Author name: Bob Carter

What Black Box Warnings Leave Out August 25, 2026 – Robert Carter In his August 23rd podcast this week, Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring speaks about the similarities between Lindsay Clancy and Tranyelle Harshman. These two women were both suffering from post-partum difficulties, both were prescribed psychiatric medications for their symptoms, and both ended up murdering their children and trying to commit suicide. Harshman was successful; Clancy was not. Each case involves careless prescriptions by psychiatrists and psychiatric nurse practitioners, but a striking detail in Dr. Josef’s coverage of these two is his revelation of what the terms “anxiety” and “dissociation” include when listed as psychiatric drug’s “side effects.” Dr. Josef knows. He was part of the original Jannsen Pharmaceutical team that ran the trials when they were developing Spravato, the nasal esketamine that Harshman was faultily prescribed. Two of the adverse reactions listed to what was then a trial drug were anxiety and dissociation. These two terms are listed in many of the Black Box warnings on SSRIs and benzos today, including what Lindsay Clancy was prescribed. However, as Dr. Josef reveals, these two terms have wrapped into them as psychiatric drug “side effecs” a subset of symptoms that are far more severe than mere anxiety or dissociation. The drug manufacturer’s use of anxiety includes not only fear and panic attacks, but also psychomotor hyperactivity. Today that is better known as akathisia, a movement disorder that causes an intense, uncontrollable internal restlessness and a compulsion to continuously move. Colloquially it is described as wanting to jump out of your skin, and it is a symptom connected to the uncontrolled homicidal impulses of many of today’s medicated school and workplace shooters. Dissociation includes not only depersonalization – which itself can remove a native sense of responsibility one has for one’s action – but also auditory, visual, and mixed hallucinations. These would include the “voices” heard in one’s head, like the commands Lindsay Clancy and Tranyelle Harshman felt they had received to kill their children. Although these risks are apparently included under the terms anxiety and dissociation, they are not the ones revealed in the frequently abridged informed consent protocol given patients these days by psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses. Revealing them in a full informed consent discussion would probably decrease the number of patients on these covertly lethal psychotropic drugs. It might also open up more and more medical practitioners to lawsuits by acknowledging the true risks involved with taking these drugs. Better to just leave these pesky details out, eh? In February 2025, , a Wyoming mother of four with no history of violence, shot her four daughters and then took her own life. Her family describes an event completely out of character for a loving mother. Husband stand s by her. Tranyelle sought help for postpartum depression in late 2024 and was prescribed ketamine lozenges to take at home.

Women Who Don’t Know Women: Lindsay Clancy’s Prescribers August 14, 2026 – Robert Carter Dr. Jennifer Tufts was the first of two psychiatrists and another two psychiatric nurse practitioners who prescribed Lindsay Clancy at least eleven different psychiatric medications over sixteen weeks for “post partum psychosis.” All were women. In January, 2023, at the end of that four month period, Clancy murdered her three young children and tried to take her own life. The defense at her current murder trial will claim that Clancy should be acquitted because she was made insane by the involuntary intoxication of so many conflicting psychotropic medications given to her in such a short amount of time by those prescribing staff at Aster Mental Health, just outside Boston. How could those four prescribing women be so that far removed from the reality of Clancy’s true condition and be so trigger happy with their prescription pads, even when Clancy herself said she was doing worse after taking some of these medications? You would think a woman would be more, not less, in tune with the struggles of another woman after she had given birth. Was it because the newly posted Tufts only met with Clancy via telehealth sessions and was therefore protected from experiencing first hand, face to face, the difficulty Lindsay was having in life and could therefore so easily just write a prescription? Was it because these four women were too indoctrinated by their training in the theoretical world of psychiatry which dictates the prescription of this SSRI or that benzo for some questionable diagnosis and the idea that those risky medications will solve everything? Remarkably, after Lindsay was sent to the Women and Infants Hospital in nearby Providence for further evaluation when she was not improving under the treatment of the Aster women, she was told she had been overmedicated. The Rhode Island facility that specializes in obstetrics, gynecology, and newborn pediatrics declared after eight hours of in-person interviews and testing that Lindsay was overmedicated and that her “post partum psychosis” symptoms were mostly the result of the crazy cocktail of drugs she had been on. This is a hospital run by women for women, and regardless of their academic or medical training, they were working in the real world, day in and day out, helping other women who might have difficulties before, during, or after giving birth. That’s a different culture altogether than Aster Mental Health, which is a psychiatric, not a medical facility. Both facilities have women practitioners, but apparently the natural human care and the “Do no harm” medical expertise had long ago been trained out of these psychiatric practitioners at Aster.

