Latest / psychophobia* podcast / Episode 12, Pt 2: The Human Cost of Forced Treatment

Transcript

Episode 12, Pt 2: The Human Cost of Forced Treatment · psychophobia* podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_01: The evidence in support of antipsychotics is actually not very strong.
0:03
SPEAKER_01: It's a powerful tranquilizer.
0:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's no question about that.
0:06
SPEAKER_01: But if you're trying to do anything else,
0:08
SPEAKER_01: like actually help the person with their,
0:11
SPEAKER_01: you know,
0:12
SPEAKER_01: psychosis or other aspects of the things they struggle with in their lives,
0:17
SPEAKER_01: it's literal torture.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: And that's how a lot of people describe it, being on it.
0:21
SPEAKER_01: And that's why they want to get off them.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: They're saying this trade-off is not worth it to me.
0:26
SPEAKER_01: This is brutal.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Psychophobia Podcast.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, years ago, a man could take his wife.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: He didn't want any more than asylum with a doctor and have her committed.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: I thought that was like Victorian age.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: Basically, it's that easy.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: It does vary from state to state,
0:49
SPEAKER_00: but basically you're saying We're saying that actually what people often need
0:55
SPEAKER_00: a hug, and actually what you're saying is they're getting handcuffs.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: How are the police able to handcuff somebody who, under their model, is ill?
1:06
SPEAKER_01: Well, you're asking me how?
1:07
SPEAKER_01: You're asking me why?
1:08
SPEAKER_01: Well,
1:09
SPEAKER_00: in America,
1:09
SPEAKER_00: how do you justify that in law that someone
1:11
SPEAKER_00: who isn't potentially violent is handcuffed to a gurney?
1:15
SPEAKER_01: They just say it's for safety purposes, you know, that they're trying to help you.
1:21
SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a process for a criminal investigation.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: So if I'm just concerned about an investigation,
1:28
SPEAKER_01: like I think that someone may have committed a crime,
1:32
SPEAKER_01: there's a thing called exigence circumstances.
1:36
SPEAKER_01: Meaning, okay,
1:37
SPEAKER_01: maybe I'm a police officer and I'm standing outside a house
1:40
SPEAKER_01: and I'm literally hearing somebody screaming and chairs being thrown banging.
1:45
SPEAKER_01: I'm getting a sense that there's an actual physical fight occurring.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: Then I have other authorities So that applies across the board
1:52
SPEAKER_01: a mental health quote-unquote emergency.
2:06
SPEAKER_01: If I have any reason to believe that someone might be experiencing
2:10
SPEAKER_01: a mental health emergency, I can again break the door down.
2:15
SPEAKER_01: I can just walk through, I can take them away to a psychiatric hospital.
2:21
SPEAKER_01: I can do all of these things that I can only do in a criminal kind of context
2:28
SPEAKER_01: if there is clear and overwhelming evidence that there's an immediate danger for
2:35
SPEAKER_01: the public or for some person.
2:37
SPEAKER_01: Otherwise,
2:38
SPEAKER_01: in a normal criminal context,
2:39
SPEAKER_01: even if I'm pretty convinced,
2:41
SPEAKER_01: you know, you're the killer or whatever, I can't just break into your house, right?
2:46
SPEAKER_01: I have to go through process of submitting,
2:48
SPEAKER_01: you know, writing something up about my evidence against you.
2:51
SPEAKER_01: Take it to a judge,
2:52
SPEAKER_01: and the judge approves a warrant,
2:54
SPEAKER_01: and then I have to come knock on your door,
2:56
SPEAKER_01: unless I could prove to the judge that it was so dangerous that we could only come
3:01
SPEAKER_01: in with an armed team, right?
3:03
SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, I have to notify you, hey, I've got a search warrant.
3:06
SPEAKER_01: So all these processes kick in and they bypass them all for mental health situations
3:13
SPEAKER_01: and under the assumption that there'd be just a good faith use of this kind
3:18
SPEAKER_01: of power.
3:20
SPEAKER_01: And what I found through The course of my book is that clearly we've got all kinds
3:25
SPEAKER_01: of cases of not good faith uses of this power.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: We've got evidence of mass scale profiteering fraud happening.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: With this power,
3:37
SPEAKER_01: where we have some of the biggest psychiatric hospital chains
3:41
SPEAKER_01: in America being found guilty,
3:46
SPEAKER_01: essentially pleading and accepting $100 million penalties.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: For using this power fraudulently.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: So that's going on in America today.
4:00
SPEAKER_01: And you can imagine then all of the gray area beneath that, because that's the extreme case.
4:04
SPEAKER_01: And we have both of the biggest psychopathy Psychiatric hospital chains, Acadia,
4:08
SPEAKER_01: and Universal Health Services having been fined by the Department of Justice
4:13
SPEAKER_01: for this kind of fraudulent incarceration under mental health laws.
4:20
SPEAKER_01: Both of them doing it.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: Imagine then,
4:21
SPEAKER_01: what about just sort of more average hospitals that are under the radar,
4:25
SPEAKER_01: that aren't being investigated, where,
4:27
SPEAKER_01: you know,
4:28
SPEAKER_01: they're just not committing as many people on a regular basis,
4:31
SPEAKER_01: so they just kind of do it.
4:33
SPEAKER_01: Like, what's going on there?
4:35
SPEAKER_01: What's the level of oversight if these giant hospital chains can get away with it?
4:40
SPEAKER_00: How do they get away with it?
4:42
SPEAKER_00: Because there's a tension on the prison system and prison for profit,
4:49
SPEAKER_00: but there seems to be very little dialogue about something
4:53
SPEAKER_00: that could affect more people,
4:57
SPEAKER_00: people who potentially have not committed any crime,
5:00
SPEAKER_00: but they can be incarcerated with less rights.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: Why is there not the attention on it, do you think?
5:07
SPEAKER_01: So interestingly,
5:09
SPEAKER_01: I asked that question of the Department of Justice attorney that I interviewed,
5:15
SPEAKER_01: who prosecutes some of these kinds of cases of this mass scale fraud.
5:20
SPEAKER_01: And he said, yeah,
5:21
SPEAKER_01: a lot of people ask us, how did this go on for years and years without you noticing?
5:27
SPEAKER_01: And he said, well,
5:28
SPEAKER_01: the reality is,
5:29
SPEAKER_01: and essentially,
5:31
SPEAKER_01: He confirmed what you and I are talking about,
5:34
SPEAKER_01: which was that,
5:35
SPEAKER_01: you know what,
5:36
SPEAKER_01: the line between well-intentioned involuntary commitment
5:41
SPEAKER_01: and fraudulent involuntary commitment is fine.
