The Matt Walsh Show - Antidepressants Are Dangerous | Proof For your Liberal Friend

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

Antidepressants are dangerous, and not enough people talk about their unknown side effects. Send this podcast to your liberal friend as proof. - - - Today's Sponsor: Hillsdale - Go to https://hillsdale.edu/walsh to sign up for free access to over 40 online courses. - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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These are dangerous, highly potent, psychotropic drugs. Here's a report from the Tennessee Star as we continue to follow the revelations about the Covenant shooter. And of course, we had our report a few days ago based on writings that were obtained by the Daily Wire. making the motives of the covenant shooter as the motives become clear and clear and also the motives for covering it up

also become clear and clear. Well, here's another report. This is the latest one. It's from two days ago from the Tennessee Star. It says, the headline is fifth medication prescribed to covenant killer Audrey Hale

was an anti-anxiety drug associated with mania, hostility, and irritability. It says a photograph of medication bottles prescribed to Covenant School Killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale reveals that she was given a fifth previously unknown prescription. This is in addition to the four medications previously reported by the Tennessee Star. The image of the prescription bottles obtained by the Star

from a source familiar with the Covenant investigation depict four orange semi-transparent prescription bottles with blue lids and white labels. All the bottles are prescribed to Audrey E. Hale and bear the name of a psychiatric nurse practitioner who runs a practice based in Nashville. An additional image of a receipt suggests at least one medication was prescribed by a Nashville psychiatrist who also operates his own practice. The third and fourth prescription bottles bear the names of medications the Star reported after obtaining the Metro Nashville Police Department affidavit used to obtain a search warrant for Vanderbilt University Medical Center where Hale was a 22-year mental health patient. However, the second prescription bottle is labeled laurazepam, which is also known as Ativan and anti-anxiety medication. Hale was not previously known to be taking this medication and the partially visible instructions shown on the prescription bottle.

And the photograph suggests Hale took one tablet daily. It was previously established by the star that Hale was prescribed the anti-anxiety medication boost prone, the allergy and anti-anxiety medication hydroxazin. And the antidepressant Lexapro under its generic name is scatolopram. Okay, so this is, this is prescription number five. And this is a drug, again, known to be associated with mania, hostility, and irritability. Five prescriptions this person was on that we know of. And all of them, or the majority of them, that we know. we know of were apparently supposed to be helping with anxiety, are supposed to be helping with

mental health issues. And at the same time, these are also drugs, at least in particular this, this latest one, that has known side effects. And one of the side effects is hostility. You know, we've talked about this plenty of times in the show. We did a, I did. I did. did a big monologue about it several months ago. This is a common theme. We find this is very often the case where you have these mass shooters, and you have to distinguish here because, you know, FBI data and the media, sometimes when they talk about mass shootings, they tend to lump together things like this,

school shooting type mass shootings with, like, gang violence in the city. And those things are similar in terms of body count, similar in terms of, you know, how violent and terrible they are. It's not like one is necessarily worse than the other. Well, I mean, I think a school shooting in many ways is worse than gang violence. But in terms of body count, the number of people that are being killed, you know, those were the similarities end. But I think we all understand intuitively that there is a distinction here. there's a certain type of mass killing, you know, gang violence is one type, and then there's this kind of mass killing. And when it comes to this kind of mass killing, what you find so often

is that these killers are on these kinds of drugs, antidepressants, anti-anxiety. And very often, these are drugs that are known to have as side effects, violence, aggression, hostility, And then what do you know? You have people that are taking these drugs that are lashing out exactly in that fashion. And yet the connection is never made. At least it's not made in the mainstream. It's not made by the corporate media. We're not supposed to talk about it.

We're also not supposed to talk about the fact that, okay, you're giving somebody all these psychiatric drugs. Apparently they aren't working, which is why you keep giving her more. so when you have someone and they're on a psychiatric drug and it's not having the effect that you wanted to have, and so the solution is, well, give them another drug. And that's not working either. So just give them another drug. And that's not working. Let's do another one and another one.

Let's just keep giving different drugs, even though it's clearly not working, which is why you keep giving them more and more. This is extreme negligence at best. when you have these doctors and psychiatrists who do this, just throw pill after pill at the problem. When they're so clearly, there are all kinds of underlying problems here and issues, and just throw them pills on. And then when something horrific like this happens,

there is no accountability for any of the people that were handing these drugs out like candy. Daily Mail has this. Here's the headline, how anti-anxiety drugs, how an anti-anxiety drug, which is currently prescribed to more than 8 million Britons, is linked to nearly 3,400 deaths in the past five years. An anti-anxiety drug reading now from the article, which is prescribed to more than 8 million people in Britain, has been linked to thousands of deaths in the past five years. It has been revealed.

