False Cure, Fake Skeptics: Anti-Depressants as Dogma.

guys just because somebody appears on
the dr. Phil show claiming that she's pregnant with the reincarnation of Jesus Christ doesn't necessarily make it so just because someone appears on dr. Phil and claims that the rapper Eminem is her biological father doesn't make it necessarily so if you describe yourself with the word skeptic if you have a youtube channel and the word skeptic is in the name of your channel you're supposed to be one of the people on the side that asks careful methodological sound questions before leaping to conclusions before believing or assuming anything that reaches beyond direct empirical experience and that's a tradition that goes back to ancient Rome and ancient Greece and each and author called sexist and Perkis and there's only one new one modern idea in the philosophy one thing that was added to this in the 20th century and that's the concept of falsifiability that was developed and prepared by the philosopher the scientific method known as call popper he did philosophy of science what if you want to call it okay what's the opposite of skepticism the opposite of skepticism is dogmatism skeptics should not really be embarrassed to be wrong being wrong is something that happens to human beings you might really find it convincing when you're on PewDiePie's channel watching that video letting you know that a young woman is pregnant with the next incarnation of Jesus and her biological father is mmm which would technically mean that mmm is God fascinating fascinating and shout out to PewDiePie thank you for bringing me up to date with this story thank you for poisoning a slash and rich in my life and mind with this completely trivial news story through the doctor dr. Phil show the opposite of skepticism is dogmatism and it is dangerous dangerous in the truest sense the word when you have someone like the armored skeptic who dogmatically propounds dogmatically believes something as simple as the claim that quote antidepressants sold a chemical imbalance in the brain I'm gonna now go to a long series of Clips contrasting what armored skeptics says to what some scientists and experts say in the field but guys it wouldn't take a genius to just read the fine print that's now written on every bottle of Prozac it wouldn't take a genius to do a little bit of google searching and a little bit of fact-checking and to realize how genuinely contestable these claims are and even if you don't come to a conclusion to do that most basic thing that skepticism requires skepticism isn't about coming to conclusion skepticism isn't about always being right the skepticism isn't about never being wrong being wrong as something happens to human beings and it's part of the scientific process skepticism is about admitting to yourself when you do not know the skeptics were the people who back in ancient Greece back in ancient Rome we're willing to say hey some people think the world is flat some people think the world is round like a sphere actually one of the most popular theories that the world was more shaped like a drum or a segment of a column and guess who the skeptics were in that debate the skeptics were the people who said there's evidence on all sides there's conflicting theories and we don't know yet today we do in 2018 you can put the pieces together and figure out the shape of the planet worth living on but skeptics by definition were the people who refused to take that step into dogmatism into certainty about something they did not know and shame on you armoured skeptic what you're doing here is more dangerous to the people who are giving advice to to the public at large then if you came out and said hey ten days of heavy drinking 10 days of vodka is a great way to shake yourself out of manic depression all right I'm familiar with vodka I quit drinking basically when I was still a teenager I'm familiar with the effects of vodka and you know what the side effects of vodka aren't nearly so dangerous aren't nearly so terrifying in the long-term as what you're about to hear about antidepressants and antipsychotics that are now also used to treat depression about classes of prescription drug that in fact have been debunked since the early 1980s a class of drugs that here is being dogmatically glorified by someone who calls himself a skeptic who's stepping way outside this field of expertise giving medical advice on a subject giving pseudo-scientific medical advice on a subject on which really he ought to have the maturity and attachment to say hey there are some things we're not the earth is flat whether on M&M as is your father that maybe this guy just doesn't know - yin antidepressants are designed to help you regulate your brain chemistry the opposite of depression is not happiness the opposite of depression is balanced brain chemistry has anyone ever told you that you had a biochemical imbalance did you go to the doctor feeling anxious or stressed or depressed and have them say oh yes genetic it's biochemical you need a psychiatric drug well you might be surprised to learn that the only biochemical imbalances in the brains of people who see psychiatrists are the ones put in there by the psychiatrists we don't have any evidence that any routine psychiatric problem from anxiety to depression and even schizophrenia has anything to do with a biochemical imbalance so where did an idea like that come from the first drugs that were thought of as antidepressants were actually similar they were drugs that were used to treat TB and they were similar to stimulants they were they had similar effects to amphetamines and the first articles about them make that quite clear they described how they could make people psychotic and very agitated and prevent them sleeping but then they start to be described as antidepressants they start to be portrayed as as specifically attacking mood or depressive symptoms there's even less evidence for the serotonin or mono Amiens theory of depression which you've probably heard of and it's now widely acknowledged by experts that there really is no evidence that there are any serotonin abnormalities in people with depression even though that idea was so widely promoted in the 90s particularly when the SSRIs were being marketed brain