Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1031 | Psychiatry Is Killing People | Guest: Dr. Roger McFillin

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

Today, we’re joined again by Dr. Roger McFillin, clinical psychologist and cohost of the “Radically Genuine” podcast, to talk about the dangers of modern psychiatry. Dr. McFillin details how depression is a part of the human condition and the truth about our "traumas." We hear the phrase "generational trauma," but what does that really mean, and why does the current generation feel more victimized than past generations? Can therapy really make you worse? Dr. McFillin reveals that there are no approved SSRI drugs for postpartum depression. What does this mean for women who are going through mental pain after childbirth? Dr. McFillin explains ways you can find the right doctor for you. The Conscious Clinician Collective: https://www.thecccollective.org/ Find Dr. McFillin here: https://www.drmcfillin.com/ Substack: https://drmcfillin.substack.com Hallucination study: https://lafayettec.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1Zl52DiyJAfYBJc Get your tickets for Share the Arrows: https://www.sharethearrows.com/ --- Timecodes: (01:30) Review of Dr. McFillin’s views (09:30) Story of former client (17:30) John MacArthur thoughts on mental health (22:20) Objective truth and suffering (33:45) Cultural problems & victim mentality (40:28) Empathy & seeing God in people (48:48) The government’s involvement (56:35) Responding to those who claim psychiatric drugs work (01:01:20) Gender ideology & body dysmorphia (01:09:15) Postpartum depression (01:22:58) How to help --- Today's Sponsors: Range Leather — highest quality leather, age-old techniques and all backed up with a “forever guarantee." Go to rangeleather.com and use coupon code "ALLIE" to receive 15% off your first order. A’del — try A'del's hand-crafted, artisan, small-batch cosmetics and use promo code ALLIE 25% off your first time purchase at AdelNaturalCosmetics.com Carly Jean Los Angeles — use promo code ALLIE50 for $50 off your order of $100+ at carlyjeanlosangeles.com. Jase Medical — get up to a year’s worth of many of your prescription medications delivered in advance. Go to JaseMedical.com today and use promo code “ALLIE". We Heart Nutrition — nourish your body with research-backed ingredients in your vitamins at WeHeartNutrition.com and use promo code ALLIE for 20% off. --- Relevant Episodes: Ep 821 | Why Antidepressants Don’t Fix Depression | Guest: Dr. Roger McFillin https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-821-why-antidepressants-dont-fix-depression-guest/id1359249098?i=1000616890403 Ep 822 | The Big Money Behind Big Medicine | Guest: Dr. Roger McFillin https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-822-the-big-money-behind-big-medicine-guest-dr/id1359249098?i=1000617050991 Ep 857 | Is ADHD Real? | Guest: Dr. Roger McFillin (Part One) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-857-is-adhd-real-guest-dr-roger-mcfillin-part-one/id1359249098?i=1000624680025 Ep 858 | The Disturbing Origins of Adderall | Guest: Dr. Roger McFillin (Part Two) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-858-the-disturbing-origins-of-adderall-guest-dr/id1359249098?i=1000624797989 Ep 963 | The Dangers of Gentle Parenting, SEL & Empathy | Guest: Abigail Shrier https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-963-the-dangers-of-gentle-parenting-sel-empathy/id1359249098?i=1000648254377 Ep 983 | What Doctors Aren’t Telling You About Antidepressants | Guest: Brooke Siem https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-983-what-doctors-arent-telling-you-about-antidepressants/id1359249098?i=1000652056518 --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

What is the truth about postpartum depression and anxiety? Can empathy actually be very dangerous and harmful? What counts as true trauma? Are we medicalizing normal emotions? Is there any positive effect of so-called antidepressants? Oh my goodness. We are getting into all of this. And so much more on today's episode of Relatable. We've got Dr. Roger McPhillan back with us. He is a clinical cyclical. psychologist. He has talked with us before about the diagnosis of things like ADHD and ADD, how that can be harmful, the harm of SSRIs. Today, we are having such a profound and even spiritual discussion about what real mental health is, what real so-called mental health solutions are. You are going to get so much out of this conversation. I know it's a longer episode, but that's because we had so much

ground to cover, you're going to love this. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com. Use code to Alley at checkout. That's good ranchers.com. Code Allie. Dr. McPhillan, thanks so much for coming back, for joining us again. So grateful to be here. I was reflecting on the last couple times I was on this show. Yeah. And it's kind of presented as if my statements are controversial. And I know in this hot take world, you know, it's presented that way to get to get, to get views. But, you know, I was reflecting back on the things that I said. And there's actually nothing controversial about what I've been talking about.

I'll just do a quick review. That there's no brain chemical imbalances that can be targeted with a drug, right? That's scientific consensus for the most part. Or the fact that antidepressant drugs have never really been proven to be antidepressant. They have significant adverse effects. They, in a lot of ways, have been just more promotional branded. than actual clinical help. And, you know, the aspects about ADHD and these diagnoses being, you know,

not discrete medical illnesses is nothing that's controversial. Even if you look at the DSM, they are not explanatory. They're descriptive in nature. So there's nothing that I have said that actually puts me at risk. And if you notice the last couple of times that I've been on this podcast, you can tell that I'm thinking a lot, right? It's how fear gets conditioned into a, a professional where you're afraid to say things that can put your job at risk. And I was doing

a lot of reflection over that, especially the past year, because I've got kids in college. My entire life has been dedicated to being a clinical psychologist. And you speak to, or I have spoken to what I've known about the scientific literature, but I don't always, I haven't always spoken to what was in my heart, for example. And the truth of the matter is, is I believe I haven't done enough. And I kind of feel shameful about it, to be honest with you, that I have this brand called radically genuine and I have this podcast. But I don't think I've spoken out about the real harms of my industry, not just the psychiatric industry, but the therapy industry, the mental health industry in general. And how I think it's been an experiment, a social experiment that has gone on

certainly for the past 30 or 40 years, that has created indelible harm. And if we continue to kind of view our human experience under the umbrella of that industry, you're going to see what we've actually been witnessing, which is declining mental health, worsening mental health. And in fact, we have generations right now who are actually in this adversarial relationship with their own emotional states. It's almost like the expectation is that we're supposed to feel good all the time. And if you don't, there's something wrong or defective. And I have seen what that has done. I think it's a conditioning.

I think it's a brainwashing. I've seen the harm that it's done in my clinical practice. And it's worsening. You know, it's worsening over the past five years. dramatically. And so I step back and am I speaking enough about that? I mean, I'm talking about psychiatric drugs and the harms of psychiatric drugs, but I think those are pretty much well accepted. I mean, I'm not going to be put on the stand for malpractice talking about the fact that there's no identifiable chemical imbalance or that antidepressants cause harm. But am I talking

about what the therapy industry is doing? What we've collectively created, in our consciousness about what actually is mental health and well-being. And that's where I don't think I've spoken out enough. And I have to be willing to give up what I know, the safety and the security of my job. Like, I thought I knew what faith was. I didn't know what faith was. You know, faith for me was this, there's a belief in God. I'm a spiritual being going through this human experience. And I pray to God. Often in my own times of fear, often when I don't know the direction. But have I really surrendered?

Have I really surrendered to what the truth is inside of me? Have I really been able to quiet my mind and be with Christ and speak the truth with my clients on my podcast, with my family, with my friends in the academic world that I have been trained? And I don't think I have because when you go to school in the United States, in the secular world that we live in, When you go to graduate school, everyone worships at the altar of scientism. You know, you talk about your faith. You talk about your belief in God and that this time on this earth is so time limited. And its purpose is so much greater than what we may even know.

