Sterilized and suicidal from antidepressants

Well, come to the untold, take it deep breath, take the higher road, that's why they always say, as if they know the way, they won't take it from me.

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The people will lie with a never-ending force, you never have the chance, so watch your waiting for it.

This is come, my friend, cause this is one.

It's time and this is one.

Welcome to this episode of The Nurses report here on the America Out Loud Network.

I'm your host, Nurse David Wayne, joined today by nurses Nicole and Ashley.

This is yet again her episode about antidepressants and must kind of feel like a dead horse that we've been beating for a long time at this point because we've done so many episodes on antidepressants and you would think at some point we would run out of material, but honestly we are just barely scratching the surface.

So that's what we're diving into again today. I'm passionate about this because I'm a nurse with a background in hospital psychiatry.

That got me skeptical about big pharma, really just shortly before the COVID pandemic.

In nursing school, we were told antidepressants, they're great, they fixed the chemical imbalance, it causes depression and that's what I was told in my job as a psych nurse as well.

When I started to learn more of the truth, that that wasn't true, that that was marketing and that the risk benefit analysis was actually drastically more dire than what we were taught it.

This is pretty uncomfortable, but made me open-minded to question COVID vaccines that got me fired from my hospital job, made me open-minded about looking at other products too.

Like the regular old childhood vaccines and now we've looked at Zantak and we've looked at all sorts of things. So nurse Nicole, how about you? How are you? What's your background?

You know, life's been a little rough guys, but that just seems to be the climate, but for those of you that don't know, I go by nurse Nicole.

I've been a cardiac nurse for 20 years. I do a lot of stuff in our local and state government in the state of Florida when it comes to legislation and just trying to really educate people.

Make sure our communities know about informed consent, bodily sovereignty and the right to choose.

Again, also having a history in the psych background as the first, as one of the first jobs I had, it really did open my eyes to a lot of things when it comes to the medications that we use and how they do affect our patients and, you know, information on, you know, lack of informed consent that the patients are given.

So this is a pretty good episode that I think, you know, like you said, has a ton of material that people just need to know about. So let's do it.

Ashley.

I'm also on the struggle bus here lately, but our legislative season is over. I have a background of about 20 years in nursing, 10 of that in cardiac and 10 of that in functional medicine.

That's where I live now, plus legislative advocacy. Super great news.

Since we're having such a struggle bus day, Indiana just our legislature just passed a law stating that clinical sites for medical professionals do not have to have vaccines as a requirement.

And so it's really just basis only EMTs and synographers and rad texts are not included. So I'm really frustrated about that. Nurses, doctors, like this whole long list of people.

Now, if you're looking to go to school as a nurse and you're afraid about your clinicals come to Indiana, get your hooked up and we'll get that going.

But aside from that, just still working on resuscitating nursing, go to resuscitating nursing.com and check out that book so that way you can make policy changes where you are.

So you guys both mentioned kind of feeling like you're on the struggle bus recently. And I think that's going to resonate with a lot of people. There's just been so much in the news lately, whether it's regarding Epstein stuff or whether it's regarding Iran.

Yeah, man, it makes a question. Everything about this world that we're living in.

So let me start with just asking you guys, you've gotten so skeptical of psych meds at this point when you're feeling down, what do you do instead like what are what are your go to coping skills or lifestyle habits that you might change up or consider when you're riding the struggle bus.

Yeah, as a former alcoholic, I do not shrink because that would lead to a whole other mess of problems. But, you know, I'm optimizing vitamin D. I have a small rebounder, which is a small trampoline in my living room.

And I'll jump on that for 10 to 15 minutes and just be like a complete idiot. And my kids make fun of me and I laugh and that really helps just kind of try to do those self care type things.

Also, the physical movement is huge because of the fact that it releases all those endorphins and, you know, obviously when drinking is off the table and chocolate really isn't a great.

I've got to do something right.

Exercise is so amazingly good for your mental health. And of course your physical health too. So yeah, that's good advice there. Actually, how about you Nicole?

I'm not rubbing your faces because you're in states that are snowing. It's really cool. But I know that I have to go outside and get sunlight because a lot of what we do is inside in the hospital walls. It can be really overwhelming.

I also have to be more mindful if I'm drinking of water, like how am I eating because I've noticed as I get older, that really affects how I feel.

I don't sleep very well. So when I take an extra moment to kind of sit still and I feel that I have some tiredness or restlessness.

I try to lay down on sleep because I know that I'm not getting enough sleep and that tends to add also to a heavy caffeine addict because I really don't drink or do anything else.

And so for me, it's cutting back the caffeine and trying to drink more water and different things like that. So, you know, just trying to recognize some of those triggers.

And then of course, you know, just trying to listen to music. I'm really big into music and like raging out and all that fun stuff. So it's always a good time. You know, not kind of lightens the mood.

Other great advice from Nicole, clean up what you're eating. That's a go-to for us as well. Usually if I'm starting to feel kind of cruddy, it's like directly because of what's been on my fork of light.

