Latest / Radically Genuine / 85. Ending Antidepressant Deaths: A Mother’s response to tragedy
Transcript
- Welcome to the radically genuine podcast. I am Dr. Roger McFillin. So Sean, it seems like I can't get through a couple of weeks without more, without more information and data being sent to me regarding kind of updates on on psychiatric drug harm and. Republication with new data and evaluating safety and efficacy of psychiatric drugs. I just got one sent to me yesterday regarding Prozac. And. how suicide old behavior and suicide attempts were kept out of final publications. It is through a groundswell of patient advocacy and family advocacy, where we bring this information to the mainstream. Because as we sit here in 2023, we still have way too many doctors and way too much of the general public believing these psychiatric drugs. are safe and effective. Unfortunately, it often requires the voice of a parent or a loved one who lost their child or someone they care about due to drug induced suicide or medical malpractice. Which brings us to our guest today. After losing her teenage daughter, Natalie, to a drug-induced death in 2013. Kristin Kaiser has applied her professional and academic background and her lived experiences to help others become more informed. She has over 20 years of professional experience in marketing and communication and education, which I think those skills allow her to be able to articulate a message that could hopefully better inform. mental health care and the harms of psychiatric drugs. She's applied these skills to author publications, accredited akathisia courses, she's provided FDA testimony and served on the board of the USA patient network. She presents at national and international conferences where she focuses on communicating crisis and risk. I know just from the times we've talked to her, she's, she's passionate, she's articulate, and she cares deeply about providing and obtaining informed consent. I want to welcome Christina Kaiser to the radically genuine podcast. kristina: Thank you. It's wonderful to be here today. Really appreciate the opportunity to share my lived experiences and what I've done since my daughter's death in 2013. To hopefully make sure others are better informed and avoid prescribed harm and prescribed death. That's my only goal. Sean: Christina, it's an honor to have you here. I think we do have to start with Natalie's story. Um, I know it's a, it's a story that you have shared with many to hopefully prevent the same outcome for others. Where do you want to let our audience begin with understanding the course of her life and, and what it led to an unfortunate tragic death? kristina: Thank you Roger. I'll refer our listeners to the links because I think that gives a very in-depth overview. But the short summary is Natalie was incredibly bright when she was in kindergarten. Her teacher said she couldn't go to a regular school, that she was going to have to go to a gifted and talented school. So when Natalie was I think eight or nine she took a test in Fairfax County Public Schools. It's a national a standardization test. And it was called the Naglieri test out of George Mason, but it's a national test. And she scored in the 97th percentile nationally. And so they told us that she would have to be bused out of our neighborhood and go to a special school for what they call it back then, terribly gifted and talented. All kids have gift and talents, and now they call it academically advanced. But anyway, so she was going to the school outside of our neighborhood. She rode a big yellow bus, bus in the morning and the afternoon. She's a very sensitive girl and I think it was difficult to ride a huge school bus by yourself and see all the neighborhood kids talking at the bus stop and you're being bused across town. But she had no trouble academically, she did fine, but she started to exhibit what I thought were signs of social anxiety. And at that time I thought it was from changing schools, I should say. I come from a family of believers, I guess I should say former believers in psychiatry. A very close loved one who went to Case Western Reserve and had a master's in social work kept telling me that I need to take Natalie to a psychiatrist. And Natalie, I remember hanging up the phone and thinking that's just crazy because Natalie did not need a psychiatrist. But this well-meaning loved one said... They have pictures of the brain and if you don't treat anxiety it can be permanent, you know, anyway. She parroted what she learned and pretty much convinced me that if I didn't take Natalie to a psychiatrist that I was not being a great parent. So, Natalie did not have depression. She went to a psychiatrist. It was Dr. Kimberly Bullock in McLean, Virginia, who was a lawyer and a psychiatrist. And I believed at that time that the more degrees the better, yada, yada, yada. And within a month, prescribed And I remember there was no black box warning at the time. And I remember I said to Dr. Bullock, but this is a depression drug. She's not depressed. And she said, oh, they give it for other reasons. Anyway, about a year or so later, there was a black box warning. A dear doctor letter came out. I was never informed. Dr. Bullock never informed us. Natalie started exhibiting unusual behaviors. I said, I don't think this is the right thing for her. And... Dr. Bullock told us to take a medication holiday and stop the Prozac, hold Turkey and see how she does. This is sad because at that time, their dear doctor letter from the FDA had already gone out and it pretty much advised not to do that. So I was very much uninformed. That was the first withdrawal induced suicidality. You can look at the links. She was only 11 at that time and she said, She wrote down, I wish I could stop thinking about wanting to kill myself. Now, of course, that was not Natalie, that was not innate to her. She couldn't even figure out why. So that's what happened. And then she had several good years after we got her off the Prozac. And oh, I'm sorry, the hospital never told me that Prozac could cause that. And they added risperdal. Okay. So then they never said that it was the drug that they withdrew. And that was what it was. So. Anyway, about a year later, we got her off everything. And then on the Madden America site, it'll tell you that depression pills cause depression. So she had some good years, but I think she was still suffering withdrawal. We didn't know what it was. And years later, somebody, another psychiatrist, put her on Zoloft claiming it was a different drug. At that time, I'm sad to say, I didn't know it was also an SSRI. And in the end, Debbie Lindy of Fairfax City, Virginia, a psychiatrist, gave Natalie Zoloft. Natalie was suffering from akathisia. She falsely believed that Natalie was suffering from some unexplainable, undiagnosable illness. Natalie was always mood disorder otherwise unspecified because she wanted to make sure she got her insurance payment. And on February 4th, 2013, Natalie called her to say she had... thought she had the flu, she was vomiting, she had a fever, sweating, she was crying very emotionally, low, labile. And Dr. W. Lindy told Natalie to start taking 200 milligrams of Zoloft. Natalie already had the drug in hand. Natalie did as she was directed by phone. And that was Monday. She took the 200 milligrams on