The Tucker Carlson Show - SSRIs and School Shootings, FDA Corruption, and Why Everyone on Anti-Depressants Is Totally Unhappy

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

Probably a fifth of the entire American population is on SSRIs. Psychiatrist Josef Witt-Doerring explains why that’s terrifying and dangerous. (00:00) How Widespread Are Anti-Depressants? (11:03) The “Chemical Imbalance” Lie (32:05) The Corruption of the FDA (54:30) The Testimonies of People Impacted by These Side Effects (1:09:45) Is There a Link Between SSRIs and Mass Shootings? (1:45:46) The Telehealth Scam Taking Over the Country Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, psychiatrist and former FDA medical officer, exposes psychiatry’s hidden harms and industry-driven myths about psychiatric drugs. He provides listeners essential knowledge to safely navigate—and ultimately escape—psychiatric medication dependence. Paid partnerships with: ExpressVPN: Go to https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker and find out how you can get 4 months of ExpressVPN free! MeriwetherFarms: Visit https://MeriwetherFarms.com/Tucker and use code TUCKER for 15% off your first order.Levels: Get 2 free months on annual membership at https://Levels.Link/Tucker Cozy Earth: Go to https://CozyEarth.com/Tucker for up to 40% off best-selling temperature-regulating sheets, apparel, and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think this is one of those topics that if people understood the scale of the problem and the severity that we would be talking about this every day, along with, you know, immigration and foreign policy, this is, in my view, one of the most important things going on right now. Give us a sense of how widespread the use. So let's just start with SSRI's antidepressants. How widespread is their use in the United States? About 14% of the population. total population of the total population is currently taking an antidepressant medication currently currently yes yeah and that was that's actually as of 2014 the numbers have gone up uh since covid so i would say it's probably between 15 to 20 percent of the population

is currently on those drugs are taking antidepressants on a daily basis So that's, I mean, compared to my childhood or even 25 years ago, that's a massive increase. It's an enormous increase. It's likely, you know, last statistics I looked at, I think it's about a 500% increase from where things were in the 90s, in the early. 90s. Has America's collective mental health improved? No, there's actually more suicides, there's more disability from mental health problems, and teen suicide is higher as well. Okay. So if there's been a 500% thereabouts increase in the use of these drugs, but more people are killing themselves and the drugs are prescribed in order to make you not kill yourself, then that suggests

that like we're getting the opposite of the intended effect? Yeah, yeah, big time. We, you know, there's more psychiatric prescribers now. There's more drug, you know, drug prescribing, and the outcomes are actually getting worse. It's what we're doing is not working on a national level. I'm just going to skip ahead to my opinion that I'm going to pull back, but that suggests that we should ban the drugs and imprison the people selling them.

That's my personal view. But, you know, you're the psychiatrist. So what effect, and I will try to reduce my emotional outburst just to that, but it is, it's so shocking when you know the details. Where do these drugs come from? What are they exactly? What is an SSRI who invented them? What do they do? So, I mean, SSRIs are kind of the latest iteration of antidepressants.

They've been out since the 50s, but Prozac really changed history when it came out in 1987. So this was a drug that was designed to modulate the serotonin system. This is by blocking serotonin reuptake. And so what that does is it increases the amount of serotonin between the neurons, and it actually has a drug effect. It will make people numb or emotionally constricted. And so that's how those drugs are. working? I remember the rollout for Prozac. I think it was on the cover of Time or Newsweek

or one of the then popular newsweeklies in the United States, and it was hailed as a wonder drug that was going to fix America's psychiatric problems. And it didn't. But it was also described as a drug that helped, as I recall, that helped regulate, and I'm quoting chemical imbalances in the brain. It was not described as something that would numb you. Yeah, it's essentially just a story that was sold. The chemical imbalance myth was a story that was sold to doctors and patients to make them feel better about taking drugs for their mood. Because I think intuitively, many people, you know, when you say, hey, you know, I'm unhappy, I'm anxious, I'm depressed, if you went to that person and said, hey, do you want to take a drug that's going to mask those symptoms? intuitively people would say no you know i'd rather get to the root cause of that you know sweeping

things under the rug usually doesn't work that well yes um but when you craft a narrative about these drugs uh fixing a chemical imbalance like say like a type one diabetic who doesn't have enough insulin you give them insulin and it kind of sort of like a magic bullet kind of injects itself like right into that you know pathological process and fixes it it, that's kind of a different message. The message to the person is that your brain is defective, there's something wrong with it, and we're going to give you this chemical to bring things up to normal. Yes.

That's a lot easier for someone to say, well, actually, I need my medicine because I'm broken. But that was essentially a lie. The idea that these drugs fixed a chemical imbalance simply came from observations that when you give people serotonergic drugs, they can become calmer, they can look less depressed. And so rather than the obvious explanation being, okay, this is a drug effect that we're seeing. They are drugged and that's what we're looking at. People said, well, maybe they just had low serotonin and now they're looking better because we've fixed this chemical imbalance. And so that message has just been grabbed by pharmaceutical industry and, you know, psychiatrists

to essentially lull people into this state where they feel more comfortable taking them. It changed, among other things, the practice of psychiatry completely. And I remember this just because I grew up in an affluent area where people use psychiatrists. Not in my family, but everyone else's family. And the idea, it was Freudian psychiatry, and the idea was we are going to treat the root causes. Now, whatever you think of Freudian psychiatry or Freud or whatever, but you'd sit on the couch and talk about your childhood. Like that would, by addressing the root cause of your problems, you would make it better. That was the promise of it, whether it worked or not.

And then it felt like in one day, right around the time Prozac came out, Freud was being denounced everywhere as a sexist. and Freudian psychiatry became not just sort of passe, but like affirmatively unpopular. And the role of psychiatrists was to dispense these drugs. From an outsider's perspective, that's what I noticed at the time. That is what happened. And I think what was going on was all of a sudden you had a billion dollar war chest of marketing spend

that was trying to seize control of the narrative about medications. And so, I mean, Prozac was like a blockbuster. Some people may not remember this, but that was the drug that made Eli Lilly a billion-dollar company. I mean, it was a small company before then. And so at every single level, there was an incentive to change how people thought about distress. You know, no longer was depression and anxiety, a complex thing where, you know, there could be relationship issues and problems that work and, you know, problems in your childhood. all of that stuff was now it was almost bigoted in a way to talk about depression and anxiety as if it had these intuitive social and societal like causes.

It was now a medical condition. And if you were going to say that it wasn't a medical condition, you weren't taking it seriously and you were stigmatizing people. So drug companies, they would platform, I guess, through their influence with the universities and the media, they were able to push out this narrative. And so they could shoot down Freudian analysis and therapy. And so the message essentially came out that was, this is a chemical imbalance, these are medical conditions,

and if you say anything otherwise, you're stigmatizing the mentally ill. But couldn't, I mean, it doesn't, that's obviously what happened. I saw it happen, but it doesn't really make internal sense. Like, you could say, you know, I think you're depressed because all your relationships are dysfunctional or your parents are horrible or whatever, you're failing at work. Those are all common causes of sadness, for sure. Without dismissing or stigmatizing the person or his problems, like you are taking it seriously.

You're just trying to find the actual cause of the problems, right? I mean, absolutely. I mean, I think to logical people, that makes sense. But the way that played out in public spaces and in medical schools was that that was actually a very backwards and kind of dismissive thing to, you know, people would say things like, you know, depression just isn't normal sadness. You know, it's a serious biological problem. And so to suggest that, you know, this is just some, you know, life issues going on relationship issues, you were kind of branded as someone who really, you just didn't get it. You didn't understand. you know, the medical underpinnings of this new disease that was gripping the country and kind of evolving and making people suffer. So privacy is the basis of freedom. No privacy, no freedom. So with that in mind, we'd like to introduce you to ExpressVPN, a company we've talked about a lot. It's an app that does a very simple and essential thing for you and your family. It reroutes 100% of everything you do

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Just one click, it works on up to eight devices at once, one subscription for, your whole family. We use it here on the show. We cannot recommend it enough. You get four extra months free when you use the link to scan the QR code on your screen right now or go to expressvPN.com slash Tucker ExpressVPN.com slash Tucker to get the special offer redeemed. Did the people making these claims understand the medical basis of this illness they were describing? No. I mean, that's the irony. Right? So, for example, they say it's a chemical imbalance. Did anyone ever describe with balances? So, I mean, the thing, this is like a white lie that people sort of rationalized to themselves.

Because, you know, people have looked at the chemical imbalance and there is a clear way to do it. You can look at the brains of depressed people on autopsy, and you can actually, you know, look at receptor levels and say, you know, is there any changes in the receptors? You can stick needles into people's spine and you can draw out fluid and you can look at the metabolites of things like serotonin and you can get depressed people and undepressed people and say, is there any difference in the actual amount of serotonin floating around in the brain? Every time they've done this, they have not found that there is any difference between depressed and undepressed people. But there's no difference? There is no difference because that's why we don't use any biological market. in the diagnosis of any psychiatric conditions. No brain scans, no blood tests.

We can do all of those things. They are not useful because there are no ways, you know, like actual biological ways, to differentiate depressed people from undepressed people. Are you serious? Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, so, well, that's not a white lie then.

