well i'm going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming out tonight on the big picture. america is filled with overprescribed pill popping teenagers heart of the psychotropic drugs teenagers take affect them as they grow and develop and what does this mean for us as a nation last kaitlin bell barno and tonight's conversations with great minds also alan was thinks the congressional progressive caucus is filled with communists but a maturity of americans agree with the caucuses new budget for all so does that

mean of a jury of americans or communists who pose that question of more of the knights guests in our big picture rumble and take with one of the most important elections in our history on the horizon this year could be a make it or break it for america's future how we come together to create a lasting change in this country so badly it's. going to be for tonight's conversations with great minds as caitlin bella barnett hill and as a journalist blogger and author she writes about mental health topics for the huffington post about young people's experience medications at my meds myself a blog at the psychology website psych central she held positions at the atlanta constitution journal in st louis post dispatch as worked as a freelance journalist for a variety of publications including the new york observer and parents magazine she graduated dartmouth college as well as the columbia university journalism school kidman is also the author of the new book joe just medication generation grows up

and she joins us now from our studios in new york city caitlin welcome. thanks so much for having me thanks for joining us tonight you write that your generation is the first in history to have a certain a significant percentage grow up in psychiatric or psychotropic medications mind and emotional during that occasions what does that mean for us as a culture and for the future of your generation. well i think that it means that a significant percentage of people have really had their personalities shaped by these medications and i think it's hard to say in any one single way what exactly that means which is why i took an entire book to say it. different people i think are shaped in very different and very diverse ways by these medications and also i think it's important to note that you know when when we say

medications as a class i'm making a generalization but there are many different kinds of psychotropic medications we have kinds to treat a.d.h. the kinds of treat depression kinds to treat more you know severe conditions like bipolar disorder or even schizophrenia and different medications that affects people as they say differently depending on their circumstances and the circumstances you know under which they're taken. one of the most important things that i think that i would identify just right off the bat is did the child have a choice in taking the medications to take it to ask for them or request or was this a course that situation you talk about how people are shaped by the medications. the generation that was shaped by the great depression it is well documented in the impact that it had on them and how it changed in altered their behavior

particularly canonically but socially as well and then the generation that i grew up with were in elementary school the bell would go off and we jump under our desks and cover our eyes and ears so it wouldn't be blinded by the nuclear flash that you know sort of these are going to get us. these kind of things these are generational experience externalities what you're describing is maybe for the first time in a long time in our history arguably some cultures that use psychoactive plants maybe there might be some kind of analogy but but this is an internal process this is going on inside people's heads. what's the difference between the two and how does that change the outcome. yes i think tom that's a really really good way of characterizing and i think that. the fact is that we don't quite know the answer and one reason that i really wanted to write the book was that we don't know yet exactly how this generation is going to be shaped

because we don't have the scientific evidence to be able to say how do these drugs affect developing minds in developing bodies so what i did is i set out to write the book from a very qualitative kind of a standpoint asking the young people themselves how did it feel to you in your particular circumstances when you were growing up to take these medications and so i was telling individual people's stories and i was trying to extrapolate of course from those stories and make them generalizations about the kinds of different realms like school and relationships and what it's like to have changing symptoms for example and contending with these kinds of disorders. but. i i did want to make a point that the circumstances really make a huge difference in that sometimes the young people themselves right off the bat

didn't know exactly how they've been affected they had a sense that something had affected bound and it was integral to the way they'd grown up and their sense of self but when i asked them they really wanted to talk to me that they weren't quite sure how it had affected them and you've been in your business on my eyes open question yeah you've been trained as both a historian and journalist. i've pointed out a fascinating juxtaposition with those brilliant analysis in the books in the book i'm curious of the various stories that you tell in the book and you're telling these stories to get through the ones of all these different people. and your own experience what moved you most and what did you whose stories moves you the most and whose stories or what stories taught you the most or perhaps surprised you. well i think there were

a couple of stories that moved me the most you know i think one that will also move a lot of readers is that of the boy that i call in the book paul he was a foster child and he was very much medicated against his will. he grew up in very difficult circumstances where he was abused he couldn't even disclose all of the details of what happened to him because it was too psychologically painful for him he still hasn't processed everything that went on in his biological parents household so he was taken from now. almost immediately he was put on medication for a.d.h. he. he with acting out in foster homes. the different foster parents couldn't handle him he was beating up other children he was just. intolerable he balance from house to house to house they put him on progressively have more heavy

duty medication and you just feel so terrible for this kid because what you see is instead of him getting a loving family that really wants to take care of him and instead of love instability you see him getting pills and not only is he getting the pills but he's not giving any sitting him down and explaining why he's getting the pills which i think is so important if you're going to give children medication they really need to understand why you can't just drug from up and not explain why they're taking these medications so it's really awful and now when he looks back on that he says he was drugged which is the term that in general i don't like i think i think it's a little melodramatic and sensationalistic but i think in his case it it maybe is fair to say so i just think that's that's so sad he just longed to be adopted he just wanted somebody to lie. that's one story the other is that if the character

