any comment section and you'll find all three, stated with total certainty. So who's right? In this video I explain why I believe they all are, because they're describing different stages of being on the same drug. And if you take Lexapro or any SSRI, there's a good chance you're somewhere on this progression right now. Stage one is the relief phase. Before the medication you were anxious, ruminating all day, spiraling over everything. Then Lexapro turns the volume down. Things bother you less, you sleep better, you function better, and you think: this is what normal people must feel like. And because a serotonin drug made you feel better, it seems like proof you had a serotonin problem. Case closed. Except that's not what happened. Researchers have never found that low serotonin is consistently associated with depression. What Lexapro actually does is boost serotonin signaling throughout your entire body, creating a drug effect, the way alcohol or cannabis create drug effects. For SSRIs that effect is usually emotional numbing, and numbing can absolutely feel therapeutic when you're drowning in anxiety. But it's not correcting a chemical state. It's inducing a new one. Which brings us to stage two: adaptation and dependency. Your nervous system does not sit passively while a drug changes its signaling every day. Serotonin runs far more than your mood. It's involved in your heart, your gut, your whole physiology. So your body compensates to regain equilibrium, and as it does, the drug effect begins to wear off. This is the stage where people say "I don't even know if this is doing anything anymore," and it's also the stage where, without realizing it, you've become dependent: your brain has rebuilt itself around the medication's presence. I walk through what comes after that, what the later stages look like, why some people get worse over time while their doctors call it treatment-resistant depression, and what it means for anyone thinking about coming off after years of use. Wherever you are on this progression, understanding your stage changes what the right next step is. That's what this video is for. A word of caution: never stop Lexapro or any SSRI abruptly. Coming off too quickly can make you much worse. Any taper should be gradual and medically supervised.

@memnosoncos @AllenFrancesMD This is so true. I don't understand why people want to be therapists without ever having been to one.

@terryca53306307 She should not be going off it cold turkey! If she demands it, the prescriber should prescribe lower doses.

People ask why I left conventional psychiatry. This clip is the honest answer. In my training, I entered medicine in the age of mass prescribing. Four patients an hour. Panels of 500 or more per doctor. At that scale you cannot understand anyone's life. It is impossible. So the system does the only thing it can do at that speed: diagnose by checklist, prescribe, next patient. And nobody ever said the quiet part out loud. Nobody in my training acknowledged that we were offering pills because pills were all the system had time for. Instead we were handed a story that made it feel like good medicine: these drugs fix a chemical imbalance. Low serotonin, magic bullet, done. Here's what I actually watched happen. Someone starts on 5mg of Lexapro, disappears for six months, comes back tolerant. The dose goes up. A few years later they're maxed out, so a second drug gets added. Then a third. I had panels full of people on four or five psychiatric medications, years deep in the system, and the cumulative side effects were outweighing any benefit. These were not people who were thriving. They were blunted, medicated, and slowly getting worse, while the root causes of their suffering went completely unaddressed. That's not why I became a doctor. It's why I do what I do now.

@KyleKulinski They didn't die of measles.

This is the company limbic.ai

Cognitive behavioral therapy, delivered by AI chatbots, is being supported by the FDA for Medicare beneficiaries in a pilot program called TEMPO. The company is Limbic, Inc. and their product, "Unpacked," will also conduct intake evaluations. fda.gov/medical-device…

@DoctorPerin What is the proof for this?

"The history of the newer antidepressant drugs is a remarkable demonstration of how fraud in the randomised trials and financial corruption have killed patients. For almost 40 years, the psychiatric leaders have denied that antidepressants increase suicides despite overwhelming evidence that this is correct." #MentalHealthAwareness #antidepressants #SuicidePrevention buff.ly/FHihAHC

It depends on the training program. Most people getting out of grad school, especially master's degree programs, have minimal experience, and most likely were taught the most basic approaches, such as cognitive behavioral therapy. There are other approaches that are more complex to learn and are more comprehensive in their ability to help people if done properly.

@LisaRayxx peacefulparenthappykids.com/read/teen-disc…

@DawnsMission What are they doing? Making $$.

@TakeThiamine Great book!

Just heard from some new clients that the first couples therapist they went to told the husband to stop talking to the wife for a month (in an individual session with the husband). WTF? The wife had no idea why the husband wasn't talking to her. How is this therapeutic?

@DrMcFillin This has been going on for years. During my pre-doctoral internship (way back in 91-92) I had way more clinical training and supervision than any of the other interns. Supervision for master's level therapists seems especially lax.

@ValerieAnne1970 People seem to love taking pills. They want a magic bullet. They don't want to feel their feelings. They don't want to explore underlying causes. They want a quick fix. That's what a pill represents to them.

@DoctorPerin We "learn" to be anxious, mostly from our parents.

@DrJosefWD I had a 80 something year old client who was weaning off of Xanax. I don't know if she ever got completely off it, but she found that Lavela (a specially formulated lavender oil for oral use) helped her. Yet psychotherapy did more for her than any drug or supplement ever had.