Seeking Derangements - SD 450 - Misery Business w/ P.E. Moskowitz

Episode Date: October 26, 2025

*Full Video for FREE on Patreon* It's Seeking Sunday! Ben here, today author, journalist and House Expert P.E. Moskowitz joins Hesse and I to talk about their new book, Breaking Awake: A Reporter's Search For A New Life, and A New World Through Drugs. We discuss how the popular belief that depression is nothing more than a "chemical imbalance" benefits the pharmaceutical industry while driving social alienation, list our favorite and least favorite drugs, and talk about how the internet has changed perceptions of treating mental illness. Then we take a peek at a handful of sinister anti-depressant advertisements. Along with one ad aimed at those of us with active bladders. Read P.E.'s substack Mental Hellth for more!

POMAYOR. But, sandsa, oh, oh, but the sun, Hello, yeah, oh, yeah, so precious to my brain. Slipping in a phenomena, slipping in other phenomena. this very special episode for you today. Husset and I are interviewing Paris Moskowitz, author of Breaking Awake, My Search for a New Life Through Drugs. Paris, how are you doing today? A reporter's search for a new life and a new world. Well, that actually depends what subtitle you're looking at,

because in the UK, apparently, reporter is not a common word, so they changed it to my search. Welcome, Paris. How are you doing today? Um, fine. How are you? What drugs are you on today? What's our stack? Let's go around the series. Oh, yeah. Okay, so my stack is caffeine, 10 milligrams of Adderall in the morning, one quarter of a bilify, which is technically an antipsychotic, but is prescribed to me at like half the lowest dose to,

it helps like PTSD symptoms or whatever. And then I drink Kratom sometimes, yeah. I'm so happy I'm speaking to a fellow Kratom head. because I also do drink Credo. Okay. Yeah, I'm trying to reduce my Craitor. I'm trying to reduce my Crater amount because I don't like being independent on anything, but it's pretty good. I'll do it like, I'm not to be such a like health neurotic about it, but I'm really concerned with like heavy metals in Cratum because I'm like, it's now becoming like so mass produced and it's literally everywhere.

And I'm like, I feel like with that scale of production, of course, quality is going to drop. Yeah. So I did them. like annoying thing and found a um tested cratum supplier that tests for heavy metals no that's great i i do that um it's very could you imagine the emails that place gets like oh i know um you'll have to send me uh also in all promo code ben at checkout for 20 percent yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the lead free cratum it's just your name i i think this is a good way to jump into one of my questions, which is, um, you, you write about a lot of

people in this book that we know personally, you're just going to docks everyone in the book. Exactly. I'm about to, well, I was about to say, the only thing is you got all of their names wrong and you call yourself a reporter. What is that? And why am I not in the book? I was addicted to opiates famously that you were writing this. That's true. True. I feel like everyone in the book who I know personally are people who I don't think I could ever report on like a bestie, which I would consider you a bestie, because I think it would be too conflicting morally, journalistically, emotionally. I think especially emotionally, honestly, because like just seeing people use drugs in these ways is like hard for me because it's just intense to watch people go through these things. That being said, like, yeah, there are people I know in the book who I'm friends are friendly with. And almost every single one of them wanted to use their real name, which is rare. Usually, like, when people are talking about drugs, they're like, please don't use my real name.

But I think people, you know, wanted to put their stories out there and hope that people could relate to them. And I was the one to be like, you know, I'm taking your real names to my editor. So she knows you're a real person. But like, but I'm not going to like make it so it's Googleable that you're doing. doing like 47 drugs in a club every weekend, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The book is basically, to describe it in, in short, in Paris, correct me if I'm, if I go astray with this in any way, but I see it as like part memoir, part

reportage about your personal trauma, which leads you to various psychiatric or psychological forms of therapy, you're kind of disillusionment with them in some way. and then into a broader critique about how people cope with the violence and alienation and just struggle of living under capitalism, what ways they find to cope with that through mostly drugs or whatever communal experiences they can scrape together as those exist right now. And I'm wondering what led you in your personal life before we get into larger questions to write this book and explore these topics. Thank you for making me have to go over my traumas and triggering me.

No, so I almost died twice in two terrorist attacks. The first when I was 13 during 9-11, went to school two blocks away, ran from the following Twin Tower, to help people die, yada, and then second one was Charlottesville, the kind of white supremacist neo-Nazi rally which I was there supporting which I was which I was there

counter protesting and like reporting for like a lefty publication at the time and almost got hit by James Alex Fields car when he rammed it into the protesters and got blood on me and all that kind of stuff and then basically

spent a month repressing that within myself and then woke up in a hotel room in Oakland, California, like basically having a complete mental breakdown, you know, hands shaking, feeling like I was being chased by a pack of animals or whatever, scary animals specifically, not like cute ones. And yeah, I just, I basically like that state lasted

for months and it's a cute phase, but kind of years. And I had to use a lot of drugs to deal with it, to kind of ameliorate the acute phase of that pain and then to stabilize myself after that acute phase. And then the most fun part, if you want to call it, that was like using the drugs we think of as fun, like, you know, ketamine and LSD and 2CB and all of those to kind of not only stabilize myself,

but like kind of rewrite a life, re-figure out who I am and like realize that I had to like move forward, not backward in this journey. But then I realized that, like, everyone to a certain extent is going through this, right? Like, not everyone is almost dying into terrorist attacks, although probably more and more people are in America. I almost died in three, by the way, but keep going. So it's like, like we're all trying to cope with the pain of capitalism. We're all not given enough tools to do that.

