Jørgen Kjønø, whose stage name is Dex Carrington, is a Norwegian-American stand-up comedian based in Oslo, Norway. He is also an actor, host of the Truth Train podcast, and former travel show host who gained international recognition as the host of Dexpedition, which aired on MTV in over 30 countries.

Today, he joins us on the Mad In America podcast to talk about his experience with Lyrica and Zyprexa, including a five-and-a-half-year taper after 10 years on the drugs.

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

Brooke Siem: Thanks for being here. Who is Dex Carrington, as opposed to Jørgen?

Dex Carrington: I was born in Norway but I grew up in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Canada, going to American schools my whole life, so English became my first language. When I started doing stand-up, I needed a stage name. I couldn’t go on stage with a name that sounded like a tongue-twister in English.

Around that time, I got sponsored by the clothing brand DC — they do skateboarding, snowboarding, that kind of stuff. They wanted a lifestyle representative, and I had to pick a name that began with “D” and ended with “C.” So I became Dex Carrington.

Siem: And all your comedy is under Dex Carrington?

Carrington: That’s it, yeah.

Siem: While this isn’t a comedy podcast — let’s find a little humor in the tragedy here. You and I connected over Instagram through the psychiatric drug withdrawal world. Can you walk us through your psychiatric drug history?

Carrington: Throughout college and high school, I drank a little, and smoked a little pot. Nothing major. I was focused on getting good grades and I was just a really upstanding citizen if you will. Then after university, I moved into adult life and the transition was too much for me. I got benzos from my doctor and thought, this is brilliant. But I noticed very quickly how intense the consequences were — they’re narcotics, and they mess with your ability to calculate risk.

Things started unraveling pretty fast, so I went to a psychiatrist and said, “Listen, I don’t want to become a drug addict but I have so much anxiety and depression. Please help me.” And the way he framed it was basically: If you’re a good person, you take psychiatric medication. If you’re a bad person, you take narcotics. What do you want to be?
It’s funny, right? Because every mood-altering substance affects your brain — but somehow, these pills are magical! They’re beyond the laws of physics!

Siem: Benevolent!

Carrington: Oh my goodness — divine, even! Homeostasis doesn’t apply, logic doesn’t apply, nothing applies. It’s just fairy tales all around.

So I started taking these pills and I went through the whole list — Zoloft, Cymbalta, Prozac. Every one of them made me sick. Each one was a nightmare. But there’s a doctor there with a diploma and the outfit and the credibility, and you’re trained your whole life to trust these people. You think, Why would this person be destroying my life? That’s not possible, right? How can this person’s ignorance be ruining my psyche even more?

Eventually, I ended up on two drugs that did something — Zyprexa, which makes you extremely groggy, and Lyrica, which at the time was still considered low-risk with the same addiction profile as Tylenol. Those were the two drugs I was on by 2011, after having tried something like 30 or 40 different ones.

Siem: What country were you in when all of this was happening?

Carrington: I was in Norway. I stayed on [Zyprexa and Lyrica] for a year or two, but the drug use kept escalating. By 2013, I needed to get clean. I got off the narcotics first. Then I went to my psychiatrist and said, “I want to get off these, too.” He said, “No problem — taper both at the same time over two weeks.” So I did. And I went insane.

It was like being rigged with a kill switch. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t think and couldn’t function. It felt like I had every neurological disorder known to man at once. The suffering was unbearable so I reinstated, and the pain went away. Subconsciously, I decided that the most important thing in my life is to never get off these drugs — and never question their efficacy because that was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced.

Siem: What was your mindset during the time when you were being shuffled around the initial 30 to 40 drugs, in terms of how you viewed yourself and your mental state?

Carrington: I thought I was at max suffering—because I didn’t have enough life experience to know how bad things could get. I didn’t have any resilience, either. But there was a doctor telling me, “This is totally safe and harmless.”

Siem: You bought into that?

Carrington: Yes, 100%.

Siem: Did you think you had a mental illness?

Carrington: That wasn’t so important to me. I had symptoms, and if I had to admit to being bipolar or whatever just to get some help, fine. I thought, People way smarter than me have figured this out. I imagined geniuses in Geneva with beakers and all this experimental stuff, wearing lab coats. I figured they were very smart, and we could trust them. I believed in modern science—blah blah blah.

I think I ended up with nine diagnoses or something like that. Today I have none—because I just decided not to have them. Looking back, it’s just madness. And it’s all so simple.

I think what gets me the most is remembering how certain that psychiatrist was. The kind of certainty he had—you can only have that if you have very little information. But even if someone had tried to tell me the truth back then, I wouldn’t have been able to grasp it. There’s just no reference point for how much suffering these pills can cause.

Once I gave up on getting off Lyrica and Zyprexa, there was no point in trying to stay clean. I mean, how can you call yourself “clean” when you’re taking Lyrica every morning and night, plus Zyprexa? If you don’t take them, you die.

Eventually, my life just spun out of control. I was on cocaine and OxyContin, on Adderall, tons and tons of benzos, powders—everything. Testosterone injections, you name it. Then there was an intervention, and I went to rehab in Thailand in 2019.

The first thing that happened in rehab was they took me off all the narcotics—either stopped them or tapered me on methadone for 10 days. But then I saw the psychiatrist there, and he said, “Oh, you’ve been on those meds for eight years? Just quit them. Cold turkey.”

Oh man—the fear. At that point, the only thing that mattered to me was staying on those drugs. Never tamper with them. I was terrified of what would happen if I did. I’ve always said: that it’s hard to get off narcotics because you love them so much—but it’s hard to get off psychiatric drugs because you fear them so much. If you’ve ever tried to reduce the dose and really felt that impact… oh my God.

