Ep 1278 ｜ Former FDA Official Unveils Pharma’s Shocking Lies About Depression ｜ Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per Minute
176.66124
Summary
A former FDA medical officer and a former drug safety officer, Dr. Yosef gives us an inside look into the corruption that is going on at the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry. He tells us scientifically how these so-called antidepressants are actually making people sicker, more depressed, and more anxious.
Transcript
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A former FDA medical officer and a former drug safety officer for the pharmaceutical
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industry, Dr. Yosef gives us an inside look into the corruption that is going on at the
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He tells us scientifically how these so-called antidepressants are actually making people
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This is a fascinating, completely enlightening conversation about what is really happening
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at our med schools, in the pharmaceutical industry, what is going on in the government
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You've got to listen to this full conversation.
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It's brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers.
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Go to goodranchers.com, use code Allie, and check out this goodranchers.com, code Allie.
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Dr. Yosef, thanks so much for taking the time to join us.
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Could you tell everyone who you are and what you do?
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So I'm a psychiatrist, and what I do now is I help people come off psychiatric medications.
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And so I guess I went through this sort of roundabout journey where I did traditional psychiatry.
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I ended up in the pharmaceutical industry developing drugs, and then in the FDA regulating them.
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And the abbreviated version of that is like once you see how the sausage is made in the
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factory, you're just like, I'm never going to touch that again.
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And so I looked at the evidence behind a lot of it, and I really think one of the best things
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that we can be doing right now is actually helping people come off the medications and
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find more sustainable ways to address their mental health.
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I got into psychiatry just because I was naturally interested in personal development, philosophy,
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It was something I was always into from a young age.
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And I ended up in medical school, and this interest in personal development stuck, and
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then I started thinking, oh, wow, there's this thing called psychiatry where I could merge
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my interest in medicine and the body, but also this enduring interest that I've had in
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And so I became a psychiatrist, and I had this idea that I would go into training, and
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I would see these patients, and I'd be like this quarterback, and we'd be helping them
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with their relationships or with their physical health, with their diet, and maybe with their
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But what I saw when I got to my intern year and then throughout residency was it was not
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It started, it really looked like a conveyor belt, like a production line, like patients
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would come in, they'd fill out this questionnaire, they'd get a diagnosis.
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You really wouldn't understand that much about their life, and then you would give them a
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And I'm like, where are all these other people who should be helping?
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You know, it was really hard to get access to therapists, you know, we hardly ever talked
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about nutrition or sleep, faith, or, you know, values on how to live.
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It was like, you have this mental illness, you know, we diagnosed you on this checklist,
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and don't worry, we've got the solution right here.
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And intuitively, I was just like, something just seems off about that.
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Like, how could you actually help someone if you don't really understand their life and
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But asking those questions was kind of dissuaded.
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It was just like, you know, you really don't want to go there, Yosef.
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Like, it's, you know, these patients, you know, they're stigmatized enough.
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We don't want to bring up, you know, we don't want to make them question the medications.
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They're safe and effective, you know, this is what the experts say.
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And so, yeah, there was this constant, like, sort of push away from, you know, push from
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academia to not really, like, kind of dig at this question about, like, is it really, like,
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a sustainable way to, like, help people by just, like, drugging the symptoms?
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Um, and so, you know, I, I kept on, on poking at that and I eventually decided that there's
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enough here for me to be, like, really suspicious about what's going on.
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I mean, I'm probably 26 when I'm in internship.
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And then I did my residency at Biola College of Medicine.
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So you stayed in Australia for med school and then you came to the States.
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So that's where you started seeing, okay, this is like a conveyor belt to use your words
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that people come in, they say, I feel like this, they check things off a list and that
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Did you notice that also in medical school in Australia?
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Well, I did, but I wasn't clued into it in the same way.
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I mean, I just, you know, the, the medical school education that a lot of doctors get
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is that there's this thing called depression, it's probably biological and we have these
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drugs called SSRIs and they increase serotonin and there's probably something about that that's
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And so you're just like, okay, okay, you know, whatever, you know, this is what my professors
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But that like interface where you're at, because what really brings it to life is when you're
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working with patients in the clinic and you start noticing things, you're like, well,
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okay, so I put this person on, you know, a low dose of Lexapro, which is a very common
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And can you tell us, remind us what SSRI stands for?
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So it's a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
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It's, it's, it's a hormone in the brain that is involved in your mood.
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And for a really long time, doctors have been telling people that, um, if you're anxious
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or depressed, it's probably because you have low serotonin.
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It's just a very simplified and reductionistic way of understanding it, which is, which is
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Um, so you'd give them Lexapro and then, you know, they cut and yeah, it would work
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They'd say, okay, I feel, you know, I feel a little bit less anxious.
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And then they come back six months later and the, and they're just like, I only feel
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it 10% or I don't even feel like it's doing anything anymore.
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And so you increase the dose and then they come back a year later and the same thing happens.
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And you're starting to notice that when I put people on these medications for quite
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a large group of them, they just become tolerant to the effect.
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You know, we're not really correcting any chemical imbalance.
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It's just like the, the drug effect is wearing off.
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And then you would start to see people like stacking on drugs.
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We're going to put you on some Seroquel, but now you're kind of fatigued and we're going
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And so it's really, once you get in there, you, you see that this kind of narrative about,
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You know, it's not, you know, that they're wearing off over time and we're stacking them
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on top of each other and patients, they just don't look good.
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I mean, you, you would look at people that have like a list of five different medications.
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I mean, they're hardly, they're hardly doing well at all.
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I mean, they're quality, you know, they're, they're blunted.
