Dr. Caroline Leaf Podcast With Robert Whitaker: The Great Psychiatry Fraud

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From Dr. Caroline Leaf: “In this podcast I speak with best-selling author, journalist and mental health advocate Robert Whitaker about the myth of the chemical imbalance, the politics of psychiatry and Big Pharma, and why we need to change the way we think and talk about mental health. Whitaker sees his role as a science journalist as someone who is an honest communicator. Science journalism is a public service — it involves presenting real, evidence-based science to the public, not marketing. This role as an honest communicator shaped Whitaker’s work as director of public relations at Harvard Medical School, and eventually led him to investigate how medical professionals can delude themselves, how money and business can corrupt medical practice, including psychiatry, and the myth of the chemical imbalance.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

  • Why Robert Whitaker is so passionate about mental health
  • The need for real mental health science, not marketing
  • The myth of the chemical imbalance
  • Whitaker’s amazing book Mad in America & psychiatry’s many delusions
  • How psychiatric drugs can affect people in the long term
  • The recent scientific article that everyone is talking about
  • We have all been lied to & it is time to take action
  • Debunking the myth of progress: the WHO study
  • There is hope!
  • Why Whitaker started his organization Mad in America
  • The pathologization of childhood
  • The disease model has made things worse
  • Drug outcomes in real world patients & how psychiatric drugs can impact the brain
  • How our experiences can affect us mentally & physically
  • What is wrong with the DSM

RW: The message I’d like to give to people is that if we can actually have an honest paradigm, we can hope again. And we can find solutions again. And we can build better environments. So this is not a pessimistic story, this is an optimistic story. And it’s one that celebrates within us, within human beings, these extraordinary capacities we have to overcome horrible setbacks. But also to understand the obligation we have to build societies that are more nurturing of us all. So that’s, I think, the final message — is that when you critique this you say, well, what are you offering — in return to that critique, well, what’s out there, in nature, is an unbelievably optimistic story — if we can just grab it — about how extraordinarily resilient and adaptive human beings are and how responsive to the environment.”

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4 COMMENTS

  1. Thank you both for this valuable and compelling podcast. There can be no doubt that ‘Traditional Psychiatry Mismanages The Treatment of Mental Health’.
    The injudicious, inappropriate and extended prescribing of such toxic psychotropic drugs is unforgivable . ‘Antidepressant’ and ‘antipsychotic’ drugs are reported to cause mitochondrial toxicity/dysfunction. This, in other drug classes, is considered to cause lipodystrophy, metabolic syndromes with gross weight gain/fat redistribution syndrome and diabetes. Mitochondrial toxicity may explain why there are so many multi-systems injuries, both during, and in the years after ‘treatment’.

    The common and commonly misdiagnosed adverse drug reaction (ADR) to both of these psychotropic drug classes : AKATHISIA is vulnerable to misdiagnosis as Serious Mental illness (SMI).

    “Psychotic Depression is vanishingly rare compared with treatment (AD) induced akathisia”.

    Antidepressant induced AKATHISIA can result in those who have been inappropriately prescribed SSRIs/SNRIs (eg for normal exam stress) being misdiagnosed, incarcerated (‘sectioned) and forcibly subjected to psychotropic poly-pharmacy when they have no mental illnesss whatsoever. The resulting increased AKATHISIA , emotional blunting and toxic behavioural changes are then serially misdiagnosed as additional SMIs: Labels for Life.
    There inevitably follows cascade iatrogenesis resulting in life-threatening and/or disabling physical, emotional, economic and social injuries. Unless these invalid false diagnoses are accepted by the injured and disabled patient, it may be impossible to ever claim any State Benefits.
    Would any G.P. be prepared to certify such a victim as: ‘Unfit to work indefinitely due to prescription drug induced, multiple, irreversible iatrogenic injuries’?

    It would afford powerful additional evidence of the Failed Bio-Psychiatry Paradigm were there to be documented evidence as to how many healthy, normal people are incarcerated, abused, and irreversibly injured (or worse) because their AKATHISIA was unrecognised, denied, ignored, unknown, misdiagnosed and mistreated.

    Psychiatry means “Never Having To Say You’re Sorry”.

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  3. I loved this interview, and the attention on what all of this does to children. This isn’t a new story, though. It’s quite bizarre to think that children are born in a way that they are incomplete, that they have to be coerced, terrified through the intimidation of deterrence or rewards and thus brainwashed to fit into our “society” to follow its “rules,” to believe all of the indoctrination instilled by fear, and then they will be “complete.” That that turns into deciding those that can’t conform have some chemical imbalance or genetic flaw is just a new turn. A new turn into how warring factions, addictions and all the rest of the thoughtless reflexes that are considered sane are instilled into people’s behavior and being human is made out to be a disease.

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  4. This is hands down the best conversation I’ve seen to date. And I’ve seen many many conversations on this topic. Thank you, both of you. ♥️ I pray every day that the scales will tip and there’ll be a revolution. I have hope of a full recovery from 25 years venlafaxine use. Into my 5th year tapering and now at 29.9mg. Tapering hyperbolically, weighing doses and listening to my body. The shame is the catch 22 whereby I’m still having to take the substance causing my physical disability because to just stop would cause further harm. Finding the sweet spot and moving forward. ♥️♥️ So much harm done to so many, and now the children!!! like you I just can’t look too hard because I can’t deal with the cruelty and greed that caused it. How do those responsible sleep ……

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