SSRIs and School Shootings, FDA Corruption, and Why Everyone on Anti-Depressants Is Totally Unhappy

29:25And so after residency, I go and I work for Janssen, which is the pharmaceutical arm of Johnson & Johnson. And I get involved in clinical development there doing a fellowship so I could see how the pharmaceutical companies develop the drugs. I stay there for a year and then eventually I go to the FDA and I become a medical officer in the division of psychiatry where I'm overseeing the safety of the drugs on the US market. And it was by going through that experience and actually seeing how these drugs were developed over time that I realized that we are practicing so far outside of what the evidence shows, like in an insane way.

30:04Like outside of science? Outside of science, yeah. Like the whole idea that it makes sense to put someone on an SSRI for years at a time is not supported by the clinical research at all. It's a complete like guinea pig. It's an experiment. It's an experiment happening on a mass scale. Millions and millions of people. Millions and millions of people, yeah. So I said before about probably between, And I mean, let's just call it 20%, you know, 15 to 20 % of people are on these medications. Half of the people that use antidepressants are on them for over five years. And so, you know, maybe seven, you know, seven to 10 % of Americans are essentially on an experiment where there's no clinical trial evidence that says that these drugs are safe.

30:56You know, the scary thing is, you know, when my doctors used to say to me, these medications are safe and effective. The thing that they would leave out was for the 12 weeks that they were studied in the clinical trial. That's like, and then when you look at the research, there has never been a randomized control trial that has gone, that has looked at this over 12 months. And - 12 months, but you said there are millions, tens of millions of people on this for years. Yeah, taking them for years. And this is just insane because anyone who has their eyes open will see that these drugs clearly wear off over time.

31:37I mean, that's why you have to keep on going up on the dose. And so it would be really important to actually see how effective these drugs are over time. Well, why wouldn't they? They have the sample. It's right here. It's in America. There's a lot of people to choose from. Yeah, they don't do it. And a lot of this happens just because of precedent. and there's a complete lack of backbone and leadership at the FDA to actually improve the way these drugs are studied. What was it like? You spent a year at the FDA? Yeah. What was that like? Yeah, it was really concerning, to be honest. Yeah. When was that?

32:132020, 2019 to 2020. Yeah. Why was it concerning? So FDA receives a lot of funding from the pharmaceutical industry. And I'll talk about a few things. here. So I've always been interested in drug safety. That's actually what I do now. I help people come off meds after they've had side effects. So that's always been my interest. One of the issues is because the agency is funded by the pharmaceutical industry through PDUFA, this is a congressional law. I think they have like 70 % funding. What it does is it tilts the agency towards certain activities. So when pharma hands over money to the agency, they say, we're going to give you this money, but every time we give you an application for a drug, you need to review it within nine months because our patents are going to expire.

33:11And so you need to get it done in nine months. Every time there's a protocol that comes in, you need to look at it within 30 days. There's nothing, I think, on face that bad about it. Hey, it makes sense. there's commercial interests here and they want to get something. But what it actually does at the reviewer level is that all of our resources go towards drug development activities. And so we're reviewing protocols for the drug companies rather than following up on safety issues. So there could be something like PSSD, which I'd like to talk about later on. It's a serious sexual dysfunction problem or all these different side effects going on that need reports and that need attention from medical reviewers, those were all just put on the back burner.

33:54They were neglected because the way success in our division was measured was that we were just getting these things, these activities done on time. And so there was much more of an emphasis on drug development activities. Now, the other thing that was really disturbing about being at the FDA, it's not so much the agency, but it kind of speaks to academic psychiatry as a whole. Now, as I mentioned before, I think we're almost brainwashed when we go through our training to internalize these beliefs that these psychiatric conditions, they kind of morph and they evolve and they can get worse. To criticize the medications is to be morally bad and to be stigmatizing the mentally ill and scaring people away from medications.

34:51Lots of academics, they end up working at the FDA. That's just a natural progression for them. And many of the people there had those beliefs. And so when I looked at a lot of the colleagues that I was working with there, they were so hesitant to call out problems with medications. I think the really cynical side of me says maybe there was like a laziness component because if you identify a problem, you kind of have to deal with it and you have to do a report. But I actually think it was more that they had been so kind of sucked into this narrative that they almost, they needed to protect the drugs and they needed to, yeah, they needed to be kind of advocates for them.

35:36So rather than actually doing good science and really having a critical look at all of the problems that were happening with them, like the withdrawal problems, like PSSD, really clear issues, they were so hesitant to call people that, call it out. So I feel like it had been captured by industry just through all of that messaging. We did an interview with a woman called Casey Means. She's a Stanford-educated surgeon and really one of the most remarkable people I have ever met. In the interview, she explained how the food that we eat produced by huge food companies, big food, in conjunction with pharma, is destroying our health, making this a weak and sick country.

36:23The levels of chronic disease are beyond belief. What Casey means, who we've not stopped thinking about ever since, is the co-founder of a healthcare technology company called Levels. And we are proud to announce today that we are partnering with Levels. And by proud, I mean sincerely proud. Levels is a really interesting company and a great product. It gives you insight into what's going on inside your body, your metabolic health. It helps you understand how the food that you're eating, the things that you're doing every single day are affecting your body in real time. and you don't think about it.

36:56You have no idea what you're putting in your mouth and you have no idea what it's doing to your body. But over time, you feel weak and tired and spacey and over an even longer period of time, you can get really sick. So it's worth knowing what the food you eat is doing to you. The Levels app works with something called the Continuous Glucose Monitor, a CGM. You can get one as part of the plan or you can bring your own, it doesn't matter. But the bottom line is big tech, big pharma, and big food combine together to form an incredibly malevolent force, pumping you full of garbage, unhealthy food with artificial sugars, and hurting you and hurting the entire country.

37:36So with levels, you'll be able to see immediately what all this is doing to you. You get access to real-time personalized data, and it's a critical step to changing your behavior. Those of us who like Oreos can tell you firsthand. This isn't talking to your doctor in an annual physical, looking backwards about things you did in the past. This is up to the second information on how your body is responding to different foods and activities, the things that give you stress, your sleep, et cetera, et cetera. It's easy to use. It gives you powerful, personalized health data, and you can make much better choices about how you feel.

38:11And over time, it'll have a huge effect. Right now, you can get an additional two free months when you go to levels.link slash Tucker. That's levels.link slash Tucker. This is the beginning of what we hope will be a long and happy partnership with Levels and Dr. Casey. Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have eczema, so I get how it can steal your time. But why let eczema take over when you can talk to your doctor about EBCLIS? EBCLIS, Lubricizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema.

38:52Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLYS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to EBGLYS. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBGLYS. Before starting EBGLYS, tell your doctor if you of a parasitic infection. Paid partnership with Lilly. Respect your time. Ask your doctor about Epclus and visit epclus.com or call 1-800-LILLY-RX or 1-800-545-5979.

39:27Well, you probably have heard about the Van Man Company's amazing toothpaste. By the thousands, Americans are ditching traditional toothpaste in favor of Van Man. The switch is like pivoting your diet from candy packed with red dye number 42 organic strawberries. It is always better to stick with real ingredients. Today's big news is that Van Man makes more than healthy toothpaste. They just launched a body wash made from the finest oils, available in vanilla, grapefruit, and no scent at all. Van Man's body wash can optimize your shower experience without all the sketchy chemicals that, well, who knows what they're doing to you.

40:02Other body washes cannot say the same. Their ingredient labels would shock you. If you could pronounce them, you can't. Some of this stuff is very bad for you. One of them is a carcinogen. It's appeared in tons of body washes, but it's not in Van Man. make the switch. Visit vanman.com slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker for 15 % off your first order. Vanman.com slash Tucker, code Tucker, 15 % off. No weird ingredients, no exceptions, great toothpaste, awesome body wash. Means. Okay. I'm not surprised by that. That's known, as you well know, as regulatory capture and regulators are cut off from the effects of the drugs that they're regulating because are not treating patients.

