← The Matt Walsh Show
The Matt Walsh Show
Ep. 1776 - I Took A Closer Look Into The Mental Health Industry, And It's Really Dark
00:57:21
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Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
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Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com a while since I've taken a hatchet to the legacy of a highly unlikable crusty feminist icon. But today, Virginia Woolf's time has come. For reasons that will become clear in a moment, she's actually a useful foil for talking about one of the biggest issues facing this country right now, which is the never ending expansion of psychology and psychiatry. These are fields that have done more damage to the United States than any other branch of medicine. Mental health treatment is in very many cases the modern day lobotomy. And before any more lives are destroyed, we need to radically rethink our approach to so called mental illness. The mainstream approach to these issues over the past several decades has not worked. It has made everything worse, as I will demonstrate, and it's time for people to think critically and deeply and take seriously some arguments that challenge their fundamental assumptions. So that's what we're going to do today. But for now, back to Virginia Woolf. In case you're not familiar, she was a British novelist who in modern times has been retroactively diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She was a miserable person in every respect. She would often refuse to eat or sleep. She claimed that she heard birds singing in Greek and she even threw herself out of a window at one point. Now all this naturally has made Wolf a hero to feminist everywhere. Wolf's family and friends described her as being mad or manic depressive or afflicted with a case of nerves owing to her regular mental breakdowns. And as part of her treatment, Wolf was force fed a lot of cream and beef in order to make her fat, on the theory that her behavior was the result of some kind of nutritional deficit within her body, although we've since learned that, you know, making feminists fat doesn't make them any less crazy. Clearly she was also isolated as much as possible because doctors believed that her delirium was the result of overstimulation. In the end, none of the treatment worked. Virginia Woolf left her home on the morning of March 28, 1941, walked down to a nearby river, put a large stone in her pocket and drowned herself. Now, the narrative of Virginia Woolf's life was mostly unchallenged until a psychiatrist named Thomas Sassy published a book called My Madness Saved Me the Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf. Decades after her death, Sauce's argument was that everybody misunderstood what Virginia Woolf was actually doing. She wasn't suffering from any kind of mental disease or disorder. Instead, SaaS wrote, Wolf was engaging in a pattern of behavior that conveniently enough, managed to solve many of the problems in her life. For one thing, she was married to a man, even though she was attracted to women. Women. So her mental illness allowed her to sidestep that whole issue and keep her husband at arm's length. Additionally, Wolf's alleged disorder allowed her to avoid most normal day to day obligations that she was not interested in, like social commitments or interacting with her staff. She had a ready made excuse to spend time alone where she could write in peace without any interruptions. Now, Thomas Sass, as you might imagine, was not particularly popular with feminists or with his fellow psychiatrists. He was not simply claiming that Virginia Woolf was faking her mental illness. He was going much farther than that. Thomas Sass, for his entire career, was intent on arguing that the whole idea of mental illness as a category does not exist. His point was not that the conditions we categorize as mental illness don't exist. His point was that the category itself, the term, is nonsensical. It's a category error. Now, in his book the Myth of Mental Illness, which everybody should read at the very least, because intelligent and thoughtful arguments challenging our most basic assumptions are always worth listening to if you're a smart and intellectually curious person. And in that book, Sass demonstrates that for much of the world's history, diseases have been understood as measurable, observable, physical phenomenon. As Renee Larich, the founder of modern vascular surgery, put it, quote, if one wants to define disease, it must be dehumanized. And disease. When all is said and done, the least important thing is man. Now, by contrast, the field of psychiatry and psychology is focused entirely on the man. They're not looking at blood tests or CT scans or any objective metrics at all. Instead, psychiatrists are interested in your feelings and your thoughts. We are impossible to measure by any objective standard. As Sass notes, quote, until the middle of the 19th century and beyond, illness meant a bodily disorder whose typical manifestation was an alteration of bodily structure that is a visible deformity disease or lesion, Such as misshapen extremity, ulcerated skin, or a fracture or wound. Physicians distinguish diseases from non diseases according to whether or not they could detect an abnormal change in the structure of a person's body. Now, this is one of those observations that, when you hear it read out loud, is genuinely shocking to most people. And most people had no idea that the idea of mental illness as we understand it today simply did not exist for basically the entirety of human history. Up till about the mid-1800s, nobody placed any faith in psychoanalysis either. Certainly, going back to ancient times, people recognize, you know, conditions like depression and mania, but they weren't considered physical illnesses on par with physical ailments the way we do today until very recently. In Shakespeare's macbeth, for example, when lady macbeth is going insane, the doctor basically throws up his hands and says she has to figure it out on her own. He says, the patient must minister to himself. In other words, there's no role for a physician here. There's nothing. There's nothing for a doctor to do with this particular problem. Which doesn't mean the problem isn't real. It just means that it's not the kind of problem that a doctor can fix. Especially since the 90s, though, politicians in the United States have relentlessly pushed the exact opposite position, One after another. Prominent politicians, particularly democrats, have declared that mental illnesses are just like cancer or a broken limb. Bill Clinton said, quote, mental illness can be accurately diagnosed, successfully treated, just as physical illness. Michelle Obama said, quote, whether an illness affects your heart, your leg, or your brain, it's still an illness, and there should be no distinction. Joe biden said, quote, addiction is a neurobiological disease, not a lifestyle choice. It's about time we start treating it as such. And on and on and on. It's the same message for the media and Hollywood and schools and everybody. Now, the root of this rhetoric, sass points out, Was the middle of the 19th century when doctors in Vienna were besieged with patients who were hysterical, which is to say, they had no illness of any kind, but they seemed to be in distress. And this was a problem because, as you probably know, doctors are mostly specialized. They follow a specific course of treatment based on observable symptoms and established data. But patients who are hysterical are a black box. Many of them have personal problems that a doctor can't even address. And therefore, the doctors in Vienna didn't know what to do with these patients, and they weren't particularly interested in treating them. So they sent Them off to Freud. Here's SaaS in a question and answer session shortly before he died, explaining what happened.
