Bannon's War Room - August 13, 2026


WarRoom Battleground EP 1067： Pastor CR Wiley On Christian Nationalism And Sami Timimi On Big Pharma

Hosted by
Steve Bannon
Mentioned
Pastor Wiley John Witherspoon Thomas Jefferson Philip Patrick Sammy Tamimi Battleground Getter Yuval Noah Harari Stephen K. Band Leslie Newbigin Hillary Clinton Brian Johnson Jesus Christ Ray Kurzweil Benjamin Franklin Donald Trump Charlie Kirk Anno Domini Peter Thiel Doug Wilson and 9 more
WarRoom Battleground EP 1066： US Catholics In Shock As It’s Revealed 82% Of Catholic Bishops’ Revenue Is INVASION-Related Grants Episode 5588： USDA Spends Millions On Muslims In The US

Episode Stats


Length

54 minutes

Words per minute

138.02

Word count

7,485

Sentence count

331

Harmful content

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
00:00:07 Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people.
00:00:12 Here's one time I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
00:00:17 The people have had a belly full of it.
00:00:19 I know you don't like hearing that.
00:00:20 I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.
00:00:23 It's going to happen.
00:00:24 And where do people like that go to share the big line?
00:00:27 Mega Media.
00:00:29 I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
00:00:34 Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
00:00:38 If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
00:00:44 War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Band.
00:00:48 Thursday, 13th of August, Anno Domini, 2026.
00:00:59 Hanwell here at the helm on Steve Bannon's War Room.
00:01:03 Fantastic folks, fantastic show today.
00:01:06 Going to go straight into this now.
00:01:08 We've got one of the leading thinkers in Christian nationalism
00:01:11 joining us today from our friends over in the Protestant sphere,
00:01:15 the Presbyterian Sphere, Pastor C.R. Wiley, who's just booked out just a couple of weeks ago,
00:01:23 called Man Made, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse book. I particularly like the
00:01:33 philosophical approach here, that with the looming reality of the singularity and transhumanism on
00:01:43 the agenda all of these things that had sort of kept mankind's humility let's put it like that
00:01:51 in check um seem to be conquerable by science and that puts mankind in a certain question mark
00:02:00 position of how we're actually going to cope if these things these realities beyond our control
00:02:06 All those inhibitions on man's reach, if these things dissolve, what happens to mankind?
00:02:13 This is the great question.
00:02:15 Pastor Wiley, thank you very much for coming on to the war room.
00:02:19 Tell me a little bit now, most of our audience will actually be relatively fluent in the concept of transhumanism.
00:02:28 Thanks to Steve Bannon's pushing this along with Joe Allen for many years now.
00:02:34 Tell us your approach to the concept and why you decided to write this specific book, because I think it comes at a particular important time in both.
00:02:46 It's providential, really. It comes not only in America's history, but also mankind's path towards what mankind would like to believe, some elements of mankind would like to believe would be limitless potential.
00:03:04 So tell us why you've done this.
00:03:07 Obviously, as a pastor, there's going to be a very strong Christian theological element to this.
00:03:14 Right. Yeah, Ben, thanks for having me on.
00:03:16 When it comes to the inspiration behind it, the inspiration is simply the fact that we are living in a major shift in terms of our society, our culture.
00:03:29 there's a kind of tsunami that's washing over us right now and washing many things away that
00:03:36 we've taken for granted. And then the things that are emerging that this new technological
00:03:44 development has made possible are things that we're going to need to adjust to and find ways
00:03:51 to live with and remain human as we do so. You noted that the transhumanists are very enthusiastic
00:04:00 about these developments because they believe they can more or less use them to level up and
00:04:06 transcend the limitations that human beings have known in the past. And I'm pretty skeptical about
00:04:13 those claims, but I do believe that a lot of damage could be done in the name of transhumanism. 0.95
00:04:18 So those are some things that were on my mind as I explored this subject. 0.77
00:04:24 And as a pastor, I'm mostly interested in just how the people that I serve as a pastor are going to be affected by these developments
00:04:32 and what advice I could give them that hopefully will be helpful.
