Cooper Davis – Executive Director Of Inner Compass Initiative

 

What happens when the mental health system you’ve relied on leaves you depleted instead of healed? Our guest, Cooper Davis, shares his decades-long journey from being diagnosed with ADD as a child and cycling through stimulants, benzodiazepines, and antidepressants to reaching a breaking point in his late twenties. A 12-step rehab program—meant for substance addiction, not psychiatric drug withdrawal—introduced him to community, mentorship, and coping skills outside the medical model. Today, through the Inner Compass Initiative, which he runs with his wife Laura Delano, Cooper champions a mutual-aid approach that helps people make informed choices about psychiatric drugs and tapering. This candid conversation offers a rare insider’s look at how one man transformed a personal crisis into a mission for mental health reform.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

 

 

Cooper Davis – Executive Director Of Inner Compass Initiative

Cooper Davis is the Executive Director of Inner Compass Initiative. At Inner Compass Initiative, their vision is a future of interconnected individuals and communities, flourishing beyond the medicalized, professionalized offerings of the mental health industries as it is now. Their mission as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization is uniting people with first-hand experience of psychiatric diagnosis and drugs to chart a new path forward beyond the limits of our mental health industry rooted in the lay person’s expertise and mutual aid, the voluntary exchange of support and resources.

They are working to change the way the world understands and addresses the challenges that come with being human in the modern age.  As Inner Compass Initiative director, Cooper Davis comes to this work with thirteen years of experience of taking psychiatric drugs and more than a decade of years since coming off of them. He is passionate about the potential of digital and physical mutual aid models to bring about human flourishing.

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Cooper, thank you for joining me. It’s delightful to see you again.

The Early Days Of ADHD: A Personal Revelation

Likewise, Dr. Hayes. If I recall correctly, you’re an hour behind me. Is that right?

We’re at 9:00 AM here in the Central US. I’m hoping you can get us started by telling us about how you got into the work you do and what drives your passion for it.

Thank you for asking and I have a short version answer to that and a longer version. For the purposes of this show, I’ll give the extended short version. How about that? I am not a clinician. I am a former patient. My relationship to what you might call the mental health industry, which is a term that is more absent in some ways than mental health system, at least in the context of the work that I do, began in first grade.

When I was in first grade, it was in 1991. I went to a public school in Rural Eastern Connecticut. This was around the time that you had cover stories in Time Magazine about Ritalin and about what was then referred to as ADD or attention deficit disorder. If my memory serves you, you might be able to correct me on this, but I believe that even back in the early days of ADD. There was an ADHD variant, but it was understood to be a distinct subtype of ADD. Since then, for some reason, it was determined that we’re going to add the H in for everybody.

We’re just going to redefine hyperactivity itself so that it makes sense for people who don’t bounce around a lot. That’s on the side, but it’s partly to identify myself as somebody in the first crop of ADD boys. We’ve had a couple of resurgence since then but in the early days, it was just ADD. It was a phenomenon in culture. My teacher who herself was certainly not a clinician either. She was a first-grade teacher at a small regional public elementary school in Eastern Connecticut. I told my parents during a parent teacher conference that I was clearly ADD.

She had read a great deal and done a lot of research on the subject. She’s already spoken to the parents of the other four. There were six boys in my class including me. She was bragging to other parents that she had already gotten the other four boys diagnosed and medicated and her classroom is just operating a whole lot better as a result of that. I was the only one who needed to get on board.

My parents, to their credit, were skeptical of what they were hearing. Especially my mom, and basically said back to her, “We certainly relate to the idea that our son can be difficult to control but we are also not comfortable even talking about putting him on a drug for that regardless of what the other boys are doing or what you would prefer as his teacher. We’re going to hold off on that decision until such time as he can make it himself, which would be at age eighteen.”

There’s no longer any discussion they need to have with that teacher. That being said, they might have had a critical response to the idea of medicating me but they were curious about the diagnosis itself. I did end up seeing a child psychiatrist over the years. I saw various therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists and different people as a kid. All of them reified the idea that if there is such a thing as ADD or ADHD, that I definitely have it.

