Challenging the pharmaceutical complex on long-term antidepressant prescriptions

Show Transcript

Sean: 00:00:21 All right. Welcome everybody to the podcast. I’m your host, Sean Tierney and I am here today virtually with a Brooke Siem. Brooke is a creator and strategist with a knack for working with small teams of people with scrappy dispositions. She’s a former NCAA athlete and entrepreneur, a champion of the popular food network show Chopped and as a speaker for PressNomics six, Brooke thrives under messy pressure situations and is currently writing her second book about getting off of 15 years of antidepressants while traveling the world. Welcome Brooke to show.

Brooke: 00:00:51 Thanks for having me.

Sean: 00:00:52 Definitely. Okay, so let me set some context just for how we know each other. Right off the bat here, we both did a program called Remote Year and different times we were in different groups, but this was a program where we both traveled the world working remotely for a year. Uh, we have a mutual friend in common, Matt Bowles who I apparently am a doppelgänger for her. But I had heard your podcast episode on his show, so you and I have never actually met in person. But when I heard that episode, it just struck a nerve. Uh, personally it resonated just because I’ve been through somewhat similar experiences. You and we’ll, we’ll get into that. But you know, I’ve read the New York times article, you saying, I’ve read your bio, read the outline, super excited to have this conversation and this topic, it just, it hits so close to home. So can you tell people just background on what you’re speaking about at PressNomics?

Brooke: 00:01:46 Yes. So I titled my talk option number three simply because, you know, I’m talking about mental health, I’m talking about, you know, what it’s like to effectively decide that you don’t want depression to run your life and more. And even just in that, um, that just the idea that you choose not to let depression run your life as something that really is not a common way we talk about this topic anymore. Because so often what happens is that, you know, if we are struggling and go see someone and we get some help, we’re kind of told that we have, you know, depression is lifelong or that it has to do with faulty wiring or that, you know, it’s genetic or whatever it is. It’s not our fault. We don’t choose to be this way. And I think that, you know, while that can be comforting to hear at the time, it also, for me anyway, it took a lot of the personal responsibility off of it.

Brooke: 00:02:47 And so I didn’t then go out and try and fix my life, try and fix my situation and choose to not let this thing run my life any longer. So part of the reason why that didn’t happen is because I was really young when of this happened to me. I was only 15 years old when I was diagnosed with, um, depression and anxiety and I was put on in a depressant and you know, at 15, like I was a people pleaser, so I was doing whatever any adults told me to do. And so they told me to take the drug. So I did. They told me that I was depressed so I believed them. And you know, I just kind of created this entire unconscious identity around this one thing that had happened to me. And I spent the next 15 years developing a life with the underlying assumption that I was depressed and that this was never going to get better and that this is who I was at my core.

Brooke: 00:03:37 It wasn’t, it wasn’t, you know, something that happened to me. It was who I was. And it wasn’t until I turned 30 and got accepted into remote. Your realize that, you know, if I was actually gonna go on remote year, I needed to get off all the drugs. And so I did. I started to get off with them and my entire world just crumbled. And I spent the next year or while traveling, putting everything back together on an emotional level. And it wasn’t until I hit the other side of all of this and had some time to reflect that I realized that so much of this I think may have been avoided had I been given a third option at the start had I been told that, okay, your options are to, you know, effectively like be depressed and just just sit in that if that’s what you want to do or you have an option to go on antidepressants and see how that works for you.

Brooke: 00:04:28 Or there’s an option here in which depression, what you’re feeling right now is not permanent and you can actually heal from that and you can go on to live a really, really beautiful life. And that third option was never, ever, ever given to me by really anyone. I effectively had to give it to myself. And what I’ve realized now is that we don’t talk about that third option at all. And so therefore I don’t really understand how people can believe that there’s any hope to kind of get over this depression to fix this anxiety. All these things is crisis that we’re experiencing. How can people know that it doesn’t have to be that way for the rest of their lives when there is no one really out there telling you that it’s possible. There’s no examples of true healing from these sorts of things. So I’m hoping that I can help start this conversation and be a person who can serve as an example, especially to young people that this is not a lifetime thing you’re saddled with.

Brooke: 00:05:32 It doesn’t have to be, you don’t want it to be, what was the circumstances leading up to it that puts you in a depressive state? You know, so the, there was a catalyst. Um, my father suddenly passed away when I was 15. He had pancreatic cancer, but we didn’t know it. And so he, at least we didn’t, we didn’t. My mom and I didn’t know. We don’t really know if knew there are some indications that perhaps he knew what was going on and just chose not to tell us. But regardless, she and I are out the country and my father went into an ulcer surgery and that he never woke up from that ulcer surgery. So we were in Italy and we were literally like hold from where we were, left our bags left, everything smooth across the world to get back to the hospital or to see him before life support was turned off.

Brooke: 00:06:21 And so that was certainly a catalyst, uh, for, you know, for the resulting depression, which, you know, it to me it sounds ridiculous to say out loud that uh, it was considered that there was something wrong with me that I was, you know, depressed because I had also just had a huge loss. I was grieving, you know, the symptoms of both grief and depression are very, very, very similar. And so, you know, there was certainly this huge grief element to it, but you know, there was also this kind of helplessness to it where people in my life wanted to help me get through it as much as, as much as they could. I mean, you know, being 15 is never an easy time anyway. There was always a lot of change and uncertainty about the future and it’s throwing this on top of it was just, you know, it was apparently too much to me.

Brooke: 00:07:07 I don’t have a lot of memories at the time, but I was not doing well and the adults in my life saw that. And then, you know, there’s also I think a lot about too, like how much of this was, you know, quote unquote predisposed, um, you know, my father struggled a lot with his mental health as well. So did his grandfather, as far as I know, um, you know, melancholy was, you know, not stranger in our house and I was not a particularly chipper kid. I had a lot of stress and anxiety even as a first grader. Um, you know, I kind of always felt like the world was bigger and Sater than I, that I felt like it should be, you know, even it was a small child. So, you know, I think that there were, you know, certainly some, um, aspects of my personality that, you know, we’re more likely to really fall into a deep depression if there was a catalyst. But I think that the catalyst was losing my father at such a young age.

Sean: 00:08:08 So they put you on the antidepressants at age 15, you’re on them for a considerable time, for 15 years. So at that point, you know, half of your life was spent on antidepressants. What was then the impetus to seek option three? What, what, why are you not still on them? What, what know what happened that made you look for another option?

