Transcription
If you clicked on this video wanting to learn how poorly trained doctors are unknowingly creating a generation of chronically medicated individuals, then you're in the right place because today we're walking through the seven-step process that turns essentially normal people into lifelong psychiatric patients. And for those of you who don't know me yet, I'm Dr. Yseph Wuring. I'm a board-certified psychiatrist who specializes in helping patients safely come off psychiatric medications. Essentially, after my colleagues have taken them through the seven steps that you're going to learn today. So, let's get into it.
Step one, you go to your doctor for a legitimate reason. Maybe your relationship just ended. Maybe work is unbearable. Maybe your physical health is poor. You're drinking too much. You're feeling isolated. Or you're dealing with some past trauma. But instead of taking the time to understand your life and offer non-drug solutions, the doctor hands you a prescription and well, you take it because you've been raised to trust the expertise of doctors and the drug works. It helps you sleep, it eases your anxiety or it numbs the pain and you think, "Wow, this is a helpful intervention."
Step two, they get you hooked on it. After this, there's no real discussion about how or when to get off the medications. Your doctor might check in occasionally and ask, "Are you having any side effects? Do you want to go up? Do you want to go down? Do you want to stay on the same dose?" But they don't really ask you about your life stresses or sit with you to explore any non-drug approaches to your healing. And because you're feeling okay, and they're not saying anything about stopping, you just keep taking the medications because why wouldn't you? It must be safe. After all, they keep prescribing it.
Step three, you eventually decide you want to come off the medication. Now, this could be for a couple of reasons. First, perhaps the original problem has now resolved. The pain of the breakup has faded. Your job improves. You've matured to a level where you're not troubled by the things that have happened to you in the past. That could be one reason. Another might be that the drug has simply slowly stopped working. And so, you tell your doctor that you're ready to stop. You're not really seeing the benefit to it anymore, but they suggest a quick taper. They say you should half the dose, have it again, and then take it every other day and stop. And sometimes this happens over just a handful of months with minimal supervision. And so you follow their advice and then the withdrawal hits like a freight train and you feel awful. But the doctor tells you something else. He says, "This is just your illness coming back and this is why you need to stay on this medication."
Step four, they convince you that you have a chronic mental illness. Because you're suffering so much, you end up going back on the drug and surprise surprise, it works. You are relieved. your family is relieved and your doctor is relieved. But instead of realizing that you've been in severe withdrawal, the doctor explains to you that it's likely you have a chronic mental illness and that you need to be on these medications perhaps for life. And this is the point where the system starts to capture you because you start to believe that you have a chemical imbalance in your brain. You start to rationalize to yourself. You think, well, maybe I do need these medications. Is it really that bad? Some people just need meds. This is just like a diabetic that needs insulin. And so you begin to dutifully take the medications.
Step five, the doses get higher and higher. As you keep taking the medications, you start to notice that you need higher doses to get the same effect and eventually you're maxed out. Then they start to add more medications all in the name of managing a worsening condition. And instead of realizing that your body is simply building tolerance to these medications, the doctor says, "Don't worry about this. This is normal. I've seen it all the time." Some mental illnesses, they simply get worse over time. You feel a bit unsettled by this, but you continue to trust them because why wouldn't you? After all, they are the experts.
Step six, the medications start to harm you. Slowly, you begin to decline. Every intervention they try seems to work only partially or for not very long. You start to feel like you're just getting worse and worse. If you've been on anti-depressants for several years, you start to feel things like low energy, poor motivation, emotional numbness, this background anxiety for no reason at all, and you start to get the sense that you're not even living in your own life anymore. Maybe if you're on a sedative like a benzoazipene, you're starting to experience memory problems, increased anxiety, and social withdrawal that just doesn't make sense to you anymore. You used to like going out. You used to like spending time with people, but now all of a sudden you just want to be at home all the time. And you start to think to yourself, I can barely function anymore. How did life get so hard? And so you go back to your doctor, but they don't recognize these as drug induced problems. Because you see, the reason for this is that they were never trained to see it. All they were taught was that these medications are safe and effective because they've been approved by the FDA. But they've never been encouraged to ask what happens to people after being on these drugs for years at high doses or in combinations with other medications. And so they simply assume that these problems can't be the medications.
Step seven, you are now told that you are treatment resistant. As your case continues to worsen, you're referred to a psychiatrist or maybe even a university hospital. You see the expert over there and they tell you that you have treatment resistant depression and they begin to escalate treatments. They give you antiscychotics, mood stabilizers, maybe ketamine, and eventually different types of neurostim procedures such as electrocomvulsive shock therapy or TMS. And maybe some of these things, they help for a little bit, but eventually as time goes on, they wear off and you start to feel worse because eventually the accumulated damage from years of polyfarm pharmacy and brain stimulation catches up to you. your functioning declines even further and your case is now so complicated with all of the medications over the past several years that no one even remembers how this started and no one's taking the time to go back and look how this whole thing unfolded. You and your family are left completely baffled. How did someone with so much potential end up completely disabled, unable to enjoy the things that everyone wants in their life? satisfying relationships, being able to do work that you enjoy, and having good physical health. As you struggle to come to terms with these things, the doctors tell you, you simply need to accept your condition, be realistic, and continue to follow up with your doctor, and take your medications. And so, you do. And so, that's what I see every single day in my practice. That is the seven-step process into how well-meaning doctors unintentionally are turning normal people into chronically disabled psychiatric patients. And so, if this has happened to you or someone that you love, please tell me in the comments below this video. I read all of them and they really help other people who follow this channel feel less alone.
At this stage, this problem that you're in is very hard to fix because it requires waking up to the fact that you've misplaced your trust in a broken healthare system. You may find yourself alone and struggling to find anyone who believes you or anyone who even knows how to help you. Sometimes your friends and family might support you as you turn away from the traditional mental health system, but often they don't. And if you want to get off the meds, you met with a lot of resistance and they say, "I don't think that's a good idea. You know, you should just go trust the experts. The experts that have gotten you into this situation to begin with." And often times this leaves people having to face the trauma of being betrayed by the mental health system that they trust and also the long and painful process of tapering off these medications on their own. And it can take years to untangle the web of medications and allow your brain to heal eventually over time. But it can be done. And so if you want to learn more about how to do that safely, you're not going to want to miss this next video about how to safely taper off your psychiatric medications.