This week, I’m traveling to Los Angeles for a round table discussion with a small group of wildly successful people who all have one thing in common: we were medicated with psychiatric drugs when we were kids.

We connected through a private WhatsApp chat hosted by a megawatt podcaster. Around 800 of us are in the group, all of whom have either guested or will be guesting on this podcast (my episode should be released by the end of the year.) Amid the usual chatter about sales funnels and product launches, the conversation turned to medicating kids. Multiple people chimed in about how a childhood spent on Adderal, benzos, and antidepressants derailed the first third of their lives and led to addiction, psych wards, and prison.

Though all of us are lucky to have come through it, one person put it best:

“After years of struggle, I’ve finally overcome the battle but not without an immense cost to my sanity, family, and friends.”

All of us were minors when we were medicated, so all of our parents signed off on the treatment. I can’t speak for anyone else’s parents, but my mom maintains that had she known what she knows now, she would have at least gotten a second and third opinion before filling my scripts.

Though most of my focus is on psych drug withdrawal and how to find yourself in the aftermath of long-term psych drug use, I always hope my work makes people think twice about starting a psychiatric drug in the first place. And I especially hope it stops parents from drugging their kids just because it’s the easy way out and every other parent is doing it. The costs of this choice are incalculable. I cannot overstress that there is zero scientific backing or research exploring the effects of psychiatric drugs on developing minds and bodies. To drug your kid with stimulants, antidepressants, or antianxiety drugs takes away their agency, turns them into an experiment, and can irrevocably change their system and perception of the world for the rest of their life.

And if you don’t believe me, maybe the work of Robert Whitaker, a Pulitzer prize finalist, or Dr. David Healy, former Secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology can sway you.

With that, here are five books I think every parent should read before medicating their kid or taking their kid to a psychiatrist.

Share widely.

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By Robert Whitaker

There is an uncomfortable question in the world of mental health and treatment that everyone thinks about, but no one says out loud: If medicating mental illness with psychiatric drugs was working, why are people getting worse?

This book examines over fifty years of research to find the answer and comes to a startling conclusion. I think it is the single most comprehensive and explanatory book on the market about the true nature and outcomes of psychiatric drugs and that it should be required reading in all medical schools.

It is also divided into multiple diagnoses (schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, and ADHD), which I found particularly useful as someone who focuses mostly on the history and treatment of depression.

By Ethan Watters

To understand why mental illness has such a strong pull in American culture, it is important to understand how mental illness is created in the first place. Yes, created.

When I was depressed and taking antidepressants, I thought my depression was caused by a chemical imbalance and that it was just who I was. After all, that’s what the doctors told me. We now know the chemical imbalance theory is unsubstantiated, and yet the narrative remains.

Watters’ book blew my mind by showing exactly how the false chemical imbalance theory was exported all over the world and why this has fundamentally affected recovery rates—for the worse—all over the globe. 

By David Healy

Though this is technically an academic book, it is extremely readable and the best account of the manipulative marketing, hidden court cases, and corruption that occurred during the development of Prozac and Zoloft.

It’s one of those books where, if my mother or I had read it before I was medicated at 15, I’m quite sure we would not have made the same choices. 

By Ben Goldacre

A book about pharmaceutical corruption and manipulative science can rarely make me laugh out loud, but Bad Science does just that.

Not only did the book make me a better advocate for my health by teaching me what red flags to look out for in research and shady science journalism, but it kept me consistently entertained to the point where I was disappointed when the book ended. It should be required reading in all high school science classes. 

By Abigail Shrier

It took me a long time to understand how my mother’s well-intentioned decision to send me to a child psychologist derailed my whole life, but Bad Therapy finally put the pieces together. In being diagnosed with depression and anxiety as a teen—and consequently medicated for it—a message was sent by the adults around me: I did not have the capacity to help myself.  

That unspoken message haunted me for the next fifteen years, leading me down a path of self-induced victimhood, fragility, and, paradoxically, more depression. I see this happening with an entire generation, and this book explains why—a must-read for every parent or medicated kid. 

It’s the 100th issue of Happiness Is A Skill, and I’m marking the occasion by going down a rabbit hole of genetic testing through GeneSight. This isn’t your usual, turns out I’m 1% Korean type of genetic testing (true story). It’s relatively new science that analyzes the body’s ability to process psychiatric drugs through the cytochrome P450 system (CYP), a group of enzymes responsible for metabolizing many medications and other substances in the body.

