I'm Cynthia Overgard, birth educator, advocate for informed consent, and postpartum support specialist. And I'm Trisha Ludwig, certified nurse midwife and international board certified lactation consultant. And this is the Down To Birth Show. Childbirth is something we're made to do. But how do we have our safest and most satisfying experience in today's medical culture? Let's dispel the myths and get down to birth.

I'm Cynthia Overgard, birth educator, advocate for informed consent, and postpartum support specialist. And I'm Trisha Ludwig, certified nurse midwife and international board-certified lactation consultant. And this is the Down to Birth Show. Childbirth is something we're made to do, but how do we have our safest and most satisfying experience in today's medical culture? Let's dispel the myths and get down to birth. Well, it

is an honor to be back with the both of you. My name's Dr. Roger McFillin, and I'm a clinical psychologist and host of the radically genuine podcast. Additionally, I am a writer. I have a best-selling Substack and have a book that is coming out hopefully in October, called "The Awakening: We Cannot Medicate. And much of my platform has been resisting many ideas that I think are interfering with human health, human flourishing, and human sovereignty, and so I do speak out against the harms of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs, and just the conventional mental health system.

Well, Roger, we were thrilled to have you for episode 235, where we took on the topic of postpartum depression and medications, and as difficult as it is, and as reluctant we felt at times, we do want to take on the topic of the Lindsay Clancy case. You released an outstanding episode on the topic that we both listened to. You have a perspective that I personally haven't heard anywhere else. So, Roger, just if you wouldn't mind, introduce the topic and start to share with us some of the things you have to say on this topic.

Well, first, it's always important to state up front that this is an absolute tragedy, and everyone's divisive perspectives on this make sense in the context of three young children lost their life, and it is nearly impossible for people to conjure up an idea about how a mother can kill their own children. It is so unnatural, and so we begin to create that person to be a monster in so many ways, and it serves us to think that that could never be us, that we could never do such a thing, and I'm worried that that takes away from something that we could all learn. This isn't the first time that such an atrocity has occurred after the ingestion of substances, whether those are prescribed drugs in our medical system identified as psychiatric, or they're street drugs, that we see over and over again throughout the course of modern history. That the more we ingest various forms of chemicals that alter the mind, alter our state of consciousness, we see a susceptibility to commit actions that are not typical to what our human souls or or who we are as people, and so you say that I have a different perspective on the Lindsay Clancy case, and what I'm trying to communicate, and I've been on a number of shows, is I want to stick to some facts because the facts matter in this case, and it's extremely important for us to evaluate what the standard of care in psychiatry and allopathic medicine has become in response to challenges postpartum. And so, who is Lindsay Clancy? You know, Lindsay Clancy was is in her early 30s. She was a labor and delivery nurse without any history to suggest that she was sociopathic, or suicidal, or homicidal. There was no evidence of that in any respect to her life. In fact, the character witnesses described. Really loving person who was a good mother and a great nurse, and so it's so shocking for people to try to make sense of how this that person who lives that life can so quickly shift and commit homicide and kill children, And she had three children, so the pregnancies that she had, the two pregnancies prior to her youngest, she exhibited something that is quite familiar, I think, to most women and most families, is that you go through a period where you struggle with sleep. You might enter into some fear and self-judgment. Am I meeting the needs of this child? Am I meeting the needs of my family? And that fear, that anxiety, can create more sleep problems. We all know the more we're in our heads, the more challenging it is for us to be at peace and to rest. And the key piece here, to me, in evaluating the medical record and just the facts, is we had Lindsay reach out to a medical professional as she was getting closer to returning to work, and what her presenting concerns were were sleep, some guilt, and some anxiety. Now, in our current world of pathologizing the inner world and our inner emotions, people begin to medicalize this, and this is part of a multi-generational psychological operation to fear your internal world and your internal experiences. She reports this to a medical provider that she searched online, who would have postpartum experience. Little did she know that this woman, who was Dr. Jennifer Tufts, is just a recent graduate of her residency, and does not have a lot of experience in treating postpartum women at all, but what she does is she responds as many standard psychiatrists are taught. Is they she hands over a symptom checklist, and then instead of that symptom checklist being used for what it was designed to do, which is to just entering into more conversation and more investigation, she uses how she responds to a measure of basically 10 questions, and starts assigning labels like it's a medical condition, and prescribes a drug. The drug was Zoloft.

Now Lindsay, being in the medical system and denying resisting these drugs in her previous two pregnancies, was quite aware that this drug gets passed through the breast milk and has a very difficult, challenging safety profile. Anyone who has examined these drugs in detail knows that it's very difficult to say that these drugs outperform an inert substance like a placebo pill, a sugar pill, it's very difficult. But the side effect profile is significant, and of course, it does harm the baby. This is this is a chemical that's passing through the breast milk that does affect brain development and a number of other things.

Roger, and sorry to interrupt. I just want to also add to that that women are very commonly told that that medication is perfectly safe to take while breastfeeding, and also generally safe to take in pregnancy.

Yes, and this is why it's so important to stick to facts. And I we were talking earlier that I always ask the why. I want to get deeper. These doctors have been lied to by pharmaceutical salespeople over decades. They've been lied to in their education. They've been told a drug is safe when it is absolutely not safe, when the drug has significant safety concerns, and we know that serotonin is such a critical chemical in development. It's not something that just is produced by the brain that lifts mood. It's a whole body hormone that interacts with this entire system. And there is a degree of hubris that exists right now in our medical system. There is Hardin's first rule of human ecology, and it means you're never intervening with just one thing. So when you take a chemical that's made in a factory, and you provide it to a human being, especially one who's in a vulnerable state, whether that's an adolescent or whether is a woman who's pregnant or postpartum, we are interfering with a very complex system, and that has consequences, and it often does. There's a black box warning on these drugs. There is more than a double risk in suicide for somebody like me who examines this drug with the scrutiny it requires. I'm going to tell you it's a four. Sixfold increase in becoming suicidal, and just one SSRI drug has been implicated in the development of suicidal thoughts, suicidal ideation, and homicide. We have case law that determines that, and we're just talking about one drug. Human beings are complex; you're interfering with a complex system, and the reactions are quite varied. You can have a very severe reaction to the drug in terms of mania, suicidality, and psychosis. These are facts; they're on the drug label. The drug sertraline Zoloft is not approved for postpartum depression, and I was on the FDA panel hearing for for SSRIs and pregnancy, and there is not any doctor, there is not any biologist, no researcher would deny the fact that this drug impacts a developing fetus or would impact a child, a breastfeeding baby, that's not in denial. So when doctors make the claim that this drug is safe, they're doing it out of ignorance. They're doing. They're just repeating what they were told, and that's concerning.