The Stimulant Solution: A Student’s Academic Transformation

What was interesting about my experience until the time I ultimately did end up going on a stimulant drug. I grew up with a sense that I had a thing that explained a lot of who I was, both to myself and to the adults around me. If I needed to understand for myself why the adults around me were more often frustrated with me than they were with other kids. That’s because I have a thing called ADD. I have a disorder in my brain that causes me to act a certain way. I could vacillate over the years from having a sense of pride over that difference.

As a young teenager, I was increasingly thinking it was crap to sell pills. I got there with it before I even went on any drugs certainly, but it was something that haunted my development and my sense of myself in a lot of important ways. When I ultimately did go on, I started on Ritalin with 5 milligrams of Ritalin twice a day at age seventeen prescribed by a GP who basically took my word for it that I had ADD. I did go on and I maybe went into it mostly with curiosity. After years of imagining like all the kids I know, all the boys and mostly boys that I know, who are diagnosed with ADD and take a stimulant, what is this like for them.

You developed some curiosity after a decade of watching that happen all around you. What happened for me was, I went from a C student to an A student overnight. I was a poster child for the efficacy of properly prescribed stimulant drugs. I directly credit the changes that those drugs bring, I think of it as the person that I was while on those drugs. That is what enabled me to ultimately finish high school with very good marks, great relationships with my teachers and also get ultimately into the internships that I applied for and get to the college of my choice and pursue the career of my choice.

 

A lot of these successes that I had that required sitting down and focusing on one thing until it’s done, I credit to the effect of these drugs. For the sake of expediency, let’s just say that while there was an initial success over time, what happened was, like a lot of people, I experienced tolerance. As I gain tolerance in terms of therapeutic effect of stimulant drugs and my dosage would be increased or I would go on different formulations, extended releases. You go methylphenidate mixed in amphetamine to dextroamphetamine.

I’m jumping around different dosages, extended release and instant release to fight the inevitable tolerance increase that was coming and that was causing the therapeutic effect at a given dose to diminish over time. Even though these are undesirable non-therapeutic effects would not necessarily diminish over time, so the appetite suppression or the interference was sleep or the unpleasant. come downs, I would describe the mass at the end of the day.

By the time I’m in the second half of my college days, I’m starting to struggle to continue this string of successes that rely so much upon these drugs because the drugs are no longer acting they initially did and I have grown up and matured and find myself in new context with different types of pressures and so on and so forth. My presumption was always like, “As long as I have access to these drugs, I can just do anything. I can handle anything.” It’s basically a superpower.

Every month you’re going to sit down with the prescriber at least for a few minutes and it usually involves like, “Champ, how is it going? How is everything going?” Sometimes, you give a perfunctory, “Fine. Everything’s good.” Sometimes you answer it and say, “Things are tough.” At one point, I mentioned that things were tough to my prescriber in such a way that he said, “Maybe we need to add another tool. Maybe we need to grab another tool in the toolbox and increase the sophistication of this cocktail.”

That’s when I started on a Benzodiazepine, which for me was a Lorazepam, which was prescribed initially just for sleep but then shortly thereafter, PRN or as needed. As needed is a pretty subjective indication. Where I found that I needed it initially was coming down at the end of the day when I needed to, especially at this point in my life. My social life is important to me. I’m firing on all cylinders academically on the stimulant but at the end of the day, I need to switch gears and be a cool, interesting relaxed guy.

That can be very difficult. At the end of the day, you’re coming off of this stuff. It can be unpleasant, especially if you haven’t eaten properly or sleep is off or partying on the weekends. Not to mention romantic entanglements, ugly breakups, gossip and social pressure. All that stuff is just compounded when you’re in that sour space at the end of the day coming down from a stimulant that you’re quite used to taking.

