Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctor's week show where I show you how bad States of mind, difficult life issues. Aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Hey folks, how are you? I hope your day or night is moving along exactly how you want it to. I very much. I appreciate you tuning in today. I've got a super juicy topic to dive into with you. It's something I'm really passionate about because it affects so many of us in so many ways, but I want to warn you this isn't for the faint of heart. I've got my sword out and I'm ready to cut through to the center. If you're okay taking psychiatric medications, you may not want to listen to this episode. Also never stop meds without doctor supervision and therapeutic support. Now I'm fully aware that questioning the status of our current mental health practices may be unsettling for you if you depend on the system for your wellbeing.
Speaker 0 00:01:22 But my goal is to promote a safer and more effective way of addressing what ails us. All right? Grab something to drink. If you want get comfortable and let's do this. I want to start by telling you about a bet. I won. That changed my life. For 10 years, I worked as a psychologist in a psychiatric clinic in Zurich, Switzerland. One of the things all the docs there were required to do was to attend lectures given by academic psychiatrists, from Zurich, the U S England and other places. At first, I enjoyed hearing what these folks had to say, but after a few years, my feelings changed my work with severely depressed. Clients had shown me that their traditional paradigm of medicalizing their emotions by dragging them up was a dangerous, dead end from working with hundreds of such clients. I discovered that their symptoms and problems didn't constitute anything like the disease entities we find in medicine.
Speaker 0 00:02:33 These people weren't ill. They were suffering from the signs of a powerful process of personal growth and change, trying to happen in their lives. Over time. I realized that traditional psychology and psychiatry have it all wrong. Your problem, isn't a disease. It's your calling. It's your life song, trying to be heard. Even your worst issue is a meaningful and purposeful process. That's trying to awaken you to deep change, just suppressing your symptoms misses the whole point. Your life is an unfolding process and everything you experience the good, the bad and the ugly aims at positive transformation. The key is to learn how to tap into the hidden intelligence, the mysterious music, the message in your messed up life. So over time, these lectures became unbearable for me because I knew from experience that most of what they were saying was complete BS. Every time I went, I had to sit there while some academic made all sorts of grand statements with no evidence to back them up.
Speaker 0 00:03:54 Sometimes it felt like attending a religious group where it's more understood that everyone will automatically agree on whatever's being said, rather than a group of scientists where evidence should be analyzed, discussed, and debated. It felt like dogma disguise. The science. I started purposely sitting in the back row and slithering out. The second the talks were over, but one night, which happened to be the night of the clinical directors lecture. I got there late because my band rehearsal went over time. I felt like the bad boy, rocker, rebel. I thought I'd shed to some degree I walked in and the only available seat was in the front row, directly in front of the podium. Lucky me. He talked about the psychiatric drug approval process in Switzerland, the U S and England. It was boring. I was tired. And at one point I forgot myself and rolled my eyes.
Speaker 0 00:05:05 Bad move. He was looking right at me for the next 10 minutes. I didn't hear a word. He said, because I was caught up in my internal dialogue debating whether he's going to lecture me personally, or even fire me. The second he finished his talk. I stood up to bolt out of the room, but he stopped me. Her doctorates, fig Connie committing and McCracken. Oh shit. Now I'm in trouble. He wants to talk to me. We waited until everyone left and it was just me and him. He immediately said he had seen me roll my eyes. And then it was disrespectful. I apologized, but he didn't seem to accept it. He wanted to know what was behind my gesture. Well, to make a long story short, we talked for a whole hour and I told him, I just didn't agree with the notion that a life problem is analogous to a medical disease.
Speaker 0 00:06:10 I challenged him to provide evidence for the idea. Yeah. Noting that there are no studies demonstrating that depression or anxiety. For example, our illnesses. I told him it's a philosophical viewpoint, not an evidence-based fact. He tried to argue, but his ideas were lame. At one point I joked let's make a bet, send me one of your worst patients. And I'll have them up and running. In three months, he smiled and said the Swiss German equivalent you're on buddy. He said, if I can help his patient, he'll give me the podium to lecture to the whole hospital. But if I can't help, I have to be his research assistant or a month with no pay deal, walking home. I totally regretted my loose behavior and envisioned him sending me an impossible client who I'd be unable to do anything with. Then he'd make me work for him for free.
