286. Challenging the Prescription Culture: The "Undoctor's" Critique of Psychiatric Medication - Dr. Fred

Kara Goodwin: [00:00:00] 

Hello and welcome to the meditation conversation, the podcast to support your spiritual revolution. I'm your host, Cara Goodwin, and today I'm joined by Dr. Fred Moss. Dr. Fred is a recovering retired psychiatrist with over 40 years experience in mental health across various roles. He's known as the un doctor, and he's a transformational, restorative coach on a mission to empower his clients by undiagnosing, unmedicating, and undermining.

Indoctrinating their lives, allowing them to reclaim their true selves. 

 This is such a thought provoking episode. I [00:01:00] was so captivated listening to Dr. Fred talk about the reasons he was compelled to go against his conventional decades, long professional career as a psychiatrist. When he realized that all of the prescribing he was doing was out of alignment with his soul. He gives fascinating insights about why the system, the patient is in, depends on them continuing to have their diagnosis and how the system is designed to rush people onto medication, 

but not to graduate out of them. And how we don't really second guess starting a medication, but have been programmed to be dependent on them and thus overly cautious about coming off of medication. Dr. Fred has so many resources available to help people take control over their lives when it comes to their mental health. 

So immerse yourself in this episode. And if you feel a resonance with what he's saying, check out his work and see if he can help you become indoctrinated to. And quickly before we get started, I want to give [00:02:00] a quick shout out to a podcasting service that I just absolutely love. People contact me all the time about starting their own podcast. And I always point them to Zencaster to record high quality audio and video. 

I remember a couple of years ago, listening to one of my own episodes in my car. And I was really embarrassed by the quality of the audio. I dropped everything and started searching how to get crisper audio from my recordings. And so began my journey with Zencaster. . 

Zencaster is so easy and gives you studio quality sound and up to four K video with your guests. Go to zencaster.com forward slash pricing and use my code meditation. To get 30% off your first month of any Zencaster paid plan. I want you to have the same easy experiences I do for all my podcasting content needs. It's time to share your story. And now. Enjoy this episode[00:03:00] 

Kara Goodwin: So welcome Dr. Fred. I'm really excited to talk to you today.

Dr. Fred: Yeah, thanks, Kara. It's really great to be here. The honor and pleasure is mine. Thanks for having me as a guest.

Kara Goodwin: So I, I can't wait to hear about the Indoctor. Can you talk a little bit about your history and what led you to this more unconventional way that you help people today?

Dr. Fred: Yeah. So I was born into a world that was in a fair amount of chaos and I was born to be a communicator. So I had two older brothers, 10 and 14 years older than me, who were, teenagers when I was born. My parents and them were in a fair amount of chaos and disarray when I was born, and I was called on to bring a new level of joy and communication into the family.

So I hit the time clock right when I arrived, and I've been enchanted with communication ever since. And so the idea was, early on, that I would bring joy or pleasure through laughing or through... Reciting, advanced, reading or math or whatever kind of [00:04:00] precocious things that I was taught how to do as a child.

And I could, lighten up a room and the idea I would watch people speak to each other and knew that communication was the thing. I don't know that I knew the word communication, but I knew that contacting and being with each other was where all of human activity took place. And I think we all learned that when we're children.

Through elementary school, I expected to learn how to be a really great communicator, but in school, what I learned was that they didn't really want me to communicate. They wanted me to, follow the rules, say what the teacher says, speak when I'm spoken to, and those kind of things. Not really the grounds for an open discord, discourse.

And so the idea then was, well, maybe junior high, the bigger kids, somewhere along the line, people must learn how to, And, of course, in junior high it got worse, and then in high school it got worse again. So I decided that in college, that's where I would finally get my education, and I went to the University of Michigan, hoping to really get,there was all sorts of [00:05:00] open conversations supposedly going on about war protests and drugs and, sex and all the things that big kids talked about.

And I was hoping that I would learn how to do that there. But even in the classrooms in Ann Arbor, it was not a place to learn how to communicate. So I eventually, dropped out of school and, and came across the country to Berkeley, California to find myself, which I did do, but it was non sustainable, and I eventually was convinced to go back to school to learn computers, which was the new and up and coming science.

