Medicating Normal

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WJW MENTAL HEALTH Legal Fund INNER FIRE Offering the choice to reclaim your life with minimal mind-altering medications or none at all. This program is made possible by... All of Dave's old meds. As soon as he said he was suicidal, we took him to the hospital and put them all in there.

I mean, if he really wanted to commit suicide, there's nothing I could do about it, but I wasn't going to make it easy. This all started off with a bad relationship and some test anxiety and stress in grad school and now I am a totally dysfunctional, highly suicidal individual, and the only thing that's happened between then and now is I've been exposed to a series of very strong psychiatric medications. Right now, medicines are given like candy. Patients are seeing doctors for five minutes and they're given a pill.

It's my belief that many of the medications that doctors are giving to patients today are more harmful than helpful to those patients. They want that pill that they hope will take care of their problem thoroughly and rapidly, and most of these medications will actually do that very well in the short term. In the short term, they really work. The problem is in the long term, they're mostly disastrous.

I'm not sick, there's nothing wrong with me. This is just damage to my nervous system caused from a properly taken, prescribed drug that a doctor told me was safe. There's nothing safe about this drug. This is crazy.

It's very clear to me after having studied the science, that the way we use psychiatric drugs do vastly more harm than good. I remember driving my niece to school and I was like, "All the kids are going to be murdered." And then, like, that thought created adrenaline. So then, when the adrenaline kicked, I was like, "Oh, my God, am I going to be the one that does it?" And then it's like, "Yeah, Angie, you're going to kill these kids." And then I'm, like, sitting here looking at my niece, like-- and the thoughts are so bad that like, your teeth chatter, like, "Oh, my God, I'm capable of that? Are you kidding me?" I was never like this.

That's the scariest part, because I don't know, is this my normal? Like... did Effexor do this to me? Did Cymbalta do this to me?

Did Geodon? Abilify? Which one? Which one did it?

I was very successful academically. I got accepted into the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. After Annapolis, I did a few years on a destroyer based out of Mayport, Florida. And then, when you're at sea, you're training to be the guy directing the ship where to navigate, where to go.

It's great fun, but it's also extremely high-stress, but I loved it. I was pre-selected for Satellite Systems Engineering. Part of that was going to grad school. When I got the acceptance letter from MIT, it was one of those moments where you're just like, "This is not happening, you know, it must be a mistake," but then, you know, the stars had aligned, and I was really happy.

Fall semester went off, you know, without a hitch. I had started a romantic relationship earlier that summer. The early spring is when things started to fall apart. My romantic relationship kind of took a turn, you know, became toxic.

You know, I was in distress, I was overwhelmed. We were taking upwards of four to five graduate-level courses a semester, and so I sought out care from the mental health clinic at MIT, the campus clinic. Presented solution to my problems was a prescription for the benzodiazepine Ativan, which I'd never previously known about or taken, and Zoloft. They work as advertised.

I mean, it's a very immediate effect, it's very calming. Yeah. Dave told me probably on our third or fourth date that he was on medication for depression and ADHD. I have ADHD myself and take medication for that.

I had issues with depression and sought out help and medication and counseling. It's kind of fairly normal now. I met the girl of my dreams. I got engaged in that period.

Work was great, loved it, you know, back to my normal, what I thought was my normal self. Somewhere in the eight-month time range, I started noticing emotional flatness, some sexual dysfunction, difficulty remembering what street we lived on. That whole period is just a blur, like, I was a zombie. Had this big wedding planned.

I can remember talking to my mom prior to it. I was, "Mom, I just-- I feel nothing. I feel emotionally void of anything." And that's when I went to the psychiatrist and said, you know, "This stuff isn't for me, you know. I need to get off it.

I think the drug is my problem." That's really when

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hit the fan. I've always been very close with my parents, even when I was a child. I love school. I like to be with my friends a lot.

I feel very comforted just being around other people. When I was 11 years old, I moved from Nashville to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We moved a lot for my parents' various jobs, which is very hard in terms of keeping, like, lifelong friends. I would oftentimes just, like, sit in my room and listen to music and just, like, honestly, just kind of mope, mope around.

I started having a lot of anxiety about school, and I was so anxious, I got these stomachaches, where I didn't want to eat. I wouldn't eat breakfast because I had a stomachache. I wouldn't eat much lunch because I had a stomachache. I noticed how--that she'd gotten kind of thin.

