The Gaslit Truth Podcast
The Gaslit Truth Podcast is a mental health podcast hosted by Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz, focused on psychiatric medication harm, withdrawal, therapy culture, and informed consent. Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz bring clinical experience, research literacy, and compassionate honesty to conversations about psychiatric medication withdrawal, tapering strategies, the psychology of dependence, and the long-term impacts of mental health treatment. The Gaslit Truth Podcast challenges outdated mental health narratives while empowering listeners with evidence-based insight, critical thinking, and practical understanding of therapy and psychiatric medications.
Episodes
A brutal headache sounds simple until it becomes the doorway to years of antidepressants, benzodiazepines, opioids, and a procedure that can erase memories. We’re joined by writer and poetry therapist Ann Bracken, whose life mirrors a painful family pattern: she watches her mother get treated for depression and anxiety through heavy medication and dozens of ECT treatments, vows it won’t happen to her, th...
One medication switch shouldn’t be able to rewrite your whole life, but that’s exactly what a prescribing cascade can do. We sit down with Senthil, who traces a startling path from long-term blood pressure treatment to an ER visit, an “anxiety” label, and a rapid pileup of prescriptions that includes benzodiazepines, SSRIs, sleep meds, and an antipsychotic. The most chilling part is how quick...
You keep hearing that longevity is about pricey supplements, constant lab tests, and the latest biohacking gadget. We don’t buy it, and neither does our guest, Ron Russell, author of Longevity Visa and founder of LongevityVisa.com. Ron is also a longtime vegan chef who has cooked for clinical cardiology patients and taught hundreds of plant-based cooking classes, so he lives at the intersection of real-world f...
“Bone on bone.” “You’re just getting older.” “PT didn’t work.” Those phrases can trap people in fear, passivity, and expensive next steps. We sit down with Dr. Clayton Durr, PT, DPT, host of Heal Without Harm, to break down what effective physical therapy should look like when the goal is real recovery, not cookie-cutter visits and endless appointments.
We talk ...
Dr. Peter Breggin has spent more than 50 years challenging psychiatry. But this is the story behind the man who challenged it.
In this rare and deeply personal conversation, Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Breggin take us beyond psychiatric drugs, diagnoses, and controversy—and into the experiences that shaped his life.
Peter shares stories he says he has never publicly told before.
He talks about growing up without...
Normal labs. Normal CT scan. Abnormal suffering. That gap is where millions of people live with chronic nausea, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, and pain, then get brushed off as “just anxiety.” We sit down with Dr. Rick, an ER doctor and founder of Belly MD, to unpack why “mystery belly pain” has become a huge slice of emergency medicine and why the old hardware-only mindset fails people wh...
A case like this doesn’t just raise questions about one family, it forces us to confront what happens when postpartum mental health care becomes a series of disconnected appointments and escalating prescriptions. We dig into the civil lawsuit tied to the Lindsay Clancy case and lay out the documented timeline: worsening insomnia, severe anxiety, dissociation, emotional numbing, intrusive thoughts, and ultimate...
“Once a cheater, always a cheater” is one of the stickiest relationship clichés on the internet, and it shapes how people judge themselves and their partners after betrayal. We sit down with psychologist Dr. Kathy Nickerson to put real data next to the hot takes, including findings from her large infidelity survey and her work alongside Dr. John Gottman. What emerges is a more complex, more human picture...
Feeling “better” on an SSRI is real and so is the moment it stops feeling like you. We talk with Mark, known as The Health Files, about his citalopram (Celexa) experience: a first year of relief followed by a slow slide into emotional blunting, lost sleep, memory problems, irritability, and sexual side effects that shook his identity and his relationship. As he tells it, the most destabilizing part wasn&...
A single hospital IV can change the next 27 years of your life, especially when the system decides your body’s alarm is “just anxiety.” We sit down with Kathy Toll, a relentless advocate whose TikTok accounts get shut down again and again, and she tells the story behind the bans: akathisia, medication injury, and the kind of medical gaslighting that turns a clear adverse drug reaction into a lifelo...
“Safe and effective” sounds like a promise, but what if it’s just a marketing stamp pasted over weak benefit and loud safety signals? We sit down with psych nurse David Wayne (Describe Health on X) to dissect the Strawn et al. clinical trial that helped push Lexapro (escitalopram) for pediatric anxiety and to ask the question parents deserve answered: what does “works” mean if the child...
Schools are getting sued, teachers are burning out, and parents keep hearing the same slippery phrases: “reasonable accommodations,” “board policy,” and “trust the process.” We’re not buying it. We sit down with family law attorney Jason Wright to explain why special education support so often turns into delay, confusion, and conflict, especially when districts treat every r...
Nobody tells you that one “helpful” prescription can echo for decades, but that’s exactly what Martin Cranford lived. After 9-11, with aviation layoffs looming and a first baby on the way, anxiety shows up fast and an SSRI seems like the obvious answer. Years later, a new problem appears: Restless Leg Syndrome. What follows is a real-world look at how SSRI side effects, dopamine agonists like prami...
The recovery world loves simple rules, but real people are complicated. We’re joined by Michael Gonzales, a veteran interventionist known for challenging the one size fits all approach to addiction treatment. Michael gets brutally honest about the years he spent presenting an abstinence-only story while privately using cannabis to manage PTSD, function in daily life, and keep moving forward. We talk about the ...
Medications can change symptoms, but they can also drain the nutrients your brain depends on to function. We get blunt about the trade-offs people rarely hear when they start psychiatric meds, and we connect the dots between nutrient depletion and the exact complaints that get labeled as “depression,” “anxiety,” or “brain fog” in the first place. If you’ve ever wondered why ...
The rehab world sells hope, but what happens when the business model rewards volume over care? We sit down with Ronnie Costa, a recovery coach and chemical dependency counselor whose life began in Providence’s crime-heavy mob culture, where money, status, and violence looked like a plan. Ronnie shares how that environment shaped his choices, how opioid addiction with OxyContin and later heroin nearly ended eve...
A federal plan says it wants to curb psychiatric overprescribing and elevate informed consent. That sounds like progress until you remember informed consent was always supposed to be the standard, and most people never received it.
We unpack the HHS MAHA action plan and the “dear colleague” guidance that urges shared decision making, regular risk-benefit reviews, and more non-medication approaches...
Rehab can make millions and still send people home sicker, more medicated, and more likely to relapse. That’s the uncomfortable starting point for our conversation with Dr. Cali Estes, a global leader in addiction recovery who’s trained tens of thousands of professionals and also paid the personal price of loving someone who couldn’t stop using.
We dig into the addiction treatment industry f...
You can walk into family court feeling certain you’re the “good parent” and your ex is the “toxic one,” then walk out stunned that the judge didn’t seem to care. That shock is exactly what we’re tackling with award-winning Austin family law attorney Jason Wright, a straight-talking divorce and custody lawyer who reminds clients that family law is about what’s legal, no...
GLP-1 drugs are being sold like a clean shortcut, but the body is not a simple math problem. We sit down with returning guest Dr. Josh Hellman, MD (Harvard-trained physician and lifestyle medicine expert), to get painfully honest about peptides, GLP-1 agonists, and what patients often do not hear before starting semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) or tirzepatide.
We break down what peptides actually are, why dose an...
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