That's like a massive whopper. If you're telling me there's a biological basis for anything, but you can't show it, then you're lying. Yeah. We're guessing at best. And the way they justify it was, well, okay, so we haven't found it yet, but it must be a medical problem, and we're eventually going to find it. And rather than admitting that, in the meantime,

we'll just tell people it's a chemical imbalance because it's an easy, it's just an easy kind of like metaphor for them to understand, and it helps us dish out the drugs without people asking too many questions. But it's untrue. It's untrue. Therefore, physicians should not say that or they should lose their medical license. They shouldn't have been saying it. But I thought, I mean, like strict adherence to reality, honesty,

I thought that was like a prerequisite for practicing medicine, getting a license. Yeah. Well, what's happened in, you know, in the space of psychiatry is almost like our field has become so overrun with pharmaceutical propaganda that it's not really an issue of truth in a lot of places, it's like a moral issue. Doctors feel the need to almost encourage people to take these medications and cheerlead them onto it. It has been sort of cast as a issue where it's like, you know, people, these medications are heavily stigmatized. You know, there's a bunch of like rednecks running around, telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstrap.

You know, that's like the boogeyman that's cast out there. Seriously? Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, that people are like, you know, there's a lot. They're rednecks out there. Yeah, there are rednecks out there, stigmatizing the mentally ill, saying, you know, your suffering isn't real. And so we need to, you know, we need to kind of peddle this narrative about there being a chemical imbalance and encourage people to take these medications because mean society out there is telling

people to just sit there and suffer in silence and to not take the drugs. And so doctors see it as like almost a, this is what medical school was like for me in residency. It's like you don't question the drugs. Don't question the side effects. You need to encourage, you need to encourage people to take them. So it's hinged away from truth and it has become more of this, this moral issue. At least that's how. Sounds like a religion. Yeah. I mean, that's what, that's what decades of drug company propaganda has done to kind of shape the narrative about how doctors and patients in the media view this issue. So you go to med school, you decide to become a psychiatrist, you spent, you know, got residency, all stuff. Did anybody during the whole course of that program note that as the

prescription rate for these drugs has risen, so is the suicide rate? No, no, not at all. Yeah. They don't, they don't notice that? They don't, they don't, they don't, they don't bring that up at all. Isn't the whole, like, point of medicine noticing the connection between behavior and outcome? Yeah, yeah. People who smoke a ton of unfiltered cigarettes get a higher rate of lung cancer than those who don't.

So that's, like, that's why we know smoking's bad. Yeah. You know, you just get a version where it's like, yes, you know, mental health is getting worse, but instead of them saying, well, it's because our treatments don't work, what they will say is that, you know, know, the depression is rising. This is a serious medical condition. You know, it's occurring more and more. And us and our drugs, we are stemming the tide. If not for us doing this, this would be overflowing and getting out of control. And so rather than actually reflecting on

the fact that things aren't getting better, they are just saying that, you know, this depression, you know, which didn't really happen that much before, it's just happening more and more and more. And so that's how they justify the worst outcome. I get it. I mean, they, they're children, obviously, it's just you're freaking me out here because these are like just kind of basic logical questions. And the first one is if depression is rising and it sounds like it is, why? Why is this happening? Does anyone ever ask that? Did you hear anyone ask that? You know, and people do ask this question. And I think it's, you know, it's, you know, it's a And it's multi, and it's multifactorial, you know, from my vantage point, depression is rising

because our treatments don't work and they may actually make people worse, but then there's also very legitimate things going on in society that makes depression rise. You know, housing is unaffordable. I agree. There are real things going on that are also making people. Society is getting crappier and more dysfunctional. That makes people sad. I get it. But it just seems like if you're treating an illness, the first question you would ask is, like, where did this illness come from? Yeah. Yeah. No?

You would be shocked if you could be a fly on the wall in what happens during, like, psychiatric interviews. Because this is what happened. This is what I observed. So I came out of medical school really excited to do. psychiatry. You know, it's like I'm going to help people with depression and anxiety. I've always been someone who's been really interested in self-help and, you know, philosophy. Yes. And then I get started and during my internship, what I see is that we spent hardly any time actually understanding our patients. The interaction is extremely transactional. You might spend 40 minutes

during an intake with someone but you're hardly going to understand their relationships you're hardly going to understand their work life there's very limited time to know what's going on with them health-wise and whether they're using any substances the visit it's almost like a checklist and what I was witnessing is we weren't spending any time really trying to actually understand

the people and their lives and we would just default to using medications because it was really quick. And the way we justify doing this is that we have this book. It's called the DSM and you can diagnose people essentially off a checklist. If you have five out of nine symptoms, you can say that person is depressed. And so you just ask them what symptoms they have. You don't have to understand the complexity of their life. And then you say, okay, you've got major depressive disorder.

And we've got this FDA approved treatment over here. We have this drug that's safe and effective. And it allows you to be kind of like medically justified and having these very transactional visits and just like putting people on meds. And it just turns them through the system. And so doesn't sound like there's a lot of concern for the patient. Well, the way it's, the way doctors are trained nowadays is to view these issues as medical issues. So why be concerned about their life if the person is just suffering from a brain illness and you've just diagnosed it with this checklist of symptoms and there's an FDA-approved treatment?

You think that you are caring for the person and doing the justified thing. But what does it say about the way these physicians feel about human beings if they sincerely believe that something as complex as a human emotion has a purely organic origin that they can't define, by the way? I mean, none of this makes any sense at all. Yeah. If there's no difference between the brain of a depressed person and a happy person, then you can't really say there's a known biological cause for depression. Like, you just can't say that because you can't show it.

But even bigger picture, like just being a human being, you know, that all of this is just wildly complex. And there are libraries full of novels written about, you know, human emotions, human experience, relationships. it's like, if you've gotten to a place where you're just like, well, you need an adjustment of your serotonin levels, you're not treating people like human beings, right? No, yeah. I mean, you have a very reductionalistic view of people.

Of people. Yeah. And I think it's very sad. And scary. And scary that the people, you know, the experts who lead the mental health teams, the psychiatrists, and that they have such. little care and appreciation for those issues. It's very scary.

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off your first order. That's meriweatherfarms.com slash Tucker. So tell us, like, okay, so you're excited to become a shrink, a psychiatrist, sounds like for all the right reasons, you want to make people better, happier, more fulfilled at purpose, all the good things. And then you wind up on this podcast with a totally different view of how your profession is helping or not. How did you get there? Well, What I started to notice in my intern year was that it just, it does not work. And I mean, this is the heart of it. You put people on these medications without understanding why they're unhappy, you know. And so firstly, it's like, how could you expect to fix someone if you don't understand why they're unhappy? Exactly. And then so putting that issue aside, like maybe we're just okay with like drugging people, you know,

that they have unhappy, you know, they're unhappy and we put them on medications. Maybe that's okay, although I don't agree with that. The drugs, they just wear off over time. You know, you put someone on five of Lexapro, you know, a starting dose. Six months later, the effect is usually worn off and they need a higher dose. You know, 12 months after that, they need a higher dose. And eventually, they're maxed out on it and the person will say to you, I don't even know what this drug is doing anymore or it's hardly doing anything.

and so at that point they ended up getting put on more and more medications and eventually you have people on five meds and the drugs aren't really working and so I would see this pattern where you know you put someone on a drug you get this honeymoon period where you know and they work you know this isn't a placebo thing like these these drugs they they turn down your emotional range that they are numbing and if you're someone who's seriously anxious you will experience that as therapeutic maybe even life-saving. Instant relief.

Yeah. Well, sometimes a couple of weeks, but practically instant. Well, for benzodiazepines, it's like instant relief. Yeah, for benzo's instant. For SSRIs, usually a couple weeks. And so people, you know, they'll get this experience with say, you know, this drug has saved my life. You know, I'm more functional. Yeah, during the honeymoon period where your body hasn't adapted to it

because our bodies, they just adapt to the drugs over time. And so I would just see them where, off and the people would start accumulating more and more drugs and then they would get slowly sicker and I'm thinking to myself sicker by which you mean what like mentally sicker they're you know more fatigues more brain fog more depression and anxiety over time and I saw that a lot lots of my patients were not getting better on on these regimens and so I would talk to my attendings and I would say well this doesn't really seem like a sustainable way to help people you know putting them on drugs that they that essentially wear off over time and they end up sort of stuck on

and they look worse and they would tell me you know don't worry yose if these drugs are safe and effective you know they're approved by the fda did they actually use a phrase safe and effective yeah yeah they use that phrase exactly these are safe and effective they they are approved by the fda nothing to see here don't worry about it why would you why would you be concerned about this the authorities have spoken. Are these actual doctors? Yeah, these are professors. They look at you in the face and say, don't worry, Yosef, they're safe and effective.