So the other thing we've been doing is rewatching episodes of cheers from the beginning, which has been fantastic. It's just such a different world like going back to a bar in Boston in the early 1980s and seeing what they're joking about and people are talking about. It's just a nostalgic. It's good stuff.

Okay, I suppose we should get into the topic at hand, which is anti-depressants. I noticed neither of you were like, yeah, I go see my nurse practitioner and or my primary care provider. And I see what the latest and greatest from Pfizer or Merck or Eli Lilly is.

That's not really what first comes to mind for you guys, you know, for me, if I went back in time a decade, that probably is what I would have encouraged people to do because that, you know, was the field I was working in and I believed in it at the time.

I want to introduce you guys to someone here. This is Tracy Johnson for listeners. She's a young woman in kind of a business casual outfit.

She has just a radiant smile here, smiling at the camera. And she was a 19 year old healthy college student who needed a little bit of extra money.

She had no history of mental health struggles or diagnoses at all. She was just a happy, healthy young woman.

At the time, Eli Lilly was studying the effects of large doses of their anti-depressants, Symbalta, on the heart. And they were also looking at its effects on stress urinary incontinence.

The hope for Lilly was that they were going to open up a lucrative market for off-label prescribing.

Since Tracy was a four college student and needed some extra money, she joined Eli Lilly's paid clinical trial in the Indianapolis for depression and average dose of Symbalta is 40 milligrams a day.

Over the course of a few weeks, Tracy received escalating doses of Symbalta up to a peak of 400 milligrams a day.

During that time, she started to exhibit some really unusual emotional reactions and it got to the point where she even dropped out of school.

Eli Lilly, for their part, they kept her in the trial and what they did was they secretly stopped the huge dose of Symbalta that she was getting cold turkey and they started giving her a placebo instead.

On February 7, 2004, Tracy Johnson hung herself with her scarf in a bathroom shower stall at the Lilly Research Facility.

Eli Lilly concluded that the suicide was unrelated to the drug. Eli Lilly spokesperson talked to NBC News and Rob Smith said it's a sad fact.

It's a tragic fact that sometimes these patients commit suicide.

He went on to say the rate of suicide for depressed patients taking Symbalta is lower than those taking a placebo.

He also said it's lower than the rate for another group of antidepressants known as SSRIs. Symbalta isn't SNRI, it's very closely related to SSRIs.

They both caused disruption in the serotonergic system.

So this is back in early 2004. Just months later, the FDA ended up adding the Blackpuck's warning regarding antidepressants and suicide for adolescents.

The family sued and they won in 2005 Lilly settled a claim with the family for an undisclosed amount of money.

I hate how much of this ends up happening behind closed doors where we don't have access to the lawsuit documents.

We don't even know what the settlement ended up being for.

So if you are a parent and you're looking for informed consent for your child and you're like, hey, is Eli Lilly ever had to pay out any big settlements for any of these drugs that they make like the settlement themselves are under wraps?

How is this our system? How could anybody call this informed consent?

Ashley, what are your thoughts here?

Well, first of all, this is legitimately right in my backyard. Indianapolis is about an hour and 45 minutes to two hours from where I live.

I was about the same age at that time. And so it's just hard to think about somebody who's going to college has their whole life ahead of them.

Joins in this drug trial and thinks that it's just earning some money, you're contributing to science, helping other people to be given insane amounts of dose with, I mean, it'd be really interesting to know what the level of titration up was and what the previous studies, how long they were studying these different doses before they went up to, you know, 400 milligrams a day.

And then why on earth would they just cut it off cold turkey?

Them stopping at cold turkey like that, like if she was depressed and then she killed herself, they would say see when she stopped the medication, her depression came back and it was so bad that she killed herself.

Therefore, the drug is safe and effective. Like that's exactly what they would do if she had that diagnosis. That's how they gas like that's how they blame the victim Nicole.

I just think it's really unfortunate that like Ashley said she went into this thinking it could potentially help, you know, again, she probably needed the money, like you said, not really receiving the information as you should to know that they irresponsibly increased it to 10 times the amount.

10 times the absolutely insane and then to know that they doubled down and just cut it cold turkey when we know even then we know any of the SSR or the depression medications.

You can't just stop cold turkey for a multitude of reasons and to know that they went so high and then just cut her off like that and then had the audacity to say that it had nothing to do with her suicide.

I'm glad that you've told her story and that we can say her name because what an awful, awful way to go to be so young and in such a tragic way, it feels so bad for her and her family.

They were studying this for stress urinary incontinence and they were also looking at how it affects the heart and it speaks to that reductionism that we get with these chemicals where they say,

oh, serotonin is the happy chemical and it fixes that chemical imbalance, your depressions caused by low serotonin.

Meanwhile, they're looking for opportunities to market this for off label things.

So, you know, serotonin, of course, affects every single body system.

They're like, hey, maybe this is good for stress urinary incontinence because that could be a very, very lucrative market for us and you get these poor college kids to sign up and if anything bad happens, you just lie basically.