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They're having problems sleeping, you know, their sex drive is annihilated, they're gaining
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And, you know, the, what I was always told at the time was like, oh, this person just
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It's like, it was like mild at the start when they went through the divorce, you know,
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but this scary biological thing has just like changed.
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You know, don't look at the fact that, you know, they've been on drugs for, you know,
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Don't look at that as maybe one of the reasons why they're not doing well.
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You know, it's just their underlying condition.
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That's morphing, which is obviously like a really easy way to just, you know, stack on
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more drugs, just to increase doses and really not have to look at the fact that the model
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And so when I started to see that as well, like one is like the theoretical stuff just
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But like in practice, I'm just like, my patients aren't getting better.
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There's something really off about this way of trying to help people.
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And when we're diagnosing other things that you medicate, like a thyroid disorder, you
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have to take a blood test and there's a certain level that if it's not producing enough
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T3 or T4, you, you know, get on artificial, you know, thyroid hormones to help you.
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But with how you're describing the diagnosis for putting people on these powerful drugs,
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there's not a blood test or a brain test, right?
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That shows you exactly this is what your serotonin level is.
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Is it basically just a guess based on a survey?
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And so in the, you know, in the DSM, it's, they make you pick from nine symptoms.
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And it's like, if you have five out of nine of these symptoms, so it's like low mood,
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anxiety, sleep problems, like, you know, lack of interest in things, you know, feelings
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It's just like a very arbitrary list of symptoms that kind of make sense.
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You know, they make sense for people who are depressed.
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And the way the people who wrote this diagnostic manual wanted to define depression was like,
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oh, well, if you just have any combination of five of them out of nine, we'll say you
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And a lot of people don't understand that it is really arbitrary.
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And they think that, oh, I have major depressive disorder.
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And it was, I was given this diagnosis by my doctor or I have clinical depression.
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It's like, they almost assume that there's been this additional step where there was
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like a blood test or a brain scan, or there was something that really like made sense to
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I've always thought of psychiatrists as people who are talking to the client or talking to
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the patient and giving them advice and trying to understand their circumstance.
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But what you're describing doesn't sound like that.
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It sounds kind of like a very quick interaction of someone saying, I feel sad.
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Was there any kind of like relational aspect when you're meeting with these patients?
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So psychiatrists in general do a better job of that because we get a lot of training on,
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you know, relationships and trauma and all of that.
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Where the big issue is happening in the US and in much of the sort of the Western medicalized
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world right now is within family medicine because depression is so common.
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80% of our prescriptions are being handed out by family med docs.
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But even within psychiatry and many people, if they've ever seen a psychiatrist will have
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noticed this, there are incentives that make it so the doctors want to see you in a very
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So like the aim of the game is like billing insurance in this country.
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And so you like if you saw one person for an hour versus four people in an hour and shorter
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visits, it works out that you essentially make double by seeing four people within an hour.
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And so even though you have psychiatrists out there who may know a lot about your, you
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know, prior history of trauma, you know, nutrition, exercise, they may be motivated and, you know,
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they want to help you come off, you know, harmful substances and things like that.
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There's always this like pressure where it's like, well, I need to kind of turn through these
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And so that pushes it all in this one direction where it's just like this very in and out
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interaction where it's like, okay, are we going up on the drug?
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And that's a very common experience for people interacting with doctors these days.
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Why do you think as you were an intern and you were going through your residency, you started
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to be troubled by this process because I'm sure you had, you know, a lot of friends who
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were going through the same process who weren't really troubled by it.
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So what is it about you that made you say, oh, I don't know.
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And this, I mean, this can sound kind of funny, right?
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Like a lot of people would be like, yeah, sure.
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You know, surely doctors, they just want to understand the truth.
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You know, they just want to get into the issue because they really want to help people.
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And that is just the main thing that drives them.
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But there's all these other incentives at play, you know, when you're in a career.
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And a big one for doctors is to fit in and to kind of-
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It's like, okay, well, this is what my professor is saying.
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I'm not going to, I'm just going to go with the flow.
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And that's like a really strong driver for people.
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It's just, you know, I want to play nice in the sandbox and fit in with my peers.
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If I don't understand something, it gets under my skin and I just have to pick and pick and pick.
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And that's kind of how I was, you know, in the drug companies and the FDA, like really just
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obsessively trying to figure out what was going on.
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I always like to ask the, like the troublemakers about that.
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It could have been something in their upbringing too, but just something just makes them, whether
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Her whole family was completely bought in, but from a young age, there was just something
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I guess it is a personality trait and I'm very grateful for it.
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So you said that you started asking questions while you were a resident, but that it was
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Like, I mean, it looks like people saying, you know, you, you bring them up and then
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It's almost like, you know, Yosef, if you keep on, you know, talking about these things,
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you're going to scare people away from the medications.
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You're going to scare them away from life-saving drugs.
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And by saying these things just like, Hey, why are we treating this like a conveyor belt?
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It's like, you know, there's always this feeling there, like you've missed the memo.
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Like, it's like, Hey, everyone else got the memo.
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We don't question the fact that these drugs were off over time.
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We don't question the fact that the studies to support these medications coming onto the
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market were only three months long and we put people on them for decades.
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And whether the brain is really even designed to be in a drug state for decades at a time
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It's like everyone else in the program got the memo that we don't ask those questions
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And so there's just this constant like awkwardness when, when you would bring it up and it's just
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like, it's like, don't, you know, we don't, we don't go there.
