The Michael Knowles Show - Your Brain's REACTION To SSRI's, Adderall, & Depression LIES： Michael & The Good Doctor

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00:00:18.000 We've done spinal taps.

00:00:20.000 We've done functional MRI scans, which are real-time scans of the human brain kind of firing.

00:00:26.000 Are there any differences between a depressed person and a non-depressed person?

00:00:30.000 No.

00:00:31.000 What about the relation of these kinds of drugs to violent acts and to aberrant ideologies?

00:00:39.000 I've noticed a major uptick in violence from the left, notably associated with transgenderism.

00:00:47.000 And in the lion's share of these cases, they're on SSRIs.

00:00:52.000 Is it safe for 15 to 20% of our population to be on these drugs?

00:00:55.000 The FDA is sitting on this because they are trying to cover up one of the biggest scandals in modern medical history.

00:01:03.000 That's horrifying.

00:01:04.000 About one in five women in the United States is hooked on depression pills.

00:01:20.000 Powerful psych drugs that we don't really know all that much about.

00:01:25.000 And in my experience, the women remain crazy as ever.

00:01:28.000 So, I have brought on an expert to tell me what these drugs really do.

00:01:33.000 That is Dr. Yosef Wit-During.

00:01:37.000 Have I pronounced that very Germanic name correctly?

00:01:40.000 You have. You have.

00:01:41.000 Dr. Yosef, thank you so much for coming on the show.

00:01:43.000 Thank you for having me, Michael.

00:01:44.000 So, you have gone really viral recently for discussing a lot of medical misconceptions, but especially SSRI drugs.

00:01:54.000 I have known a lot of people on these drugs.

00:01:56.000 I'm sure the entire audience knows a lot of people on these drugs.

00:01:59.000 Some of them might be on the drugs themselves.

00:02:02.000 I read a statistic that it's one in five American women are hooked on these kinds of drugs.

00:02:09.000 Yes. So, it's actually one in five Americans.

00:02:13.000 One in five Americans, including men.

00:02:15.000 Including men are on psychiatric medications right now.

00:02:19.000 Specifically, if we talk about antidepressants, which most commonly are SSRIs,

00:02:24.000 that's around 14% of the population and about 18% of women on SSRIs.

00:02:30.000 And if you go up in age range to around when women are 60 and older, it's one in three are on psychiatric medications at that point.

00:02:40.000 It's a huge amount.

00:02:42.000 I mean, it's so big that people are either taking them or they know someone in their immediate family who's on them.

00:02:47.000 Everyone knows someone who is on one of these medications now.

00:02:50.000 Okay. Before we get to the other types of psych drugs, I want to focus in on SSRIs.

00:02:55.000 Forgive my ignorance. What is an SSRI?

00:03:00.000 So, it's a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and it's a type of drug that was designed to block the reuptake of serotonin between the neurons.

00:03:11.000 So, effectively, serotonin is a chemical messenger that allows neurons to communicate with one another.

00:03:18.000 And if you block the reuptake, it builds up in the synaptic cleft, which is the space between the neurons, and that has a drug effect.

00:03:26.000 So, what that drug effect typically does is it is a numbing effect or an emotionally constricting effect.

00:03:33.000 And that's what leads to that therapeutic benefit where people will feel less emotions.

00:03:40.000 This is what I've heard about SSRIs and also what I've observed is that it's not that it fixes people's emotions or corrects their emotions.

00:03:50.000 It just blunts their emotions, right?

00:03:53.000 Yeah, and that is kind of the, you know, one thing that people, that is really important for people to understand is that that is actually what they're doing.

00:04:03.000 Because for the last three decades, we've been lying to people about how these medications work.

00:04:09.000 We've been telling them that they fix a chemical imbalance.

00:04:13.000 And it's something that I want to lay out because it's really important.

00:04:16.000 Because there is a distinction between saying, hey, there's something wrong with your brain.

00:04:20.000 You have low serotonin.

00:04:22.000 I'm going to give you a drug to kind of bring it up to the normal level.

00:04:25.000 You know, case closed.

00:04:27.000 Everything's fine.

00:04:28.000 It's like giving a type 1 diabetic insulin.

00:04:31.000 We've essentially just corrected a biological problem and all the things that flow from that should be fine.

00:04:37.000 That was the story sold to Americans through the chemical imbalance.

00:04:41.000 I remember the TV commercials that say, depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.

00:04:46.000 So take this drug and it'll fix it.

00:04:49.000 Exactly, yeah.

00:04:50.000 And the thing is, a lot of people, you know, it really is quite an evil lie.

00:04:57.000 Because many people, they're okay with that.

00:05:00.000 They're okay with taking a medicine for a biological medical problem.

00:05:04.000 But if you were to say to someone, the way these drugs actually work is by numbing you and constricting your emotional range.

00:05:13.000 All of a sudden, you start thinking about your grandma who says, you really shouldn't sweep problems under the rug.

00:05:19.000 You know, you should deal with them.

00:05:21.000 You should address them.

00:05:22.000 But intuitively, a lot of Americans, they know that's not a great solution for problems, to kind of just numb them with something else.

00:05:30.000 And so we've been selling this lie that they're not really drugs that numb things.

00:05:35.000 They are drugs that fix a medical problem in your brain.

00:05:39.000 Okay, so the synapses are communicating, and the SSRIs block the serotonin, so the serotonin gets stuck in the middle and numbs up your brain.

00:05:50.000 And serotonin is just like a happy chemical?

00:05:54.000 Yeah, it's one of the main neurotransmitters in the brain that control your mood, your personality, your emotions.

00:06:01.000 Okay, so when did this all start?

00:06:05.000 I remember when the commercials first came on in the 90s or 2000s or whenever.

00:06:09.000 When were SSRIs first discovered, prescribed, popularized?

00:06:15.000 So we've had antidepressants since the 50s.

00:06:20.000 But a lot of those older types, they were lethal in overdose.

00:06:24.000 They were kind of complicated to use, and so they were used really sparingly.

00:06:28.000 But then Prozac came out in 1987.

00:06:32.000 That's when it entered the US market.

00:06:34.000 And Prozac wasn't, you know, you couldn't overdose on that medication.

00:06:40.000 So it had a much safer safety profile as well.

00:06:44.000 And so that drug became very successful in the early 90s.

00:06:49.000 It was the drug that made Eli Lilly.

00:06:51.000 Eli Lilly was not a big company before Prozac.

00:06:54.000 I mean, it's the biggest pharmaceutical company now with the GLP-1s.

00:06:58.000 But Prozac came onto the market.

00:07:00.000 Eli Lilly becomes a billion-dollar company within a couple of years.

00:07:03.000 And we get flooded with a lot of, they're called me-too drugs.

00:07:07.000 So after Prozac comes out, you get Paxil, you get Lexapro, you get Zoloft.

00:07:12.000 All of these different SSRIs kind of follow Prozac's success.

00:07:16.000 And the effect of that has essentially been brainwashing or propaganda where the commercial interests of all of these billion-dollar companies has changed how we think about these drugs.

00:07:31.000 I mean, because they have been pushing this narrative that depression is a chemical imbalance and we have drugs to essentially fix it.

00:07:40.000 And so that's how they've kind of wrestled control of this narrative where before, you know, if you're anxious or depressed, like in the 80s, people would say, hey, let's look at your relationships.

00:07:50.000 Let's look at your purpose.

00:07:51.000 Let's look at your physical health.

00:07:53.000 You know, are you dealing with problems of loneliness?

00:07:56.000 The 90s comes along and there's this huge commercial interests and they take control of the narrative.

00:08:01.000 Depression is now a medical problem that needs a medical solution.

00:08:05.000 And if you say anything otherwise, you're dangerous, you're unscientific, you're kind of like a Neanderthal, like in terms of your understanding, you're in the past.

00:08:15.000 And they've essentially been silencing these other views ever since then.

00:08:19.000 So between the modern liberal advice of just ply yourself with heavy psych drugs and the kind of traditional advice of take stock of your life and try to fix things that are able to be fixed and, you know, keep your eyes up to God and have a stiff upper lip.

00:08:34.000 There are the hippies in the middle who say that if you, you know, I don't know, do a rain dance around the root of turmeric or something and like eat a few herbs, then that will fix your depression symptoms.

00:08:47.000 I'm being only slightly hyperbolic here, but what do you make of the so-called natural remedies?

00:08:53.000 It's bullshit.

00:08:54.000 Okay, good.

00:08:55.000 And they're actually much closer to the liberals who are saying, ply yourself with medications.

00:09:01.000 Yeah.

00:09:02.000 Because there's this whole thing of like nutraceuticals.

00:09:05.000 I don't know if you've ever heard that.

00:09:06.000 No, I like that word, but I don't, I've never heard of it.

00:09:09.000 Yeah.

00:09:10.000 So they, you know, adaptogens, nutraceuticals, supplements.

00:09:13.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:09:14.000 And so these natural, you know, these natural hippie types, they'll say, you know, take ashwagandha, take St. John's ward, take lion's mane, take really high doses of, you know.

00:09:24.000 What's the one that turns people blue?

00:09:26.000 Colloidal silver.

00:09:27.000 Colloidal silver.

00:09:28.000 Colloidal silver.

00:09:29.000 Colloidal silver.

00:09:30.000 And so, and then they, and then they, or it could even be cannabis.

00:09:33.000 You know, they'll say, these are natural things.

00:09:35.000 They are safe.

00:09:36.000 You know, don't worry about them.

00:09:37.000 They're not like those nasty pharmaceuticals.

00:09:38.000 Mm-hmm.

00:09:39.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:09:40.000 But they are.

00:09:41.000 I mean, the only difference is that they're not coming from a pharmaceutical company.

00:09:44.000 People use supplements like psychiatric drugs because they're actually quite powerful.

00:09:49.000 I mean, these chemicals, they have real neurological changes.

00:09:52.000 They can sedate you, they can energize you, they can numb you.

00:09:56.000 Wow. I thought you were going to say it's BS because you're just chewing on a piece of mint

00:10:00.880 or something. No, no, no. Actually, it is powerful and you should treat it like a drug.

00:10:05.020 You should treat it like a drug, but you shouldn't lie to yourself and say,

00:10:07.860 oh, this is a natural thing. I'm not going to be dealing with the problems of tolerance. I'm not

00:10:11.960 going to be where it wears off over time. I'm not going to have to worry about the fact that I'm

00:10:16.020 sweeping legitimate problems under the rug. And I think they kind of delude themselves into

00:10:21.200 thinking it's safe because it's not coming from a pharmaceutical company. Right. Yeah. I heard

00:10:25.780 one time someone argue that anything that's natural has to be good for you. I thought like

00:10:31.380 many poisons are natural. What are you talking about? Look at what's happening with cannabis now.

00:10:37.000 I mean, I feel like, I mean, we've been legalizing cannabis. We have high potent. And this is not

00:10:41.880 the ditch weed that people used to smoke a long time ago. It's like 40 times more potent. And

00:10:46.680 cannabis is one of the biggest gateway drugs into psychiatry. Like if you're using high potency

00:10:51.960 cannabis products and you have a psychotic, um, a bad trip, you know, a psychotic break on it,

00:10:58.080 cannabis more so than meth, LSD, cocaine is, is more toxic to the brain that you are more likely to

00:11:06.220 convert to an ongoing psychotic state.

00:11:08.980 I knew that marijuana was related with, to psychosis. And I've just noticed that most of my pothead

00:11:17.140 friends, I'm going to get so much pushback for this, but most of my pothead friends insist they

00:11:21.380 have no problem, no addiction. It's all, it's totally great for you, but they, they increasingly

00:11:25.380 get problems. But I've never heard that it's worse for the brain than LSD.

00:11:30.100 When it comes to trans, when it comes to someone who's had a psychotic, a bad trip,

00:11:35.120 transitioning to a bipolar or a schizophrenia diagnosis. And so essentially what that is

00:11:41.820 with, um, marijuana is that bad trip. For some people, that's not a temporary thing. Like it

00:11:47.840 actually hurts them. Think about it as a serious toxic reaction that can actually lead to enduring

00:11:52.700 problems over time. And I know this because I've seen many of these patients, they'll have a psychotic

00:11:56.820 episode on cannabis and it takes them sometimes a year, even two years to feel fully back to themselves.

00:12:02.020 Now, during that year to two year period where their brain is recovering and they're still having

00:12:06.320 periods of paranoia and mood instability, doctors will diagnose them with bipolar and schizophrenia

00:12:12.400 and put them on psychiatric medications and tell them that they have like a brain disease when they've

00:12:17.580 actually just had a neurological injury from the high potency cannabis products that they're

00:12:22.680 consuming. And yes, it is more dangerous in that respect. It is more dangerous than meth and LSD and

00:12:28.120 cocaine. So, okay. There are two views on depression. One being that it's, uh, basically

00:12:35.900 just kind of made up and it's people who are engaging in aberrant behavior who have suffered a

00:12:40.040 lot of misfortune and haven't been able to pull themselves out of it. And so they've got these

00:12:44.100 lifestyle problems that they're pretending is neurological or chemical or something. And then

00:12:48.940 they pop the pills. The other side says, no, no, it's just hardwired into your brain and your

00:12:54.560 lifestyle has absolutely nothing to do with it. And you might be, uh, making all sorts of bad

00:12:59.860 choices, but that, you know, that your choices don't affect anything. And is one of those views

00:13:05.840 correct or is there, is the answer necessarily in the middle? So, well, let's, let's start with the,

00:13:13.740 the biological one. So we've been looking for this chemical imbalance for decades now. And I want to

00:13:22.060 talk about some of the ways we've done this because I think there may be some people listening to this

00:13:26.520 who are just like, are you sure it's not a chemical imbalance? They've heard it so much.