Tuesday and she took it on Wednesday. And around four or 40 Wednesday, she died. Very violent death, which is... not indicative of a depressed person or an anxious person. It is indicative of an akathisia induced death. And after death blood test showed that she could not metabolize this toxin. A lot of things that happened before she died, I think we can touch on later, they were physical symptoms. Skin itching, skin picking, feeling that the head is outside the body, not being able to communicate, she was not being able to talk. And Change of date, she was shuffling her feet, she had a balance problem, and I was planning to ask her if maybe she had a rash or cut herself shaving, but I never got the chance. And that's what happened, 48 hours, 200 milligrams, taken as directed by phone, and dead at barely 19. Sean: Fortunately, this is a familiar story for us. We've had previous podcasts where we've spoken about akathisia and drug induced homicide and suicide via a drug induced akathisia reaction to a psychiatric drug. I want to just go back to the beginning a little bit. And I think this is one of my major problems with the mental health system and psychiatry in general, is we take a young girl who's appears to be experiencing kind of normal adaptations to stress. Um, there's great variability in the experience of people in the world. So, uh, going through a stressful experience during pre-adolescence or adolescence, there's nothing more normal than that, especially the experience of anxiety, very expected and normal reaction, we all have to learn how to manage anxiety and there are developmental stages, I think, where we're exposed to it more frequently. And it sets the stage for. risk-taking later in life, appropriate risk-taking and kind of pushing ourselves outside our comfort zone. However, in the psychiatric system, that's viewed as a symptom, a symptom to target with a psychiatric drug. You mentioned that when she was prescribed the SSRI and it was very clearly spoken to the treating psychiatrist that she doesn't really demonstrate any symptoms of clinical depression. Why are you giving her a quote-unquote anti- Depressant she said well, we give this for a lot of other things, right? kristina: Absolutely. Sean: How was the case Conceptualized communicated. What did they believe was going to be the outcome of providing this drug at the time? What were they even looking for? kristina: Oh, that's a good question, Roger. I think she didn't know, and I'll tell you why. As Natalie's symptoms, as she got new and somewhat bizarre symptoms, for example, after Prozac, she started cutting herself with a paperclip, and I, why? You know, she would never have done that. So she started having worsening symptoms, and every time I would mention it to this psychiatrist who was also an attorney, she would tell me, that it takes time to kick in or we should change a dose or I mean, or wait, wait for it. I should see her every single day for psychotherapy. And I was thinking, you know, I just wanted to get back to what my child was. And it's kind of like Stockholm syndrome is that once your loved one has been chemically abducted and you suspect, but you're scared, you know, well, gosh, if she's doing this poorly on this, what's wrong? But I think it's a Stockholm syndrome, and that is that you're desperate, that the captors who chemically abducted your loved one, and at this time I didn't put it in these words because I wasn't cognizant of it, but I understood the desperation I had. But also the other thing, and you know this in therapy, is this triangulation. And... I think every single psychiatrist, I don't wanna call them therapist, every single prescriber that Natalie had, engaged in triangulation. And over time, yes, the drug makes you paranoid anyway. Natalie and I had a very close relationship. Drug harmed that, but by the time she passed, we were close again. But the triangulation, and I wonder, I guess I have a question for you is, is it? how many psychiatrists possibly go into this field that maybe had a bad relationship, a poor relationship with their own parents, and they have transference where they start thinking that they're gonna save this child from the mother or save this person. And I really think, I think all of Natalie's prescribers, if they... have any insight and could be honest and or were given a truth serum and looked back at all the things I did and looked back at all the notes they would see that they robbed Natalie of a loving and caring mother and they robbed her of her innate personality and in the end they robbed her of her life. Sean: Yeah, I want to jump in here because I think you make an interesting point and it generalizes past just psychiatric harm. It's also some of the theories or the psychotherapies that are administered. So let's imagine that you're a traditional psychiatrist. Um, and most psychiatrists now aren't conducting psychotherapy, but traditionally their training is around this idea of psychodynamic therapy or psychoanalytic therapy, which really. You know, at its core sees emotional struggles and distress as related to dynamics within family or, you know, childhood type, a general term of trauma. So it was like, I'm talking to a friend yesterday whose son had a knee injury and went and had a con a consult with a surgeon and, you know, surgeons see things through a scalpel, you know, I can fix things through surgery, a psychiatrist for the most part. I can. give you a drug. A therapist, I can help you resolve kind of that trauma or the emotions that you're experiencing through the relationship that's developed with that person. Now, if you're of the highest ethical accord and you're very self-aware and you're scientific in your work, you approach everything with humility and try to make sure you protect against bias. But if you're just average, average trained or even poor, you begin to become biased in the manner in which you see the person in front of you. And so the idea of triangulation or kind of developing a connection against someone else and kind of victimizing you without all the data or information to actually support that can be a huge problem because we as therapists or anyone doing therapy has this power to create a reality. But if you're also under some drug induced symptoms, right? That can create anxiety or paranoia or not feeling well in general. It creates even more of a dependence on that person because you need to help me feel better. You know, it's outside of my control and there's trust there, all right? You're gonna give me another drug. There's something else I can talk about. There's a new way of thinking about my life and you're going to alleviate the emotional pain that I'm experiencing. And we do not recognize the dangers of what is really modern mental health treatment, and it goes beyond just the drugs. The drugs are horrible. This story here, I mean, I think sheds light on this, but it's more than that. It's a conceptualization of why someone may be suffering from too many that creates a problem. That's why you see this bilateral relationship with therapists and doctors where they're, they're, they're referring them to the drug and then. The doctors are referring them for a specific type of therapy. So I think it does speak to just the overall poor care. But her symptoms from the drug were misunderstood