00:04:36 So that's what's behind the book.
00:04:38 could you tell me a little bit more about the the concept that these problems that mankind
00:04:46 has been wrestling with for let's say 4 000 years what what you think what you think happens to
00:04:54 mankind's concept of itself of himself when um things like death for example let's start with
00:05:03 the simplicities. Death is no longer treated as a problem that limits mankind, but as a
00:05:14 technological problem to overcome. How does mankind relate to, say, something like Christianity, 0.73
00:05:22 for example, whose promise is eternal life? But of course, the doorway through death is something
00:05:29 that we have to pass through if if if if mankind and i actually i i treat certain certain with a 0.98
00:05:36 certain skepticism some of the uh the promises of transhumans but let's take for the sake of
00:05:43 arguments that mankind is able to merge spiritually and physically with machines how does mankind deal
00:05:51 with the promises of Jesus Christ
00:05:55 in a world that no longer suffers human death?
00:06:00 I mean, from one perspective,
00:06:01 and it's a diabolical proposition,
00:06:04 but from one perspective,
00:06:06 does man actually have any need of Christ anymore
00:06:09 as the antidote to death
00:06:12 if we're no longer confronted with the prospect of dying?
00:06:18 Well, certainly people like you,
00:06:19 Yuval Noah Harari or Ray Kurzweil or Brian Johnson would say we don't.
00:06:26 Basically, they've tried to reconceive of what, you know, we've been promised as Christians in technological terms, basically engineering terms.
00:06:37 So historically, as Christians, we've understood the promise of eternal life and the resurrection of the body and so forth as being accomplished by the work of God.
00:06:50 What they've done is taken essentially the eschatological vision that Christians have had from the start and made it something that really is used to an engineering project. 0.87
00:07:05 And in order to do that, they've had to reduce human beings to machines.
00:07:08 So they often will kind of in a flippant way refer to human beings as meat machines.
00:07:13 And that consciousness is just simply something that is generated biochemically, but doesn't have any relationship to, say, older ideas or older convictions about the soul or the spirit.
00:07:27 So the prospect that we're dealing with now is basically human beings are, as Harari has said, understood as hackable animals.
00:07:36 And what we want to do, according to these folks, is essentially hack the animal and level up, make ourselves divine in a way that is the product of our own technical acumen.
00:07:51 And so, you know, two things, you know, one of the things, of course, that the transhumanists want to transcend is death, the sort of the hard limit on the end of life, that as we know it in the body, in the world as we experience it physically, but also expand consciousness, but also knowledge to the degree that artificial intelligence develops.
00:08:17 So there's a real, in order for all this to happen, there has to be a merger with the machine.
00:08:22 And Christians, of course, have always understood life in God, eternal life as being something that we enjoy because of our relationship with God through Christ.
00:08:31 But what these folks have in mind is something along that line.
00:08:35 But instead of God, we make God in our image, and then it makes it possible for us to live indefinitely.
00:08:44 so that's that's the challenge we've we're dealing with an alternative eschatology an
00:08:49 alternative vision of the end of the world do you um do you see this project as forgive me for for
00:08:58 just saying this coming out and saying this but do you do you see this project as fundamentally
00:09:03 satanic well yes i i think so uh i think that there are people who say that they're christians
00:09:12 who try to hold this all together.
00:09:16 Someone I think like Peter Thiel, I think, would qualify.
00:09:21 But what I think they've done is they've made a fatal error.
00:09:25 And I do think that what we're seeing is a recapitulation
00:09:30 of the first 11 chapters of Genesis.
00:09:34 There's a sense in which the temptations are the same,
00:09:37 the promises, the false promises are the same.
