Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Robert Whitaker on the Myths of Neurochemical Imbalance, DSM Critiques, and the Environmental Impact on Mental Health
574 Plays1 year ago
This week we are joined by Robert Whitaker. Mr. Whitaker gives us an amazing take on health, relating it to every facet of life. We discuss Whitaker's journey and how he came to this view of psychology and psychiatry. He explains some of the convincing literature and history that led him to this perspective.
We discuss the fallacies of the neurochemical imbalance hypothesis, the role of the environment in healing as well as its role as a causal factor. We cover some very important aspects of the development of mental health conditions, including how we treat people with these conditions.
We also address the problem with diagnosis, especially with the DSM. We discuss how psychiatry has been medicalized and how pharmaceutical companies pushed the idea of neurochemical imbalance without evidence.
We then explore the natural course of mental health conditions and how psychoactive drugs can inhibit this natural course. This, in turn, affects the ways we study psychiatric drugs and how we treat people.
Learn from me
https://www.instagram.com/beyond.terrain/
https://linktr.ee/beyondterrain
Support the vision
Share!!!
BCH: bitcoincash:qq7eq276ylanluc5e39unrqshkvs9xsemg07yxezf7
ETH: beyondterrain.eth
BTC: bc1qqwc470ktgj3l4myqxr5hq67rnlqys0qm98u6f0
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/beyondterrain
Support and Learn from Robert
Recommended
![DNA Doesn't Exist & Genomic Nonsense with Dr. Jerneja Tomsic [Part 2] image](https://media.zencastr.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=112,quality=85/image-files/652933f3a749dc383eb375de/ce5a5fd9-98c9-44fe-9b4b-3d0cd5abcf29.png)
Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome everybody to another episode of the Beyond Training podcast. I'm your host, Liam Dalton. Today we're joined by a phenomenal guest, Mr. Robert Whitaker. Really looking forward to this episode. Of course, this man's work speaks for itself. And so there's no need for me to offer too much praise here or even recap it. Uh, he's definitely well known in the, in the field of, of psychology. And, um, I'm really, really grateful to have him on today. So.
00:00:30
Speaker
Mr. Whitaker, thank you so much for coming on today. It's a pleasure being here. Thanks for inviting me. Certainly. Yeah.
Holistic Health Perspectives
00:00:37
Speaker
So I always ask an introductory question that gives us a nice little baseline. I asked my guests to define health. I want to know how. Define health. Well, that's a question. I never thought of trying to define health.
00:00:57
Speaker
Well, listen, you know, obviously health encompasses many different, there's many different elements of health. There's a physical health, and I'm not saying these are separate, but there's also sort of psychological health wellbeing, if you want to say. That's such a broad question. I think that the question of health is, is your body and mind in a place?
00:01:28
Speaker
that you can pursue a life with an underlying sense of joy and meaning. Now, that doesn't mean you're always joyful or always happy and you're not sad and you're not filled with grief or something. But if you have sort of a comprehensive sense of able to move about the world physically, okay, and not sort of impaired by pain, you know,
00:01:56
Speaker
whatever it might be that might limit you physically, then you're really blessed with this type of physical health. And then I think if you're a person who has sort of social engagements that you find meaningful, you have pursuits that you find meaningful, wherever they might be, they can be in very many different things, then you're in a healthy sort of social place. And that makes for a healthy mental place.
00:02:23
Speaker
And obviously there's degrees of this, but so from my definition of health is this combination of you have the blessing to move through life relatively pain-free, we always have our pains, relatively free of illnesses that knock you down, and that you have this social world that is meaningful for you and rewarding to you, even as it can be difficult, frustrating,
00:02:49
Speaker
um saddening all those sort of things but nevertheless you're engaged in in a way of being that is meaningful and in some ways socially rewarding to you and when I say socially rewarding you can be angry with people you can be upset with people you can be fighting with people but nevertheless you're engaged with people you're not socially isolated and that sort of thing so that's my
00:03:12
Speaker
sort of off the cuff sense of health. It's a good question, but it's, you could spend months in books discussing what is health and people try to do so. Yeah. Yeah. No, I had a similar answer almost, uh, when I was on a, I guess on another episode that hit me with that question. And, um, yeah, to just be able to pursue your goals and aspirations without, you know, being inhibited by phys, uh, physical or mental or
00:03:41
Speaker
spiritual factor, right? I think we should add that, you know, having some social, uh, some, I don't want to, it is more difficult if you're really poor. Okay. So if you're really poor, it doesn't often exact a toll on your health, obviously. So part of, I think of, of, of when we think of social health is having at least, you know, a place to live,
00:04:09
Speaker
access to food and that sort of thing. But I don't want to say that there are poor people who aren't healthy. There's plenty of poor people who aren't healthy if they're living in certain situations. But having sort of material factors that allow you to pursue these things you're talking about is important to health as well, I think. And that's how a society nurtures well-being, is they try to provide people with these basic necessities so then people can flourish in these ways.
00:04:40
Speaker
I mean, I completely agree. I think that's a really good point as well. And, you know, in today's society, too, we kind of equate time and money, right? Because if you have to work two jobs, then, you know, it comes with a lot of stress and financial stress is a very real thing that so many people face, especially in this day and age, you know, so I think that's a very valuable point that you have. You know, I think now I think that was that was fantastic. We may as well get into the
00:05:09
Speaker
meat and potatoes of the conversation. I want to discuss, um, you know, what you're most known for.
Books and Personal Journey
00:05:15
Speaker
Uh, you've written some really amazing books, uh, the anatomy of an epidemic and mad America. Uh, and these two, these two pieces of literature, I think are, are foundational. Maybe I give you the floor to maybe just discuss, um, a little bit about writing of these books, you know, how you kind of came to this point. Um, and we can take it from there. Sure.
00:05:39
Speaker
I'll try to do this quickly so I don't take too long. So I think the important thing is because there's a process to talk about, a mental process, a journey to talk about. So I was a medical reporter for a long time for newspapers. And then I did have a stint as director of publications at Harvard Medical School, which this was at a time in the 90s they were talking about evidence-based medicine, the need to adopt evidence-based medicine, which
00:06:07
Speaker
When you even talk about the need, there's an understanding sense that doctors can be diluted about their merits of the therapy. So that's part of my background. Now, in the 1990s, I had a completely conventional understanding of psychiatry, okay, from being a medical reporter. And the story that was being told to us reporters and then to the public at large was that psychiatry had made breakthrough advances in diagnosing and treating mental disorders.
00:06:37
Speaker
They had found that there were these chemicals, neurotransmitters, that were the cause of psychiatric disorders. So we were told that depression was due to too little serotonin, schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders to do too much dopamine. Now that alone is a story of a great breakthrough. Think about that, how complex the brain is. And we were being told they could pick out a molecule that caused depression. They could pick out a molecule that caused schizophrenia or madness.
00:07:06
Speaker
Well, that's even that is a story of great advance. Like, wow. And, you know, I can remember the 1990s thinking in incorporating this into my sense of philosophy. So am I just a robot driven by my neurotransmitters? You know, in other words.
00:07:22
Speaker
It's just something that happens genetically, chemically, and almost apart from the environment, which, by the way, didn't fit with my experience at all. But anyway, and that was only part of the story. The second part of the story was that they now had drugs that could fix those chemical imbalances like insulin for diabetes. Now, if that story were true, and by the way, I reported on that story as if it were true.