40:43So I'm not making excuses, but I'm not surprised. What I am surprised by is the behavior of clinicians, of physicians prescribing these drugs to individual people with whom they're in regular contact and they somehow don't notice that these people are not getting better and then killing themselves or going through all these other problems that are the results of side effects. Like, why don't the doctors notice this? Like, where are the decent doctors? And so there are some, I mean, there are decent doctors out there and people are waking up to this. But a lot of the rank and file physicians, again, they have been marinating in a soup of just marketing messages.

41:28Like when you see someone who is getting worse, like you put them on an SSRI and they have a manic type reaction to it. But rather - Does that happen? That does happen. Yeah, this is a side effect. Rather than saying, oh, we made you manic because we put you on this SSRI. You can just say, we have bipolar disorder. You were depressed before, but now because you're manic, you have bipolar disorder. There was always this tilt towards viewing worsening as the underlying condition. And so many people are trained in that way. Is there evidence to support that? No, there's no evidence to support it.

42:08It's like, I mean, the whole diagnostic criteria in psychiatry, it's just, it's completely subjective. It's just, you know, you just kind of, do you have these symptoms? Okay, maybe you have bipolar disorder. And there's a very limited education about the side effects. It's also easier for doctors to look at worsening as the development of a new condition, because what that means is one, I'm not at fault because I put this person on the drug and they're worse. But two, if I just diagnose them as having a new condition, I can just hand them another drug. It's very kind of quick to just say, okay, well, now you have bipolar disorder.

42:49Don't worry, we got a drug for that. And it allows you to kind of treat them in a very quick way rather than going through the mess of saying, hey, this was a drug side effect. Now we have to get you off of it. that's a lot of a much more involved process. It sounds like the culture of medicine in this country is really kind of anti-human. I mean, like, what about the people? I'm sorry, I'm mean, but I... No, I mean, it is. I mean, it's a practice that has been really destroyed by a whole range of bad influences. I mean, one, we can't trust our academics because so many of the academics that teach doctors are actually on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies.

43:38They are in positions of power because of assistance from the drug companies. We also have a health insurance system that incentivizes people, doctors to see patients in the shortest period of time. You don't get incentivized to make someone well. You get incentivized to just kind of churn through them. And so you make nearly... Like if you were to see one patient for 45 minutes to an hour, you essentially make half as much as if you were to just churn through four patients within that period of time. So even doctors have this incentive just to default to the fastest thing, which is to diagnose someone off a checklist and give them a drug because that's a hell of a lot easier than understanding their life and their relationships and their work and their health and all of that.

44:30And so that's really what's happened. What are the side effects of SSRIs? So there are a couple, but I want to start with one which really doesn't get a lot of airtime and that is actually the effect that everyone has. And so these drugs, they work through emotional constriction. And there's an opportunity. What's emotional constriction? Numbing, numbing. So if you're having like a lot of anxiety, negative emotions, it kind of just sucks it in. But it'll also take out the positive things. So many people will experience that as therapeutic. but I mean the risk of this is that you miss an opportunity to actually address the real reasons that you're unhappy many doctors they they will not talk to patients about this and most people have very clear issues why they're unhappy you know they're having problems with drugs you know they're they have relationship issues they have they have work issues they they have you know they're eating terrible foods, they have like massive insulin resistance or diabetes that has completely disrupted the energy system of their body and their neurons are just starving for energy.

45:47If you're having these legitimate problems, you just throw a drug on top of it to mask that anxiety that is really like the smoke detector saying, problem, problem, problem. Those issues, they just fester. They just kind of sit there and they just get worse over time. To me, that is the number one problem. with these medications is that you miss an opportunity to actually address the problem that is causing the anxiety. That seems, now that you're saying it out loud, so obvious. Yeah. People have anxiety for a reason. They feel sad for a reason. I mean, most of the time anyway, correct? Yeah. I mean, it is correct.

46:30But to say that, some people would say, Tucker, that is a really insensitive thing to say. These people have medical problems. And that is what - But you can say, sure, depression's a medical. I'm happy to acknowledge it's a medical problem with dire consequences. You kill yourself. It's very serious. It's not reducing the seriousness of or dismissing it as fake. It's acknowledging just how real it is. It's more real than a serotonin imbalance. It has to do with your life. And so - I just can't believe there are people that stupid and shallow practicing medicine. Yeah, they've done a number on us.

47:16Yeah, because, I mean, they're not a lot of dumb doctors. They're all pretty smart, right? The screening, it's for intelligence to some extent. But like, that's just so shallow. I guess that's what I - You mentioned religion. I mean, I think we're ideologues in there. we've been pushed into thinking about mental illness essentially in a way that benefits drug companies and a profession because psychiatry as a profession is also really into pushing this narrative because it gives us a primacy amongst the healthcare professionals to say, we are the doctors and we have the drugs and because of that, we need to protect the reputation of the drugs because to do so is to elevate us.

47:57So that is really deep and smart. No, that's right. Because psychiatrists in this country anyway are unique among mental health professionals in that they can prescribe the drugs. Yeah. That's what makes you fundamentally different, right? Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And so, yeah, there's guild interests at play as well. Guild interests. I'm sure. Yeah. Right, because the marriage counselor can't give you SSRIs. Yeah. But you can. Yep. And that's why we're special. And that's why don't question the drugs. Wow. That's so plausible. So the first, what you describe as the first side effect is effectively ignoring the cause of the illness in the first place.

48:36And that has costs. Yeah. And, you know, I'm going to mention a whole bunch of other things that are important. We've got PSSD. We have brain damage during withdrawal. We have homicidal behavior. Okay. So let's just, let's go in order. Yeah. Yeah. PSSD. Yeah. So this is. What does that stand for? It stands for post SSRI sexual dysfunction. And from my perspective, this is the biggest scandal in psychiatry going on at the moment that has been not discussed. Now, there are people who get put on these medications that, well, firstly, one of the big side effects of these medications is sexual dysfunction.

49:15It happens in, I think it's like 70 % of people. 70 %? Yeah. Yeah, so. And when you say sexual dysfunction, since you're a doctor, we can just be totally blunt. What specifically are you talking about? Yeah, so it would be like loss of interest in sex, loss of arousal, difficulty to reach climax, and erectile dysfunction. Wow, 70 %? 70%. It's a really normal side effect. But the issue is we tell people that this goes away when they come off the medications. And this is just a temporary trade-off. To feel less depressed, you're going to deal with the sexual dysfunction. But what we've been seeing is that these drugs are causing permanent sexual dysfunction in people, even when they come off of them, they develop, on top of all of those things I mentioned, they will develop genital anesthesia.

50:11And so this is a real neurological issue. Those areas down there, they lose erogenous sensation. People will say that when they touch down there, it feels like the back of their hand or the back of their arm. And so there's sensory changes. Are you serious? Yeah. And so it's totally frightening. For how long? It can be permanent for some people. Come on. Yeah. And so the prognosis is actually really, it's not good for that. Some people will recover in three years or so, but there are case reports out there where this has gone on for decades. What? Yeah. But it's not just that. And here is the - Basically you're castrating people.

50:51You're essentially castrating people, but it's worse than that. How could anything be worse than that? Because along with the sexual dysfunction, and this is where the condition is misunderstood, people think it's just a sexual problem, which is already horrific as is. It causes cognitive damage as well. People will, along with that, they'll have difficulty, severe difficulty concentrating, focusing, paying attention. And there's also severe emotional blunting. And so people will talk about being completely dissociated as well from their emotions. Like if you were to hug a child, you know, your child or your wife, you just don't feel anything warm.

