Transcription
If you clicked on this video looking for a scathing critique of the psychiatric leadership in America, well, you found one. Because today, we're going to be going over the joint statement from our psychiatric leaders on their concern about RFK looking into the overprescription of psychiatric medication. What I have to tell you about this document that we're about to review is that it is a masterful effort at deception, that kind of reminds me of the people that used to deny that smoking actually harmed people. And so, without further ado, let's get into it.
For those of you who don't know me, my name is Dr. Yosef Wering. I'm a board-certified psychiatrist. I used to work for the FDA in the division of Psychiatry, and I also work for several pharmaceutical companies. Nowadays, I spend most of my time on YouTube debunking misconceptions about psychiatric meds. So, let's jump into it.
Okay, so this first paragraph talks about how the safety and efficacy of psychiatric medications has been established through decades of rigorous research and, um, pharmacovigilance monitoring and FDA oversight. It's simply wrong. Um, now, for those of you watching the channel, they'll, they'll know that I like to say whenever, whenever anyone says, "Are these meds safe and effective?" I say, "For how long?" Because that's really the main issue that people are concerned about these days is the long-term effectiveness and the long-term safety of these medications.
Now, right now, for all of these medications, typically they're studied for about three months or less in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study. And yes, most of the time, it shows that they reduce symptoms. But we simply do not know what these drugs do long-term. Now, the way the FDA and the drug companies have tried to convince us that they're safe long-term is by doing something called a relapse prevention study, where essentially you put a group of people on a medication for about six months, six months only, and then you randomly assign half of that group to a placebo.
Now, now you might be saying, "Yosef, well, how do they assign those people to a placebo? Do they do it in a way that prevents withdrawal?" Well, no, actually. When they looked at the antidepressant studies that did this, they transitioned them over maximally with a two-week taper. When they looked at the average, the taper was five days. And for many of them, they would taper over immediately. So, with, with no sort of, you know, transition at all.
Now, if you have a brain, you'll know that a lot of these people, if they've been on the drugs for several months, sometimes even years, who are in these studies, they're going to go into withdrawal. You might say, "Okay, well, maybe that's okay because, um, the studies have a design that differentiates withdrawal from relapse." That's not true either. And so, these, these relapse prevention studies that go on where they put people on these meds for around six months and then rapidly transition half of the group over to placebo, essentially, it shows that there's a higher rate of "quote unquote" relapse in the group that are rapidly put on placebo. But it's probably withdrawal for many of them. And so, we don't know if actually staying on the drug prevents people from having a depressive relapse, let alone what these drugs are doing when someone takes them for several years.
And now, this should be really interesting for us for several reasons. Well, the first reason is, when you look statistically at the length that people have been on these medications, at least in the United States, 45 to around 50% of people have been on antidepressant medications for over five years. And so, let's, let's think about that. What does our evidence base consist of for their long-term safety? A three-month placebo-controlled trial, and then a highly compromised and methodologically unsound relapse prevention type of study.
This clearly isn't an evidence base that should make someone feel confident if they're taking these drugs for several years. I mean, after all, it's, they're essentially studied for, you know, no more than a year. But when you have statements like this, like, "Oh, the safety and efficacy of these medications has been established through decades of rigorous research," it sort of makes you feel like there's a lot more to it, and in fact, there's not. And so, statements like this are just false, and and they misdirect, and and they're sort of designed to give people a false sense of security about these medications. And it's actually one of the major reasons why we have a massive overprescription problem at the moment because, uh, people like the APA and the other psychiatric leaders who put this statement out, um, are sort of creating this illusion that we have so much more evidence out there about the safety and effectiveness of these meds long-term, which, which simply does not exist.
Okay, so let's go on here. The February 14th, 2025 Executive Order cast down on this research by tasking the commission with assessing the prevalence and threat posed by these medications. Well, firstly, the research is poor. The research does not support the long-term safety and effectiveness of these medications. When they position it in this way, it makes them appear like they're blind to problems that are so obvious to the public and to most Americans.
Now, a little bit of nuance is needed here, right? Because there is a small group of people who benefit from these medications, right? And the way I think about it, and probably the easiest way to talk about this with the antidepressants, is there are people out there who should take antidepressants if nothing else has worked for them, right? And so, these, these should not be people who are taking these medications for, like, for life stresses, things like divorce, uh, things like stress at work, things like poverty. That's a bad idea to essentially take a medication that's going to sort of blunt you and paper over real things happening in your life. And also, people should not be taking these drugs unless they've tried safer things like psychotherapy, lifestyle interventions, dietary interventions. And listen, if, if all of those things have been tried and they don't work, you can go ahead and you can try psychiatric medications. And that's really how they should be intended to be used because you'd only want to use something with a very uncertain long-term safety profile if you tried the, the safer things first.
