Brooke Siem was among the first generation of teenagers to be prescribed antidepressants. As Brooke was initially diagnosed and treated in the wake of her father’s sudden death, this psychiatric intervention sent a message that something was pathologically wrong with her and taught her that her only solution was medication. For the next 15 years, Brooke took antidepressants exactly as prescribed.

When she turned 30, she realized that maybe she was misdiagnosed and decided to taper off the medications with the help of her doctor. But stopping meds after 15 years isn’t as easy as people may think. Join us as Brooke shares her story of antidepressants and antidepressant withdrawal. And don’t forget to tune in next week as Dr. Mark Horowitz explains the medical side of Brooke’s personal experience.

Brooke Siem

Brooke Siem was among the first generation of teens to be prescribed antidepressants. Fifteen years later, Siem’s work explores the reality of antidepressant withdrawal and recovering from long-term depression. Her newsletter, “Happiness Is a Skill” is devoted to philosophy, research, and strategies to help people unravel internal scripts, heal from depression, and practice the skill of happiness. Her memoir, “May Cause Side Effects” is available wherever books are sold.

Gabe Howard


Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, “Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations,” available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author.

Gabe makes his home in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He lives with his supportive wife, Kendall, and a Miniature Schnauzer dog that he never wanted, but now can’t imagine life without.

To book Gabe for your next event or learn more about him, please visit gabehoward.com.

Producer’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: You’re listening to Inside Mental Health: A Psych Central Podcast where experts share experiences and the latest thinking on mental health and psychology. Here’s your host, Gabe Howard.

Gabe Howard: Welcome, everyone. I’m your host Gabe Howard and calling into the show today we have Brooke Siem. Brooke is perhaps best known as a Food Network Chopped champion, but she’s now a prominent mental health advocate due to her personal experience being prescribed antidepressants as a teenager. Her memoir, “May Cause Side Effects,” explores the reality of antidepressant withdrawal and the fight to manage the modern mental health system all unfurled against a global backdrop, and her work as an award-winning chef. Brooke, welcome to the show.

Brooke Siem: Thanks so much for having me, Gabe.

Gabe Howard: Thank you so much for being here, Brooke. I want to let our listeners know that next week we’ll have Dr. Mark Horowitz, who is a medical doctor and researcher on the topic of antidepressant withdrawal and antidepressant overprescription. So tune in to learn more from the medical perspective. Now, Brooke, we’ve heard a lot about how the use of antidepressants in America is at an all-time high. Somewhere between 13 and 20% of Americans are currently taking antidepressants. And we’ve heard a lot about how people who are struggling during the pandemic have been prescribed antidepressants to help ease that suffering. But now that the pandemic is abating, shouldn’t those prescriptions become unnecessary? Shouldn’t we be seeing those usage rates decline?

Brooke Siem: You know, the reality is, is that we are not seeing usage go down. We are not also not seeing rates of depression go down and we aren’t seeing suicides go down. We’re not seeing any of these markers going down for, you know, an aspect of the medical field that’s now been working from, you know, a few hypotheses for about 50 years. And so that makes a lot of questions. And I’m not a doctor, I’m not a researcher, I’m not a pharmacologist. I do not have nearly enough letters after my name. But I am someone who had a very significant experience. I was part of the first generation of teens to be put on antidepressants back in the early 2000s. This was not a common thing when I was put on them. It really was kind of a rare thing and I was put on them in the wake of a trauma. My father had just died and the adults around me didn’t really think I was grieving properly. They were worried about me. My mother especially, she was being a good mom. She wanted to make sure that I was okay. And this is what the professionals around her were recommending. And so I got put on a cocktail of antidepressants, and then I stayed on them for the next 15 years.

Brooke Siem: It took 15 years to realize, wait a second, I was put on these drugs when I was 15, I’m 30. I was not doing well. I was having a lot of suicidal thoughts. I was had been going on a downward trajectory for years and something just clicked that said, I shouldn’t be this depressed on this many antidepressants. So what do we do? So I saw a psychiatrist and started to get off them, and that’s kind of when my whole world exploded. I entered into severe antidepressant withdrawal that lasted for quite a long time. The bottom line is now it’s been six years and I have the ability to look back in hindsight and see where things went wrong, see where we could have made different choices, hopefully show other people that you’re not broken if you’re having a hard time or if a lot of a lot of crap has happened. There are ways to get out of this. There are ways for depression to be temporary. Let’s bring some hope back into this conversation because it’s really dismal out there.