51:34If you were to hear a favorite song from your childhood that, you know, used to make like the back of your neck kind of a prickle from nostalgia, all of that gets like nuked and taken out. And so you have people who are essentially lobotomized with cognitive impairment who also have severe sexual dysfunction. So you're basically destroying someone's soul. I mean, the things that make you distinctly human, your love, your emotional response, your sexual response, which is very deep. It's not just, I'm horny today. It's like, it's your life force. It's your procreative force. It's what keeps the species alive, that's gone?

52:15It's wiped out and people become highly suicidal because when you don't feel anything, you don't feel any connection to life, it's like there's nothing to live for anymore. And so the suicide rate in this population is through the roof. And I want to say something. Just a second. And this is all confirmed? Yeah. So that's what I want to say. Some people hearing this would be like, this is so crazy. There's no way this could be true. Yes, that's my response. PSSD is a listed side effect in the European Union. So the European Union has already acted on this. They've put it in the warnings and precautions of all of the SSRIs and SNRI antidepressants over there.

52:55So they have recognized it. Canada has recognized it. Australia has recognized it. Hong Kong has recognized it. The New York Times has run pieces on this. This is being reviewed by the FDA right now. This is not a fringe issue. This is something that several regulatory agencies, like the biggest ones in the world, like the European Union, second biggest regulatory agency in the world, they have acknowledged this and they put this in the drug labels to warn doctors so they can talk to their patients about this. This isn't fringe. This is completely acknowledged by major health regulators, but doctors do not tell patients about it.

53:37Do doctors know? Most of the doctors don't know. And that's because, well, there is no incentive to get this message out there. Now, when this came on, so when the European Union... So there's a huge population of SSRI unix, many of whom kill themselves out of despair caused by SSRIs. And yet for some reason, nobody knows this is happening. I'm confused. Why don't one people talk about this? Again, it's this issue where I think media doesn't want to touch it because to do so would be to scare people away from life-saving drugs. You should be experiencing comfort every single day of the year, and it should not be something that happens every so often when you get home from work.

54:26No, all the time, no questions asked. And that's why we recommend Cozy Earth. Cozy Earth makes bamboo sheets sound weird, weird enough to try. That's what we thought we did, and we're grateful we did. Bamboo sheets are actually incredibly soft, breathable, natural, and regulate your temperature without artificial means. That means you and the person sleeping next to you sleep much better than you would, even if you prefer different temperatures, which is pretty common. That can save you a lot of arguments and help you to wake up feeling great. Cozy Earth also makes pants because, of course, they do.

55:01They're perfect for just about anything you're doing, work, travel, chasing your kids around, having dinner with friends. They are clean cut, stretchy, very, very comfortable. Every Cozy Earth customer I've ever talked to, and that's like everyone who works here, said they're never going back. It is easy to get hooked on Cozy Earth. Cozy Earth offers a 100-night sleep trial, a 10-year warranty. Your first purchase comes with no risk. You either love them or you send them back, no questions asked. Go to CozyEarth.com. Use the code TUCKER for up to 40 % off the softest bedding, bath, and apparel.

55:32If you get a post-purchase survey, tell them you've heard about Cozy Earth right here on this podcast. Built for real life, made to keep up with your life. Cozy Earth. Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have eczema, so I get how it can steal your time. But why let eczema take over when you can talk to your doctor about ebglis? Ebglis Lubrikizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies, EBCLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids.

56:16Don't use if you are allergic to EBCLIS. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBCLIS. Before starting EBCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Paid partnership with Lilly. Respect your time. Ask your doctor about EBCLIS and visit ebclus.com. Or call 1-800-LILLY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. I. At Farmers, our honesty is contagious. Wait, am I going to catch honesty? Well, when you're with Farmers, it's kind of inevitable. Well, how long does it take to...

56:52I lied to you when you asked if I knew what a deductible was. I don't know my dad's birthday. I thought umbrella policies were for rainstorms. Actual rainstorms. I have it, don't I? You don't just have honesty. You have Farmers. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Learn more at Farmers.com. Underwritten by Farmers Truck or Fire Insurance Exchanges or Affiliate. The product's not available in every state. How are they life-saving if they hike the suicide rate? They're clearly implicated in mass shootings. Let me say that again. They're clearly implicated in mass shootings. Yeah. And they castrate people and make them want to kill themselves.

57:24Like, how is that life-saving? I mean, it's just a slogan because they're not life-saving at all. Because when you look at, actually, the clinical trial data, it's clear evidence that people who are under age 25, it actually makes them, they engage in more suicidal activity than the people on placebo. It's absolutely insane. And then when reanalyses have been done looking at the adult populations, they also find higher rates of suicide in the clinical trials. But I want to have some nuance here. They can be experienced as life-saving for some people. Like if you have a lot of anxiety and you get put on this medication and it blunts it, you will experience that as feeling life-saving saving in that moment.

58:09But in general, on a population level, they're actually contributing to more suicide attempts. I used to feel that way about vodka. Yeah. Really strongly. I'm being serious. Not any heavy drinker can tell you. You wake up and you feel completely out of control, completely out of control. You know, you just feel like your head's going to explode. You've got pins and needles, anxiety. You're so sensitive, you can't even live in this world. And you have, I was a double screwdriver in the morning guy. Solves the problem. like right away. By the time you get to the bottom of the glass, you're under control.

58:45So I would call that, and in fact, at the time did call that life-saving. Yeah. And then, of course, the progression of alcohol and alcoholism is well known to most people. So it's like people laugh at you when you say it's life-saving. How is vodka in the morning life-saving? Well, if you've experienced it, you know why someone could say that. Yeah. But big picture, that's insane. So SSRIs sound like exactly the same phenomenon. It is. I mean, on multiple levels, I think, you know, one, they make you ignore the real problems which fester and get worse and could actually push you eventually towards becoming suicidal.

59:22And two, I think they disrupt your brain chemistry over time and actually make you more likely to be depressed and develop other issues. I just can't believe basically the entire weight of the American medical establishment, the regulatory bodies, some of the biggest publicly traded companies in the world, they're all basically prescribing vodka to desperate people. It sounds crazy. It honestly does sound crazy. And people are going to listen to this and they're going to say, you know, this is crazy. But the beauty of it and the reason I feel so good about having this conversation is that it's provable.

1:00:00We don't have to guess because we have the outcomes. Right? So the two numbers, as a layman that seem relevant to me, doses prescribed, suicide rate. That just seems like a pretty big picture way to measure success. If more people are killing themselves as you got more prescriptions for this garbage, it's at very least not working. Can we say that? I mean, that seems logical. I think it makes sense when you look at that on the population level, but I also think it makes sense intuitively for a lot of people. I mean, with nearly, you know 15 to 20 percent of people being on these medications everyone knows someone who's on these drugs yeah in their family in their in their social circle just look how are they doing are these people thriving you know a lot of the times i mean the stories that i hear is that person's not doing that great you know they or they they've slowly gotten worse over time i mean you can look at it at a population level this issue is so common people actually see this in their real life and the people that they know.

1:01:04Have you ever spoken to someone who had numb genitals or no sex drive? Yeah, I've spoken to probably 20 to 30 of them. What do they say? What's that like? It's like they wake up in a horror movie. I think about a woman and I interviewed her from my recollection. So she got on one of these medications, beautiful young woman, and she ended up developing PSSD. She told the doctor that it had happened to her and she became incredibly distressed. You know, what is happening to me? Her sex drive just gone. Sex drive gone, cognitive damage, emotional blunting. It completely disassociated from her family, from her emotions and disconnected from her life.

1:01:49The doctor involuntarily hospitalized her saying that she was delusional and that she had a health anxiety and tried to pressure her onto anti-psychotic medication because they simply could not accept that this had happened. They managed to briefly turn her family against her and just say, she's wrong, she's delusional, she has another psychiatric condition. And so she ends up in a psychiatric hospital. Talk about a horror show. You get put on a medication that's meant to help you. It destroys your nervous system and then a doctor involuntarily hospitalizes you and turns your family against you.