00:07:46
Speaker
or as a documented truth, that would be the greatest advance in medical history, in my opinion, given the complexity of the brain, that they could identify these chemicals and fix them. That'd be the greatest advance in medical history. And by the way, in the 1990s, this story was being promoted in the sense that, oh my God, psychiatrists are gaining such powers, they can give you whatever personality you want. You want to be outgoing, we'll make you outgoing. And there was even some hand wringing over like, oh my God,
00:08:17
Speaker
Do we really want a society where people are happy all the time? That's how the story that was being told to us. Now, what happened was in 1998, I was co-writing a series for the Boston Globe on abuses of patients in psychiatric research settings. And one of the frameworks for that story was we looked at studies and research studies where they had withdrawn antipsychotics from schizophrenia patients to see if they relapse.
00:08:46
Speaker
And we said, that's unethical. You would never withdraw insulin from a diabetic to see what happened to them. So why would you withdraw an antipsychotic which fixes the dopamine imbalance like insulin for diabetes to see if they become sick again? However, during that reporting, and then by the way, I was rewarded for highlighting abuses of psychiatric research, but it was really within a common conventional context.
00:09:13
Speaker
That series was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Now, the reason I mention this is if you become a finalist and for public service, which is the top Pulitzer Prize, you're going to have an implicit bias to support what you reported on, okay? Your cognitive dissonance is going to say, I'm not going to challenge this. Unfortunately, as that series was coming to print, I began questioning that chemical imbalance story. And that whole story that
00:09:43
Speaker
antipsychotics represented a great advance in care, okay?
Global Schizophrenia Outcomes
00:09:48
Speaker
And that's part of the conventional myth is that antipsychotics arrive in asylum medicine in 1955 and it kicks off this great psychopharmacological revolution. And here's where the studies that made me question this. One, Harvard researchers in 1994 had looked at long-term recovery rates for schizophrenia patients going back to the first third of the 20th century. And here's what they found.
00:10:11
Speaker
Recovery rates for schizophrenia patients today were no better than in the first third of the 20th century, which belied that narrative of progress. And second of all, they had actually declined since 1975. They were in decline. So all of a sudden we have very well-known researchers looking at recovery rates over time, and that belies that story of progress, okay? So that was the first that made me question. Second, there were these studies done by the World Health Organization, two studies,
00:10:41
Speaker
one, two years in length and one, five years in length, in which they compared outcomes in three developing countries, India, Nigeria, and Colombia, with outcomes in the US and six other developed countries, okay? Now, as you know, we're in Western societies and in the US, we're very proud of our medicine, okay? It's one of the things that we think is we're a global leader in medical advances. Well, what they found, and the first one was the five-year study, is that outcomes were,
00:11:10
Speaker
much, much better in the developing countries. So much so, the World Health Organization investigators concluded that living in a developed country is, quote, a strong predictor that you won't fully recover if you're diagnosed with schizophrenia. And by the way, the diagnosis was made by Western doctors in these other countries as well. So it wasn't a matter of diagnostic differential. Sure. That was a stunner. OK. Why would living in a developed country where you have these medicines that fix
00:11:39
Speaker
chemical imbalances be a predictor you'll do poorly. So in the second study, they looked at medication usage, the World Health Organization and Pescus. And the hypothesis for doing so was that, oh, maybe in the poor countries or the developing countries, the patients are more medication compliant. And that's why they have the better long-term outcomes. Now that's a valid hypothesis. If the drugs indeed fix a known pathology, then compliance should theoretically lead to better long-term outcomes.
00:12:09
Speaker
So they measured outcomes, they measured medication use, and here's what they found in the second study. In the poor countries, India, Nigeria, and Colombia, and this was particularly true in India and Nigeria, where the outcomes were the best, they used the drugs acutely. A person has a psychotic episode, they used them to sort of stabilize them, but they didn't use the drugs chronically. Only something like 10% of the patients were maintained on the drugs in India and Nigeria.
00:12:35
Speaker
Add in Columbia was 16%, but very few patients were maintained long-term on antipsychotics. Now, what is the standard of care and what we're told in the United States that you have to be maintained on antipsychotics, right? And otherwise you're going to relapse and have a very horrible outcome. So that belied that common wisdom, okay? So then at this point, I called up a man named David Oakes who'd once been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and he led something called mind freedom.
00:13:05
Speaker
He was off antipsychotics. And I said, what do you make of this? And he said, well, we hate these drugs. They make us feel like zombies. They make us less functional. And then he said this, you should dig into the research on brain volumes related to antipsychotics, because you're going to see that they shrink the brain. I said, what are you talking about? Anyways.
00:13:28
Speaker
This is where the moment I said, I'm going to see what's really in the scientific literature, okay? Because there's something amiss here with what I believed and have been reporting on. And so I got a contract to write Madden America, and really the purpose of the contract was to say, why are outcomes so poor in the United States and other developed countries? And what do we know about the long-term impact of antipsychotics, okay?
00:13:56
Speaker
And that led to a book in which basically I went back to colonial times. And you see that there's always a split between, by and large, between what the treaters are saying about the mad people and their treatments and what the mad people are saying about the treatments.
00:14:14
Speaker
And the one thing you find is often if treatments quiet people, still people, make them less engaged, that's seen as a benefit by the providers, but not a benefit for those who are being so treated. And then there is this moment in history in the early 1800s when Quaker's ideas became prominent in sort of asylums. In fact, they led to a lot of the founding of asylums. And Quaker ideas were very different. And here's the key.
00:14:44
Speaker
We don't know what causes madness, but we do know these people are brethren. And as brethren, we know they may have a God-given capacity to regain their reason and sanity. But even if not, we need to provide them with comfort.
00:15:02
Speaker
So we built these sort of asylums out in, asylum meaning a refuge out in the country, and they exercised, they believed in exercise, diet, kindness, meaning in life. In other words, they believed in environments. Now, other historians have gone back, looked at their records and said, those are the best outcomes we've ever seen. And if you look at the case reports for when they came into the asylums, these were severely disturbed people. So now we had a thought from
00:15:31
Speaker
the early 1800s that says maybe environmental care is good. And then to finish the Madden America story really quickly is what you find with the antipsychotics once they're introduced is a story of science that belies the story of how they're improving long-term outcomes. You find that very early on, it looks like they're induced, maybe people are getting better faster, but they're relapsing more frequently than their studies done in the 1970s in which they do long-term outcomes. And in every case,
00:16:00
Speaker
There were better long-term outcomes if people got off the medications with a group as a whole. Then there was a biological explanation for why the drugs increased the risk of relapse. And then we can go forward from them for the last 40 years and all this picture comes together that on the whole,
00:16:21
Speaker
antipsychotics used conventionally as a mandatory treatment long-term for everybody worsens long-term outcomes and we can get into that. There's all sorts of research that confirms that worry that arose in the early 1980s. So that's mad in America, but here's the thing, the big picture is. So I went from believing in the conventional narrative to believing in what we call a counter narrative. And the counter narrative
00:16:46
Speaker
put forth in Latin America exists in the conventional psychiatric literature. You just have to dig it out. Okay. So then after that, I wrote a couple other books. My agent said this is too, you know, psychiatry is too controversial. You're going to ruin your life as a writer. I wrote a couple other books.
