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| Brooke Siem, "Chopped" champ and author of the memoir "May Cause Side Effects," was among the first generation of teenagers to be prescribed antidepressants. When she turned 30, she realized that maybe she was misdiagnosed and decided to taper off the medication with the help of her doctor. But stopping meds after 15 years isn't as easy as people may think. |
| Healthline's Gabe Howard spoke with Siem to hear her story and answer the question: Are antidepressants for life? Below, we share our favorite clips from their chat. |
| This interview has been edited for length and clarity. |
| *Disclaimer: Antidepressants can be a safe and effective treatment for depression. They have been proven to save lives. Siem's experience is not representative of all people's experience taking and tapering off antidepressants. |
| Q: | Tell us about when you were first prescribed antidepressants and how you eventually knew it might be time to stop taking them. | |
| A: My father had just died, and the adults around me didn't really think I was grieving properly. And so in the early 2000s, I got put on a cocktail of antidepressants, and then I stayed on them for the next 15 years. |
| I had the experience that so many people have: You go in, you're in there for 10 to 20 minutes, you walk out with a script, and, assuming you don't have some horrible immediate reaction, that's pretty much that. In my 15-year-old brain, there was certainly no thought that I didn't need this because a doctor was telling me I did. |
| It took 15 years to realize, "Wait a second, I was put on these drugs when I was 15. I'm 30." At that time, I was not doing well. I was having a lot of suicidal thoughts. I'd been going on a downward trajectory for years, and something just clicked that said I shouldn't be this depressed on this many antidepressants. So, what do we do? |
| I saw a psychiatrist and started to get off them, and that's kind of when my whole world exploded. I entered severe antidepressant withdrawal that lasted for quite a long time. |
| Q: | How long did you go through withdrawal? | |
| A: For me, the serious symptoms abated within a year, then it took another year of readjustment. By the second year, I was kind of used to the ups and downs. I started to see more distance in between. More time was spent up than down, so I started to trust that I was on an upward trajectory. |
| I also started to get to know myself as an unmedicated adult, which was entirely new. It became more comfortable after those 2 years passed. That's when I started to consider myself fully recovered. |
| It's now been 4 or 5 years since I took my last antidepressant. So, roughly 6 years since this whole process started, and I've never been back on a psychiatric drug. I'm doing really, really well. It hasn't always been the easiest 6 years, but I have tools that I learned during this time to help me, and I feel like I will take all of that into my life moving forward. |
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| Q: | Why do you think the default is once you're prescribed antidepressants, you need them forever? | |
| A: What's interesting to me is that prior to the existence and common practice of prescribing prescription drugs for mental health issues, depression was largely viewed as a temporary thing. People would recover in 6 months to a year from big depressive episodes, and they weren't necessarily doomed to have it return. And that was the assumption that started to change once pharmaceutical interventions arrived. We can draw a lot of conclusions from that. I don't think we're ever really going to know how much money and politics and power play into this. |
| I also think that we've become a culture that's so impatient and so fearful at the same time. And those two things together are kind of a perfect storm for the situation. |
| Yes, sure, [antidepressants] could be a very useful tool. But I think there's value in letting kids work through stuff and gain some resilience and see if they come out of it. I mean, we're not really giving people time to actually work through this stuff. I think that there are a lot of people who could have just used more time, myself included. |
| Q: | I want to address a potential elephant in the room. There are pill shamers and anti-psychiatry advocates out there who believe that "evil Big Pharma invented depression simply to make money." You mentioned people wanting to punch you in the face at one point in our interview, so I know that you have a lot to consider in your advocacy work. | |
| A: I know that there are amazing psychiatrists and practitioners out there on the forefront of this stuff, who don't just give anyone a prescription who walks in the room, who work with people who can really benefit from these medications, and they're monitored. |
| My work and book are specifically focused on antidepressant withdrawal. The way I saved my own life is not the way somebody else would. We all have different reasons for making the choices we do, but I get tons of emails from people who have stories like mine. So I know that this is a prominent narrative out there that's worth talking about. |
| The bottom line is now it's been 6 years, and I have the ability to look back in hindsight and see where things went wrong, where we could have made different choices, [and] hopefully show other people that you're not broken if you're having a hard time or if a lot of crap has happened. |
| There are ways to get out of this. There are ways for depression to be temporary. Let's bring some hope back into this conversation because it's really dismal out there. |
| Q: | What is life like for Brooke today? | |
| A: You know, I love my life now, and I have an immense amount of gratitude. |
| When I was suffering, I always thought "gratitude" was the fluffiest word that was so overused and irrelevant in the mental health world. But I actually have it now, and I feel it. I've done a lot of counseling. I finally grieved the loss of my father. I did it 15 years later, and I've made some gigantic life choices that changed my situation and put me in a better one. And I think that for me, that's the biggest thing. |
| If you start making these choices, you start to piece together a life that really resonates with you. I've been lucky to be able to do that. As a result, I'm reaping the benefits of it now and finally starting to plan my future, which is a really weird, cool thing to actually project 30 years and say, "God, I hope I'm here" because for so long I didn't want to be here. |
| Click here to listen to the full episode. |
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