It's very refreshing to see a licensed medical doctor (especially a psychiatrist) acknowledge the societal factors and financial motivation influencing the treatment of depression and mental illness. you are truly valuable and i hope more practitioners follow in your footsteps.
It makes me so mad that I was told I was depressed since 12 and given drugs and these doctors ruined my self-esteem by making me think I was some kind of mental defect. I was depressed because of the hell hole I was living in with abusive people. I didn't even have clothes I had to wear my moms bra all throughout high school. I was constantly beat down, treated as if I was garbage while my brother was treated like royalty. Of course I came across as depressed but back in the early 2000s these therapists and doctors didn't ever care to find out why I was presenting this way they just took everything at face value. It makes me so mad because as soon as I was out of that environment and away from abusers I am way happier than average. I am not depressed at all and never took meds after I left that abusive home. If the doctors did their job I could have been removed from that home at 12 and never experienced the degradation of living in an abusive home for all those developmental years.
I can totally relate. Psychiatry has a history of heinous injury to millions of people. The grief is real, the losses are widespread. I’d love to be part of a class action
"It was easier to prescribe medications than to engage in the difficult discussions that could result from conducting the necessary investigation to root out these issues" A good descriptior of past and modern psychiatry. Compounded on with today's stressors.
Yes, this is the same I found within 20 years working in a health insurance talking amd listening to people suffering depression. People talk about their stressors, it is easy to find out. It is not very difficult. But many therapist don't ask or they believe it is easy for people to overcone them. But to talk about the stressors dosn't help them to overcome them. They wouldn't have a sickness leave , they wouldn't be in a clinic when they can manage the problems alone. The health system offers no finiancial help, no "manpower" to help to get a new accomodation, or to get a new job, or to pay a lawer or other specialists, to pay people to talk with all family members or with people at the working place to solve problems they have. To go in a clinic/ a hospital to TALK about stressors doesn't help, when they couldn't solve their problems and can't change the stressors alone. That's one of the reasons of the the “revolving door phenomenon” refers to frequent psychiatric rehospitalizations. It is cheaper for the insurances when they stay at home. They can't work anyway.
Exactly. And for family its so hard to see your loved ones getting lost in tons of pills or "magic healing devices" promoted in ads instead of really giving psychologists and emotional/psychological therapy a chance. But it's no use to push them into a psychologists arms if they don't want it and refuse to accept this kind of help
I see medication against anxiety or depression as the same thing as painkillers. It does not affect the reason for the pain, but it can make you feel better. Unfortunately it can cause increased tolerance, be hard to quit and have serious side effects.
I would agree they are the same but would word it slightly differently: Both painkillers and psychiatric meds generally only mask the symptoms and never deal with the root cause. Much like trimming back a weed bush to the ground only deals with what we see, but digging it out will prevent the continual need to keep cutting back the bush. As someone with a serious mental illness, I understand why medications are used, but they dehumanise the sufferer and undermine that person's truly deeply human experiences. We need to do better.
I would add one more thing to the list of 11. People who take illegal drugs, even weed, particularly if they start as a teenager. Im no expert but I knew many people who were normal, happy and social as teenagers, but after taking drugs became reclusive, quiet, and depressed. Some even developed psychosis or even full blown schizophrenia.
@elsh332 But you're ignoring the fact that some people, like me, do not have any "root causes " or life issues causing my depression. I am fortunate to have a very happy and relatively carefree life. So what is causing my depression ? I definitely think it's related to serotonin levels, and medication allows me to lead a normal, productive life.
I really appreciate your measured, evidence-based approach toward this sensitive topic. I am a psychiatric provider in full agreement with your stance, struggling to work responsibly within a broken system.
Sir, I live in Turkey. The experts in Turkey are very ignorant and have a lot of ego. We all know that drugs are of no use. Psychological drugs are of no use. They exploit people with drugs. Chemical imbalance hypothesis and serotonin and dopamine hypothesis. If you have no evidence of these, what are you treating? It is pathological. There is no biological or physiological problem. There is no evidence that psychiatric disorders are diseases. If there is no disease, there is no treatment. Why are you giving drugs for nothing and turning the human brain into scrap? Anyway, I want to ask you this. How can depression, anxiety, OCD and bipolar be treated without medication? Your opinions are very important to me. .
I'm in full sympathy. Psychiatry is trying so hard to be a science, but it should be trying hard to be a humanity. That's where the real insight will come from. The fact that humanities are considered "soft" is the tragedy of our current science (ideological) paradigm.
I'm with you as a fellow MH clinician. Thank so much Dr. Josef for your courage in putting this out there. I have applied, and will continue to apply, what I have learned here in my practice. Moving away from pathologizing people is a good thing :)
I find the label helpful. I'm not formally diagnosed, I'm self-diagnosed. But when you're too miserable to get out of bed till late, you're feeling completely hopeless, you're withdrawing from the world, don't want to do enjoyable stuff, and this goes on for weeks you don't need a psychiatrist to figure out you're depressed. It becomes a monster you're strangely attached to. You haven't felt okay in so long, feeling okay is a scary alien feeling, yet you are living a hell on earth. Your emotions become paradoxical and confusing, you start to think your going crazy, and you can't tell anyone that you are going crazy. You doubt you are experiencing what you are experiencing and start to wonder if you are malingering, making your symptoms up, doing the shameful act of attention seeking (despite not telling anyone how you feel). You're self esteem becomes non-existent. You make a commitment only to find that you are completely unreliable, bringing your low self-esteem into the negative numbers. There is genuine hopelessness, even if you are usually optimistic, you see no chance of hope. You have had your last happiness, and the only rational feeling is despair You experience this over the course of months. That's my experience of depressive illness. And it takes at least over a year to recover. And it's changed you - your brain just functions differently even after recovering. it might be a label, but the label seems to make sense of these experiences.
The brain heals overtime when u feel safe and allow yourself to be just the way you are. I realise now all the feelings I had and thought were crazy, were actually valid. I did not like anymore being with people and I realised now it s bc they were narcissists or not a good match for me. And I had put these people on pedestals. I did not want to party and I realise now I Don t like being with people who drink and talk about crap. I want to enjoy a good book, nature and a good friend who respects my needs. Trust your feelings and just allow yourself to feel stress and function anyway. Soon you ll get used to it and relax. It s OK if u r slower or your mind a bit blurry it s OK. It s still a mind given to you by God. Accept yourself and you will heal. Ask God to heal you and read Claire weeks books and the body keeps the score book
This makes me think that we're back to the old ways where society will just ppl to get over it again, that we're crazy, weak and all kinds of derogatory terms. When ppl were told it was physical, the weak and crazy labels were less. So what are we to do now? Go to therapy? With what money? Leave toxic jobs? And go where? How to support ourselves,families etc? How many side jobs to not even stay afloat? What about ppl with jobs but still homeless cos they don't get livable wages? What about abuse? All kinds/types. Ppl need to be able to function in spite of all bad surroundings. I'm not against the information but there are no real and practical solutions either. Imo, most ppl who do not have the resources to address the causes are stuck between a rock and a hard place. What to do?
@@LUVN4GIV I have symptoms of depression and can work and live independently with medications. I know several people who are the same. People like this doctor try to discourage people from getting treatment, makes it extremely difficult for people who have these mental illnesses. There are actually many people who benefit from psychiatric medications. We can't all be characterized into one group.
@@janetappmeyer7483 I was on Prozac and a few other psych meds off and on from age 17 to 47ish for PTSD resulting in depression and anxiety. I'm in my 50’s now. I stopped and didn’t feel worse. I studied science and worked at a medical school. I have many friends and family in the science, engineering, pharmaceuticals, and medical fields. I know depression and anxiety are real as I suffer from them as well, but I am wondering if we have been sold a lie. As soon as we are prescribed more than one medication, doctors can't tell you what side effects to look for, and the scientific studies on the meds and their effacacy are skewed and controlled by money and politics. I am looking more into integrative medicine now. Unsure about how it will end up, but we all have different perspectives at different times in our lives. My mom died from Tardive Dyskinesia which was a side effect of psych meds that progressed to the inability to swallow without food or drink going into her lungs. The medications never made her better after the first year or two. It was a rapid decline and ended with a 12-year residence in a care home that wasn't great as she had gotten so bad from the cocktail of drugs that nicer facilities kicked her out. She died very early due to all the meds that famous, and very expensive psychiatrists insisted she needed. I saw the rapid decline and she never got better. Everyone has a different story and different needs, but I am more and more convinced that the government, FDA, and medical fields are very broken in the USA. Check out Diary of a CEO and watch the recent show with the toxicologist. Check out Anthony Kaveh and Peter Santenello. All on TH-cam. Maybe the way we live, disconnected from family, sedentary, out of time with nature and our communities, eating bad foods, and being prescribed pills instead of getting at the root of these issues is making us sick in way more ways than one. Too bad we can’t go back in time and save the earth for our children and those who come after them. I'm not saying you should stop your medications. But, is it possible that if you ate well (whole foods), exercised, and spent adequate time with loving family and friends doing things in nature, getting good sleep and being kind to yourself, you might feel a little better? For me, this was the case. I hope you don't get upset. I'm not trying to say you are wrong, but being curious (but not in a scared way) has helped me find better ways for me to thrive. Check out Diary of a CEO, Peter Santanello, and Anthony Kaveh, all here on TH-cam. I've learned a lot from them. I hope you are doing well. 🙏🏽❤️
@@janetappmeyer7483 I was on Prozac and a few other psych meds off and on from age 17 to 47ish. I'm in my 50s now. I stopped and don't feel better or worse. I studied science and worked at a medical school. I have many friends and family in the science, engineering, pharmaceuticals, and medical fields. I know depression and anxiety are real as I suffer from them as well, but I am wondering if we have been sold a lie. As soon as you take more than one medication, doctors can't tell you what side effects to look for, and the scientific studies on the meds are skewed. I am looking more into integrative medicine now. Unsure about how it will go, but we all have different perspectives at different times in our lives. My mom died from Tardive Dyskinesia which was a side effect of psych meds that progressed to the inability to swallow without it going into her lungs. The medications never made her better after the first year or two. It was a rapid decline and ended with a 12-year residence in a care home that wasn't great as she had gotten so bad from the cocktail of drugs that nicer facilities kicked her out. She died very early due to all the meds that famous, and very expensive psychiatrists insisted she needed. I saw the rapid decline and she never got better. My father, a brilliant, kind man, took his life while taking meds for sleep and anxiety. Everyone has a different story and different needs, but I am more and more convinced that the government, FDA, and medical fields are very broken in the USA. Check out Diary of a CEO and watch the recent show with the toxicologist. Also, Anthony Kaveh and Peter Santanello. All are on TH-cam. Maybe the way we live and what we eat is making us sick in way more ways than one. Too bad we can go back in time and save the earth for our children and those who come after them. I'm not saying you should stop your medications. But, is it possible that if you ate well (whole foods), exercised, and spent adequate time with loving family and friends doing things in nature, with a sense of community support, that you might feel a little better? For me, this was the case. I hope you don't get upset. I'm not trying to say you are wrong, but being curious (but not in a scared way) has helped me find better ways for me to thrive. (I posted this before, but have no idea what happened?!) Wishing you peace, health, and wellness. ❤️🙏🏽❤️
This is so true. I hate psychiatrists for a reason. This department requires patience and empathy. If they want to be commercial, they need not have to take this. Doctors who are supposed to be saviours are the killers. Its very hard to find a right one.
Yes, I was struggling before I went on a meds increase, but I was motivated to recover from my ED relapse. My meds have caused depressive symptoms even 3 weeks out. Today I was out seeing if a railway bridge would make a good spot. In wouldn't do it, but I'm on the edge. And I've given up on ED recovery, and I'm actively ED'd again. I'm getting sucked into depression again. I was trying to keep focused on God, but when I tried to pray last night I just berated myself, telling God he seriously had no business saving me. I was struggling to keep going before, but I wasn't badly depressed. Now my anxiety's less, the body dysmorphia's calmed down, but I'm so apathetic, I just don't care.
@@FronteirWolf I really hope and wish you from the bottom of my heart that you will feel better maybe you could try Comportemental Behavior Therapy CBT it has Shown good result in Eating disorder
I’m 65 and wasn’t wanted by my mother (3rd and last child). She often introduced me as the unwanted surprise. She favored my only brother. My brother molested me and bullied me my whole life. He was totally enabled by my mother. My mother has been cruel to me throughout my life. My poor father, a medical professional, tried his best to protect me and support me. Mother is an evil person. After Dad died, she has rewritten her will and given my brother things that were to be split 3 ways. My spirit is crushed and I think of suicide every day! All of this is to say that trauma is not addressed by people that could and SHOULD help. Years of antidepressants and clonazepam have not helped. Being LOVED and VALIDATED is essential to having quality of life. And you are spot on about socioeconomic and political effects. Home and food insecurity affect quality of life. The government and big pharmaceutical companies are in bed together. If you’re not wealthy, you’re going to suffer! I pray for Jesus to return soon!!!
