00:00:00.000Today on the Matt Walsh Show, with RFK Jr. confirmed as HHS secretary, we will finally have someone in a position of authority who's willing to investigate all the psychiatric drugs that are prescribed to millions of Americans, starting with antidepressants.
00:00:11.760Also, Trump makes the first major mistake of his presidency by signing an executive order expanding access to IVF.
00:00:18.640And a couple of weird Democrats in Ohio have proposed a law banning men from having sex unless they intend to conceive a child.
00:00:25.380It's supposed to make some kind of point about abortion laws, but it actually proves the opposite case.
00:00:29.360We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
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00:01:34.400Imagine that we're back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and you're feeling depressed, and nobody wants to talk to you,
00:01:40.780so you pay a psychiatrist to listen to your problems, but even after talking things out with your shrink, you're still not feeling great, and all hope seems lost.
00:01:48.600Then the shrink tells you not to despair because you have an opportunity to participate in a clinical trial for a new class of drug that has the potential to cure all of your symptoms called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.
00:02:02.980And if you enter the trial, you have a chance of getting the new SSRI drug, or you can get a placebo that does nothing.
00:02:10.980You know, if you participate in the clinical trial, big pharma will get some more data on whether this new class of drug actually works, and you have a chance of being cured.
00:02:20.000If you're not cured, then in all likelihood, the worst-case scenario is, you know, is not a big deal.
00:02:24.820Either you get a placebo and nothing changes, or you get the real drug, which has relatively modest side effects like dry mouth, nausea, dizziness, and so on.
00:02:32.580In exchange for enduring those side effects, your depression might go away.
00:02:38.520Well, this was the process that drug companies used to convince the world that SSRIs worked.
00:02:45.340After running a bunch of double-blind clinical trials, they found that people who took the SSRIs ultimately reported that they felt better than people who received the placebo.
00:02:54.920And therefore, we were told that the whole serotonin theory of depression must be true.
00:02:58.380After all, when people took SSRIs and had more serotonin in their brains, their depression went away.
00:03:04.380People who took the sugar pill didn't do as well, so there you have it.
00:03:11.200But there's a major problem with this whole methodology, and it's a problem that somehow didn't occur to any of the media outlets or physicians who pushed SSRIs for many decades.
00:03:22.660And you might have to think about it for a few minutes, but eventually it becomes obvious.
00:03:28.900In practice, these clinical trials were not actually double-blind studies.
00:03:34.880The vast majority of patients were able to break blind, as they say in the industry, and that means they were able to figure out whether they got the real SSRI or the placebo, which destroys the whole study.
00:03:46.640And that's because in most cases, the patients who got the real drug very quickly noticed that they were experiencing some of the side effects.
00:03:53.020After all, if you take a pill and you start experiencing dry mouth or nausea or something like that, then you'll probably conclude that you're taking active medication.
00:04:01.940And that's exactly what happened in many of these trials.
00:04:03.920In fact, one study conducted by researchers at Columbia says that 89% of participants correctly guessed that they were on the SSRI, which is an extremely high number for a clinical trial.
00:04:17.100Now, you can probably see the issue, hopefully.
00:04:20.980If the studies aren't really double-blind, then we have no way of knowing if the SSRIs actually improved people's minds.
00:04:28.520It's quite possible that these patients were actually feeling better because they thought they were taking a wonder drug.
00:04:35.920And because we're talking about people's emotional state, which is very fickle and highly suggestible, if you tell them they're taking a wonder drug that will make them feel better, a lot of people will just feel better because you told them that they would.
00:04:52.140And they convinced themselves that it was working, so they told the therapist that they were improving.
00:04:55.800And this is commonly referred to as the placebo effect, of course.
00:04:58.860And the only way to defeat it, particularly when you're trying to assess the effectiveness of psychoactive drugs, is with double-blind studies.
00:05:07.240But that didn't really happen with SSRIs.
00:05:10.520And this is not some crackpot theory, by the way.
