Psychiatric Drugs: The Real World is Where the Harms Live

Welcome to the Mad In America podcast. My name is Brooke Siem, and I am the author of May Cause Side Effects. Today, I’m sitting at my kitchen table surrounded by four titans in the world of psychiatric drug withdrawal. We threw this together in the last 12 hours, and so there’s very little agenda, but we felt that it is so rare to get people all in one room and to have a conversation.

We discuss the challenges of openly discussing psychiatric drug withdrawal, the meaning of informed consent, getting doctors to acknowledge medication-induced harm and much more.

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

Brooke Siem: So, I am here with David Antonuccio, Angie Peacock, Kim Witczak, and David Healy. Let’s just have everybody go around quickly and give a quick introduction.

David Antonuccio: I’m a retired clinical psychologist. I worked for 24 years at the Veterans Administration, for 32 years at the medical school here in Nevada, and 40 years in private practice. I’ve published a lot on studies that compare non-drug interventions for depression with antidepressants.

Angie Peacock: I am a former combat veteran. My story of over-medication after trauma appears in the film, Medicating Normal. Now I coach full-time. I declined licensure as a social worker to help people who are de-prescribing. I provide support groups and one-on-one coaching for people coming off psych drugs.

Kim Witczak: I like to call myself the accidental advocate because I got thrown into the world of drug safety after my husband was given an antidepressant for insomnia in 2003. Five weeks later, he took his own life. I helped to get the black box suicide warnings on these drugs in 2004 and 2006. I have now just completed my ninth year as a consumer representative on the FDA Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee.

David Healy: I’m a doctor. That means I believe in the medical model. It means I’ve worked closely with the pharmaceutical industry for over 40 years and taken a lot of money from them. Most of the good things that anyone ever thinks that I say have come from friends in the pharmaceutical industry. It’d be a bad idea to think they’re all bad.

Siem: Meanwhile, I’m staring at a book that David Healy wrote called Let Them Eat Prozac. The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression. David, I just want to say why I’ve been referring to your book a lot over the past couple of days. I have a Substack newsletter, it’s called May Cause Side Effects, and it started off as something to help explore the healing process after antidepressant withdrawal. Now that I feel like I’m through that, I’m more interested in what’s been untold and especially connecting the dots between your work, Bob Whitaker’s work, Angie, and my conversations.

There’s a researcher named Chris Masterjohn, who is a nutritional scientist, and talks about serotonin and how it affects our mitochondria. In fact, a lot of stuff that I had never heard before in this realm at all, because in psychiatry, it’s all about what’s happening in the brain.

Meanwhile, people are having such horrible, wide-ranging physical withdrawal effects. I think that there’s something in nutritional science around why this is happening.

Chris was talking about how SSRIs are called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. But if they were properly named, they might be called Serotonin Uptake Inhibitors because reuptake and uptake are different. That’s when I went back to your book because I remembered that the naming of these drugs was pretty specific back in 1991 with Paxil. Putting those two things together was this light bulb moment for me in trying to figure out why it’s so difficult for us to convince anyone that there’s a problem here, especially mainstream doctors.

Healy: I think one of the things people need to know is that the consumers of drugs are doctors like me. They’re not you, Brooke, and they’re not Angie. From an industry’s point of view, once we write a script, that’s what makes industry money. It’s not when you put it in your mouth.

So it’s a different marketplace than anything else, and there are more dollars spent on a small number of consumers, doctors, than on any other product on earth. It ends up with the industry figuring that very few doctors have a thought in their head not put there by us.

Witczak: I’ve created this kind of spider web, and I have both the patient and the doctor trapped in the web, which is all the pharmaceutical influence on every level. From medical school, because they control the research, the FDA and all the regulators, and the marketing. I spent my entire career in advertising and marketing, and I see this as a game of marketing fear. Names are really important, whether it’s the drug or the chemical, and I saw that in how drugs come to the market at the FDA.

I just want to just say that the book Let Them Eat Prozac is also how I got into this. 22 years ago, after Woody died, my brother-in-law said, “What? Woody would never have taken his life”. He went on Google and bought David’s book, because he was trying to figure out how this happened. He read that book and reached out to David, and David responded and said something that most people wouldn’t, he said, “No, this was the drug”.