And it's frequently up to us to kind of figure out how to reshape our lives or psyches or whatever. whatever to this horrible world and drugs are one of the biggest tools through which we do that. So I started reporting on all these people using drugs in ways I found interesting and that related to my story. There's one phrase that I really like that I like to think of as kind of the guiding phrase of the whole book, which is, say, you were, quote, learning to get a little weird with it. Yeah. And you talk a lot about the hero's journey and like Joseph Campbell's.

sort of, of course we all know of the hero's journey by the great scholar Joseph Campbell, you know, where there's a beginning and an end and you learn something along the way. Yeah. You talk about trying to learn how to see your life more as like a Picasso painting. Yeah. Than a straightforward linear hero's journey narrative of like trauma and recovery from trauma. Yeah, I mean, there's this psychoanalyst of Giesakitapulu who writes about like how we're all taught to be of like traumatophobic which like i i like to think that anything bad that happens to us like

is life ruining and that like we can somehow prevent it and like life is traumatizing especially life under capitalism it's just inherently traumatizing and that if we acknowledge that like what we can do instead of trying to like refit ourselves to some supposed narrative of healing which doesn't actually exist and the more you try the more you fail and i think that it's almost like a form of to use like a very 2017 word like a form of gaslighting ourselves being like why can't I fit it why can't I why isn't this drug make me work why doesn't this medication make me work why doesn't this form of therapy make me work um instead what we can do is kind of like turn these these traumas these wounds into sites of meaning and and uh exploration and so

I think one of the most painful things about like after having this nervous breakdown was like attempting to will myself back to like this previous narrative of my life and just like there was so much grief in that there was so much grief in trying to to fit back to that that version of me and eventually what I realized was just like like I have to just give up on that and and like yeah get weird with it throw shit at the wall see what sticks and like cobble together a new self through that and I think that was I think that was very freeing once I once I kind of accepted that was to just be like, okay, I don't have to heal. I just have to change.

Well, there is this very, like, I feel like particularly American way of dealing with trauma or maybe not even trauma, just bad moods in general. There's this expectation that the kind of baseline healthy person is consistently happy and fulfilled and content, which I think more than anything, engender is more discontent. engenders more alienation from yourself and your emotions and the underlying material causes of that very real and justified discontent. And I, not only is it this Western ideal of consistent, leveled happiness, but when you have that ideal in tandem with perceptions about depression or anxiety, et cetera, that there's this understanding that these things are nothing merely more than, certain biological chemical imbalances in the brain. As you point out in your book, that is, I mean, quite frankly,

just like a pharmaceutical op in my mind. I guess I can't speak for you there. Yeah, you talk about the good and bad of the medicalization of all of these things. Yeah. The categorizing and kind of naming and like the positives and negatives. You know, it's very personal, but also very political. yeah it's very you're always like this dumb bitch I have I have two questions related to that

basically like what do you see as the the driving factor of this ideal that happiness in general is something that is or should be a constant level state in one's internal emotional life. And second, how do you see that relating to the pharmaceutical industries, the way they sell certain antidepressants, anti-anxiety, medications, et cetera? I, you know, I always get a lot of pushback when I, like, criticize these things because

I think people are, people think I'm telling them, like, go throw your antidepressants down the toilet or whatever. And that's not what I'm saying. Like, I think substances of any kind, whether there are. legal or illegal, like, it can be helpful to certain people and harmful to other people. I think what I hate is the kind of narrative we've put around these drugs that they, that's, one, the goal is like a kind of permanent state of happiness or stability. And two, that it is all up to the individual, that there is such a thing as like a cure to

these things in a system that is making us all super depressed and anxious. despondent all the time. And, you know, like the analogy I use with, um, with like antidepressants specifically, it's like, imagine if you're a fish in a pond and the pond is being like polluted by a factory downstream or whatever. Like, you could take the fish out of the water and you could give it fish medicine or whatever. But then if you just throw it back into the pond, it, you know, it's going to get sick again, right?

And so I feel like that's what we're all doing to ourselves all the time is, is being told that these things are cures, but then never, never like going and shutting down the factory down the street, right? Yeah. And also a fish, if you put it in a bag and it goes like the end of finding Nemo, where those fish are in bags and they go into the ocean and they're still in bags, but they're in the ocean. It's like... And that's capitalism. They're in these little bubbles, you know? that you know and then one of the fish says now what and I think that is I like I'm making a joke kind of but I do think no it is sure no it's true we're all like completely understand what you're saying in these little bubbles you know what I mean isolated and separated from each other and I think part of that is like you don't have to be conspiracy theorist to think that like if you were to create a system by which no one like would fight that system you would make people as isolated from each other as possible. And you would make sure that people weren't comparing notes.

So, like, to say that your depression is unique to your chemical imbalance and not the same thing your neighbor down the street with an anxiety disorder is going through, it disenables people from actually, like, realizing that we're all in the same fucking pond or ocean or whatever and not in our little plastic bags. But I think, sorry, just to answer your question at the beginning, Ben, is like, this all goes back to the neoliberalization of... everything, the economy, the world, you know, starting really in the 80s, which is not coincidentally when antidepressants came to market. This is when tens of thousands of mental

hospital beds were shut down when homeless people were starting to be forced to live on the street in greater numbers by First Nixon and Reagan. And when unions were being busted, when basically everything became about individual prosperity and individual management of capitalism. So antidepressants and the medical model we have of the brain right now are the perfect tool by which to usher in those other things because it's no longer a collective issue when you're discussing, you know, if you are struggling with something and you go to a doctor and you get an antidepressant, that's all happening privately and individually.

If there was a more collective form of care that would, require more collective form of society, one in which we're not, you know, all kind of isolated doing gig work, not in unions, not, you know, spending less and less time with each other each week. So, so yeah, it's not, it's not that these drugs are inherently bad, but it's that they're a part of a much larger system of individual, individuation and atomization. For sure. I, and you also, you talk a lot about the racial disparities in these, um, kind of phenomena and how those like racial disparities have shifted over the years right and how you know like certain groups in the past were the first kind of to feel the sting of the world that we are

forced to live in and the first to feel that trauma I mean obviously like you know like slavery and stuff Yeah, and there was a drabitonemia was a psychiatric diagnosis given to slaves who wanted to run away from their plantations. And, you know, that with the theory being that you would have to be insane to want to not live on a plantation. And you can see that continue throughout history, like with black people being diagnosed as schizophrenic at way higher rates than white people. you know in the 60s there was a group of very mainstream psychiatrists who said that like the black power movement was essentially a form of psychosis and that that what we were seeing was not like a legitimate fight against oppression but a kind of individual mental health problem it kind of it reminded me of something that I learned that like part that like a fact act in the book. And it's that in Germany, if you try to escape from prison, it's not a crime because they're like, of course you would do that, you know. And there's something really crazy about like the acknowledgement of that. And like, it is crazy to be like, if you escape from prison,