Yeah, yeah. You're freaking me out. And so I think I'm 26 at the time, but this does not sit right with me. And I get, and so I decide that, you know, who am I? I don't understand this research. I'm going to become an expert in it. And so after residency, I go and I, I will. work for Jansen, which is the pharmaceutical arm of Johnson and Johnson, and I get involved in

clinical development there doing a fellowship so I could see how the pharmaceutical companies develop the drugs. I stay there for a year and then eventually I go to the FDA and I become a medical officer in the division of psychiatry who are overseeing the safety of the drugs on the US market. And it was by going through that experience and actually seeing how these drugs were developed over time that I realized that we are practicing so far outside of what the evidence shows like in an insane way like outside of science outside of science yeah like the like the like the whole idea that it makes sense to put someone on an SSRI for years at a time is not supported by the clinical research at all it's a complete like guinea pig uh like you know it's it's it's an

It's an experiment. It's an experiment happening on a mass scale. Millions and millions of people. Millions and millions of people, yeah. So, you know, I said before, you know, about probably between, I mean, let's just call it 20%, you know, 15 to 20% of people are on these medications. Half of the people that use antidepressants are on them for over five years. And so, you know, maybe seven to 10% of Americans are essentially on an experiment where there's no clinical trial evidence that says that these drugs are safe.

You know, the scary thing is, you know, when my doctors used to say to me these medications are safe and effective, the thing that they would leave out was for the 12 weeks that they were studied in the clinical trial, that's like, and when you look at the research, there has never been a randomized control trial that has gone that has looked at this over 12 months and 12 months but you said there are millions tens of millions people on this for years yeah taking them for years and it is and this is just insane because anyone who has their eyes open will see that these drugs clearly wear off over time i mean that's why you have to keep on going up on the dose and so it would be really important to actually see how effective these drugs are over time. Well, why wouldn't they? They

have the sample. It's right here. It's in America. There's a lot of people to choose from. Yeah. They don't do it. And a lot of this happens just because of precedent and there's a complete lack of backbone and leadership at the FDA to actually improve the way these drugs is studied. What was it like? You spent a year at the FDA? Yeah. What was that like? Yeah, it was really concerning to be honest yeah um when was that 2020 2019 to 2020 yeah why was it concerning so so FDA receives a lot of funding from the pharmaceutical industry um and I'll talk about a few things here um so I've always been interested in drug safety that's actually what I do now you know I help people come off meds after they've had side effects and that's always

in my interest. One of the issues is because the agency is funded by the pharmaceutical industry through PDUFA, this is a congressional law, I think they have like 70% funding. What it does is it tilts the agency towards certain activities. So when pharma hands over money to the agency, they say, we're going to give you this money, but every time we give you an application for a drug, you need to review it within nine months because our patents are going to expire. And so you need to get it done in nine months. Every time there's a protocol that comes in, you need to look at it within 30 days. There's nothing, I think, on face, you know, that bad about it. Hey, it makes sense there's commercial interests here and they want to get something. But what it actually does at the

reviewer level is that all of our resources go towards drug development activities. And so we're reviewing protocols for the drug companies rather than following up on safety issues. So there could be something like, you know, PSSD, which I'd like to talk about later on, it's a serious sexual dysfunction problem, or all these different side effects going on that need reports and that need attention from medical reviewers. Those were all just put on the back burner. They were neglected because the way success in our division was measured was whether that was that we were just getting these things,

you know, these activities done in time. And so there was much more of an emphasis on drug development activities. Now, the other thing that was really disturbing about being at the FDA, it's not so much the agency, but it kind of speaks to academic psychiatry as a whole. Now, you know, as I mentioned before,

many I think we're almost brainwashed when we go through our training to internalize these beliefs you know you know that these psychiatric conditions they kind of morph and they evolve and they can get worse you know to criticize the medications is to be morally bad and to be stigmatizing the mentally ill and scaring people away from medications lots of academics they end up working at the FDA that's just a natural progression for them and many of the people that they had those beliefs. And so I didn't actually, when I looked at a lot of the colleagues that I was working with there, they were so hesitant to call out problems with medications.

I think the really cynical side of me says, maybe there was like a laziness component because if you identify a problem, you kind of have to deal with it and you have to do a report. But I actually think it was more that they had been so kind of sucked into this narrative that they almost they needed to protect the drugs and they needed to um yet they needed to be kind of advocates for them so rather than actually doing good science and really having a critical look at all of the problems that were happening with them like the withdrawal problems like PSSD really clear issues they were so hesitant to call people that call it out so i feel like

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I'm not surprised by that. That's known, as you well know, as regulatory capture, and regulators are cut off from the effects of the drugs that they're regulating because they're not treating patients. So I'm not making excuses, but I'm not surprised. What I am surprised by is the behavior of clinicians, of physicians prescribing these drugs to individual people with whom they're in regular contact,

and they somehow don't notice that these people are not getting, better and then killing themselves or going through all these other problems that are the results of side effects like why don't the doctors notice this um like where are the where the decent doctors so there are some i mean there are decent doctors out there and people are waking up to this but a lot of the rank and file uh physicians again they have been marinating in a in a soup of um just marketing messages. Like when you see someone who is getting worse, like you put them on an SSRI and they have a manic type reaction to it, does that happen? That does happen. Yeah, this is a side effect. Rather than saying, oh, we made you manic because we put you on this SSRI, you can just say

you have bipolar disorder. You know, you were depressed before, but, you know, now because you're manic, you have bipolar disorder. There was always this tilt towards viewing worsening as the underlying condition. And so many people are trained in that way. Is there evidence to support that? No, there's no evidence to support it. It's like the, I mean, the whole diagnostic criteria in psychiatry, it's just, it's completely subjective.

It's just, you know, you just kind of, do you have these symptoms? Okay, maybe you have bipolar disorder. And there's a very limited education about the side effects. it's also easier for doctors to look at worsening as the development of a new condition because what that means is one, I'm not at fault, you know, because, you know, I put this person on the drug and they're worse. But two, if I just diagnose them as having a new condition, I can just hand them another drug. It's very kind of quick to just say, okay, well, now you have bipolar disorder, don't worry, we've got a drug for that. And it allows you to kind of treat

them in a very quick way, rather than going through the mess of saying, hey, you know, this was a drug side effect. Now we have to get you off of it. That's a lot of a much more involved process. It sounds like the culture of medicine in this country is really kind of anti-human. I mean, like, what about the people? I'm sorry, I mean, but I... No, I mean, it is. I mean, it's a practice that has been... really destroyed by a whole range of bad influences. I mean, one, we can't trust our academics because so many of the academics that teach doctors

are actually on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies. They are in positions of power because of assistance from the drug companies. We also have a health insurance system that incentivizes people, doctors to see patients in the shortest period of time. You don't get incentivized to make someone well. You get incentivized to just kind of churn through them.

And so you make newly, like if you were to see one patient for 45 minutes to an hour, you essentially make half as much as if you were to just churn through four patients within that period of time. So even doctors have this incentive just to default to the fastest thing, which is to diagnose someone off a checklist and give them a drug, because that's a hell of a lot easier than understanding their life and their relationships and their work

and their health and all of that. And so that's really what's happened. What are the side effects of SSRIs? So there are a couple, but I want to start with one which really doesn't get a lot of air time and that is actually the effect that everyone has. And so these drugs, they work through emotional constriction.

And there's an opportunity. What's emotional constriction? Numbing. Numbing. So if you're having like a lot of anxiety, negative emotions, it kind of just sucks it in. But it'll also take out the positive things. So many people will experience that as therapeutic. But I mean, the risk of this is that you miss an opportunity to actually address the real

reasons that you're unhappy. Many doctors, they will not talk to patients about this. And most people have very clear issues why they're unhappy. You know, they're having problems with drugs. You know, they're, they have relationship issues. They have work issues. They have, they're eating terrible foods. They have like massive insulin resistance or diabetes that has completely disrupted the energy system of their body and their neurons are just starving for energy. If you're having these legitimate problems, you just throw a drug on top of it to mask that anxiety that is really like the smoke detector saying, problem, problem, problem, those issues, they just fester. They just kind of sit there and they just get worse over time. To me, that is the number one

problem with these medications, is that you miss an opportunity to actually address the problem that is causing the anxiety. That seems, now that you're saying it out loud, so obvious. People have anxiety for a reason. They feel sad for a reason. I mean, most of the time anyway, correct? Yeah. I mean, it is correct. But to say that, some people would say, Tucker, that is a really insensitive thing to say these people have medical problems. You know, there's, and that is what you can say, sure, it's a depression's a medical. I'm happy to, I'm happy to acknowledge it's a medical problem with dire consequence. Once you kill yourself. It's very serious.

It's not, you know, reducing the seriousness of or dismissing it as fake. It's acknowledging just how real it is. It's more real than a serotonin imbalance. It has to do with, like, your life. So I just can't believe there are people that stupid and shallow practicing medicine. Yeah, they've done a number on us. Yeah, because, I mean, they're not a lot of dumb doctors. They're all pretty smart, right?

The screening, it's for intelligence to some extent. But, like, that's just so shallow. I guess that's what I. You mentioned religion. I mean, I think we're ideologues in there. We've been pushed into thinking about mental illness, essentially in a way that benefits drug companies and a profession, because psychiatry as a profession,

is also really into pushing this narrative because it gives us a primacy amongst their healthcare professionals to say, we are the doctors and we have the drugs and because of that we need to protect the reputation of the drugs because to do so is to elevate us. So that is really deep and smart. No, that's right, because psychiatrists in this country anyway are unique among mental health professionals in that they can prescribe the drugs. Yeah. That's what makes you fundamentally different, right? Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And so, yeah, there's this, there's guild interests at play as well. Guild interests. I'm sure. Yeah. Right? Because the marriage counts.

