Prologue: When People Got Bored of Reality Movies were born in the late 1800s when photography got tired of sitting still and decided to move. In 1895, the Lumière brothers projected short films like Workers Leaving the Factory and Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, prompting early audiences to panic because they thought...

A Quick History The very first modern psych med, chlorpromazine (Thorazine), showed up in the 1950s. Its story starts earlier, in a chemistry lab, not a psychiatrist’s office. French researchers were tinkering with compounds originally related to treatments for allergies and malaria, and one of those tweaks accidentally produced a drug that calmed patients without...

The Second Brain You’ve Been Ignoring Let’s have a heart-to-gut talk about the forty trillion tiny squatters who live inside you. They are not just along for the ride. They help digest your breakfast burrito, train your immune system, produce vitamins, and send chemical messages that can literally change your mood. They have been here...

The Advice Everyone Gives (and No One Wants) “Have you tried exercise?” If you have ever been sad, anxious, stressed, tired, or just existing in a human body, someone, your doctor, your therapist, your gym teacher, your mom, the random guy on Twitter with #grindset in his bio, has probably offered this advice1. It is...

The world has this massive problem now where tons of people—mostly young ones—are just straight-up disappearing into their rooms and not coming back out. No, they’re not in Narnia, and no, they’re not just “taking some time.” They’re stuck. And I don’t mean stuck in traffic or stuck on a math problem. I mean emotionally,...

So, Are My Meds About to Vanish? First things first: nobody is carting off your Prozac or Adderall in handcuffs. Right now, we are living under an Executive Order (EO, which is political shorthand for “the president scribbled something in pen and now a committee has homework”) that created the Make America Healthy Again Commission....

If America has a tradition, it isn’t baseball or apple pie. It is ignoring experts until disaster strikes, then swearing we will never do it again… until we do. Most people think medicines magically appear in orange bottles because some CVS elf worked overtime in the stockroom. Behind every pill is centuries of messy trial...

RFK Jr. vs. Stimulants Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not just co-chair of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission. He is also the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which technically makes him the nation’s top public health official and, for the purposes of this essay, the chief potato of HHS....

What Even Is ADHD? It’s not just “kids bouncing off the walls because of Mountain Dew.” ADHD is a legit, brain-based condition where your attention, impulse control, and ability to sit through algebra without doodling swords in the margins all go haywire. The DSM (aka the Big Book of “Why You’re Weird”) calls it “a...

What if your psychiatrist actually had time to talk to you, not just for fifteen minutes, not just to click boxes and refill your prescription, but to really understand why you feel the way you do? What if your appointment included a conversation about your childhood, your diet, your sleep, and even your gut bacteria,...