Now, why is this relevant? Well, it's relevant because we're currently living in a world where we are bombarded by pharmaceutical advertisements. You know, when we're not seeing ads on TV, we're seeing sort of like, uh, disease mongering operations. Yes, I know it sounds like I'm wearing a tin foil hat, but if you've been around the block like me, you'll be aware that pharmaceutical companies actually fund, you know, supposedly independent, you know, grassroots campaigns with organizations and celebrities to promote diseases, right? It looks like they're not trying to promote the drug because they're just giving money to Adam from, you know, Maroon 5 to get him to go and talk about having ADHD or some other celebrity out there to, to get her to talk about, you know, having depression and things like that. And the effect that this has when you essentially bombard the media, you know, with, "Hey, ask your doctor if you're depressed," and you have all these celebrities saying, "Well, you know, depression, it's, it's, it's so bad, it's out of control," is that you start to pull a lot of people into the market who really shouldn't be on the market in the first place.
I mean, we live in a world now where, you know, people used to say, "Man, why am I anxious right now? What does this mean? Why am I having a hard time sleeping? What, you know, does this have something to do with things going on in my life?" And before these folks even start to look at, you know, stresses in their life, dietary factors, lifestyle factors, they go, "Oh, maybe I've generalized anxiety disorder. Maybe I have a depressive disorder." This is the effect of essentially allowing, you know, media to be bombarded with pharmaceutical ads. And so, because of this, we've convinced a massive group of people that maybe they have mental health problems and they need to get on these drugs. And and yeah, a big part of that is also, you know, what I mentioned before, the perception that these drugs are much safer than they are.
Whoever put this thing together is completely blind to the fact that it is so obvious to everyone out there that these drugs are massively being overused. Right? But they hide behind the fact that, yes, there is a small group of people who need this, and they completely ignore that probably these drugs are overprescribed by a factor of 20. Um, and, uh, it's just obvious.
So, let's move on. Now, the next paragraph talks about, "Yeah, these drugs provide relief for many young, many young people, enabling them to fully participate in school, social activities, and family events. And efforts to discourage or stigmatize or curtail the use of evidence-based treatments, yeah, you heard about that evidence base already for mental illness, will have serious deleterious consequences, especially for individuals with serious mental illness." This is like a pharmaceutical playbook 101, and sort of, um, you know, establishment psychiatry playbook. Anytime someone talks about the risks of their medications and says, "Hey, they're overprescribed," right now, which is so obvious, they start to say, "Well, you're going to discourage people away from life-saving consequences." Sorry, you're going to discourage people from taking these life-saving treatments. It's just dangerous to talk about the risks.
But is it not important as well to make sure people aren't harmed by these interventions, especially when it's so obvious they're being just handed out like Pez from Pez dispensers by, you know, family medicine doctors, OB-GYNs, from a system that's seriously broken and has transactional medicine visits because of the insurance system and this misunderstood idea of just how safe they are? That's important as well. You have to give people informed consent. You can't just, just shout down when someone talks about the risk of these meds and say, "Oh, you're scaring people away." It's like an ad hominem attack. I mean, it, it's trying to attack the messenger who's, who's trying to inform people about this.
The, the other issue is it completely sidesteps the fact that there are literally hundreds of thousands of people online who are stuck on antidepressants or who have tried to come off them and have developed brain damage or protracted withdrawal. The same issue with, um, with the benzodiazepines as well. Well, it doesn't talk about, "Hey, the current system is massively harming hundreds of thousands of people, potentially millions of people out there, um, through the, through the, the really bad overprescribing going on." And so, again, sidesteps that issue and pretty much talks about, "You know, don't, don't negatively talk about the drugs, or else you're dangerous."
So, the next section talks about what RFK Jr. said during his Senate confirmation hearing when he said that some people are having a really hard time coming off antidepressants and it's harder than heroin. They say that this is misleading information that scares people away. It's simply not, you know, it's true. There are hundreds of thousands of people online having a hell of a time coming off these meds, and you need to acknowledge it. You can't simply say that it's not true because, um, it's happening to, because you haven't seen it. There's, there's enough people out there having this problem.
