FLF: #6 Breaking Free from Conventional Medicine w/ Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring

Unmasking Psychiatry: Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring’s Fight Against Big Pharma

Join us on this eye-opening episode of 'For the Love of Freedom' as we engage in a deep conversation with Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, a board-certified psychiatrist and founder of the Taper Clinic. Dr. Josef shares his mission to challenge conventional psychiatry, exposing the truth about psychiatric diagnoses and the pharmaceutical industry's influence. Discover his journey from the FDA to founding the Taper Clinic, where he focuses on tapering patients off benzodiazepines and antidepressants. Uncover the unsettling realities of psychiatric medications, their side effects, and the systemic issues perpetuated by Big Pharma. This is a must-listen for anyone concerned about mental health treatment and pharmaceutical ethics.

SCRIPTURE OF THE DAY:

Psalms‬ ‭18‬:‭28‬ ‭TPT‬‬

 

ACTION & INFO FROM TODAY'S EPISODE:

• To learn more about Dr. Joseph's work & clinics, visit: www.taperclinic.com
• Find him on X @taperclinic
• Follow him on YouTube as Dr. Josef @taperclinic

  

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KEY POINTS:

00:00 Debunking Psychiatric Diagnoses
01:38 Introduction to Dr. Yosef Whiting
04:05 Dr. Whiting's Journey into Psychiatry
06:22 Challenges in Psychiatric Training
10:35 Critique of Psychiatric Medications
16:00 Cultural and Societal Issues
17:22 Personal and Professional Backlash
18:30 Alternative Solutions and Root Causes
20:08 Impact of Other Medications
22:54 Cultural Shift Towards Medication
25:34 Lack of Human Connection
33:13 The Misleading Nature of Psychiatric Diagnoses
36:00 Challenges in Conventional Medical Practice
38:23 The Impact of Psychiatric Medications
41:55 ADHD: Diagnosis and Cultural Perspectives
51:19 The Role of Diet and Lifestyle in Mental Health
53:36 Inside the FDA: A Culture of Compliance
01:00:19 Reforming the Pharmaceutical Industry
01:02:24 Conclusion and Resources

 

Danielle Walker (00:01.25)
Welcome everyone and a special welcome to VOP USA radio listeners tuning in from around the world. Thank you all for joining us. Welcome to For the Love of Freedom, where we get to meet the person behind the mission to bring freedom to the world. Today, my guest has an incredible mission and it is to free people from one of the most insidious parasites in our world today. My words, not his, and that's big pharma.

Dr. Josef Witt-Doring is originally from Australia. He's a board certified psychiatrist and founder of the Taper Clinic, where he works with patients to address withdrawal symptoms, particularly from benzodiazepines and antidepressants. His approach emphasizes personalized evidence-based tapering plans, patient empowerment, and holistic care. I think you can correct me if I'm wrong, doctor.

seven locations and you do online consultations as well. A little bit more about your background. You served as a medical officer at the FDA's Division of Psychiatry Products, analyzing adverse drug reactions and proposing drug labeling changes. He also held roles in clinical research and drug safety at pharmaceutical companies where he gained insight into the risks of psychiatric medications. So we have

Both been in the belly of the beast and we can maybe talk a little bit about that. have most recently worked at Pfizer. But Dr. Whit-Doring, I'm so pleased to have you joining me today. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on with us.

Josef (01:36.926)
It's pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Danielle Walker (01:39.938)
Yeah, you're absolutely welcome. Well, I always like to start my shows with a scripture to help frame the conversation. And the one for today is Psalm chapter 18, verse 28. And it says, let me grab it. It says, God, all at once you turned on a floodlight for me. You are the revelation light in my darkness and in your brightness, I can see the path ahead. And as I was reading that, I just thought, you know, Dr.

I love the work that you're doing and this script, I felt the need to bring this scripture because I think about the freedom and the hope that you're bringing to people through your work. And I think this is how some of them, probably many of them must feel like they're coming out of a thick fog or worse and they can finally see the path ahead. Would you give us a little bit about back of your background? What drew you into psychiatry to start with? And then what ultimately turned on that floodlight for you?

about the harm that was being caused by prescription medications.

Josef (02:43.422)
It's interesting because I think I started my interest with psychiatry and mental health. I actually think being very clear about how I wanted to help people, a perspective that I now think was the right one originally. And the interesting thing about my story is that I end up walking into that fog, that I had good intuition about how to help people, but...

along the way was led astray and then had to come out of it again. And so that's the overarching theme. mean, if I go back to my interest in becoming a psychiatrist, I wanted to help people. And I really liked self-help. I liked psychology. I had a very can-do attitude towards fixing things. I think I come from a place where if there is a problem in your life, know, there...

there are people that know how to fix them. And if you work on it and you get good advice, you can write things, complicated things, things like your problems with relationships or even finding meaning in your life. There is a way to address these issues. And that always resonated with me from a very young age, when I was a teenager. And so I loved...

consuming that content, it just felt right to me and it was helpful in my life. But when I was in medical school, I had to pick a specialty and I thought, know, psychiatry sounds like a great fit.

I love reading this stuff. I find it very empowering. It's helpful in my own life. Maybe I can merge my interest in medicine with my interest in self-development and personal growth, all of that. I said, psychiatry sounds like that could be a great fit. And so I said, I'm gonna do that as a career.

Josef (04:40.966)
I started my psychiatric residency. I was in Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and that was not what I saw at all. In fact, what happened over the next four years was a real stripping away of what felt intuitive. So I had thought I would go into my psychiatric training and, you know, I would be

we'd be supporting people, we would be connecting them with professionals who could help them address problems in their lives, whether they're relational problems or work problems, whether sometimes it's just resources, because people are having issues with poverty and all of the things that go along with that. And I was thinking, yes, maybe we'll use these medications judiciously, cautiously if we really need to, but really we're gonna support building people up.

Danielle Walker (05:22.562)
Yeah.