Gabe Howard: Thank you so much for sharing your story, Brooke. And there’s a lot to unpack, so I want to break it down a little bit. It sounds like you were put on antidepressants in the wake of your father’s death. Now, one could argue that you weren’t experiencing depression at all. You may have been experiencing grief. And for most people, while grief can be debilitating, it’s temporary. Most people come through to the other side with no medical intervention whatsoever. So it seems wrong to me that you were 15 years old. Your father died, and now you need lifelong medical intervention. Did anybody ask that question? Did anybody ask a doctor, Why do I need to be medicated for the rest of my life just because my father passed away?

Brooke Siem: So the answer to that is like like all things in this topic, mental health and emotional health is extremely complicated and that there were a lot of factors going in. So one of the big things to be aware of in my story and to keep in mind is that I was a minor when these drugs were prescribed to me, so it wasn’t like my dad died on Tuesday and they put me on these drugs on Wednesday. There was, I’d say a period of 4 to 6 months from the time my father passed before I was first given these drugs. And in the meantime, I had seen a child psychologist who had called my mother up out of the blue one day and said, what Brooke needs is a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. I’m diagnosing an anxiety and depressive disorder and I’m recommending medication.

Brooke Siem: Now my mother here, who’s grieving herself, is being told by professional that I need medication and she’s not a doctor. And so she just has said, in hindsight, maybe this wasn’t the right call, but at the time she was terrified that she was going to lose me, too. And she had just lost my dad. So she followed the advice and took me to the psychiatrist. I had the experience that so many people have, which is you go in, you’re in there for 10 to 20 minutes. You walk out with a script and assuming you don’t have some horrible immediate reaction, that’s pretty much that. But from my perspective, you know, I was 15. I was in a headspace in 2001 where if you go to the doctor because you’re sick and they give you medication, you take it because you need it. In my 15-year-old brain, there was certainly no, no thought that I didn’t need this because a doctor was telling me I did. And I think that’s really important to note, because that’s the time when, you know, kids are forming their personality, Their understanding how they work in the world.

Brooke Siem: They’re not quite adults, but they’re not quite kids. This choice pretty much implanted in me that no matter how I was grieving, it wasn’t right and I needed help. And I held on to that unconsciously for years. It wasn’t until I was 30 that, like, things were just so bad in my external life that the light bulb kind of went on and I was like, Wait a second. And furthermore, I had seen multiple doctors through multiple states and parts of my life over those 15 years. None of them questioned why I was put on these drugs still in grief. Because of that, I just had constant reinforcement that these were medically necessary. And I think that happens to a lot of people, which is why you have people who I mean, there’s this one woman who reached out to me who was put on antidepressants after her high school boyfriend broke up with her and has had one of the worst withdrawal stories I’ve ever heard. And she said the same thing. She was like, these were choices that were made for me. Like I didn’t know. Why should I have been the one to have to stand up for myself in that situation?

Gabe Howard: Considering that you were a minor when you were first prescribed antidepressants, just adds such an incredible wrinkle to this. I’m sitting here as a as a middle aged man. I manage bipolar disorder. Medication helps me. I live with serious and persistent mental illness. And there’s this part of me that wants to fight you, right? Like

Brooke Siem: I know [Laughter].

Gabe Howard: No, medication saved my life. Why are you doing this? Why are you tearing down medication? But there’s this other part of me that’s like, Wow, 15-year-olds aren’t fully baked.

Brooke Siem: Nope.

Gabe Howard: We’re not complete people at 15. There’s still a lot of growth and maturing and changes in our bodies. This idea that you can be diagnosed with something, put on a medication at 15 and it’s like, Hey, look, nobody needs to revisit this. We have diagnosed you forever at 15. I got to tell you, it doesn’t sit right with me. And you mentioned that you saw many doctors who just saw this as the status quo. I’m just struggling with the idea that the treatment that would work for a 15-year-old would work for a 20-year-old, a 25-year-old, a 30-year-old, and all the way into adulthood.