And, I went back and the only computer in all of Michigan was at the University of Michigan. And I tried to be a computer person, but that didn't work either. So I dropped out again. And when I came home, I told my mom that I would never go back to school for any reason. She said, that's fine, but you have to get a job then.

And she got me an application at a state mental health facility for adolescent boys and,out there in Northwest Detroit. And I [00:06:00] began to work and here I was finally getting paid to communicate. The idea was that when I communicated with these kids, seven years my junior, they would get better, but I would get better too in the healing process of communicating and connecting with another human.

And I could see that's where the real healing took place. I knew that when I was a child, but I especially knew that when I, over there at Fairlawn Center. And, eventually I, the thing I hated most about that job was psychiatry. Psychiatry, treated those kids more or less like commodities. we would call the psychiatrist when Timmy and Tony got in a fight or Jimmy was up too late.

He would come down and interview the child for just a minute and then interview us. And then, write something in the chart and then we'd have to go retrieve the child, hold him down and fill him through full of some injectable anti psychotic, anti anxiety combination cocktail. And if he was in a stupor for the next day and a half, we would call that a success.

Now I saw that you were kind of [00:07:00] alarmed by that, but you should know that's still going on in nearly every hospital in the country every day. I mean, it's happened many times already this morning in the psychiatric hospitals. Well, this was so barbaric and so unacceptable to me, and I really knew that communication was what was going to cure Timmy or Tony or Jimmy.

I went into the field. My brother was already a psychiatrist. I went into the field in order to re inject, communication as the key feature for... It was clear to me, and I think clear to most of us, that connection is what actually heals people. When I went into the field changed while I was in training and Prozac was introduced in 1987 and Prozac altered the landscape of psychiatry forever and forever and ever, by creating something called biological psychiatry or the notion of a chemical imbalance when we don't feel well.

So we learned that if it was depression, maybe it was like serotonin, or if there was anxiety, there was maybe You know, something up benzodiazepine, like a GABA [00:08:00] receptor might take care of. And we began to medicate things during that time. and met the medication revolution really took place from those years forward.

So there I was discharged from my residency and my internship.

Kara Goodwin: Because you did go back to school in the end.

Dr. Fred: I did. I went back

Kara Goodwin: Did your mom say, I told you?

Dr. Fred: Exactly. I went back to school. I went back to school in order to inject communication in. That's the

Kara Goodwin: Right?

Dr. Fred: And, by the time I came out of school, I was now a prescriber. That was all that was left for me to do, even though I went in. So the. I would never have to prescribe or diagnose, but you know, those were the sunken costs.

That's what I learned how to do. And over the next 30 years, I saw approximately 40, 000 patients and wrote over a hundred thousand prescriptions during that time. Each of them was not aligned with my core self. So they all hurt. They all had a little bit of a little or a lot of soul sacrifice associated with it.[00:09:00] 

And eventually,really got to the point where I could not live with that level of duplicity. So I started to do something fairly radical in 2006. And that was, I started to take people off of medicine. I took my low risk patients off of medicine and sure enough, they got better, way better, reliably better.

And in many cases, their original diagnosis actually disappeared.

Kara Goodwin: Really?

Dr. Fred: Yeah, and then I kept doing that and did it with my,grander, greater part of my practice and even their diagnoses often disappeared. Now, there are several reasons to keep a diagnosis and sometimes the system isn't really ready for the identified patient to get better, for instance.

And so they'll call on me, we liked him better when he was medicated

Kara Goodwin: Now, wait, that's really interesting. Can you say that again? The system, about the system is not ready for the person to not have that diagnosis.

Dr. Fred: The diagnosis fills an important role in the system. So the [00:10:00] identified patient often is a really key place to be able to, like, funnel all the concerns a family is having or the system is having about themselves, etc. That if it wasn't for my sick sister, we would be okay, or if it, like there's a lightning rod of a patient in many systems that actually keeps the patient Fully entrenched and being psychopathological.

