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Feb. 19, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:02
How the Mental Health Industry Has Created a Pill Popping Culture: Cooper Davis
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Time Text
It's complicated enough.
The scientific consensus will generally say we don't quite understand why these drugs work.
At a young age, Cooper Davis was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed a low dose of Ritalin, which helped his ability to focus but had side effects.
To counteract them, he was prescribed other medications.
By age 30, Davis was dependent on six different psychiatric drugs at any given time.
What's commonly known in the mental health community is a prescription cascade.
Once people experience withdrawal symptoms, they get back on the drug.
They treat it as confirmation that they are still mentally ill.
Today, he is executive director of the Inner Compass Initiative, where he addresses America's mental health crisis and helps people make informed choices about prescription drugs, diagnoses, and withdrawal.
Experiential expertise, expertise gained from your own life.
It's just as valid and probably more useful in many, many cases than clinical expertise.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan J. Kelley.
Cooper Davis, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Pleasure to be here.
It's been a huge shift in medicine since my time when I first sort of encountered the medical system as a kid.
I had some serious surgery done, and there's been this huge rise in using medication.
To my view, as the solution for a whole suite of things.
And something I haven't covered much is the area of mental health.
So let's dive in here.
Well, I can say when you talk about pill-popping culture, in the context of mental health, it's sort of this idea that if you have a problem that sort of fits categorically in the bucket of a mental health challenge or mental illness, The default response approach to handling that problem is to pop a pill, certainly.
That's like woven into the culture.
You see it in movies, you see it in TV, and you see it all around you in real life.
Or you can think of it as around 1 out of 12. Now certainly when we're talking about children, we're talking about teenagers there.
And that's where a lot of that is.
But it is getting younger and younger, more normalized to Medicaid kids, diagnosed kids and Medicaid kids.
And I think there's a ton of different incentives that are bringing us in this direction.
But the trend line has only gone up, despite there's been many, many years of admonitions and people from inside the industry, from inside regulatory agencies, coming out and saying...
This ship is going in a direction that nobody imagines is a good place.
Pharmaceutical companies, a lot of fingers get pointed at them.
You also have regulatory bodies.
You have the media.
You have the doctors, the prescribers.
But then you have the guidance counselors, the therapists, the social workers, and you have the patients themselves.
And their parents and family members.
All these people have various levels of sort of complicity in what some people would describe as an over-medication problem.
I would say that over-medication is a term that I cringe a little bit at just because it implies that there's a right amount of medication, and I don't know if that's necessarily even the case.
But essentially, I think everybody knows there's a problem here.
But nobody can agree on what needs to happen in order to address it.
And a lot of people want to look towards power and look towards industry and say, well, you guys need to do things differently.
But I think being a part of this world and living this, because I have my own story that brings me to this world.
I have come to the point where I think, actually, if we want to see a change in how this happens, it actually starts at the bottom of that list of agents that I just described to you.
It actually starts with patients and then family members and then, you know, guidance counselors and social workers and then goes all the way up.
Asking the people at the top who have sort of led us here to make the changes necessary to lead us away strikes me as a little preposterous, actually.
Meanwhile, it's the people at the bottom, the people who are taking these drugs, who are most incentivized to actually rethink this.
So you say that everybody agrees there's a problem, but what is the issue?
Some people will say, very smart people will say with a straight face that we actually have an under-medication problem and that we have a mental health crisis that needs to be addressed.
And the way to address that is to increase access and increase quality of mental health care and mental health treatment.
But increasing numbers of people will say that the treatments are either not working or possibly are causing a lot of the harms that we're seeing, that we are understanding as, you know, instances of mental illness.
Terms for this, psychiatric iatrogenesis is a pretty clinical term.
There are people who identify as being part of something called the prescribed harm community.
You have iatrogenic harm exists in medicine, you know, depending on who you listen to.
It's a pretty serious problem or a very serious problem.
Statistically, it's, in terms of causes of preventable death, it's quite high.
And that can be alarming.
But if you also consider just the amount of health care that is being, quote-unquote, consumed, it makes sense that, you know, it's not all going to be gold.
Sometimes it's not going to quite go the way you want it to.
And the way health care tends to work in this country, the incentives tend to run in the direction of more all the time.
More.
And not necessarily what's needed.
And it's more about what is profitable, what is expeditious, or whatever.
Tell me very quickly, so how prevalent is the use of psychiatric medication in this country today?
The CDC's numbers say that it's one out of four adults, or maybe just under, is currently taking at least one psychiatric drug, and around six million kids.
And you can define kids, you know, that's going to be inclusive of Teenagers.
But it is certainly the trend that more and more kids that are younger and younger are being diagnosed and prescribed earlier and earlier.
And so, I mean, that seems like a huge amount.
This would include some very simple medications all the way up to some, you know, antipsychotics.
I'm trying to understand what kind of medications we're talking about here.
First of all, the idea of a simple medication is maybe mythological.
There are medications that are familiar to us that have been very normalized.