Brooke Siem: I mean, I have so many things to say. First of all, I’m so glad that you’ve brought up your personal journey and how you feel like you want to fight me, because I get that a lot. And most people don’t have the ability to separate the desire to punch me in the face from actually having a conversation about it. So I’m really, really grateful that we’re doing this because it’s so important. We are so quick to pin every experience that one person has on to somebody else’s. But this is just way too complex and varied. As far as the very first question I asked myself and the light bulb moment I had when I kind of realized was, I don’t think I should be this depressed on this, this many antidepressants. And the second thought was, I’ve been on this exact same cocktail of drugs for 15 years. Shouldn’t that have changed as my brain changed? And I likened it to the fact that I don’t wear the same clothes as I did when I was in high school. I’ve gotten new clothes over the years and styles change. Why was that same courtesy not extended to my health? That thought was what spurred this whole thing for me. And the reality is I don’t have the answers.

Brooke Siem: I do know that I didn’t have great luck. I know that there are amazing psychiatrists and practitioners out there who are really on the forefront of this stuff, who don’t just give anyone a prescription who walks in the room, who work with people who can really benefit from these medications and they’re monitored. And those are the people who have good experiences. But I know that I had bad doctors. Not all doctors are created equal. And if you if you don’t think someone’s working great for you, it’s time to go find someone else. But of course, then that runs into the big health care problem all over the world, and especially in this country, where maybe you can’t afford them, which is what happened to me.

Gabe Howard: And to build on that many people just trust their doctors, especially when you’re young.

Brooke Siem: Mm-hmm.

Gabe Howard: I want to ask you, Brooke, why do you think that the default is once you’re prescribed antidepressants, you need them forever? Because I know that you’re trying to reframe the narrative to once you’re prescribed antidepressants, you need to monitor that use and see how long you need it. It might be temporary. It might be forever. In fact, there’s there’s so many studies out there with varying degrees of numbers. But some of those studies show as many as 50% of people who are on long term antidepressant use don’t need them.

Brooke Siem: I think the answer to that is both wrapped up in our cultural and I’m putting this in air quotes here, understanding of depression, our individual ability to change our situation, and then just kind of what we’re being told from people on pedestals, doctors. Look, if I break my arm, like take me to a doctor, I don’t know how to fix that, but a doctor isn’t really in a position to fix your life. Right? They’re not there every day. They don’t know what’s going on in my day-to-day life. So their tool is a pharmaceutical tool. What is interesting to me is that prior to the existence and common practice of prescribing prescription drugs for mental health issues, depression was largely viewed as a temporary thing. People would recover in six months to a year from big depressive episodes, and they weren’t necessarily doomed to have it return. And that was the assumption that started to change once pharmaceutical interventions arrived. And we can draw a lot of conclusions from that. I don’t think we’re ever really going to know how much money and politics and power play into this. But to me it seems like a likely thing, follow the money. When you’re making money, it stands to reason to try and keep making it. That’s not to say that these drugs don’t have a purpose for a lot of people, but I do think they’ve gotten really off track. I also think that we have become a culture that is so impatient and so fearful at the same time. And those two things together are kind of a perfect storm for the situation.

Brooke Siem: If we go back to my situation, my mother was a parent. What she was afraid of was that something would happen to me, that I would take my own life. There were no signs that that was anywhere on the table for me, but because she was a mother who was grieving, that’s where her brain went. And so we stuck me on these and I think there’s a lot of that happening when possibly that’s an overreaction. And I know that’s a big thing to say, especially when youth suicides are on their way up. But in the most severe cases, yes, sure. These could be a very useful tool. But I think there’s also value in letting your kids work through this stuff and gain some resilience and see if they come out of it. I mean, we’re not really giving people time to actually work through this stuff. I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there who aren’t going to like that I have to say that. But I think that there are a lot of people who could have just used time, myself included. I just needed more time.

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Gabe Howard: And we’re back with Brooke Siem, author of “May Cause Side Effects.” Obviously, this is very confusing and most people don’t have medical degrees. They’re not doctors. And it’s clear that people are suffering. Depression is not friendly. But I want to address a potential elephant in the room. There are pill shamers out there. There are anti-psychiatry advocates who believe that, and I’m making air quotes, evil big Pharma invented depression simply to make money. You mentioned people wanting to punch you in the face at one point in our interview. So I know that you have a lot to consider in your advocacy work.