00:09:40 and we shouldn't be surprised this is something that doesn't just simply characterize a particular
00:09:46 moment in time in the past but the entire sweep of human history could be understood as this
00:09:52 temptation that that we revisit again and again and again to to make ourselves like gods
00:10:00 um tell me why did you choose saint anthony well when i was uh doing my work uh researching the
00:10:12 subject i mean ray kurzweil of course is a very prominent figure in transhumanist circles and
00:10:17 it occurred to me just as a like just a you know kind of as a flash of insight that the
00:10:22 that the antithesis for ray kurzweil was was anthony and so i thought well maybe there's
00:10:27 something Anthony has to say that could help me help us, help me help others think about
00:10:32 the temptation that we're facing and what is the Christian way of thinking about it and the
00:10:39 Christian hope. So I turned to him mainly as a way to do that, but also as a way to think about
00:10:45 the temptations that we are going to be subject to. So I think that there's going to be, the
00:10:50 temptations are going to be significant and very seductive. Most of them are going to be wrapped
00:10:56 up initially in the language of healthcare. But long term, what I think we're going to see is a
00:11:04 move from healthcare to basically approaches to, well, the transhumanist project where we're going
00:11:14 to be told that in order for us to become more intelligent, we're going to literally need to be
00:11:19 neurally linked to artificial intelligence. And if we're going to participate in the economy,
00:11:23 that'll be necessary as well i think these are the sorts of things that we're going to be
00:11:27 presented with as temptations uh and the antidote to temptations are fundamentally humility and
00:11:37 trust in god yeah i think that's right and i think we should recognize or remember that we already
00:11:43 have marvelous promises and those promises um are what are the source are the source of our hope
00:11:51 and the comfort that we have in life and in death.
00:11:55 So we shouldn't cash those promises in for something that's a fraudulent and a bad copy.
00:12:04 And I think that's what the transhumanist project can be summed up as. 0.91
00:12:12 Pastor Wiley, stay with me one moment.
00:12:14 I'll be back to continue our conversation in just two minutes.
00:12:17 It's time to give a shout out to the show's sponsor today, Birch Gold.
00:12:22 I'm going to start off.
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00:14:35 Okay, back now with Pastor Wiley.
00:14:38 Pastor Wiley, one of the reasons that I was particularly enthusiastic about speaking to you on the show
00:14:48 is because along with Pastor Doug Wilson, you are one of the great thinkers in America presently
00:14:54 fleshing out this concept of Christian nationalism.
00:14:58 I know you've got this
00:15:00 you're involved in this project
00:15:02 we won't go into details
00:15:03 now perhaps come back
00:15:04 and talk to us a little bit more
00:15:06 about Battleground
00:15:08 up in I think it's Washington State
00:15:09 isn't it
00:15:10 tell us more about that
00:15:12 but about Christian nationalism itself
00:15:16 I want to ask you
00:15:17 because there are some views
00:15:19 kicking around
00:15:20 you know and this
00:15:21 The War Room is definitely a show
00:15:23 that promotes Christian nationalism
00:15:25 in fact we like to suggest
00:15:27 It's one of the great arenas where Bible-believing conservative evangelicals can come together and work with traditionalist Catholics, putting aside the theology, putting aside the differences, but fundamentally fighting in the public square for a Christ-based culture and politics.
00:15:51 What I wanted to ask you, and I think some of your own thinking here has pushed up pretty closely on this, Christianity is not particularly tolerated even in the modern secular world.
00:16:06 But if it is tolerated, it's the form that leaves Christianity as no more than warm and fuzzy feelings, right?
00:16:19 But if you try to go straight, break out of the reservation, if you will, of warm and fuzzy feeling based Christianity and actually try to use biblical revelation, Old and New Testament biblical revelation as the basis of politics, well, then you really see the intolerance against Christianity. 0.74
00:16:44 I think that's what Christian nationalism promises.
00:16:48 Could you tell us a bit about your own work here,
00:16:51 specifically on the idea of a locally focused form of Christian nationalism?
00:16:57 And as the background of this, I'll just simply say this.
00:17:01 As I say, we don't really have time to go into it.
00:17:02 But one of your most famous contributions to the debate in Battleground
00:17:08 is this idea that the Ten Commandments should be the basis of law.
