Are We Medicating Kids TOO Early? The Shocking Reality | Brooke Siem DSH #845

I think just what's going on in the world, if you have to put a seven-year-old on LexPro, then maybe we should look at what's going on in the home

before tossing them on a drug that we don't have any idea what the long-term effects are.

That's what I think.

Not a bad idea, right?

It's not a bad idea.

So what is that?

Is that an antidepressant?

Yeah, LexPro is an antidepressant.

Jeez, seven years old.

I can't believe kids are getting depressed that early.

I mean, are they?

All right, guys, got Brooks Seam here.

We're going to talk depression and all these medications.

medications going on.

It's depression, Sean.

Yeah, let's talk about it.

Kids at seven getting prescribed medication now.

Yeah, last year, Lexapro was approved for use in children and teens starting at seven years old, which I just find

pretty disgusting.

I mean, the study that was used to pass that approval wasn't great.

It showed a six-time increase in suicidality within the group, the cohort that was being studied.

And they still added the approval.

And it doesn't really,

I think just what's going on in the world, if you have to put a seven-year-old on LexPro, then maybe we should look at what's going on in the home

before tossing them on a drug that we don't have any idea what the long-term effects are.

That's what I think.

Not a bad idea, right?

It's not a bad idea.

So what is that?

Is that an antidepressant?

Yeah, Lex Pro is an antidepressant.

Jeez, seven years old.

I can't believe kids are getting depressed that early.

I mean, are they?

I think that's one of the big questions is you've got the criteria for, yes, you have the DSM, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that lays out

what the criteria for depression is, but it's very loose.

You can have 10 people diagnosed with MDD, major depressive disorder, with 10 different sets of symptoms, 10 different manifestations of it, and there's seven.

Again, what's going on in the home?

At what point is the parent responsible here?

I don't really think it's particularly ethical, especially given that a seven-year-old has no agency and no clue what it's even like, like what emotions even are.

They have no emotional regulation already.

And yet here you're putting them on a potentially life-altering drug that's definitely altering their brain

and

wondering why it's not going very well.

Like it's not a mystery why people can why we have not It's not a mystery why we have not seen any improvement in mental health despite more and more people being medicated.

This isn't working.

Yeah, this isn't working.

It's definitely not working.

And you were prescribed at 15, right?

Antidepressants.

So you were in high school.

Yes, my father had suddenly passed away.

And so this was 2001.

So we do have to look at the time and context being quite different.

At the time, only Zoloft and Prozac were approved for use in children and teens.

But I managed to walk out of a 15-minute appointment with a psychiatrist with a prescription for Effexer XR and Welbutrin XL.

And so they were both given off-label.

They were put in combination.

And then I stayed on that same cocktail of drugs along with four others that were added on over the course of about one to two years.

Wow.

Those the other four drugs were actually to combat side effects that we didn't know were associated with the antidepressants.

We thought they were something else because medicine is so segmented that, you know, if your stomach's upset, you go to a gastroenterologist.

If your hormones are off, you go to a endocrinologist.

No one ever stops and looks at the whole spectrum of a person and says, well, actually, this drug can cause this effect.

So maybe that's the issue, not that you have a separate thyroid disorder.

But I ended up on six different drugs and was on those for 15 years.

Jeez.

And then at 30, was pulled off all of them pretty recklessly.

And that led to severe antidepressant withdrawal that led to a book.

Like it was so bad I got a book deal out of it.

Holy crap.

So you just cold turkey cut them all?

Well, I was actually cold turkeyed under the care of a psychiatrist.

So

don't recommend it.

Find a different psychiatrist if they do what mine did.

But at the time, I was on 37.5 milligrams of Effexor XR.

Jeez.

That's the lowest dose on the market.

What?

That sounds high.

That is the lowest dose on the market.

So my psychiatrist decided that she couldn't.

taper me off in any way because she couldn't prescribe me a drug for 20 milligrams or whatever.

So she just said to stop taking it.

Now, that was 2016, the first systematic review of antidepressant withdrawal, which means that the first time somebody sat down and looked at the landscape of the literature and just kind of looked to see what was going on in the world of antidepressant withdrawal, that came out in 2015.

So this was 2016.

There just wasn't too much chatter about getting off of these drugs, about tapering off of them.

And so she just told me to stop.

And I was just the patient.

So I followed her advice, just stopped, and basically opened a portal to hell.

I bet.

Yeah.

Panic attacks.

Right.

There was some of that.

For me, the biggest issue, I mean, this lasted for well over a year.

So it was, it's difficult to encapsulate in a few sound bites, but they kind of tell you you might feel like you have the flu or that the last withdrawal effects might last a few days or a couple weeks and they kind of just shoo you away.

