In this episode of The Truth with Lisa Boothe, Lisa digs into America’s mental health crisis in light of the tragic deaths of Hollywood icon Rob Reiner and his wife Michele — allegedly involving psychiatric medication struggles. Board-certified psychiatrist and former FDA medical officer, Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring joins Lisa to discuss the risks of psychiatric drug over-prescription, hidden side effects of SSRIs and antipsychotics, the impact on youth and developing brains, withdrawal challenges, and how Big Pharma influences the mental health narrative. If you’re curious about the long-term effects of antidepressants, the limits of current research, and how to approach mental health treatment more safely and effectively — this episode is a must-listen.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Truth with Lisa Booth, where we get
to the heart of the issues that matter to you. Today,
we're talking about mental health. The nation has been grappling
with the heartbreaking tragedy surrounding the deaths of Hollywood icon
Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle, allegedly at the hands
of their son, Nick, who has struggled with schizophrenia, substance abuse,
(00:21):
and psychiatric medication adjustments. But the story has really once
again thrust America's mental health crisis into the spotlight. Today,
we're joined by Board certified psychiatrists and former FDA medical
officer doctor Joseph Witt. During Doctor Joseph is a leading
voice challenging the over prescription of psychiatric drugs, from the
(00:46):
glamorization of SSRIs on TikTok among young women, to sort
of the hidden risks of long lasting use of some
of these drugs, the potential push to homicidal tendencies as well,
that we don't really talk about as a society. Now
that a lot of these drugs have been mainstreamed, they're
(01:07):
discussed very casually, in a cavalier way. So we're going
to talk about this surge in use. What it means
for you, what it means for the country, and also
how big Pharma has fueled a lot of it. So
stay tuned for doctor Joseph wit During. Well, Doctor Joseph
(01:29):
whit During. It's great to have you on the show, sir.
You've been talking about a lot of important things in
the country just over dependency on drugs, particularly mental health drugs.
So really looking forward to getting your insight into all
of this.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Thanks for having me, Lisa.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
The concepts of mental health as well as some of
these psychiatric drugs, it's really on everyone's radar after the
tragic deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle, allegedly
at the hands of his son Nick, who has a
lot history of substance abuse, mental health struggles, also reported
schizophrenia diagnosis, past use of a lot of different drugs
(02:08):
for those things, antidepressant psychiatric drugs. From your work as
a former FDA officer and a psychiatrist who has been
soundingly alarm on all this stuff, what does this tragedy
reveal about the risks of sort of overreliance on medications
for some of these complex health issues.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, Lisa, So you know we often typically in a
case like this, we wouldn't even be talking about psychiatric medications.
You know, and a man who you know, troubled, man
with the history of drug abuse, I think most people
would say, well, you know, maybe it was some illegal
drugs he may have been using, or maybe there was
some animosity between the parents. I mean, these things happen. Unfortunately,
(02:49):
murder happens within families. The only reason why we're talking
about psychiatric medications is I think TMZ got the scoop
on this, and they found out from a source that
he had just been in a very elite psychiatric institution
and while he was there, he was having trouble with medications,
(03:12):
and so with the diagnosis of schizophrenia, we immediately go
to while he was probably having trouble with antipsychotics, it
could have been some other medications as well. And so
the reason everyone's talking about psychiatric meds is that antipsychotics
in rare instances can make people homicidal. They have a
long history of doing this that is not disputed. This
(03:35):
is also in the drug labels for several of these
medications for homicidality and suicidality, and that makes this story
really interesting. From a drug safety perspective, because now, you know,
with the I guess the defense for Nick and also
(03:57):
just figuring out what happened, they need to dive into,
you know, is there were there signs when he was
hospitalized that these drugs were making his mood unstable? Should
he have been let out of the hospital, you know
for this Christmas party? And then also is there an
alternative explanation for him doing this apart from mood instability
(04:23):
from the drugs, you know, And they're going to have
to start looking at, you know, what was his relationship
like with his parents, was it strained where they're talking
about I don't know, like a will or something like that,
because it is possible, and this has been shown in
multiple lawsuits in the past that these drugs actually can
be the straw that breaks the camel's back. They can
(04:45):
be the causal factor for driving violent events like this.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
You know. Look, I do think sometimes people have you know,
chemical imbalances. But I think the challenge we're facing is
they're given out like way too. It's too cavalier, right,
They're not taking it seriously the impact that these drugs
can have on the body. And then you're layering them
too right, So you know Nick, if he's on antidepressants
and then they're giving him drugs first schizophrenia, Like, how
(05:12):
do some of these drugs overlap with one another? I imagine
you know, the more you're taking obviously the bigger impact
to the body and the mind.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yes, Lisa, you're right. You know the point that you
brought up on, like layering these drugs is a really
good one, because these drugs are never studied in combination.
That that's not how the FDA looks at them, and
it is very common for people to accumulate drugs. I
won't be surprised when we finally get maybe some of
(05:43):
the reports from the court when this case goes to
trial that Nick may have been on five different medications,
because I certainly see that a lot of the time,
and there is mass overuse of these medications. Now this
this is I think people often suspect this, but they
(06:04):
assume that it's safe. They say, well, yes, we use
a lot of these medications. But it must be because
they're safe. It must be because we've got great long
term data on how these drugs help people over time,
and you know, the combination of medications. We must have
data for that listen. I've been at the FDA, I've
worked in several pharmaceutical companies directly on psychiatric drugs. We
(06:25):
don't have any evidence that these medications work any longer
than about a year. So that's the first thing that's
really concerning there. And so the reason that these drugs
are used so much, it's not because there's a great
evidence based supporting long term use and combination. It's really
because of commercial factors. You know, back in the nineties,
(06:47):
we had health insurance companies sort of conglomerate and they
started to control the flow of patients and they were
able to have doctors, they were able to bid down
the price of reimbursement for visits, and for many doctors
to make ends meet, that meant they had to see
four patients in an hour. And that's still the system
we're in today. And when you're dealing with patients who
(07:08):
have emotional problems and you have fifteen minutes to help them,
really the only thing you can do is prescribe a medication.
There's no time to really understand someone's problems. There's no
time to motivate them to do tried and true non
drug approaches, whether it's dietary modification or exercise, or socially
reconnecting them with people, or doing even things like mind
(07:29):
body work like breathing and meditation that goes out the window.
All you can essentially do is put someone on a
medication and adjust the dose up and down or hold
it the same. That is why we have fifteen percent
of Americans on these medications and five percent of kids
on them. It's not because the evidence space really supports
it or is strong. It's because of an economic convenience.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
You know. It's interesting because we hear all these stories.