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And if you push, they eventually say, well, people with mental illness, you know, they're
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And if you ask these questions, you're actually shaming them and you're going to push them towards
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And so then you get this veiled threat that if you're like questioning these things,
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And, you know, the more, and the more I looked at it, I mean, all of this is just a crafted
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I mean, there's a drug company, you know, there's a pharmaceutical industry.
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They have a lot of influence and they can shape the way we talk about issues because they have
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And anytime there's like, you know, a problem with a drug or someone commits suicide unexpectedly,
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or there's a school shooting, you know, they have their team ready to go that says there's
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And on top of that, the people who say there is evidence of this, you know, they're in it
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for the notoriety and they're actually really dangerous.
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And so it creates this climate where it's just like, shut up, don't bring it up because
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And the best PR campaigns are the ones that you don't know exist.
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It's just like, oh, why do I have this thought about this person?
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And the same thing is true when it comes to pharmaceuticals, but you did kind of go into
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So, I mean, after residency, I end up in the pharmaceutical industry, you know, as a drug
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It's someone who's responsible for understanding the safety profile of the drug and writing
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the labels for the drug, which communicates the most important information to the doctors
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so they can have conversations with their patients and monitor the patients well.
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Did you go into that thinking that you were going to cause trouble, like be a disruptor?
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I went into it from a place where I was like, I'm really troubled about these drugs and I
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actually don't want to practice clinically because I can see the constraints in the system
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where it's like, I have to treat people in 15 minutes.
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I don't really think I can do a good job there.
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But what I'm really into is understanding this evidence and maybe I can better characterize
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the safety issues, the things that I'm really concerned about, you know, the drugs wearing
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Maybe I can better understand that and then convey that to the public.
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And I, as is normal, like I kind of bounced around my actual, my first gig in the pharmaceutical
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That was like my, my step in the door was doing a cancer drug development and we had developed
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a drug and we, you know, they, you know, it was going to the market.
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We'd been working on it for a really long time.
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And the pharmacovigilance team, that's sorry, drugs, the drug safety team, they were really
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interested in publishing a manuscript about all of the safety issues.
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They said, you know, we've been developing this drug for 10 years.
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Let's take all of this information that we know and publish it.
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So doctors who want to learn from us can, and we would have leadership come down to us
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Like we already have some of this information, very abbreviated in the drug label.
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We don't want to make a bigger issue of this than it is already.
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You know, they're thinking like, if we make a manuscript about the safety issues, our competitors
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out there are going to grab that thing and they're going to walk around to all of the
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doctors and just say, use our drug because look at this manuscript, which is really there
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But did you know it causes this problem and this problem and this problem?
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And so I quickly learned within the pharmaceutical industry, like to the extent they possibly
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can, they will always be minimizing the risks associated with the drug because it's life
00:21:48.580
You know, when it's like, when you're in a marketplace and there's multiple other drugs,
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And if people, if doctors are worried about the safety of your drug, it's like, boom,
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And that's why you really don't get reliable information out of them.
00:22:09.120
It's, they will do everything that they can to make doctors view the drug in the best possible
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light without like kind of stepping over the line into something that's blatantly fraudulent.
00:22:28.540
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If we ask our doctors, well, what are the side effects?
00:23:40.280
They don't even know the full picture because they have to rely on the pharmaceutical companies
00:23:46.240
And it gets, I mean, there's a part of this that's even darker because when you think about,
00:23:55.240
And a lot of the time it's the people who train them.
00:23:58.260
You know, the professors who are leading the institutions and, and these people are called,
00:24:03.720
you know, the drug companies refer to them as key opinion leaders.
00:24:07.020
And so these are the people at the top of Harvard and Stanford and Yale, UCSF, all of these places.
00:24:13.960
And when I was in the, when I was in the industry, I would notice that we would work with these people
00:24:24.360
And, and so you would have a drug company, they would have like a manuscript and then
00:24:31.580
they would get a publisher to write, so they'd have a drug company has a clinical trial.
00:24:37.380
They get a publisher to write up that study in a completely biased way, you know, that,
00:24:41.920
you know, overhypes the benefits, minimizes the risk.
00:24:44.360
And then they shop around for academics to put their name on the, on the authorship line.
00:24:51.000
Um, and yeah, and you may be asking, yeah, why, why would an academic do that?
00:24:57.120
Like, why would someone compromise their integrity in that way?
00:25:00.960
And it has to do with how people get promotions within an academic system.
00:25:05.320
So if you want to become a professor at a place, you do that by collecting these feathers
00:25:11.140
in your hat, you know, so it's lots of publications on your CV, it's lots of international talks.
00:25:16.440
Um, and, and once you have enough of those, you can say, Hey, you go to the dean of the
00:25:28.780
And what academics learn, especially in psychiatry, but I think this is happening in a lot of medicine
00:25:34.300
is one of the best ways to do this is by running drug company studies.
00:25:38.380
And so very early on in their career, they start to be heavily involved in clinical trials.
00:25:44.240
And so instead of having to do their own research or apply to the government agencies for grants,
00:25:49.980
which is very time consuming, they go, okay, Janssen or Pfizer or Eli Lilly, I'm going to help you.
00:25:56.480
And when they do that, they get the protocol done for them.
00:25:59.460
They get the support staff, they get the funding, um, people write the manuscripts for them.
00:26:05.760
It's, it's like the fast track to, to getting to the top.
00:26:10.360
And so what this has created in, in a lot of medicine, especially in psychiatry,
00:26:15.320
is that you have this upper echelon of people who are heavily biased, uh, towards the drug
00:26:22.300
companies because they're kind of reliant on them for career advancement.
