Medical Truth Podcast
Medical Truth Podcast
What is Post SSRI's (Antidepressants) Sexual Dysfunction- Interview with Dr. David Healy
David Healy is a psychiatrist, scientist, psychopharmacologist, and author. Before becoming a professor of Psychiatry in Wales and more recently in the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University in Canada, he studied medicine in Dublin and at Cambridge University. He is a former Secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology. He has authored more than 230 Peer Reviewed Articles and 25 books, including The Antidepressant Era and The Creation of Psychopharmacology from Harvard University Press, Let Them Eat Prozac from New York University Press, and Mania from Johns Hopkins University Press and Pharmagedden. His latest book, Shipwreck of the Singular –Healthcare’s Castaways, shows how improvements in medicine, which contributed to increasing our life expectancies, have turned inside out and are leading to shortened life spans
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get ready to hear the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the United States healthcare system with your host of the medical truth podcast, James Egidio.
James Egidio:Hi, I'm James Egidio Welcome to the medical truth podcast. I'm your host. My guest is a psychiatrist, scientist, psychopharmacologist, and author. Before becoming a professor of psychiatry and Wales, and more recently in the department of family medicine at McMaster university in Canada. He studied medicine in Dublin, Ireland. And at Cambridge university, he's a former secretary of the British association for psychopharmacology. And as authored more than 230 peer reviewed articles in 25 books, including the book, the antidepressant error and the creation of psychopharmacology from Harvard university, press. He also wrote the psychopharmacologist volumes one through three. Let them eat Prozac from New York university press. And mania from John Hopkins university press in Pharmgedden the latest, the most important book he wrote is shipwreck of the singular healthcare's castaways. Which documents, how improvements in medicine, which contributed to increasing our life expectancies have now turned inside out and our leading to short. Shortened lifespans. Here to discuss post S S R I or antidepressant sexual dysfunction. it's an honor and a pleasure to have on the medical truth podcast. My guest, Dr. David Healy. Hi, Dr. Healey. Dr. Healy, welcome to the Medical Truth Podcast. How are you doing today?
Dr. David Healy:I'm doing fine.
James Egidio:Great. For the listeners and viewers of the Medical Truth Podcast, a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Dr. David Healy:Okay, quickly I'm a doctor and I figured one of the interesting things when I qualified first was to look how the brain fits into the mind. And there was an opportunity back then to do a... PhD on the serotonin system. This is before the SSRI group of drugs, and that turned out to be really interesting. It illustrated to me how a lot of the stuff we hear about things like the serotonin system and the SSRI group of drugs, this is really bio babble. It's got Nothing to do with what we actually know about the serotonin system. But the other interesting thing was, having worked on this before the drugs came out, pharmaceutical companies thought I was the perfect person to talk about these drugs to doctors who knew nothing about them. And this gave me a great insight on how the pharmaceutical industry works.
James Egidio:Nice. So what I want to do today is I want to unpack something that you, that really got my attention because I'm going into a series now of interviewing several guests that are involved, either were victimized by SSRIs, or are experts even here in the United States. And of course, just for the listeners and viewers, We Dr. Healey is from, you're in, located in Ireland, right? The UK. What part of Ireland are you in?
Dr. David Healy:Currently, I actually come from Dublin, and that's where I am at the moment. But I've worked most of my life in the UK, and I've worked in Canada for a few years.
James Egidio:Nice. Nice. But what I wanted to talk about, like I said, is what got my attention was the post SSRI sexual dysfunction with SSRIs.
Dr. David Healy:Yeah. So go ahead. Okay. Quickly to fit you in on, let me take you all back a little bit first, 60 years ago to when the first antidepressants came out. And these were drugs that also inhibited the reuptake of serotonin, but they did much more than that. And there were a lot stronger drugs than the SSRI group drugs in the sense they could treat a condition called melancholia, severe Mood disorders, which cause you to commit suicide, hugely increase the rate at which we might go on to commit suicide. Get in the way of us being interested to make love. We lose interest in virtually everything. And this is a kind of problem that can also relapse. So the older drugs treated this, the SSRIs don't. And doctors were thrilled to get these older drugs. They thought this is hugely helpful. We're going to be able to save lives and things like that. But they could also recognize back then within a year of the drug's been out that these drugs, while they save lives on average, could also cause some people to become suicidal and commit suicide. While they were treating an illness, which might mean that you weren't interested to make love, they could also cause sexual problems in their own right. And while they prevented relapse, they also came with a withdrawal syndrome that could be confused for relapse. Now, one of the big mysteries about PSSD is not the actual problem, which I'll outline now for people, but it's the fact that doctors today using much weaker drugs in terms of their age. ability to help us get well but much more powerful drugs working on the serotonin system. These drugs cause people to to actually commit suicide, but doctors today can't see this and they tell you it's the mild condition that we've put you on this drug for, which comes with no risk of suicide, but it's actually causing you to commit suicide. And these drugs also hugely inhibit our ability to make love way beyond what the older drugs do and they've been given to people who've got mild conditions Where there's no interference from the condition with our interest in and ability to make love Doctors can see the drugs are actually causing the problem and say it's your condition that's causing this we need to increase the you know at the dose of the drug i'll keep you on it much longer And the other thing is these mild conditions people get put in these drugs for there are usually stress, their distress, there's things that are going wrong in their life, but usually the problems are going to clear up in a few weeks or months at most. Doctors put you on these drugs. You then try to come off them and you feel desperate and you're told, ah, this is your illness coming back. You're going to have to remain on these drugs for the rest of your life. When you're We thought when these drugs came out first that, if you're on them for about six months, that's about all you need to be on them for. But people these days are on them for 10, 20, 30 years. Now, the extreme version of this is PSSD. I've said to you that people who go on the SSRI group of drugs, that's These drugs have a powerful effect on our ability to make love. Within 30 minutes of your first pill, you're going to be genitally numb. Okay? Now, companies can use this, doctors can use this