Here is an alarming stat: 1/5 people in America is on some form of psychotropic medication. Meaning 1/5 Americans is regularly consuming mind altering substances made by habitually deceitful companies with substantial criminal records who pay 75% of the FDA's drug review program (meaning the agency approving these drugs is funded by the companies whose drugs it's approving). Additionally, there's a well documented revolving door of employment between the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies it oversees, and the FDA doesn't run its own independent studies on the drugs it licenses, but rather reviews and approves based on the studies submitted by the very companies applying for approval.

The body and brain were in a constant state of adjustment, withdrawal, or both, without ever reaching a stable baseline. I watched this firsthand when my mom was cut off cold turkey, her symptoms went berserk. Again, hellish to witness, and I can’t fathom the firsthand experience my mother endured. This is what real, unmanaged withdrawal from these drugs looks like. Plus, there is a documented, legally proven pattern of the industry lying. GlaxoSmithKline paid $3 billion in 2012 to settle criminal and civil charges that included burying negative safety data on Paxil and pushing it on kids it was never proven safe for. The study behind that, “Study 329,” originally claimed Paxil was safe for teenagers. A fully independent re-analysis of the same raw data, years later, found the opposite: no real benefit, and a suicidality link that had been completely covered up. Harvard’s Irving Kirsch went further, analyzing the full trial data for major antidepressants, including data manufacturers never published, and found the difference between drug and placebo was minimal or nonexistent in roughly half of all studies. That literally means for half of these trials, the drug barely outperformed a sugar pill. And that’s not because researchers couldn’t find it, but rather because it wasn’t in the industry’s interest to publicize it. Another example is Prozac. Dr. David Graham, an FDA safety reviewer, found that Eli Lilly excluded 76 of 97 reported cases of suicidality from the post marketing safety data it submitted to the FDA, a finding he flagged in an internal FDA memo in 1990. Separately, past court litigation referenced an internal 1988 Lilly memo, showing the company’s own clinical trials found higher rates of suicide attempts, hostility, violence, and psychosis with Prozac compared to other antidepressants of that era. It gets even deeper than manipulated trials, though. The foundational premise millions of people were prescribed SSRIs under, that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance, specifically low serotonin, was never actually proven. A 2022 review in Molecular Psychiatry, synthesizing decades of the highest quality research on the subject, found no consistent evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin at all. The lead researcher said plainly that patients should never have been told this, and that doing so kept people from making an informed choice about whether to take the drugs in the first place. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the public still believes the chemical imbalance story today. Tens of millions of prescriptions, and the story sold to justify them was never solid. So how many other psych drugs does this same lack of evidence apply to? How many other psych meds, prescribed to millions and millions of people, are built on premises that were never actually substantiated? I’d be willing to bet all of them. And it gets more disturbing when you factor in the rest of the picture: the substantial criminal record of the companies that make these drugs, the fact that the pharmaceutical industry itself pays for over 75% of the FDA’s drug review program, meaning the agency approving these drugs is funded by the companies whose drugs it’s approving, a well documented revolving door of employment between the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies it oversees, and the fact that the FDA doesn’t run its own independent studies on the drugs it licenses, but rather reviews and approves based on the studies submitted by the very companies applying for approval. Then look at how Clancy herself was actually treated. Her nurse Rebecca Jollotta was told the drug Remeron was giving Lindsay intrusive thoughts. She didn’t ask what those thoughts were. She told her that was normal. Remeron carries the FDA’s own boxed warning for increased suicidal thoughts and behavior, and this was the response. Normal. WTF? Normalization now makes it okay?

I know one thing for certain about this Lindsay Clancy trial, and I say this based on my own direct experience watching my mother suffer for years under a fistful of psychotropic medications: Nowhere near enough attention is being paid to the fact that Lindsay Clancy was cycled on and off 13 different psychotropic medications in an absurdly short window of time. For years, I watched my own mother suffer tremendously. I would never wish what my siblings and I, nor what my mother, experienced on anyone. It was hell. She didn’t sleep for days on end, didn’t eat, screamed that it felt like her skin was burning off, screamed that it felt like her brain was being zapped, sat in front of her bathroom mirror staring wide eyed without saying anything, hallucinated that she was 13 years old and I was her father, saw demons and shadowy figures in the room, was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, and attempted to end her life more than once. These drugs don’t just fail to fix people. They mask symptoms, manufacture new ones, and in some cases push people toward harming themselves or someone else—and the industry that profits from them has spent decades making sure the general public doesn’t fully grasp how often that happens. They rip people apart psychologically and physically. They rip families apart, too. I’m not on “team Lindsay” or “team Patrick,” and I don’t know what happened in that house. But the medication piece keeps getting drowned out by true crime theorizing. In the 4 months before the killings, Clancy was pumped through 13 different psychiatric medications, with over 30 total prescriptions as doses got yanked up, down, and swapped, by multiple providers who never once compared notes with each other. The publicly available data backs this up, and they’re not “fringe” in any sense: The FDA’s own 2006 review of 372 antidepressant trials (nearly 100,000 people) found a 2.3x jump in suicidality risk for patients under 25. That’s why every antidepressant in America now carries a black box warning. A 2015 Swedish national study found SSRI users aged 15-24 were convicted of violent crimes at more than 5x the rate of non users (3.3% vs 0.6%). Sertraline in particular stood out among the top-prescribed SSRIs. Roughly 1 in 4 American women is currently on some form of psychiatric medication, per the CDC’s own newest data, nearly double the rate for men. This isn’t a fringe issue at all. It’s mainstream medicine, quietly, on a massive scale. And the problems with rapid switching or cold stopping these drugs, exactly what happened to Clancy, isn’t a fringe theory: Antidepressant discontinuation syndrome is very real and can, at a minimum, trigger brain zaps, insomnia, anxiety, and suicidal ideation within days of stopping. Benzodiazepine withdrawal is one of the most dangerous withdrawal syndromes in all of medicine, capable of triggering, at a minimum, rebound psychosis, seizures, and severe agitation. I watched that happen to my own mother. Cross tapering (stopping one drug abruptly while starting another) can stack withdrawal from the first on top of side effects from the second, leaving a person destabilized from both directions at once. According to the medical system’s own ideas, psychiatric medications typically take 4-6 weeks just to reach full effect, and many require slow, deliberate tapering over weeks specifically to avoid destabilizing the nervous system. Going through 13 drugs in that same window means many of them never had time to even show whether they were “working” (which is a loaded, problematic idea, in and of itself…) before being swapped again. 13 different medications in 4 months is not normal, cautious psychiatric care, or at least it shouldn’t be. But it probably is relatively normal. And that’s the problem: it’s pure pharmacological, psychological chaos, and nobody bats an eye because this is just how the system runs…