as new psychiatric symptoms. kristina: Absolutely. Sean: So they don't even understand that the drug can create that response in their patient, and then they misinterpret that. How did we get to this point where the doctors are so blinded? by the pharmaceutical industry, that they're not able to take a scientifically sound objective stance in trying to understand what's in front of them. kristina: Interesting. Well, I think. psychiatrists, and I'll just say prescribers of these drugs because general practitioners are very guilty and they don't have close follow-up and pediatricians, but they've lost sight of the treatment relationship and they cannot even possibly entertain the idea that the pharmaceutical intervention they selected is harming the person they profess to help. And so that's not. That's not something, it's either not on the radar screen or it happens to other people, but it's rare and it doesn't happen to, I've never seen it in my practice. Also, another thing I'll just say, when you talk about the, I call it pharmaciatry is what I call psychiatry nowadays, but I think it is pharmaciatry. And again, my family were believers and I have social workers in my family and they would agree now that, you know, psychiatry isn't what it... possibly started out to be, but I call it pharmaciatry. But at any rate, I was gonna say that when you go to the dentist and you have a cavity, the dentist kind of shows you the cavity and tells you how he or she's gonna fix it. Do you need a crown? Does it need to be pulled? Can it be filled? But when you go to a prescriber of these drugs and you start reporting new and bizarre symptoms like skin picking, crawling, having trouble walking, coughing up blood, excessive sweating, headaches, inability to concentrate, auditory command hallucinations, which I believe Natalie did have at the end on the 200 milligrams. But they just changed her diagnosis. So when I got the records from several of the prescribers, I didn't get them from the fatal prescriber, I'll tell you about that in a minute, but when I got the records, the first prescriber, it was so interesting that when you look at the records, the beginning is just, you know, general anxiety. Then as she continued to poison Natalie, the diagnostic DSM label guesses change and I thought, gosh, does any responsible prescriber when they're doing their charting ever think that they keep guessing and that the person's changing and that they're causing harm? Why? When you look at the records and you think this person wrote these records over time, where was the disconnect? And I think it goes back to your statement, Roger, that they're in bed with the pharmaceutical companies. They can't entertain the idea that they've abandoned their Hippocratic oath. And the triangulation is definitely there too, because they think they're going to be a hero and save this person from whomever it is that maybe in their own past had issues with. So it's pretty much... my feeling that that's what happened. When you can't entertain the idea that you're harming the person you profess to help, sometimes you continue harming them and they die. I will say that when Natalie's doctor, the final prescriber who prescribed 200 milligrams over the phone and Natalie already had it in hand, when she was told that Natalie died a violent death, I say Natalie died. of self-sustained injuries while suffering from a drug-induced akathisia psychosis. But even though Natalie died of self-sustained injuries, she did not die by her own hand, not in the least. And so when we told Dr. Debbie Lindy at City of Fairfax that Natalie had died, she started screaming, oh my God, oh my God, it doesn't make sense. I just saw her. She wasn't depressed. And as I've said in many of my writings, no, Natalie wasn't depressed. She didn't get the drug for depression. And talking to somebody on the phone, especially before zoom, you know, this was 2013, there was no clinical observation. And lastly, the doctor falsely charted that Natalie had taken 200 milligrams before when Natalie hadn't, and she was going out of town that week for a, to Canada where she's from, she was going to her nephew, I think, Bar Mitzvah. And she told Natalie to come in two weeks to check, you know, for a checkup. Two weeks is not close monitoring when you increase the drug like this. And she never also gave Natalie a name of anybody else that she should be contacting. So it's no surprise, Roger, that when we went to request the records, she got very flustered. She started providing onesies and twosies and saying her printer was broken. It was very strange. Then she was saying, do you want me to transcribe the records because I use a software? Do you want them as is? There's just so, compared to the other prescribers who were equally bad, but they didn't put the nail in my daughter's coffin, but they at least gave me the records, and they were normal records and in order. But this prescriber was doctoring the records. She was buffing the records. She was trying to. uh... take things out i'm sure of it and the reason i'm sure of it is because in the end i think when you start buffing the record and you start doctoring the records lawyers will tell you you know it you'll actually sometimes disingenuous person does themselves more harm than good but i think after she realized that there was just too much there that she couldn't cover up she actually left me a text message can you imagine a text message in a voice message and it said I wanted to sound like a valley girl. It really was sad, but she said, I wanted to talk to you because I, I can't give you all of Natalie's records because they kind of, sort of, that's what she said, they kind of, sort of were distorted in office flood because, wait for it, I thought of Natalie as if she were my own daughter and I couldn't bear to put the records away so they were on the floor in my office. Now I gotta say, Incriminating records have a way of disappearing when a prescriber knows that they've caused harm and death. And at the time it was pretty amazing that she did that. But in the end I thought, well, she didn't mean to, but she did me a favor in the sense that the one positive takeaway, because I tried to be a positive person using trauma and loss to help others, that's something that you can do if you have the gumption. But the thing is that when she told me, quote, you know, I thought of your daughter as the daughter I never had, and then she lost or whatever, destroyed, office flood, whatever you wanna believe, it made me realize this, at least I believe this. She knew what she did. And also she robbed Natalie of a mother because had she ever told me that she had basically climbed through my daughter's bedroom window on a Monday afternoon. via the phone and drugged my daughter further. Do you not think that in the 48 hours I was able to see some of these very concerning changes? I said to Natalie's dad, I was married then, that something was wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I mean, she was shuffling her feet the last time I ever saw her walking to her bedroom, and she was walking with a very wide stance. She was having trouble balancing. Change of gait is a toxicity. She wrote down before she died, I keep coughing up blood. Upper GI bleeding is one of the symptoms. So the reason the FDA, well, I