00:26:26.760
Um, and so, you know, people in the community, um, who aren't aware of what's going on, they go,
00:26:32.180
Hey, there's a professor at Harvard who says SSRIs are the ants pants.
00:26:37.740
They're just thinking to themselves, you know, Harvard's a great institution.
00:26:41.780
One of the best institutions in the world, this guy at the top, he's probably there because
00:26:46.240
he's the smartest, most ethical and, you know, a very moral person.
00:26:51.040
And so that's, and so they go, I'm going to believe him, but they're not really understanding
00:26:54.980
that that person's there because essentially he's become a shill for the drug company because
00:27:01.160
Um, and so you mentioned a moment ago, some of the most persuasive marketing is the marketing
00:27:08.420
And one of the main ways that it's happening right now is that the academic elite has been
00:27:17.580
And so you're learning all of this while you're working in the pharmaceutical industry.
00:27:22.360
Tell us more about your kind of evolution, your enlightenment.
00:27:26.920
Did you have one moment that was a wake up call?
00:27:35.460
And it was, it was like these several little things along the way.
00:27:38.760
And so, you know, I did a stint at the FDA as well, which is, it's kind of, you know,
00:27:44.060
when you're at the FDA, you're looking after, you know, 20 to 30 different drugs and all of
00:27:49.100
the safety issues are coming to you and you can actually see how all of the studies are
00:27:54.460
That was really where I put it together because for a long time I was, you know, people would
00:28:00.200
say, you know, SSRIs, these are evidence-based treatments.
00:28:03.780
And I, and you kind of like, unless you really know like what that means, you just have to
00:28:11.540
And so when I'm at the FDA, I'm looking at animal studies.
00:28:14.160
I'm looking at, you know, early phase one studies, phase two, phase three.
00:28:20.640
And that's when I started to notice, I'm like, there is not a single study for any psychiatric
00:28:26.720
medication that was done in a, you know, randomized placebo controlled way that's gone over a year.
00:28:35.220
And, and so I was, I started to think to myself, I mean, we're telling patients these are safe
00:28:39.820
and effective, but we're missing leaving out for the one year that they were studied for.
00:28:45.040
And then on top of that, I'm learning that, you know, SSRIs can make some people worse.
00:28:51.160
They can cause this, this thing called tardive dysphoria, which essentially is where you get
00:28:59.920
And that's like a chronic issue that emerges after several years on the drugs.
00:29:04.580
I noticed, you know, I started learning about benzodiazepine induced neurological dysfunction,
00:29:10.180
which is something that people get from drugs like Xanax and Klonopin, where they start to
00:29:15.160
become more anxious and agoraphobic and they start to develop insomnia.
00:29:20.780
And agoraphobic means you're scared to go outside.
00:29:22.900
You said, yeah, you said, you're so like anxious that you're just like, I don't even, yeah,
00:29:27.440
I don't even want to go to the grocery store because if someone talks to me, I'm going to
00:29:31.500
And so your world just gets smaller and smaller and smaller and you stay inside.
00:29:35.080
And a doctor might tell them, well, that's just your anxiety getting worse.
00:29:40.840
And so it was really those two things where I'm just like, oh, wow.
00:29:46.380
You know, when they said evidence-based, they meant that, you know, for the one year that
00:29:51.360
they were studied for and, you know, they never really talked about the fact that some of these
00:29:59.900
And so at that point, I was just like, this doesn't like, how could this be a sustainable
00:30:07.420
We have drugs that frequently wear off over time.
00:30:09.880
They're making a proportion of people actually sick.
00:30:23.720
And my wife, who's also a psychiatrist, we opened this clinic together.
00:30:30.000
And then we started to focus, you know, firstly on just getting people off these medications
00:30:36.960
And then over time, it's morphed into a, almost like a complete alternative to the mental health
00:30:43.360
care system, where we look at nutrition, sleep optimization, different therapies.
00:30:50.060
And we try and give people all of the non-drug treatments that have good scientific evidence
00:31:09.520
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So I was about to ask, what year was all of this going down in your life?
00:32:40.380
Well, I was going to ask, what did you think about everything that was going down during COVID
00:32:45.700
from the top level of like, you know, the mixed messages about masks and the COVID vaccine and
00:32:53.840
I'm sure you had a lot of insider insight into how those decisions are made.
00:32:58.360
You know, I got the shots, you know, so I had two of the Moderna shots at the time, because
00:33:05.980
even back then, I was just like, well, psychiatry is a dumpster fire, but maybe the rest of medicine
00:33:13.120
And so, you know, thank, you know, my wife and I, we both got the shots, you know, thankfully
00:33:20.580
But as I kind of went further down this path, I started to realize, oh my God, I'm like allies
00:33:28.040
with the anti-vaxxers, you know, because I'm over here, like, I'm just like, these drugs
00:33:33.940
You know, they're causing all of these problems.
00:33:36.100
And I'm getting flamed on Twitter, but I have this support from this anti-vax group.
00:33:44.760
And then, so I've, you know, over the last couple of years, like my skepticism to medicine
00:33:50.160
I'm just like, this is not just a psychiatry issue.
00:33:53.160
This is, you know, the money from the pharmaceutical industry has really just like taken over all areas.
00:34:00.580
Before we get into more of what you and your wife do now, I want to go back to something
00:34:06.760
You said that it's not true that depression and anxiety are necessarily caused by low serotonin.
00:34:14.200
And so the premise of the necessity of SSRIs just doesn't necessarily hold up, right?