I mean, and we know these, we know that it was a lie too.

We know that this guy who gave these interviews with NBC and other outlets, he was lying.

Like, it was only a couple months later that the FDA came out and basically had to acknowledge the evidence is overwhelming.

All these anti-depressant drugs do increase the risk of suicide for young people.

A couple years after Tracy died, they actually expanded it to people up to age 24. She was 19.

So, all this is happening and you know who's watching closely Europe.

Europe has a much different system than we do. Every individual country has their own regulators.

But then they also have the European Medicines Agency and Eli Lilly really wanted to get their anti-depressants selling over there in Europe, especially Prozac.

So, Prozac was, of course, the first blockbuster SSRI medication and Eli Lilly product.

And it was controversial over there. In fact, most of the countries were a hard no on approving anti-depressants for children.

Why? Because there's really poor evidence of efficacy like they don't help with depression.

And there's that increased risk of suicide. So, it was looking like it just was not going to happen.

And incredibly, all of a sudden, there were some behind closed door meetings.

We have no idea what was said because why would we be allowed to know? And they came out and they decided to approve it.

They did it with some caveats, however. They wanted more research done.

One of the problems that they saw was they had rat studies on Prozac.

And it turns out that Prozac will cause some pretty serious fertility issues with both male and female rats, for example, with male rats that crosses necrosis of the testicles.

And if you want to have offspring someday, that is not a good thing.

So, what the European regulators told Eli Lilly is, hey, we're going to approve this, but the approval is contingent on you doing some follow-up studies.

You need to do more animal studies and you need to look specifically at human reproduction.

Do antidepressants do SSRIs affect human reproduction?

So, we'll give you a green card for now, but get back to us in a few years and let us know.

Do you foresee any problems with this scenario here, Ashley?

I mean, it's typical. They're not going to do it. They're going to do cherry-picked data if they provide any information.

Well, nobody reported any problems. So, therefore, there are no problems.

Yeah, that's the playbook. That is exactly the playbook. They say, there's no evidence of that for something that they have intentionally avoided studying.

So, that way they can say, well, there's no evidence of a problem here. It's that it's that playbook that they do over and over.

They do this with childhood vaccines by not testing them against inert placebo.

They did this with fiox, COVID vaccines, of course. They say, there's no evidence of myocarditis when they didn't do a simple triponin or EKG on the thousands and thousands of people that they had in those studies.

It's the playbook is to say, there's no evidence of that. So, that's really what we're going to dive into next is, okay.

So, we heard about a couple rat studies. What happened next and have there been studies in the Netherlands?

There's this research group called the Marvel Group and they dug up a lot of documents about Prozac.

One of the interesting quotes from this publication that they put out in 2012 says, the FDA rejected to conduct studies on adverse effects on several grounds.

First, it argued that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to study long-term implications of Prozac on sexual maturation in humans.

They stated that such a study would be unacceptable to patients, parents, and investigators, and would not likely be approved by ethical review boards.

And when you think about it, they're probably right because studying rats is one thing, but can you imagine a parent has their child at the doctor

and they want to start an antidepressant and the doctor is like, oh, hey, can we enroll you in this clinical trial?

What we want to do is look at how this is going to impact your child's fertility because all the animal studies are incredibly concerning.

And so we're not sure whether or not this is going to affect whether or not your child is going to be able to have children.

So we're going to need to do things like routinely measure their genitals, measure their response to sexual stimuli.

We're going to have to check their sperm quality. We're going to have to check their egg quality.

No parent is going to go along with that.

No, no problem. Here in Indiana, that kind of stuff is totally okay because we have the Kinsey Institute down at IU.

Oh yeah, Kinsey Institute, geez.

So okay, sorry, but so why didn't they do these studies and adults? I mean, is it just in the early reproductive years that they're seeing this in rats?

Why couldn't they do this in because necrosis isn't necessarily growth?

Because if they're finding necrosis and adults, do we even need to do this in children? Why are we starting this in children until we have that data point from adults?

Like this makes no sense to me, but who am I? I mean, who are you to judge?

Nicole, if you had your child at the doctor and they talked about enrolling you in a clinical study because they don't know whether or not this product affects fertility and then they ran down the list of measurements they want to take on your child, would you be like, yes, sign me up.

I mean, I just feel like it's so invasive. It's so over the top for a young child. I mean, they're not even of age.

I mean, in my opinion, and no, I would be completely blindsided. I would really question the process.

And then what do you do? You just sign a document like, hey, we know that this is exactly what could happen and you be okay with the fact that you're perfectly healthy child could lose fertility and possibly have necrotic body parts.

I mean, like that's that's a bit intense. I feel like that would just be, but again, we've seen worse with other things too in medicine as we know, COVID-19 vaccines and everything else being propped on our children and, you know, not having any studies done to prove any of that.

So we have it. This seems this is more way more brutal.

