The Pseudo-Science of Depression: Unnatural Vegan on SSRI Drugs.
22 June 2018 [link youtube]
Scientific skepticism. Easy to preach, difficult to practice. Especially when it's your own ego (your own happiness, your own misery, and even your own sanity) that's on the line. Here is the link to the playlist of videos on anti-depressants hosted on this channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZEkgohG7k7rq7l8i6VGhFUrGAwTBoTS1
Youtube Automatic Transcription
okay guys I'm opening this video with a
peer-reviewed article I'm going to ask you to try to set aside your attachment to the particular personalities of the particular people that provide the context for why I'm making this video and most likely for why you're watching it you can probably see from the first recheck that's up on screen this is from a formal medical journal and appeal to Authority who's the author PhD born in 1965 he has published approximately 400 peer-reviewed publications and is a member of the editorial board of 18 peer-reviewed journals professor and chair Department of Hygiene and epidemiology I've highlighted epidemiology I would guess that's why he has a somewhat more critical and insightful view on this particular matter okay we commence antidepressants in particular newer agents are among the most widely prescribed medications worldwide with annual sales of billions of dollars the introduction of these agents in the market has passed through seemingly strict regulatory control over a thousand randomized trials have been conducted with antidepressants statistically significant benefits have been repeatedly demonstrated and the medical literature is flooded with several hundreds of positive trials positive in quotation marks both pre approval and post approval however two recent meta analyses question this the first meta-analysis use data that were submitted to the FDA for the approval of 12 antidepressant drugs while only half of these trials had formerly significant effectiveness published reports almost ubiquitously claimed significant results quote/unquote negative trials were either left unpublished or were distorted to present positive results the average benefit of these drugs beast on the FDA data was of small magnitude while the published literature suggested larger benefits a second meta-analysis also using FDA submitted data examine the relation between treatment effect and baseline severity of depression drug placebo differences increased with increasing baseline severity and the difference became large enough to be clinically important only in the very small minority of patient populations with severe major depression in severe major depression antidepressants did not become more effective simply placebo lost effectiveness these data suggests that antidepressants may be less effective than their wide marketing suggests pause I just say this is a formal peer-reviewed journal article in a medical publication that's about as harsh as you're gonna get any judgement in that context you can check out the full article this is just the abstract I did read the conclusions of the full article and several the sections that were more interesting to me if you hear medical experts like Peter Breggin speaking live and extemporary you will get harsher language of condemnation of of antidepressants what they are and what they don't do but in peer-reviewed medical journals that's about as as harsh as it gets you have to know how to read that with due weight and graphic short term benefits are small and the long term balance of benefits and harms is under studied I discuss how the use of many small randomized trials with clinically non relevant outcomes improper interpretation of statistical significance manipulated study design by a selection of study populations short follow-up and selective and distorted reporting results has built and nourished a seemingly evidence-based myth on antidepressant effectiveness and how higher evidence standards with very large long-term trials and careful perspective meta analyses of individual level data may reach closer to the truth and closer to clinically useful evidence the title of the article I note effectiveness of antidepressants : an evidence myth constructed from a thousand randomized growls point is it's shocking to me that not once does Christina mentioned treatment in this video it's ridiculous if you think you were struggling with depression please go seek professional help please go see your doctor when I finally did when I finally drummed up enough courage to make the call I got an appointment literally the next day I got into the doctor they gave me the questionnaire you can find it online I scored off the charts and I was prescribed medication I had an appointment with a psychiatrist right then and there literally 45-minute appointment and went to my you know Walgreens afterwards got my medication and that was it it took like not even two hours my main problem with this video is that it comes across as she is telling people what to do and how to feel and how to get through their depression again without recommending treatment and and just thinking certain things but for many of us our brains are so diseased quote-unquote that we we aren't thinking rationally if you're feeling like that and if that's stopping you from getting treatment because you feel like it's stupid like you shouldn't feel that way you're being stupid by not getting treatment go get help and it's it's not your fault it's not because you're a bad person or a stupid person I know I just said you're being stupid but I'm joking obviously it's not because you're stupid it's just because there's something there's something wrong with your brain that medicine might be able to fix or again maybe just treatment a combination of the two we need to acknowledge that there are people who do eat right who do exercise who do manage their stress who do get enough sleep and they still suffer from depression we've been dealing with this for a