1:02:27These people literally wake up in a horror show. I spoke to another person in India. Is the doctor still practicing? Oh yeah, they didn't, yeah. They're still practicing. And this is not isolated. I spoke to another - Why is that person not in jail?

1:02:43And you know, it's... That's so cruel. That's cruel, in my opinion. Yeah. Sorry, I'm interrupting. I'm making me mad again. You spoke to someone in India? The same thing happened. Yeah. Because, you know, doctors, they've never heard of this condition before. And it just seems like, you know, too crazy to be true. How could these life-saving drugs, you know, do something like this? and the same thing happened. He ended up being involuntarily hospitalized. This young man for months, and his family was turned against him. He kept on trying to tell them that this had happened to him, and it took them months to let him out.

1:03:27And so, yeah, it's about the worst thing that I could ever imagine happening to someone, and they lose people all the time. The suicide rate's out of control in this population. So a doctor who refuses to see the obvious and is committed knowingly or not to a lie, it seems to me to be likely in a case like this to prescribe a drug on top of the drug that it clearly caused the symptoms he's trying to treat, right? Yeah. What happens when you do that? A lot of these patients seem like they're on all kinds of different drugs. How do they interact with each other? What's the effect of that? Yeah, I mean, it's awful, right?

1:04:10You have someone who's highly distressed for legitimate reasons with a totally messed up nervous system and you've just thrown them on an antipsychotic. So now they're kind of like blunted and even more dulled dealing with the same problem. So if these drugs can eliminate your sexual response, numb your genitals for life, drive you to suicide, is it possible that they have other sexual side effects? well having spoken to um some of these pssd sufferers um i've had two men a heterosexual men tell me that they started to question their sexuality um because of because of all of the the blunting that was going on these were men who were having encounters with women that they were just saying i would find this person very arousing and attractive and that's not happening anymore and they start wondering whether they're gay.

1:05:05And so I think on that level, it can make people feel asexual. It can make people start to question their sexuality, which I've directly seen. And then the whole other issue, which is even more frightening, is the data that's coming out is some of the animal studies about what happens to mice who are exposed in utero to antidepressants. because this has always been a question that people have been curious about. You know, is there, like what are the effects of exposing a developing nervous system during this period of life where it goes from being like a speck to a fully formed brain in nine months?

1:05:45You know, these drugs freely cross placenta. What is the effect on the development? They do. They do. All of them do. Yeah. All psychiatric drugs freely cross. So mothers taking these drugs, the drugs are in the developing child. Yes. Yes. We know that. Yeah. Fact. Yeah. Yeah. But no study has been done on what that means. Well, there have been some studies. And so firstly, there's the studies in rats and mice. And what they find is that the mice who are exposed in utero, they grow up with a higher rate of autistic-like behaviors and also decreased sexual interest. So they mate less than the other mice.

1:06:25Now, you might be saying, hey, well, that's just mice. Who knows if that happens in humans? I tell you what, I'm concerned enough about that already to worry about humans. I don't need to see that human study. But we do have some studies in humans. And what they've found is we have 12 MRI studies that have controlled for depression, which is essentially just a fancy way of making sure that depression isn't a factor. And they've looked at the brains and they find that there's structural changes and functional changes in the brains of kids who are exposed versus those who are not exposed. They've then gone again and looked at this when the kids have become adolescents and they've looked at their sensory processing.

1:07:10And the kids who were exposed growing up had altered sensory processing when they looked at the amygdala. It's a part of the brain that's responsible for high emotions. And those changes, they have correlated with worse mental health outcomes. So that's like a whole other topic that I was recently at the FDA talking about this with some of my colleagues, that many women are not actually being told that there are real risks to your child. If you take these medications when the nervous system is developing. Are they prescribed to pregnant women? 10 % of pregnant, I think 9 % or 10 % of pregnant women are taking antidepressants.

1:07:58There's been a massive increase in, well, sexual changes of all kinds. In the way that people couple, in the way, literally in the way they have sex, in the outcome that are children who were born and in self-identified sexual orientation. A massive increase in homosexuality, massive increase, like mind-boggling increase in transgenderism. No one seems interested in why. Is it possible that if you've got 10 % of the population on these drugs, that there's a connection there? I mean, I think that's something to be explored because, you know, yes, you could make an argument, okay, the world is more accepting these days and maybe people are coming out.

1:08:46That's bullshit. The numbers are so high that that's not it. But I'm looking at these animal data. I'm seeing changes in sexual interest in the mice who are exposed growing up. I mean, we're putting kids who are seven, six, seven, eight, who go through sexual maturity with their sex drive essentially blunted from these medications. I'm having people come to me and tell me that they're questioning their sexuality because they're not feeling attraction and arousal. Right. Connect the dots. I mean, it has to be playing a role. Is there like currently an NIH study of this underway? Is anyone saying, hey, wait a second, like you could change the future of humanity with this kind of stuff?

1:09:33This is like big consequences. No, I mean, the NIMH has essentially been useless. I mean, all they do from what I see is they are essentially just looking for drug targets in the brain. They're not doing any research into side effects. They're not doing any studies comparing non-drug alternatives to drugs for the treatment of anxiety and depression. They are so captured and just obsessed with finding the next target to throw a drug at. I think the American public has been betrayed by the NIMH. I really do. Well, it sounds like a lot of people have been killed. What about, going back to the question of side effects, I don't think, every time you raise the question like, hey, it seems like a lot of the school shooters that we know about, to the extent we know anything about a lot of them, they seem to be on these drugs.

1:10:30Has there been research into that? I know you're not allowed to say that. YouTube shuts you down if you say that. I don't know why. Yeah, we're throttled for sure, you know, but... For asking that question. Yeah, for asking that question, yep. Yeah. There weren't school shootings, you know. I mean, the biggest school shooting of like American history took place at the University of Texas. Chuck Whitman, who turns out he had a brain tumor. So there was like a reason that that happened. Went up in the bell tower, killed all these people. Then there was a lull and then Columbine happens and then there's like probably many reasons for this, but the increase in school shootings coincides with, almost precisely coincides with, almost precisely coincides with this massive increase in the prescription of these drugs.

1:11:14So like, is anyone studying this? Well, it's actually really hard to study is the issue. I want to say this because this is a topic, I don't think drugs are involved in all the school shootings. I do think there is a social contagion element to it. But I do think if you look at the side effects of all of these medications, it's already in the label. If you look at stimulants, right there it says it can cause aggression and hostility. If you look at antipsychotics like Abilify, in the label it says it can cause aggression. If you look at the antidepressants, it also says it can cause mania and aggression and agitation.

1:12:01and that's kind of the opposite of the intended effect now well what these things are are paradoxical side effects and so and maybe an easy way to think about it is if there were 10 people in a room and there was smoking cannabis you know you might have nine people giggling and you have one person becoming paranoid there's something just about that person's genetics and the way they respond to it that they have the opposite reaction yes and so that can happen with psychiatric medications. And so these are rare side effects. But if you're putting 15 % of the population on these drugs, rare side effects are going to happen.

1:12:40And so the next thing is, like I said, we know these drugs can do this. Well, has this ever actually happened? And it has because there There have been lawsuits, for instance, there was one in the early 90s. It was the Tobin case. There was a gentleman called Don Shell who had had a bad reaction to Pax. He had a bad reaction, I think, to Prozac. And then he was put on Paxil many years later. And shortly thereafter, he became incredibly homicidal and he killed his wife, his daughter, and his granddaughter and then shot himself. now the surviving son-in-law the husband of the daughter who he killed ended up bringing suit against I think it was Smith Klein at the time it wasn't GSK they go to a jury trial and they win it gets appealed and the appeal isn't successful and he ends up getting paid out and so we even have I mean we have legal cases where jurors have listened to the evidence of these cases and said if not for this drug, you know, this awful murder-suicide wouldn't have happened.