5:45
SPEAKER_01: It's a very fine line.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: And in fact,
5:47
SPEAKER_01: it's often very difficult to tell the difference because in both cases,
5:52
SPEAKER_01: I scoop you up against your will.
5:54
SPEAKER_01: You're protesting the whole time.
5:57
SPEAKER_01: I drug you heavily against your will so you become virtually I restrain you
6:03
SPEAKER_01: against your will if you act up in any way.
6:05
SPEAKER_01: I prevent you from contacting a lawyer for a certain period of time
6:10
SPEAKER_01: until I'm absolutely required to,
6:12
SPEAKER_01: somebody compels me to, somebody enforces the actual law.
6:15
SPEAKER_01: I do all of these things with the best of intentions and also the worst of intentions.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: And for anyone looking at it from the outside, it can look almost exactly the same.
6:25
SPEAKER_01: And he said, that's the problem we have as well.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: So he said,
6:29
SPEAKER_01: we're reliant on things like these people get so brazen
6:35
SPEAKER_01: that they'll often bill Medicare or Medicaid At levels
6:40
SPEAKER_01: that are just not humanly possible for their own practitioners to be doing.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: So, for example,
6:45
SPEAKER_01: you know,
6:46
SPEAKER_01: one practitioner will bill for one patient for 24 hours of therapy seven days
6:52
SPEAKER_01: a week.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: You know,
6:53
SPEAKER_01: sort of that's maybe a slightly It's a completely exaggerated example,
6:55
SPEAKER_01: but that's the idea,
6:57
SPEAKER_01: that it's so brazen that basically their algorithms pick it up
7:02
SPEAKER_01: when they're doing audits,
7:05
SPEAKER_01: that this is clearly fraud,
7:08
SPEAKER_01: they couldn't possibly be doing So now we're going to really investigate that place,
7:13
SPEAKER_01: right?
7:14
SPEAKER_01: And it's often just the fraud that catch them on,
7:16
SPEAKER_01: which is why a lot of times the settlements are purely financial.
7:20
SPEAKER_01: And in the end,
7:21
SPEAKER_01: they can't truly prove,
7:22
SPEAKER_01: and these psychiatric owners will never I would never admit
7:25
SPEAKER_01: that they were truly doing it fraudulently in the sense that
7:29
SPEAKER_01: the individual clients involved,
7:32
SPEAKER_01: the patients often get no settlement unless they individually go after
7:36
SPEAKER_01: the hospital themselves using the evidence base.
7:39
SPEAKER_01: The Department of Justice has created and they may get a settlement trying to show
7:44
SPEAKER_01: that they personally were one of the victims of this,
7:47
SPEAKER_01: but that's much harder to prove.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: It's much more easy for them to prove this brazen sort of level of financial fraud.
7:53
SPEAKER_01: So that's how it goes on because it's very hard to tell.
7:57
SPEAKER_01: Involuntary commitment is generally so aggressive and so brutal and done
8:01
SPEAKER_01: against people's will that it's hard to prove when it's being done for the best
8:05
SPEAKER_01: of intentions versus the worst of intentions.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: It's very nuanced.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: I think what I lived and worked in Malaysia for four years and
8:15
SPEAKER_00: when I initially went there,
8:17
SPEAKER_00: you know, I thought of the system and big pharma as a wee bit of a conspiracy.
8:22
SPEAKER_00: And then when I got there, I realized this is just business.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: And the key word is growth, right?
8:29
SPEAKER_00: So if I've exhausted the adult market for antipsychotics, I need to look at a new market.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: So they were looking at older people.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: They were given antipsychotics to prevent early onset of schizophrenia in children and stuff.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: And I just saw it as business.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: And with the opioid crisis, it revealed that aspect.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: If you're a doctor and someone's saying,
8:54
SPEAKER_00: This medication will reduce pain and it's not addictive.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: You want to reduce pain, so you're going to prescribe it.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: In the same way,
9:00
SPEAKER_00: if you've been told there's no side effects to these drugs,
9:05
SPEAKER_00: it's going to stop depression, whatever, you're going to prescribe it.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: I think we're at a point in society where people are starting to wake up a little bit.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: There's been enough people negatively affected by both medication and incarceration
9:17
SPEAKER_00: that people are going, hang on a second.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: Perhaps all is not well.
9:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean,
9:24
SPEAKER_01: I hope that that's true at this part about people waking up,
9:29
SPEAKER_01: because what you've described is correct, of course.
9:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the pharmaceutical industry worked very hard to get the expansion of use
9:37
SPEAKER_01: of antipsychotic drugs in elderly care,
9:40
SPEAKER_01: and now it's widespread,
9:43
SPEAKER_01: and in children as well, and now it's becoming increasingly common too.
9:48
SPEAKER_01: And there's that driver.
9:50
SPEAKER_01: And I think you're right to highlight, well, what is the role of the doctors here?
9:54
SPEAKER_01: Like, sometimes they are corrupt.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: They're literally taking kickbacks in order to prescribe these drugs.
10:00
SPEAKER_01: And in other cases, they're just genuinely kind of naive.
10:03
SPEAKER_01: They're not really reading the evidence space.
10:05
SPEAKER_01: The pharmaceutical company presents them some evidence,
10:09
SPEAKER_01: and they just believe it, and so on and so forth.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: And so this kind of system works with a lot of different people with a lot
10:16
SPEAKER_01: of different attitudes.
10:17
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things I like to highlight in my book is that a lot
10:21
SPEAKER_01: of this is playing out in Canada as well,
10:22
SPEAKER_01: where we have a mainly public health care system.
10:25
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, there isn't as much money to be made.
10:28
SPEAKER_01: There are certainly certain areas of the system
10:31
SPEAKER_01: where there's been increasing privatization occurring,
10:34
SPEAKER_01: and there are some profits to be made.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: But by and large, the system isn't any more sort of profit oriented.
10:40
SPEAKER_01: Dr. Montgomery, psychophobia.
10:57
SPEAKER_01: So, nevertheless, the systems are very, very similar.
11:00
SPEAKER_01: A lot of the same processes play out.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: And so that's what I like to highlight there, is that we have both going on at the same time.
11:06
SPEAKER_01: There are entities that are very exploitative,
11:10
SPEAKER_01: We're clearly motivated by profit and we've other ones that are other people
11:13
SPEAKER_01: who are just naive.
