➡ Antipsychotic drugs, often prescribed for mental health issues, can cause severe side effects like weight gain, movement disorders, and even sudden death. These drugs can also lead to a shortened lifespan due to metabolic diseases like diabetes and heart disease. Despite these risks, many patients are forced to take these drugs, sometimes leading to a worsening of their condition. Alternative methods of treatment, focusing on understanding and addressing the root causes of mental illnesses, may provide a safer and more effective solution.

➡ A psychiatrist shares his experience with a patient who wasn’t responding to traditional medication. He tried an unconventional method suggested by psychologist Jerry Marzinski, which involved the patient reciting Psalm 23, a biblical verse. Surprisingly, the patient showed improvement, leading the psychiatrist to question the effectiveness of antipsychotic drugs and explore other potential treatments. He concludes that while these alternative methods may not be fully understood, they can have significant positive effects with minimal risk.

Antipsychotic medications are not really antipsychotic. They have limited, if any, benefit. Really, they’re just sedatives and tranquilizers and that they have very serious health consequences, up to and including sudden death. Welcome to the True health report. I’m Dr. Andy Kaufman, recovering physician, plandemic whistleblow, natural healing pedagogue, and legal code talker. You can call me the Truth Doctor. My mission is to shift your paradigm as we dive into radical forensic dissections, discerning fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, medicine from poison, law from legal fiction, and individualism from collectivism. This podcast is your channel for unraveling the truth about health and science.

Together we’ll challenge the narratives, expose the fallacies, and empower you to become your own health authority. This is the True Health Report, where critical appraisal fuels true freedom. Foreign hello and welcome to the True Health Report. I’m your host, Dr. Andrew Kaufman. Today I’m going to talk about schizophrenia and antipsychotic medications, and I’m going to do this a little bit differently than my usual approach. In other words, I’m not going to focus primarily on scientific papers. In fact, I’m not going to have any slides, but I am going to reference some scientific studies to provide evidence to support some of my points.

But largely I’m going to draw upon my own experience in psychiatry, both through my medical and psychiatric education and also in some of my clinical practice experience, to help educate you about this very important issue. And this is part of a larger topic, really, on psychiatric medications in general, which is part of a larger topic on pharmaceuticals. And as many of you know, my position is, is that I don’t recommend the use of any pharmaceuticals really, under any circumstances. Sometimes it may be certainly more justifiable than others. So let me start off in my journey back in medical school, in my third year rotations, and that was the first time I really experienced what it was like on a psychiatric ward in a mental hospital.

And I was fortunate to be assigned to the inpatient service on the ward that had the people who are considered to have severe and persistent mental illness. And largely the diagnosis you’ll see among that population is schizophrenia and some other varieties of that. But really they all fall under that general rubric of schizophrenia, or you could say psychosis. And this was a unique and interesting experience for me because the behavior of those people was so far outside your observation of normal behavior that it made me ask the question, how could someone who’s like me in so Many ways have thinking and behavior that is so different.

And this was of course, very fascinating with me because it showed the array of distinctions that one could see in an individual that are outside the norms. And also gave me a reference point of how much of our behavior and thinking and understanding of the world is based on cultural constructs rather than what is actually our true nature in reality. So this really helped inspire and foster my interest in pursuing psychiatry as a profession, and which is where I ultimately ended up. Now, when I began my residency training is when I really started learning about antipsychotic drugs.

And of course, I had some exposure to those before. Even in cancer medicine, sometimes they’re used for nausea or to treat someone with delirium, which is a complication either of an illness or sometimes of a drug effect. Like I saw people that got high dose steroids, corticosteroids, things like prednisone and cortisol, who develop a drug induced delirium. And then we ended up treating with antipsychotics and such. But really it was in my residency that I started getting this exposure on a bigger scale to these drugs. And let me say that these drugs, actually, this class has different names.

I think the most original name was tranquilizer, because most of them have very strong sedating properties. And if you ever heard the term major tranquilizer, that’s what it’s referring to. And the first drug of this kind was named Thorazine or chlorpromazine, and actually was originally developed as an allergy medication, but then was used and marketed as a tranquilizer. And there were ads and magazines that essentially, you know, how to pacify your unruly, demented grandparents. You know, give them Thorazine. Neuroleptics were another word that was applied to them later on, and you might hear that term. And antipsychotics came a bit later.

