(00:02) we have been duped by feminism sexual Liberation and anti-depressants we have been told that we are powerful and free now as women but we feel tired wired and bitter we’re mostly eating right exercising and meditating wrangling to-do lists and arranging playdates and yet there’s a haunting hollowness beneath the huge complaint what if I told you that there is a huge Storehouse a reservoir of energy inside of you that has not been tapped that you could feel light and pulsing excited and alive in ways that a wellness lifestyle
(00:49) cannot deliver that you could trust yourself that the world could feel safe and that unexpected and expected Delights could start to illuminate your path no coach therapist doctor or Guru required just you learning to get real present and attentive with you I feel like I’m here to matchmake your inner parts for the greatest love affair ever written I want to help you learn first where you’re buying eggs from the hardware store which is the source of all pain I want to help you master entering through the upset which is the
(01:27) only spiritual practice You’ll Ever Need and to get real comfortable putting on your villain Crown which is in my opinion the key to True power and then you’ll attune to your inner yes so you can live the life defined by the specific pleasure of who you are I am so excited to announce my latest book called The reclaimed woman which is available for pre-order now so if you head to the link in show notes you can learn more about bonuses events and companion offerings and I cannot wait to see your gorgeous face on the
(02:12) path I’m Dr Kelly Brogan you may know me as a New York Times bestselling author of a book with an exploding pill on the cover Renegade psychiatrist pole dancer or honorary member of the Disinformation Dozen what can I say I’m a born provocator I’ve spent most of my recent life exposing deceptions connecting dots and discovering the secret places my inner victim is still waiting to be liberated and now I feel called to help you reclaim all of your parts your health your sexuality your power and
(02:44) your expression so that you can finally truly own yourself I want to ignite in you that inner knowing and the pulsing Vitality that lives beneath your disempowerment disconnection and resentment so that you can audaciously courageously and playfully alchemize your struggle into the specific pleasure of who you are this is Reclamation radio a soulfire production hi and welcome back to Reclamation radio I’m Dr Kelly Brogan and today I would like to take a deep dive into some of my core messaging which is mythbusting
(03:28) anxiety and depression I promise that this won’t be as long as my Joe Rogan interview and we’ll also speak to my core messaging you know what’s in my books and my online program vital mind reset and membership vital life project which is that there is nothing wrong with you and that we have been deceived around our very nature so this Reclamation process requires that we engage a couple of important reframes so today I want to talk about why we think that medications work why we think that so-called mental illness so I’m going to
(04:08) be talking about anxiety and depression but this extrapolates to all of the labels in the diagnostic and statistical manual the Bible of Psychiatry right so why we think that illness is related to chemistry and a so-called chemical imbalance the untold story of anti-depressants specifically but the risks that we are not informed about because doctors are literally not in a position to provide informed consent and where we go from here with this information okay so to begin the reframe I often invoke a Krishna mury quote which is that it is
(04:51) no sign of Health to be well adapted to a profoundly sick Society right so if you’re chugging along like everything’s cool everything is most definitely not cool so if you are expressing symptomatology around the not coolness whether that is through your biology through your psychology through your emotionality something is actually working right and so that’s why I have described those who are captured by The Guild of Psychiatry and by the mental health system the so-called I just always have to put that in quotes mental
(05:32) health as the canaries in the coal mine right as the most sensitive most expressive among us to what is actually going wrong in our ecosystems in the natural world in our social structures I have become very interested in the social structures that set us up to experience deep struggle and suffering that is then Corral out that is then labeled by the medical system as a pathology right so Fred as Weller talks about the community wound and this concept that if we don’t wake up to 40 Familiar Eyes who know us in ways better
(06:15) than we can know ourselves you know remember we can’t actually see ourselves ever so the social infrastructure when it is absent what happens right I often counsel myself and women in my life around how right it is to feel that raising your children alone living in a home and maintaining and managing it alone is not something that your nervous system has ever registered in the history of human ancestry as normative something is not right about that you know I often think about the fact that if we had Community if we as women had
(06:56) true Sisterhood like co- habit related Sisterhood that the adventures you know the trials and tribulations the explorations and even the just Frank absence of the father would not be felt in this like core abandonment way that so many of us are working on in our inner healing Journeys right so if a father were to leave for whatever reason and we had all of these women around us the children would not feel it right so this Village reverberates in its messaging to our systems as safety and what is it to function as automatons in
(07:40) modular families and to pretend that something is right even with a parent two parents even with a man and a woman in the household raising children right so that is not even to speak to the ways in which our disconnection from the natural world to our self- sustenance to our daily rhythms the imposition of so many forms of toxicity whether it be electromagnetic or chemical uh industrial whether it’s actually thought forms we are swimming in our own dysfunction as beings and this is being expressed right so if we reframe those
(08:21) who are expressing as Sentinels that’s an important first step in the Reclamation process and I often wonder if anything I ever did you know for patients in practice was simply to tell them there’s nothing wrong with you actually and we’re going to find out why you know you’re expressing this way and we’re going to start with the basics we’re going to start with that very foundational signal of safety around lifestyle right so Terence McKenna said that artists are here to save Mankind
(08:51) and it’s been my observation that as we begin to restore remember and reclaim as individuals all of these gifts are unlocked and that these folks you know who are often captured in these diagnosis have so much Vision to bring to us as a collective so through this framework your illness is an existential question that only you can answer right so it is your symptoms are literally you telling you about you and it feels far because we’ve been inculturated around that separation and if we reframe this way
(09:38) and we look at what we’re calling depression we look at what we’re calling anxiety as an invitation to explore where in your life you are insisting that fulfillment be available where it simply is not and that there’s a hero or heroin’s Journey that you’re being invited to Embark upon that necessarily involves a dark night of the soul that necessarily involves the sweet experience of your own courage then on the other side of it you come home to yourself to the you that you’ve always
(10:11) been and that is universally the feedback that I have received from vital mind reset participants and from patients is I feel like myself I finally feel like I am Landing in my own skin and I actually think that’s why so many of us become more attractive more beautiful as we move through this process because we’re liberating energy from stored trauma spaces in our stress physiology so if the goal is 360 degrees self-relating right it’s gaining that perspective on yourself and all of the dimensions of yourself so as to
(10:51) understand the messages that some of the dimensions are holding for your awareness then you can imagine that fighting with something that you are presenting to yourself saying no to it hating it wanting it to be not as it is it’s just forestalling your progress towards that goal of 360 relating of total self- Embrace of moving through the shame walls of your own self-rejection self- betrayal and self-abandonment in order to claim these precious gems of who you are right so it’s not like there’s a
(11:28) wrong or a right but if we can agree that the goal is ending all of the wars inside so that you can release relax and resolve all of the struggles on the outside with your partner with your job with the government you know all of this controversy it begins inside and I’m a firm believer as we’ll get into that this journey begins with the Reclamation of choice and what that does to your nervous system is life changing when you begin to understand that what you eat for breakfast that what you buy at the
(12:05) supermarket let alone grow in your yard that you know what you drink that how you think that all of these little choices all day long have vast impact when you begin to experience that and it comes into your tissues as reality you can’t unknow it you may grapple with it over time because the Readiness factor is the most mysterious of all the variables I’ve ever explored like what makes somebody ready and the only thing I’ve come to is that movement in the direction of change finally feels like relief it finally feels
(12:46) like okay I know there’s a lot of uncertainty ahead of me and I already feel better you know that I’m embarking I also know that this is the beginning stage right and what comes next is resolving the fear of Life Alexander Lo and a psychiatrist wrote a book by that title fear of Life how could we be afraid of life I thought we were afraid of dying right but there is so much in the Reclamation of our Eroses in the Reclamation of our vital force and the reconnection to that animating energy that is from somewhere Grand from some
(13:25) place beyond us that is the sweet terrain of understanding understand in why it would be that we would even Dain to move through the more harrowing elements of and phases and passages of this journey it’s to come to the place where the things that you thought mattered so much simply release into you know sort of sparkly particles and honestly the things that you didn’t think matter begin to take on great significance like what it feels like to put one fork of food into your mouth and experience the sensual pleasure of that
(14:05) you know what it is to wake up with a devotional practice you know what it is to come into silence and slowness why would that matter right but all of a sudden these things start to take on immense significance how you speak to your lover how you share touch with that person how is it that we can begin to make love to all of what would that look like if you were doing that right so contrary to what I’ve just framed the dominant narrative around anxiety depression Associated medications and what it is to struggle
(14:47) is predicated on victim Consciousness and what I mean by that is that you are encouraged I call it victim coddling right you’re encouraged to say I hate this this sucks why is this happening to me please fix it and who’s going to come to the rescue is the system the doctors the experts the gurus with the credentials who are going to tell you about you what you can’t possibly know right because you can’t possibly know your genes and your brain chemistry and whatever is the theory dour and the