I would also like to say I believe they're doing it to protect themselves because my understanding is that if a in this did I believe come up in the Lindsay Clancy trial is that if a doctor believes that a woman is suffering to a severe extent and they do not prescribe something to them that they are actually liable and at risk.

Yeah. Can

I throw in another? And my perspective on this as well is that, and we see the same thing with pitocin. It was not FDA approved for the elective induction of labor. And when I saw clips of these doctors defending themselves, because of course there's a civil lawsuit happening here as well, which is more the nature of this discussion we're having today, not the criminal side of it. What I pick up from these doctors is the message like, well, this is widely administered by most psychiatrists. Like basically, they're saying so many of my colleagues are doing what I did that I'm covered. They they they're so irresponsible that they're hiding behind what their colleagues are doing, and if enough of them are doing it, they think they're covered and they're safe. I don't think they'd be the lone one to do what isn't FDA approved, but they like they see everyone else. Well, this is widely missed. This is traditionally what we do.

It's exactly what happens with cesarean birth. It's the same thing. This is what we do in these scenarios, and this is what my colleagues do. So this is what I must do, because otherwise you're the black sheep, and then potentially more liable, or your reputation is at risk, or your career is at risk. I think they're misguided into thinking it's going to protect them, right? Well, and it does though by case law. It does actually protect them.

You are you are both correct, and you're talking about the dangers of standard of care, when the standard of care is influenced by industry, and not by science, and doctors can be held legally responsible for deviating from the standard of care. We have created a guild. We have created a system in which we are protecting the harmful treatment. So you're both bringing up great points, and I've had these private conversations. One was with a pediatrician who sat right in front of me, and he posed this question to me. He said, "Roger, if I get a suicidal adolescent And I do not provide an SSRI as a frontline treatment, and that teenager ends their life. I am held legally responsible for deviating from the standard of care, and I said yes, sir. But you are prescribing a drug that increases the likelihood that that exact event is going to happen, and he said, "This is true, and I will lose everything if I deviate from the standard of care. So the standard when the standard of care is dangerous, which is exactly the world that we are living in. Ethics has to supersede law. You have to have courageous, well-meaning, independent medical professionals to act on their conscience and be on top of all the scientific literature to provide informed consent. That is not the world we live in in corporate medicine, and the corporate medical world is dangerous. And it is being witnessed right now in this Lindsay Clancy case. That's why I believe that that is that should be on trial, not just Lindsay Clancy. And so when she goes into the doctor and says, "I'm afraid that I'm not sleeping, and I and I'm about to go back to work, my four month leave is coming to an end, and the expectation is I return to 12 hour shifts, and you guys understand what it's like to be a nurse today. You might have a 12-hour shift, or potentially just an 8-hour shift, and if somebody calls out, they expect you to extend your hours to continue to work on the unit. Now, what if you have three children under the age of five and you're not sleeping? Can you understand how that would create anxiety in a young mother? It's not a symptom of a disease. It's a natural response to events in your life. And here's what nobody else is talking about. And I am absolutely floored that people are not bringing this up when it comes to this case, and I don't have evidence from the medical record that this existed, but I have evidence in 20 years of practice that this happens every single day. What she was actually looking for, in my opinion, was a medical justification to continue to extend her leave that she was not ready to go to work under the current conditions of having to breastfeed this child and not getting a full night's rest, so the doctor prescribes or recommends Zoloft, and this is in September. It was September 15, 2022, and Lindsay rejects it. She says no, and says I'm going to try this on my own. She went to therapy, started some form of meditation, tried to get back to exercise, and so what happens between September 15 and the beginning of October is fascinating to me. She improves. She reports feeling better and getting better, but sleep is still a problem. So she returns to the same doctor, Dr. Jennifer Tufts, and reports this. And this is where the real malpractice exists. This is where we have real conflicts of interest. I believe that Lindsay wanted an extension, an FMLA, to not return to work because of her concerns with sleep. Despite getting better, not being diagnosed with postpartum depression, we now inexplicably see that she is placed on Zoloft, and this is concerning because we see she goes from having trouble with sleep to 48 hours straight without sleeping right after she was prescribed Zoloft. Now there is a known reaction to this drug called activation syndrome. This was observed in the initial clinical trials when the drug companies were trying to create a difference between a placebo drug and the drug effect. That a number of people became activated, and it could range from mania to severe anxiety, a condition called akathisia, severe insomnia, to even psychosis.

The drug companies later spun that to say there's an underlying bipolar disorder, so you can't prescribe SSRIs to somebody who has bipolar disorder. That belief system is still present today, and the Lindsay Clancy defense team used that to try to proclaim that she had bipolar disorder. I think that was a huge error on their part because I think what we saw was a drug-induced iatrogenic harm, so 48 hours right away, and that that type of that type of reaction to not sleeping for 48 hours. Can you imagine? Let's just have some empathy. Have you ever? Have anyone listening to this ever just gone 24 hours without sleeping. Now try to go 48 hours for sleeping and be responsible for three children under the age of five. And you are breastfeeding your child. If anything is going to create a distortion of reality, a shift in your mindset or consciousness, it is severe sleep deprivation that is induced by a drug. Now the prescriber knew right away that that's concerning. The problem with Dr. Jennifer Tufts is that she is a first of all she's extremely green, and she's young. She doesn't have experience, and she is trained in the drug model, the disease model, that there is an underlying disease. So now the reaction to the drug is being misinterpreted as worsening mental illness, and she has to intervene. Now I'm talking a lot, so I want to pause there to allow you to jump in. But I think that's a critical piece.