I wish I could remember. I was reading a calumn
a woman posted it was in you know, pretty major publication.
I've read it like a week or so. I'm just
remembering it now at the top of my head. And
she was writing, you know, posted it in response to
the Nick Reiner story and was reminding people how you know,
(08:14):
she got her son on antidepressants and they encouraged her
to get her son all these different things and it
just like totally made him worse. And you know, there's
also articles about this. You know, Chris Burks, she lost
her nineteen year old son, Bryson, to suicide. And he
you know, he was a football player, full of energy
and all these different things, and he was actually given
(08:37):
antidepressants not for depression but as a treatment for the pain,
and then he tapered off the medication but then ended
up committing suicide after that. You know, there's a lot
of danger in sort of tapering off of these drugs
as well sort of what goes through the mind or
you know, talk about sort of the impact on the
(08:58):
body of that time as well.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Yeah, yeah, these are two really good stories to talk
about that people don't often hear about from their doctors.
And so, you know, to touch briefly on the first one,
these drugs can definitely make people worse in the short term.
I mean, that's why they have black box warnings on them.
They and when you look at the placebo controlled trials,
(09:24):
you know, this is you know, getting a group of
people who put on a placebo or sugar pill and
you compare them to a group of people put on
like the SSRIs. There are more suicide attempts on the
group who are taking the anidepressants, and so that's very
disturbing because what it's showing is that yes, these drugs
they do lower kind of the symptoms of depression by
(09:46):
kind of muting emotions, but that doesn't actually confer, that
doesn't lead to less suicide. In fact, it makes it worse.
And so when you tell me the story about this
woman whose kid got worse on the drugs and became
more suicidal, that's the average that that is actually the
norm for children on these medications, which is why it's insane.
(10:07):
It's absolutely insane that we have five percent of our
kids on them. And then when we transition over and
we talk about this other case of this healthy football
youth who came off the I think it was symbolta
for pain and he became suicidal. You know, this is
my bread and butter. This is what I do. I
(10:28):
help people come off psychiatric medications. And it's becoming more
widely talked about now that if you come off these
medications too quickly, you can actually cause a neurological injury
called protracted withdrawal, which is like having a concussion. It's
like you get hit in the head really hard, and
it can be severely destabilizing. There's something about severe withdrawal
(10:50):
symptom symptoms in a small group of people that can
set off this electrical storm in the brain that is
just very harmful. And you know, in in my space,
a lot of people become very suicidal when they're pulled
off these medications too quickly.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Quick break. If you like what you're hearing, please sure
on social media or send it to your family and friends.
And there's a difference to I mean, isn't it more
dangerous for young people than the adults on some of
these drugs as well, because you know, obviously their their
minds are reforming, their brains are reforming. You know, maybe
talk about a little bit of the differences between or
(11:28):
are they or are there differences? You know, walk us
through that.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
I mean, there's a lot of concerning data about the
effects of antidepressants on the developing mind and I think, gosh,
the best way to actually look at this is with
the MRI studies and so just going back to human
human babies who were born to mothers exposed to SSRIs.
(11:55):
So so all of these drugs cross the placenta. When
they do MRI studies of the babies and they compare
them to babies who weren't exposed to SSRIs, they find
clear differences in the structure of the brain afterwards. This
has been confirmed in over twelve MRI studies. They then
follow these human kids up to adolescence and they find
(12:18):
that the kids who were you know, the kids who
were exposed in utero, and this is not even like,
you know, they stopped the medication during childhood, they have
enduring changes in areas of the brain like the amygdala,
which are involved in emotional processing. And so that to
me signals that there there are impacts of exposing the
(12:39):
brain to drugs that alter your neurochemistry during this critical
period of neurological development. And you know, we've also seen
this with monkeys. We've had two huge monkey studies, well
huge huge monkey studies, like thirty monkeys. We had a
monkey study from the NIMH and oh so at UC
Davis that put juvenile monkeys, you know, young monkeys on
(13:02):
these antidepressants and they found that it disrupted their sleep,
it led to more complacent behavior. You know, they found
clear structural changes in the brains afterwards, and there were
attentional problems and concentration issues and so these you know,
it is not a benign thing to put some to
put a developing brain on a chemical for several years
(13:24):
and to just take a step back from that. And
I can just speak clinically because I take a lot
of people off these medications. You know, I have women
in their forties who have been on since they, you know,
they were teenagers, and when they come off, they get
hit with all of their emotions and they say that
it's like learning to manage emotions for the first time
(13:46):
in their life. So they feel emotionally stunted in a
way because they've been blunted for such a large period
of their life, and then they're figuring it all out
when they come off. So on multiple levels, it is
something that is very concerning.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
You know, you had said something about a year mark
earlier in our discussion, and was it that they've not
been studied beyond a year or they're not supposed to
be used beyond the year.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
That there's never been a randomized, placebo controlled trial that
has gone longer than a year. So, you know, most
people when they get put on an antidepressant, the doctor
says they're safe and effective, and they and I guess
if you're you know, a layperson, you might just say, yeah, well,
I bet you there was some study where they put
people on these meds for maybe five years or maybe
(14:31):
even two years, because that's how you know, when we
look at the duration of antidepressant use among users, seventy
percent of them have been on them for two years
or more. So I think most people would say, I
bet you, we have good evidence that these drugs are
still working, you know, after a couple of years, you know,
especially since they caused tolerance and they wear off over
time and all of that. But the majority of the
(14:53):
studies of these medications they only last eight to twelve weeks.
Those are the short term studies and the you know,
the longer studies which the FDA uses to say that
they're safe for longer term use, that they last about
fifteen months. And I think for many people their jaws
drop when they hear this, because, you know, they wish
(15:15):
they were told, hey, these are safe and effective for
hey the fifteen months they were studied for. Outside of that,
we have no idea what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
So what what does long term on these drugs due
to the brain? I mean, does it permanently people come
off them, Does it permanently change sort of the you know,
balance in your brain, or I guess, are there long
term impacts even if you come off them.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
This is an uncomfortable area. And so the truth is
I don't have any statistical data, or no one has
any statistical data because it hasn't been done in a
study where there's you know, a thousand people and there's
a clear like denominator. But if we just look at
things high level, like if you look at the popular
level data, as anydepressants have gone up, the rate of
(16:04):
suicide has gone up. So what that tells me is
these drugs aren't preventing suicide. They might actually be making
some people worse over the long run. When we look
at naturalistic studies, so these aren't experimental like these are
where doctors will just follow a group of people over time. Recently,
a few years ago, there was a study of six
hundred Swiss youth and they followed them for thirty years
(16:28):
with depression questionnaires, and they found that the kids who
were on the antidepressants compared to the kids who didn't
take any depressants, even after controlling for you know, education level,
which is frequently a metric for you know, how your
economic status and how much money you make, and they
control for the severity of the depression and family history.
