Brooke Siem
speaker
410 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 15 Jul
Brooke Siem’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Thank you so much for sharing a little bit of your story and taking time and you've already shown that
your experience has helped others by it influencing your sister and
There will be more of that to come, I'm sure.
So thank you so much.
Welcome to the Mad in America podcast. My name is Brooke Seem, and I am the author of the award-winning memoir on antidepressant withdrawal may cause side effects. Today, I'm with Marsha Zuritsky, and I am very interested to talk to her because she reached out to me about the fact that we don't spend a lot of time talking about women who are prescribed psychiatric drugs as part of menopause.
And we don't talk a lot about it when it comes to the older adult population. And so I thought Marsha would be the perfect person to have on the pod to talk about this. Marsha is a survivor of being prescribed Klonopin for sleep when going through menopause. She said she was never told what class of drugs she was put on. And it wasn't until years later that when she became ill with severe digestive issues that she figured out she was on a benzo and that it could be the root of all her health issues.
Very interestingly, Marsha is also a licensed mental health therapist certified in IFS therapy, which is internal family systems. She is licensed to see clients in Idaho and Washington, although she did tell me before we started recording that she is full. But the reason why this is so interesting is because when we have people in the mental health field who have also had experience with psychiatry and psychiatric drug withdrawal,
that can sometimes change and inform how they practice and approach the entire industry, if you will, as a whole. So I am very excited to have you here, Marsha. I am thrilled to hear what you've been through and where you're at now, because even just seeing you through the screen, I can tell how much radiance and joy there is there. And we need a lot of hope in this space. And so I'm glad to be here with you. Thanks for giving me this opportunity to talk about it and share what I've been through and what I've learned.
You're welcome. So right before we started recording, you mentioned to me something very interesting, and that is that you have been through and recovered from a protracted withdrawal injury, and also currently you are hyperbolic tapering. And those are two things we often don't see together. So if you can just take us back a little bit and tell us how this all started and what was going on in your life at the time.
Isn't that wild? That is wild, isn't it? Like, it's like, I got lots of friends on these. Like, it's fine. And how is that science? Yeah. And it's the fact that I even have to say this out loud. You come out of the psych hospital where you went to go get off the benzos on other things. So now you're on the Zoloft and...
Again, this was all prescribed around menopause. So tell me, like, we are off the Klonopin now, but the Zoloft is still... So I wasn't in a psych ward. I was in rehab, drug rehab. Oh. So...
So what was the genesis of you starting to learn about hyperbolic tapering and how were you also healing from protracted withdrawal at the same time? So after that first year of like cleaning it up and then just being on Zoloft and Mirtazapine, I just...
Yeah, I also, I've had a number of encounters with people who I would say 50s, 60s, and even occasionally in early 70s. And one of the things that I will hear from them is just this, I mean, literally the words, it's too late for me. Like it's too, I'm too old to go through this. And
I'm not that age yet, I don't know, I'm not in their experience, and I've never really known what to say to that. I think there's a part of me that understands that maybe there gets to be a point where you don't want to upset the apple cart too much. But at the same time, these people are reaching out to me because there's something, you know, I've had grandparents say I can't connect with my grandchildren.
I don't know, that hits me in a very, very, very deep way because you're really talking about what for most people is the ultimate fear. And to have the bravery to say that I recognize I want to hit that and feel it with all the force it's got is quite a thing to say out loud.
You know, I feel a little like one thing I love about aging, I just take a little more liberties than I used to. Yeah, I've always found that to be so perplexing in this space where, you know, I understand that in a professional therapeutic environment, the clinician is not supposed to share anything about their own life, but like,
It allows people more agency to choose the right direction for them in their life. You know, if I could wave a magic wand and have these drugs never be on the earth, I'd do it, but I can't. And people are going to have such a wide variety of experiences and they're going to need to go their own way on this. And you can't know what way to go or even how to start strategizing that if you don't know what your options are.
Every like the identical words out of all three of your mouths has been, you cannot know what this is like, unless you've been through it. And I forget that sometimes because I'm in the world, I'm out of the world. I it's been 10 years for me and I'm not actively in it anymore. Thank God. But there's just this, I'm having this feeling of.
of connecting on a on a deeper level because i'm being reminded that this is a very real thing that if you know you know and if you don't you don't and i just hope that whoever's listening to this can get that there are two people here talking about this experience and we're both saying like this is
something you will never ever experience in any other way. The people around you who haven't been through it won't get it. But we're also two people sitting here who have recovered and you're still in the middle of it, but you're doing well. I'm fully recovered. It's
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