11:15
SPEAKER_01: There are other people who are genuinely well-intentioned and doing their best
11:20
SPEAKER_01: and they just,
11:20
SPEAKER_01: you know, they really think that it could be worse otherwise, things like that.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: We have all of these people kind of working together,
11:27
SPEAKER_01: and the problem is that it's a gigantic hundreds of billions of dollar a year system
11:34
SPEAKER_01: that is driving all this,
11:36
SPEAKER_01: and there's almost no support for the people who are raising up to say,
11:39
SPEAKER_01: hey, wait a minute.
11:40
SPEAKER_01: Maybe this is a little too much and maybe there's some problems here.
11:43
SPEAKER_01: Maybe we should talk about these problems.
11:44
SPEAKER_01: Maybe we need more oversight.
11:46
SPEAKER_01: There's no money, virtually no money flowing into those people to lift up those voices.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: And that's the problem right now.
11:54
SPEAKER_01: We have a systemic problem.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: Have you seen the film Unseen with Claire Foy?
12:02
SPEAKER_00: No.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: So basically it's kind of a masterpiece in a way,
12:06
SPEAKER_00: but she goes in,
12:07
SPEAKER_00: she's going in for a sort of a health check And she ticks the box,
12:12
SPEAKER_00: you know,
12:12
SPEAKER_00: the self-reporting,
12:14
SPEAKER_00: maybe not feeling so good today,
12:16
SPEAKER_00: whatever, and she doesn't realize and she ticks the box.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: So they admit her.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: So she's stuck on this ward.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: I started to pick up
12:27
SPEAKER_00: With the growth of AI,
12:30
SPEAKER_00: I started to pick up that on some of these models,
12:33
SPEAKER_00: so there's this whole thing of liability and AI psychosis,
12:35
SPEAKER_00: but some of these models are actually tracking for behaviour that might be
12:41
SPEAKER_00: of concern.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: And the questions that the AI were asking people led me
12:47
SPEAKER_00: to believe it wouldn't be too far off them contacting emergency services
12:52
SPEAKER_00: if they thought the person talking to them was a liability,
12:55
SPEAKER_00: if they were risking themselves or others.
12:57
SPEAKER_01: Right.
12:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:58
SPEAKER_01: Oh, no, that's already happening.
12:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:59
SPEAKER_01: And particularly because a couple lawsuits have gotten a lot of attention, right,
13:03
SPEAKER_01: where in cases where people were actively trying to get the AI to give them advice
13:10
SPEAKER_01: on how to kill themselves and then did.
13:12
SPEAKER_01: And so the family sued,
13:14
SPEAKER_01: and so now the AI company,
13:15
SPEAKER_01: even the ones that were holding out against it now,
13:18
SPEAKER_01: have all these processes in place where they're trying to put guardrails
13:21
SPEAKER_01: on conversations, and they have processes in place to flag it, ostensibly flag it.
13:27
SPEAKER_01: It's not flagging it to a human first,
13:29
SPEAKER_01: but the AI is flagging to a human for human review to potentially contact 911
13:35
SPEAKER_01: and get police to intervene and they would then breach that person's privacy and
13:42
SPEAKER_01: the police would come around and take that person to a psychiatric hospital.
13:44
SPEAKER_01: Those policies are already in place for AI.
13:47
SPEAKER_01: So I highly recommend people be careful what they share with virtually any of
13:52
SPEAKER_01: the major AI tools when they're talking with it.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: So I'm a George Orwell devotee and I had thought Big Brother can't,
14:03
SPEAKER_00: it's passed now,
14:04
SPEAKER_00: you know,
14:04
SPEAKER_00: there's so much information out there that the government,
14:08
SPEAKER_00: they don't care, they just put it all out there.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: But then in recent years,
14:12
SPEAKER_00: I saw the capacity to be Big Brother through surveillance,
14:16
SPEAKER_00: through AI,
14:18
SPEAKER_00: you know,
14:18
SPEAKER_00: and you look at China and you look,
14:20
SPEAKER_00: but I think that the link with AI and the unseen movie is people are volunteering
14:26
SPEAKER_00: the very information that's getting them incarcerated.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
14:32
SPEAKER_01: And social media too, right?
14:33
SPEAKER_01: So Facebook has a policy.
14:35
SPEAKER_01: Most of the major social media, let's have a policy around this.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: So depending on what you're posting, you could get flagged.
14:42
SPEAKER_01: I got flagged once on Reddit, you know?
14:45
SPEAKER_01: I think it was maliciously intended because what was actually happening was right
14:50
SPEAKER_01: after I had held an Ask Me Anything about the book and somebody flagged me to them
14:57
SPEAKER_01: and I got this automated message saying,
14:58
SPEAKER_01: you've been flagged for Or a potential, you know, are you okay?
15:02
SPEAKER_01: You know, here are some mental health numbers to call, you know, that sort of thing.
15:06
SPEAKER_01: And I wrote to them and said, hey,
15:08
SPEAKER_01: you know,
15:09
SPEAKER_01: I think whoever reported this is doing it maliciously and they just never responded,
15:13
SPEAKER_01: you know?
15:14
SPEAKER_01: But these policies are in place.
15:16
SPEAKER_01: Humans can report or they're having algorithms monitor and you know
15:21
SPEAKER_01: that AI is being applied in that context now for sure and and you know
15:26
SPEAKER_01: and they're not only doing it
15:27
SPEAKER_01: for these involuntary interventions they're also studying it right
15:30
SPEAKER_01: so they're using it to kind of.
15:33
SPEAKER_01: Do any kind of psychological analyses of people,
15:36
SPEAKER_01: the public,
15:37
SPEAKER_01: what people say,
15:38
SPEAKER_01: kind of correlating that with other information just to potentially sell it
15:43
SPEAKER_01: to marketers and so on.
15:44
SPEAKER_01: There's all sorts of uses happening.
15:46
SPEAKER_01: And I know for a fact,
15:48
SPEAKER_01: because I've been researching it lately,
15:49
SPEAKER_01: that AI is really on the forefront of that right now.
15:52
SPEAKER_01: They basically aren't doing psychological research in a digital space now without AI.
15:59
SPEAKER_01: Everybody's using AI for that purpose.
16:03
SPEAKER_00: Because I think people don't realize that the purpose of AI in many areas is to push product.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: We actually haven't fully got to that point yet because it's still collating
16:14
SPEAKER_00: the data on people,
16:15
SPEAKER_00: but ultimately it will tell you what you want before you know you want it,
16:19
SPEAKER_00: which is kind of like the thought police on steroids, right?
