Cooper Davis

My ADHD/stimulant story, as told to Ethan Brooks for @TheAtlantic, for a podcast feature called Scripts—about the pills we take for our brains, and the stories we tell ourselves about them YouTube: youtu.be/B1GnowLnpdc?si… podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rad…

‘Uncertainty tolerance’ is the greatest indicator for your quality of life

I think part of what makes this account’s work so satisfying is they are doing a form of pattern recognition that is computerlike in many ways but actually requires a soul to pull off. Proof humans are still on top

@RyanMalphrus This is true for lots of things We don’t prepare our children to skillfully and intentionally inhabit many of the roles they are likely to take in life (mother, father, friend, taxpayer, consumer)

Alfred Adler What a perspective, that I drop out of context on purpose 😁 What do you all think?

I would like a massive directory of all the things that cannot be reproduced digitally

I spent the last month obsessed with finding colors that can't be displayed on a conventional screen. This is what I found. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/whe…

@KetoCounselor @wjwmhlf Amazing

Yes by all means. Encourage people to continuously experience the effects of slowly debilitating symptoms and the devastation of chronic disease for as long as possible to hold onto a strange eating bias that cannot be supported by the literature.

Excellent and rational response to the dismissiveness being directed towards claims about the potential severity of SSRI withdrawal

Sometimes AI is right

And then I want all the covers of So Long Marianne including the one that Macaulay Culkin did

Can someone help me figure out the most efficient way to make an Apple Music playlist that includes all the available covers of Alberto Balsam in existence?

if a toddler puts a sticker on you, that’s a sign of great respect in their culture

Allen Francis', chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-IV taskforce, letter to the Guardian on the 'overdiagnosis' of psychiatric disorder.

@atomicaceso @DanielCohrsMD @EllenBarryNYT @nytimes Understandable This podcast isn’t for ppl like you and me It’s for ppl who are basically brand new to the topic and might also be long term users It’s a gentle introduction

@DanielCohrsMD @Cooperdavis @EllenBarryNYT @nytimes I don’t want to listen to a podcast about antidepressants that doesn’t cover the severe withdrawal topic.

Great work from @EllenBarryNYT on today’s The Daily podcast, breaking down the “open secret” that doctors are far better at getting people ON psych drugs than off them R.F.K. Jr.’s Newest Mission: Getting Us Off Antidepressants nytimes.com/2026/06/22/pod… via @NYTimes

@StigmaB47868 @MattZirwas @joannamoncrieff I think you are much more attractive when you avoid absolutes

@Cooperdavis @MattZirwas @joannamoncrieff Moncrieff jumped the shark years ago. She offers nothing beyond grossly offending people who live with MI.

After a day debating @joannamoncrieff's views on antidepressants I learned something useful. That SSRIs produce a generally altered mental state is meaningful and under appreciated by people outside psychiatry. And it's not some 'newfangled' idea - it was the original view of psych drugs and Lilly/Pfizer did a disservice to the field pushing the idea that SSRIs were a targeted correction of a specific, known pathophysiology. Moncrieff named it, formalized it, and forced the field to confront it. That’s a genuine contribution. The alcohol analogy even works, sort of. Alcohol and SSRIs are both psychoactive, just like a praying mantis and a tiger are both predators. But she became so attached to the idea and pushed it to such an extreme that she became self-discrediting and discredited a useful insight that could have benefited the general public. The claim that there's no role for chronic use of any psych drug doesn’t survive contact with the evidence and it isn't credibly debatable to anyone who's seen a psychotic schizophrenic repeatedly relapse off therapy. SSRIs are the closest case, but at best you can argue that lots of people didn't/don't understand the risks, not that they don't help anyone. Clozapine keeps people alive in a condition that is obviously biologically based on heritability, separated-twin and adoption data. The drug-centred framing could have been a real correction to the overselling of the targeted correction of a chemical-imbalance story that filtered out of psychiatry and into primary care and the general public. Instead it got pushed to an extreme that’s plainly false and the false version buried the useful insight that could have helped millions and millions.

I hear you, and agree that there’s a lot of important issues that aren’t included here That being said, I think that there’s a lot of value in just focusing on one issue, from one vantage point, at a time, especially when the task at hand is fundamentally about getting the public to rethink things that they’ve maybe been encouraged to take for granted Hearing the host reflect on his own relationship to SSRI drugs, being shocked by the lack of evidence for long term use, and wondering out loud about why he is still taking them after 10 years and whether his own lack of personal agency in stopping them is the result of some degree of self-infantilization that comes down through a culture that maybe expects more from medical experts than is reasonable…..all of this is hugely meaningful and potentially impactful for the Daily’s massive listenership and would be a lot less effective if it were less focused There’s always more to be said but I think the process of cultural change is always incremental

Really? I’m kind of surprised to see you say that. I want to be charitable in my interpretation of this piece, and I’m glad to see any press coverage of the issue, but her complete lack of coverage of protracted/severe withdrawal was pretty glaring. As she said in the pod, she covers mental health, and she has had many people personally message her to tell their stories, no doubt of debilitating withdrawal. Yet, she says that withdrawal symptoms that persist beyond a few weeks are thought to represent relapse by most psychiatrists, and then literally says nothing else on the matter. The overmedicalization summit consisted primarily of stories of iatrogenic harm, but these weren’t mentioned at all either. Iatrogenic harm from these meds was remarkably absent from a pod about deprescribing. It actually didn’t even really make sense narratively— she talks about people microtapering, but then gives no air time to the possibility of withdrawal symptoms beyond a few weeks.

The people who will matter most in your life arrive without spectacle, just quiet steady unremarkable souls who simply refused to leave when everything got ugly, who kept showing up with their plain boring dependable faces when the brilliant ones, those luminous magnetic captivating creatures who lit up every room they blessed with their dazzling exhausting presence, they were the first to disappear and it will take you years to understand that God sent the flashy ones to wake you up and the quiet ones to keep you alive

No it isn’t. It’s not “bunk”, Lauren has nothing to gain by lying about such a mortifying and personal experience and i don’t think it’s kind or helpful of you to respond to her testimony that way. Further, there’s nothing here that is “antipsychiatry”; SSRIs and Psychiatry are two entirely different subjects and they shouldn’t be conflated. As you yourself have pointed out many times in the past, most of these drugs are prescribed by non-psychiatrists (at least in the U.S.) and, very often, off label, for a whole panoply of issues, not constrained to psychiatric practice. Psychiatry is so much more than drug prescribing, and many very serious and respected psychiatrists share our serious concerns about the lack of awareness of possible adverse effects of these drugs among both patients and prescribers (again, most of whom are not even psychiatrists) I believe that the field of psychiatry is changing, and a lot of that change is being driven by people who are choosing to take Lauren and others like her more seriously. Some will continue to ignore her, and of course some will openly mock and ridicule, but I don’t think those behaviors are emblematic of the profession overall.

I made a dream machine adapted from the original William S Burroughs schematics using a 72 rpm turntable and it caused a severe epileptic seizure at my gallery show The gallery-goer individual was ultimately unharmed but I myself was from that point viewed as a bit monstrous and my access to the community sculpture studio was unilaterally revoked