The only commonly prescribed psychiatric medication that I personally would consider to be simple would be a stimulant, like what's prescribed for ADHD. So your Adderall and your Ritalin.
Those are pretty straightforward drugs.
They've been around a pretty long time.
They more or less do what it says on the box, what they're going to do.
It's complicated enough that the scientific consensus will generally say, we don't quite understand why these drugs work.
And then, you know, the definition of what do we mean when we say work there, I mean, that's certainly up for debate.
But when it comes to antidepressants, Anti-anxiety drugs, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, sleep drugs, and that, you know, there's increasingly a lot of off-label use as well.
So if you are somebody who's taken an antidepressant for a very long period of time, increasingly people are prescribed antipsychotics despite not fitting any diagnostic criteria.
Mm-hmm.
adjunct therapy when your antidepressant is no longer, you're not getting the therapeutic effect that you're looking for, generally because tolerance effects or whatever it is.
Or you are presenting with what's called treatment-resistant depression, and so you're trying to find the right cocktail.
All these terms that I'm using are pretty common parlance within the realm of mental health care, but every single one of them is a little package that once you start to unwrap it, it maybe flakes away.
Cooper, just one sec.
We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with Cooper Davis, Director of Development at the Intercompass Initiative.
So, well, tell me your story.
Tell me how you got into this.
When I was in first grade, which would have been 1991, this is around the time that Ritalin was on the cover of Time magazine, and ADD was something everybody was talking about.
And my first grade teacher in a parent-teacher conference told my parents, I think Cooper has ADD, and I think he would benefit from medication.
This is a first-grade teacher in, like, sort of provincial, rural, regional elementary school who had probably read that Time magazine article and was also, you know, presumably a pretty good teacher with some experience.
So she made the case for my parents, and she also informed them that a decent number of the other boys in my class were already on Ritalin.
And she was basically endorsing it.
Today, people would be horrified that a teacher would take liberties to say such a thing and whatever.
But at the time, my parents were horrified even then.
And they were quite crunchy, and they were very thoughtful parents.
I mean, my parents are wonderful.
And they made the decision.
They said, well, you know, it does sound like he does fit the criteria for this ADD thing, but we're absolutely not putting him.
On these drugs.
And what I did grow up with was this sense that I probably have a thing called ADD, which is something about the way my brain is wired by default that makes it more difficult for me to perform in an academic setting or follow through on certain tasks or make myself do things that I don't want to do.
My parents always said, when you're 18, you can make the decision for yourself if you want to go on these drugs or not.
It ended up being age 17 when I made that decision alone with my primary care doctor, family doctor.
I basically said, Doc, lots of people have told me I probably have ADD. I want to try the drugs.
This doctor was a very sweet man, 80 years old at the time, still practicing.
Called up a friend, probably another 80-year-old guy who was a psychiatrist.
Hey, I got this kid in here.
He says, blah, blah, blah.
What do you think?
Yeah, okay, 10 milligrams.
And that was the beginning of my career as a psychiatric patient.
Started on Ritalin, five milligrams in the morning before school, and then a booster dose, a little after lunchtime.
And did it help?
I went from a C student to an A student overnight.
My entire life.
Every report card I ever got was does not work to potential, underperformed, distracted, class clown, all this stuff.
Like the classic profile of a hyperactive kid.
I was daydreaming a lot.
There's an aversion to sitting down and doing a thing until it's done, unless it's a thing that I'm interested in.
It's almost like a physical force field.
Keeping me away.
Sometimes I find myself like I'm forcing myself to write an email that feels so tedious and I realize I'm not breathing.
It's that painful to be bored for me.
What the drug did is it took that away and it made basically anything I chose to focus on equally engaging.
Everything felt like it was interesting to me.
And so once I was able to direct that, I took great pleasure in directing it at the things I was supposed to do and that were necessary in order to achieve academically.
And within an institutional setting, I went from feeling like a liability, a problem, to feeling like an example that a teacher could say, feeling that for the first time in high school was a revelation for me.
It was a thrilling experience.
And it confirmed the idea that whatever's going on here is a chemical issue in my brain.
Because if it can be corrected so demonstrably, how could it be anything else?
And why would I even be curious to find out if there's more to it?
The problem is solved.
I can finally be who I'm...
It's supposed to be.
The world can finally see me for what I really have to offer.
And this was not a high dose.
But even in the beginning, there were other things that changed.
And I'll describe one thing.
So when I was prescribed, and I think a lot of people have this experience, you know, the doctor is required to tell you, you know, you might have dry mouth, you might have difficulty sleeping, you might have appetite.
Decrease or whatever.
They're required to give you, informed consent is required.
So they basically tell you the top-line side effects of whatever the drug is.
But what he couldn't have told me, because there's no studies for this, but what I would have known very quickly if I had talked to somebody else who had taken the same drug at this time in their life, who was of a similar type of person to myself, the drug...
It's really active for the first two, three hours after you take it.
You have that morning dose, and you have a lunchtime dose.