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Listen, this is what modern medicine from, you know, since the 19th century, what was, how did psychiatry, how did psychoanalysis come into being? So Viennese doctors had a lot of patients who were hysterical, meaning that they went to doctors and there was nothing wrong with them. The doctor knew it and the patient often knew it but wouldn't admit it. So they couldn't. In order to say, Mrs. Jones, I don't want to see your face again, I think you should see to Dr. X called Freud or Jung or somebody
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else
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in America again, you know, forgive me for being very down to earth. Psychiatry and psychiatrists have often been called the sewers of society that expresses this idea. It deals with a subject and with people that most doctors don't want to deal with.
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So this is how modern psychiatry began. There was no grand discovery or some laboratory finding. That's what's important to understand. There was never any point where psychiatrists like discovered something about people that nobody knew before. Patients simply began showing up and the doctors decided they had to go somewhere. But even at this point, the field didn't have any kind of uniform, objective rules. There was a significant distinction, distinction in how exactly doctors practice psychiatry in different countries. And it's a pretty big clue that the discipline is in fact political in nature, not scientific. I mean, you'd think that if this was a real discipline like cardiology or anything like that, the doctors in different countries would generally handle patients the same way. But that's not what happened with psychiatry. Consider the Soviet Union for example. There was no psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union. There was no confidential one on one psychotherapy either. And that's odd when you think about it. Surely if these diseases of the mind were real, the Soviets would have treated the victims of these diseases just like they treated patients who walked in the door for any number of reasons, cardiology, oncology, pediatrics, etc. But they didn't. Instead, the Soviets exclusively used coercive psychiatry. They would throw people in mental asylums if they disagree with the ruling party as a way of cementing their political control. They would diagnose people with mental disorders as a way of getting rid of them. Meanwhile, in the west, psychiatry expanded exponentially. And since there's no way to actually discover a new ailment in psychiatry, doctors could simply invent them. You don't need to point to any particular physical marker of disease. Believe it or not, it's extremely easy to just come up with new disorders to treat. And that's exactly what they did. As SaaS puts it, quote this reclassification of non illnesses as illnesses has of course been of special value to physicians and psychiatry's profession and social institution. The prestige and power of psychiatrists have been inflated by defining ever more phenomena as falling within the purview of their discipline. Mortimer Adler had noted long ago that psychoanalysts are trying to swallow everything in psychoanalysis. It's difficult to see why we should permit, much less encourage such an expansionism in a profession and so called science, international relations. We are no longer treasure, we no longer treasure the Napoleonic ideal of national expansion at the expense of the integrity of neighboring peoples. Why then do we not consider psychiatric expansionism even though it might be aided and abetted from many sides, that is by patients, medical organizations, lawyers and so forth equally undesirable. Now, whatever the explanation is, and we'll talk about some of the theories in a second, there's no question that the field of psychiatry quickly devolved into absurdity. This happened very quickly after it came into being. The field of modern psychiatry almost immediately just collapsed into total nonsense. During World War II, it became fashionable for psychiatrists in America to talk about malingering as if it was a real disorder. And even today there are some psychiatrists who buy this. And be clear. Malingering means that you walk into the doctor's office and claim to have a disorder that you don't actually have. But even in this situation, psychiatrists concluded there must be a mental illness at work. After all, who would go through the trouble of pretending to be sick? Only a sick person would do that. So in other words, it is logically impossible to pretend to be sick. That's the idea. Anyone who claims to be sick is sick by definition. Everything is a disease. In other words. And for decades there's been a gold rush in psychiatry. These, these quacks are realizing that there's no limit to the number of disorders they can make up. So every year they come up with more. All they have to do is invent some new criteria. And that's why in the past few years the following disorders have been added to the dsm. And this is just a very short list. This is not exhaustive. Prolonged grief disorder. That's when you're really sad. When someone dies. That's a disorder. Now you're mentally ill. Ill. Disruptive mood Dysregulation disorder. Premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Skin picking disorder. Disinhibited social engagement. Disorder, binge eating disorder, and avoidant restrictive food intake disorder. They're also considering even more disorders, including Internet gaming disorder and caffeine use disorder. Now, the upshot is that virtually every human behavior is now a medical disorder. Even Alan Francis, who oversaw the revision to the dsm, warned that doctors were turning everyday life into a pathology. In the 1980s and 1990s, we were told that, you know, we'd eventually have a blood test for disorders like schizophrenia and depression, that we'd be able to prove definitively where these disorders originate in the brain. But we don't have any such blood test in 2026. And while it's true that a very small number of patients who suffer from mental health disorders are later shown after an autopsy to have some form of brain damage, the vast majority of psychiatric patients have no biological marker of their disorder whatsoever. You know, the psychiatric industry simply kept growing despite the fact that none of their promises actually panned out. And at any rate, as Sass would argue, if a mental illness is indeed the result of a physical disorder of the brain, which it would stand to reason is the case