How an Entire Profession Learned to Call Child Abuse 'Treatment'

Why Commissioner Makary's FDA expert panel could change everything - July 21st Livestream

I'm sitting in my office this morning, preparing for what may be one of the most important five minutes of my professional career. On July 21st, I'll walk into FDA Headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, as one of nine experts invited to present evidence to Commissioner Marty Makary's Expert Roundtable on SSRIs and Pregnancy.

Nine independent experts. Five minutes each to present our findings and analysis. Then a lively debate between experts who've actually examined the evidence without financial conflicts of interest. This should be must-watch television—a historic moment when truth finally gets an uncensored platform.

You can watch the hearing live at 10am Eastern time on Monday, July 21st on the FDA Youtube channel. I will make my 5 minutes count. I promise.

Watch Live Here on Youtube

I want to commend Commissioner Makary for his willingness to let independent experts speak their minds. Not the usual suspects who accept pharmaceutical dollars for a living or benefit directly from prescribing these drugs. For once, we'll have voices that aren't bought and paid for by the industry they're supposed to be evaluating. The fact that I am one of the nine is telling.

But I'm fearful this groundbreaking moment may just become background noise. Another government meeting that gets buried while pregnant women continue being lied to about the safety of psychiatric drugs.

That's why this isn't really about the five minutes I get to make an impact. This is about twenty-five years of watching mental health professionals witness obvious harm and choose to look away. It's about the psychological mechanisms that allow educated, intelligent people to suppress their own intuition and comply with a system that's systematically destroying the people they claim to help.

The Awakening That Created a Calling

I never aspired to become a psychologist. When I took my first job in a children's psychiatric hospital, I had no career ambitions in mental health. I was simply a young man who needed work and stumbled into what would become my life's mission.

What I witnessed in that facility changed everything. It awakened something in me that I never knew existed. It revealed a calling that would define the next twenty-five years of my life.

Picture this: A seven-year-old boy who'd been sexually abused by his stepfather, removed from everything familiar, placed in a sterile institutional setting. When he acts out in fear, confusion and trauma, a psychiatrist spends thirty seconds asking his name and why he's there, then writes a "comprehensive psychiatric evaluation" diagnosing him with ADHD, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and emerging Bipolar Disorder.

Thirty seconds. Three psychiatric labels. A developing brain about to be experimented on with powerful psychoactive chemicals. This kid is labeled for life.

I watched children raised in poverty and violence get sedated into passive compliance while mental health professionals documented this as "stabilization." Kids whose only crime was reacting predictably to horrific circumstances were transformed into psychiatric patients requiring lifelong management.

The pseudoscientific labels flew around that ward like confetti: ADHD for kids who couldn't sit still after being traumatized. Bipolar disorder for children whose emotions were chaotic after their worlds had been shattered. Oppositional defiance for kids who didn't trust the adults who'd already failed them.

And when the drugs made them worse, more agitated, more suicidal, more disconnected from their own humanity, this was interpreted as evidence of how sick they really were, justifying more drugs, higher doses, additional diagnoses.

I looked around that ward in absolute horror, waiting for someone else to scream "WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING TO THESE CHILDREN?"

The scream never came.

So I let the fire burn inside of me. I questioned the leadership in treatment team meetings. I asked uncomfortable questions. Many of the same uncomfortable questions I ask today. You don’t go from those treatment meetings to an FDA panel of experts without a willingness to ruffle feathers.

"How do we know this seven-year-old has bipolar disorder when his emotions are the expectable reaction to being sexually abused?"

"What evidence supports medicating a child whose behavior problems started after sexual abuse… how will this help him recover?"

"Why are we treating normal reactions to abnormal circumstances as mental illness?"

“I witnessed your comprehensive psychiatric evaluation consist of two questions in 30 seconds, none of which the kid answered”.

These are true stories.

The answers were hollow. Pathetically hollow. Psychiatrists would hide behind vague references to "clinical judgment" and "evidence-based practice." They'd cite studies they'd never actually read, referencing "the science" while demonstrating they understood nothing about the actual research.

The other staff members, nurses, social workers, psychologists, would sit there in these meetings like obedient students, nodding along with whatever medical authority proclaimed. They deferred all responsibility to the psychiatrist, convinced that his white coat and medical degree meant he possessed some special knowledge they lacked.

He must know something we don't know… was the general attitude.

Well, guess what? He didn't.