(16:52):
Even after looking at all of that, they find that
the people who take these medications long term actually end
up worse. And then if we couple that with the
monkey studies I told you just a moment ago there,
there there are clear changes, you know when when you
look at what happens to you know, to either the
(17:14):
monkeys or the humans who who are exposed to these
medications long term. So yes, they do appear to be
making people worse in the long run. And this has
been you know, this isn't just you know, you know me,
you know, one person who used to work at the
FDA talking about this. This is discussed by you know,
Giovanni Fava, you know, and other psychiatric professors out there
(17:37):
who who have proposed reasons why this is happening. And
this also isn't just a unique thing to any depressants.
I mean, when you look at anti psychotics long term,
they cause brain impairment. It's called tart of diykinesia, and
there's permanent movement disorders. When you look at benz atiazepines,
they worsen. These are drugs like xanax and klonopin. Accepted
(18:00):
that they worsen anxiety frequently in people over time. If
you look at some medications for Parkinson's that affect the
dopamine circuits, they can worsen symptoms of Parkinson's long term,
and even when you look at things like alcohol and methamphetamine.
And to me, when I take all of this together,
all I can say is it makes sense because I don't.
(18:22):
I do not think the human brain really has, you know,
is evolved to handle years or decades in a drugged
state without something breaking eventually.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
But yet they've been turned into a lifestyle accessory or
you know, viral content. And you've contributed to major reporting,
including a Wall Street Journal piece about how gen D
women on TikTok or sort of glamorizing antidepressants and how
it's become sort of this cool cultural thing and this
normalization of it. But that doesn't that sort of deludes
(19:00):
the seriousness of it. So I guess, you know, why
have the into sort of a lifestyle accessory and why
as a society are we uh, you know, not telling
the truth that there's dangerous to it as well?
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Lisa, It's such a good question. And you know, if
I put on my hat as a social commentator. Somehow,
like having a mental illness got like swept up into
the whole like oppression thing. I mean, we've just come
through a ten year period where you know, if you're
a sexual minority, or if you're a certain race, or
if you're you know, you know, agenda, you got so
(19:38):
you had, you got a social currency, you got you know,
it was you were seen to be you know, oppressed
in a way, and you know, and and and it
mattered and and people treated you well for it. And
so the whole mental health thing got swept up into that,
and they started saying, oh, you know, these people with
mental illness, they're so stig tized, and you know, they
(20:02):
really need to be supported. We had big campaigns go on,
like the post your pill campaign a few years ago,
where everyone was just like, hey, you know, I take
prozac or I take this anti psychotic, and they went
completely viral. And so, you know, I think people do
that because it's incentivized. I think you see it on TV,
(20:25):
you see it on media, you see celebrities talk about
their medications. I think the general sense is that you know,
if you have a mental illness and you're taking a
medication or several medications, you have some kind of you know,
you're a complex person, you're a sensitive person, you have
more depth to you, and so it it has become
(20:46):
something that we've incentivized people to identify with. And yes,
it is dangerous because you know, at a very simple sense,
people think it's cool and they think there's some kind
of advantage to having to taking a medication which you
know can annihilate your sex drive and cause a whole
bunch of problems long term.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
So it is your stance that people should never be
on them, or that we should just treat them with
the seriousness that you know they deserve.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Yees. So I don't think we should throw the baby
out with the bathwater, so to speak. I mean, I
think we just have to have a very sober view
of these medications. They're not fixing any chemical imbalance. There's
no serotonin deficits in depression or dopamine deficits in schizophrenia. Essentially,
what doctors have is an armamentarium of drugs which reliably induce,
(21:36):
you know, a drug state, which can be therapeutic, so
especially in the short term. So that's really where they
have their strongest use. So you know, if you put
someone on a medication like an antidepressant, predictably it induces
a numb to state. Now, if you have someone who's
paralyzed by anxiety, they will experience that as therapeutic. If
that anxiety is so severe it's leading to someone being suicie,
(22:00):
they will experience that as being life saving. And so
it is a tool. But we also need to understand
that when you use drugs to essentially mask symptoms, a
whole bunch of issues arise. So firstly the tolerance problems,
they wear off over time, and also there's an opportunity
(22:20):
cost if you get bad medical care. So what's bad
medical care? Bad medical care is you come in, you
have these symptoms, you just get put on a drug.
A lot of the time, these symptoms, especially with like
anxiety and depression, they're due to very normal things going
on in people's lives. You know, they're due to you know,
very poor diets. You know, they're due to a lack
(22:41):
of exercise. They're due to social isolation. Sometimes they're due
to economic issues and stresses, you know, burnout, you know,
difficulty looking after kids. These are all completely real problems
that can be really serious of people. And if you
just put someone on a drug and you don't help
them in their lives, you're essentially just going to make
(23:02):
them worse over the long run, because I don't think
these drugs actually help people long term. And so the
way I like to think about it is do everything
you possibly can without medications. So use all the non
drug approaches. If you need to use them in the
short term, that's fine, but long term use should be
avoided at all costs and only considered when all of
(23:22):
the non drug approaches have already been tried and failed.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
What role has big pharma played in sort of normalizing
and mainstreaming these drugs.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, great question, Lisa. So I always think there's two
major forces that have led to the over prescription epidemic.
The first one I touched on before, which was the
how we've you know, the economics, you know, the health
insurance issued driving doctors to want to deliver care and
in these short visits. But the other big elephant in
(23:56):
the room is the drug companies. Now, you know we
spend I mean, we spend an insane amount of money
on mental health each year. Each year, I think it's
like a three hundred billion dollar industry, you know, and
if you compare that to you know, the defense budget,
I think it's like ninety billion, and so it just eclipses.
(24:18):
I mean, it's just it's so huge, it's insane. And
in that group, the pharmaceutical industry are like the biggest actors.
And so these guys have billions of dollars at their
disposal to shape the narrative around medications. And the way
this happens is, you know, one, they can buy influence
with doctors. Many academics at big institutions discover early on
(24:43):
that if they work with the drug companies and their
drug and they're friendly with them, and they run their
clinical trials and they don't criticize the medications, there's actually
a lot of career advantages. And so you get and
because and so because of that, a lot of the
people who are in charge of academic institutions at Ivy
League universities, people that the public look up to as
(25:05):
for advice, they're actually very pro drug because their careers
have been built on developing the medications. That's because of
Big Farmer. Oftentimes, you also don't get any coverage of
negative stories about medications in the media because the pharmaceutical
industry spends a lot of money buying ads and it's
(25:27):
just awkward, and broadcasters will avoid this kind of issue.