But

what we're not told when we are first prescribed antidepressants, and this is especially true of children, which is why I'm so mostly against medicating kids because their bodies are changing and they have no frame of reference for who they are and I had no frame of reference for who I was as a fully formed adult because I was medicated at 15.

So when these drugs started to get pulled away and my body started to go nuts in every in every aspect, like physically, mentally, emotionally, visually, my vision changed.

I literally saw colors brighten and the edges got sharper.

And this, yep, and the same thing happened with my hearing.

Like sounds got very, very, very, very intense.

And so I realized if these drugs were affecting something as simple as my vision,

what else in my whole world were they affecting that I wasn't told about?

Because I just thought they were making me less sad.

The bitter irony, of course, was that I was suicidal at the time.

So it wasn't like they were doing anything to make me less sad.

In fact, I think they were exacerbating it.

But we're not told any of this when we go into a doctor's office.

And that is a big problem.

And that's why I'm here.

And there are millions of people around the world suffering in psychiatric drug withdrawal or feel like they've effectively been duped.

It's so easy to get them to.

I remember getting Xanax and Clonazepam first day I met the doctor within 10 minutes.

Within 10 minutes.

Just said I had anxiety.

Just say what you want.

Yeah.

My GP in New York, so I was on six drugs when I went to him.

My very first appointment, I had just graduated college.

I had been on the same cocktail for six years.

I found him around the corner from my apartment and he took my insurance.

So I just walked in and I sat down and

he basically said, Why are you here?

I said, Well, I just moved to New York.

These are the drugs I'm on.

And he said, Okay.

And he wrote me a new script for everything that I was on, called it into the pharmacy.

And about four years later, I needed a refill.

And I called him up for it.

And he looks at my chart.

Again, four years.

And he goes, Oh, I just realized we never did a physical we should probably do that

oh my gosh yes four years so you kept it for a while you weren't taking it daily oh no no no no it was um just a standard refill like i was taking everything daily oh and you know sometimes you just they give you 10 refills or whatever it is and when you run out you're supposed to go back to your doctor for a new script but yeah we had never done a physical but he was happy to prescribe me thousands of drugs for years.

You start wondering if they're what their incentive is to this.

Oh, there's not much to wonder.

I mean, they get paid through insurance.

That's what I think, too.

It's not even what you think.

It's what happens.

Like they get a kickback on each prescription.

Oh, you mean kickbacks?

Like the doctors?

That's a little fuzzier.

It used to be a lot more common.

Back in the day, there has been some things that have come down legally that make it more difficult, or at least you can't get direct kickbacks, or it has to be public.

Like there's some websites where you can go and search and see if your doctor or researcher has received any kickbacks.

And sometimes that comes in the form of speaking fees, more than a percentage of a drug sold.

But you don't even really need that to see where the incentives are because to be a doctor right now, I mean, my doctor was objectively bad, but even really good doctors who care about their patients are still stuck in a horrible insurance system where the only way they get paid, unless they're working out of network, is to get as many people through the door as possible.

So it was every time I went to go see this guy, there were 20 people in the waiting room.

Jeez.

Yeah, and you were in there for five to seven minutes and he's just banging out codes, and that's how he's getting paid.

He wasn't actually practicing medicine, he didn't give a shit.

No,

he was horrible, though.

Damn, yeah, so are you fully holistic now, though?

I fall on the spectrum of functional as opposed to holistic.

And I would say that I've had to actively work to overcorrect to not overcorrect.

I definitely overcorrected, and I'm trying to come back a little bit because I actually am recovering from ECL surgery.

So, look, if I am acutely ill, if I'm in an accident, if I broke a bone, please take me straight to the nearest doctor, put me back together.

But a chronic illness, I'm going to look everywhere before I'm going to my GP who's going to see me for a minute and a half.

Same.

And I think that there's a wealth of information on the internet and with functional medicine doctors.

And I pay out of pocket, which is unfortunate.

Oh, you don't have insurance?

Oh, I have insurance.

I have insurance for things like when I, you know, do something stupid and break my leg.

but um

i still pay out of pocket for the doctors i want to go see and the functional practitioners that i want to see got it because that's actually where i'm healing and insurance doesn't cover that no yeah that's crazy to me no when when you want to prevent something they won't cover it no so stupid but if you want to fix or temporary fix band-aid it then they'll cover that maybe yeah broken system yeah i had to

Once I got off all the antidepressants, I was in serious withdrawal for a year.

And then about about another year of,

I was still in withdrawal, but I was starting to see that I was coming out of it.

So it was easier to handle.

And I was kind of just looking around the world saying, all right, who am I?

What does life look like for me now?

Because it definitely isn't what it was before.