I just want to make one point: is the reason that Lindsay accepted the Zoloft at that point because that was the only way she could get the extended time off from work.

So you you may be aware of this. This was my experience working in the system. Was if the prescriber is going to sign that there is a medical condition that is preventing you from work, you really can't deny their treatment, and then get that same paperwork signed. I have had to make this case for psychiatrists and practitioners over the course of 20 years to not see treatment as a drug, to see that there are other ways we can intervene, and I would always like jump in there and try to support young mothers, and advocate on their behalf and sign paperwork myself. She did not have that level of advocacy in this situation. Now I want to be clear that I don't have evidence that this is the case. This is not written in the file, we just see somebody improving, then reporting to the doctor that they're not ready to go back to work because of sleep problems. Prescribe the drug, having a drug reaction. That piece is so critical because it starts a cascade effect, where the original response to the drug is now being misinterpreted as a mental illness, and now you're prescribing more drugs. And when I say more drugs, we're looking over less than four months 13 separate prescriptions by six or seven different prescribers. I thought it

was even 30, Roger. And at the end, at the very end, she was on 13 at one time. Over those that period, wasn't it actually about 30 or 30 1am? I mistaken? Well, there's

30 separate prescriptions made, but the drugs were only 13.

And she was not on all 13 at any one point.

No, this is actually worse. People don't understand this. They think about, they still think about this in terms of medicine and not a drug effect. And people think about drugs in terms of like, all right, if I if I drink alcohol on one day and I'm impaired by that that drug alcohol, if I'm not drinking two days later, then that what happened to me from the alcohol, it's out of my system. Therefore, it's not affecting me. That is not the case. You can take a psychiatric drug, and it is interfering with your cognition, your emotion, your entire system in ways we still yet do not fully understand. We just observe. Like I said before, we are interfering in a complex system, but taking a drug for a couple of days is can lead to dangerous consequences, and often does. We've seen this in the case of teenagers who are prescribed an SSRI for test anxiety and commit suicide two days later. This is real. This is something I am intimately involved with in my clinical work and my advocacy work, in this particular case, we are inducing the most dangerous of situations, which is the starting, stopping, increasing, and decreasing of multiple drugs in a small in a short period of time, and we are inducing states Of psychosis, of extreme mood, of insomnia, of intrusive thoughts-these are all identified consequences to that type of care.

Quick question, Roger. I once she reported side effects, and I know her husband did as well. I know there's something about a provider prescribing a different drug from the same drug classification that I thought is is not supposed to happen. And what does the standard of care say there? And of all these doctors prescribing, did they talk to each other? Or great

questions. All them all all of those are great questions. So, let me address the first point. I think it's common sense, and most physicians outside of psychiatry would say this: if you're prescribed a certain class of drug, and a person has an adverse reaction to that drug, you would you would be very concerned that that class of drug is dangerous to that individual, but psychiatry has protected itself in a way that they do not understand to the extent to which these drugs are dangerous. They still continue to call them medicine. With very few or rare, you know, side effects. You know, they say all drugs have side effects. We're not different than any other medicine. And while you know, other other specialties of medicine have this ability to objectively test and evaluate, apply the scientific method. We can identify clear disease states, we can measure the effect. Psychiatry is not a medical specialty with that degree of scientific scrutiny, so you can see a drug reaction misrepresented as a symptom of an illness. So we do know that there are various forms of genetic mutations of specific metabolizing genes that lead to different reactions to the drug, SSRI drugs have been implicated in suicide and homicide. The cases in which in which that has been identified as case law is when they underwent gene testing, and they have identified this variation of this particular gene, and that has altered the prescribing habits of the doctor. None of that occurred in this case. Nobody knew ahead of time where Lindsay Clancy could actually metabolize this drug, and nobody knew if she would have a a positive reaction to the drug or a poor reaction to this drug. So we she had this response to sertraline, which is called Zoloft, and it's not identified in the in the record as an adverse drug reaction. Therefore, every subsequent provider did not see that, and of course, no, they are not interacting with each other. They are not consulting with each other. They have access to the clinical record, but if it's not identified as an adverse drug reaction, then they're going to make the same error again and again. And they did. She was prescribed Zoloft back in you know a little over a month later in November. So the major point here is this is a reflection on what medical care has begun. Drug reactions misinterpreted, poor coordination of care, seeing drugs as the response to everything, understanding normal reactions in people's lives, medicalizing it to an extent where people become fearful of their own internal states, and then drugging them into oblivion for the worst of consequences. This has become standard psychiatry. This is this is clearly to the rest of the country who looks at 13 drugs or trying to make sense of this, and most reasonable people can say, "Yeah, that's horrible care, but then the mind doesn't allow them to like just say, "Okay, this is because of the medical care, so they have to try to make up other reasons. Well, she wasn't on 13 drugs at one point. Well, no, she was doctor shopping. You know, they they create all these other reasons to vilify her, which doesn't allow us to look at the actual reality of this situation.

Well, Roger, one of the biggest criticisms was she wasn't even taking all her meds. How do you like that one?

And what about the fact that she was doctor shopping? What about the fact that she did see six different doctors in was it a four month time frame? Why wasn't anybody paying attention to that. Did anybody talk about that? I mean, that's that's significant. If somebody is moving around in that way and not getting continuity of care, something's going wrong there. Exactly

right. And we use doctor shopping. It's a term that's used to describe drug addicts. So you're going to try to get more and more drugs. Let's look at the reality of this situation. This woman goes and follows somebody's medical recommendations and gets dramatically worse. Wouldn't you seek out another opinion? That's not doctor shopping. That's going to somebody else and trying to see. Take a look at what's going on here. I am getting worse. There was a point where her husband Patrick came to her in an in-person meeting with a nurse practitioner, and said, "Can we just stop this and go back to baseline? Ever since she started receiving psychiatric care, and this is a quote: "This was in the medical record. She is 10,000 times worse. So, to me, this is a very clear iatrogenic harm, drug-induced mental unwellness and psychosis. And she was deteriorating. Did she make choices to stop taking a drug without the doctor's approval, yes. But what do you do if you ingest something and get dramatically worse? Do you continue just to take the drug because the doctor told you to? No. Most people on their own end up stopping this drug. Do you know how many cases I have had over the course of 20 years? Where people came to me and said, "Yeah, I was prescribed that drug. It made me feel absolutely horrible, so I just stopped taking it and never went back. That is much more typical than you realize. So I think we have to be very careful of the judgment that is placed upon her.

