Pushing Pills On TeenagersA new telemedicine start-up is pushing psychiatric drugs on teenagers, using TikTok.
By John Hirschauer
April 5, 2022
A lot of teenage girls on TikTok claim to have Tourette’s syndrome. It is extraordinarily unlikely that they are telling the truth. Tourette’s is four times more prevalent in boys than girls and typically presents between the ages of five and seven. The videos of many alleged sufferers are not convincing.
It’s not limited to Tourette’s. Take dissociative identity disorder, for example. There is a good chance the condition itself is fake. If it does exist, it is extraordinarily rare. And yet there are hundreds of videos on TikTok with unhappy-looking teenagers switching between “personalities,” flipping voices and poses like they’re Sally Field in Sybil. They don’t look tortured or deranged—none of them are frothing at the mouth or having conniption fits. They have enough composure to produce well-choreographed videos dramatizing their “condition” for their hundreds of thousands of followers.
Each mental illness you plug into the search bar has its own little community of sufferers who post their travails on the platform. Some of them really seem to be mentally ill. Others do not. Many of the supposed sufferers self-diagnose with bipolar or borderline personality disorder—relatively rare and serious conditions.
Kyle Robertson is the co-founder of the mental-health startup Cerebral. His company provides customers with direct-to-door prescription psychiatric medication. It also runs its own TikTok account, where it promotes “medication management for anxiety, depression, insomnia [and] more.” It has several paid “influencers” who post promotional spots on the site with the hashtag #cerebralpartner. It even brought on Olympic gymnast Simone Biles as a “chief impact officer.”
Plugging SSRIs to teenagers on TikTok is a little like selling OxyContin outside of a rehab facility. It may be evil, but you marvel at the gall.
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The only reason Cerebral exists is a pandemic-era regulatory change at the Drug Enforcement Agency. In January 2020, the DEA relaxed its remote-prescription restrictions under the Ryan Haight Act. The rule change allowed doctors to prescribe everything from Schedule V drugs like Lyrica and Robitussin through Schedule II drugs like OxyContin and Vicodin in telehealth sessions without in-person consultation. This allowed Robertson to create a company in which potentially addictive drugs like Xanax and Adderall change hands without the prescriber ever physically meeting the patient.
Cerebral’s success partially stems from its ability to give patients what they want: meds. Chief Medical Officer David Mou reportedly told employees that 95 percent of clients should be given a prescription. The review feature on Cerebral—where patients can leave reviews for the company’s in-house nurses and treatment providers—allows patients who are denied medicine to leave vindictive reviews for uncooperative prescribers. Pressure from management and the threat of negative patient reviews forces many Cerebral nurses to prescribe life-altering medication without so much as an in-person consultation.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/pushing-pills-on-teenagers/