I’ve had death threats. I had to live at a secret address for four years. I’ve lost people I’ve loved. The love of my life left me. My dog was stolen. I’ve been suicidal—over and over again. But all of that? It’s nothing. I’d rather live through all that every day for the rest of my life than experience one minute of psychiatric drug withdrawal.

Siem: Where are you at now, just from a symptom standpoint?

Carrington: I’ve been off Lyrica for over four years. I took a six-month break, then did the Zyprexa taper. And this part is really important for me to communicate—because I would’ve given everything I owned in the world to hear this when I was in Lyrica withdrawal: The fear disappears.

That overwhelming, body-wide terror—when your amygdala’s on fire, when fear isn’t even the right word because it’s not fear, it’s horror, terror. There are no human words to describe how bad it feels. But it fades. It dissipates. Everything gets better. The fear from Lyrica withdrawal goes away. That might be the most important message on planet Earth.

Two years ago, I had 10,000 symptoms. Now I have about 10. But your brain doesn’t spend time thinking about the symptoms that are gone—it fixates on the ones that are still there. There’s always one that steps into the spotlight. Right now it’s some digestive stuff but the big difference is that I can talk again. For two years coming off Lyrica, I couldn’t even talk.

What really matters is looking back six months, a year, and noticing the changes. You need people around you who’ve witnessed the journey and say things like, “Whoa, you’ve got a spark in your eye again,” or “Your skin is glowing,” or “Your hair looks thicker.” Whatever it is—those markers show you’re coming back to life.

Siem: How did you weigh the math of being in that place of unbelievable pain and suffering versus just going back on the Lyrica and Zyprexa?

Carrington: When I got clean and sober—funny enough—everyone at rehab was saying, “If you can get off Oxy, you can do anything.” And for most people who are just on Oxy, that might be true.

But in my case, the Oxy, cocaine, amphetamines—all that stuff was counteracting the side effects of the psych meds. So once I got off the narcotics, I was sicker than I’d ever been in my entire life. If I didn’t find a way to get off those pills, I would’ve ended up handicapped—on government benefits, probably needing someone to take care of me full-time.

My back pain was so debilitating I couldn’t get in or out of a car at age 36. And I’ve said this on stage many times: nothing can make you more mentally ill than a psychiatric drug. Because once you’re messing with the nervous system, the amount of pain you can generate is incredible.

I remember giving a talk about a year ago and a nurse came up to me afterward. She said, “How can you say Lyrica causes pain? We give it to patients every day for pain.” So I asked, “Do you have a single patient who is only on Lyrica—and not also on Codeine, Oxy, Ketarax, or Benzos?” And she said, “No.” That had never even occurred to her.

But for me, Lyrica caused anxiety, pain, and dysfunction. If I hadn’t gotten off of it, I would have been permanently disabled. So I started the taper and thought, Hey, I went off Oxy, I can do anything.

Siem: What kept you going?

Carrington: There are two kinds of people in this world, Brooke: those who are humble, and those who are about to be humbled.

What got me through it was that once you get down to a certain dose, and for me that was around 100 milligrams, it stops feeling like withdrawal and starts feeling like a bad acid trip beyond your worst nightmare. And it feels like it’s never going to end.

But then I started noticing that people in the Lyrica support group were saying they’d reinstated—and it didn’t help. Some said they actually felt worse. And that’s when I realized: once you commit to the withdrawal—especially with Lyrica—you can’t mess with it. You can destroy yourself if you don’t follow through.

Fear kept me going. Say what you will about fear—it’s maybe not the most inspiring motivator, but it worked. It kept me alive.

Siem: Fear kept me going too—and anger. Once I realized what was happening, I was so pissed off. I got into this headspace where I was like, I will not give the pharmaceutical industry one more dollar after what they did to me.

Carrington: I can relate to that completely—just not having to go to the pharmacy and take something I didn’t want to take. That kind of anger—it was just unhinged. And then on top of that, all the doctors would do was deny my experience.

Siem: What was your support system like during this time?

Carrington: I had the best support system in the world. I had my parents, and it was COVID. Everything was shut down and I had a girlfriend at the time who was just obsessed with getting me off these drugs. She was basically like my personal nurse.

Siem: You said something before we got on this call that stuck with me—that there’s just an unacceptable amount of doom and gloom in this space. That’s something I’ve struggled with too.
It’s tricky. On one hand, I think one reason I was able to make it through withdrawal—even though it was horrible and lasted a few years—was because I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t have anyone in my ear from social media listing off all the symptoms I might get. I wasn’t constantly being bombarded with worst-case scenarios. I think that ignorance helped me.
On the other hand, I feel a real obligation to share what I’ve learned and to contribute to advocacy, to help make this whole process safer and less destructive for other people. But I’ve seen how sharing too many specific symptoms can backfire. They might hear about a symptom they didn’t even have—and suddenly, they develop it.
We’re doing so much important work to raise awareness, but at the same time, I worry that we’re also making people more scared. What are your thoughts on that? How do we steer this in the direction of recovery, while still making sure people are fully informed?

Carrington: In April of last year, I was volunteering with an organization called We Shall Overcome, an anti-psychiatry NGO here in Norway. With a little funding from them, I went down to Copenhagen and sat down with Anders Sørensen, and I asked him all the questions I had been terrified to face—like, “Is this permanent?”

Anders turned out to be the best support I ever had—not just for protracted Lyrica withdrawal, but also for actually tapering Zyprexa. He walked me through everything: how to use the diamond scale, what kind of dosages to use, when to drop to zero, what percentage of the original dose you reduce to. All of it.