It's going to go by like this. And that our mental health is very much connected to what our purpose is and connection to that. And you bring up those ideas in academia, and religion and faith are almost discussed as if they're fairy tales. And those fairy tales are of less evolved people who have a hard time dealing with death, coping with death. And so I'd like to have a greater conversation today on what mental health is, where we are in our culture, where my industry is harmful, and where we can go. Yeah. I want to go back to what she said at the beginning about your statements being controversial. And I think to me it comes down to a matter of defining what it means to be controversial. So when I've said in the past that your statements are controversial, it's not that they're wrong or that they are scientifically ambiguous, but that they cause anger. They cause defensiveness. They cause controversy within the comments. Maybe not even in the scientific community. community, but certainly when you say things like there's no such thing as a chemical imbalance in SSRIs are not getting to the root cause, they're not actually healing. Same thing with ADHD,

that it's kind of like an umbrella term, which I think you're right, that the science supports what you have said. What I mean by controversial is not me trying to, you know, throughout clickbait or trying to get views. But I know because I'm sure you, you do too, but I'm receiving a the DMs and the comments from people who have never heard this before, who have been told they think from doctors, maybe it's just from pharmaceutical companies, that yes, it's a chemical imbalance, yes, it's a serotonin problem, yes, ADHD is one easy diagnosis that we can just fix with medication. So to them, your statements are extremely controversial because they've never heard that before and they feel very defensive about the choices they've made for themselves or their children.

So I just wanted to clarify that in the past. I haven't tried to cast the conversations, you know, for clickbait or just for views, but acknowledging that there are people out there who are going to feel that this is extremely controversial for you to make those statements. Yeah, it's interesting. I have a cousin who's a Navy SEAL. He was one of the Navy SEALs who refused to get the COVID vaccine. And he was at risk of, you know, losing his position and being dishonorably discharged. He was represented by Robert Kennedy.

And at the time, he was considering that next step in his career and still is and is considering becoming a psychologist. And he sent me this text one day where it said, how do you reconcile with modern psychology's unwillingness to even recognize the soul? And I gave some junk answer, really, about how we can change behavior and that can serve people. But it wasn't truth. And can I tell an amazing story? Yeah, please. I mean, I'm probably going to get a little bit emotional about this. This was two years ago.

So I was on your show. This had already happened, and I didn't speak to this. So I got a case into my practice, you know, confirmed by hospital records, police reports. It was a woman who was sex trafficked, brutally tortured. and she was about an hour and a half away from me. So she was coming up to see me, to work with me. And I work with post-traumatic stress clients, sexual assault victims. You know, I've worked with servicemen who've, you know, been in combat.

So well-versed in the therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder. And so I was experienced. I was traumatized. I was expecting a woman to be in a state of high distress and difficult to be able to trust me,

especially as a male. So that idea in my mind of who she was before she even stepped into my practice was pretty solidified. And when she came in and I met with her, there was this overwhelming sense for me that I was in the presence of God. And my rational mind cannot even describe to you what that feeling was like.

And it was a woman of such tremendous strength and wisdom that I was shocked, right? I still went very slowly with her getting to know her building trust, building rapport, under the understanding that she still does have significant trust issues. although that wasn't presented in front of me. So I just spent a lot of time getting her story. And I was really looking forward to the sessions because I think I was benefiting it more than she was. And I had to recognize this one day.

And then we got to the details of the rape, the sexual assault, the torture. I mean, she was made to sleep in a cage and treated like an animal. She was brutally raped. Wow. And, you know, I asked her, I asked her how she got through that,

which is certainly not a question that's out of the ordinary. But her answer was out of the ordinary. I mean, she looked at me dead in the eyes in a way that you could feel it. And she said, you know, God came to me while I was being tortured and while I was being raped. And he turned everything around into love. I also had visions

of who they were when they were children and what happened to them, which generated compassion. It protected me against any harm. She eventually escaped, told that to police. She was sent to the hospital, which she should have been.

She was examined, and she was examined psychiatrically. And then she was placed on a series of antipsychotic drugs because she told the story about you know, what happened with God visiting her. And, you know, she speaks to the horror of what happens when you're on multiple mood altering and mind-altering drugs. And, you know, she was able to get off those drugs. But it was so important for me also to reflect on how our current culture would view such an

event, how it's viewed from the lens of illness. And we have lost our ability to talk about collective of suffering to talk about the spiritual phenomenon, at least in the academic world, in the world that I exist in, to speak about how phenomenon such as that really can be divinely inspired and created. And when you're open, that God does visit us in that way. And that's not the first situation that I've had since then. You know, I found that people are afraid to talk about those experiences. Even I'm afraid to talk about them because of how we're mass conditioned by fear. I honestly believe that me hearing that was an important message to actually share on this podcast today. So I ended up, I told you before we sat down, I've been having these nonstop

dreams about what needs to be shared on this podcast. I get up very early in the morning and and pray and get into a meditative state. And it consistently has come to me. I have to share that story. So I reached out to her because we're under strict confidentiality laws. And I could never share such a story in any way that it could violate her confidentiality. So I ended up contacting her a couple weeks ago to ask for permission to tell that story. And, you know, she was absolutely thrilled because when I stopped working with her, this is what she shared with me. I said, I said, you don't need therapy. In fact, I'm benefiting from this experience. And she said that she knows and that she felt like she had to share the story with me for it to be a greater message.

And that was two years ago. And I didn't necessarily understand fully what that meant. And so I think it has something to do with having to share it today. And these spiritual phenomena, these experiences, are very, very common. Like, I've experienced them, not to the extent that this young lady has, I mean, I've lived a blessed life in comparison to her. But learning to be able to quiet our minds, to be fully connected to the spirit, has transformed the work that I do in the last few years because I've had a challenging relationship with my own faith because I'm a Catholic and I was treating victims of clergy abuse. And so that was a real challenging period. And so these experiences that I've had with some of my clients and some of the messages have been,

you know, very eye-opening and changed the way that I should talk about mental health. And I think we should all talk about mental health. Dr. John McArthur, that's always been his criticism of psychology is that psychologist and psychology in general disregards the soul. And he's always argued, and I'm not saying that you would necessarily agree with this, but he's always argued that it is really only Christians who are equipped to deal with issues of mental health, because only Christians understand the soul, the soul's creator, and what the soul fully and finally needs. And whether you agree with that line of reasoning or not, I think that we can agree that disregarding the soul means that you can't fully address someone's issues or problems or

confusion or whatever, the chaos that's going on inside their mind because you're only thinking about it in context of the brain and the context of chemicals and hormones and things like that. To me, that makes a lot of sense for why so many psychologists. do just kind of put a band-aid on it and say, well, this is a chemical problem. If you don't believe that there's a spirit, if you don't believe that there is a soul, then we really are just like a, you know, just neurons firing off, you know? So I don't know. I don't know what you think about that, but it seems to me like what you're saying and what

he's saying are kind of similar. I agree with him. I watched your interview with him. And then I investigated a little bit more of his work. and he actually refers to a, you know, a number of the psychologist and psychiatrist that I've read as well. And it talks about the illegitimate authority of the psychiatric medical establishment. The idea that, you know, consciousness is somehow emitted from the brain, you know, is a categorical error in identification for one. Explain that.

So Matt Walsh actually got into an interesting discussion on this with some, you know, known psychiatrists, including some that I've had on my podcast. And his statement was that that depression is a state of being, that we have to connect with the soul. It's a state of despair, right? That is part of the human condition. It is not a medical disease. That's a categorical error, right? It's not something that there's something broken within your brain. It is a state of, you know, often of emptiness and spiritual disconnection. of loneliness, of fear, that we all have the propensity to enter in. And statistically speaking, we will likely go through those periods in our life.

Here is what I disagree with my profession. I believe it's transformative. I think it's divinely created and inspired for our growth. That we are designed with this rich tapestry of human emotions. despair, loss, and loneliness are the balance to the love and to the joy that we experience. They cannot exist without each other. We have to kind of go through those dark periods to walk close to the light. And then that growth is where we become not only closer to God, but we get closer to each other.