to treat men who got a premature E. ejaculation problem. So it's not it isn't the end of the world, this can be useful, but it happens in pretty well everyone that goes on these pills. But if you look at the label of the drugs or the informed consent forms or anything like that, there's no mention of it. You aren't told this. You're told maybe 5 percent of people could have a problem on these pills. In actual fact, doctors like me who ran trials for the pharmaceutical companies, we were told, early on, this is before these drugs actually come in the market, when you're doing this trial, don't ask about sex. The companies knew beforehand when they gave these drugs to healthy volunteers that, the healthy volunteers were complaining bitterly about the fact that, on these drugs I just can't function at all. Okay. So the other thing that was clear from, the 1980s, we've known, at least some people have no, when you halt the drugs, you can have a problem that however bad the problem was when you went on the drug first about, not being able to make love the way you normally would and orgasms are muted and your libido begins to fall off. Everybody thinks when they come off the drugs, things are going to be just fine. But natural fact, what can happen is things get worse. You get more numb, not just your genital area. Your entire groin can be numb. Your orgasms, which may have been muted, disappear. Your libido and emotions generally can just be numbed completely. So this is what we call. post SSRI sexual dysfunction. Now you can maybe forgive doctors for thinking that you're off this drug. It can't be causing the problem. The person complains about when they go to see the doctor wondering what on earth has happened. In fact, we've known for 60 years that some of the psychotropic drugs we have the antipsychotic group of drugs can cause Problems that really begin or get much worse when you come off the drug and can endure for years afterwards is a famous condition called Tardive Dyskinesia that can cause just this. PSSD is like Tardive Dyskinesia, but it's involving our ability to make love. And the response loads of people get from the doctors that they go and see is, you're crazy. Somatizing, you're hysterical, and even, I know of people who have been told you're crazy to the point where we need to detain you in a mental hospital and treat you for these crazy ideas. It's, the person who has the problem, who has the insight, the doctor has lost insight. So one of the big problems we face, not just with this problem and this group of drugs, but with any of the problems we can have on any of the drugs we're on is. Doctors have lost insight. They seem to be unable to recognize that the drug may also be causing problems. It's a bit like the drugs have become sacraments. That is, they can only do good, they can't do harm. If you get worse on this drug, our response these days tends to be let's double the dose. The reason you're not getting better is we've got you on too low a dose. But of course, if the drug is making you suicidal, for instance, doubling the dose is a recipe for completed suicide. This is a huge problem that's not just a mental health problem. It actually extends right across medicine these days. And the thing, the key thing we need to get to understand is how come it's happening. What's actually leading to this and how to turn things around.
James Egidio:Yeah. What you mentioned that when someone gets off the medication, it's even worse at times. Is there like a period that when someone does quit using the medication that they go through, let's say a recovery process where they. They get back to, some normalcy without the medication.
Dr. David Healy:Yeah. There's loads of people that can come off the medicines and don't have any problem at all. Okay. But at the moment the situation we have is that 15 percent of the population in most Western countries is on these drugs. And primarily because it's awfully difficult. to get off them. You've got a bunch of people who go on them first and roughly half the people that go on them figure these aren't for me and they halt instantly after the first few weeks. And that's fine. It's unfortunately the people who do relatively well to begin with, who end up being on the drugs for weeks or months, who then when they try to hold can feel terrible. And figure they hear that this is your illness. And this is a bit like insulin and diabetes. You're going to have to remain on these drugs for the rest of your life. So they remain on them. Okay. Now you have to come off the drugs for us to Make a diagnosis of PSST, that's post SSRI sexual dysfunction. If you're not able to get off the drugs, you may have it. And in fact, it can often look like people who are still on the drugs have probably PSST, in the sense that the sexual dysfunction they have on the drugs is pretty extreme. Okay, so that means that we know there's tens of thousands of people who've got PSSD. What we don't know is of, say, the 15 percent of people, which I guess in the United States is somewhere in the area of 40 million people, what proportion of those might have PSSD when they come off? In essence, there's a bunch of them who have something like PSSD and that while on the drugs, they aren't actually making love the way they would wish to. be able to do so it's a huge problem. There's only tens of thousands of people who have a confirmed diagnosis that they're off the drugs. But potentially in terms of the number of people who could have a problem or have something like a PSSD problem on the drugs, it's a huge number and goodness only knows how big.
James Egidio:Yeah. What are some of the signs? Let me back up a moment. It sounds like to me that once they get started on these SSRIs, these antidepressants it sounds like it creates a dependency, correct? As opposed to, let's say, an addiction.
Dr. David Healy:Yeah, now, and that's a key word. You're absolutely right. These aren't drugs that cause you to go out in the street and mug people to get the money to be able to buy the next. bit of drug. Partly because it's so easy to get them from your doctor, so you don't need to mug anyone. Yeah, it's whether a dependency is quite the right word isn't absolutely clear in the sense of when you're trying to come off them, it's not like trying to come off an opioid or alcohol and things like that. It's much more like the drugs have done something like caused a peripheral neuropathy. That is, they can leave you feeling pain and things like that from the small nerve fibers that we have in our hands and feet and skin generally. And when you try to come off them, you're lifting the drug that's controlling the pain so that you feel really bad and awful as you try to come off them. So that's not that's not classic dependence and it doesn't respond. We don't have the kind of treatments we have with the opioids that can help people get off opioids or the kind of treatment we have with alcohol that can help you get off alcohol. We don't have anything to manage withdrawal from this group of drugs. As I say, there are people who can withdraw easily enough. But then there are a bunch of people who simply can't withdraw at all. I've got patients who've actually tapered very slowly over a course of three or four years before they can get off in the end, they do get off, but for years afterwards, they know they're not right yet that they haven't come back to normal.
James Egidio:Yeah. Yeah. And that's because of the SSRIs that they haven't come back to normal, correct?