Yeah, it is brutal. So another thing that Dutch looked at was kind of like we did. They looked at all the clinical trial data for SSRIs and stuff like that.

And they noticed these are garbage trials. These are highly biased. These are very short term. These are really, really problematic.

The risk-benefit analysis, the efficacy compared to placebo, like what are we doing here? I don't even know how these ended up getting approved for adults.

The data is so incredibly problematic. But again, things happened behind closed doors and it did end up getting approved.

So to find out what happens next, we welcome you to join us after this short break.

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So before the break we were talking about antidepressants and specifically we were focusing on Prozac and we were looking at the kind of scandalous situation that happened when Prozac was approved for adolescents in Europe back in the early thousands.

Don't worry this is not a 20 year old story. We are going to get up to date with the latest and greatest research on this topic, but we're specifically interested in fertility.

Because this medication class have an impact on the fertility of humans. What we do know without a doubt is it has a very negative impact on the fertility of rats.

Something that I found really interesting when I was doing research on this topic is okay we have evidence that this was harmful to a few dozen rats but rats are not humans.

How does this actually translate to human sexual health? Is there anything here? Is this even something to be legitimately worried about?

And so I started to look for other research on serotonin on reproduction. Of course medications that affect serotonin have been around for over half a century at this point.

This has been extensively studied. When I say extensively studied I'm talking about hundreds of thousands of studies have been published on the topic of serotonin and its effect on different body systems.

So here is a small sampling of the species that have been studied regarding serotonin.

Fruit flies, worms, seasnails, pondsnails, crawfish, lobsters, crickets, bees, locusts, zebrafish, clownfish, mice, rats, lambs, chickens, quails, pigeons, cats, dogs, frogs, toads, salamanders, pigs, cows, horses, rabbits, hamsters, gerbos, guinea pigs, shrews, bats, macaques, and baboons.

The only one they haven't looked at the sexual function on is of course humans. They have looked at everything else from fruit flies and worms up to macaques and baboons.

But they still say there's no evidence of that. There's no evidence that there should be a problem. The things that they have measured in these studies.

These different species, what have they been looking at? They have measured activity, exploration, stress coping, sensory processing, anxiety, serotonin, transporter, and receptor levels, social behavior, learning, memory, pain, reflexes, sperm quality, hormone levels, organ weights, follicular development, embryonic outcomes, reproductive behaviors, fertility, mounting, intro mission, ejaculation behaviors, partnered activity, frequency, freezing responses, fear circuits, limbic responses, brain patterning, alterations,

ventral tail curling. So I bet when you tuned into this episode, you didn't think that you were going to learn about the mating habits of worms, but yep, they measured this maladaptive behaviors delayed puberty, reduced sexual behaviors, persistence of sexual dysfunction, libido loss, semen volume, muscle contraction, amplitude during orgasm, egg laying, they have measured,

like, is anything missing from this list as far as either of you can tell?

It took a wild turn.

This did take a wild turn. It goes back to that theme.

No, no, no, no, no leaf unturned.

No leaf unturned, truly, truly. And it speaks to how serotonin too, again, it affects every major body system, the nervous system, the cardiovascular system,

the gastrointestinal system, that's where 90% of your serotonin is.

8% in your platelets, that's why there's a warning like, hey, if you're on an antidepressant, it might cause surgical complications.

That's because this big chunk of the serotonin in your body is in your platelets. It is unbelievable.

When you look at the number of studies that they have done, the number of species that they've looked at, all of them, it reduces their fertility and affects their sexual functioning.

For humans, they say, well, don't know.

I have so many thoughts.

And, okay, when we take and we look at this and we know that SSRIs can decrease sensation and kill drive, how do we know that this isn't impacting testosterone?

I mean, everything, the testes help drive male hormones, right?

We have studies that show clearly their significant impacts in rodents and several other species, certainly, like a laundry list of other species.

And this is just a quick Google search. It says, studies note that reproductive toxicities were observed at dosage levels comparable to those used in human pediatric patients.

So there's got to be a little bit of evidence showing that there's some toxicity.

Why can we not measure this with a blood draw and show that there's toxicity and give some indication saying, hey, actually, you know what?

We're maybe seeing a little bit of this, but I mean, why would we want to do that?

Because that might hurt our bottom line and our profits and we can't have that.

Who cares?

Yeah, this is from the European Medicines Agency, the title is EMA adopts a positive opinion for the use of Prozac and the treatment of children and adolescents suffering from depression.

This is actually their 2006 publication.

And it says, based on the data reviewed, we concluded that the studies and children and adolescents showed a positive effect.

But remember when we discussed that regarding paxle where they had the study that showed a positive effect in children ghost authored because their internal data showed that it actually increased suicidality.

The significance of the observation and animal studies on sexual development, emotional behavior and testicular toxicity will be further investigated.

The agency will also put in place a system to obtain safety data and treated children in particular regarding sexual development.

So this is what they agreed to here.

They agreed to put a system in place and do some more animal studies.

Let's fast forward three years and take a look at the next bit of correspondence that they had.

