Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Fred Moss Speaker | Consultant | Mental Health Coach

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

Dr. Fred Moss is a renowned mental health advocate, keynote speaker, and psychiatrist with a passion for helping people find their authentic selves. As the founder of the Welcome to Humanity movement and True Voice Mastermind, Dr. Fred’s work is centered on the power of communication to heal and connect people. He is the author of “Creative 8 – Healing Through Creativity and Self-Expression” and “Find Your True Voice!” and has written numerous articles for Psychology Today. Dr. Fred’s most recent work includes the “True Voice Course,” which helps people rediscover their voice and share their message with the world, and “Healing the Healer,” a virtual course and mastermind designed to support transitioning healers.Learn more: http://drfred360.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-fred-moss-speaker-consultant-mental-health-coach

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello, and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with is Dr. Fred Moss. He's a speaker, consultant, and mental health coach. Fred, welcome to the program. Yeah, it's great to be here.

for having me on. You're so welcome. So let's dive into what you do, how you do it and why you do it, but give us a little bit of your background, your story. How did you get into this industry? What kind of caught your attention way back of the day? Yeah, way back in the day. So it's interesting that you're able to introduce me these days and not even call me a psychiatrist, because in fact, that's what I have. And I'm a psychiatrist and I'm a psychiatrist. I've been a psychiatrist for 36 years, but these other offshoots you talked about are a function of who I was before I became a psychiatrist. So we'll go back to where the beginning is. You know, I was a born healer. I really was. I had two brothers 10 and 14 years older than me who lived with my parents,

and there was a fair amount of chaos and disarray. And I was called on to bring unity and love through connection and communication, joy and love and happiness. And apparently that's what I did as a little bundle of joy as a child. I think my brothers wouldn't agree that I've been that way all the way through, but that's a podcast for a different day. So I really felt enchanted and really encompassed and really like inspired by communication from a very young age. And what I really wanted to do, and I knew that this was it, was like really get that when my parents and my brothers were talking, I was seeing the heart of what humanity was all about. And I knew that there was some deep healing from there. I'm not sure I would have said that

at three, four, or five years old when I learned it. But it was really true. And I became, became very committed and dedicated to learning how to communicate and the power of communication. So for seeing that, that was where all healing took place as a young child. I just worked as hard as I could to learn how to communicate with people of all types and all places and, you know, whatever their, wherever their upbringing was or whatever kind of, you know, whatever kind of distinguished, like whatever kind of aspects about them, whatever kind of demographics they had, I was interested in learning more. And as it moved forward, I realized that I was naturally becoming a communicator in high school. People would come to me and spill all their beans on me and let me

try to help them organize. And so it became clear that I would be working in mental health. Now, what really was kind of disappointing is that school wasn't a place where I learned how to communicate, even though I was hoping to have it happen in school. It happened out of school. It happened, you know, when I was off school. It happened when I was off school. It happened when I was taking adventures and outside of school, maybe hitchhiking or going to the other side of the city or the other side of the neighborhood and learning what's going on there. And as time went on, I eventually dropped out of college for the second time, trying one more time to see if it would work and it didn't.

And upon promising that I would never go back to college, my mom got me a position as a child care worker in a state mental health facility for adolescent boys. And finally, I was communicating and rightfully communicating and making money and, you know, potentially making a living by just being a child kill worker. But that wasn't enough for me either because the future of psychiatry was really going downhill. And I was very disturbed about the direction it was going and thought, okay, one more time through school, let's go. And I went in and I got my medical degree. I actually graduated from Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, and then became a psychiatrist, not because I liked the field, actually because I hated the direction it was going.

that really happened since then is it's gone further and further down that direction. So I've had to whittle around and figure out how to create a healing mechanism inside of the industry that I don't think is committed to healing and actually be me and be, you know, be a communicator and be a connector such that actual healing takes place. And that's really what I've been over the last 36 years and going through multiple changes of the industry and multiple changes of my own attitude and what I get to present and how I get to help people heal, in spite of or on the side of peripheral to the conventional psychiatric system, which, as I said, doesn't work very well. I don't think we're watching the world get healthier.