But once I got through all that, the biggest thing that I was left with was my gut was completely, completely wrecked.

And I couldn't figure out what was going on.

I had seen a variety of doctors.

You know, I'd gone to see the gastroenterologist and they just say, well, we can do a colonoscopy.

And I'm like, That's no,

not helpful.

But I ended up spending, you know, I probably spent 10 grand just, I finally went to functional medicine and did

dozens of tests all within a month so we could see a whole picture of my health.

And that's the first time I started to actually build this stuff back up.

Wow.

And it took five years to find the right people to do that.

It took that was in 2021.

I just went through another round of blood tests, so it's an ongoing process, but

I'm lucky that I was able to, you know, to do that and to help myself.

But most people or a lot of people aren't in that position.

And worse than that, they don't even know that it's an option.

No, they don't know at all.

Yeah.

I had some liver damage from it.

I personally think it was from Accutane.

Yeah.

And I've had that side effect years.

Like always had, because I do blood tests every year, always some liver issues.

And I don't drink or eat fried food or anything.

So I think it was from that, honestly.

Yeah.

Well, I remember I was also on Accutane.

That was one one of the drugs I was on at some point, which, again, just in combination with everything is nuts.

But they make you get your liver enzymes tested every month.

Every month.

It's poison.

It's all poison.

It's crazy.

It's just, is the risk, are the risks worth the benefit of some of the poisons?

And I think we've gotten it real wrong with antidepressants.

Yeah, just to fix some facial acne.

I mean, now what I know now, you could treat that shit pretty naturally.

Yeah, I mean, change your diet at first.

Yeah.

Cut out presence.

I don't tell you that far.

No.

So I was eating the same shit, but on Accutane.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yep.

Didn't help.

Yep.

Crazy.

So crazy stat, though.

One in four teenage girls dealing with suicidal thoughts, according to the CDC now.

Yeah.

That is super high.

Well, one in four women, specifically middle-aged women, are on antidepressants.

So I guess that tracks.

I mean, look, it's when I talk about antidepressants in medicating kids, I'm not trying to say that people aren't in pain.

They are,

but throwing a blanket chemical solution at them with no coping skills, leaving them in the same horrible environment that they're already in.

And of course, now with the internet and phones and everything, I mean, it doesn't surprise me that teenage girls are struggling so much.

You know, there's a lot of things I'm grateful for in life, but not being in high school right now is one of them.

Yeah, imagine comparing yourself because of Instagram and TikTok.

It's bad enough anyway.

I'm looking at myself on this thing and I'm just like, God, I don't look like the 20-year-old influencers.

That sucks.

Yeah, no, it must be tough.

I mean, I caught the tail end end of it.

Instagram came out when I was in high school, and there was a lot of comparison and, you know, self-identity issues from that.

I don't know how they're doing it.

I mean, it's baffling to me that they haven't just banned phones in schools.

They tried.

Yeah, and then a couple parents bitch about it.

I, I, like, have a backbone.

Yeah.

Stand up for something.

Three-second attention spans we have now.

Yeah, well, I'm also not a parent, so I get to very conveniently just stand on my little pestle and be judgy.

I'm sure it's very hard.

Are you the Karen on the block?

Oh, I'm not really the Karen on the block.

I just sort of sit in my house and take stock of what's going on and just say, God, it seems hard out there.

I'm kind of glad I just have my dog.

I feel that.

I love dogs.

Yeah, I do too.

I'd rather have a dog.

Have you had dogs?

Yeah, I have two.

I want more.

Oh, how many?

I want, honestly, 10.

I want to be one of those people who has like the senior dog.

Yeah.

Compound.

I've had many conversations about that.

Yeah.

I just don't know if I could take the emotional damage from losing a dog a year or whatever.

Oh, so I usually, I've I've had a habit of rescuing older dogs.

Now, all the dogs I've had are at least six or seven.

Wow.

And there's just something you kind of on the one hand know you're signing up for Heartbreak earlier, but I find it so fulfilling and rewarding.

And then they're a little calmer too.

So, you know, it's like you don't have to take care of a puppy.

Yeah, I can see that.

You might have sold me on it.

I might have to.

I highly recommend giving it a shot.

They love you so much.

I mean, all dogs love you, but the older ones, especially.

And then I just see my little dog there and she's on a pillow and I know that she was on the street, and just, ah,

you feel fulfilled, I bet.

I love that.

How many dogs you got?

Just one.

Oh, just one?

Yeah.

Okay.

One level?

Four seasons creature.

No, I can barely deal with one.

You're probably traveling a lot, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the tough part, leaving them for a week.

Yeah, leaving them for a week.

She doesn't like it.

I don't like it.

