174: They've Brainwashed You to Think Psych Meds Are Good, But They Make You Worse

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Something you're excited about, proud of, or loving about yourself, and you start it with the phrase, my blast. This product is all of my skincare dreams come true, so I cannot wait to get it in your hands. If we're medicating more people, shouldn't more people be better? In the first decade after Prozac's release, it was named in over 40,000 reports of adverse events to the FDA. There is something called tardive dysphoria, which is a chronic form of depression that is induced by antidepressants. You go to take it so that you don't feel depressed. And in fact, you trade that for a long-term form of untreatable so-called depression. The risks are what made me put down my prescription pad forever. I never, ever, after 2010, started a patient on the psych med ever again. So you've probably heard about diversifying investments and saving for the future. But what about becoming your own bank and opting out of high interest loans and difficult decisions about whether to sell off an asset? 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I'm pretty skilled, I think, at attracting sleeper resources that are game changing. So I am delighted to put you on. Go listen to episode 153 of Reclamation Radio. We unpack the whole thing in a way that makes sense. And if you want someone to run the numbers of your specific situation, book a free call with my friends Josh and Ken over at kellybroganmd.com forward slash whole. Hi, and welcome to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan, and today I am going to put my activist hat back on. I'm going to adjust it off and place it gingerly upon my pretty head because I got a thing or two to say about medication-induced harm and specifically psychiatric medication-induced harm. So if you are new to the magic carpet ride of Kelly Brogan, MD, you may know me for the things I love to talk about these days, including hair and skin and nails and peptide creams and body composition and looking and feeling your best as a midlife woman. You may not know that I spent 10 years as a very angry activist and specifically an anti-pharmaceutical activist before I began to do a good amount of inner work, of shadow work, and resolved the impulse that was driving, in me anyway, was driving that crusade, which was primarily to vanquish the bad parent out there that I was projecting onto the system. And also the grandiose notion that it is my job to save anybody. So everything that follows is with the intention of supporting your meaning making, your capacity to make sense out of reality. This is an offering. And just when I thought I had screamed this from the rooftops, I published a New York Times bestseller with an exploding pill on the cover. I was on Joe Rogan running my mouth for three hours. I made the disinformation dozen list just when I thought I had let everybody know that there's more to the story of so-called mental illness and associated psychotropics and psychiatric treatment. I learned recently about two cases, instances, experiences that I'll unpack a bit that ignited this in me. Because sometimes if you know better, you can do better. Sometimes you can know better and you still can't do better because you don't have the nervous system capacity to do differently. However, sometimes just knowing a bit of information can open up possibilities for new avenues. So I share this in the spirit of that, not because I want to triangulate against the system with you, not because I think anyone is doing anything bad and wrong, but simply because I have a storehouse of professional information and, dare I say, science to support my claims that psychiatric medications are the juice that is not worth the squeeze. So I have an entire episode about the risks and undisclosed issues, including the lack of efficacy around psychiatric medications. I'll link it in show notes. But suffice it to say that a book I read in 2010 by Robert Whitaker called Anatomy of an Epidemic really set off a cascade of awakening bells for me, alarms for me, and prompted me because it was just the right time. It was the right messenger. It was the right personal moment because I had just put my Hashimoto's thyroiditis diagnosis into remission. And you would think that I would have been so excited, but I was irate. I was rageful that I was never told in my expensive, tedious, stressful, arguably even traumatic medical training that you could put a recidivistic illness into remission through what? Lifestyle change. And this book was given to me by a colleague. In this book, he looks at non-industry funded literature and research to interrogate the hypothesis that psychiatric medications are in fact driving an epidemic of psychiatric disability worldwide That it actually the medications themselves that are responsible for these increasingly poor outcomes, right? Because if we're medicating more people, shouldn't more people be better? Well, in fact, what he found is that not only are they not better in the short term, they're certainly not better in the long term than if they did nothing at all. So that is the efficacy side of the conversation. But then there's also the risks. The risks are what made me put down my prescription pad forever. I never, ever, after 2010, started a patient on the psych med ever again. From that point, I focused my then Manhattan practice on deprescribing and became one of the foremost deprescribers with a two-year wait list and a lot of experience with the natural arc of the dark night of the soul. I, at that time, worked extensively with women who were expressing suicide with what is referred to as ideation, meaning that they were pretty serious about their nihilistic feelings, that there's nothing here for them and they can't handle it anymore and they want to press the ejection. Because of the nature