The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW SSRI's — BigPharma Knows the Connection to Mass Shootings

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

Self-described "accidental activist", Kim Witczak, WoodyMatters.com, became active when her husband committed suicide under the influence of an SSRI drug. Since the tragedy, she's seen from the inside what happens with the approval process, serving as a current Consumer Representative on an FDA Drug Advisory Committee, and successfully fighting for "Black Box" labeling for SSRI's. Yet, mainstream media black out makes it hard for consumers to understand the dangers.Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here:SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation through Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Kim Witzak. She is someone who has worked and had a lot of experience, and we're going to talk about her own personal experience with SSRIs. And she's had a tragic experience in her life, and she has worked very hard to try to make sure that this doesn't happen to other people. As she pointed out, she became an accidental advocate for people to be informed about the risks and dangers of SSRI and many other drugs that are out there. Her site is WoodyMatters.com. Woody was her husband, and we're going to talk about that and about SSRIs. Thank you for joining us, Kim. Great. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Tell us a little bit about,

you said you became an accidental advocate. Tell us a little bit about your story and your husband's story. Sure. Well, I like to call myself the accidental advocate because I certainly did not choose to do this work, but sometimes our greatest life purposes choose us. So I was married. It was almost, it'll be 20 years ago this August, but I was married on August 6th, 2003. I'll never forget the phone call that changed the trajectory of my life. My dad called to tell me that my husband, Woody, was found hanging from the rafters of our garage dead at age 37. Woody was not depressed. Woody had no history of depression or any other mental illness. He had just started his dream job with a startup company and was having trouble sleeping,

which is not really that uncommon for entrepreneurs. And so, but what he did is, you know, I always call Woody the athlete who, you know, used doctors because they put him back, humpty dumpty, you know, they put him back. So Woody went and saw his GP, somebody he's trusted for a long time and was given a three-week sample pack of Zoloft, which is an antidepressant for insomnia, and said it would take the edge off and help him sleep. And yeah, it's really crazy. And when I look back and, you know, I was out of the country the first three weeks he was on the drug. We both lived, we had very successful careers in advertising. So I was out of the country. It was our busy time in production. So I wasn't even there when he first got put on these drugs. And like I said, the three-week sample pack automatically doubled the dose. And so that's really the story. But

we never once, and I'll tell you one thing that happened right before Woody's death. I came home and Woody walked in the back door, completely sweat through his blue dress shirt, fell to the floor in a fetal position with his hands around his head like a vice. Kim, you got to help me. I don't know what's happening to me. My head's outside my body looking in. And I remember like, yeah, it was really, you know, and at that point we'd been married for 10 years. I've never seen this kind of behavior. And we calmed him down. He called his doctor and the doctor said, give him four, you got to give the drug four to six weeks

to work, to kick in. Wow. Yeah. Give it time. Yeah. It's amazing when you look at this and we look up the definition of SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. What you will see on the internet, they'll say, well, it's the first line of pharmacotherapy for depression and other psychological issues due to its safety, its efficacy, and its tolerance. It's amazing that they can put this message out there after all the stuff that's happened. And I've talked in the past, Kim, to people who have just started collecting SSRI stories. They call it SSRIStories.net. They've got over 7,000 of those. And we're trying to get this information out there. You know, when we look at this and how destructive this has become, how people will commit suicide and how sometimes as part of that

is mass murder. We've seen that being a factor in many of the shootings that are out there. And yet the public doesn't really understand. And there's so much trust in the doctors and in the pills that people are taking. I imagine, as you talked about the dosages, when I've talked to the people at SSRIstories.net, they said where it gets really dangerous is when people are having negative effects and they decide that they're going to adjust the dosage, maybe even cutting it, not even taking more of it, but just changing the dosage one way or the other,

more or less, can trigger these types of suicides or murder-suicide. Correct. And it's like they always say, you know, we never, like you just mentioned, we never once questioned a drug because, you know, it's advertised safe and effective, given to him by his doctor and the FDA. And, you know, the most, and at the time ofody's death there were no warnings so that became kind of our mission and the night that woody was found the corner gave us a gift and i call it a gift because intuitively i knew like something didn't make sense like my husband who loved life we just booked our 10-year anniversary trip that he took his life. But she asked one simple question, was Woody taking any medication?