Kara Goodwin: Now that's fascinating. I feel like you've probably said this a million times and you're, and it's not like it, it doesn't hit you the way that it might be hitting people right now. So I don't want to like speed on by that because. That's really, really important. So you're talking about the family, the people who have the relationship with the person,

Dr. Fred: patient. Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: the identified patient, they're relying on this diagnosis so that they can explain why they have

Dr. Fred: Why their lives don't work. That's right.

Kara Goodwin: Right. And then also when you talk more [00:11:00] about like a system,what other parts of that, that presumed patients who else is benefiting

Dr. Fred: Yeah. So there's extended systems as well. There's other caregiving, systems. there's the, multiple systems that really count on that tire remaining flat. it's really important that the tire remains flat because that's how we learned to drive was with a flat tire. And so if we fill up the air in a flat tire and a car that's had a flat tire for a long time, the regular driver of that car will not know how to drive and will immediately drive into a ditch because he'll be compensating for the flat tire that no longer exists.

So that's really common in the world of systems as well, in which there's an identified client, identified patient, usually I. A daughter or a son, but it can be a mom or dad who's got the psychiatric diagnosis and the psychiatric, stigma, the psychiatric label and is carrying the load for the whole family.

And so there's a real, like when people finally started to get better, if I removed their medicine and [00:12:00] they started speaking their real truth, that's the last thing that people really wanted to hear in many cases, because they had been watching the whole time and they were actually saying a truth that had been, that had been.

Subdued over the years. Yeah, and suppressed over the years. Exactly.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. Wow. There is a lot there.

Dr. Fred: Yeah, there's a lot there.

Kara Goodwin: Yeah. Wow. Okay. Well, thank you for taking us through your

Dr. Fred: Well, that's only to 2006 and now

Kara Goodwin: oh, right.

Dr. Fred: The whole idea in 2006 was I began to do that and I started taking off most of my patients off of their medicine and many most of them got way better and then my practice closed And, I started going around the country and around the world as a traveling physician, often carrying the same level of philosophy, but not always with the same wherewithal to be able to do it in my part time or temporary jobs.

When I could do it, I had great success. When the administrators would allow me to take people off of medicine, people would get [00:13:00] way better. But the truth is, the system is not built to make people better. The system is built to advance or to perpetuate or to increase or to some cases actually cause the symptoms are marketed to treat.

And that's what keeps people in the system. That's why people line up every morning at every single pharmacy around the country to make sure they get in early to get their pharmaceutical medicine so that they can take them. And they're frankly not doing anything close to what they're told they're doing.

In most cases, they're either perpetuating increasing or in some un, some, fair amount of cases there might be actually causing the symptoms that they're marketed to treat.

Kara Goodwin: Wow.

Dr. Fred: Yeah.

Well, then we start looking at where is the undaughter because in, in 2016, I started creating a company called Welcome to Humanity. And that's a self explanatory company, a company that really takes into consideration all of life's ins and outs, all the things that work in life, all the things that don't work in life, all the pleasures in life, all the [00:14:00] miseries in life, and include that in being part of what it means for having a full life.

And really when we can embrace all of that and not see ourselves as sick, that's when we get a full life. Actually acknowledging that misery is part of it, that discomfort is part of it, that being uncomfortable is part of the beauty of being human. And we all, Buddha knew that everyone knows that there's nobody who's ever written about like, there's no, but it never been anybody who's lived like a fully comfortable life.

That's just not happened. So the idea is that As we move forward, the undoctor was a moniker I received a few years ago from a friend of mine. Because ultimately it isn't the medicines that are causing the problems. It's the choice to take medicines because nobody's holding down any of these clients.

Nobody's holding down any of these residents or patients. They're taking the medicine because they actually believe there's something wrong with them that needs to be fixed or altered. And the whole idea that I really like to put, put [00:15:00] people into perspective is that maybe there's nothing that needs to be altered.

Maybe what's really here is just, Being crazy in a crazy world makes sense. Being uncomfortable in a world that, is really depressing makes sense. Being anxious about a future that is so unpredictable makes sense. It's okay to have these human responses, even if they're deeply and highly uncomfortable.