don't have a lot of respect for the FDA, to be honest, it doesn't mean a drug is safe and effective, but at the very least, the black box warnings who were put on there in part because of my colleague, Kim Witzak and Matthew Downing, my friends and colleagues, you know, it says, Patients should be carefully monitored and caregivers informed to watch for and report any unusual changes in behavior. That's why, because these changes of behavior are oftentimes the precursor to iatrogenic violent deaths and homicides. And so when you rob somebody of a caregiver, I was not able to connect the dots. I wasn't able to connect the dots because I didn't know somebody had further drugged her. Sean: Christine, I know you're aware of a lot of the work that I'm doing and I'm trying to at least present information out there to the general public through social media in this podcast so they can make more informed decisions, but I keep coming up against the same kind of resistance. And I see this in my community with patients at my center and I see it on social media, the doctors will continue to minimize the potential for harm. And in fact, that minimization of the harm leads to this poor practice. Even though you go to the drug websites, at this point, you know, it's clearly identified the potential adverse reactions from these drugs. I can only imagine the information that the doctors are getting, which is through the pharmaceutical salespeople, is minimization of how likely that these events could happen. So a lot of the side effects that they're being told, well, maybe some nausea, maybe some changes in mood, let's just be careful about it. They're not being told that this drug is potentially toxic to you because we know there's a percentage of people where they are unable to metabolize the drug, likely due to a metabolizing gene, potentially 10% of the population where it's gonna create reactions just like it did in your daughter. But they're not also told that even if you... If you don't have, if you are able to metabolize that drug, just people get different reactions. It's the variability that exists genetically amongst all of us. And they all act so shocked or surprised when these drug reactions occur, because they are brainwashed in the thinking that the poor response to the drug is just the mental illness presenting itself, and they need to find the right drug. So I know that after the loss of your... your daughter, you've become really educated on these, on these subjects. I don't know how many doctors you've been able to speak to, but how do we change this narrative? How do we get doctors to become more aware under this current culture? kristina: Oh, well, that's an interesting thing for we. I think, look, we're never gonna have the we advocates, people who speak truth to medical power and have no vested interests, you know, personal or financial, except for being altruistic to help others. We can tell our stories. And it's interesting how the drug trials that, you know, Patient stories are meaningless for pharma unless they support whatever it is they've cherry picked, which is rather laughable because, you know, anecdotes are evidence. I mean, with Natalie, I could say it was a bit like if you look at the chain reaction of walking in a park and getting poison ivy. I mean, I always find it interesting that doctors don't seem to want to read more of these stories because if I were a prescriber, I would wanna know. Let's look at this case study because unfortunately, I, Christina, have a lot of years assessing and observing akathisia and drug-induced psychosis and serotonin toxicity because she had that before she died. But they're not interested, so because it doesn't fit with their, it would hurt their financial bottom line, first of all, but otherwise. The only thing I would say, Roger, and this sounds a little, I don't really care how it sounds, but I think... Some people might think it sounds out there, but honestly, I think prescribers such as Natalie should be charged with manslaughter. If you gave somebody, they should be going to prison. If somebody gave my daughter a controlled substance, a drug, that can cause psychosis and violent death, I don't consider her death a suicide, but you know, we call it that because we don't have another term. If somebody popped that into her soda or put it in her food in college, and we found out who it was, and Natalie thought she could fly and jumped off the garage at the campus, they'd be prosecuted. And I think, you know, some people disagree. It is maybe years ago, and I think David Healy, whom I respect, has said that there is no excuse anymore. Maybe decades ago, there was an excuse that doctors didn't know. But now they don't know they have their head in the sand and they ought not be practicing. But honestly, I think until prescribers go to prison, it's difficult to change. I think the one good thing that has come about with advocacy, and I'll get back to some of the conferences I've attended with the Mist Foundation, is that when people hear the story, you cannot imagine how many emails we get and people will say, because I saw Natalie's story, because I saw another world, which is a... short documentary that Kevin P. Miller did using Natalie's diaries. They say I knew what was happening or I told my doctor I didn't want my son to be on that or my husband who was restless and pacing, we knew it's the drug. And it's not just SSRIs that cause akathisia. We hear from people on Accutane, hair loss drugs, calcium channel blockers, which is cancer, heart, I'm sorry, heart blood pressure. But what I would just say is that doctors... have to be accountable. Because when these kind of things happen, pharmaceutical companies will throw them under the bus. Sean: Totally great. Um, in fact, just this week, or actually it was last week, one of my clients experienced akathisia right in front of me after B after being prescribed a drug for migraine headache. And luckily that patient also has my personal cell phone number because of a program we have here. And I was able to, uh, even after the, the session later in that day, we were able to stay in touch and in contact with the neurologist and, or the nurse on call for the neurology program, I explained I saw akathisia in front of me, which is an inner restlessness, like scratching of the skin, feeling like you're going to lose your mind, and experiencing thoughts of harm that almost appear to be outside of you. And I was very clear, she's gonna need to be monitored, do not treat her as a psychiatric patient. Because kristina: Exhibit. Sean: if you treat someone as a psychiatric patient, then you're into the system, and it's misunderstood. And they're being treated as if they're an imminent risk or danger to the self, their self or others, even though they clearly say, I don't want to have these thoughts. I don't want to do things or something happened to me from the drug. It's clearly a drug reaction sent this person to the hospital. And of course he's treated as a psychiatric patient, which is in that nowadays it's a, it's a prisoner. You lose your phone. You kristina: Absolutely. Sean: have to strip and you have to strip naked in front of other people. And if you have a history of, of trauma, other things, it's a, it's a retraumatization. because you're losing your rights under this