that that's a big crime and we're going to put you in there for even longer now. Right. Right. I mean, I think you can see that as kind of like a metaphor for all of society as corny as that sounds, but it's like, that's what we're all trying to do is like escape from the prison of capitalism. And then when we do, we're told that this is like us being crazy. It's criminalized or it's like, or we're told that it's, you know, all within our brains. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Right. Because of the individual metrics in which we all understand this, there's no real communal understanding of pain or trauma or the material basis of. such as it exists in our culture or society right now, it's all understood through exceedingly individualistic terms, through psychiatry, psychoanalysis, medications, et cetera. It's something really disturbing I see happening because of this. You see people making, especially online, earnest attempts to heal their traumas through personal journeys of sorts, right? My struggle with BPD, my struggle with depression, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Like, earnest desires to heal are oftentimes just completely and entirely subsumed by capitalism because they are in some way, have become an individual, individualistic capitalistic pursuit. And I'm wondering, like, can you talk a little bit about how you see the earnest attempts to heal with this trauma, becoming in and of itself a individualistic capitalist pursuit and in your journey through doing this have you found any way to resist that yeah i mean like everything in this world if there's money to be made from it people will also have to be money from yeah and i really think that some of the most evil people in the internet are the

psychologists or who even knows if they're real psychologist but like all these mental health healers who are trying to categorize and diagnose and heal people from from their traumas and life circumstances um as if these things can be done like in one minute long videos um that there's just so much so much misinformation disinformation just outright lying up there i think the thing is is that there's my my sympathetic take is that there's not much not not on those people i don't have a sympathetic take on those people but my sympathetic take on like need names get them all wrong like in the book. No, my sympathetic take on like this phenomenon in general is like that people don't

really have any other option, you know, like something like 75% of SSRI prescriptions are doled out by primary care doctors and they're not experts in mental health, but because people don't have the money or the resources to go to an actual psychiatrist, that's what they're left with, right? And it's, you know, same online. When people find mind a lot of these spaces online that say, like, oh, you can heal from this thing or this thing. Like, that's often their only options. And it also, in tandem, offers in some way, communal misunderstanding of the problems. And it's kind of ironic in that that is how they find community, belonging, people who have

the same struggles as them. Right. And I think that's one of the saddest parts of all this is that, like, the pain is real. When I say, like, when I say, like, diagnosis is bullshit. I don't mean that the pain underlying that diagnosis is bullshit. For sure. I mean that like when I, I quote unquote, I have ADHD, but for nine years or something, I wasn't on, on Adderall or any ADHD medication and I was fine.

I was maybe even better. But then the pandemic hit, I felt lonely and insane. And I couldn't sit at my desk anymore. And then all of a sudden my quote unquote ADHD got worse, right? So is it, is that because I have a uniquely. malformed brain or is it because my life circumstances made it such that sitting in front of the computer and doing work when I thought we were all going to fucking die makes my anxiety symptoms and therefore lack of concentration and get worse right and so I think these things

become these self-fulfilling prophecies where people become so convinced that everything in their life is a symptom of their illness that it that you know everything gets pushed into that Whereas, you know, you might be fucking depressed or you might be BPD because you hate your fucking husband or you hate your job or you know like yeah or like you because you have like traumas you need to work through or your wife is a bitch. That's a given, you know, hey, hey, the cure is called to kick that bitch out of the house. The cure is called to kill your wife. That's my next book. Kill your wife exclamation point. A reporter's search for a new life and a new world through killing their wife. And the follow-up book, Kill the Wife in your own head. You are the wife, Mitch, you're the wife.

The book catalogs your journey through everything we've been talking about here. And in brutal honesty and like total, like, you know, it's, I literally, I texted you this. but hearing the listening to the audio book and hearing your voice the voice of my friend talking about you know all of these horrible things and experiences and feelings it legitimately made me cry for like you know and like hearing also similarities with how like my own journey yeah absolutely yeah one of the surprising things about writing this book is like i kind of forgot that people i know would read it and like damn this bitch is fucked up yeah literally no I had this like phone call with my mom like I only gave it to my parents

like two months before publication even that I've been done for longer than that and I got like a phone call for my mom being like I have 10 questions and I was like oh fuck and then like the first

the first nine of them she was like so I have some corrections to make can you do have a pen period Yeah. And then the 10th one, she was like, are you okay? Oh. That's very sweet. It was. But yeah, but I just, I feel like it's like, you know, in the process of making my life into this story, I kind of forgot that, like, people, that it's like a real thing that people know.

Right. Into this Picasso, more like. Yeah, yeah. Well, and that, I mean, your experiences here, and I think this is part of what you get out in the book is that these are universal experiences with the time and place we all live in currently. Right. At the end of the book... I mean, yours are very individual and crazy, though. But I think they're just like the leading edge or whatever of, you know, like the kind of fascistic violence we're all experiencing. For sure. Yeah.

Like, you don't have to almost die in a white supremacist terror attack to, like, experience the violence of capitalism. I think, like, mine made it obvious that that's what I was experiencing. And for other people, it's more subtle and more hidden. It broke you awake. It broke me awake, yes. But I think, like, I think that's the thing is like to just encourage people to think about their experiences in life as communal and as not unique to themselves. Like, yes, everyone's life is unique to themselves, but like that we have these kind of like million overlapping Venn diagrams with each other of like why all of our pain is related. And, you know, how are we supposed to fight for any kind of like better future if we don't even realize that the things we're fighting?

writing against are interrelated. Right. And that's what I find so pernicious about the pharmaceutical industry in particular. Yeah. And that I do think there is a massive potential in people understanding their traumas, their pain, their anxieties, as non-discreet personal experiences. Yeah. And the pharmaceutical industry has made billions of dollars and invested billions more

in creating this idea that these are nothing more than certain misfiring misfiring chemicals in your brain that these are not a genuine response to your material circumstances and the material circumstances of your family of your neighbors of our country writ large right it's extremely bothering to me and to be honest about it i have seen a lot of people on the left especially since 2020 especially since the you know co-optation of the black lives matter revolt within the Democratic Party, within corporations, within what we all now understand colloquial as the summer of infographics, whatever it may be. I know that's not what it was originally, but unfortunately that is where it landed. It was co-opted. Of course these things are

going to be co-opted by the status quo. Of course they are. It doesn't mean they're not worth fighting for or worth believing in. But post that, I have seen a lot of people on the left, especially younger people genuinely believe that they are and i hate harping about it because i i know that these talking points are used by the right wing used to manufacture consent for demonizing people on the left is meant to ill etc no but it is still true i do see people calling themselves disabled because they have ADHD right or you know saying that all of these things are in some way it does become the oppression olympics and i don't fault the individuals for that. I fault, of course, the pharmaceutical industry who has made these

understandings of trauma and disability and mental illness, et cetera. I fault them for... I think it's just also, it's like a naturally, it's naturally like occurring... People will search for an answer wherever they can get it, and they have an answer offered to them. Like pattern that happens just in capitalism, you know, of like, it's not even like a grand conspiracy or anything by the... No, no. No, I mean, it's... It's fortuitous, but the pharmaceutical industry has a corporate message ready for the taking, and people took it. And it's what capitalism does best, like a kind of if you can't beat them, join them kind of thing where it's like, like there used to be all these radical anti-capitalist mental health struggles that, you know, were so intertwined with the civil rights movement, with like anti-war movements. And then, you know, women's rights.