00:17:07
Speaker
But then people kept asking me, okay, but what's happening to the kids? Why are we having so many kids get diagnosed and seen as mentally ill? What's happening with people with, why are we seeing more people with mood disorders? What's happening to these people long-term? So anatomy of an epidemic was conceived of in this way. First, I just looked at data showing the rising burden of mental illness in the United States, okay? And the rising treatment of people was like diagnosing its treatment. Now, normally,
00:17:36
Speaker
If you diagnose diseases, because that's how they were presented to us, diseases of the brain, and you treat that with effective drugs, the burden of those illnesses will diminish in society, okay? So that was the framework. And then what I really sought to do was just look at what does research tell us about the long-term impact of psychiatric drugs on these major disorders, schizophrenia, depression, bipolar, ADHD, that sort of thing.
Psychiatric Drugs and Mental Illness
00:18:07
Speaker
And that's a question that just so you understand the context of that question, in order to understand the impact of a treatment, you first need to sort of flesh out what is the natural course of that disease? So let's say the natural course of a disease is 50% are recovered in a year and 30% stay the same and only 20% worsen. Well, you have to, in order for your treatment to be helpful, you have to beat that 50% rate, okay?
00:18:37
Speaker
You have to beat that spectrum of outcomes. So you can't just say, oh, listen, 20% of our people are just well at the end of the year on this treatment. But you have to know the natural course. So the first thing I did in that book for each of these disorders was flesh out the natural course. And what you find there, by the way, is very actually reassuring or optimistic, because you can find that so often people can have a time.
00:19:03
Speaker
or an episode of depression, an episode even of psychosis, that sort of thing. But so much of these disorders are episodic, including what we call bipolar, but manic depressive illness, meaning many people naturally recover over the long term. So you have that as your foil. And then unfortunately, what you see again and again is this pattern is when the drugs are introduced,
00:19:29
Speaker
Doctors start saying, well, let's say with schizophrenia or with depression. My patients do seem to be getting better faster, but now they're relapsing more frequently. And then when you put together this whole puzzle in anatomy of an epidemic, you see over and over again that in the aggregate, you're lowering recovery rates and increasing the risk of functional impairment. Now, what I think sometimes gets hard to understand is that doesn't mean everybody does poorly on the drugs.
00:19:57
Speaker
It means on the whole, you're worsening long-term outcomes. So that was that book. And then I did co-write another book called Psychiatry and the Influence that basically looked at, why don't we know this story? And that was part of Anatomy of an Epidemic too. This expanded on it. We did it in this context of institutional corruption. And what you see in essence is that psychiatry, going back to 1980,
00:20:23
Speaker
decided for guild purposes to tell a story of how these were diseases of the brain. But there weren't scientific discoveries to support that marketing story, that rebranding of psychiatry. Pharmaceutical companies love that story. They gave money to psychiatry to tell that story. And so the bottom line is, boy, this was a long-winded answer. The bottom line is what you see in anatomy of an epidemic is that we as a society have organized our thinking
00:20:49
Speaker
and our care around a false narrative of science. In other words, the chemical imbalance story is a narrative of science. And of course, what I write about in all of these books is that narrative, that hypothesis, which arose in the 1960s, fell apart. It wasn't found to be so. So that's the big picture of these books. And I think you call them a foundation. What they are is they're, in my humble opinion,
00:21:21
Speaker
They're a research-based, they're an evidence-based story about how we organized ourselves around the false narrative of science and that it is doing harm to us as a society as a whole. Very welcome. Well, thank you for that. So, of course, we've spoken about the biological origins of mental illnesses before on this podcast.
00:21:47
Speaker
Um, you know, we've discussed the flaws, so I don't think we need to get into that too much. Uh, but I am very curious about maybe hearing your thoughts on the environmental influence. You said that the environment has great impacts on recovery. Uh, perhaps there is an environmental origin to it as well, right? Like through maybe traumatic experience. I don't know how you would sort of describe it. I don't know if you have a solid
00:22:14
Speaker
base of evidence for this either, I'd just like to hear your thoughts. Yeah, no, no, I think there is evidence for it. I just want to say one thing about biological causes of mental illness. The chemical imbalance story is what's found not to be, didn't pan out, that hypothesis didn't pan out. And we haven't found any characteristic sort of pathology for any diagnosis.
00:22:38
Speaker
But that doesn't mean there aren't obvious biological pathways to what we call it psychosis or depression, et cetera. So cardiovascular problems can lend themselves to depression. Syphilis, in stage syphilis leads to psychosis. Parkinson's disease is often leads to psychosis. Toxins can lead to psychosis. So there, and you know, we do know that there can be like, you know, very poor diet can lead to sort of depression and that sort of thing.
00:23:08
Speaker
So when we say we are biological creatures, now and what I'm saying, we're brain body machines, okay? So if something has gone wrong with that machine, it can manifest in sort of mental difficulties. But the point of that is there can be many pathways to depression.
00:23:31
Speaker
There can be many pathways to psychosis. And one of the problem is seeing this as a discrete disorder with a single pathway. So I just want to get that in there because one of the problems with modern psychiatrists, they stopped looking for things like pernicious anemia was known to be a, you know, it's a blood problem and that sort of thing that led to a lot of people being in asylums.
00:23:57
Speaker
And then once they got a treatment for pernicious anemia and, you know, discovered it and treated it, you understood that was a disease, not like, you know, just the symptoms were secondary to this disease. Now let's go back to the question of environments. And there's two parts to this. And I'll ask you a question. Are you responsive to your environment? Absolutely. Right?
00:24:22
Speaker
What do you know growing up is that environments are so key? Do you have friends? Start with a kid. Is a kid in a safe environment? Do they have parents around that make them feel safe? That sort of thing. Do they have parents that are able to be around because they're not having to work 16 hours a day? And then what is their neighborhood like? Is their neighborhood safe? And then as we grow up, have we found friendships?
00:24:53
Speaker
meaningful things to do. And at every stage in your life, I think you can look and say like, what is happening in my environment and how is that affecting me? And by the way, of course, we know that like when you're a teenager, you're half crazy and you know, you're up and down like this and you're filled with angst and jealousies and urges, et cetera. That's part of being alive too, is that we go up and down and we're very emotional creatures. But everything I know is that, you know, if you have a hard time, you lose a job.
00:25:24
Speaker
Boy, that's tough when you lose a job. You start doubting yourself. How am I ever going to get a job? So everything that tells us is that environment matters. And by the way, if you look at evolutionary and our brains, what do our brains do? They change in response to the environment. They mold themselves in response to the environment. So we are creatures meant to be responsive to our environment.
00:25:50
Speaker
Now, if you go back and look at environmental cures, the Quakers are the most example. We don't know what causes insanity, but we do know they're brethren, so we're going to conceive of them like us, you know? And then what worked? Well, what worked was being with other people, wanting to please other people.