And it implies that it has a specific action that works against psychosis. But this is really not the case. It’s really, these drugs are very non specific, very sedating, and don’t really have that effect. Now in residency, aside from observing what happens to people taking these drugs, which I’ll describe in a moment, we also looked at the clinical studies about these drugs and something really interesting occurred to me early on in reading these studies, which was that most of the studies used as their clinical outcome. In other words, how do you judge if this drug is good or not? They didn’t say, well, is this person’s life different? Is it much better? Like, do they have better Relationships, are they more likely to be working or in school, these kinds of meaningful things? That’s not what they looked at at all.

Instead what they did is they used rating scales. And some of these rating scales are administered by the doctor or a psychologist, perhaps a professional that would try to make it a somewhat objective assessment and rate the level of symptoms or functional ability on a scale that was standardized with a numerical value. And some of them were self reported scale where you’d simply like give a questionnaire to a patient or a study subject and they would fill it out and give an idea of how well they thought they were doing. Now most of the studies used instruments or scales that were professionally judged and recorded and that was thought to be more objective.

But what I noticed is that the difference between the groups that got treated with the drugs and the group that got a placebo or an older therapy was that it was a tiny, tiny difference. Like not enough of a difference to be actually meaningful in life, even though it might have been enough difference to generate a statistical signal. What I didn’t realize at the time was that in addition to those published studies showing there was this very small but mathematically distinguishable difference is that there were also unpublished studies at the same time that didn’t show that effect, but had to be submitted to the FDA and maybe later could be analyzed through Freedom of Information Act.

But if I would have known about that, then I would really just say, well, this little small effect that you showed in the study, it is just by chance because there’s probably another study that didn’t show it at all. And it’s so small that it doesn’t make a difference in the person’s life. So when I asked the professor or the doctor who was teaching this course and giving the study data about that, he was a little bit ticked off and just dismissed me, you know, as saying, well, no, it’s a meaningful difference, period, end of story.

But I was really, you know, beginning to question, do these drugs really work? And then there was another study, and this was a pretty famous study and it had a very different design. The design was basically that the patients would be given a drug, but then if they wanted to switch, either because it wasn’t helping them or because they didn’t like the side effects, then they would just be allowed to switch and then they would be given a different drug. And this study was meant to compare these particular drugs, you know, which ones are more effective and have less side effects.

But the main thing that was found was, is that people kept Switching because none of these things were working and they had bad side effects and some had worse side effects than others. And this was completely supported by my clinical observation because I realized that it took a lot of convincing to get people to try these drugs. And then once they did, it took even more convincing to get them to keep taking them for the most part. There were some people who liked the sedating properties of those drugs, but those people generally weren’t really people with schizophrenia.

The people with schizophrenia really did not want to take it. And this is why there are many of them were under court orders or they got put in the hospital under commitment and then got forced by legal proceedings, sometimes held down and injected or put in physical restraints and injected to be given these medicines because they didn’t want to take them at all. Now, you could say, well, these folks were just resistant to everything, but if you offered them cocaine, they would not have refused. So even if it was in a needle. So it’s not a matter of that.

They were afraid of all drugs. And also, it wasn’t just that they wanted to get high. It’s just that they would accept a drug like that because it made them feel okay, at least temporarily. But when they took antipsychotic drugs, it did not make them feel okay. In fact, there have been at least one study where they used experimental lab animals like rats. And there have been studies where the rats will, especially if they’re outside of a social situation, that they will use cocaine and even choose it over water and food. But when they’re given antipsychotic type drugs, they would choose not to take those things.

They’d rather starve to death than take those. And that’s because they make you feel bad. They’re almost like the opposite. And some more than others are like this. But of drugs that people take to experience euphoria, that they can cause a dysphoria and people don’t want to take them. And I observed that they made people gain weight. They were sedated. They caused different movement disorders. Some of them resembled Parkinson’s disease. In fact, I saw some people so severe that they couldn’t really even move. It can cause muscle stiffness, and that could even be like an emergency situation.

In some cases, they cause this terribly insidious movement problem caused akathisia. And this is very difficult to detect. The patients aren’t educated about it. Most of the even psychiatrists don’t really know how to properly recognize it. And it’s the kind of thing where you can just never get Comfortable. It’s like kind of similar to what people describe as the restless leg syndrome, where they’re just moving around incessantly and just can’t get comfortable. But imagine if that was all the time, not just when you’re trying to fall asleep, but every moment of the day can be very torturous.