Speaker 0 00:07:15 And then he'd fire me. My only refuge was the fact that we hadn't set out any kind of specific parameters for what would constitute me, helping the client. But the idea seemed to be that I'd have to do more than he'd been able to do. He sent me a 20 year old man. I'll call him Jeremy, who had come to the clinic at the insistence of his parents and doctors. He had gotten severely depressed, had stopped speaking. Wouldn't go to his university classes and had withdrawn into his apartment. When his parents visited him, he sat completely still in the corner. Wouldn't talk to them and didn't even make eye contact. They forced him to see a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with selective mutism disorder, which is a type of social anxiety that makes one clam up in certain situations. The diagnosis didn't make sense to his parents since Jeremy had always been outgoing.
Speaker 0 00:08:22 So they sent him to another shrink. The second doctor told them that selective mutism usually starts in childhood. So it was unlikely. It was the correct diagnosis. He diagnosed Jeremy with PTSD and try to elicit a description of a traumatic event from him. Only problem was that Jeremy wouldn't answer. When the doctor asked him questions at their wit's end, his parents send them to one more professional. My clinical director of veteran psychiatrist. He diagnosed him with catatonic depression, which isn't actually thought of anymore as a distinct disorder. Catatonia is now seen as a specifier, a subcategory for various mental illnesses. One of them being depression, but also PTSD and bipolar disorder. He said, Jeremy exhibited three important identifying symptoms of catatonia that led him to the diagnosis. He gave no verbal responses to the doctor's questions or instructions. He physically resisted when the doctor tried to reposition his body and he mimicked the doctor's movements.
Speaker 0 00:09:39 He prescribed him Xanax, a tranquilizer, and followed up with him over the next three months, but saw a little improvement. If you want to hear this story of my work with Jeremy, which was transformative for him, you can read it in my blog. It's called how Jeremy broke out of his mutinous. It's pretty interesting. And it involves the guitar. My timeframe for the bet was three months, but it only took us two months to make significant progress flash forward. And then next thing I knew I was standing in front of the entire clinic staff in their white doctor coats telling them in my awful German, how I work with clients, it was an incredible experience for me because the majority of folks were fascinated and many agreed with what I said. It changed me in terms of realizing that just because group mind keeps everyone in line with a certain dogma doesn't mean it's what people necessarily really think and feel deep down.
Speaker 0 00:10:48 It gave me confidence to go forth and really rock my ideas and methods to a wider audience, but I didn't get any illusions that me and my new comrades were going to change the world. I knew only too well, how powerful group mind is on a mass level, especially when power politics and money are involved. So what's behind the whole medicalization of depression. Well, before answering this let's first look at the context within which it happens. Diagnoses of depression have skyrocketed since 2013. New statistics released by blue cross blue shield state that diagnosis rates have risen 47% from millennials and 63% for adolescents. Depression is the second most impactful condition affecting Americans, putting it right behind high blood pressure. It's already predicted to become the leading cause of, of longevity or life by the year 2030 as of today, 2017 54 million Americans were on psychiatric drugs, mostly antidepressants that's one in six of these 8.4 million were children, including infants and toddlers.
Speaker 0 00:12:14 Yup. Lots of tiny kitties on site meds. What do you think of that from 1988 to 1994 and 2005 to 2008, the rate of consumption increased by almost 400%, 23% of women in their forties and fifties take antidepressants a higher percentage than any other group by age or sex. Well, move over opiate crisis. Here comes the antidepressant crisis. Most people who take these meds do so for many years, despite the growing list of long-term adverse effects, researchers have identified increased risk of brain cerebrovascular, cardiac, gastrointestinal sexual and reproductive disorders increased risk of type two diabetes and paradoxically psychiatric problems, including increased risk of suicide and teens. In 2017, there was a major meta study done in Canada that analyzed 16 studies, which included 375,000 participants. The results were scary. The analysis found that in the general population, people taking antidepressants had a 33% higher risk of dying prematurely than people who weren't taking the drugs.
