{"product_id":"dosed-isbn-9780807001455","title":"Dosed","description":"Over the last two decades, we have seen a dramatic spike in young people taking psychiatric medication. As new drugs have come on the market and diagnoses have proliferated, prescriptions have increased many times over. The issue has sparked heated debates, with most arguments breaking down into predictable pro-med advocacy or anti-med jeremiads. Yet, we’ve heard little from the “medicated kids” themselves.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eDosed\u003c\/i\u003e, Kaitlin Bell Barnett, who began taking antidepressants as a teenager, takes a nuanced look at the issue as she weaves together stories from members of this “medication generation,” exploring how drugs informed their experiences at home, in school, and with the mental health professions.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e For many, taking meds has proved more complicated than merely popping a pill. The questions we all ask growing up—“Who am I?” and “What can I achieve?”—take on extra layers of complexity for kids who spend their formative years on medication. As Barnett shows, parents’ fears that “labeling” kids will hurt their self-esteem means that many young children don’t understand why they take pills at all, or what the drugs are supposed to accomplish. Teens must try to figure out whether intense emotions and risk-taking behaviors fall within the spectrum of normal adolescent angst, or whether they represent new symptoms or drug side effects. Young adults negotiate schoolwork, relationships, and the workplace, while struggling to find the right medication, dealing with breakdowns and relapses, and trying to decide whether they still need pharmaceutical treatment at all. And for some young people, what seemed like a quick fix turns into a saga of different diagnoses, symptoms, and a changing cocktail of medications. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The results of what one psychopharmacologist describes as a “giant, uncontrolled experiment” are just starting to trickle in. Barnett shows that a lack of ready answers and guidance has often proven extremely difficult for these young people as they transition from childhood to adolescence and now to adulthood. With its in-depth accounts of individual experiences combined with sociological and scientific context, \u003ci\u003eDosed\u003c\/i\u003e provides a much-needed road map for patients, friends, parents, and those in the helping professions trying to navigate the complicated terrain of growing up on meds.Introduction\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eChapter 1\u003c\/b\u003e Difficult Kids\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eChapter 2\u003c\/b\u003e Playing a Role: The Medicated Kid\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eChapter 3\u003c\/b\u003e School Interventions\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eChapter 4\u003c\/b\u003e Early Rebellions\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eChapter 5\u003c\/b\u003e Something New?\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eChapter 6\u003c\/b\u003e Breakdowns\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eChapter 7\u003c\/b\u003e Side Effects\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eChapter 8\u003c\/b\u003e Complicating Factors\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eChapter 9\u003c\/b\u003e Reassessments\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments\u003cbr\u003e Notes“Sensitive, provocative . . . Rais[es] questions that go far beyond abstract hand-wringing about overmedicated kids.” —Kate Tuttle, \u003ci\u003eBoston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An insightful, timely analysis of an issue I have yet to see anyone confront head-on: the effects of psychotropics on the first generation raised on them from a young age. \u003ci\u003eDosed\u003c\/i\u003e is a book that should be read by everyone concerned about quick fixes for complex problems.” —Lauren Slater, author of \u003ci\u003eOpening Skinner’s Box\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“\u003ci\u003eDosed\u003c\/i\u003e is thoughtful, potent and overdue.” —Paula Span, contributor, the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e’ Science Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The implications of Barnett’s book are important and unnerving.” —Casey Schwartz, \u003ci\u003eThe Daily Beast\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[\u003ci\u003eDosed\u003c\/i\u003e] is thoughtfully written, a wonderful presentation of the full range of the issues everyone should be thinking about when prescribing psychotropics to children and teens, and Kaitlin Bell Barnett does a commendable job of communicating her masterful understanding of a complex topic.” —Dinah Miller, MD, \u003ci\u003eClinical Psychiatry News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The author’s clear rending of the tough questions surrounding this knotty topic should make it required reading for anyone touched by this issue.” —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] disturbing and often heartbreaking debut, journalist and blogger Barnett is...Cogent and thoughtful” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This nuanced examination of the effects of the increased use of medications to change behavior and mood in children, adolescents, and adults is a must-read for advocates and critics alike. Kaitlin Bell Barnett blends personal stories with historical perspective to paint a fascinating picture of how attitudes towards psychiatric disorders and treatment have changed in the United States over the past thirty years.”