with something like schizophrenia, then it is a neurological disease, not a mental illness. Neurological diseases are obviously real. You can see them in brain scans. Mental illness as a category exists to diagnose diseases that cannot be found in the physical brain. They are not diseases of the physical brain, but of the mind. And this distinction is extremely important. But it's something that most people don't think about at all, including most of the doctors who hand out psychiatric drugs like Pez dispensers. Meanwhile, anyone who criticized the industry like SaaS was cast aside. New York tried to revoke his teaching license. They wrote him out of every psychiatric textbook. The profession tried to pretend he never existed because they knew he had a point. And that's why in the past four or five decades, he's been almost entirely vindicated, at least on some of the major points. There are certain bills people just accept without ever questioning them. Wireless is one of them. You look at the number, you know it's too high, and then you keep paying it anyway. So $70 a month, 80, sometimes more. Pure talk fixes that problem immediately. They now offer unlimited high speed data for $34.99 a month. That same plan used to start at $55. They, they lowered it. Not because they had to, because they decided to. So if you looked at pure talk before and didn't switch, well, it's worth taking a look again. And if the question is whether it actually holds up well. They give you 30 days to find out. No contract or cancellation fees. You can test it and make your own decision. The switch itself takes about 10 minutes and if you need help, you get a US based customer service team that can actually solve the problem. 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All you got to do is take a short quiz and Helix will match you to the mattress that works for you. Helix also makes a simple process. Very simple. The mattress ships straight to your door for free and you get a 120 night sleep trial and a limited lifetime warranty. If it's not the right fit, well, they will make it right. It's a simple change, but it has a real effect. Go to helixsleep.com walsh for 27% off site wide helixsleep.com walsh For 27% off site wide make sure you enter our show name at checkout so they know we sent you helixsleep.com Walsh so let's start with SSRIs. There's been a lot of conversation this week about them, which is what got me thinking about all this. Think about it all the time. The pharmaceutical industry now makes more than $20 billion a year on SSRIs alone. One in eight American adults are on antidepressants. One in eight? We're talking about tens of millions of people. From 2016 to 2022, antidepressant use among Americans aged 12 to 25 increased by more than 60%. And unsurprisingly, women are twice as likely as men to be prescribed an SSRI. Around 23 million women use SSRIs compared to about 11 million men. And this is just one form of psychiatric drugs, by the way. Now why might that be? Why Is there such a massive gender disparity with this medication? I mean, if depression is just a physical illness, like diabetes or cancer, then why do we find this enormous difference in between men and women? How do you explain that? Nobody in the psychiatric industry will answer that question. They have no answer for it. It's like long Covid. We're just supposed to conclude that for some reason it affects women far more than men. It can't possibly have anything to do with the fact that women are anxious and miserable because for the past 50 years they've been told to murder their own children, work 40 hours a week in a soulless office building instead of raising a family, and, you know, pretend that men can transform into women by saying a few magic words all while their brains are being fried by social media. Can't be that. Instead, the psychiatric industry will tell you that women must have some sort of unusual chemical imbalance in their brain for whatever reason, even though there's no data to support that theory whatsoever, and even though the concept makes no logical sense. If so many women have this chemical imbalance, then how do we even know that it is an imbalance? I mean, what is the right balance? What is the correct chemical balance that all of these other, you know, chemical imbalances are being judged against? Nobody knows. When a doctor says, oh, you have a chemical imbalance. Oh, so what. What is that like? What am. What's the right balance? Where. Where are you looking at the right balance? And then you're judging that my balance is not balanced. What. What do you. Where is that coming from? Nobody knows. Nobody can answer that question. And there's never been any evidence to back any of this up. This is from a paper that was published in Nature from researchers at University College London, and I'm going to read it at some length because it remains one of the most extraordinary passages that's ever been published in a medical journal, at least in recent times. It was published in the summer of 2022. And in this article, leading researchers admit that actually there is no basis whatsoever to think that serotonin has anything to do with depression. That's kind of a big deal, since we've been told for more than 30 years, a lot longer than that, that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain. That's why they told people to take SSRIs. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. After all that, we learn it's a lie. Quote, our comprehensive review of the major strands of research on serotonin shows that there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with or caused by lower serotonin concentrations or activity. Most studies found no evidence of reduced serotonin activity in people with depression compared to people without, and methods to reduce serotonin availability do not consistently lower mood in volunteers. High quality, well powered genetic studies effectively exclude an association between genotypes related to the serotonin system and depression, including a proposed interaction with stress. The chemical imbalance theory of depression is still put forward by professionals and the serotonin theory in particular has formed the basis of a considerable research effort over the last few decades. The general public widely believes that depression has been convincingly demonstrated to be the result of serotonin or other chemical abnormalities. This belief shapes how people understand their moods. This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis to depression. This is consistent with research on many other biological markers. We suggest it is