What I needed at the time was to be treated like a terrified five-year-old going on a roller coaster for the first time. You can’t look that kid in the eyes and say, “We could die, you know.” That’s trauma for life. You have to stroke their head and say, “It’s going to be fine. It’s only two more minutes. You’re safe.” That’s what I needed. I needed someone to say, “It’s going to be fine.”

I mean, I had weeks where I had uninterrupted heart attack symptoms—like a full-blown heart attack—for two weeks. So you sit there wondering, Do I go to the hospital? But then you remember, Wait—they did this to me. So what the hell do you do? All I needed was for someone to tell me, “It’s going to be fine.”

What’s so crazy is that when you go to a doctor and say, “I feel broken. I’m in pain. I have these symptoms,” not only do they deny your entire experience—they make you the enemy. You become the enemy of the establishment. And people need to feel understood. We need someone to say, “That sounds horrible. I believe you.” So when doctors won’t do that, people go online. That’s where they go to be seen, acknowledged and heard.

But in this misguided effort to help or raise awareness, what we end up doing is presenting horror stories. And a lot of those stories haven’t even run their course yet. I remember reading one on Surviving Antidepressants—a so-called “success story” from someone who had been on Zyprexa for 20 years at 30mg, tapered it in six weeks, and started five new drugs. They were four weeks off that six-week taper and called it a success. That’s not a success story.

As you said—the last thing someone needs to hear in that state are words like permanent, damaged, or irreversible. This is already a nightmare. You have to be so careful with who you listen to and where you get your information from.

When you’re coming off a psychiatric drug, every single mental faculty that allows you to do hard things is gone. Your brain is stripped of those tools. You don’t have access to discipline or resilience. You’re like a newborn, plunged into one of the hardest human experiences imaginable. It’s like being halfway up Everest and suddenly losing the ability to walk or think—and then someone says, “Good luck.”

Siem: What have you taken from this, from a more spiritual perspective?

Carrington: I remember talking to my sponsor in recovery and asking, “What do you think prolonged suffering actually does to people?” Because let’s be honest—it doesn’t always improve people. Sometimes they just double down on their delusions. And he said, “Humility.” That stuck with me. All the other stuff—curiosity, openness, flexibility—it’s all rooted in humility. And I think the opposite of humility is certainty. That mindset of, I know for sure this is how it is.

But I don’t know anything for sure anymore. Everything’s fluid now. If someone has an opinion I don’t agree with, my first instinct is to ask them to tell me more. Sell me on it. Convince me. That combativeness I used to have? It’s gone. I’m not interested in fighting for ideas. I’m not even that interested in talking about myself anymore. I just want to know what other people think. That curiosity—that’s what stayed with me.

Siem: It’ll keep changing, too. It’s been nine years since I got off my meds, and about seven since I felt like I was truly healed—or out of withdrawal, whatever that means. And the further I get from it, the less I feel like I know.
It’s this lovely inverse relationship—where I’m becoming more childlike and more enamored with the basics of existence, while simultaneously becoming less and less sure of anything. And then I find myself sitting there, shocked at how deeply this experience shaped me—how much it continues to influence my life in ways I still can’t put into words.

Carrington: When my girlfriend of seven years—my best friend, the person I spent every single day with—left, took the dog, packed up the apartment, and I never heard from her again… the only thought I had was, At least it’s not psychiatric drug withdrawal.

That’s happened again and again. I’ll go through something hard, and my brain just immediately compares it: Yeah, but it’s not withdrawal. It’s like I’ve got this internal reference point that’s so extreme, nothing else really registers the same way. Other people talk about wanting to go to Thailand or Dubai, check off their bucket lists, get married, go to cool parties—and I just think, I don’t care about any of that.

All I want is serenity. I want the opposite of psychiatric drug withdrawal. I want to be able to sit in a quiet room and stare at a wall. I take a walk and it’s like, Wow. I go to the grocery store and I’m like, Imagine that we can just buy this. That we can just walk in here, and other people are doing it too. And it works. That’s wild.

Siem: I think it goes hand-in-hand with spirituality—or maybe whatever’s left when all the constructs fall away. I like the word spirituality, but I don’t love religion, and I especially don’t love God because that word brings so much baggage with it.
Sometimes I wonder if ‘wonder’ is a better word. It captures the weirdness. Being human is weird. Everything we’re doing is so strange when you stop to think about it. And over the past year or so, that sense of weirdness has just intensified.

Carrington: Do you think it was the withdrawal experience itself that changed you—or was it returning to your natural baseline that brought that childlike wonder back?

Siem: I think it’s a little of both. I’ve always been an extremely sensitive person. As a kid, I was emotional, reactive, constantly moving, and sensitive to everything—foods, fabrics, and smells. But the drugs totally dampened that. They flattened everything. I became stoic and “tough,” and you get rewarded for that in society. So I leaned into it.
The drugs made it possible to go deeper into the pain cave and act like nothing bothered me. And then, when I came off them—especially since I did it cold turkey from Effexor—it was like I got dropped into a scalding hot tub straight out of the snow. There was no time to adjust. No buffer. Just overwhelming sensation.
And I think that kind of sudden, intense contrast encodes itself into your body. And after that, your baseline sensitivity changes. It expands. Like you’ve been cracked open, and now your container is just bigger. So yes, part of me thinks I returned to my original sensitivity—but I also think withdrawal blew the edges off what I thought was possible to feel. And now, I live with more range than I ever did before.

Carrington: It’s lonely. To be in this space where you see it—that the world isn’t what you thought it was—but most people are still asleep. Still stuck in that loop of trusting the system to the bitter end. That has to be worse, honestly. At least I’m not there anymore.

So I try to find gratitude in everything. And I think the biggest lesson of this whole experience is to question authority. To question anything presented as an “established fact.”

