May 13, 2025 - Epoch Times
09:20
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| When it comes to the drugs, I think what I was not told, what my parents were not told, is that these drugs are approved by the FDA on the basis of very short-term trials, six to eight weeks on average. | |
| There is zero evidence base for polypharmacy. | |
| So these drugs have never been studied in combination with each other. | |
| Their safety and efficacy, I should say, have never been studied in combination with each other. | |
| And every single psychiatric drug across... | |
| All the different drug classes is dependence-forming, meaning, as I said earlier, if you take this drug for any length of time, your body may well completely alter itself to accommodate the presence of this drug so that if you want to come off of it one day, you might have a really hard time doing that, and you might need years of tapering. | |
| And I think especially for women, for girls and women who are teenagers or... | |
| Entering into their young adulthood, childbearing years, it should be a legal requirement that doctors tell us before we start these drugs that if you want to have a child one day, you need to build in a long-term exit strategy here so that you don't find yourself in a situation where you need to stop this drug abruptly and potentially cause significant harm to yourself. | |
| So I think a lot of it is about... | |
| Just the straightforward facts about the evidence base upon which all of these drugs are prescribed. | |
| And I think part of my outrage that a lot of it is fueled by how in the dark so many of us are about what we actually know about these drugs. | |
| And what's wild is that it's all available right now. | |
| Don't take my word for anything I just said. | |
| You can go to the FDA website right now. | |
| At sign FDA, you will be taken to the website where you can search for the drug label of any psychiatric drug you're on. | |
| You can read the whole thing. | |
| You can see the two or three trials that were used to approve the drug. | |
| You can see how long it lasted. | |
| You can see what they called effective, which you may or may not be surprised to know is often quite small. | |
| And then from there, decide what you want to do. | |
| Another one of the criticisms I've seen, That's a big question. | |
| What are the true causes here of this so-called mental health crisis that we're in? | |
| Chemical imbalances in our brains or faulty brain pathology, which it isn't. | |
| There's no evidence base for any of that to this day. | |
| The NIMH acknowledges that. | |
| It's not too hard to kind of come to the conclusion that it's about our relationship to the world we live in. | |
| Of course, people need support and resources, but do we need them in the arena of getting people more treatment, more diagnoses? | |
| Or do we need them actually where people's struggles emerge from, the circumstances of their lives? | |
| And I would argue that's where funding needs to be directed, to the community level, to neighborhoods, to helping people get their basic needs met. | |
| So I have yet to see my story actually be used by any policymaker as a justification. | |
| I don't take that critique too seriously, but I do think the deeper fears behind that critique are valid. | |
| I share them. | |
| I just don't think the solution is to fund more mental health treatment. | |
| I think it's to actually redirect funding to the circumstances of people's lives, which is what leads them to have the struggles that get them diagnosed and medicated in the first place. | |
| And one quick additional point to that is... | |
| As I found for myself, long-term mental health treatment was actually quite disabling for me in mind, body, and spirit. | |
| And I do think we have a crisis of psychiatric iatrogenesis. | |
| And for anyone not familiar with the term, iatrogenesis is basically harm caused by treatment, by doctors. | |
| I'm not saying they're doing this on purpose. | |
| I think these are well-meaning people who want to help. | |
| But the mental health industry can have this paradoxical effect where it promotes itself as being this resource that will help people feel happier, feel more productive, feel more connected, capable, and yet ends up producing the very opposite in people. | |
| And so I think we need to address that as well. | |
| We need to direct funding towards helping people recover from The harms that have been caused by their treatments, which in turn, I think, will help people return to their lives and to meaningful work and meaningful connections and purpose and all of that. | |
| I know a number of people who strongly believe that they've been helped by these drugs and were able to come off them later. | |
| I guess there was some plan for that. | |
| They didn't feel like there was a relapse. | |
| You're not against these drugs, but everything you're telling me suggests that there's serious problems here with how we think about them, what we're told about them. | |
| What role is there for these drugs in people's lives, in your view? | |
| I mean, human beings have been altering themselves with psychoactive chemicals for countless thousands of years. | |
| So I think it's natural for us as humans to... | |
| Disrupt our own consciousness for all kinds of reasons. | |
| And so, you know, psychiatric drugs are one of a vast array of other substances we turn to, from coffee to alcohol to psilocybin to a long list of other psychoactive substances. | |
| So I think they can be helpful for people. | |
| And, you know, used especially in the short term. | |
| I think these drugs can have a place in our society. | |
| I'm against them being forcibly used. | |
| But beyond that, yeah, I really think it's about changing the language that we use to talk about these drugs and our conceptual framing of what they are. | |
| I knew someone quite well who ended up becoming arrested for... | |
| You know, stabbing someone in a corner store and was out of his mind at the time, and he was, you know, forcibly treated. | |
| And in some interactions I had with him later, seemed to be happy about that fact. | |
| But you can kind of imagine situations where people are really not in their mind and they need some kind of treatment that they would never consent to. | |
| How do you react to that? | |
| Well, I think seeing someone in a psychotic state in a... | |
| Public space. | |
| I mean, when someone's reached that point, basically every system has failed them. | |
| Every support, every resource, or perhaps lack thereof. | |
| And so I think in those rare circumstances, if forcibly drugging someone is the solution that we have decided is the best thing to do as a society, let's at least just call it what it is, which is sedation. | |
| It's not actually treatment. | |
| And perhaps being on psychiatric drugs, stopping them abruptly, starting them, stopping them, people often end up forcibly drugged because they've tried to come off their drugs in the past and they did it cold turkey and it leads them to go crazy. | |
| But also being human, people lose it. | |
| We're violent. | |
| It's a part of being human as well. | |
| And so I think this idea that we could somehow get rid of... | |
| Violence is denying our nature. | |
| Obviously, I don't like violence. | |
| I wish it didn't happen. | |
| Well, and we incarcerate people, and we remove them from society because of that, and I would argue very rightfully so. | |
| And that brings up the issue of how a psychiatric diagnosis can strip people of... | |
| Responsibility for their actions. | |
| Because there's a big difference between someone who has not committed an act of violence and someone who has. | |
| So once an act of violence has been committed, if you're telling that person, oh, this happened because you're sick, it's not your fault, you need treatment. | |
| There are serious consequences to that message versus holding someone accountable for their actions. |
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