And the only medication he was taking was Zoloft. And she said to us that we are going to have to take it with us. It might have something to do with his death. So they took the bottle of Zoloft with her. So that became clue number one. Ironically, on the front page of our Minneapolis paper, they had an article that said the UK finds link between antidepressants and suicide in teens. So that was the same night, which is, you know, I look back now and I feel like, you know, that was Woody's note because there was no note, right? And that became our mission and started to go out to D.C. So what a lot of families don't realize is before this time, when we Googled Zoloft and suicide, we had no idea that the FDA had hearings in 1991 on the emergence of violence and suicide with Prozac and did nothing.

And every, you know, did nothing and every you know did nothing they never warned and they said to study suicidality the Eli Lilly never did you know the FDA never followed up and meanwhile here comes Zoloft from Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Paxil it gets approved for kids. And so that became our mission to get black box suicide warnings added to these drugs in 2004 for kids and then 2006 for adults. But, you know, a lot of people we must constantly keep in front of people like you're doing with the show. Well, yeah. You know, when we look at, you got on your site, Woody Matters, Woody was your husband's name, WoodyMatters.com. You have some interesting factoids and graphics that are there. You say that there are $19 spent on ads by the pharmaceutical industry for every $1 that they spend on research. That's pretty astounding. And of course, that's the ask your

doctor commercials. And those things really exploded in the 90s. That's when that first phenomenon started happening. I've talked many times about how we had not seen, we moved to an area where we didn't have TV reception. Then we're traveling a few years after this stuff happened. We're in a hotel, and we turn on the TV, and it's like, wow, this is just one pharmaceutical ad after another. I've never seen anything like that before. But $19 worth of ads for every $1 they spend on research. That's amazing.

Yeah, it's a great, you know, that was a study that was done by a couple of researchers. And it's fascinating because it's not just, you know, that was a study that was done by a couple of researchers. And it's fascinating because it's not just, you know, advertising that we see on television, but it's all of this other marketing, you know, there's so much marketing. And I, you know, have been, the interesting thing is I'm still in advertising and marketing. So I have a lens that looks at everything through the marketing and advertising lens. And it's the perfect, and especially when you look at this, it's the drug commercial, then we've created all these side industries, and then we've created the advertising with the media networks. All of this influences that. But then you look at the the um i could you know call it like i said

the spider web and it's all the trappings of marketing that doctors aren't even aware that they're being marketed to yeah that's right yeah it can be even it can be very very subtle it can be very um overt and what we saw with the opioid industry you know they were selling this as like the panacea for everything give it for every of thing, getting a lot of people addicted to it. And when they went back and they saw how they were influencing doctors and spending so much money on vacations and even on hookers with some of them, it was amazing what they were doing with that. And so you can imagine that if all the commercials that we see on television, on cable news especially, are just the tip of the spear, how much is being spent with the rest of this stuff,

and with free samples and all kinds of studies that they fund. But, of course, all those commercials guarantee that the news agencies, the big news agencies on cable aren't really going to cover this topic. You talked about the fact that whenever the, when the coroner was looking at your husband, Woody, ask you, you know, what, what kind of drugs is in? Oh, Zoloft. Okay. Whenever we see some kind of a crazy mass shooting that has been for the longest time, what I try to get to, Oh, look,

this person was under psychological evaluation and under medication, but they won't say, typically won't say what it is. They always still cover for the pharmaceutical companies. And if you dig far enough, you probably will find in almost all these cases that it is SSRIs or something like that, that is a part of that, you know, it's part of this medication. But it's very interesting to see how many of these shootings has been involved with and how the press now doesn't like to mention that whatsoever. Yeah, you know, again, I go back to the simple question of where was he on any drugs, right?

