Why So Many People Can't Get Off Their Antidepressants | Laura Delano
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How much testing has been done for SSRIs with long-term use?
How much testing has been done for SSRIs with long-term use? The average length of a trial is about six to eight weeks that tests the safety and efficacy. One of the Ambien trials that the drug was approved on the basis of was one night. Whatever the drug class is, whether it's SSRI, SNRI, MAOI, tricyclic, antipsychotic, benzodiazepine, Z drug, stimulant, they are all approved on the basis of short-term trials. It is literally an experiment to take these drugs long-term.
Imagine if Taylor Swift would have been put on an SSRI as a teenager. If she would have been numbed out by Lexapro, we would not have this level of art that we have from her.
Angry teenage girls aren't meant to be sitting in front of their screens in a dark room on the internet. They're meant to be experimenting with fashion and painting and music. They're meant to be channeling their emotions into art.
What is the average length of time people are on antidepressants?
Laura Delano spent 14 years inside the psychiatric system, diagnosed, medicated, hospitalized, told her brain was fundamentally broken before realizing the symptoms that she thought proved she was mentally ill might actually have been caused by the drugs themselves. And once you hear what happened to Laura after trying to get off antidepressants, you start looking at America's so-called mental health crisis very differently. Laura Delano is a speaker, founder of Inner Compass Initiative, and author of Unshrunk. But this conversation goes way beyond, are antidepressants bad? What Laura is really challenging is the entire modern identity framework around suffering. You know, this idea that that every painful emotion, every season of despair, every uncomfortable human experience must automatically be labeled a disorder and medically managed forever.
We talk about what happens when children are taught their brains are defective, why getting off SSRIs can sometimes take years, whether withdrawal is being mistaken for relapse, and how an entire generation may have built identities around diagnoses that they were never meant to carry for life. Watch this episode on the Real Alex Clark YouTube channel or Culture Apothecary on Spotify. Whether this is your first time ever listening to my podcast or your hundredth, please leave us a five-star review. This helps the show tremendously and takes three seconds to do. Please welcome author of Unshrunk, Laura Delano to Culture Apothecary. The most common explanation for this rapid decline that we're seeing in society today is that we're in a mental health crisis.
But you're actually arguing something even more controversial, which is that millions of Americans may not actually be mentally ill. Millions of Americans may be in drug withdrawal.
Yeah, it's a controversial statement to make. And I think it's a combination of long-term medication adverse effects and people trying— time after time to come off their medications and feeling horrible, leading them to go back on. I think it's a multifaceted source that's behind this crisis, but it's not what we've been told. And what I realized for myself is that the treatment itself might be fueling what we're thinking of as a mental health crisis.
Why is tapering off antidepressants often misunderstood?
How could that be mistaken for one another? I mean, drug withdrawal symptoms, that can look like mental illness?
Drug withdrawal symptoms can mimic the symptoms of the diagnoses in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and also long-term adverse effects can as well. So we're in this situation where our culture has this lens over our eyes where we see people who are told they have chronic You know, mental health conditions month after month, year after year, not getting better or even getting worse. And we're all trained to see that as their illness is progressing. And what I found in my own experience and now having been doing this work for 15 years, have heard from thousands and thousands of other people is that. It was actually the long-term polypharmacy regimen that we were on that was fueling what we were being told was our own illness inside of our brains.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How much testing has been done for SSRIs with long-term use?
0:00–1:14
2
What is the average length of time people are on antidepressants?
1:14–3:24
3
Why is tapering off antidepressants often misunderstood?
3:24–5:01
4
How can withdrawal symptoms be mistaken for relapse?
5:01–6:21
5
What are the common adverse effects of antidepressants?
6:21–7:24
6
What challenges do people face when trying to come off psychiatric medications?
7:24–8:30
7
How should parents discuss medication with their teenagers?
8:30–10:13
8
What does a rehumanized future look like in mental health?
10:13–1:26:12
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark
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