Before help even begins, I often hear it: “We’re against meds.” It’s usually said with the same tone people use for “We don’t talk about the war.” I get it. No one wants to believe their brain might need something their willpower can’t fix. This morning, before I even met with a new patient, her...

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...

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....

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....

We live in a culture where people will swallow, snort, inject, or chug just about anything if it promises to make them happier, sharper, or stronger. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, and some of it lands you in a congressional hearing. SSRIs SSRIs are the antidepressants like fluoxetine, sertraline, escitalopram. They’ve been...