00:13:30.600 We've done, um, uh, spinal taps where we sample the fluid around, um, the brain and we look for

00:13:38.320 differences in the serotonin metabolites. You can directly measure that. You get a group of depressed

00:13:43.260 patients and non-depressed patients. Are there any difference? No, we've done autopsies of, uh, of the

00:13:49.640 brains of people who have taken their lives, uh, depressed patients and compared them to non-depressed

00:13:54.380 people. Are there any changes in receptor density, uh, in those brains under pathology slides? No

00:14:00.760 difference. We've done functional MRI scans, which are real-time scans of the human brain kind of firing

00:14:07.260 and showing all of the metabolic changes in the brain. Are there any differences between a depressed

00:14:12.460 person and a non-depressed person? No. There has never been any biological signature to

00:14:19.220 differentiate, um, depressed for non-depressed. So are, are you therefore saying that this phrase

00:14:25.340 clinical depression does not signify a real thing? It does not signify a biological problem.

00:14:32.260 Usually people say clinical depression when they, I'm very depressed. You know, that's, it's, it's just a,

00:14:38.840 I think a way to say, Hey, this is really serious. You know, take this seriously. Um, but I want to have a

00:14:44.620 little bit of nuance here because I'm not trying to say that there's no genetic loading for anxiety

00:14:49.920 and depression. I mean, we probably know some people who are worry warts. I mean, they were just

00:14:53.900 born that way. You know, they're a bit more neurotic. They have a tendency to be more depressed.

00:14:58.960 That is just normal human personality. We, we, we exist on a bell curve and a spectrum. We're going

00:15:04.280 to have more extroverts. We're going to have more worry warts. Um, but that's hardly a disease.

00:15:09.360 This, you know, imagine telling, you know, these, these worry warts, you have a diseased brain,

00:15:13.680 there's something wrong with you. This is just normal human variation. Um, and so I think that

00:15:21.120 is possible. And yes, maybe there is some medical problem that we haven't found out about depression.

00:15:27.480 Um, but we, we essentially, we haven't found it yet. And so I think to go around and tell people

00:15:33.200 that we really know depression is this biological problem is just a complete lie right now,

00:15:38.620 where we actually have, um, a lot of evidence that shows that, you know, depression is correlated

00:15:44.760 with loneliness. It's correlated with, um, you know, life dissatisfaction, work dissatisfaction,

00:15:50.800 and a lot of the things that are very intuitive. Okay. So if that's the case, then if, if someone

00:15:57.500 is, uh, depressed and there are plenty, plenty of people around today who say they're, they're

00:16:01.540 depressed or clinically depressed, meaning just very, very depressed, they should not go seek a

00:16:08.280 chemical is what you're saying. They should just seek, um, behavioral therapy.

00:16:12.740 Yeah. Talk therapy.

00:16:14.240 Yeah. I, and one of the big injustices that I really worry about is that we actually rob people

00:16:19.780 of that opportunity because, you know, you're upset, you're depressed, you go online and you're

00:16:25.660 going to see messages. You have a chemical imbalance or someone on TikTok or, you know, a celebrity

00:16:30.320 influencer talking about how, you know, SSRI saved their lives. You go, okay, maybe that could be

00:16:35.900 something that's wrong with me and sort of recasts how you view your problems. You go and see a

00:16:41.220 doctor, you see a family medicine doctor. This is where 80% of the drugs come from, not psychiatrists,

00:16:46.320 just family medicine doctors. You have a 15 minute visit where you get, you know, five to seven

00:16:51.780 minutes of FaceTime and they tell you, Hey, you might have depression and we think it might be

00:16:56.860 biological and take this medication. And so you take the medication and while you take it, you sort of,

00:17:05.120 you're ingesting along, along with the drug that numbs your emotions, a whole ideology about where

00:17:10.560 the problems come from. And it robs you of the opportunity to fix other parts of your life.

00:17:17.120 Because if you think about depression and anxiety as, as essentially signals like a smoke detector in

00:17:22.560 your brain, that's saying, Hey, maybe you need to look at your health. You know, maybe you need to

00:17:26.700 cut down on your drug use or your cannabis use, you know, relationships work, all that kind of stuff.

00:17:30.840 Instead of listening to that signal from the smoke alarm, when you take that drug,

00:17:35.840 you're essentially numbing it and, and you can go years or sometimes even decade, decades,

00:17:41.720 not addressing real legitimate problems in your life. Um, that's simply fester there in the background

00:17:49.120 while you're on the drug. Do you think there is any circumstance in which doctors should prescribe

00:17:55.280 SSRI specifically or antidepressant drugs more broadly? Yes. Yeah, I do. I think there are

00:18:02.260 cases for that. Um, but they should be, um, and this is, I mean, it's common sense.

00:18:09.040 They should only be used after you've, you've exhausted all of the non-drug approaches.

00:18:14.000 And so if someone comes in and they're, you know, anxious and depressed and you, and you go through,

00:18:18.600 you know, relationships, purpose, meaning your physical health, you know, you, you get them off

00:18:22.780 drugs and alcohol, um, and you really take the time to get to know them and understand their life.

00:18:28.180 This never happens by the way. Yeah. No, no doctors. Hold on. There is one exception. I know

00:18:35.120 women, especially women of a certain age have been going to their therapist for 30 years. They only ever

00:18:43.040 seem to get crazier and they're now, I'm sure the therapist hasn't actually gotten to know them

00:18:47.320 very well. Obviously not. They haven't worked on the symptoms, but, but yes, in modern medicine,

00:18:51.960 as you say, you go in, you get five minutes with the doctor, maybe it's like, okay, here's a script.

00:18:56.500 See you later. Bye. Yeah. Yeah. And so, so it doesn't happen, but let's, let's say hypothetically,

00:19:03.240 you, you, you did that and they had great relationships and they're actually working a job that

00:19:07.460 provides purpose and meaning. They're not using drugs. You know, they're moving their body.

00:19:11.540 They're getting out in the sun. They're eating a nice clean diet. If you have someone in front of

00:19:15.660 you that's still suffering after that, I, I think you should use a medication. Why not use a medication

00:19:21.320 in that point? Because you've exhausted all of the other non-drug means you want that person to

00:19:26.120 function. You want them to be able, you know, um, you know, to, to live a productive life. And so

00:19:32.380 I have no problem with the use of the drugs after you've exhausted the common sense non-drug

00:19:37.620 approaches to, to treating anxiety and depression. Now, what about the people who are currently on

00:19:41.580 them? Is this huge percentage of Americans who are currently on SSRIs? One, other than, uh, restraining

00:19:49.960 the range of emotion, are there other nasty side effects that come about as a result of this other

00:19:54.620 than just sweeping the problems under the rugs and which is a big enough, uh, negative side effect?

00:19:59.160 And two, would you advise them or many of them or all of them to get off the SSRIs?

00:20:07.680 So that's a complicated, uh, question. So let's, let's, if it's okay, let's talk about some of the

00:20:14.360 side effects first. And, you know, there, there's a lot of them. One of the things that I worry about

00:20:20.380 the most with these medications is they can actually make some people worse in the long run. Um, our brains,

00:20:26.320 our brains are not designed to be exposed to drugs on a daily basis, uh, for years at a time. Um,

00:20:34.820 and I'll take a little aside here just to say, most people aren't aware that these medications

00:20:39.980 are studied for 12 weeks to get approval. There's never been a study that's gone any longer than a

00:20:46.180 year. And these are drugs which clearly wear off over time. Um, our brain is not static. It doesn't

00:20:52.900 like that you're taking a drug that disturbs neurotransmitter function, which doesn't just

00:20:57.760 control your mood. It controls your heart, your digestion, your immune system. And so homeostasis

00:21:02.760 kicks in, the body pushes it back against the drug and the effect wears, the effect diminishes over

00:21:08.680 time. Um, and so one, I think it's kind of very bad that we only studied these drugs for 12 weeks,

00:21:16.260 um, 12 weeks to a year. And then we put people on them for multiple years when they clearly wear off

00:21:21.100 over time. And so that's the first thing, not only when do they wear off over time, what I see in

00:21:28.180 many patients after they've been on them for several years is they'll develop a trifecta of symptoms.

00:21:33.960 Um, specifically with the SSRIs, people start to have low energy. They start to get brain fog and

00:21:40.580 they start to feel very flat. And that is just the effect of being on these drugs long-term. Um,

00:21:46.900 now, unfortunately they will go and see their doctor at this time. And the doctor will say,

00:21:52.620 well, they won't say, oh, you know, this is a side effect from chronic SSRI use and you're kind

00:21:58.540 of getting worse. You're numbed out. You've got cognitive, um, fog now they'll say, your depression

00:22:03.900 is evolving. You've got treatment resistant depression. You know, these are mysterious

00:22:08.340 mental illnesses and we need to put you on another drug. And so it starts this prescribing cascade

00:22:13.100 where the drugs when taken long-term cause side effects that make the person worse. And then

00:22:18.420 they take another drug and all of a sudden you start accumulating psychiatric diagnoses and you

00:22:23.040 end up on five or six different drugs. I think that's one of like the biggest risks and why we've

00:22:28.280 seen the use of these medications balloon over time. Cause I do think they're making some people

00:22:32.660 worse. What are some of the other drugs that, that the doctors will put you on then? Um, so if you take

00:22:38.640 an SSRI and it triggers a manic episode, uh, where you become disinhibited, you know, hypersexual,

00:22:44.360 you start gambling, maybe you become hostile or aggressive. They'll say you have bipolar disorder

00:22:50.720 and they put you on antipsychotic medications. Um, and so, um, and those are, those are heavy drugs.

00:22:58.280 I mean, they have a lot of stopping power. They're really sedating and your life really goes in a

00:23:02.800 different direction. Once you've, once you've put on that, you can gain like a hundred pounds on some of

00:23:06.980 these antipsychotics. It can be completely disfiguring for some people. And so it can get

00:23:11.700 out of hand really, really quickly. So if you're telling them, you know, not, not to be doing this,

00:23:19.660 uh, you know, because of all these side effects, then for the people who are currently on them,

00:23:24.200 do you, would you give a blanket recommendation, get off? I think you need to check in with yourself

00:23:33.540 and you need to look at your life and just say, so the drugs do work. So they do have this numbing

00:23:44.180 effect, right? But if you pull that drug away, you can throw someone into a very anxious state.

00:23:49.260 Let's say they have a lot of issues going on in their life already. What do you have

00:23:53.440 in place of that? And so before just coming off these medications, you need to think about, you know,

00:24:00.860 why did I get on it in the first place? And so if you, I think if you, let's say you just got on

00:24:06.640 it because you went through a divorce or a job loss, or you moved and you were lonely, some kind

00:24:10.600 of stressor at one moment of time, which you've recovered from, you don't need to be on that drug

00:24:15.440 anymore. Like come off it, do a gradual, slow, safe taper. But if you had, I mean, I don't know,

00:24:22.180 maybe you're in a relationship that's having a lot of problems. Maybe you're, maybe you really don't

00:24:26.260 like what you're doing at work. Maybe you have a whole bunch of physical health problems or you're,

00:24:30.500 you know, you're, you're using drugs and alcohol and it's leading to this anxious state. You need

00:24:34.660 to address that first, because if you just pull that drug off, you're also going to send your life

00:24:38.920 into a tailspin. So I recommend that kind of practical approach, just, just thinking about,

00:24:43.860 you know, what can you replace it with? But for the majority of Americans, for the majority of

00:24:48.900 people on these medications, and just, just from my clinical experience and doing this for over 10 years now,

00:24:54.820 I think that 95% of people on these medications shouldn't have been put on them in the first

00:25:00.420 place and they, they don't actually need them. So it's dangerous to quickly come off these types

00:25:05.660 of drugs. How are you supposed to do it? If you want to get off these kinds of drugs,

00:25:10.700 what's the safest way to do it? Sure. So there's a, the safest way to come off these drugs is without

00:25:18.340 exposing yourself to severe withdrawal. Now, one of the big problems is, is many doctors have been

00:25:23.800 telling patients for years that, um, the withdrawal is mild and it goes away in a couple of weeks.

00:25:30.300 And because of this, they'll get people who've been on these drugs for years, sometimes decades,

00:25:34.740 and they'll taper them off over a couple of months. And, um, and that can be really dangerous. Now,

00:25:41.520 for some people, they can do it. You know, their brains are very elastic and they come off quickly.

00:25:46.780 And, um, you know, it's very difficult for a month or two and then they're fine. But you may have,

00:25:51.600 uh, may recall, I mentioned the issue of protracted withdrawal with benzos and antidepressants.

00:25:56.500 There is a fairly large group of people that if you expose them to these severe withdrawal symptoms,

00:26:02.400 they actually end up developing this neurological damage. And so the way to actually avoid

00:26:08.280 the risk of that is to, is to taper off slowly. Now, what I generally recommend for people is to start

00:26:16.100 with a five to 10% reduction. And then every month, just assess how you're going. You know,

00:26:20.760 if that was a good reduction for you, you could do the same one. Um, or you could increase it. You

00:26:25.480 could say, now I'm going to do 10%. Now I'm going to do 15% and go down in these very gradual steps.

00:26:32.340 Many people, when they get to the very end of the taper, they, they struggle greatly. This is because

00:26:37.840 at that point you've removed so much of the drug. It's like, you don't have a lot of residual

00:26:43.880 drug floating around in the brain. And so when you take another bit out, you actually disconnect

00:26:48.400 a lot of the receptors. And so when people get to the very end of the taper, if they're struggling,

00:26:54.040 I would just want them to know that that is normal and they should go up to the previous dose before

00:26:58.640 they had the withdrawal symptoms and ask their doctor if they can give them a liquid version of

00:27:03.560 the medication. And the reason I asked them to do that is you can draw up, um, the drug in a

00:27:09.960 syringe. And the great thing about syringes is you can get like a one ML syringe and there's like a

00:27:14.600 hundred spaces on the side. It allows you to lower down that last amount with a lot of precision.