Though I personally have zero plans to ever swallow a psychiatric drug again, the more time I spend in the world of antidepressant withdrawal, the more interested I am in the why of it all. Why is it that some people have no issue stopping psychotropic drugs cold-turkey, while other people, like the man I wrote about in Issue 99, have permanent brain damage from psychiatric drug use and withdrawal?

My hunch is that it has something to do with genetics and the CYP system. Though there are no known studies on the CYP system and withdrawal specifically, there is some emerging research on CYP system and medication side effects. My assumption is that if the CYP system affects how a daily dose of drugs is metabolized, it’s likely involved in clearing the drug out of the system even when a daily dose is no longer being taken.

Hopefully we’re not too far from formal research on the subject, but in the meantime, I’m going to share what I’ve learned about this genetic testing and my results.

The CYP450 pathway is a group of enzymes found in the liver that are responsible for the metabolism of a wide variety of drugs, including antidepressants and antipsychotics. Specifically, the CYP450 enzymes are involved in the breakdown of these drugs in the liver, which can affect their efficacy and potential side effects.

Most antidepressants are metabolized by the CYP450 enzymes through variant alleles (versions) of the CYP450 pathways. For example, allele CYP2C19 is primarily responsible for metabolizing citalopram/Celexa and escitalopram/Lexapro while allele CYP2D6 is primarily responsible for fluoxetine/Prozac, paroxetine/Paxil, and venlafaxine/Effexor.

By looking at the genetic variations in these alleles, we can see how the body metabolizes psychiatric drugs via the CYP450 pathway. Everyone falls into one of the following categories: extensive (normal) metabolizer, intermediate metabolizer, poor metabolizer, rapid or ultra-rapid metabolizer.

An extensive metabolizer is a person with normal enzyme activity levels, meaning they can metabolize drugs normally, and therefore require standard doses of medications.

In contrast, an intermediate metabolizer has reduced activity levels of the CYP enzyme, which means they metabolize drugs slower than expected. As a result, intermediate metabolizers may experience higher overall drug levels or longer exposure to drugs, which can lead to increased risk of side effects or toxicity.

Poor metabolizers have significantly reduced or absent activity of a specific CYP enzyme, which leads to impaired drug metabolism. As a result, poor metabolizers may need to avoid certain drugs altogether due to the risk of adverse effects.

Conversely, ultra rapid metabolizers are individuals with increased activity levels of CYP enzymes, which means they metabolize drugs faster than expected, potentially leading to lower overall drug levels and reduced or absent effectiveness of medications.

The work of Selma Eikelenboom-Schieveld, a Dutch forensic scientist based out of New Mexico, focuses on the association between genetic variants of the CYP450 enzymes and violence-related adverse drug reactions in patients receiving psychoactive medication.

In her 2016 research paper “Psychoactive Medication, Violence, and Variant Alleles for Cytochrome P450 Genes,” Eikelenboom-Schieveld compared 55 violent individuals—whose behavior ranged from an altered emotional state (30 subjects), to assault, attempted or completed suicide and homicide (25 subjects)—against 58 persons with no history of violence as the controls.

In the nonviolent group, 38 subjects did not use prescription medication. In the violent group, all the subjects were on prescription medication. Of the 75 subjects on medication, 52 (almost 70%) were on three or more medications.

Her research showed that there is an “association between prescription drugs, most notably antidepressants and other psychoactive medication; having variant alleles for CYP2B6, CYP2C8, CYP2C9, CYP2C19, CYP2D6 and CYP3A4; and the occurrence of an altered emotional state or acts of violence. Based on these results, genotyping patients for these six CYP450s would provide information as to who might be susceptible to adverse drug reactions, e.g., the development of an altered emotional state or assault/suicide/homicide.”

To say it another way: if someone is a normal metabolizer or has limited CYP gene variations and is only on one medication, chances are acts of violence are also limited. But in someone with many variants and many medications, the enzymatic pathway effectively gets clogged up, causing a buildup of drugs in the system that can lead to an altered emotional state or violence. These undesirable actions are often mistaken for mental illness, so more drugs added, increasing the likelihood of violence.