Betsy McKay

An American is on an antidepressant is five years.

That's a huge gap.

So nobody really knows.

We're kind of a living experiment in that sense.

So it started kind of in a good place of you're all lonely.

We already have so much anxiety in our lives.

Which sounds like a good thing, right?

Like that's destigmatizing.

It is.

It's very destigmatizing.

And I think that's destigmatizing being open, realizing that you're not alone.

So there are side effects while taking benzodiazepines.

There are side effects while taking antidepressants, and some of them are similar.

And same with withdrawal.

It can be a very similar picture.

The biggest thing I've learned is that there are too few guardrails around these medications, which do help a lot of people.

And it's been sort of this under-recognized, un-talked-about problem for many years.

Yeah, John is absolutely right. We are at the tail end of a very bruising pandemic, very bruising to public health in the sense that there was a lot of anger and backlash, and that remains, and the view that government was not efficient. More broadly speaking, the administration says chronic diseases are worsening and changes need to be made. So there's two things here.

Yeah, John is absolutely right. We are at the tail end of a very bruising pandemic, very bruising to public health in the sense that there was a lot of anger and backlash, and that remains, and the view that government was not efficient. More broadly speaking, the administration says chronic diseases are worsening and changes need to be made. So there's two things here.

There are the philosophical changes. They view a smaller, more effective government and more focused on chronic diseases. then there is the immediate impact of the changes being made suddenly and the disruption that that causes.