00:17:12 Now, of course, that's going to be meat and two veg to pretty much all of the audience, pretty much standard fare, but leaving the rarefied confines of MAGA world and going out into the secular sphere, they think that, you know, they start sort of dreaming up ideas of sort of that, those handmaidens with the red robes and the white hats and all this.
00:17:39 in your own words, Pastor Wiley, what do you mean by Christian nationalism? And why do you think
00:17:45 now is a particularly providential time to be working towards that? Well, I believe in nations
00:17:53 for one thing, and I do believe that nations are informed by some kind of vision of what's best
00:18:00 and the good. And so consequently, as a Christian, I can't help but say, this is best, this is good,
00:18:08 this is true. I was strongly influenced years ago in the early 1990s by a book by a fellow named
00:18:14 Leslie Newbigin entitled Truth to Tell, The Gospel is Public Truth. And essentially what he was
00:18:20 dealing with was this tendency that we have to privatize and neuter the Christian faith.
00:18:29 That's simply not something that we can reconcile with the American experience.
00:18:34 For example, John Witherspoon, who was a Presbyterian and a minister and a college president, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
00:18:43 This is one of those things where you can just say, well, how do you reconcile the fact that this fellow not only was one of the signers, but one of the most influential forces in the Continental Congress and so forth and did so much to train so many of our leaders?
00:19:03 So it's not true then that the founders are just basically a bunch of deists who believe in the mechanical god sort of thing.
00:19:15 That's just a happy, fond reinvention of the secularists.
00:19:21 Yeah, I think that's correct.
00:19:23 I mean, maybe we can say some things about Jefferson and Franklin, but what do you do with Witherspoon?
00:19:28 You know, this is a guy who actually went out and preached and rallied Presbyterians in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to support the cause of the American Revolution.
00:19:41 And he did so explicitly in biblical language.
00:19:44 He appealed to the covenant and how, you know, the king had violated the terms of the covenant and consequently the people had a right to rise up and rebel.
00:19:56 So everything he, you know, we can say about his influence and his work was informed by his Christian faith.
00:20:04 He didn't put it on the shelf.
00:20:05 He didn't say, oh, well, you know, this is not something that should be spoken about in public.
00:20:12 So since that's the case, and I think we could go through the Founding Fathers and find many other examples,
00:20:19 I wouldn't waste any time trying to, you know, sort of read the mind of Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin or even John Adams.
00:20:28 But I can say that, you know, those fellows didn't have any, those men didn't have any problem working with John Witherspoon.
00:20:36 So on that point alone, I think we have a basis historically for saying Christian leaders can speak publicly and without apology or without any kind of self-censorship when it comes to their Christian convictions and how those inform government.
00:20:54 So I think that's important for me as I reflect on my role as a pastor in public life, whether we're talking about in a local environment like a place like Battleground or beyond.
00:21:12 Sometimes I describe myself as post-secular in the sense that I don't think that secularism has a future.
00:21:19 I think its days are numbered, and I've been thinking about doing some work on that, but I don't have much to share about it yet.
00:21:29 But I did spend time at Harvard Divinity School.
00:21:32 I lived in Cambridge for a decade between Harvard and MIT.
00:21:35 I have a pretty, you know, I guess a good sample when it comes to kind of the thinking of secularists
00:21:47 and people on the progressive end of the left spectrum, lived with them, talked to them, worked with them for years.
00:21:55 So I didn't expect my convictions on this matter to be warmly received.
00:22:02 It was just kind of, you know, it's just a fact that there are people who really are banking on a kind of secular utopia and don't have any room for people like me.
00:22:17 But I don't intend to be quiet about the subject.