It was the same bullshit I recently received from Columbia University's Dr. Girkis on my podcast. You can watch the full episode on YouTube here

The same defensive posturing when challenged. The same retreat into credentials and institutional authority. The same hollow invocation of "the science says" when pressed for actual evidence.

An Illegitimate Authority

I've never fit the typical profile of mental health professionals, as many who read my Substack or listen to the Radically Genuine Podcast probably already know. I have a fierce rejection of social hierarchies and an unwavering belief that authority should be challenged at every opportunity.

No one person has a fundamental right to hold authority over another. When such authority exists in society, the person who has obtained that power carries an enormous responsibility to act according to the highest ethical standards. Those in medical authority hold this responsibility most acutely due to their potential for causing irreversible harm. This trust is required for a society to flourish. Violation of this trust erodes the foundation of our institutions.

It has always been a red flag to me when an authority figure feels threatened by being questioned. There's an almost instant energetic reaction that tells me this person is an illegitimate authority. If you watched or listened to my recent podcast with Columbia University Professor of Psychiatry Dr. Ragy Girkis, you can probably sense my discomfort with his defensive posture. He represented exactly what I'm talking about: an illegitimate authority defending an indefensible system.

Psychiatry as a healthcare specialty is an illegitimate authority in our medical system. It has claimed dominion over human consciousness, emotions, and behavior without any objective diagnostic tests, reliable scientific foundation, or demonstrated ability to heal. It maintains its power through institutional capture, pharmaceutical industry funding, and the systematic suppression of dissenting voices.

But what makes psychiatric authority truly terrifying is its legal power to destroy lives. A psychiatrist can take away your freedom through involuntary commitment based on subjective opinions disguised as medical diagnoses. They can force psychoactive drugs into your body against your will. They can override parental authority and chemically alter your child's developing brain while threatening you with loss of custody if you resist.

This isn't healthcare. This is state-sanctioned violence with a medical license. No other medical specialty wields this kind of coercive power over human beings. Your cardiologist can't force you into the hospital. Your oncologist can't mandate chemotherapy. But a psychiatrist can strip away your constitutional rights based on nothing more than their clinical opinion about your mental state.

The Compliance That Haunts Me

What haunts me to this day isn't just the systematic abuse I witnessed in that children's ward. It's the calm acceptance of my colleagues who watched the same thing and felt nothing. This is pervasive today.

They would nod along as psychiatrists discussed "treatment plans" for traumatized children as if sedating them into submission was medical care. They would document "medication compliance" as if forcing mind-altering chemicals into developing brains was therapeutic. They would celebrate when a terrified child became docile and call it progress.

I kept waiting for someone, anyone, to acknowledge the obvious truth: these children weren't mentally ill, they were responding normally to abnormal circumstances. They didn't need psychiatric labels, they needed safety, love, and time to heal from trauma.

But my colleagues had learned to detach. They had trained themselves not to listen to whatever might be emanating from their hearts. They had surrendered their intuition to authority and their compassion to protocol.

They see harm, but they don't acknowledge it. They witness suffering, but they rationalize it. They observe destruction, but they call it treatment.

They've been trained not to question science, but to cite studies as absolute truth and justification for clinical guidelines without ever developing the skill to critically evaluate the strength of evidence.

Medical school and graduate training programs don't just teach clinical skills. They systematically break down students' capacity for independent thought. They teach students to treat published research as gospel, regardless of funding sources, methodological flaws, or industry manipulation. Students learn to regurgitate study conclusions without understanding how to assess bias, conflicts of interest, or statistical manipulation.

Then come the licensure exams that coerce them into referring to psychiatrists and promoting psychiatric drugs as legitimate healthcare. The message is embedded in every question: follow the pharmaceutical pathway or fail. Deviate from the protocol and lose your license.

They're taught to operate in fear. Fear of losing their license. Fear of malpractice lawsuits. Fear of regulatory scrutiny. Fear of being blamed if something goes wrong. This fear transforms healers into liability managers, more concerned with protecting themselves than helping patients.

That's why a suicidal client is met with a series of checklists and an automatic recommendation to go to an emergency room, which will almost certainly make them feel more empty and hopeless instead of receiving the compassionate human connection they desperately need.

But here's what they willfully ignore: Ethics trumps rule following. Ethical standards supersede law. You cannot violate fundamental ethical principles simply because a guideline tells you to. And if you want to go deeper, there's a higher moral authority provided by God that transcends all human institutions.

This is precisely why they don't teach about moral authority in higher education. The state becomes the authority. The medical apparatus becomes the authority. Individual conscience and divine moral law are systematically erased and replaced with institutional obedience.