00:05:12.820A few years ago, a researcher at Harvard named Irving Kirsch found that, quote,
00:05:16.540analysis of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most, if not all, of the benefits are due to the placebo effect.
00:05:25.460The relatively small differences between drug and placebo and antidepressant trials are at least in part due to breaking blind and discerning that one is in the drug group because of the side effects produced by the drug.
00:05:35.660Now, Kirsch goes on to suggest that instead of SSRIs, maybe all patients should just be given a placebo.
00:05:41.960After all, based on the FDA's data, less than 45% of SSRI trials showed a statistically significant benefit of the SSRI over a placebo.
00:05:51.560And the placebo, of course, has no side effects.
00:05:55.100But as we all know, there's no money in prescribing sugar pills.
00:05:57.740So instead, doctors in the pharmaceutical industry pushed SSRIs based on these garbage clinical trials, which fall apart under the slimmest possible scrutiny.
00:06:08.900The use of SSRIs among teenagers and adults in this country increased by almost 400% from the early 1990s to 2006.
00:06:18.320By 2014, one in 10 adults was filling an SSRI prescription.
00:06:22.580From 2015 to 2021, SSRI use increased by another 35%.
00:06:27.580So we're talking about tens of millions of prescriptions here.
00:06:32.540Meanwhile, the number of Americans suffering from depression has only kept increasing.
00:06:37.040According to Gallup in 2023, the percentage of U.S. adults who reported having been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime reached 29%, nearly 10 percentage points higher than in 2015.
00:06:46.800So, in other words, we are more depressed than ever, and at the same time, we're taking more antidepressants than ever.
00:06:57.160And if antidepressants are actually working, then you should see that trend going in the opposite direction.
00:07:05.580Now, these prescriptions have continued even after one of the most prominent medical journals on the planet admitted that actually doctors no longer think that low serotonin levels are linked to depression.
00:07:15.400In other words, if these drugs actually work, then no one can really explain why.
00:07:21.720Quoting from the journal Molecular Psychiatry,
00:07:24.020our comprehensive review of the major strands of research on serotonin show there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with or caused by lower serotonin concentrations or activity.
00:07:34.440Most studies found no evidence of reduced serotonin activity in people with depression compared to people without.
00:07:38.900This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis to depression.
00:07:48.160This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis to depression.
00:08:00.900This was a paper published in the summer of 2022 by one of the top journals in the entire field of medicine.
00:08:07.740And yet, to this day, if you suggest that depression is not related to a chemical imbalance, if you suggest that it is not biochemical, which is what that study showed, that it's not biochemical, then you will still be dogpiled for doing so.
00:08:28.120I mean, it's been impossible to have anything approaching an honest conversation about depression and SSRIs in this country, because many of the people on these drugs will just lash out with blind rage if you even suggest that depression might have causes that go deeper than chemical imbalances.
00:08:46.740If you try to talk about depression is, if you try to talk about depression, if you try to talk about depression, if you try to talk about it with any depth or nuance at all, you're screamed out of the room by drug addicts who don't know they're drug addicts.
00:09:00.740But the truth is that none of the support for SSRIs is based on reality.
00:09:06.400The whole class of drugs has been peddled to tens of millions of people based on complete fabrications, based on bad studies, and based on bunk theories.
00:09:18.620It is not an overstatement to say this is one of the great medical scandals of our time.
00:09:23.220What's changing now is that finally someone in a position of authority is willing to investigate these drugs, and many other drugs like them.
00:09:32.020A few days ago, via executive order of the Trump administration, established something called the Make America Healthy Again Commission, or MAHA, and MAHA, I guess maybe is how you pronounce it.
00:09:41.560And it'll be headed by RFK Jr., and the purpose of the commission, according to the White House, is to determine why Americans have shorter life expectancies than people living in other nations, as well as higher rates of chronic diseases like cancer and asthma.
00:09:54.660And part of this effort means assessing the, quote, prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight loss drugs.
