In this episode, we speak with a man who took the first step in his recovery from depression and anxiety: getting off of psych meds. He shares his story of how he went from heavy dependence on meds to living an independent life.
00:03:00.220It's just, it's in, and I understand everything that you've said.
00:03:04.080I mean, I think you've got a lot of detail on this, but the country's pretty much addicted to these drugs,
00:03:09.740like a huge percentage of the population takes them, can't get off them, unclear if they're benefiting from them.
00:03:14.780So I understand that you're poking at something that people rarely mention in public and that goes deep.
00:03:21.100On the other hand, I thought the goal was health and independence and joy and connection between people and productivity and creativity.
00:03:32.120And it doesn't even seem like those are considered virtuous goals by the New York Times, which does kind of give me the creeps a little bit.
00:26:25.080I hadn't asked for this kind of help from them in years because of how betrayed I had felt by them sending me to the therapist years earlier.
00:27:21.820But, um, it was, it was the kind of typical bipolar regimen, as they call it, where it's literally a handful of different prescriptions.
00:27:31.700And the way it was explained to me, you know, it was, it almost felt like the, I had this impression that, that my psychiatrist was very skilled and sophisticated.
00:27:43.560Oh, this for a little, you know, a little bit of this for that issue, a little bit of this for that issue.
00:27:48.340I, I, the more meds I was on, the more cared for I felt.
00:27:53.620And then, and, and it felt like the, the more serious, you know, my, my doctor was taking me and it just steadily beginning that freshman year at Harvard, um, on, you know, I, I just, my, the more treatment I got, um, and the more compliant I was and the more deferential I was to psychiatric authority, the more my life fell apart.
00:28:18.660During the, so you said you got meds in your first, your first appointment.
00:28:23.620Did anyone ever say to you, you know, you, you obviously feel deeply unsettled and unhappy at times suicidal.
00:28:31.860Maybe you're not living the right way.
00:28:35.860Maybe you shouldn't be on the varsity squash team.
00:28:38.400Maybe you should be, I don't know, tending to horses on a farm or painting or working in a bank or I don't know, doing something else.
00:28:44.480I don't know, like, it does seem just intuitive that if someone has pain, it's worth thinking about the cause of the pain.
00:28:53.440If I put my hand on a stove and it hurts, I don't take meds for that.
00:28:57.340I'm like, take my hand off the freaking stove.
00:28:59.440Did anyone ever address it in that way?
00:29:02.200Well, they, they, they can't really, because this is the, the bind of this medical model that the mental health industry is built on.
00:29:11.000So, so you're told you have a mental illness, quote unquote, and that it's in your brain that, that there's some kind of, usually you're, it's the chemical imbalance story, which by the way.
00:29:23.260So this is a phrase that I first heard maybe 30 years ago when I, the first person I knew started taking an SSRI, Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel.
00:29:34.100It was this whole like Time Magazine promoted idea that depression, mental illness of all kinds was caused by a quote chemical imbalance in the brain.
00:29:42.520And the question I always had is, well, okay, if something's an imbalance, what's balance?
00:30:23.580And you are one of the lucky few who somehow miraculously saw right through it.
00:30:32.200Because most people, to this day, despite the fact that the chemical imbalance theory has long been debunked, and there was an umbrella review published in Molecular Psychiatry two years ago that just kind of put the final nail in the coffin on it.
00:30:47.500It has been, it has never been proven, and that's been known all along.
00:30:55.260And yet, if you survey American, and surveys that have been done of Americans, most people believe that mental illness, you know, that depression, all these things, are caused by chemical imbalances to this day.
00:31:16.960And even if, you know, this medicalized framework that we use to think about ourselves, you know, which has such a monopoly on how we make sense of what it means to be human now.
00:31:30.280I mean, suffering, anxiety, madness of all kinds.
00:31:36.160I mean, most people view that as illness, quote unquote.
00:31:40.560Like that medical framework is so ubiquitous.
00:31:43.340And what it does to return to your question about, like, did anyone ever ask me about the circumstances of my life?
00:31:50.660Like, you can't because you either have this unfortunate bad luck with your brain chemistry and you're just, oh, it's too bad.
