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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You know, what if because you went on these medications long term, you never experienced the impulses to fix your relationships or to go and find that job that you should actually be doing? You know, you did quit the one that you're doing now. But what if it means you neglect a health issue that was making you anxious and that's just festering in the background?
I mean, if you don't fix these problems at their root, they get worse. And so I worry about all of the long-term problems with these medications long-term. And let me tell you this, this is the exact same with dogs because before I got on this podcast, I did some research. I couldn't find a single clinical trial in dogs that went longer than six weeks. And so these vets out there-
So, yeah, so coming off psychiatric meds, especially the antidepressants for humans, can be really challenging. So... there's a huge variation in what people experience coming off these meds. I talk to some people and they've been on the meds for three, four years. They can come off in two months, no problem. They go back to their life. In fact, I actually think that's the majority of people.
But there are some people that when they try and come off, For reasons we don't understand, their brains are just not very elastic. They have a very hard time adapting to the drug being removed. And then they can develop really severe withdrawal problems. And sometimes these can go on for years. It's a condition called protracted withdrawal. And it can make the person very unwell.
It's not the most common outcome, but it can happen. And because of that, I mean, that's what I do now. I find these people who are having a really hard time coming off the drugs, and then I do these very gradual, slow tapers to help them come off, typically after they've failed to come off quickly. Yeah.
Ivan, do you have any difficulty getting the dogs off medications when you take over their care?
Yeah. Yeah, a lot of these dogs haven't really been given the opportunity to find a non-drug ways of coping. And instead of doing that, you're putting them on drugs that flatten their emotions and... And the same thing happens with humans. A lot of the people that I speak to at the taper clinic, they'll come to me and they'll say, I just want to feel like myself again.
Yes, I don't really feel bad emotions, but I don't really feel good emotions either. I have pretty low motivation. I'm not that excited about anything or doing things like I used to be. I feel like I'm just...
um you know um sort of like you know passive you know just just living but not really alive and and they hate that feeling and and i guess i mean it saddens me to think yeah and i mean it saddens me to think that you know you have this lovely dog um and um um you know it's having some separation anxiety or that or there's some issue going on and then The way we treat that is by blunting them.
I think you might have said this, Ivan, because I've been on your social media. It's like if you left a child alone in a house for like 12 hours and the child became unhappy, would you drug that child? That's essentially what I feel like a lot of people do to dogs.
Yeah. And this is one of the things that I worry about with humans as well. Because they often say drugs and antidepressants are the best combination. And I guess maybe for some people that's true. If they're so depressed, they couldn't even do the therapy without getting a little nudge from a drug. But we're essentially talking about a drug that is going to affect...
your mood and your personality and how you respond to things happening to you on a daily basis. And if you blunt that, you're also going to have a lot less material to work with. In fact, a lot of the people that that when I'm pulling them off medications, if they've been on them for decades, they tell me it's like their maturation was stalled.
If they got on the drugs as a teenager, they're learning to regulate their emotions for the first time in their 40s when I'm pulling them off and everything is coming back to them. It's not like they've really taken gains or taken a lot of gains from while they're on the drugs. It just kind of flattened things. So they never...
really got to have that experience of having to work through difficult emotions and deal with that. That's really part of the normal process of maturing. And then so we get it all when we pull them off the drugs.
That's a really good question. For some people, it will be just removing the medication because it's impacting their ability to be connected with the world. Some of the humans, when I ask them, can you describe...
they're having a lot of side effects to the meds i'll say can you describe what it feels like um to be you and then they say it's like i'm watching my life through a television you know i'm not feeling the emotional responses to things when i hear my favorite song come on i don't get prickles down the back of my neck you know because it reminds me of my youth when i hug my child or my spouse
It's harder to feel those feelings of connection. I mean, it actually just is. I mean, it is the effect of the drug that is blunting the emotions.
So this is the thing that's gonna be challenging, because dogs can't say that they're not feeling well on the drug. It's really hard to know. So with antidepressants, Many people, I mean, they may or may not be aware of that they have this thing called a boxed warning. Now, a boxed warning is the highest warning a drug regulator can give for a medication.
It means that when you get the drug, it has this big black box on the front of it, and it says... And it says what the risk is. Now, for the antidepressants, it's that the drugs may make you more suicidal. And this is crazy. People will think this sounds crazy, but this is real. When they've done clinical trials and they look at the rate of suicidal behavior in people under age 25...
there are more suicide attempts in the groups of people who get the drug compared to the groups who get placebos.
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