From my list on books every parent should read before taking their kid to a psychiatrist or psychologist.
Why am I passionate about this?
I have spent my entire adult life wondering if my world would be different if I hadn’t spent my teens and twenties on antidepressants. What I know for sure is that the person I am after psychiatric drugs is wildly different than the person I was while medicated, which has led me down a path of understanding the history and cultural significance of psychiatric drugs to understand my own story. Now, I am an advocate for safe psychiatric drug deprescribing education. My goal is to teach patients and parents how to ask their doctors the right questions, encourage true informed consent, and make prescribers aware of the signs and symptoms of over-medication and psychiatric drug withdrawal.
Brooke's book list on books every parent should read before taking their kid to a psychiatrist or psychologist
Why did Brooke love this book?
To understand why mental illness has such a strong pull in American culture, it is important to understand how mental illness is created in the first place. Yes, created.
When I was depressed and taking antidepressants, I thought my depression was caused by a chemical imbalance and that it was just who I was. After all, that’s what the doctors told me. We now know the chemical imbalance theory is unsubstantiated, and yet the narrative remains.
Watters’ book blew my mind by showing exactly how the false chemical imbalance theory was exported all over the world and why this has fundamentally affected recovery rates—for the worse—all over the globe.
2 authors picked Crazy Like Us as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
“A blistering and truly original work of reporting and analysis, uncovering America’s role in homogenizing how the world defines wellness and healing” (Po Bronson).
In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented…
- Coming soon!