Speaker 0 00:13:47 In addition, antidepressant users were 14% more likely to have a stroke or a heart attack. Antidepressants disrupt your serotonin and dopamine levels, which have important functions, not only in your brain, but throughout your body. For example, serotonin affects growth, reproduction digestion, immune function, and it's found in almost every major organ. So while these drugs alter your brain chemistry, they also have unintended effects on your body in a way that can increase your risk of illness or even death. One of the causes of this antidepressant mania is the fact that anyone with a medical degree can prescribe these powerful drugs, no training in mental health is required. Primary care physicians and pediatricians routinely write prescriptions without having any idea of what's going on with the patient, writing a prescription, makes everyone feel like the problem is being taken care of. The physician makes a diagnosis and the patient gets the so-called cure, but does this meteoric rise and pill popping really mean depression is now being successfully treated or doesn't mean the pharmaceutical industry has given doctors enough financial incentive to convince the public that a pill which numbs out their problems is the correct and healthy way to go to answer this question.
Speaker 0 00:15:25 Let's peer into the psych lab. Back in 2008, a research study led by dr. Irvin Kirsch of Harvard medical school analyze the results of 35 drug trials submitted to the FDA to get approval for antidepressants. They were testing Paxil. Prozac affects her and Sarah zone, really popular meds. Kirsch used the freedom of information act to gain access to everything that was in the studies. And what he discovered was shocking for patients with mild to moderate depression, which is most people who take antidepressants. The results were basically the same as placebo, Bose, sugar pills. Those with severe depression felt only a bit better and only that totally out of it. Folks noticed some improvement in 2010, the journal of the American medical association reported the same thing, the statistical results of these double-blind clinical trials, where people don't know if they're being given a drug or a placebo showed that almost the entire effect of antidepressants is placebo.
Speaker 0 00:16:42 This means they didn't pass the FDA standards for drug efficacy. Yet the FDA still approved these medications for marketing, but how could this be? Well, I'll tell you drug companies provide 75% of the funding for the FDA's approval process. I can't think of a worst conflict of interest. The FDA only review studies that were designed, performed and paid for by profit-driven multinational pharmaceutical companies or farmed out by those companies to private research firms whose interested is to find positive results for their employers. It's absolutely no secret in private research circles that these collaborations virtually guarantees some fraudulent results. People think that FDA approval means that a psychiatric drug is safe and effective long-term, but it doesn't even mean this for the short term, psych drugs are rarely tested in clinical trials for longer than a few months. While most patients take their drugs for years or decades, the drug companies pay researchers crazy amounts of money to do their work.
Speaker 0 00:18:05 It's done mostly by academic psychiatrists, like the ones that bored me with their lectures. And some of them actually sit on the FDA or industry advisory committees that fast track these drugs through the approval process. It's criminal. I used to have a client who worked for Pfizer, the drug giant, and he told me that when they apply to the FDA for marketing approval for a drug, they only send them one or two of the most favorable studies that seem to show short-term safety and effectiveness. The negative studies are shelved and never revealed to the FDA or any agency unless subpoenaed by the courts or applied for through the freedom of information. Act, talk about putting your best foot forward. In the case of the super popular psych meds known as SSRI drugs, selective serotonin re-uptake pump inhibitors, great name lab, animal studies, usually only hours, days, or weeks.