who i call elizabeth. she's still struggling to find medication several of these young people are actually are still struggling but she particular is really still struggling with some other health problems as well and she's struggling to find psychiatric medications that will that she can integrate and have worked with those other health problems and just for years and years and years she was trying different medications couldn't get them to work on going struggle it wasn't really clear. what exactly her problem was and that is a recurring theme that i saw in a lot of people that i interviewed and it was very difficult for them to contend with i think if you're a guy with a single disorder a single clear disorder at least you can say ok i have a diagnosis i have are how depression i'm going to accept that you know yes it's

a label but you can choose to adopt the label or not adopt the label as you want and you can you know why you're taking the medication which again as i say is i think it's so important. if you have if it's not clear what your problem is and you're just dealing with these really troubling symptoms and the doctors don't know what to do or one doctor is calling up one thing and then you go to a different psychiatrist and he's calling it something else and or your symptoms are changing over the years i think that is so difficult and i really really sympathize. with the young people who are going through that this particular young woman elizabeth was diagnosed initially as a as a young teenager with a.d.h. she and depression and those diagnoses changed over time and it just it wasn't clear what was causing what and even as i was interviewing her it was clear she was

really still struggling and i really felt for her. i'm curious if. the experience of constantly visiting doctors. might be for or being dependent upon them alternately a lot of these kids you describe it would draw all the bonds you know that might actually start a whole new round if there's this sense among these kids in your generation who've grown up medicated that they have to depend on an older authority figure that would be the doctor how that is affecting the generation. yes i think. that's a great point i am i think that at some point there's a lot of frustration i think you know not initially but after a while you get a sense that almost that you know you're just order you know your symptoms better than the doctor does and

a lot of this comes from the nature of our medical system which is that you tend to change insurance a whole lot and young people are very mobile especially young adults so we're moving from say the a city we're moving from job to job and not me it probably doesn't mean that we're also moving from doctor to doctor also the nature of our medical care is that we have pediatric doctors and we have adult doctors so that means that at a certain point your pediatrician or your child psychiatrist who is prescribing your medication as nice as they are they're going to say you know why i'm sorry i really can't see. and so there is so much transition there that you're not going to probably know your doctor all that well and you know even the most patient patients i think are going to get a little frustrated and feel like they sort of know themselves better than the doctor does you know the other problem is that we see these fifteen minute med

checks which that's again just part of the nature of care and how weezer start high tourist or if you're a general practitioner prescribing the medication going to get you really know you in that short period of time it's almost like a reward to force your kids bouncing around we'll be right back with more conversations with great minds with kate o'beirne afterward. wealthy british style. markets finance scandal. find out what's really happening to the global economy

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ok maggie conversations are great minds of hate with bill of our net cable as a journalist blogger and author she writes about mental health topics for the huffington post about young people's experiences of medications and my meds myself a blog at the psychology website of psych central and she's the author of the new book ghost medication generation grows kalen. prognosis looking looking forward your generation. kids and young people in their twenty's and early thirty's. who were the first

generation to even have psychoactive drugs available to them and you know outside alcohol and pot but i mean serious drugs that if you don't take them you get a blow back you get and you have to go to a doctor to see and i think that these things that we've been talking about. your generation how do you think that experience is going to affect the middle age as that generation as your generation reaches into their forty's and fifty's or thirty even their thirty's you know through their thirty's how do you think that that's going to affect them as they're moving through that phase of adulthood and also if i can throw to for as you hear. might this have something to do this being the first generation the kind of the pros or generation the ritalin generation i think have something to do with why people are getting married so much later and why they're having children so much later than historically they have.

that's really interesting well so for the first question i think some of this will have to do with whether they stay on their medications or not i think that's a huge question for a lot of people. they're trying to decide whether they should stay on the medications and a lot of them are really trying to get off and that's something that incidentally i did find in my research a lot of us i should say since i take these medications as well myself and have since high school we don't want to be on on these drugs it's no fun and a lot of us of have tried several times in fact not to be on the medications so i think that's that's part of the question you know will will they stay on the medication will they successfully will they be able to get off and will they find an alternative. perhaps we'll have some reform of our health care system perhaps.