A friend of mine went through this—his kid is seven. His ex-wife is a psychiatric nurse, and she insisted the kid had ADHD. So they took him to a psychiatrist. I gave my friend all the literature he needed—counter-arguments to the ADHD/amphetamine model. And he was relentless. Every time the psychiatrist said something, he had data and he kept saying, “No, no, no”. Eventually, the psychiatrist said, “You know what we’ll do? We’ll put the ADHD diagnosis on hold and come back to it in six months.”

I mean—imagine if an oncologist said that. “You have stage four cancer, but hey, we’ll just put that diagnosis on hold for a year and circle back.” It’s absurd, Brooke. It’s crazy.

Now, I question everything. And I don’t mean I’m naive or falling for every conspiracy theory—I just stay open. If someone says the earth is flat, I’m not jumping on board, but I’ll say, “Okay, sell me on it. I’m listening.” No one has convinced me yet, but that openness? That wasn’t there before.

The truth is that most people I meet have done an excellent job avoiding pain for most of their lives. And I get it—that’s the most human instinct. But people can only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves. Pain and suffering rip your illusions away.

When I was younger, I had all these luxury beliefs. Like, “If I ever had to amputate my arm, I’d kill myself.” That kind of thing. But when you get into actual hardship, real survival-mode suffering, all that talk disappears. You realize how much of life is just noise. You discover the real you.

On one hand, it’s incredibly lonely trying to talk to people who’ve never been through something like this. But at the same time, I’m so grateful I’m not where I used to be. Does that make sense?

Siem: Oh yeah. In my experience, psych drug withdrawal forced me to figure out the difference between what money could fix, what it couldn’t fix, what I could fix, and what I couldn’t. When I started to get really deep into the realization that doing what was best for me—not in a selfish, way, but truly what my soul needed—that’s when I started to turn the corner in recovery.
It wasn’t fun. There was a lot of crying. A lot of vulnerability. A lot of saying things out loud to a counselor that I was terrified to admit—because of the shame I felt. Shame about a bad experience, about how far I’d fallen, about what I’d done. But I walked into that fire. And the more I did it, the easier it became to turn away from the garbage. I stopped clinging to the things that weren’t serving me.
Now—seven years later—it’s so easy to see the garbage. I just say, “Nope. Not that.” And I turn the other way. As a result, when I talk to most people here in the U.S.—they say things like, “The world is on fire,” or “Everything’s going to hell,” or they’re deep in political panic. But that’s not my experience. Not at all.
I’m having a great time. My life is beautiful. And it’s not because I’m making millions of dollars. It’s because I’m being intentional about what I consume. I choose the information I let in. I choose the people and the energy and the environments I surround myself with.
I follow that tiny internal compass—just that little flicker of curiosity or peace. And if I start veering off and I feel myself turning toward the garbage, I notice it early and course-correct. The more I do that, the better things get.
And I couldn’t have learned that without psych drug withdrawal. I wouldn’t have been forced to face it. The spotlight was on everything—my thoughts, my values, my relationships. And the only way through was to give up all the old ideas of who I thought I was supposed to be and keep turning toward whatever felt like relief, curiosity, or expansion.

Carrington: What you’re saying is so spot-on—especially the stages involved. First, there’s the technical part: tapering the doses, doing the math, and navigating the mechanics. But then you have to go way back to the beginning—as you said—and realize the drugs are even the problem in the first place. That stage alone can take years.

And then, eventually, you get to where I’m at now—where the withdrawals start to subside—and that’s when the real stuff begins. That’s the part you’re talking about: the reinvention.

For over a decade, I was living as someone I wasn’t. I was going through the motions of a life that didn’t have my soul in it. Now I’m almost three years off—two drugs, cold turkey, June 19th will be my anniversary—and I still have some symptoms, but I’m here. It’s inspiring to hear you talk about what comes next because people who make it through to the other side really do have a responsibility, I think, to go back into the mess—just long enough—to say, It gets better. It really does.

And it’s wild—because these drugs have withdrawal timelines that are inhumane. There’s nothing else in medicine like it.

The fact that you’re nine years off? That’s way more inspiring to me than someone in my recovery group saying they’re 30 years clean from alcohol. Because this—what we went through—is the real stuff. I don’t even think of myself as an addict. I think of myself as a psychiatric drug survivor. And for me, it’s just a given that I’ll never take anything again that alters my central nervous system.

Siem: One last question. Based on everything we’ve talked about…who is Jørgen Kjønø?

Carrington: I just remember being a kid and being so… responsible. Rigid. I was the one who did everything right. Straight A’s. Perfectly organized. Hyper-disciplined. And I remember being around 15 or 16 when I had my first beer—and suddenly, I felt relief. Relief from myself. From the constant mental noise and pressure.

But that moment—that search for relief—was the beginning of a long, slow spiral. Drugs, alcohol, psych meds… it all just snowballed. Eventually, I lost myself completely.
Now, having come through all that, I feel like I’m in a place where I can finally integrate everything—the wildness of that chaotic chapter with the best parts of my original neuroses. I don’t have to erase anything. I’ve learned to use it. I’ve figured out how to squeeze the juice out of it.

I used to be such a perfectionist and I was unbearable to be around. Take cooking, for example—I love it, but no one could be in the kitchen with me. I had to control everything. But now? I’m more balanced. Well-rounded. I’ve let go of the illusion that anything is as important as we make it out to be.

It’s like that old saying: the average person has 10,000 dreams—but a sick person only has one. I was sick for so long. That one dream—just to not be in psychiatric drug withdrawal—still resonates. It keeps me grounded. As long as I’m not in that place again, I’m the most grateful, humble person in the room.

What a humble thing to say, right? “I’m so humble, Brooke.” But you get what I mean.