Did she stop? I I was actually imagining she was primarily taking most of these drugs, and I was thinking, "Wow, what a shame this couple is so deep in the medical system themselves because she's a nurse and it's her lifestyle to normalize medications. I was thinking, "Why didn't she stop? Why did she even take that first prescription, knowing she had reported to feeling so well on no medications? Yoga, meditation, journaling-three things we know reduce anxiety and depression. So I-I was thinking, what a shame this was her livelihood because it inclined her toward taking the drugs despite all her her evidence and experience.

Well, there's a mixed record here. So she did follow the medical care early on, but she started to deteriorate under that. So she was taken off the Zoloft within a few days. I think it was like four days she was off the Zoloft, but then they started her right back on a benzodiazepine and Benadryl. So she kept getting kind of chemically lobotomized in a lot of ways, like the the doctor and the nurse practitioners were seeing, just like can we can we play with her brain chemistry in a way that can get her to sleep initially? Like the doctors online are describing this as treatment as a postpartum depression with psychosis case. That is a complete misrepresentation of the medical facts. This woman was not experiencing anything related to that until she was placed on many mind and mood-altering drugs that do create psychosis, and that is where the American public is being manipulated, and where psychiatry continues to maintain their standing. They're saying this is a disease, and this is what happens with this type of disease, and this is why we're important, and we have to learn how to manage this condition. They're using this particular case to kind of reinforce their requirement in the American healthcare system when I believe it's an illegitimate medical authority.

So, can we talk about postpartum psychosis for a minute? Because do you believe that is even actually a thing, or do you believe that is always something that is only ever drug induced, or how often is it real? And because most women who are going to end up with a diagnosis of postpartum psychosis have probably been in the system with some type of postpartum depression, anxiety, OCD, something like that, and getting treatment.

Okay, so let's. This is such a great question, and I'm glad we're able to go in this direction. First of all, we always have to define the terms. Okay, so what do you believe the term psychosis actually means, and how is it used in the medical profession?

Most people don't even know, have never even heard of postpartum psychosis. So I think that that's a hard question to answer because most doctors don't even know.

Does it have something to do with whether one is in touch with reality, or does it not? It it

does, but who gets to define reality?

Right. Okay.

Okay. So psychosis is real in the terms of hearing voices or seeing things that are not necessarily there. So let's let's define you know what psychosis is. Throughout human history, we have had these phenomenon where people maybe see things that other people don't see, or even hear things that other people don't have access to. Now, when we call them saints or prophets or psychics or psychics

or psychos, right?

We don't. Well, we don't pathologize the saint, the medium, the prophet, or the shaman.

Right, but if a friend of yours says she saw an angel like lurking over her bed when she woke up in the morning, you know she's going to have friends who judge her and say she's imagining things and crazy. That's what I meant, right? Yes,

right. So there's this fear of anything outside the material world,

right?

And what's interesting is if you poll most Americans, 85% will believe in a spiritual realm that there are unseen forces at play, but yet if we talk about it, it's very quickly pathologized, and in our culture, it's medicalized. Not in other cultures. If you go to indigenous cultures and you talk about feeling connected to a spirit world, or. The Divine Mother, or anything else in nature, or you even hear voices, or you see things that aren't there. In some ways, it's understood as a spiritual gift, and you might work under mentorship of certain elders in your community. Now, in our mental health world, it's met with fear. Now I am concerned about the response of fear to anyone's internal experience. Now this is different than the Lindsay Clancy case because Lindsay Clancy case was was never experiencing voices until she was prescribed a drug, multiple drugs, stopping and starting of multiple drugs, but I want to bring this up because we've created fear around these experiences, and what can become a delusion, which a delusion is an idea, become is at the subjective judgment of another one. So if I tell the the two of you, I had a great meditation this morning, and I experienced God. Will either one of you judge me?

No, not at all.

Okay, if I say that to the wrong person, they can force incarcerate me and force drug me by law, and it happens every day. I have those conversations with people around the country that they experienced just that. They said it out loud. A family member got concerned. They went to a medical professional. The medical professional deemed that a spiritual delusion, and they were committed.

God help us. That is-it's incredible when you think about it. And

once once you're committed, okay, they can force drug you until you stand in front of a judge, which can be seven days later. Wow. So that's why this is a slippery slope, and that's why I want to define the terms. Another point is this: we know that prolonged periods of sleep deprivation do shift your understanding of reality. You miss things. You become cognitively impaired. You are prone to having a dream-like state. Anyone ever experience being in a specific dream-like state? Kind of wake up and you're groggy, kind of a liminal state, and you don't know if you're awake or asleep. These are various forms and states of consciousness that human beings experience without any drugs. How we understand our internal experience and how we communicate it to another person matters. Is it normalized or is there fear provocation? When there's fear provocation, you're now going in battle with your own internal experience. People all the time say, "I'm afraid I'm going crazy, and you say this to an illegitimate medical authority. They're using this as a reason to say you have an underlying disease state, but this is what makes this medical specialty different than other medical specialties. There's no objective test. There is no postpartum depression evaluation. You don't get a blood test or a brain scan and say, "Well, we're sorry. We we see this higher level of enzymes in your blood that are going to create or evidence of an underlying disease state of postpartum depression. We're going to give you the treatment, and you will be okay. No, none of this exists. This is a subjective response. Now, what the media does, and what the medical establishment does, is they want you to be afraid of these diseases. Apparently, which is what drives someone like Lindsay Clancy to go see the doctor in the first place, and what are how are they being met in the medical community and medical centers? Well, we know the average appointment time in primary care and in an OB/GYN is somewhere between eight minutes to 12 minutes, and even when it gets closer to 12 minutes, you know that's they're they're counting the time with the nurse, and you're weighing yourself, and all these things. Lindsay Clancy got no medical care. She wasn't weighed. She didn't get gene testing. They didn't test her thyroid. She completed a measure, an Edinburgh scale that that reported her sleep problems and some mood shifts and some thoughts.

