June 25, 2025 • Brooke Siem
Bad Medicine, Antidepressant Withdrawal, and the Incalculable Costs of Medicating Normal: My full talk at the University of Nevada, Reno Medical School
After years of speaking publicly on the topic of antidepressant withdrawal and overmedicating children, I’ve learned that meaningful change is going to come from two directions: patients and new prescribers.
I’m not going to say I’ve lost hope in existing clinicians, but it’s more difficult to treat Stockholm syndrome than it is to prevent abduction in the first place. Paraphrasing from the former Big Pharma and Big Food lobbyist Calley Means, who now spends his life whistleblowing the playbook of Big Pharma and Big Food: “It’s difficult to change your actions when your beach house depends on it.”
Thus, I’m working to get my work in front of residents who have yet to begin their practice, hoping a seed of my message will be buried into their fertile little brains. Nevermind the fact that research shows medical students’ empathy erodes in year three—the year in which they begin seeing patients.
Alas, we must press on, which is why I was thrilled to lecture at Psychiatry Grand Rounds and the University of Nevada, Reno, where all psychiatric residents are required to attend. This wasn’t just a talk about my story. Instead, I focused on the language of withdrawal, the theory of serotonin occupancy and how it lines up with hyperbolic tapering, and genetic pathways and their role in drug-drug interaction and metabolism. While there wasn’t a ton of time for questions or feedback, I was pleased when a room full of residents raised their phones to take photos of my slides. That told me this was new information and that maybe it will make a difference.
I also got a little heated at the end when I was gently pushed by one of the UNR professors who wanted to “get clear” and reiterate that the problem wasn’t actually psychiatrists, because it’s primary care practitioners who prescribe most antidepressants. I couldn’t let that slide, especially knowing that one of their psychiatrists had a 7-year-old on 5 different psychiatric drugs. Off I went.
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