decade and a half at least eating various different diets and I've struggled with depression through all of it the only thing that has eradicated my symptoms completely is drugs not pot or anything like that but an SSRI I'm really fortunate that I responded positively to the drug to the SSRI that I was given to the first one that I was given that's awesome and even then there's still a side effect of the drug that I don't like I don't like it at all you know at the end of the day I had to choose between my mental health and this side effects going away to of course of course I chose my mental Oh SSRIs and sexual dysfunction SSRIs definitely target these neurotransmitters and could lead to sexual dysfunction sexual dysfunction meaning I may not be interested in sex I may not be able to achieve an orgasm I may not be able to get it up if I'm a guy there are a lot of different parts to sexual function as a whole so that kind of runs the gamut being interested in it being able to have it and being able to achieve an orgasm the main kind of antidepressant that is the most popularly prescribed are the SSRIs these are medicines that that increase serotonin transmission and when you start to push on the doses of these SSRIs you start to lose some sort of quintessential feminine things I mean first of all it becomes much harder to climax and it becomes much much harder to cry but you also see decreases in empathy insensitivity in passion but then there are those of us like myself who live really good lives and we have nothing in our life that we would change and yet we're still depressed for people like me it's not about self-love it's not about going outside and hugging a tree like it's about fixing our brains the only thing again the only thing that stopped it was getting on a drug that literally fixed my brain it's all based on the idea that the drugs are somehow rectifying some underlying problem and until we understand that they're not doing that or that we've got no evidence that they're doing that we don't really know how to interpret the evidence we've got so for example if you give children a sedative drug like an anti-psychotic and measure their mania schools their mania schools will go down a bit they will be less hyperactive less irritable and they'll sleep more that doesn't mean that we've cured anything or done anything very useful what we've done is we've sedated those children and until we understand what the drugs we give to people are doing we don't know how to interpret the evidence that's my position on it why because people talk about fantastic results but people have always talked about fantastic results with all sorts of therapies that we now know were completely useless and often quite dangerous so you have to do proper studies and what the proper studies show as you probably know is that drugs like antidepressants are only very minimally different from a placebo and that minimal difference in my opinion is because they are psychoactive mind-altering drugs they make people feel different they suppress their emotions of it so that's what we're doing to people that's why we need to understand what the drugs are that we're using what sort of effects do they have what sort of mind altering behaviour altering effects do they produce and I think that the effects that say antidepressants produce are just not useful I don't see why being a little bit suppressed emotionally is going to help someone and feeling a bit groggy and having your libido taken away that your libido taking away I don't see why that's going to help someone who's depressed I'm not I'm saying is we really have no evidence that these drugs are curing depression it just so happens that there is a robust peer-reviewed literature proving that every single claim every single assumption and every single recommendation unnatural vegan makes in this video he is false dangerous and harmful to you the viewer why why didn't she do the bare minimum that she demands other youtubers do why didn't she do those few Google searches why didn't she read just a few peer-reviewed articles like the one I read out to you at the start of this video why didn't she consider some of the contrasting views and look at the methodology for how it was anyone scientifically had come to these conclusions how it was that we constructed the model that depression is a quote unquote disease that there's a quote unquote chemical imbalance in the brain who who came up with that notion I know the answer it was Eli Lilly corporation and I can now provide for you a series of video clips talking through the whole intellectual marketing and scientific history of how these misconceptions were were constructed mass marketed became so influential and then were debunked as pseudoscience why do people respect the opinion of a natural vegan why is her opinion regarded as more important than someone like fully rock resina whom she is presuming to criticize in this video I think unnatural vegans position is that someone like fully rock Christina takes anecdotes about their own personal experience and without duly considering the hard science the facts of health research or what have you makes recommendations to reviewers that are not only factually false but could actually be dangerous and harmful to them I can state as a fact a scientific fact that what unnatural vegan is doing in this video is making scientifically false and not just potentially harmful but actually harmful recommendations to you the viewer in telling you that you like her can go out and with doing any of the google searching or research without any the peer-reviewed studies without considering the evidence without considering the effects without considering the effectiveness let alone the side effects that you yes you can fill out a questionnaire that you find on the internet go in and have a 45 minute consultation with an expert and then be handed over a set of mind-altering drugs - ring drugs SSRI antidepressants that at this point