00:32:00.600You had the bad, you know, genetic card and you have this chemical imbalance.
00:32:04.120Or your struggle is a response to your life.
00:32:18.140And so the experiences that I had in the decade and a half that I was a psych patient and I think the experiences of so many of the more than 60 million adults who are on these drugs right now and more than 6 million children is that.
00:32:36.600Wait, there's 60 million American adults and 66 million Americans total on these drugs.
00:32:48.920And we are told that we're having a mental health crisis because so many rates of suicide are through the roof.
00:32:57.320Anxiety disorder diagnoses, young people struggling, young girls struggling.
00:33:02.320We're told, you know, this is this terrible crisis.
00:33:05.580And most people think, oh, we must not be getting enough mental health treatment.
00:33:09.280But no, if you look at the numbers, you're like, basically everyone is almost, you know, this huge percentage of our population more than ever before is getting mental health treatment.
00:33:19.500So the problem isn't not enough mental health treatment.
00:33:22.160The problem perhaps is is the mental health.
00:33:25.180So I'm just, I can't, I'm fixated on this and to continue the metaphor, want to beat it to death.
00:33:30.700If you come in with a burnt hand and I don't ask you how you burned it, you're not really treating it.
00:33:44.720So I think a clinician who cared about the patient would say, how about don't put your hand on the stove?
00:33:50.100Like there was no effort to understand why you felt bad about your life.
00:33:54.220I mean, in therapy, I would, of course, talk about my life and the circumstances of my life, but it was all the baseline operating assumption was that I was just, I had this brain disease that I was at the mercy of that the only thing I could do to manage, you know, to manage it was take pills.
00:34:12.060And so any conversations that I had with therapists about my life, to me, and I think to a lot of them, just felt kind of secondary, like, oh, you know, you're having, you have a lot of stress or you're in this dysfunctional relationship or this kind of hard thing happened to you.
00:34:30.020We would talk about those things, but not because we thought that was working through those would be what helped me resolve my challenges.
00:34:40.840It was the meds that were going to do that.
00:34:42.660That was, you know, what I learned to believe.
00:34:45.240And I think that's the insidious, that's the insidious nature of this medicalized paradigm is that it basically teaches you to let go of any sense of responsibility or agency over your life because you're just at the mercy of faulty brain chemistry.
00:35:04.120And so, like, what's the point in trying to change the circumstances of my life?
00:35:07.420Because I'm still going to have this brain disease.
00:35:32.920Since there are 66 million Americans taking these drugs, can you just go through and order what those drugs are generally and what the effects on a person are?
00:35:42.500So, the different drug classes are antidepressants, of course.
00:35:47.640So, you have the, you know, Prozac, Effexor, Cymbalta, Celexa, Lexapro, the mood stabilizers, which many of which are actually anticonvulsants used for epilepsy.
00:35:59.000But they've, you know, over the decades, when they were studying them, they noticed that the, you know, the animals became kind of apathetic when they were testing them for these other conditions.
00:36:11.940They're like, oh, maybe we can use this on psychiatric patients.
00:36:16.140So, most mood stabilizers are actually anticonvulsants.
00:36:19.960So, those would be, you know, Lamictal, Depakote.
00:36:23.580Lithium is classed as a mood stabilizer.
00:36:25.380It's literally a neurotoxin that, you know, it was banned in the United States until the early 70s.
00:36:35.580It didn't get approved until the early 70s for psychiatric uses and had been banned prior.
00:36:41.080So, that's the other, you know, that's considered the so-called gold standard mood stabilizer.
00:37:01.500It's been around for a long time and it started to be used for psychiatric purposes first in Australia and I can't, in the first half of the 20th century.
00:37:15.300Yeah, and if you actually, I do a deep dive in the chapter on it in my book because the story to this very day that most people are given about lithium is that it is the most, you know, it's been around the longest.
00:37:31.220It has this really reliable evidence base because of how long it's been in use for.
00:37:38.580If you actually look at the studies that got it approved decades ago, I mean, they are the most shoddy, unscientific, completely flimsy, subjective studies that you could possibly imagine.
00:37:56.680And this is the case for every single psychiatric drug that is currently on the market.
