Transcription
Chemical imbalance. So this is a phrase that I first heard maybe 30 years ago when I, the first person I knew, started taking an SSRI—Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wartzell. It was this whole, like, Time magazine-promoted idea that depression, mental illness of all kinds, was caused by a “chemical imbalance” in the brain.
And the question I always had is, well, okay, if something’s an imbalance, what’s balance? Is there a baseline? Is there a way to measure various chemicals in your brain? Do we know what the right levels of those chemicals is? I mean, I don’t under—like, is there any science behind that at all? No. It’s a chemical imbalance in your brain. Okay. Where should—So, like, if I’m low on oil, I throw the dipstick at the top of the engine. I’m like, “Oh, it’s two, you know, two inches down. I got to pour another quart in.” Is there anything like that with psychiatric assessment? No. Okay. Nothing. And and you you are one of the lucky few who somehow miraculously saw right through it because most people, to this day, despite the fact that the chemical imbalance theory has long been debunked and there was an umbrella review published in Molecular Psychiatry two years ago that just kind of put the the final nail in the coffin on it. Um, we it has been it has never been proven, and that’s been known all along.
And yet, if you survey American—in surveys that have been done of Americans, most people believe that mental illness, you know, that depression, all these things are caused by chemical imbalances to this day. So So but it’s like that’s like utterly fake. Utterly fake because we can’t define balance, therefore we can’t define imbalance.
Correct. Exactly. And and even if you know this, the this is this medicalized framework that we use to to think about ourselves, you know, which has such a monopoly on how we make sense of what it means to be human now. I mean, suffering, anxiety, um, a madness of all kinds. I mean, you’re—most people view that as illness, quote-unquote, like that medical framework is so ubiquitous, and what it—what it does to return to your question about like, did anyone ever ask me about the circumstances of my life—like, you you you can’t because because you either have this unfortunate bad luck with your brain chemistry and you’re just, oh, it’s too bad you you had the bad you know, genetic card and you have this chemical imbalance, or your struggle is a response to your life. It can’t be both. You can’t have this unfortunate disease and also be having a meaningful response to your circumstances. It’s like it’s one or the other.
And so the the experiences that I had in the decade and a half that I was a psych patient, and I—the experiences of so many of the more than 60 million adults who are on these drugs right now and more than 6 million children—is that—wait, there’s 60 million American adults and 6 million—66 million Americans total on these drugs according to the CDC in 2022. So those numbers could well be higher by now. That’s craziness.
Yeah. And we are told that that we’re we’re we’re having a mental health crisis because so many rates of suicide are through the roof. Anxiety disorder diagnoses, young people struggling, young girls struggling. We’re told, you know, this is this terrible crisis, and most people think, oh, we must not be getting enough mental health treatment. But no, if you look at the numbers, you’re like, um, basically everyone is—almost, you know, this huge percentage of our population—more than ever before—is getting mental health treatment. So the problem isn’t not enough mental health treatment. The problem perhaps is is the mental health treatment. So I’m just—I can’t—I’m fixated on this. And to continue the metaphor—want to beat it to death—if you come in with a burnt hand and I don’t ask you how you burned it, I’m not really treating it. I’m just giving like a palliative—if I give you a painkiller because you’ve got a burn on your hand. But if I never say, “How’d you burn your hand?” Well, I put it on the stove. I do it every morning. So, I I think a a clinician who cared about the patient would say, “How about don’t put your hand on the stove.”
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Like there was no effort to understand why you felt bad about your life. I mean, there—in in in therapy I would of course talk about my life and the circumstances of my life, but it was all—the the baseline operating assumption was that I was just—I had this brain disease that I was at the mercy of—that the only thing I could do to manage, you know, to manage it was take pills. And so any conversations that I had with therapists about my life—to me and I think to a lot of them—just felt kind of secondary, like, oh, you know, you’re having—you have a lot of stress or you’re in this dysfunctional relationship or this kind of hard thing happened to you. We would talk about those things, but not because we thought that was—working through those would be what helped me resolve my my challenges. It was the meds that were going to do that. That that was, you know, what I was—what I learned to believe. Um, and I and I think that’s the insidious—that’s the insidious nature of this medicalized paradigm is that it basically teaches you to let go of any sense of responsibility or agency over your life because you’re just at the mercy of faulty brain chemistry. And so, like, what’s the point in trying to change the circumstances of my life because I’m still going to have this brain disease? So like, why—does it really—a disease they can’t define, whose origin they don’t even ask about—um, a a brain disease that’s like, in no scientific sense, a disease—literally—is it contagious? Um, wow, that’s—wow, that’s even crazier than I—speaking of crazy—that’s even crazier than I realized. So okay, so can we just go—if you don’t mind, please—yeah, since there are 66 million Americans taking these drugs, can you just go through in order what those drugs are generally and what the effects on a person are?
So the different drug classes are antidepressants, of course. So you have the, you know, Prozac, Effexor, Symbalta, Celexa, Lexapro, uh, the mood stabilizers, which many many of which are actually anticonvulsants used for epilepsy, but they’ve—over, you know, over the decades—when when they were studying them, they noticed that the, you know, the animals became kind of apathetic when they were testing them for these other conditions—they’re like, oh, maybe we can use this on on psychiatric patients. So, so most mood stabilizers are actually anticonvulsants. So, those would be, you know, Lamictal, Depakote is classed as a mood stabilizer. It’s literally a neurotoxin that, you know, it was banned in in the United States until um the late—the early ‘70s. It didn’t get approved until the early ‘70s for psychiatric uses and had been banned prior. Um, so that’s the other, you know, that’s considered the so-called gold standard mood stabilizer. And I could talk a lot about lithium. I have a whole chapter on it in my book because of all the drugs that I—lithium salts—it used to be called. I think um they—Yeah, they pro—I think they—that’s one of the ways it’s been described. Old—old drug. It’s been—it’s been around for a long time. It started to be used for psychiatric purposes first in Australia and I can’t—in the first half of the 20th century. That’s what I mean.
Yeah. It’s been around a long time. Yeah. And and if you actually—I I have—I go—I do a deep dive in in the chapter on it in my book because the story—to this very day—that most people are given about lithium is that it is the most, you know, it’s been around the longest. It has this incredibly reliable evidence base because of how long—how long it’s been in use for. It’s the gold standard. If if you actually look at the studies that got it approved decades ago, I mean, they are the most shoddy, unscientific, completely flimsy, subjective studies that you could possibly imagine. You’re just shocked when you—and and this is the case for every single psychiatric drug that is currently on the market. If you actually look at the drug label on the FDA website, so don’t take my word for it. Go to the FDA website, look up any psychiatric drug, go to the clinical studies section to see what trials this—the approval was based on. Usually, it—it’s maybe two studies. And of course, they can do as many studies as they want, and they just throw out the ones that they don’t like the outcomes of. Guess how long your average psychiatric drug trial lasts. This—to determine safety and efficacy. I don’t know, 10 years. 6 to 8 weeks. Wow. Some of them last a week. Some of them last a day. Two—maybe two studies. That’s—So these are not longitudinal, as we say. There is zero evidence base for long-term safety and efficacy of these drugs. Zero. Thanks for watching our YouTube channel. We hope you’ll subscribe to it. And by the way, you can hit the little bell on there and get notifications every time we produce a video. We hope you’ll do that also.