I can't give you SSRIs, but you can. Yep, and that's why we're special, and that's why don't question the drugs. Wow, that's so plausible. Yeah. So the first, what you describe is the first side effect is effectively ignoring the cause of the illness in the first place, and that has costs.

Yeah, and, you know, I'm going to mention a whole bunch of other things that are important. We've got PSSD, we have brain damage during withdrawal, we have homicidal behavior. Okay, so let's just, let's go in order. Yeah, yeah. PSSD?

Yeah, so this is... What does that stand for? It stands for post-S-S-R-I sexual dysfunction. And from my perspective, this is the biggest scandal in psychiatry going on at the moment, that has been not discussed. Now, there are people who get put on these medications that, well, firstly, when you... One of the big side effects of these medications is sexual dysfunction. It happens in, I think it's like, like, seven. 70% of people who...

70%? Yeah. Yeah, so... And when you say sexual dysfunction, since you're a doctor, we can just be totally blunt. What are you specifically you're talking about? Yeah, so it would be like loss of interest in sex, you know, loss of arousal, difficulty to reach climax and erectile dysfunction. Wow.

Yeah. 70%. 70%. It's a really normal side effect. And... But the issue is we tell people that this goes away. when they come off the medications and this is just a temporary trade-off

to feel less depressed you're going to deal with the sexual dysfunction but what we've been seeing is that these drugs are causing permanent sexual dysfunction and people even when they come off of them they develop on top of all of those things I mentioned

they will develop genital anesthesia and so this is a real like neurological issue like those areas down there they lose erogenous sensation. People will say that when they touch down there, it feels like the back of their hand or the back of their arm. And so there's sensory changes. Are you serious?

Yeah. And so it's totally frightening. For how long? It can be permanent for some people. Come on. Yeah. And so the prognosis is actually really, it's not good for that. Some people will recover in, you know, three years or so.

But there are case reports out there where this is going on. for decades. But it's not just that. Basically, you're castrating people. You're essentially castrating people, but it's worse than that. How could anything be worse than that? Because along with the sexual dysfunction, and this is where the condition is misunderstood, people think it's just a sexual problem, which is already horrific as is, it causes cognitive

damage as well people will will along with that they'll have difficulty severe difficulty concentrating focusing paying attention and there's also severe emotional blunting and so people will talk about being completely dissociated as well from their emotions like if you were to hug a child you know your child or your wife you just don't feel anything warm if you were to hear a favorite song from your childhood that you know used to make like the back of your neck kind of a prickle from nostalgia all of that gets like nuked and and and taken out and so you have people who are essentially lobotomized with cognitive impairment who actually who also have severe sexual dysfunction so you're basically destroying someone's soul i mean the things that make you distinctly human

yeah your your love your emotional response your sexual response which is very deep it's not just i'm horny today it's like it's your life force it's your procreative force it's what keeps the species alive, that's gone? It's wiped out and people become highly suicidal because when you don't feel anything, you don't feel any connection to life, it's like there's nothing to live for anymore. And so the suicide rate in this population is through the roof. And I want to say something... A second.

And this is all confirmed? Yeah, so that's what I want to say. Some people hearing this would be like, this is so crazy. there's no way this could be true. Yes, that's my response. PSSD is a listed side effect in the European Union. So the European Union has already acted on this. They've put it in the warnings and precautions

of all of the SSRIs and SNRI antidepressants over there. So they have recognized it. Canada has recognized it. Australia has recognized it. Hong Kong has recognized it. The New York Times has run pieces on this. This is being reviewed by the FDA right now. This is like, this is not a fringe issue.

This is something that several regulatory agencies, like the biggest ones in the world, like the European Union, second biggest regulatory agency in the world. They have acknowledged this and they put this in the drug labels to warn doctors so they can talk to their patients about this. This isn't fringe, this is completely acknowledged by major health regulators,

but doctors do not tell patients about it. Do doctors know? Most of the doctors don't know. And that's because, well, there is no incentive to get this message out there. Now, when this came on, so when the European Union... Wait, so there's a huge population of SSRI Unix, many of whom kill themselves out of despair caused by SSRIs. And yet for some reason, nobody knows this is happening. I'm confused.

It's like, why don't want people to talk about this? Again, it's this issue where I think media doesn't want to touch it because to do so would be to scare people away from life-saving drugs. You should be experiencing comfort every single day of the year, and it should not be something that happens every so often when you get home from work all the time, no questions asked. And that's why we recommend cozy Earth. Cozy Earth makes bamboo sheets sound weird, weird enough,

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they're not life-saving at all. Because when you look at actually the clinical trial data, it's clear evidence that people who are under age 25, it actually makes them, they engage in more suicidal activity than the people on placebo. It's absolutely insane. And then when reanalyses have been done looking at the adult populations, they also find higher rates of suicide in the clinical trials. But I want to have some nuance here. They can be experienced as life-saving for some people. Like if you have a lot of anxiety and you get put on this medication and it blunts it, you will experience that at life-saving, as feeling life-saving in that moment. But in general, on a population level, they're actually contributing to most suicide attempts.

I used to feel that way about vodka. Yeah. Really strongly. I'm being serious. I'm not, and any heavy drinker can tell you, you wake up and you feel completely out of control, completely out of control. You know, you just feel like your head's going to explode. You've got pins and needles, anxiety. You're just, you're so sensitive.

You can't even, like, live in this world. and you have, how was a double screwdriver in the morning guy, solves the problem, like right away. By the time you get to the bottom of the glass, you're under control. So I would call that, and in fact, at the time did call that life-saving. Yeah. And then, of course, the progression of alcohol and alcoholism is well known to most people. So it's like people laugh at you and you say it's life-saving.

How was vodka in the morning, life-saving? Well, if you've experienced it, you know why someone could say that. But big picture, that's insane. So SSRI sound like exactly the same phenomenon. It is. I mean, on multiple levels, I think, you know, they, one, they make you ignore the real problems, which fester and get worse and could actually push you eventually towards becoming suicidal. And two, I think they disrupt your brain chemistry over time and actually make you more likely to be depressed and develop other issues. I just can't believe

basically the entire weight of the American medical establishment, the regulatory bodies, some of the biggest publicly traded companies in the world, they're all basically prescribing vodka to desperate people. It sounds crazy. It honestly does sound crazy. And people are going to listen to this and they're going to say, you know, this is crazy.

But the beauty of it and the reason I feel so good about having this conversation is that it's provable. we don't have to guess because we have the outcomes, right? So the two numbers, it's as a layman that seem relevant to me, doses prescribed, suicide rate. Like, that just seems like a pretty big picture way to measure success. If more people are killing themselves, as you've got more prescriptions for this garbage, it's at very least not working. Can we say that? I mean, that seems logical. I think it makes sense when you look at that on the population level, but I also think it makes sense intuitively for a lot of people.

I mean, with nearly 15 to 20% of people being on these medications, everyone knows someone who's on these drugs in their family, in their social circle, just look, how are they doing? Are these people thriving? A lot of the times, I mean, the stories that I hear is, that person's not doing that great. You know, they've slowly gotten worse over time. I mean, you can look at it at a population.

a population level, but this issue is so common. People actually see this in their real life in the people that they know. Have you ever spoken to someone who had numb genitals or no sex drive? Yeah, I've spoken to probably 20 to 30 of them. What do they say? What's that like? It's like they wake up in a horror movie. I, you know, I think about a woman and I interviewed her from my recollection. I mean, so she got on one of these medications, beautiful. young woman and she ended up developing PSSD, she told the doctor that it had happened to her and she became incredibly distressed. You know, what is happening to me? Her sex drive just gone. Sex drive gone, cognitive damage, emotional blunting, completely disassociated from her family

from her emotions and disconnected from her life. The doctor involuntarily hospitalized her saying that she was delusional and that she had health anxiety and tried to pressure her onto antipsychotic medication because they simply did not, they could not accept that this had happened. They managed to briefly turn her family against her and just say, you know, she's wrong, she's delusional, she has another psychiatric condition.

And so she ends up in a psychiatric hospital. Talk about a horror show. You get put on a medication that's meant to help you. It destroys your nervous system. and then a doctor involuntarily hospitalizes you and turns your family against you. These people literally wake up

in a horror show. I spoke to another person in India. Is the doctor still practicing? Oh, yeah. They didn't do, yeah. They're still practicing. And this is not isolated. I spoke to another.

Why is that person not in jail? You know, it's... That's so cruel. That's criminal, in my opinion. So... Yeah. Sorry, I'm interrupting. Damn, you're making me mad again.

You spoke to someone in India? The same thing happened, yeah. Because, you know, doctors, they've never heard of this condition before, and it just seems like, you know, too crazy to be true. How could these life-saving drugs, you know, do something like this? And the same thing happened. You know, he ended up being involuntarily hospitalized. This young man for months, and his family was turned.

against him he kept on trying to tell them that this had happened to him and it took them months to to let him out and and and and so yeah it's it's it's it's about the worst thing that i could ever imagine happening to someone and they lose people all the time uh the suicide rates out of control in in this population so a doctor who refuses to see the obvious and is committed knowingly or not to a lie it seems to me it would be likely in a case like this to describe a drug on top of the drug that it clearly caused the symptoms he's trying to treat, right?

