The Drugs Don't Work: the Future of Depression.

[Music] the future of antidepressants and the future of depression whether you are engaged in formal research involving uh scientific journal articles or you're just informally gathering anecdotes from the people you happen to know and care about in your own life what you're gonna find is the same rationalization the same sort of strange excuse being offered again and again and again one this is something real two this is biologically real three in some strange way it's the same as having diabetes how how can it be i mean you know when you look back at shakespeare when you look through you know century by century the allegories we have used to express human sorrow human sadness human misery and in some sense depression how could it be that in our age in our era in our epoch it's a blood sugar problem diabetes that's become the dominant paradigm for how we think about how we understand depression oh yes and it's some cure when we look at the narrative that has driven our care in the united states and elsewhere over the past 30 years it it centers on this chemical imbalance theory of into the source so the theory is that say depression is due to lo not too little serotonin in the brain and that the drugs fix that serotonin restore it to a normal level and there's therefore it's like insulin for diabetes now that is a metaphor that is a story that tells of extraordinary progress think about it you've identified the very molecule that causes depression or psychosis or quote adhd and you can fix it so i was clinically diagnosed by a psychiatrist in december 2016. i've been having this illness for four years and according to my research is that there is no cure for clinical depression so you can seek treatment and take medication the medication will suppress the symptoms you can go into a remission but then it comes straight again and then you even take more medication so the way to treat it is to keep taking the medication to treat an analysis like if you have the kidney disease you have to treat it with medication and injections or cancer every day you take your medication oh and by the way as part of this story of progress what happens do we learn about in the 80s early 90s we hear that these drugs fix chemical imbalances in the brain so we hear that antidepressant that depression is due to low serotonin you take an ssri at absurd energy levels and therefore it's like a treatment like for insulin for diabetes so mental illness is actually the same as any other illness clinically depressed means there is actually an injury in your brain and there is a chemical imbalance in so that's the story that we organized our care around and you can find it was promoted by the american psychiatric association and here's the amazing thing it's not true there's really only one thing that diabetes has in common with depression and that is that people believe that both justify taking prescription medication every day possibly multiple times per day for the rest of their lives diabetes has become the preferred example for something that is physically and biologically real precisely because the question these people don't want you to ask is oh you're taking antidepressants so are they working are you cured yet are you better yet and when are you going to stop taking those drugs because if you're never going to stop then it starts to sound a whole lot like some kind of psychological dependency kristen bell when i was 18 years old my mother said to me if you start to feel like you are twisting things around you and you start to feel like there was no sunlight around you and you were paralyzed with fear this is what it is and here's how you can help yourself and i've always had a really open and honest dialogue about that especially with my mom which i'm so grateful for because you have to be able to cope with it i mean i present that very cheery bubbly person but i also do a lot of work i do a lot of introspective work and i check in with myself when i need to exercise and i got on a prescription when i was really young to help with my anxiety and depression and i still take it to this day and i have no shame in that because my mom had said if you start to feel this way talk to your doctor talk to a psychologist and see how you want to help yourself and if you do decide to go on a prescription to help yourself understand the world wants to shame you for that but in the medical community you would never deny a diabetic his insulin ever but for some reason when someone needs a serotonin inhibitor they're immediately crazy or something and i don't know it's a very interesting double standard that i often don't have the ability to talk about but i certainly feel no shame about it's interesting that these conversations tend to begin and end with statements about reality about what's truly real the claim being made again again that uh depression isn't just a subjective experience of sorrow or sadness no no no this is something real um as opposed to having a discussion about whether or not the treatment works whether the therapy is effective whether it gets results whether or not there's a known cure oh no to some extent on some level everyone's aware that our skepticism is not primarily directed towards the cure it's directed towards the mere existence of the condition itself and what is our gold standard for the experience of something being truly real it's the blood test you can take when you're suffering from diabetes isn't it strange that this allegory is used again and again for a population of millions of people taking psychiatric drugs for alleged psychiatric disorders who can never do this same simple thing themselves exactly what they're lacking is a blood test exactly what they're lacking is a litmus test if you like exactly what they're lacking is any way to prove to you to prove the world or to prove to themselves that their problem is something real now i am not of the opinion that subjective experiences emotions and feelings are unreal no no no no no and sometimes even within the medical sciences we have to talk about feelings emotions subjective experiences as medically real symptoms just think about the process of quitting smoking overcoming nicotine addiction all right there are really severe symptoms there are measurable symptoms there are real symptoms that you suffer from when you quit smoking but you know what most of them are psychological most of them can't can't be demonstrated by taking a drop of blood from your fingertip oh oh the reason why you're acting nervous so the reason why you're depressed or the reason why you're so frustrated driving your car sitting in traffic is because you're going through nicotine withdrawal no it's not quite that real i once read an autobiographical account from a man who was taken hostage he was taken