chemistry is the key to depression but the brain is really complex a treatment that may work for one person will not work at all for another or maybe even have the opposite effect everyone's brain processes those chemicals differently psychiatric drugs are psychoactive substances and this is sometimes forgotten so that's this is just why I'm putting this this slide up there is no fundamental difference between them and other psychoactive substances the ones were familiar with of course are the substances that are used recreationally the difference might be that most psychiatric drugs produce states that are not particularly pleasant but that doesn't mean that they're that they're fundamentally different in any way they still like all drugs alter the body and like all psychoactive drugs because they work on the brain they they produce altered mental states as well and like all drugs they produce tolerance that is the effects that they have initially don't necessarily last because the body adapts to their presence and for the same reasons you get withdrawal symptoms when they're stopped some people need a lot to feel stimulated others are extremely sensitive to even the smallest imbalance like other psychoactive substances the states that they produce means that people are not necessarily very good at judging how they're how they're functioning when they're under the influence of the drug what someone called Peter Breggin an American psychiatrist has called a process of spellbinding federal drug administration is taking a hard look at the evidence the FDA now wants the makers of paxil prozac Zoloft and others to mention suicide as a side effect on warning labels and doctors have been ordered to closely monitor patients I mean it's ironic when you think about it isn't it that a drug that's marketed as an antidepressant has a side effect of suicide to take the irony further now the FDA's new label warnings and the Canadian we'd like my books for 10 years ago that these drugs produce anxiety insomnia over stimulation impulsivity aggressivity hostility and Oh general worsening of their condition antidepressants are designed to help you regulate your brain chemistry allowing you to function without the distraction of emotional instability yes some drugs will make you feel kind of dull but that's the trade-off you take they seem to fall in they seem to have two sorts of contrasting effects the modern antidepressants anyway the SSRIs and and various other more recently marketed antidepressants they seem to induce a state of lethargy and listlessness and drowsiness but at the same time seem to make some people at least rather agitated and panicky and tense and irritable I should say actually that they're much milder psychoactive substances than many of the other drugs that are used and prescribed for mental health problems so in many people they don't have many effects at all and I think if we were talking to people honestly we'd present antidepressants in a very different way from the way that they are currently presented so the way they are currently presented by many by many doctors and by drug companies is this idea that they will help to normalize an underlying chemical imbalance or at the very least there's that there's a hint or an implication that they will normalize whatever is going on that's causing the depression if if we were taking a drug centered approach this is what I think we would say to people okay this drug effect the way people think and feel but we don't really know how yet because we haven't studied it enough it may dampen down a mo suppress your libido we know it does that may make you feel a bit lethargic and drowsy and some people that may some people it might make them feel a bit agitated do you think that would be helpful the opposite of depression is not happiness the opposite of depression is balanced brain chemistry we don't have any evidence that any routine psychiatric problem from anxiety to depression and even schizophrenia has anything to do with a biochemical imbalance so where did an idea like that come from we know the answer it was actually made up by the brilliant minds that the drug company Eli Lilly but then in the 1980s there was a crisis over the widespread use of benzodiazepines and the idea of using mind-altering substances to shut people up keep people quiet stop people complaining got a very bad reputation rightly of course and so with david Healy's very cleverly shown they started to change the market for the benzodiazepines into a market for antidepressants and they needed to get away from that bad reputation they needed to portray the antidepressants as something that were avert we're reversing an underlying disease so that disease center model became very important to them in the early 1990s and then more recently of course we've seen the creation of other conditions or the chain a chain the changing nature of other conditions like bipolar disorder to sell new drugs so this is what I was saying about antidepressants so the idea that there was an underlying deficiency or disease was sold in a package with the drugs they very much came together the idea that you had a chemical imbalance and therefore you needed an antidepressant in the 1990s with the marketing of the SSRIs like prozac and Eli Lilly were one of the funders of a big campaign in the UK and I know they've been campaigns here and campaigns in Australia very that is campaigns designed to increase the use of antidepressants by increasing the number of people who are diagnosed with the depression so this campaign suggested that 5% of the general population had depression ten percent of people attending general practitioners it was it emphasized that antidepressants are not addictive which has transpired is completely wrong and is now accepted as completely wrong and it emphasized that they should be given for for a few months and not just used for a brief period it was very successful we've already seen how much the prescribing of antidepressants has increased we all have to play an active role in our battle with depression you can't just pop a pill and expect your problems to go away just because you've managed to overcome some of the symptoms of depression doesn't mean that you no longer have depression and