Concerns have been raised about the impact of pregabilit. Pregabilin? I don't know. which is used by doctors to treat anxiety as well as epilepsy and nerve pain, with one saying prescribing it is like selling a car without brakes. Use of the drug can lead to dependency, with some people becoming addicted to the euphoria that taking it can cause, while others become reliant on the relaxed feelings it can induce.

Those who have become addicted to it have compared it to trying to wean themselves off morphine and oxycodone, two drugs notorious for the ill effects they have on people who try to quit. pregabellin users have told mail online that the drug has led to erratic behavior, blurred vision, mood swings, and suicidal thoughts, with many now desperate to lower their dosage or come off the medication that has robbed them of their lives altogether. It's been linked to nearly 3,400 deaths in Britain in the past five years alone. The drug involved in 779 fatalities in 2022, up from just nine a decade earlier in 2012. And so there's actually, there's been a few reports about this drug that I've seen recently. and all of the reports have focused on its prevalence overseas. I don't know how prevalent it is here in the United States. And this is just the latest psychiatric drug that we're hearing about that have terrible side effects. And this is why people accuse me of being anti-psychiatric drugs.

and I'm not, you know, because anti would mean that I'm taking the position that you should never prescribe it to anybody. That all psychiatric drugs are bad in all circumstances, and they should never be prescribed to anybody under any circumstance. That's not my position. That's not my position. My position is that, well, number one, there are way too many of these drugs, way too many, and they're given out far too easily. Now the difference, and that part, you know, when I say that, almost everybody would agree, even the people that are on these drugs, even people that are on a cocktail of psychiatric drugs. When they hear that, they'll go, oh, yeah, it's way overprescribed. Except the problem is that it's like it's way over prescribed, and everybody who it's been prescribed to will agree that it's way overprescribed. Except that everyone who it's been prescribed to will say that it should have been prescribed to then. So that's the interesting.

It's overprescribed, but we're not willing to look at any. individual case and say, oh, yeah, that person should not have gotten it. It's a strange thing, isn't it? But we all agree these drugs are overprescribed, but there's not any individual person who shouldn't have gotten it who did, apparently. Because if you ever try to get more specific, this is where I run into trouble with people. When you get more specific and you say, okay, well, here are some kinds of cases where I don't think they should give these drugs out.

Then all the people who agree it's overprescribed are going, what? That's, this. What are you a doctor? You can't say that. I thought you just agreed that it's over-prescribed. So can we get past that part of the conversation, start talking about the scenarios when we should not be giving these drugs out?

So when I say that it's over-prescribed, I mean that, you know, I don't mean it in the sense that, you know, five million people are on a certain drug and it should only be 4.5 million or something. I don't mean it in that sense. I mean in the sense that 5 million people just pulling a number out at random. Five million people are on a certain psychiatric drug, but it should only be like 500 people who are on it.

Okay, that's what I mean by overprescribed. I mean that these drugs, there's a certain portion of these drugs that really just should not be on the market at all. And of the ones that have a valid application, it should be used. an absolute worst-case scenario. And worst-case scenario as in no other methods are effective, and it's the only way to stop someone from doing something drastic, destructive, or self-destructive. In that case, as a temporary, last-resort, band-aid measure,

I can see a scenario where you use psychiatric drugs. and those kinds of situations do happen where you've got someone and they're just in a state of total self-destruction and then you know you do whatever you have to do in that moment it's like you know I don't think that we should be going around like if someone is depressed we shouldn't go and tackle them to the ground and drag them off to somewhere to get treatment however if somebody's on the edge of a building and it's about to jump that in that case, when it's your only option, then, Ray, you run up and you tackle them.

And then you end up probably, hopefully taking them somewhere to get, whether they want to or not, taking them somewhere to get the help they need. And I kind of look at psychiatric drugs the same way, and that's how I think everyone should look at them. That's how I think the medical field should look at them. That's how they should be used.

That's how they were originally meant to be used. not as like a daily thing that millions of people take for their whole lives and not as a first resort, which is the other problem. They become a first resort. Someone who comes in, they're struggling with anxiety. Five seconds later, they got the prescription in their hand. And not for anyone who's dealing with basically the normal challenges of being a human being in the world.

And that's why when I read about anxiety drugs in particular, now once again, there could be people who are basically crippled, totally dysfunctional, unable to function, where they feel like they are, living completely self-destructive lives on the verge of, again, doing something drastic potentially. And maybe in that case, some of these anti-anxiety drugs could have a place. But generally speaking, this is, you know what it's used? It's like maintenance. They give these drugs out as maintenance for people.