Brooke: 00:08:29 Kind of a few things that happened all at once. Um, I had, I had gotten to a point where I was incredibly unhappy in my world than in my life’s and you know, the point where I had a lot of suicidal thoughts and I just, I was not planning for a future because I didn’t want one. But that also felt so normal to me at that point because I was 30, I’d been on these drugs for my entire adult life. I was just kind of operating in in a very, very low vibrational state. And it was what I thought my baseline was. It’s where I thought my true normal was. Uh, it wasn’t until I got accepted into remote year and started looking at the logistics of carting around a suitcase full of medications for a year that I kind of stopped and said, all right, like is this even feasible?

Brooke: 00:09:18 And I found myself kind of faced with the choice of, all right, well I can stay in New York and keep doing the life that I’m doing and I can keep taking my suitcase full of drugs and I know exactly what that life will be like because it’s been what I’ve been living for the past eight years. Or I can get off these drugs or at least try to get off of them, establish a baseline without these drugs, see if I still need to be on them and or see if I need to be on something different because I knew something needed to change. I just didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if I needed to fully be off the drugs or be on different drugs. I might, my prescriptions also hadn’t changed since I was 15 so I was literally taking the same brand of medication for all those years as well.

Brooke: 00:10:04 And I, I just started to think about it and I thought to myself like, this is kind of like the, you know, the mental health equivalent of still wearing the same clothing I wore as a 15 year old. Like my body’s different now than it was when I was 15 like, shouldn’t we have looked at that? Like, is it okay that I’m still on these drugs? Or maybe they don’t, they’re not working for me anymore. Maybe they don’t work for a 30 year old brain. And the way they worked for my 15 year old brain, you know, I really didn’t know the answers to any of these questions. I just started asking them. And then the, you know, as soon as I began asking one question, it was just like a slut of other questions that came in behind it. And that’s when I kind of, you know, had this existential crisis of also being 30 and realizing like, you know, that when I turned 31 I will have been on these drugs for more than half of my life.

Brooke: 00:10:55 There was, there was kind of a mental shift of knowing that the, you know, 51% of my life was going to be spent on these drugs. That really scared me. Um, combined with the fact that my entire adult life had been on them. So once I through remote, you’re into the mix and suddenly had a really, really big expensive reason to change what I had been doing. I made the decision to do it simply because I needed to get out of my current situation and here was this big nuclear option and in a way I think it is the nuclear option that is what really pushed me to do it. Had it been a small option, had it been like moving to Boston or something, I don’t think it would’ve worked. I had to effectively like cut all ties from anything that had kept me in the mindset and the space. I was in, in order to make this change. And when you put $5,000 down on a credit card for a program that’s going to send you on a one way trip to Malaysia, like that’s big enough to make you stick to something.

Sean: 00:11:55 Yeah. Well I just think it’s interesting that, I mean, it’s no small feat to come off those drugs having been on them for so long. But you didn’t, you, I mean, you changed a lot of variables at once. So that had to be a really interesting time to be Brooke, to be just like throwing yourself into, I mean, and also weren’t you changing your career as well at that time?

Brooke: 00:12:13 Oh yeah. Yeah. So I own a bakery. I co owned a bakery in Manhattan, which meant that I had a physical location. So I had a store that people could go to where we made a physical product that had a shelf life and gave it to customers by hand. So none of my life was like I was not living a remote lifestyle. Um, and, but I was, I was really unhappy in my work and you know, we were sort of reaching the end of our lease. I mean we were within like a year and a half of knowing that our lease would be up. And at the time I assumed that the bakery would, uh, close and it would not move past that lease date. So when I kind of looked at the timeline, it was like, all right, well by the time I leave for remote year and it’ll, it’s about seven months until we have to realistically start closing this place.

Brooke: 00:13:02 And so we had enough of the, you know, protocols in place and my business partner was happier running it than I was. So it was a lot easier to just say like, okay, I’m going to step away. I can do what I need to do remotely, but you are going to run this place physically and then I can come back to help shut it down in six months. So, but still that had been my baby that I had worked on for five years and I was leaving it and I was leaving it, you know, in a, out of there in a really negative state. It wasn’t leaving it with like positive and sending it off from the world to flourish. I was basically pulling the parachute because I had to and then then I had to figure out, you know, what to do in order to pay money. So I started figuring out, I wouldn’t call it a career, but work in order to make remote your happen. So,

Sean: 00:13:50 so can you take us through what that looks like as your, did you go off the drugs before you transition a remote year or were you taking them and then w tapered off while on remotely or how did that play out? The

Brooke: 00:14:02 time I got on remote year, we, I think arrived in Malaysia on like August 28th or so, um, of 2016 but the time I arrived, I no longer had I was, I had not been taking any drugs for a few months. I was at the time, I was on about six different medications. And so I had been eliminating one at a time. Starting at the, I believe was the end of February. And I think by the end of like July ish, I had kind of stopped taking all of them. And so, uh, the thing about a lot of this stuff is that there’s, you know, there’s half lives, different drums in different half lives. They stay in your body for different amounts of time. And from my, from my understanding and you know, I’m not a doctor or a psychologist or psychiatrist or research or any of these things, this is from my limited understanding of I’m learning as much as I can about these things.

Brooke: 00:14:53 What will happen is that, you know, some drugs that have a shorter half life tend to have more intense, um, withdrawal symptoms upfront, whereas ones with longer half-lifes because they stay in your system for a longer, you know, the, the effects of the drug being out of your system takes a bit longer to materialize. So there’s no real way to measure, um, you know, especially on an individual basis. Like how, what, what level of withdrawal I was in let’s say in month one in remote year, right. Because I don’t, and I was on so many drugs, I don’t even know which one was causing which problem. I do know that, you know, when I got off the first ones in like February, I had a very intense reaction for about a month and when I got off the second one, the reaction wasn’t as intense. But six months down the line I was still having issues.

Brooke: 00:15:41 So I don’t, you know, it’s hard to tell what caused what or you know, and on top of all that, there was a part of me that was like, maybe this is just what my body is like normally. Like is this a side effect or is this just really my, how my body works and who I am. Like there was even after the drugs were gone, there was about a long period, about a year of just basically having to ask that question, is this, is this a new thing I’m learning about myself or is this just some weird like emotional swing that’s gonna even out, I don’t know, let’s find out in Portugal or Czech Republic or wherever we were.

