Brooke's Thoughts Archives - Page 2 of 2

As I sit here on this gloomy spring morning, the tentacles of a migraine still latched onto the left side of my head, I am reminded of the phrase, “Do as much as necessary and as little as possible.”

wooden doll building wooden wall and text overlay

I first heard this phrased used around physical training. Think of an Olympian, for example, who has a finely tuned workout schedule designed to create gold-medal worthy results. She can’t back off and do less, otherwise, she risks her performance. She also shouldn’t do more, even if she’s capable of it, because doing more interferes with the rest and recovery necessary to perform at a high level. She doing both as much as necessary and as little as possible to reach her goals.

The idea is that doing more for the sake of doing more isn’t beneficial. That extra energy has to go somewhere, and if you’re not careful, that untamed energy leads to overuse and destruction.

Case in point: a Sunday night migraine that bleeds over to Monday because you broke your “no work on Saturday, under any circumstances, because you need to force yourself to rest so you don’t get sick” rule.

“Do as much as necessary and as little as possible” is tricky, though. Not only does it go against the “hustle harder” mantra that has so dominated our culture over the last decade, but it also gives those without much…shall we say, gumption, a route to laziness.

Take parenting, for example. I know one couple who, in all likelihood, will push their kid to take the SATs twice (and the ACTs twice, for good measure), even if the first go around yields scores strong enough to get the kid into her school of choice. I also know another couple whose neuro-typical seven year old can’t read or write his own name, but because they feed the kid and plop him in front of Zoom school for an hour a day, they’ve rationalized that they’re doing what is “necessary” to keep CPS off their back.

Both scenarios are recipes for different types of destruction. The SAT kid doesn’t need to expend more energy when the goal has already been met. Doing so will only lead to unnecessary, and prolonged anxiety, self-doubt, and shame. Meanwhile, the illiterate seven year old doesn’t even have a shot because of his parent’s fundamental disregard over what constitutes “necessary” parenting.

Ultimately, what is “necessary” is subjective and meaningless without clear goals or expectations. Get clear on what you want and what it takes to get there, but stop once you cross that line. Any effort beyond what is required is a liability.

Need a little giggle? Order one of my Fuckit Buckets™.

After 15 years of depression and antidepressants, my mission is to help people find hope in the name of healing. My memoir on the subject, MAY CAUSE SIDE EFFECTS, publishes on May 10, 2022. Pre-order it on Barnes & Nobles, Amazon, or wherever books are sold. For the most up-to-date announcements, subscribe to my newsletter HAPPINESS IS A SKILL.

Coming September 6, 2022

May Cause Side Effects

Brooke’s memoir is now available for preorder wherever books are sold.

This is a heart-rending and tender memoir that will start conversations we urgently need to have. It’s moving and important.
Johann Hari, author of New York Times bestseller Chasing the Scream and international bestseller  Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions

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Enter predatory journals.

To get a research article published in a competitive journal is an exercise in patience and will. I haven’t done it myself, but as the other half of a research academic trying to land a tenure track job, the process strikes me as the brainy equivalent of peeling your own skin off, letting it scab over, and peeling it off again. Some clever yet undeniably shitty people saw an opportunity to take advantage of struggling academics, so predatory journals were born. Think of them like the academic equivalent of late-night infomercials. For just $1700, you too can have your important research published in our official journal!

Yes, you read that right. Predatory journals often charge academics a fee for their work to appear in a bogus journal. That’s the hallmark of any good scam, right? They make you think you need them and then they take your money. It’s not always so obvious, though. Some journals are more sophisticated than others, leading well-intentioned researchers to unintentionally publish in hack journals. One study found that 5% of Italian researchers were duped into publishing in predatory journals.

In addition to exploiting academics, these journals don’t perform any sort of quality check on the work that gets submitted, leaving ample room for plagiarism, fraud, ethics, conflicts of interest, and general shitty science. But naive readers don’t know the difference, leading to a cancer of misinformation.

If this isn’t bad enough, predatory journals also create a sinkhole for funding and resources. One analysis found that 17% of articles sampled from predatory journals reported that their funding for the study was from the US Nationals Institute of Health (NIH). This means that one of the world’s foremost medical research center is funneling resources towards studies that end up in scientifically questionable journals.

“Little of this work will advance science,” the authors of the analysis say. “It is too dodgily reported (and possibly badly conducted) and too hard to find.”

What’s the deal with birds?

When I asked my partner, Justin, about predatory journals, he laughed and brushed it off with an, “I get spam emails from them all the time!” Then he giggled and pulled up a journal article entitled, “What’s the Deal with Birds?” published by Daniel T. Baldassarre in the Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews. The author, fed up with predatory journals, submitted a fancy-looking yet totally bogus “study” to a known predatory journal just to prove a point. And they actually published it, proving that just because something looks like research, doesn’t mean it’s legit.