00:34:20.380
That it's supposed to be raising your level of serotonin, but you're saying that that's
00:34:27.860
I'd love to expand on that a little bit because that has been one of the most dominant myths
00:34:37.680
And so, I mean, you know, to do a brief history lesson, back in the 1950s, a drug was discovered
00:34:45.720
called ipronizid and it was being used as an antimicrobial for patients with tuberculosis
00:34:53.340
And so they gave them this medication and they noticed that these patients started to
00:34:57.360
perk up and they said, hmm, you know, they're more energetic, they're more lively.
00:35:03.000
Maybe this drug has some promise as an antidepressant.
00:35:08.720
And so they went and they did that and it worked.
00:35:11.780
You know, these patients who were, you know, very low energy, very unhappy, started to look
00:35:17.540
And so this narrative really could have gone in two ways at this time.
00:35:25.080
One way they could have said is, hey, we just found a drug that has these energizing properties
00:35:32.320
And, you know, what we're seeing is a drug effect.
00:35:34.040
But the other narrative was, well, maybe these drugs are actually helping these depressed
00:35:40.380
patients because they don't have enough, you know, serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine,
00:35:46.260
because that's what they had discovered ipronizid was doing.
00:35:52.240
And so they said, well, we know this drug lifts these chemicals up.
00:35:56.580
And so one narrative survives and the other dies.
00:36:03.660
And so the narrative that survives is that the patients, they have these chemical imbalances.
00:36:08.220
And the reason for that is because it's a better commercial narrative.
00:36:12.820
Now, intuitively, like I know we just like gobbled down antidepressants like crazy now,
00:36:18.180
but really like just going back to like prior, like the 80s, a lot of people intuitively were
00:36:25.720
like, it's not a good idea to mask your symptoms with drugs.
00:36:30.080
Like, let's not sweep our problems under the rug because they're just going to fester there.
00:36:37.520
And so the drug companies knew this and they said, well, a better way to package this drug
00:36:42.460
is to say, hey, this drug is actually fixing a medical problem.
00:36:50.180
Your problem is serotonin and we've got the drug that's going to fix it.
00:36:53.620
If you characterize it as like you're fixing a biological problem, all of a sudden it makes
00:36:59.440
sense to take a biological agent rather than a drug to mask things.
00:37:08.080
And so for a long time, they would just say, well, we're just about to find it.
00:37:17.780
I think it was like three years ago, Joanna Moncrief and her team in London, they did
00:37:23.720
umbrella review on this where they looked at all of the evidence trying to find differences
00:37:29.160
in essentially serotonin between depressed and non-depressed patients.
00:37:33.840
I mean, they looked at cases where they would get a group of depressed patients and they would
00:37:39.920
That's where you stick a needle into the spine.
00:37:41.740
And you actually remove some of the cerebral spinal fluid, which is the fluid that surrounds
00:37:48.820
And you're looking for metabolites of serotonin.
00:37:52.020
And so they would do that in depressed patients and then non-depressed patients.
00:37:55.480
And they'd say, well, are there any differences here?
00:38:00.740
They would find people who had committed suicide when they were depressed and they would do
00:38:07.340
And they'd say, well, maybe there's differences in the number of receptors in the brains of
00:38:19.080
And even when it comes down to like genetics or brain scans or any of these things, they have
00:38:26.000
never been able to find a biomarker that can separate people who are depressed from people
00:38:34.880
Not one single biomarker has been found between depressed people and non-depressed people.
00:38:41.980
So we don't know of any biological cause for depression.
00:38:45.640
Well, there are some things now which I do think are kind of getting at it in that direction.
00:38:51.640
I think inflammatory markers, they do tend to correlate with depression, but they also
00:38:57.560
correlate with heart disease and all of this stuff.
00:38:59.760
And that's a whole nother avenue why, you know, diet is really important.
00:39:04.640
Because none of that, no form of inflammation is addressed by an SSRI.
00:39:09.400
Or if it is, you know, very shortly at the start, but long-term, no.
00:39:14.620
Really, a lot of the major causes of inflammation are really dietary.
00:39:19.060
That's, you know, 70% of our inflammatory cells, they sit in our gut because that's the
00:39:24.220
main place we interface, our body interfaces with the external world.
00:39:29.100
So that's why, you know, it seems like everyone's talking about diet these days because it's
00:39:36.180
But yeah, essentially there's no difference in any of these chemicals.
00:39:42.740
They're simply masking symptoms, which is, you know, you could have a moral argument and
00:39:51.900
But you could also just say, well, I don't really care.
00:39:57.240
And I think that's totally fair because we want people to feel better.
00:40:01.100
But then the issue is we don't tell them about, hey, these are drugs just like any other
00:40:07.400
And there's also risks of prolonged use because our brains aren't used to being on
00:40:11.920
And so we give them this very like, you know, it's just a lie.
00:40:17.760
You know, it's just a misleading message about the safety of the drugs and how they
00:40:22.500
And because the more responsible thing to tell people is, hey, these have drug effects.
00:40:32.940
But, hey, this is probably not going to work forever.
00:40:36.420
And while you're on this drug, we better make sure we figure out why you are unhappy.
00:40:43.480
And then we tape you off this medication so you don't have this chemical exposure just
00:40:47.900
lingering around for years later that can cause all these problems.
00:40:56.280
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We had a woman on who she had been on different forms of antidepressant, anti, I guess SSRI is
00:41:58.840
the right way to say, but it's marketed as an antidepressant, anti-anxiety medication.
00:42:04.860
She went through a really hard time and they just stuck her on all of these pharmaceuticals.
00:42:09.160
And the most devastating part of her story that she shared was that she said, it wasn't
00:42:13.100
until my 20s that I felt joy for the first time after she got off all of these medications.
