Betsy McKay
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Prozac was introduced in 1987, and it was a revolution.
Prozac Nation and so forth.
Then came other popular antidepressants, like Zoloft and Lexapro.
And prescriptions for benzodiazepines have been going down.
There's a lot more concern about them now, but prescriptions for antidepressants are going up.
Betsy, is that the same for antidepressants?
Yeah, it's very interesting.
I mean, again, it's a similar picture to benzos.
Most antidepressants have not been studied for long.
The average study was about eight weeks long, but the average time...
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's very destigmatizing.