Dr. David Healy:That's correct. There are other antidepressants that don't work on the serotonin system at all, which are much easier to get off.
James Egidio:Yeah. So what are some of the signs or symptoms of someone coming off of SSRIs? When they do come off of them, what are some of the signs and symptoms of
Dr. David Healy:that? Yeah. And there's an interesting problem here, which is that when researchers look at this, they want to see things that you didn't have in the original condition. so Things like feeling dizzy, that's the kind of thing people when they're anxious, people when they're and depressed going on. And that's right. Don't usually complain about feeling dizzy when you come off the drugs. One of the big features is you're feeling unsteady and dizzy. And if you complain of things like that, doctors feel reasonably happy figuring that this is part of our withdrawal problem. The problem is most doctors don't know the following, which is that when the companies bring drugs like the SSRIs on the market, they do what are called phase one trials first. That is, they give them to healthy volunteers, usually young men. And when you see what what actually happens in At the trials of these young men, it's really interesting. You get them being put on the drugs for maybe two or three weeks. And when they come off it, they complain about dizziness for sure. That's one of the commonest things. They also complain about insomnia, which is a bit tricky. This could be part of the original condition. This. could be part of a drug induced problem. Doctors will be a little unsure. If you come back to them and say, you aren't able to sleep properly and things like that, they're not sure whether this is a withdrawal problem. But the other thing that these young men complained about Fairly often was, I'm anxious, and this isn't a thing they had before they went to the pill. And I'm depressed, and this isn't a thing they had before they went to the pill. Some of them tried to commit suicide, and some have committed suicide after only a few weeks on these pills. Doctors faced with this feel confident this couldn't be withdrawal. This is your original condition. Except, these healthy volunteers didn't have these problems originally. This is the kind of problem we face. This is the kind of problem anyone on these pills faces. They're going to be told by the doctor, for sure, this just shows that you have an illness that we need to continue treatment for. Yeah. You could have an illness. You could have the original problem that you do need to be treated for. You can also have a new condition, which is something that's been caused by your pill. And the pill is the answer to treating that in the sense of you have actually taking it.
James Egidio:That's what I was going to ask you. You must see a lot of polypharmacy along that are accompanied with these SSRIs, these antidepressants. In other words, let's say someone gets off of the medication. And they're anxious or even someone that's on the medication that's anxious Then you get the physician that says oh, by the way, let me put you on some kind of a you know Something for anxiety like let's say xanax or something.
Dr. David Healy:Correct? Absolutely. Yeah one and it's It's a trick that the pharmaceutical companies have been quite good at using which is background At 2004, lemme take you back 30 years to 1990 where the first concerns blew up about the SSI group of drugs causing people to become suicidal. The regulators and the companies were able to damp things down, so some doctors knew there was a problem, but there was no warnings put on these drugs around 2004. Big concerns again re emerged about children becoming suicidal on these drugs. And the clinical trials done on kids didn't show the drugs worked all that well. So FDA felt forced to put black box warnings on these drugs. But the companies handled the whole thing really well. They said, okay, maybe people have become suicidal, but this isn't really the problem with our drugs. It's it's... Much more a case of this proves you're bipolar and we need to add a mood stabilizer into the mix. And these days when I'm treating patients over in Canada, and it's a bit the same in the United States, teenagers on. Up to 10 psychotropic drugs. And if you look at what happens, it's they've been on an SSRI, they become suicidal, they're told you need a mood stabilizer to get an anticonvulsant which may not help much, then they get an antipsychotic and they come back and say, yeah, not not as suicidal. But I'm not able to focus. And they get handed an ADHD rating scale, which is all about not being able to focus. And they tick the boxes and they get told, Oh, you've got ADHD. We need to add a stimulant into the mix and having an antipsychotic, which works one way on. at the dopamine system. And a stimulant, which works exactly the opposite way, makes no sense. As I often say, it's a bit like, you get up on a weighing scale and I put, 25 kilogram dumbbells, one in each of your hands. So you're 50 kilograms overweight. And I look at the scales and say, you're overweight, I need to give you a weight loss drug rather than take the dumbbells out of your hand, which will be, it's crazy as that.
James Egidio:So you get a push and a pull with these medications working against each other. So it's a recipe for disaster. I know a lot of people to that. From what I understand that are on these and that are on these SSRI's they get, because from what I understand, they get very anxious on them. So what they'll do is they'll drink alcohol. And they'll mix them with alcohol. That's a deadly mix, correct?
Dr. David Healy:There's a curious thing there. Yes, it is. And no, it isn't in the sense of one of the best treatments for the agitation and akathisia That the SSRI group of drugs are the antipsychotic group of drugs can cause is alcohol, we drive a lot of our patients to drink because of this, because they find out for the pharmaceutical companies way back when the SSRI group of drugs came out first the companies knew in the first week or two, when you go on them, you could become very agitated. And they told loads of doctors to give a benzodiazepine at the same time to damp that down. Alcohol will do very similar things, and a lot of patients have worked this out for themselves. And as I say, one of the consequences of this is we drive a lot of our patients to drink. They're doing a reasonable thing in the sense of it does make them feel a lot better. better. But, as you say, there's the other problem, which SSRIs can disinhibit. And alcohol, of course, does that also. And some people, when they're on both, become very disinhibited and do things that are fairly catastrophic.
James Egidio:Yeah. Yeah. I know in your last I want on your website David Healy dot org. You talked about how health care has gone mad and you made a comparison on a parallel between thalidomide and the SSRI's that cause sexual dysfunction in your research. And I know you referenced the book Wonder Drug. Let's talk about that a little bit.