I just kind of blurted out, you know, "Do you think you might be anorexic?" She went and got on the scale, and she said, "You know, I think I've lost 20 pounds." And so I just totally freaked out and got an appointment same day. And then, toward the end, the therapist asks me to come into the room. She said, "I think what would really be best to kickstart this treatment is for her to get on antidepressants." Wait a second. We came here for the talk therapy, right?

We didn't come here to kickstart with medication. That's the whole point of going to a therapist, I thought. Rebecka was prescribed Zoloft for the first medication. She said it didn't really make a difference.

She didn't feel any better, but she also didn't really feel any worse at that time. So when we saw her doctor again, the doctor switched her to Prozac. Shortly after, I had a business trip, and I get a phone call from Rebecka and she said, "You know, I've been seeing this little girl." And I'm like, "What do you mean you've been seeing a little girl?" "Yeah, like, you know, she's not really there, but, like, I can see her and I named her Alice." Like, I genuinely thought that there were people here in the room that weren't there, that people could also see. But...but they were very real for me.

She came into our bedroom late at night and she was shaking. She said, you know, "The hallucination touched me and asked me to come into the kitchen so I could hurt myself." And they said, you know, "Enough of this. She needs help." I was a waitress in New York City. Pretty normal girl doing normal things, nothing exceptional, nothing not exceptional, just normal.

My mind was clear. I was happy. The only little issue I had was...I couldn't sleep. I'd get out at two, three in the morning, so I knew that my sleep issues were related to working nighttime.

So went to my doctor, just my regular doctor. I would see him maybe twice a year, and I asked him for something for sleep. He gave me a referral, and I took the referral and I called a bunch of psychiatrists, and this one doctor in Brooklyn said, "Yeah, we're seeing patients. Come on in." He gave me a prescription for Lorazepam.

He told me to take two in the day and two at night. I then said, "Why would I need to take a sleeping pill during the day? I don't want to sleep during the day." And he said, "That is how it works." I said, "OK." I didn't even know people could have sleep issues because I was sleeping normal all my life, so it's not something I thought about, so-- but I had a feeling it was my job. I just didn't think I could quit my job.

I thought I could get help for it. That's how come I went to a psychiatrist, and he prescribed me this drug, Lorazepam. I took it for six years, yeah. Wait, you took Lorazepam for six years?

Six-and-a-half years. Unfortunately, that's the problem that most pharmacists see with Lorazepam. Lorazepam--again, if the doctor takes the time out to read the package insert, it clearly state-- Are they not reading? - That I don't know.

I can only tell you what I read. The use of benzodiazepine has increased tremendously over the years. Since they've been around for such a long time, a lot of doctors have forgotten about the side effects and the possible dangers of these medications. None of them were ever meant for long-term use, but everybody knows somebody who has been taking benzodiazepine for years.

I started thinking, like, "OK, when did this start? How did this start? What led up to, like, me falling apart?" Like, I was always the go-to person in my unit, always. If they needed a job done and they needed it done right, they would ask me.

I was physically fit, knew my job. I got promoted to Sergeant. After work, I was, like, a lot of fun, I liked to travel, go to the beach, spontaneous. I was just, like, the happy person, like, the happy-go-lucky friend, like, "Hey, let's go shopping, let's go to a bakery, let's--" you know.

Never had a second thought about anything crazy. That's who I was before this. So when the war started, I think most of it was stressful situations every day, like being shot at in convoys, just driving around in dangerous areas of Baghdad. Your head was, like, constantly, like, scanning for something dangerous, like, "I'm going to be a strong sergeant.

I don't take no

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." That's just the way I was, but, like, the first two months I was in Baghdad, like, I'm really, really sick. I had nosebleeds, fainting, dizziness. I lost, like, 40 pounds, so they medevacked me out of Iraq. Then my convoy got hit the day after I got medevacked, and so I saw the kid come back in and he was one of my soldiers and I felt horrible and, like, that was the day that I saw "Psychiatry" with the arrow and I walked straight there, because that's what you do.

I don't know. And they put me on Klonopin. Right. - That's how this all started.