00:22:20 what do you think is going to be the prospect for the development of christian nationalism
00:22:28 in america specifically over the course of the next generation do you think it's going to
00:22:34 depend at all on who's in the white house i mean i i asked that because under a certain
00:22:39 uh under a certain light it would appear that the movement has grown a lot since the time that
00:22:47 that donald trump has been on the political scene do you um for you know for certain obvious reasons
00:22:52 because he's shown conservative biblically biblical christians that they can win um at the
00:23:00 whether what they're getting is always what they intended when they voted is a separate question
00:23:05 as it always is um but it indicates that this that the inevitability of of the the liberal
00:23:12 progressive agenda as exemplified say by hillary clinton can actually be blocked um if enough
00:23:19 people come together do you think that that's what i mean when i say this do you think that
00:23:23 that the movement of christian nationalism can now move forward and continue to grow irrespective
00:23:30 of of who's going to be in the white house over the over the overcoming years i think so i think
00:23:38 the primary reason for that is the failures of the promises that have been made on the left.
00:23:46 I think those are becoming more and more evident, less, I think people are finding it less
00:23:53 plausible that those things can be explained away. And in the values vacuum, I think there
00:23:58 are people who are hungry for something to fill it. They want something to fill it. And when it
00:24:05 comes to the Christian faith, I think that the Christian faith, because it's true, I don't 1.00
00:24:10 believe it. Let me put it this way. Christianity isn't true because I believe it. I believe it 1.00
00:24:16 because it's true. And because I have that conviction, I'm going to make that case.
00:24:22 These things are true. And I think that those truths should inform our public life,
00:24:29 our entertainment uh and so forth now how that is carried out how that it's all instituted that's
00:24:35 all open you know we can talk about that but i do think something's going to fill the void
00:24:40 we've got like a minute left i just want to ask you if you can give me a minute answer on this
00:24:46 as a pastor as a theologian as a public commentator why do you um i absolutely agree with
00:24:53 you that secularism um has really had its moment because it's manifestly failing my question is
00:25:00 why is it that christ you know because everybody is seeing the same set of facts right why is it
00:25:08 christians can look at these facts and say yep secularism's failing but the secularists themselves
00:25:13 aren't reaching the same conclusion well i think it's because their hearts are in secularism and
00:25:21 it's a very difficult thing to admit that your God has failed or the things that you believed
00:25:26 to be the case didn't work. So I'm not surprised. I think that there will be a lot of folks who just
00:25:35 go to their graves holding on to the convictions that they have concerning, you know, secularism
00:25:43 and so forth. And I'm related to some of these people. It's not like these people are aliens to
00:25:47 me i mean they're in my family you know so um i i but i but i do believe that the time is up
00:25:55 and that it's going to become harder and harder for them to justify and and it's not that it's
00:26:00 not just christians who are looking to fill the vacuum there are lots of other groups that will
00:26:04 try to too as as we mentioned on the show yesterday the that in europe the um the numbers of adult
00:26:12 baptisms in the most secular of places on the planet are increasing year by year pastor chris
00:26:18 wiley author of man-made saint anthony's guide to surviving the ai apocalypse thanks very much
00:26:24 for coming on the show very quickly where do people on social media reach out to you or follow
00:26:29 your analysis well i'm on x and i'm on facebook so those are a couple of places that i'm you know
00:26:37 checking in on every day that's cr x cr wiley 1962 um pastor wiley many thanks indeed
00:26:47 do come back uh again at some point back in two minutes after this short break
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00:32:10 thing welcome back well earlier this week folks you might have seen the images from the oval
00:32:18 office as President Trump just announced the new guidelines separating out a number of vaccines
00:32:27 because of the concern that they might be primary causes of autism.
00:32:37 Therefore, we have the author, I think, of one of the key books in the field,
00:32:44 Not necessarily related to the idea, the make America healthy again, idea of separating out the vaccines, but going into the idea of whether things like autism, for example, or the attention deficit disorder are over overly defined, overly diagnosed.
00:33:12 whether they're even condition neurological conditions at all sammy timimi the author of
00:33:19 searching for normal a new approach to understanding mental health distress and
00:33:24 neurodiversity the book came out in 2025 but i think it's particularly um providential
00:33:33 at this moment in time sammy welcome on to the show i'm gonna get your you to break down for us
00:33:39 If you wouldn't mind, in about 10 minutes, just your reaction to the news I was mentioning about the changing of the guidelines with regards to the vaccine schedules and separating them out a bit.