Yeah. What happens when you do that? A lot of these patients seem like there are on all kinds of different drugs. How do they interact with each other? What's the effect of that? Yeah, I mean, you... I mean, it's awful, right?

You have someone who's highly distressed for legitimate reasons with a totally messed up nervous system and you've just thrown them on an antipsychotic. So now they're kind of like blunted and even more dull. dealing with the same problem. So if these drugs can eliminate your sexual response,

numb your genitals for life, drive you to suicide, what other, is it possible that they have other sexual side effects? Well, having spoken to some of these PSSD sufferers, I've had two men, a heterosexual men, tell me that they started to question their sexuality because of all of the blunting that was going on, these were men who were having encounters with women that they were just saying,

I would find this person very arousing and attractive, and that's not happening anymore, and they start wondering whether they're gay. And so I think on that level, it can make people feel asexual, it can make people start to question their sexuality, you know, which I've directly seen. And then the whole other issue,

which is even more frightened, is the data that's coming out is some of the animal studies about what happens to mice who are exposed in utero to antidepressants because this has always been a question that people have been curious about you know is there like what are the effects of exposing a developing nervous system during this period of life where it goes from being like a speck to a fully formed brain in nine months you know these drugs freely cross placenta what is the effect on the development of that? They do.

They do, all of them do. Yeah, all psychiatric drugs freely cross. So mothers taking these drugs, the drugs are in the developing child. Yes, yes. We know that. Yeah, fact, yeah. But no study's been done on what that means. Well, there have been some studies.

And so firstly, so there's the studies in rats and mice. And what they find is that the mice who are exposed in utero, they grow up with a high, rate of autistic-like behaviors and also decreased sexual interests so they mate less than the other mice now you might be saying hey well that's just mice who knows if that happens in humans i tell you what i'm concerned enough about that already to to worry about humans i don't need to see that human study but we do have some studies in humans and what we've and what they've found is you know we have 12 MRI studies that have controlled for depression which is essentially just a fancy way of making sure that depression isn't a factor and they've looked at the brains and they

find that there's structural changes and functional changes in the brains of of of kids who are exposed versus those who are not exposed they've then gone again and looked at this when they when the kids have become adolescents and they've looked at their sensory processing and the kids who were exposed growing up had altered sensory processing when they looked at the amygdala it's a part of the brain that's responsible for high emotions. And those changes, they have correlated with worse mental health outcomes. So that's like a whole other topic that I was recently at the FDA talking about this with some of my colleagues that many women are not actually being told that there are real

risks to your child. if you take these medications when their nervous system is developing. Are they prescribed to pregnant women? 10% are pregnant. I think 9 or 10% are pregnant women are taking antidepressants. There's been a massive increase in, well, sexual changes of all kinds in the way that people couple in the way, literally in the way they have sex, in the outcome that are children who were born, and in some. self-identified sexual orientation, a massive increase in homosexuality, massive increase, like mind-boggling increase in transgenderism. No one seems interested in why.

Is it possible that if you've got 10% of the population on these drugs, that there's a connection there? I mean, I think that's something to be explored because, you know, yes, you could make an argument, okay, the world is more accepting these days. and maybe people are coming out. That's bullshit. The numbers are so high that that's not it. But I'm looking at these animal data. I'm seeing changes in sexual interest in the mice who were exposed growing up.

I mean, we're putting kids who are 6, 7, 6, 7, 8, who go through sexual maturity with their sex drive, essentially blunted from these medications. I'm having people come to me and tell me that they're questioning their sexuality because they're not feeling attraction and around. right you connect the dots i mean it has to be playing a role is there like currently an NIH study of this underway or is anyone saying hey wait a second like you could change the future of humanity with this kind of stuff this is there's like big consequences no i mean the n i am h

has essentially been useless i mean they all all they do from from what i see is they they they They are essentially just looking for drug targets in the brain. They're not doing any research into side effects. They're not doing any studies comparing non-drug alternatives to drugs for the treatment of anxiety and depression. They are so captured and just obsessed with finding the next target to throw a drug at. I think the American public has been betrayed by the NIMH. I really do.

Well, it sounds like a lot of people have been killed. What about going back to the question of side effects? I don't think, every time you raise the question like, hey, it seems like a lot of the school shooters that we know about, to the extent we know anything about a lot of them, they seem to be on these drugs. Has there been research into that? I know you're not allowed to say that. YouTube, like shuts you down if you say that. I don't know why. Yeah, we're throttled for sure, you know, but.

For asking that question. Yeah, for asking that question. Yeah. yeah there weren't school shootings you know i mean the biggest school shooting of like american history took place the university of texas chuck whitman who turns out he had a brain tumor so there was like there was like a reason that that happened went up in the bell tower killed all these people then there was a lull and then columbine happens and then there's like probably many reasons for this but the increase in school shootings coincides with almost precisely coincides with almost precisely

coincides with this massive increase in the prescription of these drugs. So, like, is anyone studying this? Well, it's actually really hard to study is the issue. I want to say this because this is a topic, you know, I don't think drugs are involved in all the school shootings. I do think there is a social contagion element to it. But I do think if you just, if you look at the side effects of all of these medications, it's already in the label. You know, if you look at stimulants right there, it says it can cause aggression and hostility. If you look at antipsychotics like Abilify, in the label, it says it can cause aggression. If you look at the antidepressants, it also says it can cause mania and aggression and agitation. And that's kind of the opposite

of the intended effect now. Well, what these things are are paradoxical side effects. And So, and maybe an easy way to think about it is if there were 10 people in a room and there were smoking cannabis, you know, you might have nine people giggling and you have one person becoming paranoid. There's something just about that person's genetics and the way they respond to it, that they have the opposite reaction. Yes. And so that can happen with psychiatric medications. And so these are rare side effects, you know, but if you're putting like, you know, 15% of the population on these drugs, rare side effects. are going to happen. And, you know, so the next thing is, like I said, we know these drugs can do this.

Well, has this ever actually happened? And it has, because, you know, there have been lawsuits. For instance, there was one in the early 90s. It was the Tobin case. There was a gentleman called Don Schell who had had a bad reaction to Pax. He had a bad reaction, I think, to Prozac. And then he was put on Paxil many years. later and shortly thereafter he became incredibly homicidal and he killed his wife,

his daughter and his granddaughter and then shot himself. Now, the surviving son-in-law, the husband of the daughter who he killed, ended up bringing suit against, I think it was Smith Klein at the time. It wasn't GSK. They go to a jury trial and they win. It gets appealed and the appeal isn't successful and he ends up getting paid out. And so we even have, I mean, we have legal cases where jurors have listened to the evidence of these cases and said, if not for this drug, you know, this awful murder suicide wouldn't have happened. And so we know this happens from court cases and there have been many other cases like this. You just never hear about them because you're not allowed to talk about this.

Why would this video be throttled for broaching this topic? I'm confused. Well, because, I mean, the dominant narrative is essentially that school shootings are caused by guns. And if you are to... I have a lot of guns. It's never occurred to me. Yeah. And so that, I mean, it's, this is meant to be stigmatizing. This is meant to be something that scares people away from medications.

And it doesn't fit the mold. I mean because if you were to accept that this this can happen you know like even if this is a one and two million type side effect that's still happening a couple times a year that people are becoming homicidal on these medications and so I think people they don't you just can't say it it's it's it's it's it's it's taboo um it shouldn't be if you care about the murdered kids at, you know, the schools. It's changing, though. And this is like a silver lining here that will make people like me seem a lot less crazy because through bipartisan support, the governor of Tennessee just instituted a new law mandating that following school shootings, there needs to be an investigation into the use of psychiatric medications. This is the first state to actually try and get that data.

to look into it because oftentimes it's you know it's redacted the fbi has it they don't give it to anyone it's kind of like shoved away in a box but in the state of tennessee with bipartisan support they will now look at this for any school shootings good good so what okay um you are you know middle age person going through the middle age you know the litany of middle age drama, and you find yourself sad, maybe even depressed, you go to the shrink and you are prescribed drugs. What are the most commonly prescribed drugs? Which are the drugs you should be the most afraid of, assuming there's a difference? I mean, I think the SSRIs, we've talked a lot about them, but the other class are benzodiazepines. These are awful drugs. They're usually

used for anxiety and insomnia and what are the brand names on those zanax clonopin valium um tamazepam yeah very common drugs in this country really yeah their use is declining um but they are still they're still quite common the main issue with them is that they god they feel good and i know we were talking about this before and you had mentioned taking one before. I mean, I've taken them. It's almost like immediate. I took one in high school. I never took another one because it was the most profound. I mean, they solve all your problems in like four minutes. So super addictive, right? You know, to have something like that on hand. But the real problem with the benzos is when it comes to coming off of them, they can be incredibly difficult to stop.

and what does that mean difficult to stop that so because they have such a potent sort of anxiety reducing an insomnia and sorry it's sleep inducing effect when you come off of them your anxiety goes through the roof and and you develop severe insomnia some people even die from coming off benzodia it's it's so jarring to the brain and because of that people can get trapped off the drug trapped on the drug every time they try and come off of it it's so uncomfortable that they have to go back on and they can also develop another condition called protracted withdrawal and so some people when they've been on this medication for years and they try and come off they develop a kind of a brain injury and so they taper themselves off the medication too quickly um and they go into a severe

withdrawal and the symptoms never stop. They end up with ringing in their ears, light sensitivity, cognitive impairment, severe anxiety, burning in their hands and feet. Oh, come on. Yeah. And then they say to themselves, they go, I'm just in withdrawal. You know, I've been white knuckling through this for the last couple of months. I'm just going to start the drug again. I don't want to deal with this anymore. I'll get it. I'll find another way to come off. They start the drug again. It doesn't go away. And this is... With the symptoms don't go away? The symptoms don't go away. And these are the patients that I actually treat in my practice. I'd say probably 70% of the people I work with now have neurological damage from coming off benzodiazepines and SSRI medications

too quickly. Thankfully, it actually has a... I mean, it's awful. It has a decent prognosis. Most people recover from it within two years. But for many people, it can and be two years of severe disability. And these are the people you treat. These are the people I treat. So you see this. So I see this on a daily basis. I see this multiple days a week.