Peacock: On the way here, Kim and I were talking about this sticker that she brought. It says, “We Are Not Anecdotes, We Matter”. I said, “Just look at what’s happened recently”. A paper came out and they did a meta-analysis and said, “Antidepressant withdrawal is weak, self-limiting, and minor. Don’t worry, nothing to see here.”

But then, when you want patient stories to be brought to the forefront so that doctors can hear what people are going through, that’s not good enough. It’s an anecdote that doesn’t matter.

There’s no research being done. The research that is out there is not good enough, and the patient stories are not acceptable either. I said to Kim, “What is it finally going to take? Because nobody’s researching it. We have hundreds of thousands of people in withdrawal right now.”

Even as someone who works directly with people affected, I find it really hard to even talk about these things scientifically because I don’t have anything to go on. We just kind of hypothesize that the serotonin in your body is 80% in your gut, and maybe that explains why you have neuropathy in your feet. I don’t know. We’re just kind of making it up as we go.

Witczak: So this ‘We Are Not Anecdotes, We Matter’ campaign was really created back in 2006 at the FDA suicide hearings, because they kept saying, “Oh, these are just anecdotes”. Even when we met with the top FDA guy, Bob Temple, he said that Woody’s story is just an anecdote. But, to David’s point, the industry knows, and they use anecdotes when it works for them.

I’ve seen through my time sitting on the FDA that the system is selling benefits and not the harms. But the real world is where the harms live. We need to just start level setting the conversation, so that you have truly informed consent, even from the beginning. I don’t think it’s a balanced conversation right now.

Peacock: Here’s my pushback on that. A lot of the ways that we talk about these things in social media, and videos on TikTok, they can be sensational, they can be provocative, they can be emotional, like “You ruined my fucking life”. I think when we are passionate like that, it can shut down some of the conversation, or when we talk about it too radically. I’m not perfect, I try to stay middle of the road to get people to hear me, because I want to be diplomatic. But it’s also in the messaging, like on Twitter, nothing good happens. All I do is argue with psychiatrists all day, but they’re not listening.

Witczak: I go back to the 2006 hearings, you would have half the room saying, “These drugs killed my kid, you’ve got blood on your hands”. Then the other side is like, “These drugs saved my life”. I’m sitting there feeling that nobody wins. But you know who wins? It’s the middle. Like this event today in Reno, we have to have conversations to listen to both sides. We have to be talking outside our echo chambers.

Antonuccio: I worry that we overemphasize the placebo-controlled trials between antidepressants and sugar pills. It feels like, to the general public, the choice is, Do I take a pill or not? Instead of being informed about alternatives to a pill. It never comes up. It’s assumed that for depression, if it’s severe enough, you have to take a pill. But this has been the emphasis of my research, looking at non-drug interventions that have, in comparison to the drug, done well and, in fact, had better outcomes over the long term.

This includes things like cognitive therapy, behavioral activation, which is increasing pleasant activity, physical exercise, social skills training, and assertiveness training. All of these things, in direct comparison to the medications in these studies, have done well. But we limit ourselves sometimes to asking just should we take a pill or not? I think we’re leaving out these alternatives that can work well.

Witzak: That right there is part of what I believe informed consent is, the choice between a pill, to do nothing, or see what else is out there that I can do. I think that’s a really important part for the patient.

Healy: Okay, can I jump in here and point to a few bits to do with informed consent that won’t come up in the agenda. One is that we’re actually talking about things that are used for health purposes. But, in fact, most of us can’t distinguish between health and beauty. They kind of merge, and tons of people take these things for beauty purposes, like Finasteride for men who lose their hair.

The antidepressants really are largely to make you more efficient and more effective. You’re not trying to treat an illness. You’re in the business of trying to compete, in a sense, with other people, and that means that there’s always going to be temptation there. No matter how much you inform us, we’re going to say, “Oh, there’s no real risk that that’s going to happen to me”.

But there are more players in this than the pharmaceutical industry and us, and doctors. Nine out of 10 of the medical treatments we get are locating problems in us that aren’t our problem. They’re political problems. They’re putting the problems inside each of us, as opposed to us seeing them as problems that need a political solution.

Siem: Can you give an example of that?

