Untold Side Effects of Psychiatric Medications for Children

Episode Transcript

​​Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Hi, everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and today we’re talking about psychiatric medication and the information and stories that don’t often get told about the concerning impact of these drugs on some children and adults. Before we go any further, I want to be clear that this is not an anti-medication or anti-psychiatry show. If you follow my work, you know I take a very balanced approach to this issue, and believe that these medications can have their place in the treatment toolbox for a minority of people with mental health symptoms. However, it is my strong research-based opinion that these drugs are widely overprescribed and under researched, especially when we’re talking about children and teens. I see kids and adults daily in my clinic who have experienced severe debilitating side effects from these medications, and everywhere they turn, the answer from the traditional medical and mental health world is to simply stay on them or take more. This is really unacceptable when we now know that these drugs don’t help the majority of people stay symptom free in the long term, and they can cause temporary or permanent problems. True informed consent is necessary when discussing the use of these medications. That requires a full discussion and disclosure of potential benefits and risks. This typically doesn’t happen. And I see many parents who end up very dismayed at the side effects and sometimes the worst symptoms that can result from using these drugs. Wherever you stand on the issue of medication and whatever your personal experience has been, my goal with this episode is to help shine a light on the parts of the psychiatric drugs story that are often hidden, so you can make the best decisions for yourselves and your children. To explore this with us today I’ve invited Lynn Cunningham on the show.

Lynn is an award-winning filmmaker, co-director and producer of the documentary film Medicating Normal, and produced directed and edited films and TV for PBS and the History Channel in the 1980s and 90s. A personal experience with a family member diagnosed with a serious mental illness and medicated to the point of being unrecognizable led Lynn to research the world of mental health treatment, and how what we’re told about psychiatric medication is far from the whole story. She’s interviewed hundreds of psychiatric patients, and consulted with scores of experts across the country about their experiences in order to create Medicating Normal. This film is a stunning new perspective on the safety and efficacy of psychiatric drugs, and society’s over reliance on them to relieve pain and suffering. Lynn, it’s such a pleasure to have you with us today. Welcome to the show.

Lynn Cunningham 

Thank you so much, Nicole, thank you for having us.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

This is such an important topic, and it’s one that I don’t think gets enough attention, certainly not enough mainstream coverage, whether we’re talking about in the typical media channels, or even in the realm of traditional medical and mental health care. It’s something I’ve been advocating and educating around for two decades now, and so I’m really, really pleased to have you here to share your experience of making this film and to let people know about the film for their own education. I want to start by having you share the story of how you became interested in this, because like so many of us, we come to this topic from either an experience ourselves or with a family member or something that has happened in our lives. And so tell us the story of how psychiatric drugs came on your radar and why you’re so passionate about this.

