Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.

Hello and welcome to the Mad in America podcast. My name is Brooke Seam, and I am author of the award-winning

memoir on antidepressant withdrawal may cause side effects. Today, I am with Nelson Lee.

Nelson is a therapist and mental skills coach with a master's degree in clinical mental

health counseling and an MBA. In 2024, he attempted to get off antidepressants that he'd been on for 15 years.

This led to significant long-term medication withdrawal that Nelson is still navigating at the time of this interview.

As a therapist, Nelson specializes in helping clients transform their relationships with themselves and others and overcome anxiety and OCD.

He loves helping people rise above their challenges and then proactively maintain long-term healing and growth. He believes

it's never too late or too early to improve your mental health. When he's not working with clients,

Nelson can be found building relationships with friends and spending time in the Utah outdoors,

where he enjoys nature photography, mountain biking, and rock climbing. Nelson, thank you so much for joining us.

Yes, thank you for having me. Glad to be on today. Yeah, I'm glad to have you here, too.

You know, we connected not too long ago about a week, week and a half. And the reason why is because you reached out to me

for just some help and support during your withdrawal process. And we ended up having a long talk

about nutrition and how that might be able to support you. But in the course of that conversation,

we got into some really interesting topics and

philosophy about withdrawal. And after speaking with you, I just decided that this needed to go on a

much bigger platform because I really liked what you had to say. So we're going to start there.

You are a therapist and you are a therapist in withdrawal.

That is one of the more interesting combos, I think, because so often it feels like the patients are fighting against the mental health experts.

So if you could just start by sharing a little bit about what you do professionally and then also what's going on in your life right now personally.

So yeah, I'm a therapist and I'm somewhat of a new therapist. I'm someone who started out going business route. So that's where the MBA comes in. I worked in the corporate world for a while. And then I eventually got into some coaching stuff around mental health and decided eventually

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