00:27:20.080 And so I think, uh, finishing a taper with liquid is also a really great thing to do if someone's

00:27:25.640 struggling to come off. As for the timeframe, um, for many patients, it can take them a year,

00:27:32.060 sometimes up to two years to come off these medications if they've been on them for a really

00:27:36.600 long time. And so I always tell people not to, not to rush it, take your time. Um, you should

00:27:42.200 be able to come off without having severe withdrawal. And that's, that's the way to do it.

00:27:46.820 What about the relation of these kinds of drugs to violent acts and to aberrant ideologies? I guess

00:27:56.020 I'll put my cards on the table. I've noticed a major uptick in violence from the left, notably

00:28:02.740 associated with transgenderism, a very serious psychiatric condition. And in the lion's share of

00:28:11.020 these cases, uh, basically every time it seems that we learn the information, they're on SSRIs.

00:28:17.820 Yeah. Yeah. Is there a relationship? Um, yes. So I, I, I believe there is now this has been shut down

00:28:26.320 in the media, uh, for a really long time. Um, and sometimes people don't believe me when I say this,

00:28:33.540 you can look at the drug labels from the FDA right now, and they already list these side effects in

00:28:40.440 there. If you look at Adderall, for instance, there's a whole section in the warnings and

00:28:43.740 precautions, which is the highlighted section of important risks in the drug label that the drug

00:28:48.520 can cause hostility, um, because they see it a lot in kids. If you look at Abilify, it's an

00:28:54.220 anti-psychotic homicidal ideation is listed in the drug label. If you look at the SSRIs,

00:29:01.200 the drug label already says they can cause, um, suicidal ideation, suicidal behavior,

00:29:06.720 um, aggression, and violence. These are already recognized risks that the FDA has ratified and

00:29:12.940 the pharmaceutical companies have put in their labels. Um, but then when it comes to the issue of

00:29:18.480 mass violence, we've all of a sudden, I feel like the media pretends that these drugs, you know,

00:29:23.440 there's no way that these drugs could do it. And if you bring it up, they try and intimidate you.

00:29:28.900 They say, um, you're stigmatizing the mentally ill. You are, um, you know, you're, you're, you're,

00:29:34.740 you're trying to make an excuse. You're trying to scare people away from them. They try and shut you

00:29:38.720 down. Um, but when we look at, uh, um, legal cases as well, this has been used as a defense by,

00:29:47.420 um, in the court of law. And it has been found reasonable by judges and juries.

00:29:52.880 It reduces culpability because they're on the psych drugs that were supposed to help them,

00:29:57.640 but actually made it worse. And you're not even allowed to acknowledge that the drugs made it worse.

00:30:02.260 Yeah. Well, let me talk about some of these cases, um, because they're, they are shocking

00:30:08.120 because most people are thinking about school shootings when they're worried about these

00:30:11.320 medications. So one of the cases was with a gentleman called, uh, Donald Schell in Wyoming in

00:30:16.740 the nineties. Um, he had previously taken, uh, Prozac and SSRI and become agitated on it.

00:30:23.060 Another doctor put him on a different SSRI later on called Paxil. This never should have happened

00:30:29.280 because it's the same drug class. If you got worse on the, on, on Prozac, you shouldn't have been put

00:30:34.200 on Paxil, but the doctor didn't know he had that prior history within a week of going on Paxil, uh,

00:30:40.540 Don killed his wife. He killed his daughter and he killed his granddaughter. He shot all three of

00:30:46.620 them and then he killed himself. Um, now the surviving, uh, son-in-law Tobin took out a, a, a claim

00:30:55.060 against Smith Klein. This was before they became, uh, Glaxo Smith Klein and, uh, he sued them and, uh,

00:31:01.340 they were found 90, uh, 80% liable for what had happened due to failure to warn about the fact that

00:31:07.460 it could cause homicidal and, um, suicidal behavior. They appealed it, but the appeal did not work

00:31:13.080 and it stood. And this has happened, not just in this case, there have been several other cases

00:31:17.860 where judges and juries have found that, uh, if not for the person taking the psychiatric medication,

00:31:24.520 this act of violence would not have happened.

00:31:29.060 I had actually never heard of that.

00:31:31.480 Yeah.

00:31:31.960 Are there more recent examples of courts finding this or have, have the court started to turn on

00:31:37.060 it too? Um, the most recent one that comes to mind, um, and some of this stuff is pretty gruesome,

00:31:44.220 so, you know, yeah, but there was a, there's a general gentleman, David Carmichael, who, again,

00:31:49.600 very similar story was put on Paxil, I believe, and he actually killed his son. Um, and, uh, while

00:31:55.480 he was in a, um, uh, psychosis because of it. Now he, uh, ended up spending some time in a psychiatric

00:32:03.960 hospital afterwards for, I think it was two to three years, something like that. But, um, the

00:32:09.080 prosecutor did not press charges because they, they looked at him and they were just like,

00:32:13.680 there's no, you know, judging from your history, from your wife and, you know, being an upstanding,

00:32:18.520 great person, good citizen, there's no way we could explain this happening if not for the drug.

00:32:24.800 And so they, they, um, they didn't pursue it to kind of send him, you know, send him to prison

00:32:29.240 and jail and all of that. But, but one objection I've heard, even if you tell your friends or

00:32:34.740 family, if they're on it, you say, you should really get off this. They'll give you the same

00:32:38.000 excuse that you'd hear if you, if you raised an objection to the COVID vaccine. Remember the

00:32:42.460 COVID vaccine, they said, if you take the vaccine, you won't get the virus. Then it turned out that

00:32:46.040 wasn't true. And so they said, well, if you get the vaccine, you'll get the virus, but you won't

00:32:49.500 transmit the virus. And it turned out that wasn't true. And they said, well, uh, okay, you'll get it and

00:32:53.880 you'll transmit it, but it would be much worse. The symptoms would be much worse if you didn't

00:32:59.140 take the vaccine, which was unfalsifiable. Well, I've heard the same thing with the SSRIs

00:33:03.180 where you say, Hey, you know, you've been taking these drugs forever and you haven't gotten less

00:33:08.700 crazy. And in some ways you've gotten more crazy, it seems to me. So you should probably get off the

00:33:13.300 drugs. Right. And a lot of the time they'll tell you, Oh, well, no, you don't, you don't know how

00:33:18.800 bad it was before. If you think this is bad. Oh, trust me, it would be much worse without the drug.

00:33:24.200 What do you say to those people? Um, I say to them that on a population level from the FDA's own

00:33:30.300 clinical trials, um, taking these medications is associated with a greater risk of suicidal

00:33:35.640 thoughts and behaviors. And I want to just let that sink in for a second, because this should

00:33:40.340 sound absolutely bat crazy. How do they control you? You're saying people who have depression or

00:33:46.880 like it's the same kind of people. Is it just normal people or people? Cause cause if it were just

00:33:52.360 normal people and people on SSRIs, you'd say, well, those are the guys who are suicidal anyway,

00:33:56.240 or are you saying people, people with depression who don't take the SSRIs, people with depression

00:34:01.980 who do take the SSRIs. It's the ones who take the SSRIs who are more likely to kill themselves.

00:34:06.620 Yes. Crazy. And your reaction is exactly the reaction that I want everyone listening

00:34:11.340 to have right now. It is in the drug labels. So if you look at the drug labels right now for SSRIs,

00:34:18.640 um, it says for populations under age 25, taking SSRIs is associated at a population level with a

00:34:26.960 higher chance of suicidal behavior. And so I don't think there is any good justification for every,

00:34:35.320 for, for really using these medications in younger people. Yes, it will reduce their symptoms,

00:34:40.500 um, their symptoms on the depression scale, which by the way, is how they measure it. How many symptoms

00:34:45.300 are you reporting? They're not measuring it by life satisfaction, relationships, rates of divorce,

00:34:50.800 any of the things. So what are the symptoms? You know, you know, anxiety, low mood, sleep. And if

00:34:56.680 you just give someone a drug that kind of numbs them out, those symptoms are going to go down,

00:35:00.580 but you could also see how being in a kind of numbed out state may not be the best state to be

00:35:06.880 connected in your relationships, feel motivated at work, feel the drive to go and change things in

00:35:11.620 your life. And so it decreases your symptoms. And so people kind of feel better. Um, but then they're

00:35:16.900 also kind of spell bound because they're in a drug state that they may, they may feel better,

00:35:21.640 but their life really isn't getting that much better. And so when you think about it that way,

00:35:26.460 you go, well, okay, so you're taking a drug that's masking problems for many people, their problems

00:35:31.780 aren't getting better. Um, and you can also have these paradoxical reactions where people can become

00:35:37.720 unexpectedly more suicidal. It makes sense that taking them actually on a population level,

00:35:43.640 like you said, group on placebo group on drug, the group on the drug is having more suicidal behavior

00:35:50.800 and, um, suicidal thoughts. And when further analyses were done, it was shown that it was not just in

00:35:56.920 the group that was under age 25, that it actually extended to all adults. Um, and so when someone says

00:36:05.260 to me, Hey, if, if I don't take this medication, um, it's going to lead to, you know, if people stop

00:36:11.960 taking them, it's going to lead to more suicidal behavior. That's what it comes down to because

00:36:14.740 people don't make the argument. Oh, if they stop taking this medication, they're going to be more

00:36:18.920 eccentric or they're going to be more annoying or they're going to be a little more. It's always,

00:36:23.160 if you tell people not to take these drugs, they're going to kill themselves and you're going to

00:36:27.660 have blood on your hands. The opposite is true. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. What about some of the other drugs?

00:36:35.260 Because we focused on this one class of antidepressants. Is that basically just what

00:36:39.660 people mean by antidepressant or pretty much the SSRIs that, that constitutes the lion's share of

00:36:44.880 that antidepressant part. Yeah. What are the other, because what are the other ones I've heard of?

00:36:48.860 Benzos? Yeah. Is a benzo an SSRI? No, benzo, um, a benzo is a very popular type of sedative.

00:36:56.300 Okay. Um, and like Xanax or Clonopin. Yeah. That, that kind of stuff. So that's different. I'm

00:37:01.980 confessing my ignorance to the entire audience, but so that's different. Yeah. Are those, are those

00:37:06.180 also bad for you? They're incredibly bad for you. Um, and I, I don't like SSRIs, but I think benzos

00:37:12.640 are worse. Um, so, I mean, the issue with the benzodiazepines is kind of similar to the SSRIs is

00:37:20.160 they just, they, they simply make people worse over the long run. That's a pretty blunt, uh,

00:37:26.060 characterization. It is. And, and so you get, um, and here's what it looks like. If you're a benzo

00:37:31.160 user, try and, uh, see if this is happening to you right now, they become more agoraphobic. They

00:37:36.500 stop, they, they, they stop wanting to leave their house and they start to have a very anxious,

00:37:41.840 ruminative and obsessive thoughts over time. And they start to have mood instability. So,

00:37:47.160 I mean, this is what I see in my practice all the time. We, we, half of my practice is getting

00:37:51.060 people off benzos. Um, so they, they, they get worse over time, more anxious, more withdrawn,

00:37:56.540 and then they're really hard to stop. And some people, when they come off these medications too

00:38:03.400 fast, this is the benzos and the antidepressants. They can actually have a neurological brain injury

00:38:10.280 called protracted withdrawal that can be completely disabling. Um, and it's almost like you've had a

00:38:16.800 severe concussion. Like someone has pushed you out of a window and you've hit your head and people

00:38:20.860 can be disabled for several years after they come off these medications. If they come off too

00:38:26.560 quickly, if they come off too quickly. And this is like another thing. When I say this, people goes,

00:38:31.380 they go, this is crazy. My doctor would have told me if coming off this medication could cause

00:38:37.000 a brain injury that could last for several years. And to them, I would say, pick up the drug label,

00:38:44.860 look in the warnings and precaution and read the section that says protracted withdrawal.

00:38:48.840 These are recognized risks in the drug labels, which doctors are not telling patients about.

00:38:55.040 And so, I mean, I've had people take their lives because they've been so disabled.

00:38:58.980 They're not able to support their families. Um, and yeah, essentially it's like you've had a brain

00:39:04.060 injury and it can take them years to recover from. And this happens with the SSRIs as well.

00:39:08.620 Are these the kinds of drugs that people take on airplanes?

00:39:11.100 Yeah.

00:39:11.500 Yeah. That's the only time I really encounter them is I'll be flying with someone and say,

00:39:15.660 oh, I popped it. What's the popular one? Uh, Xanax.

00:39:19.640 Xanax. I'm popping a Xanax for the airplane. I said, just get a whiskey. I don't know. That's

00:39:24.220 what I get on an airplane.

00:39:25.040 Well, the sad thing is I actually see a lot of, um, perimenopausal women who are entering

00:39:29.940 menopause get put on these drugs and end up getting a lot worse because of them. Menopause is one of the

00:39:36.340 highest risk period, um, for women when it comes to psychiatrists, like, cause they have mood

00:39:41.620 insubility, they have insomnia. And I have so many patients right now who are just going through

00:39:47.280 menopause who end up kind of hooked in this, this like psychiatric hell, you know? Um,

00:39:53.760 so the idea being they start to go crazy during menopause, they can't take it anymore. They go and

00:39:59.180 get some drug, but if they had just gone through menopause on the other side of it, they would have

00:40:03.640 been basically fine again.