These drug companies they also pay pr firms as well,
so they have a whole series of journalists who are
there ready to run cover. So if there is a
negative story that comes out about a drug, they will
have a whole bunch of whether it's medical articles or
(25:47):
just lay articles in New York Times places like that
that will say, you know, I can't believe this professor
said this drug was so bad. They're actually wrong. They're dangerous.
You know, they're scaring people away from medications, they're stigmatizing people. Well,
it's like, you know, it's what you would imagine if
you're a billion dollar industry and you know your cash
cow psychiatric medications, you are going to control that narrative
(26:10):
and defend it at all costs. And that's why there's
just I mean, these medications are looked at as like
darlings right now. You cannot criticize them. You look like
you're a cruel person or someone that's against like a modern,
safe and life changing intervention, and and they aren't these things.
But that's what that sort of money and influence has
(26:32):
been able to do in just the cultural narrative.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Yeah, I feel like we went through a lot of
this with COVID as well, where you know, if you
had questions about lockdowns or questions about the vaccines, you know,
you were sort of shut down, and you know you're
labeled anti science or you don't care about people. You know.
It's like, I think we kind of all learned how
big of a role big pharma has on our country
(26:58):
and sort of the power of that, or even you
know the power of people like doctor Fauci previously at
the NIH and shutting down research that he doesn't like,
or or the fear of scientists and studying things who
want grants and fearful that that's going to be cut
off if they, you know, run a foul of some
of these alphabet agencies. You know, So what do people do, right,
(27:22):
Because there's people who are on some of these drugs
and you know, they listen to their doctors or maybe
they need it in the short term that you laid
out previously, you know, how do they get off them?
What does that process look like? I know that's part
of your expertise in tapering people off these So you know,
what are your recommendations there?
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Yeah, So what I would recommend is, you know, don't
jump off these medications without talking to a doctor or
a professional that you trust. Fust Ideally, you want to
prepare yourself to come off by identifying the areas in
the life that lead to your depression. Sometimes they're super
concrete and it's you know, your you know, bad relationship
or that you don't like. Other times it can seem
(28:02):
like the symptoms come out of nowhere, in which case
things like diet, exercise, mindfulness are really really good. So
you want to identify the reason why you're depressed in
the first place and try and address start addressing that
with non drug causes now. Afterwards, when you come off
these medications, especially if you've been on them for several years,
(28:25):
the worst thing that you can do is come off
in like two months or something like that. Your brain
has taken years to adapt to the presence of this medication,
and if you come off quickly like that, many people
will go into withdrawal. And typically what happens is the
doctor will say, well, you know, we tried to bring
you off and now you're having all of these symptoms.
(28:46):
This is proof that your underlying depression is coming back.
You know, you're chronically mentally ill and you just need
to be on these medications for life. For so many
people that is not the case. They're simply in drug
withdrawal and it could be avoided if they go slower.
And so two things that I would recommend you do
first is that you start with a five or a
(29:08):
ten percent reduction. And so this can be You can
do this in two ways. If you have a tablet,
you can get a small Duweler's scale and you can
shave off small increments of the tablet with a with
a raiser, and then you can slowly lower it down
in five to ten increments. And you just want to
listen to your body. So you do a reduction, you
(29:31):
wait two weeks. If your symptoms are manageable, then you
do another reduction, and so on and so forth. And
in this way you can slowly bring yourself down. If
you start to have a lot of withdrawal symptoms, go
up to the last dose that you tolerated, wait a
couple of weeks and do a smaller reduction. And when
you do it in that way, you're going to make
(29:51):
sure that you're moving at a pace that your body
can handle. The final thing that I want to mention
is that the most challenging part of coming off psychiatric
meta is just at the very end, when you get
to the lowest dose. Typically it's the dose that you're
started on. That's when most of the drug will start
to disconnect from the receptor because there's no longer all
this you know, residual drug floating around your brain from
(30:14):
the higher doses. You know, when you're at that lowest dose,
every time you remove a little bit, you're disengaging a
lot of receptors. And so do not be discouraged if
it becomes harder at the end. Sometimes that last bit
can take just as long as the top you know,
seventy five percent of the taper, and so that last
bit just move extra slowe and for whatever reason. I mean,
(30:36):
if you want to find out you know more than this,
like a two minute bit that I'm sharing now is
you can come over to my YouTube channel. It's doctor
Joseph Josef and we have just full playlists that can
completely go through all of these tapering tips on how
to come off the medication safely.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Got to take a quick commercial break more with doctor
Witt during on the other side, you know, and before
we go, we've seen sort of the Make America Healthy
Again movement and r FK Junior as Health and Human
Services Secretary sort of address and touch these previously untouchables,
(31:15):
you know, like over you know, overdependence on some of
these drugs, or concerns with vaccines, or you know, things
that potentially could lead to autism. I know you discussed
the dangers of taking these while pregnant, But what do
you kind of hope that we get from our FK
Junior and from the Trump administration's desire to sort of
(31:39):
look under the hood and dig a little deeper on
all of these things. You know.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
The first thing is just that we're having these conversations now.
I think a lot of this problem can be solved
with just informed consent, you know, just just with parents knowing,
oh wow, you know, we actually don't know what these
drugs do. After about eighteen months. If I'm going to
put my child who has a developing brain, you know,
(32:08):
on this drug, I want to have crystal clear knowledge
that this is going to work, and we don't have that.
I think just people knowing that it's going to make
a big difference. So so you know, adults knowing that.
I also think that the federal agencies have been so
(32:29):
captured by the drug company I mean drug companies. I mean,
as someone who used to work at the FDA, most
of the people who work at the FDA are like
former academics who have gone through you know, you know,
they've been groomed essentially by the pharmaceutical industry to look
at things in a certain way. They exist in this community.
And what I see Bobby doing is he's putting very
(32:53):
ethical people in charge of these organizations and allowing them
to build the team. And so I think if you
can get someone really good the National Institute of Mental Health,
we can start to get some really great research. I mean,
we may get a long term study on any depressants.
We may get one that compares it to things like exercise, meditation,
dietary change. I mean, these are all the things that
(33:15):
doctors really want to know so they can help their patients.
And so I think informed consent and also just improving
the leadership within the federal agencies. And I think he's
going to do that. I think he's really doing a
great job so far.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Doctor witt During, thank you so much for your time. Sir.
