Unedited： Petersons' Times Interview (Fd2wKn6-X_A)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Fd2wKn6-X_A

professional and we’re in a beach house. Oh well I guess if you have to be stranded maybe that’s not such a bad place to be stranded. I think it would be my number one choice. Oh good well Janiel Wynn that blows no one any good. Well said, well said. Thank you so much for doing this. Well thank you for thank you for being patient. I know we’ve put you off for a long time. That couldn’t be helped but I’m very I’m actually very happy to be doing this and I was weirdly enough I didn’t expect it but I was looking forward to it. Really I wasn’t sure how you would feel about it. Is there an element of trepidation or? Well definitely there’s an element of trepidation because I would say the most stressful experiences I’ve had in the last five years apart from being in the epicenter of various demonstrations were definitely interviews with people who were well they ranged from mildly hostile to very hostile and those are tight ropes you know because if you make a mistake well it can be devastating and devastating to your career, devastating to your family, devastating to your general reputation. So that’s interesting. I think most people watching you thought that you are completely fearless, kind of cool as a cucumber, unfazed by any amount of attacks. Yeah that’s wrong. That’s wrong okay. Oh yeah that’s definitely wrong. No I definitely found the interviews of all the things I did as I said apart from the demonstrations you know how being having your name being cursed out and being chanted at by several hundred angry people is not anyone’s idea of fun especially if the attack continues afterwards which happened on multiple occasions and but I don’t think that was worse than the more hostile interviews. I really don’t like upsetting people. That’s interesting. Again I think that’s not something that people would imagine. Well I am a clinical psychologist it’s not really it’s my nature to help people I would say. You know I have a hierarchy of belief in some sense. I’m not going to say things I don’t believe to be true to spare anyone’s feelings although I would pick a truth that spared feelings the maximum allowable amount if I could do that. So but I’m not interested in generating controversy. Mostly I’m see it’s a funny thing because I’ve learned over the years and this is again in large part because I’m a clinical psychologist is that a little conflict in the present can save an awful lot of catastrophe later and people are very much likely to sidestep a problem in the hopes that it will go away and I know the problems don’t go away. They never go away. What they do is they multiply they fester and multiply and so I will have the fight now knowing that it’s inevitable later. I mean I always conducted myself that way within our family as Michaela can attest to both Tammy and I never allowed anything to sit unspoken under the rug. And so we’d have our uncomfortable conversations but you know I’d sweat my way through them. I don’t enjoy them by any stretch of the imagination but I can see the inevitable coming and I’m not going to allow that to happen without trying to make a difference. So do you think it’s the case that most people have the wrong impression of who you are or what you’re like as a person? You know I actually see people every week and some people have a sense that they’re hardly committed, absolutely accurate and others feel that there are huge misapprehensions about who they are. Where are you sitting on that? Okay well first we have a bad audio situation so you’re echoing a lot so we should fix that because we won’t converse well. Well I’ll go ahead and answer the last question while we’re waiting. I feel I believe that I’m misunderstood by the people who want to misunderstand me. I think that by and large that people have a good idea of who I am and by and large that that image is positive. In fact it’s positive to the point where I find it very difficult to believe. I mean for example I just finished a podcast with Matthew McConaughey on Sunday and the YouTube comments there’s about a million people have watched it already and so that’s something in and of itself but the comments are unbelievably positive. Like they’re heartbreakingly positive and the like to dislike ratio is running about 99 to 1 and that’s a little better than typical but usually it’s between 50 and 100 or 50 and 99 to 1. And usually the YouTube comments are overwhelmingly positive and that’s certainly been the case while I’ve been ill and while my wife was ill. And so you know you might quibble and say that people have an impression of me that’s too positive but if I had to have a problem that would be a good problem. I think that my reputation suffers among those for whom it’s convenient to assume things about me that aren’t the least bit true. Like that I’m all right for example in my proclivities either overtly or covertly or that my followers are can be easily categorized in that manner. First that I have followers, second that they can be categorized in that manner. And none of that’s true. That those aren’t my political leanings. I’m not temperamentally inclined to any extreme viewpoint and in fact find them abhorrent. I spent my whole life studying extreme political views since I was 18 essentially and my listeners and viewers and readers are on YouTube they’re primarily male but my book 12 Rules for Life sold about between 4.5 and 5 million copies now and it’s not young angry men who are buying that and all you have to do is scroll through the YouTube comments on a popular video and you can see that and almost none of the discussion is political. And when I did my tour for the book it wasn’t a political tour. I’m a psychologist. I’m happy about that. I’m comfortable with that and when I had to make a choice in my life between being political overtly and staying working as a psychologist I’ve always chosen the latter. So tell me that’s way better. Is that better? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. First speaking alphabet now ABCD. Is that all working? It’s better. Yeah. Yeah. Thank God for that. Thank God. I’m really sorry about that. Oh that’s okay. You know there’s bound to be the odd tech glitch. I guess that’s true. I guess so. Just because I’m curious as you’re describing that kind of huge public response to you it’s a very shocking and strange thing to become a famous person. Yes. Well actually I’m not certain that it’s the controversy that’s been the most emotionally demanding. What is going on? Yeah. Go on. Well I think I’ve had this incredible view into the suffering of thousands and thousands and thousands of people. You know when I can’t go out without people coming up to me. Michaela can attest to this. But every time I go out wherever I go people stop me and you know they have an instant deep conversation with me and they tell me that you know they tell me about well first of all they’re usually somewhat shocked and then they’re very polite and then they tell me that they’ve been watching my YouTube videos or listening to the podcast or reading my book and that it’s really helped them in some manner and then they tell me a little bit about that and they’re usually quite emotional and you don’t have conversations like that that often outside of the clinical sphere and you certainly don’t have them repeatedly with strangers on the street and but there’s something about it that’s really remarkably positive you know. When I walk around well in any city in some sense it’s like I’m at home because where people know me because people say on the street they say well really nice to see you out. I’m glad that your health is recovering. It’s like being surrounded by well by well-wishers and by friends and I’m happy about it because you know it’s it’s a great thing if you’re a clinical psychologist to be able to extend your reach like that but part of what’s overwhelming to me is how it’s direct evidence for how little encouragement so many people get. They’re starving. Sorry I haven’t done an interview for a long time. Fine, take me as long as you need. Of course, of course, of course. He’s okay but he hasn’t done an interview in a long time. Totally understand, totally, totally understand. I’ve got an extra size towel so that should do me through the interview. Can I ask you a question? Do you carry this enormous sense of pressure of their expectations on you to be able to encourage them or guide them or does that feel like a big pressure? Well it feels like a big responsibility and but I can’t it’s an overwhelming responsibility and it’s very surprising like it’s hard to it’s hard to believe it’s surreal it’s always surreal and it’s so universal I mean I was in Serbia for months not so long ago and it’s the same there it’s the same everywhere I’ve gone if it’s an airport or a cafe or it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it’s everywhere in the world. I mean I think I’ve looked at my YouTube views and I think my YouTube videos including the interviews have been viewed at least 600 million times and so it’s a scale of exposure that’s well I mean it’s not unparalleled because there are no shortage of famous people but it’s unparalleled it’s certainly unparalleled for me but it’s there’s also this international element to it that’s also new you know YouTube is a universal media platform and it’s so powerful that it’s unbelievable and if you put yourself in its clutches then well most of the time nothing will happen but sometimes there’s a tremendous explosion I mean it’s not surprising to me in some ways you know I knew when I was working on my first book Maps of Meaning that I was dealing with things that were fundamental a lot or I knew I mean I knew in so far as my sense of knowing is reliable but generally it’s been reliable I can tell when I’m on to something and I knew I was dealing with things that were fundamental and I watched the effect of my lectures when I was a university professor on my students and most of the students who I taught said the most common response to my classes was that it changed their life it changed the way they looked at everything and that was my experience having learned and thought through the what I learned and thought through when I wrote Maps of Meaning it changed the way I looked at everything so I mean I and I could see this coming because as my reach expanded electronically that sort of response continued to occur but YouTube magnified that in a way that’s well it’s a lot to adapt to you know I mean when all this hit me I was already 55 or there or something you know and I’d labored under relative obscurity that that’s been made more of than is really the case because my classes were always popular and so I had a certain renown at the university as a teacher and I’d done some TV work for about 10 years really before I made the first couple of videos that went viral but I’d also set up the YouTube channel a couple of years before that and it was accruing views not at an exponentially growing rate but you know there were still tens of thousands of people watching and that’s not trivial so but the response you asked me about responsibility I I certainly felt that when I have been ill over the last year I mean I thought it was one of the things that really kept me alive and I suppose it shaped my next book because I tried only to the the illnesses and the responsibility I tried only to keep words that I found sustaining during that period of time but part of the reason that I stayed alive was because I felt a overwhelming responsibility to all the people who had been you know affected by my work I thought well that wouldn’t go very well if I just expired somewhat melodramatically in the middle of Russia and middle of Serbia and so it was responsibility but also tremendous support you know it’s quite something to be in despair and to have thousands of people wishing you well and that’s been my experience overall is that the the proportion of people who have been supportive to me and my family compared to the proportion of people who’ve been antagonistic there’s no comparison the antagon it’s not like the antagonism is trivial and I don’t I it hits me I think it hits everyone in the family I mean Michaela’s taken a lot of flak for squirreling me away in Russia and in Serbia and you know profiting from my corpse so to speak and that’s been hard on her because like the rest of my family well she put a lot on the line to help me and that is the case for many members of my family but you know she she was certainly the primary mover of all this from the public perspective and took a lot of flak for it and that’s been hard on her but so the negative is salient but the positive is overwhelming and that was certainly that was certainly the case on the tour which was a delight in many ways because it was so unbelievably positive there’s thousands of people who were gathering together on a regular basis different people in all these different cities who were there fundamentally because they wanted to get their lives together you know and the way that that was treated by the people that were antagonistic to me was was exactly what you’d predict if you gave some credence to their cynicism you know that it was a political ploy or that I was exploiting people or they had no and that would be mostly the radical identity politics types who you know who have no love lost for me and vice versa it wasn’t in their worldview that people could gather together like that because they wanted to improve but that that was the case of 2018 by that point obviously your life has kind of become unrecognisably huge and you’re going on the book tour to what extent was your mental health an issue for you during that year I think you said to general open that one of the worst days of your life was days like Sam Harris not obviously oh yeah Jesus God that first discussion I had with Sam Harris oh man I was just um well I don’t think it’s a mental health issue I think it’s a physical health issue I have an autoimmune disorder of some sort and it has multiple symptoms