Increasingly, the Benzodiazepine was a helpful tool for me in minimizing the unpleasant edges around being a daily stimulant user. Before long, I found that if I was taking them earlier, more or less dosing it while the stimulant was at its peak effect, that it took some edges off and it almost made this stimulant feel as effective as it did earlier on in my experience with stimulants just because it felt a little bit more smoother and I was just distracted by the unpleasant side effects physiologically.

My nervous system being in overdrive. I’ll just fast forward again, bouncing between a stimulant and a benzodiazepine is generally not a sustainable approach to, let’s say life and yet it’s been done before. You look at everybody or you read memoirs of rockstars. JFK himself as a president was bouncing between uppers and downers. We’ve had a long history of people especially who one might think of as high performers. Not to compare my workload to the leader of the Free World or Mick Jagger or something.

Bouncing between a stimulant and a benzodiazepine is generally not a sustainable approach to life functioning. Share on X

Nonetheless, I understand why being able to turn on one’s capacity to engage work, stay focused, lose your inhibitions a little bit, relax a bit and being able to moderate modulate those on demand is something. It is a useful tool. It’s bad for you. It’s not sustainable. It certainly doesn’t force you to learn the skills necessary to do it for real. If you’re looking at just pure output and being able to fulfill.

You don’t care about the consequences.It’s the long-term damage, the addiction and the disruption of the relationship. If you don’t care about any of that then it’s a good tool.

Which is why famously it’s like managers of rock stars who pushed these things on their clients. They say, “You got to get out there. I don’t care what it takes.” That’s the Trope. In my case, I didn’t have them. I was that manager. I was the one saying to myself, “No. It doesn’t matter that you’re dissipating, miserable and have lost any sense or you had no more insights coming to you and your physiologically aging too fast. None of that matters.”

At least you’re being productive the way people outside you want you to be productive.

You’re winning awards and acing job interviews. I ultimately ended up working as a reporter at a small newspaper. I always wanted to be a journalist and now I’m a journalist. It was an exhilarating experience in a lot of ways even though this was a small regional paper. I became the editor for the arts section of this paper and it was at that point. Journalism was already a dying field by the time I showed up, certainly.

When you’re working in a newsroom, the only place to advance beyond the reporter who’s out there like chasing down stories and whatever. It’s going back to the newsroom, sitting there all day, sending reporters out and they’re looking at what they write and picking through it and that tedium. Everybody who works for a paper that lives on deadlines, but when you’re the editor, you merge your consciousness with awareness of deadlines and that was me.

It was around that time that I ended up adding an antidepressant and then later on, started going into, I think it was Gabapentin, that came after that, which later became Lyrica. I began to try various sleep drugs. I went through all the Z drugs but they didn’t help and then heavier duty or stuff like Trazodone. With all this experimentation, I was cracking up. I was not holding it together, so that’s when mood stabilizers started entering the fray or antipsychotics prescribed off-label. Maybe this will help basically.

Throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

This was not one bad doctor. This was a series of doctors who were thoughtful. Most of whom were not crazy about what was going on here but who also felt as though they needed to pick up where the last guy left off. There was this sense that I got off trying to solve a mystery. “Let’s get this dialed in. There’s got to be something that’ll work for this guy.”

 

The Systemic Problem: When Doctors Throw Meds At The Wall

Within the framework that they’re taught and they have the tools to deal with. They’re just doing everything they can and everything that they know how to do. The problem is, they’re training has been so myopically focused that they aren’t trained in the things that people can do that do work with or without all negative effects that they call side effects and without the addiction and crashing.

I am not someone who assigns blamed. I assigned some to myself because I was not naive. I, more than anyone else, in this story was the one choosing to look the other way. That being said, there is something about when you have gotten to the point where you feel as though all of your personal and professional successes were predicated on access to these drugs. It is an extremely scary thing to even consider going without that. Even when in your bones you are certain and people around you who love you, who you can trust are echoing the fact, “It doesn’t matter what these drugs are doing for you. What they are doing to you is way worse. Even when you know that for a fact.”