Sean: 00:16:17 Yeah. Cause you had no adult baseline to compare it to you. Right? Like you’re basically like probably adolescent, which has its own slew of emotions, but you’ve got really no adult being fine mode, emotional level to compare against.

Brooke: 00:16:30 Yeah. The, uh, the emotional level I had to compare to was a prepubescent, uh, S 14 and a half, 15 year old who had not just been through a major trauma. So that really was not relevant at all. I mean, is anybody the same person they are when they’re 14, 15? No, of course not. And throw in, you know, 15 more years of crap and a couple of traumas and it’s like you can’t go back to that person. You have to come to exactly where you are. Yeah. And that was one of the things I really didn’t understand until he came back out later.

Sean: 00:17:04 So I imagine undoubtedly there was just crazy like ups and downs coming out of that state. But how did you land, you know, in your maybe halfway through remote year, you said some issues were still going on, but you emerged from whatever kind of, uh, like not zombie but you know yet heavily sedated state that you were in, you came out. What was that like? And can you just talk about what that experience was like?

Brooke: 00:17:33 The best way I can describe it was like I had been walking around with 15 years ish of cellophane, kind of wrapped all over my body. And then one day someone kind of lifted it off. And so the, the world in all its complexity and intensity and the NOI is, and the, the feelings and the details of the world just kind of suddenly sell down on me all at once. And it took, you know, took a long time to get used to that. I mean there was, you know, I became very, very sensitive to sound. So I really struggled in Southeast Asia where there’s construction around every corner and nothing ever quiets down and you know, there’s some guy jackhammering outside your restaurant or cutting a sidewalk or whatever. It was like I really struggled with that throughout Asia. And then, um, you know, I had to decide whether or not that was something that I was going to be able to deal with in my life or if I was gonna push through it.

Brooke: 00:18:37 And, you know, I wouldn’t say I’ve gotten used to it, but I’ve certainly, uh, my, I’ve, I’ve worked on my response. So that’s really what was my technique was cause after a while, once I had started to learn what these big triggers were going to be, I was able to start formulating how I was going to respond to it. And that’s kind of when I started to land because it became more like I had control over the situation as opposed to the situation having control over me. But it took very long time, um, in order to find consistency in my reactions. And also not be just so overwhelmed with the emotional baggage of it that I could actually logically work through a response. Um, so, you know, I, I kept grounded. I had a, I had a remote counselor the entire time, which was huge.

Brooke: 00:19:27 I mean, that certainly would not have, I don’t think the situation would have gone the same way had I not had someone that, a consistent person that I was able to call and work with in a very specific modality, uh, as often as I need to, no matter where I was in the world. That was absolutely huge for me. Um, and then the other thing that really kind of kept me going and, uh, is that, you know, for all of the negative aspects of this, for all of the terrible things that I’ve felt in the world, like literally, you know, how loud it was or I, it just seemed so much dirtier. People seem so much shittier to each other. It’s smelled awful. Like for all those things in the world. It didn’t matter where I was in the world that I felt that everywhere, even in New York when I was first getting off the drugs, but there were so many moments of just like these, these high is this like so many experiences that I hadn’t ever really fully experienced that were beautiful that I was, I just, I, I latched onto them like I started painting and I’ve never painted before.

Brooke: 00:20:32 I don’t paint well, but the fact that I had a creative urge, like a deep creative urge in order to stay up till two, three in the morning and just paint, even though I didn’t know what I was doing and just for no reason other than that, I liked it. That was such a change from who I had been before where I was sleeping 1415 hours a day or I would just zombie out in front of the TV. Like I was so curious about the fact that there was this part of me that wanted to be creative again. And so I kind of wondered, well, what else? What else do I like? You know? And it just kind of sent me on this path of like looking for little breadcrumbs of who I, who I might be or who I, things I had forgotten. And those little moments became so precious and I was very aware of them.

Brooke: 00:21:20 And being in an environment like remote, you’re where your environment is constantly changing and we got to go see so many places and be around so much history. I was very lucky to have so many opportunities to stand wherever I was and kind of contemplate the, the, the bigness of the world and how small I was, but also in the, it was the fact that I was physically in an amazing place where I kind of had a little shot of instant gratefulness that I’m not sure I would’ve gotten had. I stayed in, gone through this process in New York and you know, it wasn’t big. Like there were a lot of people doing a lot of really Epic side trips and having these really big experiences while we were on remote year. And I wasn’t one of those people. I, you know, I wasn’t, I didn’t have a huge budget and so I tried to find things to do that were a little smaller.

Brooke: 00:22:10 But for me it was, you know, being in Croatia and standing in front of one of the oldest, all of trees in the world that was just in someone’s backyard. And it wasn’t a big fancy moment. There wasn’t anything to Instagram it, but it was just beautiful old tree and kind of being next to something that old, something that had survived all of that time. There was kind of a mysticism and you know that little tingly feeling that runs up your spine in that place that I could hold on to when, you know, my life fell apart for a couple of weeks as I just went on, like kind of an emotional bender trying to get used to myself again. You know, I’d go think about the tree, right? Think about the beach in Thailand or whatever it was. So it was the positives that helped me get through the negatives.

Sean: 00:23:00 Yeah, it’s so all, I’ll just kind of interlace some of my own personal experience here cause it’s relevant. But I was the thing, the reason why your episode resonated with me so much. Uh, I too had an issue in 2001 where I wound up being on a cocktail cocktail of anti psychotics. So I was on Zyprexa and Risperdol and affects her and Depakote and some of these things that were in that article that you said. Um, and the net result of that was for about a year, I was on those and it was just a very, very like compressed existence. I know that the best way I can describe it in musical terms, it’s like you take the amplitude of your sign wave and you just compress it down to a narrow, right. And so coming off of that stuff, I was very lucky as well to be able to like forcibly wean myself off stuff that I was told would be a way of life.