one of the symptoms is depression and you know it’s not really a classic depression because I don’t I don’t have the classic cognitive symptoms I’ve never felt that my life wasn’t worth living I felt that I was in so much pain that I didn’t know if I could continue to exist or that I said pain can you elaborate on that word pain because I come in so many different things well it would depend on on the particulars of the circumstances I suppose but depression is a pain like phenomenon it if you’re depressed much of the cortical circuitry that mediates a pain response like a physical pain response is activated many people with depression have pain syndromes like lower back pain is very common among people who are depressed so it is a pain symptom it is a pain syndrome um I guess the it’s the the depression I experienced which is characteristic of many people in my family was grief-like I would say many people in my family was grief-like I would say it felt like overwhelming grief and it was worse in the morning and and would recede during the day but it seemed to be part of a cluster of symptoms that were autoimmune in nature and much depression is autoimmune in nature so I don’t really I think of it as I think it’s a physical illness as far as I can tell when when I talked to Sam Harris um it’s very complicated and I’m still trying to piece all of this together but I had gone to see my family my extended family on my on my wife’s side and um Michaela and her husband and me both all of us came down with the same symptom set that lasted about three weeks and it was absolutely terrible um I couldn’t get up without fainting I’d faint fall to the floor gray out not black out completely but gray out every time I got up I couldn’t get warm I was wearing multiple layers of clothes and multiple layers of blankets and I couldn’t get warm um I had an overwhelming sense of of doom and anxiety um and I didn’t want to move and plus I couldn’t sleep for for days and days I I don’t I I was without sleep for many weeks and you know people have I have look that’s what that’s this is it wasn’t no hold on there were no doubt hold up it wasn’t apple cider it was sodium metabisulfite in apple cider um like the alcoholic apple cider was added to a stew so it was sodium metabisulfite in that apple cider but it wasn’t apple cider right I understand anyways in the midst of that um which was in the midst of that I talked to Sam Harris and I was operating at about five percent of my normal capacity if that was terrible but I wasn’t going to forego the opportunity because it was a necessary discussion now I was nowhere near it I wasn’t I wasn’t at my sharpest and you can certainly tell that in the interview uh you know I I couldn’t respond rapidly on my my normal quickness of wit to what degree I possessed that was certainly absent in that first discussion with Sam but it turned out that that was it worked out all right because we had another discussion and overall I was able to get a little bit of a discussion and overall and you know then I had these public debates with Sam too that really I think we had 10 000 people at the Orpheum in London it would it turned into something that neither of us would have possibly imagined I don’t know if there’s ever I don’t know if there’s ever been a larger public debate or certainly not on that kind of issue you know and who would have known that that would become something that was so popular that it was what was somewhat of a cultural event so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to to claim that and so you would prescribe the benzodiazepines as a result of that incident yes and a sleeping pill were you at all worried did you did sort of alarm bells ring about women in the 50s and 60s who got hooked on value and couldn’t get off it and well look when when benzodiazepines were were first introduced they were touted as a an almost completely safe replacement for barbiturates no I really didn’t give it a second thought what happened was well partly I was I was you know my life was an absolute whirlwind at that at that time um so it it fell if if it had been an item of concern it fell you know to number 20 on a list of 20 and only 10 1 through 10 ever got attended to um you know at the time that I had this terrible reaction other things were happening they the Canadian um equivalent of the IRS was after me and and making my life miserable for something they admitted was a mistake three months later but they were just torturing me to death the college of psychologists that I belonged to was after me because one of my clients had put forth a a whole sequence of specious allegations because the person was upset that I had sort of disappeared over the Christmas vacation so that was extraordinarily stressful um it wasn’t clear to me whether my job was going to continue um so you know there were other there were other issues plus I was at the epicenter of this incredible controversy and there were journalists around me constantly and students demonstrating and like it was a very hectic time um in any case I took the benzodiazepines I didn’t take the sleeping pills I think I took them two or three times and just stopped but the benzodiazepines allowed me to sleep again and it was a very stressful time and uh I just they were prescribed for two a day and I just took them and it wasn’t like I was I couldn’t feel them they weren’t they I wasn’t taking a high enough dose so that I could actually detect the effects of the of the sedation they weren’t sedating me at all they just stopped whatever had happened to me which I still don’t really understand you know we have a hypothesis that it was a reaction to allergic reaction to to the chemical that Michaela described but but it was strange that all that the three of us were affected by it and no one else as well anyhow well that’s what David that’s what the psychiatrist said is that when you go off of SSRIs you can be neurologically sensitive to chemicals yeah yeah well that’s a reasonable head lines up yeah and I was probably our theory like we did fair enough yeah that doesn’t give it enough credit like there’s there are doctors involved here no it’s not like we were no yes and many of them it’s not like we’ve been sitting around armchair hypothesizing about what happened we’ve consulted many people to try to figure this out and you heard by that point come off SSRIs because of the diet is that right because the efficacy of the diet yes and the diet did a lot of different things it had a lot of different effects on me uh one of the most marked effects immediately was that I stopped snoring and that that happened within a week it was very very surprising to me and then I I had psoriasis and that cleared up and um I had gum disease that cleared up which is that’s not curable gum disease so it’s treatable but not curable but it’s completely cleared up and uh I lost 70 pounds over about a seven month period so it was the transformation was remarkable and I’ve had other autoimmune uh symptoms in my life I had LAPC areata at one point and thought I was going to lose all my hair but luckily that that stopped and I had this condition called peripheral uveitis which is an inflammation in the in the tissue of the eye and markers on my fingernails for autoimmune like an autoimmune condition your body attacks its own cells and I had markers for that as well so there’s and I have had a lengthy history of mouth ulcers um that and that you’ve never been but there’s never been a formal diagnosis of the nature of the autoimmune disorder yeah it was twice in the last year okay um in Russia and in Serbia because they did blood tests dad yep I’m back in Russia it they never pinpointed what it was in Russia it was fibromyalgia and in Serbia they thought fibromyalgia but it was from blood markers and so they were going based on blood markers and symptoms and put fibro on it yeah and I mean these autoimmune conditions aren’t very well understood and and fibromyalgia is a good example of that it’s it’s terra incognita um so the basic has been seemed to help sort of resolve that issue but you talked about how you felt I’ve read you talking about how you felt that it kind of muted somewhat your relate your relationships with well it was very confusing it was very confusing time you know because a lot of what was happening to me was also in some sense alienating me from from myself and my family because it was so different from what had happened before so trying to discriminate between the strange and surreal conditions of my life and the effect of this drug I never thought about the drug having any effect on me with regards to this muting and for quite a long time and then and while I also started to get kind of weak on my left side and I kind of thought at that point that the benzodiazepine might have had something to do with it but wasn’t sure and that thought would you just come up now and then and I complained about it that I had a weak weakness in my in my musculature on the left side but I never thought much of it and I wasn’t that worried I wasn’t thinking about the benzodiazepines like 10 hours a day or anything like that I never thought about it at all I was extraordinarily busy 16 hours a day flat out seven days a week for for well right until Tammy went into the hospital in right until Michaela went into the hospital in January of 2019 it was flat out running and so I wasn’t sitting around thinking about what was happening with me and you know if I was a bit off well so was my life it wasn’t exactly surprising that all of this might have had some effect on my relationships and that was kind of that was subtle anyways I mean we talked about it you know the kids would tell me that I was distant but that’s not a five alarm fire bell being somewhat distant especially under under strange circumstances including visiting 160 cities in 200 days Jesus and I was functioning obviously I mean I gave a different lecture every night were you enjoying yourself yeah it was amazing yeah it was amazing and I don’t think enjoying myself doesn’t really cover it it’s it was it was the best year of your life dreamlike um I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’ve had some pretty good years it was the it was it was surreal but it was it was surreal in a way that was also see one of the markers for post-traumatic post-traumatic stress disorder is derealization right when the things around you don’t seem real and I was in a constant state of derealization from October 2016 October 2016 till January 12th of 2021 go on next slide well I didn’t I still don’t really have the I I’ll give you an example so one day this would have been in 2017 probably and so things hadn’t got as busy as they were going to get um 200 of my colleagues signed a petition at the University of Toronto to have me removed from my tenured position and my faculty association so an association to which I belong forwarded that to the administration without even notifying me and my son came over to talk to me and I said Julian um you know 200 of my colleagues just signed a petition asking for my removal from the University of Toronto faculty and he said oh dad don’t worry about that it’s only 200 people and we had got to the point by that time where that sort of event was well produced exactly the kind of response he had like under normal circumstances I believe for anyone who’s employed by an organization the news that 200 of their colleagues had conspired um inappropriately to bring about their demise would be enough to rattle them for to rattle them into silence permanently instantly and for us that was barely noticeable as a blip on on the horizon given everything else that was going on and as it turned out it had absolutely no effect maybe a somewhat negative effect in terms of the reputation of the university but no effect on me so no practical effect but do you think it had a kind of residual effect you’re talking about de-realization and PTSD that these kinds of all of this has I still really don’t have a proper conceptual framework in which to slot all this yeah um it’s it’s not it’s not an easy thing to understand I don’t know what to make of it what do I what should I make of the fact that I have 600 million views on YouTube I don’t know what do you make of that I don’t I mean on the one hand like I said I knew that I was dealing with things that were fundamental when I was writing maps of meaning and I watched the effect of what I had learned on my students and so that didn’t and that grew across time it continued to grow in a linear fashion and so and it in some sense that’s not that surprising because all the ideas in maps of meaning which is really where I’ve derived most of the ideas or many of the ideas for my book 12 rules and for the new one um you know I studied people whose work I thought was profound and was able to integrate that and to disseminate it and so the fact that profound thoughts had effects on people isn’t that surprising and I’m not saying that they were my thoughts because maps of meaning has a very lengthy bibliography and and I use ideas that towering intellects had generated on many of them psychologists and so the fact that they had a powerful psychological effect makes sense it’s it’s still something to be the messenger even if you’re not necessarily the originator but so that part wasn’t what wasn’t a surprise in some ways but the magnitude of the the magnitude of the response has been and the nature of the response the emotional nature of the response has been continually amazing you know when I was visiting Tammy in the hospital well and then you know not only did all did all of these things occur on the social front you got to think about it this way you know I’ve watched people respond to being attacked on Twitter so they’ll post something or write a paper and 20 people will go after them on Twitter and that’ll produce a bit of a storm and they usually apologize profusely and back the hell off and disappear it’s really really emotionally hard on people to be attacked publicly like that and that happened to me continually for like three years and on a way larger