of our clinical work together and the understanding that they were not going to be prescribed new meds to take the edge off, that they were not going to be restarted on old meds, that they were not to run to the emergency room because I myself was terrified of a bad outcome. I have a lot of experience with the natural history, which is what it's often called in medicine, of suicidality in the field. Now, the psychospiritual crises that attend deprescribing these meds, the tapering of these meds, is well described by so many courageous folks. I had Laura Delano on the show recently, who have detailed what it is like to be multiply prescribed and then to emancipate yourself from these medications. This is a biological phenomenon because these are the most habit-forming medications and chemicals, I would say, on Earth. It's also a psycho-emotional phenomenon, and I would also argue a spiritual phenomenon. When you are transitioning from the woman or the person who is medicated, aka triangulating against their own cognition, behavior, mood, selfhood, right? Because when something is psychiatrically wrong with you, it's quite different than if something is endocrinologically wrong with you or orthopedically wrong with you, okay? This is an identity. And the biological instability, the medical instability attends the necessary transition to a new identity, a new version of yourself that can integrate whatever was the mismatch with your life and the reverberative trauma patterns that induce the struggle in the first place. I don't know where this quote comes from, but I love the quote that illness is a question only you can answer. that there is a change being asked of you, and that is any type of so-called illness, including what we're calling depression, anxiety, so-called ADHD, psychoses, manic depression, etc. So I have written and spoken extensively about this subject because I have felt that it is important to know that these meds are not as efficacious as you've been led to believe, aka they don't work just like all pharmaceuticals don't work in the ways we've been told. That's my problem with them actually, primarily. But then with the limited efficacy, because of their very biological nature, the lack of subtlety around these chemicals in the biological milieu of the body, you get a lot of so-called adverse effects, which are just other effects of an intensive chemical exposure. So these other effects in the case of psych meds include these two categories that when I began to research them were so alarming to me that, as I mentioned, I never prescribed again. Because it is a total Russian roulette. who is going to experience these adverse effects. We don't know. We don't risk stratify, as it's called, when we prescribe, at least not at the time of this recording. And so you don't know if you are somebody who, within a matter of one or two months, is going to become so physiologically dependent on these chemicals that coming off them is going to define the next chapter of your life, sometimes for years. You also don't know whether you may be somebody in whom impulsive or even calculated violence to self or others emerges as a direct result of exposure to these chemicals. To me, spinning that roulette could never, ever yield a worthwhile trial. Why and how would it ever, ever be worth it? Because the nature of this kind of violence is such that it is insidious. And while at times there are outer indications of what is medically referred to as akathisia, sometimes it is quite egocentronic, which means that the patient herself or himself is totally unaware that they are essentially being hijacked by the intoxicating effects of this medication. Now, I'm speaking about it as if we understand what happens in these cases. We really don't. And I would imagine that most of you who would otherwise consider a psychiatric medication just to kind of get you through a tough time, I mean, it makes a lot of sense, would never walk over to CVS and fill this prescription if you knew what it is that the literature is reporting. on the danger of these medications that is impossible at this point to predict just by through a psychiatric interview, which is what most, that's probably the most extensive interaction that somebody's having before a prescription is just a conversation. So the notion that these meds are even relatively so-called safe is really undermined by so much pre-existing information, including things like in the first decade after Prozac's release, it was named in over 40,000 reports of adverse events to the FDA. This is passive reporting, right? So, so much of what is going on out in the field is not actually being captured in rigorous studies, but a lot of it is. You know, there's a Yale study I often quote that suggests that one in 23 people who are prescribed an antidepressant go on to be diagnosed bipolar. Now, we learned as psychiatric residents that their underlying illness has just been unmasked. And this is a part of the machinery of attributional error. You'll hear me say that phrase again. That keeps these meds in an ivory tower untouched by their outcomes by the causal effects that they have while those effects are erroneously attributed to the patient and their so mental illness There is something called tardive dysphoria which is a chronic form of depression that is induced by antidepressants. So you go to take it so that you don't feel depressed. And in fact, you trade that for a long-term form of untreatable so-called depression. There was a Canadian study of children with stimulants, some sort of bopping around the different categories because these are all psychotropics, that looked at a 13-fold increase in prescriptions of antipsychotics and a four-fold increase in prescriptions of antidepressants after their stimulants were prescribed. There was a Swedish study of 500 women, all of whom completed suicide, and over half of them were medicated