it is no exaggeration to say or debunked fad science from the 1990s not just science that's been discredited but really science that never was credible to begin with this is a bizarre and ironic situation in which our natural vegan is guilty of exactly the things she excoriates others for being guilty of on her channel for you as a viewer I know you may feel some personal attachment to a natural vegan you may feel she's charming you may feel she's attractive you may have watched her reviews of food products and feel you can relate to that you may have seen her deal with briefly or at length um seemingly trivial questions in a rigorous scientific manner you may have seen her doing an enormous amount of research to justify her personal choice to put artificial sweetener in her coffee and you see that and respect that and think wow this is someone who did all this google searching and looked at all these peer-reviewed articles just to figure out whether or not it was healthy or I don't know marginally unhealthy and acceptable to take Splenda sweetener and add it to her coffee surely this must be the kind of person who would engage in rigorous scientific examination and deep introspection before making this leap to take a mind-altering drug that has serious side effects serious health consequences and that sits on such a shaky empirical basis and she isn't that's not who she is at all by her own account a natural vegan was a young who studied philosophy in university I've never heard her talk about any original research she did in philosophy or any other field I've never heard her mention a single job she held not in philosophy nor in any other field I've really heard very little about her real-life experience that could inform her in these ways up until quite recently and I knew her YouTube channel back in the day she was someone who jumped on one fad diet after another one crazy hippie superstition base pseudo-scientific lifestyle after another with one of them destroying all of her teeth because she read a fad diet book believed in natural hygiene believed crazy theories that you didn't have to use shampoo didn't have to use soap and didn't have to use to face that you should get rid of fluoride etc and she had an enormous number of cavities as a result lost a lot of her teeth she's someone who jumped on the bandwagon for freelee and durianrider 'he's ridiculous unlimited calories high sugar diet gained a lot of body weight and then reached a breaking point and she tried to transform her channel transform her public image and transform her life from being I don't know a superstitious hippie cult follower to being an arch Li skeptical science-based leader of public health research opinion that's not who she really is I can sympathize I can see the pathos in her story I can see her own desperation to just feel better but a natural vegan what you're doing here is just as dangerous just as deceptive just as dishonest as anything you've criticized on fully raw Christina's dream and to be honest it's going to harm a lot more people Brydon Apple rap straight from out the salad pastor haters gonna hate my true where them bottles at so we can pop cokes at the head and pour some on the floor cuz these [ __ ] dead I've understand
peer-reviewed article I'm going to ask you to try to set aside your attachment to the particular personalities of the particular people that provide the context for why I'm making this video and most likely for why you're watching it you can probably see from the first recheck that's up on screen this is from a formal medical journal and appeal to Authority who's the author PhD born in 1965 he has published approximately 400 peer-reviewed publications and is a member of the editorial board of 18 peer-reviewed journals professor and chair Department of Hygiene and epidemiology I've highlighted epidemiology I would guess that's why he has a somewhat more critical and insightful view on this particular matter okay we commence antidepressants in particular newer agents are among the most widely prescribed medications worldwide with annual sales of billions of dollars the introduction of these agents in the market has passed through seemingly strict regulatory control over a thousand randomized trials have been conducted with antidepressants statistically significant benefits have been repeatedly demonstrated and the medical literature is flooded with several hundreds of positive trials positive in quotation marks both pre approval and post approval however two recent meta analyses question this the first meta-analysis use data that were submitted to the FDA for the approval of 12 antidepressant drugs while only half of these trials had formerly significant effectiveness published reports almost ubiquitously claimed significant results quote/unquote negative trials were either left unpublished or were distorted to present positive results the average benefit of these drugs beast on the FDA data was of small magnitude while the published literature suggested larger benefits a second meta-analysis also using FDA submitted data examine the relation between treatment effect and baseline severity of depression drug placebo differences increased with increasing baseline severity and the difference became large enough to be clinically important only in the very small minority of patient populations with severe major depression in severe major depression antidepressants did not become more effective simply placebo lost effectiveness these data suggests that antidepressants may be less effective than their wide marketing suggests pause I just say this is a formal peer-reviewed journal article in a medical publication that's about as harsh as you're gonna get any judgement in that context you can check out the full article this is just the abstract I did read the conclusions of the full article and several the sections that were more interesting to me if you hear medical experts like Peter Breggin speaking live and extemporary