scale than 20 people you know I mean the the even just the events at at um um Wilfrid Laurier University with Lindsay Shepherd like was that was the biggest scandal that hit a Canadian university certainly in my lifetime and that was just that was a sideshow and I’m not making light of it it wasn’t a trivial thing but it was a making light of it it wasn’t a trivial occurrence but it was just one of dozens of things that were happening on a regular basis the the demonstration at Queen’s University when when I went there to talk with Bruce Party a lawyer there I mean you know we were we were in a building with 200 250 students 300 students I don’t know and the protesters were outside at the windows banging on the windows breaking them in one case it was completely surreal it was like a zombie attack um were you frightened by any of this was any of it frightening I guess I’d have yes I would say definitely I mean yeah I I would the most the the fright I was never concerned for my I wasn’t concerned for my life I wasn’t concerned for my physical safety I was concerned for my family I was concerned for my reputation I was concerned for for my my occupation both as a clinical psychologist because I was under attack at the College of Psychologists as well as at the university um so and then there were times where I was physically threatened certainly that happened at Queen’s University they arrested a woman who was carrying a garrot for god’s sake you know and and um I was harassed directly after the demonstration there by a you know a small coterie of of insane protesters um let’s say committed protesters who were in my face for two blocks three blocks yelling and screaming with my my son was with me and you know the the university security guards they didn’t know what to do they weren’t trained for that sort of thing and I was very I was I wasn’t say I was so much afraid I was very angry like I took everything I could not to knock the man who was in my face flat but I wasn’t going to do that and I mean I was afraid by what he was doing how did you how did you what was your demeanor while that was going on? Calm and watchful I mean one of the advantages I have had is that I am a clinical psychologist you know and I can detach myself from what’s happening and watch it and that’s partly when I’m being interviewed by someone who’s hostile and and able to keep my cool it’s partly because I can watch and also partly because I I know that what’s happening right now isn’t the whole story you know it’s especially true in the modern world with an interview it’s like the interview can be very hostile and that by no means means that I’m under attack it just feels like that in the moment like with with the interview with with Kathy Newman for example on channel four or there was another interview done by a woman who works for GQ which I think has been viewed 22 million times I believe at the moment so it’s just it’s just under the Kathy Newman video in terms of number of viewers that was a very very animus possessed interview she was on my case right from the moment I walked into the room essentially and presumably you knew that would be the case I mean Helen Lewis is a very established feminist professional feminist well I didn’t I didn’t know that it would be the case at that time I was being I was being interviewed so often that I never had any time to prepare for the interviews I just walked into them and I assumed I assumed at least that there would be you know common professional courtesy and most of the time that was the case was certainly the case with Kathy Newman who was very professionally polite when we first met in the green room and then well and then why isn’t and then went on the attack I suppose when she was interviewing me but both of those interviews the tide turned you know and it was very very strange with the Kathy Newman interview because first of all people were rather sympathetic to me and then she reported being harassed especially online and then so the sympathy sort of moved over to her side of the equation let’s say and then for one reason or another it shifted back to me but do you think but did you enjoy them in real time during those two hours with Helen nearly and half an hour with Kathy? No, no, oh yes with Kathy I enjoyed a second of it. Which second? Well when she stopped when when when I see there was one point where she was reduced to silence and I’d asked her a very serious question which was how why she thought it was okay to go after me for making people uncomfortable with my opinions when it was okay for her to go after me and make me as uncomfortable as possible in this particular scenario and she had no answer to that and she had no answer to that because she knew perfectly well that she was being hypocritical and she stumbled and stopped speaking and I said gotcha and I enjoyed that and I thought like in that half a second I thought long and hard about whether or not I was going to say that I knew it would be funny and I do have a sense of humor although it’s rather suppressed it’s been rather suppressed over the last couple of years yeah and I took a calculated risk and I would say that I enjoyed that because the timing was right and it worked it paid off but it sounds like it was a risk man it could have easily gone badly right you said that you withstood all kinds of pressures and stresses and navigated an extraordinary roller coaster and kind of kept it all together and handled it up until 2019 when your wife is in hospital and being given this devastating well so 2019 was you know it was just it started out rough I mean yes I went to Switzerland and I was in Switzerland with Michaela for well for a number of weeks when she was having her ankle rebuilt by carpenters I mean it was very dramatic surgery and the outcome wasn’t obvious she could have easily lost her leg and lots of people that she talked to suggested that that would be the case and so and it was strange to set up camp in Zurich and and to bring her food and and to take care of her and then we went to Australia for a whirlwind tour in February and that went quite nicely and then well things just things just fell apart insanely with Tammy you know it was just every bloody day was a life and death crisis for like five months and initially we were informed that her illness was highly treatable and minor and you know just in in a typical cliched movie scene we went to see the doctor after she had had her surgery but wasn’t recovering quite properly and they said well she’s contracted this cancer that’s so rare there’s virtually no literature on it and the one-year fatality rate was 100% and that was just the beginning of you know endless nights sleeping on the floor in emergency and continual surgical complications and so and then and then you know my mood was was wavering at that point um I was taking a bit more of the benzodiazepine under still being supervised by my my GP but I started to react to it in a paradoxical manner it seemed to be making me more anxious rather than less and I tried various and I tried various means of dealing with that but it just got worse and worse and at one point I stopped taking the benzodiazepine altogether and that what happened when you did that I developed this condition called akathisia which I didn’t know about at the point yes and let me tell you you wouldn’t know what that means and let me tell you um you wouldn’t wish that on it’s unbearable to say the least and you know they say with akathisia people are driven to suicidality within an hour of the onset of the symptoms I had akathisia for 800 hours 900 hours thousand hours sometimes seven hours a day unbelievable what did it feel like Dr. Bateson well imagine that so imagine I just figured this out a way to communicate it proper to some degree properly in the last couple of days so imagine that someone jabbed you really hard in the ribs with their fingers and stiff fingers you know you’d kind of you’d pull away and then there’d be a spasm from that and you’d move well then imagine that that’s happening 50 times and every time you breathe that’s that’s sort of what it’s like that level of physical pain and discomfort yeah yeah and it doesn’t go away it’s just there and it’s there and it’s there and it’s there and every time you breathe it’s there you can’t sit and you know I couldn’t sit down I’ve been able to start sitting down again in the last month so you and I could not have had a conversation like this where we’re just talking to each other and I might have been able to do it it would recede to some degree as the day went on it was way worse in the morning and would get better in the evening so it would have depended on the time of day but certainly even now you know I really don’t get going until two o’clock or so in the afternoon right I’m my my morning schedule is still very very rigid but it’s it’s it’s uh it’s yes it’s unbearable the sensation and it’s also humiliating because it’s a voluntary movement disorder and so what that means is that it feels like you’re doing it and I could also control it so if it was happening and I was twisting and moving and walking around in my bedroom uncontrollably thousands and thousands of times if one of the people who were caring for me a nurse or doctor said well can you stop it I could I could stop it although I had a hard time stopping the effect of the breathing it’s not voluntary one of the symptoms of akathisia is that it feels voluntary this is in akathisia so one of the torturous things about it is it feels voluntary there are other like psych side of well and you can contribute you can stop it at least briefly well yeah there’s a disorder called dyskinesia where you move but you don’t you don’t even know you’re moving it’s so it’s it it’s an uncontrollable movement disorder but it’s involuntary it doesn’t affect the voluntary motor system but akathisia does and so there’s always this sense that you could stop it if you just exercised enough willpower so it’s humiliating as well and does that also generate a kind of self-punishing dynamic in your head that you’re angry with yourself? disgusted I would say more than angry disgusted well you feel as if you’re being kind of grotesque and ridiculous and weak is it or yes definitely it’s not only that you feel like you’re being that it’s it’s that is the situation or that’s certainly how it appears grotesque for sure and did you feel incredibly self-conscious about it and then oh no after a while I just like being self-conscious it was so awful that being self the problem of being self-conscious fell way down the the uh if you’re in enough pain you’re no longer self-conscious it’s there but it’s I shouldn’t say that you’re still self-conscious but the that problem is so it’s trivial compared to the pain it was horrible I mean I’m that’s the other thing that’s so strange about this and and that’s also made this surreal is that I’m actually a very private person but prior to all this I never discussed my own personal affairs with anyone I never talk about my illness I don’t talk about how I’m doing I have done that with depression to some degree because I thought there was a public service element in it you know because our my family has battled it for a very long time and I felt that some public disclosure of that would perform a reasonable public health function but other than that I’m not inclined towards personal self-disclosure and certainly not on a mass scale so that’s also been very strange to have all of this be so public over the last two years and saying that you know brings up a wave of disbelief that that can be the case that that’s actually is it is it a panicky wave or is it just incredulity at now I think it’s mostly just incredulity so you’ve tried to get treated twice in North America first in the eastern seaboard yeah that just didn’t work at all do you even remember much about those two I don’t remember anything about Toronto there’s a I don’t remember from December 16th to February 5th I don’t of of 2020 the end of 2019 the beginning of 2020 I don’t remember anything at all do you think you even did you know that you were being that you were flying to Moscow to be put in a coma yeah so in real time you were fully aware of it but you’ve got no memory of it now that’s right yeah I mean obviously what lots of people would say is why this is obviously I’ve talked to various people about this and everyone says why on earth would a high-profile North American I went to the best treatment clinic in North America in Connecticut and all they did was make it worse there were we were out of options like we were out of options my the judgment of my family was that I was likely going to die in Toronto and so there was no again I mean lots of people would say why would you sort of trust the judgment although your family members love you they’re not trained qualified medics why would you why would you put yourself in their hands and not the medical profession’s hands I had put myself in the hands of the medical profession and the consequence of that was that I was going to die and there were we put ourself in the hands of medical professionals in Russia too so it wasn’t like we were fleeing completely fleeing from the medical profession I tried a slow taper on the benzodiazepines and I couldn’t do it yeah you know and I went to this the treatment clinic in in on the eastern seaboard and they had promised essentially um a 12-week treatment program and my impression of that was that at the end of that 12-week period I would be free benzodiazepines but that isn’t how it worked out at all and I was I was on more medication when I left that treatment center than I was when I went in were you angry with them were you arguing with them no why not there was no point in in being angry that was wouldn’t be helpful I was disappointed I mean when I when I went when I went there to begin with uh right at admission they basically told me that the 12-week program was unlikely to be successful and I thought well this is a hell of a time to be informing me of that since I’ve just come down from Toronto but by that time I was well there