I think you would agree. And what really is here is to really start focusing again on speaking our own true, genuine, authentic, core, honest stealth. and then communicating that with others because at that moment, it's when we get that burst of healing that we both know can occur when two people connect in that direction. You know, that's a lot to impact, but one of the things that jumped out at me that I made a note of is, you know, you said that the industry is not really interested in healing. Reminded me of how some people say, you know, our health care system isn't really health care but sick care because it's not proactive, it's reactive. Is that kind of what you're seeing there in the mental health industry? Well, the mental health industry, first of all, it doesn't even pretend to heal.

It doesn't even, it gives you a condition and tells you you're going to have this for the rest of your life. And by the way, you don't get into a psychiatrist's office without walking out with a condition. Some people think that if they walk in without an intention to have a diagnosis, they're not going to get one. Well, you are going to get one. You're going to get one that first visit because they need one in order to pay, in order to have a third party pay for your services. So you have a condition and then what you learn is you're now saddled with that condition the rest of your life.

And, you know, the best we can do is hope to contain it or perhaps slow down the deterioration. But what's really very disturbing is that the treatments as designed and certainly the medications that design do not serve any real purpose other than to perpetuate this, the relationship that you might have with your therapist or your relationship you might have with your doctor or psychologist. Now, some people would argue that it really has helped them. And that's really great. If people believe that it's really helped them and they wouldn't trade what they have for the world, then all I have to say is more power to you. Congratulations. That's wonderful. But this conversation that we're having is for the hundreds of millions of people literally, who are pretty sure that they're

misdiagnosed, underdiagnosed, overtreated, mistreated, et cetera, inside of the psychiatric system and that they're not getting better and that their lives are actually continuing to go downhill. And we start looking out, okay, if that's the case, where can we enter this cycle and make a difference? And where we enter the cycle is how people see themselves. If people see themselves as being mentally damaged as being sick, as being afflicted, of being defective or deficient, then they'll come and get help. But if we can start recognizing and showing people that all that's really happening is you're working with this thing called a human condition And maybe this symptoms that you think you have of being X, Y, or Z awkward in a crowd or missing deadlines

or having mood changes that are more frequent than you would like or being nervous or afraid about a world that's very nerve-wracking and very fearful. You know, it's kind of terrifying. To be a human is really not an easy job. And when we start writing this off as we're all humans trying to get through this thing, instead of thinking that we have a permanent psychiatric condition that's going to require help that actually makes us worse anyways, we get a whole new paradigm to start from. Yeah, exactly. You know, you say that a psychiatric diagnosis is really just a conversation that's primed

for transformation. Unpack that a little bit. Yeah, so just based on what I just said, I mean, what we got here is these conditions don't exist, is that someone tells you you haven't and then you agree. like you don't have a condition until so it's a two-way conversation meaning it's not just the psychiatrist saying here's this go out and do that and then the patient goes got it it should be a good conversation starter to go okay let's work through it help me understand it as a patient yeah and really a psychiatrist doesn't have any extra special tools that can help you understand your life ultimately

what you really need to have is somebody who can connect with you and it doesn't have to be someone with a license. In fact, you could make a case that that's actually not a very good choice of someone who's there to understand you. If you really want someone to understand you, what you have to do is actually speak with from your core values, speak from your genuine nature, speak with, you know, speak articulately and authentically about what it is that what that's going on in your life. And you know and I know that when someone connects with us, when we feel like we've been gotten, there's just tremendous relief of power and freedom that happens at that point. And that's what we're really looking for. And that's what the und doctor is really all about. The un doctor is really about

taking these diagnoses, which are simply conversations and did not exist and have changed over time. What do I mean by simply a conversation? The best way to look at this is when you have a broken arm and you go to Singapore, you still have a broken arm. If you go to, if you have a broken arm and you go to Rakevic, you still have a broken arm. If you have what you think is a psychiatric condition in St. Louis, you might not even have a psychiatric condition if you went to a different doctor in Spokane. And you definitely probably don't have a diagnosis of a psychiatric condition if you went to Singapore or Reykivik. You have a different thing going on. So without it actually staying stable wherever and whoever you go, it's not a real condition. It's just a condition

