Former FDA Insider Warns of The Risks Of Antidepressants
According to the CDC, up to 11.4 percent of Americans were taking prescription antidepressants in 2023. The trend has only moved upward, especially among adolescents and young adults
Dispensing rates in these groups were already increasing before the pandemic, then accelerated by 63.5 percent in the years that followed, shaping not only how mental health is treated but how it’s understood.
In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, a practicing psychiatrist who worked within both the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA, described what he saw firsthand inside the system responsible for developing, approving and prescribing these drugs.
His account opens the door to questions that deserve to be asked, especially if your well-being is tied to these medications.
The rise of SSRIs and the collapse of psychiatry
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are a class of psychiatric medications introduced in the late 1980s, starting with fluoxetine, more commonly known as Prozac.
They were promoted as a breakthrough for depression, based on the claim that low serotonin caused its symptoms. This theory shaped public understanding and guided prescribing habits for decades, even though it lacked firm biological grounding.
SSRIs were built on the idea that boosting serotonin would correct depression
Early marketing framed depression as a simple serotonin deficit that medication could normalize by blocking the reuptake of serotonin and raising levels at synapses. This explanation was widely embraced by the public and many physicians because it offered a simple and appealing solution — a chemical imbalance that could be fixed with a pill.
This theory was never supported by definitive scientific evidence.
Diagnoses are based on patient-reported symptoms and clinical interviews, not lab results or brain scans. The prescribing process became driven by checklists and diagnostic criteria, with little room left for nuance or context.
Once a patient met enough criteria, a label was applied, and medication was initiated.
Witt-Doerring explained in the video:
“The chemical imbalance myth was a story that was sold to doctors and patients to make them feel better about taking drugs for their mood.
“The idea that these drugs fixed a chemical imbalance simply came from observations that when you give people serotonergic drugs, they can become calmer, they can look less depressed.
“And so, rather than the obvious explanation being, ‘Okay, this is a drug effect that we’re seeing. They are drugged, and that’s what we’re looking at.’
“People said, ‘Well, maybe they just had low serotonin, and now they’re looking better because we’ve fixed this chemical imbalance.’
“That message has just been grabbed by the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatrists to essentially lull people into this state where they feel more comfortable taking them.”
Prozac’s launch triggered a fundamental shift in psychiatric practice
Earlier approaches explored personal history, relationships, stressors and meaning. After SSRIs became the dominant treatment, depression and anxiety were framed almost exclusively as medical conditions requiring pharmacologic correction.
“No longer was depression and anxiety a complex thing where there could be relationship issues and problems at work and problems in your childhood,” Witt-Doerring noted.
“Now it was almost bigoted in a way to talk about depression and anxiety as if they had these intuitive social and societal causes. It was now a medical condition. And if you were going to say that it wasn’t a medical condition, you weren’t taking it seriously, and you’re stigmatizing people.”
This change aligned with broader institutional incentives.
Drug companies had a clear financial interest in promoting medication as the first and often only treatment option. The push to prescribe was supported by pharmaceutical sales teams, advertising and continuing medical education courses funded by industry.
FDA approval was based on short-term trials despite long-term use in practice
Most trials submitted for SSRI approval lasted only six to 12 weeks. These brief studies formed the evidence base for judgments about safety and effectiveness, even though patients in the real world take these drugs for far longer, often for many months, years or decades.
Over time, many patients find that the initial effects of SSRIs begin to wear off.
When the brain adapts to the presence of the drug, the benefits that were once felt start to fade. This process, known as tachyphylaxis, is common with SSRIs, and Witt-Doerring noted that patients who experience this often return to their doctors, reporting that their symptoms have returned.
Escalation becomes the default response, leading to widespread polypharmacy
Instead of questioning the treatment itself, the usual response is to increase the dose, switch to a different drug, or add another medication. The assumption is that the illness has progressed, rather than the drug having lost its effect or causing a physiological dependency.
This escalation leads to polypharmacy, a situation where multiple psychiatric drugs are prescribed at once.