(15:23) challenge is that the villain is you so you are fighting you with the help of the system and this victim triangle is an endless parade of hat switching experiences of suffering and it’s very familiar I’ve had many patients describe to me the validation that they feel when they finally get a diagnosis their first diagnosis they feel like oh yes I knew something was wrong with me and now it’s real right now I can see and they agree that something is wrong with me it’s not my responsibility it’s not my fault well in
(16:04) this Warfare model there is no Victory there is no end and that Silent Scream of chronic illness becomes your open air grave I mean it’s really not even that traumatic of a rendering of the situation to describe it that way right so and you can see how Warfare threads through the conventional medical system because you just look at the name of these medications right they’re all antis anti-emetics anti-hypertensives antibiotics anti-anxiety anti-depressants antis psychotics and the fight is very tempting it’s very
(16:41) alluring and there may be a time where that’s exactly what you need to activate your energy however it’s important that you know what the greater body of scientific literature and research has to say about this model and that is my effort to provide the groundwork for informed consent that can possibly be made available to you through your prescribing physician okay so let’s dive into some myth busting firstly it’s a chemical imbalance you may have heard of Serotonin as the happy chemical this is
(17:23) one of the more pervasive Concepts in the hegemony of American culture the world over and it is taking a long time to die because in seven decades of published research there is literally no valid evidence to support the claim that serotonin has anything to do with so-called depression and again remember I’m just putting a spotlight on depression serotonin anxiety you could have this same conversation pick any so-called brain chemical and any so-called mental illness and the answer would be the same there’s been more
(18:03) attempts at validating this particular Theory than probably any other and that’s what makes it all the more sad so most recently Moncrief published an umbrella review and this essentially is the summary of so many decades of failed research and what she found was that in tens of thousands of participants they looked at serotonin metabolites they looked at concentrations in body fluids they looked at so-called receptor binding they looked at postmortem analysis Imaging tryptophan depletion studies genetic Gene environment
(18:40) interactions and here is her conclusion quote the main areas of Serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentration and I like to take it a little bit further by invoking a researcher by the name of Andrews who says quote we also propose that the direct serotonin enhancing effects of anti-depressants disturb energy homeostasis and worsen symptoms we argue that symptom reduction
(19:19) which only occurs over chronic treatment is attributable to the compensatory responses of the brain attempting to restore energy home homeostasis so essentially what he’s saying which I’ll get into when we talk about risks is that if there’s any benefit it’s because the body is recruiting an adaptation to a poison is there a better way yes there is a better way so why do we think that these medications work why might we have the impression that these medications are addressing a so-called chemical
(19:56) imbalance so again I’ll share some choice quotes I’ve been collecting in my little bag over the years the first is by an editor of the British medical journal who says quote unfortunately in the balance between benefits and risks it is an uncomfortable truth that most drugs do not work in most patients end quote another by Marsha Angel who says quote it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the Judgment of trusted Physicians or authoritative medical guidelines I take
(20:33) no pleasure in this conclusion which I reach slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine so we think that these medications are addressing a chemical imbalance in no small part because of direct to Consumer advertising we in America are one of three countries that allow pharmaceutical companies and Industry to speak and advertise directly to Consumers SLP patients about theories of biology health and illness and obviously when it comes to the ways in which media
(21:12) can shape our dominant thought forms this is non-trivial so we might think and really want to think that science is science and science even the word has this like inbuilt innate Integrity but there are some aspects of science especially as it applies to the approval of these medications that are important for you to know like did you know that it only requires two studies for the approval FDA approval of an anti-depressant medication so you can literally toss a coin over and over and over again until you get heads and then
(21:52) you can present the two heads into the world so you know a now famous study from back in 2008 in the New England Journal by Turner really sought to like expose the extent of this data manipulation and what they analyzed was the 74 studies that were used to approve 12 antidepressants 38 of these studies were positive meaning that they showed that there was a benefit to taking an anti-depressant 37 of these 38 were published right 36 very similar number to 38 36 were negative showing no benefit and three of these were
(22:40) published as negative right however 11 of them were published with a positive spin which is why you always have to read the methods and the data not just the author’s conclusion and 22 of them were unpublished that explains why we have one impression that is very much disconnected from reality Irving kers is one of the most important figures in whistleblowing around Psychiatry and arguably one of the world’s Placebo experts and he worked with a 2008 review where he invoked the Freedom of Information Act
(23:23) Right because they hide these unpublished and negative studies in the file drawer and he invoked their release right and what he found was that anti-depressants outperformed Placebo in only 20 of 46 trials so that’s actually less than half and the overall difference between drugs and Placebo in those outperforming trials was 1.