There's a connection that's developed through the pain. There's an empathy that's created that we start. that we serve other people. And that's the problem with my industry. My industry has become this TikTok, Instagram, hot take about what is mental health? And it's the absence of suffering. It's the absence of negative emotions. You're designed to be happy.

And everything should be focusing on you. You are serving your own pleasures. It's very hedonistic. And I have never met any person in my life who was, happy, focused on just themselves. Getting down here was very difficult. My plane was delayed five hours last night. It got in at like one in the morning. There was a point where I didn't think I was going to make it. They almost canceled the flight. They had to get another flight to come in here. And I just noticed what my mind started doing, right? Oh my God, I'm going to miss this. And if I do get there,

I'm going to be so tired. I'm not going to be sharp. I'm going to get these bags under my eyes. I'm going to look horrible. I'm going to look tired. And I just noticed that's what my mind was doing. I ended up walking by a bookstore and came across a book on gratitude. I grabbed it. And I spent the time just reading on gratitude. You know, it was quoting gospel. It was talking about ways to retrain the mind. And I often share with a lot of people. podcast too, that we are creators of our own reality, that doesn't mean that there's no objective truth. So we were all last night facing the same thing. You know, I was at the airport for, what, six or seven hours? And I was observing the people around me who the objective truth was the plane was delayed and we weren't going to get to our destination. We might have to stay overnight.

And I saw the level of distress, the level of despair that came up. And that's the mind, right? the mind says, this is unbearable. I can't stand this. I can't take this anymore. And I'm here in this gratitude. And I completely surrendered. God doesn't want me to speak about this. Today, I'm not going to speak about it. If I'm not going to get there, I'm not going to get there. And there was no stress about it. If I have to be tired, I have to be tired. It changes your entire emotional experience, right? And this is where psychologists or therapists should be, right? That we are creators of our reality. Sometimes what we create can serve us, serve our purpose, and other times it can harm us. But if you're in an industry, if you're going to talk to

someone who wants to focus all on you and it's going to be all about you, guess what? You're going to be miserable because that's not how we experience joy. We actually experience joy with our attention outward, serving, right? And part of the exercises that I I was doing. It was just actually listing what I was grateful for. And then there's like a 28 day series to do that. Don't you think we would be much better off engaging in those type of practices to serve our mental well-being than incessantly talking about our own narcissistic wants and needs? And that's the challenge is do I follow these limited understandings and protocols from my profession? Or do I really step out and serve in the way that I think I'm designed to

Yeah. And how do we talk about depression? Do we talk about it? What happens if we talk about it as a brain illness? That's genetic. That requires a drug. That we have no control over. Versus, it's this transformational experience to serve your growth.

How do you think the outcomes are going to be? They're going to be so much different in how you talk about it. And that's what's pulled from our educational system. We don't have a collective. a conversation on resilience. You don't go into public schools and talk about resilience. You go into public schools and you talk about psychiatric disorders and you're a victim. And that victim mentality is creating a fragility that is generational now. And how can I not believe that's purposeful? How can we not all believe that's purposeful? Because no longer are we serving the same greater purpose and mission.

as a country, we're not doing that. We are actually serving, you know, at the altar of the scientism, right, that if it's not empirically identified, then it doesn't exist. And then we see how that's corrupted, too. Like, science is no longer the search for truth. Science is, I own it. Yeah. And you do what I say.

If you don't do what I say, you're acting outside the bounds of your professional code or your ethical code. And that's not what our ethical code is. Our ethical code is to serve the well-being of others. It is larger than law. And the highest ethical code is serving God. And my challenge in everything that I want to do professionally right now is I have to one step outside of what I thought I should be, or how I predicted my life to be, the safety and the comforts and the security of that. And I have to be willing to give up my job. I have to be willing to no longer serve my clients with a license of being a psychologist. I have to be open to other ways of serving others. And although that creates discomfort and that's scary, it's also, I think, what's divinely inspired in a lot of us. And when you think about the struggles that most people are experiencing right now, it is a struggle of the mind. It is the worry. It's worry about what's going to happen to my kids or where's the future or our minds go back in the past. it hooks onto the highlight reels of the most embarrassing and worst situations that we've ever had to go through in life. And so we're creating this alternative reality and we live in it.

Yeah, it's so true. Gosh, there are so many things I want to respond to. I was thinking when you were talking at first about just how thinking about ourselves and dwelling on ourselves makes us miserable, that's the exact opposite of what we hear. And I see this especially as a woman on social media and this narrative is marketed to me that the way for me to be happy is to figure out all of the nooks and crannies of my personality, how my mind works, to fully know myself, to fully love myself, to understand every bit of me. And then and only then can I liberate this like inner goddess that has been trapped by my own insecurities, by other people's expectations of me, by talking. relationships by social media and beauty standards, whatever it is. And when I let all of those things go, I'll finally free that inner goddess and I will love myself fully and I'll finally be happy. I'll become rich. I'll attain this perfect career. I'll have these perfect relationships.

And then I'll finally reach this pinnacle. I mean, that is like, girl wash your face, untamed, Bray Brown, so many of these female teachers. Like that is the narrative. behind so many of their teachings. And not to tout my own book, but that's why I wrote this book. You're not enough and that's okay. Because I actually see all of that trendy narcissism as a really heavy burden for people to carry because being our own God is really exhausting. The God of self is actually not this liberating, merciful, gracious God.

Having to sacrifice everything on the altar of my. my wants and my personalities and my goals is a really miserable way to live. And so I just think that you're absolutely right, that freeing ourselves of that narcissism and the constant need to think about us and who we are and what we want is much more freeing as far as spirituality goes, but mental health, if you want to call it, that goes. And so anyway, I'm just, I'm in agreement with you there. It's such a great point. it's the lie that's sold to us. I think it's a lie sold to us by the enemy, whether the enemy

you see spiritually, where you see that it's a spiritual enemy in human form, right? Because it is going to only create more mental suffering. Back to that, to the woman that I saw who was sex trafficked, one of the questions that we started talking about, because I felt like she was just so connected to God in that way. I said, you know, why do you think horrible things or bad things happen to good people. Because those who've been traumatized sometimes struggle with that idea, like this just world hypothesis, like good things only happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. But I asked her just for her inherent wisdom on that. And she said that she said that in her experience, and this is her connection to Christ, is that what she went through

provides her internal love and wisdom. The pain of what she went through is quite short in all of eternity. In the entire experience, like we can only live in the eternal now, and I think that's where God exists in the eternal now. And that's the problem with our minds and why it creates so much torture for us

because we're often disconnected from the moment. But she had this profound wisdom that what she received from the experience was going to be something that is part of her soul's journey for all of eternity. And that's really hard because the people who are in front of me have been so harmed and traumatized in so many ways that they can't get out of what happened to them in the past. They live there still. And it's about protecting from that from happening again.

And I can understand how fear works that way. I think fear is an emotion that is to, that's a survival mechanism, right? And it is important to stay alive to serve our mission. But the inability to get out of what happened in the past to fully live in the present is I think what stops people from being able to progress forward and to be okay in this life with all the pain that exists. And there's a collective suffering, even when that doesn't happen to you, there is collective suffering that exists on this earth. We're all going to lose somebody close to us. That is absolutely inevitable and we fear of that. And the other thing about modern mental health system is psychology,

we're not talking about the fear of death. You know, that's such an important piece to the anxiety that people feel. There is a fear of death because they're tied to their version of themselves, right? I am Roger, the psychologist, or whatever the identity characteristic is. And if I lose this identity. And if I lose my understanding of what this life is, that is so painful, I'd be, I can't, I can't bear it. But that's not my experience. My experience is the default for all of us is is resilience and wisdom. And that's not what the narrative is, Al. The narrative to us is that we're, we're weak, we're fragile, we're dependent, we're mentally ill. And that is harming our collective culture. You know, when you're talking about how depression is actually something,

that can be used for your development and growth. I always think of the word sanctification. Of course, that's kind of Christian ease for the progressive holiness, the progressive development of the soul through Christ. And I think of James I, one that says, count it all joy when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.

