Meg Jay

Online, it's easy to find the antidepressant influencers.

The Lexapro girlies, the Lexahos, the Zoloft gang.

That's my PSA about my mental health and taking antidepressants for today.

More young people than ever before are taking a class of antidepressants called SSRIs, and this fact has drawn the attention of the public health establishment.

Mr. Kennedy, do you think that people who take antidepressants are dangerous?

Coming up on today explained how antidepressants got political.

Today, today, explain.

My name is Meg Jay.

I'm a developmental clinical psychologist and the author of The 20-Something Treatment and The Defining Decade.

All right, let's go back in time about 31 years.

A book called Prozac Nation hits shelves, written by Elizabeth Wurzel.

It's about being a young person who's prescribed SSRIs.

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background.

How did we start down this path of putting young people, teenagers, 20-somethings, on these kinds of medications?

Antidepressants were developed for use in adults originally, but over time, doctors gradually began prescribing downward to younger and younger people, including young adults like Elizabeth Wurzel and then teenagers and kids.

Just like the Cheshire Cat, someday I will suddenly leave.

But the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant.

Still, in the 1990s, when this book came out, about less than 5% of young adults were on antidepressants.

And when I first started seeing clients in 1999, it was still pretty unusual to have a client on meds.

What's happened in the meantime, the last 25 or so years?