They're trained while they're on active duty, very, very systematically that if you come back and you have problems, you need to go to the doctor. A hundred years ago, if they had this kind of a trauma, would talk to their fellow soldiers, talk to their parents, talk to their friends, talk to their pastor, and instead, they're going to their doctor and getting medicated. And I think the Klonopin was starting to make me worse, but they just kept telling me, "That's what PTSD is. You have PTSD now." And then I remember, he looked at me and he said, "We're going to start the proceedings for medical retirement.

You are not able to be around soldiers, and no weapons." And I remember feeling like, "How was I, like, super-soldier, and now I'm disabled at 25?" Are you kidding? There is a post-traumatic stress and it's a problem, so we would never argue with you that it's not a problem. It is a problem. It's a big problem, but for you, it's not a mental illness.

Like, I feel like I'm waking up from a nightmare. Mm-hmm. - "Like, what the

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just happened to my life?" You lost years of your life. You lost your career. Yeah. - There's just so many things that are losses in here.

That's part of the situation that we're in right now as a culture, is that if you run to the doctor and cry about this, they're gonna say, "Oh, you have major depression," and they're gonna stick you on the next pill, instead of saying, "Hey, you know what? Suffering is the only normal response." There's a grief process-- Yeah. - that you have to go through. Yes.

Wow. Normal's in danger. The definitions used in psychiatry, and even more, the way they're applied have become so wide that a far too large percentage of the population would be defined as having a mental disorder. You know, now we have patients come in, and if they're, you know, they're anxious or they can't sleep or they have some kind of physical pain, it's like, "Oh, my gosh, you know, let's get rid of that." We have really vilified pain, and I'm talking emotional pain, physical pain.

Like, it has now become the responsibility of the doctor to eliminate all suffering, at all cost. There is a cultural context, and the context really goes back to the arrival of antibiotics in late 1940s, and then the polio vaccine. They really do change life. Bacterial infections are no longer a problem, and now we have this magic cure for polio.

So now we believe in magic bullets. Pretty soon, we're gonna be having magic bullets for everything. What you find in psychiatry, if you trace its history, that is in the 1970s, American psychiatry was in competition

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counselors, social workers. What do they say to themselves? They say, "We need to present ourselves as doctors, as medical doctors. We need to put on a white coat." They adopt a disease model for categorizing psychiatric disorder.

We're going to say, "These are diseases of the brain, illnesses of the brain, that our drugs, therefore, treat the symptoms of those illnesses." It centers on this chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders. While the cause is unknown, depression may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals between nerve cells in the brain. Prescription Zoloft works to correct this imbalance. When you know more about what's wrong, you can help make it right.

It hasn't been possible to demonstrate that first you have a chemical imbalance, and then, because of that, you become depressed or psychotic. But what we have shown is that the drugs create a chemical imbalance. Nobody has a clue what happens when you push this system somewhere. You have all sorts of reactions elsewhere.

It's a very naive thought that a psychiatric disorder is based on one... one single thing chemically that went wrong, and then we have a quick fix for that. It's totally, totally naive. In 1980, American Psychiatric Association adopted a disease model and began to tell that story to the American public.

You know who was so happy with that story? The pharmaceutical industry. They were thrilled with this story because now they could see markets expanding-- depression, anxiety. All these things that we used to think of as sort of normal fluctuations in human experience could now be seen as illnesses, therefore you could treat with drugs, and they said, "Wow." Binge eating disorder, or BED, isn't just overeating, it's a real medical condition.

Certain chemicals in the brain may play a role. BED is also the most common eating disorder in U.S. adults. I never really thought...that the medication was a bad thing.

I was like, "Yeah, if this is going to make me feel better, awesome. OK, if this other one's gonna make me feel better, awesome. Oh, if these four are gonna make me feel better, great. Let's do it.

I will try anything." There was never any notion that the medication was causing these symptoms. It was more like the disease was developing. The only warning she sort of gave, but she was very dismissive about it, was, "You might hear, Mr. Green, that in some instances, people who are on antidepressants might have suicidal thoughts, but this really isn't something you should be overly concerned about." She said, kind of almost flippantly, like, "Oh, you might want to lock up your knives." So we went out and bought-- We did.

- a lock box... Yeah. - and put anything, you know, dangerous in there, and that's really when it kind of sunk in even more, like, "Wow, this is serious." So I was hospitalized that first time when I was 13. But over the course of a year, I think I was hospitalized seven--seven times, seven, eight times.