time to acknowledge that the serotonin theory of depression is not empirically substantiated. That's in the psychiatric world and the medical industry generally, that is like a nuclear bomb exploding or it should be the whole basis for all these drugs that we're putting millions of people on. Almost everything we've said about depression, our whole basis for even claiming it's a physical disease in the first place is wrong. There's no evidence for it. But what's happened since this paper was published in 2022? Nothing. Nothing has happened. The rate of SSRI prescriptions has not slowed down at all. According to all the data I've seen, there has not been a drop in SSRI prescriptions at all. People are still taking them even though doctors admit they have no idea what these drugs are doing to the brain. Let me state that again because it's important you understand this. The entire medical basis for prescribing SSRIs has been debunked and yet doctors are still prescribing them at the same or even maybe higher rates. Now does that mean that SSRIs are totally ineffective? No, actually it's worse than that. They do have an effect. It's just that the effect is often quite negative. Indeed, there are quite a few indications that SSRIs are making people more violent. For one thing, pretty much every mass shooter was on an ssri. That includes the Trans Identifying Covenant school shooter who killed three adults and three nine year old children. Dylann Roof, who shot up the black church in Charleston. Jesse Strain, the Trans Identifying Tumbler Ridge school shooter in Canada, who killed eight people, including several children. Eric Harris, Columbine shooter. Kip Kinkle, who killed two of his classmates and his parents. Jeff Weiss killed nine people at an Indian reservation. Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard shooter. James Holmes, the movie theater shooter in Colorado. Christopher Pittman, who killed his grandparents. Joseph West Becker, killed eight co workers at a printing plant. And on and on and on and on. I could go on listing examples and keep in mind there are plenty more mass shooters who were taking SSRIS that we don't officially know about. These are just the ones that we know now. In response, you might try to argue that, well, the SSRIs may not have caused the violence after all. Mentally troubled people are more likely to take the drugs. They're also more likely to commit mass shootings. There's actual data to suggest that indeed SSRIs could be directly contributing to the problem. This is from a study published in 2016 in the journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Quote the century old belief that patients with depression are at a heightened risk of suicide as they begin to recover and their energy and motivation return is being propagated everywhere. Because of this deeply ingrained idea, many psychiatrists believe that when patients become suicidal on an antidepressant drug, it is not an adverse effect of the drug, but a positive sign that the drug starts working. However, a Systematic Review from 2009 showed that the research that has been carried out contradicts this belief, and our review also suggests that it is wrong. We found that antidepressants double the risk of suicidality and violence, and it's particularly interesting that the volunteers in the studies we reviewed were healthy adults with no signs of a mental disorder. While it is now generally accepted that antidepressants increase the risk of suicide and violence in children and adolescents, although many psychiatrists still deny this, most people believe that these drugs are not dangerous for adults. This is a potentially lethal misconception. Antidepressants double the occurrence of events in adult healthy volunteers that can lead to suicide and violence. Now, to be clear about what they found when looking at healthy volunteers, people with no mental health issues, SSRIs made them far more suicidal and violent. Now, nobody can explain exactly why this happens because again, Nobody knows how SSRIs work at all and nobody under how and how exactly is it? I mean, what does it mean to be suicidal? It means that you have a thought. You have the thought of taking your own life. Well, how is it that a drug could put a thought in somebody's head? How can you take someone who's healthy and has never had any suicidal thoughts and then you start making them think these thoughts. The drug puts these thoughts, not just any thoughts, but thoughts of self destruction, in their head. How does that work? I mean, how does it actually work? Well, you can ask any doctor who prescribes this stuff and they will not be able to answer because they don't know by itself. This finding is obviously extremely alarming considering how widely diagnosed these medications are. You know, psychiatrists are handing out SSRIs like candy, despite the fact that according to the study, they drastically increase the risk that normal people will commit suicide or kill someone. Now, what other effects might these drugs have? It's a very good question. Recently, the stepdaughter of Kamala Harris posted the following video on YouTube where she describes SSRI withdrawal symptoms. Apparently these withdrawal symptoms are so severe that she's been taking these drugs for 15 years. Watch.
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I'm just sitting here crocheting, waiting for a friend, and I was just listening to this podcast that the Wall Street Journal put out about SSRIs anti anxiety meds and kind of the over prescription of them in America. And it was making me think a lot because I've been on SSRIs for over a decade, almost 15 years probably. And they were calling out the lack of research on long term use of these things. They were calling out the lack of information that doctors give about coming off of these meds and kind of the psychological effects they can have, have. And it really got me thinking how little I've thought about that, naively, obviously. But I've noticed that every time I've gone off of it for a week or missed it or for whatever reason, like it has been really hard for me and I've had a really hard time. And I guess this is just something I was wondering if you guys have thought about or relate to or kind of consider when you're thinking about going on meds like that. Because I don't know if this is something that I feel like is being talked about enough because I feel like so many of us are on these meds and this is like actually happening. Like people get off of them and they kind of break down and it could be really bad. So yeah, I guess I just want your general thoughts now.