Josef (05:35.295)
And yes, there might be some cases where, you know, because someone has something like schizophrenia and it's really serious or they have advanced dementia. I mean, we might have to use some medications, you know, cautiously on an ongoing basis. mean, it felt intuitive to me, but what I saw in the training was just so different from what I had expected. We were just seeing patients in these 20 minute visits. We weren't really

taking the time to get to know them. We were told we could just diagnose them based on checklists of symptoms without really understanding where the symptoms were coming from. And we were putting them on medications. And that was all we really had time to do. And so we would see them, we would ask them what symptoms they had, and we'd put them on something without understanding why they had the symptoms. And when we saw them for the follow-up, you two months later or three months later, we would say, do we want to go up, down?

or stay the same. And it just felt so off to me. And I would bring this up with my attendings. say, you know, there's something not right about this. And they'd say, you know, Joseph, don't worry. These drugs, they're FDA approved. You know, they're safe and effective for anxiety and depression. know, these conditions, they're medical. Yes, sure. You sometimes they can be based on life, but...

really if they're based on life, they wouldn't be getting to this point. And so it's probably more of a chemical imbalance or a neurological problem and we need to fix it with a drug. I mean, that's essentially the messaging that I got. And it just felt off and I asked questions and they would look at me as if that I had been trained very poorly in Australia, where I did medical school or there was something quite rude about it because...

I should have gotten the memo that we don't ask these questions. know, it's just assumed it's one of these things where, you know, there's sometimes these beliefs which you're not allowed to question in a culture and it's just everyone just takes them for granted. I was questioning those. I was saying things like, well, wouldn't it be bad to put people on these medications, you know, based on the checklist of symptoms if we don't understand where they're coming from? Isn't it a problem if we put people on medications that

Josef (07:54.239)
clearly wear off over time because the brain becomes tolerant to them. Isn't this just going to lead to people accumulating one drug after another? Isn't it confusing to diagnose people who have been on these meds for a long time? How much of it is the drug? How much of it is maybe something that happened 10 years ago, like a divorce? What's really going on with this person now? And you don't ask those questions in psychiatry. The drugs are safe. Everything is the underlying condition.

And there's almost these like veiled threats as well. like, if you, you know, it's almost like the vaccine stuff. It's like, if you start questioning them and you, you know, cause some vaccine hesitancy or some psychiatric drug hesitancy, the blood is on your hands and you know, and if you scare people away from these life-saving interventions, you're, you know, there's something, you know, very, you know, you're, you're dangerous. And

I didn't have words really for a lot of what was going on, but I could feel this strange pressure and I didn't like it. And so I decided then that I was going to become a drug safety researcher because I said these drugs, cannot be as safe as my attendings are letting on. I mean, to me intuitively, you cannot fix problems unless you understand where they come from. And we most certainly were not taking the time to understand our patients in the time constraints.

Danielle Walker (09:21.281)
And it feels so basic, right, when you say that, but it's really a big deal in medicine right now, that that's just not the case. For the most part, conventional medicine, seems. Doctors are not able to, or choose not to, depending on the circumstance, able to actually even have.

Josef (09:41.555)
And the more political, I was going to say the more political it gets, the less, the more the doctors stop listening to patients. mean, with the whole COVID situation and Gardasil and all of these different vaccine injuries that are coming out now, you cannot, you know, if you step out of the party line, well, I mean, for them, it's all, you know, it's unrelated. And so they just don't listen to patients anymore.

They go, well, the government says these are safe and effective, so they're safe and effective. Don't be a troublemaker.

Danielle Walker (10:22.061)
And so you went on, I'm sorry I interrupted you, went on to study adverse effects of drugs.

Josef (10:23.027)
Yeah.

Josef (10:28.381)
Yeah.

Yeah, so I'm sitting there and I'm like, this doesn't feel right to me, but all of these professors and I was at Baylor, you know, Baylor, it's a, I mean, it is a decent academic university with good professors and, you know, good endowments. And, you know, I'd say definitely a national standing and probably an international standing for some areas of research. And they were all like, you know, this is fine. This is not a problem.

but it felt wrong to me, but I knew I didn't know enough about research to really go toe to toe and say, this is why it's not right. So I ended up doing a fellowship in psychiatric clinical trial research at Janssen Pharmaceutical, which is the pharmaceutical arm of Johnson and Johnson. It's, I mean, they've been the biggest manufacturer of novel psychiatric drugs for decades. And so I'm working there. I'm learning how clinical trials are run. running

Danielle Walker (11:02.507)
Yeah.

Josef (11:23.624)
clinical trials for a ketamine drug. And I stayed there for a year and then I used that to get a foothold into the FDA as a medical officer. And so now I'm, instead of working on just one trial, I'm overseeing maybe 20 different drugs on the US market, looking at their safety. I'm also doing evaluations for new drugs coming onto the US market. And what I was able to learn there was really about

the evidence base supporting the use of these psychiatric medications. And it was just frightening. I end up, mean, long story short, I leave the FDA, I go back to the pharmaceutical industry for a year and I essentially quit because by that stage, it had dawned on me that we were essentially lying to patients about the safety of the medications. We were leaving out really important information that anyone

would want people to know about. know, particularly the things that were most, the most troubling is the fact that the drugs aren't studied any longer than three months. And we put people on these drugs for years and they clearly cause tolerance and they wear off over time. And, you know, we're saying, the drugs safe and effective, but yeah, for the three months the FDA studied them for, you know, how does that make sense?

Danielle Walker (12:46.061)
Yeah.

Josef (12:50.286)
And, and so I end up, mean, there's a parallel to the story where while I'm at the FDA and working in the pharmaceutical industry, my wife and I have started a private practice and we've, and because of our convictions, we've started tapering people off medications because we're worried about the harms. And eventually I just quit and I start doing that full time and speaking out quite vocally about all of the problems that I'm seeing with.

the medications and the research. And now I think I'm probably the most well-known person in the critical psychiatry space, at least on social media. We've got, I would say about 200,000 people subscribed across our channels and we were sharing information about drug injuries, clinical research, and we have the largest e-prescribing practice in the world. We've got, we were in 10 US states and growing.