But on the other hand, I like to leave.

So one's good.

I feel that.

You working on anything else?

Another book?

Or?

You know, I'm not working on any other books.

I kind of got burned out.

I got really burned out on writing.

I

am not someone who, you know, I have two books.

I don't love writing, so that's a lot of work to put into something that doesn't fulfill you.

I've transitioned into oil painting.

Oil painting.

Yes, which I love.

It's very, it gives me the same creative

itch.

It scratches that itch, but I don't feel like it yells at me.

Like, the words literally yell at me on the page when they're wrong, whereas painting feels a bit more,

this is art, nobody cares, just, Just, you know, more relaxing.

Yeah, I've been offered a lot of book deals and I just, it seems like a lot of work.

It's a lot of work.

I mean, you could hire a ghostwriter, I suppose, if you wanted to, but then it won't feel authentic.

Yeah.

So that's my battle with it.

Yeah, it's a lot of work.

And I think it's almost not worth it to have a medium book.

You got to write a great book or don't write a book.

Yeah, because the money is only good if it does well.

And the money shit, even if it does do well.

Like, you could probably self-publish it and do way better anyway at this point so yeah it's really just for purpose if you're going to write one at this point yeah for a book like mine you know it's it's nice to have

it's nice to have the backing of a publisher because it's on a tricky topic it's very it can very easily get lost in the realm of kind of crazy voices talking and not really having anything rooted so for me it was really important to write it really well, have a traditional publisher, do all the traditional stuff.

But believe me, I'm not rich based on this book.

I don't think I've, I think I've spent roughly 10 times more than I've ever made on it.

Wow.

So a lost money.

Oh, of course.

Yeah.

I mean, there's the lost income from all the years I was working on it.

Right.

There's the fact that my advanced was, you know, roughly a couple months' rent.

And then all the PR, all the travel, like some of that's paid for by your publisher and whatnot.

But at the end of the day, you're just...

hustling by yourself and selling it by yourself and then you get literal pennies on the dollar back from every book.

Well, I love the honesty for real.

People don't really talk about this side of publishing.

Yeah, that's because they're either a best-selling author.

How do you get that?

Because I see it in everyone's Instagram bio.

Is there a certain amount of copies you have to sell?

Oh, for God's sakes.

It's at this point,

you can buy it.

You can literally buy it in the sense that, okay, I think there was

this article that went around the writing community a few years ago where

when Amazon was really pushing hard, still is on self-publishing,

he decided to write a best-selling book.

So he picked the most obscure topic he could, which I believe was foot health.

He designed a cover in like two minutes.

I don't think there was any words written in this book.

What?

But it was just because it was the only book being sold within this particular time in that category.

Yeah.

He became a number one new release bestseller in foot health.

So that's how people game Amazon and then they put bestseller and no words were in the book just

not this one.

Yeah.

Or maybe there was like one word or something, but it wasn't a book about foot health.

Wow.

And there's no quality control.

So you can game the Amazon system that way really easily.

And people do that all the time to the point where I don't even bother.

If I see bestseller in a title, it's just like,

this is just.

That used to mean something, but these days, there's so many weird categories.

Yeah.

And now even the New York Times lists and those lists, they're not.

really about who has sold the most books.

It's very, it's curated.

Oh, it's curated and weighted.

Wow.

See, that's why I like podcasting because you can't fake that.

Exactly.

Like, it's based off your downloads.

So, like, you really can't be number one without having some data.

Yeah, so it actually means something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there's five million podcasts.

Well, congratulations.

You've done very well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was, that was a fun thing to hit.

Any TV shows?

I know you went on chopped.

Yes, I am a chopped champion.

Are you going on again?

No, I have not been invited back.

I would go back.

Occasionally, people get brought back for a tournament of champions, but I was not.

I was actually in antidepressant draw when we filmed that.

So,

did they know?

No, they didn't.

Well, they knew something was up because I was a mess.

I was crying constantly.

Dan, how'd you win in that state of mind?

I

like, I have no idea.

I have no idea.

I remember at one point, the producer, so when you're on a show, like chopped, it's not like you just show up and no one's ever heard of you and you just go.

Like, someone has been part of your journey for a little while because you do various rounds of interviews.

I had the same producer the whole time.

Okay.

So I had kind of been in contact and met in person because I did an interview, an on-camera interview with this producer.

So we had a little bit of a rapport.

She knew my personality.

I knew my name.

There was a group of people who came to my bakery that I owned and they did a little teaser.

So when I showed up, it's like she kind of was assigned to me and me only.

And so at one point, she didn't know what was going on with me, but at one point I was just a complete emotional mess.