And then I began looking into the literature more and saw that actually these drugs contribute to mortality and shortened lifespans. And for example, there was a study in Tennessee looking at all of the adolescent Medicaid recipients who are prescribed these types of drugs. And a lot of this was driven by a famous Harvard psychiatrist, Joseph Biederman, who basically said that kids with bad behavior actually may have early onset or juvenile bipolar disorder. This is something he totally made up, but it justified giving those kids very strong antipsychotic medications. So lots of teenagers in Tennessee and every other state were prescribed these drugs, and they looked at the outcomes and found that there was a small but substantial number of those teenagers who just had sudden death from taking these.

And I’ve actually seen one case of this in my own clinical experience. It was a patient that wasn’t at the facility I was at, but was transferred to the hospital from the facility that I was at and given the drugs there and had sudden death. And then when we look at studies from adults who are taking these longer term, like adults with schizophrenia, because they would tell you that you have to take these drugs for the rest of your life, that schizophrenia never can be resolved or reversed. But what happened is, is that they had terrible metabolic disease because of the weight gain and alteration of their metabolism, that they generally develop things like diabetes, heart disease, peripheral vascular disease, and die very, very young, like in their 50s, many of them.

So these drugs actually shorten the lifespan. And many times, as I mentioned before, they’re given by force, under a court order, or with putting someone in restraints. Now, at this point in my early career, when I had read all this research and started being less and less comfortable prescribing these medic, I came across a book called Anatomy of an Epidemic by author Robert Whitaker. And it wasn’t his first book about psychiatry that was critical of it. And in this book, though, which I definitely recommend, it kind of discusses the sequence of events of how patients get put on these drugs.

And sometimes it’s through a chain of causation that they have a small problem at first, and then the treatment for that problem creates other problems, and the ball rolls downhill until you end up on antipsychotic drugs. And he highlights through A series of case studies how this has really destroyed some people’s lives and their whole mental experience. And of course, I’ve been very critical of psychiatric medications because the idea of just giving a medicine to someone with serious mental issues ignores all of the important dynamics that went about to cause those illnesses, whether they be purely psychological or physical.

So it ignores the trauma, the toxic relationships, the learning disabilities, all of those aspects. And there’s no systematic way that those things really get addressed at all. So I wanted to highlight an interesting case study of a teenage boy that I worked with to help you understand a little bit better how this plays out and to let you know about another type of possibility of how you might help someone with this type of condition that is completely different from using these types of dangerous medications. So this was when I was working at the last position before I completely left psychiatry and allopathic medicine.

And it was a residential facility for mostly teenagers who had juvenile delinquencies and severe violent behavior type issues. And one day we got a new admission of a teenage boy, and he was not verbal. And in his records it said that he was severely developmentally disabled and had a low iq. And that that was the reason he was non verbal. But he was sent to us because of these behavior issues. And we had other children with below normal IQs. And so we were equipped to work with a child like that. But we didn’t actually have the testing or the educational records that we knew any level of detail about what his functioning was.

But it became clear very early that he was very mentally disturbed and had a lot of behavior problems. And it was very difficult for people to connect with him. He was very fortunate that he had one counselor who was able to develop a good rapport. And I was lucky that I was able to develop a good rapport with him as well. Now, when he first came to me, he. Since he was not verbal, he was able to shake his head yes or no in response to questions. But it was very difficult because you had to speak slowly in very simple language, often repeat things to get an answer.

And then you would question how honest the answer was. But as we had several sessions like this, it became easier. His counselor, who worked with him on a day to day basis, was able to help facilitate some of the communication. And I felt pretty good that he was actually, I was starting to learn what’s going on with him. And what I learned is that he was having a psychotic experience, which is a typical kind of experience that I found in people with schizophrenia. And what he experienced that he was able to tell me about with me kind of asking him, and him saying yes or no was something called a running negative commentary.

Now, this is. They call it an auditory hallucination, like, as if your brain creates it, but we don’t really know exactly what it is. But they experience it as a voice talking to them, and sometimes more than one voice. And these voices have specific characteristics, like they’ll have a gender, an age, an identity, sometimes a name and such. And the running negative commentary is when they are essentially critical of you, beating you down all the time, you know, like calling you names like you’re a loser, you never do anything right, this kind of thing. And as you go about activities, you might get this criticism on an ongoing commentary, like, that’s why it’s called a running negative commentary.

And it’s one of the most unpleasant experiences that people have with schizophrenia, although it’s also one of the most common types of symptoms that they have. And so I was obligated because of my position there and working, practicing under my license to try antipsychotic medications. And so I did this, and I did it in a very careful, systematic way, the way that you’re supposed to do it. I started it at a low dose, gave it enough time to see if there was a response, then titrated the dose upwards to the optimal therapeutic dose in the literature, gave it enough time, and then if it was not successful, then I would switch it to cross taper to a different medicine that worked by a slightly different mechanism, so to speak.