Wellbutrin: the Happiest of Happy Pills August 7, 2026 – Robert Carter The marketing copywriter at Burroughs Wellcome who came up with the brand name Wellbutrin for bupropion in 1974 was a genius. After two decades of widespread use of the tongue-in-cheek term “happy pills” for antidepressants, the naming of Wellbutrin for the synthesized drug bupropion created by chemist Nariman Mehta in 1969 conveyed all of the hopeful enthusiasm of “happy pill” without any of the ridicule. It was like the mass miracle of soma, the synthetic mood drug from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World. Like soma, Wellbutrin could act as an instant escape from reality to replace religion, traditional medicine, and alcohol by giving you a permanent “holiday” from reality. Well…butrin. Rolls so smoothly off the tongue. Perfect. The eternally optimistic “Wellbutrin” tag helped propel the drug to 30,000,000 prescriptions per year by 2023. It had become the third most prescribed antidepressant by then and it made a fortune for then manufacturer Glaxo-Smith Kline. Almost $6 billion in just one short pre-2012 period alone. That was the figure revealed during the massive lawsuit over Wellbutrin that cost GSK a $3 billion settlement of civil and criminal charges for its illegal off-label marketing of the drug. It certainly remained a happy pill for GSK as they measured their revenue/penalty dollar ratio. Besides its happy little name, Wellbutrin also became known as a popular antidepressant without the conventional antidepressant drawback of weight gain. In fact, many of those prescribed Wellbutrin lost weight. Of course they did. It’s “speed.” That explains the black box side effects warnings for insomnia, anxiety, and high blood pressure. When you’re tweaking, you do feel pretty good, but there are these minor drawbacks. There are some other more major drawbacks, though, like seizures, eating disorders of anorexia and bulimia, and death from liver failure. Wellbutrin is quite easily available, if you have the right shrink. Anybody who has a “major depressive disorder” can get it. That 1980 DSM III diagnostic label can be given to somebody who has been experiencing a low mood, some hopelessness, and a loss of interest in activity for just two weeks. Of course, if one has “seasonal affective disorder” – feeling low during the winter, for instance — one can also be prescribed this little happy pill to get you through all those cold, lonely nights. The Center for Disease Control did state in a 2026 report, though, that there was no link discovered between seasons, sunlight or latitude location and depression rates. Ah, well. Don’t tell a prescribing psychiatrist that, though. It might make him unhappy.

Media Cannot Distinguish between Mental Illness and Overmedication July 27th, 2026 – Robert Carter The good news is that Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial in Massachusetts is attracting national attention. She is charged with three counts of first degree murder for killing her three young children on January 24, 2023. She has pleaded not guilty. Her defense will show that Lindsay was suffering from gross overmedication, and thus she should be acquitted because she had been “involuntarily intoxicated” by the broad cocktail of psychiatric medications she had recently been prescribed. The bad news is that the media covering the trial is misrepresenting the importance of this landmark case and is too often blaming postpartum psychosis, a mental illness, as the cause of the homicide, not her sanity-robbing overmedication. One AP headline this morning by reporter Michael Casey reads “Lindsay Clancy goes on trial, saying postpartum psychosis drove her to kill her 3 children.” That’s not what Lindsay is saying at all. She’s saying that she went to a psychiatrist for help after becoming anxious about returning to work as a nurse after giving birth to her third child. He prescribed her Zoloft. Her mental health began deteriorating immediately. Over the next four months three different psychiatrists, two nurse practitioners, and one doctor prescribed even more medications for her. In that short time period she was prescribed a total of eleven different psychiatric medications, including five antidepressants, three benzodiazepines, and one sleep medication. Her “mental illness” was caused by this tsunami of medication she had been given. The AP article, not alone in turning a blind eye to the true culprits here, quotes Nicole Cirino, a frequent psychiatry apologist and the director of the division of reproductive psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine. “Many of the women who harm their children while in the grip of postpartum psychosis believe their actions are helping the child.” Not “in the grip” of psychiatric drugs, the actual cause for Lindsay’s temporarily crazed behavior. In contrast to the mainstream media coverage, David Carmichael, manager of the Know Your Drugs global awareness campaign, recounts far more accurately the full history of Lindsay’s descent into her vile overmedication in his article on last week’s Mad in America website. Apparently too many mainstream media reporters have been so indoctrinated with the psychiatry/Big Pharma party line – as too many Americans have — that they cannot see the actual facts in cases like these which point to the actual cause behind such violent acts that occur due to savage overmedication. These brainwashed reporters now reinforce the psychiatric indoctrination Big Pharma has been marketing to us for so long. Do they do so inadvertently or because they’d rather prioritize a “good story” than tell the truth.