within the previous year. Now, this could be easy to attribute to their underlying mental illness, and that's why it's important to look at literature in healthy volunteers or those who have not been previously diagnosed. So David Healy is arguably the most notorious whistleblower on this subject, and he has studied stable volunteers who become acutely suicidal after they are exposed to psychotropics. There's also a very important study, came out, I believe, in 2014 by Lucere and crotty that looked at everyday folks who were medicated for what is often considered an adjustment disorder. So everyday reactions to things like the passing of a pet or divorce or run-of-the-mill stress. And these folks went on to commit heinous acts of violence, killing their therapist, their spouses, and themselves. And what they identified is that in these cases, there were aberrations in their cytochromes, in the way that they metabolized these meds that could be at least correlated with how these medications impacted these folks. Now, it's been over a decade since this was published, and I would love to hear from prescribers who are risk stratifying according to cytochrome analysis in their patients. Because as far as I'm aware, it's not translated into clinical practice, which is pretty typical because I often reference a study that it takes 17 years for the primary literature to translate into clinical practice. Well, what about all the folks who are being prescribed in that time? There was also a paper by Thomas Moore in 2010 that analyzed 1,500 cases of reported violence and found 31 different psychotropics to be disproportionately represented in that pool. And I myself have published a paper, I'll actually put it on the screen, called Treatment Emergent Violence to Self and Others, a Literature Review of Neuropsychiatric Adverse Reactions for antidepressant and neuroleptic psychiatric drugs and general medications. I was one of several co-authors, and this was a first-in-its-class report. I have published, I'll click over here, a number of papers on the untold story of psychiatric meds and adverse events. events. And all of this information is available. You can watch my Joe Rogan episode. You can read A Mind of Your Own. You can cruise the free resources on my website. I really felt like I had said my piece on this. And then I learned about a media making case. I don't pay attention to the media, I am very focused on serving my immediate reality and making sure that I am as clean and clear inside as I can possibly be to harmonize with my lived reality. I have many reasons for that. Happy to go into them. But the summary is the shadow of activism. So I don't pay attention to what's going on out there for the most part. You're not going to come to me for my hot take on everything. So I don't really offer hot takes on current events. Nobody asks my opinion, and therefore I'm not getting it. So I'm mostly focused on what is interesting and alive to me. However, I did recently learn about the case of Lindsay Clancy. And why? Well, because many people informed me of this, knowing that I was one of the first 300 reproductive psychiatrists in the world when I completed my fellowship level training in 2009. And the reason that this specialty emerged was because one in four women were entering pregnancy on a psychotropic, and there's absolutely no safety and efficacy data at all to support continued prescribing or initiating new medications. So the way that I was trained was to very carefully analyze the available literature, most of which was what is called cohort studies and passive reporting registries. And the preliminary conclusions that I came to and my colleagues came to was that it's mostly better to take these meds in pregnancy, aka continue your treatment, than to discontinue and be struggling with your so-called mental illness, which is a false choice, right? Because those aren't the only two choices. A third and very important choice is that you can resolve the root cause of what's going on, serve you and your pregnancy and your child. Okay. Now, because we didn't know a lot about so-called discontinuation syndrome and all of the things that emerge in the wake of even reasonably tapered medications that can look like new issues and can look like a relapse of pre-existing symptoms, of course it made sense to continue them. And we did our best, and reproductive psychiatrists probably are still doing that today, to reassure patients around the continuation of their prescriptions. There's no signal of teratogenesis for the most part, meaning that your baby is probably going to be born formed normally. Some of the long-term data is a little sketchy. There are a couple of signals of harm around primary pulmonary hypertension, maybe preterm birth. But I was really trained to support the ongoing prescribing of these meds. So it wasn't until I began to explore lifestyle medicine and holistic care and put my own Hashimoto's into remission that I began to look at so-called postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis through a very different lens. And I looked at root cause drivers that include things like postpartum thyroiditis that looks in many cases just like depression plus minus mania. mania. I looked at the role of inflammation and learned about psychoneuroimmunology and the ways in which our environmental exposures take a toll on the postpartum female body. I looked at the role of hormones. I also looked at the context, the environment, and the fact that it is never and will never be physiologically normative for a woman to be alone with a baby. That is a stress physiology nightmare for a delicate system. And we have normalized this and we have blamed the victim, so to speak. We have said, oh, there's something wrong with her, that she is feeling disconnected, that she is feeling confused, that she's feeling flat, that she is wondering if she's up to this task. Okay