what they've been doing is trying to persuade people they've the makers of antipsychotics and the antipsychotics are the big blockbusters at the moment the new antipsychotics like zyprexa and seroquel they've been trying to get into the depression market because they know that there's many more people you know out there with depression than with psychosis and the way that they've been doing this in part anyway is through this diagnosis of bipolar disorder so a lot of their advertisements have been about trying to persuade people who might view themselves as being depressed that actually they've got bipolar and therefore they they need an anti-psychotic the advertising and promotion has been very emotive and a lot of it has been justified by this idea that psychosis psychotic symptoms are toxic to the brain so they have to be stopped at the earliest point possible you need to prescribe as early as possible it turns out that it's probably the antipsychotics that are toxic to the brain that all the evidence that people saw that brains that the brains of people with schizophrenia and psychosis were getting slightly smaller over the first few months of their treatment it looks as if that's attributable to their drug treatment rather than the disorder so in particular I've got a macaque monkey up here because the middle middle line refers to a study well sorry should say first Jeffrey Lieberman who's a psychiatrist based in America conducted a trial which was sponsored by Eli Lilly which compared haloperidol and olanzapine and brain scanned people for over a year for a year followed them up for a year and found that within 12 weeks there was evidence of shrinkage in people taking haloperidol and over a year there was evidence of the same shrinkage in people on olanzapine as well but to a slightly lesser degree they concluded that what this showed was that a lanza pain prevented the underlying brain shrinkage better than haloperidol and and they were obviously convinced about this conclusion because Eli Lilly then funded this study with macaque monkeys which did the same thing compared haloperidol olanzapine and monkeys that were treated with without any drugs and showed conclusively that the brains of these monkeys were smaller in the monkeys treated with olanzapine and haloperidol than the monkeys treated without the drugs they were given some placebo injections instead so and then this has been a long-term follow-up study done here as well which also suggests that there was a strong correlation between the shrinkage of the brain and the amount of antipsychotics that people were prescribed this trend this trend started to label children with PD what was called pediatric bipolar disorder going back a couple of decades it wasn't believed that children could have bipolar disorder whose thought to be something that only started later in life but then there was this idea that pediatric bipolar disorder can be manifested in different ways from adult bipolar disorder and this group at Harvard started to do trials with with children some preschool children testing them with antipsychotics diagnosing them with bipolar disorder it turned out they were receiving enormous amounts of money from the pharmaceutical industry which they hadn't declared it is not yet clear if antidepressants do trigger suicide attempts but there is definitely enough concern for the FDA to issue this warning and until it gets answers 10 drug makers must change their warning labels and those taking the drugs will be monitored this is hard for me because I tried to commit suicide in front of my five children I didn't know what I was doing I don't remember exactly what happened all I know is that my hug has been took the gun away from me and my children was looking from the other room if my husband wasn't there I wouldn't be here my children wouldn't have a mother one woman earlier spoke of near nearly committing suicide in front of her children my sister did commit suicide in front of Lindsay another woman spoke of hollow-point bullets that's what my sister used to do it my sister would have never never killed herself in front of this little girl she would have never done that prozac induced her to do that I attacked him with a kitchen knife luckily he's bigger and stronger than I am and he defended himself but I did this right in front of my son I thought I can't believe what I'm doing I don't believe what I'm doing this is wrong then I decided that I was gonna kill myself the bottom line is I was never suicidal before taking Prozac I was obsessed with suicide while taking Prozac and the obsession stopped immediately after stop I stopped taking Prozac unfortunately with my dad we didn't have time to notice too many changes except that he became withdrawn and agitated but that by that time it was too late he got up and 9 o'clock in the morning took a 12-inch butcher knife out of the kitchen drawer and stabbed himself violently in the abdomen once and then proceeded to do it twice by the 14th day I was experiencing such an intensified fear that I could not stand to face life as it was for me anymore there was to my mind no hope and no future where suicide had never been a logical solution for any reason for me it now became my only solution because I had nothing left with which to fight and I was terrified to go on living this drug is most assuredly responsible for any torment or suffering and the eventual suicide of my husband I was totally out of control my friends were cast at my deteriorating mental state or but were afraid to speak to me about it because of my educated state of mind during this time it is a miracle I did not harm myself or others I had become a menace to society and that FDA is allowing this to happen I want to know why how many more people are going to be killed in Maine before you do something you have the power to change things you have the power to listen to what we say and investigate what we say we need help and some say the FDA eventually could ban the use of antidepressants altogether 15 years ago I warned the FDA and I warned the country and toxic psychiatry that antidepressants were causing a stimulant amphetamine-like syndrome that was resulting in violence and murder in 1994 and talking back to prozac I warned the country