00:38:03.060If you actually look at the drug label on the FDA website, so don't take my word for it, go to the FDA website, look up any psychiatric drug, go to the clinical studies section to see what trials the approval was based on.
00:38:20.040Usually, it's maybe two studies, and of course, they can do as many studies as they want, and they just throw out the ones that they don't like the outcomes of.
00:38:29.940Guess how long your average psychiatric drug trial lasts to determine safety and efficacy?
00:40:11.540It's going to course through your bloodstream, potentially for the rest of your life.
00:40:15.620To be so disregarding of what the long-term consequences of that might be, especially when you're putting a kid on this, it's—it's, you know, it's—it's one of the most horrible crises of our time, I think.
00:40:35.100It's—it—because to return to your question, you know, besides the antidepressants and the mood stabilizers, there are the antipsychotics, you know, Risperdal, Seroquel, Zipraxa, Geodon.
00:40:47.140There are, of course, the anti-anxiety drugs, the benzodiazepines, Klonopin, Valium, Ativan.
00:40:53.700And there are the stimulants, the so-called ADHD drugs like Ritalin, Adderall, and then the sleep aids like Ambien and Lunesta.
00:41:03.300So those are the—all the—that's the family, the psychiatric drug family.
00:41:09.060Can we go—okay, so can we start at the beginning, if you don't mind?
00:41:39.160So when I look back now at how my life, the different path that psychiatric drugs set me down, I can see that they, you know, they altered my body physically.
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00:47:31.060And so a lot of people, myself included, will get diagnoses of irritable bowel syndrome or, you know, they'll have other kinds of digestive issues while they're on these drugs.
00:47:42.740You know, sometimes it starts quickly.
00:47:58.560And so as my physical issues accumulated, I just assumed I was just – you know, because I'm so mentally ill, I'm not taking good care of myself.
00:48:51.920All those – all these subtle changes that just grew over time, I never linked it to the drugs.
00:49:01.440And then in terms of their effects on me, you know, emotionally and mentally, a lot of people talk about antidepressants especially as having a numbing effect.
00:49:15.260And which, by the way, can be helpful.
00:49:18.500I mean, it's important to make clear here, my orientation to this is not anti-psych drug.
00:49:24.780I think, you know, we've been altering ourselves as human beings since the dawn of time with psychoactive substances.
00:50:26.560You know, if you walk them through, if you are walked through all of that and then you still decide, you know what, I kind of want to numb myself out right now.
00:50:35.840Like, I can't I don't have support system.
00:50:53.660And that is not if you are being told this is an antidepressant medication, you're not making an informed choice because that is marketing language.
00:51:01.900This is not a drug that's acting against depression, like targeting.
00:52:33.180And every study shows the faster the effect, the more profound the relief, the more addictive it is.
00:52:39.140And that's one of the reasons benzos are so terrifying.
00:52:42.060But I guess my question is, like, does it, you get the feeling that people on some of the antidepressants, the SSRIs, like, seem kind of, like, dead inside.
00:53:28.160Like, you, I think it's, it's, a psychiatrist named Peter Bragan calls it medication spellbinding, which I think is a really compelling phrase because the, the very parts of you that are required to step back and think critically about what's happening to you are impaired by the drugs.
00:53:47.400And so, you're in this, for me, like, decade and a half, almost like intoxication state.
00:53:54.340And, and then you're getting all these messages from all these well-meaning therapists and psychiatrists saying, oh, you're not feeling helped.
00:54:03.340Like, let's try this new drug or let's up your dose or let's switch you to that.
00:54:07.800But it's never like, let's all just pause for a moment here and step back and wonder if maybe this whole thing is, is wrong and you don't need any of this.
00:54:19.860And so, as I went deeper into psychiatric patienthood and those physical issues worsened, my cognitive function worsened, you know, memory, oh, my gosh, when you were, I mean, I don't know which drugs were the biggest culprits, probably the benzos and the antipsychotics.
00:54:38.220But my capacity to remember things, to read, to absorb information and actually comprehend information, I just dissipated over the years and which was really hard for me as someone who had, you know, so much of my sense of self, however fake it felt, was rooted in my intellect.
