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Feb. 22, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

53:40

1590 Drugging Dissident Children - Dr John Breeding Interviewed on Freedomain Radio

Dr John Breeding, a prominent psychologist, reveals the pseudoscience behind ADHD, attention deficit disorder, and the myth of antidepressants.

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	Well, thank you everybody so much for joining.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	I have on the line Dr.
	John Breeding, who is a psychologist practicing out of Texas, who has some information that will raise what I affectionately call the pounding aneurysm of indignation about how people are treated, particularly children in the modern mental health system, how they are Riddled with diagnosis that are not descriptions of anything physical, but merely universal opinions that are inflicted along with quite the deluge of somewhat destructive medication.
	So thank you so much for taking the time, Dr.
	Breeding. And I was really struck if we can start early in life by your comments about the virtually supernatural scientific status of ADHD. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about How it is that you came to be skeptical and what it is that you're skeptical of when it comes to this diagnosis.
	Well, I appreciate you having me on, and it's great to listen to your...
	I love metaphors.
	I never heard the one about the pounding aneurysm of indignation.
	That's pretty good. If I had a horse, I think that's what I would call it, but I don't, so I just have to use it in my show.
	And the supernatural science.
	Yeah. Well, you know, I just call it pseudoscience.
	Basically, you know, one of the things that I teach over and over again is the importance of people, you know, being able to really make an effort towards discerning what's fact, what's theory, and what's opinion.
	Because over and over again, theories and opinions are presented as if they're facts, and this is definitely true in the of pharmaceutical substances in psychiatry and the marketing of diagnoses in psychiatry trying to parallel that of physical medicine which oftentimes is actually scientific in the sense of objectively identifying various physical or chemical abnormalities that may or may not be treated with various substances and so psychiatry as a branch of medicine attempts to Take the same language and rhetoric and present the same type of face to the public.
	The problem is that the actual data that's presented is not scientific.
	There's an American humorist, he's dead, his name is Josh Billings, that said something that I really remembered, which is something like this, that the problem is not that people don't know anything, it's that they know so many things that ain't so.
	Right. And so in this case, like everybody knows depression is a chemical imbalance because that's presented over and over again as if it's a scientific fact in psychiatry.
	Everybody knows schizophrenia is a genetic inherited mental illness, right?
	And so these things are presented over and over again as a fact and justify the treatments, specifically psychiatric drugs that flow from that assumption.
	But the incontrovertible truth is, and this amazes people, you know, is that it's a scientific fact that no problem routinely seen by psychiatrists has been demonstrated scientifically to be of biological or genetic origin.
	And that's the supernatural, I guess you could say, in the sense of, like, unbelievable state of the situation is that, you know, there's no confirmable scientific evidence that Depression is due to a specific chemical imbalance that requires a specific psychotropic drug to treat it.
	And yet, there's no scientific evidence and no objective test or indicator for the most popular child psychiatric diagnosis, which is so-called attention deficit disorder.
	And yet, millions and millions of American children and Canadian children and It's these Western countries that tend to do it mostly, are placed on controlled substances, amphetamine type stimulant drugs for this alleged mental illness called ADHD. That's it basically.
	It's a theory that there's a chemical imbalance.
	It's an opinion that the drugs are good.
	The science is just not there.
	Right, right. And the staggering increase in the diagnosis and treatment of things like ADHD and even to some degree the disorders which are considered oppositional defiant disorders and so on, the anti-authoritarian disorders, which strikes me as an eerily Soviet way of describing a kid who doesn't want to obey.
	And it's strange that, of course, a country that was founded on not obeying authority now has such a problem with kids not obeying authority that it has to medicate them.
	But the astounding growth in this would seem to me to be indicative of other social factors.
	Do you think it's the case that children are, quote, worse behaved now than, say, in the early 90s when the diagnosis was first introduced?
	Or do you think other social factors or school factors have influenced the way that children behave so that there is less conformity to social norms?
	Well, yeah, it's great the questions you're asking because you're bringing in You know, some real, you know, thinking about society and people, you know, and that's one of the big problems I say with the approach of biopsychiatry, short for biological psychiatry, is that it stops people from thinking and looking at what's really going on with people and in the society because it's, oh, that explains it.
	Oh, it's just this mental illness inside the child.
	It's just this ADHD. Or, oh, it's just this chemical imbalance and this In this adult worker, you know, and that explains it, and so the solution is just a drug instead of looking at what's really going on.
	The trend right on, you know, in 1970, for example, there was about 200,000 kids in the United States estimated to be on stimulant drugs, right?
	And that was enough to cause the United States Congress to hold a special hearing on the issue of Stimulant drug use with children in the United States and that's what led to drugs like Ritalin being placed as controlled substances along with cocaine and methamphetamine, you know, placed under the purview of the Drug Enforcement Administration in the United States because of their high addictive potential and risk of abuse.
	Nevertheless, you know, in the 30 years following 1970, You went from about 200,000 kids on these drugs to perhaps 8 million, and now you have perhaps, you know, more like 15 million, not just on the stimulant drugs, but on all the psychotropic drugs, probably about 6 to 8 million on the stimulant drugs, and then you've got the so-called antidepressants and the so-called antipsychotics and et cetera.
	So you have this thousands of percentage I think that the main social factor is economic, you know, and it's the fact that corporate entities basically control largely governmental decision-making.
	They definitely control the marketplace.
	They definitely control the media outlets and so the advertising and the marketing and You know, the psychotropic drug market was a huge growth market, and then in the late 80s and 90s, children became the big growth market in that area.
	So I think that's the biggest factor.
	The other factors, though, that you mentioned, you know, as far as possible other social factors and educational factors and community factors, yeah, I think there's factors, you know, in a society becoming more alienated, more breakdown of community,
	more More economic pressures on families, bigger and less functional, government schooling, perverse incentive factors, meaning that schools get support and funding for kids who get channeled into so-called special education and the huge growth of special education and funding that goes with that.
	So there's many, many factors.
	The toxicity In the foods, you know, the use of children more and more with dozens and dozens of questionable immunizations at very young ages.
	You know, there's many, many factors, but I think the biggest one is just pure economics and the fact that the corporate dynamic that drives decision-making is maximum profit and minimum liability, and children are huge Product point in that market.
	Right and some of the research that I did and admittedly this is going back some years and I'm sure you're up to more current research.
	Of course the preponderance of these diagnoses fall upon boys and I think it seems to be somewhat coincidental though I'm not saying it's causal but it's coincidental with the rise the general rise of fatherless families within the United States and one of the studies that I remember being quite struck by in the past was the degree to which boys ADHD symptoms diminished when they were in the presence of their father.
	And that's something that really helped people to understand that we're chemically treating a fiction, a metaphor, a ghost in the brain because there's no such thing as a leukemia that diminishes in the presence of another human being.
	There's no such thing as a cut that miraculously heals when your father puts his hand on it or anything like that.
	And it has always sort of struck me that the rise of The economic problems within the society combined, of course, with lowered funding of schools and less outside activity, playtime, less recess.
	But the fact that children have much less access to their parents for the first time since, I would say, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution seems to me quite striking as well.
	Well, yeah, very well said, you know, just like these, I call them funny diseases for the reason that you're saying, you know, just like you say, leukemia or any form of cancer doesn't disappear because you change the people that you're with or change the environment that you're in, at least not immediately, right?
	And also, Yeah, that's a funny disease.
	Also, the symptoms don't generally reside more in the people around the patient than in the patient.
	Oftentimes, the child who's labeled ADHD is a happy camper, but the adults around are all distressed and uptight, so it's kind of a funny disease that way too.
	Also, I don't know of anybody in the world who really suffers from a Ritalin or Adderall deficiency, and that's the treatment, so there's a lot of funny things about it.
	It is true that, and the data is still that way, that boys get hit the hardest by psychiatric drug treatment.
	It's gotten to where girls are included a little bit more, but still it's probably four out of five of the kids labeled ADHD or boys.
	And in general, boys get hammered more now in the educational system.
	It's kind of It's kind of interesting to look at the fact that in some ways it used to be girls that seemed to get hammered more in some ways, but nowadays it's definitely boys, and there's a lot of reasons for that.
	You mentioned some of them.
	Some of it is just the fact that boys at age 5, 6, and 7, for various reasons probably, Just aren't quite as suited to the behaviors that are expected at that age all of a sudden when you go from being able to roam and play in a rough house and climb trees to just being expected to sit quietly in a little circle or sit quietly at your desk for hour after hour after hour.
	And if you're not able or willing to do that, then You become a behavioral or emotional or learning disabled child very quickly.
	You know, for example, if you're not interested in reading, like my son Eric, he loved to be read to when he was that age, but if you tried to get him to read the book, he'd throw it against the wall, you know?
	And if you do that in school at age 5, 6, 7, that's a problem pretty soon.
	You know, you're emotionally disturbed and learning disabled, and when you got a little older, Like around 8 for him.
	For some kids it's a little older than that even.
	He got interested and it's not that hard to learn to read when you're interested and he learned to read quickly enough and went on with his academic development but if he had been in a regular school at that setting you know he would have been one of those millions of kids who's learning disabled and emotionally disturbed and ADHD not because there's anything defective in him but because he I was not at all interested or ready to read,
	you know? And it seems to be the case that that's true a lot more for boys than for girls at that age.
	Yeah, and I think it's certainly true that a system that is low on resources and really end market satisfaction of demand, right?
	Because the purpose of the schools, of course, is to engage and instruct the children.
	That's the stated purpose of the schools.
	But when schools are low on resources or they've lost focus on that, in a sense, boys become more problematic to a system that's low on resources because girls at that age, as you say, they tend to be quieter, they tend to be more verbal, they tend to be more linguistic in terms of their reading desires and abilities.
	So they're easier to manage in a system that's low on resources versus boys, which I think have quite quickly become viewed as broken girls.
	Like girls are the ideal and boys are broken because they don't follow And it's always struck me as just mad in the extreme.
	And in the future, when they look back upon this time period, they will look back, I think, with complete horror at how children were treated because the whole purpose of school is to engage the children.
	And if the children aren't engaged, if they are distracted, if they're not enjoying the learning process, dragging them seems as mad to me as if I bought a computer from some store and I took it back and I said, I don't like this computer.
	It crashes. It's not fast.
	It's not what was promised me.
	And they won't take the computer back, but they'll offer me a pill to make me happy with my purchase.
	I mean, we would look at that as completely criminal and insane in any other market, but somehow, in the educational field, it is considered good medicine, and that just is astounding to me.
	Yeah, well, that's right on, Stephen.
	I think there's a lot of us who already are at that place of looking at it as insane and astounding, and I hope you're right, that gradually...
	This will be looked at, you know, from a point of view of I can't believe we did that.
	I totally, totally agree with you.
	It's also true that these kids...
	Oh, I know what I was going to say.
	The part about the purpose of schools being to engage the children, you know, and I think that there's a...
	You know, the way I say it is all oppression has a claim to virtue, you know, and there's all kinds of claims to virtue about, you know, our educational system and certainly there are ways of supporting children to learn that are very uplifting and encouraging,
	but generally speaking, if you look back at the educational system in North America, you know, it was adopted from the Russian, I mean the German or Prussian That was developed in the mid-19th century.
	My favorite writer on this currently is John Taylor Gatto.
	But he went back and looked at the actual stated rhetoric, not now what the rhetoric is, but the stated rhetoric at the time this system was designed by the commissioners of education, mostly German immigrants who designed this thing and what the purpose of it.
	It wasn't really to engage children to facilitate learning.
	It was basically to alienate kids from being independent producers so that we'd get good soldiers and factory workers, and the system is very, very effective at that.
	It's referred to as a kind of factory or industrial model of schooling, but it's a system that's designed very specifically with things such as But isolate children by age, which is totally unnatural because people learn from people of all ages and why in the world would you put all six-year-olds together and all seven-year-olds together and isolate them from all other children and then put a single adult authority at the head of the class and then pose this curriculum in which every 50 minutes You change subject,
	no matter how engaged you are or how interested you are in it, and then think that's the best way for children to learn.
	Actually, it's designed to create an emotional and intellectual dependency on this one single adult teacher.
	It's designed to disempower the children from learning and teaching each other.
	It's designed to interfere systematically with self-directed or self-initiated learning so that if I'm reading Catcher in the Rye or whatever and just totally into it but when that bell rings after 45 minutes it's time to go run laps around the track and PE or maybe not PE much these days time to switch over to doing math problems or whatever and even though I'm totally into this thing you know it has no conscience in the sense of this process of self-directed self-initiated learning and So there's a lot of people who think that the way the schools are designed is problematic,
	and that's why you have so many, many people doing homeschooling and looking for alternative schooling.
	But the vast majority of kids obviously go through this system, and it works fine for some, and for many, it just does not work.
	No, I agree with you. I did a presentation in New Hampshire last year and John Taylor Gatto was there and I saw a presentation of his highly, highly recommended To look him up.
	And also, if you get a chance, I interviewed Kevin Soling, the director of a new documentary called The War on Kids, which is very powerful stuff.
	And he shows up in there as well.
	Yeah, people make this mistake.
	And you're quite right. They think that public education has something to do with helping to keep democracy egalitarian.
	But of course, it's not. It's fundamentally there to maintain a class system that should have died out about five generations ago, but is somehow sustained through this macabre system.
	Now, you've also had a lot to say about the inefficacy of antidepressants for adults, and I'd like to touch on that as well, because that is something that I'm a little bit bewildered by, because there is a lot of contradictory information out there, and you may say some more objective and some more self-interested, i.e. pharmaceutically funded or doctors sort of subsidized.
	And I was wondering if you could talk about that, because there are so many people on antidepressants or anti-anxiety meds That may not have been given the alternate view on their efficacy.
	You're very good. Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, the guy sent me his documentary, The War on Kids, that you talked about.
	I second your recommendation of that.
	And also, of course, JohnTaylorGato.com for your listeners who are interested.
	Those are great resources. And I'll go ahead and mention mine, too, now that I'm thinking about it.
	WildestColts.com.
	It's my website that has a lot of information.
	One of my books is called The Wildest Colts Make the Horses.
	Which is a fantastic title.
	I just wanted to compliment you on that fantastic title.
	The important thing about having a good title, and it's not original for me by any means, but it actually comes from a Greek philosopher named Themistocles back about 500 B.C. The important thing about having a good title is that most people, regrettably, maybe don't read books nowadays, but a lot of people hear the title.
	I've had a lot of people say, your book really helped me.
	I say, what part of it did you like?
	I say, well, I never really read it, but the title helped me.
	Well, you know, that's good enough.
	If you can get some part of the thesis across in the title, fantastic.
	Exactly. So, Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses of the Course just means spirited children make spirited adults.
	So, that's my website. You're asking about antidepressants.
	With kids, they tend to start them out on these stimulant drugs.
	And then those cause problems, and then they get labeled bipolar, and then they add on antidepressants or mood stabilizers or antipsychotics, and so you get these teenagers for psychiatric drugs, and the later diagnosis are caused by so-called iatrogenic or negative effects caused by the very drug treatment.
	It's a really tragic thing, and my view on it has always been that, you know, A society would not be drugging literally millions of its children with toxic, addictive, dangerous drugs that cause dependency and negatively affect every organ system of the body and not infrequently cause death,
	most commonly due to heart damage, you know, because of the old saying, speed kills and stimulant drugs gradually damage the heart.
	You know, a society wouldn't do that with millions of the kids, you know, unless even more millions of the adults were also taking drugs.
	And, of course, we expand the drug conversation.
	It includes, you know, legal and illegal and prescription and non-prescription.
	But in this case, we're talking about specifically prescription drugs.
	The antidepressants, you know, most popularly the so-called serotonergic drugs, the SSRIs that everybody hears about, like Axel and Prozac and Zoloft and Effexor and Selexa and Remeron and etc.
	Those drugs are the big profit points for the pharmaceutical industry nowadays and they're so-called antidepressants, although there's no such thing as an antidepressant, really.
	There's just uppers and downers and these are more They have pretty much an amphetamine effect profile.
	They're very popular.
	They're said to treat a chemical imbalance.
	Depression is said to be due to a deficiency in serotonin.
	The antidepressant is supposed to somehow create more serotonin or block the uptake.
	It's in the brain so that the serotonin stays in the brain longer.
	But the fact is that the chemical imbalance theory has never been proven.
	It's never been proven that serotonin is really related to depression.
	That only people with deficient serotonin get depressed.
	Or that the drugs are like smart bombs that they only I mean, they do affect neurotransmitters, no doubt about it, but they cause a lot of problems and havoc.
	First of all, they don't only focus in the brain.
	They hit every organ system in the body.
	Second of all, they tend to really have that amphetamine effect and create a stress reaction Hitting those stress hormones, you know, which release from the adrenal glands, meaning your adrenaline and cortisol, so you get an upper effect.
	What you also get is a compensation in the brain and body, where to the extent that it does block serotonin uptake, so-called, then the body compensates by actually producing less serotonin or Changing the morphology of the brain so that the receptor sites actually start to disappear in the brain and so you change and so then you create a really serious dependency on these drugs and a compensatory factor in the body so that when you try to withdraw from these drugs you know you go into even worse depression or some other kind of emotional and physical reaction And it just so happens that these so-called antidepressants are some of the hardest drugs in the world to withdraw from.
	Peter Bregan has a book, a fairly new book, called Medical Madness, and what he's talking about there is involuntary intoxication.
	What he's talking about is that these drugs, and this is definitely true for the antidepressants, but not only the antidepressants, create medical madness for involuntary intoxication.
	They create A disablement of the brain and central nervous system that impairs self-awareness and leads to all kinds of problems so that you see people kind of disconnected with their feelings, disconnected with their ability to think things through and started to act more irritably,
	more impulsively, more depressed, sometimes leading to severe medical madness in the sense that these drugs are associated with increased rates of suicide and also with Incidents of so-called senseless violence, like the school shootings at Columbine,
	Colorado, and in Minnesota, and in Oregon, and in California, and at Virginia Tech, and all these places around the world where young people are going off and shooting people.
	Nine times out of ten, they're on this particular class of drugs.
	So, I guess I've said it now for a lot of issues, but it comes down to the fact that the chemical imbalance theory is just a theory, that it's not scientifically proven, that the drugs have powerful effects and powerful consequences, and a lot of them are very negative and problematic.
	Yeah, and the long-term ADHD, and again, this research is several years old, but the long-term ADHD effects for a child's brain can cost you up to 10% of your brain mass, and that is a staggering A staggering deficiency when it comes, it's crippling your most essential organ in some ways.
	And I think it really is a case of even if there was a disease, the cure is far worse than the disease.
	And I have another question around the efficacy of the anti-depressant medications.
	I've had a really tough time finding controlled, double-blind, really well put together experiments that can find In these antidepressants a better-than-placebo effect.
	Have I just been missing something or is there a significant gap in that data set?
	Yeah. First, just a second, what you said about the stimulant drugs.
	Basically, they suppress growth in general.
	That's a well-known effect of speed and stimulant drugs, and that includes the brain.
	The overall body growth is suppressed, but specifically also that organ, so you end up with suppression of brain tissue growth.
	It's referred to as cortical atrophy, and it's a pretty well-documented effect that goes along with stimulant drugs, so yeah, it's a very heavy price to pay.
	In terms of antidepressant efficacy and the efficacy studies, that's one of the biggest ongoing challenges for big pharma, for the pharmaceutical industry, is that it's very, very difficult to beat Placebo with a psychotropic drug of any kind.
	The theory, the idea is that in order to get the drug approved by FDA and demonstrate how great it is, you do these tests where you compare the drug to a placebo, which presumably is like a pretend drug.
	So you get a pill that you're told is an antidepressant, but it's just a sugar pill or whatever.
	You know, if the drug, the real drug doesn't beat the fake drug, then you got a problem.
	And that's the problem over and over again is that most of the time these drugs cannot be placebo, you know, because for one thing, just because of the well-known fact that expectancy or belief, you know, is a powerful drug.
	Determinant of feelings and behavior and that expectancy effect is really strong and so if you tell somebody they're taking a drug they'll tend to feel better.
	And so they set up these drug trials and there's a lot of problems with it.
	The biggest one, the one is that they just don't beat the placebo.
	Two is that there's a so-called an inert placebo and an active placebo A lot of times I use an inert placebo, which means basically it's like a sugar pill.
	It has no effect. You don't feel anything.
	So you take the real drug and you feel the effects of it in your body because it's kind of a standard effect.
	You take the other, you don't feel that. So the people in the study know whether they're really taking a drug or not, even though they're not supposed to know, right?
	That's one thing. And then they use drugs that have active placebo.
	So it's some sort of you feel something in your body, but it's not the actual substance.
	The other thing is that what they'll do a lot of times is they'll have people in the placebo group who are really, it's so-called washing out, they're really going through withdrawal because they've just been taking off some other drug and so, you know, there's that.
	The other thing that happens since what's coming out now more and more is that it's been revealed that the people who are doing these studies are paid, you know, either the studies themselves are paid for by the drug companies Or the people doing the studies are paid consultants for the drug companies.
	So there's a bias in there.
	The other thing is that there's a tendency for the journals to only publish the positive results.
	So if they do six studies and one of them gets a positive result, that one will get published.
	This has been revealed by some congressional investigations lately.
	And so sometimes now you'll see, at least on the website, you'll see You had this study and these negative studies, but over the last couple of decades, mostly you had only the positive studies presented.
	Bottom line is that this guy, Irving Kirsch, particularly has reviewed the literature a lot, but there's been some people who've reviewed the literature over the last 20, 30 years on all these drug studies, and the bottom line is over and over again basically the antidepressants Have been more or less equal to a placebo in terms of their effect.
	And what's also interesting, Stephan, is they've also been more or less equal to no treatment at all.
	Because a lot of these studies, they'll show you get, you know, whatever, you know, maybe say a 40% response rate, you know, over a few months period.
	But the research shows two things.
	One is you get at least as good of an effect One, from exercise, and two, you get, generally speaking, at least as good of an effect with no treatment at all.
	It's about 50% of depression just gets way better over a few months, you know, with no treatment at all.
	Right, and the degree to which people believe, in a sense self-stigmatized, that they have some sort of biochemical deficiency within the brain, It's the degree to which they don't explore other treatment options.
	And economists call this obviously the opportunity cost.
	It's like what you don't do because you're taking a pill.
	And I've always been a very strong advocate of physical exercise and talk therapy with a really great therapist seems to me to be the very best way to solve these problems.
	But if you're taking a pill, you're like, oh, well, you know, I'm going to take a pill and I'm not any more than I would go and see a therapist for having a cast on my leg.
	I'm not going to go and see a therapist because it's a biochemical problem.
	It's nothing to do with say early trauma or sleep deprivation or Being in a bad marriage or any of the other things that can cause people's sense of happiness and security to whittle away.
	And the same thing occurs of course with children and you had a list in one of your YouTube presentations that I thought was very powerful.
	The degree to which children are stigmatized and drugged is exactly the degree to which other symptoms are not being explored like sleep deprivation, like poor nutrition, like child abuse that may be occurring within the home and all of the other things that may be occurring All you're doing is you're treating the symptoms.
	It would be, I think, as irresponsible to, if somebody was self-mutilating, to just give them a stack of Band-Aids and say, there you go, without going to the root causes of what is causing this harm.
	You got it. I call it a magic trick.
	You know, it's like, voila, it's all explained, you know, and you're absolved from thinking about it any further, you know.
	Problem, reaction, solution, you know.
	The other thing is that You're not only absolved, but you're absolved in the sense that you're not responsible.
	Biological psychiatry absolves everybody of responsibility.
	It's a false absolution, but it absolves everybody of responsibility.
	Oh, you have ADHD? That's your problem in school.
	You're not responsible.
	Oh, you have chemical imbalance depression?
	You're not responsible for being able to work through whatever's going on and dealing with You know, taking charge of your life.
	You know, it's just you have this unfortunate mental illness.
	Oh, your child has ADHD. You're not responsible as a parent to try to figure out what's going on in terms of meeting that child's needs and helping them successful.
	It's just this unfortunate mental illness they have.
	Oh, the school's not responsible.
	The kid's just sick.
	He's got ADHD. He just needs his Ritalin.
	Kid's having a problem today?
	Have you taken your Ritalin?
	We're not thinking.
	Nobody's responsible to keep trying to think and figure out what's going on at the level of the individual, at the level of the family, at the level of the school, at the level of the community, at the level of society that's feeding all this junk and toxic stuff to kids, at the level of how we design and think about our schools, at the level of whatever, right?
	That's exactly right. You know, that's one of the biggest problems is that it just abdicates responsibility.
	Yeah, it's the modern equivalent of say 10 Hail Marys and drop 50 bucks in the collection jar and everything is forgiven.
	It's a way of absolving responsibility.
	And the awful aspect of this, like all addicts, and I think that in a sense we're addicted to medicating our children and then that creates addictions within them.
	Like all addicts, the degree to which we abandon responsibility is the degree to which That responsibility falls upon those around us to maintain and support us.
	And the really tragic thing is that this abandonment of responsibility for figuring out a society that better serves the needs of children, and if we can't do that, we have no right to call ourselves a moral society in any way, shape, or form.
	Dostoevsky said that a society's compassion is determined by how it treats its prisoners, which I would amend to say is how it treats its children, but the negative consequences of the general abandonment of self-examination and self-criticism within society Falls upon the most vulnerable and dependent of society, which is the children. And I really do shudder to think, when these kids figure this out as adults, I can't imagine that they're going to have a lot of allegiance to the social norms that society has inflicted upon them.
	And I think we could be raising quite a generation of nihilists in the process.
	Well, you got it.
	Children and elders get really hammered as two relatively powerless groups.
	You know, I'm talking about 15% of the kids.
	You know, 50% at least of the elders in nursing homes, you know, get drugged as ways of controlling their behavior.
	It really is a terrible indictment on our society.
	Absolutely. The other thing is that, well, I don't remember what the other thing was, but that's a good point.
	Now, I want to be sensitive to your time, and I really do appreciate your time.
	It's just fascinating stuff.
	The last thing that I would like to ask you, as somebody who has infinitely more expertise in the field than I do as an amateur, but it seems to me, I'm not a big one for sort of smoky backroom conspiracy theories, but it seems to me quite astounding in the extreme that during a time in American society when healthcare costs are going under the microscope and people seem to be casting their nets very wide in order to find savings in the healthcare field,
	Why this issue of the unscientific or anti-scientific drugging of children for imagined metaphorical superstitious, quote, ailments, has never even been discussed.
	I've never seen this issue raised.
	And this has got to be costing tens of billions of dollars or more in the healthcare field.
	And yet, it seems to me astounding that when people are talking about reducing benefits to the poor, when people are talking about closing down hospital wings and closing down beds and firing nurses as a way of saving children, Well, it is a conspiracy, and I'll explain how it works.
	First, I remembered the other point, though, about this conspiracy thing, you know, is that related to what you said about the cost to society, You know, we're very much, in Tom Zott's words, a therapeutic state.
	And Robert Whitaker is an investigative journalist from the Northeast up there.
	He wrote a great book a few years ago called Mad in America about the history of mental illness in this country.
	But he also wrote an article that you can find called Anatomy of an Epidemic.
	And in that he documents the increase in disability rates for psychiatric patients.
	Disability or mental illness and diabetes in the United States.
	Around 1900, it was about one in 2000, I think, that were considered disabled by adult Americans considered disabled by virtue of mental illness and that was measured pretty much by people in mental hospitals.
	By 1950, it had gone up to about one in 500, okay?
	It's significant, but it's still relatively rare.
	But by 2000, it was closer to 1 in 50 adult Americans disabled by virtue of mental illness.
	And that's measured nowadays, of course, by being on Social Security disability roles.
	So basically the state, the government, It's paying out permanent disability for people as chronically mentally ill.
	We're talking about one out of 50 adult Americans.
	That's an astounding figure, if that's accurate.
	I encourage you to look at Robert Whitaker's article, those of you who are interested.
	It's pretty clear that there's this severe, incredible spike that more and more people disabled by virtue of mental illness.
	You can argue different causative factors for that, but one of them, in my mind, seems to be very clear that it's the iatrogenic effect of these drugs because it's about 1950 that exactly the first psychiatric drugs for seriously mentally ill, quote-unquote, people came into play with Thorazine, and now there's a whole pack of them, of course, but they create permanent disability in those who take them.
	It's also true that people who become chronic mental patients Also die on average about 25 years younger than the general population.
	So this is very, very serious and very, very disabling.
	And it's so medieval, sorry to interrupt, but the image just struck me that if the ailments are metaphorical or imaginary, it really is like cutting someone's leg off because you believe that an invisible demon is eating their flesh.
	It is a terrifying and terrible physical consequence for an imaginary ailment.
	Well, you know, one of my main teachers about all this, like I've mentioned a while ago, is Thomas Zotz, and he wrote a book in 1974 called The Manufacturer of Madness, and the subtitle is A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement.
	And you've thrown out a couple of times these analogies between psychiatry and religious stuff, and he's making this direct analogy that as As society moved from a predominantly theological worldview and a theocratic state to more of a scientific worldview,
	you know, the shift was from religion as a primary agent of social control and, of course, the epitome of that would be the Inquisition, you know, as a social control dynamic, you know, to control and weed people out and literally Kill hundreds of thousands of people,
	largely women, labeled as heretics and witches for heresy and to torture and kill them in order to save their souls.
	And so the metaphor is that the Inquisition is to heresy and psychiatry is to mental illness.
	That it's really not about medicine.
	It's really not about biologically or genetically based mental illness.
	That's the justification But it's really about psychiatry as an agency of social control that comes into play where the legal system and the police and the prisons aren't able to step into realms like kids' behaviors in schools or old people's behaviors in nursing homes or people who are depressed about going to work or whatever.
	So there's that.
	Right. The brightest people in a dysfunctional society are the ones who find that society most unbearable and they represent the greatest dangers to those classes that are profiting from that dysfunction and so in a sense they have to be silenced one way or another or at least marginalized.
	And the research is pretty interesting that generally speaking you can talk about this depression epidemic or whatever and all these millions of depressed people and you know it's interesting to look at the fact that generally speaking People who are depressed, on average, are more intelligent, as opposed to less intelligent than non-depressed people, and definitely tend to be more accurate in their perceptions of what's actually going on in the world.
	I'm not recommending people being depressed, but there's a lot of truth to the fact that when you look at depression and when you look at the world, you're going to face depression.
	You're going to have to work through these feelings that come up around despair, and you're going to have to somehow face that and find a way to live in a militaristic and consumerist society without selling your soul or without ending up on disability to somehow deal with your money flows and the pressures of that and still lead a life that feels meaningful and purposeful and authentic and moral.
	It's very, very difficult and very challenging.
	Yeah, if your eyes don't hurt sometimes, it's just because you have your eyelids closed all the time.
	I think that's a very good way.
	Now, is there any sort of last things that you'd like to say?
	Yeah, the conspiracy theory.
	Please, let us in.
	Give us the secret handshake, the Masonic forehead rub or whatever it is that lets us into that inner circle.
	You know, I like conspiracy, you know, because I think the people who are called conspiracy theorists, it mostly just means we've got a radical idea or one that It's threatening to the status quo somehow.
	Conspiracy just means people are working together to make something happen.
	It's very clear that corporate forces, in this case the corporate pharmaceutical industry, conspires to sell their product.
	Some of it's very covert and a lot of it's very overt.
	But it's very, very deliberate.
	You know, they work with the government in terms of the fact that the pharmaceutical industry has, you know, literally more than one full-time paid lobbyist for every member of Congress and spends, you know, billions of dollars, you know, in the whole effort and in the marketing effort and,
	you know, over $10,000 per doctor, you know, in this country, you know, Billions of dollars spent in media advertising and money spent funding the psychiatric journals, the conferences, paying off the key spokespeople and researchers at various universities, including the head of the psychiatry department at universities like Emory and Brown and Stanford.
	You know, including paying off the key researchers at Harvard, like Joe Biederman, who developed the concept of childhood bipolar disorder.
	This is all documented, in fact, largely exposed through the works of Charles Grassley, a U.S. senator who's been exposing a lot of this stuff.
	So, you know, it's very overt in some ways.
	In some ways, it's very covert in the sense that a lot of these payoffs were hidden until they get exposed, you know.
	And so, you know, there's a very deliberate marketing and a conditioned branding.
	You know, so you create a product and you need conditions for it, and so you create things like bipolar childhood, bipolar disorder, or things like, you know, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or you mentioned oppositional defiance disorder, or now they're pushing one for the new DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, called Tempered Dysregulation Disorder.
	You know, which is for basically tantruming in kids.
	And so they pathologize all these things.
	Those are then conditions or mental illnesses that require the treatment.
	And then they also get into these states, like in Texas, the Texas Medication Algorithm Project, you know, where the pharmaceutical industry invested with the state of Texas to create these algorithms, which are these formulas, It says, if ADHD, then Adderall or whatever.
	If depression, then Paxil or whatever.
	The companies then get their drug in the formulary.
	The state then mandates that Medicaid doctors or doctors in the mental health system use those formularies and those drugs in their systems.
	It leads to hundreds of millions and then billions of dollars in sales and profits.
	That's how it works.
	If that's not a conspiracy, I don't know what is.
	It's very, very effective.
	An alignment of self-interest in multiple groups can often seem to be coordinated by some person, but it's really just coordinated by, in a sense, the free market within a corporatist environment, that people's interests are aligned, and that's what ends up happening.
	You did actually put a great missing piece of the puzzle together, well, more than one, but The media, of course, if...
	I live in Canada, so you can't really advertise medication in Canada.
	There's not much point as well because it's socialized, but the media there.
	So if these guys, these pharmaceutical companies are regularly, as they do, running ads for these psychiatric medications on television...
	Then those television stations have a significant disincentive to publish reports skeptical of these medications.
	That's a fascinating piece of the puzzle which I hadn't really put together at all.
	And the last thing I'd ask, and I really appreciate your time, is what should people do if they know somebody or are on these kinds of drugs?
	As you say, they are very difficult to kick and they do create a dependency that is very powerful.
	And what is it that people should do and what alternative treatments would you suggest for people who are facing this kind of withdrawal?
	Right. Yeah. Well, fortunately, there's a lot of resources available.
	The main thing and the main recommendation and the main piece of information is that abrupt withdrawal can be dangerous, you know, and it can throw you into...
	All kinds of severe withdrawal reactions varying from psychosis to depression to physical problems.
	Some of the drugs, for example, the benzodiazepines can lead to severe seizure reactions with abrupt withdrawal.
	So the thing is gradualness.
	The rule of thumb is like the 10% rule, but 10% at a time.
	But the main thing is gentle and gradual withdrawal.
	At the same time that you're supporting your system with as much nutrition and rest as possible.
	There's some great resources.
	One of my books, The Necessity of Madness, has some information on it.
	I've got some information on my website, WildestColts.com.
	Peter Bregan and David Cohen have a really good book called Your Drug May Be Your Problem, which is a guide for withdrawing.
	There's some really good websites.
	It's the antidepressants, The drugawareness.org is good.
	There's one called the Road Back.
	There's a lot of resources available on the internet.
	There's groups that can give legal advice if that's what you need.
	It just depends. But in terms of the drug withdrawal specifically, it's to do it gradually and get as much support as possible.
	My recommendation is basically like your, Stephan.
	You know, it's to look at things more as multidimensional human beings, you know, to look at What's going on physically?
	What's going on emotionally, mentally, spiritually?
	Finding good nutrition, drinking a lot of water, getting some gentle exercise, finding someone to talk to, finding support for allowing emotions to express and release.
	That's a big key. Getting support, finding support, finding friends, finding safe places, building a little community for yourself.
	That's what's going to help in the long run, for sure.
	Well, I really do appreciate your time, and I just wanted to sign off by really thanking you enormously for the work that you have done over the years to bring this light to the awareness of people.
	The voices in the wilderness are really how humanity progresses up the ladder to a more functional and rational and happy society.
	It is people like yourself.
	I know that when you face up against Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	For the courage that you've shown in speaking out very publicly and very vociferously and very repeatedly in a fight that seems like a losing battle half the time at least.
	I really do want to thank you for your courage and your dedication in bringing this out to people and to do what I can in my small way to help with that is a great honor.
	Well, thank you, Stephan. It's been a great conversation.
	I really appreciate it. All right.
	Thanks so much. Have a great day.

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