We really appreciate very interesting stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Thanks Lisa, thanks for having me have a good one.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
That was doctor Joseph witt During. Appreciate him for me
in the time to come on the show. Appreciate you
guys at home for listening every Tuesday and Thursday, but
you can listen throughout the week. I also want to
thank my producer, John Cassio for putting the show together.
Until next time.
Welcome to the Truth with Lisa Booth, where we get
to the heart of the issues that matter to you. Today,
we're talking about mental health. The nation has been grappling
with the heartbreaking tragedy surrounding the deaths of Hollywood icon
Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle, allegedly at the hands
of their son, Nick, who has struggled with schizophrenia, substance abuse,
(00:21):
and psychiatric medication adjustments. But the story has really once
again thrust America's mental health crisis into the spotlight. Today,
we're joined by Board certified psychiatrists and former FDA medical
officer doctor Joseph Witt. During Doctor Joseph is a leading
voice challenging the over prescription of psychiatric drugs, from the
(00:46):
glamorization of SSRIs on TikTok among young women, to sort
of the hidden risks of long lasting use of some
of these drugs, the potential push to homicidal tendencies as well,
that we don't really talk about as a society. Now
that a lot of these drugs have been mainstreamed, they're
(01:07):
discussed very casually, in a cavalier way. So we're going
to talk about this surge in use. What it means
for you, what it means for the country, and also
how big Pharma has fueled a lot of it. So
stay tuned for doctor Joseph wit During. Well, Doctor Joseph
(01:29):
whit During. It's great to have you on the show, sir.
You've been talking about a lot of important things in
the country just over dependency on drugs, particularly mental health drugs.
So really looking forward to getting your insight into all
of this.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Thanks for having me, Lisa.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
The concepts of mental health as well as some of
these psychiatric drugs, it's really on everyone's radar after the
tragic deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle, allegedly
at the hands of his son Nick, who has a
lot history of substance abuse, mental health struggles, also reported
schizophrenia diagnosis, past use of a lot of different drugs
(02:08):
for those things, antidepressant psychiatric drugs. From your work as
a former FDA officer and a psychiatrist who has been
soundingly alarm on all this stuff, what does this tragedy
reveal about the risks of sort of overreliance on medications
for some of these complex health issues.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, Lisa, So you know we often typically in a
case like this, we wouldn't even be talking about psychiatric medications.
You know, and a man who you know, troubled, man
with the history of drug abuse, I think most people
would say, well, you know, maybe it was some illegal
drugs he may have been using, or maybe there was
some animosity between the parents. I mean, these things happen. Unfortunately,
(02:49):
murder happens within families. The only reason why we're talking
about psychiatric medications is I think TMZ got the scoop
on this, and they found out from a source that
he had just been in a very elite psychiatric institution
and while he was there, he was having trouble with medications,
(03:12):
and so with the diagnosis of schizophrenia, we immediately go
to while he was probably having trouble with antipsychotics, it
could have been some other medications as well. And so
the reason everyone's talking about psychiatric meds is that antipsychotics
in rare instances can make people homicidal. They have a
long history of doing this that is not disputed. This
(03:35):
is also in the drug labels for several of these
medications for homicidality and suicidality, and that makes this story
really interesting. From a drug safety perspective, because now, you know,
with the I guess the defense for Nick and also
(03:57):
just figuring out what happened, they need to dive into,
you know, is there were there signs when he was
hospitalized that these drugs were making his mood unstable? Should
he have been let out of the hospital, you know
for this Christmas party? And then also is there an
alternative explanation for him doing this apart from mood instability
(04:23):
from the drugs, you know, And they're going to have
to start looking at, you know, what was his relationship
like with his parents, was it strained where they're talking
about I don't know, like a will or something like that,
because it is possible, and this has been shown in
multiple lawsuits in the past that these drugs actually can
be the straw that breaks the camel's back. They can
(04:45):
be the causal factor for driving violent events like this.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
You know. Look, I do think sometimes people have you know,
chemical imbalances. But I think the challenge we're facing is
they're given out like way too. It's too cavalier, right,
They're not taking it seriously the impact that these drugs
can have on the body. And then you're layering them
too right, So you know Nick, if he's on antidepressants
and then they're giving him drugs first schizophrenia, Like, how
(05:12):
do some of these drugs overlap with one another? I imagine
you know, the more you're taking obviously the bigger impact
to the body and the mind.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yes, Lisa, you're right. You know the point that you
brought up on, like layering these drugs is a really
good one, because these drugs are never studied in combination.
That that's not how the FDA looks at them, and
it is very common for people to accumulate drugs. I
won't be surprised when we finally get maybe some of
(05:43):
the reports from the court when this case goes to
trial that Nick may have been on five different medications,
because I certainly see that a lot of the time,
and there is mass overuse of these medications. Now this
this is I think people often suspect this, but they
(06:04):
assume that it's safe. They say, well, yes, we use
a lot of these medications. But it must be because
they're safe. It must be because we've got great long
term data on how these drugs help people over time,
and you know, the combination of medications. We must have
data for that listen. I've been at the FDA, I've
worked in several pharmaceutical companies directly on psychiatric drugs. We
(06:25):
don't have any evidence that these medications work any longer
than about a year. So that's the first thing that's
really concerning there. And so the reason that these drugs
are used so much, it's not because there's a great
evidence based supporting long term use and combination. It's really
because of commercial factors. You know, back in the nineties,
(06:47):
we had health insurance companies sort of conglomerate and they
started to control the flow of patients and they were
able to have doctors, they were able to bid down
the price of reimbursement for visits, and for many doctors
to make ends meet, that meant they had to see
four patients in an hour. And that's still the system
we're in today. And when you're dealing with patients who
(07:08):
have emotional problems and you have fifteen minutes to help them,
really the only thing you can do is prescribe a medication.
There's no time to really understand someone's problems. There's no
time to motivate them to do tried and true non
drug approaches, whether it's dietary modification or exercise, or socially
reconnecting them with people, or doing even things like mind
(07:29):
body work like breathing and meditation that goes out the window.
All you can essentially do is put someone on a
medication and adjust the dose up and down or hold
it the same. That is why we have fifteen percent
of Americans on these medications and five percent of kids
on them. It's not because the evidence space really supports
it or is strong. It's because of an economic convenience.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
You know. It's interesting because we hear all these stories.
I wish I could remember. I was reading a calumn
a woman posted it was in you know, pretty major publication.