00:54:59.300And so, here I was just feeling like this mushy, you know, just totally incapacitated mind that couldn't engage with the world anymore and let alone like feel creative and curious and I was just, I was just like a zombie basically.
00:55:20.400Just killing your life force, it sounds like.
00:55:23.380And that idea of a life force, like to me, this whole thing at the heart of this crisis that we are in, because it is a crisis, it's just not a mental health crisis, it's a crisis of psychiatric iatrogenesis is what I call it.
00:55:39.840The word iatrogenic means treatment-induced or doctor-induced harm.
00:55:44.020I believe that this huge, these huge numbers of people who, who are in so much pain, a huge driving force of it is the fact that this entire paradigm is actually leading to more, more suffering and it does.
00:56:01.200More violence, more disconnect, more polarization.
00:56:03.800When you're under the influence of these drugs for years and years and years, like you said, you do, I won't speak for everyone, I'll speak for myself and the thousands of fellows whom I have known over all these years.
00:56:17.260You lose touch with your human spirit, with, you know, your sense of aliveness in the world, your ability to feel connected to the sunlight on your cheek, to the, you know, the sweet child on the sidewalk, to God, to serenity.
00:56:37.700You lose the ability to feel connected to any of that and you're thinking the whole time it's you and you're just getting sicker.
00:56:45.320And when you, when you scale that out and think about the consequences on our society of that with so many, especially young people on these drugs without even realizing that this is happening to them because of this medication spellbinding phenomenon.
00:57:03.720I mean, to me, it's like, no wonder our country is more polarized than it's ever been.
00:57:40.820I mean, I chuckle because I'm like, first of all, I'm like, well, what relationships really?
00:57:44.980But then of course I, I did have, I had boyfriends.
00:57:48.520I had, you know, people I would socialize with, but it was all, by the time I, I graduated, which, you know, I had to take a year off at Harvard because I was so suicidal.
00:58:02.460I had my first admission to a psych ward while I was at Harvard.
00:58:07.120The fact that I made it through to this day, I don't really remember anything I learned there.
00:58:17.080But by the time I left, I had no friends.
00:58:20.840I, I had a tendency to be in, I was a serial monogamist, you could say, just relationship with a guy and then we'd break up and then I'd get right into another relationship with a guy.
00:58:30.720And it was just, I dated guys who were as lost as I was.
00:58:34.540So suffice to say, it didn't look pretty.
00:58:36.600I, um, that was my, when, when I would sometimes, you know, muster the energy to go out and socialize, like I'd had to, I'd have to do drugs and get trash because that was the only way that I felt alive.
00:58:54.400So, and my family, you know, they were, my family hung in there with me through the whole, the whole, that whole thing, that whole thing.
00:59:05.480Um, but of course they didn't have access to the real me and because I was under the influence of all of these drugs.
00:59:13.420And so they were there for me, but I wasn't connected to them emotionally.
00:59:18.060I would rely on them and I would come home and, and they would take care of me and provide for me as I, you know, bumbled along through my twenties, like a total mess.
00:59:30.460They sound like really kind to people.
00:59:31.760They, the patience and the persistence that they all had, you know, my, my younger sisters and my parents, you know, it was not easy for them and it was not always pretty in our family system.
00:59:46.580You know, we, our whole family evolved around me as the designated problem, you know, me as a designated patient.
00:59:53.620So, so understandably that created all kinds of challenges, but they never gave up on me.
01:00:01.480And I would just, I'd come home whenever I couldn't function anymore.
01:00:06.540And, but I didn't feel, I didn't feel connected to them, to myself, to anything.
01:00:39.900And I think the other piece of this that is so important, especially because of how many of us are psychiatrists as kids, is that I had no, I had no sexuality.
01:00:53.040I had no kind of like erotic life force in me that animates you as an artist, as a writer, as a friend, as a appreciator of beauty.
01:01:07.920And I, of course, didn't realize what I was missing because I'd been psychiatrists basically at the onset of puberty.
01:01:15.580And when you don't have access to that facet of who you are, it, it makes for a very lonely, alienating existence.