This is a document from Lily to the European regulatory team and I got to say, does it exactly inspire you with confidence when the first thing you notice about a document about a product that your child might be taking is that a bunch of it is redacted.

I mean, yeah, my first question would be, what are we hiding here? Why is there specific information being withheld and how can you make the best informed decision when you don't have everything transparently given to you?

Yeah, exactly. So one of the things Lily says in this document is in accordance with the FUN Lily proposes that discussions relating to any potential updates to the page package insert do not take place until all three studies have been assessed.

Lily does not believe it is feasible to submit further changes to the page package insert at this time and request that as per the commitment, label discussions do not occur until all three

Pharmacotoxicological studies included in this FUN have been assessed. What they are looking.

Scroll up right there. This the assessment report amended once data confirming an absence of a treatment related effect on FSH and LH two hormones that could be tested without any weird Kinsey Institute.

And I said that earlier in just like these those kinds of things are not okay. But if you go look up Kinsey Institute, you'll be mortified.

But it's telling us right here that they could be monitoring these kids. These are two simple lab tests. These are not that expensive to do, especially if this could potentially impact fertility or call this necrosis. And so that to me is a huge red flag.

Yeah, what they end up saying is that some of these things that we have the ability to measure don't seem to be changing and therefore just trust that this is safe.

Alright, so in summary, Lily did rat studies, more rat studies, those studies were bad and they're saying, but there's nothing to see here and we should just continue as we were before and let's not worry about any human studies.

Now as it turns out, those human studies ended up being done elsewhere. Now they didn't go to the length of what we talked about before regarding measuring testicular growth and sperm quality and that sort of thing.

But they did do some very large studies, one of them in the US and another one out of Europe that were peer reviewed and published.

One is from October of 2023, published in the journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. This was a retrospective study done in Cleveland and what they determined was that the SSRI group showed a statistically significant higher risk of delayed puberty.

The way they conducted this study is they looked at one of these huge databases with thousands and thousands of children in it who are on SSRIs and what they found is that the ones on SSRIs compared to the ones who aren't had this increased risk of delayed puberty, which is exactly what you would expect to see if there's a problem here based off of all these incredible animal studies.

There's another one published in 2025 in frontiers of pharmacology. It's titled progress in the study of the effects of SSRIs on the reproductive system.

I'm going to read you a little bit from that here. It says in a prospective cohort study involving a clinical population of 1,228 women of child-bearing age who were planning to conceive naturally, those who were exposed to SSRIs experienced a 24% reduction in the ability to conceive.

With Prozac exerting an even more pronounced effect than other SSRIs, as well as a 9% reduction in the incidence of live bursts.

Therefore, SSRIs in general and Prozac in particular should be used with caution, 24%.

Do you know how many women are put on these medications because you hear it all the time, right? They're going to, you know, the doctor to kind of figure out what may be going on or they might feel like they have these hormone changes or just

even at these ages, struggling with life in different things and automatically being put on these types of medications, knowing that they're doing this to them and causing these potential lifelong issues. This is scary.

It is scary.

And do you get a 10% decrease in live birth? Is that right?

Yeah, 9%, yeah.

9%, I mean still, 1%, we're going to round up.

That's the difference between a first world and a third world country.

I just can't believe that that statistic is out there and yet we're still putting all these people on this medication.

And while it may not be at therapeutic doses, this is in our water.

It is.

My gosh.

Like seriously.

They go on to say exposure to any SSRI such as italopram, paxil, zooloft, any at any time during pregnancy has been shown to increase the risk of fetal mortality.

They go on to say the use of SSRI during pregnancy increases the risk of congenital malformations, congenital heart defects, cleft palate malformations, preterm delivery, low fetal weight, increased visceral and skeletal abnormalities, neonatal,

adaption symptoms and persistent pulmonary hypertension in newborns, maternal toxicity induced by SSRIs like zooloft have been shown to manifest as a significant reduction in weight gain during pregnancy and the risk of preeclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage may also be increased.

This just speaks to what we've mentioned multiple times that these medications affect every single body system.

And if you're a mom who wants to have a healthy baby, you need every single body system to be healthy.

They go on to say an umbrella review of meta-analysis of observational studies archived in the PubMed and M-based databases that included over a million women who had used antidepressants during pregnancy reported that the use of SSRI during pregnancy was associated with a 43% increase in the risk of preterm labor,

a 43% increase risk of respiratory distress, 26% increase risk of cardiovascular malformations and a decrease in the one-minute apgar scores.

The evidence is just piling up here.

And you really can't say any of this is surprising when you look at that list of animal studies and the things that they measured and all those species of animals,

I would kind of be surprised if this wasn't the case because this is the exact sort of thing that they found in every animal species that they looked at.

I don't know any women that know this type of information, these statistics. I don't think I've ever heard that, you know, those are high.

Those are unbelievably high.

Right. I don't understand why that.

It's been replicated like this isn't like some outlier by some, you know, as somebody who had all of her children prematurely,

all of my kids spent time in the NICU.