wasn’t any alternatives at that point so you know I was in you know I was in that I was in a sufficiently dire state so that it wasn’t tenable for me to maintain my residence the clinic to the clinic you went to in mosca they were more they’re more familiar with doing a kind of induced coma to have sort of a speedy withdrawal from opiates rather than benzodiazepines is that right um Michaela would probably be better able to answer that than me there you’re back I suppose again one of the things that people absolutely associate you with is that you are meticulous about following the data you know it’s almost a kind of putus and cataract there’s no evidence for that you know you are very much an evidence-based person what was the evidence that you saw that was so compelling and overwhelming to take you to mosca I couldn’t do the the um I couldn’t do the I couldn’t tolerate the uh the gradual taper so it was the only other alternative that’s all wasn’t that it was compelling it was that we were out of options right yeah the treatment I received on the eastern coast and in Toronto didn’t help and made it worse yeah so we didn’t have any other options what were you most frightened of at that point and then Michaela’s talked about your kind of your anxiety levels I was I was most afraid of akathisia like there isn’t anything else that like every day I had akathisia was the worst day of my life by a huge margin not by some trivial amount but by a huge margin it was absolutely unbearable I I mean I tried to describe it it’s very difficult to describe it’s like pain but it’s a pain that that you can’t that only movement will satisfy I mean even now I’m walking 10 miles a day yes yes I’m yeah so I mean obviously the obvious thing that critics your enemies would say I’m sure you this is hardly going to be news to you well be hold on a minute you know you’ve your entire intellectual framework your philosophy of life is that life is about suffering about pain and that the manly strong dignified thing to do is to accept that pain and suffering and battle through it and learn from it and that the cow’s way out is to try and take drugs to to to no I’ve never said that I’ve never said that and as a clinician I mean um I’ve had many people in my practice look if you’re a if you’re a viable clinician you encourage people to take psychiatric medication when it’s appropriate and many people in my practice were helped to a tremendous degree by antidepressants I was they were they were unbelievably helpful to me and to my and to other members of my family not universally and not without a cost but but very very helpful and you know that’s a caricatured viewpoint too what what I really encourage people to what I what I encourage in people is the um it isn’t useful to allow your suffering to make you resentful even though you have many you have reason for that and so part of the battle it’s a ridiculous caricature that that perspective you know life people people are hurt badly by their lives in all sorts of ways and becoming bitter and resentful about that means that you start to cause extra suffering in yourself and in your family members and in your community and that’s not helpful it’s not helpful and believe me I mean I’ve I’ve had plenty of temptation to become resentful about what’s happened to me in the last two years with my wife’s terrible illness and well with my daughter’s illness first of all and then with my wife’s illness and then with mine you know and I’ve certainly had my moments where I thought it was torturous because it was unbelievably torturous because I was in agony and with with an indeterminate uh prognosis but certainly one that indicated that this would last for months and months and only slowly recede months and months and perhaps years um I was shut off from my family except for for much of this time and among strangers who didn’t speak my language um and at the same time I was I had this plethora of opportunities sitting in front of me none of which I was able to access like I love my wife and my my kids and my grandkids and it was it was it was like a nightmarish surrealist novel I had all this waiting for me all this life I put together so carefully and it was constantly dangled out of my reach I was completely consciously aware of that the condition I developed made it impossible for me to live at home so I was divorced from from my profession from all the things that I was working on and from everybody that I loved I had plenty of reason to become like many people do to become bitter it’s not helpful. When I watched the podcast that you did with Michaela I thought you looked angry at moments and I was wondering who who or what you were angry with? Well pain will make you angry right you know so so fate I suppose it was I mean I would say well we’ve had our health troubles in our family for the last few years many years and the last two years were surreal in that regard again it was just too much and so I was never a very rarely angry when I was in the hospitals never angry at the nurses or doctors or very rarely Is there any of you that’s angry with yourself for taking benzodiazepines when now that you know how dangerous they are? Angry I wouldn’t say angry it’s not like I failed to see the irony that was another thing about this that made it quite still continues to make it difficult to stomach you know I could should have I known better I mean I did do my thesis on alcoholism although you know this is hold up hold up yeah you had a side effect from a medication should you have known better that benzodiazepines can cause akathisia in people who take SSRIs? No you didn’t have it like this it turned this wasn’t benzodiazepine dependency problem this was akathisia-sensory disease and you know problem this was an akathisia side effect from psych meds right so like yes and no I couldn’t have known that yes that’s right thank you I have to say we have 10 minutes before we have to wrap up yeah I’m doing okay by the way yeah yeah I know but still or mom will kill me me so Deca what else do you want to talk about? I was curious about whether you know this sort of art Soviet critic where the irony was also not lost on you that about ending up in Russia and it kind of um to have your life saved how do you make sense of that does that just seem like one of the bizarre coincidences of life? Yes it’s it’s no I don’t know how to make sense of that I don’t know how to make sense of the fact that Tammy recovered the day of our 30th wedding anniversary which is literally the case the surgical complications that were threatening her life ended on that day and she had told me a few months earlier that she would recover on our 30th wedding anniversary it’s like I don’t know how to make sense out of that it was it was yeah I don’t know what to what to what to think about that there’s lots of things I don’t know what to think about this the diet too has been a complete shock so that’s maintained been maintained throughout this whole process the hospitals were all willing to feed you your diet is that right? I don’t know how willing they were but but that’s what happened that’s what happened I’m sure some people reading this are going to say this is all kind of pharmacological flim-flam what we surely to god it’s much less complicated than all of this why we have someone with a history of a history of depression who’s lived through extraordinarily stressful surreal as you say few years managing unimaginable pressures and demands and pace of life and this has got nothing to do with medicine or pharmaceuticals this is purely just about somebody cracking under the pressure of life is that a possibility that you’ve considered? Well there’s no doubt that that’s right well that’s the basic answer to that is that like I didn’t develop akathisia until I stopped taking tried to stop taking the benzodiazepines so now whether the I don’t know I can’t say what additional effect the pressure had on making me more susceptible to akathisia for example I don’t think anybody could answer that and I certainly know that stress makes it worse but stress makes everything worse so that’s not that helpful what’s causing you the greatest stress now? Fear that the akathisia will come back right I mean I’ve had it five days well in the last 43 days I’ve had in November I had 26 akathisic days out of 31 and those would last those episodes would last anywhere from five to seven hours so that was just horrific in December I had five days I was akathisic only and in January so far none although it’s still lurking there I can feel the impulse yeah but I can keep it under control or it’s or it’s not intense enough to overwhelm me I don’t want to claim I don’t want to make any unwarranted moral claims about the effect of my will it certainly seems that I am effortlessly suppressing the desire to move constantly almost constantly but that’s starting to recede and the mornings are still very very very difficult but is it difficult you mean difficult to get started difficult to kind of get your brain into gear well I get up and and I start breakfast and then I go and I have a sauna for an hour and a half and then I I’m in the shower and I scrub myself for about 20 minutes and I usually can hardly stand up at that point and then I eat and by the time I start to eat and I’m starting to be I can walk with at a somewhat normal pace by then and then I usually walk for anywhere between two and four hours and and then I can have I’m beginning to have something resembling a productive day my cognition is sharp enough now again so that I can well engage in an interview like this for example or I’ve been increasingly participating in podcasts and that’s probably that’s been the other thing that’s so difficult is my life was so bloody complicated that when it when I stopped my occupational activities it was very very difficult to start them up again because it’s like jumping into a car that’s going 900 miles an hour you know I did a podcast with Matthew McConaughey on December 22nd I think and it was released yesterday and something on the order of a million people 1.2 million people I think have watched it by now it’s I’m to jump back into my life is to jump back into that there’s no simple entry point and so that’s been a real problem I I haven’t known what to do the other thing that happened to me that was terrible in 2020 is that I had this terrible experience of time dilation so when I first woke up in Russia I was asking Michaela when she’d come and visit me I’d ask her what time it was 10 times in 10 minutes assuming that something on the order of half an hour or an hour had gone by since the last time I asked her and so I had these torturous days that were like 100 times longer than they should have been so that’s receded and now I my days are there they last the proper amount of time yes thank god how are you feeling about the prospect of the book coming out and all the demands that that entails and the opportunities that that entails well I’m I’m ambivalent about it because I’m ambivalent I’m ambivalent about it I can’t judge the book properly I didn’t write it under optimal circumstances to say the least and so I’m unsure I can’t tell I can’t make an adequate judgment of its quality I know I believe that my capacity for editing wasn’t what it could be yeah but that was offset to some degree by the fact that I was able to filter what I was writing through the lens of my illness and to eradicate everything that wasn’t sustaining for me while I was in such trouble so it’s amazing to me that you were able to work on the book during that whole year if you would have seen me believe me it would have been more amazing when I recorded the book the audio book in in um November I was akathetic almost the entire time and so 26 days in November I would go to well I would go to the studio virtually convulsing in the car like unable to control my movements unable to control my arms unable to control my legs thrashing about and and Tammy would drive me there or my son some and then the same thing would happen in the lobby I I was moving just frenetically and then I’d go to get upstairs into the studio and force myself to sit down and then force myself to not move for two hours and do the recording was I I was if you would have asked me to lay odds on the probability that well that I would live to finish the recording I would have bet you 10 to 1 that I wouldn’t have but certainly as well that I wouldn’t have been able to do the recording but I did the recording so it’s done and it was the same with the book I mean I have I’ve had lots of support you know my family has supported me tremendously and and the professional staff that I’ve had the fortune to employ have helped me and my viewers have supported me and all of that’s helped a lot and so but not those five days in December I can tell you why I did it five days in December I can tell you why I did it how I could do it it was easy the alternative was worse you know if I would have lost the book I wouldn’t have had anything left no job no no function you know and I’m a I like to work and I’ve always tried to be it’s like a game in some sense I’ve always tried to be as productive as possible on as many fronts as possible simultaneously and I’ve practiced that since I was in graduate school and it’s a game at constant challenge and you know I first lost contact with my professional life well probably when I went on the tour but the tour of course filled in that gap but then when I I spent all my time in 2019 in the hospital with Tammy and that disrupted my professional life completely and then I got so sick I couldn’t get it going again and so that was two years but but I had the book and so I’d you know I’d get to the point where I could sit a bit at by three o’clock and I’d think okay I’m going to sit and write and it was it was hellish but the the thought that I’d stop and and that would fold up and I’d have nothing that was worse and so you know if you’re caught between the devil in the deep blue sea at least you have your choice of demise and so I it was better to work than to not work and that’s definitely the