Psychiatry has reshaped itself around these drugs, drifting away from the deeper examination of human emotions that once defined the field. The story of SSRIs reveals how a theory without strong evidence became the foundation for an entire medical model, supported by industry incentives and reinforced through decades of prescribing.
The emotional cost of long-term SSRI use
SSRIs often narrow a person’s emotional range in ways that go beyond symptom relief. These drugs create a state of emotional constriction that blunts not just sadness and anxiety but also joy, love, and connection.
While this effect is frequently misread as therapeutic improvement, it actually only masks distress but prevents meaningful resolution of what caused it.
Long-term use often turns numbness into despair
Patients who remain on SSRIs for years report low energy, cognitive dullness and difficulty feeling bonded to others. Witt-Doerring described his own patients who feel hollowed out and unable to reconnect with who they were before medication:
“Most people have very clear issues why they’re unhappy. They’re having problems with drugs. They have relationship issues. They have work issues. They’re eating terrible foods.
“They have massive insulin resistance or diabetes that has completely disrupted the energy system of their body, and their neurons are just starving for energy.
“If you’re having these legitimate problems, [and] you just throw a drug on top of it to mask that anxiety that is really like the smoke detector saying, ‘Problem, problem, problem’ — those issues, they just fester. They just sit there, and they just get worse over time.”
Sexual function is especially vulnerable to these effects
According to Witt-Doerring, one of the most disturbing yet underrecognized side effects of these medications is post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD), a state in which patients experience persistent genital numbness, inability to feel pleasure and persistent loss of sexual sensation even after discontinuing the drug:
“The issue is we tell people that this goes away when they come off the medications. This is just a temporary trade-off. To feel less depressed, you’re going to deal with the sexual dysfunction. But what we’ve been seeing is that these drugs are causing permanent sexual dysfunction in people.
“Those areas down there, they lose erogenous sensation. People will say that when they touch down there, it feels like the back of their hand or the back of their arm. There are sensory changes. You’re essentially castrating people. But it’s worse than that because … it causes cognitive damage as well.
“People will talk about being completely dissociated from their emotions. You have people who are essentially lobotomized with cognitive impairment who also have severe sexual dysfunction.”
PSSD distorts a person’s relationship to sexuality and identity
Witt-Doerring also shared that he sees patients who begin questioning their orientation not because their attractions have changed but because the ability to experience arousal or pleasure has vanished.
This is especially confusing for those placed on SSRIs during adolescence when sexual identity is still forming.
Despite international recognition, PSSD remains invisible in U.S. medicine
Regulators such as the European Medicines Agency acknowledge the condition, yet it has no formal recognition in the United States. Witt-Doerring noted that most physicians have never heard of PSSD, and those who have often avoid discussing it.
Patients searching for answers are dismissed or misdiagnosed, leaving them without guidance, validation or support.
SSRI exposure during pregnancy carries developmental risks
According to the interview, about 9% to 10% of pregnant women in the U.S. are taking antidepressants, often without being informed of the impact on their child. Animal and human studies have shown altered sensory processing, changes in social behavior and disrupted neurodevelopment in children exposed to SSRIs in utero.
Taken together, these effects show how easily SSRI treatment can drift from short-term symptom control into long-term harm that reshapes your emotional life, your relationships and even your future generations.
When psychiatric drugs trigger suicide and violence
While psychiatric medications are prescribed to reduce suffering, they can sometimes cause the very outcomes they’re meant to prevent. The interview draws attention to cases where SSRIs contribute to worsening despair, emotional instability and even violence — outcomes that are rarely acknowledged or properly investigated.
‘The suicide rates are out of control in this population’
Witt-Doerring has spoken with families and individuals whose lives were devastated by SSRI-induced harm, including cases of suicide linked to PSSD and emotional blunting.
Yet these deaths remain uncounted and unacknowledged, attributed instead to mental illness rather than the medications that contributed to them.
He said:
“When you look at the clinical trial data, it’s clear evidence that people who are under age 25 [taking SSRIs], they engage in more suicidal activity than people on placebo. Then when reanalysis has been done looking at the adult populations, they also find higher rates of suicide in the clinical trials.