Well this is the second story of a similar kind and it's too unusual. Obviously bullying in childhood is a huge trigger for lifelong depression. It is very hard to tell other people what to do but I wouldn't give in to bullies and let them destroy my beautiful life ..your father obviously adored you, as did mine. I often think of my father especially in a recent bad relationship when it was over I realised looking at old photographs( he's dead now a long time )that he definitely wanted better for me than what I accepted
Depression for me is like a WW1 battlefield. Getting sucked into the mud, bombarded by ordinance, cowering in a disease-infested trench, no rest, the air is thick with the stench of death and burned gun powder, a hellish landscape of destroyed buildings, and crippling fear of meeting my fellow man in this liminal space of barbed wire and machine guns. It's pure terror.
Neuroticism isn't necessarily a personality trait. I was very, very neurotic while I had an untreated sleep-breathing disorder. Now that it's treated, all the neuroticism just melted away.
Check out the big 5 personality evaluation. I believe this doctor mean it in the sense it is used in evaluating a person's personality and not as a symptom of something else.
Right ... Who wrote the DSM and why. There is a temporary 'situational' depression or anxiety that will go away if the situation is resolved. But prescribed meds can cause many symptoms and meds kept coming till they stopped. Eight years off and most symptoms are long gone yet I'm treated like I'm mental and new doctors only look at the PDMP and want to prescribe either way my medical records are forever engraved and I lack ongoing care for real physical progressive conditions. That's when I realized it was probably pharma funded. There was no real science behind psychiatry
I had this issue and I took no psychiatric meds.. once depression was on the file it was all they could see.. developed numerous autoimmune issues and was told I had OCD one time(never on my file ever) when I couldn't lean forward to cough properly with a chest infection I was leaning against the wall with my back and what was wrong with me was degenerative disc disease which went undiagnosed completely until a work injury resulted in a disc in the back of my neck severely protruding and catching a nerve I'd say most of my severe tiredness was lack of spinal alignment.. I would suggest some tai chi for you. I know it's very easy because I was really ill and did it and the health benefits were unbelievable.. out of the blue for no reason this Dr many years ago decided that me leaning against the wall to cough was 'my little ritual' when I asked her what she was talking about with OCD.. that and rubbing cream into my numb finger to bring back my circulation which was diagnosed as altered sensation and Raynaud's disease.. I subsequently joined the Raynaud's disease society here and one of the recognised treatments was rubbing any cream with shea butter into the numb area because the drier it was the more numb the skin was. Shea butter is amazing for dry skin
The DSM was invented for insurance companies. For insurance to pay, they needed a diagnosis. That is the entire reason behind the DSM. Just because you are told you have something doesn't mean you really have it or that it even really exists.
I slightly disagree with the last sentence. Schizophrenia is real and those people would have no way of functioning without pharmaceuticals. I have seen people going off antidepressants after lifestyle changes beautifully. A friend had prediabetes, cut out sugar and started going to the gym and his whole life improved. No more obesity, no more depression, tons of insight. He started a really amazing positive chain of events
@@heresy1987LV but that's the point schizophrenia is clearly and distinctly mental disorder and most diagnoses are self 'created' by over achieving psychiatrists parading as all knowing or above the less than type of attitude
Depression for me is caused by negative people doing negative things to me and there isn't a cure for bad people doing bad things so good luck with finding that magical happiness pill no such thing ...no cure
I don’t blame all doctors for needing to make a living, but I do blame them for not INVESTIGATING the drugs they are prescribing to anyone and everyone. Steer clear of psychiatrists or anyone who suggests meds.
As a patient with two lifetime bouts of depression and now in the midst of a hyperbolic taper off Prozac after 10 years on (because my former psych told me 2nd bout = lifetime of meds as risk of relapse too high… I bought that line for far too long) … THANK YOU for helping change the narrative!!!
I was told the same thing, but my initial problem was always anxiety. Now months after getting off the long term SSRI, I am very depressed as well as anxious. It is a confusing experience because it makes me doubt that maybe these doctors are right about the defective brain and I'm just self-sabotaging trying to be off medication 🙃 But like why would I feel so much worse after tapering off it, if they weren't right? 🥲
@@instant_mint watch some more of Dr Josef's videos to see why you feel this way after coming off and being off antidepressants. It won't be what you want to hear but it is the truth unfortunately. May God bless you and heal you 🙏
@@skinney9542 What I don't want to hear is: "you are feeling this way because you have a genetic vulnerability that results in you needing SSRI:s to function, so if you don't take them you won't get your life back". I guess I'll go and look for more videos on the topic on his channel and see...
22:35 always made the most sense about depression. If your parent dies, a spouse leaves you, friends abandon you, those are deeply depressing events to experience!! Let alone multiple ones at the same time or close together
i truly appreciate this. depression is truly complex and i think you have spoken to why it it treated the way it is. so many people would be better served by more holistic approaches. this is good and important work. thank you for advocating for patients like this. i have a complex mental and physical health history, and they are intertwined. finding help that allowed me to really address trauma in addition to drugs that helped me to maintain my engagement in that process has saved me. there is no wonder drug. healing from depression requires support in many different areas.
I have said my whole life (officially diagnosed at 14, now 54): "there is a difference between 'being' depressed versus 'having' depression" and the 2 are completely different beasts
I agree. I’ve suffered on and off for 60 + years. When my dad died suddenly of a heart attack at a young age, I was devastated. But when I started feeling “clinical” - I couldn’t even cry - I ran to my doc, saying: “I do not want depression on top of my grief! Please give me my Elavil! She did, and in 2-3 weeks my depression began to lift and I could cry again and grieve normally. Those who say depression is just sadness have never been depressed.
when i was feeling bad i asked all the people that i knew and was open to talk about it about their mental health. and i found out that almost everyone was on anti depressants SSRI and they felt it was impossible to stop and had been on them for 10-20years plus and would take them for life. so when me dock gave me it i took the presciption but i refused to take any pill and lied to doc that they didn't work not to anger him as i might need his help on other things.
Pete Walker helped me to understand my depression can be labeled more accurately as abandonment depression or that I was in a emotional flashback. When you can get precise about what's really going on, like say, I am habitually self abandoning myself then I can take steps to counter this by say committing to myself, re-parenting that version of me that was abandoned and abused.
So much good research shared in this video! I was going to share it with others, but I’m extremely disappointed that you did not provide any information about adverse effects of psychotropic drugs at the end when you offered those as a good option for those who were disappointed with other options. Informed consent is so important, and people are not going to get the information from their doctors in most cases. You could have at least offered a link where people could get more information about this. I hope you’ll consider adding that to this video. Thanks for considering this and for speaking up.
Dr. Josef: you are a taking on the establishment and I applaud you for being a truth teller. Thank you for putting yourself, you family, your career on the line. You are figuratively David up against Goliath. Truth always wins in the end.
You correctly realized that depression is not a well-defined unitary disease. But you are stepping into the same trap you just recognized: You act like all depression is circumstantial or reactive, but there absolutely are subtypes of depression with exclusively biological root causes.
Yes but SSRIs simply do not address the root cause even in the cases that do have a biological cause because the biological causes have not been conclusively discovered, although it seems we're starting to finally converge on some answers with the autoimmune hypothesis. But even then, when you get to the fundamental levels the line between seemingly separate things like psychology and the immune system begins to blur.
Well said, thank you ! In the absence of any life ' issues ' and the fact that my long term recurrent depression responds completely to SSRIs, I have to conclude that my depression is related to serotonin imbalance
@@WilliamDurrant-ll8xy I agree there are likely biological/autoimmune causes of depression. I feel that's the reason for my depression. However, just because the root cause hasn't been definitively identified, it's no reason to deny patients a drug that works very well for many of them. Me included !
I am perimenopausal, and doctors keep insisting im depressed. I went to the doctor because i had a prolapse, and the first thing the doctor said was asking me about my bipolar - bipolar that i DON'T HAVE! If im depressed, its BECAUSE of the doctors and how im treated WITHIN the medical system!
@@kathryn7739 in my opinion, many are entirely unaware of the history of psychiatry and that they are being entirely “educated” by pharmaceutical companies. Add to that honorariums, incentives and free product to prescribe and inject and it’s a complete disaster with no good long term outcomes.
@@kathryn7739 this group of medical specialists are almost entirely Pharma marketing educated. It would be important to study the history of psychiatry and the long term outcomes. Conflicts of interest are absolutely staggering.
@@drannamdsociety is sitting idly on one huge ethical problem with psych. Polypharmacy, iatrogenic harm, greed, lack of accountability, incompetency…people need to wake up and see what this specialty is really all about. It’s one giant scheme.
Im a neuroscientist but not a psychiatrist and have shared this opinion for so long but did not have the language and experience to put it so well-thanks!!
Opposite for me... it took me 3 years to be diagnosed with depression, I had a horrific feeling, very low energy, couldn't take care of myself, didn't clean, wash or eat, I was given food by a friend. I forgot where I lived and how to count money. I don't care what caused it, I had a good life. Nothing to go to therapy for. Wasn't abused as a kid. I was just deathly ill. Just by myself, but this doc is like my doc, doesn't believe in depression.
I'm the same. I have no external issues in life to cause my depression. In my case it's obviously caused by a chemical ( serotonin) imbalance or some sort of disease process. Autoimmune disorders have been mentioned as a possible factor, well, I already suffer from an Autoimmune condition. It's well documented that Autoimmune disorders can appear 'hand in hand ' with each other.
It’s been really evident in the UK recently how much this is a societal label and treating people for reasonable feelings which ought to have a societal remedy. I keep seeing news articles, interviews etc with victims of crime, or people living with insecure housing, or people who’s family members have been caught up in ‘newsworthy’ events, where ‘X person has had to take antidepressants for the last Y months since the incident’ is essentially put forward as a marker of the significance this traumatic event has had on them.
Another problem with the destigmatisation argument is that it is not addressing the root cause of stigma. By saying ‘no you’re not a bad person, its a biological illness’ you are essentially validating the worldview that says that some personality traits might be inherently bad, and people with differing personality traits might be less intrinsically valuable. If instead we attempted to combat the societal stigma around certain personality traits, then we might make a wider range of people’s lives better and also stand a better chance of helping people in ways which actually work
Thanks for this discussion. I started to feel this way about all of it (including how contrived the DSM is) a few years ago when I realized that my antipsychotics didn’t *really* work and then possibly started making me sick. And it was nice to for this video to really explain why I felt that way with seemingly credible evidence. It’s difficult for to separate disinformation about any topic now when it’s being pushed by credible sources. That being said, I just kinda wanted to note that the dietary advice given at the end of the video can probably picked apart in another video with as much detail as this one did with depression…. Unless there’s some real evidence that I’m not aware of, or if there’s medical issues where diets really truly help. Food/dietary advice is too often a scapegoat that deflects from the other major problems you mentioned. Not to mention that if we’re speaking about personal observations about diets etc helping folx overcome mental health issues, then in my experience, I was solely focused on food- production, cooking/health based eating, even herbalism all as a career when I started to develop severe mental health issues that eventually led me to take antipsychotics that I probably didn’t need, made me sicker when in reality I was just dealing with life stressors and bad relationships… which went ignored.
For people reading this: healthy food can make a huge difference. Obviously depression is a huge topic, and there is no one size fits all solution. Still, if you have the energy, do prioritize eating fruit, vegetables, beans, lentils, nuts and seeds. And avoiding Ultra processed food, including processed meats.
I wish there was more help and answers for this. Because I am suffering either this, or "relapse,because-you-need-medication-for-life" and I have no idea what to believe
@@Ava-fx6dq solve underlining issues. For me it looks like it's been about long term stress - loneliness, mistreatment by a parent, unfulfilled life expectations, gender dysphoria. Your situation is probably different, so I cannot recommend anything specific.
3:17 no, then the diagnosis is grief reaction and we may not medicate it depending on the patient's risk of suicide or not 4:47 informative, thank you 10:12 neither do all patients of Diabetes or raised BP or Parkinson's look the same. There are severity levels in all diseases and not everyone of the same severity group has the same symptoms.
A lot of the points you brought up in this video I can agree strongly with. I have struggled with depression for years and I strongly disagree with a lot of the ways we approach treating depression. I actually work as a Nursing assistant and plan to go to Nursing school. I worked in home health for 4 years and have been working at a hospital for over a year. I can say as someone who struggles with a lot of the symptoms that qualify for depression, I can relate and have a deep understanding on the feelings that the overwhelming majority of depressed people describe. And I strongly agree with especially your second half of this video in getting to the causes of depression. I have drastically improved my physical, spiritual, emotional, mental health, and even financial health by changing my diet, socializing with the people that align with my attitude and lifestyle, and focusing on a bigger purpose and goal. I find that helping people and kindness really helps my overall mood and is also positive for the person you help. My own kind of personal theory is depression is similar to an infection. I think it’s sort of like a spread of positive and negative energy. The more negative aspects around your life are going to have a profound impact on you in the long term if you haven’t been able to change them or by even adding positive ones. Basically, bad begets bad and good begets good. Thank you for this video and thank you for everything you do it is refreshing to see someone who is challenging the way we do things for the purpose of a better outcome. I know I had a ton of stigma towards the medical field largely because of my strong disagreement with the overall approach with treating depression. I can say that after working in the medical field for 5 years and currently that I love my job. I wasn’t sure about it and didn’t honestly enjoy it until after two years of sticking with it and pushing through because I want to make a real positive impact any way I can.
While I agree with your treatment recommendations what I find is that people at the poverty/working poor level generally can’t afford or have access to the more intensive therapies or dietary therapies. It’s an ongoing push to treat societal problems with meds as you’ve accurately noted. For those with expendable incomes much more is available. For instance do you take Medicaid reimbursement in your practice?