So that gave me another insight. So every time there's a mass shooting, a lot of these shootings really started since the advent of antidepressants. And you look at whether, you know, there's some of the, there's a famous one that had the Donald Shell case down in Kentucky. And, you know, they actually settled with, um, with the, the company settled. And so it became like, so there wouldn't be a jury verdict, um, when the drug was on the trial. Right. And so these guys have known about it for a long time. It's a simple question. I have always like, one of the things that we've been out there advocating for is anytime there's a shooting, we, as the public, um, you know, your HIPAA rules no longer apply. We need to know what medications, again, it does not say it's causation, right?

But is there a link? Is there a curiosity that we should be asking? You know, we should be knowing what medications they were on. And their privacy doesn't really matter because we are all sitting ducks and we should, as the member of the public, we should be demanding that our legislators are pushing for information or this kind of information or investigations

when we do have big shootings because we need to get to the bottom of what's going on with this increase why are we seeing it again i always say it's not causation but is there a link and we need to be curious yeah they're going to great lengths to keep this manifesto from the shooter in nashville under wraps but i'd be as interested if more interested, in finding out what was going on with her with the evaluation, the psychological treatment that she was undergoing. What kind of medication was she on? We need to take a look at that as well as the manifesto. Tell us a little

bit about this Donald Schell case that you referred to, where they settled. Donald Schell was in the 90s, and he was a factory worker, and he shot up some of the people. I think it was in Kentucky. I believe it was in Kentucky, Louisville. But anyways, the judge didn't know that there was a secret settlement. I actually just tweeted about it earlier in the month. But there was a secret settlement that the judge found out about. But it really gave, it let the drug company off, which was Eli Lilly, because it was Prozac.

They let them off the hook. And, you know, one of the things I didn't mention as part of my, as I call battle for Woody, we had a lawsuit against, a wrongful death failure to warrant lawsuit against Pfizer, where we were able to get a bunch of documents out from under seal. And there were some in there that like Pfizer helped to create a prosecutor manual in the 90s. Now, I just have to say, why would a drug company help to create or why would there need to be a prosecutor manual being helped for the it was called the Zoloft prosecutor manual to be used for any time somebody used the Zoloft defense or the drug made me do it. Again, that's from the nineties. Then you go back.

I mean, it's really, I mean, it's really crazy. They really war game this. They war game all of this stuff. They war game all the different stories about what they're going to tell people, you know, about the warp speed vaccines and everything. They've got it planned from the very beginning so they if somebody says that you know they were under the influence of zoloft here's what you do to take that away wow yeah again from the the 90s and then you know what a lot of people also don't realize is you know prozac in germany

was never approved for a couple reasons um. Initially risk of risk of suicide, lack of efficacy, and eventually it did get approved, but with a tranquilizer. Now that idea of with a tranquilizer never got translated to our U S right. And so, you know, that is what we have to remember.

There's that whole agitation and akathisia, which is the side effect that can cause, you know, that is what we have to remember. There's that whole agitation and akathisia and if people would get experience akathisia quote unquote his words not mine death may be a welcome result wow and so that journal article is public right but what wasn't in public and came out in my documents was a letter that the chief medical officer wrote to his salespeople that said the attached journal article may is not suitable for general practitioners, but maybe for neurologically inclined psychiatrists. And I was like, they intentionally kept the side effect of akathisia from the GPs. But, you know, 80%, 70%, 80% of these drugs are written by GPs and not by the psychiatrist. Wow. And akathisia, that was similar to what your husband, Woody, was experiencing with his mind outside of his body type of thing?

Yep. And it's like an extreme agitation. It's like, you know, where you just want it out. You know, I just want it out. And that's the thing that they said would be, death would be considered to be preferable for many people like that. And of course, a lot of people,

if you're having situations like that, and some people would alter their dosage for SSRIs because of physical things that were happening to them, right? Not just a mental thing that was happening to them. They might be doing other things to their body. And so they would adjust the dosage for that or get off of it. You weren't there when your husband committed suicide. So you're not sure if he was having this, uh, akathisia and it was driving him nuts. Maybe he made the connection and, and just, uh, didn't take it. Maybe that could have sent him over the edge as well, because it will exacerbate changing your dosage. This is an important thing

for people to know changing the dosage can really trigger this thing. And, um, you know, it's almost like taking an overdose for many cases to even to reduce it a little bit. Tell people about the black box warning that is on these things that you were able to get put on. The FDA black box warning. So the black box warning is the most serious of all warnings. That means that there's some type of serious adverse event or death that can be associated with the drug. It is literally in a black box in your paperwork that you get from the pharmacist. But more importantly, it is a conversation that your doctors should be having with us, the patient or the caregiver, at the time of prescribing.