Lynn Cunningham 

I had a family member, very high functioning. Scholar, athlete, Ivy League educated, high powered job in her twenties, who started to unravel. She might have had some trauma. It’s unclear what started the whole thing, but in her twenties, she had symptoms of depression first, and they morphed later into psychosis, and all of a sudden she is being diagnosed with a very serious schizophrenia. And I couldn’t figure it out. At the time, our family looked to all the top experts, the psychiatrist in New York and on the East Coast, Boston, New York, Washington. And she started to say the very top, top experts, and was medicated pretty quickly. I think she started on antidepressants, and then it evolved. And about 10 years into this, we were told that this is a chemical imbalance and that we would be able to manage it effectively with medication, and it is a lifetime disease that she has, but she’s going to be okay. And one drug led to another and what ended up happening was, yes, a little bit of stability occurred, but 10 years into it, starting with one drug, she was on 10 drugs. She was calling me up every day, “Lynnie. Is everything going to be okay?” Well, when you’re asked if everything’s going to be okay by someone you love, you assume that it means, “Are you guys going to take care of me?” But one clue led to another, and I realized she wasn’t really asking that. She knew we have a very tight, loving family and she was always going to be okay. But she was on disability. She was dysfunctional. Her asking that question was, “Am I going to reach my potential as a human being?” Because Nicole, she was really doped up. Her eyes were fluttering at half mast, the weight gain was enormous. She was really wanting so badly to be keeping up with her elite college buddies, but was unable even to have simple jobs like at a bookstore or at a grocery store. And the decline was so shocking to me, that I thought, “Okay, I’m going to answer honestly, and I am going to look into what it is she’s putting into her body on a daily basis.” And that led me to reading Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of An Epidemic, which had I not had someone I loved going through this, if it would have been in another sphere. It would have been in the mental health sphere, and I would have respected the mainstream. I wouldn’t have probed at it. But I saw someone who had such great potential not realizing it and really suffering. So that inspired me to read it. And that one book led to so many well-written books. And I know you know all of them. They’re featured a lot on Mad America. Dr. Breggin, many, many, Dr. Healy. So I read and educated myself, and very soon thereafter thought: This is not a story. This data and this information about these drugs is not what we’re told in mainstream media or in mainstream medicine. And while there are many people, I am sure who do well on psychiatric drugs — I know that because they have spoken to me, there are as many if not more, who do worse. And that’s the story that nobody knows about. And so as you say, as you are not, I am not anti-medication, I am pro-informed consent about this, which means showing the film and getting it out there.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah, it’s a powerful story. And I know so many people listening can relate to that, either for themselves, their child, a family member, or someone they know about. This experience of first starting to have some symptoms, getting a clinical diagnosis, and then before you know it, ending up on what I call this rollercoaster of medication treatment that it’s a very slippery slope. I mean, most parents who bring their children to our clinic, the vast majority of kids are medicated or have been medicated, and they tell a very similar story about how “It started with a recommendation for one medication, and I thought, okay, this is a well-respected physician or prescriber telling me to do this, this will fix the problem.” And then before they knew it, their child was on multiple drugs, changing doses, and their kid was a shell of their former selves, is how a lot of people will put it. “I just don’t know where my kid went”, and what started with maybe one type of issue and now has ballooned into several different types of issues. And so there’s a lot of people who can relate to this. And I wonder if in your situation with your family member, because I see this a lot and I hear this story a lot, what happens when someone isn’t doing well is it gets blamed on the diagnosis itself. “Well, you have to understand, you have this, you’re coming in, well, your symptoms are getting worse. Well, actually, you have this additional diagnosis, or these three other diagnoses that we didn’t know about initially.” Everything gets put on the diagnosis or the person. Very rarely does anybody step back and go, “Hmm, I wonder if it’s the medication we started that could be worsening things or creating problems.” And it’s like this lightbulb moment when I point that out to a lot of people like, “Hey, has anybody helped you consider whether the worsening of your symptoms, the additional symptoms you’ve developed, the rapid deterioration may have had anything to do with the drug itself?”, that’s just not something most people even consider or are told.

Lynn Cunningham 

Yeah, and that, I don’t understand at all. That is the key to the entire thing. That and also withdrawal, which manifests itself if you do not taper any of these medications slowly, much slower than what they recommend, generally. And in the making of the film, it struck us hugely that one doctor on the West Coast would say, “Oh, cut a pill, a third, a third, a third in a matter of three weeks or a month”, another doctor would say, “Oh skip it, take it, skip it one day,” I mean, the variation of tapering instructions, the fact that the FDA doesn’t see that and flag it, I don’t get it. And the fact that any of these drugs cause withdrawal for many people, the withdrawal brings up symptoms that look like the original problem. So you can see why they’re adding on diagnoses. If you don’t really understand withdrawal, you’re going to add on the diagnoses.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Well, that’s right, and people get stuck in the trap of the medications not helping them, but they also aren’t able to get off of them. And that feels so disempowering and so frustrating, because that’s a common story and an experience that that families share as well around the withdrawal. “Well, the doctor started my child on this medication, they weren’t doing well on it. So they took them off over the course of a week or two weeks or whatever, started them on another one at the same time.” And I’m going “Whoa! Wait a second. First of all, you didn’t even give the child’s system a chance to rebound, to gently and appropriately come off of that. And then you started another one.” It’s no wonder people struggle with this. It’s no wonder we see increased problems, and yet 9.9 times out of 10, the explanation that’s given to people around why the symptoms are worsening, why the problems are worsening, is that “Well, you have mental illness and it’s getting worse.” And it’s not even looked at, like “Let’s consider what other factors here”, and you’re right. It’s astonishing that we don’t focus on that piece more. We have the research evidence for it now. And to your point about the withdrawing protocols, I find it fascinating. That’s a nice way of saying that I am a bit incredulous around it, that people who are trained to prescribe these meds do not receive specific detailed training about how to get them off of it. In fact, we have very little research substantiating any protocols for taking people off of it, and I think that’s a piece of informed consent most people aren’t aware of. These people know how to put you on medications but if you need to or want to get off, there’s going to be a problem there, right?