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I have every reason to believe she's telling the truth here because if the drug wasn't extremely addictive, then in all likelihood she'd have given it up at some point in the last 15 years. After all, it's Obviously not working. She doesn't seem to be a happy person, despite all the serotonin that's circulating in her system. And instead of showing any positive emotion whatsoever, she's constantly uploading videos, like this one, where she complains about her climate anxiety. Watch.
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D
I feel disgust at what's going on in the world around genocides, the loss of race rights, the loss of health care, the just general fear that everyone has surrounding affordability, their lives, their livelihood. Like, everything, it's just. It feels so big. I think everything with the environment is
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really,
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to me, and it is
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one.
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I experience a lot of climate anxiety, like a lot of us do. It's not funny. I. It's just like. It's one of those things. It's not funny, but you just, like, nervous laugh about it because it's scary. It is.
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F
It's.
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All of these things are happening. And, like, what are what besides the small things we can do and pushing for change and fighting and protesting, and it's really hard not to sit in those moments where it just feels. Feels so heavy,
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B
so very miserable. She's just looking for things to be miserable about, just going down the list. All things that have no impact on her life whatsoever. I mean, she's very comfortable there. There's. She's perfectly safe. Like, she lives a very comfortable life just looking for things running down the list. This is what she does every. Every morning when she wakes up. Just run down, like, go through the checklist, have it on a sticky note, have it on your bathroom mirror. A checklist of all the things to be upset about and worry about. Oh, genocide, climate change. It's like watching somebody who's been on Zepbound for 15 years and they're still £800. At some point, you just have to give it up. It's not doing the trick. In the case of Kamala Harris's stepdaughter, the SSRIs, if anything, are probably making her anxiety even worse. Truly hard to watch. But again, it only serves to underscore how addictive these drugs are. RFK Jr has compared quitting SSRIs to heroin withdrawal, except he says that SSRI withdrawal is even worse. Watch.
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F
I happen to be an actual expert on this because I was addicted to heroin for 14 years. I never wanted to be. So I was constantly getting off of it and then getting back on. And I went through cold turkey withdrawal probably over 100 times. And so I know what it's like. And it's not fun, but it is limited. It is finite in time. After 72 hours, it's over. So you just have to steal yourself for 72 bad hours. But I've watched people come off of SSRIs, and it is not even comparable. And I watched family member get off of them after a couple of years on them. And she was suicidal literally every day. She woke up every morning and said, I don't want to live. And she said, the only reason I'm staying alive is for you guys, for the family. And that's heartbreaking to hear from a family member. And I've heard that from hundreds and hundreds of people. The same story again and again. It can be prolonged. And for many patients, it's completely unexpected. And the physicians handle this by saying, oh, this is your original symptom, reasserting yourself. You need to get back on the SSRIs, and they get locked in. A lifetime cycle that is that for many patients, is absolutely, absolutely cataclysmic.
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B
So it's not just the withdrawal symptoms that aren't discussed when it comes to SSRIs. Their possible effects on sexual dysfunction are hardly mentioned at all. This is from a recent panel in Washington featuring a Vanderbilt student who says that SSRI has chemically castrated her. They don't really tell you about this side effect. Watch.
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E
Yeah, so I'm living with a condition called post SSRI sexual dysfunction. Sexual dysfunction is one of the most common and reliable side effects of SSRI. In fact, 50 to 70% of all patients taking these will have sexual side effects. What patients are not warned about is that these side effects can be permanent long after you stop the last drug dose. And PSSD is not just low libido. It is a full nervous system injury in which you lose total sexual function neurologically through essentially nervous system damage. So the hallmark symptom of PSSD is genital numbness? Yes. Like complete loss of sensation in your genitals. For me, I clearly hate to talk about this, but my clitoris is completely numb, as if it's the back of my elbow. I have no sensation internally. I'm 23 years old. Sufferers also lose the ability to orgasm permanently, like, for the rest of their lives, and their libido entirely, which for me and what a lot of other people experience is like a sudden onset, like, chemical asexuality that just never goes away. And in my opinion, I don't think it's sensational to say that this is a form of chemical castration, that it is permanent. But beyond that, PSSD is not just a loss of sexual function, but a loss for some people of emotional function as well. That has been the case for me before this. I was a super emotional, empathetic, loving, caring, like Sylvia Plath reading and resonating girl. And the day I woke up with this injury, I quite literally felt my soul leave my body. Like I'm so serious. It was the most unbelievable, inorganic thing I've ever experienced. And it's a common symptom of people who have this condition to this day. It's been years for me. I'm 23 now. I can't feel love for my own mother, which is the hardest thing on earth. I can't feel connection or love for my friends or even pleasure in music, which was the bane of my existence. I was a songwriter since I was a child. It was my outline and it's been completely neurologically severed from these medications.
