How the Mental Health Industry Has Created a Pill Popping Culture: Cooper Davis

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This is the 30 minute TV version of Jan Jekielek’s interview with Cooper Davis. The longer-form version was released on Epoch TV on January 28, 2025.

🔴 Watch the extended version of this episode: https://ept.ms/4axsaew

At a young age, Cooper Davis was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed a low dose of Ritalin, which helped his ability to focus but caused unwanted side effects. To counteract them, he was prescribed other medications. By age 30, Davis was dependent on six different psychiatric drugs at any given time, what’s commonly known in the mental health community as a “prescription cascade.”

“It’s complicated enough that the scientific consensus will generally say, ‘We don’t quite understand why these drugs work,’” says Davis.

Today, he is executive director of the Inner Compass Initiative, where he addresses America’s mental health crisis and overmedication problem by helping people make informed choices about prescription drugs, diagnoses, and withdrawal
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“Once people experience withdrawal symptoms, they get back on the drug. They treat it as confirmation that they are still mentally ill,” says Davis. “Experiential expertise, expertise gained from your own life, is just as valid—and probably more useful in many, many cases than clinical expertise.”

Davis says that one out of four adults in America and 6 million children are currently taking at least one psychiatric drug.

“That’s going to be inclusive of teenagers, but it is certainly the trend that more and more kids that are younger and younger are being diagnosed and prescribed earlier and earlier.”

CHAPTER TITLES
0:00:01 – Cooper Davis’ Journey with Psychiatric Medications
0:00:33 – Pill Popping Culture in Mental Health
0:04:43 – Debate on Under-Medication vs. Over-Medication
0:07:27 – Types and Effects of Psychiatric Medications
0:09:47 – Cooper Davis Personal Experience with Ritalin
0:18:07 – The Role of the Inner Compass Initiative
0:22:51 – Challenges and Solutions in Mental Health Treatment
0:22:59 – The Potential for a Grassroots Movement
0:23:04 – Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Cooper Davis about so-called ‘side effects’ of psychiatric drugs: “They [psychiatric drugs] have effects, and then they have indirect effects. Side Effects is a marketing term. All direct effects are primary effects. There’s a desired effect, and then there’s everything else, which is generally understood to be a side effect. You’re trying when you’re prescribing or when you’re taking the drug, you’re trying to get that desired effect and then minimize those undesired effects as much as possible. But some of those undesired effects, you don’t even know what they are until you are quite a few years down the road.”

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