01:01:28.260And, you know, I'm, I'm so glad that when I got myself out of this mess years later, I regained my sexuality because a lot of people, like, there's a whole movement now of, it's called, there's this condition called PSSD, post-SSRI sexual dysfunction.
01:01:51.100They're incredibly well organized on X, doing really important public awareness work around how many people either never regain sexual function when they come off.
01:02:20.300No, because this is the, it's the lack of accountability.
01:02:24.540And of course, this is the whole pharmaceutical industry, not just psychiatry.
01:02:29.980It's designed in such a way that no one, the most that they're held accountable is, you know, the occasional $3 billion fine for criminal activity.
01:02:38.800So I guess we could say, but at least the suicide rate's going down and people are happier.
01:02:42.020I mean, you would think, but as of 2022, one person killed him or herself every 11 minutes.
01:02:52.260I think it was 50,000 people killed themselves.
01:02:54.300So like, that's kind of the bottom line.
01:02:55.980I don't, I don't need to have a medical degree to say that if the number of people, the absolute number and the percentage of people taking these drugs rises and the suicide rate rises, you know, we can argue about cause and effect, but they're not working.
01:03:11.960I mean, can't, I mean, in what sense are they working if more people are killing themselves?
01:03:24.580And what's wild is that in these drug labels for many, many years in the adverse effects section, you will see antidepressants have been documented to increase rates or increase suicidal and homicidal ideation even in some of the drug labels.
01:03:41.160So this isn't like we're just realizing that these drugs can actually make people worse.
01:03:47.040It's been in the drug labels the whole time.
01:03:49.500Well, I know from firsthand experience, so I knew nothing about this.
01:04:01.560But anyway, these mass shootings and the calls for gun control and to take my shotguns away and all this stuff got me involved in like what is causing all these shootings because there are a lot of shootings, right?
01:04:13.160And in every case you look at, the person's just full of psychiatric meds.
01:04:21.120And so I brought this up a couple of times in public and whoa, you get attacked for even raising the question like is there a connection between SSRIs and mass shootings?
01:05:03.040And I know a friend of mine who's a professor at one point tried to FOIA the medical records of various mass shooters and couldn't get access.
01:05:31.160And as you said, the 90s were – so Prozac came to market in the late 80s.
01:05:36.760The 90s were declared the decade of the brain by our U.S. government.
01:05:41.200And the 90s began basically the ubiquitization of psychiatric drugs, the normalization of them, the kind of infusion of them into every facet of our lives.
01:05:53.360And this, of course, was fueled by industry funding.
01:05:57.740So all the kind of anti-stigma, mental health awareness campaigns that you now – you know, Mental Health Awareness Month.
01:06:07.500These are all industry-funded efforts to basically infuse the cultural discourse around emotional pain with this message that – with this actually very just, righteous message that you should never feel alone with your suffering.
01:06:24.380You should feel like you can talk about your troubles.
01:06:27.400That is a really important message that –
01:06:31.400But that has been exploited by powerful corporations to basically now mean there's no shame in getting mental health treatment.
01:06:39.560And so they've taken this important message and perverted it to basically link anyone who is calling into question psychiatric drugs with someone who doesn't care about suffering.
01:06:55.000I mean, it's amazing the number of times that I share my story and I'm literally just talking about my story.
01:07:02.700I'm not saying anything about anyone else.
01:07:04.660You know, the story of how I eventually left this all behind, people hear that as me denying the reality of suffering.
01:07:14.360I mean, you're – you know, this woman doesn't think people are struggling out there.
01:07:22.480I think there's – I am – first of all, I struggle a lot in my life.
01:07:28.260You know, I'm by no means a happy, put-together, mentally healthy person all the time.
01:07:32.960But how are you conflating me questioning the psychiatric drug paradigm with me questioning the reality of people suffering?
01:07:42.020Like, if you think about it, it's just these industries have been so effective in conflating care with treatment.
01:07:51.220So if you question treatment, people assume you're questioning the need that people have for help.
01:07:56.580It's like there are other ways to get help, people.
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01:10:47.060Well, I think, I think you, the way I would think about it for myself, at least, is that when I let go of this medicalized way of understanding myself, you know, translating all my struggles into symptoms to take to a doctor, et cetera, et cetera.