“But I want to have some nuance here. They can be experienced as ‘life-saving’ for some people. If you have a lot of anxiety and you get put on this medication and it blunts it, you will experience that as feeling ‘life-saving’ in that moment. But in general, on a population level, they’re actually contributing to more suicide attempts.”
The interview also linked antidepressant use with rising mass shootings
Witt-Doerring explained that SSRIs can trigger paradoxical side effects, in which the drug produces the opposite of its intended effect. Instead of reducing distress or calming the patient, these reactions may induce agitation, mania, aggression or even suicidal thoughts and behaviors:
“If you look at the side effects of all of these medications, it’s already in the label. If you look at stimulants, right there, it says it can cause aggression and hostility. If you look at any psychotics like Abilify, in the label, it says it can cause aggression. If you look at the antidepressants, it also says it can cause mania and aggression and agitation.”
The system doesn’t meaningfully track these outcomes
Manufacturers submit adverse event reports to the FDA, yet most are never examined. The evidence of drug-induced suicidality or violence often ends up buried in surveillance files or written off as anecdotal.
With no follow-through, red flags go unaddressed, public warnings never materialize and the same patterns repeat without correction or accountability.
Tennessee makes a move to track the link between psychiatric drug use and school shootings
Tennessee has instituted a new law mandating post-incident reviews of whether the shooter was using antidepressants, stimulants, antipsychotics or related medications.
These data have historically been withheld or redacted, making it impossible to study drug-related contributions to violence. This approach represents the first attempt to publicly track these links and prevent them from being buried.
The same blind spots that surround SSRIs also apply to other psychiatric drugs. Few illustrate this more clearly than benzodiazepines, where withdrawal alone can become a life-altering ordeal.
Benzodiazepines: From short-term relief to long-term harm
Benzodiazepines, commonly known as benzos, are prescribed for anxiety, sleep problems and panic attacks.
Drugs such as Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan and Valium work by amplifying the effect of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), a neurotransmitter that slows brain activity and induces calm. While they offer short-term relief, they are highly addictive and difficult to discontinue.
Benzo withdrawal often lasts far longer and cuts far deeper than SSRI withdrawal
Unlike SSRIs, which are usually tapered over weeks or months, benzodiazepine withdrawal can stretch on for years. Witt-Doerring treats patients experiencing protracted withdrawal syndromes marked by burning nerve pain, electric shock sensations and intense physical discomfort.
Many develop akathisia, an inner restlessness so severe that patients describe it as psychological torture. The longer the exposure, the harder the withdrawal becomes.
Benzo withdrawal has directly led to suicides
As the nervous system becomes profoundly dysregulated, basic functioning breaks down. The ability to return to baseline after stress collapses, leaving patients unable to work, sleep or interact normally.
Many become disabled during this process and require long-term, specialized care that is rarely available.
Misdiagnosis during withdrawal deepens the injury
Most prescribers fail to recognize benzodiazepine withdrawal symptoms and often interpret them as a return of the original anxiety or panic disorder. Instead of supporting a careful taper, they restart the benzo or add new medications.
This prolongs the neurological damage, extends dependence and traps patients in a cycle that becomes harder to escape with each intervention. Even when the taper is successful, full recovery is uncertain.
Witt-Doerring describes cases in which patients experience persistent cognitive deficits, emotional blunting or physical pain long after the drug has left their system. The nervous system may eventually recalibrate, but for some, the damage appears to linger indefinitely.
The severity of benzo-related harm remains largely hidden from public view
Despite the widespread focus on opioids, the suffering Witt-Doerring sees in patients withdrawing from benzodiazepines is equally severe. These are individuals who followed medical instructions as directed, yet ended up physically and neurologically altered by drugs they believed were safe.
Benzodiazepine withdrawal exposes a major blind spot in modern psychiatric care.
To learn more about its risks, read “What They Don’t Tell You About Benzodiazepines and Anxiety”
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Header image: Everyday Health