Dr. David Healy:Yeah, one of the interesting things that people don't know about much is that the thalidomide story is that this drug, which was aimed to help us sleep, came out in Europe and caused horrific birth defects. And the way the story is told is that a lady called Frances... Kelsey in FDA held up its licensing so that this problem didn't happen in the United States. Now, in actual fact, what happened is the company bringing the drug on the market in the United States, Merrill was the name of the company, actually two years before the Thalidomide crisis broke open, we're handing it out to doctors in the United States, thousands of doctors who gave it to tens of thousands of women who had hundreds of children born with the birth defects that we were also seeing over in Germany at that time or in the UK and elsewhere. So the problem did happen in the United States, but FDA, when they came to look more closely at it, certainly found themselves unable to find the children who had these problems. They didn't get any help from at the company and they didn't chase the company hard to get the names of all the doctors who had who had been given this drug and they didn't chase up the doctors who had been given the drugs to hand out to the patients who handed them on to their friends to hand out to other patients, so it was really a major problem that left FDA looking bad. One of the doctors who had been given the drugs was a man called Louie Lasagna, who at the time was the, one of the most famous doctors in the United States. He was an advocate and advocate for what we call randomized clinical trials, which were a good way to look at whether drugs really do work or not. Drugs that we have doubts about whether they work. You don't need randomized controlled trials for drugs that work clearly and well. You don't need them to pick up the adverse effects of drugs when these are obvious. But if there's doubts about Whether the drug works, then randomized controlled trials, RCTs, can be awfully helpful. And Lasagna was the major advocate of this, and Merrill gave him the drug, and he ran an RCT on thalidomide, and showed that it worked wonderfully well. As a sleeping pill, and he missed the fact that it can cause sexual dysfunction. It can make people agitate and suicidal. It causes peripheral neuropathies, which the SSRIs do also. It's a very SSRI like drug. And one of the fascinating things about it is we think now that the way it produced the birth defects that it actually produced is very similar. It's acting on the same kind of proteins that the SSRIs act on to cause PSSD.
James Egidio:Yeah. So I know with thalidomide, it was more of no limbs, correct?
Dr. David Healy:That's right. But it, so the key thing was that it's, if you take the drug at a certain point, okay it's, there's critical windows when you're pregnant during the first three months of the pregnancy, if you have the drug. When the limbs are being formed, if the mother is on the drug at that point in time, then you can have a missing limb or missing part of your limb. The SSRIs can also cause birth defects if you're on them. One of the, one of the consequences that has come out of all this is that after thalidomide, There was a great focus on not being on any drugs at all during the first three months of pregnancy if you could at all avoid it. That's when we thought birth defects happen. But it's now clear, actually, that if you're on drugs during pregnancy, a lot of other things can happen other than just birth defects. You can be born, we now know, with organs, limbs, organs, kidneys, hearts, things like that, that all look normal. but aren't functioning normal. And a lot of these problems happen if you're on the drugs through pregnancy completely. So it's not just the first three months that we need to be are that we need to take care about. It's any drugs at all during pregnancy cause problems. And one of the things FDA has only woken up to in the last year is that we haven't really looked at this in the kind of detail we should have looked at it in that, there's things about, could this drug or whatever cause. mean that an embryo won't implant, the the sperm might meet the egg, but it doesn't implant in the uterus. So there's things like this happening. There's the fact that drugs you could be on can cause babies to be born with a low birth weight, which puts them at huge risk of dying soon after birth and generally living a much shorter life than they would otherwise live. There's a whole bunch of things like this that most women probably would like to know about to be able to take into account. They don't know about it because FDA isn't asking companies to screen for these things.
James Egidio:Yeah. And it's so evident too when, Someone who is pregnant, a woman who's pregnant is instructed not to drink alcohol because of fetal alcohol syndrome or not to smoke cigarettes. So it should be the same thing with the the use of, let's say, like you said, SSRIs, these antidepressants, and it just seems to me, and it sounds like that it's like a wink and a nod by the FDA and these pharmaceutical companies to just go ahead and give the green light. And it's okay, even if you're pregnant to use these medications. And so what you're saying is that there are birth defects that are now evident. with the use of SSRIs during pregnancy,
Dr. David Healy:correct? Absolutely. And just to add to the point we've got, if people go out for a meal these days, any restaurant you're in will have a sign saying, if you're pregnant, don't drink, which is the point that you've just made. But that's your fact. When people look at this in detail, they find that. Women who are taking an SSRI during pregnancy have a tenfold increased rate of having a baby born with a fetal alcohol syndrome. Because for some women, these drugs cause compulsive drinking. There's no point having a sign saying, don't drink alcohol. If if the woman is on a drug that's going to cause her to compulsively drink. And only in the last week or two, about two weeks ago, the Canadians brought out some new guidelines recognizing just this, that there's a group of people, and we don't know how big the group is, but it's not a small group, who begin to drink compulsively. When they're on an SSRI and it seems to be probably more women than men and you've got if if you look at the media are the things we see in the media the way I do you see a lot of women awfully respectable women, who end up being in awful trouble because they've crashed the car and killed someone and behind the story there's an antidepressant involved and what's happened is this is not. An alcoholic woman, it's a woman who has recently developed an alcohol problem, and it's linked to the pills that she's on, and she's not going to be told you need to hold these pills. She's going to be ashamed afterwards. She's going to be depressed afterwards. People are going to say to her, you need to continue taking these pills. Nobody's recognizing. The role of the pill in at the tragedy that's just happened. Yeah,