People who have brain damage from coming off these medications too quickly. Now, again, I know most people haven't heard about this before, so they're going to be listening to this and saying, you know, this is crazy. You know, how could I have never heard that coming off these medications could induce brain damage? read the drug labels in the U.S. Every single benzodiazepine has a section in there that talks about the risk of protracted withdrawal. So what does that look like? So describe obviously anonymously, but like the experience of one of your patients?

So the experience of one of my patients is, man, I mean, it's so, it's so bad. you are living your life one day you decide to come off a medication and then before you know it your whole life is turned upside down your brain you are gripped with severe anxiety and obsessive dark thoughts that just torments you all the time you never have a moment of rest or relaxation you you simply cannot relax some people feel so keyed up that they pay you incessantly in circles it's a condition called acethesia um and they they cannot stop moving they become social recluses because they cannot go out in public because it's too bright it's too noisy the the nervous system is like a snail without a shell even interacting with

people and their shopping center can cause like you know surges in adrenaline uh people have severe neuropathic pain when you know their feet burn um and it destroys families i mean people become disabled um people take their lives uh frequently um and this is you know i i know i mentioned before about PSSD being like the biggest story going on but this this would be just as big honestly there are probably millions of people who are suffering from protracted withdrawal from Benzos or SSRIs. Thankfully, this has actually been picked up a lot by major news outlets recently, but this condition has, and it does kill people.

How long do you have to be on Benzos or SSRIs to develop physical dependency and to get these kind of withdrawal symptoms? So most people, it's several years, and then it's triggered by coming off the medication. Several years, I mean, is there any evidence that's a good idea to put someone on a surrise or benzos for years? No, no, there isn't. But I do want to say, I have had some people develop this much quicker than several years, like within taking the medication for a few months, things like that. That's much less common. Usually, the way it happens is you're on it for several years, five years, decades, you come off too quickly.

Decades? Yeah, that's really common. You've seen that. Yeah. yeah decades what is the doctor thinking well then when they put them on these drugs for decades well i mean if someone's coming back to get a script filled you know after 15 20 years of taking one of these drugs is like does no one pause to say what does it do to something the brain's not designed for that right yeah they're well they think that they're helping the person um at the risk

of getting a little technical, I want to go here because I think it's important. So when a drug comes onto the market, there's a study called a relapse prevention study. This is essentially the rationale for leaving people on these drugs indefinitely. And so I think it's important to talk a bit about the design of these studies because it's so, it's so telling. Essentially, a drug company will get a group of people and they'll put them on the drug for, like, say, six, months. And so you have 500 people on the drug for six months. 250, you then, this is actually how the studies are designed. 250 people, at a certain point, they continued the drug, and the other 250, they rapidly stop it. And so they pull them off the drug, either immediately or at the longest,

about two weeks. And then they watch what happens to those two groups over time. And they're looking for how many people become depressed in the two groups. With the thinking being, well, if the patients who continued the drug become less depressed, then that means it works. But the issue with these studies is that it completely ignores the fact that people develop withdrawal. And so if you stick a bunch of people on this drug for six months and then you stop it immediately or within two weeks, they are going to develop withdrawal symptoms.

that will look like depression. And so the study is flawed, essentially. It's majorly flawed. It's embarrassing that the FDA even allows this and that doctors even believe this is a rationale for keeping people on these medications. And that's it. That is the study that lets doctors feel good

about filling these drugs up again and again and again because they say, oh, we're preventing relapse because this poorly designed study that makes no sense that is honestly just embarrassing even to believe in showed that when you rapidly pulled people off the medication

there was more depressive relapse which really it wasn't it was just withdrawal and so just even at the heart of it is just bad science and faulty studies I mean even I as a non-scientist can understand the gaps in the logic there

it seems pretty obvious that doesn't make a lot of sense but I'm fixated on the worldview that allows this to persist. Like, how would you have to feel about other people to allow this kind of stuff to happen? And I just want to ask, when you were doing your training as a doctor for whatever, six or eight, ten years, however long it took, did you get a sense that other doctors considered like the human soul ever? Or is there a sense that people are just like a more evolved animal?

Is there something special about people? they have like, is there a spiritual component to a person? Did anyone ever acknowledge that? No, we, that's not part of the training. So if you think people are just clever cattle, you can treat them like this. Yeah. Well, you know, with biological systems, you know, where you can sort of just tinker with it with the right chemical.

That's what we are. That's the belief. That's the way biological psychiatry is taught. So it's kind of inevitable you're going to wind up in a place like this, isn't it? Because that's not true. People are not just machines. Right? And no other civilizations ever thought that they were.

Yeah. Sorry, I don't mean to bum me out. No, no, I'm just, I'm thinking about it. I mean, the only reason that happens is because there is such a massive incentive to recast the human experience in that way. yeah yeah but it's that's not reality no at all no um yeah so what about umphetamines and their ADHD and the fact that like every third kid on your street is taking this stuff like what what is ADHD is an effective way to treat it what are the long-term effects of those drugs.

I mean, ADHD, I mean, I want to start here. So there was an awesome piece in New York magazine recently that summarized a lot of this research. But it really, the thing that most parents care about is usually academic improvement. That's why they want their kids on these medications. When you look at the results long term, they do not improve academics. What they find is that the medications are mostly effective for control. controlling behavior. So when you have kids who are fidgety, who are having to pay attention to

things that are boring, putting them on medications makes them easier to control. So if you're like a bad teacher, they're good. They're good. They're great. Now, I mean, there is some, I mean, ADHD is interesting because it kind of hits at the, it's like societal expectations, Like in the US and a lot of developed countries, academic success is synonymous with your value as a person. You know, if you have to be successful at school to be worthy. And a lot of parents believe that. And so they will push their kids into subjects and, you know, university courses because they want to help them. They think they're helping them by pushing them into these things.

and the kids are really struggling and they're not interested in it and you can put someone on a stimulant and it will make something that's boring more interesting. Definitely. Yeah. And so there's also... You have the world's most boring conversations on cocaine

but you have no idea they're boring. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's the same with your studies. And then I think another thing that I believe is going on that really doesn't get enough air time is that actually a lot of lifestyle problems are leading to ADHD, especially in adults. And the main one being poor diet and insulin resistance. As people become insulin resistant, they end up with more anxiety, more depression, and more brain fog.

Essentially, they've broken their body because they've been eating too many refined carbohydrates, added sugars, all of that. And it makes it very hard for neurons to work. When the system is disrupted, there's too much insulin, they can't pull energy. And so I think a lot of people out there have very legitimate, real problems focusing and feeling foggy, but they're not really looking at lifestyle issues

that are really clear. And oftentimes people, if they do things like, you know, they try ketogenic diets. This is like a really big thing in the mental health space. And they work for a lot of mental health conditions because they reverse insulin resistance and they improve energy, the way your cells work. And so I think the biggest thing that I worry about... So that it does work.

The low-carb diet affects your mental health. Yeah, yeah. In a major way, some people even call Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes. because the correlation between the worsening of, you know, diabetes type 2 and your blood sugar levels correlates with cognitive decline. I mean, the insulin resistance diabetes all has very strong links to cognitive decline. And so when it comes to ADHD, I think the thing that bothers me the most is that there's actually a lot of reversible things that you can do there. You can, you know, if you have brain fog, it's not that you're just like, you know, you're weak and you're not

trying hard enough or you're lazy or something like that. I mean, if you can look at your diet and there's things you can optimize there, if you can get moving, if you can stop smoking cannabis, there's a lot of, and obviously if you can actually try and do work that you genuinely find energizing and that you enjoy, you probably won't need to be on stimulants. Stop smoking cannabis. I thought cannabis was good for you.