(23:49) 7 on a 52-point Hamilton scale like literally trivial so maybe you can start to see how in these short-term trials there may be and effect the effect may be inconsistent it may be minimal however what happens like in the real world and what happens with the nature of this effect over time often there is an invocation of the alcohol analogy right so you take somebody who has like really bad social anxiety and you put them in a trial and use the placebo arm gets like cucumber juice or whatever and the active arm gets two shots of vodka before every you know
(24:32) social gathering at night you could obviously see how over a six-week or two-month period which is a typical time window for one of these trials that alcohol could be deemed effective right that there is an effect but we wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the people who experience the benefit have an alcohol deficiency or an imbalance and we wouldn’t jump to the conclusion certainly knowing the nature of the Beast that long-term so-called treatment would be of benefit so there are many flaws in the nature of the study design
(25:09) and then even within the seeming benefit there are a lot of unanswered questions about what that effect actually consists of and this is a lot of what kersch also looked at so when he found that anti-depressants outperform Placebo in only 20 of 46 studies he went on to research and explore the overlapping effect so what he found is that 12% have a benefit while 88% have basically all risk so what is the nature of this benefit and he went on to research what he calls the active placebo effect so what happens in a lot
(25:51) of these trials is that patients are perhaps because of direct to Consumer advertising or otherwise may be aware of the possible adverse effects of these medications right so dry mouth or constipation racing heart whatever it might be and let alone like bleeding and death or whatever so they’re made aware of these initiatory adverse effects but then they’re told okay you’re either going to be in the sugar pilled group or you’re going to be getting the anti-depressant that we’re studying in the hallowed Halls of the Laboratories
(26:25) right so when they start to experience these adverse effects there is a whole inner pharmacopia that is released that is in response to that belief that kicks in saying I’m being treated now with a medication I know I am because I have side effects something is happening to fix me so this effect has been researched by comparing anti-depressants to other medications like cardiac meds like atropine to identify whether or not there is a difference in the so-called benefit and guess what spoiler alert there isn’t so there are so many aspects
(27:09) of belief at play in the experience of efficacy and also the withdrawal of these medications that like so many outcomes in medicine it is essential to assess the mindset of the participants almost everywhere that I lecture or share this information there will be somebody who says I don’t care what you say I know that these medications have saved my life okay I’m not taking that away from anyone however there are two studies that I like to Showcase that can help us understand the power of mindset in these outcomes and
(27:50) if we are talking about benefit with vast risk and we’re talking about which we’ll get into and we’re talking about benefit that could otherwise be engaged and appreciated and enjoyed with a risk-free intervention would you make the same choice this is called informed consent right so one of the studies was around the use of Lexapro right so common anti-depressant and the participants were given 20 milligrams of Lexapro all of them however they were divided into two groups and one group was told that they were receiving said
(28:29) Lexapro the other group however was told that they were taking a placebo and guess what those in the Lexapro group had a fourfold greater response and benefit than those who were told they were taking a placebo four times as effective what does that tell you right in another study similarly volunteers who were taking Prozac to remission so who already felt fine quote unquote on their medication they were told that some of them were going to be randomized to a sugar pill and what happened in this study is that even though everyone
(29:08) was actually continued on their very same dose that they said saved their life so to speak there was a statistically significant emergent signal of depression in the participants all of them simply because they were worried that they were going to have their medication taken away even though they were still taking it right so this information helps us to understand why sort of like real life examination of how these medications may or may not be working is unimpressive right so the largest non-industry right so we talked about the industry studies
(29:48) and the shenanigans that they get up to to present one picture of these medications to us but the largest non-industry funded study is called the stard trial and this cost the public $35 million they followed 4,000 participants treated with celexa it was not blinded so they knew what they were getting and they found that half of them improved at eight weeks so those that didn’t improve were switched to all sorts of different medications or augmented and this is very common in Psychiatry this is how like you know somebody who goes through