James Egidio:and I think we, in the last two and a half years with this whole COVID thing and the vaccine, it's probably been more evident with the wink and the nod from the pharmaceutical companies to allow this what I called now a bio weapon to be released onto the public through, of course, emergency use authorization, which I call it. Experimental use authorization is what I called it. thAt there was no oversight. It was just done in a very haphazard way. When they released this vaccine, it just seems like it's the the cost of doing business for these pharmaceutical companies. And even freeing themselves now from the liability with this bioweapon, this so called vaccine that they call it as but I guess what I also want to ask is what, why do these SSRIs, these antidepressants, uh, cause these side effects or what is it That causes the side effects or function the way
Dr. David Healy:they do. Let me answer that question in a way that you're not going to expect, and listeners aren't going to expect either, which is clearly the drugs act on the serotonin system and that's where the problems come from. But what's really causing the problems is not the action on the serotonin system. It's the fact that every Prescription drug is a chemical which can cause problems, but a chemical that comes with information that should let me and you know how best to use the problem so that you are how best to use at the drug so that you get what you want out of this. Okay. And then I'm helping you to live the life that you want to live, but in actual fact what we've got is in the studies companies do to bring these drugs on. The market there is no access to the data from these even FDA when they agree to License a drug and let the companies claim. This is an antidepressant. They don't see the raw data from the company trials they read the company report about what the trial has shown. It's the same for the vaccines also FDA don't the key thing people need to know is that In a trial, there's going to be people like me and you in this trial. There's me being the doctor, perhaps you being the volunteer who thinks you're doing something useful for everybody you know, helping to prove this drug either works or not works. Okay. For FDA to really have access to the Data. It's not just the raw data beyond the company report, they need to have your contact details. They need to be able to call you up and find out look, it says here in this report that, you had nausea and headache or whatever. They might find out as you can see, when you get access to the raw data, that actually you were suicidal. You've ended up being coded as having nausea, but that's not what happened to you in this trial. The other thing is that In the case of the articles written about all of the drugs and the vaccines that we have, they're ghostwritten. You may have a distinguished authorship line coming from Harvard and Yale and all the best institutions. But the natural fact these guys won't have seen the data themselves. The investigators won't have actually seen the data. They didn't write the article. It's usually. Ghostwritten. Now, this has been going on for 30, 40 years or more to the point where, the ghosts, they haven't seen the actual data. They know the company report and they're able to frame it well and things like that and make it look like the drug worked wonderfully well and was reasonably safe and do so in a way that's legally defensible. Usually. Okay. And looks okay to the journal, the best journals in the field, like the New England Journal of Medicine actually publishes these articles and they're all ghostwritten and the New England Journal of Medicine knows it. But the pharmaceutical industry tripped up 15 years ago or so maybe no. 20 years ago now, when in a case, in the case of study 329, which is a trial done by Glaxo Smith Klein of their SSRI Paxil in teenagers who were depressed. The company had recognized that in this trial, our drug didn't work and wasn't safe. And there's a document to show this. Okay. So they published it and the article said the drug worked wonderfully well and it's completely safe and. Thousands of kids got put on this drug shortly after the article came out. A year later, GSK sent this trial into FDA and told FDA actually, it was a negative trial. And FDA looked at the company report said, we agree. It's a negative trial, but we're still going to license the drug for teenagers who are depressed. Now, it turns out that it wasn't just this study that FDA approved a drug on the basis of it being a negative trial, and then say nothing to you and me and the wider world of doctors and the media and the politicians and all, that actually there's a lot of articles out there in the New England Journal of Medicine that are fraudulent. The company says the drug works in a safe, but, We know it isn't. FDA stay quiet about all this. And this applies to pretty well. It isn't the case that all trials failed to show the drug works, in the case of the antidepressants, over half the trials companies did, and they did these engineering the trial to make sure it looked good. And it, it still turned out to be the case that these trials, the drug were negative. But that's not how it looks when you read at the published literature, which looks like, These drugs are wonderfully effective and wonderfully safe We should all race out and get ourselves put on them pretty quickly
James Egidio:Yeah, and that leads to my next question is how safe or unsafe are SSRIs antidepressants for Pediatric patients and we're talking I say pediatric patients. We're talking let's say I guess you could say a child under 19 years old or 19 years old and younger. So how safe or unsafe are they for a teenager?
Dr. David Healy:There's a whole bunch of things that we don't know here, which is that it's not just teenagers actually becoming suicidal. They don't become suicidal any more frequently than adults put on these drugs. The reason we've got warnings for teens is that actually the trials done in teens didn't show the drugs worked at all. What FDA argue is they may make an adult become suicidal, they can also help. So we don't want to warn people about this risk and put them off taking the drug. But in the case of teens, they recognize, they don't also usually help, and we do have to warn about it, but there's a bunch of other things that FDA didn't go near, which is that, um, if you're a male, for instance one of the things that we know about in male rats is you give the rat the drug and the rat's sperm count. Drops off a cliff. Now the, what you hear, you're reassured to hear that actually, it comes back to normal when the rat comes off the drug, but I've just told you that a lot of us, when we go on these drugs can't get off them and we don't know, there's no evidence that your sperm can't come, there isn't anything. that we've got that will drop your sperm count in quite the way the SSRI group of drugs can do. And if you can't come off them you're not going to be fertile. Yeah. And these things really aren't looked at.
James Egidio:Yeah. I was just of these. We have in the United States here, the, these mass shootings that took place and this was titled always swept under the carpet when the mass shootings take place and it's been decades of evidence that SSRI antidepressants cause these mass shootings and each 1 of these. Suspects or perpetrators of these mass shootings have been placed on and they were most of them were teenagers. I guess there's a lot of stuff that's being uncovered about SSRI's and the dangers of them. What are your thoughts on that?