You know, leaving her in the hospital, a psychiatric hospital, I mean, this is just--you know, this was not our life. This was not our daughter. We knew our daughter. We knew, I mean, you know, a few months before, she had been sort of, you know, a little depressed, melancholy, but this was a far leap from that.

And once in the hospital there, they added an antipsychotic because she was now experiencing psychotic behaviors. In addition, they had prescribed another medication to take care of the known side effects of the antipsychotic. We didn't really know what else to do and we were in the system. We wanted to trust the experts, so, you know, we went that route.

My mind was just filled with horrible thoughts, like, about me, and about how horrible I was and how much I hated myself. I mean, what is even the point of me being here anymore? Many, many people are getting an antidepressant, an antipsychotic, a benzodiazepine, and a sleep medicine without any rhyme or reason. And instead of the beneficial effects of these different medicines adding up to something wonderful, very often, their harmful effects add up to something terrible.

When I got out of the Army and went into the VA system, it was like a whole 'nother ballgame. It turned into, like, cocktails of antipsychotic, antidepressant, benzo. I would say to the clinician, like, um, "I don't have good feelings. All I just feel is numb or anxious or depressed.

I don't ever feel happy or grateful or, like, loving." And then, "Oh, we'll just add another medicine. Maybe that one's not working." So then we'll switch to a different one. So, basically, my medication history is just a succession of, "Oh, this doesn't work. Let's go all the way up to the highest dose and see what happens." "OK, it didn't work.

OK, come back down." "OK, that didn't work, so let's switch it and try another one." It's like a hamster wheel that I never got off of until now. What happens to someone like Angie is that when they get on these medications and they begin to deteriorate, the attribution is to their mental condition, as opposed to the medication, and so, when they go in and they say, "Well, you gave me an antidepressant and now I'm really depressed," then they say, "Well, I see your depression is worsening," and so they up it or add a medication. Next thing, they're on uppers and downers and, I mean, you just see this pattern, and every time they go in, it's their deteriorating mental condition instead of somebody saying, "Your drug may be your problem." Hi. How are you?

- Nice to see you. Nice to meet you. - You, too. Thank you for coming.

- I'm excited. It's awesome to be here. I'm so nervous because I can't talk like this at my own school.

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So I want to just, like, run through my story quickly and then just talk because I'm sure you have, like, really cool questions. I was on a cocktail of 17 medications at once, and then, basically, from 2006 to 2016, it took me all that time to, like, get off of everything else. So every time you went in and you were prescribed some of these medications, what were you told about the side effects? How much information were you given before you were prescribed this medication?

In the office, you have 10 minutes with the psychiatrist. That's it, so then they're like, "So how are you feeling today?" and then you're like, "Um, well, I'm still really anxious, and I didn't sleep last week and--" And then they're like, "Well, I want you to take this little quiz. You know, do you feel jumpy in public? You know, do you spend time with friends?" Like, it was just one of those psychological assessments, right?

So I'm just filling out the little test, and then he takes the test and then I see him pull out the DSM, and then he's like, "Oh, yeah, you have generalized anxiety disorder." And I'm like, "What is another label going to do for me now? Like, really? Another label? Thank you.

Now I have addict, PTSD, generalized anxiety, panic disorder with agoraphobia, major depression, like, for what? What does any of those labels do for me? Nothing. I'm doing everything that you tell me to do, and I am not getting better." So the most hurtful part of all of this that I want you to listen to is that I did all the therapy.

I saw social workers, therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists. Not once did somebody say, "It could be your meds." Not once in 13 years. That is what hurts me the most. And now I'm in social work school.

I have all As. My brain is coming back. Ha ha!

APPLAUSE

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I can write a mean APA paper.

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Yeah? - You were talking about, you know, a lot of these meds that are being prescribed for four to six years should only be taken for a few weeks. Do you think there's ever a place for medications or would you ever hold someone's hand through that decision process? At the beginning, I was, like, anti-med.

Like, "No way, hell no" because I'm lucky that I didn't kill myself or someone else, so, like, how can I, like, say, "Oh, go ahead, take those meds," you know? And, like, there is times when some people, and then, when I say "some," I mean, like, very few. So I'm not anti-med, I'm pro-informed consent. So, if you, as a social worker, want to talk to them about informed consent, that is, like, well within our boundaries.

We get it for surgery. Why aren't we getting it for meds? You shared that you're very uncomfortable with all the labels you've been given. If you could change that label to something, what would you?