Siem: I do. Where can people find you?

Carrington: I think @badassdex on Instagram is probably best. But honestly, I urge people to check out the YouTube videos with Anders Sørensen. Just search his name—there are 26 videos covering the most commonly asked questions about tapering.

Siem: Well, thank you so much, Dex. I have a feeling this won’t be the last time we talk.

Carrington: Absolute pleasure, Brooke.

**

MIA Reports are supported by a grant from Open Excellence and by donations from MIA readers. To donate, visit: https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/

26 COMMENTS

  1. Hello, Dex, thank you for the inspirational disclosures. I’ve been taking a myriad of psych drugs since 1977, and am relatively comfortable with the likelihood I’ll have to take them for the rest of my life. I’m not particularly interested in quitting, and maybe that’s due to the fact that I can already relate to every one of the descriptions you mentioned.

    What does bother me a little bit is your remark about the Zyprexa/Lyrica combination. I’ve been taking 2.5 mgs. of Zyprexa every day since 2018. I very recently started taking 50 mgs. of Lyrica twice per day, to combat excruciating nerve pain following an amputation. For me, Lyrica is a better alternative than Neurontin, which I’ve also taken.

    I wasn’t aware that Lyrica is habit-forming in any way. I hope it isn’t an opioid, is it? Egads, if it is! I know about those things!

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  2. I can’t stop crying after reading this! This is such an important and beautiful interview. It is so raw and really delves into what’s at the heart of this situation. It really speaks to what I feel Ive lost since being on these drugs. It speaks to the trauma I’ve been through with every unsuccessful attempt to come off them. Most of all …. it speaks to the real horror that is psych med injury and everything it brings up in us that is human, fragile, beautiful, strong, desperate, resilient and suicidal all at once. Thankyou both for baring your souls and sharing this honest account of your experience with psych drugs, both on and coming off and recovering from. I wish you both peace and freedom and a tonne of badass fun, laughter and human connection. Thankyou for being here to help guide us towards the strength inside that will help us reach our true,liberated selves.

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  3. For those ready and willing to take the deep dive once and for all and get off these DIRTY drugs I would concur 100% with this gentleman’s experience. I have personal experience helping my wife get off 4 drugs with the dedicated assistance of her psychiatrist who up until recently was one of the few who fully understood how to safely and effectively help patients get off and stay off these poisons. Her name is Dr.Alice Lee, MD and you can find her C/V, her philosophy and treatment regime along with many success stories on her podcast called The Holistic Psychiatrist http://www.buzzsprout.com/1645573/episodes

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    • I am utterly amazed. Gobsmacked.. Change a few details here and there and it could be my story.

      Too overwhelmed – in this present moment – to respond with my own story – but i am saving this podcast – saving it as a a sorta lifeline i can turn to – do many many dark dayde but – not dead yet – yeah! Not Dead Yet.

      Mary. Co. Waterford. Ireland

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      • Dear Mary,

        Our heart goes out to you! This is exactly why my wife wanted to share her story so it might help others escape the horrors of these drugs and give hope anything is possible if you have a healer with a proven strategy to help guide you.

        Dr Lee was that person for my wife and it was my wife’s journey and complete recovery that inspired her to start the Holistic Psychiatrist podcast which has many success stories for people to glean pearls of wisdom.

        FYI , most of her patients are not required to meet her face to face but target she has successfully used video counseling to help them so it doesn’t matter where you live. I would reach out to her to share your story and to set up an initial consultation to see if you two are a good fit.

        The link below is my wife’s podcast which was one of the first she ever did. We wish you blessings as you continue your journey to heal yourself physically and spiritually.

        https://www.buzzsprout.com/1645573/episodes/8900488

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  4. I am new to psych drugs because I had psychosis in 2016 where I thought I was being followed, I tried coming off them twice and I keep having worse delusions. So yeah.. I wish I had a person with me 24/7 like his ex GF telling me everything is going to be ok. That is the goal after all, to feel complete vulnerable and proctected at the same time.

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  5. Wow! About time someone touched onto this subject!
    I myself am off all psychotropic drugs for 4 yrs now officially; but, at a major cost. My body is failing me at 43. I’ve had my gallbladder removed, lost an ovary, been diagnosed with CKD, EPI, and a host of other maladies and I am certain all the many years (15-39) on those drugs has done this to me. I thank you for this very informative read! More people should be made aware of the potential risks and consequences of just going along with doctors who just want to write scripts but not actually help people!

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  6. Absolutely fascinating interview, thank you very, very much, indeed, Jørgen/Dex, Brooke and MIA!

    “Laugh, and the world laughs with you…”

    No: REALLY!

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45937/solitude-56d225aad9924

    Bob Whitaker’s ?May interview with Kermit Cole, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okTjQS_ZZSA , supported an understanding that when we are at our highest, most expansive levels of consciousness, we invariably must have humor, and that this humor invariably infects those around us, lifting them to similar planes of consciousness, however momentarily, but always magically, musically, miraculously (and much like sex at its best: “A woman laughing is a woman conquered!” – Napoleon Bonaparte.).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhZOTveyzGM

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45937/solitude-56d225aad9924

    Could it possibly be that all that unspeakable, drug-induced suffering hinted at in the lives of Jørgen/Dex, Brooke was neither random nor gratuitous nor in vain nor wanton nor unnecessary nor avoidable, but all absolutely necessary for their individual and for our collective evolution as human beings?

    Could it be that Jørgen/Dex, Brooke and MIA have here, now, offered us a unique opportunity to at least attempt to alchemize all that incomprehensible, vile, hideous and ghastly suffering and sacrifice into a glorious gift which can help potently propel us all through our transcendence of all human pain, suffering and sacrifice?

