Betsy McKay

I started diving down and pretty quickly came across hashtags like Lexa pro-girly and Lexa ho.

Oh, TikTok.

Yeah, it was just huge.

I'm Betsy McKay.

I'm a senior writer covering health and medicine for The Wall Street Journal.

I mean, we've talked to hundreds of people at this point.

We've talked to patients.

We've talked to doctors.

We've talked to researchers.

In general, if you were just to look at the most glamorous videos, the most positive ones, you really wouldn't come away thinking...

these drugs can have serious side effects but there is a whole part of the mental health universe that is talking only about very serious side effects you want to know what absolutely nobody told me not even my psychiatrist how bad it is to wean off an antidepressant i feel crazy

Is America over-medicated?

These drugs are so popular and they've been on the market so long now that grandparents, parents, and children in the same family now take them.

When we become anxious, it's basically we're overstimulated.

And so neurons release this chemical, GABA, and it's meant to sort of quiet everything in your brain.

So they basically mimic the calming effect of that substance, GABA.

I'm curious, like, how effective are they at doing what they're supposed to do?

Well, the people we spoke to were, you know, seriously, anything between two weeks and like 20 plus years.

Years.

There's plenty of people out there who