Speaker 0 00:19:16 And the human studies only last four to six weeks, way too short to draw any valid conclusions about long-term safety and effectiveness. So we shouldn't be surprised that over the years, an epidemic of adverse reactions occurred addiction brain damage, dementia suicidality, as well as the more common side effects like worsening, depression, insomnia, constant tiredness, obesity, diabetes, blood pressure problems, nausea, weight, gain, loss of sexual desire, decreased orgasm of rectal dysfunction, dry mouth blurred, vision, constipation, dizziness, agitation irritability sounds like a bad day. Oh, and don't forget anxiety. Then you get an anti-anxiety med with all its side effects. It's crazy. Also another side effect is violence. In some people studies on the school shooters in the U S show that the conventional wisdom that they were nuts and didn't take their meds is wrong. Most of them were taking their meds, insane cocktails of this stuff.
Speaker 0 00:20:40 And that's what made these already vulnerable young people crazy. But the whole notion that up States of mind are caused by brain. Chemical imbalances is false. These chemicals called neurotransmitters have never been proven to be imbalanced in people suffering from depression or other bad States of mind. There are over a hundred known neurotransmitter systems in the human brain. And so proposing a theoretical chemical imbalance is laughable. If you know anything about neuroscience, it would be impossible to prove that any two neuro-transmitters within these hundred plus systems are imbalanced when they're all entangled together and no drug would ever be able to rebalance them in that infinite web of interactions, it would require a level of knowledge centuries, more advanced than where we're at. It's utter nonsense, but these simplistic theories have been relentlessly promoted by big pharma to a gullible public. It's not an overstatement to say that the drug companies resort to propaganda to convince prospective patients and prescribers, why they should be taking or prescribing these meds.
Speaker 0 00:21:59 And the, the easiest thing is that while drugs, companies and doctors work to convince the public, that meds correct a chemical imbalance that causes their symptoms, the entire psych diagnostic manual is based on the idea that mental illnesses have no known cause it's the most glaring contradiction you can imagine. And it's right there out in the open, like the biggest elephant in the universe that no one sees the manual is called the diagnostic and statistical manual DSM. And it's published by the American psychiatric association despite its name. It actually has no statistical data in it. It arbitrarily group symptoms into clusters and gives them disease names. Each new edition of the manual shifts around the clusters because they're not based on research, but on the opinions of the manuals authors, the painful experience of depression makes the intuition that you have a chemical imbalance seem reasonable, but it's a faulty intuition, conscious emotional processes can produce the most severely messed up States of mind.
Speaker 0 00:23:17 You can imagine no preexisting chemical imbalance required. Antidepressants are supposed to work by increasing serotonin in the brain. Only problem is there are no studies demonstrating that depression is actually caused by a serotonin deficiency nor that antidepressants fix it. There isn't even a way to diagnose a serotonin deficiency because there's no method to accurately test the amount in your brain. And there aren't any diagnostic criteria you can test for it in the blood, but that doesn't tell you the levels in the brain. The serotonin hypothesis has been around for 50 years and still hasn't been confirmed, but this doesn't stop doctors from prescribing drugs that alter serotonin levels. The depression serotonin idea has become so commonplace that people have stopped questioning it. They believe it to be a proven theory. When in fact it's still just a conjecture is a profound disconnect between the true status of the research and the public's understanding drug companies amplify this confusion by doing advertising campaigns that reframe negative States of mind as symptoms, which the drugs are designed to cure the ads, frame your emotions in terms of two choices.
Speaker 0 00:24:46 Either you have a mental illness or you don't, they don't provide a third option that perhaps feeling sad and hopeless. Isn't an option, unless at all, if you're depressed, feel vulnerable or don't have happened to be a rigorous scientist, it's easy to buy into these deceptive messages. Now don't get me wrong. Many people claim they can function better when they're on these drugs. Some consider them lifesaving, but for mild to moderate depression, which is what most suffers have an increasing number of studies show that they could achieve the same results just with changes in diet, sleep and exercise. And as I said earlier, during the decade I lived in Switzerland, I worked with hundreds of severely depressed clients and was able to help them completely turn their lives around. We did this by hacking into and processing their painful States of mind, not just by numbing them with medication patients.