Women's rights, yes. and and they took almost got you there I didn't even say gay rights so oh no bad wrongs more like you know what I mean

but what they did is they took all of that energy and turned it into a way to fit people back into the system and I think what's so frustrating now to like what you're saying Ben it's not that I'm saying like don't complain about your ADHD or whatever I'm saying that like don't complain about it in a way that is like

predetermined for you by the pharmaceutical lobby industry and completely done for some kind of vanity i'll say it completely done for some kind of weird upper hand that you have on your fellow leftist or fellow you know whatever right and you're like well i i actually suffer from this i actually suffer from that that's not what politics is that is just a complete vanity pursuit of hyper individualism to me yeah no exactly it is yeah beyond the the diagnosis of it all like diagnose the dsm is a perfect tool for like a hyper individualized society. It's not like the DSM's fault necessarily,

although that too, but it's like this is one tool of many of like this kind of hyper individuation that we're all experiencing right now, right? But I also think the really frustrating thing to me is that this energy, people's righteous indignation at how our health and our mental health is treated in this country, has been completely co-opted by the right.

And the left's response to that is to defend the status quo. Right. So you have Maha, which is obviously like an evil and stupid movement, but you have them at least saying, what does it stand for again? Well, you know what, Make America healthy again? But you know what, Maha did? Make America Hitler again.

I mean, literally. But also, even on that, it's something that truly boggles my mind, that health neurosis, genuinely, like, health, earnest health neuroses used to be terrain for the left about healthy eating about factory farming about chemicals in food etc but it was a systemic critique like it was a systemic critique it was it was skepticism of the pharmaceutical and agricultural

industries right yeah that's all gone away and been usurped by the maha people it's now it's now the right wing suburban moms who are the ones reading food labels complaining It's our red dye, red dye number 40, the microplastics, the seed oils. I know a lot of that stuff is just crank stuff. And of course it is, it's because it's the right wing doing it now. But I, for the life of me, am so confused as to how that terrain was seeded. Well, because we chopped off our own like we were standing on or whatever. I don't know if that's a phrase.

That's one of the great phrases of our time, actually. But it's like, you know, we gave up the systemic. fatigue of mental health and health in general for a more mainstream. It's kind of like how I see it like the gay rights movement too, actually. It's like there used to be a kind of inherently anti-capitalist in solidarity movement on, you know, queer rights, trans rights, whatever. And then we we gave that up for kind of rainbow capitalism. And then it hollowed out the movement. And now it can be kind of hijacked by anyone because there is no movement.

And I think that's what happened. Like when we decided that mental. health wasn't a systemic problem that it was all in your brain and could be cured chemically. We gave up any power we had as a movement to like stake a claim and say like this is part of a fight against capitalism. But then you still left millions of people wondering like why are we all so sick? Why are we all so depressed? And then you you open the door to having the charlatans come in and provide them an answer. Yeah. Like RFK Jr., if we're being real, I don't think his voice is like that

I think he is like I think that's a psychological thing and I think that's honest to God I think that is that was a joke when I said that I think that it's like the gay list exactly exactly exactly

do we have an explanation for that yet by the way the gay the gay list well I I do that people say it's because when you're in a formative stage as a child, gay men often mimic the female adults around them. And that's the leading theory on gay voices, that it's just mimicking women.

No, but like, about this, they're, the first ever, the first ever psychiatrist I ever had, well, actually the second, because I did have a child psychiatrist but your psychiatrist was a child yeah exactly that's it period um the second psychiatrist i ever had was in high school i was very depressed and he was like oh let's try getting you on lexapro and i kept being like this isn't really working i don't feel any better i don't feel any different at all it literally isn't and he kept being like let's just up the dose of lexapro And then my brother went to the same psychiatrist and was like, the psychiatrist, of course, was like, let's get you on some Lexapro. And then I looked it up and like there used to be a website where you could like search this.

And like that doctor, yes, he was being paid by Lexapro. It's sick. I genuinely cannot believe we let this shit happen. It really is. It anchors me truly to no end because it is such. it at once distills everything wrong with American society the revolving door between

the pharmaceutical industry between psychiatric industry between even primary healthcare physicians it is so sick and it shows it should be something you can lay out to people as a leader as a political person of the left to say

look you can see everything that is wrong endemically wrong with American society right here you have sickness that is in general gendered and created by capitalism, that capitalism is then selling you the cures for, convincing you have them, and they don't even fucking cure you. Yeah. To give another analogy that is not fish-based this time, like, even the most mainstream

researchers, like, acknowledge that we're not getting to the root causes of these things, I mean, at least the mainstream ones that aren't being paid by the pharmaceutical industry. Like, there was one, I quote in the book who said, like, let's say you have a toothache and you prescribe a pain reliever to help with the two. toothache, you can study that and know that the pain reliever helps with the toothache, but that doesn't teach you anything about the underlying infection that caused the toothache, right? And I think that's what we're doing is like we're quote unquote curing the toothache by

prescribing pain relievers. No one is actually looking at the infection. Yeah. I, like one of the other crazy things that you said that I had no clue about before I read the book is like that Tylenol was found to help with a. emotional pain as well, kind of, you know, in the same exact way. And that that is how that's kind of like one of the research instances that showed that emotional and physical pain and trauma are so interconnected and similar. And like the body reacts the same way to both of them.