case so that’s why to a degree that I can explain how I was able to manage it I’m not going to talk about willpower or courage I’m going to talk about the lesser of two evils. Yeah that makes sense. We’ve only got a second. Let me ask you one question then I just wanted to ask a little bit about recent news events. If you could turn back the clock five years what would you do differently? I wouldn’t take benzodiazepines. Are you angry with the doctor who prescribed them to you who knew that you had already done 15 years on SSRIs? No look he he he served he was my my daughter’s physician as well and he was very helpful to us for a large part of her trouble and so it would have no I’m not angry with him maybe he should have known better but maybe I should have known better too and like you know he he also it wasn’t like I was consulting him every month there was no reason there was no reason to to raise red flags I was on a relatively moderate dose of benzodiazepine and that’s it’s not like that’s rare it’s unbelievably common now it’s not good as it turns out the FDA put out warnings last fall you know stating quite clearly that these drugs shouldn’t be used for more than 10 days but the FDA didn’t drive that message home until last fall so those are the breaks you know and and I’m not happy and I don’t see how he could have no I don’t harbor any resentment towards him. And just before we finish can I just ask you a quick question about recent news events I’m sure go right ahead you’ve been as kind of gripped as the rest of us by events in Washington in the last couple of weeks um do you obviously lots of people are now saying actually I’ve changed I’ve revised my opinion about Trump I didn’t think he was dangerous I didn’t think he was and you had certainly said quite calmly if you’ve called him a liberal and a moderate no more of a Democrat demagogue than Reagan um do you still feel that or have you similarly changed your view about him? Well I’m not I’m not really when I’m looking at what’s happening in the United States in the last week I’m not really thinking about it in terms of Trump I’m thinking about it in terms of a positive feedback loop that’s developed between the radical left and the radical right and that’s something that I saw coming five years ago and you can put it out at Trump’s feet but it’s not helpful I mean obviously he was the immediate catalyst for the horrible events that enveloped Washington the inexcusable events that enveloped Washington and perhaps it’ll all die down when Trump disappears but I doubt it and what I see what’s happening is there’s a feud going on and the feud is between the radicals on both sides of the political distribution and the left will do something extreme and the right reacts and the right will do something extreme and the left reacts and the left blames the right and the right blames the left and that’s a feud and they’re both right they can both point to incalculably stupid things that their their opposites across the political spectrum have engaged in the danger is that we won’t be able to dampen this down now if Biden is wise and I’m hoping that he is he’ll dampen the positive feedback loop down a system is in a positive feedback loop when it amplifies its own behavior and that’s what’s happening and that can easily get out of control and Biden Biden now has sufficient political power so that he could emerge on the world stage as a genuinely moderate Democrat he could leave the identity politics behind and rule in a Clinton-esque fashion and that would be good and we’ll see I’m I’m hoping he can manage that but the the American political situation is it’s a robust country and it’s been through worse but there’s always the danger that things can spiral out of hand are you more worried now than you were five years ago four years ago no I’m not actually I think that all things considered 2020 could have been a hell of a lot worse politically given the fact that there is a simultaneous pandemic people are under an awful lot of stress everyone they’re too isolated they’re they’re cut off from their family members they’re under unbelievable economic strain and they’re also susceptible to the paranoia inducing influence of the bubbles that have of the bubbles that have emerged on social media and then those are that that technology is exacerbating people’s conspiratorial mindsets because they can find like-minded people and don’t encounter correction it’s not good but having said all that we’re not doing too badly you know if we’re lucky the vaccinations will proceed apace we’ll start to see a real decrease in the intensity of the epidemic by the end of March or the beginning of April it’s not that far away it’ll be mostly the vaccinations will be universally accessible by September and Biden will have proved to be intelligently moderate and cautious and we’ll squeak through this now that’s that’s the most likely outcome as far as I’m concerned and it’s certainly the one that I’m hoping for so you know my objections to the identity politics types were elicited in large part because I thought that the continual pushing on the radical leftist front would wake up the sleeping right and so it came to pass well we’ll see you know I’m not going to say that that was accurate I don’t know how awake the sleeping right is you know and what happened in Washington was appalling but it was also stupidly appalling thank god you know there was an element of farcical theater about it and and so that’s a relief in some sense like it’s much better to see stupidity than malevolence than organized malevolence and I’m not saying there was no organized malevolence there certainly was but there was plenty of theatrical stupidity and Trump is definitely egging that on you know and and he’s divisive in that very divisive in that manner could he be impeached for that I think he should be ignored that the best thing that could happen is that he would fade away and impeachment will amplify well I’m not claiming to be omniscient in these matters but yes I think that impeachment will just man it’s god he’s gone what hang on a sec he’s gone in a week and the Democrats could busy themselves with getting the goddamn vaccinations out you know Biden’s Biden could be a successful president instantly if he did nothing else but vaccinate 100 million people in the next three months and there isn’t anything that’s anywhere near as important as that and I’m hoping that what happened with Trump and the president and the president’s administration is that they’re not going to be able to do anything important as that and I’m hoping that what happened with Trump and his incitation his inciting to protest I’m hoping that will fade away and that wise people will allow it to do exactly that I don’t think stoking the flames is a good idea I’ve never thought that that’s what’s I can from my perspective I could see what was coming too much too much ideological nonsense too much identity politics that’s why Trump was elected to begin with the Democrats alienated their their working class voter base they sacrificed their typical the people that they had stood for for decades on the altar of identity politics and I know why that is too the Democrats don’t have any policy making procedure it’s not part of the political a part of the political system and so what that means is the the radicals who have a narrative control the rudder because they have a narrative and the centrists don’t and this is absolutely clear I’ve been to Washington many times now and watched it so the centrists need a story and there is a story the story would be peace and prosperity for all of us low cost energy you know an economic economic program that would that would that would benefit everyone but maybe even most particularly the poor because inequality is a real problem inequality destabilizes societies it’s clear and so if you’re a right-winger or a left-winger you have your reasons to control inequality if you’re a right-winger you control inequality because you don’t want your society to spiral out of control and if you’re a left-winger you control inequality because it’s unfair that the people at the bottom are suffering the way they are and that’s why you’re in a situation where the people at the bottom are suffering the way they are the ones that stack up at zero it’s a it’s an unbelievably deep problem and cheap ideological solutions aren’t going to solve it you know inequality isn’t a function of capitalism it’s it’s not there’s no evidence for that whatsoever and so the continual attempts of the radical leftists to blame inequality on self-defeating and and if if if if you were i was talking to um matt ridley the other day he wrote the rational optimist a number of other books you know and one of the things you might derive from matt’s books is that if you were truly concerned with the poor and with the environment you would do everything you could to make the poor as rich as possible as fast as you possibly could because rich people can care about the environment and the fastest way to lift rich poor people out of poverty is through free market capitalism clearly and the evidence for that is quite pronounced since the soviet union collapsed more people have been lifted out of poverty than in the entire course of human history before that from 2000 to 2010 the number of people who were in absolute poverty in the world fell by half the chinese just announced its eradication last week and by 2030 the un predicts that there will be no absolute poverty anywhere in the world so there are alternatives to this terribly ideological idiocy that’s that’s threatening the stability of of that’s threatening this it’s threatening stability in places like the united states anyways look i have faith in in western democratic institutions and the americans have been through all sorts of upheavals in the past and come through with flying colors and i think the same thing will happen now i pray that biden keeps the radicals in his party under control he has the mandate to do that he was a moderate he was elected as such and there’s plenty of moderates in the democrat in the democratic party that he could rely on he doesn’t have to pander to the radicals and i’ve seen some evidence of that pandering already it’s very unfortunate you look exactly like we should wrap this up yes otherwise mom is going to wonder why we’ve been doing this for an hour 40 minutes okay okay okay you said i look exactly like you know i mean listening to you speak then that that you would be eminently recognizable to anyone who’s ever followed you or read you or just before but i’m curious do you think what what in any way if in any way do you think the experience of the last year has changed you as a person i have far more appreciation for the banality of the normal you have no idea what a privilege it is to be able to sit down on that note thank you i have to shut down though so look before we before we stop michela we should think about this deca you should think about whether you got everything you wanted i mean i want this interview to be i want you to be satisfied with this interview and uh it’s in it’s obviously in my interest as well as yours that you’re satisfied with this interview and so if you have other questions if you think there are things that we haven’t talked about if you think there are lacunae and in our conversation then let us know okay and we’ll make arrangements to talk to you again fantastic thank you i really really appreciate this all of you thank you i guess i i have one other one question for you too i think of all the things i think it would be a mistake to tilt this discussion too much towards the details of my illness because the story the story here that hasn’t been told properly is the reason for the tremendous hunger that’s manifested itself for the sorts of things that i’ve been talking about and there isn’t a journalist who’s got that right yet and i think that’s because journalists tend to look at things from a political perspective and this hasn’t been a fundamentally political what i’ve been doing hasn’t been fundamentally political even though it’s been cast that way you know i’ve been trying to help people i’ve been trying to point out to people that they need a profound meaning in their life because their lives are difficult and and without a sustaining meaning then you can become bitter and that’s a bad outcome and also that the meaning that you need to sustain yourself is to be found through responsibility and that’s the fundamentally that’s the fundamental message that’s resounded with people it’s that small equation meaning justifies suffering and meaning is to be found through responsibility and meaning is to be found through responsibility and no one is delivering that message but it’s not optional that knowledge it’s vital people can’t live without knowing that and so that’s what i’ve been telling people is that look your life is going to be hard and that can warp and and hurt you in a way that will incline you to make things worse rather than better but you can forestall that without being naive by taking on the proper responsibility in your life for yourself and for your family and for your community and that’s real that makes things better it’s not just a psychological paper over it’s the genuine article and then i have all these thousands of people who are continually communicating with me who say i’ve tried that i tried that i was desperate and i tried that and it works so that shouldn’t be lost in the shuffle and and in the details of my you know bizarre affliction it’s a sideshow so good talking with you thank you thank you don’t let the sun burn too badly in jamaica thanks very much thank you okay hello hi mikaela how are you doing good not bad how are you i’m okay we’re um i’m not feeling quite at my most professional mikaela we’ve got stranded in jamaica oh um due to covid please there are definitely worse places to be stranded you are not wrong so jealous but the wi-fi in the house we’re currently in is slightly ropey so i’ve just had a slightly nervy 10 minutes but okay okay hopefully hopefully i don’t mind um