It's complicated enough. The scientific consensus will generally say we don't quite understand

why these drugs were. 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, is just as valid and probably more

useful in many, many cases than clinical expertise.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yankee Kellogg.

Cooper Davis, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

It's a 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 is sort of this idea that the 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 to handling that problem is to pop a pill, certainly.

...