hostage by old-fashioned armed communist terrorists in the jungle and he was scared for his life he woke up afraid he fell asleep afraid living in that terrorist camp every day until he was rescued he had been a chain smoker and he managed to quit smoking without ever experiencing any of those uh psychological symptoms he quit smoking without even noticing that he was going through the process of withdrawal if you have a condition as simple as the common cold you can't do that you can't overlook and you can't overcome the symptoms of just needing to cough because you happen to have been taken hostage if you have diabetes your blood test when you prick your finger and draw that drop of blood it's going to be the same whether you've been taken hostage by terrorists or not but if you can be honest with yourself right now think about your own worst experience of depression sorrow human misery think about the darkest saddest time in your own life and then think about how much your attitude would have changed think about the extent to which you would have been shaken out of it or the extent to which you just would not have noticed those symptoms those feelings if you had been the one taken hostage by terrorists if you were waking up and falling asleep every day alert and afraid for your life that's what's real what's real are the problems you have and you can't change and you can't ignore even if you're literally taken hostage by terrorists and the analogy is you ask somebody in the wheelchair you want to get out of your wheelchair and walk they are in the wheelchair because they can't walk so same thing for mental illness you see you can't work and you can't function because your brain injury and chemical imbalance if you look at say for example the low serotonin theory of depression depression is due to absence of normal activity of this chemical messenger that actually was sort of falling out of that was a hypothesis raised in 1965 it was began to be investigated in the 1970s and even in the 1970s researchers weren't finding it to be so they weren't finding that people with depression had low serotonin and as early as 1984 the nih said listen there's no sign that there's a lesion in the serotonergic system that's a primary cause of depression in 1998 the american psychiatric association's own textbooks sort of made fun of this hypothesis what they said is it came out of understanding how the drugs act on the brain they upped serotonergic levels and so we hypothesized that people with depression had low serotonin but we didn't find it to be true so in 1987 we as a people spent in the united states spend about 800 million dollars in psychiatric drugs we're now spending about 40 billion dollars a year on psychiatric drugs 50-fold increase you know what percentage of americans of all ages now take a psychiatric drug on a daily basis any guess 20 so one in five that tells you how prevalent these become we of course have children i think it's the latest data i saw in children about 13 no excuse me 13 have been diagnosed it's about 10 now on a drug every day that's from 6 to 17. as i've mentioned in my earlier video currently i'm taking 150 mg of effect saw in the morning two tablets of remember on half a tablet of olensa pin which is 2.5 mg 2mg of colonizer pump which is a sleeping pill i'm maintaining that for medication and my psychiatrist did try to win me off the orlando pin but every time i try to win off a few days time i feel like crap and he asked me to try to reduce my plan as a pump to 1 mg and i also have trouble sleeping and staying asleep throughout the night if i cut down the 1mg and then the next day again i feel like crap so yesterday we had sort of like a chinese new year reunion dinner my wife and my sister-in-law initiated this dinner to have it before the chinese new year is over next to me is my brother who is 5 years older than me my son evan next to evan is noel my eldest son who is 21 now and both of them are actually in college so all you know it was a good dinner but i heard something when i was talking and jason you have a good wife you have a good two sons and you have a good house and you know you will get better you'll be happy and then that's what the depression sufferer doesn't want to hear because it's like i can wield my depression away it's like saying to someone that was diabetic oh you have a good family good children good spouse so you must get better soon you know so it's the same thing you see you won't say that to someone who's having cancer or diabetic or kidney disease oh no no no now wait wait we're here to talk about the future of antidepressants we're going to talk about the future of depression not just the past kristen bell kristen bell thinks she's an activist kristen bell thinks she's helping people kristen bell is encouraging each and every one of you to take your good-looking teenage daughter tell it to the psychiatrist and sign her up for antidepressants sign her up for anti-anxiety medications and for you to teach your own children that they should regard these drugs as equivalent to insulin and that then they should feel positive they should feel proud to take those drugs every day for the rest of their lives to regard it as a perpetual dependency a treatment that does not lead to any cure there was a time when nobody would have thought of censoring her as recently as 2016 none of us thought of the purpose of government censorship as being ensuring the accuracy of medical advice on the internet and we've seen a whole lot of crazy health fads come and go we've seen all kinds of people peddling cures and weight loss programs that really could kill people and some of them really did and the governments of the western democratic world stood far back and said hey freedom of speech that's none of our concern that's none of our business and you know just in the last few years things have changed just in the last few years every single one of us has experienced a level of censorship that we never imagined possible as recently as 2016. if you're a youtuber you know what it is to have your youtube videos deleted because you dared to say something contrary to the government's message and the government's message was always changing over the last two years right you said some that somehow challenged the propaganda message of the week as to what medical science is supposed to be and how we're all supposed to follow its dictates in our own personal and private lives many of you will have known what it's like to be threatened with having your twitter account deleted or your instagram shut down and maybe sometimes it's just because you made a joke or because you were talking about a totally unrelated topic and you happen to have the wrong keywords in the message i remember what youtube was like in 2016 and i look at it today and look at all the strange