00:26:12
Speaker
Having a chance to read and by the way, they would dress they would dress up neatly. They would have dances They would exercise in the 1800s by the way, they played baseball at some asylums and sometimes those traveling baseball teams were quite good Okay So and we see that that has always proven so that's in the 1800s approved to help many people get well and stay well That's what the research shows
00:26:35
Speaker
But there are modern studies, too. There's something called the Sateria Project that shows that with newly psychotic patients, if you put them in a residence with other people, where they cook with other people and can be with other people and can start thinking about how they might get their lives back, that's more successful than just drugs. The best outcomes we have in modern time with psychotic patients, schizophrenia patients comes from northern Finland, where they
00:27:04
Speaker
They reconceptualized things. They said psychosis doesn't happen sight in the brain. It happens in the in-between spaces. We got to fix those in-between spaces. And part of that is helping the person remember when they could be with others and have an idea how they can move forward and rejoin society. That's an environmental form of care with dialogical therapy at the heart of it. And then if you see with kids, if you see kids, like let's say kids who are, there's a place called, what was the name of the place?
00:27:34
Speaker
Anyway, there was this place across from San Francisco that has long treated the worst kids. By the worst kids, I mean the most disturbed kids in California. They're called level 12 plus plus kids. And when they come in, they've all been diagnosed with schizophrenia. These are five-year-olds, six-year-olds, seven, or bipolar, okay? And they're all on like five, six, seven drugs, okay? And they're acting out. They're difficult to reach and all. Well, the man who for many years was a psychiatrist there, he spent 12 hours
00:28:04
Speaker
fleshing out a biography of their lives and their parents' lives. In other words, he's asking what happened to them. And over and over again, of course, he sees these kids have been abused, they've been abandoned, they've been brutalized, they're not safe spaces. And then his thought was, how can we help people, these kids, build a new life? And he says, there's only a way. You've got to model your behavior on somebody you love, okay, and care for, and somebody who cares for you.
00:28:32
Speaker
So what he always did was take everybody off the medications, because the medications weren't solving what happened to them. And then they would mentor up with someone. And these were generally poor kids, et cetera. So with someone like a younger person that they could see like as an older brother or something, sort of from the same sort of milieu of the ethnic milieu, et cetera. And here's what he found. When the kids came off the drugs, A, they could now
00:29:02
Speaker
be emotional towards others. But at the same time, the others, the mentors could now be emotional towards them because emotion is a two-way street. And if they're not getting anything bad, they can't do it. And what generally happened over time was initially as the kids, because they had interpreted in their interior, they had said, oh, I'm a bad kid. I'm an awful kid. All right.
00:29:27
Speaker
And now, because that was their self-identity, when they're taking off the drugs, they said, you watch. I'll show you. I'm a bad kid. So they would act out for about a month. And then you would see all these behavioral disturbances. And then they would start changing. And the change really happened when that bond formed, when that emotional bond formed. And next thing you know, they wanted to behave in a way
00:29:51
Speaker
that fostered this sense of love and affection. Now I spent a couple of days, I'll tell you a real quick story. First of all, these horrible kids, I'm using those in quotes, had just come back from a trip to Disneyland because those who had been there longer, because they had learned to control their behaviors, that sort of thing. But when I went there, now that doesn't mean that everything was great, okay? We're talking about severely disturbed kids, no hospital wanted it, and no foster.
00:30:20
Speaker
but they were making this progress and those at this further along could go to Disneyland. Well, the minute I got there, my first name's Bob, okay? For some reason, they started calling me Bob Marley, okay? So everywhere I went on the campus, kids would shout out, hey, there goes Bob Marley, and it was affectionate, okay?
00:30:42
Speaker
And, you know, I played games with them that we managed to go into McDonald's and this sort of thing. And I placed an order with them, they'd run off, they'd come back with the fake hamburgers. And then when I was getting ready to leave on the second or third day, they all gathered around, like in this particular house where I had spent most of my time. And I went, and I went, go on what? But you see they were anticipating something. So this little girl reaches out her hand to shake my hand goodbye.
00:31:09
Speaker
So I said, I shake her hand goodbye. And what she had is one of those buzzers, you know, one of those buzzers that you have that stings you. So it stings me. Everybody burst out laughing. Okay. But that was a way to show affection towards me. Right. And it showed a totally different. So I didn't see these kids as schizophrenic. I didn't see them as bad. I just saw them as kids. And this is really interesting too. Once the, the, the,
00:31:37
Speaker
Presiding psychiatrists built this story this life story. No one saw these kids now through that lens of diagnosis They didn't see him as bipolar. They didn't see him as schizophrenia They saw kids that had been abused and had no safe space. So it go back to the Quakers in essence They're seeing them like brethren and that's the change. Anyway, I could go on and on and on I know a group that what they did with ADHD kids they taught him how to cook and
00:32:07
Speaker
And they talked to them about diets. They incorporated exercise into this. They introduced that into a school. And guess what happened? Those kids started changing as well. So, and are you surprised by this? I'm asking, are you surprised that environment can help kids? Not surprised whatsoever. Yeah. Can I give one last story? There's this group in Connecticut. Oh, please. Well, I know I just, I just, this is so important. I think there's this group in Connecticut called volunteers for psychotherapy.
00:32:37
Speaker
And what they do is when people come out of a mental hospital, mostly they're working with people who've been hospitalized, and often they're very poor, okay? They can't afford psychotherapy. So this group says, we'll give you free psychotherapy in a way it's free. You have to pay for it by volunteering two hours per week. You can volunteer in animal shelter. You can volunteer taking meals to elderly people. Now, what happens when someone volunteers? They're no longer the sick one.
00:33:07
Speaker
They're not the one that is seen as the abnormal one. Now, what's their new role? They're helping others. And if they go to a social situation, what do you do? They don't have to say, well, I sit around because I'm bipolar and depressed. They can say, oh, I work with the elderly. I work in an animal shelter. So that changes their sense of self. So what have they done with that volunteer? And the guy who runs this every once in a while joke, like, I don't know if the psychotherapy is any help, but I'm pretty sure the volunteer work is.
00:33:37
Speaker
That's an example of changing the person's environment. Beautiful, beautiful. I'm really glad you shared that. I think that's, that's extremely valuable. You know, I think you're really hitting the nail on the head of your course. Uh, but one of the books that got me into this way of thinking was how to become a schizophrenic by John Mojo, I believe. Oh yeah, that's a great book. A fantastic book, you know, and he told the story of his life and, um, you know,
00:34:06
Speaker
A huge part of it, of his theory of how he develops schizophrenia was being treated like he was some psychotic person. You know, he was treated as this psychotic person or this bad person, you know, so he would act out. And you mentioned there, you know, the kids for a month after getting off the psychiatric drugs, you know, they would start acting as bad kids, you know, I'm going to show you how bad I really am. You know, I think that is just foundational to this whole problem is people are over identifying with
00:34:36
Speaker
these disorders that, you know, disorders that are being put onto them, like, oh, you know, I'm, I'm an ADHD person, I can't focus, you know, and then you'll never be able to focus, right? You know, like, and it's, um, and it comes down a lot to the, to the diagnosing, you know, the,
00:34:55
Speaker
You know, we could take this so many different directions. Maybe I could just get a word from you on the diagnosis and maybe the role that that plays.
Critique of Psychiatric Practices
00:35:03
Speaker
And you know, how are we formulating these diagnoses in the first place? How are we categorizing them? Because the DSM, Madro's book. I thought that was amazing. Two things. And if you remember, he has towards the end, he has this line. If you want to know how to help and he used the word schizophrenics, you want to know how to help with schizophrenics, stop the lies.