—Glen R. Elliott, emeritus professor of clinical psychiatry, the University of California, San Francisco; clinical professor (affiliated), the Stanford School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eDosed\u003c\/i\u003e is a fascinating, well-researched,  and very important book. After reading it, I hope that no parent, pediatrician  or psychiatrist will give psychiatric medication to a child or adolescent  without very careful consideration of the potential long-term consequences. Bell  Barnett shows that these medications are often not a ‘quick fix,’ but rather  have deep, lasting impact, not only on physical and emotional health, but also  on a person’s core sense of self.”—Claudia  M. Gold, MD, author of \u003ci\u003eKeeping Your Child in  Mind\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Like the other  young adults she deftly portrays in a series of poignant narratives, Kaitlin  Bell Barnett belongs to 'Generation Rx'—the children of the 1990s who were  medicated with psychoactive drugs, and are now asking how those drugs shaped  their identities. With wisdom, insight, and clear-eyed analysis, \u003ci\u003eDosed\u003c\/i\u003e gives eloquent voice to this  medicated generation, and poses tough questions—to parents, doctors, and  society at large—about how we have treated our children, why, and at what  cost.\"—Stephen S. Hall, author,  \u003ci\u003eWisdom: From Philosophy to  Neuroscience\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eKaitlin Bell Barnett\u003c\/b\u003e is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in numerous national and regional outlets, including the \u003ci\u003eBoston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eNew York Observer\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003ci\u003e Parents\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003ePrevention\u003c\/i\u003e. She lives in New York City with her husband.\u003cb\u003eFrom the Introduction\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I fall hard for coming-of-age stories, and my list of favorite books and movies contains many in this genre, from \u003ci\u003ePride and Prejudice \u003c\/i\u003eto \u003ci\u003eThe Catcher in the Rye\u003c\/i\u003e. The movie \u003ci\u003eGarden State\u003c\/i\u003e,  which starred Zach Braff and Natalie Portman, also struck a chord with  me when it came out in 2004. It dramatizes a few days in the life of  Andrew Largeman, a twenty-six-year-old struggling actor in Los Angeles  who returns to his native New Jersey for his mother’s funeral. Andrew is  nothing if not alienated: he feels disconnected from celebrity-studded  Hollywood as well as from his old hometown, which he hasn’t visited  since leaving for boarding school nearly a decade earlier. For the first  time in sixteen years, Andrew has stopped taking the psychotropic  medications his psychiatrist father prescribed after ten-year-old Andrew  caused an accident that rendered his mother a paraplegic. Like the  illegal drugs his high school buddies take, Andrew’s meds serve as a  metaphor for the feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, and  rootlessness endemic to my generation of twenty-somethings. Judging from  the film’s cult-hit success, its target audience of my peers apparently  found the metaphor apt. When Andrew falls in love with a quirky,  vibrant girl he meets in a doctor’s waiting room, she shows him how to  reengage with his feelings—and the world. Presumably, he leaves the  medications behind.\u003cbr\u003e       For several years, \u003ci\u003eGarden State \u003c\/i\u003eremained my favorite  movie about my generation. It spoke to me as a young person growing up  in turn-ofthe-millennium America—though not as a young \u003ci\u003emedicated \u003c\/i\u003eperson.  In fact, I completely forgot psychiatric drugs were even mentioned.  Funny, because I myself have been taking medication since high school,  and \u003ci\u003eGarden State \u003c\/i\u003eis one of just a couple of films I know of to  allude to the psychological impact of growing up taking psychotropic  drugs. But although it touches on this important phenomenon, the film  never really examines its underlying assumptions that medications numbed  Andrew’s pain and guilt, and that getting off them allows him once  again to experience the agony and ecstasy of life.\u003cbr\u003e      For the first time in history, millions of young Americans are in a  position not unlike Andrew’s: they have grown up taking psychotropic  medications that have shaped their experiences and relationships, their  emotions and personalities, and, perhaps most fundamentally, their very  sense of themselves. In \u003ci\u003eListening to Prozac\u003c\/i\u003e, psychiatrist Peter  Kramer’s best-selling meditation on the drug’s wide-ranging impact on  personality, Kramer said that “medication rewrites history.” He was  referring to the way people interpret their personal histories once they  have begun medication; what they thought was set in stone was now open  to reevaluation. What, then, is medication’s effect on young people, for  whom there is much less history to rewrite? Kramer published his book  in 1993, at a time of feverish—and, I think, somewhat  excessive—excitement about Prozac and the other selective serotonin  reuptake inhibitor antidepressants, or SSRIs, that quickly followed on  its heels and were heralded as revolutionary treatments for a variety of  psychiatric problems. For most people, I suspect, medications are  perhaps less like a total rewriting of the past than a palimpsest. They  reshape some of one’s interpretations about oneself and one’s life but  allow traces of experience and markers of identity to remain. The  earlier in life the drugs are begun, the fewer and fainter those traces  and markers are likely to be. All told, the psychopharmacological  revolution of the last quarter century has had a vast impact on the  lives and outlook of my generation—the first generation to grow up  taking psychotropic medications. It is therefore vital for us to look at  how medication has changed what it feels like to grow up and to become  an adult.