Episode 7: Janet Schiel

In this seventh episode of Akathisia Stories, we hear from Janet Schiel. In 2016 her husband, Joe, was nearing the end of his 37-year career in the pharmaceutical sales business. But prior to making his own announcement of retirement, his boss had a health scare and retired, and several people at the company were let go, thereby doubling Joe's workload and his regional responsibilities, from half the country to the entire country. Meanwhile, Joe and Janet found their perfect retirement home in the Lake of the Ozarks. But Janet believes the reality of buying and selling homes on top of the workload led Joe to call his doctor. Without talking with him in person, the doctor prescribed the generic version of Lexapro, an antidepressant Joe had briefly been on a decade earlier. When he took the drug then, Janet remembers that he couldn't get a grip on reality.

[Janet Schiel] “We thought he was having a nervous breakdown, and we drove to the hospital and he wouldn’t get out. He said, ‘Just take me home and I’m going to get off all the medicines.’”

In 2016 the adverse effects were significantly worse.

[Janet Schiel] "I watched him change and become depressed and paranoid. And I finally said to him about three weeks into this, ‘What are you taking?’ And I’ve never said that to him in my entire life. And, you know, I don’t even know where the words came from, and he looked at me and he told me and I said, “Don’t you remember what happened the last time?” And obviously he didn’t. And I said, “You can’t take this drug.” I said, “You have got to promise me you’re going to wean off of this. And that’s as much as I knew.”

Janet Schiel is a drug safety advocate who champions policies and practices to stop medication-induced suicide. In 2019, she founded Butterflies for Joe, a nonprofit organization dedicated to spreading awareness about the negative adverse effects of SSRIs, which tragically precipitated her husband's death in 2016. Like many others who have lost spouses to prescribed harm, Janet also lost her best friend when Joe died. Prior to her husband's death, Janet was the founder and president of Guiding Hand Senior Resources, which helps families navigate the financial challenges of long-term elder care. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado with her dogs Buddy and Annie, and enjoys spending as much time as possible with her two adult children, Luke and Blake, and their partners. We spoke late last year in Chicago.