And it's really been...

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the story from a bird's eye view of how I've ended up here.

Danielle Walker (14:00.703)
I love it and I love that you took such a scientific approach to figuring out what was actually going on with the science and I'm sure that was met with some resistance. Has your being vocal on some of these issues caused some backlash for you personally?

Josef (14:19.816)
Big time, yeah, yeah, so it's, I would say.

Josef (14:27.006)
Criticism of psychiatric medications is a sacred cow in our society, particularly in the US.

Josef (14:40.466)
We really, think, I mean there's so many ways to go into this but...

In our society, in our culture, more and more these days, we look at people who are on medications and who are having mental health problems as really victims. These people that they're suffering. And if you were to even talk about the risks of these medications, you're dangerous, they say you're stigmatizing them as if bringing up

side effects that people can have informed consent is somehow, you know, saying pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Cause I'm not saying that I'm really saying that people ought to know the information about the drugs and the limitations of the research before they make decisions to get on them or put their children on them. And, and because there's so much of this, you know,

there's so much advocacy around mental illness. Anytime someone even gets a whiff of, this person's not saying the party line, which is essentially the drugs are safe and effective. It's so brave of you to get on them. It's okay. If someone's not saying that, they come for you. So, I mean, people stalk me around the internet. They post the information for the medical boards where I'm licensed and they say, please submit a complaint against Dr. Yosef. Let's get him struck from the medical board.

I have professionals on Twitter and different places calling me a fraudster and that my business of getting people off medications, that's the only reason why I talk about these problems.

Danielle Walker (16:15.309)
Well, you're not enriching a big pharma any longer. You're, you're disempowering or disenriching big pharma. So if you, I get it. Are you, hold on one second. Let me see. I just lost my train of thought. You, we were talking about,

Josef (16:22.31)
I know. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Danielle Walker (16:37.717)
Okay, so you're getting people off of these big drugs. What happens? you're moving them off of these drugs. I've seen that there's a lot of really horrifying side effects for the drugs when they're taking them. They can be even more horrifying when they're coming off of them. And then what's ultimately the solution to the original problem because the drug clearly wasn't it.

Josef (16:38.194)
You would ask me.

Josef (17:05.854)
Yeah, so this is a few things. So we'll start with the last question of like, what about the solution to the original problem? Because people get on these medications for a reason. And what I find is that I feel like out of the people on these medications, only 5 % really ought to be on them. Because when I do the histories with people, most people got put on the drug for really

I would say not good reasons. know, they, you know, and this is not because they weren't suffering, but they were suffering when they got on them. They just shouldn't, should have been offered something that wasn't a pharmaceutical. So when I talk to people, they'll say things like, I went through a divorce. I moved town for work or for college and I was having a hard time. I was burning the candle on both ends. was, you know, I was, you know, I was using some drugs maybe, or I was, you know, consuming a lot of stimulants and

or cannabis, I wasn't looking after myself, know, I found out that, you know, I was in college and my parents wanted me to be an engineer and I really didn't want to be an engineer and I was doing something that I hated and then I got into a job and I really didn't like it. Whenever you talk to people and if you give them enough time, they will give you context into what was happening. And so for all of these people who ended up on these medications because of life hardship, there was a better solution.

them. There was a solution out there that could have been directed actually at the problem and fixed it at the root cause and it shouldn't have been papered over with a drug that numbed their emotions which they were then left on long term. And so I think that's like, yeah.

Danielle Walker (18:49.335)
Yeah. How many, sorry, how much of what you see would be stuff like anxiety and depression that is induced by another medication they're on that's not psychiatric in nature? Because I know for sure that birth control causes a lot of anxiety in women and that's just something that de facto OBs love to put 15 year old girls on for no reason.

Josef (19:19.57)
I see it a lot is the truth. I think the two major culprits are the oral contraceptive pill for young women. For some people it has the opposite effect that they can feel less emotionally reactive on it, at least at first. But for many people who take the oral contraceptive pill, it makes them more emotional. And then the doctors don't realize it and they end up on antidepressants. The other big problem is there's a few...

There's few of them actually, are statins. Statins can make people feel depressed and anxious and have brain fog. We put everyone on statins these days. That's a big one that ends up being a gateway drug into the psychiatric system. A massive one is cannabis as well. know, people have this perspective that cannabis is medicine now, but I get lots of people who end up with bipolar or sometimes even schizophrenia diagnoses from cannabis use.

you know, something that we talked about before we kind of officially hit plays, I actually think a lot of anxiety and insomnia is due to overuse of caffeine and nicotine products coupled with a lack of physical movement. I think we have a society these days where people will, you know, they'll sit behind their computers all day. They don't move their bodies like they've been designed to, and to just, especially in the U.S. where people are very competitive and work-oriented.

you know, and I'm speaking from experience because I had this happen to me, you know, we can sit behind our computer, you know, you know, have a coffee in the morning to diet coke, sort of a couple top tops of caffeine and you can have some chewing tobacco in and it wrecks your sleep and it makes you kind of strung out. Then you feel like you have to balance it out with a couple of drinks in the evening and you just get on this, this roller coaster that leads you to being anxious. And so I do think a big part of why

we get depressed and anxious are, you know, aside from the intuitive things like the relationship problems and the work problems, it's really what we're doing to our body with different substances or medications.

Danielle Walker (21:26.541)
Have you looked into it all? Why at some point would we even think that if I'm having a problem in my relationship a chemical pill is going to fix it?

Josef (21:39.305)
You know, part of this is it's extremely disturbing, but it's in the culture these days. have, you know, so I treat people who have had severe drug injuries. mean, that's like if, that's generally why you come to the taper clinic to get off the medications, because something terribly wrong has happened with the meds. And I talk to the moms and they'll go, my daughter's asking me for an antidepressant.

She says, I want to get on something because I'm having a hard time knowing full well what's happened to me. Like, how do I even understand this? And then she goes to her daughter, she goes, well, like, don't you understand the effect that this has had on the family, on me? Why would you want it? And she would say, it's not a big deal. I mean, all my friends take these, you know, it's fine. It's so ubiquitous these days that, so everyone is taking them.