system. And so I, I, I sense your, your, your, your anger, obviously even, you know, 10 years down the line, you're doing so much work, but there's an anger there because there's not justice and there's not accountability and we are not seeing the system change. So it continues to happen. I still hear the same ignorance and nonsense. When I talk to a doctor who minimizes the harm of the drug. who doesn't follow up with their clients for observation for another 30 plus days after a new drug being added. They don't even know the clients because they are doing psychiatric interviews within 15 to 20 minutes. And that's financial gain. Now kristina: Absolutely. Sean: that's because if you can see multiple psychiatric patients in an hour, then you can continue to code that. If you just see them for one session for one hour, you don't make as much money. And so they don't even know the people that they're prescribing. They've become legalized drug dealers and I don't see it changing. I don't see it getting better. I see it getting worse. kristina: Interesting. Sean: Christina, Christina kristina: Yes. Sean: with, um, with your daughter and the increase of, of Zoloft, there's, there's a clear case of some like negligence and male practice. I believe you've learned quite a bit over the last 10 years. Maybe you can touch on some of the complexities of a legal system. kristina: Absolutely. So I contacted a well-known, great question by the way, thank you. My partner is British, English to be exact, and I find it ironic that one of the reasons Natalie never, we never had justice in the legal system has to do with England. It goes back to Virginia is one of three or four states that has a law. I want to be careful how I explain it, but it's called contributory negligence. It doesn't mean that the person contributed in any way. It doesn't mean that Natalie did. Her after death blood test, which I had to fight the coroner in Virginia to get blood to show to get tests done. So after death blood test with the little blood we got left showed that Natalie could not metabolize this toxin. It's the only test she ever had by any of these, ever had all these years that none of the drug pushers ever asked. already blood tests so isn't that interesting after she's died. She's died. But I had to fight the corner to get blood. I wanted to test for serotonin toxicity, serotonin levels too because she definitely had serotonin toxicity before she died. Natalie was found on February 6th next to a fan and it was full blast and it was a very cold February day. So she had profuse sweating, lots of different things. She wrote down that she was coughing up blood. She complained about skin crawling. But anyway, back to the thing, very good question. So in Virginia, it's almost, I had one expert psychiatrist said, this is so bad. Every case is worse than the one before. He taped me 90 minutes at the time I called him. I wasn't thinking about suing. I was just thinking about understanding what happened. And he said, oh, it won't even go to trial because it was so bad, you know, misdiagnosis, didn't have any clinical observation, didn't know how much she had prescribed before, yada, yada, yada. Well, it never went to court. And the reason it never went to court is because in Virginia, you have to be able to prove that the adverse outcome, whether you fell down on a wet floor at Home Depot and broke your hip or whether you took a drug and it caused your precipitated your demise and death, if you can't prove that the end result of the defendant's actions were 100%, if you can't prove... that what happened, the result was 100% due to the malpractice or the dereliction of a company, you get zero. So many attorneys, most in these cases don't want to take these cases because how difficult it is to convince people, and you talked about this before, not just Sean, but you talked about how people... is more prescribing nowadays people don't want to believe you know it's kinda like the catholic church and i was married in the catholic church and and so practicing catholic but i think i compare it to that is that people don't want to believe that your institution i.e. a church whether it's catholic or something else that you trusted your family members and your children to have harmed you or could harm you that happens to other people happens to other neighbors it happens to other churches So the same thing happens, Sean and Roger, is that juries don't wanna believe that what happened to Natalie was due to the malpractice in the pharmaceutical product because then they have to go to bed at night and realize that nobody is safe, and they're not safe. Sean: Christina, I want to thank you for sending me the recently published paper, restoring the two pivotal fluoxetine trials in children and adolescents with depression. I think it's actually worth mentioning. kristina: Absolutely. Sean: This is in 2022, published by Peter Gaultier and David Healy, who you mentioned earlier. Floxatine, which is Prozac, which is widely prescribed to children and adolescents now, commonly communicated to physicians and physicians communicating it to the general public that it is safe and effective for the treatment of depression and anxiety in children and teens. In fact, The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends this as a frontline treatment. But, um, Peter Gaultier and David Healy reviewed, it was a systematic review of the original clinical studies that received FDA approval X 065 and HCJE with 96 and 219 participants respectively. What they found was essential information was missing and there were unexplained numerical inconsistencies. Number one, the efficacy outcomes were biased in favor of fluoxetine by differential dropouts and missing data. The efficacy of the children's depression rating scale revised was 4% of the baseline score, which is not even clinically relevant. Patient ratings did... not find fluoxetine effective. Suicidal events were missing in the publications and the study reports. Precursors to suicidality or violence occurred more often on fluoxetine than on placebo. For trial HCJE, the number needed to harm was six for nervous system events. Seven for moderate or severe harm and 10 for severe harm. Fluoxetine reduced height and weight over 19 weeks by one centimeter, respectively, and prolonged QT syndrome or interval was identified. The conclusions from these authors was that the two pivotal trials that received FDA approval from their perspective, demonstrate that fluoxetine is not only ineffective, but it is unsafe. But yet we have doctors today referencing FDA approval for justification for these prescription drugs. And honestly, can anyone at this point, deny the fact that the pharmaceutical industries are the most lucrative criminal organization in the history of the world based just on fines alone, not to mention all of the settled lawsuits. I know you have experience in this area with the FDA and understanding a lot of the fraud from these trials. What's your opinion on what has gone on and how do we rectify this? kristina: That's a great question, Roger. And Sean, I appreciate the question about the legal system. You just reminded me of something. I want to get back to Virginia. So I was a very successful marketing teacher coordinator with one of the supposed 11 largest best districts in the