And there's also for kids, there's an FDA medication guide for parents that talks about the suicide, the, where the dangers are also with some of the anxiety medications, how there's addictive, you know, qualities to them or that they're on the DEA schedule too. So these are all very, very important conversations. And you know, it's funny, I always say when people are like, well, everybody, you know, the media sometimes will say, everybody knows that there's warnings on these drugs, they just have to put it on. I said, No, that's not true. If you like in 1991, I was a young kid, I didn't even know that the FDA was having hearings on Prozac and it was a big deal,

Prozac and suicide and violence, right? So in 2004 or 2006, when I was in the thick of advocating for those and out in DC, you know, almost every other week, if you were like these parents now, if they were kids, they didn't know anything about this, right? So I think it's one of those things that we have to constantly be reminding people. And, you know, just recently, there was a study that looked at that was done by Dr. David Healy and Peter Goetje out of Copenhagen. And they looked at we they got the data that was used to originally approve Prozac for kids where it's called, it's part of the reanalysis of the original clinical trial. And then they can look at what the data says and then compare it to what the journals say about the medication. Well, they

just did and looked at Prozac approval that came out of the, using the MRHA, which is the UK version of the FDA regulatory body. And they reanalyzed it and looked at what the data said that was used to get approval and then what it looks like in the journal and how it got reported. And they left out suicides. So they're actually calling for the journals to actually update their data because they've reanalyzed it. But, you know, it's funny looking at what we've seen in the last couple of years with just the, you know, the COVID vaccines and like, you know, all of the censoring and talking about it. We didn't have that same experience, meaning we didn't have social media in the media environment when we were trying to get the antidepressant black box warnings but now i'm seeing anything to do with antidepressants uh especially around the shootings but also this re-analyzed um

study that just came out we're not the mainstream media has not touched it and it should be one of those game changing findings this new study that is using old original data that was used to get the drug approved so you know i feel like there's so many parallels between those two worlds but yeah we are living in a different world and and we have to like at the end of the day it's you and i the the the people who either are taking or we have loved ones or that we need to be the ones questioning and pushing our officials you know i today sit on the fda advisory board the same advisory board that in 1991 didn't do their job and they all took money. So I have a very unique perspective also sitting on the psychopharmacologic drugs advisory committee, seeing how new drugs are coming to market using fast tracking and breakthrough.

So I think there's just a lot of, you know, the system is not really built to protect you and I. It's really protecting others' interests. And a lot of interests are at play when it comes to the medications that we take. And it's an unbelievable amount of money that is involved. I mean, people are willing to kill for billions of dollars. I mean, we've seen it. Certainly corporations are. But tell us a little bit about that experience that you have sitting in there on the FDA committee, and your role in that is as a consumer advocate. Tell us what you're seeing. You mentioned that they're speeding things up, and, of course, now we're seeing that as they come out with one new vaccine after the other,

they have established this paradigm. We heard Fauci talking about it in October 2019 at a Milken Institute thing. They said, you know how do we get everybody take a flu shot that we haven't tested and he goes well we do it from the inside we do it with disruption and we do it iteratively well they have now established a protocol where they can just run through all these tests without going waiting for a decade as they were talking about we're seeing one vaccine coming after the other with mRNA without really any testing. Is that what is happening to the psychological drugs that you're looking at in your committee?

