A new undercover experiment is raising fresh questions about the safety and oversight of the booming telehealth psychiatry industry, after a reporter says she secured more than 300 prescription pills from nine different online doctors in just 13 days.
Writing for The Daily Wire, Gabriella “Ellie” DiPrima detailed her experience of booking appointments with a string of telepsychiatry companies — including Klarity Health, Rula, UpLift, Sondermind, Brightside, Talkiatry, and TalkSpace — to test how easily prescription drugs could be obtained remotely.
DiPrima reports she never set foot in a physical doctor’s office, never identified as having a mental illness, and never spent more than 30 minutes with any single physician. The result, she says, was a haul of 12 prescriptions representing over 300 pills, including antidepressants, anxiolytics, sedatives, benzodiazepines, and an antipsychotic.
A 12-Minute Appointment and a $1.76 Co-Pay
The experiment began, DiPrima writes, with a late-night Google search for “insomnia treatment” that led her to an ad for Klarity Health, a telehealth company that promised fast access to Ambien. She booked an appointment for the next morning.
That session lasted just 12 minutes. After telling the doctor she was not falling asleep as quickly as she would like, DiPrima says she was prescribed both 50 mg of Trazodone and 5 mg of Ambien. She reports having the drugs in hand two hours later, having paid just $1.76 at the pharmacy — where she was not asked to show ID.
The psychiatrist reportedly billed her insurance company $280 for the brief encounter, during which, she claims, side effects of the powerful sedative-hypnotic and antidepressant were never discussed. Ambien has been linked to dangerous sleepwalking episodes, a risk that gained widespread attention following a class action lawsuit in 2006.
Over the following two weeks, DiPrima signed up for eight more appointments across a range of telehealth platforms that advertised heavily on her social media feeds. The average session length was approximately 20 minutes.
A Shopping List of Psychiatric Drugs
Across her nine appointments, DiPrima reportedly collected prescriptions for a staggering array of medications: Ambien, Atarax (prescribed twice), Buspar, Desyrel, Effexor, Lexapro, Propranolol, Seroquel, Wellbutrin, Zoloft, and Xanax. One prescription for Xanax was written, she notes, in a record-setting four minutes.
The diagnoses attached to the prescriptions were equally rapid-fire. According to DiPrima, the doctors concluded she had depression, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, insomnia, and — potentially — PTSD, despite her never having described a traumatic event. She writes that she was “assured” she had all the symptoms, “just short” of the qualifying experience.
“I never was sent away from a first session without a prescription,” she reports. “Not one doctor told me how long I would be taking drugs.”
DiPrima describes her typical pitch to the doctors as modest: inconsistent sleep, anxiety in crowds or when public speaking, and a wish for more energy. When one psychiatrist asked if she was depressed, DiPrima said she did not think so, describing her occasional low mood as “normal melancholy” — a response the doctor reportedly rejected.
“‘Melancholy is not normal,’ she rebuked,” DiPrima writes, adding that the doctor asked if she had felt sad in the last two weeks. After admitting she had, DiPrima was prescribed Seroquel, an antipsychotic typically used to treat schizophrenia.
The ‘SSRI Zombie Effect’ and a Totalizing Paradigm
DiPrima argues that while some doctors were cautious about handing out drugs associated with a euphoric high, they were far quicker to prescribe serotonergic antidepressants, which she notes carry their own documented risks, including sexual dysfunction, blunted emotions, cognitive impairment, and suicidal ideation. She suggests these classes of drugs share similar side effect profiles, adding movement disorders, weight gain, and amnesia to the list of potential harms.
The writer is careful to acknowledge that such medications may be appropriate for seriously distressed individuals in pursuit of stabilization. But, she argues, her own case was different — she was prescribed powerful drugs without ever expressing serious distress.
“My intermittent sadness, fatigue, restlessness, distractibility, or nervousness were enough to warrant mental illness labels and chemical intervention,” she writes.
DiPrima places the blame not solely on negligent individual doctors, but on what she calls a “totalizing” mental illness paradigm. She cites statistics suggesting that an estimated 23.4% of Americans carry a mental illness diagnosis and that one in six is currently on an antidepressant. She points to aggressive marketing by apps like Betterhelp, which she says advertises that “62% of Americans can’t sleep” and “66% of Americans can’t stop worrying.”
“If we are openly suggesting that a majority of Americans may need psychiatric treatment, we have adopted a dysfunctional worldview,” she argues. “Unwanted feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and habits are not signs of a medical disorder. They are part of being human.”
DiPrima also points to the entrepreneurial pressures of the telehealth market, suggesting that psychiatrists have expanded their sphere of influence by convincing consumers that personal distress is a medical problem with a medical solution. Looking forward, she notes that new treatments like home-order ketamine nasal sprays are already being advertised for “treatment-resistant depression” — which she defines sardonically as “anything your SSRIs didn’t cure.”
“Without a limiting principle for medicalization, anyone can have a bed in the virtual psych ward,” she concludes.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/three-hundred-pills-in-13-days-welcome-to-telepsych