People are just, you know, experiencing anxiety. Everybody does. Oh, my anxiety is different. Probably not. You think it is because it's yours and you only have your own anxiety. You can't really compare it to anybody else. but so you don't really know that. But, you know, most people,

it's just sort of like baseline anxiety that everybody has all the time. And it's hard to deal with. Like, it's hard to be a person sometimes. But those are all of those kinds of cases. They should not be giving these drugs out. And yet they do. And it's, it doesn't matter how,

these headlines we see people overdosing, dying, side effects, it only gets worse and worse. And that's because, you know, we always hear about difficult conversations we should be having, and I kind of hate that phrase now. You need to have a difficult conversation. I hate the phrase, but in this case, this is actually a difficult conversation that we should be having as a society about mental illness and about these drugs that everybody's taking. and that every individual person taking it thinks they need it, when in reality, most of them don't. That's a difficult thing for people to hear, but they need to hear. This is unconstitutional.

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When you look at the numbers involved, the money they've made off of it and the damage caused, it is, again, it's saying a lot because there are a lot of them. But I think this is the greatest, the biggest big farmer scam of all time. And that is the claim that depression, is rooted in a chemical imbalance in the brain. And that is the basis upon which millions and millions of Americans for decades have been prescribed antidepressants in order to cure this chemical imbalance. And now we find out that, well, that depression has nothing to do with the chemical imbalance. It was a myth, a fiction.

At best, a guess. A guess that was made decades ago and then glommed on to, to buy institutions like Big Pharma because they could profit off of them. Now, I say, and this is an important follow-up in the Daily Mail today, because I say that, well, we just found out, well, it was just revealed that the chemical imbalance theory was false. That's not actually true. It was not just revealed. This has actually been known for a long time. So it's much worse than maybe we make it sound when we say that this just came out. now. Because then maybe Big Pharma has an excuse. They could say, well, we didn't know.

Then we could blame them for not doing their due diligence, not doing enough research, but then maybe they could plead ignorance. They could say, we really didn't know, we thought it worked. Well, no, actually, for decades, it has been known that the chemical imbalance theory is not correct. The Daily Mail has this. Psychiatrists have been aware for years that low serotonin levels may not cause depression, despite continuing to prescribe the pills, a chair of psychology has said. Dr. Jonathan Raskin from State University of New York told DailyMail.com he'd been concerned that the theory that depression was caused by low serotonin levels was incomplete for a while.

He said many medics continued to prescribe the medication even while they were unsure if they were effective because it was easier than offering more time-intensive care. The pills could still help some patients, he added, but they're not a cure-all for those suffering from depression. This week, a landmark U.K. study called into question. society's ever-growing reliance on antidepressants like Prozac. And so then it reviews the study, which we need to go over again. But the point is that this has been known by the psychiatrist, quote,

depression is a complicated issue, and the idea that we would be able to reduce it simply to serotonin is not right. When we give antidepressants, we don't do this based on biological tests showing they don't have enough serotonin, but if we think it could help them. Asked whether people should keep people. taking the pills, he said, I think that this is a conversation worth having. I'm not going to say people should or should not be on them, but I think there has been a lot of popular dissemination of the idea that we have reduced depression to low serotonin levels. So this has been known.

Speaking of what people have known for years, there's an article in the Scientific American 11 years ago, back in 2011, this is what was published. It says, in a New York Times essay, in defense of antidepressants, Peter Kramer, professor of psychiatry at Brown, insists that antidepressants work ordinarily well on a par with other medications doctors prescribe. Kramer's article seeks to rebut a wave of negative coverage of antidepressants, most notably a two-part essay in the New York Review of Books by Marcia Engel, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and now a lecture in social medicine at Harvard. Engel cites research suggesting that antidepressants may not be any more effective than

placebos for treating most forms of depression. Angle highlights a meta-analysis carried out by the psychologist Irving Kirsch of trials of a half-dozen popular antidepressant submitted by drug companies to the FDA. Many of the studies were never published because they failed to yield positive results. Let's stop there for a second. These were studies that failed to yield positive results and so they just didn't publish them. And when we say positive results, we mean results that affirm the effectiveness of antidepressants. They were not able to affirm it, confirm it, and so they just didn't publish the studies. After analyzing all the FDA studies, Kersh concluded that placebos are 82% as effective as antidepressants.

According to Kersh, this difference vanishes if antidepressants are compared to active placebo, which are compounds that block certain nerve receptors and cause dry mouth and other symptoms that have distinct side effects. This is 2011 again, over a decade ago. It was known and being published that when you put an antidepressant up against a placebo, there is almost no difference. And then the difference goes away completely with active placebos. And why does the active placebo matter? Well, because if they give you, you know, if you give someone just basically a sugar pill, but it has certain compounds in it that causes a side effect, dry mouth, something like that, then they're going to really feel like, oh, well, this thing is working.