My youngest spent 100 days because she was born just after 24 weeks had a heart defect.

And I think about the risks that this would have added to that.

Besides the fact that we know that unfortunately black women seem even affluent people with high access to care, black women have poor maternal outcomes period.

I don't know why, like don't ask me that because I have no clue.

But then you talk about these women who are more susceptible to death and complications, especially preeclampsia, postpartum hemorrhage.

You put them on a medication like this and my land. That's terrifying.

Yeah, one of the reasons I chose to do this episode now is because I have seen headlines recently that basically say, hey, if you're pregnant, definitely don't stop your antidepressant because there's not good evidence that they're harmful and you don't want to, you know, have your mental illness or turn when you're pregnant, do you?

And it's just from these publications that are just far more propaganda wings, you know.

So this is very personal. I mean, I was just talking with a friend who's pregnant. She lost a baby to congenital severe congenital heart disease and she's pregnant again.

And she has a mental health condition in his own a bunch of medications. How do you even broach this conversation because it's like you're darned if you do, you're darned if you don't.

But how is a maternal or an OBGYN? How far along is she?

Now she is probably five months. But I'm saying no, how, how could a physician that they probably don't know they don't know just like everything else?

Like they probably not reading this stuff. They're not making associations. They're just taking what pharma is telling them and going with it.

I just feel like that would be something you would have to disclose knowing somebody was taking those kinds of medications being pregnant or bringing it up, right?

Like here's high level high risk medications that if you happen to be taking them, you definitely want to make sure that you know these are the risks that could happen when you're forming a baby in the womb. Like that's just wild.

It is wild. And if you're wondering about men, yes, they've looked at that as well. In fact, there's a systemic review and meta-analysis that's been published at this point in frontiers in pharmacology back in September of 2022.

A quote from that is in general, our meta-analysis showed that SSRIs had a negative effect on seeming quality.

These studies included hundreds of men. The authors conclude by saying more larger, randomized, well-controlled clinical trials should be conducted to support our conclusion.

Hundreds of men kind of sounds like a lot, but that's like this is something that they could easily do a much larger study on.

And the only reason they don't is they say, well, it's too expensive or they say, well, there's no reason to think that it would be a problem even though every animal study shows that it is a huge problem.

And that makes me think of our Glaxo-China episode where one of the revelations about the way Glaxo is operating in just that one country is that they had a $100 million a year bribery budget.

One company in one country, that's what they're willing to spend on bribery. When they complain about how expensive clinical researches, their research and development budget is way smaller than the budgets that they have for marketing, for lobbying, for bribery, for their executive pay, it's just laughable and kind of infuriating at this point.

So, you know, let's just say that the benefits of these medications actually like were substantial and significant, right? Let's just pretend for a minute that the benefits were there.

We have these indications and this is not like gospel, okay? I'm reading about apoptosis or cellular death. I'm reading about decreased testicular size, structural issues and a bunch of other things.

Okay, so is this oxidative stress? Let's just say that it's oxidative. Let's say that we give some antioxidants. Could we see an improvement? Are there studies out there like that? Can we do these studies in rats?

If the risk, and this is what kills me about modern medicine, is we sit here and we are so afraid of that negative connotation that we are unwilling to admit that there is a potential risk and then give people who are willing to take those risks, the tools that they need to mitigate them.

Because if these, you know, and I'm just glossing over these things, if there is actual evidence in rodents that some vitamin C could help reduce the risk of damage and improve the quality of semen, don't you think that men would just take some vitamin C along with their prosa?

Right, but you're exactly right, Ashley, they can't, they don't want to admit there's a problem. So even when they know that a problem exists and that there's a way to mitigate it, they will bury the whole thing rather than risk those negative connotations for their product.

Vitamin C is so cheap, it's over the counter. And so, you know, maybe this is something to think about, is it that oxidative effect of this medication that's going through and causing some of these issues, and could it be mitigated for people who think that they just need, like we need to start demanding answers.

People, if you're listening to this, if people you know and love are taking these medications, start advocating for this, push back on the doctors, have the conversation, we have to change this mindset and we have to push pharma past this threshold of which we cannot admit error, because we're too afraid it's going to affect our bottom line.

If people don't think that they have a choice, then they're just going to go along with it, but simple things like this just aggravate me to no end vitamin C really.

I mean, come on. Right, so that would be a much more nuanced and complex discussion. And I guess that brings up the point of, okay, so what does informed consent look like with an antidepressant at this point with everything that we've learned?

Like, let's say you've got somebody who's 19 years old, like Tracy Johnson was the young woman we talked about who killed herself in Eli Lilly's bathroom.

If she was really struggling with depression and she goes to a renowned psychiatrist who knows the entire risk benefit analysis, what does informed consent look like in that conversation?

And I, I think with everything that we've learned, it looks something like this. Hey, I understand you're struggling.

We have these medications that can cause some disruption to your serotonergic system. And for some people that disruption helps with the very negative emotions that they're feeling.