country, a wealthy county. And I remember I taught in an academy program. So some of my high school students had real world experience. We would do real marketing things Autism Speaks or one of the things we did long before Now They Die is we worked, kind of worked, it was FDA funded but the word, the acronym FDA never came up. I was working with my students on banning smoking in public places like playgrounds and stuff and we were able to help get a law passed in Virginia that, you know, at the McDonald's play area at your local park, young children wouldn't be... to secondhand smoke. So most people could argue, you know, would support that that's a good thing. So this is a real quick interesting thing about the money, the pharmaceutical fraud and also the far mafia. I mean, that's what I'll call them, far mafia. They are aided and abetted by politicians. And I get back to McCain at the time, so Kane rather. So in 2016, oh, well, around like 2012, around that time, I think, before Natalie died, Governor Cain, then was the governor of Virginia, his office invited me and my students to Alexandria, Virginia, where we were, the dog and pony show pictures for him announcing that Virginia now had a law that you can't smoke in playgrounds, et cetera. Well, that was fine for Hillary Clinton's running mate. who was the vice president candidate. But when I went in 2016 to talk to him about what happened to Natalie, wasn't interested. Nothing we can do, blah, blah, blah. Well, yesterday that came up to me and I went online to look and there's a New York Times article. I will show you, leave it in the links. McCain or Kane, I keep saying McCain, but Kane, Senator. Cain, who was the vice president nominee with Hillary Clinton. The New York Times article shows how much money he took from pharmaceutical companies. Free rides. We're not just talking free lunches like W. Lindy and Natalie's fatal prescriber took. And that's on open payments to see who she took the money from and the drugs she pushed in response to the free lunch. But Cain is just like any other politician, to be honest. I don't know if there's anyone that doesn't take pharmaceutical money. And it's big money. And at the time, Virginia's laws were some of the more laxed. And as he was taking the money, he was actually voting on something that was going to benefit the door company. And so I really would just say, Sean and Roger, I think our stories help, and I know I have saved people. I have no doubt that my efforts have saved people that I've met, people who've written me, and people I will never know. And Natalie meant the world to me, but your life was no more important than anybody else's. It was really important to me. She was the world to me, but her life was no more value than anyone else's. So I think when I know I've saved someone from suffering and possibly death, I know I've saved that family. I've saved their world. But back to the thing at hand, the system in the economic system for political fundraising, Pharma owns it all. They own it all, Pharma and the chemical companies. I was really glad that Bomb Headlin, I give a shout out to that Bomb Headlin law firm that did the Stuart Dolan case and they won it. It was overturned by whatever technicality, but the jury voted against GSK. Not only did they say that Paxil caused Stuart Dolan's death, they also gave awarded damages for the time he was suffering before he died after being hit by a train. That's how Myst was founded. But back to the thing at hand, until the US, I don't know, until they decide that pharmaceutical companies aren't gonna run the US, and until politicians stop taking pay for play money and the FDA, I don't really know what the answer is, except for sharing our stories. Sean: this really runs deep too because I know that you have spoken out against how the pharma funded mental health nonprofits are, you know, infiltrating our schools and they're trying to kind of work with this narrative to understand mental health related to biological means that can be corrected with their pharmaceuticals. I also read something regarding, um, a meeting that you had where a organization was trying to discuss Natalie's death due to an undiagnosed eating disorder. Can you tell some stories around that? I think they're powerful. kristina: Roger, I'm so glad you brought that up. Well, first of all, I know you've authored several chapters on eating disorders and you're an expert assessor of that. And it was interesting, Natalie was trying to figure out what was happening to her and it was only about two days before she died where she said to me, because she was looking online about parathesia, the skin picking, she was looking online to see what was happening and she said, Mom, I think I have an unspecified eating disorder. Well. I said, well, we'll go to the group. It was the first thing I never had heard that before. And then of course she was dead less than 48 hours later. So it was all very stressful. When she died in the Washington Post, I wanna get this in there because she didn't have an eating disorder. But I chose an eating disorder nonprofit as donations because the last thing my daughter ever told me in terms of what might be wrong, aside from parathesia and the skin itching and bugs crawling and not being able to walk. and all that. She said she had an unspecified eating disorder. Well, Roger, I don't know if you're aware of it, but if you dig deep, anorexia. It's drug-induced. It's SSRI-induced anorexia, which isn't to be confused with anorexia whatsoever, because Natalie was of a normal weight, and she was a healthy eater, and she was a good exerciser. She was vegan. She just didn't have anorexia, but she did develop an SSRI-induced eating disorder. disorder of sorts in the end because on the little piece of paper she wrote down before she died, she wrote down, I keep coughing up blood, I'm not hungry. Now let me get back to... Sean: It's hard to eat when you feel horrible. kristina: Yeah, yeah, but AFSP is largely pharma funded and AFSP stands for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and there's a great Fitiman blog article I'll post there. Basically, I called Christine based out of New York. The AFSP has some pretty nice offices. They look more like Gucci. So he shows you where they get their money. Manhattan offices. But she tried to convince me. She said, I remember we had like a 40 minute phone call. This is great to please reference it because it's an amazing article on the Fitment blog. But she tried to convince me that Natalie, that a lot of people who have eating disorders kill themselves. And I was just saying, my daughter didn't have an eating disorder. She had eating issues. from the drug, but first time I ever heard that she thought she had an eating issue was two days before she died. But I was talking to her about akathisia. They don't announce akathisia on their website. AFSB takes a lot of pharma funding and they have no interest whatsoever of telling people that the products they promote on their website can actually cause suicide. So here's a Sean: More kristina: suicide Sean: than doubles kristina: organization. Sean: the risk. That's kristina: Yeah, yeah, so. Sean: what we have to be very clear about because I've placed published papers on my social media feed that with adults, it more than doubles the risk. I