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B
Now when I looked into this, I mean, it's a totally tragic story and there are many, many like this. And it's absolutely infuriating that doctors are just recklessly dosing millions of young people, in particular young women, especially with these drugs and then when they have these kinds of side effects that as she says, can be permanent, the response of the medical industry as well, Tough luck. Nothing we do for you now. Or, or you know, more appropriately, the response is, well, here's another drug. Oh, our drug caused this life altering, life destroying problem. Well, good news, we got another drug that'll help solve that problem. Now when I looked into this, I came across this paper from researchers in Canada at McMaster University. This was published two years ago. They wrote, quote, while sexual dysfunction is a well known side effect of taking SSRIs in an undetermined number of patients, sexual function does not return to pre drug baseline after stopping ssri. The condition is known as post SSRI sexual dysfunction. PSSD characterized most commonly by genital numbness, pleasureless or weak orgasm, loss of libido and erectile dysfunction. A number of obstacles to quantifying the occurrence of PSSD include difficulty in designing a suitable study method. Other obstacles include patient embarrassment and raising sexual concerns. The response of healthcare professionals, inability to stop an antidepressant due to withdrawal issues in a proportion of patients and patient unawareness that their sexual difficulties are linked to prior medication, compounded by variability of online information and a lack of information aimed at public education. In other words, they're acknowledging that SSRIs can cause long lasting effects on people even after they stop taking the drug. But there's no way to determine how many People are suffering these side effects in part because their doctors make fun of them when they bring it up. Quote. It is not uncommon for patients to have difficult experiences with healthcare professionals when trying to seek help for symptoms they suspect are pssd. Reports of unhelpful, dismissive and hostile responses have been documented in the medical literature. These include patients having their suspicions ridiculed, being advised to find a different sexual partner, or having their symptoms attributed to some kind of ongoing mental health condition. And you can see why that would happen, by the way, because when a doctor prescribes you a medication and then you go back to that doctor sometime later and say, hey, Doc, I think the medication you gave me destroyed my life, they're going to be very unlikely to say, yeah, you know what? You might be right about that. I might have just screwed your life up. Sorry about that. They're very unlikely to say that. And additionally, because no one in the media ever brings up this topic, people don't even consider the fact that their SSRI might be causing their problem. So this is one of those problems that no one wants to talk about, even though it's obviously happening. And behind the scenes, over the years, various regulators have tried to get more information on this point. A group called the PSSD Network assembled a timeline that catalogs all these requests for information. It turns out that in April 2011, Eli Lilly sent a letter to the FDA which stated that they had observed, quote, the occasional persistence of sexual dysfunction following discontinuation of SSRI treatment in trials. 2008, the Swedish Medical products agency, quote, raised concerns about the clinical relevance of observed testicular toxicity and reproductive effects. Saying it was premature to dismiss safety concerns, they requested a more detailed analysis. In 2006, the European Medicines Agency, or EMA, voiced concern about evidence from animal studies that show SSRIs cause testicular toxicity. The EMA requested further studies from Eli Lilly over concerns that the drugs might affect fertility. None of these requests for information produced a comprehensive study on the topic because, again, nobody can figure out how to conduct a study like this. Or at least that's the excuse. I think a better reason might be they just don't want to know the answer. Nevertheless, Canada added warnings about persistent sexual dysfunction SSRI labels in 2021. Australia followed suit in 2024. But in America, the FDA to this day does not require any warning labels about persistent sexual dysfunction on these medications. So SSRIs are potentially causing serious lifelong side effects, most of which are not disclosed to patients as a potential risk. Now, the same is true For a lot of psychiatric meds, including ADHD medicine like Ritalin. Last year we discussed how even the experts who initially promoted ADHD medications are now admitting that it's all a giant scam. More than 21% of 14 year old boys in the United States supposedly suffer from adhd. Many of them are taking drugs like Ritalin and Adderall as a result. But as New York Times admits, quote, that ever expanding mountain of pills rests on certain assumptions that ADHD is a medical disorder that demands a medical solution, that it is caused by inherent deficits in children's brains. The medications we give them repair those deficits. Scientists who study ADHD are now challenging each one of those assumptions. Oh, you think? I mean, this is one of those. The many times where I look at, you know, when the scientists and doctors finally get around to saying, yeah, there might be an issue here. And I think, well, how is it that I noticed that 15 years ago, just using my own common sense and you guys are just now getting around to, yeah, well, maybe, I don't know, like it was. I'm not a very smart person. If it was obvious to me, it was obvious to you. Basic common sense questions about the whole concept of ADHD should have been asked a long time ago and they weren't. In particular, scientists are now admitting that Ritalin does not improve academic performance at all. The alleged behavioral benefits, to the extent they exist at all, fade to nothing within a couple of years. And meanwhile, children are suffering permanent, lifelong consequences. Quote There was another distressing result they noticed in their data. The children who took Ritalin for an extended period grew less quickly than the non medicated children did. By the end of those 36 months, subjects who had consistently taken stimulant medication were on average, more than an inch shorter than the ones who had never received medication. Many of the scientists in the study group assumed that this height suppression in childhood would be temporary, that the shorter children would catch up during adolescence. But when data was collected again nine years after the initial experiment, the height gap remained. In 2017, the study group published yet another follow up, this time tracking the subject until age 25. The ones who had consistently taken stimulant medication remained about an inch shorter