Transcription
Some of the statistics we have on this are frankly horrifying, if you ask me. We have one in three women over 60 on a psychiatric medication. Now, that is absurd.
And also, if we look at how much, how many anti-depressants we're using, it's gone up by a factor of five since the early '90s. And you would think that, you know, with the, you know, increased use of these medications, we might actually be getting better results. But that's not what we're seeing. In fact, suicide rates are up. Psychiatric disability is up. More people are depressed than ever.
And so, it kind of it makes you go to this question of, are these drugs really working? Are they really effective? And for a lot of patients, they're finding that they're not, and that they've kind of been sold a lie. And the, the lie really is that these medications are fixing a chemical imbalance. Patients are told that there's something wrong with their brain, and if you take this anti-depressant, it's going to, it's going to fix you, just like a type 1 diabetic needs insulin. There's something wrong with your brain, and you need the drug to, to make it better. But that's simply not the case. You know, the, the drugs that we've never found a chemical imbalance, and essentially the way that they're working is by masking symptoms.
Now, most people intuitively know that if you just sweep problems under the rug, they don't go away and they fester. And that's really what's happening with a lot of anxiety and depression treatment in the US. And so what happens when you use these drugs to essentially mask symptoms is that for many people, they wear off over time. You know, our body is not a static machine. You know, it, it develops tolerance. It reduces the amount of serotonin we're producing. It desensitizes the receptors. And you get many patients who have been on these drugs for, you know, 2 to 5 years. They're now maxed out on the dose. It's not doing anything, and they're dealing with the same problems.
On top of that, especially with the SSRIs, many people gradually feel worse over time. This is one of the biggest secrets that no one is talking about. It's the fact that long-term SSRI use is associated with fatigue, brain fog, and low motivation. This is often missed by doctors, and they end up stacking them on multiple medications, and before you know it, you have someone on five different meds, and um, and they're at the end of the line. And that's usually when I find them.
And so, you know, right now, there's hundreds of thousands of people online in communities who are in this situation. They're, they're nuked on multiple drugs, and they're trying to come off, and they're finding it's actually very difficult. And so that's, you know, that's really what I've been focusing on is helping these people find a way out of this maze.