Yeah. One of the sections that really like made me kind of like emotional was, You saying that you watched a thousand episodes of 30 rock in your emotional state. And it reminded me of when I kind of went through a trauma in my life and I went to your apartment on your couch for like 48 hours just sobbing. And you were like, you put on 30 rock every once in a while. And just like laying on the couch and like that you just like see. sitting with me like it really like it's such uh you know because tv is also a drug in a lot of and i it really makes me think of taylor from the real houseways of beverly hills and um

you know because she like throughout the whole show she is like acting weird there's a season where she is acting weird okay for anyone who hasn't watched the real life The Real Houseways of Beverly Hills. There's like an entire season where this woman is acting. She's basically having like a manic episode. Yeah. Yeah, is having a complete and total manic episode. She's the woman in the famous picture of a woman pointing at a cat that was a meme.

Yeah. And if you know the context of that image, it becomes like really fucked up. I know. It's like literally a perfect example of like what we're talking about is like she was actually going through like an insanely hard time. being abused by her husband all this shit was happening to her and like no one wanted to like actually you know look under the rug and see what was happening it's just like we called her crazy right um for anyone who hasn't seen it this uh like Taylor this housewife um her husband was beating her mercilessly yeah and like really like truly she like genuinely almost was killed by yeah

And he eventually killed himself instead because it came out on the on the show you know and it like they were talking in the I'll never forget like the feeling of watching the recap episode and like they're talking to Taylor about it like amidst talking about like you know like oh Kyle and do you forgive Kim like you know you know Um, do you believe Kim will, like, stay sober? And like, there, and then, like, as they're talking about it, Taylor's like, yeah, no, I was told by my psychiatrist that like, usually in cases like that, where an abusive husband kills himself, he takes the wife with him, you know? And I'm like, I was like, I forgot about that. Yeah, no, it's crazy because then you realize, like, she literally. And her behavior made perfect sense, yeah. She escaped death by the skin of her teeth. And I, yeah, I remember texting you watching this show and being like, wow, people think this show is like. No, I mean, the first few seasons of. Stunning. Beverly Hills, yeah, they're like an avant-garde documentary about a bunch of crazy women.

I wanted to just wrap up the kind of summation of your book here. It ends with you basically maybe perhaps finding somewhat of a cure or maybe I should say a more effective way of relieving yourself of the pain that you've experienced in your life. Now we all experience through raving, through going out, doing ketamine, raving, not doing G, which Paris, I do agree with you on G. We don't have to open up the G conversation. No, I actually do. But let me just finish this question and then we can get to G. but there is i mean you've quoted it yourself in the book um this idea you know religion is the opioid of the masses yeah and raving going out dancing the communal experience one of the few

communal experiences people queer people have in new york city that is about i mean truly just being in a crowd and and losing losing yourself in almost a physical way that is very spiritual It is very similar to the relief that religion gives people. And I'm wondering here, what do you think of the limitations if raving is somewhat of a religion, a spiritual practice? What are the limitations you see of that spiritual practice? Is it something that we are merely allowed to have because it keeps us functioning? Or is it something that does have a genuinely revolutionary potential? not in that you're going to overthrow the government because of a rave,

but in a spiritual way. When Mark said religion was opiate of the masses, like... Who's Mark? He didn't mean that it was like purely evil. But, you know, to butcher the rest of the quote, it's that religion provides the flowers on the chain of your oppression so that you don't realize the chain, right? And it's like, he wasn't saying like stop going to church necessarily.

No, of course. But he was saying like, he was saying that this provides this kind of salvelling. to people who are experiencing legitimate oppression. And I think we can think of raving in the same way, where you work during the week and you feel horrible about your life, and then you have this self at the end of the week that makes you feel more spiritual or communally oriented and whatever. If there is radical potential in that,

I think it's in what it helps you realize you need. Like when I've been in a sweaty, half-naked room, on a lot of drugs and kind of feeling the ecstasy not only of the substances but the ecstasy of like being to quit the psychologist from the 60s eric from like but a drop of water on the crest of over wave of your fellow man um which is like to feel that's horny as fuck yeah yeah i mean all of psychoanalysis is horny as fuck but um no but like this kind of feeling of like oh this is what life can be like if it wasn't for the isolation and atomization we experience under capitalism.

I think that has revolutionary potential in it. But then I think that gets confused with like the, you know, the ends get confused for the means or whatever. People find that revolutionary potential there. And then so they just keep going back and back and back. And it's like eventually the sun comes up the first time and then you keep going and comes up the second time. And then you have to go back to work and like at the end of the day,

you still have to actualize. You still have to materialize the world and change it, right? So it's like raving or any kind of spiritual ecstatic experience can help you realize like what what is needed in your life and your communal life. But then you have to go like, you know, do the thing that will help the world experience that, which is not relegated to a club or a church or whatever. Yeah, which and we don't really know what that thing is really there's no, you know, like how do you bring, how do you turn the world into a rate? There's movement politics. Yeah, there's movement politics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, I mean, that is, unfortunately. We've got daddy Zoron. We've got, you know. Right, Zoron's there. Vote for Zoron, everyone. Of course, go out for Zoran. Paris, I know you, you were texting me earlier. You hate Zoron.

It's not true. Do we want to shit talk G? We can wake up, we can shit talk G. I didn't make a shut down that conversation. One of my questions, one of my questions for you was. Well, I'm actually writing a really big story for the nation on it right now. Oh, okay. Well, but I'm happy to shit talk.

for a second i yeah i was going to ask you like what are your top three what are your favorite and your like least favorite like because you have experienced so many and you talk in depth about like the lc chapter kind of the you know the the infamous g or not infamous but the the famous g chapter where you correctly... I'm sure infamous to some gay men and deconstructed wife feeders probably didn't like that job, aren't. Some skinny gay...

Skinny gay and deconstructed wife beaters are some of my best friends, so... Exactly. No, me too. No, but I think that like... Well, okay, to answer that question, I think my favorite drug ever is 2CB, which kind of feels like... I've actually never done it. Really?