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e • • •\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Our society is not used to thinking about the fact that so many young  people have already spent their formative years on pharmaceutical  treatment for mental illness. Rather, we focus on the here-and-now,  wringing our hands about “overmedicated kids.” We debate whether  doctors, parents, and teachers rely too heavily on meds to pacify or  normalize or manage the ordinary trials of childhood and adolescence.  Often, the debate has a socioeconomic dimension that attributes  overmedication either to the striving middle and upper-middle classes,  or to the social mechanisms used to control poor children and foster  children. We question the effectiveness and safety of treating our youth  with these drugs, most of which have not been tested extensively in  children and are not government-approved for people under eighteen. We  worry about what the drugs will do to developing brains and bodies, both  in the short and long term. The omnipresent subtext to all this: what  does the widespread “drugging” of minors say about our society and our  values? Certainly, these questions are worth debating—even agonizing  over. But they ought not to constitute the be-all and end-all of our  society’s conversation about young people and psychiatric drugs,  particularly with millions of medicated teens transitioning into  adulthood. Too much of the discussion occurs in the abstract, and drugs  too easily become a metaphor, as in \u003ci\u003eGarden State, \u003c\/i\u003efor a variety  of modern society’s perceived ills: the fast pace of life and the  breakdown of close social and family ties; a heavy emphasis on  particular kinds of academic and professional achievement; a growing  intolerance and impatience with discomfort of any sort. Far too rarely,  though, do we consult young people themselves. How do \u003ci\u003ethey \u003c\/i\u003efeel about taking medication? How do \u003ci\u003ethey \u003c\/i\u003ethink it has shaped their attitudes, their sense of themselves, their academic and career paths, their lives\u003ci\u003e? \u003c\/i\u003eHow do they envision medication affecting their futures?\u003cbr\u003e      Focusing on people who needed therapeutic intervention early in  life and who continued to use medication for an extended period of time  can help us get past the are-they-or-aren’t-they nature of the  “overmedicated kids” debate. By assessing what medication has actually  meant for my peers, I hope to get at something more intimate and more  complex than either the psychotropic true believers or the total  skeptics allow themselves to consider. “A prescription becomes an event  that generates fantasies, wishes, concerns, and meaning,” write the  social scientists Tally Moses and Stuart Kirk in an analysis of young  people’s experiences of psychotropic meds. “It structures one’s own  expectations and those of others in ways that are not necessarily  intended or foreseen.”\u003cbr\u003e      As Moses and Kirk suggest, the experience of taking psychotropic  drugs is more than just popping a pill, and these drugs often become a  part of the self in ways children and teenagers could not have imagined  when they swallowed their first dose. Now that the first generation of  medicated kids is entering adulthood, we have an invaluable opportunity  to hear about their experiences with psychotropic drugs, and their  assessment of those experiences. In addition to looking at the family,  medical, and educational circumstances in which drugs are prescribed and  taken, that is what this book sets out to do.\u003cbr\u003e      My cohort lives with some powerful contradictions. On the one  hand, we have grown up with the idea that prolonged sadness, attention  problems, obsessions and compulsions, and even shyness are brain  diseases that can—and ought—to be treated with medication, just as a  bodily disease like diabetes ought to be treated with insulin. The  1990s, sometimes called “the Decade of the Brain,” encompassed a period  of unprecedented growth in understanding how the brain works, which  generated enormous enthusiasm about the prospects for discovering the  underlying mechanisms behind mental illness, enthusiasm that many say  was overwrought and premature. Direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical  advertising on TV, which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration  authorized in 1997, has allowed drug companies to define the public’s  understanding of mental illness and psychiatric medications—and this is  especially true, I think, for young people who knew no other paradigm.  Even as we grew up, though, immersed in the idea of an “imbalance” of  particular brain chemicals—an outdated theory that has not held up to  the science—we have inherited the American ideal of self-sufficiency, of  solving one’s problems through one’s own resourcefulness. As we’ve  sought to forge our identities, we have often struggled to reconcile the  two.