I just think I was in-- like, I was just scared. Like, I was just a scared little girl that was 24, and, like...it didn't have to be so complicated. Yeah. - You know?

So I was first diagnosed with ADHD when I was 15, I think. I remember it being a relief to get the diagnosis. "Oh, my gosh. OK, that's...

that's why everything's so hard. It's not that I'm...stupid. It's not that I'm lazy." I was pretty severely depressed. I mean, I couldn't go to school.

I don't know. I just cried all the time and, yeah, just kind of a mess. At that point, then I was put on Dexedrine. I felt a ton better and was able to go to school on a regular basis.

I felt...some hope again. I hear anecdotes that vary, anecdotes of the great effects of drugs, and I would say that's about... 20%, 25% of anecdotes I hear are, "This has really been great for me. This has helped me through a very difficult time." About 40% say, "It may have helped some.

It's hard to tell what exactly it was doing. I can't say it hurt me. Can't say it helped me. I seem kind of indifferent to what it may have done." And then I get the other 30% or 35%, saying, "This hurt me.

This damaged me." That's the anecdotes I've been hearing, and I think that details a little bit what you find in the literature out there. The reason that I kind of changed the way I practice was the realization that I was actually harming my patients. It is very clear that there is a cohort of patients for whom getting off of these drugs is exquisitely painful. When Dave decided to go off the meds, I think he probably didn't share it with me because he knew that they worked for me and they were successful for me, but that wasn't the case for him.

She knew something was different. She knew something was wrong. I was having a lot of irritability, a lot of difficulty communicating, so it put a lot of stress on our relationship, and we just didn't talk about it much, you know. I thought I was the worst wife in the world, and I didn't know what was going on.

And every day driving home, I was like, "OK. What can I do differently?" And about, I would say, four weeks later, he shared with me that he had taken himself off the medication. And that was a huge relief to me to go, "OK, it's not me." But, yeah, he became short and irritable, and he wasn't positive anymore. Everything was negative.

I was totally dysfunctional and began experiencing this... what I'll call this irrational, terror-like level of anxiety that I had never previously experienced. I might come home from work, and I found him on the kitchen floor, curled up in a ball, just sobbing and rocking. He didn't want anybody to touch him, be anywhere near him.

He would find a place to go hide in the house and just sob uncontrollably. It was really, really hard to see. I got to a point where I wholesale refused to consume any more drugs, and that kind of came to a head several months ago. And that's why right now, we're separated.

The breaking point for me deciding to move out, there was a couple of things. He is of the mind-set that it's just going to take time and there's nothing that you can do. I said, you know, "Here's what the options that I see. They're mostly medical-based," and he absolutely refused.

I explained my entire background to my psychiatrist. I said, "Look, I took pride in being in the Navy. "I took pride in surviving and making it through MIT, "and I had high hopes to do good things "for the Navy and for the country. "And now I don't know who I am.

"And the only thing that's happened between then and now "is I've been exposed to a series of very strong psychiatric medications." And the answer after 20 minutes was, "Well, I can give you a prescription for Cymbalta."

SPRINKLER AND BIRDS CHIRPING

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When I did move out, he called me and said that he was standing in the basement next to a noose. And I said, "And what's your safety plan?" And he said, "To call you." And I said, "That's not a safety plan. You need to hang up and call 911." And I hate having to tell him that. It feels callous to me.

When you're going through withdrawal off psychiatric drugs, the best thing is to kind of get back off that ledge and just say, "Dave, just give yourself more time, "give yourself more time. "Continue to fight for it. "You know, and someday...you'll regain a sense of normalcy in your day-to-day life."

THUNDER

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Typically, we find that the withdrawal phenomenon is the opposite of whatever the drug does. If the intention of the drug is to help somebody be more relaxed or help them fall asleep, then when they're experiencing withdrawal, what they will experience is anxiety and restlessness and insomnia. It may even get so bad that they, you know, are profoundly depressed and consider suicide. The withdrawal symptoms can often be much worse than the original problems the person came with.

And the withdrawal is very, very difficult, sometimes quite dangerous. It may take months or years to really be accomplished. People are jumping out of their skin, feeling terrific anxiety, having all sorts of physiological symptoms that are difficult to bear. People cannot stop this medicine except in the slowest possible way with very gradual reductions in dose.