00:40:04.540 gone through menopause, um, uh, started hormonal therapy that could be really beneficial for some

00:40:10.020 women. Uh, uh, uh, but yes, exactly. You know, that, that, that's a really high risk period,

00:40:15.120 uh, for them.

00:40:16.420 So then what is the alternative? You know, we're in a period where people really like the idea of

00:40:22.060 alternative medicine, where it used to be all the left wingers were the hippies and now the right

00:40:27.420 wingers are kind of the hippies. And now Bobby Kennedy, who used to be a left wing kook is now the

00:40:33.580 Republican health and human services secretary. And it's all, and like my very traditional wife

00:40:39.660 is reading all about, I don't know, granola and seed oils and everything. So that's a good wife.

00:40:44.180 Yes. Yeah. We're kind of totally up, up, upside down at this point. So what do you tell people

00:40:50.340 to do? I mean, the answer is just deal with it, stiff upper lip, talk it out, fix your relationships.

00:40:56.840 I don't mean to, I don't mean that derisively.

00:40:59.840 That's like good advice sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, well, it depends. I mean,

00:41:04.380 when we're looking at anxiety and depression, we have to respect it as a very complicated problem.

00:41:09.720 I mean, like what are the things that make people anxious and depressed? I mean,

00:41:13.620 there's a whole range of things from the fairly benign to, you know, quite bad childhood trauma,

00:41:19.340 where you develop, um, maladaptive personality traits and it's very hard to relate to people and

00:41:24.380 you have low self-esteem. Like that kind of issue requires, that might require a lot more work.

00:41:28.920 Like that might require actually working with a professional to gain insight into how, um, you

00:41:34.060 know, terrible things that happened to you in the past are playing out in your current life and

00:41:38.800 relationships. But then we can also have people that just have really terrible physical health.

00:41:45.780 I mean, they're sitting behind their computer all day, you know, just typing away. They're not

00:41:50.100 getting any sunlight. They're not moving their body. They're, they're eating, um, uh, just

00:41:54.880 lots of refined carbohydrates. They have insulin resistance. Their brain is starved of energy because

00:42:01.020 they're completely metabolically destroyed for that person. It's like, let's get you healthy.

00:42:06.520 Let's get your, um, get nutritious food back into you. Let's decrease the amount of carbohydrates.

00:42:11.900 And so you're actually, your physical health is kind of improving. That might be a solution for one

00:42:16.540 person. Um, you can have someone who's in an abusive relationship and then it's like, well,

00:42:21.440 how do you navigate that? Oh gosh, you have kids as well. Well, that's a big problem. How do we

00:42:25.800 navigate this abusive relationship where there's children going on? Like some of these things are

00:42:29.900 like, I don't want to diminish anxiety and depression. I mean, some of the things like,

00:42:34.680 like it's like, it's like a gut punch is it's really complicated, messy problems. Yeah. You could

00:42:39.720 be in a job that you hate, but then you have a family to support as well. And it's like, how do you

00:42:44.880 find peace with that? And so. No, I, I, you know, I have friends, I'm being a little tough on the

00:42:50.180 ladies and calling them crazy and stuff, but I, I do have friends where I think, well, you know,

00:42:54.540 if I had that lady's husband, I'd probably be a little anxious and depressed too.

00:42:58.320 Yeah. Be a little down in the dumps, you know, or if I had to do such and such job,

00:43:02.540 that might get to me a little bit too. So look, it's, this is why I'm unsatisfied with the advice

00:43:09.000 of just, you know, buck up kid. Uh, though I sometimes dispense that very advice is at the level of

00:43:14.380 the U S population. The fact that you have 20% of people or whatever it is feeling the need to go

00:43:21.000 on these very heavy psych drugs tells you that something has gone wrong. Maybe at the personal

00:43:26.340 level, maybe they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, maybe at the systemic level,

00:43:30.780 maybe at the political level. I think we should talk about that. And the thing that has kind of

00:43:34.940 dawned on me the longer that I've been doing this for is that a lot of these problems actually start

00:43:41.180 young. I mean, like relationships, I mean, this is one of the core pillars of, of your wellbeing.

00:43:47.260 If you marry the wrong person, like if you don't have the right kind of guidance to understand,

00:43:52.100 Hey, how do I pick a partner that shares my same views about having kids or values or religion or

00:43:58.400 anything like that? That could be really hard. I've seen that turn up in a lot of relationships.

00:44:03.420 You know, if, if you don't have parents that kind of encourage you to find the thing that

00:44:07.880 energizes you, um, and that you're going to naturally be interested in, and they say, no,

00:44:12.880 you need to become a lawyer. You need to become an engineer. And okay. You're not interested.

00:44:17.640 Take the Adderall so you can sit down and focus because success is just doing these jobs and you

00:44:22.320 end up doing a job that you need to be essentially drugged to do. This is really common. Like I,

00:44:27.700 like I don't want to great point. There's so many people who get kind of driven into these careers.

00:44:32.620 They white collar job, you know, big, big firm that is success, you know, because wow,

00:44:38.320 it's, I considered for a while in my twenties, I considered going to law school. So should I,

00:44:43.080 should I sit for the LSAT? Should I go to law school? I thought, I really don't want to be a

00:44:47.580 lawyer on paper. I could be, you know, I, uh, write, I read, I make arguments, but I just don't want to

00:44:54.320 be a lawyer. It would be so depressing. And today, whatever it is that I don't, I don't even really have a

00:45:00.380 real job. I work 20 hours a day or something, but I don't feel like I have a real job and it really

00:45:05.540 jazzes me up. Whereas I think if I worked half the amount of time that I do, even in a prestigious

00:45:10.800 career, like a lawyer or a doctor, I would probably be severely depressed would be my guess.

00:45:16.320 Yeah. Yeah. And, um, and so I think we, we, we need to help, we need to help kids when they're,

00:45:25.260 when they are young, actually challenge, you know, go figure out some really important things. Like,

00:45:31.120 um, uh, I'm most people aren't thinking about that at that stage in their life. And so,

00:45:38.300 you know, I think, I mean, if we talk about, I think, um, churchgoing has, has gone down. And if

00:45:45.320 we look at, um, the decrease in churchgoing, I mean, that is something where people,

00:45:53.440 there is an emphasis on marriage. There is an emphasis on values, core values, which you want

00:45:58.040 to share with your partner, you know, before you get married, you know, if you're at a Catholic church,

00:46:02.520 you talk to a priest and things like that. Some of these institutions actually used to kind of help

00:46:06.960 with going through these motions. Um, so you don't make some of these really big mistakes

00:46:12.540 early on in your life. Okay. Then I have a question to go further. So you say,

00:46:15.860 well, sharing values with your spouse is, is going to be more conducive to flourishing than

00:46:21.480 if you oppose your spouse. Correct. And I get that point, but let's say you do share value. Let's say

00:46:27.360 two, you got two couples and they both share values, but they have different values and one goes to

00:46:33.700 church and one votes the right way. And one, you know, has kids and all the rest. And the other

00:46:40.600 doesn't, does all the opposite stuff. They both share values with their spouses, but they have very

00:46:46.660 different values. Can we say that one set of values is more conducive to happiness than the other?

00:46:54.880 I think statistically, I mean, you can look at, um, some like having kids is associated with greater

00:47:03.500 happiness. I mean, that has been born out with clinical trial research. Being married is associated

00:47:08.440 with greater happiness. Um, church going is associated with greater happiness as well. Um, and so,

00:47:17.560 so, so yes, we don't, we don't really have to guess. Yes. No, it is. It is there. My theory on

00:47:24.260 this from the systemic level is I think liberalism makes you unhappy. I think the ideology of liberalism,

00:47:30.540 I'm not just knocking the, the leftists, even people who call themselves on the right, who are

00:47:35.240 liberal, meaning they, they think that the highest good is to maximize individual autonomy, say,

00:47:41.260 I think that makes you unhappy. I think it alienates you from your family and your community and your

00:47:48.220 nation and everything else. I think it gives you unrealistic expectations of yourself because you

00:47:53.480 think that you can transform your natural limits. You can, you can, or transcend your natural limits.

00:47:58.240 You can transcend your body, I guess, you know, you can be a man and you can think that you're a

00:48:01.940 woman. I think it inclines toward a lot of sexually deviant ideologies, but just more broadly,

00:48:07.260 aberrant ideologies that tells you that, you know, you can flunk every class in school,

00:48:11.840 but still be an astronaut someday, or it tells you you can be five foot three, but play for the

00:48:15.820 New York Knicks. And, and, and it says that if you don't have that belief, that that will somehow

00:48:21.800 depress you, that that will, you know, that will be bad for your self-esteem. I think liberalism

00:48:26.700 drives you crazy. Um, and it's not just a thought that you need to have because that's actually been

00:48:31.880 backed up with statistics that when they look at liberal women, uh, compared to conservative women,

00:48:36.540 they are more depressed than that. Um, and I'll go a point further because this is something that

00:48:41.600 I see, especially with like, you know, people call it, um, you know, like the oppression Olympics.

00:48:46.240 Yeah. Like there, there is something about liberal ideology right now where, um, you are being

00:48:52.120 oppressed, you know, the system is against you. You don't have an internal, you don't have a locus

00:48:57.840 of control. Like you don't feel like you are in control of your life. You know, the way my life

00:49:03.120 turns out is up to me and my responsibility and I can control it. I feel like that ideology is very

00:49:08.200 much like men are holding me down, you know, the government, you know, the government, the people,

00:49:13.000 all of these types of things. It's, it's not a very empowering, um, ideology. It's not something

00:49:18.400 that builds confidence in yourself and your ability to kind of navigate the world over time. And so,

00:49:24.160 that's something I also worry about. Do you have faith in the psychiatric profession?

00:49:28.240 No, no, absolutely not. You know, I, I feel like they've absolutely betrayed the American public

00:49:35.620 in a major way. Um, and I, and, you know, I would want nothing more than the president of

00:49:42.440 the American Psychiatric Association to be pulled before a panel of senators and to be asked some

00:49:47.700 hard questions like why are one in three women over 60 on psychiatric medications? You know, why are,

00:49:55.120 you know, 18% of our female population taking these drugs right now? Why are 17% of adolescent boys,

00:50:01.640 uh, you know, 14 to 17 diagnosed with ADHD right now? Why have SSRI, you know, why have antidepressant

00:50:08.660 prescriptions gone up 500% while suicide, uh, teen suicidal thinking, um, have both gone up 50% in the

00:50:16.400 last 30 years? Why is psychiatric disability, uh, going up? What are you doing? You know,

00:50:23.920 I mean, and so I think there's been a massive betrayal, not just with the psychiatrist. I also

00:50:30.020 think the, um, National Institute of Mental Health, um, in its prior form, it's getting reformed now by

00:50:36.200 Bobby and his team. They have just been obsessed with biological cures for anxiety and depression.

00:50:41.920 I think the, you know, you would think that with, uh, you know, you know, 15% of the population,

00:50:48.620 men and women on these drugs, that someone at the NIMH would have said, Hey, let's do a two-year

00:50:53.160 study where we look at people who get standard of care, just kind of plopped on the antidepressants.

00:50:57.720 And we compare it to people who get some relationship coaching, you know, nutrition help, um, you know,

00:51:02.800 some, uh, coaching on life and purpose. Let's see how those two cohorts go. So we can really,

00:51:08.080 we can really see, you know, is it safe for, you know, 15 to 20% of our population to be on these

00:51:13.920 drugs? Cause that's a lot of us. And we should really know that. Well, they have never done

00:51:18.180 any studies like that. They're just looking for biological targets for new drugs. I think that

00:51:23.900 is a massive betrayal, um, of the American public. So then can you go even further to say,

00:51:31.340 yes, the psychiatric profession has this whole conversation of mental health and the obsession

00:51:37.400 with mental health without ever dealing with the actual underlying issues of mental health,

00:51:41.940 that that's a betrayal of what the psychiatric profession is supposed to be. But you would

00:51:47.540 not go so far as to say that the practice of psychiatry or clinical psychology is in itself

00:51:54.280 a fool's errand. As if to say, I know some people, there are prominent people who say, nah, the whole

00:51:59.840 thing is just kind of fake, you know, and, uh, it's, uh, trying to make scientific that which is a

00:52:08.100 little bit more of an art, you know, the art of human relationships. Yeah. You, you still would

00:52:12.300 defend psychology as a discipline or no. I, um, I, I actually have my own misgivings about, um,

00:52:20.980 psychology. Um, and a lot of this comes from the fact that many people stay with therapists

00:52:28.420 indefinitely. And that makes me suspicious. It makes me feel like people are really paying for

00:52:33.800 friends. Um, and, and, and so I, I think a lot of that goes on. I also think there is, um, we're so

00:52:41.880 censored these days as well. And I actually think that turns up in therapy. I think some therapists

00:52:47.880 are afraid to actually, um, take a stand on some things and say, I think you need to work on your

00:52:56.260 relationships. I think you need to, um, you know, find, I think, I think you need to find a job that

00:53:02.960 is more aligned with you. I think you need to think about living a life in service of others.

00:53:07.860 I think we're so agnostic in, uh, in therapy. We're just like, well, well, what do you think about it?

00:53:13.520 What do you think about it? The last example really got me too, because it seems rather modest to just

00:53:20.160 say, hey, maybe you should think about anyone else ever, but even that might be too far. I don't want to,

00:53:25.560 I don't want to impose my moral and values system on you. Exactly. They, they, they really, I mean,

00:53:31.980 they pussyfoot around the whole thing and they do not. I, and so I, I don't think it has backbone.