Only One out of Ten Doctors Obeys Informed Consent Law   July 17th, 2026 – Robert Carter       A study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that a mere nine percent of all surveyed doctors fully apply informed consent protocol to their patients.      The 1999 Braddock study analyzed 1,057 patient and physician encounters and evaluated 3,552 clinical decisions. The providers surveyed were 59 primary care physicians and 65 general or orthopedic physicians.      The study reveled that only one of every ten doctors surveyed performed a full informed consent disclosure of the risks and benefits of their treatments. Consequently, and worse yet, only 2 percent of the patients surveyed actually understood their recommended treatments.       Maybe that’s why 80,000,000 Americans are on antidepressants today. The legal requirements for informed consent demand informing a patient of the reason for the diagnosis, the risks as well as the benefits of the treatment, the alternative treatments available with their risks and benefits, and the risks of doing nothing at all. Federal law requires a full enough disclosure that a “reasonable decision” can be made by a patient about taking any recommended treatment.      Because antidepressants have such proven high risk for emotional blunting, sexual dysfunction, increased suicidal thought, and a near impossibility of quitting them, many “reasonable” patients might seek safer alternatives than psychiatric drugs to handle minor depression or anxiety.      Some doctors have claimed that because insurance only pays them for an abbreviated interview time with patients, they are forced to curtail any informed consent discussions.      That, however, is a decision based on finances, not on patient welfare.      “First, do no harm” says the Hippocratic Oath.       Not “First, make enough money to afford a Mercedes.”

Women’s “Weakness” an Ideal Market for Psych Drug Profit   July 13th, 2026 – Robert Carter       It started when the patent for Prozac, Eli Lilly’s high profit drug, ran out in 2001. Lilly had reaped $22 billion in revenue for the thirteen years it was on the market, and it earned them a full one third of all their income during that time period. When a federal court blocked Lilly’s appeal for a Prozac patent extension, Lilly got tricky.      Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder had been relegated to an appendix of the 1994 DSM-IV, but it was “revived” to a full blown diagnosis in the DSM-V. That “disorder” made the symptoms of a monthly period that women experience a “mental disorder” for which lucrative medication could be prescribed by a psychiatrist.      Perfect. Eli had a hot flash of inspiration and they re-branded Prozac as Sarafem so it could now be prescribed for this unfortunate mental “weakness” of women, over which they had no control. Eli Lilly now had another full run of patent protection for Prozac, the drug they re-branded simply by changing the capsule it came in from green and yellow to pink and purple and calling it Sarafem.      When Sarafem was launched in 2001, Lilly made $80 million dollars from it – less than they’d hoped — and in 2002 they sold the rights to Sarafem (aka Prozac) to Galen Holdings for $295 million.      Today there are four SSRI’s and other antidepressants that are usually prescribed for PMDD. The market has dwindled considerably for each Big Pharma manufacture, but it is about to be expanded to include far more, younger, premenstrual women.      It turns out, per psychiatry and Big Pharma, that there can be another premenstrual disorder that women experience before they ever even get to PMDD. It’s perimenopause, a condition that precedes menopause itself – the culprit behind PMDD – and it too, of course, has unpleasant emotional and mental symptoms associated with it which will need to be medicated for women to continue to enjoy life.      The good news for Big Pharma is that perimenopause begins ten years earlier than menopause itself, which can start as early as forty. Perimenopause, though, can start for a woman as early as thirty. So the market for drugging middle age women for a condition that is only natural to them — not a mental or emotional weakness for their “hysterical” gender — has just been increased by another decade full of pre-premenstrual women.      There are already tons of SSRI’s and antidepressants available to address plain old PMDD. All Big Parma has to do now is market this new “disorder” correctly to a female market with increasingly more disposable income.      It’s time now to handle your own, even more prevalent and younger, hot flashes, ladies.

Lost in Language: the Myopic Blur of a Psychiatrist’s Mind   July 4th, 2026 – Robert Carter       Last year Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring posted an hour and a half long interview with Awais Aftab, a psychiatrist who has become a controversial spokesman for the general validity of contemporary psychiatric practice. Much of the criticism has been directed at his glossing over valid concerns about inadequate diagnostic tools, over-medication, and sketchy informed consent protocol about the harm of psychiatric drugs and the potential ordeal of trying to quit them.      In his interview, Dr. Josef brings these points up and asks Aftab about them. Aftab confirms those flaws in modern psychiatric practice in a long winded, multi-syllabic, academic reiteration of them. “It’s a complex, multi-causal picture, in reality,” he concludes.      Dr. Josef then asks him what the consequences are for patients from those deficiencies in the psychiatric system.      Aftab’s answer reveals an aspect of the psychiatric mind which shows how removed from human reality psychiatry has become. Or, possibly, has always been. “On the one hand, the consequences are kinda conceptual and narrative,” Aftab answers. “On the other hand, they relate to treatment factors. People have a distorted understanding of the nature of their problems.”      That’s the main personal harm from psychiatry today? A patient’s lack of conceptual understanding of his condition?      Not the stigmatization of a misleading “mental disorder” label? Not the numbing of one’s emotions, the sexual dysfunction, and the increased likelihood of suicide from psychiatric drugs? Not the Catch-22 ordeal of not being able to get off the drug when you want to return to a normal state without a painful eighteen month tapering process?      Aftab is a man who is lost in language. The symbols of the words are more significant to him than the troubled human conditions they are trying to describe and repair. A neat and tidy, well groomed theory of psychiatry is more important to him than the effects on a human being of the application of psychiatric theory.      This is a man so lost in mental concepts that he is utterly removed from the world around him. Actual living human beings and their troubles in life are not real to him. Worse, those patients are apparently of secondary importance to the throne of psychiatric theory, and therefore to its authority.

