← More at erikpeers.comI'm Erik Peers, an Executive Coach. I work with senior people coming off prescribed psychotropics while the career is still running. I write reviews of books that have informed the way I work over the years.
May Cause Side Effects
Summary
A memoir of fifteen years on antidepressants, roughly ten thousand pills, prescribed at fifteen after her father's sudden death — and the year of withdrawal that followed once she finally set out to find who she was without them.
Why It Matters
Siem spent fifteen years on medication that was, on paper, working, and was still thinking about ending her life at the end of it. I see the paper-working version of that constantly — people functioning well enough that nobody around them, sometimes including their own doctor, ever asks whether the underlying thing got addressed.
Review
Siem was prescribed antidepressants at fifteen, in the weeks after her father died suddenly. Fifteen years and roughly ten thousand pills later, she was still, by her own account, thinking about ending her life — the exact outcome the medication was supposed to prevent. That contradiction is where this book starts: if the drugs were working, why was she still there?
By then she'd built a public, successful-looking life, including a win on the television competition Chopped. A remote-work opportunity came up not long after, around the same time a question from her own psychiatrist stuck with her: who would she be without the drugs? She decided to find out, with that same doctor overseeing the process, and spent the year that followed finding out while working from a string of different countries.
That year is the bulk of the book, and it isn't softened for the reader. Withdrawal brought the suicidal thoughts back. Siem writes about it plainly. She is equally direct about how much of what she felt that year belonged to withdrawal and how much belonged to grief for her father and a chaotic upbringing that never really got processed — by her own account, even she can't always tell the two apart.
None of my clients started on antidepressants at fifteen, grieving a parent. But the shape of what she describes is familiar: years on something that is, on paper, working, while the thing underneath it never actually got addressed. An executive points to a title, a trajectory, and years of people assuming all is well because the metrics say so. What Siem describes from the inside — functioning, medicated, and still not well — is the same thing I hear across a desk from people whose outside looks nothing like hers.
Read this for what fifteen years on medication, and the year of coming off it, actually felt like from inside one person's life. Read the Maudsley Guidelines or Crossing Zero, reviewed separately, for how a taper is actually run. This book is doing something else: telling the truth about what it cost her, grief and withdrawal tangled together, without pretending the two can always be separated.
The Verdict
Read this for what fifteen years on antidepressants, and the year of coming off them, actually felt like from inside one life — unsentimental, often very dark, honest about how much of it she still can't separate from grief for her father. One woman's own account, told with real skill.