00:33:52 What I really wanted to, as someone who has practiced as a psychiatrist yourself professionally and a psychologist as well, if I'm not mistaken, both disciplines, I'd like to ask you what it is you mean for a non-specialized audience, what it is you mean when you question whether something like autism is in fact a neurological condition?
00:34:22 Well, in my work, and particularly in this latest book, I've been questioning the whole idea of mental health, how we think about it, how we categorize it.
00:34:34 And I've tried my best to point out that the way we've categorized and understood what we call mental health is based on a set of subjective ideas that don't have any empirical support within the science.
00:34:54 So all our definitions of mental health, and that includes our definitions of autism and ADHD and the whole neurodiversity paradigm, are based on subjective ideas.
00:35:08 They don't track to any definitive biological or indeed psychological correlate that you can measure in any empirical way.
00:35:19 So there is an important difference to understand between something like how we define something like, say, diabetes.
00:35:28 We don't define diabetes by reference to the sorts of symptoms that you may experience,
00:35:36 because common symptoms like, for example, feeling thirsty, going to the toilet a lot, fatigue,
00:35:43 can appear with a number of different conditions,
00:35:45 but also diabetes itself may not present in that way at all.
00:35:49 We define diabetes by reference to blood sugar that's too high.
00:35:55 And whilst there may be all sorts of discussions about how high blood sugar should be before we define it as diabetes, there's no discussion about the idea of blood sugar.
00:36:08 Blood sugar is a measurable quantity.
00:36:12 And you can then track what happens to treatment.
00:36:15 But when it comes to mental health conditions, we're talking about things that are defined by subjective means.
00:36:23 For example, if you take something like ADHD, it's defined by reference to certain behaviors.
00:36:31 And all the so-called symptoms, they're not symptoms really, not in a medical sense, they're just behaviors, start with the word often.
00:36:39 So take, for example, the idea of often squirms in their seat, which is one of the things that are listed as symptoms.
00:36:50 Well, how often is often? At what age? What's a unit of squirm? How much movement do you have to have?
00:36:57 So the problem with all these definitions is that, in fact, we literally don't know what we're talking about when it comes to many mental health conditions.
00:37:07 and particularly in the neurodiversity area, which means that in certain circumstances,
00:37:16 these definitions can be expanded. And that's what's happened. We're in a time, I believe,
00:37:23 where culturally speaking and economically speaking and politically speaking, there is a lot
00:37:30 of uncertainty. People are feeling insecure, lonely. They don't have a sense of things that
00:37:39 give them meaning beyond narrow consumer choices. And in those circumstances, these definitions can
00:37:49 expand, and they've expanded horizontally by including lesser extremes of behavior,
00:37:55 and they've expanded vertically by changing the criteria
00:37:59 to introduce new populations.
00:38:03 And there's a lot of people making a lot of money
00:38:05 by this kind of quackery that's going on.
00:38:09 Okay, a couple of things there that I want to ask you about.
00:38:15 Firstly, if a mental illness doesn't manifest
00:38:22 and actual objective symptoms, characteristics
00:38:29 that you can point out on an X-ray and say, look, there it is.
00:38:33 Were you suggesting that no mental illnesses, inverted commas, exist?
00:38:41 What I'm suggesting is... 0.66
00:38:43 Sorry, yeah.
00:38:45 No, please go ahead.
00:38:47 What I'm suggesting is that the paradigm, if you like,
00:38:50 the framework that we use for understanding what we're referring to as mental illnesses
00:38:56 is not the one that is supported by our current scientific knowledge.
00:39:06 What is important for us to do is to understand that our way of thinking about and classifying
00:39:18 and dealing with, if you like, distress, mental suffering is something that requires a different
00:39:26 framework for understanding. One of the things that we have in common as humans is that we want
00:39:35 to make sense of our situations. But the meaning making framework that we use has a profound effect
00:39:43 on how we interpret the the experiences that we are having so if you take a meaning making
00:39:52 framework that tells you that what your distress or your discomfort or your loneliness or your
00:39:59 sense of alienation is because there's something wrong in you that in itself can reinforce an idea
00:40:08 that there is something that you have no control over,
00:40:12 something that you need to maybe take a pill for,
00:40:15 something that maybe you need to go for a lot of therapy for
00:40:19 to try and fix something within you.