Now, it's only a small percent of people that actually get benefit from the medication over placebo.

The people who benefit by far the placebo effect is the biggest factor in whether or not they feel better.

Now, in terms of side effects, these medications, we already know are drastically more effective at causing sexual dysfunction than they are at treating depression.

At treating depression, the efficacy once you remove the placebo effect is something like 13% at causing sexual dysfunction depending on the medication at something like 50 to 70%.

And that's probably a gross underestimation because that's using data that we know is incredibly biased from the pharmaceutical companies.

Now, for some people, that sexual dysfunction persists even after they stop taking the medication. It is permanent. They have it for as far as we can tell the rest of their lives.

If you want to know what the odds are of that happening to you, we have no idea because the pharmaceutical companies refuse to study it because learning more about it would be incredibly harmful to their profits.

Now, if you want to have children someday, you do need to know that every animal study that's ever been done from everything, from fruit flies and worms up to rodents, up to cats, dogs, fish, up to primates as well.

All of them show that these have a negative impact on fertility. So as far as whether or not that happens in humans, all the human studies that have been done show that it has negative effects on human fertility and negative outcomes for baby and mom during pregnancy.

Now, if you want to stop this medication in order to have a child, you're going to go through a pretty difficult withdrawal.

And it can take sometimes months to years to safely taper off of one of these medications. If you do decide you want to quit it.

Unfortunately, most psychiatrists aren't even going to know how to do that because they haven't been trained in hyperbolic tapering and because all their textbooks are written by the very companies who have been selling us these medications while egregiously lying about the side effects for decades.

What am I missing here?

I mean, I think it's just to echo off what Ashley said in the beginning of the show, you asked us what do we do when we're having a lull or not feeling like ourselves.

And we listed a bunch of things and then you made the comment like, oh, it wasn't like we would go see our doctor maybe go see a psychiatrist.

We want our listeners to know that that's we're not hating on that. We're not saying that that is obviously something you can't do.

There are people that genuinely need help and different things may not work right and medications may be the solution.

Our big thing on this show and I speak for myself is making sure that we have unbiased data transparency and working with the medications that we see faults in and adverse outcomes and poor things happening.

And of course, you know, what can we do to better that so that for individuals who want to take that route or are trying to better themselves.

And that's all they can figure out at that time, maybe medication wise that there's other things in the works for it that can help you but give you the most information.

And right now you don't have that because they're not looking for it.

And like Dave says because it affects their bottom line and that's where we we want things to change.

Yeah, I think if I were to add anything, it would be the alternatives. What are my alternatives?

Let's go ahead and evaluate you for seasonal effective disorder. Let's check your vitamin D.

You know, let's look at your other lab markers to see what's going on your body.

If there's anything that could be contributing to this before we automatically default to this, you know, lack of serotonin just such a hard thing.

That's a good one. There are lab markers for depression. It ain't serotonin.

The definitive study on that is by Moncreef et al.

And umbrella meta-analysis that looked at every study they've ever done to try and measure a link between serotonin and depression.

And that link is just not there. But you can get your thyroid checked.

You can get your vitamin D checked. You can get your B vitamins checked.

There are a lot of things that are physiological drivers of depression.

And then there's just all the social drivers of depression as well.

What's going on in your life? How's your relationship? Do you have purpose in your life?

Do you have some sort of connection to a higher power? How are you doing physically? Are you moving your body?

Are you getting sunshine on your skin? And Nicole, I do really appreciate it because I start dumping on these medications so hard.

I absolutely have talked to people who would say that antidepressants have saved their life.

And that experience is completely valid. And I am happy for anyone who has benefited from these medications.

If you're on them and the things that you're hearing are scaring the hell out of you and you have a goal to get off of them, that is a fantastic goal.

And don't let anybody ever tell you differently, but it is difficult.

And you do need to do it under the supervision of somebody who is good at hyperbolic tapering.

Somebody like Joseph with dooring somebody who knows about the modestly, deep prescribing guidelines.

Don't let anybody tell you that your depression is caused by a chemical imbalance and you need to be on these medications for the rest of your life.

That is just not true. It's not supported by the studies. It's not supported by the science.

The science that's out there is incredibly dark and problematic.

And we opened this episode with a very specific person because I wanted to bring in that human element where you can see how these topics that we discuss affect individual people.

And I want to close with that as well. And looking back on it now, I maybe should have chosen someone where we could kind of end on a high notes.

But this is not that we're kind of ending on a low note here. And so I apologize for that.

Maybe we can figure out a way to lighten things up after I tell you about Lindsey Clancy.

But Lindsey Clancy, she was experiencing some postpartum mental health issues after the birth of her third child.

This is back in May 2022. A few months later, in September, she was anxious about returning back to work.

So a couple months after that, she saw a psychiatrist. And in January, she was briefly admitted to McLean Hospital.

And she was admitted there voluntarily because she was having some suicidal thoughts.