Healy: Most of the antidepressants are awfully convenient for politicians who realize that we are unhappy, and that the world doesn’t seem to be working all that well. It’s convenient for them if we go to a doctor who says, “Oh, these are all the symptoms of depression. You should take a pill”. That’s locating a political problem in you. Part of us sees that it’s actually a political problem, and it needs political action to fix it, but we end up medicalizing it.

Peacock: I want to say something about informed consent. In the film Medicating Normal, I say, “If people want to take drugs, they just need informed consent”, okay? But you can’t consent to something you don’t understand or can’t imagine. So, I almost think informed consent is just a waste of time because it does not exist. If someone had told me you’re going to lose your career, your marriage, your femininity, your sexuality, everything it means to be human, and you’re going to be terrorized for three and a half years coming off these drugs, I can’t imagine that.

Healy: Just on that point, back in the 1950s, the general culture was to think that these drugs are poisons out of which we may bring good. Our job is to try and bring good out of their use. But we don’t see the drugs as poisons anymore. The magic in healthcare used to lie in the person you went to see, who might or might not choose drugs. Now the magic lies in the pill. We see it as being in the pill, when in actual fact it’s not.

Antonuccio: Can I add one thing to that? It’s not just one pill. My observation in the work that I did is that many patients were on multiple pills. It’s what’s been described as a prescribing cascade, getting pills for the side effects of the pills for the side effects of the pills. Maybe they’re just marketing one pill at a time, but that is not the way it is practiced.

Witzak: That is one of my biggest peeves at the FDA when we’re looking at new drugs. Those drugs are one pill at a time with the ideal population, but that’s not how the world works. What if we’re just told that these are serious mind mind-altering chemicals that you’re putting in your body, and they may or may not help you? But we’re not being told that. I think there is that quick fix of a pill.

Peacock: As someone who works with people coming off, this is the stuff that I hear daily. It took me away from myself, and it was so subtle that I didn’t even notice it happening. Or when I’m lower and lower and lower, parts of me come back that I didn’t even know were in there that I’ve lost for 25 years. But to get to that point, there’s so much pain and suffering and loss of dignity, money, jobs, and partners. That’s the collateral damage.

What I think we see in mainstream psychiatry and mental health is that the drugs work by altering your chemistry, but they also alter your personality, your ability to emote, like everything that it means to be human. It’s not a little thing the way that we’re sold.

Siem: Which brings me back to what David was saying, because I can’t let that fly off into the ethers. Here’s what I don’t understand. We know based on your work and the history that these drugs have never worked. They’ve always had horrible side effects. There’s always been lawsuits. Why then are the most powerful people in the world in industry and the military so keen on their use? It’s like the military-industrial complex is running all of us, and we’re just puppets.

Why would they want the masses on a drug that makes you effectively slower, less healthy, and less able, especially in kids? The fact that there’s no one fit enough to even be in the military should suggest that they’re doing something wrong.

Healy: The United States had a very weak pharmaceutical industry through to about 1960. There was a policy decision to seduce European companies over to the United States, and most of them have moved over. Big Pharma is largely based in the United States now. It looked like a good idea because in World War Two, there were a bunch of drugs like Penicillin and malaria treatment, and all this helped the United States in World War Two and Vietnam and afterwards. It looked like a great idea to have all of the pharmaceutical industry in the US. They were going to be a strategic industry in terms of warfare generally.

They’ve got to a point now where I’m sure a lot of the top brass are looking at the situation and saying, “US healthcare is a disaster”. We’re paying more money, but we’re losing life expectancy. Kids are in a weird shape these days. Until recently, people on disability benefits were from the age of 35 up, and you had it for physical problems. Now it’s teenagers up to the age of 35, and they are on disability benefits for mental problems. That’s not a situation that’s going to help us compete with the Chinese.

Unlike the companies that are in the business of making money rather than making us healthier, the military have an incentive to make sure that the treatments are working not to make money, but to keep enough people in the country and healthy enough to fight a war if needed.

Siem: But they’re not. So like, why is the military not reacting?

Healy: If you listen to when RFK actually got appointed, and Trump was there in the Oval Office with him, and he said, “The kids are too autistic and things like that to be recruited to the army”. This was a feature of what they were talking about. I think people have begun to realize this and realize we have a crisis. They’re worried about the Chinese. This is who we’re up against.