Saying the root cause of depression is having been mistreated as a child still leaves the question of what to do about it after the fact. You can’t go back in time to actually fix that root cause.
Thank you for saying all this. My psychiatrist, instead of drawing correct conclusions such as that most of her patients are depressed because they are in shitty situations (marital or parental abuse, disability and not having proper support, etc.), she prefers to think that the problem if the drug doesn't solve her patients issues is that they "don't want to be better"... When I confronted her (in the psychotherapy style) about it, her answer was : but I'm not strong enough to live in a world were I have to admit that I may end up in a situation like yours just because I don't get proper support from society, it's too frightening! I answered : well I don't get to choose, as I'm not longer able to work because of my disability and I get no support. Radio silence, no answer and since then, she's been wishing I don't come again see her (not me saying it, her saying it). We need more courageous psychiatrist who are willing to admit society needs to fix the root cause of a whole lot of depressions.
great - more of these please - be useful to look at the other common 'disorders' taking in the bigger picture and teasing apart the incentives - really useful, thank you.
Point of clarification from someone with a PhD in clinical psychology: MDD should not be diagnosed in cases of uncomplicated bereavement and there’s a note in the DSM asserting this
I have been a psychiatrist for more than 15 years and have always believed about the psychopathology of depression as a collection of symptoms/signs that point to issues/concerns/beliefs that are either alien to our individual identities or nature or arising as a result of living life/consequences of choices and hence it is absolutely necessary to explore what in our psyche is leading to /pointing us to address such issues/depressive "sings and symptoms".
I don't know about metaphysical causes. My severe depression had a purely physical basis. It was bad gut bacteria, killed with three courses of antibiotics.
I have suffered recurrent depression for over 30 years, and I assure you I do not have any issues of any sort. As SSRIs have been the only treatment that has allowed me to function normally, I conclude that I do have a serotonin imbalance, and I do not think much of the so called study that allegedly proved otherwise.
i always thought the dsm was wrong and that certain diagnosis were just not a real thing, not because they don't happen but because what we know about them is misunderstood. this happens very obviously with depression, i've been depressed for as long as i can remember but my family is abusive (not physically) and i was heavily sheltered and restricted, once i started to stop listening to everything they said i got a bit better, at least around other people, and when they're not bothering me as much or aren't at home for a bit i feel completely fine and not depressed or anxious at all, but as soon as they come back or i'm not with my friends i feel horrible again and cant deal with anything, even my bpd symptoms are directly linked to how they're acting towards me or if im too stressed out but otherwise i don't have the symptoms at all. there are other disorders that i think could be linked to circumstance or even health, depression could be due to a vitamin deficiency or a chronic illness or any other health issues, adhd symptoms can be linked to diet and gut microbiome and seem t be worse in children who are neglected, people can confuse autism with being socially awkward and feeling different which could be due to parenting or lack of socialising or using social media at a young age, its a genetic thing but it can be misdiagnosed and can sometimes be improved in some people so i wonder if its not as accurate as we think. mood disorders in women can be caused by menstrual cycles and disorders with them theres also a lack of information about so many things especially with medication, depression can be helped with antidepressants but they don't actually know why it works, just that it does for some people. antipsychotics and antidepressants can actually cause psychosis or depression or mania. even birth control can help some people and cause depression symptoms in others. anti-anxiety meds can increase anxiety or cause addiction and withdrawals. i feel like the whole dsm and the way we treat things and teach people about it needs to change as well as the way we think about these things, especially since a lot of mental issues are just natural reactions to bad circumstances, learned behaviour, or health issues
Psychiatrist here. While i agree with some of your points, such the medicalization of the natural response to stress/adverse life events and the very hetrogenous nature of 'depression'. You also seem contradict yourself by then viewing depression in totality as mostly just a stress reponse/childhood adverse events that is more severe in neurotic person. Then deny any brain problem with mood regulation. Anyone who managed patients with bipolar disorder will know that their depressions isn't just a natural stress reponse, In the same way their manic/hypomanic episodes aren't a stress reponse. There is no necessarily a 'social cause' of why they switch from depressed to manic or crash from feeling manic to depressed. In bipolar patients there are defnintely biololgical issues in mood regulation, And mood stabilizers are life changing for almost all of them. The magnitude of beneficial effects in treating and especially in preventing replapse is considerably much higher than antidepressants used for unipolar depression. So yes, Depression is a complex and huge construct, Some of it biololgically driven, some of it social driven and in many cases it is a combination of both.
If psychiatrists who are trained in medicine and biological treatment accept that mental disorders could be treated without medicine , and psychiatric medicines make mental health problems worse and damage brain functions(good only some population) it's like questioning their existence. Psychiatrists must be awake , they must take training in social, political and economic aspects of meantal health problems. These are illnesses or disorder of soul(mind is not brain).
Do you know about PSSD by the way? I got it from antidepressants for anxiety treatment. It's anhedonia, emotional blunting, cognitive impairment, s. dysfunction and other symptoms that persist after discontinuation.
The question should be: why do modern people have such a hard time overcoming grief and depression? Why are the rates more prevalent in modern societies as opposed to more "primitive" peoples. The dissolution of universe-explaining myths, break down of tight-knit communities, an emphasis on personal hedonism....but fixing the causes requires more effort than a band-aid pharmaceutical. For example, If I believed I would be reunited with a loved one after death, grief would be so much easier to overcome. But with the secular understanding that we all just dissolve into nothingness, it is almost unbearable to deal with. Also, I tried therapy once, and I felt it was locking me into my problems and an almost narcissistic navel-gazing. When I quit, I felt so much better and in control.
Lack of connections with others and themselves 😢 people lack empathy for themselves and don't know how to be gentle or kind to themselves. "It was easier to prescribe medications than to engage in the difficult discussions that could result from conducting the necessary investigation to root out these issues" A good descriptior of past and modern psychiatry and medicine (morphine, benzos, SSRI, anti psychotics) Compounded on with today's stressors.
That can happen with counselling and my recovery from clinical depression coincided with me going back to Catholic mass here in Ireland which to this day nobody agrees with and I don't give two hoots.. the ritual helps me.. the community that you meet in the mass and the certainty of a future in the afterlife. We have some funny beliefs here like a belief in being buried and not cremated.. it's a very old Irish Catholic belief and literally there is still no money put away to bury me as I spend my money on health products as I have a couple of supposed autoimmune diseases. Most are cured on the keto diet by the way. I have completed a very good course and once I am in the relevant job I will be putting away peace of mind money which isn't that much to know that when I die my body will be dealt with in the dignity that i deal appropriate..
Unfortunately, universe-explaining myths don't stand up under scrutiny and if one says so, those who still believe ostracize (and sometimes even kill) non-believers. We need groups that are less fanatic and don't completely lose their shit when someone says, "Um, what if this is bullshit?"
I think most of what is said is true and for sure a more supportive and sociable society where human needs are met would solve most of this. However, SAD is an example of where something is about imbalance ie circadian rhythm goes off and early morning awakening with anxiety and depression occurs. In other words, it seems mood can easily be impacted.
I got depression when I hit puberty at 13 years old. Went from a happy kid to a depressed 13 year old. Crying, worrying, feeling desperate, feeling like Id lost myself. Happy childhood, brilliant upbringing with supportive loving parents. All the meaning drained out of my life Ifelt numb but anxious and it was excruciatingly painful also. I wouldnt wish it on anyone. So changes in my brain and body with hormones / chemicals? It ended after 3 or 4 months. Ive struggled my whole life with it ive tried everything and do have better periods but if I had an external reason it would be much easier. Depression kills people it has a spectrum. It can be a very serious thing.
@@instant_mint Therapies only work if there is some underlying issue (s) causing the depression. I am fortunate to always have had a very happy and relatively trouble free life, yet I still have depression. I have tried all these therapies, but they don't work because it's obvious I have an imbalance of serotonin in my brain, and SSRIs address that and allow me to function normally.
This guy might be the first of his age group to challenge the current status quo. Fuckin rock on. If the whole world wasn't garbage and I could attend university for 5k like my parents, I to would fight the power! Thank you or your parents or my government for putting forth the moneys and still going against the brainwashing. I sound bitter but I'm sincere. You're the beginning of a new era!
I always believe I got depression after I took two different drugs for acne age 22 .. I actually don't think the antibiotics did it because I have a hormonal imbalance that reappeared later in life I think it was the contraceptive pill that I was put on for 2 years for severe acne that while I was on it I felt fine but when I came off of it then the problem arose. It got very severe and turned into one year of clinical depression which I'm happy to say many years have gone by and once I got over one bad year it never reoccurred
When they did the brain imaging, did they look at the serotonin/dopamine /norepinephrine . activity during a task compared to a not depressed person , or like how well the neurotransmitters were functioning? I couldn’t tell if he said or not or if that’s what he was talking about. It seemed like he said they kinda were just looking at structure or number of transmitters not how well they were working.
Man, you are an angel. Really. You could stay silent and do your profession and just earn the money but you are a true angel. I've been into an unjust penal procedure towards me and I was really stressed so I went to a psychiatrist, he gave me Rivotirl ( clonazepam ) in drops and Cipralex (escitalopram) - I used them for 5 days and thank god I quit. Now after a little bit of studiying about my anxiety, I am totally well. I'm good. It's 1 month since I took the meds and I feel totally ok, I get anxious but I self CBT and they go away.. people need to understand that getting a diagnosis of depression and anxiety is really easy, also to get prescriptions.
I don't believe a persistent moderate/major depression is a standalone disease at all. I consider it as being only a symptom of an unrecognised underlying disease, probably linked to immune system with origins in central nervous system (CNS), gut, possibly even in disfunctional mitochondria. We just don't know and it's irresponsible to say otherwise as we know very little in detail how our CNS actually functions, that's why we can't effectively treat (auto)immune and degenerative diseases like, Alzheimers, Parkinskons, Chrons, RA, MS and cancers. I was "depressed" since my late teens with constantly abnormal IgG and monocites blood levels, just to find out I've been having autoimmune/neurodegenerative disease all this time 30 yrs later.
Thanks for being so introspective and reflective on these topics. I think depression is a spiritual issue too often presented to practitioners who don’t know what to do except prescribe drugs. I think people have problems which are misconstrued as having a nonexistent chemical imbalance in the brain. I really think people should steer clear of psychiatry when these feelings or thoughts occur. They are being misled by the fraud in this messed up system. I think it is a dangerous path to tread because you probably are getting fed drugs your healthy brain does not need.
My brain is NOT healthy. Having recurrent depression for over 30 years with no outward cause, it is obvious that I do have a serotonin imbalance. SSRIs allow me to lead a normal life. I do not have any of the "thoughts" or "feelings" of which you speak.
How come doctors don't address the issue on parasites in humans and how they can affect our mental health in such ways? Yes they can cause depression. We come in contact with these bugs everyday from our food - meat, veggies, especially from processed foods, sugars, but also from pets abd environment. They can stay in our body for years. They are microscopic. It's difficult because the testing is not good and they aren't always detected, but you can find their presence in other ways. Some people's immune systems filter these out and don't have any issues with them, but some others are not so lucky and it can cause all sorts of health issues including our mental health. This is why diet and nutrients are important in addition to do parasite cleanses. I wish there were more studies on this to bring awareness.
Well, if there were several kinds of depression, some with precise underlying neurological causes, wouldn't lumping them all together under this one fuzzy label keep many of those studies from detecting them?
Well... life is, and has always been, by definition, beyond our control. 😉 So... isn't it rather the other way round ? What if it was our society's incapacity to accept that simple fact that actually lead people to feel anxious all the time?
Hi Dr. Josef, this is an excellent presentation on depression. Do you also have one for burnout? Burnout seems sharing the same attributes as depression, and worse, burnout is not defined as an illness or disease.
I am loving your content. The way you present is very thorough and I appreciate that you show your sources and explain visuals. I wasn't sure about the way you presented the criteria for depression for point 2: No consideration for contextual stressors. I had to go back and realized that you use words carefully, noting that people "qualify" for a diagnosis of depression and would be "eligible" for drug treatment rather than "diagnosed" based on their subjective reports and without context per DSM specifications. Based on your wording, this is true, but I feel like at face value this could be misconstrued by viewers. Have you seen patients diagnosed so carelessly? I don't work as directly with mental health assessment, but have an understanding that the biopsychosocial components for clients will all play into mental health. I hope that teaching a thorough understanding of context is not unique to social work (my field). I just feel like it's important to emphasize in point 2 the "dictionary-ness" of the DSM to coin a term, and I would hope the clinicians engaging with patients aren't hanging on its every word and fail to rely on common sense during assessment. That being said, I felt curious because I am familiar with other diagnoses that are fairly specific about the circumstances that disqualify a diagnosis. I was surprised to find that the DSM-IV specified that something like bereavement would be a disqualifying contextual factor, but in the DSM-V edition, that specification was removed. How interesting. I wonder what was behind that decision! Source: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519704/table/ch3.t4/ Also, I've been focused on CPTSD in school and am curious if you have any opinions on its relevance to mental health. I loved that you acknowledged trauma's significance in depressed patients, and I found it interesting that you specifically noted childhood trauma as a significant stressor. I know that, speaking of DSM deficiencies, there is not enough trauma-informed diagnostic information and that CPTSD isn't even included as a diagnosable disorder in the US. But IMHO polyvagal theory + context awareness + trauma understanding feels like a game-changer for mental health understanding--in a getting-at-the-root-of-things kind of way. Sorry for the long-windedness. I don't usually find such engaging content on TH-cam. Please keep informing!