Sean: 00:23:50 This is just the new normal, this is what you’re going to be on for the rest of your life. And I just, I knew that I wasn’t myself. I knew that I was a creative person by nature and it just, I wasn’t that way anymore and I still held out the possibility that, that I could return to the way I was. And so I’m not advocating that everyone do this, but like I forcibly cut down my dosage to the point where I was off of it entirely and then gradually just came back to myself and like you said, like with the painting, you know, I’m in the music and music and or my life again and like all that stuff was still there, but for a long time, for a year it just wasn’t. And I, I don’t know the right answer. Like I guess my question for you is going to be, what do you advocate like it seems irresponsible just to say nobody should be on antidepressants because I know that they serve a role. I know that they can solve that acute issue for some people and probably save lives, but what is the right role of antidepressants, anti-psychotics, any of these, these like kind of terrible, potentially like not way of life type drugs. What is the role of them in your opinion? What? How? How should they be used?

Brooke: 00:25:01 Yeah. No, I agree that there’s no,

Brooke: 00:25:05 I don’t if there’s a right answer, I don’t know what it is, but what I do know is that what we’re doing currently is not the right answer because I have way too many people who are emailing me out of the blue or you know, leaving. They’re seeking me out because they’re saying they’re not getting the support from the traditional set up. And so if they’re coming to some like stranger on Instagram who you know doesn’t have any qualifications because that’s the only place they can feel they’re supported. That tells me that something in what were something in the way the system has worked. It’s awkward. Excuse me. It tells me that something in the way this system is set up is not working properly now. I don’t know what the answer is because you know, I think the struggle with this is that, you know, depression and mental health, it can’t be measured.

Brooke: 00:25:54 It’s not like you can go and get your blood drawn and say, well you have, you know, your blood type says you have exactly this many depression cells in it or whatever. It’s not that it all in our heads, we can’t measure it. I can’t compare my pain and the way I feel to yours. There’s absolutely no way to do that. And there’s no way to, you know, there’s no way to say, okay, well your trauma was this severe so therefore you should have this reaction because we all know that the severity and the trauma does not necessarily correlate to the severity of your pain. And it doesn’t matter how much money you had, you can still, you know, be very depressed as evidenced by a lot of high profile suicides over the past year. Right. So because of all those things, you know, there’s certainly no broad strokes that I think should be painted.

Brooke: 00:26:38 And so for me, what I think is the most important thing to do is I think that the patient needs to become more educated. I think we need to give the patient more examples of how this can play out. And I think, um, you know, that means talking about what can happen, what might happen for longterm antidepressant use. And when we talk about longtime manner depressant use, we need to say there haven’t been, not a lot of studies that have been conducted on this. So we don’t really know. We need to say, you know, that we don’t really know what happens in withdrawal. We need to talk about how we, like we need to, I think we need to get into media and talk about how we are literally advertised. Um, you know, or how we, sorry, I’m having trouble formulating my thoughts because I have so many of them, but you know, we’re one of the only countries in the world where we have a commercial that has put in front of us in the middle of a very like positive comedy show telling us that we’re screwed up and we should go to our doctor and get drugs in order to fix it.

Brooke: 00:27:41 Like we are constantly inundated with all of these things, telling us how wrong we are to feel the way we feel and how our lives are all wrong too. And therefore if you take this pill, it’ll fix it. And like, I think that’s bullshit because we’re not all here to do the same thing. We’re not all here to be a Kardashian. We’re not all here to be rich. We’re not all here to travel the world. We’re not all here to be a mother. We are here to do different things and to live different experiences and all of these feelings that we have our alarms telling us that we’re, we’ve gone off course. So if your life is shitty and you don’t like it, something in your life needs to change. It’s not your brain that’s broken. Your life is broken, so go fix your damn life and no one wants to hear that because it’s hard.

Brooke: 00:28:30 Beyond that, the, you know, we have, they’re often can’t afford the help we need in order to dig our way out of our own problems because no one can do that alone. We all need help. We don’t all come from supportive from supportive backgrounds. So I think what needs to happen is that the power needs to come back to the individual person and we need to start talking about self awareness and different options and like here’s a great person who talks about career. If you’re having an issue with your career, like maybe read this book, it costs $12 on Amazon, let’s try and fix the problem. Let’s look deeper than I don’t make enough money. Why don’t you make enough money? Is it because you are fearful that you’re going to lose it is because like what is the emotion underneath the problem? Let’s start talking about that.

Brooke: 00:29:14 And you know, then let’s talk about people like you and I who have gotten off these drugs and who have experienced the narrow lights and have their life come back open again. Because we have to understand that if we want a rich life, sometimes that means we’re going to lead a very, we one that feels very starved because how can we feel the richness without feeling starved for it? You know, like the spectrum of humans is emotional. It has to be like, but that’s what differentiates us and what makes us fix problems in the world. It’s what makes us create technology. We are trying to fix problems, um, because we’re driven by emotion. And to just avoid that I think is just like a love bottomy of the collective.

Sean: 00:29:59 Yeah. Yeah. Well I think it’s also, we got to look at just the economics and the incentives and the pharmaceutical complex that exists. And you know, if you, I think it can be traced back. Yeah. It can get it though, if at the end of the day can be traced back to the incentives that are in place for these drug companies. Big pharma making a ton of money promoting this stuff. You have a, just recently, I think just this week you’ve got, uh, I forget which big pharma it was, but there for Oklahoma, the opioid epidemic, there’s just been some landmark case ruling where they’ve find some, an incredible sum of money to the, the, the manufacturer of the drug because it’s just, look, you’ve created this societal condition now this, this pandemic that’s costing the city all this money and you just basically 6,000 lives or whatever it is that had been lost in the opioid epidemic in Oklahoma city, I think it was.

Sean: 00:30:56 Um, and they’re now starting to find that pharma companies, but at the same time, this is like a rounding error, right? Like they’ll, they’ll find them, they’ll some big amount of money, but it’s kinda like the bail outs with the banks. Like it’s still, it’s still a net win for them to continue doing it. It’s like a slap on the wrist. So I think it’s sort of like fundamental painful changes are implemented that affect the powers who are creating this issue. I don’t know that we’re going to see, you know, in short of people like yourself speaking out. Um, I think they’re just, it’s going to perpetuate. So actually I want to ask you, if you were, if you were in a position to enact legislation or regulatory changes, what type of stuff would you envision?