in the FDA again this time with tons now scientific data on the same issues during that period of time I was asked to be and this is very relevant to deliberations the scientific investigator for all of the combined Prozac suits almost 200 of them so I got to look at all the sealed data that Eli Lilly Lilly didn't want anybody else to see so about 20 books later now and a few dozen scientific studies and innumerable innumerable product liability suits or I've looked at sealed data I've come to tell you that you're evaluating junk you're evaluating carefully edited expurgated data that I've seen and you haven't this is a most remarkable circumstance [Music] - yen the very first thing you're gonna find in the description below this video is a link to a playlist of other videos basically on exactly the same topic as this one and just a few days ago I put up a video much more brief succinct and to the point dealing with the rousing endorsement of antidepressant drugs from skeptic youtuber Jacqueline Glenn now now part of the question of raised here in this video is what does the word sceptic mean anymore a lot of us need to go back and re-examine our assumptions about bio psychiatry and about antidepressants a lot of us also need to go back and re-examine our philosophical exceptions our philosophical assumptions about the meaning of skepticism the meaning of Darwinism and then then how we apply these concepts in our in our lives there's not a lot of heroism really for someone like Jaclyn Glenn or for someone like armored skeptic to beat up on Christianity in the decadent West in the United States of America you know what it takes guts it takes balls to stand up to the Muslim establishment in Saudi Arabia being an atheist being a voice for atheist activism for skepticism in that sense within the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that takes nerve being a voice for Reform challenging the institutions of Buddhism in Thailand today takes nuts tape takes nerve takes backbone there's risk involved if you want equal rights for women within Buddhism in Thailand if you want to separate church and state get the King disentangle the power of the government from Buddhism stop having Buddhist monks preaching government policy and stop having government policy being dictated upon any of these reforms hey you might want to stand up for actually theism skepticism what have you within Buddhism - maybe all kinds of things you want to do yeah it actually does take nerve in some of these places where the power of church and state have not been disentangled where it's really your skin on the line where you're facing prison sentences you're just facing the possibility of being outright murder by religious Fundamentalist and you know I think that people like Jaclyn Glenn and an armored skeptic they're they're kind of you know they're wearing the skin of the lion their fame on the internet came up they had this aura of heroism because they stood up and liberated themselves from the chains of faith which is something most of us did most of you go up watches with sudden we did as children at such an early age that we can barely remember them and somebody I don't know if there's a sense of which you can say you're an atheist from birth but a lot of us questioned or rejected Christianity or Judaism at such an early age that we don't really remember the reasoning that went into it nevertheless when other people go through this infantile process of intellectual development as teenagers or as fully grown adults we seem to treat them as heroes even when there is really fundamentally nothing heroic about it okay why because he evokes this idea of speaking truth to power it evokes the historical memory of Galileo standing up and risking his life to say no he believes that the Earth rotates around the Sun and not vice versa that the Sun rotates around the earth and being put on trial by the Catholic Church the the witch trials and all the barbarity of the Dark Ages being challenged by the supposedly noble man of science when you look into the real biography of what really happened with Galileo there's a lot more moral complexity to it but nevertheless that's the symbol that someone like Galileo has become that's the symbol someone like Copernicus has begun again Copernicus is actually a very different historical figure when you look into what his life really was and what the challenge to to you know church authority was that he presented and so on nevertheless whether it's the the church reformer of Martin Luther posting his objections to the church or it's an outright atheist or what or what have you these people appear to us wearing the skin of a lion and examples that are just slightly inconvenient for their personal lifestyle choices whether it's eating meat drinking alcohol or getting high on antidepressants we see that these are heroes with feet of clay they're not just phony YouTube personalities they are phony skeptics if you care about public health if you care about the damage that is being done by pseudoscience being popularized in the internet you should hate these people who themselves are Crusaders against who designs if you hate dogmatism you should hate these people who present themselves as the enemies of dogmatism precisely those who care most about skepticism in a meaningful sense of the word ought to be the most scandalized at the people who today on YouTube on the level of c-list celebrities have come to represent skepticism and my heart goes out to you because I'm a vegan and I care about the future of the vegan movement and one of the many reasons I got on YouTube and started making videos about veganism I've now made about 1,000 by the way and reached over 2 million people Mayans blah blah blah blah blah it's been a lot of effort is that I saw exactly the people who were the most popular most renowned voices for the vegan movement dragging the name of veganism through the mud nobody was discrediting veganism more than precisely the people who stepped forth claiming to represent veganism and you guys in the so-called skeptic community or skeptic movement or new atheist movement today you have to face out for this fact that nobody is discrediting skepticism more than your own self-identified leaders baddest yen