I've read it like a week or so. I'm just
remembering it now at the top of my head. And
she was writing, you know, posted it in response to
the Nick Reiner story and was reminding people how you know,
(08:14):
she got her son on antidepressants and they encouraged her
to get her son all these different things and it
just like totally made him worse. And you know, there's
also articles about this. You know, Chris Burks, she lost
her nineteen year old son, Bryson, to suicide. And he
you know, he was a football player, full of energy
and all these different things, and he was actually given
(08:37):
antidepressants not for depression but as a treatment for the pain,
and then he tapered off the medication but then ended
up committing suicide after that. You know, there's a lot
of danger in sort of tapering off of these drugs
as well sort of what goes through the mind or
you know, talk about sort of the impact on the
(08:58):
body of that time as well.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Yeah, yeah, these are two really good stories to talk
about that people don't often hear about from their doctors.
And so, you know, to touch briefly on the first one,
these drugs can definitely make people worse in the short term.
I mean, that's why they have black box warnings on them.
They and when you look at the placebo controlled trials,
(09:24):
you know, this is you know, getting a group of
people who put on a placebo or sugar pill and
you compare them to a group of people put on
like the SSRIs. There are more suicide attempts on the
group who are taking the anidepressants, and so that's very
disturbing because what it's showing is that yes, these drugs
they do lower kind of the symptoms of depression by
(09:46):
kind of muting emotions, but that doesn't actually confer, that
doesn't lead to less suicide. In fact, it makes it worse.
And so when you tell me the story about this
woman whose kid got worse on the drugs and became
more suicidal, that's the average that that is actually the
norm for children on these medications, which is why it's insane.
(10:07):
It's absolutely insane that we have five percent of our
kids on them. And then when we transition over and
we talk about this other case of this healthy football
youth who came off the I think it was symbolta
for pain and he became suicidal. You know, this is
my bread and butter. This is what I do. I
(10:28):
help people come off psychiatric medications. And it's becoming more
widely talked about now that if you come off these
medications too quickly, you can actually cause a neurological injury
called protracted withdrawal, which is like having a concussion. It's
like you get hit in the head really hard, and
it can be severely destabilizing. There's something about severe withdrawal
(10:50):
symptom symptoms in a small group of people that can
set off this electrical storm in the brain that is
just very harmful. And you know, in in my space,
a lot of people become very suicidal when they're pulled
off these medications too quickly.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Quick break. If you like what you're hearing, please sure
on social media or send it to your family and friends.
And there's a difference to I mean, isn't it more
dangerous for young people than the adults on some of
these drugs as well, because you know, obviously their their
minds are reforming, their brains are reforming. You know, maybe
talk about a little bit of the differences between or
(11:28):
are they or are there differences? You know, walk us
through that.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
I mean, there's a lot of concerning data about the
effects of antidepressants on the developing mind and I think, gosh,
the best way to actually look at this is with
the MRI studies and so just going back to human
human babies who were born to mothers exposed to SSRIs.
(11:55):
So so all of these drugs cross the placenta. When
they do MRI studies of the babies and they compare
them to babies who weren't exposed to SSRIs, they find
clear differences in the structure of the brain afterwards. This
has been confirmed in over twelve MRI studies. They then
follow these human kids up to adolescence and they find
(12:18):
that the kids who were you know, the kids who
were exposed in utero, and this is not even like,
you know, they stopped the medication during childhood, they have
enduring changes in areas of the brain like the amygdala,
which are involved in emotional processing. And so that to
me signals that there there are impacts of exposing the
(12:39):
brain to drugs that alter your neurochemistry during this critical
period of neurological development. And you know, we've also seen
this with monkeys. We've had two huge monkey studies, well
huge huge monkey studies, like thirty monkeys. We had a
monkey study from the NIMH and oh so at UC
Davis that put juvenile monkeys, you know, young monkeys on
(13:02):
these antidepressants and they found that it disrupted their sleep,
it led to more complacent behavior. You know, they found
clear structural changes in the brains afterwards, and there were
attentional problems and concentration issues and so these you know,
it is not a benign thing to put some to
put a developing brain on a chemical for several years
(13:24):
and to just take a step back from that. And
I can just speak clinically because I take a lot
of people off these medications. You know, I have women
in their forties who have been on since they, you know,
they were teenagers, and when they come off, they get
hit with all of their emotions and they say that
it's like learning to manage emotions for the first time
(13:46):
in their life. So they feel emotionally stunted in a
way because they've been blunted for such a large period
of their life, and then they're figuring it all out
when they come off. So on multiple levels, it is
something that is very concerning.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
You know, you had said something about a year mark
earlier in our discussion, and was it that they've not
been studied beyond a year or they're not supposed to
be used beyond the year.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
That there's never been a randomized, placebo controlled trial that
has gone longer than a year. So, you know, most
people when they get put on an antidepressant, the doctor
says they're safe and effective, and they and I guess
if you're you know, a layperson, you might just say, yeah, well,
I bet you there was some study where they put
people on these meds for maybe five years or maybe
(14:31):
even two years, because that's how you know, when we
look at the duration of antidepressant use among users, seventy
percent of them have been on them for two years
or more. So I think most people would say, I
bet you, we have good evidence that these drugs are
still working, you know, after a couple of years, you know,
especially since they caused tolerance and they wear off over
time and all of that. But the majority of the
(14:53):
studies of these medications they only last eight to twelve weeks.
Those are the short term studies and the you know,
the longer studies which the FDA uses to say that
they're safe for longer term use, that they last about
fifteen months. And I think for many people their jaws
drop when they hear this, because, you know, they wish
(15:15):
they were told, hey, these are safe and effective for
hey the fifteen months they were studied for. Outside of that,
we have no idea what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
So what what does long term on these drugs due
to the brain? I mean, does it permanently people come
off them, Does it permanently change sort of the you know,
balance in your brain, or I guess, are there long
term impacts even if you come off them.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
This is an uncomfortable area. And so the truth is
I don't have any statistical data, or no one has
any statistical data because it hasn't been done in a
study where there's you know, a thousand people and there's
a clear like denominator. But if we just look at
things high level, like if you look at the popular
level data, as anydepressants have gone up, the rate of
(16:04):
suicide has gone up. So what that tells me is
these drugs aren't preventing suicide. They might actually be making
some people worse over the long run. When we look
at naturalistic studies, so these aren't experimental like these are
where doctors will just follow a group of people over time. Recently,
a few years ago, there was a study of six
hundred Swiss youth and they followed them for thirty years
(16:28):
with depression questionnaires, and they found that the kids who
were on the antidepressants compared to the kids who didn't
take any depressants, even after controlling for you know, education level,
which is frequently a metric for you know, how your
economic status and how much money you make, and they
control for the severity of the depression and family history.