I believe that it depends on a person’s personality some are more sensitive to stress than others. Twelve years ago I noticed and still remember that something happened in me after being living with lots of pressure and stress. At least I perceived my stressors had gone much too far. I can absolutely tell that I almost changed over a night. And unfortunately never managed to come back to my older me. If I may say that I feel my brain damaged or at least changed. I could not recover during my sleep anymore and everything I had to do became a nightmare. Many people just can’t change their life even though it would help someone’s mental health. Some people can cope better with challenges than others. I’m on Lexapro ever since and it helped me a lot the first few years but not so much nowadays. Thx for a very thorough explanation doctor.!
One critical part of the constellation of symptoms is that it relies on self-reporting. Plenty of people might deny a biological marker if they don't think they're ill, but we wouldn't let that influence our diagnosis. If depressed people don't see their symptoms as symptoms, then they won't report them and we won't disgnose them. So the only sampling of people with depression we have, from which we derive our very definition of depression, are those who are willing or able to accurately self-report. Given how depression seems to interfere with motivation and executive functioning, this group of self-reporters (and their other symptoms) might be in the minority of sufferers.
Thank you for this. I see this and have for a long time. When I found your videos it was so refreshing and validating. So what can we do as clinician. Payor sources now drive how we are treating our clients in so many ways. I feel unethical in supporting this way of industry. Thank you for this.
In my experience, when there are too many very traumatic life stressors occurring over decades and you end up stuck between a rock and a hard place for decades, medications like SRRIs are very helpful in taking the edge off, and gives one a bit of breathing space to learn better coping skills and make living at least bearable.
I agree with pretty much everything you say, except your concluding point about medication (ie SSRIs) being safe. That’s probably the case for some, or perhaps most people, but for others they can do harm. I was diagnosed using the PHQ-9 questionnaire and put on increasing doses of citalopram and then sertraline. I was later diagnosed with ASD and my earlier symptoms were found to be that of autistic burnout. The SSRIs made no difference apart from suppressing my natural brain patterns, but the real problems occurred when tapering off after 5 years - those supposedly minor ‘brain zaps’ developed into seizures, with other severe side effects persisting for 3-4 years and leaving me with a chronic and severe memory disorder (loss of episodic memory function, past and present). There’s a presumption when coming off antidepressants that a patient will resume normal brain function within a few weeks, but those of us on the autistic spectrum often feature something called ‘aberrant neuroplasticity’ which correlates with the inflexible behaviour that most of us display in normal life. It is very difficult for the healthcare sector to capture this information since most of these negative outcomes just get bundled into the already-complex pathology of autism, so the data is lost and doctors still don’t understand that an extra level of supervision is needed if these drugs are given to a neurodivergent patient.
The question, the burning question is why do so many people with severe anxiety get depression. The problem of anxiety is not understood. It too is considered a brain problem. Anxiety is a problem for the heart because there is fear and worry. In severe anxiety, unlike ordinary anxiety, there is a fight or flight response, which raises the heart rate. Worry, the attempt to think through and solve some issue, requires resting metabolism because in a stress response the cognitive function in the brain is declined to some extent. So the metabolism returns to the resting state to enable the person to think. This means the heart is getting signals to go slow. But as they start thinking they become aware of the danger problem or issue and they go back to high metabolism, the stress response, which means the heart is getting signals to go faster. The net result is that the heart is getting signals to go fast then slow then fast again and so on. If this continues then the heart becomes ineffective as a pump and that means the metabolism will go low, lower than resting metabolism. The screaming evidence here is that heart rate variability is affected, lost essentially. Without heart rate variability we cannot feel any momentary high that comes when we experience something pleasant in the moment. You have to resolve the underlying problem to arrest the depression. No medications are going to do any good.
What do you think about the hypothesis from Dr. Sapolsky? He talks about the damage of cortisol in the hippocampus which isn‘t reversible and you need to take antidepressants to keep the damage at bay..
The main cause of depression in my opinion is processed sugar and also blood sugar levels which people elevate with diet. Adequate hydration and no to low sugar is key to recovering. There are other minor factors such as disliking their job and work hours but it’s mainly inflammation from poor diet and abusing sugar.
I love it how for women in perimenopause and menopause the recommendation is to give antidepressants for emotional changes and vasomotor symptoms rather than treat the root cause which is hormone deficiency. The mental and physical issues that women are experiencing are directly related to the loss of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone which also increases risk of Alzheimer’s, heart disease, osteoporosis, joint/connective tissue degradation, pelvic floor dysfunction, bladder dysfunction, GI issues, and more. Yet yeah, just throw antidepressants at us instead of hormone replacement therapy (and no, not birth control)…🙄🤬
I don’t really want to take anti depressants. I’m on day 4 of escitalopram and honestly don’t know what to do. I was seriously depressed before trying them and still am I’m in bed, not eating, been like this a week. Not sleeping Had depression on and off for decades
Have you ever suffered severe depression with psychosis? And then in turn been treated very successfully with medication? With other disorders such as bipolar disorder, schizoaffective order, and schizophrenia should we teach skills and not prescribe pills? I understand the medicalization of psychology is pumped up by drug companies. I'm using the term "psychology" because your job as a physician is essentially pointless. Who needs you? Just see a therapist. The outdated commercials are a nice touch. I agree in a comprehensive approach. But medication as a last resort and then an obsession with removing them can destroy lives. I would shocked but delighted if you would respond.
The DSM was invented for insurance companies. For insurance to pay, they needed a diagnosis. That is the entire reason behind the DSM. Just because you are told you have something doesn't mean you really have it or that it even really exists.
I’m a bit confused by the way we use the word ‘neurotic’ to describe a person who is often anxious as a personality trait, but ‘anxiety’ to pathologies seemingly the same thing
"Neuroticism" (in the Big Five Factor model) or "Emotionality" (in the similar HEXACO model) are, in their nomenclature, "traits," each with multiple "aspects." "Anxiety" is *relatively* easy to describe and understand, IMO. "Depression" is much more vague and slippery. Being inherently high in "Neuroticism" or "Emotionality" predisposes one to anxiety and depression as pathologies.
Your channel is such an important one, thank you for doing this kind of work! I have experienced first hand & had so many friends struggle with medication & prescribers that don't do the therapeutic work along side them & it kills people, thank you Dr josef!
My severe depression was due to bad gut bacteria. Four foods would give me three days of severe depression. I was cured with antibiotics prescribed by a Chinese doctor who told me that bad bacteria was behind these food reactions. She got the clue when I told her that eggs also gave me severe asthma attacks, and that this never happened before. It was then that she knew I needed three courses of antibiotics, one being a tetracycline.
I just got into LA today and I don't know if this happened to you guys. As soon as I stepped off the plane here the air hit my eyes and my eyes would not stop watering. I was like "Oh my god" right? So I went to the doctor here and I thought it was going to be allergies. Plot twist! It was not allergies, turns out: depression!
My father experienced severe depression, to the point where he eventually committed suicide. I have inherited his illness (yes, inherited), and I don't have nearly as severe symptoms because of medications. My belief is that there are many people on social media that attempt to persuade others to not get treatment because these are not real illnesses. This shows that there continues to be a lot of stigma surrounding mental illness. I have never seen anyone on social media attempt to persuade people with MS, Parkinsons and other diseases to not get treatment. Yes, we can see Parkinsons and MS on brain scans, but 50+ years ago, could we see these diseases on brain scans? People back then, had no idea what Parkison's was. However, there were still people who experienced Parkinson's disorder.
I often hear people compare depression with type 1 diabetes. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Since there is no measurement of serotonin like the monitor of blood sugar. They are not the same. If someone is living in a place they hate and doing a job they hate , and staying in a marriage they hate, plus not eating right and not exercise. and there is little they can do about it at the time, how can they not get depressed.
Just about to try psycadelics 36:48 with Monarch clinic Melbourne Australia. Any comments from you Dr? I watch all your videos. We don’t have a tapering clinic in Canberra that I know of. Cutting out SSRI is horrendous. Got to 50 mcgs a day so far. Been left on them 23 years was at 150. Make me suicidal but not having it is another visit to psyche ward
Hi. I got out of a 24 year mistreatment of what people I now trust in medicine was treating no actual mental illness. I was always trying to make sense of what I was being told, and what it was being prescribed, and true, I was walking in the door and I was eating the pills. I lost so much function due to bad meds, erasing close to a decade into a half zombie trance, and then I faced a cascade of problems getting off one pill that basically shatters my mind for 13 months. It looks like I just got my clarity back less than a week ago. Through this I have formed enormous concerns over what we call mental health treatment. The whole term “mental illness “needs to be seriously unpacked. In many cases, it is literally nothing other than a social construct. That is risky, to say the least. No for the record I am not saying anyone should flush their psych meds. I’ll just say that to get it over with. I will say, certainly with the Internet, if you have a mental health, diagnosis or treatment that seems suspicious, I recommend you do your homework, and do it carefully. I know you can’t trust everything online, but I know I can’t trust everything in the doctors office either. Thank you Dr., I’ve seen a couple of your videos, including good videos on benzodiazepines‘s, I believe, what you are saying here is fully consistent with everything I am observing and I am glad to see you talking about this so openly.
It's also really hard for family members watching their loved ones drowning in pills and "medicine", knowing you're probably at least a small part of their suffering, but too timid to actually sit down and talk. That's me with my dad. I know I'm not the daughter he wished for, I know I disappointed him dearly and I absolutely can't handle how he transformed from a witty strong minded and willed, educated man I saw as a "perfect man" growing up, into a weak, pathetic crybaby unable to keep himself alive. If not for my mum he wouldn't be here anymore. Probably. We often clashed, even when I was just a kid and I often criticized his neurotic and (in my eyes) respectless behavior towards mum but I know I'm only barely better than him. I "left" my family at only 16 years old, dealing with anger issues, insecurities etc and I flourished away from home. Since then I willingly took everything my parents offered in terms of help, support etc but I rarely give back. I know he doesn't feel loved by me and I know I accept him, but I don't love him like my mum. It's weird. He's having so many underlying issues he never talks about and it hurts me watching him disappear, I know he's getting better as soon as he starts to work on his issues, but also it doesn't bother me that much bc I emotionally detached from him years ago. I know I'm at fault. I know I should do better and help him. But I'm so scared to talk to him about all these feelings bc it took me years to detach and find my inner peace. He's never been a bad dad, I never experienced violence at home, he's just rarely been there for me as a child and his patience has always been thin. But apart from being told that I'm stupid and getting punished for not thinking things through I had a nice childhood. Heck, do I need therapy? No idea why I'm talking about all this here. Sorry 😅 But what I wanted to point out - depression is a monster not only hurting those unlucky souls tortured by it but also those around.
what was interesting to me is that it appeared that suicide rates in the US seem to drop significantly from the end of 2018 until the end of 2020, but then started going back up to their usual trend in 2021. Are there any good theories as to why that might've occurred?
It's very refreshing to see a licensed medical doctor (especially a psychiatrist) acknowledge the societal factors and financial motivation influencing the treatment of depression and mental illness. you are truly valuable and i hope more practitioners follow in your footsteps.
It's cause he's a scientologist . I am very suspect of this TH-cam account,. I don't trust them
It makes me so mad that I was told I was depressed since 12 and given drugs and these doctors ruined my self-esteem by making me think I was some kind of mental defect. I was depressed because of the hell hole I was living in with abusive people. I didn't even have clothes I had to wear my moms bra all throughout high school. I was constantly beat down, treated as if I was garbage while my brother was treated like royalty. Of course I came across as depressed but back in the early 2000s these therapists and doctors didn't ever care to find out why I was presenting this way they just took everything at face value. It makes me so mad because as soon as I was out of that environment and away from abusers I am way happier than average. I am not depressed at all and never took meds after I left that abusive home. If the doctors did their job I could have been removed from that home at 12 and never experienced the degradation of living in an abusive home for all those developmental years.
muster up Lawyers and sue the Demons.''- Victim Support- Sean O'Dwyer.- 136- 140 Hobson Street.- Auckland City. 1010.- New Zealand./ maha aotearoa.'''
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Power to you.
Wow. I could've written your response. I wonder how many people can relate. ❤️🩹
Thank God you got out
I can totally relate. Psychiatry has a history of heinous injury to millions of people. The grief is real, the losses are widespread. I’d love to be part of a class action
"It was easier to prescribe medications than to engage in the difficult discussions that could result from conducting the necessary investigation to root out these issues"
A good descriptior of past and modern psychiatry. Compounded on with today's stressors.
Yes, this is the same I found within 20 years working in a health insurance talking amd listening to people suffering depression. People talk about their stressors, it is easy to find out. It is not very difficult. But many therapist don't ask or they believe it is easy for people to overcone them. But to talk about the stressors dosn't help them to overcome them. They wouldn't have a sickness leave , they wouldn't be in a clinic when they can manage the problems alone. The health system offers no finiancial help, no "manpower" to help to get a new accomodation, or to get a new job, or to pay a lawer or other specialists, to pay people to talk with all family members or with people at the working place to solve problems they have. To go in a clinic/ a hospital to TALK about stressors doesn't help, when they couldn't solve their problems and can't change the stressors alone. That's one of the reasons of the the “revolving door phenomenon” refers to frequent psychiatric rehospitalizations. It is cheaper for the insurances when they stay at home. They can't work anyway.
