What Doctors Often Don’t Tell You About Antidepressants | Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring

American Thought Leaders

The Epoch Times

Government, News, Politics

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

More than 11 percent of Americans take antidepressants, including rising numbers of kids and adolescents and even pregnant women.

The majority of Americans believe that depression is linked to a chemical imbalance in the brain, and that drugs can fix this imbalance—just as someone with Type 1 diabetes might take insulin. But that’s not true, according to board-certified psychiatrist Josef Witt-Doerring.

“There’s never been any evidence that there’s been a chemical imbalance,” Witt-Doerring says. “There is no way to differentiate patients who are depressed from those who are not depressed using any objective markers.”

Instead of fixing a chemical balance, what antidepressants really do is mask symptoms, he says.

A former FDA officer and now director of TaperClinic, Witt-Doerring helps people safely get off of psychiatric medications.

In this episode, we dive into the realities of antidepressant drug use, what most patients often aren’t told by their doctors, and how a patient can be weaned off of psychiatric drugs safely and avoid devastating withdrawal symptoms.

How do these drugs affect people long-term? Are they really safe for pregnant women? And what kinds of potential side effects do they have?

And we dig into perhaps the most taboo subject of all: Is there a link between antidepressants and mass shootings?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	A lot of people have this idea that antidepressants, they're fixing something,
0:05.0	kind of like a type 1 diabetic takes insulin, restoring them to a normal state.
0:10.0	That's not true.
0:12.0	Over 35 million people in America take antidepressants.
0:16.0	But many are not being told about the long-term side effects of these drugs,
0:20.0	says psychiatrist Dr.
0:21.6	Josef Witt During.
0:22.6	He's the founder of the Taper Clinic, which treats severe withdrawal symptoms and helps people
0:27.6	safely get off of psychiatric medications.
0:29.6	There is a group of people that when you bring them off that medication over two months,
0:34.6	that's what I would say is a fast taper.
0:36.6	They will actually develop very severe withdrawal symptoms that do not get better.
0:42.3	They get back on the drug, but the symptoms don't go away.
0:46.3	How do antidepressants actually work?
0:49.3	And what kinds of side effects can they have?
0:51.3	What we know is that many of the mass shooters are exposed to antidepressants.
0:57.3	In the case of some who are trans, there's also hormone medications as well, which can
1:02.6	have a mood destabilizing effect.
1:05.5	This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek.
1:13.0	Dr. Josef Witturring, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
1:17.5	Glad to be back.
1:19.0	So what's the bottom line?
	...

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