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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Yeah.
You know, let that sink in for a second.
Yeah.
Taking an antidepressant will make you more likely to have a suicidal behavior than taking a placebo. Yet we use these drugs in people under age 25 all the time. It astounds me why we do that. Now, the reason these drugs can make people suicidal is that they can cause paradoxical effects.
And so when I say paradoxical, I mean it's like a random effect that just happens to someone because they have the genetic susceptibility. And the example I usually like to use to explain this to people in a relatable way is you could have 10 people sitting around smoking a joint. Nine of them are giggling and they're laughing, they feel relaxed, and you get one person who becomes paranoid.
That's what happens with antidepressants as well. The majority of people are feeling emotionally numb, which is the intended effect of the drug. But you can get one person who starts to feel more depressed or even more aggressive. And... And if that's already an unhappy person and they start to have this paradoxical reaction where they feel even worse, that can push them into a suicide attempt.
Yeah, yeah. Let me link it. And so, I mean, for me, I don't know how suicidal behavior might turn up in a dog. I imagine it could be self-injurious behavior. Maybe they start to bite their paws or their arms or they start to do something like that. But also, you know, what we've seen in humans is And this is in the drug labels.
I mean, it has, you know, aggression, hostility, you know, all of these things are already in there. They've been observed to be these idiot, these paradoxical reactions. And And these side effects have led some humans to do terrible things like mass murder, people strangling their family members, killing their whole families and then turning the weapons on themselves.
These have gone to courts of law where juries and judges have heard all of the evidence about what that person was like right before they got on the drug. how their behavior drastically changed, and then usually how their behavior got better when they removed the drug. Juries have heard these stories, and based on what we know about the drugs and the side effects, they have...
they have let people off who have essentially harmed other people during these things. They've also allowed people to sue companies. One man got $6 million out of SmithKline Beecham after a side effect resulted in the death of multiple family members by his father-in-law. This is a gentleman called Donald Schell. And so... We do know that these drugs can make some people unexpectedly aggressive.
And, you know, Ivan, when I was preparing for this, I was looking at, you know, one of those two studies that you had mentioned. And in one of the studies, they have a doubling of aggressive behavior. You know, the dogs who got the drug, the Prozac, aggression as a side effect was seen in 12% of them compared to 6% of them who didn't get it. Now, and so...
I mean, that would just be another thing that people would need to be aware of, um, before putting the, the, the, their animals on these medications is if, if you start to see, you know, a typical aggressive behavior or violence, um, these are potential side effects of the drugs.
It's a great analogy, and we use them in the same way in humans. We will give SSRIs to people with depressed mood, to people with anxiety, to people who have PTSD and trauma. We give it to women who have uncomfortable periods and are irritable around their periods because the drug doesn't work in any specific way. It's a chemical blanket. You know, they wipe out emotions.
I mean so anything that's that that generally tends to make people anxious and and and Irritable it can it just turns the volume down on the on the on your emotions Good and bad ones. It's just like cranking a knob down and it'll work for many different things but not in any specific way the tapering or tapering
Because I do have a... No, I'm smiling because this is like... This is like the greatest question that I've ever been asked before to start talking about antidepressant tapering with dogs. I love it. I love it. It's great.
Yeah. Yeah, this is a great question. And so what I would What I would say the most important thing would be is to try and get a sense of the dog's baseline behavior before you taper because you're going to be looking out for withdrawal signs. What do we notice in humans? Humans will start to become more anxious and they might have a hard time sleeping. They can look dizzy as well.
And sometimes they have like brain zaps, although that's really hard to notice if you're configured. It's going to be hard to notice that the dog's having brain zaps. Maybe you'll notice some twitches or some ticks. And this is just assuming that the physiology of the dog will behave in a similar way to the human when you're taking it off.
As I mentioned before, most people can come off these medications I would say in a couple of months. Honestly, that's way too fast for what I do but I talk to a lot of people and they can come off pretty quickly. The most important thing that you need to be aware of is that if the So if the person starts to look like they're becoming very uncomfortable, you slow down the taper.
And so that might be the same with the dog. If when you're removing the medication, you notice the dog is very irritable, maybe very on edge, you might want to just wait. You might want to wait two weeks or just until the dog looks like it's settled down a bit more and then keep on dropping the dose.
I'm going to have to rely on you and your community to sort of educate the world on how to do this well, whether it's something that can be done in a couple of months or maybe it takes six months. Maybe for most dogs, it's pretty quick. Maybe for a select few, it takes longer. But the golden rule is to, if the dog looks very uncomfortable, put it back on the last dose where it was comfortable.
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