Exactly. And for family its so hard to see your loved ones getting lost in tons of pills or "magic healing devices" promoted in ads instead of really giving psychologists and emotional/psychological therapy a chance.
But it's no use to push them into a psychologists arms if they don't want it and refuse to accept this kind of help
I see medication against anxiety or depression as the same thing as painkillers. It does not affect the reason for the pain, but it can make you feel better. Unfortunately it can cause increased tolerance, be hard to quit and have serious side effects.
I would agree they are the same but would word it slightly differently:
Both painkillers and psychiatric meds generally only mask the symptoms and never deal with the root cause.
Much like trimming back a weed bush to the ground only deals with what we see, but digging it out will prevent the continual need to keep cutting back the bush.
As someone with a serious mental illness, I understand why medications are used, but they dehumanise the sufferer and undermine that person's truly deeply human experiences.
We need to do better.
I would add one more thing to the list of 11. People who take illegal drugs, even weed, particularly if they start as a teenager.
Im no expert but I knew many people who were normal, happy and social as teenagers, but after taking drugs became reclusive, quiet, and depressed. Some even developed psychosis or even full blown schizophrenia.
@elsh332 But you're ignoring the fact that some people, like me, do not have any "root causes " or life issues causing my depression.
I am fortunate to have a very happy and relatively carefree life.
So what is causing my depression ?
I definitely think it's related to serotonin levels, and medication allows me to lead a normal, productive life.
I really appreciate your measured, evidence-based approach toward this sensitive topic. I am a psychiatric provider in full agreement with your stance, struggling to work responsibly within a broken system.
I really appreciate you trying tho! Many in your field do not even try.
Sir, I live in Turkey. The experts in Turkey are very ignorant and have a lot of ego. We all know that drugs are of no use. Psychological drugs are of no use. They exploit people with drugs. Chemical imbalance hypothesis and serotonin and dopamine hypothesis. If you have no evidence of these, what are you treating? It is pathological. There is no biological or physiological problem. There is no evidence that psychiatric disorders are diseases. If there is no disease, there is no treatment. Why are you giving drugs for nothing and turning the human brain into scrap? Anyway, I want to ask you this. How can depression, anxiety, OCD and bipolar be treated without medication? Your opinions are very important to me. .
Yes, many don't even try.
Thank you for your support! It's crucial to have open discussions about these sensitive topics, especially within a challenging system.
I'm in full sympathy. Psychiatry is trying so hard to be a science, but it should be trying hard to be a humanity. That's where the real insight will come from. The fact that humanities are considered "soft" is the tragedy of our current science (ideological) paradigm.
I'm with you as a fellow MH clinician. Thank so much Dr. Josef for your courage in putting this out there. I have applied, and will continue to apply, what I have learned here in my practice. Moving away from pathologizing people is a good thing :)
Thank you so much.
Thank you for your support! It's great to connect with fellow clinicians who share a similar vision for mental health.
I find the label helpful. I'm not formally diagnosed, I'm self-diagnosed. But when you're too miserable to get out of bed till late, you're feeling completely hopeless, you're withdrawing from the world, don't want to do enjoyable stuff, and this goes on for weeks you don't need a psychiatrist to figure out you're depressed.
It becomes a monster you're strangely attached to. You haven't felt okay in so long, feeling okay is a scary alien feeling, yet you are living a hell on earth. Your emotions become paradoxical and confusing, you start to think your going crazy, and you can't tell anyone that you are going crazy. You doubt you are experiencing what you are experiencing and start to wonder if you are malingering, making your symptoms up, doing the shameful act of attention seeking (despite not telling anyone how you feel). You're self esteem becomes non-existent. You make a commitment only to find that you are completely unreliable, bringing your low self-esteem into the negative numbers.
There is genuine hopelessness, even if you are usually optimistic, you see no chance of hope. You have had your last happiness, and the only rational feeling is despair
You experience this over the course of months.
That's my experience of depressive illness.
And it takes at least over a year to recover. And it's changed you - your brain just functions differently even after recovering.
it might be a label, but the label seems to make sense of these experiences.
The brain heals overtime when u feel safe and allow yourself to be just the way you are. I realise now all the feelings I had and thought were crazy, were actually valid. I did not like anymore being with people and I realised now it s bc they were narcissists or not a good match for me. And I had put these people on pedestals. I did not want to party and I realise now I Don t like being with people who drink and talk about crap. I want to enjoy a good book, nature and a good friend who respects my needs. Trust your feelings and just allow yourself to feel stress and function anyway. Soon you ll get used to it and relax. It s OK if u r slower or your mind a bit blurry it s OK. It s still a mind given to you by God. Accept yourself and you will heal. Ask God to heal you and read Claire weeks books and the body keeps the score book
This makes me think that we're back to the old ways where society will just ppl to get over it again, that we're crazy, weak and all kinds of derogatory terms. When ppl were told it was physical, the weak and crazy labels were less. So what are we to do now? Go to therapy? With what money? Leave toxic jobs? And go where? How to support ourselves,families etc? How many side jobs to not even stay afloat? What about ppl with jobs but still homeless cos they don't get livable wages? What about abuse? All kinds/types. Ppl need to be able to function in spite of all bad surroundings. I'm not against the information but there are no real and practical solutions either. Imo, most ppl who do not have the resources to address the causes are stuck between a rock and a hard place. What to do?
This is an accurate description of it.
You describe what I'm feeling perfectly. 🎯
I'm blown away by this interview you are literally dismantling the psychiatric arena brick by brick
But he's wrong. Lol
@@eriamhsl3841I disagree. Please say why and back it up!
@@LUVN4GIV I have symptoms of depression and can work and live independently with medications. I know several people who are the same. People like this doctor try to discourage people from getting treatment, makes it extremely difficult for people who have these mental illnesses. There are actually many people who benefit from psychiatric medications. We can't all be characterized into one group.
@@janetappmeyer7483 I was on Prozac and a few other psych meds off and on from age 17 to 47ish for PTSD resulting in depression and anxiety. I'm in my 50’s now. I stopped and didn’t feel worse.
I studied science and worked at a medical school. I have many friends and family in the science, engineering, pharmaceuticals, and medical fields.
I know depression and anxiety are real as I suffer from them as well, but I am wondering if we have been sold a lie. As soon as we are prescribed more than one medication, doctors can't tell you what side effects to look for, and the scientific studies on the meds and their effacacy are skewed and controlled by money and politics.
I am looking more into integrative medicine now. Unsure about how it will end up, but we all have different perspectives at different times in our lives.
My mom died from Tardive Dyskinesia which was a side effect of psych meds that progressed to the inability to swallow without food or drink going into her lungs. The medications never made her better after the first year or two. It was a rapid decline and ended with a 12-year residence in a care home that wasn't great as she had gotten so bad from the cocktail of drugs that nicer facilities kicked her out. She died very early due to all the meds that famous, and very expensive psychiatrists insisted she needed. I saw the rapid decline and she never got better.
Everyone has a different story and different needs, but I am more and more convinced that the government, FDA, and medical fields are very broken in the USA.
Check out Diary of a CEO and watch the recent show with the toxicologist. Check out Anthony Kaveh and Peter Santenello. All on TH-cam.
Maybe the way we live, disconnected from family, sedentary, out of time with nature and our communities, eating bad foods, and being prescribed pills instead of getting at the root of these issues is making us sick in way more ways than one. Too bad we can’t go back in time and save the earth for our children and those who come after them.
I'm not saying you should stop your medications. But, is it possible that if you ate well (whole foods), exercised, and spent adequate time with loving family and friends doing things in nature, getting good sleep and being kind to yourself, you might feel a little better?
For me, this was the case. I hope you don't get upset. I'm not trying to say you are wrong, but being curious (but not in a scared way) has helped me find better ways for me to thrive.
Check out Diary of a CEO, Peter Santanello, and Anthony Kaveh, all here on TH-cam. I've learned a lot from them.
I hope you are doing well. 🙏🏽❤️
@@janetappmeyer7483 I was on Prozac and a few other psych meds off and on from age 17 to 47ish. I'm in my 50s now. I stopped and don't feel better or worse.
I studied science and worked at a medical school. I have many friends and family in the science, engineering, pharmaceuticals, and medical fields.
I know depression and anxiety are real as I suffer from them as well, but I am wondering if we have been sold a lie. As soon as you take more than one medication, doctors can't tell you what side effects to look for, and the scientific studies on the meds are skewed.
I am looking more into integrative medicine now. Unsure about how it will go, but we all have different perspectives at different times in our lives.
My mom died from Tardive Dyskinesia which was a side effect of psych meds that progressed to the inability to swallow without it going into her lungs. The medications never made her better after the first year or two. It was a rapid decline and ended with a 12-year residence in a care home that wasn't great as she had gotten so bad from the cocktail of drugs that nicer facilities kicked her out. She died very early due to all the meds that famous, and very expensive psychiatrists insisted she needed. I saw the rapid decline and she never got better.
My father, a brilliant, kind man, took his life while taking meds for sleep and anxiety.
Everyone has a different story and different needs, but I am more and more convinced that the government, FDA, and medical fields are very broken in the USA.
Check out Diary of a CEO and watch the recent show with the toxicologist. Also, Anthony Kaveh and Peter Santanello. All are on TH-cam.
Maybe the way we live and what we eat is making us sick in way more ways than one. Too bad we can go back in time and save the earth for our children and those who come after them.
I'm not saying you should stop your medications. But, is it possible that if you ate well (whole foods), exercised, and spent adequate time with loving family and friends doing things in nature, with a sense of community support, that you might feel a little better?
For me, this was the case. I hope you don't get upset. I'm not trying to say you are wrong, but being curious (but not in a scared way) has helped me find better ways for me to thrive.
(I posted this before, but have no idea what happened?!)
Wishing you peace, health, and wellness. ❤️🙏🏽❤️
what is ironic is that SSRI lead to all those symptoms too
Yes SSRI messes up the chemicals in your brain and often makes depression worse over time.
50% of the time, the medication harms the patient further😢
This is so true. I hate psychiatrists for a reason. This department requires patience and empathy. If they want to be commercial, they need not have to take this. Doctors who are supposed to be saviours are the killers. Its very hard to find a right one.
Yes, I was struggling before I went on a meds increase, but I was motivated to recover from my ED relapse. My meds have caused depressive symptoms even 3 weeks out. Today I was out seeing if a railway bridge would make a good spot. In wouldn't do it, but I'm on the edge. And I've given up on ED recovery, and I'm actively ED'd again. I'm getting sucked into depression again. I was trying to keep focused on God, but when I tried to pray last night I just berated myself, telling God he seriously had no business saving me.
I was struggling to keep going before, but I wasn't badly depressed. Now my anxiety's less, the body dysmorphia's calmed down, but I'm so apathetic, I just don't care.
@@FronteirWolf I really hope and wish you from the bottom of my heart that you will feel better
maybe you could try Comportemental Behavior Therapy CBT it has Shown good result in Eating disorder
I’m 65 and wasn’t wanted by my mother (3rd and last child). She often introduced me as the unwanted surprise. She favored my only brother. My brother molested me and bullied me my whole life. He was totally enabled by my mother. My mother has been cruel to me throughout my life. My poor father, a medical professional, tried his best to protect me and support me. Mother is an evil person. After Dad died, she has rewritten her will and given my brother things that were to be split 3 ways. My spirit is crushed and I think of suicide every day! All of this is to say that trauma is not addressed by people that could and SHOULD help. Years of antidepressants and clonazepam have not helped. Being LOVED and VALIDATED is essential to having quality of life. And you are spot on about socioeconomic and political effects. Home and food insecurity affect quality of life. The government and big pharmaceutical companies are in bed together. If you’re not wealthy, you’re going to suffer! I pray for Jesus to return soon!!!
Well this is the second story of a similar kind and it's too unusual. Obviously bullying in childhood is a huge trigger for lifelong depression. It is very hard to tell other people what to do but I wouldn't give in to bullies and let them destroy my beautiful life ..your father obviously adored you, as did mine. I often think of my father especially in a recent bad relationship when it was over I realised looking at old photographs( he's dead now a long time )that he definitely wanted better for me than what I accepted
I also await eternal return of ⚖️ justice...those that persecuted us will have their day of judgement....
Don’ think of suicide! I want you alive and hopeful! Don’t give up! You still have good chances of good life
Jean, Jesus loves you so much. Your daily struggle sounds much to bear, but remember to lay it at His feet. Thank you for sharing such a raw account.
Ask jesus to heal you
Depression for me is like a WW1 battlefield. Getting sucked into the mud, bombarded by ordinance, cowering in a disease-infested trench, no rest, the air is thick with the stench of death and burned gun powder, a hellish landscape of destroyed buildings, and crippling fear of meeting my fellow man in this liminal space of barbed wire and machine guns. It's pure terror.
Neuroticism isn't necessarily a personality trait. I was very, very neurotic while I had an untreated sleep-breathing disorder. Now that it's treated, all the neuroticism just melted away.
Check out the big 5 personality evaluation. I believe this doctor mean it in the sense it is used in evaluating a person's personality and not as a symptom of something else.