00:10:06.160Last Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order to establish the MAHA Commission to study what has caused the precipitous decline in American health over the past two generations.
00:10:21.140So we will convene representatives of all viewpoints to study the causes for the drastic rise in chronic disease.
00:10:29.200Some of the possible factors we will investigate were formerly taboo or insufficiently scrutinized, a childhood vaccine schedule, electromagnetic radiation, glyphosate, other pesticides, ultra-processed foods, artificial food allotives, SSRI and other psychiatric drugs, PFAs, PFOAs, microplastics.
00:10:59.980As of right now, as you heard, RFK's commission is going to be focused on gathering data.
00:11:04.580You know, they're not banning anything outright.
00:11:06.340They're not punishing doctors for prescribing anything.
00:11:09.180Instead, they're doing what the government should have done several decades ago.
00:11:12.600They're looking at the existing evidence and determining whether it's valid or not.
00:11:16.880They're not going to simply accept clinical trials without looking closely at them.
00:11:21.080They're going to see whether it makes sense to keep prescribing these drugs to so many Americans, particularly young people.
00:11:26.440Now, you have to wonder what kind of person would object to a fact-finding effort like this.
00:11:32.640After all, if SSRIs and other drugs that he mentioned actually work as advertised, then the extra scrutiny wouldn't be a problem at all.
00:11:39.720But RFK Jr. has received a lot of pushback because of this.
00:11:44.700Newsweek, for example, recently took aim at RFK's claim that antidepressants can be more addictive than heroin.
00:11:49.060They cited a Stanford professor saying, quote,
00:11:52.220Antidepressants and heroin are in different universes when it comes to addiction risk.
00:11:56.040In my 35 years in the addiction field, I've met only two or three people who thought they were addicted to antidepressants versus thousands who were addicted to heroin and other opioids.
00:12:07.880I've met only two or three people who thought they were addicted to antidepressants.
00:12:14.940So one thing we could take away from that is that people who take these drugs tend to be in a lot of denial.
00:12:22.860And I think the very idea that you could become addicted to them doesn't occur to a lot of the people taking these drugs.
00:12:29.040They don't even think that that's a thing that can happen.
00:12:31.180And so when they have this compulsion to keep taking the antidepressant, they don't see it as an addiction.
00:12:38.900And according to this addiction specialist, because they don't see it as an addiction, it isn't one.
00:12:45.040I mean, this is the kind of quote unquote science that's behind so much of the psychiatric field.
00:12:51.160And it's what has propelled millions of people to end up on these drugs is this kind of totally bunk, ridiculous nonsense that they call science.
00:13:04.560So we're meant to conclude that RFK is a conspiracy theorist for even suggesting that SSRIs can cause dependency.
00:13:10.480But just a few years ago, that was not a conspiracy theory at all.
00:14:39.400Now, this is another common refrain you hear from the defenders, the apologists for SSRIs.
00:15:00.880They say that most school shooters were not taking SSRIs.
00:15:04.640And as we've previously discussed, there are two major problems with that line.
00:15:08.140First of all, we don't actually know what drugs a school shooter was taking unless the family discloses it.
00:15:13.720The police and hospitals aren't going to tell anyone, citing privacy laws.
00:15:17.540And in pretty much no case does the family definitely state that the shooter wasn't taking certain kinds of medication.
00:15:25.300Secondly, a lot of mass shootings are really gang violence.
00:15:28.720And those incidents get lumped in with school shootings.
00:15:30.980So they flood the data set and make it hard to determine whether SSRIs are influencing a certain kind of shooting.
00:15:36.680Now, anecdotally, of course, you'll find plenty of evidence that SSRIs might be linked to school shootings from Columbine to Northern Illinois University to the Navy Yard to the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, to the Black Church in Charleston, to the old National Bank in Kentucky.
00:15:50.200The shooters were all confirmed to be on antidepressants.
00:15:52.900In response to these shootings, you might say that correlation doesn't prove causation.