What these drugs do for you doesn't matter. What they do to you is far worse. Share on X

You can still generate a lot of fear.

You combine that. At the time that I was starting to realize I needed to get off these things. Even back then, which would have been around like 2010 or so, you didn’t have what you have now in terms of an overall awareness of psychiatric drug withdrawal. A lot of what I was experiencing both myself and my prescribers were willing to say, “It looks like there’s your underlying baseline or mental dysfunction or mental illness. This is why and maybe we will just go back and try a different one.” That was music to my ears.

Without the knowledge that this is literally a pattern of symptoms that often accompanies inappropriate withdrawal then that’s the conclusion that people came to. The fact that there were complicating factors, skewing their view and their perception. Their motivations were skewed. It couldn’t cut through that. At that point in time, there were people like Peter Breggin trying to bang the going about medication withdrawal and no one wanted to hear it.

Nobody did and things changed slowly then they started to change quite rapidly. To finish out my story and how it connects to that change, I ultimately decided to come off of everything after I had dissipated to the point that I was essentially unemployable and it was not reliable.

The Breaking Point: From Functioning To Unemployable

Around what age are you talking about when you reached that conclusion?

I was about 27 or 28 years old. It took a while to figure out how to come off fully. The approach that worked was not working closely with the prescriber. It was going to an old school twelve-step rehab facility for 30 days. Even there, they had a medical director that was like, “Half of these things you’re on, you probably shouldn’t be on.” He had no problem with the gabapentin, the Lyrica, the Trazodone, and the other one that I hated. I hated all of them but there was one that just made me so stupid. All the unfun ones, he wanted to keep me up.

They were all fun at that point but the ones that just have no street value, he’s like, “These are probably good for you.” I was like, “I got to go all the way off.” What was incredibly useful for me and I learned over time while I was there, it was a difficult 30 days. Most people around me are there for opioids and for alcohol. You’re going to AAA meetings a day. The fact that I was there for drugs that I was prescribed, taken not always, but more or less as prescribed. It seemed like a fluke to a lot of the people around me.

The reality is what I needed at that time, it would have been nice to have had somebody who’s clinically trained in proper hyperbolic tapering and a sense of like when you’re dealing with polypharmacy, where to start, which drug do you start with and all of that stuff that we’re only now starting to see clinicians focusing on that work. What I needed even more than that was what I had there. I needed direct access and regular contact with people who have had the experience of hitting some bottom in their lives.

Coming back from it, finding ways to reinvent themselves, rediscover their place in the world, renegotiate all their relationships, personal, professional and romantic and do it in a way that works. That’s what AAA is supposed to be and what it’s supposed to do as far as I can tell quite often. That’s why AAA, if you consider it, a lot of people don’t think of it this way. AAA and all the twelve-step groups that have grown out of it represent that there’s no profit motive and no personal glory to be derived by anybody involved with these programs. It’s essentially an anarchist organization. There’s no hierarchy. It’s completely decentralized. Anyone can start a meeting and all it is, is two books. You have a big book and then you have the 12 steps and 12 traditions.

Each meeting is essentially about those books more or less and what’s right in them. That is how you maintain fidelity to the original model. As a result, anywhere you go in the world, the odds are, you can find your way to a twelve-step meeting of some kind. Since COVID, there’s got to be a couple of hundred thousand twelve step meetings happening at this moment or at any moment in any day on Zoom. The fact that this thing has spread is a testament to the fact that it works. Not because it’s enriching anybody. There’s no other reason why it’s all over the place.

It’s not subsidized by the government. It just works. That is what allowed me, even though I myself never had much of an alcohol problem. The language of addiction did not carry over one to one to what my experience was. This has allowed me because I was lucky enough to be able to transpose what I heard in those meetings onto my own experience and find mentorship and sponsors who themselves had never once in their lives had a psychiatric drug. We’re like hardcore booze bags for the most part, working class guys, 40 years sobriety with all the little slogans.