1:13:54And so we know this happens from court cases. And there have been many other cases like this. You just never hear about them because you're not allowed to talk about this. Why would this video be throttled for broaching this topic? I'm confused. Well, because, I mean, the dominant narrative is essentially that school shootings are caused by guns. And if you are to... I have a lot of guns. It's never occurred to me. Yeah. And so that, I mean, this is meant to be stigmatizing. This is meant to be something that scares people away from medications and it doesn't fit the mold. I mean, because if you were to accept that this can happen, even if this is a one in two million type side effect, that's still happening a couple times a year that people are becoming homicidal on these medications.

1:14:49And so I think people, they don't, you just can't say it. It's taboo. It shouldn't be if you care about the murdered kids at the schools. It's changing though. And this is like a silver lining here that will make people like me seem a a lot less crazy because through bipartisan support, the governor of Tennessee just instituted a new law mandating that following school shootings, there needs to be an investigation into the use of psychiatric medications. This is the first state to actually try and get that data to look into it because oftentimes it's redacted, the FBI has it, they don't give it to anyone.

1:15:36It's kind of like shoved away in a box. But in the state of Tennessee, with bipartisan support, they will now look at this for any school shootings. Good, good. So what, okay, you are, you know, middle-aged person going through the middle-age, you know, the litany of middle-age drama. And you find yourself sad, maybe even depressed. You go to the shrink and you are prescribed drugs. what are the most commonly prescribed drugs which are the drugs you should be the most afraid of assuming there's a difference I mean I think the SSRIs we've talked a lot about them but the other class are benzodiazepines these are awful drugs they're usually used for anxiety and insomnia and what are the brand names on those?

1:16:26Xanax, Klonopin, Valium um to mazapam yeah very common drugs in this country really yeah their use is declining um but they are still they're still quite common the main issue with them is that they god they feel good and i know we were talking about this before and you had mentioned taking one before i mean it's it's i've taken them it's almost like immediate like you take one in high school i never took another one because it was the most profound. I mean, they solve all your problems in like four minutes. So super addictive, right? You know, to have something like that on hand. But the real problem with the benzos is when it comes to coming off of them, they can be incredibly difficult to stop.

1:17:20What does that mean, difficult to stop? that so because they have such a potent sort of anxiety reducing and insomnia and sorry, it's sleep inducing effect. When you come off of them, your anxiety goes through the roof and you develop severe insomnia. Some people even die from coming off benzodiazepines. It's so jarring to the brain. And because of that, people can get trapped on the drug. Every time they try and come off of it, it's so uncomfortable that they have to go back on. And they can also develop another condition called protracted withdrawal. And so some people, when they've been on this medication for years and they try and come off, they develop a kind of a brain injury.

1:18:03And so they taper themselves off the medication too quickly and they go into a severe withdrawal and the symptoms never stop. They end up with ringing in their ears, light sensitivity, cognitive impairment, severe anxiety, burning in their hands and feet. Oh, come on. Yeah. And then they say to themselves, they go, I'm just in withdrawal. You know, I've been white knuckling through this for the last couple of months. I'm just going to start the drug again. I don't want to deal with this anymore. I'll find another way to come off. They start the drug again. It doesn't go away. And this is - Wait, the symptoms don't go away?

1:18:41The symptoms don't go away. And these are the patients that I actually treat in my practice. I'd say probably 70 % of the people I work with now have neurological damage from coming off benzodiazepines and SSRI medications too quickly. Thankfully, it actually has... I mean, it's awful. It has a decent prognosis. Most people recover from it within two years, but for many people, it can be two years of severe disability. and these are the people you treat these are the people I treat so you see this so I see this on a daily basis I see this multiple days a week people who have brain damage from coming off these medications too quickly now again I know most people haven't heard about this before so they're going to be listening to this and saying you know this is crazy you know how could I have never heard that coming off these medications could induce brain damage read the drug labels in the US every single benzodiazepine has a section in there that says that talks about the risk of protracted withdrawal so what does that look like so describe obviously anonymously but like the experience of one of your patients so the experience of one of my patients is man I mean it's so bad you are living your life one day you decide to come off a medication and then before you know it your whole life is turned upside down your brain you are gripped with severe anxiety and obsessive dark thoughts that just torment you all the time you never have a moment of rest or relaxation you you simply cannot relax some people feel so keyed up that they pace incessantly in circles it's a condition called akathisia and they cannot stop moving they become social recluses because they cannot go out in public because it's too bright, it's too noisy.

1:20:53The nervous system is like a snail without a shell. Even interacting with people in their shopping center can cause like, you know, surges in adrenaline. People have severe neuropathic pain when, you know, their feet burn. And it destroys families. I mean, people become disabled. People take their lives frequently. Um, and this is, you know, I, I know I mentioned before about PSSD being like the biggest story going on, but this, this would be just as big, honestly, there are probably millions of people who are suffering from protracted withdrawal from benzos or SSRIs. Um, um, thankfully this has actually been picked up a lot by, um, major, uh, news outlets, um, recently, but it's, this condition has and it does kill people.

1:21:51How long do you have to be on benzos or SSRIs to develop physical dependency and to get these kind of withdrawal symptoms? So, most people, it's several years and then it's triggered by coming off the medication. Several years? I mean, yeah. Is there any evidence it's a good idea to put someone on SSRIs or benzos for years? No, no, there isn't. But I do want to say, I have had some people develop this much quicker than several years, like within taking the medication for a few months, things like that. That's much less common. Usually the way it happens is you're on it for several years, five years, decades.

1:22:28You come off too quickly. Decades? Yeah, that's really common. You've seen that? Yeah, yeah. Decades. What is the doctor thinking? Well, when they put them on these drugs for decades. Well, I mean, if someone's coming back to get a script filled, you know, after 15, 20 years of taking one of these drugs, it's like, does no one pause to say, what does it do to something? The brain's not designed for that, right? Yeah, well, they think that they're helping the person. At the risk of getting a little technical, I want to go here because I think it's important. So when a drug comes onto the market, there's a study called a relapse prevention study.

1:23:11This is essentially the rationale for leaving people on these drugs indefinitely. And so I think it's important to talk a bit about the design of these studies because it's so telling. Essentially, a drug company will get a group of people and they'll put them on the drug for like say six months. And so you have 500 people on the drug for six months. 250, this is actually how the studies are designed. And 250 people, at a certain point, they continue the drug and the other 250, they rapidly stop it. And so they pull them off the drug either immediately or at the longest about two weeks. And then they watch what happens to those two groups over time.

1:23:57And they're looking for how many people become depressed in the two groups with the thinking being, well, you know, if the patients who continued the drug become less depressed, then that means it works. But the issue with these studies is that it completely ignores the fact that people develop withdrawal. And so if you stick a bunch of people on this drug for six months and then you stop it immediately or within two weeks, they are going to develop withdrawal symptoms. That will look like a depression. And so the study is flawed, essentially. It's majorly flawed. But it's embarrassing that the FDA even allows this and that doctors even believe this is a rationale for keeping people on these medications.

1:24:45And that's it. That is the study that lets doctors feel good about filling these drugs up again and again and again. because they say, oh, we're preventing relapse because this poorly designed study that makes no sense, that is honestly just embarrassing even to believe in, showed that when you rapidly pulled people off the medication, there was more depressive relapse, which really it wasn't. It was just withdrawal. And so just even at the heart of it is just bad science and faulty studies. I mean, even I, as a non-scientist, can understand the gaps in the logic there. it seems pretty obvious that it doesn't make a lot of sense, but I'm fixated on the worldview that allows this to persist.