based on the culture and based on the diagnostician's whim, essentially. And once you get that we don't even know what normal is in a mental world, we don't even know what normal is in the emotional world. We don't have a description of that. Don't you think it takes some kind of audacity to actually think we know what abnormal is, thereby suggesting that it's simply a function of the diagnoser rather than a function of a reality. Yeah. You know, it's all, you know, I've often said tongue in cheek many times. Oh, if you ask, you know, 10 whatever financial advisors for the perfect retirement plan, you're going to get 437 opinions, meaning what you just said. You know, if you ask 10 psychiatrist to diagnose this one person and maybe it's an interview with them on video so it's

you know that all 10 psychiatrists got the exact same facts you would not get 10 diagnosis you would probably get 11 or 12 because one or two of them would have a you know a couple opinions oh more than one or two of them more almost all of them will have more than a couple things and when people come into my office they say I have eight psychiatric diagnosis all that really means to me typically is, oh, you've seen eight clinicians. That's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. And obviously you haven't gotten something that makes you feel confident because you're here talking to me. Yeah. I'm your ninth guy and that's why this works. So, you know, you're here talking to me. And really what we can get is all that's been happening is that you've been knocking on a door that is actually there to secure and perpetuate increase and deuce and sometimes

actually even cause these so-called symptoms that they're marketed to treat. So when we get that that's a very disturbing concept in and of its own right, of course, this idea that the treatment is actually causing the symptoms that's marketed to deal with is a very disturbing symptom, you know, very disturbing phenomena. But when we start getting that that is really what's happening, whether we like it or not, that's when we start looking at how can we shift the paradigm from the foundation up. And the way that we can do that is by recognizing what humans have known their whole life, like all the way back to, as far back as you.

want to go in humanity, that human connection is at the heart of all healing. We've all known that. We all knew that when we were three. We knew that in past lives. We knew we can see that in all our readings of all the spiritual gurus and all the icons from the past and the sages and the prophets from the past. They always said the same thing, which is at the heart of all healing one way or another is where is when human connection takes place. So when we feel like we've been heard and understood and actually gotten, well, we get this freedom that is indescribable and certainly more powerful than anything that's a conventional psychiatric system or the conventional pharmacology or even the conventional psychological modalities that are available would have to offer.

So it's not even what I'm hearing you say. It's not even what's the alternative to the conventional psychiatric system. It's really what is Dr. Fred Moss seen that is a travesty. And what have you put it into place to help counteract that to say, listen, we need to go down a path this way. So what are what are what are, you know, I know we can unpack that for days on end. But give us a 30,000 foot view of what you now have seen, what solutions you are putting into place and are getting that message out to the world. Yeah. So, you know, the general solution of the whole thing. I've tried to look at when in 2006, I took a big bunch of people off of medicine, which was, you know, like hair raising for some people like, frightening to come off of medicine. That's hilarious in its own right, as if it's not frightening to start medicines. It's frightening to stop them. That's kind of hilarious. Anyways, when I did that,

all these people got better. They got way better, reliably and predictably better, and many of them lost their so-called diagnosis right in the process, where they no longer were feeling that, which they thought they had that was requiring them to take medicine. So I had to come up with an idea of how to deliver this news, because at the time, it was so disturbing. I just wanted to go to the top of the mountaintops and scream to everybody, stop doing this. Everyone, please, here's the proof. But what we really learned is that, you know, being calm, being collected, and starting to believe, in fact, that if the reason you're taking medicine is that you're pretty sure there's something broken, like you wouldn't have to fix it if you didn't think

there was something broken. So when backing up a little bit, I saw that the real place for entry is helping people see that maybe, just maybe, it's possible that there's never been anything wrong with them in the first place, even after acquiring a psychiatric diagnosis. So that's the first thing, is acknowledging we all have the same condition. It's called the humanity. We all have the same thing. It's humanity. It's difficult. It's challenging.

There's obstacles and hurdles that we have to overcome. It's hard to be a human being. And it's often very painful and can create massive misery. That's really true. I don't mean to downgrade that in any way. It's not like I'm diminishing the power of that. It's very, very real. But having those conditions doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you.

So the first thing we do is we acknowledge that maybe there's never been anything wrong with you in the first place because you see that would stop the whole cascade. The way that we do that, there are many ways. Finding Our True Voice, a book that I wrote is one way called Find Your True Voice. And another book I wrote was The Creative Eight. So being creative offers multiple ways to communicate that don't even count on words and ears to get done. And we can create different ways to communicate who we are with others when using creativity, art, music, dancing, singing, drama, etc., to express ourselves. So I help people with the Moss method, which are 20 different tactical strategies, tools and tricks, exercises, and practices, that we can put into place starting today.