It's pretty fun. Yeah. It's pretty fun. Yeah. It kind of feels like, taking like a quarter of a molly and a quarter of a tab of asset at the same time so you feel like really warm and fuzzy and like all the lines are squiggly but you're not like hallucinating like a monster chasing after you it's it's kind of like chill um i see i every time i take molly i just get sleepy i hate molly yeah i don't really like molly either actually i think it like i don't know there's too much there's something i think there's something fucking wrong with me because every time i think molly i'm like i want to go to bed well no i think that there's certain whatever

We don't have to get in the serotonin reactions. Yeah, but anyway, I'm not against G completely, but I think it kind of becomes this way to black out one's own life and, like, just kind of, there's nothing to be gleaned from it necessarily or not much to be gleaned from it. And I've heard it describe as a kind of, like, hungry drug where it's like it insists on more of itself. And I think, you know, it's just scary on a personal level

to see a lot of friends take it too far to be, like, you know, convulsing in a bed every weekend or whatever and um i'm i'm i'm as not anti-drug as they come but i just think that like at a certain point at a certain point that you you lose the fun of it and right and uh it's kind of sad to see this these spaces it just becomes a formality for yeah yeah it's just sad to see a lot of these spaces that at certain points have been fun and freeing and in a way like liberatory become these like zombified spaces in a way yeah i think I think of ketamine on the dance floor in kind of a similar, but to a much lesser degree, kind of, I think of it in a similar way of like, you know, ketamine.

I've described doing ketamine as like putting yourself in the Doom engine where it's like the video game Doom where it's like all of the every other figure around you is a 2D image kind of like. That's a good way to describe it. you know, facing you and you move too fast. You are the wrong height and like all of this. Yeah, like. Yeah, but I think that can be true of any drug is like, do the drugs become an enabler of an experience that is ecstatic or do the drugs become the point themselves?

Right, right. Yeah, and I think your discussion of opioids, like, is like part and parcel to this, this question because usually like, when thinking about a drug that is like the shutdown like tune everything out kind of drug the go-to for years and years and years was heroin which i used to do uh quite extensively and which as you point out in the book you just cannot get anymore right i think it's now it's just fentan yeah it's yeah it's it's fent and like trank which you also talk about um it's like and i think not even perks or perks anymore like it's all fentanyl and which by the way is like a consequence of our carcral system like the reason fentanyl exists is because it's much easier to import than heroin is and much in much

smaller packaging and it's like if we if we had a more decriminalized system that probably wouldn't be true i wanted to talk also about you going to east hastings Yeah, I went with this really cool group drug user liberation front, and they were selling pure tested heroin from the dark web and meth at kind of like below street market value so that people could actually get what they wanted and not all this shit that's cut with, you know, a million different things. And they were doing what they called the Compassion Club, which was basically a study that that showed that if people were able to access their actual preferred drugs and given them

in this in this kind of like structured way it prevented essentially all overdoses and deaths and then of course so then like the canadian government arrested them and they are currently facing trial um but it was just like a a good small kind of proof that that the problem is not drug use writ large the problem is how like this system deals with drug use. Yeah, because I mean, like, that area of Vancouver, if people have never been there, it truly makes like, it is, like, genuinely like what every right-wing person describes San Francisco as, but for real, whereas there are just, like, it's really, it's a lot of desperation there.

It's a nightmare. And I, like, I think it's so interesting to be like, let's go and kind of like works into the theory of the book of like, instead of trying to, you know, shut this down completely, which obviously is what we've been trying for so long, you know, like just criminalizing these drugs and doing all this stuff, instead of that, like the kind of theory of like, what if we just like work through it you know Portugal is an another example of like yeah where they've decriminalized all these yeah and like in in Vancouver um this gives me an opportunity to say one of my favorite quotes from an activist in the book um Vince tau who who worked in a lot of harm reduction programs in Vancouver you know he would see these people who often worked building these kind of like gentrification buildings in Vancouver injure themselves on the job, like just this very, very obvious and direct example of like how

capitalism causes this crisis. And then they would like turn to opiates to ameliorate that pain. And what he said to me was like what we're seeing is not a drug crisis per se. We're seeing a pain crisis and that capitalism, what it does best is create an uneven distribution of pain. And if you think of pain as a kind of like negative commodity, like, you know in the same way that inequality like monetary inequality is getting worse and worse pain inequality is getting worse and worse where certain people who can afford it and be protected from it have to experience none of it and then the rest of us have to experience more and more of it but anyway yeah let's watch some fun yeah let's watch some ads Paris I know you wanted I was inspired

by a chapter in your book wherein you talked about some of the early antidepressant ads in this country yeah do you want can you just give me a quick critique or summation of that chapter and then we're going to play some more modern antidepressant ads for you yeah so like back in one bladder ad and one and one bladder ad yeah so back in the 50s and 60s uh there were all these ads that uh not only for the what essentially were the precursors to antidepressants but for things like dex or dexogen which is basically the precursor to adderall dexies midnight runners that's what they're named after and i'm not kidding that's true um yeah um and i didn't know that uh but they all were like like my favorite one is like a housewife trapped in a jail cell and the jail cell bars are made of brooms and mops and like she's like screaming and she and like the text is like the modern woman's like too educated to be happy and she has to stay home with her stupid kids and her husband's out probably cheating on her like of course she's not happy um like give her dexterine or whatever and i think what's great about those ads is just that they are honest like the it's the material

circumstances of this theoretical woman's life that is causing her pain. It's not like some some unidentifiable thing within her, right? And I think we've again kind of gathlet ourselves into thinking that it's not our material circumstances. So in a way, even though those ads are like sexist and ridiculous, I also think they're more honest than the ones we have today. Of course. Of course.

They're saying your problem is your fucking family and the fact that you can't care for your family adequately. I have one ad here. I kind of want to give, given that as the basis, I have the iconic Zoloft commercial. I want to go through how these ads have changed, starting with the Mommy's Little Helper style ads. Yeah, which I also, I love that, the Rolling Stone song, like, the famous, you know, the famous opening where the line, what a dragon is getting old. and it like they accidentally kind of hit the nail on the head in a certain way because it's not that getting old is a drag of course they I think in my mind like Mick Jagger probably thought that of like a woman she gets ugly and she ages you know and that's why all these housewives are sad but like getting old is the process of being alive basically every moment that you're alive you're getting older so this ad was a I'm sure a fixture of all