00:35:23
Speaker
story said, stop the lies about us. So that was powerful. Now, there's also what you're talking about how you're treated. Like, one of the things if you go back to some of the work in the 1960s, they talk about and 70s, the staff, once someone got labeled as schizophrenic, they would never
00:35:45
Speaker
You could ask him like, if the patient could ask what time is, they wouldn't respond. They wouldn't look him in the eye. They basically just ignored them as worthless all the time. It's not worthy of paying attention to. Well, that could drive you a little nuts. Go around the world and have people not look you in the eye ever, and you ask them about times ignoring you, walking by you. You know, that will drive, that'll make you a little psychotic. And there's a famous guy named,
00:36:14
Speaker
Sanborn Bakovan who said, said something about people with schizophrenia has been extremely sensitive to the slings and arrows of misfortune. And then he said is, most of these things can be episodic unless we do something to turn them chronic. And one of the things is we now have a diagnostic system that says it's a chronic disease. That's the new message to them.
00:36:42
Speaker
And then, of course, people are treated as if they have a chronic thing, as if it is their condition, okay, that they move through the world as chronically ill. So here's the, the diagnosis in some ways and the story that was told about the diagnosis is part of the root problem. And maybe it is the root to the problem.
00:37:05
Speaker
Because the what happens with the diagnostic scheme we have that we've organized ourselves around came with the publication of DSM three in nineteen eighty. Now.
00:37:18
Speaker
And the story that was told when it was announced is we have, we are now conceiving of these things as diseases of the brain with discreet causes. And they're real. And this is just like cardiovascular diseases, cancer and schizophrenia is as different from bipolar is cancer is from heart disease and there's specific causes. Then we hear about the chemical imbalances. So that was validating this disease brain. The idea that mental disorders were psychiatric sources were diseases of the brain.
00:37:47
Speaker
And then in the 1980s and 1990s, basically psychiatry with funding from pharma ran PR camps to say, depression is a disease. It's not basically what happened to you or anything like that or moral failure. It's a disease of the brains. And ADHD was seen, if you don't believe in ADHD as something real, then you're like a flat earth person. That's how they sold it. Okay. Okay. So they're telling a story that these
00:38:18
Speaker
Diagnostic categories have been validated as real diseases of the brain. Validation is the key here, and we'll go into that in a second. And then if you don't believe this science, you're a flat earther, okay? That's what we were told. Now, if they're diseases of the brain, that does mean it's chronic, right? If it's a chemical imbalance, okay? And it means I'm going to need this drug, and it's going to become part of my idea. This is what happens in my brain. There's this abnormality, okay?
00:38:48
Speaker
Now here's the tragedy of this. It's all, can I cuss here for a second? It's all bullshit. It's all bullshit scientifically because here's the really the roots of DSM three. In the 1970s psychiatry was feeling under siege as a medical discipline. And there were, there were various reasons it was feeling under siege. One was there was an anti psychiatry movement that came out of academia. That's Foucault and,
00:39:16
Speaker
Irving Goffman and Thomas Soss, who said that psychiatry functions not so much as a medical discipline, but as a social control discipline. That's number one. Then number two, we had the first real popular drug were the benzodiazepines, Librium and Valium, okay? And they became real popular in the 60s and women like crazy were put on the drugs. The marketing of these drugs is hilarious, by the way. Basically, if you see the marketing, it's like,
00:39:46
Speaker
Is your wife a bitch? Have her take Valium. That's really the marketing, et cetera. And then they would show the woman bringing him the man, the slippers, and a drink when he came home from work. But anyway, in the 1970s, it became known that these were addictive. And both in the UK and the US, there were panels at the highest echelons of government saying these drugs are addictive, and they're drugs of abuse. And so all of a sudden, Valium's seen, rather than as it's great,
00:40:15
Speaker
drug for you know alleviating anxiety as a problem drug even compared to heroin okay so their basic drug went to be seen as problematic next you had people ex-hospital patients forming a psychiatric survivor movement which was a model after the civil rights movement and saying you know hugs not drugs and they called themselves survivors of psychiatry so the the patients were saying they were rebelling against the doctors okay then we had
00:40:45
Speaker
all sorts of competition for psychiatrists. We had mental health counselors, right? We had psychologists, everybody offering talk therapy, and they couldn't prove that their talk therapy was any better than this other talk therapy. And then there were two things that really made psychiatrists say, we have to rebrand ourselves. One was the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but basically it's set in an asylum and the real crazy people are the staff.
00:41:14
Speaker
And that the people with wisdom and knowledge and reason really are often seen as the patients. And then also there was a famous study done by David Rosenhain, a psychologist at Stanford where he and seven of his students presented themselves at mental hospitals and they said they were hearing a word called THUD. That was it. They were all admitted and they were all seen as
00:41:44
Speaker
you know, diagnosed with schizophrenia. And then once they were in the hospital, at least this was what was reported at the time, none of the staff ever identified them as impostors, but the other patients did. Anyway, this came out, it was published in science. And a week later, the American Psychiatric Association said, we've got to change our image. So the image of psychiatrists was sort of as crazy people with people on the couch. And they said,
00:42:13
Speaker
How, what do we need to do? We need to put on a white coat. We need to present ourselves as doctors like infectious disease doctors who treated real diseases of the brain. So now their whole goal here was to resell themselves as treating diseases of the brain. But there was no discovery behind that sense that we have found the pathology of, of, of these major disorders. The chemical imbalance hypothesis was being floated.
00:42:42
Speaker
That gives it a little push as well, but there was no concrete founding. And the other thing was it was known that psychiatric diagnosis with DSM-1 and DSM-2 were neither reliable nor valid. Reliability means you went to two different doctors, you got two different diagnosis, and they weren't validated as real diseases. Now, when
00:43:07
Speaker
DSM three is created and they think they somehow find 200. You know why there's 267 disorders than DSM three? Because they said, we need a diagnosis for everybody who comes to us for whatever reason. So we can get insurance reimbursement. Okay. So basically you got a problem. You're in the DSM. It doesn't matter what it is. They can diagnose you. Okay.
00:43:29
Speaker
But when they published this book, they acknowledged these were not validated as real diseases. And the way you validate diseases, you find a genetic link. You find that this thing is responsive only to this type of drug and not to another type of drug. You flush out the long-term course of the disorder, that sort of thing. You find the pathology. And the thought was they would, through research on the brain, validate these disorders, okay, as real disorders.
00:43:57
Speaker
Now, in 1984, Nancy Andreas and the future editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry, she writes a book, becomes a bestseller called The Broken Brain. And now she presents this, that these are real diseases, discrete diseases. Now, what, and so that becomes a story that we have, the people who have these problems have broken brains, okay? That's not an environmental thing. There's something abnormal in the brain.