Brooke Siem: And really on top of that, I mean, a lot of my work specifically focused around antidepressant withdrawal, which is something that is pretty new to the zeitgeist as far as how to actually take people off of these drugs. We’ve got so many doctors don’t know anything about this either because it hasn’t been part of the literature and it has not been part of the conversation. My book is specifically about withdrawal. But like you said, it’s not, not your journey. You, the public out there is not mine. So we all have different reasons for making the choices we do. But I do know that I get tons of emails, more emails that I can deal with in a day of people who have stories like mine. And so I know that this is a prominent narrative out there as well that is worth talking about. The reason why I think we I get so much pushback and why I think anyone in the mental health field, no matter what side of the conversation you end on, gets pushback is because we can’t measure this stuff. There is no blood test that says whether or not you have depression. We cannot measure neuro neurotransmitters’ action in the brain in real-time. We don’t know what a quote-unquote chemical imbalance brain is compared to one that isn’t. Like we don’t know so much of this stuff. So we’re totally operating on hypothesis and there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence. And when that happens, you start running into people’s egos and their sense of self. And I don’t mean ego in the sense of, Oh, you have a big head and you’re self involved. I mean that if you have created an and this happened to me, I spent 15 years believing that I was so depressed that I was never, ever going to recover because I needed so much chemical intervention.

Brooke Siem: That has a huge impact on the lens through which you view your life. And if someone comes along and tells you that maybe there’s another way, you get really upset. I used to get really upset because I felt like they didn’t know me, they didn’t understand me, they couldn’t see my pain and they didn’t know what I had been through in order to get to the point where I was at. And their solutions always felt so trite and. It’s it’s always going to seem incredibly trite until you’re ready to start facing those issues and doing that work and to make giant life changes that are very painful and can alienate people you love and are just highly unpleasant. That is not as simple as getting told you have a cancer diagnosis and then you get chemo and it’s really physically hard, but you come out of it at the end or you have all of these people who have shown you that if you believe and you get all the best doctors that here’s your chances of survival. That is the narrative in cancer. It’s not the narrative of mental health or depression, because everything is so individualistic. The way I saved my own life is not the way somebody else would.

Gabe Howard: I’m always fascinated that people don’t take a buffet approach. And

Brooke Siem: Right.

Gabe Howard: I love this analogy because you go to the buffet and you take what you want and you leave the rest, right? We understand that you take the food that you want and you leave the rest. But there’s like a second layer to that. You don’t stand in front of the food that you don’t like and start screaming at it. You don’t yell at other people that are taking the food, that they’re wrong for taking that food, that only your food is good, and that anybody who takes other food is an idiot. Nobody does that. We see all the choices. We take what works for us. We sit down and we all eat in harmony. But

Brooke Siem: This is the best analogy I have ever heard, and I love it.

Gabe Howard: You you may steal it as long as you credit Gabe Howard circa 2000, I don’t know, 2017. But in all seriousness, though, it really does remind me of this. What is the harm in being given information? It’s only going to do two things. One, it’s going to reinforce that you have made the right decision. I like validation, I like reinforcement. I like to know.

Brooke Siem: Mm-hmm.

Gabe Howard: That I personally am on the right track or it’s

Brooke Siem: For yourself.

Gabe Howard: Right, for myself. Right. Or that information is going to change the way that you think. Presumably, for the better, you’re going to realize, Oh, I had no idea this was an option, and that option is good for me. So I, I

Brooke Siem: Mm-hmm.

Gabe Howard: Really hope that people listen to this with an open mind and understand that it may not be for you, it may not be for everybody. But there is just so much data out there that shows that people are on antidepressants for way too long. Now, Brooke, I want to talk about your personal experience with antidepressants and antidepressant withdrawal. And I also want to remind the audience that you did work with your doctor which makes your bad outcomes all the worse.

Brooke Siem: Sure. So, one of the things that we know is that drugs with different half lives tend to have different symptoms they create. So for me, one of the drugs I was on has a very short half life, which means that leaves your system very fast. And so you kind of go from having the drugs in your system to not right away. And anyone who’s ever missed a dose of an antidepressant has probably experienced some level of maybe your heart races or you feel extra on edge. Those are early signs of withdrawal. For some people, that’s all that happens. Other people, like, I mean, for me, the biggest thing that happened is about three or four days with the drug not in my system. I was kind of on edge but it was tolerable for the first three or four days. And then I was walking on Park Avenue in New York where I lived, and it started to rain and it was about dusk. And I just remember in this one moment. It was like my literally my whole world changed in one moment. Like my eyesight got sharper. All the sounds around me suddenly really intensified. The light from all the headlights became really bright on my eyes and it had just started to rain.