01:11:02.020And when I came off the drugs and when I also then began to educate myself about, like, the broader issues with just our whole medical industry and how we compartmentalize the body in all these problematic ways.
01:11:16.820And so I just kind of reconceptualized how I think about well-being and the things I put in my body or don't put in my body.
01:11:25.800I, I, to your point, I definitely have found my way to an equal, a kind of equilibrium that equips me to face life's challenges, which are inevitable.
01:11:36.680I mean, it's, I think it's a part of the human condition to suffer, to struggle, to, to have dark nights of the soul.
01:11:43.380And I think historically, these were episodic experiences that, that would, you know, some, something hard happened in your life or even something not visible, but you just are in a tough chapter.
01:12:00.740You, you kind of, you just find your way through it.
01:12:06.100Maybe it takes a week, maybe it takes a month, maybe it takes a year, but you move through it.
01:12:10.760I think that used to be prior to the rise of this medicalized mental health industry, that used to be the baseline operating assumption.
01:12:20.100And then since the rise of psychiatric drugs and since the rise of the chemical imbalance story and this incurable brain disease story,
01:12:29.240we've just forgotten that the struggles that emerge in life are responses to life and not permanent.
01:12:37.980If, if you, if you orient yourself to them in that way and actually, um, and actually believe and tell yourself, like, this is a hard chapter that I'm in, but it's a chapter.
01:12:51.860And that's what I was taught by psychiatry is that my whole story, the rest of the story of my life is that I'm just so-called mentally ill needing treatment.
01:13:31.640I, I, in my book, I talk about the chapter in my life when I quit drinking, which I did eventually do because drinking one to two bottles of wine a night before you take your five med regimen,
01:13:46.020including like horse tranquilizer doses of Klonopin is not a recipe for, for functioning.
01:13:51.580And so I did eventually decide to quit drinking and was really active in the 12-step world for a few years.
01:13:58.980And I hold a soft spot for it in my heart, but I came to the same conclusion for myself is, you know, I had spent the most formative years of my life letting psychiatry define who I was.
01:14:13.120And then I moved into the 12-step world and I took on a new label, alcoholic, and I began to defer my authority to, you know, a higher power.
01:14:27.060And I do believe in God and I do, I am connected to, to this kind of like broader oneness of, of, of life around me.
01:14:36.860But I eventually realized that I have to stop turning it over.
01:14:40.860I have to stop seeking outside guidance, authority, expertise, answers, and I need to start looking within myself and actually take responsibility for my life and my decisions and my relationships.
01:14:58.400And I, I, I realized like, I have to stop labeling myself as anything really, and, and kind of buying into any ideology of any kind that tells me I have a problem, it has the solution for.
01:15:11.380Now I'm like, you know, I, and even in the wellness alternative health world, you, you, there are a lot of problems that you get sold into thinking you have that their products can help you solve.
01:15:27.600And I'm at the point where I'm like, I, I don't want to look out there anymore for answers to, to anything, anything internal to me.
01:16:01.680Um, the whole, the, I mean, the whole time I was from 18 to 27, but consistently in therapy.
01:16:09.600Sometimes I would enroll in, you know, programs too.
01:16:13.200If I was, I was, I was, I ended up hospitalizing, going into the hospital four times during those years.
01:16:21.380And then afterwards, you know, you, when you're discharged from a psych ward, you're enrolled in some kind of like step down program, you know, an intensive outpatient program for, you know, where every day from nine to five for like a few weeks, you go to the psych hospital and then you go home.
01:16:39.200And then you downgrade to, you know, a lesser intensive program where you go to a few groups a week.
01:16:45.420So in my twenties, I was, I was always in individual therapy and then very often in group programs.
01:17:10.240Oh, well, that's, that's the, I, I, I won't speak for all therapists or the therapy industry as a whole.
01:17:18.940You know, some of my good friends are therapists and they, they work with people in very different ways than how I was in therapy.
01:17:25.300So, but in my experience, and I do think in the experience of a lot of people, because, because our society has lost so many, because you, there's so few spaces where you can turn to other human beings, to neighbors, to friends, to colleagues, to talk about how hard it is to be alive.