16:24
SPEAKER_00: But we've seen that on social media.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: Working with people in states of distress, the algorithms are What's distressing them?
16:34
SPEAKER_00: Because they're getting more and more of the negativity and paranoid thoughts
16:40
SPEAKER_00: and hatred and, you know, there's been constantly triggered.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: But they don't realize that it's their selections or doubling down.
16:49
SPEAKER_00: They're creating their own hell in a way.
16:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a scary way of thinking about it too because it's sort of like
16:58
SPEAKER_01: the AI that's driving the algorithm now is the thing that's driving you crazy and
17:03
SPEAKER_01: then the AI is utilizing that information to analyze you.
17:07
SPEAKER_01: And then also potentially get you locked up,
17:09
SPEAKER_01: but also gathering more information that it can use.
17:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
17:12
SPEAKER_01: one of the things I know they're doing is they're trying to develop therapy bots,
17:15
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:16
SPEAKER_01: so they are trying to improve,
17:17
SPEAKER_01: quote unquote, the way AI is giving therapy ostensibly.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: Then they're going to give free therapy to the whole world.
17:24
SPEAKER_01: All of you who can't afford their own therapists will get this.
17:27
SPEAKER_01: So there's this dream,
17:29
SPEAKER_01: this gold rush going on out there now that if only we can collect enough information
17:33
SPEAKER_01: about, say, suicidal people and analyze it well enough.
17:37
SPEAKER_01: How to work with them,
17:39
SPEAKER_01: how to talk with them,
17:40
SPEAKER_01: then we can get an AI to provide
17:43
SPEAKER_01: for people what we don't have enough human therapists to do.
17:47
SPEAKER_01: It's a very bizarre dream because as we've been talking about,
17:52
SPEAKER_01: Over and over again,
17:53
SPEAKER_01: often one of the most healing things
17:55
SPEAKER_01: that can possibly happen is just genuine human connection and understanding.
17:59
SPEAKER_01: And AI is never going to be able to provide that unless you literally use it to lie and deceive.
18:06
SPEAKER_01: But then when the person finds out, it's going to be even more devastating, right?
18:09
SPEAKER_01: So yeah,
18:11
SPEAKER_01: I think this whole AI thing is really going off the rails quite already
18:15
SPEAKER_01: in this particular space.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: So we need human contact and we need human contact where we can scream.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: Because going back to suicidal ideation, many years ago I did research to make the distinction.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: Your father was an example.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: There's lots of people will say, I feel like killing myself.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: That's how I feel.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: That is the level of despair.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: But I'm not actually going to do it.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: Right?
18:42
SPEAKER_00: It's a different, you know, they'll train and say, oh, is there a plan?
18:48
SPEAKER_00: But actually, being able to say, you know what?
18:51
SPEAKER_00: Life is so damn difficult, I just don't feel like going on.
18:54
SPEAKER_00: And someone going, I hear you.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: I've been there.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: It's okay.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: We can get through that, right?
19:01
SPEAKER_00: Not immediately going into, oh, they've said a trigger word.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: I need to cover my ass for liability.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: I need a risk assessment.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: You know,
19:10
SPEAKER_00: the problem is,
19:12
SPEAKER_00: It's clinically beneficial to witness someone's pain and it doubles down
19:18
SPEAKER_00: on how destructive it is by saying,
19:20
SPEAKER_00: not only are we not going to witness your pain,
19:22
SPEAKER_00: but we're going to punish you for it.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: That's a double whammy.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
19:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
19:27
SPEAKER_01: And that's what a lot of people talk about because A lot of people
19:32
SPEAKER_01: who get involuntarily committed were having trouble at the time, right?
19:37
SPEAKER_01: It's not all fraudulent,
19:38
SPEAKER_01: like some of them were really struggling,
19:41
SPEAKER_01: maybe were feeling suicidal,
19:43
SPEAKER_01: and then they experienced Dr.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: Montgomery,
19:46
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
19:47
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia.
20:03
SPEAKER_01: For a few months afterwards is hundreds of times more likely to take their own life.
20:09
SPEAKER_01: Even people who were not suicidal when they went in.
20:14
SPEAKER_01: So that wasn't the reason they were hospitalized.
20:17
SPEAKER_01: Those people are a hundred times more likely to take their own lives.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: So we have this devastating evidence that psychiatric hospitalization does not seem
20:27
SPEAKER_01: to be helping people and arguably she does seem to be making them worse.
20:35
SPEAKER_01: But the system and our culture is continuing to not really grapple with that.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: So I think that's an excellent point.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: So going back,
20:46
SPEAKER_00: we're compassionately highlighting that there are people in states
20:52
SPEAKER_00: of extreme distress that need support and help.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: But from what you're saying,
20:58
SPEAKER_00: and I endorse it,
21:00
SPEAKER_00: more often than not,
21:01
SPEAKER_00: the treatment that they're getting in forcibly being taken to hospital,
21:05
SPEAKER_00: x10, Their problems that they went in with.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: I used to see it in London,
21:11
SPEAKER_00: I used to see people,
21:12
SPEAKER_00: this was a slightly different point,
21:13
SPEAKER_00: but I would see somebody who aesthetically was beautiful.
21:18
SPEAKER_00: They would go into hospital and two,
21:21
SPEAKER_00: three months later they were unrecognizable because maybe they put on so much weight
21:26
SPEAKER_00: or they had muscle spasms or shakes.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: And it took me a few months to realize the people that I thought were different
21:36
SPEAKER_00: to me because they had a mental health issue,
21:39
SPEAKER_00: Looked different to me because of the effects of the drugs that they were on.
21:43
SPEAKER_00: Maybe how they moved, how they spoke, how they sounded, you know, were they drooling?
21:48
SPEAKER_00: That wasn't mental health, that was the medication.
21:51
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I learned that too.
21:53
SPEAKER_01: I remember even from my childhood,
21:57
SPEAKER_01: you know,
21:57
SPEAKER_01: being downtown in the city where I lived,
22:00
SPEAKER_01: kind of seeing certain behaviours,
22:03
SPEAKER_01: and decades later, Dr.
22:06
SPEAKER_01: Montgomery,
22:08
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
22:09
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
22:10
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
22:11
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia.
22:21
SPEAKER_01: You know, but those people at that time, but it rings in my head.