Lynn Cunningham 

No, yeah. And then the tapering, if you go into any of the drugs, if you type in Zoloft support group, they all share very valuable information. I mean, it’s a subculture that every prescribing doctor should delve into and start to read before they prescribe any drug, because those are the people who are wrestling with the agony of some of this. I mean, sometimes it’s not always agony, but for many people, it is. Really valuable resources and advice are shared amongst these support groups, and to a very sophisticated degree, for instance, the notion of hyperbolic tapering is very sophisticated. Why is it on an Internet support group and not in a University Medical School course?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Well, let’s back up and talk about why. Let’s back up and talk about the bigger picture of why this stuff isn’t part of the mainstream education and dialogue in the media, in medical education, in the fields of medicine and mental health. Because this really gets to why these drugs have become so prevalent, why the stories that we’re told are the stories that we are told, and why information about how to get off of these drugs is not a part of what happens in medicine and mental health. So talk about what you discovered around that in your research for the film.

Lynn Cunningham 

So it’s a profit-driven system, and there is nothing wrong with that. There are many of those in our society. But when the regulators, the testers, the people who fund the drug trials are the same people who make the profit off of the trial they are testing, it just is a conflict of interest from the get go. So this is just a very simple explanation. A lot of money is poured into drug trials, and it has to be, if a drug is going to be safe for the public. But I just believe that the people who test these drugs need to be separate from the people who are making money off of these drugs. And that is so simple, but I don’t know how we’re going to do that as a society, because this is just a systemic problem. But that’s it. It’s our profit driven system, I think.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah, and I think most people don’t realize that the vast majority of the research and the data that we have on these drugs comes from trials that were done by the manufacturing companies themselves. And I think when people are made aware of that, they go, “Oh, well, okay, inherently, there is a conflict of interest there.” But people aren’t aware of that, that the vast majority of studies are done by the companies who stand to profit from them. And in fact, we’ve had research come out in recent years showing that data is hidden, suppressed, that the way that data is analyzed is often to show better efficacy and safety than the trial actually produced, that there’s all kinds of manipulation within, “the science” behind these drugs. And yet, in the fields of medicine and mental health, we just continue on as if none of that’s happening, right? “Nothing to see here. Not a concern, this is what you need to be doing.” And that disconnect, to me, is profound.

Lynn Cunningham 

And in the film, we go into something so simple as when you say manipulation, Bob Whitaker talks about one of the early Xanax trials. Xanax is a benzodiazepine. It’s used for anxiety or sleep. It’s very, very effective. As one of the film’s characters says, it works immediately. But it’s extremely dependency-causing, and down the road causes lots of issues. But in this trial, to speak to what you call manipulation, the trial went on, and in the first four weeks, Xanax compared to placebo was doing so much better. By eight weeks in the trial, the placebo started doing so much better, and then when you get to 12 and 14 weeks, Xanax plummeted. In fact, it started creating panic attacks, but what is chosen by the communicators, and what’s published in our journals is the very small window of when Xanax actually did well. But that does not help our public who are thinking about “Should I be taking Xanax?” So that’s an example of what’s communicated.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