@@elsh332 How can you evaluate someone's personality if it's being warped by an untreated unrelated disorder.
Right ... Who wrote the DSM and why. There is a temporary 'situational' depression or anxiety that will go away if the situation is resolved. But prescribed meds can cause many symptoms and meds kept coming till they stopped. Eight years off and most symptoms are long gone yet I'm treated like I'm mental and new doctors only look at the PDMP and want to prescribe either way my medical records are forever engraved and I lack ongoing care for real physical progressive conditions. That's when I realized it was probably pharma funded. There was no real science behind psychiatry
I had this issue and I took no psychiatric meds.. once depression was on the file it was all they could see.. developed numerous autoimmune issues and was told I had OCD one time(never on my file ever) when I couldn't lean forward to cough properly with a chest infection I was leaning against the wall with my back and what was wrong with me was degenerative disc disease which went undiagnosed completely until a work injury resulted in a disc in the back of my neck severely protruding and catching a nerve I'd say most of my severe tiredness was lack of spinal alignment.. I would suggest some tai chi for you. I know it's very easy because I was really ill and did it and the health benefits were unbelievable.. out of the blue for no reason this Dr many years ago decided that me leaning against the wall to cough was 'my little ritual' when I asked her what she was talking about with OCD.. that and rubbing cream into my numb finger to bring back my circulation which was diagnosed as altered sensation and Raynaud's disease.. I subsequently joined the Raynaud's disease society here and one of the recognised treatments was rubbing any cream with shea butter into the numb area because the drier it was the more numb the skin was. Shea butter is amazing for dry skin
The DSM was invented for insurance companies. For insurance to pay, they needed a diagnosis. That is the entire reason behind the DSM. Just because you are told you have something doesn't mean you really have it or that it even really exists.
I slightly disagree with the last sentence. Schizophrenia is real and those people would have no way of functioning without pharmaceuticals.
I have seen people going off antidepressants after lifestyle changes beautifully. A friend had prediabetes, cut out sugar and started going to the gym and his whole life improved. No more obesity, no more depression, tons of insight. He started a really amazing positive chain of events
@@heresy1987LV but that's the point schizophrenia is clearly and distinctly mental disorder and most diagnoses are self 'created' by over achieving psychiatrists parading as all knowing or above the less than type of attitude
Depression for me is caused by negative people doing negative things to me and there isn't a cure for bad people doing bad things so good luck with finding that magical happiness pill no such thing ...no cure
Right?! Especially when dealing with narcissists or sociopaths
Exactly...the weight off me removing my ex from my life is mind altering....truly...in a great way
Leave, pr
Leave and pray to God to help you get rid of those people. He s always faithful and he ll help you
@@stefaniakonstantinidou981 god isn't real if he is he watches me suffer and doesn't care
I don’t blame all doctors for needing to make a living, but I do blame them for not INVESTIGATING the drugs they are prescribing to anyone and everyone. Steer clear of psychiatrists or anyone who suggests meds.
As a patient with two lifetime bouts of depression and now in the midst of a hyperbolic taper off Prozac after 10 years on (because my former psych told me 2nd bout = lifetime of meds as risk of relapse too high… I bought that line for far too long) … THANK YOU for helping change the narrative!!!
I was told the same thing, but my initial problem was always anxiety. Now months after getting off the long term SSRI, I am very depressed as well as anxious. It is a confusing experience because it makes me doubt that maybe these doctors are right about the defective brain and I'm just self-sabotaging trying to be off medication 🙃 But like why would I feel so much worse after tapering off it, if they weren't right? 🥲
@@instant_mint watch some more of Dr Josef's videos to see why you feel this way after coming off and being off antidepressants. It won't be what you want to hear but it is the truth unfortunately. May God bless you and heal you 🙏
@@skinney9542 What I don't want to hear is: "you are feeling this way because you have a genetic vulnerability that results in you needing SSRI:s to function, so if you don't take them you won't get your life back".
I guess I'll go and look for more videos on the topic on his channel and see...
22:35 always made the most sense about depression. If your parent dies, a spouse leaves you, friends abandon you, those are deeply depressing events to experience!! Let alone multiple ones at the same time or close together
i truly appreciate this. depression is truly complex and i think you have spoken to why it it treated the way it is. so many people would be better served by more holistic approaches. this is good and important work. thank you for advocating for patients like this. i have a complex mental and physical health history, and they are intertwined. finding help that allowed me to really address trauma in addition to drugs that helped me to maintain my engagement in that process has saved me. there is no wonder drug. healing from depression requires support in many different areas.
Dr. Josef is wonderfully rigorous and thorough. REAL science !!
I have said my whole life (officially diagnosed at 14, now 54): "there is a difference between 'being' depressed versus 'having' depression" and the 2 are completely different beasts
I agree. I’ve suffered on and off for 60 + years. When my dad died suddenly of a heart attack at a young age, I was devastated. But when I started feeling “clinical” - I couldn’t even cry - I ran to my doc, saying: “I do not want depression on top of my grief! Please give me my Elavil! She did, and in 2-3 weeks
my depression began to lift and I could cry again and grieve normally. Those who say depression is just sadness have never been depressed.
when i was feeling bad i asked all the people that i knew and was open to talk about it about their mental health. and i found out that almost everyone was on anti depressants SSRI and they felt it was impossible to stop and had been on them for 10-20years plus and would take them for life. so when me dock gave me it i took the presciption but i refused to take any pill and lied to doc that they didn't work not to anger him as i might need his help on other things.
Pete Walker helped me to understand my depression can be labeled more accurately as abandonment depression or that I was in a emotional flashback. When you can get precise about what's really going on, like say, I am habitually self abandoning myself then I can take steps to counter this by say committing to myself, re-parenting that version of me that was abandoned and abused.
.
So much good research shared in this video! I was going to share it with others, but I’m extremely disappointed that you did not provide any information about adverse effects of psychotropic drugs at the end when you offered those as a good option for those who were disappointed with other options. Informed consent is so important, and people are not going to get the information from their doctors in most cases. You could have at least offered a link where people could get more information about this. I hope you’ll consider adding that to this video. Thanks for considering this and for speaking up.
Thank you
Dr. Josef: you are a taking on the establishment and I applaud you for being a truth teller. Thank you for putting yourself, you family, your career on the line. You are figuratively David up against Goliath. Truth always wins in the end.
You correctly realized that depression is not a well-defined unitary disease. But you are stepping into the same trap you just recognized: You act like all depression is circumstantial or reactive, but there absolutely are subtypes of depression with exclusively biological root causes.
Yes but SSRIs simply do not address the root cause even in the cases that do have a biological cause because the biological causes have not been conclusively discovered, although it seems we're starting to finally converge on some answers with the autoimmune hypothesis. But even then, when you get to the fundamental levels the line between seemingly separate things like psychology and the immune system begins to blur.
Well said, thank you ! In the absence of any life ' issues ' and the fact that my long term recurrent depression responds completely to SSRIs, I have to conclude that my depression is related to serotonin imbalance
@@WilliamDurrant-ll8xy I agree there are likely biological/autoimmune causes of depression.
I feel that's the reason for my depression.
However, just because the root cause hasn't been definitively identified, it's no reason to deny patients a drug that works very well for many of them. Me included !
What an excellent video. Eye opening
I am perimenopausal, and doctors keep insisting im depressed.
I went to the doctor because i had a prolapse, and the first thing the doctor said was asking me about my bipolar - bipolar that i DON'T HAVE!
If im depressed, its BECAUSE of the doctors and how im treated WITHIN the medical system!
3:24 DSM used to have a bereavement exclusion. Now they say more generally that normal response to loss can resemble a depressive episode
And yet, I’ve had episodes of MDD that were obviously a medical condition. There are depressions that are not triggered by outside sources.
IMO, Pharma Marketing Funded Modern Psychiatry is an incredibly dangerous “specialty” causing so much iatrogenic harm
The conflict of interest is terrible. Psychiatrists are truly a bunch of snakes for believing all this BS!
@@kathryn7739 in my opinion, many are entirely unaware of the history of psychiatry and that they are being entirely “educated” by pharmaceutical companies. Add to that honorariums, incentives and free product to prescribe and inject and it’s a complete disaster with no good long term outcomes.
@@kathryn7739 this group of medical specialists are almost entirely Pharma marketing educated. It would be important to study the history of psychiatry and the long term outcomes. Conflicts of interest are absolutely staggering.
@@drannamdsociety is sitting idly on one huge ethical problem with psych. Polypharmacy, iatrogenic harm, greed, lack of accountability, incompetency…people need to wake up and see what this specialty is really all about. It’s one giant scheme.
@@kathryn7739 in new zealand under 1992 compulsary mental Health Act- the Demons can label Public with 600 Labels.
Im a neuroscientist but not a psychiatrist and have shared this opinion for so long but did not have the language and experience to put it so well-thanks!!
Opposite for me... it took me 3 years to be diagnosed with depression, I had a horrific feeling, very low energy, couldn't take care of myself, didn't clean, wash or eat, I was given food by a friend. I forgot where I lived and how to count money. I don't care what caused it, I had a good life. Nothing to go to therapy for. Wasn't abused as a kid. I was just deathly ill. Just by myself, but this doc is like my doc, doesn't believe in depression.
I'm the same. I have no external issues in life to cause my depression.
In my case it's obviously caused by a chemical ( serotonin) imbalance or some sort of disease process.
Autoimmune disorders have been mentioned as a possible factor, well, I already suffer from an Autoimmune condition.
It's well documented that Autoimmune disorders can appear 'hand in hand ' with each other.
It’s been really evident in the UK recently how much this is a societal label and treating people for reasonable feelings which ought to have a societal remedy. I keep seeing news articles, interviews etc with victims of crime, or people living with insecure housing, or people who’s family members have been caught up in ‘newsworthy’ events, where ‘X person has had to take antidepressants for the last Y months since the incident’ is essentially put forward as a marker of the significance this traumatic event has had on them.
Another problem with the destigmatisation argument is that it is not addressing the root cause of stigma. By saying ‘no you’re not a bad person, its a biological illness’ you are essentially validating the worldview that says that some personality traits might be inherently bad, and people with differing personality traits might be less intrinsically valuable. If instead we attempted to combat the societal stigma around certain personality traits, then we might make a wider range of people’s lives better and also stand a better chance of helping people in ways which actually work
Thanks for this discussion. I started to feel this way about all of it (including how contrived the DSM is) a few years ago when I realized that my antipsychotics didn’t *really* work and then possibly started making me sick. And it was nice to for this video to really explain why I felt that way with seemingly credible evidence. It’s difficult for to separate disinformation about any topic now when it’s being pushed by credible sources.
That being said, I just kinda wanted to note that the dietary advice given at the end of the video can probably picked apart in another video with as much detail as this one did with depression….
Unless there’s some real evidence that I’m not aware of, or if there’s medical issues where diets really truly help.
Food/dietary advice is too often a scapegoat that deflects from the other major problems you mentioned. Not to mention that if we’re speaking about personal observations about diets etc helping folx overcome mental health issues, then in my experience, I was solely focused on food- production, cooking/health based eating, even herbalism all as a career when I started to develop severe mental health issues that eventually led me to take antipsychotics that I probably didn’t need, made me sicker when in reality I was just dealing with life stressors and bad relationships… which went ignored.
For people reading this: healthy food can make a huge difference. Obviously depression is a huge topic, and there is no one size fits all solution. Still, if you have the energy, do prioritize eating fruit, vegetables, beans, lentils, nuts and seeds. And avoiding Ultra processed food, including processed meats.
Depression is very much curable, drug induced brain dysfunction? much harder.
I wish there was more help and answers for this. Because I am suffering either this, or "relapse,because-you-need-medication-for-life" and I have no idea what to believe
Same for anxiety and panic
Wait what how do I cure my depression ???
@@Ava-fx6dq solve underlining issues. For me it looks like it's been about long term stress - loneliness, mistreatment by a parent, unfulfilled life expectations, gender dysphoria. Your situation is probably different, so I cannot recommend anything specific.
@@Ava-fx6dq
3:17 no, then the diagnosis is grief reaction and we may not medicate it depending on the patient's risk of suicide or not
4:47 informative, thank you
10:12 neither do all patients of Diabetes or raised BP or Parkinson's look the same. There are severity levels in all diseases and not everyone of the same severity group has the same symptoms.
Absolutely. Exactly how I understand it. I speak as a survivor of SSRI withdrawal. Well done.
A lot of the points you brought up in this video I can agree strongly with. I have struggled with depression for years and I strongly disagree with a lot of the ways we approach treating depression. I actually work as a Nursing assistant and plan to go to Nursing school. I worked in home health for 4 years and have been working at a hospital for over a year. I can say as someone who struggles with a lot of the symptoms that qualify for depression, I can relate and have a deep understanding on the feelings that the overwhelming majority of depressed people describe. And I strongly agree with especially your second half of this video in getting to the causes of depression. I have drastically improved my physical, spiritual, emotional, mental health, and even financial health by changing my diet, socializing with the people that align with my attitude and lifestyle, and focusing on a bigger purpose and goal. I find that helping people and kindness really helps my overall mood and is also positive for the person you help. My own kind of personal theory is depression is similar to an infection. I think it’s sort of like a spread of positive and negative energy. The more negative aspects around your life are going to have a profound impact on you in the long term if you haven’t been able to change them or by even adding positive ones. Basically, bad begets bad and good begets good. Thank you for this video and thank you for everything you do it is refreshing to see someone who is challenging the way we do things for the purpose of a better outcome. I know I had a ton of stigma towards the medical field largely because of my strong disagreement with the overall approach with treating depression. I can say that after working in the medical field for 5 years and currently that I love my job. I wasn’t sure about it and didn’t honestly enjoy it until after two years of sticking with it and pushing through because I want to make a real positive impact any way I can.