Kara Goodwin: Okay. Well, so that sounds like it's dealing more with like depression or, anxiety. I wonder about things like narcissists or, people who are really harming other people through the relationships that they have, where I can think of people who not, I don't know what the, what medicine they would be on in that kind of case.

I don't know how much narcissists in particular seek help, but from like a relational standpoint, I think of something like a, a psychopath or something who is like really trying to harm [00:16:00] people. I don't know. Is it, is there kind of a cutoff where it's like, if it's. More anxiety and depression and things like that, then it's easier to treat without medicine or I don't

Dr. Fred: Well, we don't have medicine for the so called narcissistic or any of the personality disorders. We never pretended to have medicine for that. And,people use that word fairly freely. This narcissist word is a word that's being thrown around these days. So no one really knows exactly what the other person is saying when they use the word narcissist.

Different people have different ideas of what a narcissist is and you can look it up in the internet and get the exact list you want to identify the person that you're calling a narcissist. again, it's, and people who do, direct harm to people because that's what they enjoy doing is part of the group of people that are called humans.

There are people out there who are doing harm for whatever reason. Normally, it's harmed people who are doing harm. And so one of the things we can really get [00:17:00] is that people really more or less want to be listened to. They want to be heard for who they are. They want to be able to self express and be understood for who they are.

Including those people who are, who appear to be harming people without any second guessing. Like those people also just want to be heard and understood for who they are as a person. And they want to make an impact. Almost everyone wants to make an impact, ultimately, and make the world a better place.

Some people see that as being done in various ways that other people think is counterproductive. And that leads to these diagnoses, like us versus them. We tend to then label somebody as having a condition if it's outside our range of what we think our human boundaries should be so we give people these diagnoses of psychopath or of, narcissism or something like that, identifying them as being outside the range of acceptable and then we call them abnormal as if we are normal.

We think we have an understanding or a definition of what normal is, [00:18:00] but no one's ever come up with anything good like that. So since we don't know what normal is, I don't know how we have the audacity to speak to what's abnormal.

Kara Goodwin: Mm. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that's a good point. I just think of people I know in my world who are trying to adapt, like they've realized they've been manipulated for years. For example, by a parent, by a spouse or something, and they're trying to like reconcile, how did I let this happen for so long? and then they're noticing they're, things like different degrees of narcissism or things like that.

That is. That has been kind of helping them to connect some dots as they realize that, oh, there's a pattern that certain people have that is recognizable across different parts of the population,

Dr. Fred: exactly. Yeah. I mean, some people really pay the notion of narcissism is, really paying more attention to my wants than anyone else's wants. And,my, my physical needs or my ego [00:19:00] needs or whatever. And,we all have that. That's why we despise the narcissist. Cause we're all narcissistic underneath it all.

So we think that we have compensated so that we're no longer now, we're no longer just feeding our own wants and needs. We're actually trying to be of service and being good for other people and being good people, And, but the people we despise who are then.

eventually get labeled as narcissists is a function of who we are as well. And that's why we can relate so well to despising and rejecting that group of people.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. Yeah. It's really interesting because I mean, when people, for instance, like have sidestepped their own, they've realized that for years, they've just put what they want on a shelf in order to accommodate what they guess that the other person wants, and then that's not the right thing and so forth.

it does kind of come across as like, wait, I'm willing to, Sacrifice what I want all the [00:20:00] time and yet it's never enough and there's nothing coming back

Dr. Fred: Yeah. There's a lot of people. It sounds like you've had your own personal experience with this group of people here and there every so often.

Kara Goodwin: it's really more that I have different people. I've been like, of course I've seen it. Yes. And I've been on the other side of it, but luckily it's not,I don't have it intimately in my life, but I do see it and it's like, oh my goodness, this is like, you start to hear the stories that come out and it's pretty surprising.