I'm critical even of the Edinburgh postpartum depression screening tool. I just think it's so inadequate. When I read the questions on it, I'm just like rolling my eyes. I cannot believe that's the best we have, and I have to just also interject with the fact, and I tell this to my own clients: the first thing you need in anyone you hire is someone with emotional intelligence. And when that doctor-I don't know if it was Jennifer Tufts, the one you mentioned-when they said not only yes, it was on Zoom, how. What the appointment was, and I didn't follow the case closely. I did see this clip, and it was very frustrating. What What did you do when she shared this? Well, I I validated her feelings. I was just like, what? You validated her feelings? She's telling you she's having suicidal and or homicidal thoughts. What do you say to her? Yeah, that's really hard. That's got to be really hard. That was inadequate, with or without a degree. That is inadequate. I mean, I know teenagers who would have a healthier response to that if a friend said such a thing. And I just want to also put out there before we continue, because I'm so afraid of not mentioning this in the this episode. Step number one in that situation is: from this moment forward, you shall not be alone with your children. Not you need to be removed from your children because you're dangerous, because that's not a great message to give women anyway, and it's very traumatic to children and a mother to be separated. But she needs 24-seven company, even if the husband has to take months off unpaid, I guess you have to take months off unpaid. She shall not be alone with the children, not so long as you're in the shower. If her parents have to retire early, if you hire full-time help, she shall not be alive. And it's the message isn't because you're not to be trusted. It's we cannot put these precious children in the care of someone who isn't perfectly well.

I want to just add to that because I think we forget about how we've evolved throughout the course of history. Women were supported in that way. In other parts of the world, they absolutely are. It is viewed as a time where tribes and families come together. It's a recognition that this is the most vulnerable time for a mother. There is a lot of physical changes going on. The sleep deprivation is real. Sleep deprivation does create impairment. We're seeing the cumulative effect of a number of ways we live in a modern society that are just so self-defeating and harmful. Who believes that after three or four months that you can just return to work when you have three children under the age of five, or you know you have a father has to work or family who doesn't come in and support somebody who's experiencing that degree of problems. It just seems so common sense, and we've lost common sense.

The other thing that has been happening is not only have we moved away from our larger family units and separated ourselves from aunts, uncles, sisters, cousins, parents. But there's this whole, maybe it's a millennial thing. I don't know. There's this whole movement towards setting such firm boundaries with family and in-laws and people like that that they people are just refusing to have the help that they absolutely need in this time period, because of sometimes to me very small reasons, and that we should be more willing to just sort of not you know pick our battles and get the help and support we need because we are not meant to do this the way we do it. A woman, a mother, is not meant to raise her children in isolation. It's hard to make friends. It's hard to find family, and we're keeping people out. We're afraid of germs. We're not letting anybody come help. It's just gotten so blown out of proportion. But I also want to come back to something you said before because I think we may have created a little bit of a fear for postpartum moms who might actually be experiencing, maybe they are feeling this out of normal state, or they are hearing something, but now are they going to be afraid to speak to somebody about this? Like, who do they go to if they're afraid of their own thoughts, especially intrusive thoughts? Many women are now believing that if they have intrusive thoughts, they are on the verge of becoming psychotic. They are on the verge of not being able to control themselves. But now, maybe they're afraid to speak to somebody about it because who's going to receive them well, or are they going to be incarcerated because they say they are having these visions or voices? What do you say to that?

This was very evident in Lindsay Clancy's case, it's very clear to me that she was afraid to report some of things, these things, to her providers to the extent in which she was experiencing them, because she was afraid that she her children would be taken away from her. And again, this is some of the consequences of medicalizing all aspects of the human experience is that people deem you to be mentally ill, and when you're deemed mentally ill, you can lose your own freedom, your own rights, and they end up just placing you on more and more drugs. I think she was very familiar with how the system worked in that way, and what she did is she started turning it onto her. She started to believe that she was without help, that she was really, really broken, and this is in a state of pretty significant sleep deprivation, while being placed on over the course of less than four months 13 separate psychiatric drugs. So you can see where that state of mind really begins to shift. She actually was asking for help quite routinely. She went into a postpartum depression specific program. It's called a partial hospitalization program. This was an interesting part of the case and the the medical file is that when she went in for her evaluation, they did not admit her. Are you aware of this? They said that she did not meet any criteria for postpartum depression. That this was drug induced. That her symptoms were based on what they used the term overmedicated. For me, I don't use that term because one drug can lead to these responses. But they saw her as having an adverse drug reaction. They called her medical provider at the time and never returned a return call. Never occurred, so she's not admitted into the program. The evaluator called her current medical provider and said she had concerns about the drug regimen creating these these symptoms, these reactions, and then the call wasn't returned. So this the ball was dropped in so many different ways throughout the course of this case, and when Lindsay eventually admitted herself into what is considered the premier psychiatric hospital in the country, McLean Hospital, because it's associated with Harvard Medical School. What happened was that she was getting worse; she was deteriorating by their care. I don't view McLean as the premier psychiatric center because it is the standard of care, the premier standard of care, and we described early on in this episode how the standard of care can be dangerous. But for her, growing up in this culture where we have put medical professionals on a pedestal, when she follows their standard of care and worsens, she continues to, you know, then direct it on herself that I'm a hopeless case, and she started then doing Google searches when she was finally discharged from McLean, that questioning if she was a sociopath, because she's dealing with these constant intrusive thoughts which were telling her to harm her kids and to harm herself, and the greater American public and media is using that as as evidence as if she is a sociopath, and we have no history at all to suggest it's anything close to that. What we do have evidence is is this is someone who's fearing her own thoughts that she's experiencing these intrusive thoughts-they're in all likelihood drug-induced-and she's questioning if it has anything to do with her, which makes sense because that's how the medical center, the medical system, responds to her. Now, the question I have for the two of you is: How deep do you want to go? Like, how bold do you want to go in this conversation? Because it-I've gone multiple levels deep into the origins of of this, and if you want to go there, I'm more than willing to to go there.