Goldman Sachs said a while ago that saving lives is not a good business model. If you have a drug that saves lives, the pressure to reduce the price is huge. If it’s for beauty issues, you can charge enormous prices. The military and the government have the power to tell industry, “No, we need you to make drugs to save lives. You’ve got to stop making drugs for irrelevant purposes”.

Witzak: 100% because they need a healthy military. You’ve seen the power of the military and pharmaceutical industries within the last five years to do with COVID.

Peacock: Here’s the thing that puzzles me, because the problem is staring us right in the face. Disability rates and suicide rates are higher than they’ve ever been. If you think about a therapist sitting in front of a patient who tells them they’re on eight drugs and they’re emotional and can’t regulate. I know many therapists who say, “Am I treating the illness or am I treating side effects here?” What is going on? We just think everything is a mental illness, but no, it could be the treatment that’s causing it.

Healy: Drugs are approved by the FDA, and the tag on them is saying, “These work”.

Peacock: But if they worked, the patients would be getting better. They wouldn’t be in therapy.

Healy: But for most people, what they see is the Alice in Wonderland kind of situation, which is you’ve got a bit of food with a label saying, “Eat me,” and you eat it. You’ve got drugs, which say they work. Even pregnant women who won’t eat cold meats and processed cheeses when they’re pregnant. But the interesting thing is, it’s very much the liberal elite. It’s women who’ve been to Harvard who buy into the fact that the system is working.

Antonuccio: Can I address something that Angie said? You mentioned a therapist sitting in front of a patient on multiple drugs. I’ll tell you how it evolved for me, because I felt like I was enabling that practice. What I ended up doing a few years into my practice is I put on my informed consent form that I’ll refer any patients who are on more than two psychotropic drugs. Now that may seem like a weird place to draw the line, but it was considered radical at the time, and people thought me a little weird for doing that.

My reason for doing it was I didn’t want to enable it. The person that you’re seeing is having trouble sitting up straight on the couch. That bothered me so much that that was what I adopted.

Peacock: How did you get there from thinking this is anxiety to maybe the medications are causing this?

Antonuccio: I read David’s book. I read Peter Breggin’s and Irving Kirsch’s books. I read as much as I could. As a matter of fact, your book, Children of the Cure, but also Let Them Eat Prozac, triggered an interest in contacting you to find out more about this. I informed myself, and that’s how I got to that point.

Healy: I had an odd experience in Canada, where primary care doctors used to refer people who had nervous problems. They could refer them to therapy, and they could refer them to me. A bunch of them referred people to therapy. What happened in therapy was they got CBT, which didn’t work, and then they got DBT, which didn’t work, and then they got IPT. The idea of adding one or more and more therapies into the mix didn’t seem to be a problem for anyone.

What I began to realize was, if I didn’t keep adding drugs into the mix, it was a problem for the primary care doctors. The expectation the patients and the primary care doctors had was that giving pills is a bit like giving therapies. The fact that you add a few more into the mix isn’t a problem. You’re showing more care by giving people more pills. When I gently suggested maybe we don’t need quite as many pills, I ended up being fired.

Peacock: I think that’s the evolution of a patient, they try everything with earnest intention of healing, and they get so far away from themselves, they get worse and worse, and then they say, “Wait a minute, something is going on here”. That’s who I talk to the most. In the film Medicating Normal, David Cohen says, “These pills work for a third of the people, a third of them could go either way, and a third of them are harmed”. But that’s a snapshot in time. I am someone who would have said, “All right, the drugs work. They work, they’re helping me. Yeah, they saved my life. I couldn’t go to school without them”. Then they turned on me. So we need to stop hanging on to that. Like they work indefinitely for everyone. That’s not true.

Siem: What was the first moment you started to question whatever your paradigm was? When did you start to question it?

Peacock: I started questioning it after what David said. I tried EMDR, EFT, CBT, and CPT twice. I thought, I’m just running on this hamster wheel, and why am I worse than ever? I looked at other people because it seems to be working for others, but not me. But when I finally realized it was absolutely true was when I was three months off the drugs. I audio-booked Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic, and it was like a lightning bolt through my head that said, “Angie, you were never mentally ill to begin with. Everything they did to you was absolutely wrong. And guess what, you have to fix this. There’s nobody coming, especially not a doctor”. That changed my life forever. I saw how many years I wasted believing that narrative.