00:40:22 But if you take a different meaning-making framework,
00:40:26 that suffering is part of the human condition
00:40:29 and that the ways we respond to that can be quite meaningful
00:40:36 and that we need people around us to help us,
00:40:41 and that can include professionals,
00:40:44 you enter a different meaning-making framework
00:40:47 where the chances for recovery and making progress
00:40:52 and finding meaning in your suffering increases.
00:40:55 um you're not um you're not exactly an outsider here with these ideas and i misspoke earlier
00:41:07 when i said psychiatrist i meant psychotherapist you've practiced as a psych excuse me you've
00:41:13 practiced as a psychiatrist and a psycho and psychotherapist i think i put in the wrong term
00:41:19 in the introduction.
00:41:22 So you're not an outsider then with these contributions.
00:41:26 How much are they accepted by the rest of the scientific community?
00:41:35 Within psychiatry, this would be considered a minority view,
00:41:43 but it is a significant minority.
00:41:45 There are, I mean, I'm part of, and I'm currently the co-chair of something called the Critical Psychiatry Network, and we have hundreds of doctors on that network who are basically saying that we've got it wrong.
00:42:00 We've got it wrong for a long time in the way that we approach distress and in the way that we try and help people deal with distress.
00:42:11 Within the broader psychotherapy community, I'm probably in the majority.
00:42:15 I think a lot of people have been scratching their heads and thinking, what the hell is going on at the moment?
00:42:23 How is it that we've got more services than ever?
00:42:26 We've got more publicity, more anti-stigma campaigns, etc.
00:42:30 And yet our mental health as a society seems to be getting worse.
00:42:34 This is sometimes referred to as the treatment prevention paradox.
00:42:38 If the approach that we were taking was actually improving our mental health, we should not see this continuous increase in the numbers of people who become long-term mental health patients, who become disabled by their mental health condition.
00:42:55 We should not be seeing that as a society.
00:42:58 so that we have there's general agreement that we've got things badly wrong and that we need
00:43:05 to rethink how we approach mental distress and mental suffering sammy timimi bear with me for
00:43:14 30 seconds i'm going to come back and continue this conversation in just a moment time to give
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00:44:37 We're continuing the conversation now with Sammy Tamimi, author of Searching for Normal.
00:44:45 Sammy, when I was sort of reading up on the background of your book
00:44:48 and your thesis, the question that came to my mind most often
00:44:54 is how is it that the medical industry has got this wrong
00:45:00 so much and so repeatedly?
00:45:03 And I don't want to put the words into your mouth,
00:45:06 but is it basically big pharma?
00:45:10 Is it basically that the whole of the medical profession has been guided towards medication as the solution to things like you're saying suffering to various degrees of mental health?
00:45:26 Where your approach, I think, seems to be, if I use the word holistic, you're more involved in bringing in the family, bringing in the local community to help people through, if I may put it like this, a non-medicated form of a non-medicated solution.
00:45:47 Would that be about right as your approach?
00:45:51 I think that's on the right lines.
00:45:54 In terms of drivers, what would be behind this is there are many factors.
00:46:03 And big pharma is an important one because they have the money.
00:46:08 And I think big pharma realized a long time ago that in order to find profits in a very lucrative area and a very poorly defined,
00:46:21 And as I say, something that's very subjectively defined is that you have to promote the diagnoses.
00:46:29 So they involved themselves in promoting diagnoses, for example, the idea that depression is a discrete, identifiable condition that is treatable by things that they started to mislabel as antidepressants.
00:46:47 There's no such thing as an antidepressant, by the way.
00:46:49 These are just substances that affect your mental state, have lots of problems in terms of side effects and withdrawal issues and so on.