While I agree with your treatment recommendations what I find is that people at the poverty/working poor level generally can’t afford or have access to the more intensive therapies or dietary therapies. It’s an ongoing push to treat societal problems with meds as you’ve accurately noted. For those with expendable incomes much more is available. For instance do you take Medicaid reimbursement in your practice?
Saying the root cause of depression is having been mistreated as a child still leaves the question of what to do about it after the fact. You can’t go back in time to actually fix that root cause.
you’re one of the best psychiatrists on youtube very informative long videos, i enjoy how you talk about mental illness
Thanks for mentioning political/economic as well as social/emotional causes.
Another overlooked cause (or misdiagnosis): autistic burn-out.
Thank you for saying all this. My psychiatrist, instead of drawing correct conclusions such as that most of her patients are depressed because they are in shitty situations (marital or parental abuse, disability and not having proper support, etc.), she prefers to think that the problem if the drug doesn't solve her patients issues is that they "don't want to be better"... When I confronted her (in the psychotherapy style) about it, her answer was : but I'm not strong enough to live in a world were I have to admit that I may end up in a situation like yours just because I don't get proper support from society, it's too frightening! I answered : well I don't get to choose, as I'm not longer able to work because of my disability and I get no support. Radio silence, no answer and since then, she's been wishing I don't come again see her (not me saying it, her saying it). We need more courageous psychiatrist who are willing to admit society needs to fix the root cause of a whole lot of depressions.
great - more of these please - be useful to look at the other common 'disorders' taking in the bigger picture and teasing apart the incentives - really useful, thank you.
Point of clarification from someone with a PhD in clinical psychology: MDD should not be diagnosed in cases of uncomplicated bereavement and there’s a note in the DSM asserting this
I have been a psychiatrist for more than 15 years and have always believed about the psychopathology of depression as a collection of symptoms/signs that point to issues/concerns/beliefs that are either alien to our individual identities or nature or arising as a result of living life/consequences of choices and hence it is absolutely necessary to explore what in our psyche is leading to /pointing us to address such issues/depressive "sings and symptoms".
I don't know about metaphysical causes. My severe depression had a purely physical basis. It was bad gut bacteria, killed with three courses of antibiotics.
I have suffered recurrent depression for over 30 years, and I assure you I do not have any issues of any sort.
As SSRIs have been the only treatment that has allowed me to function normally, I conclude that I do have a serotonin imbalance, and I do not think much of the so called study that allegedly proved otherwise.
i always thought the dsm was wrong and that certain diagnosis were just not a real thing, not because they don't happen but because what we know about them is misunderstood. this happens very obviously with depression, i've been depressed for as long as i can remember but my family is abusive (not physically) and i was heavily sheltered and restricted, once i started to stop listening to everything they said i got a bit better, at least around other people, and when they're not bothering me as much or aren't at home for a bit i feel completely fine and not depressed or anxious at all, but as soon as they come back or i'm not with my friends i feel horrible again and cant deal with anything, even my bpd symptoms are directly linked to how they're acting towards me or if im too stressed out but otherwise i don't have the symptoms at all.
there are other disorders that i think could be linked to circumstance or even health, depression could be due to a vitamin deficiency or a chronic illness or any other health issues, adhd symptoms can be linked to diet and gut microbiome and seem t be worse in children who are neglected, people can confuse autism with being socially awkward and feeling different which could be due to parenting or lack of socialising or using social media at a young age, its a genetic thing but it can be misdiagnosed and can sometimes be improved in some people so i wonder if its not as accurate as we think. mood disorders in women can be caused by menstrual cycles and disorders with them
theres also a lack of information about so many things especially with medication, depression can be helped with antidepressants but they don't actually know why it works, just that it does for some people. antipsychotics and antidepressants can actually cause psychosis or depression or mania. even birth control can help some people and cause depression symptoms in others. anti-anxiety meds can increase anxiety or cause addiction and withdrawals.
i feel like the whole dsm and the way we treat things and teach people about it needs to change as well as the way we think about these things, especially since a lot of mental issues are just natural reactions to bad circumstances, learned behaviour, or health issues
Psychiatrist here.
While i agree with some of your points, such the medicalization of the natural response to stress/adverse life events and the very hetrogenous nature of 'depression'. You also seem contradict yourself by then viewing depression in totality as mostly just a stress reponse/childhood adverse events that is more severe in neurotic person. Then deny any brain problem with mood regulation.
Anyone who managed patients with bipolar disorder will know that their depressions isn't just a natural stress reponse, In the same way their manic/hypomanic episodes aren't a stress reponse. There is no necessarily a 'social cause' of why they switch from depressed to manic or crash from feeling manic to depressed. In bipolar patients there are defnintely biololgical issues in mood regulation, And mood stabilizers are life changing for almost all of them. The magnitude of beneficial effects in treating and especially in preventing replapse is considerably much higher than antidepressants used for unipolar depression.
So yes, Depression is a complex and huge construct, Some of it biololgically driven, some of it social driven and in many cases it is a combination of both.
If psychiatrists who are trained in medicine and biological treatment accept that mental disorders could be treated without medicine , and psychiatric medicines make mental health problems worse and damage brain functions(good only some population) it's like questioning their existence. Psychiatrists must be awake , they must take training in social, political and economic aspects of meantal health problems. These are illnesses or disorder of soul(mind is not brain).
Do you know about PSSD by the way? I got it from antidepressants for anxiety treatment. It's anhedonia, emotional blunting, cognitive impairment, s. dysfunction and other symptoms that persist after discontinuation.
depression can absolutely be caused from biological factors. under-eating or weight loss can cause depression all by iself
The question should be: why do modern people have such a hard time overcoming grief and depression? Why are the rates more prevalent in modern societies as opposed to more "primitive" peoples. The dissolution of universe-explaining myths, break down of tight-knit communities, an emphasis on personal hedonism....but fixing the causes requires more effort than a band-aid pharmaceutical. For example, If I believed I would be reunited with a loved one after death, grief would be so much easier to overcome. But with the secular understanding that we all just dissolve into nothingness, it is almost unbearable to deal with. Also, I tried therapy once, and I felt it was locking me into my problems and an almost narcissistic navel-gazing. When I quit, I felt so much better and in control.
Lack of connections with others and themselves 😢 people lack empathy for themselves and don't know how to be gentle or kind to themselves.
"It was easier to prescribe medications than to engage in the difficult discussions that could result from conducting the necessary investigation to root out these issues"
A good descriptior of past and modern psychiatry and medicine (morphine, benzos, SSRI, anti psychotics) Compounded on with today's stressors.
That can happen with counselling and my recovery from clinical depression coincided with me going back to Catholic mass here in Ireland which to this day nobody agrees with and I don't give two hoots.. the ritual helps me.. the community that you meet in the mass and the certainty of a future in the afterlife. We have some funny beliefs here like a belief in being buried and not cremated.. it's a very old Irish Catholic belief and literally there is still no money put away to bury me as I spend my money on health products as I have a couple of supposed autoimmune diseases. Most are cured on the keto diet by the way. I have completed a very good course and once I am in the relevant job I will be putting away peace of mind money which isn't that much to know that when I die my body will be dealt with in the dignity that i deal appropriate..
Unfortunately, universe-explaining myths don't stand up under scrutiny and if one says so, those who still believe ostracize (and sometimes even kill) non-believers. We need groups that are less fanatic and don't completely lose their shit when someone says, "Um, what if this is bullshit?"
One thing I would add to this list is diet. Modern diets are awful.
I think most of what is said is true and for sure a more supportive and sociable society where human needs are met would solve most of this. However, SAD is an example of where something is about imbalance ie circadian rhythm goes off and early morning awakening with anxiety and depression occurs. In other words, it seems mood can easily be impacted.
I got depression when I hit puberty at 13 years old. Went from a happy kid to a depressed 13 year old. Crying, worrying, feeling desperate, feeling like Id lost myself. Happy childhood, brilliant upbringing with supportive loving parents. All the meaning drained out of my life Ifelt numb but anxious and it was excruciatingly painful also. I wouldnt wish it on anyone. So changes in my brain and body with hormones / chemicals? It ended after 3 or 4 months. Ive struggled my whole life with it ive tried everything and do have better periods but if I had an external reason it would be much easier. Depression kills people it has a spectrum. It can be a very serious thing.
I recommend looking into metacognitive therapy. It has some really good evidence
@@instant_mint Therapies only work if there is some underlying issue (s) causing the depression.
I am fortunate to always have had a very happy and relatively trouble free life, yet I still have depression.
I have tried all these therapies, but they don't work because it's obvious I have an imbalance of serotonin in my brain, and SSRIs address that and allow me to function normally.
This guy might be the first of his age group to challenge the current status quo. Fuckin rock on. If the whole world wasn't garbage and I could attend university for 5k like my parents, I to would fight the power! Thank you or your parents or my government for putting forth the moneys and still going against the brainwashing. I sound bitter but I'm sincere. You're the beginning of a new era!
I always believe I got depression after I took two different drugs for acne age 22 .. I actually don't think the antibiotics did it because I have a hormonal imbalance that reappeared later in life I think it was the contraceptive pill that I was put on for 2 years for severe acne that while I was on it I felt fine but when I came off of it then the problem arose. It got very severe and turned into one year of clinical depression which I'm happy to say many years have gone by and once I got over one bad year it never reoccurred
Did you take accutane? There is a problem called Post-Accutane Syndrome
When they did the brain imaging, did they look at the serotonin/dopamine /norepinephrine . activity during a task compared to a not depressed person , or like how well the neurotransmitters were functioning? I couldn’t tell if he said or not or if that’s what he was talking about. It seemed like he said they kinda were just looking at structure or number of transmitters not how well they were working.
I love how you go into this in so much depth.
Man, you are an angel. Really. You could stay silent and do your profession and just earn the money but you are a true angel. I've been into an unjust penal procedure towards me and I was really stressed so I went to a psychiatrist, he gave me Rivotirl ( clonazepam ) in drops and Cipralex (escitalopram) - I used them for 5 days and thank god I quit. Now after a little bit of studiying about my anxiety, I am totally well. I'm good. It's 1 month since I took the meds and I feel totally ok, I get anxious but I self CBT and they go away.. people need to understand that getting a diagnosis of depression and anxiety is really easy, also to get prescriptions.
I don't believe a persistent moderate/major depression is a standalone disease at all. I consider it as being only a symptom of an unrecognised underlying disease, probably linked to immune system with origins in central nervous system (CNS), gut, possibly even in disfunctional mitochondria. We just don't know and it's irresponsible to say otherwise as we know very little in detail how our CNS actually functions, that's why we can't effectively treat (auto)immune and degenerative diseases like, Alzheimers, Parkinskons, Chrons, RA, MS and cancers. I was "depressed" since my late teens with constantly abnormal IgG and monocites blood levels, just to find out I've been having autoimmune/neurodegenerative disease all this time 30 yrs later.
Thank you for your work!
Thanks for being so introspective and reflective on these topics. I think depression is a spiritual issue too often presented to practitioners who don’t know what to do except prescribe drugs. I think people have problems which are misconstrued as having a nonexistent chemical imbalance in the brain. I really think people should steer clear of psychiatry when these feelings or thoughts occur. They are being misled by the fraud in this messed up system. I think it is a dangerous path to tread because you probably are getting fed drugs your healthy brain does not need.
My brain is NOT healthy. Having recurrent depression for over 30 years with no outward cause, it is obvious that I do have a serotonin imbalance.
SSRIs allow me to lead a normal life.
I do not have any of the "thoughts" or "feelings" of which you speak.
How come doctors don't address the issue on parasites in humans and how they can affect our mental health in such ways? Yes they can cause depression. We come in contact with these bugs everyday from our food - meat, veggies, especially from processed foods, sugars, but also from pets abd environment. They can stay in our body for years. They are microscopic. It's difficult because the testing is not good and they aren't always detected, but you can find their presence in other ways. Some people's immune systems filter these out and don't have any issues with them, but some others are not so lucky and it can cause all sorts of health issues including our mental health. This is why diet and nutrients are important in addition to do parasite cleanses. I wish there were more studies on this to bring awareness.
its true we also ignore, lyme/infections, metabolic problems mold, hormonal problems,
Well, if there were several kinds of depression, some with precise underlying neurological causes, wouldn't lumping them all together under this one fuzzy label keep many of those studies from detecting them?
Circumstances that are beyond our control make our culture feel life is hopeless .
Well... life is, and has always been, by definition, beyond our control. 😉
So... isn't it rather the other way round ?
What if it was our society's incapacity to accept that simple fact that actually lead people to feel anxious all the time?
Thank you so much. This is the most helpful information I got in 15 years in the mental illness system... I am so angry.
Hi Dr. Josef, this is an excellent presentation on depression. Do you also have one for burnout? Burnout seems sharing the same attributes as depression, and worse, burnout is not defined as an illness or disease.
