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May 14, 2025 - Epoch Times

09:43

Former psychiatric patient exposes systemic flaws in the American mental health system

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	I took for granted that the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is, you know, copyrighted by the American Psychiatric Association, and it's considered the Bible of psychiatry.
	It's where all the diagnoses live.
	I just assumed that it was this scientific text.
	There must have been extensive, rigorous research behind the scenes over at the APA, you know, going into...
	Understanding, oh, schizophrenia, and what it is, and bipolar, and major depression, and social anxiety disorder.
	I just took for granted that these were discrete illnesses of the brain without ever once asking myself or any doctor, how do you know that?
	I just assumed.
	I just never questioned.
	And I learned that the DSM is really...
	All it really is is this book that has been written and edited by a relatively small number of psychiatrists who discuss in a very subjective way what they observe in their patients and then they basically vote in and out which Diagnoses they think should be in it or not.
	So, for example, homosexuality was a mental illness until it was voted out in the third DSM.
	And so when I kind of stepped back and thought about what this actually means for me, I realized I've been assuming that there's pathology inside of me without everyone's asking for proof.
	Sometimes I get accused of denying the reality of mental illness and I find that fascinating because so much of what I write about and speak about is about how hard it is to be alive and how intense and profound it is to struggle and how real it is and how, you know, when you lose touch with reality and...
	You know, you are spinning out and you don't know up from down and you don't know what's true and what isn't.
	I mean, it's debilitating.
	Of course it's real.
	These experiences are real.
	People hallucinate.
	People have delusions.
	People want to kill themselves.
	People have panic attacks.
	These are all real things.
	But this idea of them being symptoms of a brain disease, that's kind of the level that I'm...
	Critiquing here.
	And I think when you disentangle yourself from that very subjective level that so many of us take for granted as objective, then it opens up all this possibility for change.
	You know, I met the criteria for bipolar disorder for years.
	I was not misdiagnosed.
	I don't anymore.
	I would definitely meet the criteria for other DSM diagnoses, like social anxiety disorder, for example, but I don't really care because it doesn't mean anything to me.
	A lot of the change for me in curing my bipolar disorder was about changing the way I was making sense of my experiences, what my experiences meant, and therefore what I needed to do about it.
	What did it mean to leave the mental health system?
	Coming off of these five drugs that you were on.
	And I understand that is a very difficult process to do.
	I mean, people that have gone cold turkey have got all sorts of terrible side effects.
	Sometimes, or other people would say their illnesses are relapsing when that happens.
	I mean, how did you manage that without knowing the things you know now?
	I'm so glad you're bringing this up because the issue of coming off psychiatric drugs is a hugely important one, and as you said, it is an incredibly dangerous, risky thing to do.
	Another thing I'm often accused of is being dangerous, you know, that I'm dangerous because I talk about coming off these drugs.
	I talk about coming off of these drugs because I want to help.
	People do it as safely as possible because it is so dangerous.
	I completely agree.
	And so I think what I didn't know in 2010 when I decided to come off those drugs was the fact that my central nervous system had become completely dependent in a physiological sense, not in the addiction sense where I had cravings and would kind of seek out the drug despite it causing harm.
	That's kind of the conventional.
	Definition of addiction.
	This was purely physiological.
	My brain had completely re-acclimated itself, its structure, how it functioned, as had my body, because of these drugs that had been in my system for so many years.
	And so coming off of them, it doesn't just...
	Flip a switch and then your body goes back to how it was prior to you ever taking them.
	Coming off of them too quickly actually, ironically, disrupts the homeostasis that your body has developed to compensate for the presence of these drugs.
	So, you know, someone quitting any psychoactive drug cold turkey that they're dependent on will go through symptoms of withdrawal.
	What's challenging in the case of psychiatric drugs is that withdrawal symptoms mimic The symptoms of the very diagnoses, the reasons why they're taking these drugs in the first place.
	And so as you said, withdrawal symptoms often look like a relapse of an illness.
	So let's say you've been on an antidepressant for 15 years.
	For whatever reason, you've decided that you don't want to take it anymore.
	You come off.
	You feel horrible.
	Your anxiety is surging.
	You're not sleeping well.
	You're feeling exhausted and fatigued and unmotivated and just your thoughts are racing about despairing things.
	And if you go to your doctor and you say this, your doctor will say, see, you're having a relapse of your illness.
	This is why you need to be on medication.
	You don't want to feel this way indefinitely, do you?
	And so people get stuck in this vicious cycle of thinking that who they are when they stop their meds is who they would always be.
	Therefore, they need to stay on them.
	So I didn't know any of this when I came off.
	I came off basically cold turkey.
	I came off five drugs in about half a year, which is very fast.
	And I went through unspeakable pain.
	You know, just the struggles that I had on the drugs were just magnified, amplified, projectile vomiting, boils breaking out of my skin, debilitating migraines, light sensitivity.
	You know, panic responses at any kind of stimulus, paranoid racing thoughts, just utter fatigue, and then insomnia at night.
	I mean, just I could go on and on and on about how brutal withdrawal was.
	It was only as I started to recover from that, which took a lot of time, it began to click just how unsafely I'd come off them.
	And what also clicked for me was that I was able to survive.
	Cold turkey withdrawal in large part because I had a lot of resources at my disposal.
	I had a family who could take care of me.
	I didn't have to work.
	I didn't have kids.
	I didn't have to pay a mortgage.
	And so that was when I realized some people feel really helped by these medications.
	I totally respect that.
	But some people don't.
	And they should have the right to know how to come off of these drugs safely and right now.
	It's almost unbelievable.
	65 million American adults and 6 million American children are currently on psychiatric drugs, and there are zero off-ramps for getting them off these drugs safely within the mental health industry.
	Zero.
	And when you say zero, I mean I actually had a psychiatrist on recently that actually specializes in doing this.
	So it's not zero.
	It's a good point.
	So there are individual practitioners and kind of what might be perceived as fringe resources cropping up around tapering.
	But the system itself, the kind of official, whether it's the National Institute of Mental Health or the American Psychiatric Association or the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, none of the official bodies.
	That are looked to as, looked to for guidance, looked to for guidelines, for protocols, for establishing standard of care.
	There's zero acknowledgement there, and there are zero offerings there.
	And so it's forced those of us laypeople who've had to figure out safe tapering for ourselves, and then doctors like Yosef Witdoering, and the small handful of others who are kind of seeing this need and building Resources for people at the outskirts.

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