And she just literally looked at me and she was like you need to calm down

okay

and so I just am so grateful to the editors of that show because they did not they could have edited me into a complete mess and they didn't wow that is shocking for reality TV to not have that in there I know I don't know why they did that I probably prevent a lawsuit extremely grateful I don't even know if it was that I think honestly I think they they knew something was going on with me yeah and they just didn't feel the need to exploit it I feel though because I was kind of a mumbling mess anyway so I was already a good character

Do you still have the bakery?

I don't.

The bakery got sold.

I sold my half in 2017.

Nice.

We still have the book.

It's called Prohibition Bakery and it's still a beautiful book and it sells and it's boozy cupcakes and so you can learn to make them at home.

But the whole thing has now been shut down for many years and

it's kind of a time and place.

You're still cooking though or you're done.

I am still cooking.

I actually am a chef to pro athletes.

Whoa.

Yes.

That's cool.

It's very cool.

So I get to talk about antidepressant withdrawal and then go make cookies and it's pretty great.

What a balance.

Yeah.

Is cooking like your de-stressor?

It kind of is.

Yeah.

I've had a complicated relationship with it.

When you own your own food business,

it's very difficult not to grow to hate the thing you once loved.

So I had to work my way back through that.

But now what I've done is I've spent a lot of years after the antidepressant situation getting my health back and really learning about the type of nutrition that is not, you know, part of the food pyramid and is not really you know government what the government is telling us to eat right um

and that's what people learn about nutrition right when they're like oh the food pyramid grains let's eat all those and what i've learned is that is really not the way to go if you want true health and wellness

yeah eat some cheese um

eat some good cheese some raw cheese organic grass i love raw cheese yes

But as I started healing myself, and I've always had a really strong background in athletics, I, you know, through a little bit of luck, a little bit of knowing the right person, being in the right place, I got connected with some pro athletes and I started working with them one-on-one.

So that's just evolved.

And now that's my primary day-to-day.

And then I do the advocacy on the side.

But it really is a nice balance to just go get to touch beautiful ingredients and work with them and cook them.

And I can literally.

create an energetic transfer between the work I do and the food I make and then go turn on the TV and watch my athlete, you know, on Sunday night, crush it.

It's a very cool thing.

It's so important for athletes dieting.

When the Lakers won three years ago, they cut seed oils that year.

Oh, thank God.

Yeah, and that's why everyone played like amazing.

It's such low-hanging fruit to do that, but it's not common.

Because all the inflammation it causes.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, meanwhile, some of the players I've worked were like, yeah, I will, you know, eat some chicken wings and onion rings, then barfed before the game.

And it's just like, I can't help you.

They could be so much better.

And it's crazy to me because in high school, I ran a mile in 440, which was decent, but my diet was so bad.

So bad.

If I ate what I eat now, I could probably run a mile in 420.

That's insane.

And not only that, the recovery and longevity.

That's what really gets me.

When you're young, you can get away with that stuff.

But, you know, when I work with my athletes, very often, it's usually not the 21-year-olds who are coming to me because they still feel invincible.

But

I'm getting your people who are nearing or at the end of their careers, but know they're not done.

And you have to dial it in at that point.

But if they had done that 10 years ago,

they'd be dominating.

Yeah, in your 20s, you could get away with like eating fast food and shit food, but 30s, that's where it starts piling up, right?

But the thing is, people think that, okay, it's just age.

So they just attribute the fact that they feel like shit to age when it's not.

It's a collection of choices that have been made.

But the thing is, you can reverse that.

I feel better now than I've ever felt in my entire life.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

I mean, Brian Johnson is aging backwards, so it's physically possible.

He's fascinating.

Yeah, he's coming on next week.

I'm, oh, man, I should have come a week later.

I would love to have met him.

I am fascinated with what he's doing.

I can say it's not for me.

I can't do the vegan.

I can't do that either.

I need.

I need more calories.

I need, yeah, I straight up need meat.

Yeah.

I just do better.

Grass-fed, grass-finished meat.

Yeah.

What meat are you using these days?

I like Snake River.

I like Colorado craft beef.

And, oh, Force of Nature.

I like Force of Nature.

I use Force of Nature all the time.

Yeah.

I love Force of Nature.

Yeah, they're great.

Yeah.

I don't know how much that matters when it gets down to that little nitty-gritty, but yeah, I think it's more of just where you kind of where you like.

I mean,

my dream would be to buy a cow.

I would like to rent a dairy cow.

People do that.

They spend like two grand, get a whole cow.

No, no, I want to rent a live dairy cow.

Oh, a live.

Yeah, so I can go get milk.

This is in my fantasy.

It's going to live near me

in the farmland that I don't have where I can just go get the milk, you you know, and other people can too.