Provided that community and support for you to do just what you needed.

Where else can you go in the middle of the day on your lunch break, show up and reliably basically talk philosophy with a group of strangers. We don’t have intellectual salons in our world now. Not really. Not in person, anyway. I spent a lot of my early sobriety and I call it early sobriety even though it doesn’t quite fit in Providence, Rhode Island. You have Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University there. There’s a lot of professors and students and more high-minded intellectuals. You also have a very strong working-class New England Community there as well.

Those meetings were very ideal for me because they straddled the intellectual world where you would be able to have these wide-ranging discussions and pull in laterally things that aren’t necessarily germane to the twelve steps or whatever inter-meetings because you have anthropology professors there and whatnot. At the same time, you have old school, Southern New England working class guys. I don’t know about all that but all I know is if you put the plug in the jug and you shut up and sit down. You’re going to be all right. That kind of thing, which you need, too. You need both.

I never needed to put the plug in the jug but for me it meant, stop thinking of yourself in terms of a problem that needs to be solved scientifically. Don’t go anywhere near Psychology Today. This idea that there’s like this cutting-edge research and we are unlocking the mysteries of the mind. Maybe, but it strikes me that the human race was doing pretty okay even before Freud and Vienna. We were doing alright. We had structures for managing things that we might now call mental illness but back then, we had other ways of thinking about.

The idea now, that 1 out of 4 American adults is on a psychiatric drug of one kind or another. It’s 1 out of 3 teenagers, I believe, with CDC numbers from a few years ago. One out of ten kids and that strikes me as you could explain some of that just because of the overwhelm of our technological environment and how distant we are from the environments for which we evolved to thrive in. That’s a real thing that should be accounted for and I don’t necessarily blame people for using unnatural means to adapt to unnatural conditions.

To me, that’s the best argument in favor of using psych drugs even as a first line treatment for some of this stuff because we’re already in such a polluted and confused space. At the same time, all of human history, literature, art and certainly religion, a lot of this stuff has the same end goal, which is, how can we either reduce suffering or transmute suffering towards productive ends?

That’s beyond basic survival. This is like the other main project of humanity over the years. We now live in an age where we are rapidly redefining any problem that feels sticky or intractable or not obvious in its solution into a medical problem. That is what psychiatry, maybe not as it’s intended but as it is applied. It’s medicalizing a lot of stuff that is not medical.

 

From Personal Hell To Purpose: The Birth Of A New Path

They’re medicalizing natural human emotions and interactions. Where did that lead you? How does that lead to your inner compass work? How did you go from getting off yourself to being an advocate?

I will put it like this. When I was still figuring myself out in these early days, which were quite tender and there were a lot of things that happened in these early days too that were challenging. I lost my very best friend who died tragically at this time. I became a dad and shortly thereafter, became a single dad and had a difficult separation to negotiate with my physiological self. My first year fully off of all these things, I was eating two pints of Ben and Jerry’s a day.

That was my drug of choice, as they call it and that is where I derived my one little window of pleasure. I was up to 275 pounds at my heaviest. That was all Ben and Jerry’s weight. I was also putting cigarettes around the same time, which in hindsight, I would have waited. I’ll tackle that one later. I’m going to meetings and I’m trying to even figure out what it’s like to be in my body. I’ve never been an adult. Not under, more or less, daily influence of one drug or another. I’m trying to figure this out. It takes time to do that.

At one point, I did see one psychiatrist during this time. I was like, “I’m not here to get back on a drug. I just want to check in and say, “Am I thinking about this the right way or whatever?” I’ll never forget what he said. He’s like, “You’re telling me you’re having all of these issues but I have to tell you. It just doesn’t make sense because the drugs are out of your system. It’s not possible that the way that you’re feeling now is the result of having been on those drugs.” This is a guy who published multiple papers.

The Doctor’s Blind Spot: A Turning Point In Understanding

He can only know what he’s been trained to know.