Dr. Fred: Yeah,

Kara Goodwin: yeah. Well, the un, the undoctrination as well as really interesting because it's like you were recognizing it, even from a young age of like, okay, this is what I feel like I should be learning from my human experience and going to school and learning this and okay, it's, I'm not finding it here and even all the way up through college and then eventually going to no, this is not giving me what I need.

I'm trying to be put into a system. That's trying to mold me into [00:21:00] what it wants me to be. And that's not working, but then through your desire to help Timmy and Tommy and Jimmy and so forth, it was like, okay. I guess I have to go through and be a product of the system.

Dr. Fred: exactly.

Kara Goodwin: And so how, what was the experience of like undock when you've become so entrenched in a system, the extracting yourself, can you share a little bit about that? Had to have been

Dr. Fred: it's a really good question and some really great intersections get tweaked here, as I recall them, but in 2006, when I began to take people off medicine and then tell my peers about it, they were like stunned. It's like that one thing that a doctor didn't have access to is taking people off of medicine, which really was stunning in its own right.

The idea was that there's an implicit agreement with our clients that, let's just try this medicine. And with that, the client agrees, assuming that if they don't work, we'll just remove them. [00:22:00] But we don't remove them. We only add, increase, or change in medicines. We don't remove them. If they, things get worse, we might add a different medicine, or increase the dose, or change to a different medicine.

And, I really saw that, Sometimes we might decrease the actual dose here and there, but never do we actually eliminate the medicines as a function of things getting worse, because things got worse, and so we need to respond by giving some form of medicine. the whole philosophy there was so strange, and I wanted, when I first figured it out, that the medicines were actually advancing, or increasing, or changing, or, contributing to and perpetuating, if not causing the symptoms, I wanted to scream that from the mountaintops.

I wanted to, tell everybody, I'll tell all my friends, tell everybody. But being violent about it didn't make any good sense and didn't really land on the ears that needed to hear it. So over time I've learned how to really quell it and be able to speak to it in a [00:23:00] more natural way, like I'm doing here today.

The idea is I have no animosity necessarily against the medicines or Big Pharma or anything like that. They're allowed to create what they want. It's like being angry at the rat poison community. It's like they just make rat poison. That's all. Use it to kill rats and it's good, and with the same thing here It's only an inert substance that they're making but it's not their problem that everybody and their grandma wouldn't call themselves bad and wrong and fixable and diseased and affected and defective so the idea of really that I'd like to put forward is, it's not about the medicines, it's about recognizing or being wanting or even needing to have a diagnosis to explain the things in our life that we would otherwise like to give up, it's like the things in our lives were that aren't working, that,we no longer can need it.

We would rather not take responsibility for that

Kara Goodwin: Hmm.

Dr. Fred: so that's more or less what the [00:24:00] purposes of many people who take on a diagnosis is they relinquish their Responsibility for the parts of a life that aren't working very well now for your listeners who are really happy with their Diagnoses and are happy with their treatment and their medicines.

This conversation isn't directly for them If you have found something in your world that actually explains why you're doing what you're doing, and you're happy with it, and you have your label, or you have your condition, and you're getting a proper treatment and medicine, and or medicine, and it's working for you, then please continue to do that.

Because that's a small subset of humans who have found something that's working. And if you've found something that's working, more power to you. Keep doing it. This is for the hundreds of millions of people who aren't there. And there are hundreds of millions of people who've been diagnosed, or misdiagnosed, or underdiagnosed, or overdiagnosed who feel like they're taking medicines that aren't making them better, and they're in treatments that don't make any sense, they have no relationship with their doctor, the one who's there to heal them, and those people are really learning that what they're [00:25:00] doing for their imbalance, if you will, not necessarily a chemical imbalance, by the way, but for their imbalance, isn't really working.

It isn't serving them. So that group of people is who I'm really speaking to here. And so that's where you get to undiagnosing. Undiagnosing as a function of unmedicating. Just taking away medicine to somebody who still thinks that they're sick, will only have them seeking to what else do I have to take now since I'm still sick?

So

Kara Goodwin: Ooh. Oh, okay. That is really interesting. Okay. The penny just dropped.