And there’s so many examples of that. I mean, I think even about stimulant medication trials. Stimulants, which are touted as the gold standard first line or second line treatment for kids and adults with ADHD, and yet when you look at the data on stimulants in the short term, it looks very compelling. Wow. Symptoms go down, kids do better. However, the people who have taken the time to do the long-term research on that, which have not been the pharmaceutical companies by the way, the long term research shows that 18 months to 3 years down the line, suddenly, you see no difference between the level of symptomatology and the functioning between kids who are taking the stimulants and kids who aren’t. And it’s that type of longer-term research, especially when we’re talking about kids and developing brains and bodies, that we need more of. And I think parents, especially, are surprised to hear that we don’t have those kinds of longer-term studies, that on average, the studies supporting the use of these drugs in children and adults are somewhere between 4 and 12 weeks, and that we don’t have long term safety and efficacy data on lots of them, that there is this massive manipulation of study protocols and data to show a positive result. And then a lot of the side effect pieces get hidden either because we’re not running the trials long enough, or they conveniently find ways to put that under the heading of “things that would have happened anyway, because these are people who have mental illness or neurodevelopmental disorders.” There are all kinds of magic going on behind the scenes that keeps people from knowing all of the facts about this stuff, which is what you and I are so passionate about: Let’s just put all the information out there and let people decide.

Lynn Cunningham 

Yeah, and I don’t blame parents, I don’t blame parents for wanting so much to help their child in this crazy world, and in my opinion, this crazy educational system that’s so competitive and so based on just not even getting into what school for what reason. I don’t blame them for it. And I’ve heard it many, many times, anecdotally, “These meds help because I see my child is doing better in school, and then I see my child’s confidence go up.” That’s incredible. But is it really happening that way? And, again, it’s all anecdotal. But in my family, also, I have a dear, dear nephew who was put on these meds, and he’s now college age, and he’s now aware, looking back on how early, third grade, how, yes, when he took them, he could get buckled down on the homework. But he ended up becoming a musician, and he’s in music school now. What happened? He didn’t do his music. So there he was buckling down to do the homework, but completely ignored the creative side of himself that actually was what he wanted to pursue in life. And I don’t think that’s helping him. He’s also telling me all about his fellow students now, so many in college are medicated. I mean, it’s more than not. We’re looking at chemically adapting our children to a life that we’ve created that’s crazy. To me, it’s Alice in Wonderland.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Well, I think that’s the point that Robert Whitaker makes, and by the way, for those of you listening, if you have not heard the episode that I did on the podcast with Robert Whitaker a couple of years ago now, I encourage you to go back and listen to that. It dovetails really well with this conversation, but I think one of the points that he really makes is about this epidemic of prescribing medications for things that get labeled as chemical imbalances, or this is a problem within you as the individual, when actually most of the problems that people are having are indicative of trying to survive and adapt and be functional in a culture, in a society, in an environment that has become increasingly unhealthy. And yet this idea, this messaging around “No, no. If there’s symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, anxiety, mood issues, whatever, that is a chemical imbalance. That is a ‘you problem’.” That message, and I’ll call it a myth, because it is now clearly a myth based on the research that continues to come out, that messaging has perpetuated, hasn’t it? And that’s part of what’s been so compelling for the medical and mental health communities to jump on this train, as well as people in general. I mean, we could probably go outside right now to 10 people on the street and ask them. The chemical imbalance myth has become widely accepted, and yet it’s not accurate. I’m curious in your work with the film and in your research, what your take is around that.