I I I know we're both willing to go there. I I can speak for both of us, right, Trisha?

Yeah.

I just want to say that I just want to make clear for my own conscience as well that to whatever extent the medical community is responsible for what happened, and I hope the civil case makes bigger news than the criminal one has when it comes. It doesn't correlate to whether she is responsible, I really believe these are two separate things because I think you know I'm so with you on this conversation about medications and always have been, and it's not to imply that therefore she isn't responsible because obviously it would be an incredible precedent to have anyone murdering their children. We already have had a copycat case last week to say because the medications played a massive role, if not exclusive role, in what happened to her. It's not to imply that a person on medication, as so much of our country is is still not responsible for their actions because wouldn't that be an interesting direction for this to go? Now, if anyone from anyone, I list the horrible things that happen in the country, but if the argument comes down to oh they were on meds, therefore they aren't responsible. I just want to make clear my opinion is of course that is a. Thing they certainly can still be very much responsible for taking the meds and the effect of the meds. So I want very much to go deep on the topic, just making clear that I don't think one absolves the other.

I agree with you, and I made this point on another popular show that certainly wanted to vilify Lindsay Clancy, and my goal was that hopefully, with some of this information, we can prevent further tragedy. To understand that psychiatry is an illegitimate medical authority and very dangerous, and this was dangerous care. And at the same time, we do not create alternative systems, and we do not evolve unless we accept responsibility for all our actions, we nobody forced her to receive that care, and no one forced her to take a drug. All of those decisions were made by her and her alone, and she is accountable for all those decisions. And it's it's it's sad to say. I think she was a victim of the medical system, but we have to have some personal responsibility and accountability in this, and that's the only way we're out of this. We to have sovereignty over our own decisions and to not fall victim to medical authority is one of the defining moments of our time.

You have to set proper precedent because if you don't, it is a very dangerous, slippery slope. And as Cynthia already mentioned, there's already been a subsequent case two days later. There's already been cases that you know have occurred in the past that are getting reopened because of this. That's dangerous. I also just want to comment on how many women came out in support of her and why, because I do think that's important. We all, we all can feel deep, deep empathy toward her. We all can feel like, oh my God, that could have been me. I remember having feelings like that. I remember I could have been right on the edge. So many women are feeling that like that right now, but also it's it's dangerous for women to say that they could just flip into that. It's dangerous for women to think that that could happen because it's not actually how it works, and it's also dangerous for women on a like greater societal level, because now it's very easy for people on the outside to say, "Well, women are just on the verge of psychosis. Women are just on the verge of being crazy. Postpartum moms shouldn't go back to work. They shouldn't have jobs. They they they're not capable. It like there's two really important sides to this coin. One is the empathy part, understanding how to help women who are struggling, and the other is the precedent we set.

Yeah, I don't think I fully answered your question earlier, and I think it's important. I think it is significantly more likely that you will enter into psychosis through a drug reaction than anything naturally, and I want that to be made clear. I think I want it to stay with facts. And once you start altering your mind with pharmaceuticals or other forms of drugs, you are increasing your likelihood dramatically of a serious adverse event, psychosis, or shifts in perception, or hearing things or seeing things that might not be visible. There are multiple causes that could lead someone to experience that over the course of their lifetime. On almost majority of cases, they are not dangerous, but prolonged periods of sleep deprivation, exposure to a toxin, potentially another medical condition can all provide those those reactions. They're rare, of course, but we can make them seem much more dangerous and more likely through fear provocation by creating them in the media in a collective consciousness that can put people in fear of their own minds and their own thoughts, which that in itself creates mental unwellness. Right when you are afraid of your own mind, that is the precursor to everything that follows.

So, when you offered to go a layer deeper on this, Roger,

yeah,

where are you going with it?

Well, let's. We have to ask ourselves some very difficult and challenging questions as a culture. How did we get to a point where, and I want to remind people that what we call medicines are chemical concoctions that are created in a factory. They're unnatural by definition. If it is. Found in nature, then it cannot be patented and sold. So all of this is synthetic. At some point, and we can go back to post World War One, the Industrial Age. They stole the real and sold us the fake, and the consequences of selling us the fake, synthetic chemicals, synthetic food, synthetic ideas, technology has led to unprecedented chronic disease epidemic, mental health epidemic, and so the more we follow these standard allopathic ideas of synthetic drugs. The worse we become as a collective culture, the more unhealthy we become. So, for me, who is in the mental health field and who is a psychologist and who's investigated the safety and efficacy of drugs, I have to continue to go back historically to say at what point did we create a dramatic shift in the way we view the the human experience? That all of a sudden we have medicalized this and prescribed drugs for what previously was viewed as the as the journey of life. And the dark side of this, the going further is understanding that some of this was very non-organic. That the U.S. intelligence agencies, through specific operations, one of them called MK Ultra, began to study with academic psychiatry starting in the 1960s into the 1970s. Can we identify and create a drug that can influence a population, can make them more compliant? Can we we can use for national security reasons that we can use abroad and overseas, for example, for a greater foreign policy initiative post World War II to be able to conduct regime changes in countries that we deem are dangerous to American capitalism or American foreign policy. How do we divide a population? How can we influence behavior? How can we carry out assassinations? People don't know, but this is documented. MK Ultra was experiments on American citizens and Canadian citizens with academic psychiatry in some of our major institutions: Johns Hopkins, Duke University, Harvard. We were conducting experiments on various forms of manipulating various brain chemicals for altered states of consciousness, when you look at the origins of this revolution of a chemical imbalance, it started in the 70s, and then moved into the 1980s, which predated the approval of Prozac, the first SSRI to be widely distributed to the American public. It was combined with media, media stories, direct-to-consumer advertising, as well as it being infiltrated into Hollywood and television. So it was a very much a coordinated and combined effort to get people to believe that their internal states, which I see as powerful signals, and those signals are actually meaningful for our transformation and for our health. I do believe our emotions are telling us, like we need to take care of something in our environment, or we have to just take care of something within our physical well-being, and that we pay attention to those as bringing us back on our path, allowing us to respond and take sovereignty over our own lives and our own health conditions. Somewhere along the line, we began to shift that, and we were outsourcing the human condition, our own challenges, to somebody who's wearing a white coat, which is a whole other aspect of association and media and training to lead us to submit to an authority figure. I do believe, and I in saying this is very challenging. I do believe this was a coordinated psychological operation to get to exactly where we are today, and where we are today is at least 25% of the population is taking at least one psychiatric drug. We see unprecedented rates of people identifying as mentally ill

proudly in some cases as a badge.