and mikaela thank you so much this is really helpful if i can get a sort of full briefing from you yeah i just wanted to um so i’ll give you the brief story i’ve recounted it a whole bunch of times every time we get a new doctor so um i’ll give you the background and i wanted to do it because my dad is he’s still not fully recovered he’s probably not going to be fully recovered for another year to be honest um and he’s not going to be fully recovered for another year to be honest um and he’s still extremely prone to anxiety and so any recounting of it is it knocks him out for a couple days so hopefully tomorrow can if i give you all the like nitty-gritty nasty details then he can fill you in on you know how he feels and everything but he won’t have to go through all all of what happened yeah got you okay so do you um let me start from i’m i’m gonna let him tell his story i’m just gonna tell the medical stuff that he doesn’t want to get into got you okay so in in 20 he was taking ssris for i think i believe 14 years it was a long time um and to treat fairly severe depression that seems to run in our family and that was going and can i ask you have you always had that all your life was that sort of part of your family experience your father’s depression yeah my great-grandpa had it and he ended up on the you know very depressed living on the couch for the last you know 10 years of his life like very very depressed it hit my grandpa in his 40s um and then it hit my dad he said it was there but it wasn’t bad until his late 20s um and so he didn’t start taking because he didn’t want to take medication for it but it was starting to affect his lecturing he wasn’t able to lecture he was working at harvard and it started to affect his lecturing so he started taking ssri and it and it helped quite a bit and then it hit me and it hit me when i was really little like 12 um so it’s this familial depression and in 2015 um we went on a low carb diet he got a lot healthier you can see from the videos in 2015 to 2016 he lost he went from 218 to 160 he lost a whole bunch of weight um he had gourd and gum disease that got better he had psoriasis that got better and his depression started to get better so he went off of the antidepressants and it was things were okay and then they weren’t okay and he went on um he went on rogan and he got a lot of negative media for this but he talked about this uh sodium metabisulfite response in apple cider where he had severe insomnia and it is actually something that happened it happened to both of us and we now know what you were both affected by yeah it was over christmas and it hit him it hit it was really awful but it hit him harder he was and that was at the end of 2016 is that right so this was after he had been off of ssri’s for about a year this was um at the end of 2016 yeah yeah it was at the very end of 2016 so he had this response where he got pale he couldn’t stand up without blacking out he wasn’t sleeping he had this impending sense of doom and he’d had similar reactions like this throughout the previous year but then it had been interspersed with no depression and then these weird depressive um reactions so we had we had this reaction and he went to the doctor after about a week of being he was in really bad shape like um and this was kind of at the same time he was under a lot of stress because the book was about to come out i was just gonna say exactly he was i mean 2016 had been a big year for him in his career yeah so not only was there this health thing but there was actual life stress going on so there was some question at u of t about whether or not he was going to keep his job um yeah so that was incredibly stressful and then just even just having people come up in the street even though that was overwhelmingly positive just going from not being known to being known was stressful but the main our entire family agrees the main problem here was this weird health thing and we were going to doctors and they didn’t really know what was going on so he was we went he went to the family doctor and the family doctor put him on a really low dose of benzodiazepine and just is that the same family doctor who’d been prescribed in the ssris before then got you so um he just took it and it helped with his especially with the insomnia and then he had we didn’t really think about it because he’d been taking ssris for you know 14 years and he had this year where we were trying to get the depression under control and then so he was on another you know psych med and we’re like okay whatever um at that time we were not aware of the response some people can have to that so he stayed on that and he did his world tour and things were okay um we’re pretty good i would say and then my so you weren’t concerned at that point at all it felt as if this sort of situation to be managed yeah well we thought we didn’t really know what these i knew because i have an autoimmune condition on top of it and i’d been having these reactions these ridiculous food reactions that was also kind of ridiculed and so we had similar reactions and i didn’t actually end up taking any medication because i was pregnant at the time so i was like i’m not doing anything i’m just whatever this is maybe it’ll go away um so we didn’t think about it and about a year so it was 20 i want to make sure i get the years right um 2020 2019 in 2019 2018 at the end of 2018 my mom got diagnosed with cancer yes um yeah and it was one of it was kidney cancer one of the better cancers and things are kind of slow in canada so she didn’t end up getting the surgery she needed until march and then about a month after the surgery um they said oh this isn’t the type of cancer we thought it was this is actually uh collecting duct carcinoma and you have eight months and nothing helps like they said we can do surgery but there’s no really no response to chemo and it’s this extremely rare cancer and we did a whole bunch of research and it was this extremely rare cancer that is extremely deadly and at that point my dad’s obviously it was just horrible because it was she’s healthy she had no symptoms and then suddenly had this and so the doctor put the benzodiazepines up and dad started to get super weird um is that because i think originally he said he was on like 0.25 and then it jumped up to four milligrams is that right i think that’s why i don’t know if it started at 0.25 twice a day or 0.5 twice a day okay but it was low and it went up to four and it went up it didn’t go up from that to four it went up slowly because it went up a bit and he got way worse so he started getting what we now know is akathisia and what did that look like yeah how did that manifest again akathisia is a uh it manifested as extreme anxiety um and suicidality something that he had never had being depressed like he’d never had suicidal even thoughts um being depressed so this was nothing that i’d ever seen or that my family had ever seen and we immediately thought something’s going on with medication but my mom was also on the verge of death and so we’re like he’s absolutely head over heels in love with her who knows how hard he’s taking it but he it was still something was wrong right so then the doctor put the medication up a little bit more and then this got worse and and then my dad who was trying to be stable because of how horrible this situation was when this was this is when things got really bad he went to a psychiatrist in toronto who said okay you have treatment resistant depression um trichetamine but in order to try ketamine you need to get off of the benzodiazepines and then he scheduled an appointment for ketamine and i’m not happy with the psychiatrist because you can’t stop taking benzodiazepines and we didn’t know that we found out but we didn’t know that so after so he stopped taking them to get to do this ketamine treatment and he’d stopped like when he stopped the antidepressants he had some side effects but he’d he’d kind of stopped before some of the summer times he didn’t take them when he felt a little bit better so he didn’t think about this anyway about a week after stopping and after two ketamine treatments he was in terrible shape like and i went over so suicide if i’d met him during that period what would i have noticed how would he have presented um extremely agitated and almost like somebody who was in pain to me it looked like pain and um i went over there and i thought and i like looked at him and i was like oh my god i can’t even talk to this guy right he’s not even here what’s going on and we called one of our friends who’s a psychiatrist and that guy said he’s in benzodiazepine withdrawal he can’t do that right so he went back on but he went to because at this point he was like oh no i have this dependency that i’ve formed i need to get off of this stuff um so he went back on to half the dose um and then it turned out he was just in withdrawal because you have to it’s crazy some people have to titrate down by using drops of this medication which isn’t something a lot of doctors know so when you’re put on the medication they’re not going to say by the way to get off of this you might need to cut your pill into slivers right so anyway so then he was put on um more mood stabilizers and his akathisia which is actually a fairly common side effect to psych meds his akathisia got way worse and for the last two years we’ve been bouncing from doctor to doctor um and for a while his akathisia was misdiagnosed so it took about it took until august this summer to actually diagnose him with akathisia which is a side effect of a medication but he was bounced from you know bipolar depression one person diagnosed him with schizophrenia and it was like he’s just not he’s in pain because of these medications so he went to this is in the news too um we made kind of a family decision was like these medications are harming you you need to get off of them but you can’t seem to without this horrible withdrawal and worsening akathisia so rehab so he went to rehab in the states and they that was on the eastern seaboard is that right yeah he um it was terrible he ended up there for i believe he was there september until november oh my goodness he was there for two months a month and a half yeah oh i see right okay yeah or two months definitely september till november 2019 and he ended up on more medication coming out and in worse shape um and so he went home and tried titrating down again and again ended up in such a this akathisia was so bad akathisia makes people suicidal it’s this crawling feeling that’s so bad you can see people on youtube try to describe it it’s a crawling sensation that makes you not want to stop moving and so it’s commonly misdiagnosed as schizophrenia because they don’t know what it is and in order to treat schizophrenia you get put on psych meds and that causes worsening akathisia so he was in he we uh he was in a hospital in toronto he got back from the first rehab center and then his akathisia got worse when he tried to get off these medications plus they had added in two more so he was in worse shape so we hospitalized him because we were worried about his safety um and it when you were worried that he would injure himself that he would that he would hurt himself and he was worried right like really oh yeah it was really bad and this is not like this isn’t him right he’s never had that kind of tendency not even in in the least so we’re like something this is really bad so he was hospitalized here in a public hospital and they diagnosed him with schizophrenia and doubled some of the medications and so my family was there and at this point my grandparents had flown over my uncle had flown over and we were going the medications are making him sick get him off of them how do we get him off of them and the hospital here said it’s schizophrenia we should do ect oh ect god yeah and he’s there so their entire position is that he has a psychiatric condition that they need to try it with drugs your entire position is he has had psychiatric side effects from being given drugs he should not be on and the solution is to get him off the drugs not to be giving them but you’re at total cross-purposes at that moment medical establishment it was so bad and that like i can remember one of the conversations we had with this psychiatrist he goes well we think it’s schizophrenia and i was like these symptoms didn’t even start until he started the medications okay so you’re telling me like a mid 50 year old man with no previous symptoms of schizophrenia suddenly gets schizophrenia which doesn’t generally it generally happens late teens for men it’s not like we’re uneducated in these things right i was like what how about you remove the meds and just see if it’s a side effect given the fact it could be and he they wouldn’t listen to us so we called this is my mom this was just i was worried my mom was going to get sick again i was like i don’t know what causes cancer i’ve been wondering what’s been going on for your mom during this whole period during that whole period in 2019 back to that she she’d had the surgery and then she obviously she had those terrible problems with lymphatic drainage okay so she had the surgery and then they nicked a lymph duct and so over the next month it was like why isn’t mom healing why isn’t mom healing and she ended up in emergency about six weeks after the first surgery and in canada like we couldn’t we had to wait in emergency to see somebody even though she just had the surgery um and then she was in the hospital for a month um she couldn’t eat anything so she was on tpn she lost a whole bunch of weight because she wasn’t absorbing any nutrients and it was just it was like a horror movie like every day was like a horror movie and they’re like we don’t know what to do we can’t find the leak um and so we ended up thank goodness we had have money because we stayed there and they couldn’t fix it they couldn’t fix it um and we ended up flying down to um flying down to the states and then they did a surgery where they went in to try and find the leak and they couldn’t find it so they injected this poppy seed dye that sometimes