Brooke: 00:31:36 Um, I mean I think one of the first things I would do would be, I think we need to get rid of all, uh, branding, like almost a little branded advertisements. I just don’t see how in any way that is like, you know, are you feeling sad? Go to go ask your doctor because you know, your doctor is as a sales rep right behind them. Like they ever notice what kind of pen a doctor uses. It probably is the brand name of some sort of pharmaceutical drug on it because you know, they have to get all their stuff from a sales rep. like it’s, you know, I think it’s unfair to the doctors too. They take a lot of Slack for all this stuff, but you know, they’re, they’re trained, they’re trained to do this. They’re operating within a system that is built upon, um, you know, insurance and pharmaceutical companies and all the stuff. So, you know, I would never blame an individual, uh, for kind of being stuck in the situation they’re in. You know, so many doctors, they just go into the profession because they want to help people and then they’re, you know, they’re [inaudible] by the system. So that’s to, you know, I think so. I think we need to get rid of, um, means get rid of advertisements. It shouldn’t, this is not something that should be in the hands of, uh,

Brooke: 00:32:49 in the hands of a consumer with Google. Um, I also think part of the reasons why I think advertisements are really, really detrimental is not so much because of planting the idea in your head that something is wrong with you. Because probably, you know, if you’re attracted to those advertisements, like for example, if I see an advertisement for psoriasis, I don’t have psoriasis. So I don’t, I don’t think about it. I just like walk it out, right. But if you’re kind of already primed to pay attention to whatever the issue is, uh, then the right. But I think part of the problem there is that they’re able to take studies that have been done, you know, scientific studies that had been done and you know, maybe not fully manipulate the results but not give all the information. So like they may tell you that a single study, you know, their drug had outperformed the placebo in a single study, but they’re not going to tell you about the 45 other studies where it didn’t, you have to go dig for that information and you can find it. But it’s, you know, at the end, at the end of the day, it’s just its marketing. And so the fact that marketing has integrated its waste so much into health, I find to be really disserving

Sean: 00:33:59 right. So I mean in an ideal world these types of changes would be made. But as you and I both know, lobbyists and like just the economics here aren’t that way. So I think in absence of that, it just seems like a lot of the responsibility now falls on the consumers. Not even that. I mean the doctors hopefully, right. We, we, we hope that they’re doing their homework outside of whatever’s being fed to them by the sales reps, which I’m assuming they are, but it also, I just think we can’t abdicate, we can’t just blindly trust the doctors knowing how just the whole, the whole system works with this.

Brooke: 00:34:33 Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s 100% I think on the consumer to do their own due diligence, which, you know, was a bit of a terrifying thought given a lot of the dumb shit we see people do. And you know, doing your due diligence does not mean listening to me on this podcast and then calling up your side of the psychiatrist and saying, screw you, I’m not taking any of my drugs tomorrow. That’s not due diligence. Due diligence is, you know, hearing this and saying like, okay, like what books can I read about this? Like, who else has been talking about this? You know, let me read both sides of the argument and make the best decision for me. And it’s not jumping on a bandwagon. It’s not seeing some biased ad on Facebook. It is, it’s reading, it’s learning. It’s following the news for a few weeks. It’s, you know, like getting a Google alert on it so you can see what’s going on outside of mainstream news. You know, it’s actually taking the control back because this is your life and it’s war health. And so it’s your choice. Don’t let anyone including me make that choice for you.

Sean: 00:35:38 Yeah, yeah. Well I think it starts with this type of open discussion and the fact that, you know, you’re putting yourself out there, it’s mental illness. I think curious, just this stigma that no one wants to talk about it, you know, and I’m trying to do my part as well, revealing, you know, you talk about what you’re comfortable sharing, but uh, it seems to me in the same way that like it was taboo. Some of the stuff that came now with the me too movement and it’s fine to talk about that stuff openly. It’s like, I think there’s a wave coming of people now that are willing to talk about this stuff. And as you mentioned before, there may not be any longitudinal studies right now in your, in terms of like clinical studying, the withdrawal symptoms of people that have been on these things long term. But there are plenty of people that have been on them long term that population exists. There’s just not the,

Brooke: 00:36:23 exactly, exactly. And I, and I, you know, I get frustrated a lot because especially when you talk to people who kind of work in the more traditional fields, you know, they’ll, they’ll talk about all the studies that have, you know, existed on the efficacy of antidepressants or whatever it is. And I’m just kind of like, that’s great. But like we only have the information that we’ve studied, but there are, you know, there are millions of canaries just singing in coal mines all around saying there’s something bigger here. And like, I don’t think that can be ignored. And just because we don’t have the, you know, scientific evidence to back it up doesn’t mean we won’t or it doesn’t mean that all these experiences are invalid. And I, and I, and that’s kind of how anything is right. Like, you know, the, like one of the thing about like gay marriage, people have been talking about how screw up screwed up.

Brooke: 00:37:12 It, it the fact that people couldn’t get married just because it was two gay people for so long. Like it took 25 years for that to be made into law firm when people first started singing about it. But that doesn’t mean that all the feelings and the pain and whatnot wasn’t valid the whole time. And so it’s kind of the same thing. We’ve seen this happen with everything. Um, you know, I think, uh, mental health is, you know, I actually have been kind of trying to stray away from using the word mental health or mental illness because you know, the landscape of that is just so broad and it is just so full of landmines. And you know, I talk about depression and anxiety because I have personal experience, but I don’t know what’s going on in the world of schizophrenia or bipolar or you know, manic episodes or any of that.

Brooke: 00:37:59 It’s not what I have experienced with. And sometimes people will say, like, you’re telling me I should stop taking my schizophrenia drugs? And I’m like, no, that’s not all what I’ve said. I, you know, I don’t, I don’t know that. So I keep trying to talk about like, okay, let’s talk about your emotional health. Let’s talk about that. Because I think ultimately that’s kind of the realm of what I am really trying to feel like figure out is, you know, how do we get people emotionally healthy so they can manage all the shit that happens to us in the world. Um, so I think that’s part of it too. Like words matter and we need to figure out how to talk about this in ways that don’t want everyone together because this is just too broad and there’s too many unknowns and the mind is a powerful, weird, unexplored place that we are not very good figuring out.

Sean: 00:38:50 Yeah, it’s the final frontier in my opinion. Uh, I actually studied psychology in college cause it was just to me the most fascinating subject.

Brooke: 00:38:58 Yeah. We don’t know anything.

Sean: 00:38:59 Okay. Um, I want to shift gears here. I mean, I think we’ve probably covered the, the this sphere, but I want to talk more about, uh, entrepreneurship and can you just talk about just shopped and how that went down. I know like I heard the story through Matt’s podcast of how, you know, you’re in Lisbon and you guys, you’re on the show and it’s, and it’s just such a cool scenario, but can you just tell people what, what you did?