Dr. David Healy:Yeah, I've got a few thoughts. And let me begin with James Holmes. And then I want to move on to a different group of linked thoughts. Okay. James Holmes. It's hard to comment on all of the cases that you've just shown. Because unless I are an expert, get to see the person and really... works out, could the drug have actually caused the problem or not, just saying that these drugs can make you homicidal, which they can, doesn't mean that because the person's actually committed homicide and they were on the drug that the drug caused it. I'd have to get to see the person and interview them and really work out what's going on here. And I have interviewed James Holmes. And I have written a report on him saying that the drug caused this mass shooting. Now, the interesting thing about that was the the legal team defending him figured as I understand it, or looking at it, how it looks to me is that they figured they were going to have an easier life. Just doing a deal with at the prosecution that somehow he was just going to get off in the sense of he's not going to be executed. He's going to be put in jail for 3, 000 years. That was going to be easier than trying to argue in court that he was innocent. Because in order to persuade a jury, it's not just do the jury get to see him and get to see why I think this drug played a part in his case. But the jury are being asked to. To say more than that, they've been asked to agree that you can't trust FDA. FDA knew about these hazards for 30 years beforehand, but haven't warned about them. That you can't trust the medical literature, that it's fraudulent. If you're an average juror, there's a lot of things that you will say, yeah, the drug looks like it caused it, particularly. In a homicide case where you've got a man like Don Schell who killed himself and his entire family, if you've got a case like that, where the man who killed people is not going to walk free from the court, the jury can say, yeah, the drug caused it. When they get to a point of having to say about James Holmes that, we really should let him walk free and FDA should be in the dock. That's a step too far for a jury and for most lawyers also. But let me go a bit further with this, which is that when people think about the adverse effects of a drug, they think I'm going to take this pill. And what could it cause me? Now, if you take an SSRI, it might cause you to become suicidal. It might also cause you to be unable to make love, but it doesn't stop there because your partner is not going to be able to make love either. If you're not able to make love, she or he's not going to be making love either. So the pill can cause problems that don't just affect the. person living with the person on the pill. But the other thing that they do is in the case of the SSRIs, there's mounting evidence that they do impair fertility. And in the United States and most Western countries, if you look at the SSRIs people are taking that there's a falling reproductive replacement rate. In the United States, the current rate is 1.65 children per Woman in the United States if it falls below 2.1, the United States is not replacing itself, it's ending up with a smaller population in the UK and a lot of European countries. It's down below 1. 5. One of the interesting things about this is that the SSRI group of drugs are taken mostly by white educated people and things like that, as I've hinted to you earlier, the, the immigrant kind of communities and faith communities like Hindus and Muslims are much less likely to be taking SSRIs. There's still much more community oriented when it comes to handling. problems that individual people in the community may be having. So what we're getting is in the UK just now the rate, the reproductive replacement rate has fallen beneath 1.5. One third of the births are to women who have been born. outside the UK. So the whole shape of the UK is changing. It's not just the person on the pill who has an adverse effect, either partner, it's the entire country is having an adverse effect from these bills.
James Egidio:Yeah. Yeah. And I think we also had Bill Gates mentioned that he wanted to depopulate the world too,
Dr. David Healy:as well. I don't my view on all this, I don't believe in that these are actually things that people have worked out beforehand, that this conspiracy, I don't know that anyone could have foreseen this. I think this is cock up country, the problem is when FDA have cocked up, how do they get themselves out? How do they. Fess up to all of us and saying look, you know We have got a real problem here and we don't know how to turn around. This is A a political issue that for the presidential debates should really be upfront to be the kind of thing that Donald Trump and Joe Biden are debating, whether that's going to happen or not,
James Egidio:you mentioned also, I don't know. Following you is random control trials and what is evident based versus evidence based medicine. You talked about that. Let's just discuss that for a
Dr. David Healy:minute. As I've indicated to you earlier, when a drug works or when it causes problems, that's actually the same thing, drugs aren't given to us by God because they work. They do a bunch of things. And one of them may be useful and that's what we say. If the drug working is, but things that may be happen happening even more commonly, maybe unhelpful. Okay. But these things are often very obvious. And just to make the point, if we take the adverse effects of oral contraceptives on women's hair. It was women and their hairdressers that were able to spot the problem. It wasn't doctors or FDA or anyone like that. Sometimes, for the most part, these things are terribly obvious, but this brings me right back to the point that I opened up with, which is the big mystery of our time is you can have people becoming. obviously suicidal, shortly after being put on a drug like an SSRI they weren't beforehand. If you took care to reduce the dose of the drug and maybe halt it and see the problem clear up it's evident the drug has caused it. Or in the case of PSSD, the first lady that I had That actually came along to me and got me recognizing at the problem. She told me she'd been off the SSRIs she'd been on for three months now, and she still couldn't make love at all. And I brushed it off and said, no, this will clear up. And she looked at me and said, I can take a hard bristled brush and rub it up and down my genitals and feel nothing. Now, once someone says that, you're able to distinguish a problem That can only be caused by the drug from a nervous disorder. There's no nervous disorder. There's no mental illness that will cause someone, male or female, to be able to rub a hard bristle brush up and down their genitals and feel nothing. This has to be some kind of toxic effect. So this is evidence based medicine. In the case of randomized controlled trials, as I often say, they are a good way to find out what a drug might do that could be useful, but drugs do hundreds of things. And a randomized controlled trial gets doctors hypnotized to focus in on just one thing that we want to find out about. And as you heard with the Louis Lasagna. Thalidomide trial, focusing in on this one thing, does it help you get to sleep, means you can miss all sorts of elephants in the room that the drug is obviously doing. And that's what's happening. What we've got is when the suicide problem blew up first about people evidently becoming suicide on Prozac, Lily's response was we've analyzed our randomized control trials and we don't see the problem. And this is when. companies discovered evidence based medicine, which is, this is the scientific way of our RCTs. Don't show the problem that it's really not happening. What you're talking about happening to you is just anecdotal. You, yes, it happened to you, but you're making a link to the drugs is just not right. In actual fact, in their clinical trials, people became suicidal. And committed suicide and Lilly manipulated the data to hide the problem.
James Egidio:I see your latest book, is called shipwreck of the singular health care's castaways. I'll actually post that right now Let's talk a little bit about that because you did mention something about how you document how improvements in medicine which contributed to increasing our life expectancies have now turned inside out and are leading to Shorten lifespans. What do you mean by that?