And there's almost this like social currency to being on medications if you're a Gen Z-er. Like you go into TikTok and people list the medications they're on, like sometimes in their bios, you know, that you'll see videos. And this is, this was unheard of when I, when I grew up. I mean, I didn't know anyone's psychiatric medications or diagnoses. I was in a class of like 400 people. Like I knew one kid had ADHD and he was on medications. And that was

Danielle Walker (22:57.804)
Right.

Josef (23:05.096)
kind of normal for me, but now it's like, there's almost this, yeah, there's a social currency to it where it's like, hey, everyone's on them. You know, there's something, you know, look at me, I'm so troubled, I need medication. You know, I'm deep in this way, I'm complicated in this way. Sometimes I think children also, maybe they don't get the validation.

or understanding that they really need from their families or professionals. And sometimes even getting on a medication feels like validation. It's like, I am hurting and their pain is legitimate. But unfortunately, if they cannot get someone to sort of validate it and say, this is normal and here is the plan because people are strapped for time or that they're not comfortable talking with folks. Then they end up on a medication. But there's a sickness. There's a cultural sickness at the moment where

it's really easy to get cheerlead onto drugs. Like people can just be like, yes, you know, that's so brave of you. You know, you, this is a really good thing. You're really looking out for yourself. And it's like, yes, you should look out for yourself and you should care about your mental illness. You're sorry, your mental health problems and you should try and fix them. But the whole system is just set up to put people on drugs and that's not real care. That is drugging problems away.

Danielle Walker (24:27.371)
And it sounds like a lot of the cultural problems even are just lack of human connection, lack of having healthy human in-person connection. Is that something that you're seeing too?

Josef (24:45.47)
I think so. it's, I mean, I don't even need to go outside of my own life for this. mean, I, I'm talking to my wife all the time. Um, you know, women, women use the most psychiatric medications. mean, 18 % of women are on eight antidepressants. That's nearly 30%. Once you get up to around 50, I mean, it's a complete national disaster. I mean, to think that we have put that many women on antidepressants in the United States. Um, it's, it's just insane.

And I look around at the women that my wife is friends with and I and because you know when my wife is unhappy and sometimes you know, you know, we've got our own things because you know, she was a doctor, we have a daughter, it was really hard for her to be a doctor and also to be a mother at the same time she ended up walking away from clinical medicine, because it was better for our family and it was the right decision. But she's also now trying to find meaning and purpose.

And we're in an incredibly fragmented society. I my family's in Australia. Her parents are in New Jersey. We've moved like every three years for work. She's not around any childhood friends. We're trying to lay down roots and find connection. And so I think, I think in many ways we are living in a very unnatural way that feels very siloed. And I see this in a lot of people.

Danielle Walker (25:43.906)
Yeah.

Danielle Walker (26:08.705)
Yeah.

Josef (26:11.15)
You know, I also know there's a lot of folks out there who have financial problems and are doing jobs that they don't necessarily like, but they feel stuck in and they don't see a way out. They don't see that there's any kind of solutions to, to cultivate their life in a way where it could be happier. And, and we don't really have services set up to guide people through this path of where, know, you validate the problems and you go, here's what I think you need to do. Here's how we need to change your family so we can get everyone.

feeling better, we just say, you know, that's too complicated. But we've got something that will, you know, make those feelings go away. Yeah. Which is so sad. I mean, it's terrible. Like, I mean, because some of these things like finding work or purpose in your life, like that can take decades. I mean, these are things that don't fall into your lap. You cultivate them over years and years, finding the person that you want to marry, finding the friends that you

Danielle Walker (26:48.171)
Yeah, that's, it's so sad.

Danielle Walker (27:00.482)
Yeah.

Josef (27:07.848)
that you like and you have these great relationships with these things can take decades. And when people struggle with these things, instead of saying, hey, these things are hard, you might spend a lot, a big part of your life figuring these things out and that's okay. And here are some things you could do to help with that. We just say, you have generalized anxiety disorder. It's a serious medical condition. And don't worry, we've got an FDA approved treatment for it. And we robbed them of the opportunity to actually

fix the problem, we drug it and then it just festers and they have a sense of security because they're not feeling the symptoms anymore but they, I mean the better long-term plan would be to actually fix the problem at the root.

Danielle Walker (27:52.588)
Yeah, I heard something so beautiful today. was listening to a pastor out in California, his name's Bill Johnson, and he recently lost his wife. And I think within maybe four days of losing his wife to cancer, he went to one of the schools that the church has and just opened up to the students and said, just ask me anything you want about grief, about what I'm going through, about what this experience has been.

And he was being interviewed as to why he would do that at such a vulnerable point in his time or in his life. And he said, it's really important to be able to share this kind of pain with people, for people to learn from your experience, to understand how someone can process something so hard in a very healthy way. And it's really kind of a rare opportunity to be able to do that. And so he felt

compelled to do that and I can only imagine how marked the students were by having that opportunity and realizing hey life is hard but we have there are ways that we can get through it and a big part of the way we can get through it is together.

Josef (29:11.998)
I mean, and I think about, you know, the criticism about Instagram where, you you go on Instagram, you see, like everyone's like, you know, the highlight reel of their life rather than the reality that life is messy and there is pain and there is illness and there's hurt and it visits everyone.

Danielle Walker (29:22.114)
Yeah.

Josef (29:32.543)
because I know people look at that sometimes and they go, I'm doing terrible. And so when I hear about your colleague or the pastor speaking about his loss and the rawness of that, I mean, it's life and it's normal to have grief and pain and it's normal to feel miserable.

I mean to have a pain that may never go away, you know, but but you are strong and yeah, and you do and you do move on with your life and you can rebuild it, but it's We don't we don't talk about you know, and there's the loss of a loved one There's the you know, the loss of your health, you know, there's there's there's all sorts of things that can happen which you need to move through And not You know just jump to medications as

as a way to cope with them. mean, we've been coping with coping without medications, you know, until pretty much the 1950s. I'm sure we're okay without them.