00:53:38.480 Um, this will make me sound really unscientific, but I'm going to say it anyway. Great. I actually

00:53:43.840 really believe in coaching. I believe, I believe in people like Tony Robbins. I believe in these,

00:53:49.820 these guys that can get you up and motivate you and just say, no, you know, go out, work hard,

00:53:54.860 live a life in service of others. Um, you know, get outside of yourself, you know, don't be so me,

00:54:00.220 me, me. And they give you more direction. Now that hasn't been studied in like randomized controlled

00:54:05.320 trials. And so I know there's probably medical professionals listening here and just being

00:54:08.660 like, that's unscientific. Well, I don't really think the other side works. I would like to see

00:54:13.740 a blend of, um, uh, more empowering coaching, coaching styles, um, with, with therapy. I mean,

00:54:21.420 think like some people think of therapy as this panacea. It's like, oh, I'm depressed. I'm going

00:54:26.040 to go and see this like 24 year old, like social worker. Who's going to be able to tell me something

00:54:31.260 about my life. And they're like, oh, she, she's got a therapy degree. She's got a therapy degree.

00:54:35.880 Therefore she is expert and I'm doing something. Yeah. She's expert. That's insane. Like if you

00:54:43.880 actually have a complicated problem in your life, you go to a professional. Why if, if,

00:54:48.700 and so I think people should say, okay, I've interpersonal problems in my relationship. I'm

00:54:53.240 going to find the person to help me with that. I, I don't like my job. I'm going to see a career

00:54:57.700 coach. I'm not going to talk to the 20 year old, um, clinical social worker who really doesn't know

00:55:02.640 anything about life. You know, she has a, she does cognitive behavioral therapy or something like

00:55:07.160 that. Um, uh, so yes, I, I think there are a lot of, I think there's actually a lot of problems,

00:55:13.540 um, in, in therapy as well. I've long thought that, uh, therapy is just confession for atheists.

00:55:20.400 Yep. And, and I, I go to confession. I should probably go more frequently than I do, but I regularly

00:55:25.560 go to confession. And for those who are unfamiliar with sacramental theology, it means I go into a box

00:55:32.220 and I kneel down. I first examine my conscience and I think about all the bad things I did over

00:55:36.380 the week or two weeks or three weeks or however long. And then I list them in number and kind

00:55:41.060 to a man who has been consecrated to the priesthood and I'm confessing my sins through him to God.

00:55:47.060 And he is given authority by God in my view and in the view of the Bible to forgive or retain my

00:55:52.720 sins. And that's what I do. And then I leave the box and I feel better. And I think that something

00:55:56.500 spiritually efficacious has actually taken place. But even when I try to recommend the sacrament

00:56:01.960 to, uh, more skeptical friends of mine, I say, even if you do not believe in its spiritual

00:56:07.080 efficacy, which is real, but you don't, you don't have to believe it at the moment. I promise

00:56:12.640 you the psychological effects of that are going to be very strong. And I really don't have any

00:56:19.160 experience in psychology. I've never, I've never gone to a psychologist, but I've known a number

00:56:23.720 of them. I strongly suspect the, the three words, ego, te absolvo from a man that I believe

00:56:30.900 is consecrated to his position by God are going to be more powerful than the 24 year old psych

00:56:38.300 major with some degree who says, gee, wow, that's really interesting. Tell me more times

00:56:43.440 up. Give me another 200 bucks next week. Yeah. Yeah. And of course it is. I mean, I think about

00:56:51.180 how we live our lives now, I mean, if you can take 20 minutes, 30 minutes to actually sit down

00:56:59.000 and take a moral inventory of, of things that you have done and really reflect on them, um,

00:57:06.400 how could that not be helpful? Because I mean, the way I see most people living their life is,

00:57:11.300 oh, uncomfortable feeling. Let me whip out my phone and start scrolling, scrolling through.

00:57:15.580 We, we numb ourselves with drugs to pain. We numb ourselves with distraction. When you're going

00:57:20.780 into confession, it's, it's, it's, it's meditative. You know, you're really reflecting

00:57:25.360 on core principles, values, you know, things that you want to practice, which you know, long-term

00:57:30.960 will improve your life and the lives of others. How could that not be a powerful tool?

00:57:37.220 And in some ways it's, it's, it's such a perversion of, uh, psychology is such a perversion

00:57:44.040 of confession that in some ways it's an inversion because again, I'm getting most of this secondhand,

00:57:49.740 but when I confess my sins, I feel a great degree of guilt for my sins as I should. In fact,

00:57:56.540 I say mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, my, my guilt. Uh, and then I confess them and then I

00:58:03.980 believe God has forgiven me and I trust in God's grace. And so I've, I have a reason to let go of

00:58:08.080 the guilt. If I go to confession or if I, if I go to a psychologist, what's the first,

00:58:13.800 the first thing you're going to say, don't feel, oh, you shouldn't feel guilt. You shouldn't feel

00:58:16.820 shame. Yeah. Go blame your mother. Yeah. Don't know. Don't you have to let go of shame. It's

00:58:21.720 very bad for you. You need to love yourself. Yeah. You need self-care. Exactly. And that's

00:58:26.020 that whole locus of control, which you kind of see, um, in the more conservative, uh, um, groups,

00:58:32.300 more religious groups as well. Responsibility, selfishness. I'm in control. Um, yeah, you need

00:58:38.620 to take self-ownership. Yeah. Yeah. And, and this is why I get really worried about chat GPT as well.

00:58:44.740 Um, people use chat GPT for therapy and I've experimented with it, um, as well, asking it

00:58:50.100 questions. And it is just like the therapist that you had, you know, that you had acted out a moment

00:58:56.040 ago. It's other people, you know, it's not you. That's so hard. You know, I'm so sorry for you.

00:59:01.140 That must be so difficult. Yeah. I hear you. Wow. I hear you. There's not some, there's not

00:59:06.480 like a hard ass in there. Take ownership of your life. You know, you know, you know, get in control,

00:59:11.260 get in the driver's seat. You know, you can change things. It's, it's not really an empowering

00:59:15.540 message a lot of the time. Because I want to, I want to hear, to hear more on the chat GPT point,

00:59:20.000 because that's very scary. And I'm sure many more people are going to use it in coming years for

00:59:24.400 therapy. But on the point of even the shame and the guilt, I can, even if you think I'm crazy,

00:59:30.820 even if you think God doesn't exist and the priests are deluding themselves and whatever,

00:59:34.980 you can at least understand why I feel guilt going into the confessional. And then I don't feel guilt

00:59:40.480 after the confessional. Because I believe that the creator and sustainer of the universe, my very

00:59:45.640 maker, who knew every hair on my head before I was born, has forgiven me. But if you don't believe

00:59:52.940 that, if you, if you instead go to some guy with a degree from like Wellesley College,

00:59:58.560 who you are speaking to as the great Oracle, and he, you feel shame because you've committed

01:00:06.180 bad actions. And then he says, no, you shouldn't feel shame. Why would you believe him?

01:00:13.340 You know?

01:00:14.020 Yeah.

01:00:14.520 Is that going to work? I just don't think that's going to work.

01:00:16.940 Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't find it compelling. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

01:00:22.140 Doesn't do it for me. So, okay. So then they turn to chat GPT. This is quite concerning.

01:00:27.380 Yeah.

01:00:27.500 Because I've used chat GPT for some research.

01:00:31.240 Yeah.

01:00:31.360 And a lot of time it's not reliable. Sometimes it's reliable. But when I say it's not reliable,

01:00:36.000 I mean, it'll just completely make stuff up and try to hide it. But, but sometimes you get

01:00:40.840 interesting stuff, access to archives, if I'm doing historical research. Okay. So it can

01:00:45.460 be a useful tool. You have to be very careful with it. People treat this thing like it is

01:00:52.520 God, like it is omnipotent, like it can give you the secrets of the universe and like it

01:00:57.900 can unfold your own personal mysteries to yourself.

01:01:01.800 It's highly disturbing. And the part of it that I worry about the most is when people start making

01:01:12.500 chat GPT like a friend and they will have a boyfriend or a girlfriend that is chat GPT.

01:01:19.540 Is this real? I've, I've read headlines about this. This is really happening.

01:01:22.420 This is real. And then people have a panic attack because I think after you put in 50,000 prompts,

01:01:27.940 it will delete the memory. So you lose, um, cause I, I, I, you know, when you use chat GPT,

01:01:33.440 it remembers things about you. And so you get more accurate replies that are kind of matched to you.

01:01:37.540 But when you go over a certain number of prompts, which you do, if you're treating this thing like

01:01:42.280 a romantic partner, it dies. And then people really freak out when that happens.

01:01:48.200 That's horrifying. Yeah.

01:01:49.740 So the fear is not even of treating chat GPT like a, like a God or an Oracle or something. It's,

01:01:56.440 it's treating it like your therapist or your friend.

01:01:59.340 It is. Um, and you know, one of the scariest things about this technology is people can retreat

01:02:06.040 into it. I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't have boundaries. It's not going to, you know,

01:02:11.620 it's not going to be like your wife where it's going to, you know, come after you if you're insensitive,

01:02:15.660 you're not talking to it or you're not, you know, attuned to the emotions. It just sits there

01:02:19.560 and just kind of takes whatever you feed into it. And I mean, that is like the worst thing ever

01:02:25.460 because you, you, I think people retreat into chat GPT because they're so wounded and fragile

01:02:30.960 with normal human relationships that they want something that feels safe, but it's the worst

01:02:36.240 thing to do. You need to be out there interacting with people and resolving conflicts and not kind

01:02:42.480 of shying away from everything. And so it essentially just, I mean, it, it allows people to,

01:02:47.780 to retreat into this fantasy world. And I mean, the whole thing with X lately and they're like,

01:02:52.800 have you seen like the artificial intelligence, like anime companions that Elon has made?

01:02:58.200 I saw something that was vaguely disturbing that he posted, but I didn't look into it much.

01:03:02.860 They're provocative looking like anime avatars. Um, and I mean, it's so twisted. I mean,

01:03:09.000 it's, it's so disturbing. Um, and I mean, so. And you can treat the, the anime, the hot little

01:03:16.740 22 year old anime as your, as your girlfriend or something? Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. But well,

01:03:22.740 actually that tracks because I, I suspect one of the big drivers of porn and why, you know,

01:03:28.680 I mean, you read these reports of, well, especially it first came out of Japan, but I think you're

01:03:32.240 seeing this here now too, is that guys will prefer porn to a girlfriend. And I remember I was having

01:03:37.640 this conversation with, with my colleague, Andrew Klavan, and he said, can you, that's crazy. Why

01:03:42.300 would anyone prefer, uh, porn to a girlfriend? I said, I totally understand why. Cause your girlfriend

01:03:48.340 has needs. She has needs. She yells at you sometimes. She is like tired sometimes. And porn is

01:03:55.460 just whatever you want. And with chat GPT, it's just that to the nth degree. Correct. Yep. Yeah.

01:04:00.380 Great. It's a brave new world. I, you know, this is like off topic from what we're talking about,

01:04:05.780 but I mean, in 10 years, we're going to have humanoid robots. I really believe that powered

01:04:10.540 with artificial intelligence. And I really worry about what the world is going to look like at

01:04:16.780 that point. I have long said once they perfect robots and AI, because all new technologies are

01:04:26.160 immediately infiltrated by pornography. Once they perfect robots and AI pornography, the human race

01:04:31.500 has about 23 years left and then extinction will set in because people, people will flock to it. I

01:04:37.300 actually do want to talk about the porn issue though, because people write in, I mean, it's not

01:04:41.240 just, certainly not just to my show, it's all over the place. Young men for years and years now have

01:04:46.160 said, one of the biggest struggles in my life is I'm struggling with porn. And, and some are now

01:04:52.260 speaking of pornography as a kind of a drug, you know, causing or fixing a chemical imbalance,

01:04:57.920 say it brings all the way back to the top of our, uh, of our conversation. What do you make of that?

01:05:03.400 I think it's a really apt analogy and, um, I would put pornography, you know, in with things like

01:05:09.440 overeating, sometimes even gambling as well and taking psychiatric drugs. It is a way to numb feelings.

01:05:16.120 It is a way to distract. It is a way to like, because think about, okay, why am I watching porn?

01:05:22.240 Well, I can't get a girlfriend, right? That could be one thing. I'm fighting with my wife. It could

01:05:28.060 be another thing. Um, um, the spark has, has disappeared in my marriage. These are complicated

01:05:34.680 things to fix. So complicated that, oh, isn't it easier if I can just go get my desires met through

01:05:41.180 pornography. I don't need to, I don't need to learn how to, uh, socialize better and go out and meet a

01:05:46.400 girlfriend. I don't need to go through rejection. I don't need to talk to 10, 20, 30 people until I

01:05:51.540 find someone. I can just do that. I don't need to understand what's happened in our relationship.

01:05:56.600 Why has the spark gone away? It is a way of distracting. It is a way of avoiding real problems

01:06:02.700 in your life. Um, and so I do that, that feeling of anxiety that reminds me of a comment,

01:06:07.880 if you'll forgive the crass remark, there was a comment that a college buddy of mine made in

01:06:14.100 college. Uh, he, he referred to, um, procrastination. Yeah.