Speaker 0 00:25:50 So the real question is this is our goal merely to be functional at all times. Like if you're going through a difficult experience, that's somehow bad and wrong psychiatry. And the pharmaceutical industry have succeeded in convincing us to settle for symptom-free living. Instead of getting to the root of what's really going on in our psyches, they've convinced us to give up the pursuit of true self-awareness understanding and happiness in exchange for not having to deal with our processes. They've told us to opt for the medicalization of our emotions over participation in the conscious evolution of our lives. They've confused us by giving us the false message that we should always be happy. And that normal States of sadness and pain are caused by a brain disease where embarking on the same kind of dangerous path we entered when opioids became widely prescribed for pain, without warnings of harm or addiction.
Speaker 0 00:27:00 This time we're attempting to erase selfhood in people in order to get rid of their bad States of mind, wait two or three decades, and a new crisis is going to emerge. Now it's not just the pseudo-scientific claim that depression is caused by a serotonin deficiency. There's also the false notion that brain scans show that depression is caused by a brain disorder. Researchers take images of depressed people's brains and go look, his brain is doing something different from a non-depressed person's and therefore his brain is causing his depression. It's the worst science I've ever seen. Brain scans show correlation, not causation. Every state of mind has a correlative brain state because everything you think and feel gets processed through your brain. But this tells us nothing about whether the state of mind produces the brain changes. The brain changes produce the state of mind or a third element drives both of these events, the mirror observation of two things happening at the same time gives no data on what causes, what to happen.
Speaker 0 00:28:22 Otherwise you could say eating ice cream causes crime. Since the incidents of both rise. When the weather is hot, there's never been a brain imaging study that even remotely demonstrates the cause of depression. The fact that a drug can numb a person's mental anguish says nothing about why she's depressed. The same is true of someone who manages his so-called social anxiety disorder. By using alcohol, it would be illogical to claim that his anxiety was caused by a chemical imbalance, which the alcohol cured, this confused notion of causality put psychiatrists in a dilemma. They want to promote the disease medication model. But the psych manual says there are no specific underlying causes since they don't know the cause they focus solely on masking the symptoms. A powerful example of this confusion is psychiatrist's dilemma over how to treat grief. The second most recent version of the psych manual had a grieving clause that said you were allowed to grieve for loss of a loved one for two weeks.
Speaker 0 00:29:44 And after that you have clinical depression. However, the newest manual took this out because it went against the chemical imbalance theory. By saying that depression could be caused by psychosocial factors. Think about it. Someone close to you dies and your grieving is considered a mental illness. The cure drugs. Now that's bad science taking medication is okay in an extreme crisis, but you absolutely need to work on the problem long-term use of pills while helping you function better turns a blind eye and a deaf ear to the underlying issues. And the more you ignore them, the more you plant the seeds for future mental and physical health problems. If you buy into the chemical imbalance idea and take meds for life, you dissociate from yourself by ignoring the deeper processes in your life, by covering over your symptoms with drugs, you use a superficial fix that ignores the fact that depression, even the worst case is an alarm calling for profound personal change and growth.
Speaker 0 00:31:08 Learning how to process your depression. Hopefully with a therapist who knows how to do this takes you far beyond merely being functional. It makes you feel whole again and transforms your life in ways you never thought possible. It also frees you from all those crap. Side-effects. I mentioned earlier, speaking of processing your bad States of mind, instead of just suppressing or managing them, I released a new video and single for my song before the Dawn, which talks about the hidden intelligence in your problems. That's trying to wake you up to something new. You can watch the video on my YouTube channel and stream the song on Spotify or wherever you listen to music. I'm going to release the demo version of the song the first week in January, 2021. And you can watch the video on my YouTube channel or stream it on Spotify or whatever platform you use. Here's a sneak preview.
Speaker 1 00:32:10 <inaudible>
Speaker 0 00:33:14 See you next time. Stay aware
Speaker 1 00:33:17 <inaudible>
Speaker 0 00:33:20 And follow me on social media at doctors awake, and you can sign up on the mailing
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Speaker 1 00:33:36 Be well.