of her childhoods it was always on cable i'm gonna play it for you guys if you want to say anything just like yeah you want to pause all right let's hear it you know when you feel the weight of sadness you may feel exhausted hopeless and anxious whatever you do you feel lonely and don't enjoy the things you once loved things just don't feel like they used to these are some wait and pause it real quick i love the text at the bottom just for one second that said symptoms persist every day for two weeks like it's it's like we couldn't fit this into the I love in these commercials like it's so telling always like what they can't what they don't say in the text right like one of the one of my favorite features of that like nowadays in drug commercials is

these are not all of the side effects yeah it's like they they found a legal loophole to just be like no we don't have to name everything right exactly but go ahead yeah symptoms of depression a serious medical condition affecting over 20 million Americans while the cause is unknown depression may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals I mean Paris this is exactly what this is literally they invented it for this commercial they invented right idea of chemical imbalance for this commercial and there's a a study that shows that there's a study that shows that most Americans believe that chemical imbalance is the root cause of depression and then when they ask like the people the people in

the study their sources like 70% of them got that information from prescription drug ads no for sure and what's what's so funny about like i have i mean of course i've seen and heard so many pharmaceutical advertisements i kind of forgot how like you pointed out paris honest the earlier ones were with their kind of naked cynicism yeah and this this one compared even to ones we'll see later on and the ones you you know i'm sure many of our viewers and listeners see on tv every day this is actually so much more sinister well in some way

honest about the intentions that they're trying to portray you know and in the newer ads they don't really even mention it's a chemical imbalance they're just like you're a fucked up loser and you want to kill yourself this will help you but they've already

told us all because everyone's already taken the pill everyone already understands that this is the premise let's keep going here between nerve cells in the brain prescription Zoloft works to correct this imbalance The way, this is like a... You just shouldn't have to feel this way. Analog horror video.

Your doctor can diagnose depression. Zoloft is not for everyone. People taking MAOIs or Pemazide shouldn't take Zoloft. Side effects may include dry mouth insomnia, sexual side effects, diarrhea, nausea. Oh, hang on a second. Sexual side of that. You know, almost like two-thirds of people who take SSRIs experience sexual side effects,

some of which are permanent. So that's a very under-discussed thing. Yeah, the other thing I wanted to say is that even with the Zolov, that that rock remained a stupid fucking rock. He didn't really change his life. What he went on to be called was the sad blob. Ah, a blob. I always thought of him as like a little rock. I don't know why.

Which is very mean to him. I wonder he's depressed. Everyone keeps calling him a sad blob. I'd be a little pissed off about that too. That's what my psychiatrist calls me too. This one is when I saw it, it took me the fuck out because it's like truly insane. This is for a... I love Rick Salty commercials.

Rick Salty, which is a supplemental SSRI, or maybe not SSRI, anti-depressant. It's, they'll explain it in the commercial. Depression is a journey. I'd made some progress on my antidepressant at some daily wins and reducing my symptoms. But I was still masking my depression. I'm sorry, just I love the contemporary depictions of depression

in modern pharmaceutical ads because they are so patronizing. Like, it's like, I mean, the Zoloff was a full-on commercial, which should be in some way more patronizing, but this is, for anyone who's just listening to this, this is a video episode, but for anyone who is just listening, the Rex Salty ads are the iconic, um, sad face. What would you call it? A piece of paper. She's holding up like a badminton paddle that has a frowny face on it. Yeah. No, no, no, a hatchy face. She's a happy in her depression, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she's like showing it. She's like shoving it in her daughter's face. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think it is indicative of how, like, out of control and crazy things have gotten that Rick Salty is, like many antidepressants in ads, is meant to, is targeted. at people who are already taking an antidepressant. Well, yeah, Rick Salty is...

Rick Salty is something that you take because, yeah, because your antidepressant is not working. Right. This at... Yeah, go ahead. Oh, sorry. Just like, even from the beginning from her, like, kind of TikTok voice to the fact that she says

depression is a journey, like, it just shows how... I know. How liberal coded this has all become, you know, like... Yeah, hero journey. A song is going to start playing and, like, you know, like, it's just very, like, about self-empowerment, right? It's no longer just a chemical imbalance. It's that to get rid of the chemical imbalance is about, like, being an independent woman.

Well, and yeah, and that it is it is an individual's journey through the, you know, the dark despair of depression. And then with this drug, I guess eventually you'll be able to have orange juice with your daughter without wanting to kill yourself. It's a grand sword. You could eat a bowl of jelly beans for breakfast every day. Literally, I think that is what they are eating for breakfast. Right. meanwhile the daughter is looking at them because she's eating a normal breakfast and she is like what are you guys what's going on here and I think like um like the way that marketing is such a fake

thing and like you know like the madmen kind of perception of it like it is that is real like that is like a real thing like you know the Edward Bernays like uh you know uh you know um Betty Crocker, how do we sell more Betty Crocker, let's change it so that women have to crack an egg to symbolize their fertility or something, which I think that is true. I don't think it's on that kind of deep of a level, but I do like, I think they're so up their own ass nowadays. Like there's no new discoveries to make that I guarantee you there was someone who was like, let's put grapes in the breakfast. I don't mean to cut you off, but exactly. This ad takes an insane time. Let's go.

Let's go. It is very liberal-coded. Just pay attention to what they celebrate after this woman takes the resulte and becomes the perfect mom. I talked to my doctor. She told me a doctor can be a woman. Rex salty, when adding to an antidepressant, significantly reduced depression symptoms more than an antidepressant alone. And less depression. six weeks study with adults.

It's not for everyone. The whole text under them saying reduced depression was in one study of six weeks. Okay. Okay. So now this lady, she's been fixed by Rick Salty. She's not depressed.

What is the first, if I shed my anxiety, my depression, I'm perfect. What's the first thing I'm going to do? Just pay attention to what she goes, what she buys, and who she brings it to.

Yeah. Okay. Period. That's a win. Rick Salty can cause serious side effects. Elderly dementia patients have an increased risk of death or stroke. Antidepressants may increase suicidal thoughts and actions. She just bought a cake at a dog store?

Wait, wait, wait, keep going, keep cutting, keep cutting. Okay, keep it going. Or if you develop suicidal thoughts or actions, report fever, stiff muscles and confusion, which can be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements which may be permanent. High blood sugar, which can lead to coma or death. Weight gain, increased cholesterol, low white blood cells. Unusual urges, dizziness on...

