Kaitlin Bell Barnett’s book, Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up, asks some uncomfortable questions about how an era of kids on psychotropic drugs are living now.
Casey Schwartz, writing in The Daily Beast:
“I was 22, walking across the campus of UCLA, where I was taking summer classes to be able to apply to graduate school.
Wouldn’t it be swell, I suddenly thought, to live every moment of my life on Adderall?
Adderall had crept into my life while I was in college. It was the most seductive thing I’d ever met. Years passed. We got closer. But still, our relationship was limited to the undergraduate black market.
Until my revelation, in the Los Angeles sunshine, that really, there was no need for this kind of moderation. Why stop here when there were so many pills to be had, and so much fun to get out of having them?
Of course, though, it wasn’t fun I was after. Instead, it had everything to do with the perception I had that in order to be up to snuff in the year 2005, to be marketable and employable and even perhaps excellent, it was no longer good enough to be unmedicated. It was no longer sufficient, I had come to believe, to just be myself.
And so, within two hours, I was on Google, typing in ‘cognitive behavioral psychiatrist, Westwood California.’ No psychoanalysts for me. They would explore the issue far too deeply for my purposes.
And presto. …”
Read more here.
Other posts about collaborative practice:
The impact of a needs-based model of care on accessibility and quality of care within children’s mental health services: A qualitative investigation of the UK i-THRIVE Programme
Mindfulness as Effective as Antidepressant for the Treatment of Anxiety Disorders
The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic