June 6, 2025 - The Tucker Carlson Show
02:20:46
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| If you're being told, you know, you have a chemical imbalance, Tucker, here's some Prozac, it's going to help adjust the chemicals. | ||
| That's a lie. | ||
| If something's an imbalance, what's balance? | ||
| Is there any science behind that at all? | ||
| No. | ||
| It has never been proven. | ||
| Most people believe that mental illness, you know, that depression, all these things are caused by chemical imbalances. | ||
| 66 million Americans total on these. | ||
| According to the CDC in 2022, so those numbers could well be higher. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's great. | |
| Craziness? | ||
| There's this condition called PSSD. | ||
| Post-SSRI sexual dysfunction. | ||
| Oh, come on. | ||
| There's a whole movement. | ||
| They'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. | ||
| What? | ||
| Some people haven't regained it for years. | ||
| So they're just dead? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And no one's going to jail for this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll see you next time. | |
| So I read this piece in the New York Times about you that's like actually kind of hostile and the story seems to be that you were on psych meds for a lot of your young life and then you got off them and that's bad. | ||
| That's bad! | ||
| You might lead people to do the same. | ||
| You might lead them astray off psychiatric medication, out of therapy and into like independent happy life. | ||
| Why would anyone be mad at you for getting off psych drugs? | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| I mean, I think really there's just so much fear and greed and disconnection from emotional pain that people hear a story of someone who's decided to let go of. | ||
| dependence on professionals and pills and institutions and they just can't fathom trying it for themselves because they've built their whole lives around this idea of being sick and needing treatment and needing medical expertise and institutional authorities to guide them. | ||
| So to hear a story of someone who said, I'm not going to do that anymore, is to basically call into question their entire life. | ||
| And it makes me feel sad. | ||
| I feel sad about it because I'm just sharing my story. | ||
| I'm not telling anyone what to do. | ||
| I'm just talking about what I did, and yet somehow a lot of people out there think I'm insulting them or attacking them. | ||
| It baffles me. | ||
| It's just, it's in, and I understand everything that you have, that you've said. | ||
| I mean, the country, and I think you've got a lot of detail on this, but the country is pretty much addicted to these drugs. | ||
| Like a huge percentage of the population takes them, can't get off them, unclear if they're benefiting from them. | ||
| On the other hand, I thought the goal was health and independence and joy and connection between people and productivity and creativity. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| Yeah, it's fascinating. | ||
| Well, it is! | ||
| It's dark! | ||
| Yeah, and I don't know if you looked at the comments on that New York Times article, or if you heard about the kerfuffle, you know, that article caused the readership of the New York Times, but they had to shut the comments down after 1300. | ||
| Which poured right in within a day of the article being out because people were just so outraged at basically what a fascist I am for entertaining the idea that you can take your body and your well-being and your identity back from a very powerful industry that profits off of. | ||
| Us being afraid of our suffering. | ||
| And I'm literally a fascist now. | ||
| Basically. | ||
| So amazing! | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I just wanted to set the stage for your story. | ||
| So you're from Connecticut. | ||
| You come from an attack family. | ||
| We had dinner last night. | ||
| I heard all of this. | ||
| It's an amazing story. | ||
| But you wound up on psychiatric medications and it began this whole odyssey. | ||
| Can you just tell us what happened to you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, which is, you know, you picture the most stereotypical kind of upper middle class affluent New England town and it's Greenwich. | ||
| I was the kind of kid who was good at school, so I happened to know how to get A's on tests and memorize and regurgitate information well and follow the instructions of adult authority figures. | ||
| So I was good at school. | ||
| I was a good athlete on paper. | ||
| I had it all together, you could say. | ||
| But when I was 13, I ended up having this profound... | ||
| a stranger was looking back at me, and I was like, who is she? | ||
| Who is she? | ||
| What is this girl doing looking at me? | ||
| I just was totally out of reality. | ||
| And when I came to, the only conclusion I could draw about what this meant was that I didn't have a real self. | ||
| I was just this programmed robot who'd been raised to perform well and have it all together, but who was I really? | ||
| What did I really care about? | ||
| What did I... | ||
| I didn't know the answer to that, and that terrified me. | ||
| And so I ended up trying to repress what had happened and pretend it hadn't happened. | ||
| I didn't tell anyone about this out-of-body experience I'd had, and I just continued on performing well. | ||
| But at home, eventually, I began to just—I couldn't hold it all in anymore, so I began to act out and scream and curse. | ||
| I started to get physical, and I'd push my mother. | ||
| I'd terrify my sisters. | ||
| I started slicing up my arms. | ||
| I started thinking about death, because what was the point to this game that I had no agency in? | ||
| And my poor parents were just shocked and stunned at what had happened to their eldest daughter seemingly overnight. | ||
| She was this maniac, basically. | ||
| And so they did what so many loving American parents are taught to do when their child is struggling. | ||
| They took me to a professional because they internalized this story that they didn't have what they needed to help me. | ||
| They needed to pay someone who'd studied about kids like me to help. | ||
| So they sent me to a therapist. | ||
| Your parents identify with the parent in this. | ||
| You know, they love you. | ||
| They think everything's going great. | ||
| You're killing it in school. | ||
| You're staying within the boundaries. | ||
| And then, like, they don't have any idea what to do, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| But they're motivated by love. | ||
| Is that fair? | ||
| Very much so. | ||
| They did what they thought would be the most helpful for me. | ||
| They're the opposite of negligent. | ||
| I guess that's what I want to say. | ||
| Like, they're engaged. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They did the best they could with the information. | ||
| as a resource was the mental health system. | ||
| There weren't any visible support groups for parents of struggling teens. | ||
| No one was talking about, "My gosh, is your daughter also slicing up her arms too?" No one talked about this then. | ||
| And so the only visible source they saw was a mental health professional. | ||
| And so, and this woman, this therapist was a very kind woman. | ||
| had the best of intentions, but when I was sent to see her each week, to me at the time, I experienced it as this profound violation of my very being. | ||
| I interpreted this as a sign that everyone around me thought I was defective, I was the problem, and I knew in my heart that the anger I felt and the despair I felt were actually really meaningful responses to the environment that I was growing up in, this really high-pressured, intense environment where it's just in the air itself that if you want to feel good about yourself, you have to excel. | ||
| I knew that that was the problem, not me, but of course, I I didn't have the sense of self yet to stand up for myself. | ||
| So I ended up being sent to therapy each week. | ||
| I felt humiliated. | ||
| I felt ashamed. | ||
| My poor parents didn't mean to. | ||
| You know, cause that in me. | ||
| But I just, I experienced therapy as basically a statement that I wasn't good enough as I was. | ||
| And so it wasn't a long, it wasn't that long before the therapist ended up recommending to my parents that they send me to a psychiatrist because I was, you know, pretty extreme. | ||
| difficulties were, you know, it wasn't enough to just see a therapist. | ||
| And so my parents took me to psychiatry And in that first session, I was 14 by this time. | ||
| In that first session, after sitting down with this woman, this stranger who I'd never met before, I think she'd been given some information about me by my parents and that therapist, but I'd never met her. | ||
| I poured out all my pain to her. | ||
| And at the end of that session, she said, have you heard of something called bipolar disorder? | ||
| And I was like, what? | ||
| And she said, well, this anger that you feel, this irritability, these rages you're getting into, these are symptoms of something we call mania. | ||
| And the despair and the injuring you're doing to yourself, these are symptoms of depression. | ||
| And this is a condition that you'll have for the rest of your life, but don't worry, they're medications that will help you manage this. | ||
| At 14, she told you you're stuck with this for life? | ||
| For life. | ||
| That's how it always is. | ||
| Anytime you're given a diagnosis by a psychiatrist, the baseline operating assumption is that this thing we call mental illness is an incurable condition that you treat and you manage. | ||
| But that forms the premise of the entire business model of the psychiatric industry is that these are incurable conditions that require treatment indefinitely. | ||
| And there I was hearing this message as a 14-year-old girl. | ||
| I'm like, excuse my language, I'm like, who the fuck does this woman think she is telling me this? | ||
| But that defiance that I felt, you know, I had no one, I knew I couldn't resist, that if I resisted, that would be used against me, so I just kind of went along with it. | ||
| If I resisted, that would be, it's like you've been taken in by the Bulgarian border police in 1975. | ||
| Resistance is futile! | ||
| Well, it totally is. | ||
| And interestingly, just to pan out for a moment to this whole broader mental health industry at scale, that is when you, many people who resist their diagnosis or who tell their doctors, I don't think I'm sick, or that actually is used literally to reinforce just how sick you are. | ||
| You lack insight, quote-unquote, into your condition. | ||
| This is so Soviet. | ||
| I mean, so like listening to the It has. | ||
| Well, in the sense that, of course, the psychiatrist is listening for signs of symptoms. | ||
| You know, okay, I'm listening past what they're saying so I can determine if this person is entering a hypomanic episode or her depression is worsening. | ||
| But they're not listening to the patient. | ||
| I'll speak for myself. | ||
| My whole very well-meaning therapists and doctors over the years were not actually... | ||
| Of me having wisdom. | ||
| They lacked a respect for my own ability to kind of define for myself what my reality meant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It sounds like they went into the sessions knowing what you were sick with and everything that you said was… It's all filtered through this clinical lens of translating your deep human experiences into this clinicalized language of symptom, illness, disease. | |
| And so they're trained to do that. | ||
| And what ended up happening to me when I eventually bought into all of this And I just came to translate every single thought, emotion, behavior, decision, through this medicalized lens of me having this sickness that was incurable and that these were all symptoms of it, basically. | ||
| Okay, so you're 14. Can you imagine telling a 14-year-old you have a lifelong illness from which you will never recover, that will define you? | ||
| At 14, you're telling somebody that. | ||
| On the basis of what evidence? | ||
| Where did you catch this illness? | ||
| In the ladies' room in an airport? | ||
| Did they explain where you got this illness? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a very good question, Tucker. | |
| And it's a question that we should be asking all the time about literally every single psychiatric diagnosis that is ever given to any human being because the entire model is built on subjectivity. | ||
| It's built on the subjective. | ||
| The observations of the diagnosing clinician, which of course means it will be infused by their own personality, whether they had a bad night's sleep, they just had a fight with their spouse an hour earlier and they're grumpy. | ||
| It's going to infuse how they see their patients. | ||
| There are no objective biological tests. | ||
| There are no brain scans, lab tests that you can do to say, oh, this is proof that you have this. | ||
| Chemical imbalance in your brain or this faulty biomarker. | ||
| There's no objective, measurable pathology of any kind in any of these conditions. | ||
| Literally, all of them, including the so-called serious ones like bipolar and schizophrenia. | ||
| It is completely based on observation. | ||
| But is there any explanation? | ||
| So they're telling you they're looking forward into the next 70 years of your life and saying this is going to be with you forever. | ||
| Kind of incumbent on them to explain where you got this thing, its nature, like, what exactly are they talking about? | ||
| Did anybody ever explain any of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, and in large part because I never asked. | |
| I mean, of course I didn't ask as a kid. | ||
| I was just so flummoxed by the whole and disoriented by this whole experience that it didn't even occur to me to be like, can you prove that I have an incurable brain disease? | ||
| We can keep you alive for decades, but it's terminal. | ||
| That's so nuts to say that to a child on the base of no evidence. | ||
| But the entire paradigm is that. | ||
| For every single person who has ever been given a psychiatric diagnosis in the history of psychiatric diagnosis, it's always that. | ||
| It's always... | ||
| It's the entire thing. | ||
| And I did not realize this because it never occurred to me to step back and ask these questions. | ||
| And I think most, maybe I shouldn't, I shouldn't presume most, but many people don't either because when I ended up eventually buying into all of this a few years after that first psychiatrist, As an 18-year-old, you know, I'd continued through high school playing the performance game, knowing it was bullshit, but not knowing how to get out of it. | ||
| So I ended up getting into Harvard and trying to tell myself, you know, maybe I'm wrong and I will actually feel okay in my skin once I get to Harvard and I'll just be able to say to myself, like, you were crazy thinking this. | ||
| Performance thing is bullshit. | ||
| Harvard is amazing, and now you're happy. | ||
| So, of course, I didn't feel that way when I got there. | ||
| And I instantly spun out. | ||
| I started getting drunk and doing coke and ecstasy and just running away from the reality that I still had no idea who I was. | ||
| I still didn't feel like I had an authentic self. | ||
| I still felt trapped in this performance game. | ||
| So now what do I do? | ||
| I'd been hoping Harvard would save me and it hasn't. | ||
| Plus, you're playing at the highest level in sports. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Yeah, I was playing on the squash team. | ||
| I had, on paper, I'd made it. | ||
| I'd arrived. | ||
| You know, the pinnacle of what you strive for as a young person in the kind of elite education industry. | ||
| Like, I won the jackpot. | ||
| And so as I spun out with each, you know, through the fall, week after week after week, and I really lost any footing I might have had, I just lost it all. | ||
| And I was just a mess and getting myself into all kinds of dangerous, impulsive, you know, really dark situations. | ||
| I eventually, by wintertime, I was just so desperate for relief from this pain that that little voice of that psychiatrist all those years earlier was saying, oh, you have this illness called bipolar disorder. | ||
| I was like, maybe she's right. | ||
| Why do I feel this way? | ||
| Why can't I get my shit together? | ||
| Why am I such a mess? | ||
| Maybe I really am sick. | ||
| And so it was at that point that I willingly, voluntarily went back to psychiatry. | ||
| I found a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital. | ||
| Which, of course, is considered the golden psychiatric institution, one of the oldest in the country. | ||
| Most famous. | ||
| Most famous, yep. | ||
| Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Ray Charles, James Taylor. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| They all wrote poems and fiction about their experiences there. | ||
| And so here I was now, so privileged and blessed to be. | ||
| Entering this hallowed psychiatric ground. | ||
| I was just so excited. | ||
| Did it work for Sylvia Plath or Robert Lowell? | ||
| I mean, we all know... | ||
| I'm not going to be mean, but like... | ||
| Which, by the way, is still alive and well. | ||
| 100,000 people a year get electroshock in the U.S. McLean Hospital, on its website a couple years ago, was bragging about how great its ECT center is. | ||
| I think, Sylvia, what ECT did to her brain and her creativity, I've heard that that played a part in why she eventually just couldn't. | ||
| be alive anymore because of the adverse effects of psychiatric treatment. | ||
| So I knew none of this then. | ||
| I was just desperate for relief. | ||
| And I think that desperation is a really important piece of this broader conversation because as human beings, we can only withstand so much suffering before we need help. | ||
| We need relief. | ||
| And that desperation drives you to just accept whatever promise is offered to you because you just... | ||
| You're too tired of trying anymore yourself. | ||
| Just someone take over here. | ||
| Someone fix me. | ||
| Someone take this pain away. | ||
| And that's the place that I got to that freshman year. | ||
| And I think because of that, it impaired any critical thinking capacities that I might have otherwise had to ask those questions of like, how do you know I have an incurable brain disease? | ||
| Or can you tell a little bit more about the evidence base for this drug you're putting me on? | ||
| None of those questions occurred to me because I didn't care. | ||
| I didn't care about any of it. | ||
| I just wanted the pain to stop. | ||
| You probably wouldn't want other people to see that because it's not their business. | ||
| Not because you're doing anything wrong, but because that's your information and privacy matters. | ||
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| So, but at the same time, you're going to class at Harvard, you're playing on the squash team, like you're continuing to achieve. | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| I mean, I skipped a lot of classes freshman year. | ||
| I was sick a lot, and so I missed a lot of practices. | ||
| That first year, I definitely fell off the upper echelons of performance that I'd been used to leading up to then, which I think also was part of why I was just so desperate for help. | ||
| When did they start putting you on drugs at McLean? | ||
| Right in that first appointment with my new doctor. | ||
| I had actually been put on psych drugs a week or two prior to that. | ||
| Meeting my new psychiatrist at McLean because I had come out as a debutante in a couple of debutante balls around Christmas time, which the good wasp girl that I was wasn't an option to not do. | ||
| And I had actually, on winter vacation, in this literal wedding dress, this fancy white wedding dress, there I was up on stage. | ||
| I coked out of my mind, completely trashed because I had to be to survive doing such a thing. | ||
| Also, to be fair, everybody is at those things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Basically. | |
| Sorry, excuse me. | ||
| And, you know, in my long white gloves and I'm up on stage and I'm like, I'm literally a robot performing. | ||
| That was my breaking point on Christmas vacation where I just was like, I either need to kill myself right now or get help. | ||
| And so... | ||
| I said, please help me. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| But now I was at a breaking point. | ||
| And so I was put on a couple of meds on vacation. | ||
| And then when I went back to school and started seeing the psychiatrist at McLean, he continued me on those and he began to add new ones. | ||
| What ended up being a decade of just the polypharmacy highway, you could say. | ||
| And I became basically a professional psychiatric patient. | ||
| So what did they put you on? | ||
| So from the beginning, I was always on an antidepressant of some kind, a mood stabilizer. | ||
| And then with the passage of time, antipsychotics were added in, benzos were added in. | ||
| I was on Ambien for a long time, too. | ||
| But it was the kind of typical bipolar regimen, as they call it, where it's literally a handful of different prescriptions. | ||
| And the way it was explained to me, it almost felt like I had this impression that my psychiatrist was very skilled and sophisticated. | ||
| Oh, a little bit of this for that issue. | ||
| A little bit of this for that issue. | ||
| The more meds I was on, the more cared for I felt. | ||
| And it felt like the more serious my doctor was taking me. | ||
| And it just steadily, beginning that freshman year at Harvard, on, the more treatment I got and the more compliant I was and the more deferential I was to psychiatric authority. | ||
| The more my life fell apart. | ||
| So you said you got meds in your first appointment. | ||
| Did anyone ever say to you, you know, you obviously feel deeply unsettled and unhappy, at times suicidal. | ||
| Maybe you're not living the right way. | ||
| Maybe you shouldn't be at Harvard. | ||
| Maybe you shouldn't be on the varsity squash team. | ||
| Maybe 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. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It does seem just intuitive that if someone has pain, it's worth thinking about the cause of the pain. | ||
| If I put my hand on the stove and it hurts, I don't take meds for that. | ||
| I'm like, take my hand off the freaking stove. | ||
| Did anyone ever address it in that way? | ||
| Well, they can't really because this is the bind of this medical model that the mental health industry is built on. | ||
| So you're told you have a mental illness, quote unquote, and that it's... | ||
| I just want to ask you to stop. | ||
| Chemical imbalance. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| It 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. | ||
| And the question I always had is, well, Okay, if something's an imbalance, what's balance? | ||
| Is there a baseline? | ||
| Is there a way to measure various chemicals in your brain? | ||
| Do we know what the right levels of those chemicals is? | ||
| I mean, I don't under... | ||
| No. | ||
| It's a chemical imbalance in your brain. | ||
| Okay, where should... | ||
| So like if I'm low on oil... | ||
| I'm like, oh shit, it's two inches down. | ||
| I got to pour another cord in. | ||
| Is there anything like that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Psychiatric assessment? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Nothing. | ||
| And you are one of the lucky few who somehow miraculously saw right through it because 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. | ||
| It has never been proven, and that's been known all along. | ||
| And 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But that's like, Utterly fake. | |
| Because we can't define balance, therefore we can't define imbalance. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| I mean, suffering, anxiety, madness of all kinds. | ||
| I mean, most people... | ||
| That medical framework is so ubiquitous. | ||
| And what it does, to return to your question about, did anyone ever ask me about the circumstances of my life? | ||
| You can't, because you either have this unfortunate bad luck with your brain chemistry, and you're just, oh, it's too bad. | ||
| You had the bad, you know, genetic card and you have this chemical imbalance or you It can't be both. | ||
| You can't have this unfortunate disease and also be having a meaningful response to your circumstances. | ||
| It's one or the other. | ||
| And so the experiences that I had in the decade and a half that I was a psych patient and 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. | ||
| Wait, there's 60 million American adults and 66 million Americans total on these drugs? | ||
| According to the CDC, in 2022, so those numbers could well be higher by now. | ||
| That's craziness. | ||
| And we are told that we're having a mental health crisis because so many rates of suicide are through the roof, anxiety disorder diagnoses, young people struggling, young girls struggling. | ||
| And most people think, oh, we must not be getting enough mental health treatment. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| So the problem isn't not enough mental health treatment. | ||
| The problem perhaps is the mental health treatment. | ||
| So I'm just, I can't, I'm fixated on this. | ||
| And to continue the metaphor, want to beat it to death. | ||
| If you come in with a burnt hand and I don't ask you how you burned it, I'm not really treating it. | ||
| I'm just giving like a palliative. | ||
| So I give you a painkiller because you've got a burn on your hand. | ||
| But if I never say, how'd you burn your hand? | ||
| Well, I put it on the stove. | ||
| I do it every morning. | ||
| So I think a clinician who cared about the patient would say, how about don't put your hand on the stove? | ||
| Like there was no effort to understand why you felt bad about your life. | ||
| 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 it was take pills. | ||
| And 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... | ||
| It was the meds that were going to do that. | ||
| That was what I learned to believe. | ||
| And I think 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. | ||
| And so, like, what's the point in trying to change the circumstances of my life? | ||
| Because I'm still going to have this brain disease. | ||
| So, like, why does it really matter? | ||
| A disease that they can't define, whose origin they don't even ask about. | ||
| A brain disease that's like, in no scientific sense, a disease. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| Is it contagious? | ||
| Wow, that's even crazier than I, speaking of crazy, that's even crazier than I realized. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so can we just go, if you don't mind, since 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? | ||
| So, the different drug classes. | ||
| Are antidepressants, of course. | ||
| So you have the Prozac, Effexor, Cymbalta, Celexa, Lexapro, the mood stabilizers, many of which are actually anticonvulsants used for epilepsy, but over the decades, when they were studying them, they noticed that the animals became kind of apathetic when they were testing them for these other conditions. | ||
| They're like, oh, maybe we can use this on So most mood stabilizers are actually anticonvulsants. | ||
| So those would be Lamictal, Depakote. | ||
| Lithium is classed as a mood stabilizer. | ||
| It's literally a neurotoxin. | ||
| It was banned in the United States until the early 70s. | ||
| It didn't get approved until the early 70s for psychiatric uses and had been banned prior. | ||
| So that's the other. | ||
| That's considered the so-called gold standard mood stabilizer. | ||
| And I could talk a lot about lithium. | ||
| I have a whole chapter on it in my book because of all the drugs that I was in. | ||
| Lithium salts, it used to be called, I think. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's one of the ways it's been described. | ||
| That's an old, old drug. | ||
| It's been around for a long time. | ||
| It started to be used for psychiatric purposes, first in Australia in the first half of the 20th century. | ||
| Yeah, it's been on a long time. | ||
| Yeah, 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... | ||
| It's been around the longest. | ||
| It has this really reliable evidence base because of how long it's been in use for. | ||
| It's a gold standard. | ||
| If 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. | ||
| You're just shocked. | ||
| And this is the case for every single psychiatric drug that is currently on the market. | ||
| If 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. | ||
| Usually 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. | ||
| Guess how long your average psychiatric drug trial lasts to determine safety and efficacy? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Ten years? | ||
| Six to eight weeks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Some of them last a week. | ||
| Some of them last a day. | ||
| Maybe two studies. | ||
| So these are not longitudinal, as we say. | ||
| There is zero evidence base for long-term safety and efficacy of these drugs. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| And there is also zero evidence base for polypharmacy. | ||
| These drugs have never been studied in combination with each other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And yet most of us, Nor is the mechanism of their effectiveness understood, right? | |
| So you said, for example, mood stabilizers were used on animals to stop convulsions, and they noticed that the animals became compliant. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that they know how that drug acts on the brain, correct? | ||
| Yeah, usually you'll see a line like that in the drug, like the mechanism of action. | ||
| is not yet understood or something. | ||
| And it's, I mean, it is such a, We are all guinea pigs in a massive experiment here. | ||
| And this, unfortunately, is the case outside of the psychiatric drug context, too. | ||
| and and you know when you think about the hubris and the um It's so mysterious to us how it works. | ||
| And to think that, you know, we're going to put in this synthetic psychoactive chemical. | ||
| We're going to put it into your body. | ||
| It's going to course through your bloodstream, potentially for the rest of your life. | ||
| To be so disregarding of what the long-term consequences of that might be, especially when you're putting a kid on this. | ||
| It's one of the most horrible crises of our time, I think. | ||
| Because to return to your question, you know, besides the antidepressants and the mood stabilizers, there are the antipsychotics, you know, Risperdal, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon. | ||
| There are, of course, the anti-anxiety drugs, the benzodiazepines, Klonopin, Valium, Ativan. | ||
| And there are the stimulants, the so-called ADHD drugs like Ritalin, Adderall. | ||
| And then the sleep aids like Ambien and Lunesta. | ||
| So those are all the... | ||
| The psychiatric drug family. | ||
| Can we start at the beginning, if you don't mind? | ||
| So the antidepressants. | ||
| So that would include SSRIs, correct? | ||
| So you were put on that immediately. | ||
| What is the effect of that on you? | ||
| Well, it's such a tricky, it's such a complicated question to answer because It was subtle. | ||
| It was, in some cases, gradual. | ||
| So when I look back now at how my life, the different path that psychiatric drugs set me down, I can see that they altered my body physically. | ||
| I mean, I couldn't answer what antidepressants specifically did. | ||
| So for me, what the drugs did generally, whichever ones did what, I couldn't say, but they interfered with my basic bodily functions. | ||
| So I pretty quickly began to have digestive issues. | ||
| You know, you don't get told that it's like 90 to 95 percent of your serotonin receptors are in your gut. | ||
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| So the point of these drugs is to regulate or affect or disrupt but change your serotonin levels. | ||
| That's the crude way that we are. | ||
| So they obviously act. | ||
| So an SSRI, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. | ||
| So it's named as a serotonergic drug so that it primarily acts on the serotonin system. | ||
| It acts on many other systems too because it's all interconnected. | ||
| the human body cannot be compartmentalized. | ||
| But the serotonin system, besides being It also, you know, muscle function. | ||
| I mean, they're like basic primal, if I'm remembering correctly. | ||
| I think it's the serotonin system that regulates temperature, vomiting reflex. | ||
| Like, it's really primal. | ||
| It's not just about happy chemicals. | ||
| And so when you're taking... | ||
| And so a lot of people, myself included, will get diagnoses of irritable bowel syndrome or they'll have other kinds of digestive issues while they're on these drugs. | ||
| Sometimes it starts quickly, sometimes it takes a while, but it doesn't occur to you because we're not wired. | ||
| We're not programmed to question medical treatments generally. | ||
| At least I wasn't. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| I'm eating shitty food. | ||
| It's your fault. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And besides digestive issues. | ||
| The antipsychotics and mood stabilizers cause serious weight gain. | ||
| My weight fluctuated 70 pounds during my mental patient career. | ||
| I literally looked like a different person. | ||
| I should have brought an old picture of me. | ||
| You wouldn't have recognized me during my peak psych patient era. | ||
| I had chronic aches and pains. | ||
| You know, I had skin issues and my nails would flake off, my hair would fall out. | ||
| All these subtle changes that just grew over time, I never linked it to the drugs. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| And which, by the way, can be helpful. | ||
| I mean, it's important to make clear here, my orientation to this is not anti-psych drug. | ||
| I think, you know, we've been altering ourselves as human beings since the dawn of time with psychoactive substances. | ||
| You know, who am I to tell someone, you know, you shouldn't take a psych drug. | ||
| For me, it's about the stories that were told about what they are and what they do. | ||
| And if you're being told you have a chemical imbalance, Tucker, that's why you feel down in the dumps. | ||
| Here's some Prozac. | ||
| It's going to help adjust the chemicals, which will help you feel happier. | ||
| That's a lie. | ||
| And you agreeing to take the pill is not a choice. | ||
| You have been coerced into taking this drug through basically propaganda. | ||
| But if you're told, Tucker, we really don't know that much about what these drugs do. | ||
| They're approved on the basis of very short-term trials. | ||
| Long-term outcomes are quite poor if you actually look at the data that does exist. | ||
| Your serotonin system controls a lot of really important functions. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, I can't, I don't have... | ||
| I'm too stressed. | ||
| I have too much on my plate. | ||
| I am aware of the risks. | ||
| I still want to take this, and I know it's not fixing a pathology in me. | ||
| Then I'm like, all for it. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| That's informed consent, is what you're describing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If you are being told this is an antidepressant medication, you're not making an informed choice because that is marketing language. | ||
| This is not a drug that's acting against drugs. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| So the language itself makes or breaks whether you can make a true choice. | ||
| And so until we change how we talk about these drugs, I don't think anyone is making a truly informed choice. | ||
| So my sense of SSRIs is that in some people they offer relief, which is not always good. | ||
| I felt that way by vodka. | ||
| You know, and it turns out it was causing a lot of problems that I thought it was solving. | ||
| I think anyone who drank too much has a similar experience, but drugs are similar. | ||
| But it does offer, at least in the short term, like, oh, I feel less crazy, like, I'm calmer now. | ||
| Does it? | ||
| I think it can, especially short-term use. | ||
| I mean, for example, if you are someone who hates to fly in airplanes and you get panicky, like you take a Xanax, that's going to help you a lot or might help you a lot. | ||
| And so when used... | ||
| I think a lot of this is around the long-term use of them, which they were never designed for. | ||
| But that's a marker for addiction. | ||
| And that's why cigarette smoking is so compelling. | ||
| Crack smoking is so compelling because anything... | ||
| It has an immediate effect. | ||
| And every study shows the faster the effect, the more profound the relief, the more addictive it is. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons benzos are so terrifying. | ||
| But I guess my question is, you get the feeling that people on some of the antidepressants, the SSRIs, seem kind of dead inside. | ||
| Did you feel that? | ||
| I totally did, but I attributed it to how sick I was. | ||
| I felt dead. | ||
| I felt disconnected. | ||
| I felt like I was trapped in this kind of sludgy morass that was separating me from the world around me. | ||
| I just, and I really, truly believed that that was me and my own faulty feelings. | ||
| And so it's so insidious. | ||
| I think a psychiatrist named Peter Bragan calls it medication spellbinding, which I think is a really compelling phrase because 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. | ||
| And so you're in this, for me, like decade and a half. | ||
| Almost like intoxication state. | ||
| And then you're getting all these messages from all these well-meaning therapists and psychiatrists saying, oh, you're not feeling helped. | ||
| Oh, you're feeling worse. | ||
| Well, your sickness is progressing. | ||
| Like, let's try this new drug or let's up your dose or let's switch you to that. | ||
| It's never like, let's all just pause for a moment here and step back and wonder if maybe this whole thing is wrong. | ||
| And you don't need any of this. | ||
| No one is doing that, of course. | ||
| And so as I went deeper into psychiatric patienthood and those physical issues worsened, my cognitive function worsened, you know, memory problems. | ||
| Oh my gosh, when you were, I mean, I don't know which drugs were the biggest culprits, probably the benzos and the antipsychotics, but my capacity to remember things, to read, to absorb information and actually comprehend information, I just... | ||
| And so here I was just feeling like this mushy, just totally incapacitated mind that couldn't engage with the world anymore. | ||
| Let alone feel creative and curious. | ||
| I was just like a zombie, basically. | ||
| It was killing your life force, it sounds like. | ||
| It totally was. | ||
| And that idea of a life force, 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. | ||
| The word iatrogenic means treatment-induced or doctor-induced harm. | ||
| I believe that these huge numbers of people who are in so much pain, a huge driving force of it is the fact that this entire paradigm is actually leading to more suffering. | ||
| And more violence. | ||
| more violence, more disconnect, more polarization, when you're under the influence of these drugs for years and years and years, like you said, you do... | ||
| I'll speak for myself and the thousands of fellows whom I have known over all these years. | ||
| You lose touch with your human spirit, with your sense of aliveness in the world, your ability to feel connected to the sunlight on your cheek, to the sweet child on the sidewalk. | ||
| To God, to serenity, you 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. | ||
| And 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, I mean, to me, it's like, no wonder our country is more polarized than it's ever been. | ||
| It's obviously much more complicated. | ||
| I'm not trying to say it's all psych drugs. | ||
| But I think it's a big piece here of why we're all so disconnected. | ||
| Well, I mean, the main takeaway, just listening to this, is that it changes something essential about people. | ||
| This is not on the margins. | ||
| this is like the deepest thing in you changes. | ||
| So the measure, if you think the measure of... | ||
| How are your relationships? | ||
| Oh my gosh, I mean, I chuckle because I'm like, first of all, I'm like, well, what relationships, really? | ||
| But then, of course, I did have, I had boyfriends, I had, you know, people I would socialize with, but it was all, by the time I graduated. | ||
| Which, you know, I had to take a year off at Harvard because I was so suicidal. | ||
| I had my first admission to a psych ward while I was at Harvard. | ||
| The fact that I made it through to this day, I don't really remember anything I learned there. | ||
| I just was so foggy from it all. | ||
| But by the time I left, I had no friends. | ||
| I had a tendency to be in—I was a serial monogamist, you could say. | ||
| Relationship with a guy, and then we'd break up, and then I'd get right into another relationship with a guy, and it was just, I dated guys who were as lost as I was, so suffice to say, it didn't look pretty. | ||
| That was my, when I would sometimes, you know, muster the energy to go out and socialize, like I'd have to do drugs and get trash, because that was the only way that I felt alive, and of course it was synthetic. | ||
| So, 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. | ||
| But of course, they didn't have access to the real me. | ||
| And because I was under the influence of all of these drugs. | ||
| And so they were there for me, but I wasn't connected to them emotionally. | ||
| I 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 20s like a total mess. | ||
| Like I could barely hold down. | ||
| They sound like really kind people. | ||
| The patience and the persistence that they all had, you know, my younger sisters and my parents, you know, it was not easy for them. | ||
| And it was not always pretty in our family system. | ||
| You know, our whole family evolved around me as the designated. | ||
| You know, me as a designated patient, so understandably that created all kinds of challenges, but they never gave up on me, and I would just, I'd come home whenever I couldn't function anymore, but I didn't feel connected to them, to myself, to anything. | ||
| And again, I believed it was me. | ||
| Wow, that's like hell. | ||
| You're describing hell. | ||
| Disassociated from everybody, everything, and from God. | ||
| Do you think it's possible to have a relationship with God while on psych meds? | ||
| It wasn't for me. | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't say that in a sweeping generalization. | ||
| But it wasn't for you. | ||
| It wasn't for me, for sure. | ||
| for sure and 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 erotic life force in me that animates you as an artist, as a writer, as a friend, as an appreciator of beauty. | ||
| I had none of that. | ||
| And I, of course, didn't realize what I was missing because I'd been psychiatrized basically at the onset of puberty. | ||
| And when you don't have... | ||
| access to that facet of who you are it it makes for a very lonely alienating existence and you know 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 the | ||
| Oh, come on. | ||
| There's a whole movement. | ||
| They'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, or some people lose it. | ||
| Some people had it on, and then when they come off the antidepressant, they lose it. | ||
| Some people haven't regained it for years. | ||
| So they're just dead? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And no one's gone to jail for this? | ||
| No, because it's the lack of accountability, and of course this is the whole pharmaceutical industry, not just psychiatry. | ||
| It'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. | ||
| So I guess we could say, but at least the suicide rate's going down, and people are happier? | ||
| I mean, you would think, but as of 2022, one person killed him or herself every 11 minutes. | ||
| I think it was 50,000 people killed themselves. | ||
| So like that's kind of the bottom line. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, in what sense are they working if more people are killing themselves? | ||
| And what's wild, Tucker? | ||
| Am I missing something? | ||
| I don't want to be a Philistine here. | ||
| I want to be, like, sensitive to the science. | ||
| You're seeing it clear as day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And what's wild is that in these drug labels for many, many years in the adverse effects section, you will see anti-discrimination. | ||
| So this isn't like we're just realizing that these drugs can actually make people worse. | ||
| It's been in the drug labels the whole time. | ||
| Well, I know from firsthand experience. | ||
| I knew nothing about this. | ||
| I don't take any of that crap. | ||
| I've always hated shrinks my whole life. | ||
| Never been. | ||
| No one I know who's been to one has gotten better, so that's why I don't like them. | ||
| But anyway, these mass shootings and the calls for gun control and to take my shotguns away and all this stuff got me involved in what is causing all these shootings, because there are a lot of shootings, right? | ||
| And in every case you look at, the person's just full of psychiatric meds. | ||
| And 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? | ||
| Why is that a crazy question? | ||
| Even the question. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| You would think that people would, of course, want to have that question asked and answered. | ||
| And if they had true faith in their products, they would be like, let's look at it. | ||
| Let's be transparent about this. | ||
| Let's have open access to the data. | ||
| Let's do whatever we need to do to show you all that our products don't cause violence. | ||
| But of course, it's the opposite. | ||
| And 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're not allowed to know. | |
| Yeah, and I can't remember when Columbine, was it like 98? | ||
| It was 97, I think. | ||
| And as you said, the 90s were – so Prozac came to market in the late 80s. | ||
| The 90s were declared the decade of the brain by our U.S. government. | ||
| And the 90s began basically the ubiquitization of – And this, of course, was fueled by industry funding. | ||
| So all the kind of anti-stigma, mental health awareness campaigns that you now, you know, Mental Health Awareness Month, we're in May. | ||
| Actually, Tucker, we're in May. | ||
| May is Mental Health Awareness Month. | ||
| These 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. | ||
| You should feel like you can talk about your troubles. | ||
| That is a really important message. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| But that has been exploited by powerful corporations to basically now mean there's no shame in getting mental health treatment. | ||
| And so they've taken this important message and and. | ||
| Perverted it to basically link anyone who is calling into question psychiatric drugs with someone who doesn't care about suffering. | ||
| I mean, it's amazing the number of times that I share my story, and I'm literally just talking about my story. | ||
| I'm not saying anything about anyone else. | ||
| You know, the story of how I eventually left this all behind, people hear that as me denying the reality of suffering. | ||
| This woman doesn't think people are struggling out there. | ||
| I'm like, where did I ever say that? | ||
| It's actually the opposite. | ||
| First of all, I struggle a lot in my life. | ||
| I'm by no means a happy, put-together, mentally healthy person all the time, but how are you conflating me questioning the psychiatric drug paradigm with me questioning the reality of So if you question treatment, people assume you're questioning the need that people have for help. | ||
| It's like there are other ways to get help, people. | ||
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| Does anyone doubt, I mean, just being honest, that if you get rid of all drugs, legal and Illegal, licit and illicit, that the mental health crisis would basically disappear. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure it's... | ||
| I haven't had any serious mental health problems since I got sober 23 years ago. | ||
| I can just speak for myself. | ||
| Like, that's just what I know. | ||
| And I know a lot of people in that exact position. | ||
| Once you just, like, stop addling yourself with crap. | ||
| You return to equilibrium. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The way I would think about it for myself, at least, is that when I let go of this medicalized way of understanding myself, translating all my struggles into symptoms to take to a doctor, etc., etc., and when I came off the drugs, and when I also then began to educate myself about the broader issues with just our whole medical industry and how we compartmentalize, The body and all these problematic ways. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| To your point, I definitely have found my way to a kind of equilibrium that equips me to face life's challenges, which are inevitable. | ||
| I mean, I think it's a part of the human condition to suffer, to struggle, to have dark nights of the soul. | ||
| And I think historically, these were episodic experiences that would, you know, something hard happened in your life, or even something not visible, but you just are in a tough chapter. | ||
| You kind of, you just find your way through it. | ||
| Maybe it takes a week, maybe it takes a month, maybe it takes a year. | ||
| But you move through it. | ||
| I think that used to be prior to the rise of this medicalized mental health industry. | ||
| That used to be the baseline operating assumption. | ||
| And then since the rise of psychiatric drugs and since the rise of the chemical imbalance story and this incurable brain disease story, we've just forgotten that the struggles that emerge in life are responses to life and outcomes. | ||
| If you orient yourself to them in that way and actually believe and tell yourself, this is a hard chapter that I'm in, but it's a chapter. | ||
| It's not my whole story. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| And that's all I have. | ||
| They do that with alcohol, too. | ||
| I can speak from personal experience. | ||
| I will always be an alcoholic. | ||
| No, I'm not an alcoholic. | ||
| I drank too much. | ||
| Alcoholic, I guess, but I don't drink anymore. | ||
| So like it's not the center of my life anymore. | ||
| That's so, I have, I don't- I love AA. | ||
| I don't go, but I love it. | ||
| I don't want to be judgmental, but telling people they're weak and pathetic and will always be dependent on you is a red flag for me. | ||
| I'm so with you. | ||
| 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, including horse tranquilizer doses of Klonopin, is not a recipe for functioning. | ||
| And so I did eventually decide to quit drinking and was really active in the 12-step world for a few years. | ||
| And I hold a soft And then I moved into the 12-step world, and I took on a new label, alcoholic, and I began to defer my authority to a higher power. | ||
| And I do believe in God, and I do believe. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| And I realized, like, I have to stop labeling myself as anything, really, and kind of buying into any ideology of any kind that tells me I have a problem, it has the solution for. | ||
| Now I'm like, you know, even in the wellness alternative health world, there are a lot of problems that you get sold into thinking you have that... | ||
| And I'm at the point where I'm like, I don't want to look out there anymore for answers to anything internal to me. | ||
| That's just me. | ||
| So what was the experience of therapy like? | ||
| So you're on all these drugs. | ||
| How many drugs were you on? | ||
| At the peak, five. | ||
| it's unbelievable but concurrently How often? | ||
| Twice a week, usually. | ||
| For how long? | ||
| An hour each time. | ||
| No, but for over what period? | ||
| Oh, for how many years? | ||
| I mean, the whole time, I was from 18 to 27 consistently in therapy. | ||
| Sometimes I would enroll in programs, too. | ||
| I ended up going to the hospital four times during those years. | ||
| And then afterwards, you know, 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 9 to 5 for, like, a few weeks you go to the psych hospital and then you go home. | ||
| And then you downgrade to, you know, a lesser intensive program where you go to a few groups a week. | ||
| So in my 20s, I was I was always in in. | ||
| And that's a lot of therapy. | ||
| Obviously, I guess I can skip to the end, to the punchline. | ||
| It didn't work because you're hospitalized four times, so it's not working. | ||
| But that's nine years of therapy consistently, full-time almost. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| What do you talk about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, well, that's the... | |
| Or the therapy industry as a whole. | ||
| You know, some of my good friends are therapists and they work with people in very different ways than how I was in therapy. | ||
| But in my experience, and I do think in the experience of a lot of people, because our society has lost so many, because there's so few spaces where you can turn to other To friends, to colleagues, to talk about how hard it is to be alive sometimes. | ||
| Therapy becomes like the one place you have to feel seen and heard and understood. | ||
| And so what happened for me is that because I had no other place to where I felt like I could be open, I... | ||
| And I came to see my therapist as really my substitute friends, sometimes my substitute mother. | ||
| They kind of replaced what would have been authentic relationships had I not grown up in therapy. | ||
| And so, of course, if this is the only place you have to go to work, You need to have a lot of problems to talk about because otherwise you don't need to go anymore. | ||
| That's just fascinating what you just said. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| Is that what? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And what's so really nefarious about the whole thing is that you don't only neglect what It could have been authentic relationships. | ||
| You actually, for me at least, I actually came to dismiss the idea of just a friendship. | ||
| They don't understand mental illness. | ||
| I need doctors. | ||
| How could a friend help me? | ||
| I have a brain disease. | ||
| That's so dark. | ||
| I don't know if that happened. | ||
| I don't know what percentage of psych patients that happens to, but it happened to me and I saw it. | ||
| You know, the culture of the psych ward, the culture of all these programs that I was in, we were the only people we hung out with, fellow patients. | ||
| Like, 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 and you're kind of over in the corner like, we're the crazy, like, fucked up patients over here. | ||
| Like, we're not like them. | ||
| I mean, there's this whole... | ||
| And heroin addicts are like this too. | ||
| It's so... | ||
| They wouldn't get us. | ||
| Like, we're so messed up. | ||
| Like, we could never... | ||
| Like, we belong here on the hospital grounds. | ||
| It's like, I used to feel really proud of, like, how... | ||
| I mean, I chuckle about it now, but I... | ||
| It's so deep and so sick. | ||
| You see it with homeless drug addicts. | ||
| There's a kind of pride, like there's a tribe. | ||
| We support each other. | ||
| We're sharing our misery, but there's a kind of feeling like we're in the elite. | ||
| We're junkies. | ||
| And it's the same kind of death worship. | ||
| Yeah, and that word tribal, I mean, because it exploits this deep, primal instinct that we have as tribal beings, it exploits that. | ||
| Whereas, you know, once in our pre-modern, pre-industrialized age, your tribe would have been your village, your local community. | ||
| And of course, people in that community, individuals would have had crises. | ||
| So, you know, grandparents had important roles helping grandchildren. | ||
| And the home was a place where the man and the woman had a kind of symbiosis and mutual interdependence. | ||
| And I'm not trying to romanticize the past. | ||
| I literally have a family like that, so that's real. | ||
| I mean, I live like that. | ||
| And I think, not bragging, but I mean, that's just... | ||
| And I think our modern world does make it really hard. | ||
| I think, you know, this isn't for me about individuals or, you know, particular families being, you know, weak or lazy or bad. | ||
| I think just we're in this toxic stew of a culture in which we're, you know, 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. | ||
| it 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 like i think it's really important to say like this is not about individual | ||
| 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. | ||
| And economics play a role, too, I think. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| So, a big role. | ||
| So, no, I couldn't agree with you more, so I keep stepping on your story. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| So you're, because it's an amazing story. | ||
| But the question of, like, what do you talk about in therapy for nine years? | ||
| I'm sorry, I didn't let you answer. | ||
| I talked about whatever poor guy I was in a dysfunctional relationship with. | ||
| I talked about my family and our conflicts. | ||
| I talked about whatever job I was trying to hold down, which I never could, how hard it was. | ||
| I talked about how suicidal I was. | ||
| Suicide was like a constant companion of mine through my 20s until I did eventually... | ||
| Actually, it's an important... | ||
| The therapy, the meds. | ||
| By the time I was 25, all I had was my relationship to the mental health professionals in my life. | ||
| To the people being paid to be there for me. | ||
| And the pills that I would pick up at the pharmacy every month. | ||
| That was all I had. | ||
| And I, life had deteriorated to such a degree that, I couldn't work. | ||
| I had no friends. | ||
| And 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on! | |
| Come on! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Yep. | ||
| So you spend millions of dollars on these people, take all of their drugs. | ||
| You get worse and they're like, unfortunately, Lori, you're treatment resistant. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| And so, you know, this phrase treatment resistance. | ||
| It's like the craziest story I've ever heard. | ||
| It's so crazy, but it's a brilliant business model because, of course, you know, if you feel better after starting a psych drug. | ||
| The credit goes to the drug, of course. | ||
| See? | ||
| It's helped you. | ||
| If you don't feel better or if you feel worse, yes, it's never the drug. | ||
| It's you and just how extra defective you are. | ||
| And what has now happened, and Tucker, you're not going to believe this. | ||
| I'm sorry to laugh. | ||
| This is just so bonkers. | ||
| It's totally bonkers. | ||
| And what I would predict, because I'm seeing from my book, I did a lot of, I wove in a lot of research into my book, and I Way more than I originally intended, and my editor kept wanting more, which is great. | ||
| And I went down this rabbit hole of looking at the current landscape of psychiatry and, like, where is it heading? | ||
| Because, obviously, this drug-based paradigm is failing. | ||
| So, like, what's next for them? | ||
| Because, you know, drug companies are not focusing relatively much at all on psych drugs anymore. | ||
| They've kind of moved on. | ||
| They've recognized. | ||
| This isn't where the big bucks are. | ||
| And so I was just curious. | ||
| I was like, so where is it heading? | ||
| And what this new unfolding chapter of psychiatry is literally exploiting is this treatment resistance concept. | ||
| It's building a new... | ||
| It's called deep brain stimulation. | ||
| If you have treatment-resistant depression because your meds haven't helped you, don't worry, Tucker. | ||
| Now you just go in for a simple procedure. | ||
| We'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. | ||
| Is this you making this up or is this real? | ||
| This is literally happening. | ||
| Besides deep brain stimulation, there's... | ||
| Oh, it's happening. | ||
| DBS is not under widespread use yet. | ||
| But it's by remote control, so you're giving somebody else the power to physically control your brain. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| With electricity. | ||
| You hear that clicking in the background? | ||
| That's the sound of seriousness. | ||
| That is the sound of the new ALP machined steel travel tin. | ||
| And it's made right here in Montana by our friends at Maschinen USA. | ||
| It's milled from solid metal with the world's absolute best tactile feedback retention mechanism. | ||
| It's totally real. | ||
| It feels like closing the door on a well-built truck. | ||
| It comes in. | ||
| Cream, gray, green, and black. | ||
| You could drive over this in your truck and it would be totally fine. | ||
| Drop in your bag, throw in the concrete, doesn't matter. | ||
| It'll still be there. | ||
| This holds your album. | ||
| And there was, I've read a few horror stories of anecdotal experiences of people who've had these procedures and then | ||
| DBS is probably the least common one right now. | ||
| The big push right now is for what's called TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation. | ||
| Which is also for treatment-resistant depression. | ||
| So, you know, there's a wide array of options for people. | ||
| Don't despair. | ||
| And you basically sit under this device that shoots, like, very powerful magnetic, you know, currents, whatever you call it, energy through your skull. | ||
| And it's being marketed as a non-drug, you know, safe alternative because it's just magnets. | ||
| And don't forget... | ||
| Yeah, I had a relative who did it and then committed suicide. | ||
| So, yeah, it's been around for a long time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| And 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. | ||
| They will accept any treatment, treatment. | ||
| Because they're panicked and they're dying. | ||
| So I get it. | ||
| And they see no other options. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| I'm not judging anybody who submits to shock treatments or deep brain, whatever the hell that was. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Let's just start there. | ||
| Like, maybe take your shoes off on the lawn occasionally. | ||
| Because that would be my program, saying, and I think that works. | ||
| Did anybody ever say that to you? | ||
| No, and if you had met me 16 years ago and said that to me, I would have been like, fuck you, Tucker. | ||
| How dare you insult me? | ||
| Do you not understand how seriously sick I am? | ||
| You're telling me to get some sunlight? | ||
| And I think a lot of people feel that way. | ||
| It's like, it's invalidating. | ||
| It feels invalidating. | ||
| Wait, they're going to really go after you? | ||
| I just had this insight because you're too articulate. | ||
| Your story is too great because you actually recovered from these tortures and you're a real threat. | ||
| I just want to say that. | ||
| I just want to be on the record saying that. | ||
| So it's just a fact. | ||
| Like that New York Times story that... | ||
| That's just the beginning. | ||
| There was a Washington Post book review of my book that was wild. | ||
| I mean, she was so... | ||
| I feel for all the people who are just outraged by my story because I know that at the heart, they're afraid. | ||
| I know it's fear. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And so I don't mean this in a, you know, She was so, so set off by my story and her review. | ||
| I mean, she was just, I can't remember the exact phrases, but just wild how vitriolic it was. | ||
| It was an attack on my character, really. | ||
| It wasn't even really about my book, this book review. | ||
| And, you know, I was ready. | ||
| I've been ready. | ||
| I take it as a sign that I'm doing something right, that these large corporations... | ||
| That you got better? | ||
| You got better? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They hate that! | |
| And 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. | ||
| Like people often assume that I'm so-called mentally healthy now. | ||
| Like I, you can ask my husband like, You've got yelling children in the background. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, 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. | ||
| And I've always been a big feeler. | ||
| I was a little girl. | ||
| 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. | ||
| and 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 mother's garden and I just I couldn't handle facing the death of And so I'm often angry. | ||
| I'm often very angsty. | ||
| I can get panicky. | ||
| I feel a lot of grief about a lot of things. | ||
| Like, 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. | ||
| If I sat down right now in front of a psychiatrist, they'd be like, oh gosh, Laura, you're a little emotionally lapel. | ||
| Maybe, you know, we might want to consider some, you know, Cymbalta or whatever. | ||
| Like, they wouldn't be able to compute. | ||
| Like, crying is actually a sign of being alive and being in touch with life. | ||
| It's not a sign of pathology. | ||
| And so 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. | ||
| I'm like, I am a dark, twisted, fucked up person. | ||
| Basically on a daily basis. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| I'm not afraid of it anymore. | ||
| Like that's the big difference. | ||
| Psychiatry and the mental health industry taught me to be terrified of my pain and my mind. | ||
| And that's been the most liberating thing. | ||
| But what's interesting is how terrified they are of healing. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| And he's like, Jesus, heal me. | ||
| And Jesus goes, okay. | ||
| And he puts mud on his eyes and washes it off in a pool and he can see. | ||
| I mean, amazing. | ||
| Talk about healing. | ||
| And the religious authorities, the Pharisees, show up immediately and they're like, who did this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And they start interrogating him. | ||
| Then they interrogate his parents. | ||
| And their only interest is not, they were infuriated by the fact he was healed. | ||
| Infuriated. | ||
| And they're trying to find Jesus to kill him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And I'm like, that's like the most burnt, screwed up thing I've ever read in my life. | ||
| But it doesn't seem so different from the response that you're getting. | ||
| It's like, I don't know, Laura Delano maybe has emotional days, but like happily married kids, like functional, like enjoying life, loving life, loving people. | ||
| That's like such a massive win, you know what I mean? | ||
| But they're like mad about it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, no, and I think when you realize that the objective to living is not happiness, it's meaning and purpose. | ||
| And finding your calling in the world and the way that you are meant to be of service to the world. | ||
| I mean, when you find access, when you find your way to those states, then… You don't care about the next quick fix because you know that's not the point to being here. | ||
| And I think that message is such a threat, not just to the mental health industry, but to so much of consumerism more broadly. | ||
| Once you realize, A, the answers and expertise, That I'm seeking don't lie out there in all these so-called experts or products or pills or services. | ||
| If I look inwards and I just trust that if I do the next right thing, I find ways to get out of self. | ||
| I mean, that's like my go-to. | ||
| When I'm getting a little too occupied with myself, which a long career as a therapy patient primes you to be. | ||
| I'm like, okay, what's the fastest way I can forget myself? | ||
| Usually it's like playing with my stepson or my son. | ||
| Or it's reaching back out to someone who's called me in a struggle, in a tough spot. | ||
| When you realize you can do that anytime you want. | ||
| Get out of yourself. | ||
| Then you're like, why would I go pay all these professionals? | ||
| Listen to me ramble on about myself every week for fucking 10 years. | ||
| So that was the thing that I was really struck by almost five-hour dinner last night. | ||
| And I asked you all about your life and your story and your family and all this stuff. | ||
| And so we talked about your life, but a lot. | ||
| But you did not talk about yourself in a way. | ||
| You were at all. | ||
| It was like, and that was really striking to me because I do think the hallmark of a therapy person is narcissism. | ||
| I'm sorry to say that. | ||
| I think they're really hurting people, including people I love who go to therapy, whatever. | ||
| So I don't want to be mean at all, but I do think that narcissism is death, and I feel like it encourages it. | ||
| Do you think that? | ||
| I think a lot of, I mean, there are some modalities that I've never tried myself that are To my understanding, it's actually about getting you out of your mind and into your body. | ||
| So when you talk about, I'm anxious, they're like, what does that feel like in your body? | ||
| It's like yoga, kind of. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so I think there are some modalities that cry. | ||
| I'm sure there are a million great kinds of therapy. | ||
| But the traditional, like, let's talk about your mother kind of thing. | ||
| I totally agree with you. | ||
| It teaches you to navel gaze. | ||
| It teaches you that whatever, like, fleeting emotion or thought is in your head is, like, so important. | ||
| Most important thing in the world. | ||
| Nothing else matters but your own upset. | ||
| And if you think about it, if you scale outwards and imagine that at scale, it's like, what do you get? | ||
| You get the social order that we have right now where everyone is driven. | ||
| I'm being a little sensational here, but where so many people are driven by their outrage, driven by their fear. | ||
| That unscientific theory that I just, based on my own experience and what I've seen in so many people, is I can't help but wonder how much of that is because a lot of these people grew up therapeuticized and taught to prioritize and privilege how they feel all the time and then decide what should happen next based on that. | ||
| Like, I am outraged. | ||
| You hurt my feelings. | ||
| Like, now let's cancel you. | ||
| Or, you know, I think the therapeutic... | ||
| Well, it's the same people. | ||
| You know, 100% of the people who've ever yelled at me in public are from the demographic that you're describing, and I don't want to be more precise because I don't want to make race or class part of it, but it's very noticeable. | ||
| You know, it's people in expensive therapy programs who are mad at their husbands and, like, talking a lot about themselves. | ||
| Those are the ones who scream at me. | ||
| I've just noticed that. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not surprised. | ||
| I'm not surprised. | ||
| To me, one of the great tragedies of this is that because there are so few visible spaces in our culture right now where you can get help that isn't a paid service, people just don't even realize that's an option in the first place. | ||
| We've been so disempowered. | ||
| By all these helping industries that have billions and billions of dollars to make off of us thinking we need them, that people don't even realize the power and capacity they have to be with someone in great distress. | ||
| Because of the work that I do and the work that my husband does, our home, for example, we have a spare bedroom. | ||
| And the way we live our lives is we have a spare bedroom. | ||
| If you are in a crisis, You're feeling lost and we know you and we trust you. | ||
| Come stay and eat dinner with us and hang out with our yelling children and just be with us in our lives. | ||
| You're making me emotional. | ||
| And, you know, of course, we are in a position where we have a house with an extra room. | ||
| Like, I'm mindful that so much of my story, and I try to talk about this all the time, like class economic factors are a huge factor here. | ||
| So I acknowledge that not everyone can do this if they wanted to. | ||
| But just as an example, there's someone we know in our neighborhood who is They're young. | ||
| They got psychiatrized as a teen. | ||
| Bad things had happened to them. | ||
| They ended up, instead of those bad things being addressed, they ended up getting sent to a psychiatrist and diagnosed and medicated. | ||
| Now they're in their early 20s, and they really haven't yet figured out how to be an adult in the world because they're just emerging from the psychiatric. | ||
| Nightmare, so to speak. | ||
| So, this person called me up a couple months ago, and I have to stop saying this. | ||
| She was on her way to the hospital. | ||
| I love your commitment to good grammar. | ||
| I just love that. | ||
| That is one benefit of the high school and college you went to. | ||
| It's like, it pains you to use a plural pronoun. | ||
| For a second. | ||
| I'm like, it's still anonymous. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I hate the word they, not just because of the trans thing, but just. | ||
| Yeah, I couldn't do it. | ||
| And I think it's still anonymous enough. | ||
| There are a lot of women in my neighborhood. | ||
| 51% of the population. | ||
| And she was like, I'm on my way to the hospital. | ||
| I think I'm going to die. | ||
| I think I'm having a heart attack. | ||
| And so I instantly was like, I think she's having a panic attack. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For sure. | |
| And I was like, well, so what is it that you're wanting? | ||
| By going to the ER. | ||
| And she's like, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And then she started thinking it through. | ||
| And she's like, and I know what's going to happen. | ||
| They're just going to admit me. | ||
| And I was like, and then, yeah, and then you'll be impatient. | ||
| And then, and I just walked her through just to help her remember like how this goes. | ||
| Like you don't just go into the ER and then someone makes you a cup of tea and comforts you and then sends you on your way. | ||
| You're like boarding sometimes for days on a psych ward with a security guard watching you. | ||
| And then you're carted off to some psych ward. | ||
| And who knows how long you'll be there. | ||
| And then, you know, it just disrupts like potentially months of your life. | ||
| So I was like, why don't you just, we're about to have dinner. | ||
| Cooper's almost done cooking. | ||
| Just come over and have dinner with us. | ||
| And she came over and she's just like the loveliest young woman who I see. | ||
| I get so emotional. | ||
| I see so much of me in her. | ||
| And she's like super lost right now. | ||
| She's just trying to emerge from this dark, dark experience of being a psych patient. | ||
| And so she comes into her house, and the first thing she says is like, do you ever have thoughts of killing yourself? | ||
| I'm like, girl! | ||
| I'm like, me? | ||
| Of course we have. | ||
| Of course I have. | ||
| I mean, I don't think about that anymore, but literally every day for like a decade, I was like, should I kill myself today? | ||
| And so what I think, and I could feel in her instantly like a shift and her poor parent was out in the driveway, had been driving her and he was like a deer in headlights. | ||
| I was like, we're good. | ||
| you go on like we're good And what she felt in me was that I wasn't afraid. | ||
| And instantly, I could feel her be like, oh. | ||
| And I was like, come on, let's go eat. | ||
| And we just sat down at the table, our yelling children are like, you know, being wild men. | ||
| And we didn't over-dramatize what she was in. | ||
| We just had a regular dinner together. | ||
| And I could just feel her energetically. | ||
| Settling in, opening up. | ||
| And she ended up staying with us for a week, sleeping in our room like we hadn't planned on it. | ||
| And just in that period of time, all we did was offer her a space where she could fully be herself in all of her darkness. | ||
| We weren't afraid of it. | ||
| We didn't make a huge deal out of it. | ||
| We just kind of brought her into our life. | ||
| Went on walks and we talked about stuff and she did need to talk a lot about stuff. | ||
| There was stuff to work through. | ||
| But it was that simple. | ||
| And when I, you know, I recognize this might sound a bit romantic, you know, and how unfeasible this kind of thing is for so many people to do. | ||
| What, human connection? | ||
| Love? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| No, it's very possible. | ||
| It's the most possible thing. | ||
| It's possible, but... | ||
| Well, then commit the revolutionary act of loving someone one-on-one, non-judgmentally. | ||
| Bring them into your home, have dinner with them. | ||
| Make them sit there while your kids cry. | ||
| That is the answer to everything, actually. | ||
| And it costs no money. | ||
| It pays the college tuition of no children. | ||
| It's just built on empathy. | ||
| Support built on empathy, not profit. | ||
| And that's, I think, part of why a lot of people are pissed at me right now is that the nonprofit that I started, Intercompass Initiative, that my husband Cooper now runs, our mission is to help people make more informed choices about all of this stuff. | ||
| So, like, everything that you weren't told by your doctor, we have it available for free on our website. | ||
| We teach you how to read a drug label. | ||
| We walk you through Like, how these drugs are researched and brought to market, the history of the DSM, you know, psychiatry's so-called bible of disorders, how unscientific it is. | ||
| Like, it's literally based on voting. | ||
| You vote disorders in and out based on the opinions of the committee members, many of whom have drug company money. | ||
| So we provide all of that for free, but really the most radical, which of course is a The thing we do is we help people help each other. | ||
| It's like mutual aid in the most pure sense of the word, like AA. | ||
| Like that support that you offer and receive from fellow humans who've been where you've been, and it's driven not by the desire to make money, but because of love and service. | ||
| And to me, that's the biggest threat. | ||
| To the mental health industry is when enough people realize I have the power and the people, you know, in my neighborhood, of course, many people don't even know their neighbors, and that's a problem. | ||
| When you band together and you realize, like, we can help each other through dark nights of the soul, like, think about how many services and prescriptions and facilities will be no longer needed. | ||
| And yeah, the fact that that's a radical concept and a dangerous one. | ||
| You're not a doctor. | ||
| I mean, the number of times you're like, you should be sued. | ||
| You're practicing medical advice. | ||
| I'm like, how is speaking about my own experiences practicing unsolicited medical advice or whatever it is they say? | ||
| It's just wild how dehumanized we've all been by... | ||
| So I was really moved by that, I will say, like emotionally moved by that. | ||
| And a couple wise people in my life have convinced me of something in the last year or so, which is stop being shocked by evil that you see in the world. | ||
| That's the status quo. | ||
| It's always been that way. | ||
| If every time you see something horrible... | ||
| I can't believe that. | ||
| It's like, no, that's the way it is. | ||
| What we should be shocked by are acts of love and altruism and self-sacrifice. | ||
| And that's unnatural. | ||
| That's like supernatural. | ||
| That's what we should be thrilled by. | ||
| So I believe that. | ||
| I've come to believe that. | ||
| And I was just, I was absolutely thrilled and moved by the love that you showed to your neighbor who's having a panic attack. | ||
| It's like, if... | ||
| We'd be living in the kingdom of God. | ||
| Anyway, that's my view. | ||
| You've been very nice about psychiatrists, and you gave them the benefit of the doubt that these are people of goodwill, and I love to hear you do that and give everyone the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| However, maybe I think you're being a little generous. | ||
| How can they keep doing something that's not working? | ||
| And why is it that, I'm sure they're a great psychiatrist, but I've known a number of psychiatrists, and they're not the craziest people I've ever met in my life, with the most screwed up personal lives. | ||
| Like, they have no standing to give other people life advice. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| Am I being too mean? | ||
| I mean, I think you're asking an important question. | ||
| And I think, you know, to the question of why do screwed up people become psychiatrists, I think... | ||
| And because the only visible place where, not the only, but the primary visible place in our culture where you go to do that is psychiatry or psychology. | ||
| When you yourself are screwed up and then you think about what you want to do with your life, whether you're conscious of this or not, I do think maybe that's why you're pulled to this field. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| That's not a bad reason. | ||
| And it's not a justification or an excuse for them, but I do think a lot of people come to this profession from a place of true, originally at least, like true curiosity and openness. | ||
| And desire to help. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I had problems. | ||
| I want to help other people. | ||
| I think that's, well, you clearly feel that way in your own life, so that's a good thing. | ||
| I guess what I'm saying is you want wise people. | ||
| Compassion, empathetic people who really are putting others at the center of their lives. | ||
| That's the profile of the healer. | ||
| And there are some exceptions. | ||
| Anna Lemke at Stanford is a wonderful person. | ||
| Psychiatrist. | ||
| She is right there on the cover. | ||
| Oh, she really? | ||
| There on the bottom. | ||
| She is a huge exception to everything I'm saying. | ||
| But in general, like you don't feel a lot of wisdom coming off these people. | ||
| And my, what I think, | ||
| in year one, for example, I think, to my understanding, at the beginning, At least pre-COVID, maybe things have changed with COVID, but the beginning of your first year, you're given your cadaver. | ||
| And I can't remember who, where I read this, but I read it many years ago from someone who was writing critically about the medical enterprise and basically saying that's very deliberate. | ||
| You enter into medical school because you want to help. | ||
| You want to help heal. | ||
| And then the first thing that you are thrown into is basically this experience of having this object in front of you who once was your fellow brother or sister and is now just an object that you're going to cut apart. | ||
| I think that's a... | ||
| It's really like a degradation ritual that you are put through so that you can separate yourself from this fellow human and it becomes a specimen. | ||
| It becomes an object, an it. | ||
| And so I think this phenomenon happens across medicine where You know, you have an issue with your thyroid or whatever body part of you, and you sit in front of a specialist who is trained to just see you as, you know, they are trained to not emote. | ||
| You are actually, as a doctor, not meant to feel too much because how could you sustainably do this for decades if you're just emoting all the time and opening yourself up and being vulnerable? | ||
| Like, you're meant to be closed off. | ||
| Who came up with that idea? | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know, I mean, I don't know enough about You laugh with your children. | |
| Like, you're so emotionally engaged with your children at all times if you're a good parent. | ||
| And that's the way to parent them. | ||
| That's the way to heal them. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I don't think you could survive, because I don't think it's feasible to cross So let's go back to psychiatry. | ||
| You know, if you're as a psychiatrist, let's say you You don't have the bandwidth to fully emote and be open and be vulnerable. | ||
| You have to survive that. | ||
| I mean, my view is that, and knowing many mental health professionals, if you stay in touch, you can't stay in touch with your heart and your humanity and last for decades in this. | ||
| You either have to numb out and disconnect. | ||
| And come to view your patients as these other, like you have to other them and just see them as lists of symptoms to write scripts for. | ||
| Or you quit or have a breakdown. | ||
| I have to imagine that it is not possible to be fully in touch with your own humanity for decades, immersed in the suffering and struggle of thousands of people. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| But there's an irreconcilable problem at the core of it, which is you can't heal people without loving them. | ||
| Period. | ||
| You can't actually make the best decision for somebody else unless you love that person. | ||
| And in the absence of love, you wind up with a system like the one you're describing where we're destroying people. | ||
| And there's a lot of evidence that we're destroying people and we're continuing to do it. | ||
| So what does that tell you? | ||
| They don't love those people. | ||
| You're raising, I mean, this is the fundamental, like, kind of philosophical, spiritual dilemma of the modern mental health industry is that when you commodify care and you turn it into a service, you can't love. | ||
| Because you can't, they're in Congress with each other. | ||
| And so if what you're saying is true, which I believe, you know. | ||
| What does that mean for the legitimacy of the foundations of this massive, mega-billion-dollar industry? | ||
| Because it's so many. | ||
| It's obviously drug companies, hospital industry, managed care. | ||
| It's psychiatry, psychology, social work. | ||
| It's medical device companies. | ||
| It's just all the industries that supply hospitals with food. | ||
| I mean when you think about how much money is made off of commodifying the care of suffering people and medicalizing that suffering you know We're in quite a dilemma here. | ||
| And this isn't me saying, like, blow up the mental health industry. | ||
| Like, it's obviously, it exists. | ||
| It's not going away tomorrow. | ||
| But I do think, like, my view is, what I want to spend the rest of my life doing is helping people. | ||
| Who in their heart feel that this isn't right for them? | ||
| If you feel helped by your meds, you love your psychiatrist, all the power to you. | ||
| I'm truly happy for you. | ||
| But if something in you is like, is this my answer? | ||
| Is this really helping me? | ||
| Is there something different, something more? | ||
| If something in you is calling you to that question, like those are the people who I want to... | ||
| And I think slowly over time, the more of us asking these questions and forging different paths, slowly over time, the demand for this industry will lessen. | ||
| And this is probably going to be multi-generation evolution here. | ||
| It's not going to change overnight, but when enough people with each passing decade Like, I'm just, let's just finally meet each other, you know? | ||
| Like, when enough people do that and then band together for potluck dinners, for crisis networks. | ||
| Like, imagine one of my fantasies is that it's three streets. | ||
| So we live on a grid and the street next to us on either side. | ||
| Let's all share our stories with each other, figure out who has what tools that we can exchange and borrow, figure out who has extra bedrooms in case, you know, if your kid is in a crisis and you need a break, come on over here, you know, to really get that grassroots about it. | ||
| Like this might sound crazy to you, but I'm like, imagine if every town... | ||
| Lived normal lives like people have always lived. | ||
| Like how we used to. | ||
| Pre-industrial evolution, right. | ||
| So, I think most people, I'm definitely in the category, would trade life expectancy for that. | ||
| It's like, oh, it's been, modernity's been such a huge win. | ||
| Antibiotics. | ||
| I'm not against antibiotics. | ||
| I'm against, you know, I'm for long life expectancy, but, like, you also have to acknowledge what was lost. | ||
| Well, I know life expectancy is dropping. | ||
| Well, I'm aware. | ||
| I'm highly aware. | ||
| You don't even have that. | ||
| Okay, so I've got two more big questions for you. | ||
| The first is, how did you go from being, like, damaged to the point of attempting suicide repeatedly, like, the most damaged you can be and still be alive, to being someone with, I can say, having interviewed thousands of people, a person of unusual wisdom, truly unusual wisdom. | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| Like, what was the moment? | ||
| Where you set upon the path of liberation. | ||
| Well, I think so my my turning point when I realized like this, this industry doesn't have my answers happened when I was 27. It's 2010. | ||
| I was I. And I found myself in a substance abuse day program because I had decided to quit drinking, specifically because I had been convinced that maybe the reason why all these meds weren't helping me was because I was getting shit-faced every night. | ||
|
unidentified
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So the booze is getting in the way of the pills? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, they were making, rather than... | ||
| Yes, this is true. | ||
| The booze was complicating things. | ||
| But of course, the booze was also what was keeping me alive. | ||
| Like, ironically, getting drunk was the one thing that kept me from killing myself for literally years because at least I didn't care how messed up my life was. | ||
| So I had been very resistant to quitting drinking for that reason. | ||
| And then, you know, on my... | ||
| Ended up being my second to last hospitalization. | ||
| Just for whatever reason, I heard this message from a mental health worker about maybe try not drinking. | ||
| And I think because I was still holding on to hope that maybe the meds would one day help me, I was like, okay, okay. | ||
| Because maybe he's right. | ||
| If I stop drinking, my super treatment-resistant bipolar disorder, like maybe now it will be treated. | ||
| So I was in this substance abuse. | ||
| Day program. | ||
| I was living with my aunt and uncle who had generously offered up their home to me. | ||
| And the psychopharmacologist on my five-person treatment team kind of caught wind that I was having a hard time and maybe becoming suicidal, which I was. | ||
| And he was like, you know what, Laura, why don't you take a break? | ||
| Why don't you go over to the short-term unit and just... | ||
| And I was like, you're right. | ||
| I wanted to go. | ||
| I loved, I was so afraid of myself that I loved going on to psych wards because it was the only place where I felt safe for myself. | ||
| So I was like, into it. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| So I was like, great idea. | ||
| I just want to go home first. | ||
| Let me get my belongings. | ||
| This is not fun going on to a locked ward without anything, like any of your comforting possessions. | ||
| And he's like, oh, I can't let you do that. | ||
| I was like, what do you mean? | ||
| He's like, well, you're suicidal right now, so I have to take you directly there. | ||
| I can't let you leave. | ||
| And I was like, I just told you I want to go. | ||
| Like, I'm coming back. | ||
| I really mean it. | ||
| And I meant that. | ||
| I was. | ||
| He's like, I'm sorry. | ||
| And something in me, it kind of, like, really outraged. | ||
| It ignited in me, and I was like, this isn't fair. | ||
| Like, I'm coming back. | ||
| And I started to raise my voice, and I started to get more angry. | ||
| He ended up calling security and a couple of security guards came on by and they escorted me over to this unit and they gave me the so-called choice of going voluntarily or involuntarily. | ||
| Well, this progressed quickly, didn't it? | ||
| Oh my gosh, in a matter of 15 minutes. | ||
| And never in my wildest dreams had I ever considered that I might once be faced with this kind of situation because I had been this... | ||
| It's like so diligent and good at what I was doing as a patient. | ||
| And now here I was, non-compliant. | ||
| And that recognition that my psychiatrist had the power to strip me of my civil liberties and incarcerate me on a unit. | ||
| Stripping me of my right to fresh air and freedom, dislodged this deep, deep faith that I had always had. | ||
| Not at the very beginning, but from age 18 on, that I had had in this system. | ||
| And I had two more experiences like that where I was, you know, made to take a drug that I didn't want to take. | ||
| And then after I had been discharged from that drug. | ||
| I slept through a therapy appointment because I was so tranquilized by that drug and my therapist called the cops to do a wellness check on me, which I talk about in the book. | ||
| Those three experiences with basically the power that psychiatry has to force you to do things you don't want to do. | ||
| Made me step back and just start questioning all of it. | ||
| And it was in that questioning space that, and the fact that I had quit drinking, I hadn't yet found AA. | ||
| So I was like really fucking miserable because I just like, just stopped. | ||
| I removed the one thing that I had for relief without doing any work on myself. | ||
| So I was really, really miserable. | ||
| But in that space opened up this new curiosity, like, Who would I be off of these meds? | ||
| I've been on these meds since I was a kid. | ||
| I've never known myself as an adult off meds. | ||
| What would my baseline look like? | ||
| What would my personality be like? | ||
| How would I think? | ||
| What would I care about? | ||
| What would my body look like? | ||
| I just suddenly started wondering these things. | ||
| And because I was questioning the psychiatric power, basically, The possibility that not all was as it seemed. | ||
| And then it was in that space that I found a book by a medical journalist named Robert Whitaker. | ||
| The book is called Anatomy of an Epidemic. | ||
| And in a nutshell, he was curious about the fact that long-term outcomes for people diagnosed with schizophrenia are much better in the so-called third world. | ||
| Where they don't have these sophisticated medicines. | ||
| And he was intrigued by that. | ||
| Why are outcomes better in poor countries that don't have a lot of drugs? | ||
| Because he had been under the assumption that these drugs are these great, amazing things. | ||
| And so he did this deep dive investigation and basically makes this very compelling case that if you look at long-term data on psych drugs, On the whole, they're making us sicker, more disabled. | ||
| And there I was on five sight drugs. | ||
| Previous ten years of my life that I'd been this compliant patient, like, progressively falling apart every month, month after month after month. | ||
| I was physically sick, all these chronic health issues, no friends, couldn't work, suicidal all the time, totally financially dependent on my family, like a fucking mess. | ||
| And in that beautiful situation, What if it's the treatment? | ||
| It's coming from inside the house. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's like really... | |
| Wow. | ||
| And that was like the beginning of... | ||
| That set me on this path that I've been on ever since, where I just knew... | ||
| I had to find out. | ||
| In the beginning, I still believed I had bipolar disorder. | ||
| I still believed in the chemical imbalance theory. | ||
| I wasn't even questioning any of that stuff yet. | ||
| But I was just like, I want to find out what my untreated bipolar state is. | ||
| At least let me see. | ||
| Maybe I could manage it without meds. | ||
| So I started there. | ||
| But I quickly began to educate myself about the DSM, this textbook that the entire psychiatric enterprise is built around. | ||
| Oh, you have four out of seven of these symptoms, it means you have this. | ||
| Oh, you have three out of five of them, it means you have that. | ||
| And of course, our insurance system is built around it for billing codes. | ||
| It's what the whole entire psychiatric research enterprise has been built around. | ||
| This textbook that I had just assumed for all these years was this, like, rigorously researched, like, scientific text, I quickly realized is, like, completely subjective, completely unscientific, and even the NIMH, you know, itself and, like, all of these kind of key opinion leaders in psychiatry admit this. | ||
| this is not controversial to say. | ||
| I learned that very quickly, and that was just the first, like, onion layer of self-reporting. | ||
| was like a marketing trick. | ||
| Everything I thought I knew. | ||
| And it was terrifying to face this. | ||
| My whole world fell apart. | ||
| I had no idea who I was. | ||
| Because all that I had been for so long was so-called mentally ill. | ||
| But I just was so determined to figure it out. | ||
| And thank God I had been born into a family who could provide for me and literally put a roof over my head while I did because when I then came off of these drugs way too fast, and I want to make sure we talk about this because… You had no idea? | ||
| No idea. | ||
| So the physicians who prescribed them never told you that? | ||
| Never told me. | ||
| They should be arrested. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| Well, what's wild, Tucker, is that it is not even, you know, in certain areas, Those drug labels will acknowledge dependence. | ||
| Yeah, because you can die getting off them. | ||
| Yeah, you can have seizures if you stop them abruptly. | ||
| But a lot of drug labels say nothing about this. | ||
| And the establishment authorities Benzos, maybe they do, but antidepressants, mood stabilizers, obviously the sleep aids, which are very similar chemically to benzos, stimulants, all of them are psychoactive chemicals that when you take them regularly for years, | ||
| you are going to become dependent on them. | ||
| And so because I didn't know that, I didn't know that I needed to taper off really slowly. | ||
| And by slow, I don't mean like a few weeks or a few months. | ||
| People who've been on these drugs for any length of time, especially like a decade or longer, often need years of tapering. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Years! | |
| I'm not even kidding you, Tucker, because the withdrawal symptoms can be so debilitating if they try going faster. | ||
| And I feel like I've said the word insidious like 30 times in this interview, but so much of it is insidious. | ||
| The insidious thing is that because our public does not understand how dependence-forming these drugs are, and because doctors don't realize it, and they're certainly not telling their patients this, when people come off their psych meds too quickly and they feel like shit, intense anxiety, insomnia, despair. | ||
| Panic, you know, paranoia, whatever ends up happening, they're told, oh, you're having a relapse of your illness. | ||
| Like, see, this is why you need to stay on your meds. | ||
| So it keeps people in this vicious cycle for literally decades, because when they try to stop, they feel horrible, and then they use that as a reason to go back on. | ||
| Yeah, he's off his meds. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He's off his meds. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And to return to them, Like, you know, this is just total speculation on my part, but obviously, like, the narrative is often like, oh, these were mentally ill people who were untreated. | ||
| That's why they committed this violence. | ||
| I can't help but wonder. | ||
| I mean, I think in the case of James Holmes, I know in his journals, I can't... | ||
| And how weird they made him feel. | ||
| So it's like, did he stop them cold turkey? | ||
| Because he was like, I don't like how I feel. | ||
| I mean, I'm just speculating. | ||
| I'm truly asking that question from a place of curiosity. | ||
| But people assume if you're off your meds, that's your illness. | ||
| Whatever you're doing is because you're mentally ill. | ||
| It's never like, oh, because you're in acute withdrawal. | ||
| And I think my hope is that, especially now with the growing awareness just more broadly in our society about the I think more and more people, the 66 million people on these drugs, more of them are going to realize they might want to pursue a different path for themselves. | ||
| And my fear is that they won't know about dependence and how important it is to taper slowly. | ||
| They'll come off too fast. | ||
| And it will be like talk about a crisis. | ||
| I mean, I have friends who... | ||
| They were bedridden. | ||
| Like one friend I'm thinking of in particular, she had been on an antidepressant and a benzo, always taken as prescribed for work-related anxiety. | ||
| She went to a detox facility because she wanted to come off of them. | ||
| They ripped her off in two weeks. | ||
| And she was bedridden for like two years because every time she stood up. | ||
| She would have vertigo and she'd like fall over. | ||
| She couldn't stand, let alone walk to her car, let alone drive for like two years. | ||
| She had to move in with her. | ||
| She was like 40 years old. | ||
| She was like moving with her parents. | ||
| That's just one of like hundreds of thousands. | ||
| Maybe that's like at least 100,000 stories online of people who didn't have this information from their doctors, came off too fast, often at their doctors. | ||
| You are taught how to put people on these drugs, not how to get them off. | ||
| And so people often only figure this out after the fact, when they're already destabilized in withdrawal, not knowing what the hell is happening to them, freaking out, and then they start Googling, and then they find this online community of, at this point, thousands of Facebook groups and online forums. | ||
| They find our nonprofit, Intercompass Initiative. | ||
| They start to learn about What they just did. | ||
| And they're like, oh my god, I had no idea. | ||
| Sometimes people recover from withdrawal within weeks or months. | ||
| Sometimes it takes years. | ||
| It took years for me, really. | ||
| And because I had a family, again, who could provide for me, I made it through. | ||
| But I often think about how many people don't have the resources that I had access to. | ||
| I'm like, I wouldn't have survived this if I didn't have a family who could literally provide for me. | ||
| Because I could not function. | ||
| And 66 million people are on this stuff. | ||
| Like, this is a real crisis. | ||
| This is the real crisis here that we need to be talking about. | ||
| It's a horrifying story. | ||
| How long did it take you to recover? | ||
| The first year, I would say, every day was... | ||
| If I took a shower, I'm like, I had a really good day. | ||
| I ended up living with my aunt and uncle for almost a year. | ||
| They opened their home to me as I went on this journey. | ||
| And everyone was scared because everyone in my family believed I had this serious brain disease and someone with diabetes needs insulin. | ||
| That whole thing, she could die. | ||
| My aunt and uncle, they just let me be a mess. | ||
| You have a very nice family. | ||
| They sound like nice people. | ||
| I'm really, really lucky. | ||
| I mean, so many people who would want the same things that I wanted with getting off these drugs do not have anything like a supportive family. | ||
| I'm so lucky. | ||
| I really would not. | ||
| I would literally be dead. | ||
| And so I lived with them for basically a year. | ||
| And I was super active in AA at that time because I had quit drinking. | ||
| And thank God for AA. | ||
| I mean, I went to a meeting every morning and every night. | ||
| And I didn't even realize at the time that like most of my struggles were because I was in cold turkey withdrawal because I came off five drugs in six months, which is like cold turkey. | ||
| Like I didn't know. | ||
| I thought that was I had. | ||
| I'm like, what do you mean? | ||
| It took half a year. | ||
| And so I would just go to AA meetings because I was so messed up. | ||
| I was so paranoid and insecure and I couldn't talk. | ||
| I felt like I couldn't articulate myself. | ||
| I was such a mess. | ||
| But I had a meeting every morning and every night and I didn't even realize it was withdrawal for a while. | ||
| It didn't matter. | ||
| Being able to talk to other people about the most vulnerable, painful parts of my daily reality. | ||
| Like, what a gift. | ||
| I'm so grateful for AA. | ||
| I would say around a year off, I started to feel less shitty. | ||
| Between years one and three, I progressively felt better. | ||
| Physically, especially. | ||
| Cognitively. | ||
| Emotionally. | ||
| And by year three, when I look back, I'm like, that was the year when I kind of like came alive again. | ||
| And I would actually have these like, these are my fingers. | ||
| I'm real. | ||
| Like, I'm here. | ||
| Oh my god, that's the sun. | ||
| That's the sun. | ||
| It feels warm on my cheek. | ||
| Like, literally at that level of, like, I exist. | ||
| Like, it was like... | ||
| And I hadn't realized that I hadn't been, like, I didn't know what I had been missing. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, because my whole adult life I'd been under the influence of these drugs. | ||
| So it took me a long time. | ||
| And what I will say is that very early on, I found my purpose, though. | ||
| So, like, even though I was super fucked up in withdrawal, I started blogging about my experiences. | ||
| Basically right at the end of finishing Coming Off the Drugs, because I had reached out to that journalist who wrote that book that had sparked my aha moment. | ||
| I had reached out to him and had asked if I could write for his website. | ||
| Because I was like, you know, I grew up psychiatrists. | ||
| I have no idea who I am. | ||
| Can I write about what this whole thing has been like? | ||
| And he said, sure. | ||
| So I started blogging very early about what I was going through and began hearing from people all over the world. | ||
| This was 2010, so this was not a commonly talked about thing online. | ||
| Most people then were like, I love my meds, I've embraced my diagnoses. | ||
| And here I was being like, I'm an ex-mental patient. | ||
| Like, what the fuck just happened back there? | ||
| And so I just... | ||
| It wasn't wasted time, it wasn't fruitless suffering, meaningless suffering. | ||
| this meant something, this means something. | ||
| And if I put myself out there in the world and the more open I am about it, like the more, the more, the more, And so even though I was super fucked up in withdrawal for a while, like, I was living. | ||
| I was, like, connecting. | ||
| And it was like, what a gift. | ||
| I mean, at this point now, it's like thousands and thousands of people have either emailed me or I've met them at conferences. | ||
| You know, to me, if... | ||
| Like, it is so much more than just faulty brain pathology, which is bullshit, first of all. | ||
| Like, not even true, but it's not wasted time. | ||
| All is not lost. | ||
| Like, what you've been through might actually be the medicine that another person needs. | ||
| Like, I just, I'm so grateful for all of it. | ||
| I wouldn't change a minute of any of it because I'm just, this is my purpose. | ||
| Like, this is what I'm, makes me cry. | ||
| Like, this is what I'm here to do. | ||
| It's just, literally just talk about how hard it is to be alive. | ||
| And just, you know, the power of the stories that we tell ourselves about what it means to be human. | ||
| Because, like, that's really all I've done. | ||
| I've just changed. | ||
| The story. | ||
| I let go of this bullshit, medicalized, pharmaceuticalized story that I grew up believing in. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| I've found my way to an actually human one. | ||
| Life is hard. | ||
| Pain isn't something to run away from. | ||
| The best way to find your way to peace of mind is to get out of yourself. | ||
| And, like, mutual aid and, like, the fellowship of other human beings is so simple and oftentimes, like, so powerful, like, to help you kind of find your way through all this. | ||
| Other people are the greatest gift. | ||
| Let me ask you one final question. | ||
| So, I think any person listening to this would conclude, you know, this is what it means to recover. | ||
| This is victory. | ||
| Like, you know, once was lost, now I'm found. | ||
| I mean, this is like the greatest story arc. | ||
| How many of your professional psychiatric caregivers have called you to say congratulations? | ||
| I'm so glad you're well. | ||
| None of them. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So that, we're going to end on that, Laura Delano, because that just kind of tells the whole story right there. | ||
| Because it's not like you're in hiding. | ||
| And any, you know, you have an unusual name. | ||
| Anyone who treated you is probably aware of... | ||
| And anyone who's not thrilled by that is serving darkness. | ||
| That's my view. | ||
| But I'm thrilled by it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So thank you so much for doing this. | |
| Thanks for having me, Tucker. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| The best. | ||
| So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show. | ||
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| That's what they do. | ||
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| And that is totally wrong. | ||
| It's immoral. | ||
| What can you do about it? | ||
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| That's a waste of time. | ||
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