This creates a generation of professionals who can witness a seven-year-old being chemically lobotomized and feel nothing. Who can watch teenagers become suicidal after starting antidepressants and attribute it to "underlying illness." Who can observe the systematic destruction of human potential and call it evidence-based practice.

Consider the mental gymnastics required for a therapist to sit across from a pregnant woman experiencing normal adjustment challenges and recommend that she consult a psychiatrist about taking brain-altering chemicals during the most critical period of fetal development.

Consider the psychological dissociation necessary for a psychologist to see a child's behavior problems improve dramatically when removed from an abusive home, yet still support the psychiatric narrative that these were symptoms of an underlying brain disorder requiring medication.

Consider the emotional numbing required to watch patients develop permanent sexual dysfunction, cognitive impairment, and withdrawal syndromes while continuing to validate the "mental illness" framework that caused these problems.

This level of detachment doesn't happen naturally. It's cultivated through training, reinforced through professional culture, and maintained through willful blindness.

The Conversation That Cannot Happen

I've tried having these conversations. I've presented evidence of pharmaceutical fraud, shown data on increased suicide rates, shared stories of permanent drug-induced damage. The response is always the same: deflection, rationalization, personal attack.

They don't engage with the evidence because they can't. Their psychological survival depends on not seeing what's directly in front of them.

They've created elaborate defense mechanisms to protect themselves from reality: Each rationalization provides temporary relief from the cognitive dissonance created by witnessing harm while participating in causing it.

But underneath these defenses, something darker operates: a complete surrender of moral authority to institutional power. These professionals have abdicated their responsibility to think independently, to trust their perceptions, to protect the vulnerable from systematic exploitation.

They've become willing participants in medical totalitarianism.

Protecting the Most Vulnerable

The connection between that children's psychiatric ward and this FDA panel on SSRIs during pregnancy should be obvious, but somehow it's not. Both represent society's fundamental failure to protect its most vulnerable members—those who cannot advocate for themselves, cannot consent to what's being done to them, and depend entirely on adults to make decisions in their best interest.

The same professionals who could watch traumatized seven-year-olds get chemically restrained and call it treatment are now advising pregnant women that exposing their developing babies to serotonin-altering drugs is "safe and necessary." The same institutional blindness that allowed us to experiment on children's brains in psychiatric hospitals is now being applied to fetal brains in utero. The same authority bias that silenced staff when they witnessed obvious harm to kids is now silencing anyone who questions pharmaceutical interventions during pregnancy.

To me it’s evil. Dark. Antihuman.

If we cannot protect children who are already born, already visible, already screaming their distress, how can we possibly be trusted to protect the ones who are still developing in the womb? The unborn are even more vulnerable, even more defenseless, even more dependent on our moral courage to speak truth when authorities demand compliance.

This isn't just about SSRIs or pregnancy—it's about whether we have the collective moral backbone to protect those who cannot protect themselves. The children I failed to save in that psychiatric ward haunt me, but they also fuel my determination to prevent the same systematic abuse from being inflicted on the next generation before they're even born.

Your Voice, Your Story, Your Power

There are no coincidences. If you're reading this now, it was meant for you. I am a deeply spiritual man, and I believe the universe has brought you to this moment for a reason.

You may know a pregnant woman who was coerced into staying on an SSRI despite her instincts telling her it wasn't right. You may know women of childbearing age who are being prescribed these drugs without genuine informed consent about the risks to their future babies. You yourself may have been persuaded to stay on an SSRI during pregnancy under the lie that it would prevent postpartum depression, only to discover later that you were never told the truth about what you were exposing your child to.

I want to read your stories in the comment section. I will make sure your voice is heard. Whether you're reading this before my presentation to Commissioner Makary or long after, your story matters. I will carry these voices with me into every conversation, every debate, every opportunity I have to speak truth to power about this systematic deception.

But don't stop there. Share this article. Forward it to every pregnant woman you know, every woman of childbearing age, every mental health professional who might still have a functioning conscience. Send it to family members, friends, anyone who needs to understand what's really happening in our medical system. The more people who see this truth, the harder it becomes for the psychiatric pharmaceutical complex to maintain their lies.

Your experience matters. Your truth has power. Your willingness to speak up and share this message could protect the next mother from being deceived, the next baby from being exposed to unnecessary harm.

I promise to amplify your voice wherever this fight takes me. Help me make this moment count.

RESIST

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