than their peers. Their ADHD symptoms, meanwhile, were no better than those who had stopped taking the medication or who had never started. Additionally, last year, a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that even a medium strength daily dose of Adderall more than tripled a patient's likelihood of developing psychosis or mania. A high Dose risk, high dose increased the risk by a factor of five. So these are just drugs that they should just never give to anybody. Okay? You're giving the drugs for a disorder that doesn't exist and has never been proven. It makes no sense. The, the potential side effects are myriad and they include psychosis and stunting your growth. By the way, if you're taking a drug that can make you be shorter, that already is a massive side effect, okay? It's affected your physical growth, but that is, that, that's just the start of it, okay? If it's doing that to you physiologically, it's doing a lot more than that. So to recap, the drugs don't even work, but they do make it much more likely that your child will become psychotic and they also stand a good chance of permanently stunting his growth as well. Of course, none of this information was communicated to the millions of parents who gave these drugs, which are essentially speed, to their children. Certainly there's been no attempt by the medical establishment to grapple with the fundamental incoherence of ADHD as a concept. What the hell does it actually mean for a child to have a deficit of attention? Doesn't this again require us to have some baseline standard of how much attention a child should have? When a doctor tells you that, oh, your child suffers from a deficit of attention, shouldn't your first question be, well, how, but how much attention should he have? What do you mean a, like a deficit? That's a, that's a quantifiable term. It's, it's a term of quantity, a deficit that means that there's less of this thing than there should be. Well, how much should there be? And what are you basing that on, Doc? Nobody asks that or very few people asked it. Every parent knows that young kids, boys in particular, have a baseline attention span of like 10 seconds anyway. And if you put them in a very boring environment like public school, or you surround them with distractions like TVs and phones and tablets and all the rest of it, then they'll have even more trouble paying attention. This is why kids today seem so distracted. The first reason is that they're kids. The second reason is that they are surrounded by distractions. If you surround your kid with noises and lights and screens and sounds and everything all the time, and then you notice that they're distracted, you don't need to come up with any mental illness theory to explain it. So before a nine year old boy is diagnosed as mentally ill and a victim of adhd, have his doctors and his parents controlled for it and accounted for the plethora of distractions in his life. And the fact that he's in school seven hours a day, which is really boring, and the fact that he's a young boy and young boy, since the beginning of time have been rabunctious, energetic and distractible. Have these factors been positively and absolutely eliminated as explanations before the drugs are prescribed? The answer is no, never. Not in a single case. These factors are not even seriously considered, ever. We take easily distracted young kids, we surround them by distractions, we plop them at a desk in a classroom with 30 other kids five days a week. And then when they respond to all that in a normal way, we pump them full of drugs to sedate them and make them compliant, which later stunts their growth and makes them psychotic. That's what's happening. It's a moral crime and it should be a literal crime. And by the way, sometimes children as young as five years old are being prescribed drugs like Zoloft and similar medications. And this is how that turns out.
- [45:34]
A
At five years old, I was given this stuff. And around the same time, starting at elementary school, I started having adverse side effects, mainly uncontrollable twitches that I'm still dealing with today and I'm probably gonna deal with forever. Again, I don't think this was told to my parents at all. But after seeing this, instead of getting me off the drugs they were, because they thought this was the only option for me, they just tried therapy that didn't work. And a few years later, when I was 12 years old, I was actually tested for a prolactin when, after I'd been on Risperdal for so long. And prolactin is basically the lactation hormone, so I could have developed women's breasts. And not only that, I could have also developed lactation from being on Risperdal. And this was at a time before I even knew trans existed. So imagine being a boy getting female parts on your chest without even knowing that trans exists. And yet that was a possibility. Thank God they didn't find anything. But what they did find was elevated cholesterol comparable to that of an old man. So that's a problem. And they had to change my dosage. At least they did, but they should have gotten me off completely. But this isn't even really my parents fault because doctors coerced them into thinking it was the only option.
- [46:50]
B
I have to wonder how long it's going to take for these scientists to tell us the truth about GLP1s or the COVID shot, or so called gender transition medications or marijuana. Any other drug that's become a contentious political issue in this country and or or and stuff that we've been told by the establishment for so long is perfectly safe, there's nothing to worry about eventually becomes the inevitable part where they say, oh yeah, you know what, actually this might have totally destroyed you. You know. Anyway, Hiring is not just about finding someone who can do the job. It's about finding someone who actually wants to do the job. When a candidate is engaged, it really makes all the difference. They ask better questions. They understand the role. They're thinking about how they fit into it. All that matters more than anything all that matters more than anything you'll find on a resume. If you're hiring, you want a candidate who's passionate about your role. Unfortunately, that insight can't really be found on resume unless you post your job on ZipRecruiter. Try for free today at ZipRecruiter.com Walsh ZipRecruiter uses powerful matching technology to quickly connect you with quick qualified candidates. And they've added a new feature that shows you the most interested qualified candidates first, so you can focus on the people who are actually paying attention to your role. Candidates can also explain in their own words why they're interested, which gives you a clearer picture before you even start the conversation. Find candidates who really want your job on ZipRecruiter four out of five employers who post on ZipRecrucutor get a quality candidate within the first day. Try for free at ZipRecruiter.com Walsh that's ZipRecruiter.com Walsh meet your match on ZipRecruiter after an extremely