Brooke Siem: And it went from feeling like, Oh, there was kind of water on my arm to almost like someone was pounding me with guns. My skin became so sensitive in literally one second that the rain started to hurt my skin. And that was the moment where I knew that something big was about to happen to me. I didn’t know what it was yet, but that was kind of the start. It’s just all my senses changing all at once. Then I started to experience incredible intense mood swings and a level of rage that I’ve never, ever experienced. I’m a pretty small person. I’m like 5’3″ and not very big. I’ve bent a metal ironing board in half out of rage because I just had so much adrenaline in me that I bent the thing in half. I started to experience really violent, intrusive thoughts, which was the single most terrifying thing that happened to me, because I thought that Oh, crap. Like, I’m I’m actually crazy. All this time I thought I was depressed. I’m actually crazy. This is how I am without these drugs, because I was having these violent, intrusive thoughts towards myself and other people. And that scared me more than anything because I thought I was going to hurt someone.

Brooke Siem: I was really lucky that I had a family psychologist, a friend who helped walk me through that time. And I realized that, no, I’m not I’m not actually a danger, but it’s terrifying when it’s actually happening to you. My body went into such like such a state of acute stress that I developed an autoimmune reaction called nodular vasculitis, where your blood vessels start to all get inflamed. And so it looked like I had like BB gun like pellets that were under my skin because all the blood vessels were so inflamed and all these, like bruising, patchy discoloration. For a while we thought, God, I must have blood cancer or something, because it was such a bizarre sudden thing. Then there, of course, just the emotional swings that very much felt like a second puberty. You know, I’d be crying one minute and laughing the next. From the outside I looked absolutely like I was completely having a psychotic break. And I was lucky that I was also having these moments of feeling so incredibly clear in ways I had never experienced before. Like literally the colors in my world brightened. I didn’t realize that they were muted, but then I would have these moments where everything like someone turned the saturation up on your phone, like everything just got a little brighter.

Brooke Siem: And I started to have moments of curiosity and wanting to do things which I hadn’t felt in 15 years, and creativity where I was like, Maybe I’ll paint something. And, you know, I wasn’t it wasn’t manic, Like it wasn’t like a bipolar mania, but it was just this kind of natural, oh, there’s there’s parts of life that are that are interesting and good. And and I can see, like have a moment of hope that maybe this isn’t going to be forever. And so I kind of latched on to those little moments, and then I get plunged back into like a month of terrible withdrawal. But I just kind of started to hold on to this idea that if I was capable of experiencing, like really feeling and experiencing the smell of coffee or a pretty flower or enjoying drawings for 20 minutes, then I was capable of learning to do that as part of my life as a whole. That could be my normal instead of this withdrawal or the depression. And it was those little moments that really helped me. Help string me along during withdrawal and help give me hope when everything felt so hopeless.

Gabe Howard: How long did you go through withdrawal?

Brooke Siem: People ask me this all the time, usually they ask me in the context of how long did it last for you, because how long is it going to last for me? And the smartest thing anyone ever said to me was you and I are both smart enough not to put a timeline on this just because it really is so different for each person. I would say that for me, like the serious symptoms abated within a year and then it took another year of readjustment. By the second year, I was kind of used to the ups and downs. I started to see more distance in between. More time was spent up than down. So I started to trust that I was on an upward trajectory. And also I started to get to know myself as an unmedicated adult, which was entirely new. And I just started to trust that, okay, this is who I actually am. And it just became more comfortable after roughly those two years passed. That’s when I started to consider myself fully recovered. And since then it’s now been four or five years since I took my last antidepressant. So six years since this whole process started, roughly, I consider like I haven’t had any relapses. I’ve never been back on a psychiatric drug. I’m doing really, really, really well. You know, hasn’t always been the easiest six years. But I have tools that I learned during this time to help me, and I feel like I will take all of that into my life moving forward.

Gabe Howard: So it’s been six years since this process started. It took really two years before you were. I hate to use the word normal, but by the time

Brooke Siem: Yeah.

Gabe Howard: That the withdrawal ended, you had your footing. You were you were solid, you were good. You ready to move forward? So it’s been four years. What is life like for Brooke today?