Danielle Walker (30:33.121)
Yeah. Yeah. And you, it takes such a special person to be able to dig into the messy parts of people's lives, to the imperfect parts of people's lives and help them. When you think about diagnosis, I heard Dr. Brian artists talk about getting diagnosed and it was a little tongue in cheek, but he was like, you go to the doctor and you tell them what your problem is. You tell them that you're stressed out or you tell them that you're sad and he comes back and he says, well,

He says the same thing to you, but in Latin, you know, or some fancy word, and he says, well, your diagnosis is anxiety, your diagnosis is depression, but they're not really getting to the why of the matter, and they're not really solving anything. how, what's your stance on like, diagnosing people, and how does that, you know, how is the modern diagnosis factor in the work that you're doing?

Josef (31:29.79)
sure.

So what I would say is psychiatric diagnosis, they're not real diagnosis, because in medicine, like you could have pneumonia, and you'd hear that or a bacterial pneumonia and say, okay, there's a pathogen in the lung, it's a bacteria and it's causing injury. It's mapped to a biological lesion or well understood disease process. That's what the diabetes, okay, diabetes type one islet cell destruction,

type two, know, too many carbohydrates, know, insulin, insulin resistance. And so when you talk about medical conditions, there's always a well understood pathophysiological process underneath it. That's not the case with psychiatry. There's no biological markers for any psychiatric condition, because if there was, we'd be doing blood tests and brain scans. All they are are labels. And we use the, I guess it's like almost like a euphemism maybe to call them diagnoses.

because it makes people feel like, this is serious, know, this is real and legitimate. And so we call them these diagnoses, but they're not true diagnoses like we have in medicine. And so you're right. It's just, you tell them that you have all of these symptoms and they go, okay, well, this label, major depressive disorder, matches the symptoms that you told me.

Danielle Walker (32:38.082)
Yeah.

Josef (32:52.862)
But it doesn't actually give someone a better understanding of their condition. In fact, it can be really misleading if someone says, okay, well, I have all of these things. I've got this major depressive disorder and this person is giving me a drug. Well, you know, it sounds like a medical condition. I'm being given a drug. Maybe this is, you know, this must be you know, a problem with my brain, even though there's never been any evidence that people have brain problems there.

Danielle Walker (33:21.431)
Yeah.

Josef (33:21.95)
And so it's a terrible, I mean, it's really misleading because ideally what you want to hear from someone is...

you there's no biological underpinning to this that we understand, you know, based on the story that you've told me, it makes sense that you're feeling the way you do because of, you know, your relationship or because of your work, or actually you're really in poor shape. you're like, you would feel lethargic because you, you you're having, you clearly having a lot of dietary problems, there's some substance abuse going on, or you might even tell them, you know what, you're upset.

and I can't really find a clear reason why. know, temperamentally, some people just are more on the depressive side. Let's figure out how we can build a life for you that, you know, that...

where you can deal with this, where we can find, maybe you need to try some psychotherapies or something like CBT. Anything, any kind of interpretation where someone's actually taking the time to be like, is this life hardship? Is this physical health? Is this substance problems going on? We don't really do that. We just say you major depressive disorder. And it's not empowering to the patient because it doesn't give them things that they can do to improve their situation.

Danielle Walker (34:26.082)
Yeah.

Josef (34:37.886)
it leads them in the wrong direction when they say the doctor has the answer to this. Well, for the majority of things with mental health, mean, for the majority of people, like there's a small sliver where meds are really needed, but for most people, I mean, I wouldn't be going to the doctor for your mental health problems. mean, that the responsibility of that is with you, it's with your family, it's with your community. Those are going to be the, those are going to be the places where you're actually going to get long-term improvement.

Danielle Walker (35:08.077)
Are you getting to practice medicine in this way, in the way that you originally set out to whenever you chose the field of psychiatry now, that you're getting to kind of direct your own course and help people?

Josef (35:23.856)
No, no, I've had to completely leave the conventional medical system. I mean, there's a reason the quality is so poor and it has to do with insurance reimbursement. The way doctors are incentivized with the payments is that if you see more people in, know, the more people you see, the more money you make. So that's why doctors are seeing people in these 15 minute visits.

And essentially they have to do that for the practice to be profitable. You can't be spending an hour with each patient, maybe 20 minutes, but a lot of doctors do it in 15. And so I had to make a decision where I didn't want to go to work and feel like, okay, well, you know, I'm putting bandages on bullet wounds and just helping people like limp along without.

really having the resources of the time to help them. So I didn't want to do that anymore. And so I've opened up a private practice. It's not in network with any insurance. I mean, we give people super bills to take. It's all out of network, but we actually design it in a way where I can wake up in the morning and go, I'm actually going to change this person's life. This person hasn't been able to come off their meds for five years.

We're going to be able to do a safe taper. We're going to be able to replace the medications with non-drug strategies to help them manage their symptoms. And by the time this person leaves, we're going to know that they're going to spend the next 40 years of their life medication free, or this woman, she's going to be able to conceive without being on medications and worrying about the risks on her child, or this man is not going to have erectile dysfunction anymore because he's having a lot of sexual side effects. And that's what me and my team

We wanna wake up in the morning and feel like we've got the, we're able to like truly make a difference. And this is a huge indictment of the insurance based system. I do not think you can do that in the current model. It just sort of limps people along.

Danielle Walker (37:27.521)
Yeah, I agree with you. Do you think that drug-related injuries are more common than what you're seeing? I mean, obviously you're seeing some of the worst, most desperate cases because people will try a lot of things before they seek you out, I would imagine.

Josef (37:51.583)
So I do see this the sickest patients at the moment, but I certainly do not think they're uncommon. mean, over 20 % of the US population are on these psychiatric medications at the moment. I would just have a thought experiment for a moment. Think about the people that you know on these medications. How do they look? How has it changed their life?