00:46:59 And you keep those quiet and you've opened up a market.
00:47:03 However, what happened since then is that a lot of other things came on the coattails of that.
00:47:11 So you've developed what I call a whole mental health industrial complex, which includes a lot of different sectors that make a significant amount of profit out of medicalizing distress and suffering.
00:47:27 So therapies, books, journals, podcasts, courses, influencers, et cetera, et cetera, and very expensive assessments.
00:47:41 So there's a whole range of products that get associated with the lucrative diagnoses, the lucrative diagnoses like ADHD, autism, bipolar, depression, anxiety disorder.
00:47:58 These became big moneymakers.
00:48:03 I wish I had more time to talk to you about this.
00:48:07 We're not going to I don't know if we're going to have time to ask you to tell me what your take is on the president's changing of the guidelines and separating out.
00:48:17 Yeah, look, we've got three minutes left.
00:48:19 What is your what was your because obviously a huge part of our audience is fully on board with the make America healthy again agenda.
00:48:26 And there is an overlap in a philosophical overlap in what you're saying here.
00:48:30 And I'd like to ask you more. We can't do it for lack of time about to say more about what you mean when you say there's no such thing as antidepressants, because a lot of people are on them.
00:48:41 I guess a lot of some people who in sheer terms of numerical averages, there'll be people who follow this show who will have been given a prescription by their doctor for antidepressants.
00:48:54 We, you know, we should talk more about that.
00:48:56 But as someone who's practiced as a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist, tell me just what was your take? And someone who's written this book then, Searching for Normal, what was your take this week on the president's changing the guidelines? Because a lot of people are interested in this.
00:49:16 well i'm not sure that in itself will make much of a difference i mean
00:49:25 anything that maybe reduces the load because because because the starting point you don't
00:49:34 you don't necessarily believe that autism as a lot of people think of it as a diagnosable
00:49:40 condition actually does exist so if it's if if it's a question mark over its over over its
00:49:47 neurological basis then you'd work backwards and say then perhaps it's it's not a vaccine-led thing
00:49:54 right okay exactly autism started as uh being defined as a condition that was considered to
00:50:02 be extremely rare. And the original prevalence was something like four in 10,000 of children
00:50:12 who were significantly disabled in many ways, who had moderate to severe learning difficulties
00:50:20 and were unlikely to be able to live independent lives and had considerable clinical, social
00:50:31 and educational needs that required a lot of support. But now autism spans all the way up
00:50:37 to people like Einstein, who've been suggested to have autism. In other words, in terms of
00:50:43 functioning, we've taken the full human spectrum of functioning right from people who are likely
00:50:49 to require considerable amount of support for the rest of their lives, right up to the geniuses
00:50:57 who have shaped science, culture, and our world more broadly.
00:51:03 So it's fairly obvious that the needs of people at that end of the spectrum
00:51:09 are different to the needs of the people who require a lot of support.
00:51:15 And because unless we disentangle this confusion,
00:51:19 we don't know what we're dealing with when we talk about a link between vaccines and autism.
00:51:24 so it's your your thesis is primarily that the issues is big pharma is the medical communities
00:51:32 what did you call that the industrial the medical the mental health industrial complex yeah it's
00:51:39 it's they're rushing to diagnose autism which is fundamentally the issue rather than than lumping
00:51:46 get a certain yeah the expansion of that concept yeah fantastic um sammy tamimi author of searching
00:51:56 for normal the book is available on um on uh amazon uh where do people go to follow you
00:52:03 either to to get the book or to follow you on social media well i mean i've got a website
00:52:10 sammytomimi.co.uk and i'm on x um where my handle i think is at s to me and occasionally i'm on
00:52:21 instagram which is at um i think it's dr underscore sammy to me and the x you're absolutely right is
00:52:30 s to me many thanks indeed to rob a real america's voice and to vittorio santi franco for putting
00:52:38 this show together. Steve, back at 10 a.m. tomorrow. If you're 65 or already on Medicare,
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