22:26
SPEAKER_01: And now, yeah, I have an eye for it too.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: And particularly people who've taken them have a really good,
22:32
SPEAKER_01: like often they're like, oh,
22:33
SPEAKER_01: that person,
22:33
SPEAKER_01: you know,
22:34
SPEAKER_01: and then you'll look at their eyes,
22:36
SPEAKER_01: you know,
22:36
SPEAKER_01: Because it's amazing,
22:38
SPEAKER_01: particularly antipsychotics,
22:39
SPEAKER_01: I think, almost more than any other of the psychiatric drugs.
22:42
SPEAKER_01: They're very,
22:43
SPEAKER_01: very powerful and they can affect you physically and the function of the brain,
22:49
SPEAKER_01: your capacity to think, all these things.
22:51
SPEAKER_01: Dr. Montgomery,
22:52
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
22:52
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: All sorts of things can be happening that to people who don't know would think,
23:10
SPEAKER_01: oh, that person must be really crazy.
23:13
SPEAKER_01: And often,
23:16
SPEAKER_01: like you say, boy,
23:17
SPEAKER_01: if you take that drug away in a safe way,
23:20
SPEAKER_01: get that person free again, a lot of that will go away.
23:25
SPEAKER_00: So just to be clear,
23:26
SPEAKER_00: you're saying all those things and that's the medication you're forcing me to take?
23:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
23:32
SPEAKER_01: That's why I think this is such a brutal thing.
23:36
SPEAKER_01: We don't have a lot of evidence that these particular drugs do a lot for people.
23:40
SPEAKER_01: The evidence in support of antipsychotics is actually not very strong.
23:43
SPEAKER_01: It's a powerful tranquilizer, yeah, there's no question about it.
23:47
SPEAKER_01: But if you're trying to do anything else,
23:48
SPEAKER_01: like actually help the person with their psychosis or other aspects of
23:55
SPEAKER_01: the things they struggle with in their lives,
23:58
SPEAKER_01: aside from just basically chemically restraining them.
24:01
SPEAKER_01: If you try and do anything other than chemically restrain them,
24:03
SPEAKER_01: there's very little strong evidence that antipsychotics are particularly good at
24:08
SPEAKER_01: that,
24:08
SPEAKER_01: especially after a few months because the adverse effects just keep increasing
24:15
SPEAKER_01: over time and worsen.
24:16
SPEAKER_01: You're forcing me to take a drug and you're just saying it's going to...
24:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's literal torture.
24:35
SPEAKER_01: Like when people have told me what the drug feels like for them, that's what I imagine.
24:39
SPEAKER_01: I go, if somebody put me on that, I would immediately see it as torture.
24:44
SPEAKER_01: And that's how a lot of people describe it,
24:46
SPEAKER_01: being on it,
24:46
SPEAKER_01: and that's why they want to get And that's a message that the public needs to hear,
24:51
SPEAKER_01: too,
24:51
SPEAKER_01: because,
24:52
SPEAKER_01: oh, they don't want to be on it because they're lacking insight or something.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: No, it's usually because they're pretty darn insightful and they know exactly what's happening.
24:59
SPEAKER_01: They're saying, this trade-off is not worth it to me.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: This is brutal.
25:03
SPEAKER_00: So one of the most controversial things I've been saying lately to psychiatrists is,
25:09
SPEAKER_00: have you tried it?
25:12
SPEAKER_00: Boy, do they get upset with me when I say it.
25:14
SPEAKER_00: I think it's a completely reasonable question.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, it sounds great.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: Oh, great.
25:19
SPEAKER_00: Antipsychotic, have you tried it?
25:20
SPEAKER_00: No.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: What?
25:22
SPEAKER_00: Why are you prescribing it then?
25:24
SPEAKER_00: It goes across the board.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: I was doing research into ketamine, online therapy, and the prescriber was singing the praises.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: I went, oh, have you tried it?
25:33
SPEAKER_00: No.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: So basically, you're prescribing medication that's going to alter my mind.
25:40
SPEAKER_00: You're prescribing them like Smarties or M&Ms and you haven't tried them.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: Why is that such a controversial thing to ask?
25:48
SPEAKER_00: Someone who purports to know their mind, you're meant to be a mind expert.
25:53
SPEAKER_00: You're not interested to know what this medication would do temporarily.
25:56
SPEAKER_00: Is it because it's dangerous?
25:57
SPEAKER_00: Is that why you want to try it?
26:00
SPEAKER_01: Well, one of them even claimed to me, oh,
26:02
SPEAKER_01: the effects would be totally different on me than they are on a quote-unquote,
26:07
SPEAKER_01: you know, person with schizophrenia or something, right?
26:10
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, oh, really?
26:12
SPEAKER_01: You know, and David Healy and I think some other people famously did take some, right?
26:18
SPEAKER_01: So the psychiatrist David Healy writes about it in one of his books.
26:22
SPEAKER_01: I think it was him.
26:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, a few of them took it and made notes about their experience.
26:28
SPEAKER_01: And it was exactly the same as everyone else I know who's ever been on
26:33
SPEAKER_01: an antipsychotic has experienced it.
26:36
SPEAKER_01: You know,
26:36
SPEAKER_01: just slow,
26:37
SPEAKER_01: impaired, feeling foggy, you know, not able to function well, really uncomfortable.
26:44
SPEAKER_01: And that's the thing.
26:44
SPEAKER_01: It's like,
26:45
SPEAKER_01: externally,
26:46
SPEAKER_01: it looks like you're tranquilizing a person because they become less able to move.
26:50
SPEAKER_01: But internally, often they're actually agitated.
26:53
SPEAKER_01: They're experiencing,
26:54
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:55
SPEAKER_01: akathisia,
26:56
SPEAKER_01: discomfort inside,
26:58
SPEAKER_01: but they look like,
26:59
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:59
SPEAKER_01: they're kind of aah,
27:00
SPEAKER_01: but inside they're kind of aah, like there's this tension around them.
27:04
SPEAKER_01: That's really common with these drugs.
27:06
SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, I know it's concerning.
27:10
SPEAKER_00: Just to expand that,
27:10
SPEAKER_00: you know,
27:11
SPEAKER_00: so basically that experience for people is literally, they more or less can't move.
27:16
SPEAKER_00: And they have this sense of being movement inside.
27:20
SPEAKER_00: That's a torturous experience for people to have.
27:25
SPEAKER_00: But I should say,
27:26
SPEAKER_00: a little caveat here,
27:27
SPEAKER_00: you know,
27:27
SPEAKER_00: if I was in a state of absolute distress and you said,
27:32
SPEAKER_00: here's a tranquilizer,
27:32
SPEAKER_00: just take it for a day, calm you down a bit, I'd be very open to it.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: My issue is not that in the short term,
27:40
SPEAKER_00: there can't be some value in tranquilizing,
27:42
SPEAKER_00: in having a medication that reduces anxiety.