00:44:24
Speaker
Now, what you don't know about in that book, she says, these are just hypotheses. And we actually haven't found the research to confirm it. However, we think the answer is in the chemical imbalance story, okay? So then what happened, the chemical imbalance story is presented, okay? And that confirms this for the public as validated disorders. And you can see in 1967, they did a survey about people about depression and they asked people,
00:44:51
Speaker
Why do you get depressed? Why do people get depressed? Bad things happen to people. What's the course of depression? Well, over time, it'll pass. You can live through it. It's episodic. At that point, the American Psychiatric Association said we need to write, and they got paid by the pharmaceutical companies, we need to say it's a disease of the brain. And you need to basically, and it's due to chemical balances, and you need to take these drugs. And by 2005, they did a survey and they said, yeah, people now understand that depression is caused by low serotonin. But here's the problem.
00:45:23
Speaker
When they began looking into the low serotonin theory, in other words, now they start studying people before they go on antidepressants, they don't find that the people have low serotonin as a matter of course, before they go on. And the first time is 1983. The NIH says, we're just not finding this. By 1999, so they've done another 16 years of experiments with all sorts of ways to measure low serotonin. The APA, the American Psychiatric Associates own textbook said, this hypothesis didn't pan out.
00:45:53
Speaker
And they said it was born from an understanding of how the drugs act on the brain, because anti-depressants increase the availability of monoamine, serotonin's monoamine in that synaptic gap. In other words, they up that activity. So the hypothesis was born based on that understanding of the drug action. Okay, maybe depression is due to too little serotonin. And in 1999, the APA said, you know, this is sort of a silly hypothesis to begin with, because there's no reason
00:46:20
Speaker
that the pathology of the disorder is gonna be the opposite of a drug that treats some symptoms. So it was declared dead in 1999 by the APA. Two years later, the head of the APA is writing a magazine article saying that we now know that these depression is a real disease. We now know that. And not 2005, the APA put out a thing saying the public needs to understand that psychiatrists are doctors who fix chemical imbalances in the brain. All this was nonsense.
00:46:50
Speaker
So here's the problem, Lee, that you're going in. And by the way, we could go into the dopamine hyperactivity thing, but basically the whole chemical imbalance theory fell apart. And my favorite quote on this is, in 2004, Kenneth Kenner, who's a real big guy in the world of psychology and psychiatry, he investigated, he says, we have looked for big, simple neurochemical explanations for major psychiatric source, and we have not found them. That's in the research literature.
00:47:18
Speaker
And then a guy named Ronald Pies in 2012, editor-in-chief at that time of psychiatric time, says, the chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders was always a kind of urban myth, never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists. And in a way, it is true. Well-informed psychiatrists didn't believe it, and it fell apart in the 80s. But that wasn't communicated to the public. So go back to diagnosis. Here is
00:47:46
Speaker
the betrayal of the human, of the public. And this was done first in the United States but around the world. And we can talk about ADHD in a second. They told us you have a broken brain if you're depressed. They told you you had low serotonin. They told you that's why you needed to take antidepressants for life. That it was a necessary treatment. And what did the research really show? It didn't have a chemical imbalance. That's number one.
00:48:15
Speaker
Actually, the drugs were only minimally, antidepressants were only minimally effective over the short term. And there was increasing evidence by the 90s that you find in the research literature, people are saying, do these drugs increase the chronicity of depression? All that's in the research literature, that it's not validated, that these drugs don't fix a chemical imbalance, and that outcomes seem to be worsening over the long term. And there was a key paper by a guy named Steven Hyman in 1996,
00:48:45
Speaker
He was the director of the NIMH at this time. So he's the head of the National Institute of Mental Health. He writes a paper called a paradigm for understanding psychotropic drugs. And here's what he says. These drugs perturb the normal functioning of the brain. In other words,
00:49:04
Speaker
antipsychotics block dopamine receptors, SSRIs block the normal reuptake. In response to this perturbation, the brain goes through a series of compensatory adaptations because we have all these feedback loops and what research says it's trying to maintain a homeostatic equilibrium. It's trying to maintain the normal functioning of this pathway. So for example, you go on an antipsychotic which blocks dopamine receptors, your brain sprouts new dopamine receptors.
00:49:32
Speaker
So this was found in the early 80s. The irony is, antipsychotics induce the very abnormality in the brain hypothesized to cause schizophrenia in the first place. Same thing with depression. Antidepressants. So, antidepressants upsurge, energetic activity. So your brain says, uh-oh.
00:49:50
Speaker
I got to diminish my own serotonergic physiology in order to bring it back into balance. So I'll put out less serotonin, at least for a time, and I'll reduce the density of my serotonergic receptors. So the drugs induce the opposite physiology of what the drug's intending to do. And there's a paper, they call this oppositional tolerance. There's a paper, you can read papers saying this is the reason for the poor long-term outcomes. Was that ever told to the public?
Debunking the Chemical Imbalance Theory
00:50:20
Speaker
Did we ever hear about oppositional tolerance? Did we ever hear about drugs that perturb normal functioning and that we hadn't found that there was anything amiss, any characteristic pathology? That's what I mean. We were told of a story of a great narrative advance when the research told us of disorders that hadn't been validated, okay, by chemical imbalances, drugs that actually induced abnormalities and poor long-term outcomes. And by the way, away from this,
00:50:49
Speaker
you see people like Nancy Andreas and Stephen Hyman saying, we have to confess none of these disorders were ever validated as distinct diseases. That's what they're saying beginning around 2000. That's what Nancy Andreas and said, that's what Stephen Hyman said. And there was a panel in 2012 when they were, they gathered people together before they were doing DSM five. And they said, have we validated any of these disorders? And this panel of,
00:51:18
Speaker
well-known psychiatrists involved in constructing these diagnostic categories and said, these are just constructs. They're not actually reflective of net diseases in nature. They have not been validated as real disorders, but that's not what the public has told either. We've been told they're validated. That's the betrayal. Long winded answer again. Yeah, I know.
00:51:46
Speaker
Well, there just seems to be a major disconnect too, right? Between the literature, the curriculums as well, because people are being taught these principles in med school and that this is the way. Biological psychiatry is the only way forward and the literature is just not there to support it. And we see that far too often. One of the problems that I see when I look at the literature is
00:52:15
Speaker
And you mentioned oppositional tolerance, which is interesting. The effect that going on these drugs has on the course of healing or treatment curing these disorders. I can't help, but it might play a role in the literature as well. How many schizophrenics out there aren't on psychiatric medication or have never had psychiatric medication? Do you see that being
00:52:44
Speaker
a little problem with our studies now because it's almost an instant you present to an emergium or whatever it may be and it's like, boom, you're on these drugs right away. Absolutely. This is part of the blindness that has enveloped the profession and society. Here's an amazing statistic or fact that is admitted.
00:53:11
Speaker
Anti-psychotics were introduced in 1955 into asylum medicine. It's now 2024. A few years ago, researchers at Columbia tried to see, do we know that these drugs are effective in first episode psychosis? In other words, when people haven't been previously medicated. And they said, there's no evidence that we don't have evidence that that's so. And the Cochrane collaboration, which is a very famous collaboration for trying to review the literature and answer questions,
00:53:41
Speaker
They actually concluded, and I think this was in 2005, they concluded that if anything, it looked like even over the short term, first episode psychotic patients did better if they weren't medicated on the whole. So what you have, and here's the delusion, and you're really absolutely right about this. And then I'll talk about one other study that's really key on this. But our evidence base is formed this way.