And I did this sequentially where he had a good therapeutic trial of three, three different medications. And this took a few months to carry out. But I had to do this before I could be creative and do anything else. And none of these drugs made any difference whatsoever other than causing side effects. So he did gain weight, he ate more junk food, he was more sluggish and more irritable in some occasions. And during this time he had a couple of episodes where his behavior was way out of control. And he was like, walking around campus with no clothes on at one point, punching people, throwing things.

I tried to get him into the psychiatric hospital and amazingly they refused him. He more than met the criteria. But sometimes it’s just a battle like that. They know someone would be difficult and they refuse them because they don’t want to do their job. So I was pretty desperate. I have this guy, he’s really suffering. None of the medicines are doing any good whatsoever, and I can’t consciously keep giving him more he’s not succeeding in the environment that he’s at, and his health is even suffering. So, you know, I tried to get some information from his mother, and she did help out a lot.

But I really. Even after doing that, I couldn’t tell what his level of intelligence was and how much of what we saw about his limited abilities were related to him being psychotic versus him having a developmental delay or a low iq. Now, I was very fortunate at this time to have heard of a psychologist named Jerry Marzinski. And Jerry Marzinski has some very controversial and different opinions, but his experience is vast. He worked in large state psychiatric institutions, mostly for the criminally insane or forensic mental health institutions, as a psychologist. And he worked with people with severe and persistent mental illness or schizophrenia day in and day out.

And he started to kind of develop some of his own ideas because he observed similarly to what I observed, that these medications were not helping people really get better. And he developed this theory that actually psychosis is some form of demonic possession. And I thought, this is very interesting because many people will describe being possessed by demons who have psychosis. So, you know, could there be actual truth to that? But without really getting into the validity of that theory, because it’s very, very difficult to figure out how to study that. He did some experiments, and one of the things he did with the patients is he asked them if they’d be willing to recite Psalm 23.

And this is a very familiar biblical psalm. You know, the Lord is your shepherd. And what he found is that the voices that the people were hearing in their mind did not like Psalm 23 and sometimes went away. And when they said it more and more often, the voices went away more and more. And this is a very fascinating finding, and to me, as a psychiatrist, like, almost unbelievable, because if you went and told your. A supervisor or whatever that you want to try this, they would, you know, probably kick you out of the residency. But I was willing to try anything at this point because I was a bit desperate.

So I found out from the boy’s mother that he went to church and she went to church, so he probably wouldn’t be uncomfortable with religious Psalm. And so I asked him about it, if he knew it. I read it with him, I printed it out and asked him. I said it might help him feel better. So he was willing to try it. And his counselor worked with him. And he came back a week later. And keep in mind, I had working with him for probably five months at this time. Everything was getting worse. No response to any of the medications.

And I’m basically throwing a Hail Mary pass based on this wacky psychologist with this idea. And lo and behold, when he comes back a week later, he was talking to me for the first time, and we found out that he actually did have language, and everything wasn’t 100% better, but it was like, now there’s a real boy with a real personality who can express himself, not this black box of bad behavior and no language. And so clearly his level of intelligence was much higher than we suspected. And as he continued these kind of techniques, and we went into Sherry Swiny’s techniques as well, which you can, if you want to look into this further.

Gerry Marzinski and Sherry Swiny wrote a book together on this topic, and there are interviews of them out there that you can see as well. So you can see her method. And he made quite a bit of improvement. And then I believe he left the facility, and I was no longer working with him. But this opened me up to just a whole new world of possibility about what could really be going on with psychosis and really helped cement my opinion that antipsychotics are both not helpful as well as very, very dangerous in terms of their health consequences.

And since that time, I also learned about another technique that may have been successful with some people with schizophrenia, and this was reported by Jennifer Daniels, using, in very creative ways, turpentine, the essentially oleoresin distillate of the pine tree. So I think what we can take away from this is another similar lesson to many of the conclusions I’ve come to by studying allopathic medicine is that antipsychotic medications are not really antipsychotic. They have limited, if any, benefit. Mostly really they’re just sedatives and tranquilizers, and that they have very serious health consequences, up to and including sudden death.

And there are other ways, very simple ways, that while we may not be able to explain exactly how they work, and they may be mysterious, they can have meaningful results that can improve someone’s actual life with almost no risk of any adverse effects. All right, Well, I think that you definitely had the opportunity to learn something here about the world of psychiatric medications and mental illness. And I look forward to seeing you back for another true health report next time.
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