01:06:20.360 Meaning he, the, the feeling of anxiety, I have to write a term paper. I have to study for an exam

01:06:25.960 or something. And that, that was actually the cause. Yeah. He was describing in a, in a funny way,

01:06:30.500 the, the very thing that you're describing. I know. And, and before you had that and you,

01:06:34.960 you know, maybe you would get up and go for a walk, you know, like you have some anxiety and

01:06:40.400 you're just like, I don't want to do anything. I'm jittery. You'd work out, but now you can just

01:06:43.940 do that. Smoke a cigar. I don't know. That's what I do. I don't, I certainly don't work out. I

01:06:48.900 occasionally go for a walk, but I don't know. Yeah. You have a, have a cigar, read a book,

01:06:54.100 like a pleasure book or you don't. Yeah. So what, if we're looking at systemic mental health

01:07:00.580 problems, psychological problems, lifestyle problems, it seems to me one in five women,

01:07:06.220 one in three women over the age of 60 being on these psych drugs is a big problem that we need

01:07:09.740 to address. But if we're, if we're also looking at these social pathologies, the fact that virtually

01:07:16.780 every young man in the country is hooked on porn that is damaging their relationships, screwing up

01:07:22.680 their brains, that seems like a major issue to fix too, before we start plying them with psych drugs.

01:07:27.360 Yeah. Well, the, the site, the issue with the psych drugs as well is they cause massive amounts of

01:07:33.600 sexual dysfunction as well. So if we're going to add, you know, I think the porn issue is, is

01:07:38.080 definitely a distraction and it's holding men back from going out there and just getting a girlfriend,

01:07:43.720 getting married and figuring that out. But these, these psychiatric medications, even the SSRIs,

01:07:49.640 they called, they cause profound sexual dysfunction, which is something that many people don't realize as

01:07:56.640 well. Like you're talking about ED basically, it doesn't work or? So there's two things there. So

01:08:02.960 the first thing is that when people get on SSRIs, about 70% of them will experience, um, um, so it

01:08:09.400 would be, uh, erectile dysfunction. Um, it would be a lower libido, muted orgasms as well. Um, you know,

01:08:17.800 just a, just a loss of interest. And they are told when they get on these medications, Hey, this is just

01:08:22.120 the trade-off for not being depressed. It will go away when you come off the medication. What we

01:08:28.280 have been finding recently over, well, not that recently over the last 20 years is some people,

01:08:33.260 when they come off these medications, the sexual dysfunction does not go away. It is permanent.

01:08:39.120 And so they develop a condition called post SSRI sexual dysfunction. Um, based on what I've seen in

01:08:46.560 the literature, the incidence is about one in 216, which. What? Yeah. I mean, I mean, so two, yeah,

01:08:53.820 which is a huge amount when you. One in 200,000, I would never touch it. I would never even consider

01:08:58.640 one in 216 men who use SSRIs will have permanent sexual dysfunction. That's what I've seen on, on one,

01:09:10.720 on, on one study that has looked into that. And so if you think about 8% of, of men in the U S are

01:09:18.220 taking these medications, that's a lot of people now. So what PSSD does, and this is psychiatrists

01:09:26.300 and doctors have been trying to explain this away for decades by saying it's performance anxiety. Hey,

01:09:31.500 you have depression and anxiety. You're complaining about, you know, your sexual fun, uh, your sexual

01:09:36.720 functioning didn't return. You're just anxious. You have performance anxiety or something like that.

01:09:41.200 They literally, it's, it's a horrific, uh, thing. They will develop something called genital

01:09:47.580 anesthesia where, um, they lose erogenous sensation, uh, down there. And it feels like, you know,

01:09:55.340 what, what used to be sexually arousing actually just feels like you're touching the back of your hand

01:09:59.440 or your arm. And so the sensation changes on top of that, you know, they have the erectile dysfunction,

01:10:05.900 loss of libido, all of that. They also develop, um, cognitive, uh, like really bad cognitive

01:10:12.440 dysfunction, brain fog, and they feel lobotomized. They, they start to feel very dissociated,

01:10:18.560 like severely numbed out on the medication to the point where they say, you know, if I hug my kids

01:10:24.100 or I hug my spouse, like, I don't get like a warm feeling. You know, when I listened to that song from

01:10:29.000 my childhood that I used to really enjoy, I don't get those prickles on the back of my neck of nostalgia

01:10:34.260 anymore. They feel totally disconnected. Um, and people hear me talking about this and they are

01:10:41.840 saying, they look like you right now. They look wide eyed in, in disbelief, Michael. And then I tell

01:10:47.280 them, this is already in the drug labels in the European union. It's in the drug labels in Canada.

01:10:53.080 It's in the drug labels in Hong Kong. It's in the drug labels in Australia. And, and this is where I'm

01:10:59.080 so upset with the United States. Six years ago, we, um, um, um, the PSSD network, um, coordinated

01:11:07.500 with other scientific professionals to submit a citizen's petition to the FDA to get this put

01:11:13.460 on the drug labels. And they've essentially just like, let it sit on the back burner. They,

01:11:19.240 they have not addressed it. The, um, this group also sued the FDA saying, Hey, we need an action on

01:11:25.160 this because the regulations say that they have to reply. I think it's within 180 days to any

01:11:31.120 citizen's petition. So that, so they were asking, they were saying, here is the evidence. This is

01:11:35.120 the same dossier we've given to the European union, to Australia, to Canada. They have acted on this.

01:11:40.380 They have put it in the labels. They are warning doctors about this problem already. FDA has just

01:11:45.720 sat on this for six years. They sued them last year. I think, sorry, I think it was earlier on this

01:11:50.060 year to say, Hey, we really want a decision about this. This is important. People need to know.

01:11:54.120 And they dismissed it on a technicality. The FDA is sitting on this because they are trying to cover

01:12:00.080 up one of the biggest scandals in modern medical history right now. Um, and I think it, I think it

01:12:08.660 is simply a disgrace what's happening. Are you hopeful that this will now get through thanks to a change

01:12:15.000 in regime and Secretary Kennedy? I'm very hopeful that this will come through because the thing that's

01:12:20.500 happened in psychiatry recently, which is very unique. We're at a really interesting moment in

01:12:26.220 time, both conservative and liberal media are starting to actually turn on the establishment

01:12:32.140 for a long time. It's just been the conservative outlets, but we've had articles in New York times,

01:12:36.840 um, uh, Washington post NPR. And once you start getting like liberal media, as well as conservative

01:12:44.040 talking about these issues, then that's where I think it's almost like the shame or the embarrassment

01:12:50.220 or the fact that this is going to be a PR disaster for them is building up. So I actually think they

01:12:54.960 are going to put it in there, but I think it's really sad because the American public, they deserved

01:12:59.900 better than this. These, the FDA will review an entire dossier of scientific information, multiple

01:13:06.760 clinical trials and animal studies in nine months to get a drug from a pharmaceutical company onto the

01:13:12.760 market, but they've had this, this, uh, report for six years and haven't done anything. It's like

01:13:20.220 their emphasis is on, um, helping the drug companies and not on actually helping, uh, the American

01:13:26.540 population. Well, uh, Secretary Kennedy has for years warned about, uh, agency capture by the corporate

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01:15:15.580 One of the neurological medical issues that's been dominating the news recently

01:15:19.820 is that the Trump administration has said it's found a link between Tylenol and autism,

01:15:26.260 that if pregnant women take Tylenol, it could lead to neurological problems in the kids,

01:15:29.680 including autism. And this has led to liberal women guzzling bottles of Tylenol on camera.

01:15:36.100 And I think some have suffered serious adverse effects, actually. But then it turns out Trump

01:15:41.540 didn't just invent this. Tylenol was treating about it themselves. And Tylenol said, we don't

01:15:46.660 encourage pregnant women to take any of our products. Major medical institutions, Harvard,

01:15:51.340 all the rest, the trade guild for the obstetricians and gynecologists, who now say Tylenol is totally

01:15:57.540 safe. They previously said that Tylenol had this connection to autism. Your take.

01:16:05.020 I think it's like, I mean, this reminds me of COVID and just the delusion that people have.

01:16:12.880 I mean, it's like being on the left, it's, I think they want to associate themselves with being the party

01:16:18.300 of science, right? That's, and that's it. And so if all of a sudden, you know, Trump is criticizing,

01:16:25.780 um, taking Tylenol, I hate Trump. He's obviously wrong. You know, you know, this, this is safe and

01:16:32.980 I'm going to do this to spite him. I'm going to poison my body. Um, I potentially my baby

01:16:38.980 with, with this medication. You're right. Of course, that's gotta be it. Because

01:16:42.920 if Trump says it, it's unscientific and it's wrong. And then Trump says, no, no, I got it from

01:16:49.200 Harvard and from the obstetricians and gynecologists and from Tylenol. I got it from

01:16:55.060 them. And it's, it's that, I guess the contempt for Trump, the presumption that he is anti-scientific.

01:17:00.680 Yeah. Trump's even the scientific credentials of the institutions and the drug manufacturer

01:17:05.180 themselves. Yeah. You know, and while we're on this topic, something that we didn't touch on,

01:17:09.860 which I think is really important is what the SSRIs actually do to the kids who are exposed to them

01:17:16.940 when the mothers are pregnant. So anywhere between three and 10% of pregnant women are on SSRIs.

01:17:23.740 Good grief. Yeah. And so these drugs, they freely cross the placenta. And for a long time,

01:17:29.820 there has been concern about this idea that, okay, what is the impact of exposing a child's brain

01:17:37.500 when it's going from the size of a speck to a fully formed brain in nine months? Like if they

01:17:42.200 are taking an SSRI that's going to kind of impact the serotonin system, will that lead to changes

01:17:49.640 over time that we should be concerned about? And so there's some pretty frightening research here.

01:17:55.660 And I want to start quickly with the animal research because you can't do a randomized controlled

01:18:00.580 trial in humans at this stage where you just randomly assign some pregnant women to this and

01:18:06.140 others. You can do it in mice. And so they do it, they do it in mice. And what they find is that the

01:18:12.480 mice who are exposed in utero and during the sensitive periods of brain development, they grow up

01:18:18.140 to display a higher rate of autistic-like behaviors and decreased sexual activity. And so that is

01:18:26.360 really concerning. The other thing that we found- So hold on, because everyone's trying to figure

01:18:31.060 out the cause of autism. Is it merely over-diagnosed? Is it Tylenol? Is it vaccines? Is it, though I had

01:18:37.400 not heard this before, that there might be a link between SSRI use in women and the developed,

01:18:43.960 in pregnant women and the development of autism? Correct. So there is, there is epidemiological

01:18:49.640 evidence, there's the animal studies, but there are some other studies which also quite, which I'd

01:18:56.360 like to touch on. I was just at the FDA about a month ago, I was talking with Marty Makari on a full

01:19:00.680 panel about this. Yeah.

01:19:02.680 And we have 12 MRI studies now that show that the children who are exposed to these drugs in utero

01:19:09.440 compared to not, they actually have functional and structural changes on the brain scans. When

01:19:15.400 you get the people exposed, the infants exposed and not exposed. They've also gone and looked at this

01:19:21.480 later on when these exposed kids have become teens later on, and they find that there's actually

01:19:26.600 changed signaling in the brain in the areas that control emotions, and that has correlated to worse

01:19:33.060 mental health care outcomes. And so this is obviously worrying from the autism standpoint, but the other

01:19:42.840 part of this is all of the transgender stuff that has been going on lately. I mean, you could say that a lot

01:19:50.600 of this is, you know, social contagion. I mean, if you're on the left, you could say, you know, it's just

01:19:55.000 increased acceptance right now. But since the early nineties, I mean, that that's when we started putting

01:20:00.920 a lot of moms on these drugs and based on these animal studies, like if these rats are growing up with

01:20:06.360 decreased, you know, changes in their sexual functioning. Personally, I have also seen men who have

01:20:12.740 PSSD who, after they have these sexual side effects, normal heterosexual men who used to be attracted to

01:20:18.400 women, they find that they lose that attraction and they start to question their sexuality.

01:20:24.240 And so I hear these stories. And so I also wonder whether there is a link between putting kids while

01:20:30.160 their brains are developing in utero and when they are children and before they have gone through their

01:20:34.500 sexual maturity on these medications, which have profound sexual effects and also impact the brain.

01:20:41.440 What is that doing to people? Is this leading to asexuality? Is this leading to gender confusion?

01:20:46.440 Is this leading to the rise in LGBTQ? I mean, I've heard some stats lately that in Gen Z, it's like

01:20:52.540 25% of them are associating with being LGBTQ. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And so this reported by liberal media,

01:21:01.140 NBC news, that sort of thing. And so I do think that we need to ask that question. I mean,

01:21:05.940 what is the impact of whether it's three or 10%? I've seen two different figures of pregnant women

01:21:11.560 exposing their children to these drugs during development. Well, and also there is a notable

01:21:17.800 association between autism and the trans identity. Yeah. So even just drawing a link between SSRIs and

01:21:24.540 autism would get you an association with the trans ideology. Yeah. That's terrifying. Yeah.

01:21:33.420 We've talked a lot about the women. Turning to the men and the boys, they seem to disproportionately like

01:21:41.300 Adderall or be prescribed Adderall. I've never done an Adderall in my life. Some friends have referred

01:21:46.380 to it as Diet Coke, though I've never been tempted. What is your take on the prescription or over

01:21:53.260 prescription of Adderall for ADHD or just for people who call them smart pills at college or say they need

01:21:59.340 him to focus at work? Yeah. I think about a story of a friend of mine. His name's Cooper Davis. And

01:22:08.660 when he was young, he got put on Adderall because he was struggling in school. He ended up taking it

01:22:15.180 throughout college. And then he ended up going into journalism or something like that. Eventually,

01:22:22.200 the drug side effects caught up with him and he had to come off the medication. And when he was in

01:22:26.380 his 30s, he realized that he had essentially been drugging himself into a job that he hated

01:22:30.980 because off the medications, he's like, I don't want to do this anymore. And so, he had to reinvent

01:22:36.340 his life at the age of 30 because he did not want to be on psychiatric medication anymore.