They're very inexpensive. None of them, only I think one of them would even cost more than a dollar. And that would be yoga lessons. But we're a yoga studio or something. But the rest of them are all free. They're all available no matter how busy you are. And they really help us get grounded into seeing, oh, my God. Yeah, life is painful, but no one ever said it wasn't.

And really life is scary. No one ever said it wasn't. Life's anxiety producing when no one ever said. You know, we start getting to see access to who we, really are so that we can make ourselves available to being in massive conversations with people one way or another using words or using creative presence to communicate together and then connect together and then of course create this thing called healing which is just a function of the word love ultimately anyways I love it so you've written more than one book I've written a

couple books yeah yeah that's awesome you know isn't it interesting and here's another like paradigm observation. You know, you get someone that's like, oh, you are an expert in and I want to take your entire course and I want to come to your weekend seminar and it's going to be $1,900 or whatever the number is. But oh my word, your book, I want it for $9 or less. But in reality, your book is, you know, a data dump of all of these solutions just put in written format.

So I love, I've been an avid reader of my whole life and I just think that people are missing the boat by not starting with let me listen to the book or read the book and then go from there so tell us a little bit about your latest book yeah the two books there's my latest book is the one i'm writing right now which isn't quite off the out of the oven yet but the two that i've written that i'm pretty proud of are find your true voice and you can find that one at find your true voice book dot com and uh that one uh comes for free that's actually a free hardcover book or it's not quite hardcover but a free real book and all you pay for is shipping to get it to your home and I am really proud of that one. It speaks to a lot of the solutions we're talking about

here. But the other one is called the creative eight, healing through creativity and healing through creativity and communication. And actually I got that. That's not what called it's called healing through god the tagline is mad how embarrassing anyways it's called the creative aid the creative aid that's catchy yeah and the creative aid is looking at um and self-expression healing through creativity and self-expression so basically what we're looking at there is um using those using different technologies different modalities different um you know performance and visual art uh subject to express ourselves open and honestly because, of course, as I said before, I'm not even saying anything controversial here.

We all know that connecting with another person, there's very little that's more pleasurable than that, and very little that is a greater solution than that. If you can find a better solution than actually connecting with someone else, please write me and let me know what that is and I'll do that. But, you know, when we really get that that's what's here, the Moss method, the books, and the second book Creative 8 can be found on my website, and that's at Welcome to Humanity.net, forward slash creative, or forward slash creative eight,

which will give you the audio book of that same title. Awesome. And let's wrap up with this. I think we've covered a whole lot of content, and I think we've only scratched the surface because you've got a lot of unique perspective. So if someone is interested in learning more about your work, also picking up the Creative Aid

and your new book, when that is announced, what's the best way that they can do that? The next way to do that is probably a way that you're familiar with, and that's to go to my 360 site, Dr. Fred 360.com. And if you go to Dr. Fred, D.R.360.com, and you just, you can create a discovery call or an introduction call with me where I'll be glad to share and learn about what's going on in your life. And if there's anything I can do to assist in any way,

whether that's be by mentoring or, putting, you know, getting you into one of my programs. I would be happy to do that, but I know a lot of people. I have been around for about 45 years and I understand how the system works. And if it's not me, it is my pleasure as well just to redirect you to one of my colleagues or to maybe a service or a group or a mastermind or a book or a set of videos or anything that's out there that I think I have pretty good access to assist you in moving life forward. Because after all, we only live once and

being miserable as part of humanity. I hate saying that because I wish it wasn't true, but it is. And what we really need in order to relieve ourselves to that misery is a team, is a group of people, is a family of sorts, or a tribe of sorts to walk us

through what's here and take us on the other side of misery so that we can at least embrace misery for what it is and move forward, or perhaps even reduced a misery by creating pleasure in its setting and move forward from there. 100%. Well, Dr. Fred, it's been a real pleasure chatting with you. We'll make sure that your link to your website and all of your resources are in the show notes. And I really appreciate you coming on today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Really great.

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