And then it goes down to say that, you know, the meds, they can stabilize serious mental illness and reduce suffering and even save lives. This is true information. Yes, for some people, they can be life-saving. And this is especially true when physicians are working closely with patients and families to assess the risks and benefits of psychopharmacology and make sure each person receives individual care. This is not happening, guys. Um, people aren't receiving in-depth care from physicians. I don't know if, if you haven't noticed, but they're actually been handed out in seven to eight-minute appointments with family medicine doctors to the point where nearly 20% of women are taking antidepressants. I mean, there's hundreds of thousands of people online who wished they never touched these. And when you talk to them, they say they got prescribed these meds for issues like loneliness when they went away for college or they went through a divorce.
This, this idea that, you know, if they're just used safely, you know, they can be life-saving, you have to wake up. This is not what's happening at the moment. There's a massive issue going on. The, the marketing, the disease mongering, the transactional medical visits, you'd have to be blind to not notice that these, these things are just being handed out like so quickly and they're harming people. So, this, this mythical place right now where everyone's getting all of this time and this individual care and attention and people are informed about the risks, that's not reality, at least not in the United States.
This next section is an absolute doozy where they go and they attack the, the black box warning, which is essentially the warning on the antidepressant saying that the drugs increase the risk of suicidal behavior in populations under age 25. So, what they say is, "Statistics on youth suicide further underscore the dangers associated with false information about safe treatments. Following the black box warning, highlighting the risk for suicidal behavior in young depressed patients taking SSRIs, suicide rates increased as much as 60%." What are you trying to say? Are you trying to say that the FDA's meta-analysis that looked at 100,000 people that found that you were more likely to have a suicide attempt if you were, if you are under age 25 than people who have prescribed placebo, placebo, are you trying to say that that is, uh, misleading information? Because that's the mac daddy right there. Um, when you have a randomized, high placebo-controlled study or meta-analysis of them, and if there are excess suicidal behaviors on the people who got the drug, damn, that doesn't look good. So, I'm not really sure what they're trying to say.
Now, this is a really interesting thing here because "doubt is our product," 101, and I want to show you how this works because they, they talk about this, you know, "suicide rates have increased by as much as 60% in untreated youth with major depression," and that "postmortem toxicology studies show that many people do not have detectable levels of psychotropic medication." This is like the, um, you know, "smoking doesn't kill you" stuff, um, where there was great evidence supporting it, and you just had experts saying, "But what about this study? What about that study?" You know, and and they try and cast doubt on it to make it seem that it's controversial when it's, when it's actually not, and they expect that they're going to get away with it.
So, let's look at what they found here. So, this is one of the studies that they're talking about. This is an ecological study. So, what, what that means is it's looking at the rates of different variables, um, at a, at a population level, and they're trying to draw correlations. And so, this is the study that they found. Red line here is the, uh, rate of suicide kind of going up here. Uh, green line is the rate of antidepressant prescription. Black box warning from my recollection comes in at around here, around, uh, sort of 2003, 2004. And they say, you know, "After the black box warning, um, the rate of suicides increased." And sure, you could say the rate of suicides increased here, but, um, around 2008, it starts to go down. Um, there's still a black box warning there. So, I, I don't think that correlation really makes any sense. You know, and and that's the problem with this, you know, it's when you look at these population-based statistics, you know, not these randomized control studies, which actually do a much better job than this, you have no idea what these correlations are about. I mean, I think this is from Sweden. What was happening in Sweden from 2003 to 2008 was that economic turmoil over there was something happening, um, in the coroner's office where they became underfunded and there were less, um, inquests into how people died, and so there was less coding of suicidal behavior. Could that have mildly changed the rate of suicides? And that's why these studies are so dangerous when you look at things on a population level. There's so many confounding factors that might actually change the rate of reporting.
But when you, when you kind of look at this here, I mean, back here we have, I mean, 1992, Prozac came out. Earlier on, we have a rise of antidepressants all throughout the '90s, and suicide rate staying the same. It kind of bumps up a little bit, and then it sort of comes back down to the normal level. I think when you get this, if you're trying to make some case that just because from 2003 to 2008 it seemed like the rate of suicide attempts went up, um, then, I mean, that it's bad science. It, it doesn't make any sense.
And here was the other thing that they looked at here when they were talking about, "Oh, you know, doesn't look like antidepressants cause suicidal behavior," uh, because apparently prescription psychiatric meds were only detected in 16% of the suicides, um, that occurred in, in New York City. That doesn't mean anything. Um, this, what did you expect to find? That, that it was in 100% of the suicides? Would that have told you anything? Or would that have just simply told you that, yes, people who are depressed and potentially suicidal are on medications? I mean, the, the level of scientific thought that goes behind these, it, it's just so poor. But they expect people to believe them because they're, they're coming from this position of authority. Um, but if you have, you know, a couple brain cells in there, you'll realize that this doesn't make sense. That the quality of this evidence compared to a randomized control study or a big meta-analysis, it's simply, it, it's, it's simply crap. I mean, the, the quality of this is crap. And so, if you're going to take an FDA meta-analysis that found that more people, um, had suicide attempts on the drug than those off the drugs, and say that these other studies here are, um, are suggesting that they, these meds aren't involved in suicide, I mean, it's, it's, it's so, it's so bad, it, it's, it's so bad, it's, it's embarrassing, actually.