Dr. Fred: Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: Yes. Okay. So it's the identification with that diagnosis. So even if you stop medicating them, then they're still going to be trying to figure out, okay, is there a supplement? Is there an herb? Is there a whatever?

Dr. Fred: What else can I take?

Kara Goodwin: But it's making peace with [00:26:00] the uniqueness of who we are.

Dr. Fred: Exactly. Exactly. Making peace with the uniqueness of who we are and really seeing that each and every one of us are splendid divine creatures of God, really. And I'm not speaking necessarily from a religious perspective. I'm really just saying that We came here and we're experiencing life exactly as we are because that's who we are.

And maybe there's nothing inherently wrong with us that needs fixing or changing. So that's what the, the idea of medicine, like therapy, talk therapy, that seem to be... That's like seems the way that,the protocol goes is that talk therapy is like surface oriented and when that doesn't work, when the psychologist or social worker or counselor finally gives up, then they punt it to the psychiatrist and we're supposed to go in there and do some sort of rip roaring, like engine change or something with a, with a, medicine

Kara Goodwin: of tires.

Dr. Fred: Yeah, a whole new set. and that doesn't work either. It just simply doesn't work. It makes things worse. And it regularly makes things worse. And [00:27:00] if we were really to look at that, we would see that going down that avenue, even though it seems like it's the last resort, is similar to, like, throwing your toaster out of an eight story window to see once you get tired of trying to fix

Kara Goodwin: This is fascinating. so I wonder too about like parents who have children who are in school because I also have friends who, you know, and I have children, and there's a certain way that I guess schools expect children to. Behave to learn to, interact and so forth. And I have a, friend, for example, who they had their child on anti anxiety medication.

And that was kind of based on what the school wanted. And they were, open, they want the best for their child. and [00:28:00] then they made the decision that like, well, let's see what happens if we take them off. And, and then, things come to the surface and they're pluses and minuses, but they kind of feel like the school is again, sort of like, well, what happened to the medication?

 Like should he be on medication again and so forth. So there's this sort of like that indoctrination that you talk about, but I think it's, it's one thing for us to do that through like what we want for ourselves. And then there's this other additional dimension that when you're trying to make the best choice for your child, I don't know if you have any, if

Dr. Fred: Oh, yeah. I have plenty to say about that, of course. And,

Kara Goodwin: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Fred: yeah, this, the whole idea of,students or children or parents of children who are being told by the school that their kids aren't listening or aren't able to complete tasks or aren't able to,pay attention or are,seemingly having a mood disturbance of some [00:29:00] sort, that they're anxious or they're depressed.

oftentimes it's the school also, working to get, like the school isn't necessarily, as we already discussed, even back in my day, that the school isn't necessarily fostering, open discourse with their children and taking advantage of their skill sets, et cetera, allowing them to explore, allowing them to learn, allowing them to ask all the questions they have, allowing, That's not how it's going.

They're wanting little Johnny to sit in his chair and stare at the chalkboard or stare at the front of the room and then be able to regurgitate what the teacher said. And if he doesn't do that, Then there's something wrong with Johnny rather than realizing that there might be some inherent flaws in the whole school system.

Now, this is a very simplistic way of looking at a very complicated issue because, when parents get told that Johnny isn't doing well in school, the parents are necessarily like interested in doing whatever they can to help Johnny and the school says the school is kind of in cahoots, if you will, with [00:30:00] the medical team. that if they get put on Ritalin or they get put on, Xanax or they get put on Seroquel or whatever their medicine is of choice, that they have experience that kids do well. Then what ends up happening is the children get, they get, quelled. their symptoms might disappear for the small points of being, but ultimately what's happening is that their symptoms are being pushed down and will come out in other areas.

in between doses or later at night, or sometimes if the symptoms are actually being advanced or perpetuated or in some cases caused by the drugs that are marketed to treat them, then we get all sorts of issues. So that the anxiety medicines cause an actual increase in panic attacks or the ADHD medicines cause an actual increase in inattentiveness.

And this is a really important issue to take in mind is that these medicines don't do what they're supposed [00:31:00] to do. Well, except if you realize that what the medicines do, maybe they do do what they're supposed to do, because what they're supposed to do is they're made to sell more of themselves.