And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect, complete, lacking in nothing, which is basically what you're saying, that trials produce a certain kind of character growth that is necessary for our mental, spiritual, and even in some ways physical maturation. So if we think about hardship like that, rather than, wow, there's something that's wrong with me because my life is supposed to be stable and perfect and happy all the time, you're right, that is a huge mental shift and I think can contribute to our endurance. I think part of this problem is, we're at in American culture, where we are in the development of our country, a lot of people

feel like we're in a late stage empire. Yeah. And we see that we are devolving into depravity and we're overextended militarily. We're in debt. We pay 30 plus percent of our paychecks go to a government that certainly doesn't serve us. And I was reflecting back on a conversation that I had with Abigail Shriver has an excellent book. Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that. So yeah, we'll touch on that in a bit. Yeah, she has a book out right now, bad therapy, which I would recommend everybody to read that. I agree. And when she was doing research for the book, she and I did, we spoke. And we spoke about some generational differences. And I think I'm in a unique period because I'm generation X. I'm going to be 48 years old next month. And I was able to witness

this cultural shift. Yeah. You know, throughout the 80s to the 90s to the 2000s with technology, with these ideas around mental illness, what's been brought into our culture, and it's like a slippery slope. It just keeps, we keep accepting certain ideas, and before we know it, they become our truth. But we're reflecting back on my grandfather, who was a veteran of World War II, Pacific. And he would work the night shift as a janitor. And then during the day, he'd go door to door as a salesman, you know, to pay tuition for his seven kids to go to Catholic school. Yeah. And my grandmother, who was a devout Catholic,

and she died of lung cancer. She had emphysema because, like, a lot of women of her generation, she smoked. And we would have these discussions as she had oxygen, you know. She's hooked up to oxygen. She's in a wheelchair. And she's, She says that she was so grateful of the suffering that she is experiencing because it brings her closer to Jesus and it brings her closer to those who are suffering.

She'd say with a smile on her face, my grandfather always had a smile on his face. His entire world was my grandmother, right? That he, his reason to live was for her. He said, I prayed when I, and you'd have this filial. accent. I prayed when I was in high school for a woman to love and God granted me with that. And he had this huge smile on his face. And all he did was serve his family. And that was mental health. That was joy. Both of them. I just observed joy within them. And my wife's grandfather, who I had the opportunity to have these deep conversations with, World War II veteran, Battle of

the Bulge. Yeah. He was dug in in in a trench. in Bastogne where he was facing an inevitable death, that whole barrage by the German army. And he talked about that experience, going through his rations in the first day and the suffering he had to go through. And he said, you know, once you survive something like that, everything else in life is easy. And so we are limited by our heart, by our perspective. And now we're in a time where coming into my practice, people will identify. being traumatized because they're verbally bullied in school or their best friend moved away. And I can't help but be so saddened by this idea of what is trauma that is created in our culture

that in so many ways devalues everyone's inherent resilience. And when I say that's not trauma, I'm the bad guy in these scenarios. I've had to sit down with some people or even some parents and say that it's harmful for you to create that version of her reality or his reality. And just think about the power of the mental health professional. The power of the mental health professional can create a reality for a person. You can create a victim mindset. You're oppressed.

You can break up marriages. You can provide harmful interventions. Like one thing I always say is you can't solve a thinking problem with more thinking. So, you know, you're caught up in your head. and you're thinking all the time. And then you come into therapy and what do you do? You judge, you over-evaluate, you think a lot. Yeah.

Right? And you're going to worsen. And so we have this therapy culture now and we just accept that therapy and drugs is the path to us feeling well. It's absolute insanity. That's a delusion. That's a collective delusion. How do we buy into something so insane?

How do we accept that? Yeah. I have so much to say about what she just said. part of that last thing, I like to say that the self can't be both the problem and the solution. And so if your problem is in your mind, all of your thoughts are jumbled, they feel anxious, traumatized, whatever it is, and then you're going to a place that tells you the solution is in the same place where you're finding your problems, that could potentially cause a lot more anxiety if you want to use that word, or just a bigger burden.

And again, it's just saying that you have all of this power. And I think once you realize that it exists outside of you, not necessary, I'm not saying in a pharmaceutical, but in actually the God who created your soul, yeah, there's just a lot of freedom in that. I do have a question based on Abigail Schreier's book and what you just said about kids who feel like they've been through trauma because they've been through a hard thing. What we are told today, again, especially women, I would say especially Christian women. that the greatest form of love is empathy.

And empathy is typically defined as affirming what someone feels as true. Not just affirming that their feelings exist, which is one thing, but this phrase, your feelings are valid. We hear that valid, valid, valid, so there's substance to it. Like, there's a grounding in truth. And that, I think, can be harmful. And in that way, it sounds like what you're saying to the parent, is that empathizing to the point of saying, yes, your friend moving away is trauma and we need

some kind of medical help to deal with this. And not since empathy is actually harmful. That's such a beautiful point. And there's so much wisdom behind us. Two thoughts here. Yeah, go for it. One, this is why I think psychiatry is the most dangerous of medical professionals that you can see right now. Because someone goes in and they tell their story, their mind, and they ascribe to it as if it's real, as if it's truth. And then their only option is to drug it, right? Now, affirming somebody's truth, right? So I can empathize with someone's pain and not attached to the story like it's real, right?

I can feel for somebody's emotional pain that their best friend moved away or that they're getting bullied in school and feel for that. person as a human while at the same time supporting their ability to deal with things in life that are challenging because life's going to get so much harder than that. You know, I look back at some of the things that my father or my grandparents would say to me that are almost like viewed as abusive today, such as like suck it up or like my grandmother's, you know, would always say, we all have a cross to bear, right? And it was just her viewpoint of yester's going to be pain. Now, what are you going to do about it? I mean, this is always my dad's message. Yeah, life's hard.

What are you going to do about it? And there's actually inherent wisdom because now you're no longer thinking about what has happened to you. It doesn't necessarily even matter. How you respond to it matters. And we have, we're actually faced with these challenges in little small bites every single day, right? Like even the airport incident last night is just an example of I can't control that. what am I going to do about? Am I going to create misery around it? Am I going to ruminate around it? Am I going to victimize myself? Nothing works out for me. Oh my God, I'm going on Ali's podcast and, you know, now I'm not going to get down there or like I'm going to be tired. And if I ascribe to that idea, it affects who I am. It affects my mental well-being. And so now we can go up notches for what happens in life, right? Because we're going to face all these trials and tribulations. right? And we should welcome that. We should welcome that as our opportunities for that growth, for that transformation. And when you, when you take on life that way, it changes everything. Here are two lessons that I think are absolutely protective against misery. One is everything is

happening for you, not to you. So the moment that you just look at everything, no matter how painful or traumatic it is, so I'm not going to ascribe to a victim mindset because I've worked with victims. I've worked with the most traumatized people. And if they don't ascribe to that mindset, why should I ascribe it to anybody else? Right. If they believe that even what happened to them, as horrible and horrific as it is, can serve their growth and they're not going to let it define them, why should I create that mentality for anyone else? So my focus on anyone who comes to me is how can this serve you? Now, it might not be that direct right away and it's got to be at the right time when somebody can digest it. And I understand that and that's built in a relationship.