(16:52):
Even after looking at all of that, they find that
the people who take these medications long term actually end
up worse. And then if we couple that with the
monkey studies I told you just a moment ago there,
there there are clear changes, you know when when you
look at what happens to you know, to either the
(17:14):
monkeys or the humans who who are exposed to these
medications long term. So yes, they do appear to be
making people worse in the long run. And this has
been you know, this isn't just you know, you know me,
you know, one person who used to work at the
FDA talking about this. This is discussed by you know,
Giovanni Fava, you know, and other psychiatric professors out there
(17:37):
who who have proposed reasons why this is happening. And
this also isn't just a unique thing to any depressants.
I mean, when you look at anti psychotics long term,
they cause brain impairment. It's called tart of diykinesia, and
there's permanent movement disorders. When you look at benz atiazepines,
they worsen. These are drugs like xanax and klonopin. Accepted
(18:00):
that they worsen anxiety frequently in people over time. If
you look at some medications for Parkinson's that affect the
dopamine circuits, they can worsen symptoms of Parkinson's long term,
and even when you look at things like alcohol and methamphetamine.
And to me, when I take all of this together,
all I can say is it makes sense because I don't.
(18:22):
I do not think the human brain really has, you know,
is evolved to handle years or decades in a drugged
state without something breaking eventually.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
But yet they've been turned into a lifestyle accessory or
you know, viral content. And you've contributed to major reporting,
including a Wall Street Journal piece about how gen D
women on TikTok or sort of glamorizing antidepressants and how
it's become sort of this cool cultural thing and this
normalization of it. But that doesn't that sort of deludes
(19:00):
the seriousness of it. So I guess, you know, why
have the into sort of a lifestyle accessory and why
as a society are we uh, you know, not telling
the truth that there's dangerous to it as well?
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Lisa, It's such a good question. And you know, if
I put on my hat as a social commentator. Somehow,
like having a mental illness got like swept up into
the whole like oppression thing. I mean, we've just come
through a ten year period where you know, if you're
a sexual minority, or if you're a certain race, or
if you're you know, you know, agenda, you got so
(19:38):
you had, you got a social currency, you got you know,
it was you were seen to be you know, oppressed
in a way, and you know, and and and it
mattered and and people treated you well for it. And
so the whole mental health thing got swept up into that,
and they started saying, oh, you know, these people with
mental illness, they're so stig tized, and you know, they
(20:02):
really need to be supported. We had big campaigns go on,
like the post your pill campaign a few years ago,
where everyone was just like, hey, you know, I take
prozac or I take this anti psychotic, and they went
completely viral. And so, you know, I think people do
that because it's incentivized. I think you see it on TV,
(20:25):
you see it on media, you see celebrities talk about
their medications. I think the general sense is that you know,
if you have a mental illness and you're taking a
medication or several medications, you have some kind of you know,
you're a complex person, you're a sensitive person, you have
more depth to you, and so it it has become
(20:46):
something that we've incentivized people to identify with. And yes,
it is dangerous because you know, at a very simple sense,
people think it's cool and they think there's some kind
of advantage to having to taking a medication which you
know can annihilate your sex drive and cause a whole
bunch of problems long term.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
So it is your stance that people should never be
on them, or that we should just treat them with
the seriousness that you know they deserve.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Yees. So I don't think we should throw the baby
out with the bathwater, so to speak. I mean, I
think we just have to have a very sober view
of these medications. They're not fixing any chemical imbalance. There's
no serotonin deficits in depression or dopamine deficits in schizophrenia. Essentially,
what doctors have is an armamentarium of drugs which reliably induce,
(21:36):
you know, a drug state, which can be therapeutic, so
especially in the short term. So that's really where they
have their strongest use. So you know, if you put
someone on a medication like an antidepressant, predictably it induces
a numb to state. Now, if you have someone who's
paralyzed by anxiety, they will experience that as therapeutic. If
that anxiety is so severe it's leading to someone being suicie,
(22:00):
they will experience that as being life saving. And so
it is a tool. But we also need to understand
that when you use drugs to essentially mask symptoms, a
whole bunch of issues arise. So firstly the tolerance problems,
they wear off over time, and also there's an opportunity
(22:20):
cost if you get bad medical care. So what's bad
medical care? Bad medical care is you come in, you
have these symptoms, you just get put on a drug.
A lot of the time, these symptoms, especially with like
anxiety and depression, they're due to very normal things going
on in people's lives. You know, they're due to you know,
very poor diets. You know, they're due to a lack
(22:41):
of exercise. They're due to social isolation. Sometimes they're due
to economic issues and stresses, you know, burnout, you know,
difficulty looking after kids. These are all completely real problems
that can be really serious of people. And if you
just put someone on a drug and you don't help
them in their lives, you're essentially just going to make
(23:02):
them worse over the long run, because I don't think
these drugs actually help people long term. And so the
way I like to think about it is do everything
you possibly can without medications. So use all the non
drug approaches. If you need to use them in the
short term, that's fine, but long term use should be
avoided at all costs and only considered when all of
(23:22):
the non drug approaches have already been tried and failed.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
What role has big pharma played in sort of normalizing
and mainstreaming these drugs.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, great question, Lisa. So I always think there's two
major forces that have led to the over prescription epidemic.
The first one I touched on before, which was the
how we've you know, the economics, you know, the health
insurance issued driving doctors to want to deliver care and
in these short visits. But the other big elephant in
(23:56):
the room is the drug companies. Now, you know we
spend I mean, we spend an insane amount of money
on mental health each year. Each year, I think it's
like a three hundred billion dollar industry, you know, and
if you compare that to you know, the defense budget,
I think it's like ninety billion, and so it just eclipses.
(24:18):
I mean, it's just it's so huge, it's insane. And
in that group, the pharmaceutical industry are like the biggest actors.
And so these guys have billions of dollars at their
disposal to shape the narrative around medications. And the way
this happens is, you know, one, they can buy influence
with doctors. Many academics at big institutions discover early on
(24:43):
that if they work with the drug companies and their
drug and they're friendly with them, and they run their
clinical trials and they don't criticize the medications, there's actually
a lot of career advantages. And so you get and
because and so because of that, a lot of the
people who are in charge of academic institutions at Ivy
League universities, people that the public look up to as
(25:05):
for advice, they're actually very pro drug because their careers
have been built on developing the medications. That's because of
Big Farmer. Oftentimes, you also don't get any coverage of
negative stories about medications in the media because the pharmaceutical
industry spends a lot of money buying ads and it's
(25:27):
just awkward, and broadcasters will avoid this kind of issue.
