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When Danielle Gansky was in second grade at an upscale private girls’ school in suburban Philadelphia, her teacher noticed she was a bit fidgety and distracted. Her handwriting was sloppy.
A school administrator told Gansky’s parents to take the 7-year-old to a psychiatrist to be evaluated for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). She was quickly diagnosed and placed on Ritalin, an ADHD stimulant.
In an interview with The Defender, Gansky, now 29, detailed her harrowing experiences with psychiatric drugs, beginning with Ritalin, which later led to prescriptions for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and antipsychotics.
By the time she was 20, Gansky had taken 14 different psychotropic medications. When she tried to get off the medications, she developed a neurological injury. Today, she still has serious and debilitating health effects as a result, including severe cognitive dysfunction and akathisia.
Gansky is working with leaders of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement to raise awareness of the overmedicalization of children. “It is my life’s passion to make sure this does not happen to anyone else,” she said.
‘There’s so much corruption behind this’
In September 2025, the White House’s MAHA strategy report named overmedicalization as a key driver of the chronic disease epidemic among U.S. children.
According to the report, there is a “concerning trend” of overprescribing medications to children. Conflicts of interest in medical research, regulation and medical practice are driving the trend, which has led to “unnecessary treatments and long-term health risks.”
Gansky said she is part of what she called the “hidden epidemic” of kids who have suffered due to psychotropic drugs.
She called out the medical industry for prescribing drugs too quickly without looking at how the drugs might be adversely affecting the kids, especially over the long term.
“This is happening to millions of people, and there’s so much corruption behind this,” she said.
Millions of kids like Gansky put on ADHD meds
Gansky is far from alone. Roughly 7.1 million U.S. children ages 3 to 17 had an ADHD diagnosis in 2022, according to an analysis of federal data. Around half took ADHD medication for it.
After starting on Ritalin, Gansky cycled through other ADHD drugs, including Daytrana, Concerta and Adderall.
The pills made her moody, agitated and dysregulated, “which was completely out of character for me because I was a very happy, sweet, silly, bubbly kid,” she recalled.
Rather than perceiving her symptoms as side effects of the drugs, her doctors assumed that there was “something else wrong” with her, Gansky said.
While she was still 7 years old, doctors put her on Prozac, an SSRI, in addition to her ADHD medication.
“That kind of really became a pattern throughout my life,” she said. “Whenever I struggled or said I didn’t feel right, their response was never to question the drugs themselves.”
Instead, doses were increased, and medications were switched or added.
The drugs made her life a nightmare, she said. Sometimes she felt “completely flattened and numb and zombied.”
Other times, the stimulants made her “very wired, panicked, unable to sleep,” she recalled. “Looking back now, I was experiencing really adverse drug effects like akathisia, but I didn’t have the language to describe it.”
‘I was so sedated that I couldn’t wake up and make it in time to school’
She could only say she felt anxious, “off” or “bad.” During middle school, she dropped to about 80 pounds from not eating.
“The doctors just kept throwing more drugs at it,” she said. “I didn’t have the words or authority to challenge what I was being told.”
Doctors diagnosed her with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
When Gansky was 14, doctors put her on Abilify, an antipsychotic, even though she was not psychotic.
At 15, she was prescribed varying doses and combinations of drugs, including Prozac, Concerta, Wellbutrin, Xanax and Risperidone, an antipsychotic that made Gansky sick and led to her being hospitalized.
“At one point in high school, they had me on such high doses of Xanax that I almost got truancy because I was so sedated that I couldn’t wake up and make it in time to school.”
The school asked for a note from her psychiatrist to medically excuse the absences so she could still graduate on time. The doctor wrote the note — and increased her Prozac dose.
Gansky’s doctor denies antidepressant harms
By the time Gansky started college, she was off ADHD medications but still taking antidepressants.
Although her doctors largely dismissed the notion that many of her symptoms could be drug-induced, Gansky started doing her own research. She encountered underground patient-led forums, Reddit communities and a site called Surviving Antidepressants, a peer support network for those tapering off and experiencing withdrawal syndrome.