Lynn Cunningham 

Well, in the film, I think we actually have a clip of Bob saying the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness is not true, it never was. And what you do hear about the chemical imbalance theory, many, many top-level academic psychiatrists say, “Oh, well, we knew that it wasn’t a real thing. A long time ago, we knew.” But it doesn’t take away from what you just said. Whether we know it or not, it’s used constantly as a rationale for medicating. And at one of the Medicating Normal film screenings, a very well-meaning doctor stood up and said, “Look, we need a simple rationale to help people understand why they need these meds. It’s a simple rationale”, meaning patients who come in aren’t sophisticated enough to really understand what’s happening, and they need to know why this medicine will help them. Well, the medicine, if you look at Joanna Moncrieff’s work, it does impact symptoms. There are impacts of these medicines that for a short time can be desirable or helpful, but to look at it that way is a much better simple way of looking at it, rather than “You are a mentally ill person with this diagnosis, and therefore, for a lifetime, you need to be taking an antidepressant every single day.” There’s a huge difference between understanding that maybe an antidepressant for six months if it helps you, if it’s the only drug you’re on and you don’t go into a drug cocktail, to get from being unable to voice your problem to going to a therapist, if that helps you, that serves a purpose, and that is a drug-centered way of looking at it, versus the disease model way, which I’m sure you you’ve talked about, Nicole.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah, and it’s so interesting that that physician said, essentially patients aren’t sophisticated enough to understand, we need a simple thing for them to understand. I would argue exactly the opposite, that medical professionals truly don’t receive an education and understanding of what’s happening. And that they in fact, are the ones who need and benefit from having a very simple disease-drug model of explaining and understanding these things because actually, that’s what the field of allopathic medicine is based on, right? Forget about mental health. Then we look at the medical system, it is based on a set of symptoms that we give a diagnostic code to, and that diagnosis then determines the specific treatment, which is very handy and clear cut for something like a broken leg, an aneurysm in your brain, type Two Diabetes, whatever, where it’s a clear cut set of symptoms. Here’s the name for that, and here’s the treatment. that we give to that. The problem is that model falls apart when we look at mental health, because there are so many other factors that influence how our brains function, how we feel, what we call mental health or mental illness. So I would argue that actually that simplistic explanation of, “Here’s your diagnosis, and here’s the very simple genetic problem, you have a chemical imbalance, you need the pill”, that serves the purpose of our commercial medical system, where we have 8 to 10 minute office visits, and our providers are in the role of giving things a name, and then giving you a pill to deal with that, which all sounds very good, except that it doesn’t work. I wish it did. I tell people all the time, “I wish that there was a pill I could give you or your child to just make these things go away, believe me, I would be the first to sign up for that.” I mean, my training was very traditional. My doctoral training in clinical psychology was traditional training. I mean, we were taught: You do therapy, and then very often, you refer people for medication. And the gold standard is the combination of some type of psychotherapy, psychological intervention with medication. And I bought into that and thought, “Oh, that’s the standard of care.” And I did that until I discovered it actually wasn’t really helping people. And I think for me, and I want to hear some of the stories that you put forward in the film, but for me, the real turning point was when I had this realization that I was seeing more and more kids on more and more drugs, and they were doing worse and worse. And it hit me one day, like, wait a minute, something is way off here. I’m seeing more kids on more drugs that are supposedly correcting their chemical imbalances and helping them, and yet I’m watching them deteriorate further. And for me, that was the pivot point of looking into what was really going on and opening my eyes to the fact that there was more to the story than what I had been taught. And I’m curious in the film, because you include a lot of patients as well as experts. What were some of the stories? What do you think are some of the compelling things that people shared, maybe from their own experience as a patient or having a family member as a patient around all of this.