27:47
SPEAKER_00: My issue is people are kept on it indefinitely.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: When I was in Malaysia, I used to ask patients to bring in their medication.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: They used to come in with a bag because it was my first experience of polypharmacy.
28:00
SPEAKER_00: So in Malaysia,
28:00
SPEAKER_00: if you went to the doctor with a They'd give you something for your ears, your head.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: Polypharmacy was a thing.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: But there were people who came in and I'm actually not even going to say tapered.
28:14
SPEAKER_00: They were more or less said, why don't you try coming off the medication?
28:18
SPEAKER_00: Came off the medication.
28:19
SPEAKER_00: Within a couple of weeks, they're back at work.
28:22
SPEAKER_00: The primary problem was the medication.
28:25
SPEAKER_00: So if anyone's listening,
28:27
SPEAKER_00: caveat, I'm not suggesting you come off your psychiatric medication at all.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: I'm just making the point that whatever use may or not have been present in
28:38
SPEAKER_00: that medication,
28:40
SPEAKER_00: they were on it longer than they needed to be, and it was now becoming the problem.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: And this seems to be a ubiquitous issue in prescribing in America
28:50
SPEAKER_00: where people are put on really serious medications but it's not reviewed
28:55
SPEAKER_00: or they're taken into hospital and then discharged and the prescriber on
28:59
SPEAKER_00: the outside is afraid to adjust the medication because they don't want
29:02
SPEAKER_00: to be held responsible for the person going back in.
29:05
SPEAKER_00: So I've seen people on lithium,
29:07
SPEAKER_00: an antipsychotic,
29:08
SPEAKER_00: a stimulant,
29:09
SPEAKER_00: an antidepressant, Something for convulsion, you know, like five, six, seven.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: And we're seeing it more in the media,
29:17
SPEAKER_00: some of these more famous, prolific cases, and also the veterans.
29:21
SPEAKER_00: They're getting a lot of our time in highlighting the insanity of the range
29:27
SPEAKER_00: of medications that they're put on, because the VA doesn't know what to do.
29:30
SPEAKER_00: So they just keep going down the medical model.
29:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
29:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
29:35
SPEAKER_01: And I would affirm what you just said too about,
29:39
SPEAKER_01: you know,
29:40
SPEAKER_01: these drugs we now know,
29:41
SPEAKER_01: we do know more about how the brain adjusts to their presence.
29:45
SPEAKER_01: And so you have to be very careful coming off these drugs,
29:48
SPEAKER_01: particularly if you've been on them Dr.
29:50
SPEAKER_01: Montgomery,
29:51
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: Dr. Montgomery, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia.
30:20
SPEAKER_01: Dr. Montgomery,
30:21
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
30:22
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
30:23
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia,
30:24
SPEAKER_01: psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia, psychophobia.
30:35
SPEAKER_01: Some people,
30:36
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:37
SPEAKER_01: it's not so bad,
30:37
SPEAKER_01: but in any case,
30:38
SPEAKER_01: especially if you've been on them a longer period of time,
30:41
SPEAKER_01: you need to take time to get off them.
30:43
SPEAKER_01: So it's not just a matter of slowly reducing the drug to get it out of your body,
30:48
SPEAKER_01: your brain needs time Dr. Montgomery, psychophobia.
31:05
SPEAKER_01: So it can be a process and people should be very careful about withdrawing from these drugs.
31:11
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, like to say, you know, we've been talking about they can also be quite debilitating.
31:16
SPEAKER_01: And so it's important to understand that they may be your,
31:19
SPEAKER_01: as one, there's a book called Your Drug May Be Your Problem.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: And it's true.
31:26
SPEAKER_00: So when I caught up with the science of tapering,
31:32
SPEAKER_00: When I was working with people on tapering off medication,
31:35
SPEAKER_00: prior to that, they thought the withdrawal and the rebound was them.
31:41
SPEAKER_00: So the cycle would be, say, take an antidepressant.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: They were on antidepressant for a period of time.
31:46
SPEAKER_00: They're ready to come off.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: They go to the doctor and say they want to come off.
31:51
SPEAKER_00: The doctor doesn't know about tapering, so they reduce the medication too quickly.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: There's a rebound of symptoms connected to your adjustment and a withdrawal,
32:01
SPEAKER_00: but they don't know that the withdrawal and the rebound is because of
32:04
SPEAKER_00: the medication.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: They think their depression is getting worse or their anxiety is getting worse
32:07
SPEAKER_00: or their psychosis.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: I know there's a lot of people in this space trying to educate in the importance
32:14
SPEAKER_00: of understanding responsible tapering.
32:20
SPEAKER_00: If it's required, that's the other thing.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm sort of very into the middle way.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: I think you can go too far.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: I've seen people come off, didn't need to taper.
32:30
SPEAKER_00: I've seen people taper too slowly.
32:32
SPEAKER_00: And then I've seen people who've come off too quick.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: It's somewhere in the middle.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: And the difficulty is you need someone who has encountered the person to understand
32:44
SPEAKER_00: the fluctuation as they come off
32:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well,
32:49
SPEAKER_01: as you may know,
32:50
SPEAKER_01: I worked a lot on the Inner Compass Initiative website early on and collaborated
32:56
SPEAKER_01: with groups of patients that had been,
33:03
SPEAKER_01: had experience with withdrawal and experience consulting with other people
33:06
SPEAKER_01: in withdrawal.
33:07
SPEAKER_01: And so I helped them kind of Pull some of their documentation together and put it on
33:12
SPEAKER_01: the website and so I learned a lot myself even
33:14
SPEAKER_01: though I've never taken any psychiatric drug but I learned a lot about this and one
33:18
SPEAKER_01: of the things that we talked a lot about and we tried to set up
33:21
SPEAKER_01: in this manual that's freely available It's available on the website
33:25
SPEAKER_01: for anyone that's interested.
33:27
SPEAKER_01: But when we're designing the manual, we're thinking a lot about that it is so personal.
33:31
SPEAKER_01: It's just everybody's journey with these drugs.
33:33
SPEAKER_01: And some people are on multiple drugs.
33:35
SPEAKER_01: And how does that affect the withdrawal process?