Witzak: I remember right after college, I just graduated, and it was the last time of my insurance with my parents. I go to the doctor because I always had this thing at the back of my throat. He looked at me and he said, “You’re stressed”. I was looking at him and said, “Why are you telling me I’m stressed? I’m thinking to myself, no, I’m not. I’m going to have the best summer of my life. But he gave me a prescription for Valium and I knew nothing. My mom is a nurse, and she says, “You’re not taking that,” and ripped up the prescription.

Later on, I helped start an art program in Minnesota, working with kids abused, neglected, and at risk. I remember after one of the sessions with the kids, this was 1998, the staff said, “Hey, kids, you want to show the volunteers where you live?” Every one of those little kids who lived at this group home had a cup of meds. I thought, “Oh my gosh, are they all sick?” Their staff person said, “This is their behavior medicine”.

Right after Woody died, I thought there’s no way Woody was depressed. I had to keep pushing back. I go to the doctor, and she says to me, “Do you think you need anything?” I say, “Aren’t I supposed to hurt? My husband died”. She said, “You don’t need to.” So I have done all sorts of things for my own healing, but it all started with something that literally didn’t make sense. I looked back at those kids who had trauma. They were not broken. It made me so sad.

As a society, we have to push back. When a doctor says you’re depressed, really? No, aren’t I supposed to feel this way? So I feel like it’s going to take a lot of us coming together and pushing back and not believing. I remember when the doctor said that to me, I go, “But that pill is never going to bring Woody back. I have to learn how to live without Woody”. It’s not a mind or trauma eraser; you have to learn new skills to learn to live in a new reality.

Healy: I was working on the serotonin system before any of these drugs came out, and it became pretty clear pretty early on that what we knew about the serotonin system was fairly limited. You couldn’t really say much about it. But when the SSRIs came out, the industry pretty quickly was saying a whole load of things about the serotonin system, which were clearly just bio babble.

I was working with industry, who thought I was one of them and chatted and said, “Look, these SSRI drugs are pretty weak compared with the older antidepressants. How are you going to be able to make money out of them?” They said, “Oh, that’s no problem, we just need to get them on the market, we’ll be able to make loads of money out of them, we’ll be able to replace the older, cheaper, better drugs quite easily.”

Then, because I worked on the serotonin system, when the drugs actually came out, and I got to give them to a few people, they became suicidal, right in front of me. I checked with industry, got in touch with a few people. At this stage, some of the early SSRI trials were out there. There’s a complete mismatch between what the RCT said, which was that these drugs work wonderfully well and are safe, and what I was seeing right in front of me. The issue was, what to believe? The answer was, well, let’s believe the patients. Let’s look a bit more closely at the RCTs. We began to see how the game was played, how these things were being fiddled by a bunch of people within industry. When you say to them, “Look, I think these drugs really do cause people to commit suicide.” They say, “Yes, we know that.”

Antonuccio: For me, it started with a mother who was skeptical of medical interventions. She was willing to consult a doctor, but she always felt you had to be in charge of your healthcare and inform yourself. Later on, it was reading David’s book, Let Them Eat Prozac, and Peter Breggin’s book, Toxic Psychiatry.

I’ll just give you one example of where it led me with a veteran who had been injured in Iraq. He had a closed head injury and spent a year in Walter Reed, and was on a laundry list of medications. He came to see me and I told him, “I don’t know how to help you with all these medicines on board. What I think you should do may not be what you want to do. But I think you need to go to the hospital and ask them to help you get off all these medicines.”

He listened to me intently. This was one of the bravest veterans I’ve worked with. He could barely sit up in the chair; honestly, it wasn’t probably safe for him to drive even. But after that one session, he later came back and told me what happened. He went into the VA hospital, and he asked them for help in coming off the medicines. They were reluctant to do it. They were a little afraid to do it, but he insisted.

He was that courageous. He says, “I’m not going to leave the hospital until I come off all of these medicines.” I had warned him in advance that they might be reluctant to take them off. But he wanted to come off everything. He was in the hospital, I believe it was for 23 days. He came and saw me subsequently. Now he wasn’t completely well, but he was so much better. It was dramatic to me, but more importantly to him, and that was just validation of the perspective that more is not better. He’s gone on to become extremely successful in multiple ways. I am so proud of him. I can’t even express it in words.