you will get harsher language of condemnation of of antidepressants what they are and what they don't do but in peer-reviewed medical journals that's about as as harsh as it gets you have to know how to read that with due weight and graphic short term benefits are small and the long term balance of benefits and harms is under studied I discuss how the use of many small randomized trials with clinically non relevant outcomes improper interpretation of statistical significance manipulated study design by a selection of study populations short follow-up and selective and distorted reporting results has built and nourished a seemingly evidence-based myth on antidepressant effectiveness and how higher evidence standards with very large long-term trials and careful perspective meta analyses of individual level data may reach closer to the truth and closer to clinically useful evidence the title of the article I note effectiveness of antidepressants : an evidence myth constructed from a thousand randomized growls point is it's shocking to me that not once does Christina mentioned treatment in this video it's ridiculous if you think you were struggling with depression please go seek professional help please go see your doctor when I finally did when I finally drummed up enough courage to make the call I got an appointment literally the next day I got into the doctor they gave me the questionnaire you can find it online I scored off the charts and I was prescribed medication I had an appointment with a psychiatrist right then and there literally 45-minute appointment and went to my you know Walgreens afterwards got my medication and that was it it took like not even two hours my main problem with this video is that it comes across as she is telling people what to do and how to feel and how to get through their depression again without recommending treatment and and just thinking certain things but for many of us our brains are so diseased quote-unquote that we we aren't thinking rationally if you're feeling like that and if that's stopping you from getting treatment because you feel like it's stupid like you shouldn't feel that way you're being stupid by not getting treatment go get help and it's it's not your fault it's not because you're a bad person or a stupid person I know I just said you're being stupid but I'm joking obviously it's not because you're stupid it's just because there's something there's something wrong with your brain that medicine might be able to fix or again maybe just treatment a combination of the two we need to acknowledge that there are people who do eat right who do exercise who do manage their stress who do get enough sleep and they still suffer from depression we've been dealing with this for a decade and a half at least eating various different diets and I've struggled with depression through all of it the only thing that has eradicated my symptoms completely is drugs not pot or anything like that but an SSRI I'm really fortunate that I responded positively to the drug to the SSRI that I was given to the first one that I was given that's awesome and even then there's still a side effect of the drug that I don't like I don't like it at all you know at the end of the day I had to choose between my mental health and this side effects going away to of course of course I chose my mental Oh SSRIs and sexual dysfunction SSRIs definitely target these neurotransmitters and could lead to sexual dysfunction sexual dysfunction meaning I may not be interested in sex I may not be able to achieve an orgasm I may not be able to get it up if I'm a guy there are a lot of different parts to sexual function as a whole so that kind of runs the gamut being interested in it being able to have it and being able to achieve an orgasm the main kind of antidepressant that is the most popularly prescribed are the SSRIs these are medicines that that increase serotonin transmission and when you start to push on the doses of these SSRIs you start to lose some sort of quintessential feminine things I mean first of all it becomes much harder to climax and it becomes much much harder to cry but you also see decreases in empathy insensitivity in passion but then there are those of us like myself who live really good lives and we have nothing in our life that we would change and yet we're still depressed for people like me it's not about self-love it's not about going outside and hugging a tree like it's about fixing our brains the only thing again the only thing that stopped it was getting on a drug that literally fixed my brain it's all based on the idea that the drugs are somehow rectifying some underlying problem and until we understand that they're not doing that or that we've got no evidence that they're doing that we don't really know how to interpret the evidence we've got so for example if you give children a sedative drug like an anti-psychotic and measure their mania schools their mania schools will go down a bit they will be less hyperactive less irritable and they'll sleep more that doesn't mean that we've cured anything or done anything very useful what we've done is we've sedated those children and until we understand what the drugs we give to people are doing we don't know how to interpret the evidence that's my position on it why because people talk about fantastic results but people have always talked about fantastic results with all sorts of therapies that we now know were completely useless and often quite dangerous so you have to do proper studies and what the proper studies show as you probably know is that drugs like antidepressants are only very minimally different from a placebo and that minimal difference in my opinion is because they are psychoactive mind-altering drugs they make people feel different they suppress their emotions of it so that's what we're doing to people that's why we need to understand what the drugs are that we're using what sort of effects do they have what sort of mind altering behaviour altering