I was like, “Can you explain? Am I not understanding this?” I remember, I used the rest of the appointment. I was like, “Can you explain to me what you mean by that?” I asked him to dig down and explain to me like, “The drug is out of your system. Therefore, this cannot be in effect of the drug in any possible way.” When I raised that, I was like, “Can we agree that if you are, say drinking alcohol or using dope for ten years that the first year that you’re off of those things. You may continue to negotiate physiological and psychological issues that will wane the further you get from that drug?”

His response to me was like, “You’re talking about illicit drugs. That’s a different category.” That was the moment where the floor fell out from underneath me and I realized that I knew there was a problem but I didn’t realize that it was this because this was not some provincial Backwater Country doctor who hasn’t opened up a medical journal in years. He’s published.

He’s a product of the system. It’s a systemic problem.

Sorry, I forgot this detail. He taught at Braun Medical.

He’s out there teaching people the opposite of what’s actual. Teaching people and going out and telling other people, “You can’t trust your perception. You can’t trust your judgment.”

Intentional Peer Support: A Radical Re-education

I could tell also in this one meeting, in this one anecdote, I could also tell that the more I was pushing him on it, my reporter mind kicked in. What I was observing is somebody who is not generally thinking about this or being asked about it. Yet he knows that in this case his obligation to the client is to avoid having to say, “I don’t know.” He was not trained to say I don’t know. Anyway, from there, I found a job with the non-profit. Sometimes, an entry level job with a mental health nonprofit is the only job you’re going to get because you’re just all over the place.

For me, that was where I started. I was more interested in getting a job with a non-profit focused on addiction generally than it was mental health. The one I ended up with was in Connecticut where I live now. It was just a state funded non-profit that operated peer support programs. Whereby, they would send people into the mental hospitals or state-run mental hospitals or group homes to engage with the clients in non-clinical ways.

It was there that I received an education in one of the most impactful things. It was a training I got for something called Intentional Peer Support, which was taught by a guy named Steve Morgan, who’s an incredible guy. He’s a great writer. I highly commend your audience reading anything he’s written. I think his website is SteveRMorgan.com. He trained me and he blew my mind in like re-educating me on the history of mental health in the modern world. From there, I got a little bit more radicalized, relatively speaking.

It was through that work that I never was able to let go of the fact that the most useful thing in my process of leaving this system, rediscovering myself and finding out, by the way, that not only did I not need these drugs but I operate a whole lot better without them. To me, even in this radical mental health space, there were not a lot of other people who could relate to my positive experience of the twelve-step world in this context.

It became an obsession of mine to figure out how we can figure out a mutual aid model for people to share their experience, strength and hope with one another who are either just taking psych drugs or not taking it or otherwise dealing with stuff that falls into the bucket of what we call mental illness or specifically for people who are in the process of trying to come off of them.

In both instances, it would be useful for people to have access to one another in an environment that is not like NAMI meetings or DBSA meetings or bipolar support groups. Those types of meetings, first of all, enjoy pharma funding in different ways but they are also predicated on the mainstream disease model of mental health. If you go in there saying, “I’m coming off my meds and I’m having a hard time.” They’re going to say, “Get back on your meds. This is dangerous. You shouldn’t be saying that here.”

 You might cause somebody else to think about what’s going on in their lives.

We have this conspicuous absence. How many alcoholics are there in the United States of America versus people who have been diagnosed with a mental disorder? I have a feeling that the latter category is a whole lot larger. Why is it that they don’t have any type of mutual aid fellowship for themselves other than these ones that are directly influenced by the mental health industry? I’ve always found that to be a conspicuous absence.

When I was working at that agency, we put on a conference at one point. I was asked to assist one of our speakers at the conference. Her name was Laura Delano. She was there to talk about similar issues at this conference in her own experience, which I had heard was similar to mine. Although, for her, she started with a juvenile bipolar disorder diagnosis. Similarly ended up on a bunch of drugs and eventually, when she hit bottom decided to come off and discovered she was a lot better off without them. I was curious about this person.