Okay, moving on. So, if you take these meds, um, it says, "Psychiatric meds are safe and effective." Again, for how long? Yet, like the one year they were studied for, and they can be life-saving if taken properly. And this is true for a small group of people. We have a massive overprescription problem going on right now. And as so, yes, we've kind of gone over this already. They're saying they can be effective for people, and that's true, but they completely ignore the fact that they're massively overprescribed.
And so, then it says here, "We urge the federal government and our colleagues within the scientific communities to not disregard the critical role played by these evidence-based treatments for individuals with psychiatric conditions that carry inherently high risk for suicide and other dangerous behaviors." Again, sort of subtly putting in there, um, you know, "if you're, if you speak too loudly about these things, you are going to kill people," is what they're trying to say. Um, absolutely no mention of where the concern comes from, the fact that it's obvious to anyone out there that we have a massive overprescription problem. Um, and so, so that's it.
Well, you know what would have been nice to see in here is actually some insight. You know, would have been great if they had said, "We recognize a problem. We recognize there's limitations in our evidence base. We see that 20% of women are now on antidepressants, and and this number is increasing. We also are worried that we've been letting pharmaceutical companies disease monger, you know, essentially do covert marketing where they can sidestep, you know, marketing rules about how to do this from federal regulators by giving money to influencers and and different groups to talk about how nasty the disease is and put it on TV and radio. We understand that direct-to-consumer advertising is bad, and now it's made everyday Americans and people reinterpret what their feelings mean. So instead of thinking that they're just normal responses to life, which a lot of them are, they now think that they have, you know, brain illnesses that need treatments." Um, yeah, we understand that because of our insurance-based system, family medicine doctors are handing out these drugs after, you know, six or seven minutes of FaceTime. They could have said all of these things. And and say, you know, "We're committed to leading our colleagues better. We're committed to pushing back against the pharmaceutical industry. We want to cut down on advertising. We want to make sure that the people who actually get these drugs are the right people." They could have said all of those things because they're so bleeping obvious. Um, but they didn't. They completely sidestepped it and ignored the really obvious, uh, reasons for concern.
And now, let's have a look at who sponsored this because this is really telling. You know, as I mentioned, I, I used to work in the pharmaceutical industry, so I know a lot of these places. American Society for Clinical Psychopharmacology. This is a pharma conference. This is run by doctors who run clinical trials for drug companies. It's heavily intended by, uh, people in the pharmaceutical industry. My old mentor was actually the director of this for a period of time, um, who was a pharmaceutical mentor. This is also a big pharma conference here. We've got, uh, ACAP and, um, American Psychiatric Association, the two major leading psychiatric, uh, groups at the moment. These folks clearly have a lot of guild interests. They, and this is sad, they shouldn't, they should care about their patients, but in general, the way these organizations behave is that they act as advocates for the medications, uh, rather than actual scientists about them. Because if, if they were actually kind of doing their job and thinking about their patients, they would acknowledge, "Yes, there's a massive overprescription problem going on." But essentially, they're throwing their name in here saying, "Hey guys, nothing to see here. This isn't a problem." National Network for Depression Centers. I don't know these guys. Let's have a look at them. I bet you there's going to be some pharmaceutical funding for these folks. Let's see here. Okay, and here we go. Last year's sponsors: Decada, Bon or Engelheim, Johnson & Johnson. So, we've got pharmaceutical companies here heavily supporting these guys. Otsuka. So, this is another group that's compromised. And then we have here, Society for Biological Psychiatry. Again, massively partisan group here, really invested in the drug model of psychiatry and kind of blind to it, and also seriously compromised by a bunch of, um, pharmaceutical physicians who make up the leadership in all of these groups.
So, there you have it. Our psychiatric leaders had a wonderful opportunity to come clean and acknowledge the very obvious problems with psychiatry. They've completely ignored it. This is not going away. This is going to fester, and honestly, it's going to blow up in their face now because it's so obvious that there, there are problems.
So, here's what I'm going to ask: Did this surprise you? How do you feel about the psychiatric leaders, uh, guiding this profession right now? I would like to hear your comments below about whether you think they're doing a good job or not. Thanks.