busy day, you should be able to come home, sleep soundly, and wake up the next day feeling rested, not exhausted. But if you've been stuck with the same sheets for years, this likely is not the case. Your sheets wear out over time. Sometimes it's hard to even remember what they felt like when they were new. The fabrics have broken down, your pillows have lost their support, and small discomforts have piled up over time. So much so that the scratchiness just feels normal. That was the situation in my house. We had normal everyday sheets, but over time we noticed they weren't staying in place or retaining their quality. So we upgraded to bowl and branch. Bowl and branch offered everything for our bed. Sheets, pillows, blankets, comforters all made with organic cotton. Everything is designed to be breathable and durable. The difference was immediate. The sheets felt softer, the bed stayed cooler. Everything felt and fit the way that it should. We started with just bowl and branch sheets and then we added more. Now the bed feels complete. It's a place you actually want to get into at the end of the day. This is proof you don't always need a new system or a new routine. Sometimes you just need to exchange low quality for durability and value. Replace what you sleep on every night and feel the difference. Upgrade your sleep with bowl and Branch. Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at BollandBranch.com Walsh that's Bowland Branch B O L L a n d branch.com Walsh code Walsh to unlock 15% off exclusions apply now what's gone wrong here is that Sometime in the 1970s, the medical community decided that their primary goal wasn't to make people healthier. Their primary goal was to play God, to fix aspects of the human condition that they found unappealing. So if a child is fidgety, as all children are, doctors decided they could change that behavior. If a mother doesn't actually want her child, doctors decided that she didn't need to have one, they could just abort the child and on and on. In 1993, there was a study showing that medical schools had mostly stopped mentioning a deity in their oaths. These are oaths that graduating students have to take where they say they're not going to do any harm. Quote 147 of 98% of responding schools administered a professional oath. The oath was typically taken in graduation. While 49% of schools claimed to use the Hippocratic Oath, just one school used the original. Only 11 schools limited abortion, 24 bad euthanasia, and five prescribed proscribed sexual misconduct. While 63 invoked external witnesses, only 16 invoked a deity, using the phrase whatever I hold sacred as a substitute. So less than 11% of medical schools referenced a deity in their oaths. Instead, they allowed the med students to determine what's sacred and what's not. A century earlier, pretty much every medical school oath mentioned God. And that gives you a pretty good idea of what's going on here. Doctors are now destroying people's lives, including the lives of children, because they're driven by an overwhelming narcissistic desire to play God. Not every doctor, of course, has that desire, obviously, but this is the general trend in the medical industry, in particular among among in the psychiatric industry. And we all know where this is going. In Canada, they're now planning to euthanize people with these so called mental Health conditions to save money for the healthcare system, watch
- [51:33]
A
section 4 of module 7 on maid and mental illness entitled Specific Mental Disorders and MAID Assessments. Features Quote the most common disorders associated with MAID requests. Common disorders featured in this section include major depression, personality disorders, trauma related disorders such as ptsd, substance use disorders and Autism spectrum disorder. So to be clear, anyone with these disorders and others, including autism spectrum disorder or substance use disorder, or someone with PTSD, could qualify for MAID in the context of having a sole underlying mental health disorder, correct?
- [52:19]
B
Yes, that's correct.
- [52:20]
A
Okay, thank you for that. Now Cam app is, and just to be clear, could be Anything in the
- [52:26]
B
DSM 5 as long as it meets all of the criteria related to a grievous, near irremediable medical condition.
- [52:34]
A
Right. So that would include things like anxiety, schizophrenia, et cetera. Correct?
- [52:39]
B
It's entirely possible. Okay, so the expansion of mental health disorders is going to continue indefinitely to increasingly horrific ends unless we take a cue from Thomas Sass and start questioning the fundamental premise that all of this is built on. You know, it's finally and very recently become acceptable to express skepticism about SSRIs and ADHD medication. That's why you have articles in the New York Times about it. It's why that video of Kamala Harris's stepdaughter went viral. So a lot, a lot of these kinds of videos are going viral just even in the last couple of weeks. Now, I'm old enough to remember when offering any criticism of antidepressants and ADHD medication was enough to get you screamed at and shouted down as some kind of anti science lunatic. That seems to finally be changing. People en masse are thinking critically about these issues for the first time in a long time, maybe ever. But if you're going to think critically, think critically about the entire issue. The problem is not just that SSRIs are overprescribed, it's that they are prescribed at all. The problem is not just that too many kids are being diagnosed with adhd. It's that any are ever diagnosed with adhd. Now, whether you want to go full sauce is up to you. I'm not saying that even I buy all of his arguments entirely, but I do know that doctors are not gods. The human condition is not a disease that needs to be or can be cured with a pill. If you also recognize that truth, then in at least one important respect, you know more than a lot of medical professionals do. The fact is that life is complicated and hard. It's not easy. We suffer, we feel despair, we have anxiety, we get distracted. That doesn't make us sick. It doesn't make us disordered. Just makes us human. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday. Have a great weekend. Godspeed.
- [54:52]
F
I do believe that if people have committed treason against the United States of
- [54:56]
B
America, their statues should not be in the Capitol. History is written by the victors. And since the 1960s, we've been told, mostly by people whose ancestors didn't even live here during the war, that the south committed treason. But if the Confederates were traitors, then why was Jefferson Davis never put on trial for treason? What were Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson afraid of? Did they know something you're not allowed to say? Today, it's time for the truth. So here it is. Robert E. Lee was a military genius and a man of immense honor. He was beloved by Americans from the north and south for a century after the war. This is the real history of the Civil War.