(30:22) a teenage breakup can end up on five medications for 25 years by the time they’re 30 so they’re augmented with you know medication like wbin and guess what it didn’t matter what was done because all of these participants remitted at the unimpressive rate of 18 to 30% regardless of what happened and then only three% of the people were actually in remission at 12 months so the truth of the matter is that in this mess of contradictory short-term data it is essential to acknowledge that there are no studies
(30:58) literally that show a better outcome in those prescribed anti-depressants long term so this would be like more naturalistic what’s called naturalistic Data so if you say I don’t care you know I just need to take the edge off whatever even if it works a little bit that’s better than nothing then it’s also essential that we do a little bit of mythbusting around their safety because that’s how you make a decision you say okay like it might not work that well and it might just be working because I believe it is and might just
(31:30) be working like a little bit but what is the cost of that particular intervention and would you still make the choice if you knew so in the first decade after its release proac was named in over 40,000 reports of adverse effects to the FDA so this probably should have raised a red flag however it would take many many many years for some of the chief concerns around these medications would even hit the radical fringes of medical literature and I know I went through my entire medical psychiatric internship residency and fellowship training before
(32:13) I began to learn a lot of what I’m about to share with you and one of the important factors to consider before we dive into the more grim and gruesome stuff is that of iatrogenesis so iatrogenesis is induced harm and what I want to shine a light on is iatrogenic pathology right so is it the case that once you sort of Enter The Mill of Psychiatry and let’s say you enter Because of generalized anxiety or depression or so-called ADHD and in attention or insomnia how is it that you could come out with like three more
(32:54) diagnoses and Associated medications well there is an important Yale study that looked at the fact that one in 23 folks who are prescribed anti-depressants actually then receive a bipolar diagnosis so what I was taught in my training is oh we’re unmasking the bipolar okay it seems based on the literature that actually what’s happening is we are generating further imbalance we are generating further grasps at safety and Primal defenses that are called you know bipolar disorder Mania and the like that is
(33:35) actually a result of the application of medication there’s a Canadian study of children who were prescribed stimulants that found that they were 13 times more likely to then be prescribed an antis psychotic and four times more likely to then be described an anti-depressant so this you know sort of domino effect of prescribing be getting new diagnosis be getting new prescribing is very common and it’s because medication that is intended to suppress and otherwise war with presenting symptoms which arguably
(34:13) includes all medications all Pharmaceuticals it actually perpetuates exactly that which it purports to resolve and this is true not only in psychotropics psychiatric medications but it’s true for antibiotics is true for acid blockers it is true for all of these anes right so whenever you are imagining that you’re just going to beat it into submission you’re actually generating the conditions for the long-term experience of what you were promised would be fixed by this like that’s a pretty big reveal
(34:53) right because otherwise it might be worth quote unquote taking edge off right so there’s actually a term in the literature for what I’m talking about which is called tardive dysphoria which is the fancy medical term for chronic depression that in this case is induced by the medication itself so the book that changed the game for me and led me in 2010 never to start a patient on medication again which is why I had a decade of experience watching what happens with these medications and specifically coming off of them without
(35:31) restarting them right without taking that bait was anatomy of an epidemic by Robert Whitaker and what he found in the portrayal of the results for 16 non-industry funded research studies was the conclusion to his hypothesis that medications are actually inducing epidemics of mental illness and that explains why more prescribing is associated with more mental health disability which is what he sought to investigate and when we look at the ways that these medications perturb your experience of your own emotions
(36:14) psychology and your body it does make some sense you know that you could get sort of I don’t know you could start like swirling around in The Labyrinth and imagining well this must be wrong with me too and I what else am I going to do I got to take that for this problem too and it just goes on and on and on but this point seems trivial in comparison to the next two points I’m going to make which are you know I had my sword aloft for many, many years because of these two factors that I was never fully informed about and I
(36:49) understand why you know it’s like you don’t go to the butcher to buy a vegan meal I went to the system and I got what the system delivers so you know I was really up in arms about this because I honestly felt a lot of guilt around the prescribing that I had done including of pregnant and breastfeeding women which was my specialty as a reproductive psychiatrist the first is the known and identified signal of harm around impulsive violence including suicide and homicide that these medications induce in seemingly random ways so the study