01:22:41.920 And so, that's one of the things that I really worry about. In the US, I feel like we worship at the

01:22:48.220 altar of career success. And for many parents and for many students, that's how I have value. That's

01:22:56.240 the most important thing for me. And they will drug themselves with these medications in order to

01:23:03.900 succeed at that level. And so, I worry that they're going to end up in careers that don't actually

01:23:09.840 naturally energize them and inspire them. And they'll end up doing things that they hate.

01:23:14.660 The other thing about this, which this is what all parents should know is the main effect of taking

01:23:21.840 these stimulants is really to actually make boring subjects seem more tolerable and for kids to fidget

01:23:29.320 less. When they look at the long-term academic outcomes, now that's what most parents care about,

01:23:34.060 like actual success, it doesn't do that. It does not convert to long-term academic success.

01:23:42.600 Because it seems like they're over-prescribed because people want to stop boys from being

01:23:45.980 boys. But listen, I wasn't fidgety. I was good in school. I was always good in school. And I had

01:23:52.800 friends and classmates who needed to sit down. But it was always on the assumption that, well,

01:23:58.720 if you just get the kid to sit down and pay attention, then he'll get the good grades and

01:24:04.260 go to the good college and get the good job. You're saying that doesn't happen?

01:24:06.480 No, it just, it kind of sedates them. They become less of a problem for the teachers. The teacher

01:24:13.420 can continue being boring. You know, they can be in a school system that really isn't that exciting to

01:24:18.280 them. And the kid is just kind of, you know, on stimulants, like ultra, you know, chemically focused

01:24:23.980 in just like doing the work. And they're like, okay, that's great. That's great progress.

01:24:29.140 They're not out there asking questions like, well, why do I think this is so boring? Like,

01:24:34.540 what would actually be more interesting to me? Like, what would energize me and bring me to life?

01:24:39.100 They shut it down with the stimulant. And again, we rob a person of the chance to be like,

01:24:46.300 okay, school's not really for me, but like, I like this. And I'm really interested in this. And this

01:24:50.320 is where my passion is going to be. And they would have done much better if they would just, you know,

01:24:56.180 spend 10 years working on that passion. Eventually, you can turn it into a job and a career and

01:25:00.140 something that you love. Um, but yeah, you, you can use Adderall to just push people through the

01:25:06.640 dysfunctional school system into jobs that they hate. Okay. Now I have a related question,

01:25:10.540 but it's a little more personal. I have a lot of friends who are hooked on those nicotine pouches,

01:25:17.340 like heavy doses all day, rocking, you know, 15 millilip pillies, double, double decky.

01:25:24.340 Yeah. Me, I'm not that into it, but I do have one or two pretty regularly. I'll to low dose,

01:25:31.140 but I'll toss one in once, once, once, twice, maybe three times a day. Yeah.

01:25:36.840 Is that bad? Is that like the Adderall? Is that diet Adderall, diet, diet Coke?

01:25:41.280 I don't think occasional use is bad when it comes to stimulants and I'll lump in caffeine as well.

01:25:47.160 This is welcome. I do a lot more caffeine than I do of the nicotine pouches.

01:25:50.160 Um, in general, nicotine and caffeine and randomized controlled trials, um, they do increase anxiety and

01:25:56.420 they do impair sleep, especially if you go any more than a, you know, a small cup of coffee,

01:26:01.560 like before 10 AM, something like that. I have three pretty strong coffees a day.

01:26:08.520 So ending at like four. How do you sleep? Not well. Yeah. I sleep poorly actually,

01:26:13.860 which you can tell from my under eye bags. Yeah. So I'll tell a personal story. Um, after my daughter

01:26:18.400 was born, uh, I was working at the FDA and I was, um, just come out of residency and I,

01:26:24.580 it was a very new job. I was writing reports all the time and I was drinking like three cups of coffee

01:26:30.020 a day. And I was also, uh, using a lot of like a chewing tobacco and like Zinn. Like, yeah. Okay.

01:26:35.720 All right. That's exactly. Yeah. But every day, not like one occasionally now and then like kind of

01:26:40.980 like, you know, five to eight pouches in my mouth, like heavily stimmed out. Wow. Okay.

01:26:45.180 And working. Yeah. Um, I ended up developing insomnia and I started taking Xanax from a nurse

01:26:51.260 practitioner as well. And so it kind of like spiraled out of control. And then all of a sudden

01:26:55.500 I was taking Xanax every day, uh, for six months and that started to make me worse. And then thankfully

01:27:00.560 I was, I caught it and I was able to come off at the time. Now, when I stopped drinking coffee and I

01:27:06.520 stopped, uh, using so much chewing tobacco, I started sleeping like a teenager. Um, and so

01:27:13.480 what I would say is, um, for anyone who's having difficulty sleeping, for anyone who feels keyed

01:27:20.040 up and irritable, you know, when they're sitting down with their kids at night and they're reading

01:27:24.300 a book and they're just like, I'm just uncomfortable. I just don't feel relaxed. I don't just feel at ease

01:27:27.900 in my skin. Look at your stimulant use. Um, now this is not going to be a blanket. Yes. Yes.

01:27:34.060 I know. I know lots of people who can have a cup of coffee a day and some nicotine pouches and

01:27:39.200 they're fine, but there are people who are sensitive to it. And so if you are having these

01:27:43.680 issues, I would recommend come off the stimulants, give it about five weeks or so. You will feel like

01:27:49.020 a potato. You know, you just, it's really hard to concentrate. Like if you've been using a lot of

01:27:53.640 them, I know I felt that way and I went through it. Um, but you may, for me, I came out the other side

01:27:59.720 with, um, um, much better sleep and a very smooth energy curve. I mean, the big thing that I used to

01:28:06.760 beat myself up on was when I would read to my daughter at night, I'd feel restless and I'd be

01:28:11.800 like, I can't wait for this to be over. That doesn't happen anymore. I'm much more grounded

01:28:15.120 and calm because I'm not on this like stimulant, like kind of withdrawal rollercoaster at the end

01:28:21.380 of the day. Um, I'm glad you brought that up because I actually think caffeine and nicotine,

01:28:26.040 uh, can be really overlooked as drivers of anxiety and depression, especially if you're

01:28:31.160 using excessive amounts and it's impacting sleep. You, this might actually have led me to change my

01:28:38.520 behavior. You, I went in here thinking I'm not depressed. I don't really feel anxiety. I'm pretty,

01:28:43.620 but I, a little bit with the nicotine and definitely with the coffee. Yeah. All right. And sometimes I get

01:28:49.840 a little restless. I'm reading those books at night too. Yeah. Well, give me, give me a call. And you know,

01:28:53.720 if you come off it, uh, I, and, and you, and it improves, I would love to, I can be a testimonial.

01:28:58.620 Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My question then is if all these drugs are so bad, if, if they not only

01:29:09.400 don't deliver the promises they say they will, but they actually make patients worse on such a wide

01:29:15.620 scale, why are they so frequently prescribed? Is it just money? Is it just big pharma wants to make

01:29:25.060 another buck or is there something deeper going on? So I've thought about this a lot. Um, I'm going to

01:29:33.540 hit this at multiple levels, Michael. The first thing that I'm going to say is that for some people

01:29:38.060 who have overwhelming, complicated problems, they want to believe that they have a chemical problem.

01:29:42.920 They don't want to believe that they have problems that they can actually have agency over. It is

01:29:48.540 reassuring to be like, it's not me. It's not my fault. It is my brain. And we should help those

01:29:54.720 people break down their problems into little steps and guide them out of that. So I think there is a

01:29:59.460 psychological component for some people. Say if, if, if, if it's something in my life and I have to

01:30:05.360 figure out how to untie this knot. Yes. And I can't figure out how to untie this knot. I'm going to be

01:30:10.660 even more despairing than I already am. Please just tell me it's a structure of my brain and I

01:30:15.840 can take a happy pill. Correct. Yeah. That is psychologically a much more comfortable place

01:30:21.200 to live in. Yeah. Not my fault, essentially. So, so there's that. And I know we, we, I touched a

01:30:27.480 little bit on the, um, on, um, the pharmaceutical industry at the start. People do not realize that

01:30:34.000 when you have a billion dollar industry, and that's what this is, you know, with a big B,

01:30:38.420 you know, they control the whole narrative about this. And so all of the academics at the leading

01:30:44.900 institutions are all running clinical trials for drug companies. That's essentially how you become

01:30:49.480 the head of Harvard, Yale, Baylor, Mount Sinai, any of these places, they are training, uh, the next

01:30:55.460 generation of doctors. They are imbuing them with this idea that these are medical problems still,

01:31:01.180 even though there's no evidence of that. Depression is a medical problem and these drugs are safer and

01:31:06.880 more effective. I think we have really perverted guild interests coming out of the American

01:31:12.600 psychiatric association where, you know, psychiatrists, we kind of differentiate ourselves

01:31:17.800 from the other mental health professionals as being the ones who have the drugs. And so our,

01:31:23.180 our organizations are also very pro-drug as well. And so they overhype the benefits,

01:31:28.940 they minimize the harms because it makes us look better and feel more important.

01:31:33.940 But the final thing, and this is what I think that a lot of people, they already know this,

01:31:38.700 I'm going to say this, but they've been feeling it for years, the insurance industry. So doctors

01:31:45.460 are incentivized to see more patients in less time. You make more seeing four people in an hour than you

01:31:52.680 would spending an hour with one person and helping them through their issues. And so when you just have,

01:31:58.360 like, a family medicine doctor there who's got 15 minutes with you, you spent half the time talking

01:32:04.060 about your cardiovascular health, and then you say you're being depressed, that person has an

01:32:09.440 incentive to get that wrapped up as quickly as possible. I mean, they could ask you about all of

01:32:14.220 those things, but all of a sudden you're crying, all of a sudden there's a huge emotional load,

01:32:18.720 it gets messy, they don't want to deal with it. So it's so much easier for them to say,

01:32:22.700 well, you've got five out of nine symptoms on this depression rating scale. This means you're

01:32:27.780 depressed. And, you know, I don't want to hear about your problems, but I've got an FDA approved

01:32:33.340 solution for this. Take the Lexapro. Yeah. I have a 130T time, so we're going to,

01:32:38.140 but I don't want to leave you with nothing. Yeah. So it's a very clean, efficient way

01:32:43.660 for them to end the visit. And, you know, and I don't want this to sound too hard on doctors,

01:32:53.780 because I know they want to help people, but it's just crazy that we've told the American public that

01:33:01.540 they can actually go to their family medicine doctor and expect this person who has no training

01:33:07.140 in relationships work. You know, they don't even help you with your physical health. I mean,

01:33:10.820 they're just kind of dishing out statins these days that we even expect them to do this.

01:33:16.880 And so one of the big structural problems in psychiatry, I think, is we need to make

01:33:21.660 coaches more available, you know, so you can go and see a family doctor and they don't feel like,

01:33:28.020 oh, shoot, I have this person in 10 minutes. Here's a script. They go, you know what?

01:33:32.320 You're having dietary problems. Don't worry. In my office, we've got a dietician. They're going to

01:33:36.520 sit down with you. You're going to be able to get that taken care of. We have a lifestyle person.

01:33:41.060 You know, we have someone who helps with relationships. We have someone who helps

01:33:43.940 with purpose and meaning. We run groups here, you know, three days a week. You can come at five

01:33:48.360 o'clock. We have a small group. We're doing these sessions where we can really help you

01:33:52.900 over time. We don't need to look for a quick fix. That's the kind of mental health care that we

01:34:00.900 actually need now. Because when you say the word coach, I like the idea that you're suggesting.

01:34:07.120 When you say the word coach, though, I think of like the scammiest, guzziest guy who calls himself

01:34:12.960 a guru, all-around life coach who knows the answers to everything and no proof that he's

01:34:18.800 ever learned anything in his life. Correct.

01:34:20.380 But that's not what you're suggesting. You're suggesting, no, no, no. Here,

01:34:23.280 we're going to have your dietary counselor. Correct.

01:34:26.720 They're just going to be kind of focused on that. And we're going to have, I don't know,

01:34:31.760 coaches. But in real fields. Let's just say expert, you know. Yes.

01:34:35.680 An expert, someone with training. I don't necessarily think they need to be a registered

01:34:41.040 dietician or they need to be a licensed psychologist. I think they need to be someone

01:34:45.840 who has training in the area that you are struggling with.

01:34:49.280 Yes. Well, think about it. When you go to the doctor, you're dealing with the physician's

01:34:52.420 assistant the whole time anyway. How frequently are you actually talking to the board-certified

01:34:56.420 medical doctor? It's for like two seconds every visit. And we do this in every other part of our

01:35:01.660 life, too. You don't always need, you know, the gold standard credentialed top person.

01:35:07.220 And in fact, and here is one of the, and this is why, you know, I may seem a little like kind

01:35:12.260 of foofy because I'm like, oh, you know, coach and, you know, this and that. But I actually think

01:35:17.300 we need to wrestle away personal development from licensed professionals. One of the most effective

01:35:24.020 treatments that we have for addiction is actually AA. And so Alcoholics Anonymous, this is, you can do a

01:35:31.780 secular version, but traditionally it's a Christian faith-based 12 steps, which is essentially a

01:35:37.700 curriculum. You're taking a moral inventory, righting your wrongs, you know, admitting that

01:35:43.020 you're powerless, handing your life over to something greater than yourself and allowing it to help you

01:35:48.380 change. You do that in unstructured, you do that in group settings, peer-to-peer. AA is one of the

01:35:55.920 fastest growing community organizations out there. Many of them are kind of withering away. AA is

01:36:01.520 growing. People really like it. These are not professionals. These are people helping each

01:36:06.620 other who have a good curriculum. And so, you know, it's amazing too. I have friends,

01:36:12.580 people I've known over the years, vastly different political views, vastly different ages, vastly

01:36:19.220 different lifestyles. I mean, friends as disparate as you can possibly imagine, religious, all of it.