00:54:07
Speaker
You take people who are on antipsychotics, like most short-term trials actually have been conducted in chronic patients. So now their brain is adjusted to the drug, right? Then you wash them out, you take everybody off, and then after a couple of days you put one group back on the drug that they've become accustomed to, and the other you keep off the drug. They're randomized to placebo. But that's not a placebo group that's reflecting the natural course of the disorder.
00:54:37
Speaker
That's a group going through drug withdrawal, and we know that drug withdrawal has all sorts of symptoms. But that's the evidence for short-term studies, okay, short-term use, and that's also the evidence for long-term use. So what you do with long-term use is you take people who have the group that has responded well. It's not even everybody. Take a group that is stabilized on the drugs, and one half is randomized to maintaining on the drug. They're not washed out at all.
00:55:06
Speaker
The other is washed out and put on placebo. Well, as a well-known person named, oh, my God, why am I drawing a blank on him? He's from Tufts Medical School, not Siragami. Every once in a while, a name just disappears from me. He recently wrote his, those are not scientific studies, those relapse studies, because they'll always show that the group that has done well is going to continue to do better than those that have taken off the drug, OK? It's a select group.
00:55:36
Speaker
Those are not scientific studies. And he says, because of that, we have no evidence for using these drugs long-term. Okay. But you're right. We don't know about the natural course of first episode psychosis, right? Because everyone gets medicated right away. Now in the seventies, when people weren't being medicated so much, just in the community, because now you get kids put on anti-psychotics, all sorts of things. They did three studies that involved not putting people on anti-psychotics right away.
00:56:05
Speaker
And in every instance, all NIMH-funded, at the end of either one was one year in length, one was two years in length, and one was three years in length, on the whole, the group that wasn't immediately medicated had the better outcomes. And the group that had the best outcomes was the group that never went on medication, okay? And what they found in the group that, and one study, a three-year study that never went on medication, two-thirds were basically just recovered at the end of three years. Now you say,
00:56:34
Speaker
And recovery means they're not on medications, they're working or back in school, that sort of thing, and they're not psychotic. Now, what was recovery rates from 1945 to 1955 for first episode patients before the drugs arrived? Three to five years later, what percentage were living independently in the community? Take a guess. 67%, roughly, 70%. But we don't see that today because everyone is put on drugs right away.
00:57:02
Speaker
We do have, we have a study that upset this apple cart, this belief, if it would have been promoted. Now we've promoted it in anatomy of an epidemic. And that was done by Martin Harrow and Thomas Joe. Long-term outcome study. They take, they enrolled 200 patients, some from a public hospital in Chicago, some from a private hospital. Now it's going to be a naturalistic study. Everybody's put on drugs in the, in the, in the hospital.
00:57:27
Speaker
They're discharged, and now they're just going to follow them at two years, four and a half, seven, half, 10, 15 years, and look at how they're doing. At each follow up, they're going to look at are they taking medication? Are they psychotic? Are they anxious? What's their cognitive functioning and social function? And here's what they found. Those who got off by year two, even though when they got off, they were psychotic, actually. Between year two and four and a half, they got much, much better.
00:57:55
Speaker
to where 40% were in recovery by the end of four and a half years. And that group that stabilized at four and a half years had almost no relapses. So long-term, the recovery rate was eight times higher for those off medication. They were much more likely to be working, had better cognitive function, less anxiety. Now here's the kicker to your question. They said the people who did well left care.
00:58:24
Speaker
They stopped going to psychiatrists. So psychiatrists only saw those who relapsed and came back to care. And he said, this is the clinician's delusion. They don't see the people who drop out and get well. They only see those who stopped taking medication and relapse. And so they lack this understanding of the capacity to recover. Now, one of the things that I will tell you is like, you know, I run this website called madinamerica.com.
00:58:53
Speaker
That because of this website and because of my chance to like to be invited as toxin, I know all sorts of people who've been diagnosed with schizophrenia and are fine now and off medication. But here's part of the kicker. If you've been diagnosed with schizophrenia, say when you're 22 and you have a time of psychosis and then you leave care and you get better.
00:59:15
Speaker
Do you tell people, oh yeah, I used to have a diagnosis of schizophrenia? You leave out that part of your biography. And by the way, Harold and Job found people who became lawyers, teachers, professional jobs. None of those people said, oh yeah, I was in a hospital diagnosed with schizophrenia. Nobody. So this is part of what your question goes to. Do we know the natural course of these disorders?
00:59:42
Speaker
And by law, we don't. The antidepressant trials have the same sort of flaw in them. They're not in medication naive. But there have been a couple efforts in the 80s and beyond to discover the natural course of depression. In one six-year study, they said those who did not get treatment, even though they had the same problem at the beginning, were seven times less likely to suffer a disruption of their functioning.
01:00:12
Speaker
Anyway, they had much better outcomes than the treated group, and et cetera. And then there was another one where they looked at recovery rates at the end of one year for an untreated group, unmedicated group. Guess what it was for depression? 85%. And guess what it was before the introduction of antidepressants? 85%. And the researchers said, wow, it's going to be hard for any treatment to beat that natural course of recovery. And by the way, that's exactly what the mood disorders experts said in the 1970s, saying like,
01:00:42
Speaker
You know, depression is one of those things that gets better over time. Really the only reason to use antidepressants is maybe we can speed up the healing. It's hard to beat this bottom line recovery rate. Anyway, long-term outcomes for depressed patients who are treated, it's not an 85% recovery rate. It's like much, much worse. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, well, I think centrally one of the, one of the main things of something that you alluded to quite often is we're so intolerant to,
01:01:12
Speaker
these people, right? And not to group them like that sort of way, but, you know, we're intolerant to mental illness in general as a society. And in general, I feel like, you know, even I've heard interesting stories of people studying, you know, different indigenous groups and somebody was termed schizophrenic because they it was a woman who killed a goat in the Hadza tribe, where only the men could kill goats. So, you know, the
01:01:41
Speaker
psychiatrist that was there diagnosed her as schizophrenic because she went against and you know she was portraying these like you know it's all very cultural based and but you know it's at the end of the day where people are intolerant to it you know they're not they don't want to be patient with their children with ADHD you know and at the same time you know I don't believe that every child can sit in a classroom for eight hours and thrive I don't think that means that there's anything wrong with child I think that
01:02:10
Speaker
probably a good indication that a child is healthy. They should be moving and active and engaged in something that's meaningful. But you know, I just think that there's a huge intolerance to these, to these conditions, conditions, right? Like, so two points to your point. Let's start with the ADHD thing. Yeah. Kids are not meant to sit in a classroom for seven, eight hours and then go home and do homework. That's just not, it's not how they're built.
01:02:38
Speaker
And this is part of the thing, if you change your classrooms to where you're out in nature, you're out running around, you're letting kids go out and play and play without too much supervision, like parents hovering over you or teachers hovering over you, what do you find? And when they come back to the classroom, they can stand it a little bit longer. And the other thing is, I'm an old guy, but when I was growing up in the high school, if you didn't like school, there was basically trade routes.
