SSRIs and School Shootings, FDA Corruption, and Why Everyone on Anti-Depressants Is Totally Unhappy

Josef Witt-Doerring emphasizes that this dramatic uptick in prescriptions has not translated into improved outcomes, suggesting that on a national scale, what is being done simply isn't working. The implication is that more prescriptions have been associated not with healing but with worsening population-level mental health indicators. This growing crisis is rarely discussed publicly with the urgency it demands, despite the everyday presence of these medications in people's lives.

The Origin, Mechanism, and Marketing of SSRIs

SSRIs are described as a relatively modern iteration of antidepressants, with Prozac's introduction in 1987 marking a significant shift. Designed to modulate the serotonin system by blocking its re-uptake, these drugs increase serotonin levels between neurons, producing a numbing or emotionally constrictive effect rather than a straightforward "balancing" of brain chemistry. Josef points out that the popular narrative around SSRIs, particularly the "chemical imbalance" explanation, was a fiction propagated by pharmaceutical interests and embraced by psychiatry to facilitate easy acceptance and compliance.

Prozac's launch altered psychiatry fundamentally, shifting treatment from Freudian-style therapy aimed at addressing root causes, to drug dispensation oriented around pharmaceutical solutions. The narrative pivot framed depression and anxiety strictly as medical, biological conditions rather than complex phenomena arising from life events or social circumstances. As a result, alternative approaches were dismissed or stigmatized, consolidating psychiatrists' roles as drug prescribers and altering patient expectations and the medical community's modus operandi.

The Debunking of the Chemical Imbalance Myth

An essential revelation in the podcast is the lack of biological evidence supporting the so-called chemical imbalance theory. Comprehensive studies looking at serotonin receptor levels, brain fluid markers, and other biological indicators have repeatedly failed to find a difference between depressed and non-depressed individuals. This absence invalidates the foundation upon which much psychiatric drug prescribing rests.

Josef describes the chemical imbalance narrative as a "whopper," a deliberate oversimplification used to coax patients into accepting medications without fully understanding or questioning their effects. Despite this, medical education and psychiatric culture have embraced this narrative, sidelining the truth. Rather than promoting transparency and scientific rigor, the field has tied its legitimacy to a simplified, pharmaceutical-friendly model of mental illness—one that disregards the messy reality of human emotional experience.

The Failure of Psychiatry to Address Root Causes

When Josef entered psychiatry with idealistic hopes of helping patients through deep understanding, he quickly encountered a system that favored transactional interactions over genuine engagement. Psychiatric visits resemble checklists aimed at affixing diagnoses rather than unraveling patients' life stories and struggles. Medication prescribing becomes a default, expedient tool, often deployed without exploring social, relational, or psychological roots of distress.

This pharmaceutical-first mentality discounts the complexity of human suffering and entrenches a mechanistic worldview in which people are seen as faulty biological machines rather than whole persons with narratives and relationships. The systemic incentives—from academic psychiatry to health insurance reimbursement structures—favor rapid diagnosis and medication over comprehensive care, marginalizing alternative supportive approaches.

Side Effects and Long-Term Deterioration from SSRIs

One of the most insidious side effects of SSRIs is emotional blunting or constriction, which while sometimes initially experienced as therapeutic relief, ultimately suppresses both negative and positive feelings. Josef stresses that this numbing effect undermines patients' ability to confront and resolve the real-life issues causing their distress, allowing those problems to persist or worsen untreated.

Beyond emotional dulling, he highlights post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD) as an under-recognized and devastating condition affecting an estimated 70 percent of patients. PSSD can result in permanent sexual dysfunction and genital anesthesia, alongside cognitive impairment and severe emotional detachment. The consequences ripple through intimate relationships, eroding connection and self-worth. While regulators in the European Union and other parts of the world have acknowledged PSSD in drug labeling, most doctors remain unaware or unwilling to discuss it with patients.

Regulatory Capture and the FDA's Role

Josef's tenure at the FDA as a medical officer exposing drug safety reveals systemic dysfunction deeply embedded in the regulatory agency. A significant portion of the FDA's funding comes directly from pharmaceutical companies, specifically tied to drug review timelines, which shifts resources away from post-marketing safety surveillance toward accelerating drug approval. This "regulatory capture" consequence diminishes independent oversight and enhances industry influence.