pauses and gaps where people don't want to say the wrong word well that's that's the level of censorship we've gotten used to in the year 2022 and why to save lives the justification is that this censorship will save lives if we were to silence if we were to censor this beautiful world famous actress do you really think it wouldn't save lives and here's the betrayal at the heart of this even as science was telling us that it wasn't true that american psychiatric association together with the pharmaceutical industries were telling us that's what they had found that's the betrayal and there's even an extra kicker here they found for example that people with a depression didn't have low serotonin before they went on the drug okay now you give them a drug that up certainergic activity what does the brain do what tries to maintain a homeostatic equilibrium it's normal functioning so it actually decreases its serotonergic activity the physiology of its serotonin system so here's the irony of science into the low serotonin the investigation of low serotonin theory depression they hypothesize that people with depression had low serotonin they didn't find it to be so before you went on the drug and then they found that the drugs induced the very pathology hypothesized to cause depression in the first place i don't have to think about cutting down i just keep taking and at least every day i can function and i can shoot videos like this you know but there are also side effects of taking the medication okay firstly you feel hot flushes secondly you'll feel the need to close your eyes all the time because of the headaches you see the headaches attack your eyes and also you keep yawning non-stop and you feel the need to eat all the time to distract the restlessness so i put on weight and also another side effect is constipation so the pool is stuck in wherever in my body so i keep farting and it's not very nice when you're around people and i'm having bad nightmares every night so that's why taking medication also have its side effects and the psychiatrist always wants you to try to win down the medication my situation is not really improving and now let's go back to why would you see a rising disability rates well one of the things here is instead of the drugs being drugs that medications that fix a pathology what we've really learned is they create abnormalities in neurotransmitter function and as soon as you understand that science it becomes fairly easy to understand why particularly over the long term these drugs are not going to improve functioning they're more likely to impair functioning so to assure you that i'm not kidding you here is a screenshot of my oku card i actually applied for oku and it was successful so the oku as you can see that it is a mental illness depression it is a mental illness and it's not something that is just made up it is an illness just like if you have cancer or kidney or pancreas or dementia yes it is an illness so that is the proof it's biological meaning there's a chemical imbalance in the brain and the brain is the most complex organ in your whole body conventional narrative is this that we've made this great progress this is the narrative told by psychiatry that we've made great progress in understanding the biology of mental disorders we've discovered that they are illnesses bio you know they have a biological pathology and we're getting new and better drugs that sort of fix that are antidotes to those disorders we have this narrative that tells of great scientific problems we have more people getting treated but then why is the burden of mental illness going up in society after society as measured by the number of people on disability due to psychiatric disorders and in the united states for example we had 1.25 million people on disability adults in other words they were receiving a government check because they couldn't function in society in 1987 that's the year that prozac is approved for marketing today we have about five million people in disability why why do you see this four-fold increase if we're getting more people treated and with better and better medications is that disability yes so this is people yeah so this is people when we talk about the disability statistics this is people declared eligible for disability to receive a social security payment because of a mental disorder during this time of second generation drugs we're seeing this rising disability by the way if you follow those kids who get on disability as children when they hit age 18 it seems about two-thirds go on to adult disability right away so what you see is a new career path that has opened up in our society where you get you get diagnosed and said to be mentally ill early on and that becomes sort of your lot in life so what you see in every country that has adopted this model of care and adopted widespread use of psychiatric medications you see increased mental problems increased psychiatric problems among the children and you see the same in adults so it's so normally when you see more people diagnosed for a problem and more people treated for the problem the hope is of course the burden of that problem will go down in a society it's exactly the reverse here and you see this in every country that has adopted this paradigm of care you see an increasing number of people who can't work you see an increase in the assignment their children are sort of psychiatrically disturbed you see an increase in problems among college age kids so if it were a good thing we would see the problems of psychiatric distress lessening in society right among those who are using the drugs it's exactly the opposite and the fact that it happens in societies of different cultures and different political structures tells you it's not just country specific related to their culture it tells you that it's the paradigm of care itself now here's the strange irony of the approach taken by kristen bell if we are going to treat depression as seriously as we treat any other medically real illness if we are going to look at antidepressants the same way we look at insulin let me ask you why isn't there a similar level of government censorship applied to disinformation and misinformation as spread as propounded as popularized by people like kristin bell why shouldn't the government and medical institutions alike have a similarly muscular policy against disinformation given that it does ruin lives given that it ultimately has a body count and given that the disinformation originates in slogans and marketing campaigns employed by pharmaceutical giants by the pharmaceutical industry back in the 1980s and 1990s but these are notions these are dangerous pseudo-scientific notions that if they weren't debunked already in the 1990s they certainly have been debunked now i'm disgusted unsubbed unfollowed goodbye [Music]