So this is how I cut my pills. So I'm doing here a 10% taper. So I take the pill. I weigh it.

So a whole pill at two milligrams weighs 0.15. Now I need 10% of that. You don't want to take off too much because you're going to waste the pills. So it's almost there actually.

That's 10%. Yeah. The first time I tapered, I didn't have my scale as yet, so I was just eyeballing because I was determined to get off. Well, your body will tell you if you're handling the cuts, based on symptoms.

So it took me a while to get from 2 to 1.6. It was 1.64. That's all I could go.

TYPING

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So this group has almost 2,300 members. And people just post stuff, "How's everyone doing today?" Let's see. "I'm in a strange window today. Up dose for almost two days." Up dose is when you're at a certain dose and the symptoms get really bad, so you go back to the original dose, where you weren't feeling so bad.

Everyone has their unique stuff running through you. No two persons are alike. I had brain zap, I had tremors, I had severe night sweats. I have a symptom where it feels like things are crawling inside my body, just, just moving.

And I came across this image, and I was like, "Wow, that's exactly how it is." Nobody understands this. And if you don't have support, you will lose yourself. I've been a part of these groups since August of last year. And since August of last year, we lost three people to suicide in my support groups.

Three. We lost a 50-something-year-old woman whose doctor cold-turkeyed her off of Klonopin, and she suffered. And she has two little boys, and she walked in front of a train because she couldn't deal with it anymore. About a month ago, we lost a 40-something-year-old guy.

He shot himself in the head, blew his head off. So we're losing people in this fight. I think about it all the time. What if my symptoms get to the point where I can't make it?

What am I going to do? Let's go back to the start of this disease model in the 1980s, OK? Now, the first drug that was tested in this new era was Xanax (alprazolam) for panic disorder. And here was the study they conducted.

They compared Xanax versus a placebo group, and the primary outcome measure was the number of panic attacks on average per week. And after four weeks, Xanax was doing better, fewer panic attacks. At eight weeks, the Xanax patients were doing no better than placebo. And then at the end of 14 weeks, the Xanax patients were doing worse than they were at the beginning and much, much worse than the placebo patients.

The trial told of harm done. It told of people who are going to get addicted. When they came off, they'd have all sorts of withdrawal symptoms and some people unable to get off, OK? That's what the study showed.

What did they report? They didn't report the eight-week results. They focused on the four-week results because that was the story that told of an effective new treatment for panic disorder, and completely hid the 14-week results. Pretty soon, Xanax became one of the bestselling drugs in the country.

It is still prescribed left and right. And what did we have in the early '80s? A story of science that told of harm done. The longer you take a study out, the more likely you are to see people not doing well on that drug, right, or developing side effects from that drug.

So the pharmaceutical industry doesn't favor long-term studies for monetary reasons and for outcome reasons. They don't want to show that their drug actually doesn't do well. The gorilla in the room is the pharmaceutical industry. Drug companies spend something like $80 billion a year on marketing and lobbying.

They spend much, much less on research. And most of the research they do is really a tool of marketing. There's as much marketing in the tests that are devised to measure the outcomes, in the investigators that are hired to conduct a study. All of that stuff is marketing, but it's presented and manufactured and published as science.

So here's how it's done and how it was done. The pharmaceutical companies funneled all sorts of money to what are called "thought leaders": academic psychiatrists at prestigious American universities-- Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins. And those academic psychiatrists began working for the drug companies as consultants, serving as their speakers, advisers, et cetera. You would start with a clinical study of the drug, but who's designing the study?

The pharmaceutical companies. They know how to design it to make their drug look good. That's step one. Who then analyzes the data?

Well, their own people do it. It's done by the drug companies themselves. Third, then, who writes the papers? It's actually ghostwriters hired by the drug companies to write up the study.

They now present this study to the people that they want to be the big names of the study. And then those thought leaders basically sign off on the ghostwritten papers, and they become the "authors" of the published paper. The former editors of the medical journals, like "JAMA" and the "New England Journal of Medicine" and "BMJ," the "British Medical Journal," they've all said that, like, "Basically, we became vehicles for story laundering." It was a corrupted creation of an evidence base. Now, I'm a practicing doctor in some town.

What am I going to believe? I'm going to believe, you know, Mister Dr. Bigwig at Harvard University that this is the best science. So my obligation is to use the very drug they say is so great.