effects do they produce and I think that the effects that say antidepressants produce are just not useful I don't see why being a little bit suppressed emotionally is going to help someone and feeling a bit groggy and having your libido taken away that your libido taking away I don't see why that's going to help someone who's depressed I'm not I'm saying is we really have no evidence that these drugs are curing depression it just so happens that there is a robust peer-reviewed literature proving that every single claim every single assumption and every single recommendation unnatural vegan makes in this video he is false dangerous and harmful to you the viewer why why didn't she do the bare minimum that she demands other youtubers do why didn't she do those few Google searches why didn't she read just a few peer-reviewed articles like the one I read out to you at the start of this video why didn't she consider some of the contrasting views and look at the methodology for how it was anyone scientifically had come to these conclusions how it was that we constructed the model that depression is a quote unquote disease that there's a quote unquote chemical imbalance in the brain who who came up with that notion I know the answer it was Eli Lilly corporation and I can now provide for you a series of video clips talking through the whole intellectual marketing and scientific history of how these misconceptions were were constructed mass marketed became so influential and then were debunked as pseudoscience why do people respect the opinion of a natural vegan why is her opinion regarded as more important than someone like fully rock resina whom she is presuming to criticize in this video I think unnatural vegans position is that someone like fully rock Christina takes anecdotes about their own personal experience and without duly considering the hard science the facts of health research or what have you makes recommendations to reviewers that are not only factually false but could actually be dangerous and harmful to them I can state as a fact a scientific fact that what unnatural vegan is doing in this video is making scientifically false and not just potentially harmful but actually harmful recommendations to you the viewer in telling you that you like her can go out and with doing any of the google searching or research without any the peer-reviewed studies without considering the evidence without considering the effects without considering the effectiveness let alone the side effects that you yes you can fill out a questionnaire that you find on the internet go in and have a 45 minute consultation with an expert and then be handed over a set of mind-altering drugs - ring drugs SSRI antidepressants that at this point it is no exaggeration to say or debunked fad science from the 1990s not just science that's been discredited but really science that never was credible to begin with this is a bizarre and ironic situation in which our natural vegan is guilty of exactly the things she excoriates others for being guilty of on her channel for you as a viewer I know you may feel some personal attachment to a natural vegan you may feel she's charming you may feel she's attractive you may have watched her reviews of food products and feel you can relate to that you may have seen her deal with briefly or at length um seemingly trivial questions in a rigorous scientific manner you may have seen her doing an enormous amount of research to justify her personal choice to put artificial sweetener in her coffee and you see that and respect that and think wow this is someone who did all this google searching and looked at all these peer-reviewed articles just to figure out whether or not it was healthy or I don't know marginally unhealthy and acceptable to take Splenda sweetener and add it to her coffee surely this must be the kind of person who would engage in rigorous scientific examination and deep introspection before making this leap to take a mind-altering drug that has serious side effects serious health consequences and that sits on such a shaky empirical basis and she isn't that's not who she is at all by her own account a natural vegan was a young who studied philosophy in university I've never heard her talk about any original research she did in philosophy or any other field I've never heard her mention a single job she held not in philosophy nor in any other field I've really heard very little about her real-life experience that could inform her in these ways up until quite recently and I knew her YouTube channel back in the day she was someone who jumped on one fad diet after another one crazy hippie superstition base pseudo-scientific lifestyle after another with one of them destroying all of her teeth because she read a fad diet book believed in natural hygiene believed crazy theories that you didn't have to use shampoo didn't have to use soap and didn't have to use to face that you should get rid of fluoride etc and she had an enormous number of cavities as a result lost a lot of her teeth she's someone who jumped on the bandwagon for freelee and durianrider 'he's ridiculous unlimited calories high sugar diet gained a lot of body weight and then reached a breaking point and she tried to transform her channel transform her public image and transform her life from being I don't know a superstitious hippie cult follower to being an arch Li skeptical science-based leader of public health research opinion that's not who she really is I can sympathize I can see the pathos in her story I can see her own desperation to just feel better but a natural vegan what you're doing here is just as dangerous just as deceptive just as dishonest as anything you've criticized on fully raw Christina's dream and to be honest it's going to harm a lot more people Brydon Apple rap straight from out the salad pastor haters gonna hate my true where them bottles at so we can pop cokes at the head and pour some on the floor cuz these [ __ ] dead I've understand