She put a king. We don't need to go through all the various, you know, side effects of this, but this woman went out and bought a bone-shaped cake for her daughter. And she bought the cake. She bought the cake not at a cake store, but at a dog store. What's so funny about it to me is that, like, I also feel like with the supposed benefits of shedding yourself of depression, the ostensible results are becoming further and further diminished because circumstances of life are becoming incredibly stupid.

You become a mom to a dog. Yeah, no, literally. I mean, this is the contemporary promise of antidepressants. That's not even her daughter. Yeah, that's a random girl. But it's like as our social lives have frayed because of all of these things you've talked about in your book, so have the promises of the antidepressants. what can you do now as a modern woman instead of you know not strangling your children and

taking them to the park whatever what do you do now as a liberated female from depression because of rex salty you get to celebrate your fucking corgi's birthday i just i can not it's so actually depressing and then this what i love most about this ad besides the dog birthday is that it's in her bag It's in her. I think the smiley face is in her back. She's no longer masking, but also her mom is there. And so as her daughter, it's like three generations of women coming together to celebrate this gorgeous birthday. And her mom is like so proud that her daughter is like now a fixed functional human being. Put that shit in your bag. Don't you pull out that mask. I swear to God. Not again, mom. I know it's so. I'm going to target these to our people. Like when? Well, I, no, I, Paris, actually, Ben, play the one that I sent you, that I just sent you, the first one of mine. Because I, Paris, you're going to lose it at this. I was looking, I was looking, because there's this eye spot, which, like, catalogs advertisements. And I was typing in gay, queer, trans, antidepressant ads.

And I was struggling to even find ones that were targeting single men. It is almost always targeting mothers. Yeah. Yeah, I always think about, I think it was, um, I saw it in like an Adam Curtis, like, a thing, maybe like Century of the Self, but it's like an interview with a woman who was talking about like why she likes Prozac and why she takes it. And she said, it makes vacuuming fun.

Yeah. And that was like one of the most crushing and like horrible things. Well, first of all, vacuuming is fun to me. I do. Yeah, I do. Oh, no, not this one. This is one. This is Hess's choice.

All right. This is from Fantap. I don't know. Let's see what that is about. This is, this is like AI, right? I think so. I think maybe. I think I'm not 100% positive. We'll take a look and decide.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We can tell. Phenept Iloperdom is approved for adults with bipolar one disorder with acute, mixed, or manic episodes. So. Unlike some drugs for bipolar one disorder, nausea, vomiting, and breastlessness. The way the eyes are out above the hair. Yeah. This is like an insane anime, like studio Ghibli, whatever, but like, about someone having a manic episode.

It's crazy. It's crazy. I saw this commercial, like, on TV. I was in Philly visiting friends and, like, they were watching the Phillies game. And this came on, I'm not kidding you, when I tell you, this commercial played 1,000 times. Yes, yes. They have so much money from this, like, undisclosed, non-existent pharmaceutical. crazy. Wait, let's watch the bladder one. Yeah, let's watch the bladder one. Also, Paris, I wanted to talk briefly about your discussion of the Gen 1, the famous Gen 1

drugs, like Thorazine. Oh, yeah. I, famously, one of the, I think maybe the best and most effective drug I've ever taken is an antipsychotic called Clozapine, which is a

than one like uh well yeah i mean a lot of the new ones that they've invented are just like minor improvements are not you at improvements on on these older drugs that but those drugs have run out of patentability so that's why they keep creating new ones and like even the head of the national institutes of mental health was like we basically haven't created any new drugs in like 50 years yeah they just add one like nonactive kind of molecule to the chain of like in the drug to be like this is a novel molecule so we can So now we can charge a $1,000. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, God, that is so sinister. Okay, here's Hesse's bladder. I love this. This won the Bronze Effie Award, by the way. This one the Bronze Effie Award, keep in mind, okay? Okay, let's watch it. It wasn't easy engaging women. To pipe up about overactive bladder.

Even with an overactive bladder, I don't always let the worry my pipes might leak compromise what I like to do. I take care with Vesicare, because I have better places to visit than just the bathroom. I have better places to visit. So this is like a Samantha-style pipe. And why is every, if the analogy is that your bladder is pipes, then the whole world is made of your bladder? I have better places to visit than just the bath. I don't be a street fair

Street fair Okay let's continue Daily Vesicare Can help control your bladder muscle And is proven to treat overactive bladder With symptoms of frequent urges and leaks Day and night If you have certain stomach or glaucoma problems

If you have trouble MD in your bladder Do not take Vessicare The side effects start at 36 seconds into this 3 minute advertisement Yes, keep going, keep going. Vesicare. Vesicare may cause allergic reactions that may be serious.

If you experience swelling of the face, lip, or tongue, stop taking Vesicare and get emergency help. Tell your doctor right away if you have severe abdominal pain or become constipated for three or more days. Vesicare may cause blurred vision. So use caution while driving or doing unsciful. Oh, that's big well. Use caution while doing unsafe tasks.

This is my favorite commercial. of all time, dude. Oh, my God. I love this. Constipation and indigestion. You have better things to join than always align for the bathroom. So pipe up and- Pause it for one second.

You have better things to join than always-aligned for the bathroom. I'm going to create... Maybe we should all take an evil turn and start making pharmaceutical ads that are, like, made for our generation and... Oh, bitch. They... That's all AI now. I will say that that ad did.

win the bronze effie award that's true um so i can't even criticize it you can't criticize it's like criticizing killers of the flower moon or something yeah which to be honest i don't like that sheen or that netflix sheen well paris thank you so much for joining us uh i truly a genuine recommendation for everyone out there to go by your book it's it's a great read um it really helped me think about things that I always had like an instinctual kind of understanding of but you put it into words that I

struggled to myself so genuinely thank you for that. Where can people find your book if they want? And I will recommend the audiobook as well. I did read the first half and then listen to the second half because this interview was quickly approaching but where can they find your book? Just

Google breaking awake and it'll come up where you can buy it wherever books are sold and subscribe to my description. If you want. Mental health, H-E-F-L-T.

Here. Okay, well, Paris, thank you so much. Appreciate it. And guys, we'll be back next week. Bye,

everyone. Bye. Bye. Bebe, be, be, big, be, big, be. Believe me, what I see

move your drums and make you feel the rhythm so you want to put your rush on. Believe me when I say is a song that's got what it's made to make you move your body and make you feel the face.

Can you feel it? Can you feel it? Thank you.