Very very proudly, almost like an identity group. We see even larger portions of population no longer trusting their internal compass to make decisions. They are outsourcing it to an authority, which is exactly how you get a compliant population. Like it has been widely, widely effective. And when I say that they are stealing the real and selling the fake, it's accelerating. We are becoming. Trolled by technology, we are living fake worlds. Like we're having a great conversation right now, but it's not the same, unless if I was in person with you.

Right, like

you are on a screen for me, and we are living our lives that way too. We are becoming completely disconnected, and I do believe we were created in an image of God that allowed us to have these mirror neurons, where we have empathy, and we love each other, and we care for each other, and that's when we come to the service and support of each other in times of needs. But that happens when we are in connection to each other, when we're not divided, when we're not separated, and the entire system is now created where even a physician doesn't really get to know you. These doctors used to be independent; they would they lived in your communities. You really got to know them. They cared about you and they loved you, and that was the care. Now we're dehumanizing everybody. You don't need you like they just rotate the number of providers you see, and you don't even know who you're going to get when it's time to give birth. Everything is sterilized, everything is chemicalized, and everything is is through fear, and you can separation, separation, it's

all separation. I mean, if you look at the healthiest populations in the world, it's not because they eat a Mediterranean diet. It's because they live in community. And when we look at postpartum women, what is the thing that they are missing most of all, besides sleep, community, sleep deprivation, and lack of community are major. Those are major risks.

You can't convince me anymore that this is organic. This is targeted. You can't convince me when you put pesticides on our food that are known to create illness, that kill life in our guts. They destroy gut microbiome. You can't convince me that that's just organic and that's just about money, because there's way too much of the same anti-life transhumanist movement that exists in all facets of our modern life, and I just think it's time for a revolution. I'm not talking about in violence. I'm not talking about upending a government. I'm talking about a revolution that creates a alternative system. We don't need permission to build new systems. We don't need permission to naturalize birth again to make it something that was never should have been a medical issue, that it is something as natural as breathing, to be aligned with the sun and the moon and nature, to get back to the simple because we are aligned with all things, we are connected to each other, but we're also connected to the earth. We're connected to the sun. We're connected to the weather, the seasons. Everything informs our well-being, and the more we get disconnected from what I believe is that energetic divine connection, the worse we become. And when the medical system creates this degree of separation, this degree of harm. We have a responsibility to oppose it.

So let's get specific about what we can do, and specifically, we can bring it back to Lindsay's case. Like, if you had been her provider, what would you have done differently? What can what would you have done differently? And what can women do now to remedy this or prevent this.

So I I will say up front that I have done countless consultations over the course of the last four or five years, in particular, intervening with families where. some when people are concerned about a mother's state of mind, so I am going to speak to you from experience. Number one, I never separate the mother, and I don't identify her as a patient. I don't identify her with words like disorder. I don't cultivate the fear. You cannot isolate and separate a postpartum mother from the context in which she is living. So I will not meet with somebody without her support system. Usually, it's her husband, but not always because we forget that there are many single mothers out there who are doing this without a loving and supportive husband. The best case scenario is it's not just the husband; it's also her parents or her sister. If you begin to see. Her and identify her to be an issue and describe her as ill. Everyone is missing the point. We're all part of this. There, the separation is an illusion. A sleep-deprived mother of three children who has to nourish and keep this child alive. The moment she assumes all responsibility for that, you are creating the exact conditions that we are so concerned about. This is an opportunity for love. This is a opportunity for transformation. I believe a couple can come closer together, love each other more through the challenges of child rearing. We have to ask ourselves what is love. I see love as the opposing force to fear. It is an energetic force that is healing, and I see disease as really the body at disease, not at peace, not in alignment with that love force, and so when I talk about an anti-life agenda or an anti-human agenda, you can use other words: anti-God, anti-alignment, anti-energy to love,

anti-nature,

anti-nature. All of those are say are kind of describing the same force. I don't believe we're separate, and that can be a that can be identified as a delusion to someone else. I think we are of the same loving force. We are all intricately interconnected, and that's why we can feel the feelings of another. When I say that we are disconnected from being on the screen, it's harder for me to tap into your energy. But if you were in front of me and I closed my eyes and I quieted my mind, I can feel what you feel. I believe I can also understand what you think. And these are scientifically supported phenomenon, telepathy is a scientifically supported idea. We are in an illusion of separation. Until we start expanding into post-material science, then we are going to continue to lose this connection. When you sit with another, you can feel their energy. You are entered into their bio field, and when you have compassion and you have empathy, that person is not different than you. You treat them as if they are you, and so when I'm going to help somebody else, I see them as my brother or my sister or my significant other. I approach it with love. If I had to be there in every single moment with that person crying and sad and in distress and experiencing guilt and sleep deprived, what would I do? They would be hugged. They would be supported. It would be normalized, and it would be viewed as transformational. So, I have to bring all of that into the context of helping a young mother, and I can't even begin to tell you how powerful of an intervention that is. Do you know what it does automatically?

It

decreases self-judgment. They don't feel alone anymore. It reduces guilt.

I I'm going to play the devil's advocate for a second. I believe everything that you're saying, but I can hear lots of people in the background, especially medical professionals, saying you have a woman on the brink of psychosis or in psychosis or struggling with severe postpartum depression and anxiety, and your remedy is a hug, Right, like I, I hear what you're saying. I'm just playing the devil's advocate for a minute because I want to know what your response to that is. Because a medical professional would say that's crazy.