And so if you can keep people on medicine, that's a good plan for the medicine company, of course.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. Yeah, that's true. It is. It's so complicated, isn't it? It's so complex.

Dr. Fred: Yeah.

Kara Goodwin: Well, we talked about children and I'm just wondering if the lens of this in the maybe misdiagnosis, miss,

Dr. Fred: Mistreatment.

Kara Goodwin: mistreatment for, a different generation.

Dr. Fred: right. Yeah, it goes on for everybody. I mean, we're all being mistreated in many ways if we walk into the standard default psychiatric industrial complex We're going to get it's you know If you go to a if you go to a barber shop enough times You're gonna get a haircut and you know in a psychiatry world when you walk in to get a psychiatric evaluation, you're going to [00:32:00] walk out with a diagnosis.

In fact, they can't even let you out without one. They won't get, they won't get paid if they don't, if you write no diagnosis, no third party payer will ever pay you.

Kara Goodwin: Oh, wow.

Dr. Fred: are compelled as a psychiatrist to diagnose every single person who comes into your office. And yes, you will get a diagnosis, and that diagnosis will stay on your record forever.

No matter what, some are maybe more benign than others, but you will get a diagnosis. And a diagnosis is a, it's a label that then you get to see yourself as. You say, that's not me, honey, that's my bipolar type 2 acting up. Or, sorry I didn't complete the task, boss, but I got a adult ADD.

Or, sorry, I'm,didn't do so well at the party last night. I got social anxiety, whatever I decide. So we're giving these labels and they do serve a purpose because like we take before they relinquish the responsibility that I might have over the parts of my life that, maybe I'm not so proud of.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm. Yeah. That's fascinating. [00:33:00] Well, when we talk about, when you talk about taking people off of medication, if there's anybody listening who's like, stunned and on some medication, then they're like, I need to get off of this. is it something that there's a protocol for coming off, depending on how long, how much they've

Dr. Fred: Yeah, it's funny. People are way more worried about coming off than they were about going on. It's really interesting. Like we're asking you to put toxins in your body. You're like, yes, please give them to me. And then we're asking you to stop putting toxins in your body, like, Hold on a minute, I don't know how long is it going to take, is it going to be uncomfortable, am I going to be, go through

Kara Goodwin: That's a great point.

Dr. Fred: yeah, we don't, we're not even worried in a second about whether or not we're putting chemicals in our body that we do not do proper research, we just assume it's all done. And then when we, I say like, if I was to tell you, And not that this is true, but if I was to say that medicine of yours has rat poison in it, if I was to tell you that and then I want you to wean it over the next [00:34:00] six months, you'd be like, I'm not weaning shit.

Kara Goodwin: Yeah.

Dr. Fred: If it's got rat poison in it, I'm stopping today. So the whole idea of weaning is also an industrial phenomenon.

Kara Goodwin: Hmm.

Dr. Fred: idea is that if they can really stretch out the weaning over a long period of time, you will have an incident along the way where you decide that didn't happen before you started weaning and therefore you should, hurry on back to your old dose.

Kara Goodwin: Really?

Dr. Fred: That's my understanding of it. I don't think anybody, it's not written anywhere, I'm sure, in the weaning process, but, but, if I slip on a banana peel or I run over my cat in the driveway, I'll say, hey. I wasn't doing that before I started weaning on my medicine. And so therefore here I am super anxious cause I just ran over my cat.

And, that's the same anxiety I felt before. And the only way I can manage that is hike up my medicines again.

Kara Goodwin: so when you help, when you advise people to come off [00:35:00] of their medication, do you just have it be a, just stop,

Dr. Fred: So some people like they use the word, like you were probably thinking about using the word cold Turkey and cold Turkey, there's nothing attractive about cold Turkey and there's nothing attractive. I just stop. that makes it look like it's really a heroic deed. It's not a heroic deed in most cases.