think it's even higher for young people. But kristina: Oh, I think so too. Sean: we have doctors prescribing drugs when clients report experiencing suicidal ideation as if it's a drug treatment for suicide. It more than doubles the risk. That's more information that needs to get out there. The last thing I would do would be adding a drug into the treatment regimen for someone who was struggling with suicidal thinking or some degree of despair. kristina: Right. Roger, good point because I think Natalie's fatal prescriber, probably all of them, but the fatal one, she wasn't very bright. And I do remember saying to Natalie after she died, after the woman doctor the records, lost the records, all this stuff, mischartered what Natalie had taken the dose and stuff. And I remember I talked to Natalie sometimes and I said, Natalie, I am so sorry that I trusted you to such an unethical, ignorant person. It wasn't just that Natalie died. It was the sadness and guilt that I realized that I had not been able to properly vet some of these destructive people who were not trustworthy nor professional. But interesting what you say because it's clear to me that NAMI, AFSP, all of these organizations are not grassroots. They're called astroturf. They are pharma funded and how do they get in the schools? I'll tell you how they get in the schools and I hope I can put this in the link. It may be off YouTube, but quickly, as a marketing instructor, we were encouraged to bring in real world speakers. And for a while, I had seen it on YouTube. I hope it's still there. The woman is a marketing instructor. She was a former colleague of mine. I don't fault her. She didn't know she was doing harm, but she brought in the speaker and it was from NAMI and the video was up. on YouTube, it was Fairfax High School in Fairfax County, Virginia. It was a NAMI presenter from NAMI and one of the kids asked, you know, raises his hand and asked, you know, what causes depression? And the NAMI speaker who is parroting the pharmaceutical line, chemical imbalance. So you want to know why it is that more young people, including college, are taking stimulants and all of a sudden after excess sex for 22 years now they say they have ADHD and they're taking stimulants which can cause violence. It can cause Hatred it can cause anger. They're taking SSRIs which I don't think these young people in college who are going to the clinic and getting this are going to realize that they are 100% going to have sexual dysfunction as some side effects some of a permanent all these things, but where does it come from? It comes from honestly Sean and Roger comes from fourth grade health class. I mean This is how it goes when you screen people. This is how it goes when you bring in pharma-funded speakers, but you've whitewashed where they came from. And I think parents have, if I was a parent of a young child today, I would do things very differently. It is that corporations, chemical companies, pharmaceutical companies, and nonprofits that are not nonprofits, but are really pharmaceuticals, have no business being invited in a public health class. Sean: It's an indoctrination. It's become this ideology where, you know, drugs are used as healthcare and it's kind of this chemical experimentation on the human experience. Now we have young people, Generation Z is growing up believing that they're normal and expected human emotions and reactions to events are now the potential illness and when you start communicating that at a very young age where they're susceptible, They start talking about their own moods as I'm depressed. Or if they can't focus on a kristina: I Sean: class, kristina: know. Sean: which is quite normal for any kid, they'll start saying, my ADHD is preventing me from this. And of course there's gonna be a doctor who's gonna love just to write that prescription. Be very careful parents, about who you assign the word expert to. Because the quote unquote experts in... the Western world are really just following guidelines right now. That's how we're training our medical professionals from primary care and psychiatry. It is such a limited understanding of the human experience through checklists and symptoms and writing out a drug. Listen, I can train a 15 year old to do that job. That's not very challenging. That's not very difficult. Um, so be very careful cause we've really given over a lot of our rights. Like I come across parents who are just scared. to actually parent. They want the expert to tell them what to do and they're fearful of going against the expert. And we hear insane comments. Like recently a psychiatrist said, well, if your child had cancer, would you not give them the cancer drug? Or if they had diabetes, would you not provide kristina: Oh Sean: them kristina: yeah, Sean: insulin? kristina: I've heard that before. Sean: And they're making that comparison. And I think the moment that somebody talking about justice, when someone makes such an insane comment to bully a parent through fear, to take a toxic harm, pharmaceutical that has potentially life threatening adverse reactions. That's criminal behavior. Hearing these kristina: Absolutely. Sean: stories and being, I know that there's our listeners, you can probably sense the anger that I have and the anger that Christina has, but that's because we've had to look people in the eyes. Christina's lost a child. I've had to look parents in the eyes and talk to them after events such as these. And the information is out there. It's... It is clear, it's out there, it's anyone wants to search for it and understand how harmful these drugs are. It just takes some critical thinking, evaluation and some work. And I feel like we're training healthcare professionals to no longer become critical evaluators of research. They're just following clinical guidelines. And when something comes up to them clinically outside, the bounds of what they were told to be normal, they can't even fathom it anymore. So we've lost the independent practitioner. kristina: Absolutely. Oh, Roger, you just gave me a touch on a couple things real quick. MIST, the MIST Foundation, we presented at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in March, and I've got to tell you that we also ran ads on the London Tube. We ran, and I say we, I have to be clear, I'm a consultant for MIST. I'm not on their board. I'm a communications consultant. I like to have my own voice. My comments are my own. Sean: Can you tell the listeners what MIST stands for? kristina: It stands for the Medication Induced Suicide Education and Prevention Foundation in memory of Stuart Dolan, but it's MIST is what we go by. Let me tell you though, we had therapists, not prescribers, but a couple prescribers, but mostly clinical social workers, when they saw our booth, the MIST booth, they said, one person said, and we have a press release on that, I'll link to it, said, oh my goodness, I can't believe I found you here. I was riding the New York subway to work, and this person I think was the head of a pretty big, you know, clinical place in New York City. She said I was riding the subway on to work, and I looked up and I saw akathisia. I saw this ad and I said, oh, I've never heard that word. And she said that week, one of her clients she had to observe had a change in medication, and she saw. that he was behaving in