And that is why I cannot work any longer outside of my faith. And because that's something I believe strongly in. And I don't think, I think if you take another mentality around that, you're going to suffer. I don't think I can help you, to be honest with you. And the other thing that is really important, and this is where my client, she shared this directly with me, see God and everybody. And you know how that's changed my life? I'll now walk down the hall to go out to my waiting room to get a client. And I believe I'm walking into the presence of God,

that that person was provided for me. Now, whether that's true or not, now, I believe it's true. But if someone wants to debate that and they want to say that I'm delusional, It serves me. It creates joy. I think that moment that I have with somebody is a holy moment. And I'm serving God's mission. And that's the other point to this, Allie. And that's why it's so scary to even say these things. Because this can be construed as delusional. This can be construed as like a God complex or a savior complex. And that is the is not my experience at all. In fact, I don't believe that in the least bit. I think God is with me. God is inside me. The spirit is inside of me. I can deny the spirit. And then it's my ego. Then it's that self. And that's when I can create harm because I'm doing it for the wrong reasons. And I was told, God is always knocking on the door. You need to answer it. You need to listen.

and when I started doing that, when I learned to quiet my mind in my sessions and just be in the presence of God, and maybe you experience this tale, that there's a truth, it's not in words, you speak, you communicate, but it's a flow that exists

and you know it's in truth versus when you're in your mind and you're in the small self and you're in that ego, you know, you're thinking, and you're analyzing and you're evaluating and it's part of what you've learned in culture and so forth. And when I drew that line and I disconnected from that, everything changed in my work. And I believe we all have the ability to do that. I don't think I'm special. I think God is in you.

I think God is in this moment. When I listen to some of the things that you speak, I don't think that's Ali. I think the spirit is working through Ali, right? And that helps people, right? I think people who listen to that, it changes the way they think. It changes the way they feel. And that's incredibly powerful. And I think that's doing God's work. And that's why the mental health industry I have problems with because I think there's so many things we can do collectively to serve each other.

You know, as you were talking, I started thinking about the CS Lewis quote. And I couldn't remember the exact quote. It's from the weight of glory. If you haven't read a lot of C.S. Lewis, you should. because he says a lot of what you're saying now just about people. And I can't read the whole thing. It's a long paragraph. But he says it is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses.

And what he's meaning in context is not a real god and goddess, but someone who is going to be in heaven one day, be a heavenly being or in hell. He says, of possible gods and goddesses to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which if you saw it now, you'd be strongly tempted to worship or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long, we are in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. And then he goes on to talk about how all of our interactions with people, you are interacting with someone who is made in the image of God with an eternal soul that is

going to end up somewhere. And our role in life, especially as Christians, is to aid someone toward that sanctification on a journey to heaven. And so that just speaks to the seriousness, especially of what mental health professionals are doing because you are appearing into the most vulnerable parts of someone's mind and soul. And even just thinking about the very definition of vulnerable, you are opening yourself up to injury, which is, again, why the role of the mental health professional is so delicate. hit. Yeah. And that's my concern. It's so watered down right now. We're pushing out therapists like it's a, like it's on an assembly line. And most of the people I'm coming into contact with are not in a

position to assume that responsibility. I don't think the rigor exists within the educational system. And of course, when you take God out of the educational system and you talk and you take away sacred and sacred text, philosophy, wisdom, that is passed down throughout the course of our own humanity. You remove that and you try to provide this very watered down basic version of what creates joy or happiness. This is why you're driving so many people through the cycle, right? No one can argue that everything is worse, right? When the more mental health treatments that we provide, the worse we all become.

And that's my most important statement in the manner in which we talk about it, in the manner which we think about it, and the drugs that we're prescribing, the more we provide, the worst people get. And the other lies that I see, and this comes from the government, psychiatry has always been on,

you know, the right arm of the government, even the eugenics movement in Nazi Germany, right? It's so easy for a psychiatrist to place a label of mental illness on you, me, anyone,

and we lose our rights, right? personality disorder, bipolar disorder. The harms that I'm seeing in my clinical practice, it's not somebody taking one drug. I'm seeing 23-year-olds, 24-year-olds on six, seven drugs prescribed since they were 15 or 16 years old. They are numbed out. They are detached. They are sedated. And they, I can't even imagine who they were prior to that type of treatment. But I see it as evil. I see it as harmful. What I am proud of is I get on the phone and I get in heated discussions with medical providers. What's interesting is 95% of the people will work with me to safely get these

people off these drugs. And what you see in time is their spirit returns to them. And they can get better not because of anything I'm doing just because we remove the toxicity. But there will be times we'll get on this phone and someone will dig in and I heard about you. I know what you're putting out there on social media. I don't have to do anything you tell me. I'm the physician. I'm the doctor. And these people are so harmful.

And that's just increasing. It used to be a time where, you know, a percentage of people came on into my practice with psychiatric drugs. I can't remember the last time someone came into my office, not on any psychiatric drug. Wow. And it is changing. us. It is changing who we are. I'm telling you, keep my warnings, everybody, when you take those drugs, they come with consequences. You are altering who you are. It is impacting the brain

in ways that nobody can predict. It affects people differently. It certainly increases the likelihood that you could end in a suicide event, that you could act out violently, that you could have permanent sexual dysfunction? That's just one drug. And what happens when you start adding two, three, four in ways that have never been evaluated, that are interacting with each other in ways that we've never studied? It is an experiment, Allie, and it's been an experiment that's been going on for 40 plus years with the general population, right? It used to be reserved for people who were really, really struggling and they were actually isolated from society. Now it's pushed on everyone in society. The more people that you can identify as mentally ill, the more drugs can be

prescribed. And it is part, in my opinion, it's part of this transhumanist anti-God agenda. You know, the circles in which I work in and the people that I talk to and the people that I'm friends with honestly believe that we are designed to heal naturally. Even I think the most brilliant physicians understand that. That really what it means to achieve health is sometimes to remove the toxins, remove the poisons, and get yourself back into balance in what you put into your body and how you live your life, the mind-body connection. The most dangerous of professionals believe that you are inherently broken and we can experiment with you with pharmaceuticals and technology and medical interventions and various genetic sequencing and changes. And

It's like we are under mass experimentation. There's no other way to deny that. Right. Right. And if we don't look at it in terms of some type of spiritual component that also exist within that. Because it is a lot of the transhumanists, their belief system is they believe they can achieve a godlike status, that they can live forever, that they can be connected to AI. There's an interface between computers and humans. It's really dark and it's really dystopian.

Yeah. And that has certainly entered into the mental health field. And most people who are listening to this will never think about it that way or have never thought about it that way. Yeah. And it really goes back to the Garden of Eden. I mean, so many things do. I talk about the creation story so often in the fall. I mean, how did Satan tempt Eve?

Did God really say? Did God really say he manipulated the truth of what God said? But then the temptation was, no, no, no. If you eat this fruit, you will be like God. You will be like God, knowing good and evil. Part of that was true. Their eyes were open to things that they hadn't been open to before, and they didn't see the consequences of how that would ripple through the rest of human history. And we're still tempted with the same temptation today, wanting to be like God. And we are seeing those kind of deadly effects. What do you do with the stories? Because I just have such a hard, I have such a hard time when it comes. to someone coming to me. And I will get these messages after this. I'll get messages that say he is exactly right on. I saw this and my husband and my dad, et cetera. And then I'll get the message from the genuinely Christian woman who understands spirituality and the importance of the soul,

who will say, look, I was at my darkest moment when I was postpartum. And this antidepressant is the only thing that lifted me out of it. I would have committed suicide. I would have not been able to be there for my child. And I tried praying. I tried going to church. I tried community. I tried exercising this SSRI, she might say, is the only thing that helped me survive. I have a hard time knowing how to respond to that person.

What is your take on? First of all, one thing I've learned right now is, you know, anecdotes don't serve me in the same way that they have in the past. because I've been doing this for quite some time, and I've never heard that story or saw it in person. The only time I ever get it is in social media comments. So I haven't witnessed that. Right. But I can also explain why that could happen.

There's this fascinating study that recently came out. So there was this Tad study, I think it was probably around 2010, 2011. It's actually the study that's used to justify antidepressants for adolescents. TADS standing for the treatment for adolescent depression, something for the, yes, I can't recall. Now, what's interesting is like a lot of the scientific research, it was completely misrepresented. There's a gentleman out of Stanford called John Ionitis, who is a medical researcher. He's what's known as like a meta researcher. He examines all the medical research.