If an Ice Pick Is No Longer Politically Correct… June 23, 2026 – Robert Carter Yale trained physician Walter Freeman’s idea for curing mental illness would be seen as simply ludicrous buffoonery if he hadn’t taken it seriously. Instead, he travelled around the country in his “lobotomobile” training hospital staff to stick an ice pick-like tool under a patient’s eyelid and pound it through the skull bone with a mallet before twisting it around in the brain to sever the neural paths which were suspected to cause the patient’s mental illness. Over his forty year career he performed nearly four thousand of his lobotomies on mental patients. One hundred of his patients died of cerebral hemorrhage. Countless others had their lives ruined. Some of his victims were only twelve years old. He was finally banned from performing his surgery in 1957, and since then modern ethical medical boards strictly prohibit this barbaric procedure. But psychiatry has a fix for this. Another Yale educated physician, William Scoville, had a “hunch” that psychosurgery would cure one of his patient’s epilepsy. Scoville surgically “re-sectioned” – a euphemism if ever there was one — part of his patient’s brain, but unfortunately ended up destroying the man’s ability to remember anything. Nonetheless, Scoville helped develop the psychosurgery procedure (called a bilateral cingulotomy) which has replaced the now quite politically incorrect Freeman lobotomy. Today the procedure for damaging a specific part of a patient’s brain is used as the psychiatric treatment of last resort, even after ECT has failed to help a “treatment resistant” mental patient. The surgery involves drilling burr holes through the skull and then focusing intense heat inside the brain to sever the neural circuits that are presumed – yes, only “presumed” – to connect psychiatric distress with negative emotional responses and habitual undesirable behavior. The procedure is used to treat patients with major depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder. “When in doubt, cut it out.” That’s apparently still the psychiatric operating basis here. Remove those parts of the brain causing that chemical or neural imbalance that, per psychiatry, is behind all mental illness. Only about thirty percent of cingulotomy surgery patients “respond positively” without that part of their brain still in their head. Short term “side effects” include mild headaches, nausea, vomiting, and temporary confusion. Longer term symptoms can be apathy, diminished drive, or mild memory lapses following surgery. More serious “complications” involve seizures, bleeding, or infection. But no ice picks are involved.

80 Million Junkies Can’t Be Wrong June 16, 2026 – Robert Carter One million Americans are addicted to heroin. Eighty million Americans take prescriptions for antidepressants. Both groups use these drugs to give them relief from those problems in life which they have not been able to handle. Both drugs are almost impossible to quit without experiencing horrible symptoms of withdrawal. The government’s solution for heroin addicts is to replace one drug for another by making methadone available for them. Both are opioids. Heroin is a partially synthetic drug that is derived from the poppy plant whereas methadone is a fully synthetic drug, totally lab produced. Heroin, of course, is illegal, but methadone can be prescribed to “help” addicts by offering them a drug that is not illegal. There’s no moral stigma to taking it. Antidepressant users have no such easy option if they want to stop taking their drugs. Only hyperbolic tapering has been shown to help them wean themselves from these fully synthetic lab drugs without the horrific symptoms of withdrawal. Those debilitating effects prevent most from stopping antidepressants because the withdrawal pain is far worse than whatever life pain they were initially using antidepressants to avoid. Antidepressants, of course, are legal. That’s why there are eighty times as many Americans taking them rather than heroin. There is no moral stigma attached to taking antidepressants. There is a big one, of course, for shooting heroin, and that itself might be enough to stop millions of people from becoming junkies. The moral deterrent is too great to snort or shoot that first hit of heroin and risk ending up a zombie in one of the country’s urban homeless camps. Even the “cure” for heroin use – methadone — is based on removing the moral stigma of its illegality, not on freeing an individual from drug addiction by safely withdrawing the person from its pernicious clutch. Big Pharma, however, has made sure there is no such moral stigma to taking an antidepressant. After more than forty years of appeal from their marketing campaigns, there is instead a subtle encouragement for the everyday person, especially a woman, to pop a pill to solve any life woe…because they are merely correcting a “chemical imbalance,” which does not actually exist. You’re wrong if you use heroin, but you’re right if you use antidepressants. How evil a message is that?