Kaitlin Bell Barnet: Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up

Kaitlin Bell Barnett explores how psychiatric drugs taken by adolescents influences their brain, body, and development as they transition into adulthood. To do so, she presents perspectives from multiple sources, including interviews with medical doctors, clinicians, parents, and especially adolescents experiencing the effects of these drugs, in addition to her own personal accounts as a teenager growing up on an anti-depressant. Her book explores widely varied opinions on treating minors with psychiatric drugs, and gives several life experiences of drug-involved children and their parents in order to socially contextualize the process. Quite strikingly, the author achieves a feeling of intimacy with her readers by introducing a few personalities that she refers to throughout the book. Each character represents a distinct type of experience that one might have as an adolescent on medications, as a result of differing environmental factors, personality, genetics, and so on. Throughout the chapters, she explains the unique circumstances that these children experience as a result of being medicated. Although the book is not without limitations, it excels at providing moving insights on real life experiences of medicated adolescents, and certainly would prove beneficial to parents who are considering a similar path for their children, or anyone interested in the phenomenon of psychiatric treatment. …