And then to just,

I researched how to rent a cow.

It was an amusing Google.

And then, yeah, I would love to just have a direct relationship with ranchers where I can get the beef I want.

Doesn't I don't really have the volume of storage space for that, but it, I feel so much better when I eat like that.

So much better.

So much better.

I even eat at restaurants now and I feel like shit.

I feel like shit.

Like, because the meat is just injected with who knows what.

I've pretty much stopped eating at restaurants, which is I'm so picky.

Yeah, me too.

It has to be, like, no seed oils, which then you're that annoying person.

I'm that annoying person.

So I don't really want to do that.

I feel bad for the server.

Yep.

I find it pretty easy to just ask them to make it in butter.

They all have butter

back there.

Yeah, especially like your kind of more bass casual places.

In some ways, that's actually easier.

I feel that.

Like a high-end restaurant, like I used to work in high-end Michelin star restaurants.

They'll do whatever you want most of the time, but there's a lot of things that they've just already prepared ahead of time that you can't mess with or you're just not going to get the same experience.

Even the high-end ones use seed oils, I heard.

Oh, yeah, we would use seed oils all the time because not only do seed oils, seed oils do a lot of things, they have a lot of function.

So it's not even just that, yeah, they're cheap to process, but we used grapeseed oil all the time in one of the French restaurants I worked in because it has a neutral flavor.

So you can kind of impart anything into it.

So if you want to make like a sorrel oil, sorrel is this really lemony, bright green.

We would just mix some grapeseed oil into the sorrel.

Wow.

And it was beautiful.

And then we'd use that as a garnish on the plate.

But you couldn't do that with olive oil because then you're tasting olive oil.

Couldn't do it with butter because then it's cloudy.

Can't do it with tallow because then it's going to taste like cow.

So that's part of the reason in high-end restaurants too, you have different oils that have different purposes.

I bought Brian Johnson's olive oil.

He has olive oil?

Yeah.

He's selling a lot now.

I will say his marketing leading up to his launch is brilliant.

Oh, well, he's very good at what he's doing.

Yeah, and I heard he's doing millions a month.

I'm sure he is.

Yeah, that was a great marketing campaign.

I'm sure he is.

God bless him for selling olive oil.

What don't you agree with him on?

You know, I just don't.

I guess what I, I think you just don't need to do that much to live well.

Okay, so you think he's too extreme?

I mean, he's definitely extreme.

I don't think anybody can argue with him.

He would say the opposite, probably.

Well, we all have our biases, right?

But

I think for me,

a better life has come through addition by subtraction.

So I think that our bodies are designed to work most of the time.

And that we can, if we just give it what it needs,

we can really do that.

But I'm glad he's out there doing it.

It's a fascinating experiment.

We'll see.

how it goes.

I tried the supplement stack.

Oh my gosh,

I felt my liver hurting because he takes 150 supplements a day.

Yeah, that's what I don't understand is how his body's like this.

Yeah, I only got up to like 30, 40, and I felt physical pain in my organs.

Like, it was bad.

It's just so hard to know because he's an N of one, right?

So he may have the ability to process all this stuff and move it through his system a lot faster than your average person.

He's also built up to it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Shout out to him and Dave Asprey, man.

150 supplements a day, both of them.

Shout out to both of them, but I can barely manage to like remember to take two.

For real.

Going back to how we started, what's the best way to taper off?

Let's say people watching this are on some sort of medication.

Like, have you figured out a good system for leaning off it?

So I'm not a doctor.

However, most doctors don't know about this stuff anyway, so you know, I have to say that.

But

the traditional way of pulling people off psychiatric drugs is in a linear taper, or you just kind of step down based on the available, based on the available dosages from the market.

So we'll use Effectser as an example.

If I'm correct, the available doses are, I think, 150, 75, and 37.5.

So that's it.

You can't find 80 milligrams, or you can't find 5 milligrams.

So traditionally, what's happened is psychiatrists or doctors have just said, okay, well, either go down to the next lowest dose, or sometimes they'll say take it every other day.

Sometimes they'll say cut the pills in half.

A lot of that stuff is, you really got to know the pharmacology of the drug because you cannot cut all pills in half.

You cannot go every other day with some of them.

It's just kind of a crapshoot.

All doctors do it differently.

And that's a problem.

That's part of the problem here.

We have spent so much time and money putting people on drugs and yet no one knows how to take them off.

And that's a big, big, big problem.

So some research has...

evolved around this.

The most prominent research is based on the work by Mark Horowitz, who's out of the University of College London.

And so he just came out with a book co-authored with another professor, another doctor who actually, they've both been through antidepressant withdrawal.

That in itself is really important because so many of these clinicians, they just don't believe their patients.