the health care reform go will conceivably flarm the structure and the reimbursement system so that may be therapy is reimbursed a little more generously perhaps a and not just medications are privileged so that will be possible for many more people to actually try therapy as an option which i support. so i think that's that's the one question. i also know that as a. another question although i'm a little more skeptical about how quickly it will happen you know it will be the big pharma develop other treatments and how effective will those treatments. you know they are experimenting with gene therapy a little bit that's i think pretty far down the road but you know e.c.t. is coming after a convulsive therapy is actually coming back into vogue and is much safer now is so

that's that's part of it. and i'm sorry remind me of have your second question here is what the people married getting married many babies later but but if i can if i can just interrupt you you mentioned you see t. i mean this people brings up kind of one flew over the cuckoo's nest kind of stuff . aren't we isn't the subtext of all this that we're looking at a radical medicalization of an entire generation when previous generations rarely ever saw the dr. yeah i think that is one way of seeing it i think that. in some way is it's medical association that just is happening at a much younger age i think for instance the baby boomers as they certainly see their share of characters and they take their share of drugs just didn't happen quite so

young of any age i think it's far is getting married. a little older i think there are a lot of factors that play into that but perhaps you know this could be one factor that many of my peers are are still struggling i don't think it has to just do with the fact that they're taking medication but perhaps the fact that they maybe are struggling with some psychological disorders or psychological issues that they don't have fully worked out and they unlike in other generations they feel they need to have issues worked out whereas in previous generations i'm not saying people didn't have those quote unquote issues but they would have just shunted them aside probably and gotten married anyway so. to to what it we talked about these drugs people you know these drugs. shaping

their experience as a as a kind of a culture of. i'm curious to what extent it has caused them to lose experience or perhaps even a sense of self or lose contact with with. if you use the phrase genuine emotions because it implies there are genuine ones but i don't i don't have an alternative for that. but is there a sense of was of sulfur and disconnection that comes with. think some people do experience. some sort of emotional numbing is a well known side effect of especially for instance antidepressants the into six hot. acts that are being increasingly used for example now in younger children and which are certainly being prescribed if you look at the statistics to people for instance in their twenty's. i don't know that it's an emotional numbing the so much

as the general sort of is sedation effect people sometimes say they feel like they're ordered drug just generally or worse a gaited. that's interesting is i've actually heard people describe something like that with medication where they feel that they were more creative or more funny when they didn't take their their stimulants and that surprised me before i started doing my research i didn't think that was going to be the case and even quite young children will complain about that so so they even quite young children is what i'm saying expand do experience i think a sense of loss of aspects of their personality that they hold quite dear the advantage with the medication of course is that it's quite short acting so if they want to get those parts of their personality back they can take what's called the

common medication vacation which is maybe that's a little bit too light hearted a term but it is something people use they will just stop taking their medication over the summer for example when they don't need it for school and they can in sort of a. way get those parts of themselves back that's a little harder to do with an antidepressant where it takes weeks and weeks to work and then it takes weeks for your body to readjust to not having it in your system you know. i'm curious first of all what the numbers lloyd what we're going to people and at what ages are these codes. well you know the numbers have been a little bit of a more for me i have to confess during my research there's always a but here quite a significant lag time for the the epidemy all adjusts to study this

they can't get their hands on the statistics especially the national level statistics until many years after the fact so it had something like a ten year lag time before they can even analyze the statistics and i'm not quite sure why that is. the the best kind of estimates that that i can get is that such in the ninety's you know something like six percent of children were taking some kind of sake a terrific drug and i suspect that probably it was even a little higher than that that it was slate we have a reported and they you know it increased from there the latest you know statistics that we're seeing currently part adults of course you know you're seeing the familiar you know slightly more than one in ten for example take an antidepressant and we're seeing these these large increases for drugs like

a typical interests at heart x. to be honest i have not seen the very latest statistics for children. and. the percentage of children. who very recently take psychotherapist medication and i think that's again because of the slide time. i'm curious if when you were researching the book you came up. you came across or or bumped into any of the various anti med folks like the scientologists or the real evangelical event evangelists for meds the farmer routes or companies or p.r. flacks. your experience with either of those if you have. i yes i i did come across some of the scientologists and some of those other groups through the mind freedom take people to be honest i really tried to avoid people on

both sides. i thought i had a pretty good sense of what the real zealots on either side were going to say and what i was really interested in is hearing from the people in the middle because i think that this does tend to turn into such a polarized to be. and what i'm interested in really is is the nuance and i don't really want to hear from. the people who are pushing these drugs the the farmer graps who i think have had far too much influence already and they certainly have huge dollars to spend and they get their voices out there and the scientologists i mean i i consider them incredibly. incredibly fringe group and you know there are certainly people who have taken these medications and think that they're incredibly evolved i did talk to some people like who have had

very negative experiences with medications i don't want to say that i ignored them altogether so i did try to take some of the more reasonable people in that group seriously but like i say i was really more interested in the people who. take took medications were willing to give medications a try. but recognize that they were imperfect and i was curious you know given that these are imperfect tools what are the ways that they've affected you it's a remarkable book and remarkable reporting a dose of medication generation grows up people and bill clinton thanks so much for being with us. thank you so much for having me tom pleasure to see this and other conversations of the great minds go to our website conversations of great minds dot com. coming up after the break how do we stop alec from turning america into the

wild wild west and are we really a nation filled with communists all that margin as big picture rubble. it. is easy.

to. see. it.