Siem: So I was put on Wellbutrin and Effexor when I was 15, and within a year I was on Synthroid, something for acne, birth control, and bile reflux disease. I had all of these physical symptoms, and we were just making a little pilgrimage around the local doctors to fix whatever came up. It didn’t occur to me that anything was wrong here. It didn’t occur to my mother that anything was wrong. We were just doing what we were told.
Then I really just internalized that these are the diseases that you have, you just kind of got a bad hand. Here are some pills, whatever, you’ll be fine. Like Angie, I spent years just absolutely defending these drugs, like I needed them. Without them, I would be far worse, and because my thought process was that I’m aware that I’m depressed, but I’d be more depressed without them.

That narrative worked until I started getting pretty actively suicidal. Then I thought, Well, wait a second, if the worst thing is taking your own life, then these drugs should prevent that because that’s what I’m being told. If I’m feeling like I don’t want to be here while taking these drugs, then they aren’t working. It was just this light bulb moment of realising, “I should not be this depressed and suicidal if my antidepressants were working”. That’s when the thought dropped into my head that something’s not right. But at the time, I very much thought that I just needed a different drug. Maybe this one’s not working anymore. I’m sure there’s been development over the past 15 years, right? I mean, I’m hearing it all the time on commercials.

So I just thought, Go to your psychiatrist, get whatever the latest drug is, slightly adjust course, and you’ll be fine. I have been on these drugs for a long time. I should probably figure out what my baseline is. I went to the psychiatrist. I was 30, so it had been 15 years. She said, “I don’t support this, but if you’re going to do it, just stop taking your Effexor”. I was on the lowest dose on the market so there was no sense of tapering. I stopped taking the Effexor, but I was still on the Wellbutrin and all the other drugs. I immediately went into Effexor withdrawal. But even then, I didn’t believe it.

Then I got blood work done. My doctor completely glossed over it. I asked him, What does my thyroid look like? He goes, “Oh, it’s fine, totally normal”. I just had this moment of thinking, Holy shit, this problem with the psych drugs, it is not just in psychiatry. It’s all over medicine. Nobody had questioned the Synthroid or the bile reflux disease pill any more than they had questioned the psychiatric drugs. I’d been on all of this thing for 15 years. The magic moment was realizing that my body could heal, that I didn’t have to do anything.

Witzak: When I get asked this question, I say, “No doctor, no system, no government, nobody is going to care more about you or your family’s health than you”. I think it’s really important that we start taking our power back. I’m not anti-doctor; I ended up in the hospital with something, and I needed it. I remember questioning this doctor about something they were putting in my body, and he got really defensive. He says, “Do you know how many of these endoscopes I do every single week?” I looked at him and I said, “Do you know how many I’ve ever had in my body? None, and you’re putting that in my body, and I’m nervous. Why can’t I be nervous?”

I realized at that point, there’s nothing wrong with asking questions. It’s your body and your healing, and we’ve given away our power because we’ve been told that doctors are smarter than us. They know your body, but they don’t live with your body. I think there’s this idea that we have to realize that nobody’s coming to save us.

Healy: But it isn’t easy to get from that realization to actually pushing back.

Siem: Oh no, so much pain in between. Especially as a woman, where you’re being taught to be subservient and to be polite and nice all the time and never piss anybody off.
I think too, especially in the United States, we have just become so bad at losing that inner voice because we’re just so used to being told what to do and marketed to. But our circle of experience is just far bigger. The industry can’t match that.

Before the internet, our frame of reference for what’s possible in this world was really small. If there was something that was wrong, you had a set thing that you were supposed to do. And if it went poorly, you probably didn’t even know. Now it’s constant, you’re trying to figure out what’s true, what’s not true. But the real question to me is to find out what’s true for me and what’s not true for me. I cannot give my power away anymore to someone; I don’t care how many data sets you have. Those are averages. Those may not be people like me. They may not be in the same climate, eat the same thing, or be from the same ethnic background.

This experience has taught me that with medical things, if it feels wrong, if it feels like I’m being attacked on the inside, then I have to say no, even if it makes no logical sense. I might just be walking myself into a brick wall, and later on, I’ll be dead. People are like, Oh, she had only taken the drug, maybe, but at least I know I’m following my own inner compass the whole time.