They will misdiagnose withdrawal as relapse.

And that's how you get put on something else.

It's why there are so many people who get diagnosed as bipolar or ADHD or manic after they've been on a drug for a while and try and get off of it.

It's because they're getting misdiagnosed because people think it's real, or it's withdrawal, not relapse.

So the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines, it's a big book that came out just this year in February.

There's the Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines.

So that's a big fat textbook about how to prescribe drugs.

That's been out for years.

I mean, I want to say probably decades.

The deep prescribing guidelines only just came out in February 2024.

And this book, it outlines the most of the most common psych drugs are still working on antipsychotics in a different volume, but it follows, the theory is, it follows what's called a hyperbolic curve based on PET scans that show the serotonin, the CERT system, basically the serotonin occupancy system in the brain.

And so the idea is, and where people get a little mixed up, at least where we think the science is today, this could be different in five years is how science works, right?

People think that

I'm going to use Prozac in like a hundred milligram

dose

because it'll be easier with the math.

So let's say you're on 100 milligrams of Prozac.

People think that if you drop down to 50 milligrams, then you have 50% less Prozac in your body, right?

They think the brain will also respond 50%, like that it will have a 50%

reduced response to the Prozac because there's less of it in the brain, right?

And then same, so on and so forth.

If you have 25 milligrams in the body and in the brain, you'd think that you should be having a quarter of the response as you would at 100 milligrams.

But that's really not how it's been, how we think it works.

Because what happens is when these drugs go into the body, they change the way the receptors work.

They downregulate the receptors.

There's more of the synthetic drug floating around.

And so the...

brain basically changes.

It adapts to having more drugs in its system, and it does not adapt as quickly to having the drugs out of the system as as we've been led to think.

So, what can happen is if you look at these curves, it's called a hyperbolic curve because it kind of goes flat and then they usually kind of drop off a cliff a little bit.

And so, it's that cliff drop off that's really important for people to understand because that's usually the period of time when people are more likely to have severe withdrawal symptoms.

But what's very, very frustrating about this is that if you look at the Prozac curve specifically,

so you're going around, you've got your 100, you've got your 80, 70, or whatever.

Then you kind of go down to the point where you're going to go get 10 milligrams of Prozac, which is the lowest amount on the market.

That curve is still very high.

The cert occupancy is far higher than 10%.

I want to say it's around 60%.

I might be a little wrong in my number there, but it's significantly higher than 10%.

And so what happens then, right?

Someone's like, okay, I'm feeling, yeah, you know, okay, but I think I'm going to pull off my next,

I'm going to stop the drug.

They go from 10 milligrams to zero because they have no way to get

the right dose.

And then they have, but they have the 60, whatever, plus or minus 60% occupancy rate in their brain.

And then suddenly the drug's out of their system and the system just goes haywire because, because what they needed to do was step down on this hyperbolic curve.

So that's where we think withdrawal happens.

It's basically the

disconnect between what the brain is doing and what the brain has been conditioned to do based on having these synthetic drugs in the system

and also

the amount of drugs that are actually in the system.

Wow, that's fascinating.

It's fascinating.

So the way around this, right?

How do we get around it?

The only way we can really get around it without having more

smaller doses on the market is to go to a compound pharmacy and to understand hyperbolic tapering.

So if you're someone who's aware of this and you go to your doctor and your doctor is also aware of this and willing to help you, which unfortunately not all of them are, but

assuming you got a good one,

they can write a prescription for a compound pharmacy so you can have a smaller dose.

So the Modley Deprescribing Guidelines recommend roughly a 10% cut per time.

So again, when we think about the way this works, if you're on 100 milligrams and you cut down 10%,

we're going to 90 milligrams.

So we hang out on 90 for a while.

10% of 90 is 9.

So now we go down to 81 milligrams.

And you can see how the dosage cut gets smaller and smaller every time.

And also how it gets more and more tedious.

It takes longer.

The longer to go off, the closer you get to the curve because you're making smaller and smaller cuts.

Right.

Because 100 milligrams, that would take a year.

It could take a really long time.

And not everybody has to go that slow.

It tends to become more important to make smaller cuts the closer you get to falling off that curve and towards dropping down to zero.

Some people can

kind of go linearly and then start going down a curve.

It depends on the drug.

It ends up being very much an experiment of one.

People have to go at the speed of their own body.

The loose guidelines of 10%

are just kind of where they've found where there seems to be less likelihood of having severe withdrawal.

That doesn't mean some people don't still have severe withdrawal at 10%.

And it doesn't mean that some people can't go faster.

But it's definitely a different strategy than going linear.

Yeah.

But of course, then there's the additional problem of, okay, not everybody has a compound pharmacy.