    In “The Right Stuff,” the 1983 movie, as I recall, Sam Shepard as Chuck Yaeger kept his “pedal to the metal” when his aircraft, like that of everyone else who’d tried to break the sound barrier, vibrated so violently it seemed it must come apart…and sailed on through into clear blue peace, at last.

    “One giant leap for humankind?”

    Are we not all nowadays, individually and collectively, facing unprecedented human challenges, gigantic leaps into seeming voids, but actually onto higher/deeper levels of consciousness, to Transcendence, to Consciousness?

    Is not our only way through these ultimate challenges going to be….together?

    How all many of us all are all in all of all this altogether, do you think? I ask myself.

    Maybe it’s always only ever been about asking the right questions, in the right way, of the right people, at the right time?

    And maybe, cosmically speaking, there is no wrong, but only righter and righter:

    “Nothing is wrong, and everything must change”?

    Maybe there is no more powerful force than an idea whose time has come – unless that one and the same force which holds back one whose time has not yet come?

    Is

    Comedy = Tragedy + Time?

    Is Time = Comedy – Tragedy?

    Is everything funny, eventually?

    If when we are laughing, we get it, then when we are not laughing, we have either forgotten it, the Plot, or not got it, yet – or both?

    Is “God” a “comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh” – a little while more, yet?

    If an all-powerful, all-loving “God” could, can and does reward each one of us in an instant, or less, for our seeming infinitude of seemingly eternal and seemingly infinitely sisyphean, wretched, miserable and frustrating human life-times, could, would or does this let “God” off the hook?

    And/or if we are all of us “God” as nothing cannot not be “God,” does this not let “God” off the hook for all human and animal and any other suffering?

    And, once we let “God” off the hook, might “God” or Life not treat us all better?

    “Der mentsh trakht un Gott lakht:” “Man plans; God laughs” – but perhaps only until we all learn to turn the tables on “God,” and to let “God” do the planning while we just keep right on laughing, even if only to keep from crying, at first?

    Is this not what all humor, all comedy, all our attempts to access our awareness of the extravagant absurdity of our own (seeming) existences as human beings engaged in such desperate and despairing drama is all about?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtYU87QNjPw

    As sure as there may two kinds of people in this world, the kind who divides the world’s people into two kinds and the kind who does not, there may be two ways of looking at the world – as utterly indifferent to our wellbeing, to our fates, or as absolutely otherwise, given time, or timelessness?

    And, rather than just one, could there not just a easily be an infinitude or so of new worlds constantly being produced/created/manifested/imagined/pinched off in perfect parallel by each of us with our every moment of thought/intention/attention/awareness/obliviousness/love…as there could be just one single universe expanding from that most recent big bang?

    Is not that what the Upanishads suggest, what Jesus suggested with his reported “in My Father’s House are many mansions…” – in the Kingdom of the Heavens, in the Realm of Formless Consciousness is at least one infinitude of parallel universes?

    (And did you know that at least two Upanishads, like Jesus (reportedly), speak of what happens when the blind lead the blind?)

    Why does contemporary Western science and scientists (whatever that is and those are) blithely speak/s of “maladaptations,” as though Evolution had some Divine (but flawed) Plan…even while yet eschewing any teleological understanding or interpretation of Evolution?!

    Once we eschew such nonsense, perhaps we may all become blithe spirits – again?!

    Is it nonsense?

    Certainly – for is not a religious rather than a spiritual perspective – to consider Nature to be capable of error?

    Is it not nonsense, likewise, to believe it far more likely, even infinitely more likely that we each live one finite human lifetime, so that the odds of 8.025 billion of us being here now, in the middle of timeless eternity, at 1 divided by infinity to the power of 8.025 billion is more likely than the 100% chance we’d all be here now if we are all immortal beings, or one immortal being, or Being?!

    I suspect that all the very brightest scientists, like Niels Bohr, all knew better.

    Nature is Nature.

    It is one thing, not many things.

    Carl Jung’s Unus Mundus.

    The Abramic or Abrahamic religions, of which I consider contemporary Western science one, insist on seeing us humans as separate from all the rest of Nature, and from “God,” and, for the most part, they preach that we each live out just one human lifetime, at most.

    Some may view us as having been fully natural and/or divine – up until a certain serpent intervened, until The Fall. Fair enough.

    But does Science (contemporary, Western, Aristotelian, Judaeo-Pauline Science, that is to say) not see us humans as having (magically, somehow) at most mysterious some point become unnatural, too – and possibly around the time those so-oft’-quoted Saber-toothed tigers left the field, and/or when we became self-aware, and neurotic?

    Is it not utterly magical or nonsensical thinking to suggest that, while Nature (a.k.a. Life/Evolution/Being/”God” etc.) faithfully, flawlessly, unerringly and sans any maladaptations evolved us all to flee those Saber-tooths etc., She somehow lost us around 10,000 years ago, not when we first harnessed fire but whenever we found ourselves with any inherited traits which did not most favor our physical survival and the passing on of our “selfish genes?”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladaptation

    Thus, are not some if not all mutations seen as random – even while mutability rates themselves may be acknowledged to be programmed rather than “random?!”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_rate

    Much as Abramic religions see humans as being separate and distinct from “God” and from Nature, does not Western science, equally see our social world as being – and unconsciously presume it TO be – distinct from the natural world, with all that that implies – with only the occasional, more enlightened scientist (like Jung or Bohr) thus far acknowledging that, being entirely natural (and therefore, of course, entirely divine!), we are at once equally subject, object and observation process?*

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/mar/03/science-definition-council-francis-bacon

    IFFFFFF it has been necessary for their and for all our human evolution that Jørgen/Dex and Brooke went through all that pharmacologically induced suffering they endured as victims of Medicine and of Science, of ignorance and of any arrogance, of any lack of care and compassion and enlightenment, then surely all those responsible for their drugging etc., as well as for mine, have been every bit as much hapless victims of our collective human unconsciousness, stupidity, forgetfulness and ignorance as we, their victims have been?