So, for example, Prozac. Prozac didn't really work in the trials. Prozac had all sorts of adverse effects. And those of us who are old enough to remember when Prozac came to market,

the drug itself was on the cover of magazines

"Our powers are such now that we can now give you "whatever personality you want. That's how great our knowledge is advancing." That was the story told. What did science tell us? Do you know what they found?

In the 1970s, very first studies done in Germany, What do they see? All sorts of psychotic events, worsening of depression, homicidal, suicidal impulses, so much that the German authorities said, "This is a dangerous drug. We're not going to approve it." And now go read the studies that were reported by the Americans. The psychosis is gone.

The homicidal problems are gone. Imagine you're a mother, and I know mothers who said to their kid who got depressed over breaking up with a girl or something like that. So the doctor says, "Oh, Prozac doesn't increase suicide risk." And then a week later, that kid hangs himself. That's in a real case.

Can you think of any worse corruption than that? It has been shown that half of the deaths that occur in psychiatric drug trials, they are never published. They disappear.

You have an expression in America

"Torture your data until they confess." And this happens all the time. The difference between an honest data analysis and one you have manipulated can be worth billions on the world market. So what do you think they'll do?

"DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPY" PLAYING

You have an expression in America

Don't worry Be happy Don't worry, be happy

INDISTINCT CONVERSATION

You have an expression in America

I'm still nowhere near the person I was, but this is how I explain it to my wife. Like, I know I love her. I know I can remember, I can recall the feelings and the sensations of when we met, when we dated, and when we got married, but I don't feel love. I don't feel love for her.

I don't feel love for my dog. I don't feel love or connection. I mean, it's almost-- like, I don't feel for other people's concerns or feelings or emotions. And I think that's multifaceted.

I think it's partly the drugs. I think it's partly brought on by the severe trauma of going through the experience. I don't know. My family hasn't necessarily understood why I've chosen to come back and stay in an abusive relationship.

Why do they define it as abusive? I mean, I said some hurtful things. Yes, and when you were in the absolute depths of it, you were abusive. In what way?

Verbally abusive? Yes. - OK. Not physically abusive.

- Not physically, no, but verbally abusive. I can recall telling you, you've just got to give me time.

CHUCKLES

You have an expression in America

I was so mad at you. Why were you so mad? Well, because we had given it time and it wasn't getting really any better. And I didn't feel like that treatment plan was necessarily working.

And you said some pretty horrible things. And it happened so quickly after we got married, I felt like it was a bait-and-switch kind of deal. So what do you think about you trying to get off the Vyvanse this summer? I would like to try.

Yeah? I think it's going to be hard. Honestly, what I'm most scared about, honey, is that I haven't heard, "I'm here to support you through this, regardless of what happens." And that's--Are you listening? I am.

OK. It doesn't feel like it. Mm-hmm. I'm listening.

I have been through hell with you and have held you while you banged your head against the wall. And this is my fear coming from the things that were said when you were in your depths, and "That's it," you're going to say, "Well, maybe this isn't the right relationship for us." Yeah, I hear you. And I have put so much into it. Yeah.

There really is no research on the long-term impact of stimulant use, but the longer you're on them, the higher the dose, the more risks that you incur over time and the less actual benefit you get from that drug. Hello. - Hi. How are you?

Good. - Good. So how has your focus been doing? Not as hot as I would like it.

I kind of feel like I've reached the tolerance. How long overall has it been that you've been on stimulants in total? Fifteen years, at least. OK.

Your dosage is as high as I've ever seen for myself. But if it's just not great, then normally we would try Adderall. OK, and I'm actually interested in decreasing and getting off. Right.

Yeah, well, I mean, you always can. If I were you myself, I wouldn't just abruptly stop. Well, no, I'm not interested in abruptly stopping. That's what my husband did, and that was not pretty.

You could actually open a capsule and gradually, day after day, just take out a little bit more. OK. At what rate? You could kind of judge.

You could maybe drop 1/3 of the amount out, one of them, wait for a few days, take 1/3 out of the other one. You know, just kind of wean off. If, on the other hand, you said, "Definitely it's better to be on the medicine, but it's still not great," then I would recommend trying Adderall just because it has got a little bit of a higher potency. Yeah.

- Yeah. Well, thank you. I appreciate your help. - Yeah, sure.

Anything else? I think that's it. - No? Super.