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am not a doctor. I am also not a researcher, pharmacist, or psychologist. I don’t have a PhD. Or a Masters. My Bachelor’s degree is in history. Not a specific part of history, but of all time. I’ve also got a culinary degree that ultimately led me to compete on—and win—Food Network’s “Chopped,” as well as an XPT Life certification that allows me to coach movement and breathwork.

All this to say: On paper, I’m no psychiatric expert.

But life has a funny way of shoving us down unexpected paths, and despite a resume that suggests my time is best spent in the kitchen or the gym, I now find myself as an emerging voice in the fight against the depression and antidepressant epidemic.

I would be lying if I told you that I was happy to hold this torch. But like an avalanche that can’t be stopped, I sealed my fate when I tipped a snowball over the mountain back in July of 2017 and agreed to write a memoir about my year of international travel. The book was to be called Ladyballs, and it would have a snarky, boss bitch attitude about leaving a shitty life for one full of global adventure. Eat, Pray, Love for disillusioned millennials.

Disgusting, right?

Like most work that overleans on sarcasm, the book’s irreverent attitude was a coverup for the story I was still too ashamed to tell: I’d spent half my life on antidepressants, and after a hell year of getting off them, I had no idea who I was or what I was supposed to do with myself.

Ladyballs ultimately fell through, leaving me with nothing but a shitty first draft of a book no one should ever read. But thank God for that shitty draft, because buried in it was nuggets of the real story, the story of what happened after I booked a one-way ticket to Malaysia and got off fifteen years of antidepressants, one by one by one by one by one. As of today, my memoir May Cause Side Effects is out for submission.

Which brings me here. I spent the last two and a half years writing May Cause Side Effects, with no guarantees that it will ever get published. While my agent is busy doing her job, I am tasked with pivoting away from my image as a chef and to what they call, a “recognized expert” in the field. And since I don’t have letters after my name that automatically deem me an expert, I’ve got a different sort of work to do.

For years, I’ve been thinking about how I can use my experience to add value to the conversation surrounding antidepressants without making black or white statements, alienating other people’s choices, or getting overly political. Now that I’ve been published in a major news outlet, started seriously tweeting, and given a few speeches on the topic, I’ve come to the solemn understanding that there’s no undivisive way to enter into the conversation about antidepressants. Like climate change and income inequality, depression and antidepressants are inherently political. The message consumers are presented with is born in a profit-driven marketing machine fueled by researchers who depend upon government money to conduct narrow studies that result in limited data extracted by pharmaceutical companies who funnel billions of dollars into government policy and television commercials in order to convince you that your problems are all in your head.

Did your eyes glaze over a little bit during that sentence? Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. You and millions of other people have a mental illness, just like millions of people have diabetes! The brain is an organ, just like the pancreas. Diabetics take insulin for a faulty pancreas, so why not take antidepressants for a faulty brain?

Except despite a few decades of rampant and rising antidepressant use, depression and suicide rates continue to rise, so much so that psychiatrists from Keele University just published a review hypothesizing that prescribing antidepressants before someone becomes depressed might lower their chance of developing depression.

That’s like giving healthy people chemo just in case they get cancer.

Which brings me to why I’m here. My work over the past few years has led me to believe that without a (highly unlikely) overhaul of our entire mental health and healthcare system, the onus is on the individual patient to do the research and take their treatment, therapy, and healing into their own hands-or face the consequences of unknown, unsubstantiated long term antidepressant drug use. This means that people need to think for themselves, learn how to do their own research, and unscrew the notion that we have any real understanding of what causes depression. Because we don’t. And I don’t see us cracking that code anytime soon.

That said, I want to emphasize the following: Since getting off all my antidepressants, I have been honored to work with a variety of outstanding medical professionals, from psychologists to researchers to psychiatrists. There are solid humans out there working to help people truly get better. This is a stark contrast to the psychiatric and psychological experiences I had as a young adult, and I regularly wonder whether or not my life would have taken the same course if I hadn’t had shit psychiatric luck so early in my life.

But I did, so here we are.

My goal is to take readers through my own process of learning, uncovering, and understanding this complex issue. I reserve the right to question what I’ve been told, to change my mind, and to make mistakes. I can’t promise that I’ll always be right. But I can promise to admit when I’m wrong. Because the only truth I know is the one I experienced, and that’s not enough for me.
If you’ve made it this far and you like what I’m doing, I’d appreciate it if you could give me a follow on Twitter or share my work with someone who might appreciate it.

Thanks for sticking with me,
Brooke