1:25:29Like how would you have to feel about other people to allow this kind of stuff to happen? And I just want to ask when you were doing your training as a doctor for whatever, six or eight, 10 years, however long it took, did you get a sense that other doctors considered like the human soul ever? Or is there a sense that people are just like a more evolved animal? Is there something special about people? Do they have like, is there a spiritual component to a person? Did anyone ever acknowledge that? No, that's not part of the training. So if you think people are just clever cattle, you can treat them like this.

1:26:12Yeah. We're biological systems where you can sort of just tinker with it with the right chemical. That's what we are. That's the belief. that's the way biological psychiatry is taught so it's kind of inevitable you're going to wind up in a place like this isn't it because that's not true people are not just machines right and no other civilizations ever thought that they were yeah

1:26:42sorry i don't i don't mean to bum you out no no no i'm just i'm thinking about i mean the only reason and that happens is because there is such a massive incentive to recast the human experience in that way. Yeah. Yeah. But that's not reality. No. At all, no. Yeah. So what about amphetamines and their ADHD and the fact that like every third kid on your street is taking this stuff? Like what is ADHD or amphetamines an effective way to treat it? What are the long-term effects of those drugs? I mean, ADHD, I mean, I want to start here. So there was an awesome piece in New York Magazine recently that summarized a lot of this research.

1:27:36But it really, the thing that most parents care about is usually academic improvement. That's why they want their kids on these medications. When you look at the results long-term, they do not improve academics. What they find is that the medications are mostly effective for controlling behavior. So when you have kids who are fidgety, who are having to pay attention to things that are boring, putting them on medications makes them easier to control. So if you're like a bad teacher, they're good. They're good. They're great. um now i mean there is some i mean adhd is interesting because it kind of hits at the um it's like societal expectations like in in the u.s and in a lot of developed countries academic success is synonymous with your value as a person you know if you have to be successful at school um to to be worthy and a lot of parents uh believe that and so they will push their kids into subjects and even university courses because they want to help them.

1:28:46They think they're helping them by pushing them into these things and the kids are really struggling and they're not interested in it. And you can put someone on a stimulant and it will make something that's boring more interesting. Definitely. Yeah. And so there's also - You have the world's most boring conversations on cocaine, but you have no idea they're boring. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's the same with your studies. And then I think another thing that I believe is going on that really doesn't get enough airtime is that actually a lot of lifestyle problems are leading to ADHD, especially in adults.

1:29:24and the main one being poor diet and insulin resistance. You know, as people become insulin resistant, they end up with more anxiety, more depression and more brain fog. Essentially, they've broken their body because they've been eating too many refined carbohydrates, added sugars, all of that. And it makes it very hard for neurons to work when the system is disrupted, there's too much insulin, they can't pull energy in. And so I think a lot of people out there have very legitimate, real problems focusing and feeling foggy, but they're not really looking at lifestyle issues that are really clear.

1:30:07And oftentimes people, if they do things like, they try ketogenic diets, this is like a really big thing in the mental health space. And they work for a lot of mental health conditions because they reverse insulin resistance and they improve energy, the way your cells work. And so I think the biggest thing that I worry about - So it does work. The low-carb diet affects your mental health. Yeah. In a major way. Some people even call Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes because the correlation between the worsening of diabetes type 2 and your blood sugar levels correlates with cognitive decline. I mean, the insulin resistance diabetes all has very strong links to cognitive decline.

1:30:59And so when it comes to ADHD, I think the thing that bothers me the most is there's actually a lot of reversible things that you can do there. If you have brain fog, it's not that you're just like, you're weak and you're not trying hard enough or you're lazy or something like that. I mean, if you can look at your diet and there's things you can optimize there, if you can get moving, if you can stop smoking cannabis, there's a lot of... And obviously, if you can actually try and do work that you genuinely find energizing and that you enjoy, you probably won't need to be on stimulants. Stop smoking cannabis.

1:31:39I thought cannabis was good for you. It's medicine. It's a medicine. It's a herb. You're going to get me on something that I'm really bothered about. That cannabis is a massive gateway drug into the psychiatric industry. It is a huge trigger for mania and schizophrenia. It is completely downplayed by big cannabis because we've decided to legalize it in so many states now. and many people they'll end up they'll think you know it's harmless it's this herb not realizing that the potency has increased like 40 times since what it used to be and it just it triggers mania and psychosis and then the doctors will see them and the doctors will downplay the role of cannabis and they'll say oh you have schizophrenia or you have bipolar and then they put them on an antipsychotic and then this person just ends up on antipsychotics for a really long period of time when really the issue was that they had a psychotic reaction.

1:32:45So you believe that cannabis use can lead to schizophrenia? I wouldn't say schizophrenia. I would say I believe that cannabis use can cause psychosis and that psychosis can endure sometimes for like a year or two after they have the psychotic break. Because to say something it's schizophrenia makes it sound like they just had a broken brain. Their brain was broken and it was just inevitable to happen. I've worked with patients who have smoked cannabis. They've had psychotic reactions. And even after they've come off the cannabis, for a period of like a year or two, they've still experienced periodic episodes of psychosis before it fizzled out.

1:33:32The only way I can understand that is that that drug, when they had that psychotic episode, it actually damaged their brain. It was like a big hit and it took them a couple years afterwards to fully recover from that. And I've looked into this with many other people who actually work in this space and they see that. When you have a psychotic reaction to cannabis, it can sometimes take months or even a year or two to fully go away. I think doctors misdiagnose that and tell someone, this is a sign you have a broken brain, you have schizophrenia, time to put you on the drug. So you're saying that the drug companies wouldn't necessarily be opposed to marijuana legalization?

1:34:10No, no, it's creating customers. Do you really think that? I mean, I don't know. That's really dark. Well, I don't think they, you know, I don't know if there's like a drug company lobbyist out there just being like, hey, you know, we really want to kind of push this knowingly, but it sure helps them that big cannabis is out there and it is sowing a message that essentially these drugs are safe herbs, these drugs are medicine. I mean, they're Frankenstein drugs now. I mean, they're 40 times more potent than how they used to be. So just to bottom line it, as a practicing licensed psychiatrist, would you ever prescribe cannabis to a patient for mental illness?

1:34:53No, it doesn't make any sense at all. Would you prescribe SSRIs? So this is where there's a bit more nuance here. I think we have to use every tool that we have. And I mean, there are a lot of people out there who will say, I mean, the fact is these drugs have saved people's lives. I can say that, you know, even with a lot of the concern that, you know, the drug effect wears off. But imagine someone who they come in and they're unhappy. And this is rare. You talk to them about their life. There's no relationship issues going on. It looks really good. Work is fine. You've tried to optimize their health.

1:35:41You've done everything that you could. And they're still unhappy. Something is still going on. Maybe they have really severe OCD or something like that. I'm not going to sit there and just say, I'm not going to give you any treatment. If I've tried all of the non-drug strategies to help you and you're still suffering, I will give you informed consent about the medication. I will put you on it and I'll monitor you and I'll do my best to make sure that you're functioning. And if there's side effects that come up, I'll catch them early. My issue with the medications is that they're used first up without anyone trying with minimal, with lip service really to helping people with non-drug means first.

1:36:25But if you've done all of that and it's still not working, I think it makes sense to use a drug to make someone more functional. So if someone goes to your practice, you said your current practice is helping people get off these drugs. Yeah. What does that look like? Just give us the kind of typical patient who approaches you. How long has this person been on the drugs? Why does this person want to get off the drugs? And how does this person get off the drugs? So a typical person might be a middle-aged woman who was put on a medication during a divorce. She's been on it for maybe 15 years or so.

