UCLA - David Geffen School of Medicine - "Medicating Normal" Post-Screening Panel Discussion/Q&A

On October 26, 2023, a hybrid film screening of the documentary "Medicating Normal" was presented at the UCLA Iris Cantor Auditorium. This is a recording of the post-screening expert panel discussion and audience Q&A. The panel includes David Cohen, PhD; Lynn Cunningham; and Peter Eliasberg; and was moderated by Helena Hansen, MD, PhD.
Film synopsis: As seen on PBS, Medicating Normal, an award-winning documentary, tells the untold story of the long-term consequences of taking prescribed psychiatric medications (anti-anxiety meds, sleeping pills, antidepressants, ADHD meds, etc). The film relays the experiences of a newly-married couple, a female combat veteran, a waitress and a teenager made worse by the very medications they believed would help. The film’s subjects struggle with serious physical and mental side effects, including neurological damage, while taking the medications and also from attempting to withdraw. One-in-five Americans take these commonly-prescribed medications daily, and often for a lifetime. The claims extolling their benefits are often the only ones presented in mainstream media. The other side of the story is rarely reported, and it is a story of harm done.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine Research Theme in Health Equity & Translational Social Science (HETSS), Semel Healthy Campus Initiative Center, UCLA Psychiatry Department, Center for Social Medicine and Humanities, and the Rangell Social Medicine Grand Rounds Series
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[@MedicatingNormal]

If you like what we do and want more of it, consider buying us a coffee! buymeacoffee.com/MNFilm

[@williamhuard3860]

Buy you a coffee? I caught COVID at the treatment center where I worked in 2021 and my employer and workmen’s comp wouldn’t pay for treatments for me to get treated for long COVID I ended up polydrugged and two years later I can’t work or get off the two Meds that were prescribed for my new “diagnosis.” I was working, grateful, engaged and now I’m in the psychiatric black hole. We need help Psychiatry has no clue how to treat patients like human beings

[@MedicatingNormal]

@@williamhuard3860 yes, for those who are able, we are asking for support. We are a 501c3 nonprofit that needs funding to bring the film in front of communities. Perhaps your laundry list of problems wouldn’t be if the right people were educated. That’s the goal.

[@tinoslaponi8514]

Im an active duty Marine with 3 combat tours, and SSRI withdrawal is the hardest thing I've EVER experienced. Im still going through it. My generation of veterans are the most medically prescribed in all of history, and I dont believe its a coincidence that our generation has the highest suicide rate by far.

[@nwicconsultants6640]

Moderator Helena Hansen, MD, PhD is nothing short of a complete breath of fresh air. As one who has endured the horrors caused by benzodiazapines...doctors like this gives me hope for change and a better future for those sufferers who have not yet begun this journey.

[@shan4145]

So very heartbreaking because we don’t know what theses drugs do to us and it’s very torturing and unbearable and sadly many many souls have end their lives . Love from Canada 🙋🏻‍♀️🦋

[@dianevalenti7753]

This happened to me, but not with psychiatric medication. I was prescribed thyroid medication to "perk me up" when I was going through a difficult time in my life and had situational depression. That medication slowly suppressed my normal, healthy thyroid. Instead of recognizing that the medication was causing a problem, I was told that I was now hypothyroid and my dose was increased to over 300 mcgs, which is huge. I have finally weaned myself off and am doing everything I can to get my HPT axis working again. Not easy. Patients need to be very, very careful with prescriptions. And, they need to be aware at a fundamental level that medicine is a business.

[@emmaester5284]

High dose vit c helps with horrendous withdrawal-to rebuild the ketogenic diet-even carnivore-also b complex,magnesium COD LIVER OIL-to help rebuild heat therapy-sauna-hot then cold shower down spine-(even jacuzzi to stimulate circulation/detox/nerves)-ketogenic diet Is key to rebuilding the brain,nervous system-a tens machine can help with nerve damage-

[@Uma921]

Many in withdrawal or experiencing an iatrogenic injury from psychiatric medications can not tolerate supplements or vitamins. It’s variable and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to diet, either. Just as there is no magic bullet to mental health or life circumstances, there is no magic bullet to fixing withdrawal or medication injury; just time.

[@LeticiaRodriguezPerez]

That will be awesome if I could tolerate supplements but I can't tolerate anything during withdrawal, is awful.

[@heathersmith6177]

I have found these exact modalities to be pivotal! Especially ketogenic diet. It’s time we realize how what we eat can help our brain heal.

[@TalRachman]

"As for progress in the advancement of knowledge about what the world is, there is no progress to an endeavour defined by a curious contemplation of the cosmos, simply because such contemplation always involves a certain set of presuppositions which, if modified, would overthrow whatever was learned in the past and set all "progress" in a completely different direction. This is not merely a question of paradigmatic shifts in the terms of Thomas Khun´s structure of scientific revolutions, but a question of first principles that are as multifarious as they are irreconcilable. Truth means different things to Buddhists, Marxists, Druids and Inuit -- so different that some of them consider betterment to be a fundamental element in the quest for truth, whereas for others, the truth is that there has ever been anything that needed bettering in the first place. What is one person´s hard-won lesson is another person´s folly, and vice-versa. Evolutionarily, our brains evolved to feed, flee, fight, fuck, and do a few other fairly simple tasks. Comprehending the nature of an infinite cosmos was never a requirement for successful reproduction. The conceptions we have of the world -- whether we want to call those conceptions rational or spiritual, subjective or objective -- will always be partial and faulty. Maybe we are all dabbling in theoretical fluff in this discussion, but my reason for harping on about the above is that progress and betterment are fundamental elements of scientific ideology -- actually, I would say that the myth of progress is at the bottom of much of the most ideological and dogmatic aspects of science in particular and western thought in general. To be able to salvage the valid principles of science it would be essential, in my opinion, to separate them from this matrix of presuppositions about betterment and progress which, rather than simply taken as axiomatic and self-evident, might more accurately be understood as an historically-specific ideological product of the material forces that shaped western civilization over the last ten thousand years." **** "... This social psychological discourse is indicative of the fundamental use of all forms of psychology (whether ”crowd psychology” or some other category): the reform of, and adaptation to, the objective forces maintaining the misery of social relationships. When this misery appears to be inevitable and unresolvable - because the whole notion of a revolutionary attack on hierarchical social relations seems unrealistically utopian - psychology functions as an apparent individualised solace and mode of reconciliation to these ”seemingly intractable” contradictions, and in this process gives the individual the illusion of progress. Yet, as many a psychoanalyst has discovered, the ‘patient’ even when s/he seems to be making a breakthrough, falls back into their separate misery, the progress they seemed to be making falling into a vast void. Because all “psychological” explanations maintain the individual as an isolated separate individual facing the material basis of this separation as if it was beyond contestation. In this, pacifism and psychologism - both reducing furious expressions against the existing world to mere individual &/or ideological pathology - are allies." --A friend

[@craftygirl17]

I know with me it was was distress after a health diagnoses and was put on Pristq now Effexor and clonazapam.