Brooke: 00:39:24 Oh man. Chops has been the gift that keeps on giving. Like it was, it was, it was literally the most emotional day of my entire life, which, given everything we just talked about, it’s quite a statement. Um, and I say that because like I’ve never experienced such an extreme, uh, of wide ranging form of emotions in such a short period of time, um, because so chop this film over one day, but it’s one really long day or called time was like 5:00 AM or something and I didn’t get home till close to midnight. Uh, and so, you know, for those who don’t know, chop does a show on food network. It’s a cooking competition where chefs come together and they give you a basket of the world’s weirdest ingredients that just should not go together at all. Like, you know, it would be like a peach and a chocolate bar and a fish caller and leftover Kung Pao chicken and they’re like, go make a dessert.

Brooke: 00:40:15 And so it’s bizarre and it’s really fun to watch, but to do it was just so unbelievably stressful because not only like, you know, everyone who’s there is a professional. So I wasn’t there. I’m just representing myself. I was also representing my business because like that’s the opening, you know, they talk about your business, they came in still there and so you’re kind of hoping for a little business boost and you know, but you’re also afraid that you’re just going to embarrass yourself so terribly that like, you know, you will just be shamed from the, on the internet for all of time. And so it’s really intense. You’re given ingredients you don’t know what to do with, um, you go from being just elated that you made it through, around to just like your heart dropping when you realize you have to do it again, you’re probably hungry.

Brooke: 00:41:01 Cause the catering is shit. They have a producer following you around the entire time who’s asking you questions that you’ve forgot. Like, you know, like you’ve been interviewing with these people for months or whatever it is and you’ve been Mike the whole time. And so then, you know, like you’re worried that you just completely like embarrassed yourself on national television, that you’re are going to therefore send your business into the ground and you have to do this all again. And then there’s a producer that says like, how do you think your dead father would feel about this? And then you start crying and it’s just, you know, but then at the end of it, I won $10,000. So it was a really great day. However, um, if you had not one, I don’t know if it would have been such a great day. And so I’m very happy that I did because I mean, the experience was totally worth it for me. I can’t, I can’t, I don’t know what other people have felt though.

Sean: 00:41:51 Yeah. We watched you watched it. The airing of that show though, was with your remote, your group when you guys were in Lisbon. I understand. It’s like in the middle of the night and everyone came out for it.

Brooke: 00:42:00 Yes. So my episode filmed in June, but it didn’t air until the following February. And I only got a couple months notice or a couple of weeks notice that it was going to air. And so in Aaron’s, like new episodes of chopped air, like 10:00 PM Eastern time. And so in Lisbon time, that was like, it was literally two or three in the morning. I can’t remember the time difference, but it was, it was the middle of the night. And I had assumed that like it was a couple of days after my birthday, I had assumed that no, like I needed to watch cause I my plans to like live tweet and I need to see, you know, what they did with all this footage because I had known what happened. But I also knew that they had, you know, 12 hours of footage that was going to get condensed down into like 36 minutes or something of actual usable television.

Brooke: 00:42:48 And I was a little terrified love about who they were going to turn me into cause I felt like they could turn me to seven or eight different people. So I had decided that I was gonna watch it. Um, my friend Jason, who had watched every single college, it was college football game while we were abroad, um, had this full set up where he was able to stream everything. And so he set up a sheet and we had a projector screen and he put my chocolate sewed on and I really thought it was just going to be like me and Jason and PJ is watching chopped. And then the next thing you know like 35 40 people came from all over Lisbon in our remote your group. So watch me on this weird show and like it was such a, it was such a special moment.

Brooke: 00:43:31 It was one of those moments where I was, I was feeling really humble and like kind of put my tail between my legs because I had, I had not had the greatest experience on remote year, like not so much because of the program, but just because I was in a really rough mental space. And so I wasn’t the most social, I was, you know, never the happiest person on the trip. I hadn’t made a huge effort to get to know people at that point because I just, I kind of just was, can only deal with myself at the time. And so I just was like completely bowled over by the amount of support that came out from this like little ragtag group of people at three in the morning on like a Tuesday. And it was just, I don’t know, it was just really, really, really cool.

Sean: 00:44:16 Yeah. Re remote. You’re uh, if you’re a group was anything like ours and I’ve met a bunch of people from Liberty them, so I know is special group. We had a really special group as well. It’s unforgettable.

Brooke: 00:44:28 We were so scrappy. But you know, it was just kind of one of those things where it’s, it’s a magical experience that I don’t think could ever be recreated even under the same circumstances. Um, but people just kind of, we managed to come together despite having a pretty rough start and you just don’t see that in regular life unless you put people in really extreme circumstances and then they do like [inaudible] things.

Sean: 00:44:57 Well, we always joke, I mean it’s just like the most incredible social experiment. It was kind of like a reality show. Like if you’re going to take 75 people and who’d never met each other, you’re going to throw them together and then they’re going to travel together for a year. Like,

Brooke: 00:45:09 yeah.

Sean: 00:45:11 Well cool. With the time we have left, I just figured, let’s talk about the book you’re writing. Can you just talk a little bit about what that is and you’ve written one before this. So maybe start with what was

Brooke: 00:45:19 I have, yeah, so this is my second book. My first book, I mean they’re two very different books. My first book is a cookbook and it’s called prohibition bakery. And I co wrote it with my former business partner and it’s a cookbook, but there’s a lot of text in it. Like we’re very proud of all the information that’s inherent. You know, a bunch of witty snark and it’s a beautiful book. It was published by Sterling F Akira, which is one of the Barnes and Nobles imprint. So you know, you can go to a Barnes and noble and find it and you can also get it on Amazon. And that was published in 2015 so I’ve been lucky that I’ve been through the publishing process before. Um, however, this is a very different animal. So I am writing a memoir right now, so this is effectively, it’s about the year of getting off of all these antidepressants and, uh, I’m so grateful to have a really, you know, amazing team of mentors and editors to help me with the writing.

Brooke: 00:46:17 Writing’s always been something that I was good at and that I liked, but I never thought I would do a project like this and it’s turned out, you know, I’ve been working on it for two years now and it’s turned out that I can’t move on with the rest of my life until this book is done. And, um, it took me a while to fully accept that because, you know, writing is a hard grind and it’s not particularly lucrative and you give up a lot in order to work on something very personal. But I feel like I’m at least starting to see the light at the end of it. Um, so we don’t have, there’s no public pub date yet. I, um, well we’ll see. I’m still looking for the right home, the right agent, the right editor.