Lynn Cunningham 

I would say almost every single subject in the film began to do worse on their medication, and they knew it. They knew it, they would report to their doctor, their doctors, for the most part did not accept it or believe it. And that’s a big thing when you’re coming in and trying to explain that you don’t feel good or something’s off. I think it’s going to be a shift, I think doctors of the future, if our medical schools can start to get all this into it, with the doctors of the future, it’s going to be more of a partnership. All of our subjects were alone. They weren’t believed by their doctors. They weren’t believed by their family. And Dave’s case, in the film, we don’t really go into it, but his marriage broke up because his wife was saying “Why aren’t you just taking your meds?” He was saying “I don’t feel good on them, they’re making me worse, I’m losing my memory. I don’t know who I am. I’m a shell of my former self.” So this very isolating experience of having absolutely nobody believe you, and then think of veterans in general who come back very traumatized from the wars they’ve been in, and they too, are then turned into mental patients who are on all these meds. And isolation, I think is the biggest thing, and the suffering and the inability to know how to get out of a situation, because there’s dependency, such dependency, and the agonizing of getting off of the meds and going too quickly. So that’s one thing. Another thing, we have a parent, two amazing parents of our subject Rebecca, who is a young girl. She wasn’t put on ADHD meds. She was struggling with an eating disorder, and her parents went in first thinking she was going to have therapy. And that therapist right away said “Well, let’s kick start Rebecca’s therapy with a drug.” That really perplexed the parents because they did not intend to go right into drugs. They wanted therapy first. So that whole experience of that wonderful parent couple, they had a year of thinking that their daughter who was increasingly medicated, that they had lost her completely. And it wasn’t until they followed their instinct of knowing, “This is who my daughter is, and this medication has turned her into someone else”, they had to fight the system, I mean, really go against the system. And that is a scary, scary thing. When suicidal ideation is involved, for you to stand up to a doctor who is saying, “I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that, parents, you’re being irresponsible.” So this notion, they educated themselves, they read all the books that we talked about, Anatomy of an Epidemic, if you go on the medicatingnormal.com website, we list all of these books, and Mad in America, where you’re featured. I think many parents are willing to do the hard work. They did the hard work, they made the hard, scary decision to take their daughter off of the medication. And what happened? She normalized. I don’t want to say it’s magic and her problems one way, she still needed to do a lot of work. But she wasn’t psychotic, she wasn’t suicidal, she wasn’t going to be in their basement for the rest of their lives. So that’s what we tried to show with the film, that problems don’t go away when you get off of medication. In a way, you’re more able to deal with them.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

That’s right. Yeah, your brain is actually able to make use of the cognitive behavior therapy, that psychotherapy, whatever it is that needs to happen. I think most people don’t realize how impairing these medications can be until you’ve experienced it yourself or seen it in a loved one. I’ve had parents come in and say, “This is not my child, my child’s inner-self is gone. They’re looking through me. They don’t have the personality they have, they can’t even follow basic directions and do basic things.” And I’m thinking about a story. This was several years ago now, but you reminded me of this couple who had a child who had a young teen who had been diagnosed with several types of things: eating disorder, severe anxiety and panic, depression. These kids end up with a whole mix of things, as do many adults, especially if they’re not getting better, right, then load on. The more diagnoses the better. Clearly, we didn’t give you enough names for your problem. So she had been diagnosed with lots of things and was on lots of medications. And it was clear to the father that she was not doing well, that actually these were creating problems, that what they had been dealing with before was bad, but this was even worse, and mom was so hesitant. She was like no, we need to do what the doctors say. And it’s interesting what happened. The mom ended up having so much stress and anxiety and struggle herself, she ended up placed on psychiatric medication for her issues, and experienced for herself the cognitive impairment that went along with that, the worsening of several of her emotional issues, that feeling of just sort of being numb, and it was over the course of a few months then that she started to go “Aha!”. And I remember her sitting in my office crying, saying “I get now what this has done to my daughter, I had no idea how impaired I would feel”, she would talk about “I’m just foggy. I can’t think through things.” This was an intelligent, well-functioning person. She’s like, “I can’t even think through how to structure my day”, and her experiencing it herself gave her insight and understanding into what had been going on with her child and what her child had been experiencing. And of course, that led to a shift, that not only did mom work on carefully tapering and getting herself off of them and getting herself the therapy she actually needed, but also in supporting the daughter with that. But I think it’s easy to look at these things and say, as you mentioned, “You’re making it up, you have mental health issues to begin with. This is all in your head. You just need to stay on your meds.” And it’s a whole different thing to be in the shoes of the person experiencing the very real changes, and we have to recognize and respect that each individual is going to have their own experience with these things, and it may not be what I would have, or you would have, or even the majority of people would have, but we’re all individuals and can have individual responses to this stuff.