    There is no them and us, no good guys and bad guys.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtap1eLYEYg

    If this is so, perhaps it is only when we can learn to get over ourselves enough to transmute all the bitterness and pain we naturally feel, and to fully realize that there can be nothing to forgive in them any more than in ourselves that we can say we have transmuted and so transcended, and will no longer transmit that ignorance and pain and bitterness, instead?

    How and why either or both parties to the above interview did not take or attempt to take their own life/lives, so that, instead, they could survive to share something of their most extraordinary stories is a great wonder to me, and one for which I am most profoundly grateful to them, to all who supported them, and to MIA.

    My heartfelt and soulfelt thanks.

    Tom.

    *”‘But why on earth,’ you may ask, ‘should it be necessary for man to achieve, by hook or by crook, a higher level of consciousness?’ This is truly the crucial question, and I do not find the answer easy. Instead… I can only make a confession of faith:

    I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists. From a low hill in the Athi plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of the primeval world. I felt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this is. The entire world round me was still in its primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been. All Nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man, but only in the most highly developed and most fully conscious man.” (CW 9i, §177)

    “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.”

    ― Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&t=89s&v=Deq_1lg9Dlo

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=SGrQpZThTZc

    “…..Beyond a wholesome discipline,
    be gentle with yourself.
    You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars;
    you have a right to be here.
    And whether or not it is clear to you,
    no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
    Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.
    And whatever your labors and aspirations,
    in the noisy confusion of life,
    keep peace in your soul.
    With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams,
    it is still a beautiful world.
    Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70274/in-search-of-desiderata

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  7. I am being bullied by a CMHT and a nurse (also an ex school friend) in the West Midlands. They are saying I am a bad mother and they are saying that their nurses are better mothers. The ex school friend wants me to be isolated and wants to convince my family that I am mad. The CMHT have given my mother medication to make her step forwards and backwards. They do not know what they are doing with the brain.

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  8. Do you know, everybody? The level of spiritualism present in any of the Comment sections following any of the articles published in MIA, knocks your socks off. I could swear it’s like walking into church and then out again, following worship and thanksgiving. We are all, all of us, the true and fabled paupers of Jesus’s time. We really are. And I’m a Jew.

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  9. Hi, Philip.

    Dunno if you’re aware of any of my own comments to MIA, let alone have considered any of them “spiritualism,” but, if so,

    1. thanks a million

    and

    2. if you consider my above comments to be “spiritualism,” I say:

    “THAT isn’t a spiritualism: THIS is a spiritualism: https://theconversation.com/can-ai-think-and-should-it-what-it-means-to-think-from-plato-to-chatgpt-256648#comment_3032660 !”

    Philip, I suspect that all of us reading and certainly contributing to MIA suffer from the disease of existential angst.

    The only possible cure I can contemplate for us, therefore, is to try to remind one another that yes, as mere mortals we have every reason to fear…everything; as immortals, none to fear anything, even Fear, which is always in some way fear of some death, and time-inspired.

    I believe that Western so-called civilization is such largely because the old Romans, perhaps scared of the westernmost druids of Scotland/Ireland as they may have been, adopted an Abrahamic rather than a most radically different Celtic or Gaelic or Tuatha Dé Danann inspired understanding/myth of what happened when a common ancestor first tasted a forbidden food:

    https://www.myirishjeweler.com/blog/irish-folklore-the-salmon-of-knowledge/?srsltid=AfmBOorUF_-bHPHvOzP9nWTPNFZeEaLaX3WIDwRSyIOxHggLTT97U2x4

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_of_Knowledge

    https://www.britannica.com/event/First-Council-of-Nicaea-325

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea

    I actually confess to the heinous sin of bodilism, which has caused Western so-called civilization to now writhe in ashes, though ones from which I feel certain we will rise.

    “Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.” ― H. G. Wells.

    I suggest that our society remaids largely materialist not least because, apart from the Puritans, in the names of those two beggar/paupers (one of whom you mentioned), Jesus of Nazareth and “Il Poverello,” Francis of Assisi (of whom I read one report that he instructed a certain young follower to lose his book of sacred hymns or psalms on the grounds that one must have no personal possessions, whatsoever, apart from what one wore), Christian Franciscan friars seem to have sung not so much Te Deums as their own versions of

    “You’ve got the brawn; we’ve got the brains: Let’s make lots of…..MISSIONS!”

    Truly, “those who can make us believe absurdities, can make us commit atrocities,” and, out of our innate peole-pleaser nature, I say, our natural wish to conform, to agree and to band together in tribal groups with which we love to identify, thus far in our evolution, we have all been easy prey to Groupthink and, with it, to predators who, forgetful of their primary purpose and good nature, seek to exploit others’ good natures.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyeWRd7ZEBs

    https://michaelleroyoberg.com/history-and-historians/on-this-day-in-history-the-chumash-revolt-of-1824/

    We, Irish and Scottish Gaels and Gauls, may have very, VERY different relationships with what pass for realities Philip, from those who remained in the Levant or wherever we may have originated, et “VIVE toutes nos differences!” say I, don’t you?

    We have no Gaelic words for yes or for no or for evil; nó means or; and, if aigne means mind, it can also mean….: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aigne

    Oh, and we have two separate verbs for to to be, each with many, many forms.

    We seem to love words, but maybe it’s the gaps between them we love most, like the gaps between syllables, so much so that we make gaps where the English has none, so that film can become fillum, Dublin Dubbelin and Thurles Thur-less, as in Durlas, the Gaelic for it.