And then they're going to convince themselves that they feel better. And now they do feel better. It was published 11 years ago, but it was known much sooner than that. The FDA knew it, but the studies weren't published because it didn't help Big Pharma. This is why I say this is the greatest big pharma scandal of all time. This is a massive scandal. They're prescribing these drugs with, by the way, the drugs that they're giving out are not sugar pills. These are dangerous, highly post.

psychotropic drugs with serious side effects, including suicide. These are mind-altering substances that big pharma was giving out, knowing that they didn't work. Or at the very least, they didn't work the way they claimed they were working. And that you could just give sugar, you could actually give sugar pills to at least 82% of these people, and they would feel the same. I'm hoping this is a red pill moment for lots of people, you know, about Big Pharma and also the psychiatric industry. The ultimate red pill moment is to realize that the whole basis of modern psychology is built on a flawed understanding of human nature.

Because I've been talking about Big Pharma and implicating them, but it's not just them. Yeah, Big Pharma is out there making the billions and trillions of dollars, but how are the drugs getting prescribed? Big Pharma is the system, the meat grinder that people are being fed into, the wood shipper that they're being thrown into. But who's picking people up and toss them into it? Psychiatrists, doctors. And we'll know that we're really getting somewhere when we start to question the fundamental basis of so much of modern psychology. Because the idea is that we hear from psychiatrists is that there is a baseline sort of normal desirable, healthy personality and disposition and emotional and mental makeup for the human

person, and that this baseline is knowable and enforceable, and that everything that falls outside of the baseline is a disease. And it's a disease in the same way, no different from how cancer or diabetes is a disease, and can be treated the same sort of way. The claim is that the human mind, not just the brain, but the mind, okay, which is your consciousness, your conscious experience can be sick in the same way that a physical part of your body is sick. And that psychiatrist and the pharmaceutical industry have the ability to determine what is the right sort of conscious experience. And through drugs, they can heal your conscious experience and make it go from wrong to right. There are so many embedded assumptions in all of that.

Like, how do you know any of this? Who are you to say? how can you take a drug that heals your mind? All of these questions that aren't even asked. The Daily Mail article yesterday said that 90% of the public thinks that the chemical imbalance theory is correct, even though, as we talked about yesterday, if you'd done just a little bit of research, you would have known before this article came out that the chemical imbalance theory is unsupported.

And before doing the research, you could have thought about it and realized that it doesn't really make sense anyway. You know, one of the thing that I've been hearing over the last 24 hours is that people saying, well, you know, even if the drugs don't work the way that they said that the drugs work, it still works, right? I take it and I feel better. But are you okay with that? You're okay with taking a drug where the people giving it to you don't really know what it does or how it works. it affects your mind and they don't really know how it affects your mind

and the ways that they said it will work are wrong because they lied to you but it makes you feel better so you take it anyway I mean that's an individual choice I'm not telling you to take it or not to take it but if it were me I'd be very uncomfortable be very uncomfortable with that

like if you this is me with and I'm and I confess maybe I'm different from a lot of people I feel this way about all medication. Not that I don't take it, but I just, before I put anything in my body, before I take any kind of medicine at all, I need to know, like, everything about it. And I want to know about all the side effects. And I want to start thinking to myself, you know, whatever I'm trying to treat right now, is it worth the potential side effects? And like sometimes it is. So it's not like I never take it in medicine, but I'm just I'm always kind of skeptical. And so if someone gave me something that's going to affect my mind, and then I said, well, how does this work? And they said, I don't know. I'm not taking that. That's me. Also, as just reviewed, it actually doesn't seem to work. Like, there's very good evidence that it simply does not work at all. You know, if it, if it can barely beat a sugar pill in a trial, then that's an indication that it actually doesn't work. What's working is your mind, actually. Like, you believe that you're going to feel better, and so you do. That's your mind doing the work. It's not the pill. And it's a very difficult thing to judge anyway, if it works or not. Because when we say, well, you believe, well, it works, what do we mean? We mean, well, I feel better. But do you feel better because of the chemicals in the pill, which would be the pill working? Or do you feel better because of your belief

about the pill? Or maybe because of lifestyle changes you've made alongside of taking the pill? Or maybe because of the therapy that you're getting alongside the pill. Like, how do you know that it's the pill working? These are all interesting questions. Ryan Reynolds here from IntMobil. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did and have one of your assistance assistants assistants switch you to MintMobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch.

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