1:37:08And she's starting to notice that whatever she does with the medications, it's not working. She's gone up on the dose. She's maxed out. She started a new one and she just feels terrible. She has brain fog, she has low energy and she feels numb. And she's realized essentially that psychiatry has kind of failed her, that the answer to her solutions aren't really drugs anymore. And so she'll come to us in this state and what we do is we look at the drugs she's on. Usually she's on several. And then we'll just start to identify which drug is causing, is most likely to be causing a problem, the most amount of your problems.

1:37:55And we start there and we slowly taper that off. Some drugs you can taper quite quickly. Others can take years to come off. Like things like benzos and SSRIs, they're much harder. And so we'll work with patients for several years, slowly untangling the medication regimen, meeting with them very frequently until we ease them off. at the same time we introduce them to non-drug approaches to managing their mental health if they need to do dietary modifications, lifestyle changes if they need to learn some sleep if we need to look at some of the substances that they're using, we'll use all of our non-drug tools while we're bringing them off the medications How long does it take to taper off the drug itself?

1:38:43So So if you've been on these medications for several years, most people are coming off at around 18 to 24 months. Wow. Yeah. So this is what I see. And I want to give a bit of nuance here.

1:39:00It's hard to know why it's so hard for some people to come off. I mean, there are some people, and for reasons I don't understand, their brains are really elastic. They might be able to come off a drug that they've been on for years really quickly. they have awful withdrawal for a couple of months and then they kind of, they come back together. But then there's another group of people that when they try that, the suffering doesn't end. And it's just, it's brutal and the withdrawal doesn't go away and then they have to come back on. And for them, it can take them years to come off. Currently, I have no real way of predicting who is going to have an easy withdrawal and who's going to have a difficult withdrawal.

1:39:37It's not related to age, sex, health. not in a way that fully accounts for the variability like in general young people have an easier go in general people who have been on the drug for a shorter period of time um it kind of skews things but i i've also seen young people who've been on the drug for for not that long have a hell of a time coming off as well and so it is it's hard for me to predict but because i've worked with so many people who have developed this essentially this brain injury called protracted withdrawal. The way I've come to think about this is everyone needs to come off the medications gradually in a way that doesn't trigger severe withdrawal.

1:40:19That's kind of the measure. You do like a 10 % reduction. You see how they go. Okay, you're fine. We do another one. But once they start to develop severe withdrawal, I then slow it down and I do smaller and smaller reductions to get them completely off.

1:40:37without severe withdrawal. So they're not at risk of this neurological injury called protracted withdrawal. And they're able to work and they're able to fulfill their household duties and all of that. That's the way it should be done. So someone remains functional while the taper is going on. How do they feel when they're off, when they're finally done? A lot of them feel great, especially if they've... Because people come to me because they're dealing with side effects. The drugs are actively harming them. They feel foggy and fatigued. And then to have that monkey off their back, they're not dealing with the side effects.

1:41:14But then they also have the self-esteem issues. Some people, they just go, I'm not broken. I don't want to be on a drug. I don't believe there's anything wrong with me. So they love that. They love that they can go and travel and they don't need to worry about losing a prescription or the prescription being stolen from them and they love not having to line up at the pharmacy. They love not having to worry about the long-term side effects of these medications on their brain. And so many people are really happy. How does being on SSRIs affect people's relationships?

1:41:58So the question, yeah, I mean, it's... It's a question really about how does emotional blunting affect your ability to connect with one another? I guess you just answered the question. And so there is a Facebook group out there called Marriage is Destroyed by SSRIs. I think it has nearly 5 ,000 people in there. And the stories you hear there are that we were in a relationship. My spouse was depressed. they got put on a medication and so in some instances they'll say that the person became emotionally distant they stopped being intuitive about their partner they stopped recognizing that there were issues going on and they became kind of harsh and neglectful and so I think it can get in the way of empathy and this was I mean this is a funny story actually because my wife and I, we both tried Zoloft.

1:43:03We got it from a friend of ours when we were in our residency because I wanted to see what it was like, these medications. I was prescribing them to people. That's a benzodiazepine. No, this is an SSRI. Oh, okay. Yeah, so I took an SSRI because I just wanted to see what it was like. And she hated me when I was on Zoloft. She did? Why? Well, she felt like I didn't really care about her anymore. Like she would, you know, we would be having like, you know, I mean, she'd be upset about something. I don't know. The kitchen was dirty and I'd left a mess and she'd be talking to me. And I'd just be like so zoned out, not caring about her emotions, emotionless, not aware, not being able to intuit things.

1:43:50Because in the past, like if I walked into the house and I could pick up that she was upset and walk over to her and say, hey, you know, what's going on? And I sense something is wrong. Let's talk about it. That went away. That ability to kind of detect, you know, subtle kind of emotional changes in her went away. And she hated that. How long were you on it? I think two to three weeks. And then, I mean, that was enough of an experience to kind of feel what that was like. And so... So you took it because you're going to be prescribing it and you wanted to know what it was. Yeah. And my professors made me feel like this was like the biggest lunatic idea ever.

1:44:32Seriously? Yeah. Yeah. They were just like, these are serious medications. You shouldn't be taking them. But I was just like, I need to know what this experience is like if I'm going to prescribe them. It's called empathy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I've taken several psychiatric medications because I think it's really important that I know what they feel like. Yes, I agree. What else have you taken? I've taken like metazapine. I've taken trazodone. What are those? These are antidepressants and sedatives. And I've taken benzodiazepines. What'd you think of those? They may be worse, to be honest. The benzos were actually prescribed to me because after, and this is crazy because I'm a drug side effect guy that this happened to me.

1:45:11Life is wild. Yeah. So after my daughter was born, I just started working at the FDA. And I was a clinician. and that's what I was used to. And all of a sudden, I was a drug regulator doing reports every day. And that was really stressful to have a new kid and have a new job. And I was also totally overdoing it on stimulants. Like I was drinking a large cup of coffee in the morning, two Diet Cokes during the day. I was probably packing like five Zins in my mouth throughout the day. First of all, Zins are only for rectal use. I don't know if you knew that. You should be using ALP. You should be using ALP, okay, yeah.

1:45:48Sorry, excuse me. Yeah. And so my sleep deteriorated. I was having a really hard time sleeping just with all of the pressure and my daughter waking up in the middle of the night. So I got a script for Xanax from a nurse practitioner and I would just take it once a night and then very soon it became every other night and then very soon it became every night. And it slowly wore off and I started to become more anxious over time. And this is what happens with benzos. I would be sitting there trying to concentrate on my reports and I'd be getting obsessive thoughts about embarrassing things that had happened in the past.

1:46:25I mean, it was like torturous, like they would just spring into my mind. And thankfully I had the foresight to realize that the drug was actually making me more anxious. And I see this with a lot of my patients. I was able to come off fairly quickly. Not many people aren't, but that experience really taught me about how easy it is for these drugs to make you worse. And I mean, if I didn't know what I was doing and I wasn't interested in drug side effects, I could have gone in to see a doctor and they would have said, oh, you've developed an anxiety disorder. You know, here's some Zoloft. And then you get on this prescribing cascade where you got started on one drug, you had a side effect and then you get started on another one.

1:47:10And before you know it, you're taking multiple meds. So you say you would go into a doctor and tell them this, but now post-COVID, there's something called telehealth. And my impression is the bar has dropped maybe. What is telehealth and how has it affected this business? I mean, telehealth is essentially being able to get medicines virtually, sometimes without even seeing a clinician. and it has essentially just exacerbated all the worst parts about the American healthcare system. I recently did an investigation on a company. I think it's called HIMSS. The female version is for hers. These are essentially online telehealth companies that sell lifestyle drugs, things like finasteride for male patent baldness, but they also sell antidepressants.