How are they speeding that up there, or are they? Yes, they are. And so one of the things that Congress kind of granted is something called a breakthrough. There's all the fast-tracking mechanisms because, you know, back in the, I think it was the 80s, with AIDS drugs, and you remember all the groups were saying, hey, it's taking you too long to approve these drugs, right? Everything was like, yeah, it's taking too long. We got to make it faster, right? So that was one thing with like, you know, PDUFA, but then they're also with Congress, they started, they have different regulatory, like it's called breakthrough therapy, fast tracking, everything is if you start watching

and listening to the drugs that we take, everything is an unmet need. And so when there's an unmet need, that means that you can like bypass some of the some of the more stringent or what I used to think were gold standards with our clinical trials. So a lot of the drugs that are coming before my committee, and I've been on it, I've just been extended till the end of next year, which I still laugh because I tend to be the only one that votes no. And it's very interesting because I see it from a very different, like, it's not about just, I mean, market, you know, to get these drugs, you got to remember what clinical trials are. The whole idea is that's, that is there because they want to get it

on the market for marketing purposes, right? And so they can get it. So, you know, it's about getting, doing the data, getting the best, you know, like a lot of the clinical trials don't even, you know, aren't real world scenarios. They're the best case scenario for something. Then you have, and so that's one thing. But then if you don't have sheer volume or numbers, because like, you know, I had a couple of drugs and I just actually, it's an article that's coming out today. It was the Rixalti, which is an antipsychotic that's currently on the market.

But they want it, the big unmet need right now is Alzheimer's, dementia, agitation. And so they have been for years with the elderly been using antipsychotics. But, you know, they got the government cracked down on it because they literally have been killing elderly people regardless. And so this company, the drug is already on the market and they just got approval from the FDA. And I was the only, the, the, the data that they use was marginally beneficial for a patient. There was no, um, or I should say, I almost think this was more for the caregivers or the nursing homes, as opposed to the patient. There were no patient, um, you know, satisfaction type, you know, where a lot of those drugs can deaden somebody, as well as then it also had a four times rate of death over the other, the drugs. But this, I was the only one that voted no. And it's amazing to me. And I really, you know, I leave these

meetings often thinking, am I the only one that's seeing this? You know, am I the only one? You know, I'm like, why bother? I want to hit my head against the, you know, the concrete. Like, it doesn't make a difference. But here's where I do think, you know, at least I'm on record. I get to challenge the drug companies. I get to challenge the FDA officials. And I come from a safety lens. And I will always come with a safety lens because

you know these drugs are coming to market really with smaller clinical trials and it ultimately is what happens when millions of people take the drugs and then we start seeing that's right you know the different issues happen but you know what time Over time and you point out on your website, I'd encourage people to go there. Woody matters.com. You say there have been no initiated drug studies by the FDA. They don't do the studies. It's the people who are going to sell you the stuff that do the studies, right?

Exactly. I mean, that was shocking too. And then the other thing that I'll say that it was also shocking to me when I got into this work, again again the accidental advocate work uh i would have assumed that doctors learn about the how the fda works and how this work in med school but i was i found out they don't learn how the fda works that is not part of and all of this critical thinking kind of things that you've got to be aware of, of the marketing, the ugly side that's behind the scenes, just so that as a doctor, you can be a little bit more aware versus, you know, versus just being educated by pharma. So the idea that, you know, they're not learning about it was shocking. The idea that, wait, the FDA doesn't do the trials?

You mean you're doing it? And you are the one that wants to sell the product to me? Of course. Like, we do this all the time in advertising. We know how to set up clinical trials. We know how to, like, play the game. That's right. So, anyways.

And you see that all the time. You'll have three different companies making a drug for the same thing at the same time, right? And they'll all run their own studies, and they'll say, well, mine is better than brand X and Y, and then brand X and Y will do it, and theirs will win as well. They rig these studies so much. It's such a rigged market. And, of course, the real key is education, and that's why what you're doing is so important. At WoodyMatters.com, thank you so much, Kim. Kim W witsack i'm so sorry about what happened to turn you into an advocate but thank you for

being an advocate and thank you for being eyes and ears as to what is happening inside the fda we all need to understand what is happening with that thank you so much thank you so much for having me appreciate it bye-bye right. We'll be right back, folks. The common man. They created common core to dumb down our children. They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing. And the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.

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