I've never even heard of that, actually.

Yeah.

Well, if you don't have a compound pharmacy, then you've got people literally being their own drug lords in their home with gram scales, with razor blades.

They're counting beads and capsules.

They're shaving off the edges of pills.

They are making solutions and titrating it through eyedroppers.

It's insane.

And the problem is, is that people have to do this because of a drug that they were told was safe and non-addictive.

And that's what pisses me off.

And that's why it pisses me off when we're giving this stuff to kids.

And we don't know what they're signing them up for.

Actually, we do know what they're signing them up for.

We're signing them up to be,

to view themselves as broken, to have to manage a lifetime of medication, to never have their brain and body develop in the way it should.

And then one day, when they decide to maybe get off of these drugs, they have no knowledge of how to do it.

None of the doctors know how to do it.

They don't know who they are.

So when they start having different feelings and emotions, they think there's something wrong with them and they get scared of it.

Then there's like sexual side effects, there's gross side effects, like everything.

And

no one's talking about it.

I mean, Sean, I'm on your podcast.

I'm a chef.

Why am I the one here talking about this?

That's so frustrating to me.

There should be doctors from every major hospital talking about this.

There should be lawmakers talking about this.

Yeah.

Not patient advocates who have been having to sound the bell in order to get the attention on something that should have happened a long time ago.

Big Pharma has a lot of money and influence on social media platforms.

But the thing is, they could also make more money.

Just like, I don't see how this isn't effectively a win-win.

Right.

Well, in their eyes, if they get people off the medication, they lose money.

Yes, but the amount of time and the amount of different drugs, like

things they could make, because right now, if you go to a compound pharmacy, the compound pharmacy is taking that money.

If they just provided smaller doses, that would be huge.

If there was a code for antidepressant withdrawal, insurance companies could start making money and also the condition would become recognized.

Oh, is it not recognized right now?

No.

Well, I mean, it's, you know, it's not, you can't find it in

the DSM.

You can't code for it.

Is that because it's new, though, or is it because they don't want it?

Probably a little column A, a little column B.

I mean, this is definitely a fairly new

discourse past.

Yeah, not enough research yet.

You said the first research came out in 2015, right?

Well, there's been some research on it, but the first systematic review.

So the first time someone sat down and looked at the landscape and kind of said, what's going on here?

was 2015.

Yeah, which is pretty recent.

Right.

But most of the research that has been done on antidepressants and all psychiatric drugs has not considered withdrawal.

So you got to think about how that impacts the whole landscape of psychiatry, mental health, right?

Because if you've had 60 years of giving people psychiatric drugs of all kinds, all kinds, starting, you know, Valium in the 60s all the way up to Adderall, whatever it is.

And none of the research, because the research is going to look at, okay, we give people these drugs, what happens?

And then sometimes it looks at, well, do they relapse if they stop it, Right.

And if none of the research looks at withdrawal and considers that withdrawal was part of the problem or that people were experiencing withdrawal, then you have all this science that just says, oh, all these people relapsed.

The drug must be effective.

Not all these people are having withdrawal effects from the drug.

They're actually fine.

And we can't untangle that from history.

But we know now because it's been so long that you have people who've been on these drugs for decades and they're not getting better and they're getting worse and you have more and more people crying to get off of them and no way to get off of them.

Now we know we've created a problem.

So it's a matter of, I don't know if we're necessarily rolling back the clock on any of this, that's for sure.

But the individual can certainly be empowered to take charge of their own health and in a lot of cases to help educate their doctor.

And then the two people together can actually go forth and help them get off these drugs if that's what they want.

Scary times.

Yeah, isn't the average elderly person on like eight different medications?

I don't know how many the average is, but polypharmacy and amongst the elderly population is very common.

Scary, yeah.

And I know you were on Michaela's show.

She dealt with this.

Her dad dealt with this.

Yep.

So it's.

You said you dealt with it.

I dealt with this.

Yeah.

I almost died from it.

It's, it's everywhere.

It's everywhere.

And if you don't know what's happening, you really run the risk of being.

misdiagnosed and put on more drugs and your system's already compromised at that point.

Yeah, I love your message.

I think it's really important.

Brooke, where can people find you and learn more about you?

Well, my name is Brooke Seam.

That's B-R-O-O-K-E-S-I-E-M.

You can find me all over the internet at Brooke Seam.

My book is May Cause Side Effects.

It's available.

Rubber books are sold on audiobook.

And I have a newsletter that's on Substack.

So that's Brookeseam.substack.com.

Awesome.

We'll link below.

Thanks for coming on.

Thank you, Sean.

Yep.

Thanks for watching, guys.

As always, see you tomorrow.