And he came to the conclusion that 90% of the conclusions of the medical research are either misrepresented, overvalued, or flat out wrong, right? And so a lot of people attach to these conclusions, but don't understand actually how poor the science is, but the conclusions are supporting an industry or an ideology. So that's, like, important to acknowledge, because that's one of the reasons why these drugs are put out there. There's no postpartum depression drug, and we can get into that because I think that's an important distinction. But they reevaluated the data from the TADS study, and this just came out this year, 2024, where in that study, they had the teens, the parents, and the doctors predict, because it was blinded. Did you get the placebo drug or did you get the antidepressant drug?

Those who predicted that they got the antidepressant drug, when they only received the placebo, got better. those who got the antidepressant drug, but believed they got the placebo, did not show the same improvement. That is the power of the mind. We don't talk about the placebo effect. We did today. We didn't mention the placebo effect in its label,

but we talked about the power of the mind today, right? So basically, if this woman believes that her brain is broken, that she has this disease called postpartum depression that it's originated in the mind emitted from the brain, there is something genetically wrong with her,

and she is giving a pill that's labeled for that, antidepressant, and she believes it, then she's right. I believe that how she creates her reality around it will support that.

This saved my life. Now, what's important for us to note is that is her creation. That is what she believes. This is why we have to have clinical trials. This is why I believe in science that it is to protect us from harmful interventions. There was a time where bloodletting was a very acceptable medical treatment until they implemented the empirical method and realized that it wasn't. And that was very hard at the time for physicians, when you look in medical history, to give that up because they saw it. They saw that it worked.

So this goes back to empathy and affirming. Like, I can feel your pain. I can understand what you're going through. It can connect with you on a human level. And I don't have to agree with your idea, right? Very similar to gender ideology, right? And the last time I was here sitting in this chair, you threw that at me. And I was scared to address it.

Yeah. I was scared to address it because of clients I had in front of me. I was scared to address it because of what my profession tells me that I could lose my license if I I somehow speak out of line to what the rules are or what the laws are of my profession. And I have to somehow attest to this affirmative care model. And that's part of where my shame has been, that I didn't speak out against that when I absolutely should have. Now, I danced around it and said I was concerned for the parents, which was true.

But I didn't really share how the idea that our culture has created that you could somehow be born into the wrong body. which is an idea that our culture has created, harms people, right? It absolutely harms people. We can't deny that. And I watched your debate with the trans activist. And one of my takeaways was how one can irresponsibly throw out data to support an argument. And you have much more patience than I do.

And that's where I thought, you know, the God was in you. And I've totally felt that. I really did. I felt the Holy Spirit keeping and helping me see, you know, back to the amazing testimony that you told. And this is obviously a much different scenario than that. But I really did in that moment feel the Holy Spirit tell me the image of God is in that person. This person is hurting. I don't think he fully told me everything that, you know, had hurt him in his life. Be patient. I really did. So I can't take credit for that at all. But I felt that. that moment someone saying, hold back, because it's not my natural. My natural is because, oh my gosh,

this ideology is killing people, how I see it. It's mutilating people's bodies. I'm so angry with you. Yes. That you are promoting it to kids. And yeah, God is amazing. Yes. And I heard that in you. And I was amazed by how that compassionate approach is probably going to change hearts versus the anger. and that's been my problem, right? That's been my challenge has been with the anger that I feel, that I want to lash out, that I want to see these people as evil and harmful, and I want to go after them, right?

And that's not how you change hearts, and that's not how you change minds. You change hearts and minds with stories, with connection. And so where this gentleman, his argument was, I trust the professionals, which might be one of the more dangerous, arguments that a person can make this time. First of all, it's a lie. There is no consensus. W. Path doesn't speak for me. The American Psychological Association does not speak for me. I'm a

clinical psychologist. There is no consensus on the views of transgender youth. In fact, there's organizations around the world of medical doctors, of psychologists, of mental health professionals, who have genuine concerns and can speak to a lot of the things that you said. And it's so fascinating because, you know, I treat eating disorders. I do treat OCD. And then there's an obsessive-compulsive disorder called body dysmorphic disorder. And so it's this intense focus on a body part that you believe is really ugly. And it creates a lot of anxiety and a lot of shame.

And the obsessive part is the degree of focus on it. And it goes back to you never really see anyone who is truly doing well when they focus on themselves. But we know that trying to get plastic surgery or to change the body creates harm. Like that's known in my field. When I'm working with somebody, my suggestion would never be changed that body part and you're going to feel better. Yeah. If I have a 14-year-old who is anorexic underweight and they're dying and they hate their body and they believe that they will feel better if they're 85 pounds, I would never affirm that reality.

But then somebody comes in the same vulnerable state and I'm supposed to affirm the idea that they were born into the wrong body. That is in direct conflict with what we know about how to help people. And that's why it's not a science-driven profession. If it was a science-driven profession, we wouldn't talk about drugging emotional states.

We wouldn't talk about cross-sex hormones or trying to change the body of a vulnerable adolescent. And wait, I have a question here because I'm thinking about this. On the one hand, we've just been talking about how psychiatry doesn't really believe there's a soul, that you're kind of just a body. Everything can be explained by that. At the same time, there's this idea that's inherent in gender ideology that says who you really are in almost like a spiritual sense is what you feel on the inside. And it can't be explained by your body. So it almost is a type of soul.

It's like a gendered soul that you think actually trumps your physical reality. So I don't know if you've thought about it in those terms or what the confusion is there. How can psychiatry simultaneously say there is no soul and also say there is this inner self that is independent from the body that tells you who you really are when it comes to gender? Is it just dissonant and like there's no explanation for it? is there some kind of ideological connection? You know, it's interesting because I haven't necessarily thought about it that way until you just mentioned it. But you see this is that in a field like psychiatry, for example, where there's not a strong science base is they'll create ideas to fit what they do, right? They're making

things up as they go along. So even when we talk about the value of antidepressants, it started with the chemical imbalance theory. And once that's kind of disputed, you know, they're just going to transition to something else. There's going to be some other junk science. or some other explanation that's going to support their intervention. Even the, it's not to say that everyone who goes into psychiatry is an evil person and is not, in their mind, I think they're doing what they believe is correct or it's right. But there's a dissonance right there. You can't, you take an oath not to create harm.

So if you actually learn that the prescriptions that you were writing or the ideas you were ascribing to are actually creating harm, what do you do with that information, right? It does create a dissonance and you have to resolve that. dissonance. And then when you resolve that dissonance, you're probably going to intellectualize it in some way. And I think that pretty much is the explanation. I do want to hear what you have to say about there not being a postpartum depression drug. There's a lot of people in this audience who have experienced some kind of, you know, we used to call it baby blues. Maybe they feel, though, that they were really in a state of depression or anxiety. So you talked about how, you know, it's hard to treat that

with just an SSRI. So what do you mean? Yeah, I've jumped into this and consulted with experts on this. And one person I want to defer to and actually promote is Dr. Adam Urado. He's a maternal and fetal medicine physician, Harvard trained, and he's in Massachusetts. And he posts a lot of research on this. He'll post videos. I really want to support his work because I think he's reasonable. He's objective. And what I like about Dr. Yerato is this is he's, he's sort of. serves the families in his community. So he works in the town that he grew up in. And in our modern medical system, you become affiliated with these large-scale hospital-based networks. And you don't develop the same personal connection with your patients that you do if you were independent and you were

working in your community and you develop those strong bonds and connections and you're accountable to mothers, for example. So I just like who he is as a man. And I trust that. And he speaks out and he says chemicals have consequences, right? And it's very important to say that these are chemical compounds made in a factory and they have consequences. Here is what your audience should know. There are no approved SSRI antidepressant drugs for postpartum depression.