33:39
SPEAKER_01: The number of years they've been on them,
33:40
SPEAKER_01: their genetics,
33:42
SPEAKER_01: the food they eat,
33:43
SPEAKER_01: their other tendencies, how much exercise they did do before, tend to do now.
33:48
SPEAKER_01: So we really tried to grab all of that up to say this is a very personal process
33:53
SPEAKER_01: and one of the key things You are retaking control of your own health,
33:58
SPEAKER_01: of your own life.
33:59
SPEAKER_01: You're not anymore just leaving it in the hands of a quote unquote expert
34:04
SPEAKER_01: in psychiatry to tell you what to take or not take.
34:07
SPEAKER_01: Rather, you are trying to decide what What really works for me and what doesn't?
34:11
SPEAKER_01: What's truly helping me or not?
34:12
SPEAKER_01: And that's going to be a process where you're going to explore all of these things
34:16
SPEAKER_01: about your own health and wellbeing and try to slowly relearn that kind
34:22
SPEAKER_01: of self-awareness.
34:24
SPEAKER_01: And I think that is it, right?
34:27
SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of people,
34:28
SPEAKER_01: one of the key things is either they were forced into this or they self-administered
34:34
SPEAKER_01: or some kind of coercive combination of both because most people have been misled
34:39
SPEAKER_01: about the drugs and what they do and don't do and all of that.
34:42
SPEAKER_01: So those people were coerced as well if they didn't have full knowledge when they got on them.
34:47
SPEAKER_01: So more or less everybody's experienced some degree of coercion
34:50
SPEAKER_01: in their relationship with psychiatric medications And so it's a process of kind
34:56
SPEAKER_01: of reasserting your own independence and control again to kind of free yourself
35:01
SPEAKER_01: from them.
35:01
SPEAKER_01: So I think it's more to see it.
35:02
SPEAKER_01: It's not just a drug process.
35:04
SPEAKER_01: It's a process of self-growth and self-learning.
35:10
SPEAKER_00: So it sounds like something out of Star Trek in the sense of, you know, whole person medicine.
35:18
SPEAKER_00: It just seems to me like such common sense, but it sounds like so futuristic, right?
35:23
SPEAKER_00: Because we're so in, oh, broken arm, let's fix it.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, how did you get the broken arm?
35:27
SPEAKER_00: Oh, you've got a drink problem, you're taking risks.
35:30
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like, let's see what's really going on holistically for someone.
35:36
SPEAKER_00: Why are they elevated and talking about these things and being in this,
35:42
SPEAKER_00: what trauma or distress or issues,
35:45
SPEAKER_00: it's like, No,
35:46
SPEAKER_00: it's purely focused on the symptomatic presentation or a formulation
35:52
SPEAKER_00: of symptomatic presentation,
35:55
SPEAKER_00: a combination of what's observed and collateral information.
36:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
36:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
36:02
SPEAKER_01: And there's so much to learn because that's just it.
36:04
SPEAKER_01: You also may need to go all the way back to why did I go on these medications?
36:10
SPEAKER_01: Or if I did choose voluntarily at some point, Why?
36:16
SPEAKER_01: And maybe some of that is unresolved material still that you do.
36:20
SPEAKER_01: Once you start going off them, you realize, oh, I never really did solve that.
36:24
SPEAKER_01: And you have to confront it.
36:26
SPEAKER_01: So sometimes that's real too.
36:29
SPEAKER_01: And it's kind of mixed in there with these drug withdrawal effects.
36:32
SPEAKER_01: And it's really hard to kind of piece it all out.
36:35
SPEAKER_01: So yeah,
36:36
SPEAKER_01: often when people are in that,
36:37
SPEAKER_01: I'm just saying, maximize your physical health, be gentle to yourself.
36:45
SPEAKER_01: Find what's working for yourself, see what works, you know.
36:49
SPEAKER_00: So basically,
36:51
SPEAKER_00: it sounds like what we should do is replace all the mental health professionals
36:54
SPEAKER_00: with investigative journalists.
36:58
SPEAKER_00: And, well, you know what the quality is when you're talking, I think?
37:00
SPEAKER_00: Curiosity.
37:03
SPEAKER_00: To encounter somebody fully, you have to have some level of curiosity.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm interested in finding out what is alive for you and what your experience is,
37:14
SPEAKER_00: as opposed to,
37:16
SPEAKER_00: I've got a list of ready-made boxes of who you are and who you're going
37:20
SPEAKER_00: to be labeled as and who you're going to be seen as,
37:22
SPEAKER_00: and everything that you say from this day forth is going to come through that lens.
37:27
SPEAKER_00: So for example,
37:27
SPEAKER_00: you take somebody who's quite eccentric,
37:30
SPEAKER_00: The minute they get a label,
37:32
SPEAKER_00: that eccentricity is seen through the lines of a mental health diagnosis.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: And then all bets are off.
37:40
SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, no,
37:41
SPEAKER_01: it's so,
37:42
SPEAKER_01: I've looked through people's medical records when they were involuntarily committed
37:45
SPEAKER_01: and you see how quickly and easily it happens
37:48
SPEAKER_01: that suddenly very otherwise ordinary behaviours look like You know,
37:55
SPEAKER_01: sound like they're pathological in a hospital setting suddenly
38:01
SPEAKER_01: because people are just filtering that.
38:04
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that person talks really fast.
38:08
SPEAKER_01: Oh, and they have a term for, you know, manic speech.
38:13
SPEAKER_01: I was watching a quarterback the other day,
38:19
SPEAKER_01: being interviewed at the NFL quarterback,
38:21
SPEAKER_01: Patrick Holmes, and he talks really fast, right?
38:25
SPEAKER_01: And I'm sure that if he was in a second,
38:28
SPEAKER_01: And then talking at that pace, that would get put in the medical record.
38:33
SPEAKER_01: Manic speech.
38:35
SPEAKER_01: Even the commentator afterwards went, oh, it's kind of hard to keep up.
38:39
SPEAKER_01: And there wasn't anything.
38:40
SPEAKER_01: You just happened to talk that way.
38:43
SPEAKER_01: Suddenly it's like over-deliberative,
38:47
SPEAKER_01: paranoid,
38:48
SPEAKER_01: you just apply adjectives to how people speak in that setting
38:54
SPEAKER_01: and there's just no right way to speak because even
38:56
SPEAKER_01: if you're speaking like They present well,
38:58
SPEAKER_01: and the implication there is that you're lying, that you're deceiving.
39:12
SPEAKER_01: That you're just,
39:13
SPEAKER_01: you know,
39:13
SPEAKER_01: you're good at hiding the fact that you're crazy and we're exposing it, right?