00:15:57.380After all, these shooters were taking SSRIs because they were unstable.
00:16:01.000It doesn't necessarily prove that SSRIs made their condition worse.
00:16:05.040But there is additional affirmative evidence to believe that SSRIs are, in fact, making these shooters' condition worse.
00:16:10.580For one thing, there's the FDGA black box label on these drugs, which indicates that they can increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior.
00:16:20.160A few years ago, researchers writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine found that the antidepressants doubled the risk of suicidality and violence when they were given to healthy people with no mental health disorders.
00:16:30.940And this is a direct quote from the journal.
00:16:33.640Antidepressants double the occurrence of events in adult healthy volunteers that can lead to suicide and violence.
00:27:33.820And all the rest are just taken out and drowned.
00:27:36.640And then the breeder will go and make more puppies for the next person who wants a puppy.
00:27:42.300And now imagine that this plays out thousands of times a year.
00:27:46.360So that many thousands of puppies are created and then destroyed every year.
00:27:53.040Now, I think everybody would agree that that kind of system would be inhumane.
00:28:00.520Because dog life is just too valuable to be treated that way.
00:28:06.640Now, you know, we're talking about newborn puppies here.
00:28:09.560What kind of consciousness does a newborn puppy even have?
00:28:12.580Do they have any sort of self-awareness?
00:28:16.000I mean, it's really debatable whether full-grown dogs have self-awareness, at least self-awareness in the way that people do.
00:28:22.840A newborn puppy almost certainly has none.
00:28:25.300And, you know, if you don't have self-awareness, then you can't really experience pain.
00:28:30.240I mean, you could have a nervous system, and so you could have all the kind of hardware in place for pain.
00:28:36.920But if you don't have self-awareness, you are not experiencing it because there's no you, really.
00:28:42.020If there's nothing that is conscious of the pain, then the pain is not being experienced.
00:28:48.000The pain is happening in a physical sense, but it's not being experienced because there's no conscious sort of entity there to experience it.
00:28:55.720And so a newborn puppy, I would seriously doubt, has any real self-awareness at all.
00:29:02.240And yet, in spite of that, we would all agree that intentionally creating and then destroying thousands of puppies every year systematically
00:29:12.240is a horrifying waste and degradation of the lives of those animals, regardless of how sentient or conscious they may or may not be.
00:29:21.920So if human life, if we would say that about the lives of dogs, I mean, is human life less valuable than the life of a dog?
00:30:46.700Well, a human embryo is not dead, not yet anyway.
00:30:49.500And it's not an inanimate object like a table or a rock.
00:30:56.380I think everyone can understand that a human embryo being stored in a freezer is not, it's different than like this, the table that I'm sitting at, the desk I'm sitting at.
00:31:05.300Because this desk will only ever be a desk.
00:31:10.460It's not like if it sits here for another 10 years, it's going to suddenly spring into a living creature.
00:31:15.480It'll decay and will be no more eventually, but it's never going to change fundamentally into anything that it isn't.
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00:44:20.320Now, there's still really no excuse because these airlines are equipped with radar altimeters, which quite literally yell your altitude as you come in for landings.
00:44:43.940I mean, it seems pretty clear that, I mean, I've talked to several pilots, I've heard from several pilots,
00:44:53.640who just look at the video of the plane landing and say, yeah, there's clear mistakes made there.
00:44:59.760Were there other things that factored into the crash?
00:45:03.300Maybe, but, so this does appear to be pilot error.
00:45:06.220I've also heard from some sources in the airline industry, some interesting information about, allegedly, about the pilot who was landing the plane.
00:45:24.340I don't know if the information is true, so I can't share it.
00:45:28.680Some of these kind of rumors are circulating right now on social media.
00:45:32.660So maybe we'll have more about that soon.
00:45:34.500But, you know, I, all I'll say is what I said yesterday, what I've been saying now for forever, that, you know, we can look and we can see that for a long time, air travel was extremely safe.