Moreover, many FDA staff internalize the dominant pro-drug narrative, which inhibits critical evaluation of drug harms and suppresses safety concerns. The system rewards speed and output over patient-centered science, leading to underfunded safety follow-ups and overlooked withdrawal syndromes or side effects. This dynamic perpetuates the ongoing over-prescription and insufficient scrutiny of psychiatric medications' true risk-benefit balance.

The Role of Psychiatric Medication in Mass Shootings

The podcast tackles the taboo topic of psychiatric medication's possible involvement in mass and school shootings, noting the challenge in studying this link due to social and political sensitivities. While not absolving other factors, Josef underscores that the increase in shootings corresponds in timing with the surge of psychiatric drug prescriptions. The drugs' prescribing information themselves list aggression, hostility, mania, and agitation as possible side effects, paradoxically opposing their intended effects.

He recounts a legal case where psychiatric medication was held responsible for a tragic murder-suicide, pointing to court recognition of real-world harms. Despite being highly censored in public discourse, the connection between these medications and violence is beginning to receive some political acknowledgment, such as Tennessee's new law mandating drug-use investigations following shootings.

The Difficulty and Danger of Withdrawal

Another grievous problem with psychiatric drugs, especially benzodiazepines and SSRIs, is severe, prolonged withdrawal syndromes that can resemble brain injury. Patients often require years—sometimes decades—on these medications, only to face agonizing protracted withdrawal upon attempting cessation. Symptoms include relentless anxiety, insomnia, neuropathic pain, cognitive impairment, and emotional turmoil so severe it causes many to relapse back into drug use for relief.

Josef's clinical practice focuses on helping patients taper safely from these medications over 18 to 24 months or longer, recognizing that withdrawal experiences vary drastically among individuals. This process demands close monitoring and individualized slow reductions to prevent neurological damage. Unfortunately, most prescribing clinicians neglect this complexity, often perpetuating dependence or misattributing withdrawal symptoms to original psychiatric diagnoses.

Amphetamines, ADHD, and Societal Expectations

The podcast also critiques the widespread use of stimulant medications for ADHD, often prescribed not for true medical need but to improve behavioral compliance and manage educational challenges. While stimulants may help control disruptive behavior, evidence does not support claims they improve academic outcomes in the long term. Moreover, lifestyle factors such as diet and insulin resistance play an underexplored role in attention difficulties.

Josef cautions against ignoring these modifiable contributors and suggests that many ADHD-like symptoms may be improved by addressing physical health, nutrition, and meaningful engagement rather than immediate pharmaceutical intervention. He also warns about cannabis's rising potency and its role in triggering or exacerbating psychosis, challenging the casual acceptance of marijuana as a benign alternative.

The Culture of Psychiatry

Throughout the conversation, a recurrent theme is psychiatry's alignment with pharmaceutical interests and the resulting ideological entrenchment that obscures nuance and marginalizes dissenting voices. Psychiatric training indoctrinates doctors into viewing mental illness strictly through a biomedical lens, while the more complex psychosocial realities of patients are minimized.

This creates a cultural inertia resistant to criticism of drugs, where questioning medications is equated with stigma or moral failing. The professional guild interest in maintaining status as prescribers further cements this dynamic, sidelining non-drug approaches and delegitimizing alternatives. The resulting worldview reduces human beings to biochemical apparatuses, ignoring the rich textures of identity, relationships, purpose, and spirit.

Alternatives to Medication

Despite the bleak portrait painted, Josef advocates for hope through comprehensive attention to three pillars of mental health: relationships, purpose, and physical wellbeing. He urges individuals to honestly audit their lives, focusing on repairing or building meaningful connections, discovering and pursuing fulfilling work or activity, and optimizing diet, sleep, and exercise.

He advises skepticism toward simplistic pharmaceutical narratives and stresses that there is no magic bullet for complex emotional struggles. Recovery is a lifelong process cultivated through effort and care rather than chemicals alone. In his clinical work, tapering patients off drugs is only coupled with integrating lifestyle and psychological tools that restore autonomy and vitality.

Risks of Telehealth

The podcast concludes with concerns about telehealth's facilitation of indiscriminate prescribing. Josef describes how online platforms can deliver psychiatric medications with minimal clinical interaction, circumventing proper assessment, informed consent, and follow-up. This commodification of mental health treatment turns patients into customers and prescriptions into convenience items, risking further overmedication and untended harms.

He warns that the collective push towards telemedicine, AI-driven therapy, and rapid digital drug sales expands an already problematic system and distances patients from the relational elements critical to true healing. The future of psychiatric care will depend on resisting these trends and restoring human-centered, evidence-based, and compassionate practices.