“I found a lot of people online describing antidepressant harms and sharing information with each other because they couldn’t really get help from the medical system,” she said.
Gansky broached the issue with her doctor. She asked him if the medication she was on could possibly affect how her brain was developing or if it could cause brain damage.
“He was like, ‘No, it’s impossible,’” she recalled. “Basically, he was the expert. He knew best.”
Antidepressant withdrawal: ‘It was so painful, and I couldn’t escape’
Since then, Danielle has tried twice to come off her antidepressant. Both times, she experienced severe withdrawal symptoms that forced her to go back on the drug.
The first time she came off, the doctor instructed her to taper in just 6 weeks. Although her doctor’s guidance did not deviate from standard medical guidelines, the taper period was far too short for someone who had been on antidepressants for as long as Gansky had been.
Coming off too abruptly can harm a person’s nervous system, which is what happened to her, Gansky said. During withdrawal, she experienced a level of physical and mental torment she didn’t know was humanly possible.
“Being alive inside of my own body felt like an emergency. It was so painful, and I couldn’t escape it. I was completely bedridden. I couldn’t shower. I couldn’t take care of myself. I lost 20 pounds because you can’t eat. It’s a constant emergency that you’re in. It’s absolutely terrifying.”
During her second withdrawal, she saw a doctor who thought Gansky had an underlying mood disorder and prescribed her Zyprexa, a powerful antipsychotic.
Gansky was only on Zyprexa for 9 days due to a severe adverse reaction. She couldn’t think or speak. “It felt like it gave me a chemical lobotomy,” she said.
In hindsight, the doctor shouldn’t have put her on the drug, according to Gansky.
“When you’re in antidepressant withdrawal, the nervous system is extremely sensitized,” she said. “So more psychiatric drugs on top of that is very dangerous and can actually injure you further.”
Now Gansky is working with a psychiatrist who specializes in helping people slowly taper off antidepressants. She’s decreasing her dose by one-tenth of a milligram every few months. Still, it takes her months to stabilize after each reduction.
A 2025 study in Psychiatry Research found that longer use of antidepressants was linked to a greater risk of severe and protracted symptoms. The study authors also found that longer use makes antidepressants harder to stop.
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‘Children like me became the long-term experiment — without knowing it’
Gansky believes her long-term psychotropic drug use impacted her brain development in a way that has made it very difficult for her to get off them.
She said:
“At that age, a child can’t meaningfully consent to taking a psychoactive drug that alters brain chemistry and nervous system function — especially when the long-term effects on developing brains still aren’t fully understood.
“We still lack meaningful long-term research on how these drugs affect developing brains. So in many ways, children like me became the long-term experiment — without knowing it.”
It angers her that she was labeled as having ADHD and needing medication at age 7, just for being a fidgety kid with sloppy handwriting. She said:
“I just didn’t meet this external standard of behavior and performance that only honored one narrow definition of what a child is, these preset norms of how a child should behave in a classroom setting.
“That was pathologized and led really to this cascade of psychiatric medications and where I am today.”
There is evidence that many kids, even younger than 7, are being put on ADHD medications. A 2025 study led by Stanford Medicine found that ADHD drugs are being prescribed too quickly to preschoolers.
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ guideline for treating ADHD among kids ages 4 to 6 calls for parent training in behavior management as a first line of treatment before pharmaceutical interventions.
However, the 2025 study found that many preschoolers were placed on ADHD medications without first trying parent training in behavior management. The authors cited shortages of behavior management services.
Related articles in The Defender
- ‘Medically Reckless’: AAP Pushes Mental Health Screenings for Kids as Young as 6 Months Old
- Big Money for Pharma, Big Risk for Kids: When Doctors Prescribe Antipsychotics and SSRIs for Children With Autism
- Antidepressants During Pregnancy Raise Risk of Birth Defects, Doctors Tell FDA
- 12-Year-Old Died by Suicide 3 Weeks After Starting Prozac, Mother Blames Social Media and Antidepressants
- ‘Very Bad Idea’: Harvard M.D. Wants to Let Pharmacies Hand Out Antidepressants Without a Prescription
