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Rethinking mental health beyond medication

·57 min·3 clips

Sell argues that psychiatric medication can hurt the very people it is supposed to help.

1. America Out Loud News' Bregan Hour centers on Tara Lynn Sell, Ph.D., and the topic of mental health beyond medication. 2. Dr. Peter Bregan and Ginger Bregan host Sell, who is described as a licensed psychotherapist and not a prescriber. 3. The episode asks how to support people when psychiatric medication, brain health, sleep, stress, and nutrition are all part of the picture. 4. Bregan says Sell specializes in cases where standard explanations and treatments fall short, and Sell says she works on filling a service gap. 5. Sell says she has spent about 10 years of a 20-plus-year psychology career working on deprescribing and reading Peter Bregan's writings. 6. She says Bregan's term “spellbound” gave her a word for her own experience on psychiatric medication. 7. Bregan defines medication spellbinding as psychoactive substances making it hard for a person to assess whether they are doing better or worse. 8. He gives the example of a patient who says after one week on Prozac, “I've never felt better in my whole life,” while a therapist raises the dose. 9. Sell connects that idea to nosognosia, which she describes as not recognizing one's own deficits. 10. Bregan compares the effect to stroke-related changes he experienced after an August stroke affecting the ventral tegmentum of his thalamus. 11. Sell says she sees similar limits in people who are medicated, including loved ones who notice changes before the patient does. 12. She says the phrase “psychiatric medication, the thing that's supposed to help you hurts you” is difficult for many people to accept. 13. Sell says mental health workers are often trained to refer side effects back to prescribers rather than address medication changes themselves. 14. She says prison work taught her how institutions use manipulative language to keep people compliant and how manualized therapy is driven by liability. 15. Sell recounts bringing omega-3 fatty acid research on aggression to a special prison treatment team and being told, “you are not a dietician.” 16. She says that moment pushed her to notice how often staff discussed adding more medications instead of questioning existing ones. 17. Sell describes her own antidepressant history, saying she was on medication for six years and that it almost ruined her marriage. 18. She says pandemic-era media coverage pushed only one narrative about mental health and that she refused to keep repeating “how bad” everything was. 19. The conversation is informal, personal, and argumentative, with the hosts and guest trading stories, validating each other's language, and ending at a break. 20. Listeners interested in deprescribing, psychiatric medication effects, and therapy outside prescriber roles will get the most from this episode. 21. Listeners wanting a clinical debate that treats psychiatric medication as universally benign may skip this episode.

As heard by us

A candid, patient-centered discussion of deprescribing and mental health beyond standard answers.

The conversation brings Dr. Peter Bregan and Ginger Bregan together with Tara Lynn Sell, Ph.D., a licensed psychotherapist working in the space where standard explanations and treatments start to run out.

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Why you'd press play

You want a frank take on mental health care when medication is not the whole answer.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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