These drug companies they also pay pr firms as well,
so they have a whole series of journalists who are
there ready to run cover. So if there is a
negative story that comes out about a drug, they will
have a whole bunch of whether it's medical articles or
(25:47):
just lay articles in New York Times places like that
that will say, you know, I can't believe this professor
said this drug was so bad. They're actually wrong. They're dangerous.
You know, they're scaring people away from medications, they're stigmatizing people. Well,
it's like, you know, it's what you would imagine if
you're a billion dollar industry and you know your cash
cow psychiatric medications, you are going to control that narrative
(26:10):
and defend it at all costs. And that's why there's
just I mean, these medications are looked at as like
darlings right now. You cannot criticize them. You look like
you're a cruel person or someone that's against like a modern,
safe and life changing intervention, and and they aren't these things.
But that's what that sort of money and influence has
(26:32):
been able to do in just the cultural narrative.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Yeah, I feel like we went through a lot of
this with COVID as well, where you know, if you
had questions about lockdowns or questions about the vaccines, you know,
you were sort of shut down, and you know you're
labeled anti science or you don't care about people. You know.
It's like, I think we kind of all learned how
big of a role big pharma has on our country
(26:58):
and sort of the power of that, or even you
know the power of people like doctor Fauci previously at
the NIH and shutting down research that he doesn't like,
or or the fear of scientists and studying things who
want grants and fearful that that's going to be cut
off if they, you know, run a foul of some
of these alphabet agencies. You know, So what do people do, right,
(27:22):
Because there's people who are on some of these drugs
and you know, they listen to their doctors or maybe
they need it in the short term that you laid
out previously, you know, how do they get off them?
What does that process look like? I know that's part
of your expertise in tapering people off these So you know,
what are your recommendations there?
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Yeah, So what I would recommend is, you know, don't
jump off these medications without talking to a doctor or
a professional that you trust. Fust Ideally, you want to
prepare yourself to come off by identifying the areas in
the life that lead to your depression. Sometimes they're super
concrete and it's you know, your you know, bad relationship
or that you don't like. Other times it can seem
(28:02):
like the symptoms come out of nowhere, in which case
things like diet, exercise, mindfulness are really really good. So
you want to identify the reason why you're depressed in
the first place and try and address start addressing that
with non drug causes now. Afterwards, when you come off
these medications, especially if you've been on them for several years,
(28:25):
the worst thing that you can do is come off
in like two months or something like that. Your brain
has taken years to adapt to the presence of this medication,
and if you come off quickly like that, many people
will go into withdrawal. And typically what happens is the
doctor will say, well, you know, we tried to bring
you off and now you're having all of these symptoms.
(28:46):
This is proof that your underlying depression is coming back.
You know, you're chronically mentally ill and you just need
to be on these medications for life. For so many
people that is not the case. They're simply in drug
withdrawal and it could be avoided if they go slower.
And so two things that I would recommend you do
first is that you start with a five or a
(29:08):
ten percent reduction. And so this can be You can
do this in two ways. If you have a tablet,
you can get a small Duweler's scale and you can
shave off small increments of the tablet with a with
a raiser, and then you can slowly lower it down
in five to ten increments. And you just want to
listen to your body. So you do a reduction, you
(29:31):
wait two weeks. If your symptoms are manageable, then you
do another reduction, and so on and so forth. And
in this way you can slowly bring yourself down. If
you start to have a lot of withdrawal symptoms, go
up to the last dose that you tolerated, wait a
couple of weeks and do a smaller reduction. And when
you do it in that way, you're going to make
(29:51):
sure that you're moving at a pace that your body
can handle. The final thing that I want to mention
is that the most challenging part of coming off psychiatric
meta is just at the very end, when you get
to the lowest dose. Typically it's the dose that you're
started on. That's when most of the drug will start
to disconnect from the receptor because there's no longer all
this you know, residual drug floating around your brain from
(30:14):
the higher doses. You know, when you're at that lowest dose,
every time you remove a little bit, you're disengaging a
lot of receptors. And so do not be discouraged if
it becomes harder at the end. Sometimes that last bit
can take just as long as the top you know,
seventy five percent of the taper, and so that last
bit just move extra slowe and for whatever reason. I mean,
(30:36):
if you want to find out you know more than this,
like a two minute bit that I'm sharing now is
you can come over to my YouTube channel. It's doctor
Joseph Josef and we have just full playlists that can
completely go through all of these tapering tips on how
to come off the medication safely.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Got to take a quick commercial break more with doctor
Witt during on the other side, you know, and before
we go, we've seen sort of the Make America Healthy
Again movement and r FK Junior as Health and Human
Services Secretary sort of address and touch these previously untouchables,
(31:15):
you know, like over you know, overdependence on some of
these drugs, or concerns with vaccines, or you know, things
that potentially could lead to autism. I know you discussed
the dangers of taking these while pregnant, But what do
you kind of hope that we get from our FK
Junior and from the Trump administration's desire to sort of
(31:39):
look under the hood and dig a little deeper on
all of these things. You know.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
The first thing is just that we're having these conversations now.
I think a lot of this problem can be solved
with just informed consent, you know, just just with parents knowing,
oh wow, you know, we actually don't know what these
drugs do. After about eighteen months. If I'm going to
put my child who has a developing brain, you know,
(32:08):
on this drug, I want to have crystal clear knowledge
that this is going to work, and we don't have that.
I think just people knowing that it's going to make
a big difference. So so you know, adults knowing that.
I also think that the federal agencies have been so
(32:29):
captured by the drug company I mean drug companies. I mean,
as someone who used to work at the FDA, most
of the people who work at the FDA are like
former academics who have gone through you know, you know,
they've been groomed essentially by the pharmaceutical industry to look
at things in a certain way. They exist in this community.
And what I see Bobby doing is he's putting very
(32:53):
ethical people in charge of these organizations and allowing them
to build the team. And so I think if you
can get someone really good the National Institute of Mental Health,
we can start to get some really great research. I mean,
we may get a long term study on any depressants.
We may get one that compares it to things like exercise, meditation,
dietary change. I mean, these are all the things that
(33:15):
doctors really want to know so they can help their patients.
And so I think informed consent and also just improving
the leadership within the federal agencies. And I think he's
going to do that. I think he's really doing a
great job so far.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Doctor witt During, thank you so much for your time. Sir.
We really appreciate very interesting stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Thanks Lisa, thanks for having me have a good one.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
That was doctor Joseph witt During. Appreciate him for me
in the time to come on the show. Appreciate you
guys at home for listening every Tuesday and Thursday, but
you can listen throughout the week. I also want to
thank my producer, John Cassio for putting the show together.
Until next time.
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