01:17:51.740Sometimes therapy becomes like the one place you have to feel seen and heard and understood.
01:18:01.120And so what happened to, for me is that because I had no other place to, where I felt like I could be open, I, I kind of, I developed this like dependence, you could say, on my weekly therapy sessions.
01:18:17.180And, and this, you know, I, I just, I kind of came to see my therapist as really like my substitute friends, sometimes my substitute mother or something, you know, they, they kind of replaced what would have been authentic relationships had I not grown up in therapy.
01:18:34.880And so, of course, if this is the only place you have to go to talk about your problems, you need to have a lot of problems to talk about, because otherwise you don't need to go anymore.
01:18:44.120That's just, that's just fascinating what you just said.
01:18:45.860So, um, you're basically paying people to be in relationship with you, but because you were doing that, and you were steered there, I mean, this wasn't like a choice that you initially made, obviously, but because you did that, you actually neglected your real relationships.
01:19:27.500It's like really, I don't know if that happened.
01:19:30.360I don't know what percentage of psych patients that happens to, but it happened to me and I saw it in, you know, the culture of the psych ward, the culture of these, all these programs that I was in.
01:19:40.720We were the only people we hung out with fellow patients.
01:19:43.520Like we had a whole, you know, you go to lunch together in the hospital cafeteria and like you're at your little patient table in the corner and you're looking at all the psychologists and social workers and doctors walking around with their badges.
01:19:56.360And, and you're kind of over in the corner, like we're the crazy, like fucked up patients over here.
01:21:18.420Whereas, you know, once in our pre-modern, pre-industrialized age, your tribe would have been your village, your local community.
01:21:26.680And of course, people in that community, individuals would have had crises and struggles, but you all banded together and you had multi-generations of families.
01:21:35.460So, you know, grandparents had important roles.
01:22:01.440And, and I think our, our modern world does make it really hard.
01:22:07.240I think, you know, this isn't for me about individuals or, you know, particular families being, you know, weak or lazy or bad.
01:22:18.560I think just, we're in this toxic stew of, of a culture in which we're, you know, the, from the food we're, so many of us put into our bodies, to the screens that we're in front of all day, to the just gross kind of consumerist messaging that's just buffeting us all day.
01:22:40.600It makes it really hard to stay in touch with yourself enough to actually have the capacity to grow of, you know, develop your own tribe, whether it's your family or your neighborhood.
01:22:53.640Like, I think it's really important to say, like, this is not about individuals, like, fucking up.
01:22:59.680It, this is about our social order having evolved in such a way that it makes it feel, like, impossible to have the family that you have for so many people.
01:23:11.080And economics play a role, too, I think.
01:24:29.200And I, I was told, like, the message that I received was, you know, unfortunately, your bipolar disorder has progressed to such a degree that you're now treatment resistant.
01:24:48.980So, you spend millions of dollars on these people, take all of their drugs, you get worse, and they're like, unfortunately, Laura, you're treatment resistant.
01:25:02.100And, and so, you know, this, this, this phrase treatment resistance.
01:25:06.460It's like the craziest story I've ever heard.
01:25:08.760It's crazy, but it's a brilliant, it's a brilliant business model, because, of course, you know, if you feel, if you feel better after starting a psych drug, the credit goes to the drug, of course.
01:25:36.000It's bonkers, it's totally bonkers, and what I, what I would predict, and because I'm seeing from my book, I, I, I did a lot of, I woven a lot of research into my book, and I, I, way more than I originally intended, and my editor kept wanting more, which, which is great.
01:25:51.040And I went down this rabbit hole of looking at the current landscape of psychiatry, and like, where is it heading?
01:25:59.020Because, obviously, these, this drug-based paradigm is failing, so like, what's next for them?
01:26:05.380Because, you know, the drug companies are not making, are not focusing relatively much at all on, on psych drugs anymore.
01:26:22.180And what this new unfolding chapter of psychiatry is literally exploiting is this treatment resistance concept.
01:26:31.560It's building a new, a new chapter of medical devices, literally inserting electrodes into the brain that are wired to, it's called deep brain stimulation, where you, you, if you have treatment-resistant depression because your meds haven't helped you, don't worry, Tucker.