Dr. David Healy:Yeah. If you look at the figures for, uh, actually life expectancy in the United States, and again, with all of these things, it's probably because in the United States, you'll actually be able to tell me, or listeners will be able to tell me, there's been a greater belief in technical progress than anywhere else. We all tend to follow you, but the United States is the one who believes we can make a better gadget we can develop better science. We can win Nobel prizes and things like that. And you do. So there's a belief in the fact that the next pill that's come out is really going to be much more helpful than the ones we had before. And we should really get on these things. The problem with it is that one of the other things that the United States is very good at is the development of marketing science. You know how to market things better than anyone else. And if you switch the word marketing for a word that's closely related to it, although people don't think about that, it's the word propaganda. Yes. Which in essence is just marketing. And in the case of drugs, what pharmaceutical companies have achieved really is the most successful propaganda ever in the sense that If you look at a medical journal, like the British Medical Journal, or most of the good medical journals we have, there's adverts in them. Some drug has been handed out by some doctor to some patient who looks very happy to get it or whatever. And people think I wish medical journals didn't have adverts like that. Okay. They focus in on the adverts, but in actual fact, as I've explained to you, right beside the advert is probably a ghost written article making claims about a drug that are close to fraudulent are actually fraudulent. And that's the bit that the companies are using to market the drugs. It's not the advert. They figure most doctors are going to pay no heed to this advert. They're going to pay heed to what they think is. The evidence, this is, the marketing here has become invisible to doctors. They think they're following the science when they're not, they're following the marketing. And the result of all this is that we're now on, 10, 20 drugs loads of people are on at least 10 drugs or more. Eight years ago in at the United States Over the age of 45 on average, half the population was on three or more drugs. Over the age of 65, half the population was on five or more drugs. Now, things have got worse since then. We we used to think this is a problem that affected older adults. It was recognized 20 years ago that some older folk are on more drugs than they really should be on, by which is meant to run. Three, three drugs or more it's now, if you look at the New York times, just a year ago, it's, we've got teenagers on 10 psychotropic drugs. So it's come all the way down and it actually affects all of us. And it's also an in utero issue. That an increasing number of women are taking drugs during pregnancy and are on multiple vaccines during. Pregnancy. So the human body can cope with a chemical taken for a short period of time, like an antibiotic, which is poisonous in its own right, but you're using it to treat a poison, which is the bug that's causing problems. We can do that and survive that. The human body is not made to be taking drugs chronically every day of the week for years and years. And we know that. Because of nicotine and alcohol. Everybody knows if you take these drugs every day of the week, and if you're on two or three of them every day of the week for 20 or 30 years, things ain't going to end well. It's the same with a prescription drugs that, if you take them three or four of them every day of the week for 10 or 20 years, it ain't going to end well. Let me give you what I think is a gorgeous story, which is I had a patient who had OCD. That's obsessive compulsive disorder. And he was an extremely nice man who I ended up dead keen to ensure that we helped him. And the usual treatment for OCD is to give an SSRI. So that's what I gave him. Okay. And he didn't do well on it. And the big problem was we needed to treat his OCD because he was going to lose his job if we didn't. Okay. The at the SSRI didn't help him. And we put the dose up and added more pills in and They didn't help. I was feeling bad because I liked this guy. Then a few weeks later, he comes back to me and he's clearly looking a little better. I'm pleased. Whatever he's done to get better, I'm pleased. And he tells me that he's halted all the pills that I Put him on, and he's feeling better. And I am more than happy with that. And then he says, I did something else. And he tells me that he'd done a bit of research before he did this something else. Okay. And found that there was research to support what he did. And what he'd done was to go back smoking. Now, what readers won't appreciate, and I didn't, and he didn't either, but he handed me a bunch of articles saying, look, there's good evidence out there on the web that nicotine can be good for OCD. And he didn't realize, he really. didn't know the field at all. He just found these articles and said, that's interesting. The top article he showed me was by a man called Arvid Karlsson, who won the Nobel prize for medicine and who was the creator of the first SSRI. Karlsson had shown that there's a bunch of people who Don't respond to SSRIs who've got OCD, who respond better to nicotine. Wow. Now, the interesting thing about it, the interesting thing about it and this is an interesting point. In the case of this man, I hope you'll be able to see it, he's in a great position to know nicotine's not safe, but he knows what the risks are. But he can also feel the benefit he gets from it compared with the SSRI, which is equally unsafe and maybe even more unsafe than nicotine. But he's the person who's in the position to make the trade off. I have to keep my job. When I smoke, I'm able to do the job and yeah, there are risks and things like that. Maybe I can use a patch instead or
James Egidio:whatever. I was just going to say that. What about a
Dr. David Healy:patch? No, sure. Sure. But that's up to him. Okay. but the point I'm trying to make is it's really. You, if you're on a pill or me, if I'm on a pill, who's in the best position to know what the trade off feels like, do we get a benefit? Can we sense hazards and things like that? The world we have at the moment is you don't get the warnings about your. Genitals will go numb. You don't get the warnings about birth defects. You don't get the warnings about actually becoming suicidal or homicidal. FDA decide they're going to decide what the risk benefit ratio is for you, not you. And that's helping you to live the life. That Pfizer and Lilly and GSK want you to live rather than helping you to use their products to live the life that you want to live
James Egidio:yeah, it's interesting. I think it was my second or third interview. I had an interview with Dr James Greenblatt, who's a pediatric psychiatrist and he uses magnesium as a alternative he doesn't use as an alternative, but he uses in conjunction with medications for ADHD because he treats ADHD and he treats them with Ritalin or Adderall but he also use and he uses those in small doses, but he also, believes in and has dedicated his career to treating pediatric patients with ADHD with magnesium supplemental magnesium, and it just completely turns these kids around the magnesium. Does it helps them focus much better? Yeah what is your take on that? What is your take on natural supplementation or just, or, things that are away from the so called pharmaceutical industry or mainstream pharmaceutical industry?