1:48:04And when I went through there - But they're drug sellers. They don't do orthopedic surgery or anything like that. They're drug sellers, yeah. They are like a Silicon Valley startup to essentially just make it really easy to get certain drugs. And I was obviously horrified about this because I think psychiatric drugs are massively overprescribed. And so I wanted to investigate what the oversight was like. And I essentially, I ended up signing up to make an account. I filled out a questionnaire. I supposedly spoke with a nurse practitioner on a chat, which could have just been boilerplate AI generated text.

1:48:46They diagnosed me with depression and then they sent me Lexapro in the mail three days later and I never even saw anyone. And then there was just like a little hyperlink that said, click here to learn about the side effects. I videotaped the whole thing and I put it on my YouTube channel. But that is awful. I I mean, that is not the kind of care that you would ever want for someone that you love. That's not care. No, it's not care. It's drug dispensing. It's drug dispensing and just milking insurance because you can just... You can just... The person pays you 150 bucks a month or whatever it is, and you just keep on sending them SSRIs without really trying to help them at all.

1:49:32and remember these are the drugs that cause PSSD and can cause homicide, homicidal behavior and can cause brain injury when people try and come off of them and no one is even sitting with them to say, hey, I really need to make sure that you understand what you're getting into. I really need to make sure that you understand that there are alternatives for this that are safer. These companies have just like, you know, there's like a PDF that you could read on the way to like the checkout page and they're just like, okay, our job is done here. But what's wild is after, you know, an hour and a half of telling me, and I think making an airtight case that these drugs are really dangerous and are grossly overprescribed, you're describing changes to the system that make it easier, that guarantee their use is more widespread and less regulated and less oversight and less actual care.

1:50:26I mean, it's kind of weird that the evidence is in, it sounds like. This is very serious. But not only are we not clamping down, we're making it easier for people to get it. Yeah. Yeah, we are. What did, something just happened, I don't fully understand it, in the state of Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker, who wants to run for president, Democrat, signed a bill that brings some of this into the schools. Tell us what that is. So it was a bill mandating mental health screening for children as young as third grade in the state of Illinois. And so this was in response to statistics showing that mental health is worsening in the state, which are true.

1:51:13Of course. And so their response was, well, we need to get into the classroom and we need to make these kids fill out mental health screeners to see if they have anxiety or to see if they have depression. with the goal that that is going to improve mental health outcomes. Because if you detect it, you can treat it. Now, why I think this is the dumbest law ever, and it's going to lead to more problems, is our mental health care system is so dysfunctional. Like screening is not a bad thing. Knowing that someone is depressed or anxious, that's not inherently bad. I mean, we want to help people. Yes.

1:51:55But what is going to happen with a law like this is it's going to end up just scaring parents. They're going to be saying, oh, you know, your kid has anxiety and depression. You should get that taken care of before they start becoming suicidal. They will go into a mental health care system, which is already broken, highly transactional, where doctors will have limited face time and will lean on prescribing medications. I'm all for screening, but not when the mental health care system is dysfunctional. It's just funneling people into a broken system. But why? So they're targeting kids for this.

1:52:30Yeah. Did anyone say anything about it? No. This just seems to be going ahead as if it's the greatest thing ever. But the irony is that the people who, I mean, there are all kinds of people grandstanding about, quote, mental health. And they're all the same people who are pushing drugs that degrade mental health and hurt people. Have you noticed this? Yes. People say, do we have a mental health crisis in this country? Well, yes, I couldn't agree more. But those people seem totally uninterested in fixing it. They seem to be intent on making it worse. I mean, it's grandstanding. I mean, that is what it is.

1:53:11It is, you know, talking about mental health and being an advocate for mental health is one of the, you know, it's this, you know, this, you know, this morally righteous thing to do and people want to jump on that bandwagon. And, and this seems like, oh, this is like, you know, this is a good thing for me to be doing. I'm such a good person, not understanding that the downstream effects could be really harmful. It's like advocates for the homeless. More of those we have, the more homeless we have. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So last question. You do this for a living and I think unusually for a psychiatrist, you seem to really care about the outcome and whether people are thriving or not, which is supposed to be the goal of the business is to help people thrive.

1:53:58What advice would you give to people who are anxious or depressed or sad or struggling with what we call mental health. Like what are the ways to restore happiness and vigor to a human life? I would say, I think a lot of mental health comes down to three things. I think it comes down to your relationships. I think it comes down to your purpose and what you do. And I think it comes down to your physical health. And so I would want the person to audit their life. How am I doing in these three areas? and to treat the root causes. Don't let someone tell you you have a chemical imbalance. If you look at your life and you're using drugs that can mess with your chemistry, address that.

1:54:47If you're eating foods, if you have like pre-diabetes or because your diet is off, fix your diet, get moving, get in the sun, do the things that our bodies are naturally designed to do. So work on your health and then just think about the next thing that needs to be addressed. Are you having problems with loneliness and relationships? You can find people that can help you with that problem. It's not like a bullshit therapist, but someone that actually has a track record of helping with your relationships or helping with connections. If you're having difficulty at work, you can find coaches that actually have a track record of helping you find more meaning in your work as well.

1:55:28And so what I tell people is that there's no... don't believe the story that there is this magic pill that is gonna fix pretty much the most complicated issues in your life. Right. Your ability to connect, your ability to find meaning and purpose, your health, there's no magic pill for that. These things are cultivated over decades with attention and effort. They're the most important things in your life. Just start somewhere. Are you confident that AI therapy will help people's mental health? why are you laughing yeah this is the new frontier i believe it's very well funded yeah um that is so disturbing because i feel like ai therapy is like the most like it just it doesn't give you like it just affirms what you put into it as well it's just like oh yeah that's so hard that's so rough that must feel so bad it's it's i don't know it's it's totally disturbing and like dystopian.

1:56:31Yeah. Yeah. Talk to the machine. That's worse than talk to the hand. Yeah. Yeah. But it affirms what you put into it. Can you flesh it out a little bit? Well, let's say you are, you know, you have a conflict with like your spouse. Oh my God, I was so frustrated that, you know, they did this and that. It could just say, yeah, that must be, you know, that must just be so frustrating. Isn't that, isn't what we're supposed to do is affirm people in their beliefs? No, we need a - No? No, no. You sound mean. Yeah, I'm mean, but that's what you need. You almost need that paternal energy in there where someone is gonna hold your feet to the fire and make you, push you, make you grow, kind of encourage you to get outside of your comfort zone.

1:57:20You don't need that affirming energy. So it's not helpful to say, yes, you are a shitty person and that's okay. Not all the time. Yeah. How unpopular are you among other psychiatrists? Yeah. Yeah. I'm unpopular amongst other psychiatrists and also in the media. I'm a dangerous person. Why? Yeah. Because I'm scaring people away from life-saving drugs. and I'm stigmatizing them because I have a message that mental illness is much more than just chemicals in the brain and that there are other non-drug approaches that can be helpful. And that's bad? That is bad. So anyone who says your problems are more complicated than a single pill can solve, that person is dangerous.

1:58:07Yeah, yeah, that person is dangerous. The person doesn't get it. And they're making people with mental illness feel bad about themselves because gosh, you should just let them accept that they have a broken brain and there's nothing they can do about it. And to encourage them to look at it otherwise is just to harm them. You know, it's to make them feel bad about something that they can't change. Boy, that's the cruelest approach I can imagine to human suffering. I mean, if you took that approach to cancer, what would that look like? You've got cancer and here comes Dr. Yosef saying, actually, I could help you and take the tumor out.

1:58:50And then a bunch of screechy ladies are like, that's mean. You got to affirm the person's cancer. Affirm their cancer, yeah.

1:59:02I really, I hope this interview is not throttled. I really appreciate your bravery and your directness and your very obvious compassion and empathy. I don't think you're a mean person, obviously. You didn't go into this to hurt people, clearly. Yeah. So thank you. Thank you for having me.

1:59:23We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor. Hit follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter. Telling the truth always. You will not miss it. If you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell, we appreciate it. Thanks for watching.