Sean: 00:47:01 Is there a, is there anything you’ve learned about the writing process itself? Uh, maybe since this one’s a little different than a cookbook this time around. Have you learned anything from that process that you might do differently had you known?

Brooke: 00:47:16 You know, for me it’s been really important to establish a very clear cut routine and so be completely inflexible when it comes to the environment that I’m working in. You know, I think having done remote year and having, I did, I worked as a freelance writer doing remote year, but I was writing like articles on fitness or food or travel. It was a different kind of writing. And for that I was pretty much able to go to a coffee shop or working or working at workspace in order to get that kind of writing done. But this is, you know, this is so much more narrative driven and you know, you’re having to, there’s there, there’s, there’s a craft to it. Um, and having to take years of information and distill it down into a sentence, you know, for me, I need to be in a place that is by myself, like at home, um, with my creature comforts.

Brooke: 00:48:10 No, like knowing I will not be bothered. For me, it’s not enough to like work by myself at a library. Like someone could come up and just, you know, costs and totally pull me out of that flow. And so, um, once I realized that like I needed to just stand up for my space, even if that meant like going away for a couple of months, um, my writing just, it got so much better and it started coming really quickly. So I think in the future if I were to do another project like this, I would just know that that’s what I needed from the start. And in respect it try not to fit into like, just because other people can read a manuscript in a coffee shop doesn’t mean I can like, I need to go to a cabin in the middle of nowhere. So I’m going to do that.

Sean: 00:48:52 Yeah. Well, it sounds like this theme just of listening to how your body responds, both with things like the drugs and things like with writing a book, just being more attentive and attuned and cognizant of the fact that everyone’s different and it’s not a one size fits all. You’ve got to be doing that biofuel.

Brooke: 00:49:08 Yeah. How are you? Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. And it’s just, I think we’re expected to know the answers a lot earlier than most of us do. And the people who speak the loudest are people who are lucky enough to, to know their process or their industry or their body or whatever it is. You know, they, we all know those people who, you know, they’ve known exactly what they wanted to do since they were a kid. And so they just went out and did it. And we, we have a bad habit of thinking that if you’re not like that, then you’re wrong. But for them, the reality is that, you know, it’s all trial and error and so like there’s gotta be some forgiveness and compassion towards yourself as you go through the process of trial and error. And then you have to actually do it to just sit around in the wrong piece of it is never going to actually bring about the correct solution.

Sean: 00:50:01 Cool. All right, well I think that’s probably a good place to wrap up. I do have one last little set of questions that I ask all the yes. So I’m just going to ask you these, what is one book that has profoundly affected you?

Brooke: 00:50:12 Oh God. Okay. So I mean normally I always answer with Eckhart. Totally. It’s the power of now. Um, I think it, it’s just an absolutely outstanding book for anytime in life that can help you get out of your own head and that, you know, as cliche as it sounds, really the only thing we have is this, this moment. And knowing that logically and understanding it intuitively and on an emotional level are two very different things. And that book was the one book that helped me start to understand that on a deep emotional level, um, however, most recently I think probably, uh, John Hardy’s lost connections is highly relevant to everything we talked about today. He’s a, he’s a journalist and he wrote a beautiful book about the true causes of antidepressants in the ways we can, or that, sorry, excuse me, the true causes of depression and how we can overcome it.

Brooke: 00:51:03 And it’s incredibly comprehensive. He traveled all over the world in order to kind of help answer this question of if we are living in a better world than we ever have before, which we are by definition, you know, less death, less famine, less disease, why is our mental health going downhill? And you know, he has a similar story to me as having been put on antidepressants at a young age and then getting off them and his world kind of falling apart. And he started asking all these questions. So that book just came out this year and it’s, I think anyone who has ever struggled with their, uh, emotional health should read that book because it helps frame a lot, helps reframe a lot of the traditional story we’ve been told about depression and how we treat it.

Sean: 00:51:47 Cool. What about, what is one person, if you could have anyone to dinner, you could have dinner with anyone, who would you have dinner with?

Brooke: 00:51:54 I mean, dead or alive? Do I, are there any, I have many qualifications here. You know, I would love to just have dinner with my dad at this point. Like I never got to know him as an adult. I remember being a child watching him as an adult, you know, and he used to love like crappy white wine and we need salt teens by the sleeve and bag of chips or a box of chili for dinner. And I would love to just be able to like sit and have a glass of wine with them and even for just an hour, like tell them like, you know, yeah. It was really rough and shitty that you left when you did. But look at what, I’ve read it out of this. So

Sean: 00:52:38 cool. Uh, what is one tool or hack that you use to save time, money or headaches?

Brooke: 00:52:45 No time, money or headache. Oh. Um, I mean I kind of like, all right, so I have a Mac bug. It’s fairly old at this point, but I put myself on kind of like an official deadlines for work. Like, especially when I’m writing, I find that, you know, I’m very good at not like getting distracted by the internet or something when I’m doing deep work. But, um, I kind of, I’m more likely to work for 45 minutes, decide it’s not working and then just do something else. And so, but I started doing is I just started making a commitment to only working when my computer wasn’t plugged in, but I had to work until it died. So that gives me about three and a half, four hours depending on how, how much effort and uh, how many things I’m making my computer to at once. But it tends to be that I get like a solid thousand words or whatever, whatever the project I’m doing, I can get done right about the time my computer dies at a time perfectly with lunch. So basically I don’t get to have lunch and like check my email and do next part of my day and tell my computer is dead

Sean: 00:53:53 okay.

Brooke: 00:53:54 And it kind of naturally just makes it, makes my life work. Go into code a little,

Sean: 00:54:00 let me make sure I understand it. So you have to work until your computer dies, but you can’t charge it. You can’t work more than that. You use

Brooke: 00:54:06 no idea. Charge it. Yeah. If I stop it, I mean I can work more than that, but more often than not what happens is like by the time I go plug my computer in, I realize it’s 1230 it’s one I don’t eat breakfast. I’m usually really hungry. And then there’s a part of me that’s like most of the world is already lived half their day. I should probably check my email to make sure there’s something I need to deal with today. And at that point it just like, it all kind of is done, you know? But for something like I’m the kind of the writing of this big deep work project I’m doing, it’s very easy to get so washed in it that you lose sight of what you’re doing. And so working 78 hours a day on a project like this to me at least would be insane because I would so quickly just like go, I would spend so much time off in the wrong direction and it helps to have a, you know, structured framework of when I have to think about this so then I can not get to a point where I overthink it.