I am loving your content. The way you present is very thorough and I appreciate that you show your sources and explain visuals.
I wasn't sure about the way you presented the criteria for depression for point 2: No consideration for contextual stressors. I had to go back and realized that you use words carefully, noting that people "qualify" for a diagnosis of depression and would be "eligible" for drug treatment rather than "diagnosed" based on their subjective reports and without context per DSM specifications. Based on your wording, this is true, but I feel like at face value this could be misconstrued by viewers. Have you seen patients diagnosed so carelessly? I don't work as directly with mental health assessment, but have an understanding that the biopsychosocial components for clients will all play into mental health. I hope that teaching a thorough understanding of context is not unique to social work (my field). I just feel like it's important to emphasize in point 2 the "dictionary-ness" of the DSM to coin a term, and I would hope the clinicians engaging with patients aren't hanging on its every word and fail to rely on common sense during assessment.
That being said, I felt curious because I am familiar with other diagnoses that are fairly specific about the circumstances that disqualify a diagnosis. I was surprised to find that the DSM-IV specified that something like bereavement would be a disqualifying contextual factor, but in the DSM-V edition, that specification was removed. How interesting. I wonder what was behind that decision! Source:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519704/table/ch3.t4/
Also, I've been focused on CPTSD in school and am curious if you have any opinions on its relevance to mental health. I loved that you acknowledged trauma's significance in depressed patients, and I found it interesting that you specifically noted childhood trauma as a significant stressor. I know that, speaking of DSM deficiencies, there is not enough trauma-informed diagnostic information and that CPTSD isn't even included as a diagnosable disorder in the US. But IMHO polyvagal theory + context awareness + trauma understanding feels like a game-changer for mental health understanding--in a getting-at-the-root-of-things kind of way.
Sorry for the long-windedness. I don't usually find such engaging content on TH-cam. Please keep informing!
I believe that it depends on a person’s personality some are more sensitive to stress than others. Twelve years ago I noticed and still remember that something happened in me after being living with lots of pressure and stress. At least I perceived my stressors had gone much too far. I can absolutely tell that I almost changed over a night. And unfortunately never managed to come back to my older me. If I may say that I feel my brain damaged or at least changed. I could not recover during my sleep anymore and everything I had to do became a nightmare. Many people just can’t change their life even though it would help someone’s mental health. Some people can cope better with challenges than others. I’m on Lexapro ever since and it helped me a lot the first few years but not so much nowadays. Thx for a very thorough explanation doctor.!
One critical part of the constellation of symptoms is that it relies on self-reporting. Plenty of people might deny a biological marker if they don't think they're ill, but we wouldn't let that influence our diagnosis. If depressed people don't see their symptoms as symptoms, then they won't report them and we won't disgnose them. So the only sampling of people with depression we have, from which we derive our very definition of depression, are those who are willing or able to accurately self-report. Given how depression seems to interfere with motivation and executive functioning, this group of self-reporters (and their other symptoms) might be in the minority of sufferers.
Thank you for this. I see this and have for a long time. When I found your videos it was so refreshing and validating. So what can we do as clinician. Payor sources now drive how we are treating our clients in so many ways. I feel unethical in supporting this way of industry. Thank you for this.
In my experience, when there are too many very traumatic life stressors occurring over decades and you end up stuck between a rock and a hard place for decades, medications like SRRIs are very helpful in taking the edge off, and gives one a bit of breathing space to learn better coping skills and make living at least bearable.
I agree with pretty much everything you say, except your concluding point about medication (ie SSRIs) being safe. That’s probably the case for some, or perhaps most people, but for others they can do harm.
I was diagnosed using the PHQ-9 questionnaire and put on increasing doses of citalopram and then sertraline. I was later diagnosed with ASD and my earlier symptoms were found to be that of autistic burnout. The SSRIs made no difference apart from suppressing my natural brain patterns, but the real problems occurred when tapering off after 5 years - those supposedly minor ‘brain zaps’ developed into seizures, with other severe side effects persisting for 3-4 years and leaving me with a chronic and severe memory disorder (loss of episodic memory function, past and present).
There’s a presumption when coming off antidepressants that a patient will resume normal brain function within a few weeks, but those of us on the autistic spectrum often feature something called ‘aberrant neuroplasticity’ which correlates with the inflexible behaviour that most of us display in normal life. It is very difficult for the healthcare sector to capture this information since most of these negative outcomes just get bundled into the already-complex pathology of autism, so the data is lost and doctors still don’t understand that an extra level of supervision is needed if these drugs are given to a neurodivergent patient.
Excellent video, thank you
I love this guy. Thanks so much for your work.
The question, the burning question is why do so many people with severe anxiety get depression. The problem of anxiety is not understood. It too is considered a brain problem.
Anxiety is a problem for the heart because there is fear and worry.
In severe anxiety, unlike ordinary anxiety, there is a fight or flight response, which raises the heart rate. Worry, the attempt to think through and solve some issue, requires resting metabolism because in a stress response the cognitive function in the brain is declined to some extent. So the metabolism returns to the resting state to enable the person to think. This means the heart is getting signals to go slow. But as they start thinking they become aware of the danger problem or issue and they go back to high metabolism, the stress response, which means the heart is getting signals to go faster.
The net result is that the heart is getting signals to go fast then slow then fast again and so on. If this continues then the heart becomes ineffective as a pump and that means the metabolism will go low, lower than resting metabolism. The screaming evidence here is that heart rate variability is affected, lost essentially. Without heart rate variability we cannot feel any momentary high that comes when we experience something pleasant in the moment.
You have to resolve the underlying problem to arrest the depression. No medications are going to do any good.
What do you think about the hypothesis from Dr. Sapolsky? He talks about the damage of cortisol in the hippocampus which isn‘t reversible and you need to take antidepressants to keep the damage at bay..
I asked the question 20 years ago.
The main cause of depression in my opinion is processed sugar and also blood sugar levels which people elevate with diet. Adequate hydration and no to low sugar is key to recovering. There are other minor factors such as disliking their job and work hours but it’s mainly inflammation from poor diet and abusing sugar.
Dr. Josef thanks. Can you make videos on bipolar, ADHD, other problems? i wonder they may be just labeling like depression. Thanks so much
One of the smartest , honest doctor in the world. Thank you for everything you do
I love it how for women in perimenopause and menopause the recommendation is to give antidepressants for emotional changes and vasomotor symptoms rather than treat the root cause which is hormone deficiency. The mental and physical issues that women are experiencing are directly related to the loss of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone which also increases risk of Alzheimer’s, heart disease, osteoporosis, joint/connective tissue degradation, pelvic floor dysfunction, bladder dysfunction, GI issues, and more. Yet yeah, just throw antidepressants at us instead of hormone replacement therapy (and no, not birth control)…🙄🤬
Always get your thyroid checked Also Thyroid blood test
I don’t really want to take anti depressants. I’m on day 4 of escitalopram and honestly don’t know what to do. I was seriously depressed before trying them and still am
I’m in bed, not eating, been like this a week. Not sleeping
Had depression on and off for decades
Have you ever suffered severe depression with psychosis? And then in turn been treated very successfully with medication? With other disorders such as bipolar disorder, schizoaffective order, and schizophrenia should we teach skills and not prescribe pills? I understand the medicalization of psychology is pumped up by drug companies. I'm using the term "psychology" because your job as a physician is essentially pointless. Who needs you? Just see a therapist. The outdated commercials are a nice touch. I agree in a comprehensive approach. But medication as a last resort and then an obsession with removing them can destroy lives. I would shocked but delighted if you would respond.
This makes me feel so much more at ease!
The DSM was invented for insurance companies. For insurance to pay, they needed a diagnosis. That is the entire reason behind the DSM. Just because you are told you have something doesn't mean you really have it or that it even really exists.
I’m a bit confused by the way we use the word ‘neurotic’ to describe a person who is often anxious as a personality trait, but ‘anxiety’ to pathologies seemingly the same thing
"Neuroticism" (in the Big Five Factor model) or "Emotionality" (in the similar HEXACO model) are, in their nomenclature, "traits," each with multiple "aspects."
"Anxiety" is *relatively* easy to describe and understand, IMO. "Depression" is much more vague and slippery. Being inherently high in "Neuroticism" or "Emotionality" predisposes one to anxiety and depression as pathologies.
Your channel is such an important one, thank you for doing this kind of work! I have experienced first hand & had so many friends struggle with medication & prescribers that don't do the therapeutic work along side them & it kills people, thank you Dr josef!
My severe depression was due to bad gut bacteria. Four foods would give me three days of severe depression. I was cured with antibiotics prescribed by a Chinese doctor who told me that bad bacteria was behind these food reactions. She got the clue when I told her that eggs also gave me severe asthma attacks, and that this never happened before. It was then that she knew I needed three courses of antibiotics, one being a tetracycline.
You're still wrong. For a mdd dx sx have to present outside of a grief reaction or drug use etc. That's simply poor diagnosis.
I just got into LA today and I don't know if this happened to you guys. As soon as I stepped off the plane here the air hit my eyes and my eyes would not stop watering. I was like "Oh my god" right? So I went to the doctor here and I thought it was going to be allergies. Plot twist! It was not allergies, turns out: depression!
My father experienced severe depression, to the point where he eventually committed suicide. I have inherited his illness (yes, inherited), and I don't have nearly as severe symptoms because of medications. My belief is that there are many people on social media that attempt to persuade others to not get treatment because these are not real illnesses. This shows that there continues to be a lot of stigma surrounding mental illness. I have never seen anyone on social media attempt to persuade people with MS, Parkinsons and other diseases to not get treatment. Yes, we can see Parkinsons and MS on brain scans, but 50+ years ago, could we see these diseases on brain scans? People back then, had no idea what Parkison's was. However, there were still people who experienced Parkinson's disorder.
Those who do not touch the drugs will save their health.
We losers who fall for it have to suffer.
I often hear people compare depression with type 1 diabetes. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Since there is no measurement of serotonin like the monitor of blood sugar. They are not the same. If someone is living in a place they hate and doing a job they hate , and staying in a marriage they hate, plus not eating right and not exercise. and there is little they can do about it at the time, how can they not get depressed.
Thank you for such an informative and interesting video. Subscribed 🙏👍
Just about to try psycadelics 36:48 with Monarch clinic Melbourne Australia.
Any comments from you Dr? I watch all your videos. We don’t have a tapering clinic in Canberra that I know of. Cutting out SSRI is horrendous. Got to 50 mcgs a day so far. Been left on them 23 years was at 150. Make me suicidal but not having it is another visit to psyche ward
Hi. I got out of a 24 year mistreatment of what people I now trust in medicine was treating no actual mental illness. I was always trying to make sense of what I was being told, and what it was being prescribed, and true, I was walking in the door and I was eating the pills. I lost so much function due to bad meds, erasing close to a decade into a half zombie trance, and then I faced a cascade of problems getting off one pill that basically shatters my mind for 13 months. It looks like I just got my clarity back less than a week ago. Through this I have formed enormous concerns over what we call mental health treatment. The whole term “mental illness “needs to be seriously unpacked. In many cases, it is literally nothing other than a social construct. That is risky, to say the least. No for the record I am not saying anyone should flush their psych meds. I’ll just say that to get it over with. I will say, certainly with the Internet, if you have a mental health, diagnosis or treatment that seems suspicious, I recommend you do your homework, and do it carefully. I know you can’t trust everything online, but I know I can’t trust everything in the doctors office either. Thank you Dr., I’ve seen a couple of your videos, including good videos on benzodiazepines‘s, I believe, what you are saying here is fully consistent with everything I am observing and I am glad to see you talking about this so openly.
Thank you for the video!
It's also really hard for family members watching their loved ones drowning in pills and "medicine", knowing you're probably at least a small part of their suffering, but too timid to actually sit down and talk. That's me with my dad. I know I'm not the daughter he wished for, I know I disappointed him dearly and I absolutely can't handle how he transformed from a witty strong minded and willed, educated man I saw as a "perfect man" growing up, into a weak, pathetic crybaby unable to keep himself alive. If not for my mum he wouldn't be here anymore. Probably.
We often clashed, even when I was just a kid and I often criticized his neurotic and (in my eyes) respectless behavior towards mum but I know I'm only barely better than him. I "left" my family at only 16 years old, dealing with anger issues, insecurities etc and I flourished away from home. Since then I willingly took everything my parents offered in terms of help, support etc but I rarely give back. I know he doesn't feel loved by me and I know I accept him, but I don't love him like my mum. It's weird.
He's having so many underlying issues he never talks about and it hurts me watching him disappear, I know he's getting better as soon as he starts to work on his issues, but also it doesn't bother me that much bc I emotionally detached from him years ago. I know I'm at fault. I know I should do better and help him.
But I'm so scared to talk to him about all these feelings bc it took me years to detach and find my inner peace.
He's never been a bad dad, I never experienced violence at home, he's just rarely been there for me as a child and his patience has always been thin. But apart from being told that I'm stupid and getting punished for not thinking things through I had a nice childhood.
Heck, do I need therapy? No idea why I'm talking about all this here. Sorry 😅
But what I wanted to point out - depression is a monster not only hurting those unlucky souls tortured by it but also those around.
what was interesting to me is that it appeared that suicide rates in the US seem to drop significantly from the end of 2018 until the end of 2020, but then started going back up to their usual trend in 2021. Are there any good theories as to why that might've occurred?
Covid