Fast forward, I’m talking to you now from her office in the home that we share. We’re married now and have been for, depending on how you count it. We had a legal wedding and then we had our real wedding but it was delayed by COVID. We’ve essentially been married since 2017. She started this non-profit called Inner Compass Initiative, which its mission has always been helping people make more informed choices about psychiatric drugs, diagnosis, tapering and withdrawal.

In 2025, that organization is stronger than ever. We have been developing these mutual aid models for years now. We’ve run pilots in the real world for these different kinds of meetings but for the most part, our work in that space is happening online in our community. It’s called the Inner Compass Exchange, which used to be totally free. We realized that when you make stuff free that people come in there and they don’t treat it with a whole lot of commitment and respect. Now, it’s $30 a month.

When you make things free, people don't treat them with commitment and respect. Share on X

Although, if people ask for scholarships, we are pretty generous with those. Its mostly donor funded. We do not make money on anything. We’re non-profit but certainly, we lose money despite whatever revenue we get from the membership fees on them. That’s an important point because there are other community spaces online that are not non-profit run that have similar missions that cost a great deal of money.

They’re great things but it’s important for us that what we do is running off the same DNA as something like a twelve step group because it’s what keeps the incentives in line. That’s one of a number of programs that we now run. I can take this in any other direction you want to go if you want to know more about this non-profit.

Inner Compass Initiative: Empowering Informed Choices And Mutual Aid

You put that out there, and so people can go to, is it InnerCompassInitiative.com or InnerCompass.com?

Our main URL is TheInnerCompass.org. Lucky enough, we have been able to purchase InnerCompass.com. I don’t know if it’s connected yet. We’re still very much a grassroots organization in many ways. Although, that’s going to change a lot in 2024.

The other thing you just mentioned for the community is Inner Compass Exchange?

If you go to Google and you type in Inner Compass Initiative or Inner Compass psych drug withdrawal or whatever. You’ll find us right away and then you’ll find the exchange on our front page. You can also go directly to Exchange.TheInnerCompass.org and read about it there. I would recommend to anybody in your audience, whether they themselves are interested in joining, we have a ton of other stuff that we do. We offer on our website a completely free what we call a tapering companion guide. Now, we’re not medical professionals and this is not medical advice.

What we went ahead and did is we went out there and we gathered all the layperson wisdom that’s accumulated over the years about how to taper more safely, guaranteeing safety. The decision to go on a drug or come off a drug of any kind is always a big decision and should not be taken lightly. There are a ton of different websites and forums and all kinds of places out there that do offer guides to proper tapering.

Deciding to start or stop any drug is a big decision and shouldn't be taken lightly. Share on X

What we’ve done with our guide, first of all, we don’t charge money for it. That’s entirely free on our website. Secondly, it’s written in such a way that it does not focus only on the technical process of say a hyperbolic taper. It’s much more broadly focused. In fact, it has two parts. The first part is the preparation part, which is entirely about examining your relationship to the drugs and thinking through, is this the right time, is it the right thing for me, what is my support system look like, so on and so forth.

We walk people through the process of thinking it through fully before we even get to the part where we say, “When people are tapering, this is generally how they approach, step 1, step 2, and step 3.” We’ve got that. We have a ton of information about the drugs. All of our information about the different drugs comes directly from the drug fact sheets from the manufacturers or the FDA trials upon which the drugs were approved.

We don’t include information from post-market analysis. That’s beyond the scope of where we’re drawing our info from. It’s purposefully very narrowly looking at this is what the manufacturers say about the drugs and this is what the manufacturers and the FDA have used as the basis for bringing these drugs to market. We think that that information alone should be all people need to make an informed decision about whether or not they want to take these drugs.

The more information you get like that, the closer you get to truly informed consent.