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e • • •\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e It took me a while to conceive of my medicated peers as a coherent  group, much less one deserving of a book-length study. Until recently, I  would not even have included myself in the category of people whose  formative years were shaped by psychotropic drugs, let alone shaped in  any profound way. When I began taking Prozac at age seventeen, I didn’t  spend a lot of time contemplating whether I’d lose some essential aspect  of my identity, and I certainly didn’t consider myself a part of any  larger societal phenomenon. I was only vaguely aware that various drugs  like Prozac had become available in the late 1980s and through the  1990s, and that they had helped a lot of people.\u003cbr\u003e      Before taking Prozac, I had spent two years in therapy with first  one therapist and then another. To a depressed adolescent, two years  feels as though it’s an eon. I thought it was time to give medication a  try. I was far less concerned with the implications of taking a  psychiatric drug than I was with banishing the exhausting and oppressive  symptoms of my pervasive unhappiness: the apathy and hopelessness, the  irritability and boredom, the pessimism and incessant self-criticism.  For several years these symptoms had seemed to colonize my entire being,  and when they abated after a couple of months of Prozac, I credited the  medication. I figured a “chemical imbalance” must be to blame, and  skipped the philosophizing. Even when Prozac seemed to stop working five  years later and I began, in desperation, trying a battery of other  antidepressants and antianxiety drugs, I still basically swallowed the  pills and left it at that. The drugs only mattered to me insofar as they  treated, or failed to treat, my symptoms.\u003cbr\u003e      Then, shortly before my twenty-fifth birthday, seven years into my life on medication, I read a column in the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003eabout  a young woman in her early thirties who had been taking antidepressants  almost continuously since she was fourteen. Richard A. Friedman, the  young woman’s psychiatrist and a frequent contributor to the science  section of the \u003ci\u003eTimes, \u003c\/i\u003enoted that the patient “credited the  medication with saving her life.” But, he wrote, she had also begun to  struggle with the “equally fundamental question” of how the drugs had  shaped her psychological development and, ultimately, her identity.  Noting the huge increase in the number of youths taking antidepressants  and other psychotropic drugs, Friedman postulated that his patient was  just one of innumerable people entering adulthood with such concerns.  With little scientific data on how drugs affect the developing body and  mind, he added, these were problems for which few answers were  forthcoming.\u003cbr\u003e      I was intrigued. Since I didn’t relate to the woman’s doubts and  anxieties, I wondered whether starting medication at a younger age than I  did, at a more vulnerable and unstable period in her emotional  development, had contributed to her discomfort. I can’t say the article  suddenly prompted me to start questioning who I’d be had I never taken  Prozac, but it did make me intensely curious about my peers. \u003ci\u003eWho are these people, \u003c\/i\u003eI wondered, \u003ci\u003eand why are they so ambivalent about their medication? \u003c\/i\u003eI didn’t know anyone who fit the bill, so I began looking.\u003cbr\u003e      I talked to friends of friends, current college students and  recent graduates I met through campus mental health groups, and I joined  online forums for mood and behavior disorders, both those devoted  specifically to psychotropic medication and more general sites where  people post their medical data and histories, such as Patients-Like-Me.  Since I identified myself as a journalist, I suspect most people didn’t  want to talk to me at all, fearing public disclosure of a private,  online identity. Others shared my initial, uncomplicated assessment: the  medication worked, therefore, they must have had a biochemical  malfunction in their brains, as much a disease as diabetes and no more  profound.\u003cbr\u003e      The more stories I heard, though, the more it seemed that even  people who believed, on balance, that the drugs helped them—somehow made  them more stable, motivated, focused, reliable, or upbeat—still  entertained plenty of ambivalence about issues such as what side effects  the medications caused and how to understand their identity while  taking a drug that affected their mood, behavior, and maybe even their  entire personality. Some harbored these suspicions from the get-go;  others developed them over time. “At first, I thought, ‘Oh, okay, yeah,  that’ll make me feel better,’ ” one young woman from outside Boston told  me of her experience beginning antidepressants at age eleven. “And then  it entered my consciousness more that it was something more serious . .  . that had stronger effects on my being.”","brand":"Beacon Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305480343781,"sku":"NP9780807001455","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780807001455.jpg?v=1767725558","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/dosed-isbn-9780807001455","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}