And let's keep in mind, I'm not taking people off of medicine who still believe they're sick. Why would I do that? They're just going to be jamming on me for their next medicine. The idea is to really get into the mindset and get people to realize that maybe they're not sick in the first place. there's two groups of people. There's the people who are considering coming into the medical complex, who think there might be something wrong with them, and they're wondering whether they should go get their psychiatric evaluation.

That's an easier group for me to work with, because they haven't actually busted through yet. The group that has already started taking medicine, at least for some period of time, has decided that they are sick enough to put [00:36:00] toxins in their body every single morning. And that group is much harder to convince that they weren't sick in the first place because they've already bought the whole thing, hook, line, and sinker to begin with.

That's a very difficult group and it really requires a massive amount of alignment. That group, what I find is, and if any of your listeners are in that group, I hope they understand. That group is like, yeah, there's something wrong with me. I mean, how many doctors have to tell me that I've got bipolar disorder?

How many doctors have to tell me that I've got schizoaffective disorder? I've got that condition and therefore, of course, I need something. I hate my medicine, but since I have a condition, I need something. What are you going to replace my medicine with? Do you have some herbs or do you have some, special concoctions or some certain practices I'm supposed to do?

they're willing to do that, but only because they are unwilling to relinquish the notion that they might not have been truly sick in the first place.

Kara Goodwin: That's really, that's really fascinating. You come, it comes [00:37:00] back to that whole identification piece.

Dr. Fred: Right. Exactly.

Kara Goodwin: Well, there, there is so much in this conversation. It has been so rich and, and fascinating. I thank you so much. Can you tell people how they can find out more about you,

Dr. Fred: Well, I know that you're, normally this conversation goes into meditation and mindfulness and, nutrition, multiple ways to just kind of hold still and capture yourself. So it's important to really understand that part of the treatment here is in the world of prevention and part of the prevention is by getting, as meditation often suggests, by getting your world, getting your unique capacity to view the world as you do, when you can get out over yourself and you can get out hovering over yourself or really get an access to who.

Who is going through the actions? Who is this me that's going through the actions I'm going through every single day, that's falling for whatever nonsense illusions that I'm falling for every day. Then we have a new access [00:38:00] to keep treating ourself with the love and, compassion and acceptance and forgiveness that we need to.

So I really support meditation as being not only preventative, but in some ways, curative. Of any notion that there's anything wrong with us. We start really getting our unique space in the world and what we do and how we think and what we say and how all those things play a role. So the best way to get ahold of me, if you want to really speak to this, it would be, to go to my 360 site, which is drfred360.

com. And from there, you can see everything I've done. You can see there's all sorts of cool freebies there. My books are in there. You can download free PDFs of my books. I have two of them and my courses are in there healing the healer and the true voice course where I walk people into finding their true voice, rediscovering their true voice and actually bringing it forth through podcasting as a primary template.

I think it's a great space to, actually speak our truth. And, then you can get all my social media links there and I invite people to [00:39:00] contact me by going to the texting area and just write your name and your email, your full email so that. I can email you back and, you can put that in when you get contact, you contact and then text and write your name and your email that can be very helpful and moving along so I can keep you in track of what I'm up to, or there's an opportunity of course, to set up a discovery call.

There's a couple of different buttons on that site where I'll give away your audience, I'll give away a free discovery call. So that we can talk about whether there's a good fit with me moving together to work with your clients who Either want to come off page medicine and want to lose their diagnosis Or don't really believe they have one in the first place and just want reinforcement along those lines.

Kara Goodwin: That's beautiful. Well, thank you so much for all the work you're doing, Dr. Fred, to help people. The undoctor Fred to help people become un indoctrinated and, or undoctrinated

Dr. Fred: Yep.

Kara Goodwin: and undiagnosed. And,[00:40:00] it's really beautiful and profound. So I thank you.

Dr. Fred: Yep. I learned it when I was three. So it's back again.

Kara Goodwin: I love it. It's all full circle 360,

Dr. Fred: Yeah, exactly

Kara Goodwin: Great. Thank you so much.

Dr. Fred: you. Kara. It's been a pleasure. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help you as well

Kara Goodwin: Thank you 

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