Kickstarter

I’m a journalist who needs funding to help report my nonfiction book, tentatively titled Dosed: A Medicated Generation Grows Up. The book tells the stories of young people in their 20s and 30s – myself included - who began taking psychiatric medication in childhood or adolescence.

I'm fortunate to have a contract with Beacon Press, but since the publisher is a nonprofit, my advance is modest and doesn’t cover my reporting expenses, namely travel. My interviewees come from all over the U.S. Traveling to their homes and spending time with them in person is integral to telling their stories. I'm hope you guys can help me do that!

As a society, we’re engaged in an ongoing, heated debate over whether or not children are overmedicated. Most of have a connection to someone who's been taking meds from a young age, but few of us actually know anything about their experiences. My book shows that for many such people, taking meds has proved a lot more complicated than popping a pill. In the absence of authoritative scientific research, many are still trying to determine how the drugs have impacted their developing brains, bodies and selves over the long-term.

The questions we all ask growing up – “Who am I?" and "What shaped me into who I am?" have taken on extra layers of complexity, as they try to parse emotions, symptoms, side effects and diagnoses. They struggle to find the right drug, to determine whether they still need treatment at all - ultimately, to make sense of their long-term relationship to medication.

Please help me tell this story!