(37:25) that really awakened me to this was by Lucire and Kat where they looked at folks who were prescribed medications for run-ofthe-mill just to sort of get them over the hump and what happened in these individuals is that they went on to commit heinous acts of violence that they you know killed their therapist they killed their child they pushed somebody in front of a train and what they found was the folks who had this experience had they shared a metabolic aberration if you will in their liver so that they at least theoretically
(37:58) metabolize these medications in such a way that they became intoxicated and I had the experience of co-presenting in London actually available the presentation in vital mind reset with David carmichel who is one of these individuals who after being routinely prescribed and anti-depressant for work-related stress went on to strangle his 11-year-old son and this is not a reality that is risk assessed or stratified for in your primary care doctor’s office when they write you that Zoloft prescription right you don’t know
(38:35) if you’re going to be that person and there’s other literature to support this right so there’s a Swedish study of 500 women who completed suicide over half of them were medicated within the previous year pretty much every time I hear about suicide sort of out of the blue one of my colleagues Kim Witczak had this experience and I’ve written about it in a blog of her husband who hanged himself never felt suicidal a day in his life until he began taking medications for run-of-the-mill issues right so another
(39:05) was by Thomas Moore and he analyzed 1500 cases of reported violence and found 31 psychotropic drugs so these this class of drugs were disproportionately associated with this violence so what is happening here you know whether it’s homicide or David Healey has really spearheaded the research on suicide right so looking at state volunteers who become actively suicidal after they are treated again in my training I was told because we did witness this phenomenon oh it’s just unmasking you know it’s the
(39:38) patients are now better enough to act on you know they have enough energy now to act on what was just beneath the surface and that is that’s not what the literature demonstrates so that is a factor that I feel is essential to consider especially because there’s not a way to know your vulnerability however perhaps the biggest one was what I dedicated my practice to after I put down my prescription pad in 2010 which was helping patient come off these medications right so you know there’s crack cocaine there’s
(40:14) oxycodone there’s you know alcohol there are rehabs for these things I began to fantasize about setting up and I still do have this fantasy setting up an impatient rehab full of incredible holistic services for people who are coming off of psychiatric medications and feel that this is one of the most essential services to be offered why because I began to observe the medical the physiologic dysfunction that would surface and result from the careful and intentional taper of these Med medications in individuals who robustly
(41:01) consented to this taper right so who wanted to come off of medication because they were potentially trapped in that bind of inefficacy and side effects and they wanted out well that should be with full patient autonomy that should be a valid choice that is supported by a prescriber right and when I dedicated myself to helping women come off of these medications I was literally running like an outpatient rehab paged around the clock and what I saw changed my life and that’s when I developed the protocol that is in my books and vital mind reset
(41:41) and that stems from the way that I resolve my own illness Hashimoto thyroiditis and I began to insist on this protocol first because I had the sense that it would be essential to send the system a signal of safety to create a foundation before engaging this trial right because it’s really a trial it’s psychological it’s emotional it’s spiritual it’s physical so before you go out into battle you train right so this is the training and it works so there’s something to this order of operations
(42:19) where when you establish this foundation and you begin to work with shifting your mindset around what was even wrong with you in the first place right which is nothing how it is that you possibly took the bait which I’ve been talking about this entire episode and you begin to develop that Curiosity around the parts of you that you are ready now to meet but first things first I call it chopping wood carrying water so first things first you have an entire month where you simply Focus all of your attention on your power of choice and
(42:55) you change your eating habits and you change your consumerism and you change the way that you relate to the toxicity in the world you change your bed time you begin to take care of yourself as if you’re a little baby and that’s what’s happening you’re being reborn that’s literally the intensity of what is occurring here so coming off of these medications is something that has been characterized in the literature as euphemistically discontinuation syndrome right and often again I was encouraged