a way that was different than before. And she said, she called the prescriber and told him it was akathisia. I mean, that kind of story to be able to share shows, we're making a difference. What are the odds that just one lady happens to come by and see our booth and she was on the train? Same with London, same with West Virginia, we had billboards, but it's interesting what you say because more people are starting to, I think also with... How do I say this? Regardless of what somebody wants to think about, whether the COVID shots, I won't necessarily call them vaccines because they don't really even meet the definition, but regardless of what you think about the COVID products, I think most people, if they were halfway intelligent and halfway honest, would have to admit that this has shown more people in the public that information is withheld. by government agencies like the FDA. Information is cherry picked and it's not just the pharmaceutical companies. Every step of the way, including politicians, did not share what they knew, only cherry picked, sometimes out and out lied, and people were harmed. And all I will say is that I want everybody to have what I didn't, informed consent. I should be able to know. If I go to the grocery store, whether it's Kroger or Safeway or Piggly Wiggly, who knows, wherever you live in the US, I should find out if the tomato was organic. So why is it that my child or anybody's, not just a child, it's all ages that this can happen, why is it that you're not allowed to have all the data? Because I'll tell you why. You said, Roger, one time on Twitter that you didn't believe SSRI should be banned, and I agree because I think once people, if people would get the data themselves, they wouldn't have to be banned because nobody would take this product. And I think you talked about the anger and I'll just say, my daughter got a product she didn't need. She never got a specific diagnosis. It kept changing. It harmed her. It took away her spirit, her soul, and her life. And it was not a product that she needed for heart disease, cancer, or some sort of terrible illness. The whole thing. is such a tragedy, but it's not my tragedy alone, it's millions of people. And the only way that we can take back our power is to try to demand, you know, accurate information. And that starts with the fact that these medical journals shouldn't be allowed to publish falsities and they publish falsities by getting the journal article from a ghost writer who was a PR firm. You know how it works and it's really evil. I mean, I don't know how else to explain it, it's evil. Sean: house of cards. You know, the next time I hear a practicing psychiatrist state, you know, hey, these drugs, they have significant harms and we should be cautious and weigh the risks and benefits. Let's just spend some time together learning about you and your life and seeing what progresses over time. The next time I hear that'll be the first time because that's kristina: Absolutely. Sean: not how they're trained, right? Listen, we've kept you a long time. Going back to this Dr. Martin Luther King post. Darkness can't drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. And I believe what you're doing is there's a light and there's a love in your advocacy work. And coming on podcasts like this and sharing your story is about love for others and caring that it doesn't happen to someone else's child or someone else's loved one. And that is love and that light is the only way that we can make change by sharing these stories that her memory continues to go on through these stories and through this information and through this passion and even this anger. The anger is valid. If we use that anger to fight back, we fight back against the criminal behavior, the censoring of scientific information, the conflicts of interest that dominate healthcare in the United States, especially mental healthcare, then I think we start making changes every single. day because there is an awakening post COVID for a lot of people out there because they were lied to. They were lied to about the safety and the efficacy of the COVID vaccine. It was the same marketing approach for the vaccines that we saw in the mental health field for the past two decades. People kristina: Absolutely. Sean: are awakening. kristina: They are. And I'll tell you, the anger doesn't consume me because I think there's beauty in the world. My daughter was beautiful. She was pretty on the outside, which isn't so important, but she was more beautiful on the inside. And I have to say that anger doesn't consume me. And at the same time, it's not true that you have to forgive someone before you can heal. And I've learned that. Anger doesn't consume me and I may or may not choose one day to work on forgiveness. It's not on my radar screen right now because I've worked on me and I'm, I'm, I have my moments that of course. Trauma and loss is always with me, but I have a happy life and Natalie would want me to have a happy life. But it is not true that some therapists, I'm not saying, well, we'll try to tell someone, you know, you have to forgive in order to heal. I don't believe that's true. I don't believe it's true for many people I've met that we have, we are healing. It's not wherever, we're not going to all of a sudden be healed. It's a lifelong trauma and loss, but I don't let anger consume me at the same time. I don't have any feeling. that I have to forgive or work on forgiveness, I don't. But I will just say that I think our work is meaningful and we have made a difference. And I know you've seen it on Twitter, we've made a difference and that no amount of money, no amount of government fraud will ever. change the fact that we have reached people and I appreciate that you allowed me today to continue my message which is really one of hope and love, hope love and truth. Sean: encourage all the listeners today to share this podcast episode. There's so many people that are just quickly being prescribed drugs and are not provided the information, especially in this mental health field. We look at the data. If you can share these stories, you can allow at least allow people to, to pause and do some research on their own. By I'm a libertarian by nature. Um, kristina: Me Sean: I believe kristina: too. Sean: in freedom and freedom of choice. And so I say, don't take SSRIs off the market. There's a lot of people that are on them. And. You can't just abruptly stop a drug, but I do believe that if they are provided the information and they hear these stories, the market, the free market is going to really diminish their use until it becomes part of our collective history. And kristina: Enough. Sean: I just think we want to be on the right side of history with this through truth and honesty. And so Christina, I really want to thank you for a radically genuine conversation today. I hope this I hope this podcast episode really does save someone's life out there and helps them. kristina: Thank you. Well, I think it was Oscar Wilde that said, be yourself, everybody else has already taken. So I'm myself and I'm pleased with what I've been able to accomplish with a lot of other wonderful, caring, intellectually curious, kind souls. It takes a village and I'm just one of many. So hats off to everybody who does their share of advocating for truth and justice.