00:45:53.560It was like almost magically safe, you know, or it seemed almost magical, at least to the passengers.
00:47:16.820And then, yeah, I've got, I've also heard from a few sources that have confirmed, I had to confirm this, but a few sources have confirmed to me this comment and others have said, yeah, actually, typically what you want is for the plane to land right side up so that you're not hanging upside down.
00:48:04.660And also you're just putting more burdens on your guests, which I wish that people, you know, if you're getting married, you want to have a big day, you want to have a big celebration.
00:49:18.180Now, look, if you decide you want to have a destination wedding, and you're not really, and it's like, you're not really inviting anyone to it.
00:49:23.640Except your close, immediate family, and they all want to go to this trip.
00:49:28.600But, you know, to say, I'm going to go get married in, you know, the Bahamas or something, and then send out 500 invitations, expecting all these people to go on a vacation, to take vacation time for your wedding is just nuts.
00:49:49.040The kid wedding argument is crap, Matt.
00:49:51.220If they were told beforehand not to bring their kid, and they did anyway, the parents are horrible people.
00:49:55.580I'm pretty sure you wouldn't appreciate someone bringing their pet into your house, and I don't want to hear the BS argument about children not being pets.
00:50:02.860That was the rule the couple who paid for the weddings had, and if the relative or loved one didn't like it, then by default they were not invited either.
00:50:10.560The option for them to bring their kids was not on the table.
00:50:13.060They were invited to a wedding, not compelled to go.
00:50:15.620You almost had it right when you made your Thanksgiving comparison.
00:50:18.680If the same guy who wants to bring his Mastiff into your house to take a dump and invited you over for a vegan Thanksgiving, nobody's forcing you to go.
00:50:27.220If you do decide to go, then shut up and eat the tofu turkey.
00:56:34.760It makes the opposite point from what they're trying to make.
00:56:38.000That's what happens when you take a strawman argument that you found in a YouTube comment section and then try to build a piece of legislation around it.
00:56:48.340And that's what's occurred in this case.
00:56:49.540The idea that this parody bill is supposed to legislate a man's body in the same way that pro-life laws allegedly legislate a woman's body.
00:56:57.820Like, that's the idea that they're attempting to illustrate the absurdity, as they see it, of pro-life laws, of laws that prevent the dismemberment of infants, by showing what it would be like if the shoe was on the other foot.
00:57:16.940Their dumb, satirical bill seeks to legally control a man's sexual behavior and penalize him for behavior that falls outside of the parameters of this law.
00:57:27.840But that is precisely what anti-abortion laws don't do.
00:57:34.320Laws restricting abortion do not place any restrictions on a woman's sexual behavior.
00:57:39.600Like, as far as these laws are concerned, the woman can have sex with whoever she wants, in whatever way she wants, as often as she wants.
00:57:48.300There is no abortion restriction in the country, in any state anywhere, nor has there ever been one proposed at any point anywhere, that would put the kinds of restrictions on women that this bill in Ohio would put on men.
00:58:01.200Now, these Democrats in Ohio are correct.
00:58:08.220The bill they propose is a good example of what legislating somebody's body and controlling their sex life would look like.
00:58:16.620And the keen observer will notice that abortion restrictions don't look anything like that.
00:58:23.660The real analogy to a law prohibiting men from having sex unless they intend to have children would be a law prohibiting women from having sex unless they intend to have children.
01:00:05.540That act has resulted in creating a baby billions of times throughout history.
01:00:12.260If you are so terrified of having a baby that you would actually kill to prevent the child from being born, if you would rather murder your own offspring than raise him, if you would even rather murder him than give birth to him and hand him to someone who wants to raise him, then you should not be having sex.
01:00:31.180Like, you should exercise some self-control and save yourself a lifetime of guilt and regret in the process.
01:00:37.080Nobody is talking about passing any laws that would prevent you from having sex, but you still shouldn't.