Well, yeah, it's not

going to work.

First of all, it's much more than a hug when you talk about not leaving a mother alone, allowing her to get sleep, cooking food for the family-it's a lot more than a hug. It's shifting the entire relationship she has to the experience. Okay, I've sat countless times with people, quote unquote, on the verge of psychosis, whatever that means. I can guarantee you, the doctors who are making that statement have not sat hours with somebody on the verge of them going back and forth from trying to determine what is real and what is not real? Yeah, well, I have, and that experience, I want to be able to communicate what happens in that space, because if I have a postpartum mother or somebody else who feels like they're on the verge of that, I spend hours with them. Not a 45 minute therapy session. I'll spend an hour and a half with you. Two. Hours, I might schedule you to come back the very next day, and what we begin to uncover is everything that leads you to question your own sanity and your own reality. And I slowly begin to ground them in this space. They're met without judgment. They're met with love and compassion. We understand that there are problems to be solved. That's the problem with the medical system right now. You're not solving the actual problems. In fact, you're making one up-the chemical imbalance nonsense that you can solve it with a with a pharmaceutical in in eight minutes. That is not solving these problems. If Lindsay Clancy and I'm convinced of this was able to get some sleep, and they made a decision to not go back to work, I believe, like her previous two children, her treaties true postpartum experiences, it would have it would have resolved itself naturally, and I will be clear and direct about this. We are creating illness. Our system and our intervention is creating more problems. These antipsychotic drugs, these SSRIs, these benzodiazepines-they are mitochondrial poisons, Doc. If you're listening to me, understand we are all light. The mitochondria of ourselves are energetic. We are beings of light. This entire reality, whether you want to recognize it or not, is made up of waves, and that is science. This table that's in front of me, this glass that is in front of me, all made of of waves that are vibrating on different frequencies. I am talking to you. I think you guys are like in Connecticut. I'm in Pennsylvania. We're on a screen. I can see your image. The physical image is being manifested by energy, by waves, and I can see you. It can be physically manifested. We are all energy, and everything is energy. Fear is an energy. Fear is an energy that constricts. Love is an energy that expands. You can measure it at a different frequency. It's vibrating at a different frequency. When you put people at disease and when you put people at fear, you are taking them and placing them in a state where the body is not optimized. The body is under attack, and so we are placing women under attack by ideas, by media exposure, by beliefs, by medicalizing this,

and by teaching them that they're incapable of healing, that their own body is broken, and that it needs something external to fix it rather than internal healing. And once you hold that belief, how can you expect to heal? How can you expect to believe that these simple interventions of getting more sleep, getting more support, getting better nutrition, maybe correcting some depletion in the body, some nutritional depletion in the body that might be contributing to this. The body can heal when you give it the space and the support and the vibration, basically, to heal.

Yeah, I I notice myself always getting like activated and upset because the question you pose to me is how doctors have dismissed this for decades now, right? They say something ridiculous like, "What is a hug going to to heal this? When that obviously wasn't my point at all, right? Like they don't understand the inner workings of the mind. They don't understand the human soul. They're completely out of context to all the variables that are impacting why someone suffers. They are so disconnected and detached that that those type of comments just are so incompetent and so ignorant. And I've heard them so many times that that's how we've got here. That we believe we can actually solve this with a pill. Doesn't that sound absurd? And I think it was Voltaire who said, "You know, once people can convince us to accept absurdities, then we commit atrocities. And that's exactly what we're doing. I'm still fixated on Trisha's statement about the hug, we forget that there is very strong scientific evidence for touch. So I'm just assuming that you have probably addressed this. We know that there's this entire field called psych neuroimmunology. So, like when a baby is presented against the mother, skin to skin. We see this like alignment into that natural state of healing. Like that is a powerful medicine. That touch and that love is powerful medicine. We see the same thing with human beings. We are meant to be loving each other. We're meant to be touching each other, and so when people become more separate and when relationships become less intimate, we literally become diseased in the mind and body. So I don't want to in any way diminish like the power of a hug because it regulates an entire nervous system, and when it regulates a nervous system, and it decreases blood pressure, and it decreases cortisol, and the body goes into a state similar to that being at peace and at rest, that allows for sleep, that allows for you to be in this optimal physical and energetic state for all healing to occur. It's it's this allopathic, oversterilized, put us at war with all of nature medical approach that in all of human history is relatively new, and it serves an industry. And I think we have to examine the outcomes and the fruits of all of this, and the only ones who are going to change is us. And a return to nature is important, but I want to bridge some of that science because I think the science supports a return to nature in all this way. And let's not forget what's been done to us psychologically. In many ways, we've been divided on class, on race, and on gender. So it's it doesn't surprise me that that many women feel completely alone and detached from their husbands, and many husbands are also feeling like in judgment or detached from their wives or significant of others because there's entire psychological operations through media and social media and in academia that create these same exact circumstances: patriarchy, matriarchy, making women out to be crazy, making women out to be controlling, or men to be controlling. Like you just continuously divide us, and it supports that isolation. If we're not aware to what is being done to us, then we assume what we believe to be true is to be our own. I did an entire Substack series on on brainwashing and influence, and how that, how easily that can be done, and how we're subjected to that. And human beings have been vulnerable to committing atrocities based on various mind control techniques throughout the course of human history, usually through like authoritarian or tyrannical regimes. Like it's justified war, it's justified poverty, it's justified like the worst of atrocities to each other. At some point, we have to be able to take a step back and say, what has been done to the human being in this level of darkness to create this level of separation? How do we justify killing another human being? How do we justify the level of care that has now become our healthcare system?

How do we justify the judgment, the division, the level of disease, the obesity epidemic, the fact that we are certainly on the precipice of having like a pretty significant, severe fertility crisis, right? The population of the world is going to dramatically start declining because we're not producing enough children to support, you know, the the end of the baby boomers. That has all these economic implications. It has social implications, but it's targeted. Like it is absolutely targeted, and we have to start looking at our lives, and I think the nature of reality from a new lens.

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