Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring
speaker
129 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It's Yeah, yeah. And it says, you know, if you're suffering from depression, you may, you may have a chemical imbalance that's going to be fixed by these drugs. Now, I think for most people, it's understandable that a drug company is going to play shenanigans and they're going to market things in a way that increases the amount of sales.
But the thing that most people don't realize is that the medical community, especially the leading academics, have been corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry. Most people think doctors get corrupted because sales reps for the drug companies, they come in and they bring them sandwiches. And because the sales rep is sexy, it's meant to convince the doctor. I'm sure that plays a part.
But as someone who used to work in drug companies, let me tell you how the real corruption happens. The fastest way to excel in your career as an academic psychiatrist, now these are the people at Harvard, Yale, UCSF, the leading institutions out there and internationally as well. The fastest way to make a name for yourself as an academic is to work with drug companies.
Now, the reason for this is they will let you run their clinical trials, they will write publications for you, and they will fly you around the world. And all of these things will bolster your curriculum vitae. And that will allow you to get promotions.
But what this means is that for very competitive academics who really want to rise to the top of their profession, they're not going to speak out about the drugs. They are going to actively avoid saying negative things about it because as soon as they start doing that, they're not going to be supported by the drug companies anymore.
And so the influence and the power of the drug companies has corrupted academia. And then the final thing, the final reason why you don't hear about negative stories about these drugs is that for many companies, especially big ones, and you'll see this when you watch TV, they're running drug ads. A huge amount of profit in media comes from drug ads.
And so even then, they are going to be less likely to support any negative content that's critical. And so it creates this thing where you seem like a crazy person if you start saying things like, hey, these drugs don't fix chemical imbalances. They're just masking the problems. People go, I've never heard of such a thing before. I've only ever heard the opposite from people.
But it's just, essentially, it's just money from drug companies.
Yeah, so I mean, when we think about the things that make humans depressed, and I mean, we think about, I mean, the main ones that Sigmund Freud would always talk about, he says, love and work. And I think that's a great way to think about it. We are social creatures. And so relationships tend to be some of the biggest things that make us unhappy. But we also need purpose.
And so we need to be doing something that we like. And so those two areas are significant. But then when we get outside of those things, I start to worry about drug use as well, especially overuse of caffeine and nicotine, but also things like cannabis. I also worry about medical problems that are missed. Big things can be dietary issues. We have a lot of people with dietary problems.
They have problems with insulin because they eat poor foods. And so your physical health can also lead to you feeling unhappy. And so those are the main ones that make humans unhappy. Now, so what are the drugs doing? Well, the drugs are disrupting your neurotransmitters. And when we're talking about SSRI-type medications like Prozac, which I think is the main one that's used in dogs,
they are typically inducing an effect of emotional blunting. Sometimes they're a little energizing and that can lead to aggression, but generally the effect is one of emotional blunting. And if you're someone who's anxious or you're feeling depressed and you're being tormented by a lot of anxious thoughts, if you can blunt your emotions, you are going to perceive that as therapeutic.
And that's why many people take the drugs and they willingly take them because they are... they are benefiting from that drug effect.
But it's not fixing the underlying problem. And when we start talking about long-term use, that's when we run into problems.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think it's because it's become so commonplace. Everyone knows someone who's taking these medications now, and it seems so normal. And And one of the reasons why doctors can put people on these medications so easily is that they lie to them about... Well, they don't lie to them per se, but they leave out a lot of the information which people really ought to know before getting on the meds.
And the main one being that these drugs... I've never been studied for longer than a year in a controlled clinical trial setting. And when we have 50% of Americans on these drugs for over five years, drugs which clearly cause tolerance and dependence and the effects wear off and you need to take higher and higher doses. And so they're changing your brain.
Your brain is fighting against them to stay in balance. We've never done a clinical trial on these drugs that lasted longer than a year. And some people take these drugs for decades. And so if people knew that, they would know that they're really in the unknown. And from what I see clinically as a psychiatrist, here's what happens to people when they take them long-term.
You get some people, the drug effect will stay there and it will work for them. But then you get some people where it just wears off and they need to go on higher and higher doses to get the same effect. Then they need to get on more and more medications to maintain it. And then we have some people who get worse. They develop a condition called...
tired of dysphoria, but it's essentially brain changes that make people have high anxiety, low energy, low and low motivation. And they get stuck in this chronically depressed state that's induced by the drug. And if we're not even talking just about what the drugs can do to people, there's also an opportunity cost about being on these meds.
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