Sean: 00:54:59 Yeah. It’s interesting. It’s almost like, uh, the PO, the Pomodoro technique. I don’t know if you heard of that. It’s like a forced kind of battery based Pomodoro technique.

Brooke: 00:55:07 Yeah. It’s a very, very large tomato.

Sean: 00:55:10 What about, what is one piece of music that speaks to you lately or musical artists,

Brooke: 00:55:15 musical artists?

Sean: 00:55:17 Mm.

Brooke: 00:55:18 You know, I don’t listen to a lot of like when you sick actually, which is kind of weird for people to hear. Um, but I can’t listen to music when I write. I have to have silence. I listen to white noise. Actually I listened to Brown noise that’s specific. Um, the very specific thing I listened to. Uh, I listened to a lot of podcasts and I’m walking around, but there was an artist that came across recently called the hidden Kalman, H, a, Y, D, E, N, C, a, L, N, I. N. and he’s, you know, just probably some like 24 year old dude with long hair and a guitar. But I liked that he brings in a lot of kind of ethereal feeling like I like [inaudible] Wednesday. I like synthesizers, but I do kind of like what they can do to music and help make it feel like it’s a little bit from another world. Yes. That’s why I liked him.

Sean: 00:56:09 Yeah.

Sean: 00:56:09 Cool. We’ll link that up in the show notes. Uh, all right, two questions. What, what important truth do very few people agree with you on? Oh gosh, that’s a heavy duty one.

Sean: 00:56:21 true. Hmm.

Brooke: 00:56:25 We could do an entire podcast about this belief. I so I believe that when people’s lives don’t work, it’s because there is a big issue that they need to fix or heal and that kind of effectively, no matter how many times they try and fix it, like on the outside, if they don’t really fix that big thing on the inside, it’s never gonna work. And so like a great example of this could be like finances, like people who constantly struggle with money. It doesn’t like you can make more money but you’ll probably find more ways to spend it. But I think that these issues are not necessarily like things that um, you know, I think they can be like intergenerational things. They can be cultural things. They can be just these, these, these, this programming in your mind and your body that is so innate to you.

Brooke: 00:57:17 You don’t even realize the program’s wrong. It’s like having a bug in your software, but you can’t update the software unless you fix the bug. And I think that finding, going back and finding the bug is very often the only way you can actually fix the outside problem. But nobody really likes to hear that. They don’t want to do that. They just want to go like find an app that will do it for them or I don’t know, just struggle through it. People love the struggle. I don’t think life has to be hard. I don’t hate the idea of calling like

Sean: 00:57:48 so the, the important truth then being that there’s actually that we can’t paper over issues with a lot of these what seem to be solutions until we actually get to the root cause and track that down. And then that’s that bug, right? You’re talking about is the thing.

Brooke: 00:58:05 I think that’s an important truth. But I do think a lot of people know that, but they don’t, they don’t like how it manifests. Like people don’t like it when other people’s lives look easy. And to me when I see someone whose life is really, really easy and you know, there are those people who just look like they sprinkle fairy magical dust over everything and they’re just, they just kind of have that magical aura. I don’t look at them as someone who just like has an, I’ll figure it out. I look at them as someone who doesn’t have a lot of like wounding either because they’ve dealt with it or they just didn’t, weren’t kind of born with a lot of it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get there just because you have a lot of crap that you have to do the work to get there and it’s, but it is possible. Like those people should be an example of not, you know, I just, I just don’t think we need to constantly, we have to work hard on herself. I don’t think we necessarily need to work hard on the outside world in order to bring us the selfies that we want. That makes sense.

Sean: 00:59:00 In for it, it’s internal.

Brooke: 00:59:03 That’s where the hard work should be. And then the outside work gets easier. And we say the outside work should make the internal work easier, which is no, flip it. Reverse it.

Sean: 00:59:12 Got it. All right, last question. If you had a time machine to go back to your 20 year old self, so this is at the point where you’ve been five years now on what piece of advice would you give your 20 year old self

Brooke: 00:59:27 Um, honestly, probably the thing I would’ve done would’ve been to tell my 20 year old self that like, look, you’re never gonna, you’re never going to have a traditional career. So you may as well learn something useful when you have the time and freedom. Cause I got a degree in history because I was just, I didn’t know what to do. Like just general history. I mean it didn’t even have a particular focus and it was just, I got to a point in college where it was like, you have to pick a major, otherwise you’re gonna, you’re gonna not graduate. And so I would have told myself to go learn Java script and learn computer science instead because you’re gonna hate your career for the next 10 years anyway. You may as well. He didn’t make some money.

Sean: 01:00:08 Alright, so we will end on that note, Brooke, how can people, if they want to connect with you or if there’s an editor listening who wants to pick up your book deal? Like how do people get in touch with,

Brooke: 01:00:18 ah, so Instagram is my most active social media and it’s just at scene B, R. O. K. E. S. I. E. M. um, I have a Twitter account and don’t tweet. Sorry. Uh, then just my website has a little bit of information. Um, you can also email me just at Brook at [inaudible] dot com [inaudible] but yeah, Instagram is really probably the best way, actually like respond to messages.

Sean: 01:00:47 Cool. All right. No creepy things. All right, perfect timing. I got to give this room up so we’ll call it there. But Brooke, thank you so much for joining and, uh,

Brooke: 01:00:57 we’ll see you soon. Thanks. Bye.

Link(s) Mentioned

• https://nomadpodcast.com/recommends/remote-year
• https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/health/oklahoma-opioids-johnson-and-johnson.html
• https://scrollinondubs.com/2006/07/08/drug-companies-should-be-required-to-eat-their-own-dogfood/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
• https://www.thecut.com/2019/01/brown-noise-is-the-best-work-soundtrack.html

Books

• https://amzn.to/2lqM4UC
• https://amzn.to/2m2moxF

Music

• https://open.spotify.com/artist/19OAtq7pNHnBRKJORFeahx?si=b0UoMMetTgqfoElFlSigRA