Some people will say, you know, I some people that they're great. It's not making a difference. But I know a lot of people will say, no, they're not doing great, you know, and they're on multiple different medications. And I actually worry a lot about them. I worry about their life and how they're doing. It doesn't really seem to be working. So I think there's a lot of folks out there where the drugs aren't really helping because they're not fixing the root cause problem. So it's just like festering and they're kind of numbed out. I think our minds are finely tuned. And I think once we start

know, blunting our emotions, we don't function as well in our life and in our relationships and in our work. And so I think there's that going on. There's that opportunity costs. And I also think a lot of these medications can make people worse. particularly the benzodiazepines like Xanax and clonopin. These folks look terrible long-term. They're more anxious as they go. I mean, the quality of their sleep is poor.

you know, they, none of them really feel that great during the day because it, when you sedate yourself to sleep, it knocks out your sleep architecture. So, I mean, they, they become more anxious over time and they don't look great. The people on the antidepressants like the SSRIs, this isn't everyone, but I see a lot of people who say they just feel, they, feel kind of blunted. They, they feel like they're going through the motions in their life. Sometimes they feel inauthentic in their, in their reactions to things like they have to fake it.

They've lost the motivation to do things. And some of them just feel anxious. They just have this strange background anxiety that just seems to be coming out of nowhere. And they're just like, why do I feel this way? And they go in to see the doctor and the doctor says, it's because you're depressed. And the person goes, well, I never remember feeling like this. I mean, I got put on this drug because I went through a divorce, but now I just feel terrible all the time. So I think it's incredibly common that the drugs are actually, you know, by their effect, making people worse.

Josef (40:17.328)
or indirectly by the fact that they're shutting down their cognitive faculties. I think that is very common for people, but it's not recognized because when people complain about it, gosh, it could never be the drugs. Your mental health condition has morphed into another one. Mental health is so mysterious, depression is so mysterious. They get told they have treatment resistant depression, and it's that whole thing with the carpenter, right? If you go and see the doctor and all they have are drugs, they're gonna be like, you know.

Danielle Walker (40:35.297)
Ha ha.

Josef (40:46.416)
underlying condition has morphed, don't worry, we've got another one. And that's why you end up with people who are just like, man, I'm so sick, I'm the most complicated case of depression, and they're on five different meds. It's a prescribing cascade, they got on one drug, it made them worse, or the problem's vested, they continued to deteriorate, and then they wake up on five or six different meds, and they're completely disabled.

Danielle Walker (40:49.655)
Yeah.

Danielle Walker (41:09.901)
Yeah. What are you seeing around ADHD? That might not be something you focus on too much, but is that, one, is that even a, is it a viable diagnosis? know diagnosis is a squishy word, but I just wonder if people's brain, some people's brains work differently.

Josef (41:30.559)
Yeah, I mean, that's the way I look at it. And I think that is the way that's quite intuitive to a lot of people. I mean, there's no underlying chemical imbalance for ADHD. The brains of people with ADHD look nearly identical to the brains of people without ADHD. There's hardly any difference there. And I think...

You know, it's like, when do you draw the line and say something is an illness versus just statistical distribution, right? You know, if anyone's done the science class, maybe they've seen this kind of bell shaped curve where it's just like the distribution of characteristics. And you'll have some people who are over here and who, you know, they do great behind a computer. They're not very fidgety. You know, they like information work and you're to have some people over here. They're more athletic. They're more physical. You know, that's,

That's their disposition, you know, sitting still behind a computer isn't really what that horse, you know, was bred for, you know, or has the, the, you know, the brain for, but in the U S we, because we're such a competitive, country, there's enormous pressure on young people to, get into these, you know, high earning jobs, whether it's law or computers or engineering or medicine.

And all of this stuff requires you to just sit behind a computer for a long time. And now when people aren't, and this is the saddest thing because you can be incredibly successful as like a building contractor or tradesman or something like that. But I think families put their children under an immense amount of pressure to do this. And so when you're in a school and you feel like you need to do that,

I'm having a harder time focusing because you genuinely just not interested in the stuff. It doesn't, it's not something you're passionate about. say, you know, I've got ADHD and then they have to sedate them with these stimulants that make people more docile and sit still and less creative. And it makes boring tasks seem less boring.

Josef (43:44.037)
And, and, and I mean, and so that's what we do. And so, yes, I think definitely there are some kids who, who are born to, and it's easier for them to do it. And there are some that are less so. Is that a disorder? I don't think so. I mean, that's, that's just differences. And as parents and society, we need to help steer people towards careers and work that they can do where they don't need to be on drugs to do them. I mean, I recently talked to a guy, Cooper Davies on my YouTube channel.

heavily medicated with ADHD meds, spent 17 years of his life being a journalist until he developed a lot of side effects from the medications, off, realized that he had built his whole life around a career that he didn't really like and was that interested in. And he was just doing it and he could only just, he was able to do it because he was on drugs essentially. And then he developed side effects and he had to come off. So now he's doing something else, but it would have been great at the time if it was like, well,

what actually holds your attention where you don't need to be drugged to do it. And I see this again, I I've had kids, I'm old enough now that I have been able to see the trajectory of my friend's lives. And there was some kids that shouldn't have been in college. I'm thinking of this one guy who struggled in college, had a really hard time doing it, ended up doing drugs as well and just really wasted his time.

And then years later, I found out that he started as just like a tradesman working on constructing roads, you know, just a job that someone from his background, you know, it would have been embarrassing for him. He's like running the place now. He's become a manager. He's looking after the team and it just took him finding something that he could do. And it was a good fit for his mind and doing it long enough to, to, um,

to get to a good spot. And so I think there's a huge cultural issue with ADHD. I know in France, they diagnose it like 5 % of what we do in the US because culturally they're like, this is BS. These kids are fine. And we're not going to say that they have a disorder, but I've got some stats here. Yeah, they get more time outside, but here's an interesting stat. This is from the Maha report that just came out.

Danielle Walker (45:51.628)
Yeah.

Danielle Walker (45:57.28)
They probably get a lot more time outside too.