Healy: Doctors are trained to give bad news. They are not trained to hear you say, “What you’ve done, you may have done it with the best of intentions, but it’s not working”.

Peacock: I just want to say one thing about the expertise angle. I don’t want psychiatry to come for de-prescribing. If you think about our all of our journeys, it took us hitting bottom, and then climbing our way out and trying to figure out the right path to follow?

I am extremely concerned about the expertise of de-prescribing psychiatric drugs going mainstream because I don’t think they understand fully that it’s not just taking the drug away. There is a whole unlearning or un-brainwashing, whatever you want to call it. There are layers upon layers of trauma and betrayal, so I am extremely concerned about the expertise.

The average patient takes months to figure out all the loops and to try to even come to some limited understanding. When you’re on medication and have cognitive difficulties from it, that’s even harder. I’m concerned with the pending book by Steven Stahl coming out about de-prescribing next year. I don’t know what you all think about that. But I’m definitely concerned about de-prescribing mainstream.

Healy: There’s an issue there, which is, doctors get taught how to put you on pills. They don’t get taught how to help you get off. It’s not just a simple thing; it really does involve them relating to you. They can’t reduce the number of drugs unless it’s a good relationship, unless they’re giving you equal weight. But if they don’t believe you, if they don’t listen to you, they cannot care for you.

Siem: What have you changed your mind about in this world recently? How is that affecting how you think we should move forward?

Peacock: Bob Whitaker and I talked about this when I saw him in June. He says, “Angie, what do you think about what’s going on in the trenches of people coming off psych drugs?” I said, “Nobody has any fucking idea.”

We have these ideas, like we think hyperbolic tapering is the way for most people to go. We have people who prove us wrong over and over again. We have people who are enduring years and years of extremely painful withdrawal syndromes that make you question is hyperbolic tapering is really correct for them. However, if we rip them off a drug, they’re going to go through hell anyway on a different level.

From my point of view, we have some idea of a little box that we can operate in. Don’t add a bunch of other drugs. Don’t put a person in a psych ward. Don’t call emergency services. Learn how to suffer. Then the rest of it is like throwing paper in the wind. We don’t know where we’re going to end up. This is going to be extremely hard. I’m really sorry. That empowers patients, which has ripple effects through communities and families that I hope will tilt the seesaw to stop using mental health services the way we have. I don’t see any other way.

Witzak: I would say for me, it’s asking the question, what if our pain and our suffering is the greatest opportunity for transformation? If you think about how our heart beats or if you look at an EKG, it is a bunch of ups, downs, ups, downs, and if it’s flat, we’re dead. I think we need to go upstream. Let’s go up there and get people before we throw them in the river, because what you guys are dealing with now is trying to pull them out of the river. I think it starts with our suffering, it’s kind of changing the conversation and not giving our power away.

Healy: I’ve just got a question as opposed to any answers. Why is it really younger women in particular who are going on antidepressants now, more than any other age group? This is a very recent phenomenon, and no one seems to be clear on just what’s happened. They loosely say, “Oh, it’s social media that’s the cause of the problem.” But I don’t know that it is. I just wonder what’s going on.

Antonuccio: In answer to your question, it comes down to one word for me, and that’s the word choice. Earlier in my career, I think I was more inclined to be assertive in telling people what I thought they should do. That’s completely changed because of a lot of the stuff we don’t know, but my focus later in my career was to give people information and leave them with, This is your choice, but here’s some information that can help you make that choice.

Siem: I think for the most part, I’m on the same page as Angie. I was a history major in college, and I’m very interested in repeating patterns. What I see happening in the de-prescribing world to me just seems a lot like what happened in the prescribing world of 30, 40 years ago. It’s just the same type of propaganda in some ways. I think it’s human nature to repeat the same things just with new details.

I’m also really interested in the idea from a much more spiritual perspective of putting your story down and just deciding not to carry it with you anymore. Because we’ve been there. We’ve done that. Do I really need to say everything’s connected back to this all the time? It’s just this idea of questioning the story that I’ve held on to for so long, because it mattered to me to hold on to it as I was working through it. But the more I work through it, the more like, you know what? I can just put this down as it just is. This is what happened. It literally doesn’t have to matter in my life ever again if I don’t want it to. It’s learning how to do that and just moving forward.

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