But by 3, 4 o'clock, 5 o'clock, in high school and in college, you're done with class.
You're done with school for the day.
Now you're going to go socialize with your friends.
At that time of day, the drug is now wearing off, and I'm experiencing what is...
Widely known, a crash.
There's a stimulant crash once it wears off.
And it looks a little bit like an inversion in some ways of the effect of the drug.
So you're feeling a little less gregarious or you're feeling a little more withdrawn.
You're grumpy.
You're a little more anxious maybe.
And so that was the person that was showing up in all these social environments for me.
Which, cumulatively, had an effect on who my friends were.
Throughout high school, into college, and then who your friends are matters a great deal for how your life ends up unfolding.
The way that that played out for me would never have played out that way if I had never gone on the drug.
There's no reason the doctor would even think...
To talk about that at all.
Like, there's not a lot of, like, quantifiables in there to build studies around to capture evidence or define this as a risk of any kind.
And so I think I offered that very particular example because this is all these different drugs.
They have effects and then they have indirect effects.
Side effects is a marketing term.
All effects are primary effects.
There's a desired...
And then there's everything else, which is generally understood to be a side effect.
You're trying, when you're prescribing or when you're taking the drug, you're trying to get that desired effect and then minimize those undesired effects as much as possible.
But some of those undesired effects, you don't even know what they are until you are quite a few years down the road.
I think that is something that, when we are talking about what needs to change on this whole issue, A big part of it is, how do we expand the knowledge base from which we are making decisions about whether to go on these drugs or stay on these drugs or how many to be on?
And this, of course, speaks to your inner compass initiative.
Of course, how does your initiative help people in this situation?
Is it just as simple as knowing, hey, there's people that have had this exact issue just like you in the past, and here's how they dealt with it?
You know, is that connecting her with someone who's experienced it?
So everybody on our team is somebody who has their own experience of taking or coming off of these drugs, right?
Every single one of us has had the experience of when you tell your story in public, people respond.
They write it.
A lot of them will crawl over a broken glass to just talk to you for a second and say, Thank you for sharing your story.
What you wrote, this is the first time I feel like I see myself.
Through the lens of your own experience, I finally have words for what I've been through.
And to which I say, I'm so happy to hear it.
Now you go tell your story and get it out there in as many places as you can.
I think that this has the potential.
You look at a movement like the Me Too movement.
This is a very...
Modern internet-based viral social movement.
When somebody goes out there and they start to share something that previously they didn't have the courage or the language or the incentive or the forum to share it, and other people see it, they speak up and they say, this is also my experience.
And previously, a lot of people only have clinical language or mainstream mental health narratives.
My life was a mess.
Then I accepted my diagnosis, I found the right cocktail of drugs that worked for me, and now I manage my illness and live a productive life.
That's the template for the mainstream mental health narrative.
And for some people it works beautifully, but for so many it doesn't.
Experience the fact that it's not working as a moral failing in themselves of some kind.
Similar to treatment resistance.
Like the best and brightest scientists in the world have figured out the mysteries of the mind and of the soul.
We call it mental health treatment, right?
If it doesn't work for me, it's because I'm that sick.
Or maybe it doesn't work for you because it's not designed to work for you.
It's designed to work for all the other industries and partners and incentives that are flowing through this.
Many, many billions of dollars sloshing around here.
This is not something that is truly just isolated on the well-being of the individuals who are reliant on this because there's nowhere else to turn.
So this is what we want to do.
And to people who will say, like, this is utopian, this is unrealistic, I would point to the success of something like Alcoholics Anonymous.
That's a peer-to-peer.
Organization is also a movement.
It changed how we understand addiction completely.
It is non-hierarchical.
It is decentralized.
There are no power players.
Anyone can start a meeting wherever they live.
There is no reason that this shouldn't exist for a broader group of people, not just suffering with addiction.
But something like this, and I'm not saying the 12-step model in particular, but the same template where it's people's own personal experience of getting through this stuff becomes the subject of a meeting you can have with your neighbors in your locality.
If one out of four people is currently taking a psychiatric drug, I think we could fill a few rooms in most towns in America.
And I do think that our organization...
Because we come from that place of each of us having our own lived experience of this stuff, we're better positioned to build out this model.
We have the credibility with the people who are engaged on this stuff that the mainstream players, the pharma-funded NGOs and nonprofits out there, certainly, you know, the government, federal agencies that are concerned with this stuff.
We have the ability to create a grassroots movement here, and I don't think it's ideological.
And anything that actually can help solve a problem I think has a real chance of catching on.
This is needed.
Again, there's a mental health crisis and higher rates of treatment than ever before in history.
So either the treatment is causing this crisis or the treatment is not doing much to slow it down.
So obviously we have to start looking at other places and where else to look than people who have actually done it and been through it for themselves.
Well, Cooper Davis, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you so much, Jan.
I really appreciate the opportunity.
This has been great.
Thank you all for joining Cooper Davis and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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