When the FDA doesn't even approve it and the FDA is corrupt and has approved drugs that harm people routinely throughout history. when they don't have a drug that's approved, understand that it is an experimental medical intervention. There is one drug that has recently been approved by the FDA for postpartum depression. God, I'm going to butcher this. It begins with a Z Z-Z-Z-Zer-A or something to that nature. I don't think it really matters. So I dug into the research there.

first of all, what's really interesting, as with many clinical trials, is the placebo drug did really well in the trials. If you take this drug, which is a steroidal, it's an oral steroid, they call an oral steroid, and antidepressant. So they use the antidepressant name again, because language is powerful. But you can't operate a vehicle. What mother is going to take a drug with all of these side effects, which include suicidal thoughts, worsening mood, a myriad of other ones, where you can't even operate a vehicle. Like, how do you get to your appointments? How do you take care of an infant when you can't operate a vehicle?

Right. Right. SSRIs are passed through the breast milk. They absolutely impact fetal development. You know, the published research on that is clear. neurodevelopmental problems, cognitive disorders, autism. Are you talking about when she takes it while pregnant or while breastfeeding? While pregnant.

Okay. So a lot of babies... Well, you said fetal development. Okay, got it. A lot of babies are born dependent and in withdrawal on SSRIs. It's published literature. And why does that happen, Allie? It's because of the mental illness delusion, right?

The psychiatrist saying that your mental illness might be worse than the same. side effects of the drug. Oh, really? A special needs child? A baby born? That in withdrawal? Imagine what a mother would go through. If they're actually aware of this information, they know they took SSRIs and you have an autistic child, right? What do you think that's going to do to depression? So I would never, for a family member, for a friend, for a client, under any circumstances, any circumstances at all, I need to be clear, I need to be definitive to ever take a psychiatric drug while pregnant because it's going to impact the baby or any drug that isn't absolutely proven to be safe for you and the baby and you're not going to find many. Okay. Now that doesn't

underscore the importance of postpartum depression and having a nuanced important discussion around it. I just recently had a young mother on my podcast by the name of Kate Galvin, who is now just doing a lot of health coaching because she went through postpartum depression. Young mother, she's actually a fan of your show. She's a listener. It was one of the most informative episodes that I've recorded. And her brilliance on that felt like you were in the presence of God as well. And I find I get more critical discussions around these subjects when I get outside of the professionals. Because the professionals, by way of their training, are just brainwashed. So when I get a young mother who's gone through it, we spoke to the complexity of postpartum depression.

First of all, it's a cultural problem. We know it's a cultural problem. Yeah, that's true. What really does impact postpartum depression? Significant hormonal changes that a mother is going through. And there's probably a way to support that too, nutritionally, with sleep, with family being around them. Like, what we do to women in our modern society is sinful, in my opinion, right? Fathers, family members, community members should really be protecting young mothers as we're,

we have done throughout history, right? Now we're, that's part of the harms of the capitalistic world that we serve, right? We serve industry. We're not serving our families in the same way. And that's why a lot of these institutions that we've relied on, the veil's kind of been lifted in so many ways. And it creates a lot of fear for so many people that when there's awakening occurs, we realize that we have to return to a lot of traditional ways. Yes. Yes. in community. So sleep deprivation is critically important.

I had Lily Nichols, who's a nutritionist. Are you aware of Lily? Yes, I do. Well, I'm thinking, I'm like, I definitely know that name. Maybe I follow her.

Yeah. And her focus, and she's got a total grasp of the scientific literature in her base. So she is around, you know, postpartum,

as well as fertility. Yeah. Nutrition. Yes. And she spoke to the what happens postpartum to a mother with nutritional deficiencies and then how that presents in what the medical establishment would be viewing as psychiatric right and that's the problem with what's been melded and conflated together in the psychiatric world right is that often the label

prevents further exploration of what is really going on medically right oh you see no one's no one's depressed because they have major depressive disorder. No one's depressed because they have postpartum depression. They may be depressed because of sleep deprivation. They might be struggling internally with what it means to be a mother. Right. One of the, I remember when my second daughter was born and my wife had this guilt that she wasn't attending to the needs of our two-year-old, right? Because so much was being given to the infant. And of course, there's so many hormonal changes that are fueling mood shifts and so forth. And I remember just being really despair, and her being in despair about not being able to serve Madison's needs. She was also sleep deprived. And Alexa had colic. So we were certainly not at our

best. But we would never view that as postpartum depression. So when you don't think about it that way, when it's not created in your consciousness, you find other ways to cope. I got to get my mother-in-law in here. Got to get my mother to help. All right. I'm going to see what I'm going to do with my work schedule. Right. I got to step up, right? I got to be up.

I have to get that baby at night after she's breastfeed. And I got to deal with the colic, right? There's so many factors that are so important in serving that. But we're in such a fear-based culture because this is what the media is going to do. They're going to promote a story of some mother who becomes psychotic and drives into a lake with her children. And then they're going to call that postpartum depression to pull that to put the fear of God in all mothers that if they experience mood changes or they're struggling. They're going to kill their baby. Yeah. And so then they go into the medical system and they go on experimental mind and mood altering drugs that haven't been researched long term. Yeah. You know, we get this like questionnaire in our postpartum appointments that is basically like, do you find yourself crying for any reason? And I'm always like, yeah. I mean, I had a baby two weeks ago.

So that does happen. I mean, thankfully, I've never been medicated. I do look back at my, after my first pregnancy. And there haven't been times where I've wondered, wow, did I have post-prime depression? But then, as you were talking, I was thinking about all of the factors there. First, you're a new mom. I remember it was July our air conditioning went out.

I felt like I was alone in a lot of ways and didn't know what I was doing. Also, there's a whole problem with the medical industry and pushing things like Potocin, which is the artificial form of oxytocin, which I'm I'm pretty sure that there is a study that shows that there's something like a 20% increase in chance of, I guess you wouldn't call it depression. I don't know what it is. Some form of baby blues after birth when you use potocin versus just relying on the natural hormone.

That happened in my first birth. There's so many different parts of this. And as you said, even culturally. And I'm not shaming people whose lives have led them to have babies later. It's just the way that it is right now is that, you know, when everyone was having babies when they were 20, you had not only aunts and grandmothers, but maybe great-grandmother around, all living in the same place. You had so much support. Well, you know, my grandmother died three months after my, you know, first baby was born. It's just not the same. You don't have the same

kind of generational support. So you're right. That can't be fixed by a pill. And you also speak to the toxicities that were exposed to that have unknown consequences, right? The endocrine disruptors. Kate Galvin, who's on my podcast, had a thyroid condition and that went undetected. Yeah, right. It was undiagnosed. And then once that got corrected, once she solved that issue, and she solved it naturally, she found a way to solve it naturally with a number of medical, another of natural interventions

around nutrition and sun exposure and other things, she felt a lot better, right? And so there are legitimate medical issues, and there might be the need for medicines. You know, I'm very careful about how I use the word medicine, right? because psychiatric drugs are not medicine. They're drugs. They're pharmaceuticals. But there are, and you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater go all or nothing, there are some medicines that actually do target and are medicinal, right?

They correct something that is like there's a deficiency or so forth. I think like blood pressure, for example, is a great one. And Dr. Eurato talks about this. Like chemicals have consequences, and we may treat a pregnant mother, with blood pressure medication. We're not going to sit there and wait for her to have an aneurysm, right, or something of that nature. And is there potential consequences to the baby? We have to be open about that.