works and it sealed the leak and then she recovered in like you know not psychologically because she was traumatizing but she recovered like in days as soon as the leak stopped um but at that point so that was august 2019 at that but at that point that’s when your dad started to be in real trouble yeah so he was akathetic like crazy we didn’t really understand what was going on because it’s like dad why are you so well suicidal and uncomfortable why can’t you sit down things are okay now and it was because you mean he would literally be unable to just sit in an armchair and with a glass in his hand and just have a kind of conversation where he’s just sort of sitting still and focusing yeah that couldn’t happen no he was pacing he was just pacing it was it was like as bad as the bad videos of people on youtube look were any of the doctors saying this is about grief and panic about his wife’s condition this is nothing this isn’t a psychiatric condition this is just this is a kind of grief response was that serious well doing around no no no it was really like they were looking back on the 14 years of antidepressants and saying this is a re-emergence of depression um exacerbated by stress uh but it had it didn’t have the same symptoms at all right he was never like his depression was like walking through tar right like he could sit on the couch he napped all the time it was like a heavy tar it wasn’t agitated panic yeah so so he’s in this hospital in toronto and they they said we can’t get him off the medications because he needs to be sedated because he’s so agitated because so they increased everything and at this point he was he had this sensation to move but he was so sedated that he couldn’t move very well and i couldn’t communicate with him like my family and i couldn’t communicate with him in this hospital very well and they wanted to do ect for schizophrenia and so we started calling kind of rehab clinics um around the world we we contacted 57 places my husband and i because at this point my mom like i said i was worried the stress was going to make her ill and it was too much and so we wrote down all the rehab centers we could write down called them and explained what was going on and said he’s on too many medications he’s having these side effects can you get rid of them uh can you get rid of them and everyone we called except for two places said no we have to stabilize him first and i was like the only thing these places use to stabilize people are like antipsychotics or benzodiazepines and we’re like those are the problems what do we do so this one this sounds absolutely insane but this one place in russia knew who dad was and was like yeah we do we do detoxes i was wondering when you have these conversations with these sort of stuff clinics are you explaining who your father is is that part of the conversation or do most of them have no idea it’s just i didn’t i didn’t explain at that point because we also didn’t know we didn’t know what was going on we’re like this could go we don’t we can’t handle the media at the moment on top of dealing with whatever the hell is going on um so no we we didn’t tell anyone who they were until we’d had a number of conversations but sorry there were three places there was a place in israel a place in serbia and a place in russia and israel has a very similar medical system to like a north american medical system so when we talked to them a number of times after we got past the money they said no we’d have to stabilize him first but don’t worry we can do that but we’d already tried a number of psychiatrists in canada and a rehab center in the u.s and a hospital in canada and no one had been able to stabilize him um because it was akathisia so uh we went to russia every like my whole family like all my uh my aunt and my uncle and my grandparents we they all flew down over christmas my dad was in the hospital over christmas um in 2019 and and we talked to these guys in russia and we said look he can’t wean down these medications are killing him we could do a detox these guys say they could do it but it’s going to be you know it’s in russia first of all um it’s got to be dangerous because no one else will do it so what do we do because and so my family agreed okay let’s give it a shot no at that point we tried a number of things like you know we got we got to the point especially when he went to the rehab center in the states because that was a high up it was an up there rehab center um and when that just made him worse we were like oh well what do we do how do we get him off these things do we just do it ourselves do we just like keep him safe but he was in so much pain from this akathisia that it’s like this isn’t fair somebody who’s like this should be like i can understand why they would sedate people because they need to be calm down because it looks like pain or something so we know at that point we didn’t go to russia until we were completely out of options right and we um we’d hoped that the hospital in canada would help but then they suggested keeping him on the meds and doing ect and it was like that is not what his brain needs he doesn’t need to be zapped he’ll forget like the side effects you can forget the last year or or two and then what if it doesn’t work because it’s not going to because it’s side effects so we went to russia my husband’s russian and that was the scariest thing i’ve ever done hands down by far and he went we flew it was like a movie we flew there on my birthday we got there and the day we got there they was you your husband your your child and your dad is that right and a security was he down at that point kind of walk and check in himself and navigate an airport or no did you feel very much that you were flying in the dirt we took yeah we took a private plane um oh did you we took a private plane yeah he was trying okay he was at this point the hospitals he’d been in put him on this regiment where it was like medication every three hours to try and stabilize him so we flew with a security guard and a nurse um to monitor the transfer um who had russian passports so they were allowed to go because we had to get a visa over christmas it was like it was absolutely ridiculous so we get to russia and they bring us to this pretty nice hospital where they do detoxes um for people on drugs and most of them are opiate detoxes so this was not a usual case um and they do i guess in at least in eastern europe the sedated detoxes are much more common than they are here so they use propofol they put you into a kind of a coma but a sedation and then wait till the drugs are out of what they did for dad at that point he was on a lot of medication he was way worse than he had been even in the summer when my mom was sick way worse because he couldn’t remember things at that point because of the medication so i put him in this propofol oh so he gets there and when he arrives he has a fever and we’re like why does he have a fever and they do a scan and he had pneumonia in both lungs that’s funny that’s the that’s when they finally diagnosed yeah he contracted in the toronto hospital yes so he’d had it i don’t know how long he’d had it because it was walking pneumonia so maybe he’d been there for months but i don’t think so because when he got into the hospital in toronto he was walking around and he was there for two weeks and um at the end when we took him out he was just in a bed he didn’t have any energy but it was hard to tell if it was the pills yes so we got there and he has a we didn’t get his medical records they they um they were not okay with it we had to sign papers taking full responsibility of whatever happened so he was discharged against doctor’s orders and they were annoyed about it enough that they wouldn’t give us his papers which is not even legal right you’re supposed to get discharged it was a complete mess but um i think they were confused because whatever was going on with him was very severe they hadn’t seen it before and they knew who he was so it was just um it was just a mess and they’re like what are you doing you’re going to russia they’re just like what is happening but we certainly weren’t going to keep him on the drugs and do ect under a diagnosis of schizophrenia and he was well enough that he talked to the psychiatrist and was like look i’m not having delusions like i’m not schizophrenic i’m just i i can’t stop moving i have this crawling sensation right i have this impending he wanted to go to russia yeah he agreed so like we we made sure because in case something terrible happened we needed everybody to be on the same page so yes yeah it was not that was a really awful christmas so so um so everyone was on the same page we got to russia they put him in this um detox and then he ended up being intubated which he wasn’t supposed to be um because of this freaking double yeah so that was horrible because that was terrifying so during the um during the detox they did something called plasma phoresis which takes your blood and cleans it um which you kind of sounds like something out of science fiction but it’s a real thing and they could test benzodiazepines have such a long half life that there’s yeah there’s a theory that maybe some of the withdrawal is because you still have benzodiazepines in you yeah so the plasma phoresis got rid of everything and when we got there the russian doctors who i couldn’t communicate with which was terrifying but my husband yeah so my husband to me to my husband to me but that that was awful too um i was like how long can how fast can i learn russian but it’s difficult um so where was i oh yeah when we got there they said we think he’s been poisoned and that this was on purpose the russian doctors they’re like we think someone was doing this on purpose and i was like no it it’s just a whole it’s just kind of what happens right if you have these symptoms you get put on these other medications and he just it’s really not on purpose but they’re so much more careful in eastern europe because there’s not as much sounds like a conspiracy theory but there’s not as much payment to doctors from pharmaceutical companies so doctors don’t care if they use certain meds so benzodiazepines are almost never prescribed and even the other psych meds i’ll get to that anyway so he does this detox um he wakes up he was sedated with these and intubated for nine days um what were you doing mccadey you you sort of where where are you the husband to show at that point okay so we just shown up we we stayed at a hotel for a couple of days then got an airbnb then found us someone to help with scarlett because we were spending time at the hospital making sure everything was not being sketchy because it’s russia i don’t know it didn’t look sketchy but you want to make sure it’s not sketchy so we feeling good hands or could you not really tell initially yeah it looked really good the hospital we first went to looked um like decades ahead of the hospitals i’ve seen in canada the public ones it was super clean when you walked in we got there and you know i can still communicate with dad he’s just in a lot of pain we get there and there are these shoe covers you step into this machine and it covers your shoe in plastic automatically yeah which he’d never seen before and he was like we got a this is genius now in the era of covid it might be genius but um anyway we uh so he was relieved too my dad was relieved when he got there because he was like he thought he was gonna die he was like i keep going to hospitals they keep putting me on more medication i’m akathetic i can’t control it um i’m gonna die um so we were at that point and that’s why we ended up in russia so he does the he does the detox and he wakes up and he’s in bad shape like um delirious but also not really talking so when he first he’s conscious um i thought he was catatonic so bad really really really bad when he first woke up he was there a little bit oh actually when he first first woke up so this was nine days after he told me uh the akathesis is gone that that was it um the akathesis is gone and i was like okay well thank god for that because that’s what was making him suicidal the akathesis is gone um and we couldn’t it was a hospital so we were visiting hours so we couldn’t stay we came the next day and then he wasn’t responding he was catatonic and i went to the i couldn’t communicate with the doctors i went to the doctors and i was like he needs like he needs to be stabilized but don’t use you know this array of medication but something is really wrong what’s happening what’s going on um and because realistically these guys hadn’t really done detoxes from a whole bunch of psych meds they were used to dealing with people on opiates realistically yeah um anyway so he was he was catatonic and then he was delirious so um we came in the next day and he thought my husband was his old roommate yeah who died um oh it was horrible so he oh yeah so i was like he you know this is a huge problem he needs to they’re not he’s not being something’s wrong and he’s not being taken care of anyway so the people he must have been panicking at that point i was like i’m yeah like i lost i’ve got a whole bunch of hair extensions in this is not this is not all me but yeah i’ve never been that stressed in my entire life and my husband obviously we’d brought dad here and it was like what did the detox do it was it too hard on his brain like um it looked like it was going to take him like two years to recover if he was going to recover it was it was really bad and so he got transferred to a reanimatology clinic um which is for people with severe like head trauma basically three hours north of moscow a public russian hospital and and um pardon oh yeah oh so you mean it’s so when it’s a word he comes out of the induced coma of the delirium they say what we’ll just send them off to the public hospital because they’ll have to yeah so at that point i was like we have you must have been freaking out that was and this isn’t just like i was like the entire i’m fucked if this goes badly because the entire world is going to blame me because who brings somebody to detox first of all