because even with support so many of us are carrying our own birth traumas into the postnatal time And that why we end up being moms who go back to work like I did at three weeks postpartum because it feels better to talk to adults than be with baby. That's a trauma signature, okay? So there is a lot in the psycho-emotional and even spiritual realm that is just swept under of the carpet when we are focused on a fictitious diagnosis, because remember that psychiatric diagnoses are questionnaires. It's like a cosmopolitan magazine interview. There are no tests. There are no markers. There is nothing even in the realm of validity that can quantify, categorize, and otherwise render meaningful a psychiatric diagnosis. So when we're seeking the diagnosis, what we're really seeking is relief. And what I would argue is many of the people driving that are the bystanders, are the people who themselves don't have the emotional regulation and stability and maturity to look on as another person struggles and works something out and processes something. When you are worried or concerned about somebody, that's your stuff. Okay. So most of how I was able to support the women in my practice, again, many of whom are published case studies on my website, was because I was in the early stages of prioritizing my own emotional regulation. And I did not flinch. And I listened. And I was there. This is a lot of what Laura Delano speaks about, who has even opened her home to people who are moving through crises, knowing that within the space of a few days, with compassionate support and an absence of reflexive fear, things evolve. Okay. So learning about that case and what I witness is, again, without a thorough investigation, is that there is a limited understanding of the causal role of psychiatric meds, let alone polypharmacy, which is multiply prescribed meds, in emergent in this case, egocentronic violence against self and others. So when you blame the illness, when you blame the woman, which I believe will be her insanity plea, there is a therapeutic illusion that protects the treatment when it fails or when it succeeds, right? So like when a treatment fails or is causal, it's the illness. When there is a resolution and treatment's on board, it's the treatment, right? So this is a logical fallacy. And this attributional error obscures the role of iatrogenesis. Iatrogenesis, if you don't know it, is a fancy word, for doctor-induced harm. In many cases, we can drill it down to medication-induced harm. Last I checked, properly prescribed medications was a third leading cause of death. So medication-induced harm is only amplified by polypharmacy, obviously, right? When you have many, many meds on board, which is almost always the case. Even responsible psychiatric prescribers will layer on benzodiazepine for periodic anxiety or insomnia alongside an antidepressant, a mood stabilizer, and sometimes some antipsychotic, even for somebody who is not presenting as such. When these cases go wrong, Okay, so I studied many media-making cases of infanticide and postpartum psychosis. And there's almost this dark, sadistic part of us that needs to believe that a woman could be this crazy. The thing is that to a case, medications are on board. So that attributional error is not only destructive to the forensic analysis of these situations, but also to the legacy, the narrative, and the trauma field of that family constellation. in my activist career, have been in touch with everyday folks who have experienced this personally. On my website or in my recorded content, you can find me collaborating with somebody named David Carmichael, who took the life of his own son by strangling when he was intoxicated with a run-of-the-mill antidepressant that he was taking for run-of-the-mill stress. Kim Witsack is another beloved ally who found her husband hanged when he was taking an antidepressant. Never felt so well a day in his life. These representatives of the gaslit population who is often told, well, that was the mental illness at work, are also here alongside me. to expose what the literature has to say about the pharmacokinetics of these meds and about their propensity to induce this phenomenon in otherwise nonviolent people. I don't know why I imagine that I have this role in whatever capacity I do to gatekeep the pharmaceutical realm for women. And again, it's not to suggest that it's bad and wrong. I don't think in those terms. It's not that. It's just that, honestly, if you knew they didn't work and you knew they were likely to induce all manner of potentially life-ending harm, you would search for something else. You would keep shopping. And that's, of course, what I've dedicated myself to making sure is available is another option, a better option, a safer, cheaper, more efficacious option. It's like my mentor, Nick Gonzalez, used to say, and he would say, match my cases, pharma. You know what I mean? Like, match my cases. So I hope that you'll share this with anyone who can benefit from this snapshot of information so that this, so the awareness around the fuller story of psychiatric medications does not remain in the blind spot, especially of the self-help and spiritual community. And again, it's not my business what anybody is doing with their body, what they're taking, not taking. It's truly not my business. So I am not here to condemn, to judge. I might once have been, but I truly, truly am not. I only know that I have this information inside of me and have been ignited to imagine like, if only I had made it more digestible, more available, you know, I don't know. I don't know. That's why I'm here sharing this. And if it is helpful, please pass it on because I like to say that suffering ends where meaning begins. And if we can make more meaning out of things that feel senselessly horrific, we can integrate it into our own story, into our own frame of reality with more grace. I'm here.