A few weeks later, January 23rd, she had a touch of postpartum anxiety. She noted that on her phone and her phone journal.

The next day, after starting some psych meds that month, she strangled her three children to death with an exercise band.

And then, in an attempt to kill herself, she jumped out a second story window.

And she survived, however, she is paralyzed. So this year, there are a multitude of trials going on regarding this incident.

She is being charged with the murder of her children, but she and her husband are also suing her providers.

They're suing them because they believe that her actions were caused by these medications.

It is a known side effect of SSRIs that they can cause derealization, depersonalization, mania, and psychosis.

Those side effects, derealization, depersonalization, this is the feeling where you're kind of floating outside your body.

It's almost like you're watching yourself in a movie. Nothing feels real. And a lot of people, and I think they're right.

They think that a lot of these school shooters are experiencing this side effect.

A lot of the people who end up committing suicide, it doesn't even feel real because they're experiencing this side effect.

The way that Lindsey describes it, she was hearing a voice. The voice was telling her, this is your last chance.

You have to kill the kids so you can kill yourself. That's what was playing on repeat in her head after starting an SSRI medication.

As she was killing her children with an exercise band, she was telling them, go to God, baby.

We will provide updates to the audience as updates come in regarding this trial, but she's one of so many.

When we looked at Paxil and the number of adolescent suicides that it caused thousands, there were thousands.

And they knew that this was not benefiting any of those kids. They knew the whole time.

Another point in time where our president was recently on TV, justifying the assassination of the leadership of a regime.

One of the things he said was that this regime, we killed their leadership because they've killed hundreds, maybe even thousands of Americans.

Well, okay. If that's the criteria, when are we going to see some cruise missiles heading over towards Pfizer leadership?

When are the 2,000 pound bunker buster bombs going to start dropping on Merck's headquarters when they're in the middle of one of their executive leadership meetings because they've killed way more Americans than any of these foreign regimes have.

And I'd really like to see some accountability.

And by that Dave does not mean physical violence. He means legalistic violence in no way, shape or form.

Do any of us here on the nurse's report or America out loud support physical violence towards, you know.

But we do want accountability.

We do want accountability for Epstein.

We do.

Also, I mean, I just told you guys before in my good friend, my good buddy Cody Hudson, who is severely vaccine injured by the Pfizer vaccine, had his fifth stroke.

I mean, we want accountability. We want people to know that in early 20s, a healthy, otherwise healthy, you know, adult who takes a vaccine should not have been harmed like this.

So, you know, Dave is absolutely right at some point these people who have committed heinous crimes and lots of deaths.

It's heartbreaking and why we talk about these stories because you guys need to know the listeners need to know this is happening every day.

And these are victims. These are absolute sad stories and victims. And it is a sad note, but this is the reality of where we're at and making sure that we're.

This is it's a form of genocide, absolutely.

But we're saying their names and you guys will hear them and that's who we fight for and try to push for accountability and informed consent and hold these individuals, these organizations accountable, but we need more people to speak up and want to demand better.

Whether you take the medications or you don't, you should walk better so you know what could happen to you.

And a lot of these things are irreversible. Like Dave said, I mean, how can you even fathom at 19 years old taking something that it could completely turn you into something you can't recognize and to the mother who felt like she had no choice.

And that particular case she was very clear as was the husband to report correct me if I'm wrong, Dave, I believe this particular case, the physicians knew that she was struggling and that she was hearing voices and that she was not okay.

She sought help.

She sought help away.

She went to the professionals. She went to the professionals.

And what do they do?

They attribute things like that to her mental illness. It doesn't make them think twice about the medications she's been giving.

Exactly.

We see that thing over and over.

Or it's blame the victim.

It's, oh, look, her mental health.

It's they blame her. It's her mental health.

Exactly.

And now she has three children gone and she's paralyzed.

Going to require care for the rest of her life because of what she was given and not told what could happen and how it and how it unfolded.

So again, you know, great episode.

This is why we talk about these things.

I think the only silver lining that I can come up with there is the love that husband must have for his wife and the ability to forgive.

And the fact that she is persisting despite all of these, all of the guilt and shame that she and abandonment and betrayal that she has to have been feeling.

So God bless them.

Let's all take, you know, some time to pray for them and just all the other victims out there like Tracy and Cody and

because a lot of disease processes, you know, when you see someone that's unhealthy or sick, you usually see something wrong.

You have something kind of to contribute it to you.

Mental health is like a silent killer in my opinion because you can't always see it.

And that's why it's so stigmatized.

And that's why so many people are afraid to come forward.

And then the medications are usually what's pushed first.

They don't get to the root cause. They don't offer other alternatives.

And then these adverse outcomes working in sight.

A lot of the patients were not compliant because of how bad the side effects were, the adverse outcomes, etc.

So it's just encompassing all of that.

You're absolutely right Nicole.

Well, that is all the time we have for today.

I don't know that we've necessarily found a high note to end on.

But until next time, this has been nurses Nicole, Dave and Ashley.

We'll see you soon.