(43:30) as a prescribing trainee to tell patients that their instability in the wake of medication dose decreases was an indication that they needed to go back on well they weren’t wrong right because often patients find that as they decrease the dose and they develop strange new and different symptoms that feel like they’ve been like plugged into an electrical socket for example if they return to the previous dose those symptoms will resolve in the same way as when you’re in alcohol withdrawal and you take a couple swigs you will feel
(44:10) better right so how do we create the conditions for safe discontinuation so this only began to appear this reality in the medical literature as far as I was witnessing right because remember I started this in 2010 in 2014 and fava an Italian researcher began to talk about the fact that this is withdrawal this is not the primary illness right so conclude with a quote from the Journal of effective disorders again because this is not just my opinion or my perspective so quote all major classes of anti-depressants have been associated
(44:48) with unpleasant and sometimes dangerous symptoms when they are discontinued when they are used long-term anti-depressants can lose efficacy and may even result in treatment resistant depression that’s there don’t you wish you knew that right before you you know carried that first prescription over to CVS so because I believe that victim Consciousness is the only human pathology that literally nothing else is wrong with you other than that you are steeped in the illusion that you are powerless dependent and helpless
(45:28) I know that there is a better way to interact with adversity and struggle and your suffering and I believe as I have mentioned that it requires setting this foundation for a very very embracing containing signal of safety that will shift your system out of fight flight and freeze and into its native regenerative capacity your healing will literally unfold effortlessly when you create the conditions so vital mind reset was designed literally for that reason you do not touch your medications beforehand you keep everything else stable and you
(46:15) simply reclaim your power of Lifestyle Choice it is a ritual portal through which you step so that you can begin to access your already present power that you gave away you gave away it wasn’t even taken from you you literally gave it away because you didn’t know better and now that you do how will you work with that power it requires holding and it requires a structured initiation to yourself in my opinion and then once that is underway and really only happens once in your life right so vital mind reset was designed to do once in your
(46:55) life then you’re connected to your inner yes and your inner no and your body is stable enough that you can actually begin to feel that inner yes and that inner no and you can distinguish it from your reactivity from the fear and the shame and the grief that is residual that’s old and been running around your tissues for many many decades because you can develop that witness Consciousness you can begin to watch your self in awareness and to make choices about how to engage at the table with all of your parts how to begin to
(47:35) say a non-coercive yes to the part of you that is in immense immense resistance to what’s in front of you in life the part of you that is like a shaking Leaf constantly Vigilant you know around what could be lurking right the part of you that is an appeasement the part of you that imagines that if you don’t agree with the person in front of you you’ll be rejected abandoned and that will be intolerable you’ll encounter the shame that is keeping these parts of you hidden from your own awareness and the moment you feel that
(48:13) shame you do not travel any further right don’t trespass there and you’ll grow your capacity in your system to hold these big Sensations that’s all that they are they Sensations and to be with them which is all we ever wanted as children and then you will guide yourself to the next needed thing so you become your own doctor right you become your own healer and you recruit the support that is needed to feel fulfilled and to begin to open like a pedal to the aliveness that is your Birthright and an essential part of connecting to
(49:00) this possibility is knowing that others have done this so after one of many Dark Nights of the soul in my life in 2015 I shifted a lot of my work and advocacy to making sure that people knew that it is completely possible to resolve integrate and heal socalled chronic illness whether mental health or otherwise it is completely possible to come off of medications that you’ve been on for decades and to experience vitality and to begin to explore the dimensions of your selfhood that’s why I set about to publishing
(49:41) case reports in the medical literature publishing case series and even published a randomized placebo control trial of vital mind reset where we looked at people who were taking at least one medication who had at least three diagnoses and found that in the space of the program they already were near remission according to a very commonly used phq9 assessment tool so I collected video testimonials so that you could feel and look into the you know the digital eyes of somebody who has walked this path before you to know that
(50:16) it’s possible in order to see if something ignites inside of you that says yeah I’m ready so I hope that this has been helpful you