It's medicine. It's a medicine. It's a herb. A cannabis is actually, this is, you're going to get me on something that I'm really bothered about, is that cannabis is, it's a massive gateway drug into the psychiatric industry. It is a huge trigger for mania and schizophrenia. It is completely downplayed by big cannabis because we've decided to legalize it in so many states now and many people they'll end up they'll think it you know it's it's harmless it's

this herb not realizing that the potency has increased like 40 times since what it used to be and it it just it triggers mania and psychosis and then the doctors will see them and the doctors will downplay the role of cannabis and they'll say oh you have schizophrenia or you have bipolar and then they put them on an antipsychotic, and then this person just ends up on antipsychotics for a really long period of time when really their issue was that they had a psychotic reaction. So you believe that cannabis use can lead to schizophrenia? I wouldn't say schizophrenia. I would say I believe that cannabis use can cause psychosis, and that psychosis can endure sometimes for like a year or two after they have the psychotic break,

because to say something it's schizophrenia makes it sound like they just had a broken brain their brain was broken and it was just inevitable to happen I've worked with patients who have smoked cannabis

they've had psychotic reactions and even after they've come off the cannabis for a period of like a year or two they've still experienced periodic episodes of psychosis before it fizzled out the only way I can

and understand that, is that that drug, when they had that psychotic episode, it actually damaged their brain. It was like a big hit, and it took them a couple years afterwards to fully recover from that. And I've looked into this with many other people who actually work in this space, and they see that. When you have a psychotic reaction to cannabis, it can sometimes take months or even a year or two to fully go away. I think doctors misdiagnosed that and tell someone, this is a sign you have a broken brain, you have schizophrenia, time to put you on the drug. So you're saying that the drug companies wouldn't necessarily be opposed to marijuana legalization? No, no, it's creating customers.

Do you really think that? I mean, I don't know. That's really dark. Well, I don't think they are, you know, I don't know if there's like a drug company lobbyist out there just being like, hey, you know, we really want to kind of push this knowingly, but it sure helps them. that big cannabis is out there and it is sewing a message that essentially these drugs are safe herbs, these drugs are medicine when they're, I mean, they're Frankenstein drugs now. I mean, they're 40 times more potent than how they used to be. So just to bottom line, as a practicing licensed psychiatrist, would you ever prescribe cannabis to a patient for mental illness?

No, it doesn't make any sense at all. Would you prescribe SSRIs? So this is where there's a bit more nuance here. I think we have to use every tool that we have. And I mean, there are a lot of people out there who will say, I mean, the fact is these drugs have saved people's lives. I can say that, you know, even with a lot of the concern that, you know, the drug effect wears off. But imagine someone who...

They come in and they're unhappy, and this is rare. You talk to them about their life. There's no relationship issues going on. It looks really good. Work is fine. You've tried to optimize their health. You've done everything that you could. And they're still unhappy.

Something is still going on. Maybe they have really severe OCD or something like that. I'm not going to sit there and just say, I'm not going to give you any treatment. If I've tried all of the non-drug strategies to help. you and you're still suffering. I will give you informed consent about the medication. I will put you on it and I'll monitor you and I'll do my best to make sure that you're that you're functioning and, you know, if there's side effects that come up, I'll catch them early. My issue with the medications is that they're used first up without anyone trying with minimal, with lip service

really to helping people with non-drug means first. But if you've done all of that and it's still not working, I think it makes sense to use a drug to make someone more functional. So if someone goes to your practice, you said your current practice is helping people get off these drugs. Yeah. What does that look like? Just give us the kind of typical patient who approaches you. How long has this person been on the drugs?

Why does this person want to get off the drugs? And how does this person get off the drugs? So a typical person might be a, you know, a middle-aged, a middle-aged woman who was put on a medication during a divorce. You know, she's been on it maybe 15 years or so, and she's starting to notice that whatever she does with the medications, it's not working. You know, she's gone up on the dose. She's maxed out. She started a new one. And she just feels terrible.

She has brain fog. She has low energy and she feels numb. And she's realized essentially that, you know, psychiatry has kind of failed her, you know, that the answer to her solutions aren't really drugs anymore. And so she'll come to us in this state. And what we do is we look at the drugs she's on. Usually she's on several. And then we'll just start to identify which drug is causing, it's most likely to be causing a problem.

the most amount of your problems, and we start there and we slowly taper that off. Some drugs you can taper quite quickly, others can take years to come off, like things like Benzos and SSRIs, they're much harder. And so we'll work with patients for several years, slowly untangling the medication regimen, you know, meeting with them very frequently until we ease them off. At the same time, we introduce them to non-drug approaches to managing their mental health if they need to do dietary modifications, lifestyle changes, if they need to learn some sleep,

if we need to look at some of the substances that they're using, we'll use all of our non-drug tools while we're bringing them off the medications. How long does it take to taper off the drug itself? So if you've been on these medications for several years, most people are coming off at around 18 to 24 months. Wow. Yeah.

So this is what I see, and I want to give a bit of nuance here. It's hard to know why it's so hard for some people to come off. I mean, there are some people, and for reasons I don't understand, their brains are really elastic. They might be able to come off a drug that they've been on for years really quickly. They have awful withdrawal for a couple of months, and then they come back together. But then there's another group of people

that when they try that, the suffering doesn't end. And it's just, it's brutal and the withdrawal doesn't go away and then they have to come back on. And for them, it can take them years to come off. Currently, I have no real way of predicting who is going to have an easy withdrawal

and who's going to have a difficult withdrawal. It's not related to age, sex, health. Not in a way that fully accounts for the variability. Like, in general, young people have an easy-a-go. In general, people who have been on the drug for a shorter period of time. It kind of skews things, but I've also seen young people who've been on the drug for not that long have a hell of a time coming off as well.

And so it's hard for me to predict. But because I've worked with so many people who have developed this, essentially this brain injury called protracted withdrawal, the way I've come to think about this is everyone needs to come off the medications gradually in a way that doesn't trigger severe withdrawal. That's kind of the measure. You know, you do like a 10% reduction. You see how they go. Okay, you're fine.

We do another one. But once they start to develop severe withdrawal, I then slow it down and I do smaller and smaller reductions to get them completely off. So without severe withdrawal. So they're not at risk of this neurological injury called protracted withdrawal. and they're able to work and they're able to fulfill their household duties and all of that. That's the way it should be done.

So someone remains functional while the taper is going on. How do they feel when they're off, when they're finally done? A lot of them feel great, especially if they've, because people come to me because they're dealing with side effects. You know, the drugs are actively harming them. They feel foggy and fatigued. And then to have that monkey off their back,

They're not dealing with the side effects, but then they also have that, you know, the self-esteem issues. Some people, you know, they just go, I'm not broken. I don't want to be on a drug. I don't believe there's anything wrong with me. So they love that. They love that they can go and travel and they don't need to worry about losing a prescription or the prescription being stolen from them. And they love not having to line up at the pharmacy.

They love not having to worry. about the long-term side effects of these medications on their brain, and so many people are really happy. How does being on SSRIs affect people's relationships? So the question, yeah, I mean, it's a question really about how does emotional blunting affect your ability to connect with one another? Yeah. I guess you just answered the question.

And so there is a Facebook group out there called Marriages Destroyed by SSRIs that I think it has like nearly 5,000 people in there. And the stories you hear there are that, you know, we were in a relationship. My spouse was, you know, depressed. They got put on a medication. And so in some instances, they'll say that the person became emotionally distant. they stopped being intuitive about their partner. They stopped recognizing that there were issues going on

and they became kind of harsh and neglectful. And so I think it can get in the way of empathy. And this is a funny story actually because my wife and I, we both tried Zoloft. We got up from a friend of ours when we were in our residency because I want to be. wanted to see what it was like these medications. I was prescribing them. That's a benzodia. No, this is an SSRI. Oh, okay. So I took an SSRI because I just wanted to see what it was like.

And she hated me when I was on Zoloft. She did. Why? Well, she felt like I didn't really care about her anymore. Like she would, you know, we would be having, like, you know, she'd be upset about something. I don't know. The kitchen was dirty and I'd left a mess and she'd be talking to me. And I'd just be like so zoned out, not caring about her emotions, emotionless, not aware, not being able to intuit things. Because in the past, like if I walked into the house and I could pick up that she was upset and walk over to her and say, hey, you know, what's going on? I can, I sense something is wrong. Let's talk about it. That went away. That ability to kind of detect, you know, subtle kind of emotional changes in her went away. And she hated that.

How long were you wanted? I think two to three weeks. And then, I mean, that was enough of an experience to kind of feel what that was like. And so... So you took it because you're going to be prescribing it and you wanted to know what it was. Yeah. And my professors made me feel like this was like the biggest lunatic idea ever. Seriously?

Yeah, yeah. There was like, these are serious medications. You shouldn't be taking them. But I was like, I need to know what this experience is like if I'm going to prescribe it. It's called empathy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I've taken several psychiatric medications because I think it's really important that I know what they feel like. Yes, I agree. What else have you taken? I've taken metasapine. I've taken tracidone. What are those?