00:42:21.720
I mean, she just came off cold turkey because she was like, I'm tired of not feeling.
00:42:25.440
You talk about that shortened range of emotions.
00:42:27.720
And I think we focus on, well, that person may temporarily for a period of time feel less
00:42:33.080
sad, but there's a possibility that they won't feel joy.
00:42:36.600
And that's a big sacrifice that people aren't being told about when they sign up for these
00:42:46.760
And I mean, you may go through a pregnancy or you may go through your child's childhood being
00:42:54.240
You may never really enjoy intimacy with your partner because the volume of that is turned
00:43:03.100
You may not be able to grieve the loss of a loved one.
00:43:06.780
I mean, you may be at a funeral and you're just like, I don't feel anything.
00:43:13.120
And so, yes, I mean, you know, some people listening will just say, hey, you know, I'll take that
00:43:20.820
But for many people, they're going to miss out on really what it means to be human and
00:43:30.820
You know, not only is it an integral part of being human, but some of these things teach
00:43:37.400
I mean, you could think about, you know, let's say, for instance, you're in a bad relationship
00:43:48.140
Do you really want to numb yourself to the smoke alarm going off in your head that's just
00:43:52.260
saying, hey, something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong.
00:44:00.620
You know, you probably should have been working actually on the issue.
00:44:03.900
You could be on a diet that is just massively inflaming you.
00:44:09.800
You could be living a lifestyle where you're on night shifts and your sleep is disrupted
00:44:16.020
And all of these symptoms that you're experiencing, they mean something.
00:44:23.760
I never feel that sense of peace in the afternoon when work is over, where I'm just like sitting
00:44:28.280
back and I'm like, oh, I feel good, you know, like those are all signs that something is
00:44:35.280
And if you just like put someone on a drug, you've robbed them of the opportunity to actually
00:44:41.160
have health, you know, like true health that's sustainable and good.
00:44:49.000
You're saying it's like, say your smoke alarm is going off and you're like, this is so
00:44:57.020
Well, that doesn't change the fact that there's a fire in your kitchen and the fire could continue
00:45:01.340
to grow, but because you no longer hear the smoke alarm, you think everything is fine.
00:45:05.980
You're saying that's basically what it's like to get on these pharmaceuticals.
00:45:14.080
And how does it, does it, does it really raise your level of serotonin?
00:45:18.500
Like, is that the mechanism that is used to shorten the emotional range and possibly make
00:45:25.120
someone for a period of time feel less depressed?
00:45:28.300
You know, truthfully, people don't really know what happens.
00:45:31.760
Like when they do studies, like, like brain scans, looking at the serotonin receptors, immediately
00:45:40.000
And then after about a couple of months, the serotonin levels actually go down.
00:45:47.840
I mean, there's so many downstream effects on how it changes neurotransmission.
00:45:54.680
But I think just the appropriate level to understand it is it's just seems the chemical
00:46:01.980
And that drug effect is just one of numbing for most people.
00:46:06.460
So when people say, because I will get messages like this, well, that saved my life or that
00:46:24.260
So my response to be to that is that's absolutely true.
00:46:27.480
You know, if you're in a state of severe anxiety and you take a drug that kind of constricts
00:46:33.840
that range, even if it knocks out the positives, you will experience that as therapeutic.
00:46:38.340
You will experience yourself as being more functional.
00:46:41.280
Now, if that anxiety or PTSD or whatever it was, was to the point where you're actually
00:46:45.980
suicidal, that drug can be life-saving in the short term.
00:46:53.860
I mean, essentially, we're just talking about a drug that will just constrict your emotional
00:47:00.580
The part where I want people to think about this more is, what does this mean long term?
00:47:06.220
And to be aware that none of the controlled trials show that they actually work consistently
00:47:12.220
Does that mean that it's not going to work consistently for everyone?
00:47:15.780
For some people, you know, they're out there and they've been on them for like 10 years
00:47:23.860
They also need to be aware that they're at risk of the drug turning on them.
00:47:27.400
And so if you're someone who, you know, you got on it initially and it was working and
00:47:31.880
now five years later, you just feel like you have brain fog and you're tired all the time,
00:47:36.740
don't get bought into this narrative from the doctor who just says, oh, your depression
00:47:40.660
is evolving and now we just need to stack on a cocktail.
00:47:43.960
It's like maybe your brain can't handle being on that drug for five years like many of my
00:47:53.340
I mean, we never want to shame someone for being on the medications or demonize them.
00:48:00.160
And the best way to look at them is, yes, they can help and they can be lifesaving, particularly
00:48:07.100
But hey, we better make sure that we're looking at other sustainable non-drug approaches that
00:48:13.100
will help the person for the rest of their life where they're not dealing with the drug
00:48:16.220
wearing off and they're not dealing with the drug, eventually making them worse.
00:48:20.360
Would you say that it's fair to say that SSRIs are causing more depression and anxiety than
00:48:30.280
I mean, that's actually what I believe, which may be a bombshell thing to say.
00:48:37.320
But if we look at antidepressant use, like antidepressant use has gone up like 5x since
00:48:52.120
We have more suicides than we've ever had before.
00:48:58.220
And so when I look at it, it's like, you know, the drug use is going up and like all of these
00:49:05.020
And so I think, you know, is it the drugs making people worse or is it the fact that
00:49:11.340
we live in this medical system right now that is just telling people like, hey, the problems
00:49:16.540
you're experiencing, go and see your doctor and take the pill rather than actually like
00:49:22.160
But the model of helping people with mental health problems at a population level is failing
00:49:28.580
And it's just become so glamorized to be on something like Lexapro.