Brooke Siem: You know, I. I love my life now, and I have just an immense amount of gratitude, which I always thought was like the fluffiest word that was so overused and irrelevant in the mental health world when I was suffering like I hated that word so much. But I actually have it now and I feel it. But the reason why is like I didn’t get here with a huge amount of work. I’ve done a lot, a lot of counseling. I finally grieved the loss of my father. I did it 15 years later, and I’ve made some really, really gigantic life choices that changed my situation and put me in a better one. And I think that for me, that’s the biggest thing. That biggest gift I got from going through this antidepressant withdrawal was that because the experience was so acute and intense, it really forced me to. I didn’t have the capacity to basically do anything that wasn’t completely necessary, like I could feed myself and sort of pay my bills. And that was about it. People who weren’t good for me or situations that weren’t good for me, I had no ability to to buffer those anymore. So I started cutting them all away. Once you do that, you get to a point where you say, okay, I’ve cut everything out of my life.

Brooke Siem: I’ve made all these choices to shed all the toxicity. Now what? Now who am I? And then you spend the next couple of years rebuilding and then rebuilding. I’ve been very conscious to look around and say, like, okay, how does this thing make me feel from whether or not I look at a plant in the store and say, Does this plant make me feel good or does it make me feel bad? It’s like those little decisions. It sounds really silly, but when they’re applied to these big decisions, you know, does this apartment make me feel good or bad? Like, do I want to live in a place where it’s sunny or rainy? Like, if you start making these choices, you kind of start to piece together a life that’s really resonant with you. And I’ve been lucky to be able to do that. And as a result, I’m reaping the benefits of it now and finally starting to plan the future, which is a really weird, cool thing to actually project 30 years into the future and say, God, I hope I’m here because for so long I didn’t want to be here.

Gabe Howard: Well, I am glad you’re here. I appreciate you talking about this. I appreciate you giving people more information. And it’s long been discussed that perhaps people are on antidepressants for too long, that situational depression is supposed to be just that, situational. And you’ve brought up so many incredible points from, hey, Americans are lazy, I’m lazy. Do you want to go through therapy? Do you want to learn new coping skills? Do you want to, you know, give it time and gain experience or do you want the magic pill? I will take the magic pill. But of course, that that might not be in your best interest. It’s a complicated subject. And I believe you said it best when you said we’re looking for simple solutions and this is anything but.

Brooke Siem: I would say my advice to cut out the part about Americans being lazy because I don’t think people are going to like that when it comes to their mental health. Like I

Gabe Howard: I’m fond of saying it though, I’ve got to tell you, it’s the.

Brooke Siem: OK, go for it. Ok, all right.

Gabe Howard: You are not wrong, but we are. We’re a lazy group.

Brooke Siem: I would amend it to say humans are lazy about their emotional health because it’s hard. But as someone who’s been through this, I know how much that would have sent me on a tear ten years ago. So

Gabe Howard: You might be right.

Brooke Siem: [Laughter]

Gabe Howard: Brooke, thank you so much. Her memoir, “May Cause Side Effects,” is available now on Amazon. Brooke, I imagine that you have a social media presence and an online presence. What are all of the places where the listeners can find you?

Brooke Siem: You can find me at BrookeSiem.com. That’s B R O O K E S I E M and that’s across all platforms and also BrookeSiem.com. The book is available wherever books are sold. Amazon, Barnes Noble, your local indie bookstore, who I’m sure would appreciate your support. So I’m just so hoping that it gets out there and helps some people.

Gabe Howard: It is everywhere that you need it to be. Brooke, thank you so much for being here.

Brooke Siem: Thank you so much, Gabe.

Gabe Howard: Oh, you are so very welcome, Brooke. And I want to remind all of our listeners that next week we will have Dr. Mark Horowitz here to give us the medical perspective on, well, everything that Brooke and I have been talking about. I also want to give you a great big thank you for being here. My name is Gabe Howard, and I am the author of “Mental Illness Is an Asshole and Other Observations. I’m also an award-winning public speaker who could be available for your next event. My book is on Amazon, but you can grab a signed copy with free show swag or learn more about me just by heading over to gabehoward.com. Wherever you downloaded this episode, please follow or subscribe to the show. It is absolutely free. And hey, can you do me a favor? Recommend the show to a friend, a family member, or a colleague. Sharing the show is how we grow. I will see everybody next Thursday on Inside Mental Health.

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