01:26:49.860However, now you just go in for a simple procedure.
01:26:53.040We're just going to open up your chest cavity, insert a pacemaker-like device there, and run some wires up into your brain, and then your doctor can press a remote control button to send electrical stimulation, which we believe is going to help target the particular areas of your brain that are involved.
01:27:13.840Is this you making this up, or is this real?
01:28:47.180And I've read a few horror stories of anecdotal experiences of people who've had these procedures, and then afterwards, like, the battery dies, and you can't get the device out because it's, like, too complicated to remove it.
01:29:06.580So, there's just, like, a dead, you know, matchbox-sized thing that's, like, protruding from your chest under your skin.
01:29:13.240I mean, it's—DBS is probably the least common one right now.
01:29:19.280The big push right now is for what's called TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is also for treatment-resistant depression.
01:29:27.160So, you know, there's a wide array of options for people.
01:29:32.380And you basically sit under this device that shoots, like, very powerful magnetic, you know, currents, whatever you call it, energy, through your skull.
01:29:44.620And it's being marketed as a non-drug, you know, safe alternative because it's just magnets.
01:29:51.360And don't forget ECT, electroshock, which is alive and well, and that's long been a treatment-resistant depression treatment.
01:30:01.380Yeah, I had a relative who did it and then committed suicide.
01:30:03.720So, yeah, it's been around for a long time.
01:30:09.140And I just want to restate what you said so eloquently, which is people subject themselves to these horrors because they are in such pain, because they are so desperate.
01:30:19.740They will accept any treatment, treatment, because they're panicked and they're dying.
01:30:29.160I'm not judging anybody who submits to shock treatments or deep brain, like, whatever the hell that was.
01:30:37.100But this is just, but does anybody ever say, you know, you really need to go outside more often, get a dog, make a date to sleep with your spouse every other day, get on your knees and pray to God.
01:32:50.100And to be clear, because people, when I, I do feel better, but by better, I don't mean I'm like happy and put together.
01:33:00.640Like people often assume that I'm so-called mentally healthy now.
01:33:05.240Like I, you can ask my husband, like, do not catch me on a day where I have, you know, I'm sleep deprived and have been in front of my screen too much and I'm about to get my period and I feel really stressed.
01:33:20.180You've got yelling children in the background.
01:33:21.340Oh yeah, I mean, I definitely, I've been off of these drugs for 15 years now, but I can tell my central nervous system is still quite sensitized to stress.
01:33:34.500So, and I've always been a big feeler from, you know, I was a little girl, like I have this vivid memory of one day I was outside in the sun in the summer and I saw this worm, this dead, dried out worm, like shiny, that had been dehydrated by the sun.
01:33:50.440And I just remember crouching down and looking at it and holding it and just crying, this life that had been taken and I buried it in my garden, my mother's garden and I just, I couldn't handle facing the, the death of this little, I mean, I've always been that kind of intense feeling person.
01:34:09.780And so I'm often angry, I'm often very angsty, I can get panicky.
01:34:16.640I feel a lot of grief about a lot of things.
01:34:20.280Like I could feel myself right now, like I could start crying just thinking about all the kids right now who are getting sent to their first psychiatrist.
01:34:27.820Psychiatrists, like you, if I sat down right now in front of a psychiatrist, they'd be like, oh gosh, Laura, you're a little emotionally labile.
01:34:35.720Maybe, you know, we might want to consider some, you know, Cymbalta or whatever.
01:34:40.660Like they wouldn't be able to compute, like crying is actually a sign of being alive and being in touch with life.
01:34:50.700And so I'm, I often find myself in this interesting position where I'm like defending how crazy I still am a lot of the time because people are like, you're so happy now and everything's great.
01:35:00.540I'm like, I am a dark, twisted, fucked up person basically on a daily basis, but you know what?
01:35:10.560Psychiatry and the mental health industry taught me to be terrified of my pain and my mind.
01:35:16.520And that's been the most liberating thing.
01:35:18.420But what's interesting is how terrified they are of healing.
01:35:21.280I mean, there's this amazing scene in the New Testament, it's in Luke or John, where Jesus heals a man who's been blind for his whole life since birth.