    It is said that when one Irishman remarked to another that “Life is tough,” the other replied, “Compared to what?”

    And it had to have been an Irishman who first told a lost stranger/foreigner:

    “If I was you, I wouldn’t start from here, at all,” poking fun at of all of non-Zen, Western so-called civilization in the process, of course.

    Yeah, and in Irish English, or Hiberno-English, we kind of mix up being and doing, subtly acknowledging that it is so much easier to be when one is not trying to do at the same time, perhaps, so that one may say

    “I do be doing that a lot;” “he does be doing it, too…” and “he bees home” or “he does be home a lot, these days,” and, as our local (Dooey, Lettermacaward, Co. Donegal) philosopher, Charlie Danny once famously summed it all up, once, at least,

    “Aye: them things bees.”

    Perhaps few foreigners have understood us (great) Gaels of Ireland as well as Chesterton, in his “The Ballad of the White Horse:”

    “The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
    For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”

    Although Julius Caesar had a good stab at it, too:

    ‘Philosophy
    Alexander Cornelius Polyhistor referred to the druids as philosophers, and called their doctrine of the immortality of the soul and metempsychosis (reincarnation), “Pythagorean”:

    The Pythagorean doctrine prevails among the Gauls’ teaching that the souls of men are immortal, and that after a fixed number of years they will enter into another body

    Caesar made similar observations:

    With regard to their actual course of studies, the main object of all education is, in their opinion, to imbue their scholars with a firm belief in the indestructibility of the human soul, which, according to their belief, merely passes at death from one tenement to another; for by such doctrine alone, they say, which robs death of all its terrors, can the highest form of human courage be developed. Subsidiary to the teachings of this main principle, they hold various lectures and discussions on the stars and their movement, on the extent and geographical distribution of the earth, on the different branches of natural philosophy, and on many problems connected with religion.

    — Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico, VI, 14′ from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid

    So THANK YOU!

    And Shalom, Philip!

    Tom.

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  10. Thank you, Steve, for tolerating all this, by ?maybe considering that, once we see that we (certainly our governments, at least) swapped for older bibles which told us we were miscreants modern DSM’s which do…the very same, then this particular exchange may not be so outrageously off-topic as some might think it.

    Thank you, Philip, very, very, very much, indeed, for this response.

    And No, I most certainly do not see what you mean, at all, at all, as I believe my dogma, or whatever it is, could hardly run more contrary to that of Judaeo-S/Paulianity than it does, insisting (as mine does) that there is not now – nor ever was or could be – anything wrong with any of us, ever: “Nothing is wrong, and everything must change;” “If this world were perfect, it wouldn’t be: “We already inhabit uber-utopias at least infinitely more wonderful than any utopias we can imagine/create, as we may all come to realize as and when we can and do adjust our dystopic visions/lenses, and we will adjust our lenses, as always, just when and as we need and are needed to, etc. etc. et cetera…

    I try to preach Zen and Humor (“the Kingdom of Heaven, withIN,” which I believe Jesus tasted but apparently lost); the bibles, old and new, preach Sin or Sinfulness and Humorlessness!

    And yet the so the thoroughly obscured core of spirituality at the heart of many Abrahamic religions, that spiritual rather than religious teaching to which I believe Jung referred with his reported

    “I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook…”

    is what alone can and will “save” us all from…ourselves and one another.

    Meister Eckhart, like Rumi and other mystics surely perceived just this, too?

    “Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.” – Eckhart.

    “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
    there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
    When the soul lies down in that grass,
    the world is too full to talk about.” – Rumi.

    The bibles seemed filled with laws and lawbreaking, with good (or normal) guys and bad (or disordered) guys, and so with endless bukings and rebukings.

    I say that whenever I buke, let alone rebuke (as I do myself for buking, too, of course), I once more have failed, lost The Plot, and succumbed once more to…Humorlessness, to Forgetfulness, to Lethargy (induced by those old poisonous gulps of mine from the River Lethe…), to (spiritual) Unconsciousness, to Sleepiness, to Stupidity, to “Sinfulness,” to Madness (funny how, despite its two cler meanings in the US, at least, we fail to see that to get mad at anyone is to be mad/bad/sad).

    It seems to me that Jesus is reported to have spent most of his ministry rebuking (getting mad at) folks for not knowing what they could therefore and did not know and understand, for their “hardness of heart [the Greek word phrase for their stubborness, intransigence, closemindedness or narrowmindedness, their cultural conditioning, their being like old wineskins] and unbelief,” and that, with his growing frustration and isolation, this only intensified towards the end of his ministry, that it inevitably brought about his paranoia and crucifixion and that, only then, hands helplessly thrown up, he finally, finally, finally admitted/declared us:

    “…for they KNOW not what they do!”

    That very (last) message of his I see absolutely nowhere else in any Judaeo-S/Pauline bibles (although it might be argued that the attitude of any DSM authors is that, actually, nobody knows anything, at all – apart from them!), but echoed always in any sincere

    “There, but for the grace of ‘God,’ go I!”

    Please try and explain to me how I can have been so misunderstood! (If I knew then what I still don’t know…)

    Much, MUCH love!

    And soulfelt thanks, Philip, again!

    Shalom! ShalOM!

    Tom.

    “The sooner you fall behind, the longer you have to catch up, but if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here, at all.”

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  11. Hi,
    Thank you for this honest and deeply resonating interview. Where can I get information on advices with psych meds withdrawal symptoms? I’m long past the withdrawal (5 years) but I still have health issues. I did many cleanses, kambo, etc but I wonder if some supplements could be good,food,or any advice really. Thank you.

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