Josef (46:08.894)
And this was stimulants. Stimulant prescriptions used to treat ADHD in the US doubled from 2006 to 2016. By 2022, 11 % of children had ADHD diagnoses, with boys having a rate of nearly one in four by age 17. One in four adolescent boys do not have a brain disease in this country requiring stimulants.

Danielle Walker (46:30.797)
That's wild.

Danielle Walker (46:36.631)
How can pediatricians look themselves in the face as they write those prescriptions? I mean, look themselves in the mirror. That's insane.

Josef (46:48.872)
Well, you know, the issue is that they can and they usually feel quite good about themselves because the medical literature has been hijacked by pharmaceutical companies to say this is the way to go, you know, this is a really good thing to do. They get bombarded with ads saying, you know, if you don't treat this kid for ADHD, you know, they're not going to live up to their potential. You know, they're going to be distracted and have a car crash. You know, they're going to be too distracted to have a fulfilling relationship.

All of their professors have always told them ADHD is heavily stigmatized and undertreated and underdiagnosed. And so they just get this one side of it. And the parents hear the same thing. They go, if I'm really a good parent, I'm gonna get my kid treated for this. Would you withhold insulin from a diabetic? They say things like this as if it's this well-understood medical thing rather than it's just drugging someone's restlessness away.

And that's the problem with psychiatry. A lot of the doctors out there feel really good about what's happening because they're just like, my colleagues are doing it. The experts say it's the right thing to do. The parents want it, but they don't realize that they've been misled by a big pharmaceutical marketing machine and a whole bunch of academic leaders who've been heavily compromised by the pharmaceutical industry, you know, for career advancement. it's almost like you get red-pilled.

Like that's what my parents, my patients say to me, you when they get one of these drug injuries, the whole thing unravels and they just go, but why would my doctor do this? How does that happen? Why are there hundreds of thousands of people online having these horrific withdrawal problems? Why wouldn't anyone warn me? And the whole thing, like a house of cards falls to pieces and they're just like, oh no, you know, we've, this whole thing was a fraud.

Danielle Walker (48:44.173)
Unbelievable. you heard, I've heard some speculation anyway that potentially ADHD could be caused by like a vaccine injury. And as you were mentioning the statistics, you think about the number of vaccines required since 2006, between 2006 to 2016 going up so dramatically as well. I mean, that's not causal necessarily, but it certainly attracts.

Josef (49:12.696)
We should be looking into these things. think vaccines is another sacred cow. I'm not an expert on the vaccine research.

Josef (49:29.328)
After I look at what's happened with psychiatry, I have to say I'm skeptical about a lot of things, and particularly vaccines as well, because there are cases of children who are developing completely normally, and then they get loaded up with whole bunch of vaccines. They get given three shots at one time, and then the parents just say they regressed, their language disappeared. And it's like that's...

That's not really like, how does that happen? You have a kid who's developing completely normally, and then two weeks after they get a vaccine, know, they're terrible. I mean, is this a neurological injury? It could be. And I think, you know, with this administration having a much more open mind to drug injuries, I think we're actually going to get some of that research.

because I think it's been, it's one of those things where because it's a sacred cow, no one could touch it without losing their career. But now at least we can because there's interested people. so we'll be able to see whether these things, things like vaccines are causing neurological damage that's resulting in inattentiveness. But what I think is going on and what I'm sure of is a dietary issues.

I think the food that we eat plays a big role in anxiety, depression, concentration. Our brains are connected to our bodies. And if you're just loading up with processed food and carbohydrate all the time, you're not going to feel well. And then you feel foggy and you feel like you can't really think right. And then you want to have more coffee or nicotine products because you're so lethargic all the time.

Danielle Walker (51:06.881)
Yeah.

Josef (51:22.43)
and then you're just in this cycle of unhealthy behavior. That I can say for sure is a problem. Because I think what I see recently, I think it was something like over 60 % of the calories that we consume in America come from processed foods, foods coming out of packages rather than whole foods. And so that's playing a problem.

Danielle Walker (51:38.157)
Gosh.

Danielle Walker (51:45.346)
I think it is a huge problem. I'm very hopeful that we're going to see some of that start turning around. It seems like RFK Jr. has got big food in his sights and some of the dyes are being taken out. I'm ready for him to hit seed oils. I'm ready for him to hit a lot of this enriched flour, know, the spraying of everything with folic acid. And it's just remarkable what

Josef (52:00.499)
Mm-hmm.

Danielle Walker (52:15.209)
what we've allowed, I guess, really as a society to happen on our watch, when you believe that the government has got your best interest in heart. And then, you know, I guess it took for most of us, COVID and 2020, all of what happened in 2020 to wake up and say, wait a second, these people are basically crooks all operating in their own self-interest. And we are the roadkill as a result of it.

is remarkable.

Josef (52:47.834)
That's absolutely right. people are waking up. People don't like feeling like collateral damage. All of those families who have children who have neurological problems because of the COVID vaccine, they're not going away quietly and they are very, very upset. And that's why there's change happening right now.

Danielle Walker (53:08.877)
Yeah. Would you talk for a minute about your time at the FDA? behind closed doors, that's so fascinating to me. What was the environment, the culture like there?

Josef (53:23.784)
Gosh.

I was very disappointed with the culture at the FDA. So there's a few things you have to understand about the FDA. The FDA is mostly staffed by burnt out academics.

And so being like an academic at an institution, you're writing grants, it's very competitive, it's hard, but you love research. And so you wanna do research. And so the job comes up, I could work at the FDA, I don't have to fill out grants, but I'll evaluate drugs. It's a great fit for some people. I found most of them to be pretty indoctrinated.