Lynn Cunningham 

Oh, absolutely. That is such a fascinating story. And how are they doing now?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

They’re doing very well, very well. That was a big shift, mom got the help she needed, they got the family help that they needed, we were able to make progress with their daughter. What often happens because of the nature of my clinic and the severity of and complexity of people that we see, unfortunately, we tend to be the stop on the journey once people have done the things they’ve been told to do. And so it’s very often the case that we don’t have the opportunity right at the beginning of treatment to say, “Okay, here’s what all your options are. But here’s where we’re going to start, and this is why”, and really using medication as a last resort approach. Typically, by the time families get to us, it’s because they’ve done all of those things, and now their child is on a cocktail of drugs and there’s more severe issues. And so we have to unwind that, and then help them do the things that someone should have done right from the get go. But unfortunately, medication, even though for many things, child and adolescent medicine, psychiatric medication should not be the first line treatment. Very often it is, and the excuse that’s used is, “Well, parents just want a quick fix. Well, kids need to do well in school. We’re worried about the increase in suicide and eating disorders, so let’s intervene with medication right out of the gate.” To your point, parents bringing their kid and thinking “We’re going to get some therapy”, and instead being told to go on medication. I hear that all the time from parents. They had no intention, they didn’t even know that was an option. They weren’t seeking medication treatment, and yet they leave the office with either a prescription or a referral to a psychiatrist to get a prescription, and they just assume, “Oh, well, this is just how it’s supposed to be”, only to discover later on. And so I wish that in the field of mental health, we would disentangle ourselves from this story about medication, to do the good therapeutic, developmentally-focused work that we’re trained to do with kids and with adults, and to realize that, that is the key to moving forward, whether or not someone ends up also benefiting from a small dose of a single medication in combination with that. You need to have a good therapeutic Foundation, and it’s so frustrating to me that that’s not where the focus tends to be.

Lynn Cunningham 

Oh, 100% agree. It’s really interesting. We’ve tried. The film is on PBS, which is wonderful, because I salute the PBS people for accepting, because it can be seen, if you’re looking at it from a very mainstream medicine perspective, as a radical film. It isn’t. Because, again, we’ve talked about our message really is not anti-medication. It’s just inform yourself, really learn about what could happen. But the film is on PBS, and we have an educational distributor, and it did well. It ran for a while, and it is getting into universities and medical schools, but not at the rate I would want it to be. And I feel we’ve just got to get it in front of younger doctors in training, and I think that they’re going to hopefully understand it earlier. Because I think it’s really hard when you have led a lifetime of prescribing, and you have seen maybe some people in your practice, especially if they keep coming back to you, doing well, for you to change your ways. I mean, the doctors and psychiatrists in our film, in my opinion, are heroes. For instance, someone like Anna Lembke was prescribing left and right. And then she had the sort of humility as a doctor to look at what she was doing and say, “Wait a minute, I’m harming my patients. I’m going to change the way I prescribe.” And she did. But there are many, many doctors out there that don’t have that ability. That humility as a doctor. Or even Bob Whitaker, he was a standard medical writer, writing for the Boston Globe. And I think his aha moment came when he was trying to talk about the unethical practice of giving someone a placebo, and not the real psychiatric drug. And he was looking into the unethical practice of that and wanted to write an article, and he looked in and he actually saw the placebo group was doing better than the people medicated. And he was like, “Wow, that’s interesting.” And that set him off. So it’s interesting. And your mom, the story you just told about your mom, she had to experience and come face to face with something before she changed her mind about it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Well, to me, that’s good journalism. That’s good medicine to stay curious enough and humble enough and aware enough to go “Hmm, maybe I need to look deeper at this. Boy, what I’m doing isn’t getting the results that I thought it would. That’s good medicine. That’s good mental health. That’s good journalism. That’s good parenting. That’s good. All of that.

Lynn Cunningham 

It’s good science.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

That’s right. Exactly, it’s good science. Boy, is that a discussion that’s been blown wide out in the open lately, around what do we mean when we say “the science”? Science is really about the ongoing discovery and humility and openness to the fact that there’s always more to learn, and that we need to be willing to change our mind. And I think that’s what’s so challenging around this. I’m glad you brought up some of the experts, because I do want to point out that you have a lot of firsthand accounts and patient stories woven into the film, you also have a wide variety of professional experts. And so I want people to know that. I encourage everybody to watch the film for yourself. But there may be people listening who are like, “Boy, I think this might be helpful for me to bring to the awareness of my providers, of my child’s therapist, whatever.” And I just want to highlight that you have professionals in the film speaking to these issues.