01:36:24.920 I've never heard anyone talk smack about AA. And for people who have gone to it, I've only ever

01:36:32.840 heard how much it benefited their lives. Yeah. Totally across the spectrum.

01:36:36.500 And so, I mean, I would like to see us stop relying on professionals for these problems. I would like

01:36:45.320 us to see, I would like us to be helping each other in community. I have a close friend called

01:36:50.320 Laura Delano. She has a group called Inner Compass right now, and they are doing this kind of work

01:36:56.320 for mental health problems. They are getting people together who are coming off these medications.

01:37:00.940 They are putting them in peer-led groups together. They've given them a curriculum. She is doing

01:37:05.720 amazing work. And I really think we should be thinking more creatively about how to help people

01:37:10.860 outside of go and see that doctor for 15 minutes. Okay. But hold on. Now, this, I totally agree with

01:37:15.980 you. But this then raises a question that some people aren't going to want to confront, which is

01:37:20.200 you say, look, we need to stop worrying about all these credentialed people and focus on what's

01:37:24.040 really working. And look, AA is really working. And there's some spinoffs, but it's kind of the OG

01:37:28.180 one, which is really just a kind of practical instantiation of Christian counseling. And

01:37:34.080 well, right. So, I've thought about this even personally, how I can help some of my depressed

01:37:41.020 friends where I can point to all the problems in their life. But I said, ultimately, I think

01:37:47.620 what a lot of it comes down to is they don't want to admit that God exists and wants things

01:37:54.040 for us. And they want a secular version. They want a scientific version. They say, oh, I can

01:38:03.800 never, don't bring your religious mumbo jumbo in here. And my sneaking suspicion is if you

01:38:10.620 don't to some degree acknowledge God in your life, in the AA way to hand your life over to

01:38:18.620 a higher power, an unnamed higher power, if you don't in some way do that, you're just

01:38:24.140 not going to get better. Am I overstating it?

01:38:28.380 I need to think about that. I need to think about it more because I think the thing that

01:38:33.740 I love about Christianity and I love about religion is that there is a right and wrong. There is a way

01:38:41.120 to do things. There are the values in there. Things like, you know, live a life in service of others.

01:38:45.680 Can you think of, you know, any better timeless advice that has always, you know, led to fulfillment

01:38:52.000 and good relationships and all sorts of, like if you just follow that, all sorts of wonderful things

01:38:57.500 happen into your life, you know, righting your wrongs, you know. And so I do wonder that I think

01:39:07.280 that we are in a mental health crisis right now because of the loss of religion and because we've

01:39:12.100 lost, you know, timeless, the timeless moral values that have come through religious teaching.

01:39:17.660 I just suspect if I were a, I think if I were an atheist, I would be some form of hedonist.

01:39:25.300 I'm not saying I would necessarily do a bunch of blow and hookers and stuff all day. I'm saying

01:39:29.360 a hedonist or an Epicurean at least in the sense that I would just do things that gave me pleasure,

01:39:34.920 ideally higher pleasures because I would have the reason to recognize that higher pleasures are a

01:39:40.100 little less destructive than lower pleasures. But I think at the end of it, at some point,

01:39:45.820 if I were those things, at some point, I think I would kill myself because at some point I would

01:39:51.240 become frail, become injured, become old.

01:39:54.820 Feel it inside.

01:39:55.520 Yeah. At some point, I'd just have enough. I'd probably just have had enough of the pleasures

01:39:59.900 and I'd probably kill myself, which I think is mortally sinful and very, very terrible.

01:40:07.660 But I don't, without the existence of God and what that means for my place in the cosmos and

01:40:13.620 how I should behave, I don't see how I would not at least be inclined toward the end point of depression,

01:40:23.820 which is what we're all talking about.

01:40:24.900 And you'd be right, even statistically, because that's what we find.

01:40:29.740 Yeah. You're less likely to be depressed if you grow up in a religious household.

01:40:34.960 I mean, that's what we're seeing. That makes sense.

01:40:41.760 But imagine, you know, you're a psychologist. Like if I were a psychologist, I'd probably give

01:40:46.360 roughly the same advice to all of my patients.

01:40:48.320 Can you imagine that?

01:40:48.820 Some people would freak out. You need God in your life.

01:40:51.980 You need God.

01:40:52.600 Like you're some radical.

01:40:53.700 Yeah. The thing that every wise person has said for all of human history,

01:40:57.800 and every peasant statistically has said probably for all of history,

01:41:01.740 like you need God, you need like good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided.

01:41:07.040 Like kind of you should live in an ordered way, kind of basic stuff.

01:41:11.800 Yep.

01:41:11.920 But if you, could a psychologist get away with that now? The patient comes in.

01:41:17.740 They'd get reported.

01:41:18.720 They'd get reported. They'd lose their license probably.

01:41:20.640 Yeah. They would get reported. They would get, you know, negative reviews. This person

01:41:24.680 pushing their ideology on me. This white male psychologist, conservative, you know,

01:41:30.320 they are coming after, yeah. They would come after you.

01:41:33.700 The main thing that can help you, you're not allowed to encourage.

01:41:38.020 I know. It's so crazy because we know how effective AA is, but therapy is, they are so

01:41:44.800 agnostic from all of that. And you've put your finger on what I think is one of the biggest

01:41:48.300 problems in the mental health industry is that lack of direction. They, in a guise to be accepting

01:41:55.680 and all of that, they have completely removed any moral teaching from therapy. It's, what do you

01:42:02.280 think? You know, what makes sense for you and your world and your family and all of that?

01:42:05.980 Yeah. Yeah. Because this would, this would be one reason why I would hesitate to go to

01:42:11.100 a psychologist. If I felt great psychiatric stress, which, which I don't happily, but if

01:42:15.520 I did, plenty of people do, I would be reluctant to go to a psychologist because of the value

01:42:22.140 neutrality of it. In, in a secular culture, in order to have confidence that someone can

01:42:28.640 give me the advice and needed to improve my life, I need to know that they have a proper

01:42:34.720 conception of what is good and what is bad. That is the most basic thing that they need

01:42:40.060 to have. Yeah.

01:42:41.040 And the way that the system is set up, generally speaking, I have no way of knowing if that's

01:42:47.400 true.

01:42:48.400 No, no, you don't. And they don't even want to mention it on their websites, you know,

01:42:52.180 because they're going to, you know, freak some people out or, or make them feel, you

01:42:56.040 know, nervous. Um, but you're right. Yeah. I mean, good and bad is important. And have

01:43:00.380 you fixed the actual problem that I'm having? You have no way of knowing that either. And

01:43:05.460 the thing that surprises people is most of these therapists that come out, they've been trained

01:43:09.280 in cognitive behavioral therapy. It's just essentially a manual that teaches people to reflect

01:43:14.080 on their thoughts. There's nothing practical in these major areas of your life. Um, it's

01:43:20.640 a sad state.

01:43:22.120 Yeah. Rather than just reflect on your relationships, like, Hey, leave your alcoholic pervert boyfriend.

01:43:30.700 How about you just do that? Your life's going to improve 800%. Yeah.

01:43:34.400 You do that. Yeah.

01:43:35.320 Sorry to be judgy, but you're like, no, you have to let the patient discover it for themselves.

01:43:39.280 You know, I have to ask open-ended questions and maybe they will fall upon that truth in

01:43:44.280 a couple of years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think you should leave your alcoholic pervert

01:43:48.380 boyfriend? I don't know. I would be like, you don't want to enforce your views on them.

01:43:52.560 You know, it's like, well, what am I here? What are they paying me for? I know. Yeah.

01:43:55.840 What about, I thought you're paying me for my views. All right. No, maybe not. It's because

01:43:59.980 I guess there's this pretense that, you know, okay. In religion or in philosophy or in coaching

01:44:07.840 even. Yeah. That's, you know, that's got values. That's got a point of view. That's loaded.

01:44:14.040 Yes. Prejudiced. Yes.

01:44:15.280 But therapy is neutral. Therapy is scientific and therefore it's totally neutral and outside

01:44:23.140 the realm of value judgments. Correct. Yeah.

01:44:26.200 Which is obvious, not only false. Yeah.

01:44:29.520 But absurd, absurd because it's impossible. Yeah. And it doesn't work. And we know a lot

01:44:33.640 of these other things work. We've seen it in AA. We see it bearing out in the statistics

01:44:37.920 that why are people who are brought up in religious households happier? You know, what is it about

01:44:44.140 that? What is it about their relationships and the way that they live their life and work?

01:44:49.060 Do you think you could learn from that and bring some of that into therapy? But they don't.

01:44:53.840 They, it's because it comes from academia. It comes from these, these colleges and these

01:44:59.280 institutions and they are allergic to that. So can psychology be reformed? You know,

01:45:07.640 this is a question that comes up with the academic institutions. Can they be reformed? Do they have

01:45:13.000 to be bulldozed? And do we need to start again? Can, is there a way to reform the APA and the,

01:45:18.480 the way that psychology is practiced or no, do we need an alternative?

01:45:21.400 I think, I think it is being reformed. Let me speak to psychiatry right now because we're

01:45:35.100 having, recently we were having some really big changes going on. So right now, the,

01:45:42.180 we've been able, pharmaceutical companies have been able to do direct to consumer advertising

01:45:48.740 since, since the eighties. And now, um, the Trump administration with Secretary Kennedy,

01:45:54.360 they are putting new rules there or they're rolling back exemptions to it, where essentially

01:45:59.160 they have to list all of the risks with the medications on the ads, which will essentially

01:46:04.200 make it impossible to do these big broadcast ads because the risks- You only get 30 seconds.

01:46:08.300 You only get 30 seconds. The risks are too much. So we're going to get back the media,

01:46:12.340 right? And so that's going to, because right now the media doesn't report on these things because

01:46:16.080 they don't want to upset their advertisers. And so I think we are going to get the media back from

01:46:21.380 the, from those money to interest. Well, that's a great point that actually is,

01:46:25.100 might be lost on some people and cause it only occurred to me just now anyway.

01:46:27.980 Yeah. When you're watching, uh, the new, the nightly news and they advertise some depression

01:46:32.840 drug on there, the question is not merely does the pharma company have the right to advertise at all?

01:46:40.220 It's also how, how does the fact that the news is supported by the pharma company change the way

01:46:47.280 that the news itself is reported? Obviously.

01:46:50.120 I'm glad you brought that up and I, and, and it is a good point to emphasize. Yes. There is a reason

01:46:55.120 that, um, um, you know, editors aren't covering this stuff. This, this story comes across their desk

01:47:01.240 and they go, do I really want to run this story that has a negative perspective of this drug when I'm

01:47:06.220 making, you know, several million dollars from the manufacturer here. Right. Aren't they just

01:47:10.540 going to take their, their ad spend and go to some other company? I don't want to have to fire people.

01:47:16.240 I don't want to have to let people go. And so, yes, that's exactly what's happening. Um, and so

01:47:22.120 when that ends, I think people are going to, one, they're going to hear about the risks of these

01:47:26.980 medications. They're not going to get such a lopsided view. And I hope we actually have, and people

01:47:32.180 aren't going to like me for saying this, a much smaller pharmaceutical industry. I think jobs

01:47:36.820 may need to be lost. I think there needs to be less of an incentive to shove these drugs down the

01:47:41.320 mountain, down the throats of Americans and things like that. I think we need less of that. If the

01:47:45.900 pharmaceutical industry shrinks, their influence over medicine, over the psyche, you know, American

01:47:51.140 Psychiatric Association, all of that will lessen. And I think that will trickle down into practice.

01:47:56.760 I mean, when you, when you lop off the head of the biggest negative influence in the space, which is

01:48:02.260 the pharmaceutical company, I think the downstream effects will lead to, you know, much more balanced,

01:48:09.180 um, um, correct mental health care. And, and even for those who would object and say, well, that would

01:48:16.180 have a negative effect on jobs in America or GDP in America. I would say, well, you know, GDP is not all the

01:48:22.000 same. Jobs are not all the same. And so wouldn't it be better to put American resources toward

01:48:27.140 building things, innovating rather than frying the brains of menopausal women?

01:48:31.340 Yeah. Yeah. I was just, I was just going to say that. Yeah. Should we, should we measure the

01:48:34.540 success of a comp, uh, of a country over the fact that we, yeah, we don't have, you know, over a fifth

01:48:40.740 of people taking these medications, right? Wouldn't that, wouldn't that be a wonderful thing?

01:48:44.180 Right. Yeah. And that we're not having, you know, one out of 216 men on these drugs, essentially

01:48:50.600 with sexual dysfunction and all of the problems that go on with that. I mean, that's so dark.

01:48:56.860 It's so evil. Dr. Yosef, you, if you had started the show just with, just with the warning that this

01:49:05.960 high number of men who take the SSRIs will have lifelong sexual dysfunction, I think we could have

01:49:12.440 persuaded at least half the country not to take these drugs in about 15 seconds rather than an

01:49:17.000 hour and a half. Uh, in any case, marvelous to hear all of this really, really important

01:49:21.440 perspective. And, uh, thank you for hopefully, uh, helping to fix the, fix the minds and spirits

01:49:26.960 of many, many Americans. Thank you for having me, Michael.

The Michael Knowles Show - November 08, 2025

Your Brain's REACTION To SSRI's, Adderall, & Depression LIES： Michael & The Good Doctor ｜ Dr. Josef

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