39:18
SPEAKER_01: So all these ways that that plays out in an involuntary commitment setting.
39:22
SPEAKER_01: And to me,
39:23
SPEAKER_01: it's the self-delusion that's occurring there among
39:26
SPEAKER_01: the practitioners is really worrisome.
39:28
SPEAKER_01: They don't seem to have good radar to self-critique their own biased ways
39:35
SPEAKER_01: of viewing patients once they're in there.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: Well, if you were scooped up from your home against your will,
39:40
SPEAKER_00: taken to a hospital and an ambulance and then admitted,
39:45
SPEAKER_00: I can't see you sitting there chilled out, talking really slowly, right?
39:48
SPEAKER_00: You're going to want to try and get your story out.
39:50
SPEAKER_00: And most people know Most people know they're going to get like 15 minutes
39:55
SPEAKER_00: if they're lucky with a subscriber.
39:57
SPEAKER_00: So there's a motivation to talk quickly because if you want to try and get out,
40:00
SPEAKER_00: you want to try and explain your story.
40:03
SPEAKER_00: But what's the future?
40:05
SPEAKER_00: Give us a few takeaways.
40:08
SPEAKER_00: That we can throw out there?
40:10
SPEAKER_00: What can we all do collectively?
40:12
SPEAKER_00: If we're one big loving community, what can we do?
40:14
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think
40:15
SPEAKER_01: that's it.
40:16
SPEAKER_01: We got to create a big loving community again, recreate it.
40:20
SPEAKER_01: We got to rebuild it.
40:21
SPEAKER_01: That's the thing I see I see most in my own life and all my friends
40:27
SPEAKER_01: in my professional life as people are isolated,
40:30
SPEAKER_01: that there's something that the internet cannot really do,
40:35
SPEAKER_01: even as we connect through it more and it has great value for lots of things,
40:40
SPEAKER_01: but it doesn't replace It doesn't really give you the feeling
40:44
SPEAKER_01: of human connection often the level people want it and need it in their daily lives,
40:49
SPEAKER_01: in their regular lives.
40:50
SPEAKER_01: And so that's what I'm on about a lot is just we need to rebuild our communities
40:55
SPEAKER_01: from the ground up, grassroots up.
40:58
SPEAKER_01: And make,
41:00
SPEAKER_01: as you say,
41:01
SPEAKER_01: space for screaming with each other, that we provide that space to each other.
41:05
SPEAKER_01: So we're not professionals trying to diagnose each other.
41:08
SPEAKER_01: We're not trying to call 911 on each other.
41:10
SPEAKER_01: Rather, we're trying to provide space for each other to have the feelings we have,
41:14
SPEAKER_01: whatever they may be, and just kind of be a friend to each other.
41:18
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't mean I know the solution to your problems,
41:22
SPEAKER_01: you know, or you know the solution to mine, but You know, we listen, we try.
41:27
SPEAKER_00: After many decades in this space,
41:29
SPEAKER_00: I would say categorically what somebody needs most in a state of distress is
41:34
SPEAKER_00: a friend, just as you said.
41:36
SPEAKER_00: But we might need to cut that bit out because I was just about to say,
41:41
SPEAKER_00: follow us, follow you on the psychforce report and follow us on psychophobia.com.
41:50
SPEAKER_00: I think sometimes these spaces can be the conduit to building community.
41:56
SPEAKER_00: So it's a space I would hope that at some point maybe we could have
42:01
SPEAKER_00: a live psych force report and a psychophobia get together where people can come
42:07
SPEAKER_00: and connect and find some community.
42:09
SPEAKER_01: We'll see.
42:10
SPEAKER_01: Well, no, I mean,
42:11
SPEAKER_01: there's still enormously valuable information being shared across the internet.
42:16
SPEAKER_01: And I want to emphasize,
42:17
SPEAKER_01: because we have this legislation going on right now about where they're trying
42:21
SPEAKER_01: to ban children from using social media, and I'm fully against that.
42:24
SPEAKER_01: There's certain things we can do, like we should be able to protect their privacy a lot better.
42:29
SPEAKER_01: There shouldn't be algorithms trying to manipulate children and all that stuff,
42:33
SPEAKER_01: but knocking them off it altogether is terrible because that's
42:36
SPEAKER_01: where some people have found community,
42:38
SPEAKER_01: because there aren't There's not that many people of a certain sort.
42:41
SPEAKER_01: There are definitely minorities out there
42:44
SPEAKER_01: that wouldn't easily find compatible people in their small community.
42:48
SPEAKER_01: And so going online in some way, it's been really wonderful for them.
42:52
SPEAKER_01: And so social connection is real that way.
42:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it can definitely also interfere with our community building in real life.
43:01
SPEAKER_01: So we got to be careful about a balance there.
43:03
SPEAKER_01: And yeah,
43:04
SPEAKER_01: I will say that one of the things I'm doing,
43:06
SPEAKER_01: I'm not trying to actually create community.
43:09
SPEAKER_01: I don't have the opportunity so much on my PsychForce report,
43:12
SPEAKER_01: but provide useful and helpful information for people about things that are going
43:17
SPEAKER_01: on there.
43:17
SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, you know, if they want to follow me there or get the book.
43:20
SPEAKER_01: And I do think that we could all do more to do that, to connect, right?
43:26
SPEAKER_01: Bringing people together, yeah, online is useful.
43:30
SPEAKER_01: It's just, it's so...
43:32
SPEAKER_01: There's something so much about having that in my daily life,
43:35
SPEAKER_01: to be able to walk out and do something with someone in my community
43:38
SPEAKER_01: that I think we all really miss.
43:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, agreed.
43:42
SPEAKER_00: Well, listen, again, I would like to just rate your contribution and thank you.
43:48
SPEAKER_00: Really, really helpful.
43:49
SPEAKER_00: It's so great to have a civilian.
43:54
SPEAKER_00: You know,
43:54
SPEAKER_00: observing,
43:55
SPEAKER_00: witnessing,
43:56
SPEAKER_00: and speaking truth to power,
43:57
SPEAKER_00: and trying to give voice to those people who don't have one, basically.
44:02
SPEAKER_00: So thank you, and thank you for coming on.
44:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and thank you.
44:06
SPEAKER_01: It's great just to talk with someone who really gets these issues and wants
44:11
SPEAKER_01: to uplift this as well.
44:13
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, and thank to your audience for listening and sharing some of this with us.
44:20
[music]