Lynn Cunningham 

Yes. Ellen Vora practices in New York City, and Anna Lembke at Stanford, Peter Gøtzsche. We have a pharmacist, Ivan. I mean, he’s interesting. He runs a wonderful pharmacy on the Upper West Side of New York City. He says basically, benzodiazepines should never be prescribed for more than two weeks, and it’s on the label. Something that’s on the label. Yet he says “Doctors have forgotten about this.” And benzodiazepines are mostly taken every day by people who take them.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

I’ve had children in my practice who have been prescribed benzodiazepines three times a day, every day for years. I mean, it’s astonishing when you look at even what the recommendations and what the approved dosing is for these things. Yeah, it’s unbelievable.

Lynn Cunningham 

Oh, yeah. So back to Ivan, as a pharmacist, this was not in the film, but he said “My advice to anyone taking any of these meds is to keep a little journal. Write down what you feel and when, and if you go back to your psychiatrist or your GP and you have taken accurate notes about what, how you feel, and when, you’re armed with information that will help convey the reality of your situation versus if you just go in and say, ‘Ah, something’s not right. I don’t like this.’ That’s hard. That’s hard for a doctor to handle. But very accurate feedback.” Anyway, I feel as a society, that it is opening up, that Mad in America has been huge. I mean, Bob Whitaker is amazing, he has changed… He needs an award on a big scale, in my opinion, and going to Mad In America, he is as critical about alternative treatments as he is about medication. He’s very fair in his critical look at these. And what exists now on the internet when we started our research? Nothing existed, nothing negative about any psychiatric drug, especially stimulants. And now, it’s beginning to come out and there is a change. We’re in the midst of a change. I think the pandemic put fear into everybody, so I’m not sure. We’re waiting to get through that.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah, I think the conversation is shifting as more people have access to more of this information, these stories. What’s the one big thing that you want people to take away from the documentary? You created this, you poured your heart and soul into this project and created this amazing film. There’s so much great information in it, but what’s the one thing that you really want people to take away from it?

Lynn Cunningham 

I think it should be, and it’s not just psychiatric wellbeing, it’s take control of your own health. And that means really learn about it. Don’t assume, and this is not to be disrespectful to doctors, but they are busy. And in the way we’ve set up our system, they don’t have time to really know you. So it is your responsibility as a patient to either get who you are across to them. And wait. If it takes five sessions before you start a medication, take those five sessions to tell them who you are. And then if you can, read. Read as much as you can and educate yourselves.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

Yeah. And the documentary certainly helps people get a jumpstart on educating themselves and understanding more of the issues involved. Let’s tell people where they can access the film, how they can get more information, you’ve put together a lot of resources for people who are interested in learning more on these topics or getting support for themselves or, or a family member. So where can people go?

Lynn Cunningham 

It’s simply the name of the film, it’s medicatingnormal.com. That is our website. And you will see on that website, there are many resources. These resources are very, very good. We should be putting in more resources every day. It will show you our PBS broadcast schedule, it will show you their trailer for the film. We also have this very exciting aspect of our outreach, which is our community screenings. That’s where we show a film in a particular region, and in that region, we then have a panel discussion afterwards, which is, in many ways, so much more important than just watching the film. And people can see the film on Amazon, they can see it on Vimeo. It is available to stream. But if you really don’t know about the topic, I encourage you to find out where you can see a community screening or plan one yourself. They are very informative. And they can be panels peopled with experts or with people with lived experience, and then the audience participates. What the audience brings to one of these events is as important as the film itself. We’ve had almost more than 200 community screenings thus far.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

It’s amazing. It’s amazing. The film is amazing. The resources that you’ve put together on the website are a wonderful support. Lynn, thank you for all of the research and all the effort you put into creating this film, to get this message out there to help educate and inform people. And thank you for being here today to talk with us about it. We appreciate you.

Lynn Cunningham 

Oh, thank you, Nicole, for having me.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens 

And thanks as always, to all of you for being here and for listening. We’ll catch you back here next time.