The way most academic psychiatrists are, are very, you this is what the medical research shows. You know, they drink the Kool-Aid, you know, people who criticize these drugs, you know, they're Scientologists and they, you know, they're out to stigmatize people. I found that they had very little awareness of how...

how biased the medical research was and how drug companies have had really shaped the messaging. I found that they had very little awareness of how academics like leading academics at Harvard and Yale and all of these places that

Josef (54:47.208)
that they had actually ascended to their positions because they are very drug friendly. mean, the number one way to get to the top of an institution is to run drug trials for pharmaceutical companies. get money, you get support, they fly around the place, they give you lots of publications. And then these leaders, they never criticize the drugs and they're very pro drugs. It's great for their careers. And so these people that end up working at the FDA, they act more like...

they act more like advocates for the drugs than actual researchers. had incredibly, they were very hesitant to call out extremely obvious risks, which are now coming up now. Like the issue of PSSD, which is persistent sexual dysfunction following SSRIs. The FDA is looking into that now, but like almost all of the other major health organizations have put that in the label, which is a really serious risk. mean, young people should know that if you get on these drugs,

Danielle Walker (55:43.393)
Yeah.

Josef (55:45.657)
You might develop sexual dysfunction that never goes away. FDA has been dragging their feet on it. They've been dragging their feet on the fact that some people when they come off antidepressants, it's brutal. It's one of the hardest things that they ever do. And it can take people years to recover. They haven't acknowledged that yet. And I find them to be

Josef (56:11.986)
to have a, mean, to really be working for the drug companies more, you know, and not because they're consciously doing it because, but mostly because they, I just don't think they really understand the limitations of the research and the problems with the drugs. And they really didn't have a great culture of safety there. I mean,

They, the feeling I got is they would do anything in their power to not recognize a drug, even when a drug side effect, even when it was really obvious. And that's a very like, I mean, that's the way the pharmaceutical industry wants it. That's the way the academics want it to be very hesitant to always like cast down about it. And I mean, that's, I mean, that's just my opinion, but that, but I have a lot of distrust about people at the FDA because I just think they,

Danielle Walker (57:03.65)
Yeah.

Josef (57:09.982)
they'd rather just go with the flow and go with what's popular and they're acting more like advocates rather than real scientists.

Danielle Walker (57:19.757)
Well, the health of our population validates your perspective. think you would hope that we would have the best and the brightest, the most curious, the most maverick thinkers in places that are making decisions on behalf of the health of our nation, not rubber stamps. So it's just, I would want people who are asking serious scientific questions instead of people who participate in the

revolving door of Big Pharma, which, you know, I was at Pfizer from 2017 through 23, early 23. And I remember being in the room whenever they announced that Scott Gottlieb, who was leaving the FDA to come to the board of Pfizer, people stood up and cheered and I was like, what is going on?

this doesn't seem right. Why are people so, I mean, it's obvious why people are so excited about it because that means more of our drugs could probably get through with fewer hurdles, but it's just astounding to me that that would be even something that's allowed to happen.

Josef (58:41.406)
I mean, it's crazy and I mean, I've seen this like.

Many of my colleagues are in the pharmaceutical industry and they're developing psychiatric drugs. And you have to think about it. Like if you're at the FDA and hypothetically, let's say I was in the pharmaceutical industry still, they'd go, know, Joseph is the lead on clinical development here. He oversaw all these protocols. Oh, he's a really great guy. I remember that time that my, you know, my mom had cancer and he came over to my house when we were at the FDA and, you know, he sat with me that afternoon and, you

know, our kids get along with each other and you know, have, there's all of these like personal relationships between these people that go out there, which completely biases the whole thing later on. They're just like, he's a great guy, you know? And I don't know how we let this happen either, but it's very, I mean, that's what the drug companies are paying for. They're paying for people who have great reputations within the industry because it means that...

Danielle Walker (59:21.527)
Yeah.

Josef (59:42.013)
you know, the review is going to go smooth and that they have friends. And also for someone who knows how the insiders work, like, you know, this person over here is reviewing our application. This is what they like. This is how you should present things to them because I know what their pet issue is. Like it's, I mean, it's a game. It's a game to get the drug on the market.

Danielle Walker (01:00:06.327)
What do you think it's going to take for the field of medicine to go back to core mission? Helping people, curing people, doing no harm.

Josef (01:00:17.074)
people aren't gonna like what I'm gonna have. Well, maybe people will over here, but it would cause a lot of problems. I think we need a much smaller pharmaceutical industry. I think it's very hard when you have one player who has billions of dollars of marketing material and a watch has to write medical journals, to buy academics, to do all of the stuff you will get a completely tilted medical...

understanding of conditions and all of that when one group wields that much power. And so I'd like drug companies to not be able to market to people in the United States. I'd like academics to not be able to take any funding from drug companies. I don't think we should be running their clinical trials. I mean, a lot of this would mean one of the biggest sectors of our economy would die down and there would be a lot of job losses.

But when you have one group that is so powerful with money and influence, mean, they're going to, they will influence the way we do things and it's led to poor health. And so I think that would be probably the biggest thing, a smaller pharmaceutical industry, you know, more regulation.

I'm usually anti-regulation, but when it comes to things like healthcare, I'd say more regulation about marketing and the involvement in academia and all of that. think that would bring more balance to the way we look at drugs.

Danielle Walker (01:01:53.365)
Yeah, I agree with you. I 100 % agree with you. And if we take a long-term view, getting pharma to be smaller means that we'll have healthier people with better outcomes who can be more productive for the economy in the long run. So we may take a short-term hit, but I think in the long term, everyone will be better off for it.

Josef (01:02:07.56)
Mm-hmm.

Josef (01:02:13.053)
Yes.

Danielle Walker (01:02:15.273)
Awesome. Well, Dr. Yosef, you have been so generous with your time. Thank you so much. It's been so great getting to know you a little bit, getting to understand your perspective and seeing how you help people is just amazing. I'm going to flash up here how people can get in touch with you. Is your website the best way for people to reach out to you if they want to learn more?

Josef (01:02:38.012)
I would say the website and then the YouTube channel, is Dr. Yosef and that's spelt in the German way, J-O-S-E-F. So go to the Dr. Yosef YouTube channel as well.

Danielle Walker (01:02:50.317)
Well, thank you so much. Thank you for the work that you're doing and your heart to truly help people. It's most welcome here and you're welcome back anytime.

Josef (01:03:01.096)
Thank you so much for having me.

Danielle Walker (01:03:06.344)
Awesome.