01:03:08
Speaker
And when they went into things where they were taking a car, those who went that route, maybe they didn't like sitting in a classroom and doing grammar and stuff, but then they could go into an automobile repair shop and become completely focused on taking apart an engine or doing metal work or doing carpentry work. So it's not that they had ADHD. What they did have is a way of being that didn't like the way our schools are organized. And you can go in any place
01:03:37
Speaker
and change those schools and ADHD tends to disappear. And so that's the first thing, okay? What is the environment we're, and just think about this. A lot of our work environments suck today. For adults, you're just, you're sitting around a desk doing something you don't give a shit about, sorry. You don't care about, right?
01:03:58
Speaker
And of course, it's demoralizing and that sort of thing. So there's a lot of demoralizing aspects to our society. So that's the first part of this, whether it be kids or how we have to live. But the other thing is when you say that there's not sort of a tolerance, what the problem is, this way of thinking that we have, it draws a line between the normal and the abnormal, as if there is an
01:04:26
Speaker
And it seems to say they're the other, okay? And you're either, that group is the other. And that sort of like raises a tribal instinct to say, yeah, we're the normal people and there's the other. And whenever you identify a group as the other, that lends itself to abuse and not listening to them and not seeing that they're worthwhile. And then you also talked about cultures. Well, there's great studies that show like black men
01:04:53
Speaker
if you have to take the same behavior, okay? And they've done experiments where they give psychiatrists, and this goes back to the 80s, a list of, they don't actually see the patients. They say, here's the symptoms of the patient. Now, the only thing in these case report studies or changes is that a black male, black female, white male, white female. Now, I'll ask you, who gets most likely diagnosed as schizophrenic after having schizophrenia? Which group of those four? Black male, black female,
01:05:22
Speaker
white male, white female. Who's gonna be diagnosed with schizophrenia? I think black male. Black male, of course. Now, who's second most? Second most? Black female. Yeah. Who's the third most back going to the 1980s? Must be white male. No, white female. Oh, interesting. Interesting. Because at this time, most of the psychiatrists in the 80s were white males.
01:05:49
Speaker
So, females were more different than males and then black females and then there was this whole thing about, you know, black males with the whole sort of tropes around black males and stuff. So, my point is we have a diagnostic system that says these people are abnormal and they're asked even to incorporate into their way of thinking. And so we're actually being encouraged to think of them as different
01:06:17
Speaker
And here's the problem with this philosophy of being. How old are you, Lee? 24. OK. Are you the same as you were when you were 16? Not even close. How about when you were 12? Yeah, same. Yeah, not even close. OK. You're not the same person. You change, of course. And I guarantee you, unless you're a very unusual kid, you had some ups and downs.
01:06:42
Speaker
And I bet you fought with your mind sometimes like what's going, you know, like you're sort of trying to come grips with your mind. That's what it is to be, to be born human, to be a human is you actually have to struggle to come to grips with your mind and your emotions, which are so powerful.
Emotions vs. Diagnoses
01:06:58
Speaker
We're very powerful. We're very emotional creatures. You know, we always say that our, our, you know, the chimps are so emotional. Well, we're even more emotional than the chimps.
01:07:09
Speaker
But the problem is now we have this false philosophy of being which says like, oh, you have a depressed brain. You have an ADHD brain. You have a bipolar brain. You have a psychotic brain. And it's completely ahistorical. And all I would say is what we should really do, throw away the DSM. Because a DSM presents the most impoverished
01:07:32
Speaker
philosophy of being on any book. And what you should do is go read your Greeks, go read your Romans, go look at Shakespeare, go read your novels and go to the theater. And what do you see in novels, literature, religious tracks? Go read the Bible. Are these people nice, nice and normal? And like, you know, not do they have not have rages? Do they not have jealousies? So just
01:07:56
Speaker
What does history tell us? It tells us that human beings are all over the map with their emotions, and they don't control them so easily, and they change all over the time. I'm 71. I'm not the same person I was when I was 61, 51, 41, 31, 21. Each time is different. So much so that if I met myself in 21, I would probably start laughing. Like, what is, who is this character? But this is part of the problem when you say,
01:08:26
Speaker
lack of tolerance because it's built around a fake story that says these people have are abnormal. They're not like us. And anything that history tells us is when you identify people as not like us, you abuse those people. You will do people things to those people you won't do to yourself. Absolutely. Very well put. Yeah.
01:08:49
Speaker
And on that note, I think we'll conclude with some final thoughts here. Anything that you think you might've missed or you want to add here? That was amazing, honestly. Honestly, yeah. Well, you know, you sort of wound me up with your questions and I just went on and on. So I'm sorry if I curtailed the back and forth, but your questions were great. And you know, the only thing is like you try to get people a sort of bigger picture of what has happened.
01:09:20
Speaker
what science may be, what the research may be saying and how we ended up where we are. And they're sort of stories that help us understand that. So anyway, you got me going and I went on a great length. So, but thanks for having me. I think what you're doing is raising these questions for society, helping us think about what we know and we don't know and what we've been told. Well, I appreciate that. Yeah.
01:09:46
Speaker
I mean, I wouldn't change a thing about this interview. I think it was perfect. Yeah, it was amazing. No, I really appreciate your time. Maybe if you want to take a moment to tell a listener how they can learn more from you, support you. I got two of your books. I'll have to get the third there and you have the great website, but anything else that you want to add? Well, I would just say that we do have a website, madnamerica.com.
01:10:08
Speaker
And there we have daily science reports. So you'll read all this science that isn't promoted to the public precisely because it counters conventional wisdom. We have people telling their lived stories or stories about being identified as patients and what happened to them. And we have an art section. We have podcasts ourselves where we interview people. And then we also have a resource section. So you can go on like the menu bar says,
01:10:34
Speaker
drugs and there's a drop down and you can then go to like antidepressants and there's a nice synopsis of what the research is related to the short-term efficacy, how they act on the brain and long-term outcomes and you'll see in that and by the way those resource pages have links to the study so you can go read the studies yourselves and you can go
01:10:57
Speaker
educate, you know, you can go see this counter narrative on Mad in America daily, but also in the resource pages. And in terms of how you can support us, we are a nonprofit. You can imagine that when you counter conventional wisdom, it's hard. You don't get grants.
01:11:12
Speaker
You know, that sort of thing. So we're basically listener supported and it costs $20 a year to gain full access to all our science reviews and our resource pages, which I think is, you know, so you can, you can come to our site, sign up as a yearly subscriber and that's a great way to support us. Awesome. Amazing. Mr. Whitaker, thank you so much again for coming on. This was amazing discussion. Well, thanks for having me. Your questions were great and I really enjoyed it.
01:11:43
Speaker
Yeah, great. Okay.
Conclusion and Farewell
01:11:45
Speaker
And I want to thank you all for listening. You should know that this is not medical or psychiatric advice. This is for your informational purposes only, but also remember we're all responsible, sovereign beings, capable of criticizing, thinking, and understanding absolutely anything. We, the people in the greater forest, are together self healers, self-governable, self-teachers, and so much more. Please reach out if you have any criticism, comments, concerns, whatever it may be, you know, or to find me beyond train on Instagram.
01:12:08
Speaker
Listen, I really appreciate every single one of you who found this informative in every way. You know how to support me, like, share, follow, comment, subscribe, review, whatever you got to do on the platform you're listening to. That's the best way to do it. There are a couple of links there if you want to go further. But yeah, just remember, there's two types of people in the world. Those believe they can, those believe they can't, and they're both crap. All right, guys, thanks for listening. Take care.