Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Online, it's easy to find the antidepressant influencers. The Lexapro girlies, the Lexahos, the Zoloft gang.
Girl, take your crazy pills. You know you're mentally ill. Just go ahead, take your crazy pills. So I got the prescription for this Lexapro and... I have so much mental bandwidth 24-7 now and I'm just like locked in, geeked up.
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.
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It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you?
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Chapter 2: What are the trends in antidepressant use among young people?
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Today, today, explain.
So cute.
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? Well, times have changed. By the early 2000s, about 10% of young adults were on antidepressants.
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Chapter 3: How did antidepressants become a political issue?
Today, it's about 20%. or about one in five of my clients will come in and say that they're already on medication. Social media has definitely played a role. It's increased social awareness around mental health, which can be a good thing, but it's also led to some social contagion.
Many young adults see videos about depression and anxiety and the medications that people are taking, and then they decide they have these problems and they want to try these medications too. You have those moments where you just find yourself smiling and you're like, wait, is this what antidepressants do?
I also feel like it's kind of helped my mood just every single day, like not snapping all the time at every little thing. Rainbows and sunshines. That's all I see is rainbows and sunshines. I'm like this whole time you've been holding on this Prozac-y like for what?
So in a recent study of university presidents, about 85% said that social media was a leading cause of mental health problems in their students. When you ask the students themselves, only about 33% said it was a leading cause, that they were more likely to say it was stressors around school and work and family and finances and friends, and that that is what was making them feel stressed.
stressed and anxious, not social media per se.
This past week has been really crazy with schoolwork and just like other work on the side. Like college requires you to spend money, bro. Anything you do costs money, bro.
I'm just really introverted and it's harder for me to get out there and put myself out there. That said, I do think that young adults go on social media and they learn a lot about mental health, but also a lot about medications. that then they decide they want to try. Are antidepressants actually helping young people? Well, it's an interesting question because, of course, they help some people.
I think the research can be misleading. If you look at the total of research on antidepressants, they're only effective about 50% of the time. I don't think that's something that young people understand, that when they decide to take antidepressants, you know, there's about a 50-50 chance that this will have a benefit for them. And they also don't understand what the risks are.
I mean, they're not a silver bullet. They can help some people. They can be life-saving. But in other people, they solve one problem and they create another problem. So one client of mine went on antidepressants to feel less anxious about a relationship, but then he wound up feeling less driven at work.
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Chapter 4: What historical context is important for understanding SSRIs?
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We're back. It's me, Noelle, from work. If you were lucky enough to have watched the confirmation hearings for the man who would become Health and Human Services Secretary, RFK Jr., you may recall this banger.
Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?
I probably did say that. Or the claims about vaccines and autism. But Kennedy was also confronted by Senator Tina Smith. This is personal for me. When I was a young woman and I was struggling with depression, thankfully, I had the resources to help me get through it, including... A new generation of SSRI uptake re-inhibitors, which helped to clear my mind.
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