Are We Broken Or Overmedicated? What Patients Aren’t Told About Mental Health Medication

There are certain stories that do not simply inform you — they rearrange you.

In 2003, a healthy thirty-seven-year-old man kissed his wife goodnight and went to sleep. He had just begun a dream job at a startup company. He and his wife were planning in vitro treatments to start a family. He was disciplined, responsible, a runner, deeply loved. He did not have a history of depression. He was not spiraling. He was not unraveling. He simply could not sleep.

His doctor handed him a three-week sample pack of an antidepressant and assured him it would take the edge off.

Five weeks later, he hanged himself in the garage.

When Kim Witczak tells this story, she does not speak as a crusader or an ideologue. She speaks as a woman who once trusted. A woman who believed that if something carried serious risk, someone in authority would have warned her. At the time, there were no black box warnings about increased suicide risk during early treatment. There was no public awareness about akathisia — the profound, drug-induced inner agitation that can make a person feel disconnected from their own mind. There was no widespread conversation about off-label prescribing or incomplete clinical transparency. There was only the assumption that prescribed meant safe.

When Woody began describing terrifying sensations — “My head feels like it’s outside my body” — neither of them questioned the medication. Why would they? The doctor said it could take four to six weeks to adjust. He was under stress from a new job. Perhaps this was simply part of the transition. Kim recalls coming home from a work trip and finding her husband collapsed on the kitchen floor, drenched in sweat, sobbing because he did not understand what was happening inside his own mind. They prayed. They practiced breathing exercises. They reassured each other it would pass.

It did not pass.

After his death, a coroner asked whether Woody had been taking any medication. A bottle of Zoloft sat on the kitchen counter. That same day, the front page of the Star Tribune carried an article about a possible link between antidepressants and suicide risk in teens in the United Kingdom. Time, for Kim, split cleanly into before and after.

Grief can hollow a person out. It can silence them permanently. Or it can clarify something so fiercely that silence becomes impossible.

Kim did not set out to challenge an industry. She was a marketing professional, not an activist. She calls herself an accidental advocate. But as she began researching with her brother-in-law, what they uncovered unsettled them deeply. They learned of earlier FDA hearings in the 1990s that had raised concerns about violence and suicide linked to similar medications. They learned that certain clinical trial data had not been fully visible to the public. They learned about akathisia — described in internal language as a state so unbearable that, for some patients, death could feel like relief. They realized this was not simply a tragic anomaly. It was a pattern that had not been adequately confronted.

What followed was not theatrical outrage but disciplined persistence. Kim brought binders of documents to Washington. She testified. She met with regulators who initially regarded stories like hers as isolated incidents. She sat across from pharmaceutical executives and advisory panels while carrying the image of her husband’s final weeks. In 2004 and again in 2006, black box warnings were added to antidepressants for young people, later extended to include those up to age twenty-four. Today, Kim sits on the FDA’s psychopharmacologic advisory committee, participating in discussions about the very medications that once altered the course of her life.

What struck me most in our conversation was not anger. It was precision. She is not anti-medicine. She is not arguing that psychiatric medications have no place. She is asking for informed consent. She is asking that patients and families receive full information — benefits and risks — so that decisions are made consciously rather than reflexively. She is asking that doctors slow down long enough to consider whether non-pharmaceutical interventions might be appropriate before reaching for a prescription pad. She is asking that we remember we are not passive recipients of care, but participants in our own health.

We live in a time when diagnostic language has expanded rapidly. Ordinary human experiences are increasingly categorized and medicalized. One in five Americans now takes a psychiatric medication. Some of this reflects meaningful progress; mental health conversations are more open than in previous generations. Suffering that was once hidden is now acknowledged. But beneath that progress lies an uncomfortable question: are we more broken, or are we more medicated?

After Woody’s death, Kim was offered medication to blunt her grief. She declined. Not because she romanticized pain, but because she understood that numbing it would not restore what had been lost. Pain, she discovered, was not pathology. It was love with nowhere to go. Sitting inside that pain became part of her awakening.

This is not an argument against appropriate treatment. There are lives stabilized and saved by psychiatric medication. It is, however, an argument against reflex. Against unquestioned compliance. Against silencing the small inner voice that asks for clarity.

Kim often repeats a question that has guided her work for two decades: Why not me? If someone had sounded the alarm earlier, perhaps her story would be different. So she chose to become the person who did.

We are living in complex systems where healthcare, regulation, and corporate interests intersect. In such a landscape, the most radical act may not be rebellion, but attention. When something feels off, pause. When a prescription is offered, ask about alternatives and risks. When a diagnosis is suggested, inquire about criteria and long-term implications. When grief or anxiety surfaces, consider what it might be communicating before rushing to silence it.

We do not control everything that happens to us. Kim did not choose her husband’s death. But we do choose how awake we remain inside the systems that shape our lives. This conversation is not about telling you what to think. It is about remembering that you are allowed to question, to think critically and feel deeply at the same time, to trust science without abandoning discernment.

Intuition is not hysteria. It is not ignorance. Sometimes it is wisdom knocking gently, asking to be heard. Thank you for reading and being part of the conversation. I am forever grateful to Kim for her time and her willingness to not only share her story, but help make the world better because with it.

Kim Witczak is a leading global drug safety advocate and speaker with over 25 years professional experience in advocacy, advertising and marketing communications. She is currently a very vocal Consumer Representative on the FDA Advisory committee evaluating new drugs coming to market. Learn more about Kim:

https://www.kimwitczak.com

https://www.woodymatters.com

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