That’s right. Which you’ll never get all the way there. It’s important to say that. Some people who criticize the work that we do say like, “We want to inform consent but come on. I spent eight years in medical school. Whatever. I still don’t fully know everything there is to know. How do you expect me to get that to my patients?” To which we say, “Of course you can’t get fully there but there’s a lot of room between what generally happens now and some unattainable idea.”

It’s not all about prescribers. It’s also about educating family members, patients themselves, teachers, guidance counselors, therapists, psychologists and people who refer out to psychiatry. Everybody needs to have a pretty strong working knowledge of the basis for which these drugs were brought to market and also where these diagnoses come from.

There’s another two or three interviews that we could do for the last three topics you brought up but since we’re getting close on time here, let me ask you to get centered and think. Is there something from what we’ve already discussed that you want to go back and highlight or something that we haven’t even touched on yet that you want to put in this interview about? Perhaps were the Inner Compass Initiative is headed.

Thanks for that opportunity. What I would say is, we’re at a time where the mental health industry is in the spotlight and part of that is what’s happening politically. Now, these issues are not political issues and I will tell you that the people in the broader Inner Compass community as well as the people in this movement come from all walks of life, all political persuasions and all ideological persuasions. There’s nothing inherently political about this, but we are at a moment where a lot of it is getting politicized and that’s a big mistake.

One thing that I would say is that, this is a view somewhat from the inside of people who have been working towards mental health reform in different ways for a very long time. In the United States, within Robert F. Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services, what I can say personally is a very genuine interest in giving people like myself and other activists an opportunity to be heard that maybe we haven’t had previously.

I do think that’s authentic. At the same time, as these issues start to dominate more of the news cycle, get thrown into the political wrist smell and find their way to social media is even more hot button, highly contentious and inflammatory. There’s going to be a lot of people who are basically new to the issue but are going to seek to make it either in the pro or anti, from either one of those camps seek to valorizing, glorify themselves or enrich themselves or some way find a way to take advantage of this opportunity for maybe not the best reasons.

I just want to say it is useful for all of us to be savvy consumers of news media and what we see on social media to discern the difference between people who are speaking in good faith about these issues and those who are just jumping on this bandwagon. I also would like to say similarly this is not a black and white issue. I have been called in my life anti-psychiatry, which is one of the most absurd things you could say about me.

 

As crazy it might sound, I have done more in my life to try and improve psychiatry and protect the integrity of the field and help guide it to its roots. Which was not necessarily supposed to be about medication management, then a lot of people who would call me or view me as in opposition to the field and a lot of us who want to see useful changes. Inner Compass operates a few different working groups and roundtables.

We bring researchers and academics and other activists together all aligned under the overarching belief that there’s a huge opportunity to improve the mental health system. Take it away from industry and return it to something that works for more people. Even if that means it works less well for certain businesses or professional guilds.

That’s the biggest challenge right there for most of us who look at this. We’re looking at developing a system that is not going to profit a big industry. It’s going to profit the individuals. I want to salute you and the Inner Compass Initiative and people like you that do that. That’s why we run this show for years and we keep trying to make these resources available. I just have to thank you for being willing to share that with us and for the work you’re doing. I understand that you might be open to another interview and you might help us connect with your wife, Laura for another interview.

I appreciate the opportunity to talk your ear off and your readers. Laura has already indicated to me that she’d love to come on your show. A lot of times, people think if they’ve talked to her, they don’t need to talk to me and vice versa. The reality is, she and I are so different and come at this in two totally different directions. It would be great if you could have her on as well. If it’s all right with you, I’d love to come back.

Let’s arrange it. Thank you so much for your time. It’s been fabulous.

Likewise. Thanks, Dr. Hayes.

 

Important Links

• Cooper Davis on Facebook
• Inner Compass Initiative
• Steve Morgan
• Laura Delano
• Exchange.TheInnerCompass.org

 

About Cooper Davis

Cooper is our Executive Director. His educational and professional background is centered on the ways leadership and relationship building enable transformation at any scale.

 

 

 

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