These are antidepressants and sedatives and I've taken benzodiazepines. What do you think of those? They may be worse, to be honest. The benzos were actually prescribed. to me because after and this is crazy because I'm a drug side effect guy that this happened to me after my life is wild yeah so after my daughter was born I just started working at the FDA and you know I was a clinician that's what I was used to and all of a sudden I was a drug regulator doing reports every day and that was really stressful to have a new kid and have a new job and I was also totally overdoing it on stimulants like I was drinking a large cup of coffee in the morning

two Diet Coke during the day I was probably packing like five Zins in my mouth throughout the day You can first of all Zins are only for rectal use I don't know if you do that I should be using ALP Should be using ALP, sorry excuse me And so my sleep deteriorated

I was having a really hard time sleeping which was with all of the pressure and my daughter waking up in the middle of the night So I got a script for Xanax from a nurse practitioner and I would just take it once a night and then very soon it became every other night and then very soon it became every night. And it slowly wore off

and I started to become more anxious over time. And this is what happens with Benzos. I would be sitting there trying to concentrate on my reports and I'd be getting obsessive thoughts about embarrassing things that had happened in the past. I mean, it was like torturous, like they would just spring into my mind. And thankfully, I had the foresight to realize

that the drug was actually making me more anxious. And I see this with a lot of my patients. I was able to come off fairly quickly. Not many people aren't. But that experience really taught me about how easy it is for these drugs to make you worse. And I mean, if I didn't know what I was doing and I wasn't interested in drug side effects, I could have gone in to see a doctor and they would have said, oh, you've developed an anxiety disorder. You know, here's some Zoloft. And then you get on. this prescribing cascade where you got started on one drug, you had a side effect, and then you get started on another one, and before you know it, you're taking multiple meds.

So you say you would go into a doctor and tell him this, but now post-COVID, there's something called telehealth. And my impression is the bar has dropped, maybe? What is telehealth? And how is it affected this business? Yeah, I mean, telehealth is essentially being able to get, medicines virtually, sometimes without even seeing a clinician, and it has essentially just exacerbated all the worst parts about the American healthcare system. I recently did an investigation on a company, I think it's called Hymns, the female version is for hers. These are essentially online telehealth companies that sell lifestyle drugs, things like finasteride, for male patent baldness, but they also sell antidepressants.

And when I went through their drug sellers, they don't do orthopedic surgery or anything. They're drug sellers, yeah. They are like a Silicon Valley startup to essentially just make it really easy to get certain drugs. And I was obviously horrified about this because I think psychiatric drugs are massively overprescribed. And so I wanted to investigate what the oversight was like. and I essentially I ended up signing up to make an account

I filled out a questionnaire I supposedly spoke with a nurse practitioner on a chat which could have just been boilerplate AI generated text they diagnosed me

with depression and then they sent me Lexa Pro in the mail three days later and I never even saw anyone and then there was just like a little hyperlink that said click here

to learn about the side effects I videotaped the whole thing and I put it on my YouTube channel but that that is awful I mean that is not the kind of care that you would ever want for someone that you love

I mean that's not care no it's not care it's drug dispensing it's drug dispensing and just milking insurance because you can just you can just you know the person pays you 150 bucks a month or whatever it is and you just keep on sending them

you know SSRIs without really trying to help them at all And remember, these are the drugs that cause PSSD and can cause homicide, homicidal behavior and can cause brain injury when people try and come off of them and no one is even sitting with them

to say, hey, I really need to make sure that you understand what you're getting into. I really need to make sure that you understand that there are alternatives for this that are safer. These companies have just like, you know, there's like a PDF that you could read on the way to like the checkout page and they're just like, okay, our job is done here.

But what's wild is after, you know, an hour and a half of telling me, and I think making an airtight case that these drugs are really dangerous and are grossly overprescribed, you're describing changes to the system that make it easier that guarantee their use is more widespread and less regulated and less oversight and less actual care. I mean, it's kind of weird that the evidence is in, it sounds like. this is very serious, but not only we're not clamping down, we're making it easier for people to get it. Yeah, yeah, we are. What did something just happen? I don't fully understand it in the state of Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker, who wants to run for president, Democrat, signed a bill that brings some of this into the schools. Tell us what that is. So it was a bill mandating mental health screening.

for children as young as third grade in the state of Illinois. And so this was in response to statistics showing that mental health is worsening in the state, which are true. Of course. And so their response was, well, we need to get into the classroom and we need to make these kids fill out mental health screeners to see if they have anxiety or to see if they have depression with the goal that that is going to improve. mental health outcomes because if you detect it, you can treat it. Now, why I think this is the dumbest law ever and it's going to lead to more problems is our mental health care system is so dysfunctional. Like, screening is not a bad thing.

You know, knowing that someone is depressed or anxious, that's not inherently bad. I mean, we want to help people. Yes. But what is going to happen with a law like this is it's going to end up just scaring parents. They're going to be said, oh, you know, your kid has anxiety and depression. You should get that taken care of before they start becoming suicidal. They will go into a mental health care system, which is already broken, highly transactional, where doctors will have limited face time and will lean on prescribing medications.

I'm all for screening, but not when the mental health care system is dysfunctional, just funneling people into a broken system. But why? So they're targeting kids for this. Yeah. Did anyone say anything about it? No. This just seems to be going ahead as if it's the greatest thing ever.

But the irony is that the people who, I mean, there are all kinds of people grandstanding about, quote, mental health. And they're all the same people who are pushing drugs that degrade mental health and hurt people. Have you noticed this? Yes. People stand up, like, do we have a mental health crisis in this country? Yes, I couldn't agree. more but those people seem totally uninterested in fixing it they seem to be intent on making it worse i mean it's it's it's grandstanding i mean that that is what it is it is you know talking about

mental health and being an advocate for mental health is one of the you know it's this this this you know this morally righteous thing to do and people want to jump on that bandwagon and and this seems like oh this is like you know this is a good thing for me to be doing i'm such a good person, not understanding that the downstream effects could be really harmful. It's like advocates for the homeless. More of those we have, the more homeless we have. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So last question. You do this for a living and I think unusually for a psychiatrist, you seem to really care about the outcome and whether people are thriving or not, which is supposed to be the goal of the business is to help people thrive. What advice would you?

you give to people who are anxious or depressed or sad or struggling with what we call mental health? What are the ways to restore happiness and vigor to a human life? I would say, I think a lot of mental health comes down to three things. I think it comes down to your relationships. I think it comes down to your purpose and what you do, and I think it comes down to your physical health. And so I would want the person to audit their life. How am I doing in these three areas? And to treat the root causes, you know, don't let someone tell you you have a chemical imbalance.

If you look at your life and you're, you know, you're using drugs that can, you know, mess with your chemistry, address that. If you're eating foods that, you know, if you have like pre-diabetes or because your diet is off, you know, fix your diet, get moving, get in the sun, do the things that our bodies are naturally designed to do. So work on your health and then just think about the next thing that needs to be addressed. You know, are you having problems with loneliness and relationships? You can find people that can help you with that problems, not like a bullshit therapist, but someone that actually has a track record of helping with your relationships or helping with connections. If you're having

difficulty at work, you can find coaches that actually have a track record of helping you, you find more meaning in your work as well. And so what I tell people is that there's no, don't believe the story that there is this magic pill that is gonna fix pretty much the most complicated issues in your life. You know, your ability to connect, your ability to find meaning and purpose,

you know, your health, there's no magic pill for that. These things are cultivated over decades with attention and effort. They're the most important things in your life. Just start somewhere. Are you confident that AI therapy will help people's mental health? Why are you laughing? This is the new frontier.

I believe it's very well funded. Yeah. That is so disturbing because I feel like AI therapy is like the most like it just it doesn't give you like it just affirms what you put into it as well. It's just like, oh yeah, that's so hard, that's so rough. That must feel so bad. It's, I don't know, it's totally disturbing. And like dystopian.

Yeah, yeah. It talked to the machine. That's worse than talk to the hand. Yeah, yeah. But it affirms what you put into it. Can you flesh it out a little bit? Well, let's say you are, you know, you have a conflict with like your spouse. Oh my God, I was so frustrated that, you know, they did this and that.

It could just say, yeah, that must be, you know, that must just be so frustrating. Isn't that what we're supposed to do is affirm people in their beliefs? No, we need a... No! No! No! You sound mean! Yeah, I'm... I am mean, but that's what you need. You need, you know, you almost need that paternal energy in there where someone is going to hold your feet to the fire,

make you, you know, push you, make you grow, kind of encourage you to get outside of your comfort zone. You don't need that affirming energy. So it's not helpful to say, yes, you are a shitty person and that's okay. Not all the time. Yeah. How unpopular are you among other psychiatrists? Yeah, yeah, I'm unpopular among other psychiatrists and also in the media.

I'm a dangerous person. Why? Yeah, because I'm scaring people away from life-saving drugs. And I'm stigmatizing them because I have a message that mental illness is much more than just, chemicals in the brain and that there are other non-drug approaches that can be helpful. And that's bad? That is bad. So anyone who says your problems are more complicated than a single pill can solve,

that person is dangerous. Yeah, that person is dangerous. The person doesn't get it. And they're making people with mental illness feel bad about themselves because, gosh, you should just let them accept that they have a broken brain and there's nothing they can do about it. and to encourage them to look at it otherwise is just to harm them. You know, it's to make them feel bad about something that they can't change. Boy, that's the cruelest approach I can imagine to human suffering.

I mean, if you took that approach to cancer, what would that look like? You've got cancer. And here comes Dr. Yosef saying, actually, I could help you and take the tumor out. And then a bunch of screechy ladies are like, that's mean! You've got to affirm the person's cancer. Affirm that cancer, yeah, yeah. I really, I hope this interview is not throttled. I really appreciate your bravery and your directness and your very obvious compassion and empathy.

I don't think you're a mean person, obviously. You didn't go into this to hurt people clearly. Yeah. So thank you. Thank you for having me. We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor.

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