00:49:32.980
Like there are ballads that people put on TikTok that go viral.
00:49:37.300
People like just thanking their antidepressants for saving their life.
00:49:41.360
It's almost become trendy to talk about what form of SSRI you're on.
00:49:46.720
And that is not an indication of a healthy society in any sense.
00:49:51.480
You know, it's it's this weird, you know, I'll take off my psychiatry hat and put on my social
00:49:57.420
commentator hat for this one, we incentivize very strange things at the moment, you know,
00:50:05.140
and it could be, you know, whether it's, you know, you're incentivized to identify as a
00:50:10.920
racial minority or a sexual minority or, you know, and right now we're just like, oh, my
00:50:20.420
And, you know, even institutionally, like very recently and still like there's advantages
00:50:27.740
And we have done the same thing with mental health problems.
00:50:30.560
Like it's it's like, you know, the mentally, you know, people who have mental health problems,
00:50:35.400
they're stigmatized, they're suffering like these people need, you know, to be coddled in
00:50:42.280
And I'm not saying it in a mean way that that these aren't difficult things, but there is
00:50:46.040
a message out there, there are incentives for people to identify with their mental illness.
00:50:52.800
And then also, you know, we see these campaigns like, I don't know, there was one about like
00:51:02.980
And this was viral on TikTok probably three or four years ago.
00:51:06.820
And it's just like, hi, I'm so-and-so and I take Lexapro.
00:51:09.840
And it's like, you get this badge for like, I am acknowledging I'm depressed and I'm taking
00:51:17.420
And so there's also this sense that like when you talk about having this medication, you
00:51:23.500
And there's a bunch of like conservative, like redneck types out there that are just
00:51:27.840
like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, like quit being a wuss, taking the meds.
00:51:32.480
Like they're sort of constructing this boogeyman out there where it's just like, there's all
00:51:37.040
these people stigmatizing the mentally ill and there really isn't.
00:51:41.800
I see people on TikTok and they're just like, you know, listing their medications and they
00:51:46.360
think it confers this sort of social currency or it gives them this air of being like, you
00:51:52.540
know, having more depth of character or like suffering in some way.
00:51:55.860
It's very twisted because that's like a weird thing to flex about, like taking psychiatric
00:52:06.840
And if especially, I think maybe that's one reason, this is a total hypothesis, but it
00:52:13.720
seems like we see a disproportionate usage of SSRIs among older white women who don't
00:52:20.220
have very many oppression points because they're just, you know, white, straight women.
00:52:25.940
And so having some kind of mental illness, I think gives them an intersectionality point.
00:52:41.380
This Christmas, we are celebrating first and foremost the gospel message, but we are
00:52:45.920
also reminded as part of that, just the beauty of life, the beauty of life inside the womb.
00:52:51.860
Jesus, of course, came as a baby, first as an embryo, then a newborn child in a manger.
00:52:56.720
He was heralded by the kicks of an unborn John the Baptist.
00:52:59.560
How beautiful is it that the Lord uses these little people to accomplish his great plan of
00:53:06.520
And all of us are part of God's great plan of redemption.
00:53:09.800
And that's one reason why it's so important for us to defend those lives inside the womb
00:53:17.980
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Tell me a little bit more about what you and your wife do, the kind of patients that you
00:53:58.560
see and how you're getting them off of these psychiatric drugs and helping them actually
00:54:06.240
So a lot of the patients we see are people who have been on medications for years and
00:54:19.360
You know, every time they go to the conventional system, they get a new medication and they're
00:54:28.260
They can't sleep even though they're on massive doses of sedatives and their quality of life
00:54:35.060
So typically that patient may find us at that point or they may even try and come off the
00:54:40.360
medication and then they'll experience withdrawal because another part of this dark narrative
00:54:47.980
is that you remember before I was telling you about these academics and how they had been
00:54:54.660
Well, back in the early 90s and early 2000s, the issue of psychiatric drug withdrawal was
00:55:06.060
And so Eli Lilly ended up sponsoring a consensus panel where they picked all of these professors
00:55:11.740
from these different institutions and they put them together and they said, well, you know,
00:55:16.560
what do you guys think about this withdrawal issue?
00:55:18.620
And the conclusion of that consensus panel who were all heavily biased was that drug withdrawal
00:55:28.160
And so, and they based this off the three-month clinical trials.
00:55:32.980
And so, yeah, no wonder, you know, in a three-month clinical trial, that's not enough physical
00:55:37.580
dependence to really build withdrawal, but they kind of bury it there.
00:55:42.540
And so, they generate this manuscript saying, don't be worried about withdrawal and the
00:55:47.180
drug companies, they give it to their sales rep.
00:55:49.680
And then anytime they're at a doctor's office and the doctor is saying, well, this patient
00:55:53.940
just had a problem with withdrawal and now they're worried, you know, they read something
00:55:57.380
in the news, they're worried they're never going to get off.
00:55:59.580
They say, hey, I've got this consensus paper from all of these academics that say it's not
00:56:05.020
What's happening to them is actually when you took them off their medication, their underlying
00:56:17.600
And so, many doctors will end up pulling people off the medications really, really quickly.
00:56:23.420
And they don't give the person's brain time to adapt to the removal of the drug.
00:56:28.940
Because after several years and sometimes decades on this medication, the brain has adapted to
00:56:38.860
It's essentially like if you take a drug, not only does it change the way your neurotransmitters
00:56:45.240
are working, but it also changes the way your gut works and your heart works.
00:56:48.800
I mean, these neurotransmitters control everything in your body and your body doesn't like it.