But now we're measuring it against the risks of death and the risk to the baby if you have high blood pressure. That's not the same as this concept of mental illness, of a mental illness that you're going to take a drug and that's somehow going to protect you from it, which is not proven. It's not correcting anything. There's no deficiency that we've identified. There are a lot of people listening to this. Some people hearing what you're saying for the first time and others who are like, yeah, I've been thinking this too, but I don't know where to turn. They don't know how to find a doctor, healthcare providers that are going to align with these values. And so can you tell us about the collective that you've started to help patients and potential patients find someone that will support them? Yeah. So thank you so much because I do

want to give credit to your audience and the opportunity for me to be on this podcast. It was yours and Alex Clark's podcast that, you know, inspired this. And, you know, this is where, you know, we talked about earlier that you have to give up on what your life is supposed to be and you have to just go with what the calling is. And so here's been my challenge since I've been on your your podcast initially because you have such a large audience. And they're an amazing audience. Like, they're just really, really good people. Totally agree. And I wish I could get back to everybody, but there is not a day goes by that I don't

get an email. Some of the overwhelming emails have been, we really need some help. We need to find somebody who's not going to push these ideologies, who's going to be able to provide informed consent, who we know we can trust. Do you have a recommendation? And I don't. especially in my field, there's not many people like me speaking out against this. And it's hard for me to hire mental health professionals.

So how am I going to be able to recommend somebody who is in Nevada, Texas, or California, or so forth? But what I do, and this is interesting, Allie, and this I can understand, is I get a lot of people who are in either the medical field or our mental health professionals who send me emails, thanking me for speaking out, that I'm speaking to exactly what they're going through. But they just can't do anything about it right now because of the systems that they work in.

So I've just prayed on this. And so I've created the Conscious Clinician Collective. It's a nonprofit 5013C. It's got two important components. If you go to our website, which is the cccollective.org. There is a declaration. Read the declaration.

Okay. It's important. I think it's of the highest moral and ethical standards. I don't think it can be debated scientifically. I don't think it can be debated morally. Even if you're not a Christian. Even if you're not religious, read that. My guess is it'll speak to you.

because we have a moral and ethical standard to protect people from harm. We also have a moral, ethical, and legal standard to provide informed consent. And what does informed consent mean? Is that whenever there is an intervention, therapy included, we have a legal mandate, an ethical mandate, to explain to them the limitations of that intervention. We have to talk about the potential costs, harms, and any perceived benefits.

We also have to explain to them what alternatives might exist. So in today's podcast, we actually talked about alternatives to the mental health system, right? We talked about alternatives to the idea of therapy or psychiatric drugs. And so I don't expect anyone today to blindly trust what I'm telling you. Do your research yourself. I am one professional in a sea of many. I'm speaking my truth. I'm speaking my understanding of it. But you know when you come and see me, there's going to be a high moral and ethical standard because I am not at this point moving forward.

The medical authority is not my authority and it never will be. But you are God for me. You are in front of me. You are the presence of God. I have a responsibility to you, as we all do as medical professionals. And if we don't do something about it, Allie, we're at risk of losing a lot. We haven't been doing anything about it. We go into these medical professionals. We go into these hospital systems. And we blindly sign these consent forms that attests to our knowledge of what's being provided. And no doctor is accountable or responsible right now for giving us informed consent.

The only way we can make change is if we mass resist and make a movement, something has to change, right? So this is an opportunity, and this is in the very foundation groundwork of this. Like I have to build money to build this platform. And that's hard for me to do because that's not my area of expertise. So we want to build a platform where clinicians across the healthcare spectrum attest to that declaration. And there'll be a searchable database for people to go on, say, who's in my locality? who attests to that declaration.

And it's around medical freedom. It's around informed consent. It's respect for your personal autonomy. And I think that's critical, right? And so that's part one. And I can only do that when I can build enough funds to be able to support that, to build that platform, and people have to sign up for it. So there's two things we need.

We need the professionals to read it to sign up and grow this movement because it has to be a revolution. And if anyone sees it in their hearts to make a donation, even if it's the cost of a cup of coffee, every little bit helps us build this. Here's the greater vision, Valley. And I pray on this every single day. If you want to find out information right now about medical interventions, most people do a Google search. And evidence from the advertising world shows that you're not really going to go past page one even. and that is filtered information bought and paid for by industries that serve their bottom line.

I mean, you'll still go to like WebMD and they'll still describe depression as a chemical imbalance. Yeah. And then they're just going to promote their interventions. You'd have to go really deep to figure out all these alternatives, the harms of the interventions, and so forth. So where do we get information? Well, one, we get information from podcasts. What a blessing that has been. That we get out of the corporate media and professionals have the freedom to be able to talk about what they're actually experiencing, what they're actually reading.

Because for a long time, it's been these corrupt organizations who are speaking for everybody. And if you act out of line, well, then you are violating your principles. So we need that informed consent piece. But how about a network, a large-scale network of media and studies, not to push an agenda? Because if you want to stay within the medical authority and you want to stay in the system exists, and there could be some benefits to that, and there certainly are, there are some benefits in our medical, we do have some great medical professionals. But it's your responsibility, because it has to be our responsibility now.

We can't blindly trust anymore. to be able to do some research and understand and ask the questions. We can't sit there and expect these eight-minute sessions that are in primary care and medical systems that are actually serving financial interests and not serving patient well-being to be the norm. So we need the time to ask those hard questions. You need to question your medical professional. If we've learned anything from COVID, you cannot blindly trust them.

The veil has been lifted. There's the corruption. put them on the spot. It is their responsibility to know this. 85% to 85% of psychiatric drugs are being prescribed in primary care settings by doctors who have no knowledge of this. They're not experts on this. They're irresponsibly pushing these drugs out there. Nobody is getting informed consent. We're pushing them on children. The consequences are severe. They're accountable. They're responsible. I used to let the medical professionals off the hook, right? They're victims of a system.

Bologna, that was my mistake. I should never have actually even said that because if I'm accountable to my patients and I'm not a medical professional, I'm a clinical psychologist and I can do the research and I can talk to people. Well, then you have that responsibility and I don't care about your loans and I don't care about how much money you make and I don't care about what your boss is telling you to have to do. You have a responsibility to stand up against that where nothing is going to change. these doctors in the hospital system, the Affordable Care Act has pretty much eliminated independent

doctors. So they are now cogs in a system following blindly those protocols. These protocols are being influenced by the pharmaceutical industries who are funding these major medical organizations. And I know there's a lot of people out there who know exactly what I'm saying can understand the anger that I have. I know there's a lot of good people out there. Join this. Please be a part of this because that's the only way we can make change. Right. And, you know, this is anything I sought out to do in my life. I had a pretty cushy life, I think. You know, I did love being a psychologist, a therapist, and being so involved in my family.

But when you're called to do something, you do it. Yeah. And we all have to be able to kind of take that next step in the face of courage right now. Yes, and amen. Everyone can go to the cccollective.org. We'll put the link in the description of this podcast so that they can just click on it easily. They can check out your radically genuine podcast as well. Thank you so much. Thanks for your courage. Go ahead.

There's two other things I want to be able to promote. Sure. And I should have said it earlier when we were talking about hallucinations or spiritual phenomena. I have a colleague, Dr. Susan Hannon, who is actually doing research right now on those who have received some spiritual or meaningful benefit from having that phenomenon. And if we can put her link in the show summary for anyone who might want to be a part of that research, that would be great. Additionally, I'm writing for Substack. And I've put out an article a week for an entire year. Awesome.

And it's free. And I never know what I'm going to write about until the morning I sit down and write. I just pray for it and I just see what flows. And it's another way of getting information out there. Right. And so you can get that from Dr.McPhillan.com. You can go to Dr.McPhiln.com. It's called radically genuine.

And if you sign up for that, then it's a free publication. And that's the only way we make change is when we're fully educated in this way. Totally. Well, thank you so much for all you do. And again, just appreciate your bravery. I know that you wish, you said that you wish that you had spoken up sooner. But gosh, I just see how God has ordained even the timing of your journey to coincide with exactly what he wants to accomplish. So we can be confident in that.

So thank you so much. Thank you.