All right. Thank you very much. You are very welcome... - I appreciate it.

Oh, Brooklyn. Well, we're going to see the doctor. We're going to see that doctor that put me on these drugs. There's a hidden camera right here, and I got some wires underneath all this.

Well, this is it. There is the office right there. What do you know about benzos? They can't come off.

Why do you think it's so hard to get people off benzos? Yeah, but do you know the kind of pain and discomfort? You didn't tell me that. You said, "You can stop anytime you want.

There will be no problem to stop..." Yes, but that's not the impression that you gave. I didn't know I was gonna have withdrawal symptoms. If you had told me, "By the way, this drug can give you withdrawal symptoms," then I would have made my own decision. I based my decision in taking this drug because of you, because of the trust that I had in you.

If I was given the clear picture as to what the profile of this drug was, I would have said, "No freaking way." He's following the script. He said, "I went to medical school, "and I'm a board-certified psychiatrist, and I follow everything that they say to diagnose people." So basically, he doesn't believe that he's doing anything wrong. We go into this field because we want to help people, but it's very difficult to know where to turn for unbiased evidence on these issues. The pharmaceutical industry has tremendous influence over what doctors learn, how they learn it.

So general lack of knowledge about the dangers of these drugs is one of the main reasons that doctors continue to prescribe even when they're inadvertently causing their patients harm. "You know, right before she went on medication, she was just fine. She was a little depressed, but she was not having psychotic episodes, she was not having body tics, she was not hallucinating. Do you think that the medication is actually the cause of this?" It was as if I was asking the most irrelevant question in the world.

I never got a real response. It was just not worthy of their attention. The more that we were talking about, "This is who Rebecka is, we know our daughter, we know this medication has turned her into someone else." We said, you know, "We don't think she should be on medication, and here's why..." And we read off the list of symptoms. He basically said, you know, "I think this is a really bad decision, a huge mistake." It was a reminder of a year in which, by and large, whenever we went down this path of, "Is the medication harmful?" we got no support from the psychiatrist that we saw.

None. "If it's not medication, then you're not doing it right." But we stuck to our guns. And this sounds very dramatic, but I feel that decision saved our daughter's life. I kept thinking when she was first telling us that she was feeling depressed that I wouldn't even have had the vocabulary to say that when I was her age.

So that just tells you a little bit about how pervasive this has become in our society. I see children who are acting out or feeling distressed. They are like the canaries in the coal mine, you know, that are basically shouting out, like, "There is something wrong!" But, you know, we quiet them. I got out of the hospital.

They took me off medication. Within a few months, I was back to normal. Not normal, but my hallucinations were completely gone, and what was left was the issues to begin with, the anxiety and the eating disorder. And then we could move to focus on those because those were the problems.

College was something that I never thought that I would do. During that year and even afterwards, I was like, "There's no way I can go to college. I can't handle that." But here I am handling it. And it's paradise for someone who loves school as much as I do.

So I'm just kind of being a normal college student, having fun, because that's what I can actually do now. That's our sorority, la la We're proud, we're the best Better than all the rest La la la la la la la whoo, whoo

LAUGHTER

You have an expression in America

So why did you do this for me? I was just as concerned as you were about coming off the drugs, and I wanted to make sure that you were in charge, right, you did what you felt was best, but you also had the tools laid out for you. The best way is essentially an exponential taper, and that's what we plotted out here. And what that leads to is this nice, slow decline over an extended period of time.

Do you think it was of any value? Well, yeah, because when I did it myself, I went down too quickly, and it felt horrible. And this gave me a clear plan with specific dates and numbers. It was very helpful.

Math can be love.

LAUGHTER

You have an expression in America

I see glimmers of the old Dave much more often than I have in several years. He's not there all the time, but I want to come home now, whereas before, it was, "OK...take a couple deep breaths and come home." But now I want to come home, which is, it's a good feeling. It's nice to feel that again. So he got killed in action a month to the day after I was medevacked out.

So now, I'm processing this grief 13 years later, which most people would say, "You should be over it by now." You know, I just had to call one of my soldiers and be like, "Can you tell me the story again? "Because the last time I heard it, I was on drugs, and I didn't feel it." So now I need to sit by him and think, like, "Look what this war did to us," and feel it.

INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS

You have an expression in America

FOOTSTEPS

You have an expression in America

Aw. Yay! Whoo!

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