00:56:53.580
So, it sends signals up to the brain to down-regulate receptors and make all these changes to kind of
00:57:02.700
And if you just like yank the drug out in two weeks, it's like pulling foundational beams out
00:57:11.560
And so, while there are a group of people who can come off these drugs pretty rapidly because
00:57:18.440
their brains are very elastic and they go through a bad withdrawal, maybe it lasts a month or two,
00:57:24.300
there's a massive group of people, I'm going to say millions of them, who when you do that,
00:57:29.680
they develop insomnia, severe anxiety, sometimes psychosis.
00:57:33.440
And it's completely disabling and it goes on for months at a time.
00:57:43.820
And it completely turns their life upside down.
00:57:47.680
And so, we get a lot of those patients who have tried to come off before the doctors have said,
00:57:52.540
hey, this was just proof you need to be on the drug forever.
00:57:54.720
And then, you know, they see me online or they come across something that I've, an op-ed that I've
00:58:02.180
written and they say, oh, wow, you know, this is, there's actually a way to come off in a more
00:58:11.180
Like, we will do custom design tapers for patients.
00:58:16.060
And it's typically just driven by three things.
00:58:19.000
There's three important things you need to understand about tapering.
00:58:21.480
The first is that using a liquid is always a really good idea.
00:58:25.040
That's because if you just cut tablets, the most you can cut them is into quarters.
00:58:30.360
And sometimes those quarters, like that's too big of a jump between doses.
00:58:35.120
But if you liquefy it, usually on a syringe, there's like a hundred little spaces.
00:58:38.920
You can just steadily bring it down every two weeks and you have a lot more control.
00:58:48.380
You need to kind of learn how your brain is readapting.
00:58:58.900
And so, we tell them to get rid of a schedule, listen to your body to come off.
00:59:03.420
And then we also help people go really slow at the bottom.
00:59:06.020
Because most people don't understand that at the very low doses of the drug,
00:59:10.560
that's where most of the withdrawal symptoms hit because the drug is binding very tightly
00:59:17.900
And at the low doses, just to kind of make it simple, is where all of a sudden the receptors
00:59:23.320
disengage very, very rapidly, much more than at the higher doses.
00:59:30.660
But in a nutshell, we do these very slow tapers, usually over a year or two.
00:59:37.160
And when you do it in that way, my patients, they can keep on working.
00:59:45.400
They don't fall into horrific insomnia or anxiety.
00:59:53.100
And the other thing that we do is, you know, we look at, you know, so if we look at depression
01:00:00.960
and anxiety, it's like, where does it come from?
01:00:03.480
So, in the conventional system, it's like, hey, you know, depression and anxiety, it's
01:00:08.800
either, okay, there's some very clear, obvious problem in your life, like a trauma or a relationship
01:00:18.320
Like, that's how we kind of, you know, triage people.
01:00:24.260
But there's a whole bunch of other things that are really important.
01:00:28.360
I mean, diet being the main one, you know, for anyone who has symptoms of anxiety and depression
01:00:33.420
and they're way out of proportion to the stresses in their life or they just seem to come out
01:00:42.720
Inflammatory food makes people feel really bad.
01:00:49.580
You have to look at their overall stress levels.
01:00:52.760
And even for some people who are just like, if you're like a person who's just like wired
01:00:56.380
all the time and if you can't remember like the last time you clocked off work and you
01:01:01.580
just sat back and you're with your family or friends and you just felt really at ease
01:01:05.860
and comfortable and just like relaxed and you're just like, oh, I could take a nap.
01:01:10.740
If you don't feel that like fairly regularly, you're in like an amped up sympathetic state.
01:01:16.540
And so, you have to teach them about, you know, minimizing caffeine use, nicotine use,
01:01:21.320
also doing mind-body practices with like deep breathing exercises being really important.
01:01:26.280
You could do yoga, you can do different things, but just teach people some way of learning
01:01:31.760
to control like that sympathetic nervous system that gets people really amped up.
01:01:39.080
We also do a lot of medical testing looking for nutritional deficiencies and other sources
01:01:43.140
of problems like, you know, hormonal issues, estrogen, testosterone, also thyroid problems
01:01:50.600
And so, we try and just grab all of the things that people tend to miss and then we help them
01:02:01.140
And where can I hear more from you and learn more about the clinic?
01:02:05.560
So, the best place to learn more about what we do is my YouTube channel.
01:02:10.620
So, that's the Dr. Josef and it's spelt in the German way.
01:02:14.960
So, it's J-O-S-E-F and we publish a whole bunch of videos on this topic, you know, drug
01:02:26.640
And if you're interested in learning more about my clinic, we're in, I think we're in like
01:02:37.980
There's a big demand to come off these meds and that-
01:02:44.800
I'm thinking it's like, are we, well, I hope not, you know, I hope, you know, what I wish
01:02:49.960
is that we get, you know, with Bobby now in charge, we actually get people shifting towards
01:02:58.860
The cynic in me is like, oh, you know, is mental health going to get worse?
01:03:01.840
And then I think about AI and like the loss of jobs and stuff.
01:03:07.560
But I'm like, I don't know, maybe if we have really good public health and we can get people
01:03:11.580
moving and eating the right foods and, you know, not getting led astray with these weird
01:03:19.440
narratives about the drugs, like it will get better.
01:03:21.620
But anyway, so my clinic, if people want to find me and learn more about our business,
01:03:32.480
Well, Dr. Yosef, thank you so much for taking the time to join us and enlighten us.
01:03:36.480
And thank you so much for what you and your wife do, for being willing to go out and do
01:03:42.080
something different that is very, very necessary.