Dr. David Healy:Yeah. I have a few takes. One is it's interesting to hear about magnesium in that there are, it was one of the First compound to be called a mood stabilizer. Way back before we began to use the anticonvulsants, magnesium was shown in clinical trials to help stabilize moods. This was done by orthodox medical doctors in, I forget where, but somewhere like Harvard or wherever. Okay. So the idea that it can be helpful is not an unreasonable idea. There's good evidence that it can be helpful, which doesn't mean it's going to suit all people. But the other aspect to all this, which is wanting to take care of it. And it's not just the supplements and things like that. It's. If I want to give you Prozac, I've got to give you a major depressive disorder first, and then I give you Prozac for this illness you have. In a sense, I make you ill. And a lot of medicine these days is about making people ill in order to give them drugs. And that can be harmful in its own right. If you start thinking of yourself as having an illness, it Impacts on the way you view yourself and how you live life. There's a very famous study. On treating people with blood pressure problems This was way back in the early 1980s and a family doctor in the uk. This was not high powered academia It was just a family doctor Figures you we've got these new antihypertensive drugs out. And I'm going to give them to a bunch of my patients. We're told that, we need to treat it because if we don't treat it, they could have strokes or whatever. He had a bunch of 75 men and he gave them the antihypertensive and in all cases he was happy because in every single case the blood pressure, the mercury column, this is an old style mercury column way to test blood pressure the mercury column fell. In half of the cases, half of the men were also happy with. Probably, it's hard to know why, but probably because the doctor was happy, he was obviously happy the way the treatment was going, but in 74 out of the 75 cases, the wives were unhappy because they had a man who had no symptoms beforehand. Who now is having adverse effects from the drugs and was neurotic because he thought he had a dangerous blood pressure problem. Now, we know from huge trials that were done later, recruiting thousands of men, that yes, these same drugs that were being tested by at the family doctor do show blood pressure falls, but they don't save lives. This is the kind of thing that you're. Not actually told, but there's very few drugs that the companies bring on the market that actually save lives. An astonishingly few. And the ones that actually save lives have often been discovered by patients. It was triple therapy for AIDS which actually saves lives was discovered by AIDS patients, not by the pharmaceutical industry.
James Egidio:So what you're saying is trust yourself.
Dr. David Healy:It's just it's easy to be overpowered by the science and the academics and things like that who think they know what's best for you. You got to do your own research and you got to ask the awkward questions and maybe at the end of the day, it's, You need to be prepared to take some risks maybe and say I might live a week longer If i'm on all these pills, but i'm not going to have the same quality of life,
James Egidio:yeah, what's your advice to anybody that's out there that's on SSRI's or is looking to get off of SSRI's
Dr. David Healy:my advice And it's awfully tricky, to advise people who are on the pills the let me be clear. I'm not anti any pills. I use the antidepressants. I use the SSRI. So it's not a case of, I think you shouldn't be using them at all. The problem you've got is not just the pills. The problem you've got is the information that comes with the pills that didn't warn you to begin with about the risks. And. Doesn't know how to help get you off them. The usual media Thing that people like me will be told if we talk about these issues is you can't tell people to go off the drugs. You've got to tell them go back to their doctor now The problem we got at the moment. We're in an extraordinary situation, which is I don't feel comfortable saying that to people because if they go back to the doctor and say, when I tried to come off this pill, I feel awful. Chances are, they're going to be told, you have to stay at it for the rest of your life, which is not the right answer either. So everybody who's on these pills, who's having problems and they. May not be having problems. Come back to the nicotine story. People may be on these pills and doing well and comfortable with being on them. I'm not saying you should change these things. The problem I'm saying is, if you're not doing well on them, it's very hard to know where to go for help because we don't really know how to get you off these things and your doctor may not be the best person to go to.
James Egidio:Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the medical truth podcast. Dr. Healy. I really appreciate it
Dr. David Healy:Okay, it's good to be here James.
James Egidio:Absolutely. Absolutely And that you can be found at online at www. davidhealy. org and then also one other thing I want to mention or if you would like to is your website, which I'm actually posting at the bottom. There is rxisc. org rxisc. org. Risk. org. What is
Dr. David Healy:that? We usually just call it risk. org. Okay. Yeah. Okay. But yeah. And this is a place where I don't give anyone any advice at all. It's a place where people who have problems on drugs can come and report the problems they have. They can also for the ones that we think are going to be of wider interest, we get people to write it up in more detail. You don't have to have your name on it, often we get. People who write compelling reports about what actually happens to them on pills and the way the medical system Doesn't respond the way it should do you know all the ways they try and persuade you It's nothing to do with the pill or whatever And you know we post, fairly compelling stories about the things that can go wrong on the pills and wrong with the medical system. And often these posts will get 300 or 400 comments from others who say, I'm glad you wrote this. I'm having exactly the same problems. And this is what happened to me. And I now know what to do based on how you've tried to solve the problem kind of thing. So it's not me telling people what to do. It's more. people themselves. And this is, one of the things that is probably most important in terms of the things that I've learned, which is, these days I learn most about most of the things I know about medicine from the people who come to me who are on pills, who tell me what's gone wrong and tell me how they've solved it and how they've gone on the internet and researched things. And. Worked out just how the drug's causing the problem So it's not me telling people what to do or if I am telling people what to do It's because i've learned it from other people who've been in the same situation Rather than from the books.
James Egidio:Yeah. Yeah, and I will post the a link to that particular website at www. medicaltruthpodcast. com On the free resources page so there'll be a direct link to that website on the free resources page of Medical truth podcast as well, but I really appreciate you joining me for this episode of the medical truth podcast. Dr. Healy I appreciate
Dr. David Healy:it. It's been great fun
James Egidio:Absolutely. Thank you so much and keep us updated on what's going on. Yeah. All right. Thanks. Okay. All
Dr. David Healy:right. Bye
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