from these medications in russia i was like this is really bad plus more importantly this is my dad and this isn’t fair like what’s this isn’t fair he’s been injured by medication that he was put on um so we get to the reanimatology clinic and and the re the head doctor andre so i couldn’t even go inside i was in the car and i was like green and nauseous and i was just like he’s not going to remember this like andre you go because i can’t talk to anyone i’m just going to yell at people right at that point i was just going in and yelling at people and i was like i can’t just go into this and yell at someone in english it’s not helpful so he went in and he came out and he was green and i was like what did they say and he said that he’d explained why we’d come that he was being put on too many medications back home and that they wouldn’t remove them and he was going to die and we’d brought him here and the head nurse had said oh so you’ve brought him here so we can finish the job and so we went home that day and you know that was not a good day i had a like i it was like out of a movie it was three hours north of moskow so we had to drive in moskow winter up there which is insane it had a guarded fence around it um it was like soviet era hospital from a movie it was a huge center and it was full of really thank god really really really really skilled doctors so it i went the next day and dad was back whatever they had done had just so i i got there and he he hadn’t been moving right he sits up and he looks at me and he goes you are in so much trouble and i was like dad dad um and he he was really confused by that response because he’s like i’m just i’m just mad at you and you’re just like happy to see me and so we explained because he was still pretty out of it um we explained you know he couldn’t even remember getting on the plane he couldn’t remember getting on the plane to go to russia so he remembered the entire hospital in um toronto wow yeah so he went from like early december to waking up in a russian hospital jesus i know it doesn’t it’s absolutely absurd i don’t know what he’s forgotten the whole of his toronto hospital experience and the journey to russia and the degree into the detox clinic so he’s gone he’s lost everything like a month and a half yeah a month and a half yeah and i think that was because so he was akathetic at the beginning of december um hold on i’m just gonna close this door um anyway and then when he went into this hospital in toronto they had literally doubled some of the medications he was on um to stabilize him and and then he didn’t remember anything after that but what have they done in the public hospital in russia what have they done overnight okay to bring you back what did they do so they had they had given him when i looked at the list because i was like did they give him a benzodiazepine like what exactly is going on here um and they had given him a whole bunch of really low dose kind of everything but most importantly from what we learned um he was on using dextre which is something they use for they use it for surgery to put it’s kind of like propofol they use it to sedate people who are in a lot of pain or for surgery and to calm people down but it’s not a benzodiazepine or an antipsychotic or one of these sedative drugs it’s called dextre dexmedidine i think in um in the u.s uh and so he was he had this iv of dextre um and then they they added a whole bunch of vitamins like they just threw everything at him to try and get him to stabilize but they didn’t use benzodiazepines which is at the time which is what we were concerned about um and over the next you he was like okay get me out of here like right now and i oh because we had to go the stupid hospital it was there was no in russia you can bribe people and it’s a bit more loose with rules and this hospital was like soviet era there was no staying over the time limit like it didn’t matter who you are what you were offering um so there were two hours of visiting there were two hours of visiting hours um a day so we drove three hours there uh to visit and then three hours home and over the next uh i can’t remember exactly he was in there for i believe eight days it wasn’t very long thinking back on it given the state he was in but he every day was get me out of here get me out of here and it was like well dad you have to be able to walk you have because he couldn’t walk at this point he couldn’t walk no and we don’t know like why exactly right and presumably that’s what you want to understand what on earth has happened why he is the way he is and even the people who done the detox were like this isn’t you know we don’t know and they had they were they had good doctors but no one could explain why what had happened exactly so the detox people had no idea about why he’s why he emerged in that way well all they knew was that they were more familiar with detoxing that’s not exactly true the head psychiatrist at this reanimatology clinic they did mris and ct scans to try and figure out what was going on see if there’s brain damage or anything and they looked at the mri and they said oh he has damage from the ssris and i was like what and they’re like yeah he has brain changes from the ssris because he was on the ssris for so long and i was like okay whatever like i kind of just ignored that um that comes into play a little bit later so they did see brain changes they didn’t see brain damage they said brain changes but they couldn’t really identify what was going on through scans which was good nothing’s really wrong they said that there was a bit of ischemic damage but it looked old so it really wasn’t clear what had happened um and so over the next eight days he went from sitting up in bed to like shuffling to walking to basically running down the halls and he was like i’m getting out of here he got off of the deck store in a in a week and then when we left when we left that place we drove so then he was going to the actual rehab center not that he was a rehab patient but they did neurological rehab as well so and we had no we couldn’t bring him home he needed too much care um he was still like not not well when we brought him out of that hospital he could barely walk he couldn’t he didn’t really understand where his feet were he said he’s like i’m blind like i’m i’m blind with my feet so he’d hit his feet on things um he forgot how to type so he put his hands on the keyboard and he’s like it’s not there i don’t know how to type and we were just like jesus this is not good like this is really not good um and so he went and stayed at the rehab center which we you know drove is that the one in florida no this was still in russia this is this is where he would organize the detox this is now the third place in russia so the first yeah this is location number three in russia yeah location number three the for the deal was he does the detox in a hospital and he moves to the rehab center the the reanimatology clinic was not supposed to happen he was not so i understand i see so this is always where he was meant to be for convalescing after the detox got you yes exactly so he’s there um and we i was carefully met monitoring the medication because i was like i don’t want i know that these medications make him sick so like remove everything that’s not you know he was on proton pump inhibitors they’d added in a whole bunch of things and i was like he doesn’t need a whole bunch of this stuff i was gonna say that what you’re trying to do is get him off meds not more right yeah and so that was annoying but he ended up on and here’s where things get tricky so he ended up on a very very low dose of an anti-psychotic um to stabilize um and a very low dose of an antidepressant where and we thought okay these are like tiny amounts if that’s what he needs to be stable we can get rid of those later when we’re at home like whatever so he’s doing pretty good he’s getting better and better we’re going for walks one of his friends flew out got a visa flew out and stayed with him like all day because so that someone was there with him we we talked to the rehab center they were really they took a huge risk bringing him in there and they were really helpful with letting people stay and visit but he was like i want to go home this is russia this is like scary um and we wanted to go home and we thought okay we’ll go to florida because he’s not i didn’t want to bring him back to toronto with mom because it was still too much work taking care of him like he needed nurses and things so we went to florida and then my brother came to visit and was like oh my god you know dad’s better like a lot better so this had been a month it was horrible this morning would you wake up in the morning and walk to breakfast read the papers send to me emails is it that level of function or not really no he was staying in bed until mid-afternoon but then he’d get up and swim he was barbecuing right so and but he was like kind of quieter than than normal and a little bit slower than he should be and muted yeah and i was like okay well he’ll i’m more comfortable that he’ll recover now but something’s a bit off so we’re there for a week and a half and the akathisia comes back and we’re like oh god it was so it was so awful he uh yeah he called me and he’s he’s like i’m you know it’s the zakathia is back i’m suicidal again and it was just like what is going on so we thought it was yeah yeah and it was like why it was gone it was gone nine days after all the medications left like it just started to like what what’s going on and i thought it’s the medications it’s got to be the medications even though it’s very low dose and she said was it um antidepressant and anticyclotic um but we were also getting information from doctors that this could be like protracted benzodiazepine withdrawal that just popped up now so really yeah it wasn’t it turns out it was akathisia from the medication but um we didn’t know that and so at that point we’re like well what do we do we’ve already called at the hospitals in the the u.s and if we bring them there when he’s akathisic they’re going to put him on meds they’ve already they’ve straight up told us that it’s like we’re not going back to russia thanks um i was like you know what do we do now so we thought maybe it’ll just go away maybe this is protracted benzodiazepine withdrawal and it’ll just go away so we stayed with him my grandparents came down um and we stayed with him and for months and the akathisia got worse and it got worse and cognitively he was getting clearer but he was in a lot of pain so it’s numbness on his left side this inability to sit down and lay down um this urge to walk around and this suicidality from this crawling sensation and super super low blood pressure so he whenever he’d stand up he he’d black out anyway so we contacted this that clinic in serbia oh one of the doctors from serbia had flown out when dad was in the re reanimatology clinic because we had wanted to obviously wanted a second opinion we’re like what are these people doing we need we need someone who knows what they’re doing here just to check on them and he’d come and and he came this actually made us feel way better he came and said this is good he’s doing well and we’re like oh wow thank god for that so we’d had like an outside outside source check on these guys because at that point we were like these guys don’t know what they’re doing um anyway so we were in contact with the serbian clinic and this was like top of the world private hospital where a lot of people from the middle east go to so we talked to this we talked to this doctor and he said you know you should come to this neuro rehab clinic we do we deal with this stuff i’ve dealt with this stuff before i’ve dealt with benzo withdrawal um and his akathisa he didn’t go off of these medications because well they were such a small amount nobody knew that they could cause such severe responses so we ended up it got to the back it got so bad that he was a danger to himself and my family couldn’t handle it anymore it was like my grandparents were there helping take care of him and it was just like it was way too much so we went to serbia so when he said too much he said he was still in the clinic in florida no we were at home so this is at the same time we flew there late late february covid happened in march so like everything shut down march april so we had rented a house and were staying with him taking care of him from in which city um palm beach okay got you just yeah kind of relax and heal yes um and then cove it and then we were taking care of like my family my grandparents my dad in this covid mess was oh my god this is a disaster so anyway months passed like horrible months passed he’s so you’re all in this house in palm beach kind of pretty much in semi-lockdown trying to look after your dad and he’s getting worse and we have no idea why and he’s suicidal although it would be so his symptoms are they’re way worse in the morning than they are in the evening so in the evening he’d actually be pretty good it was weird it would like he’d do he’d do a whole bunch of swimming do some weights even in his horrible state he’d do this stuff and then by like 5 30 he could sit down and have dinner and by 9 p.m we’d watch tv and he’d be laying on the couch watching tv and he’d he had a bit of a sense of humor it was absolutely absurd and then it’d be like shit the morning is going to happen again like what is going on he was like how much am i contributing like is this in my head just we had no idea what was going on so we went to serbia and we get to serbia and you probably saw the podcast dad and i did together um so they put him in under propofol again because he was so anxious and of course he’s like i’m back in eastern europe i’m never gonna see my wife i’m never gonna go home like i’m doomed is he articulating all of these things yeah he was doing better like at that point for he wasn’t less he wasn’t in a better place but at least he was more cognitively there but there are great some refusals and vanguards here riffing on all the kind of yeah sort of worst case scenarios worst case for sure um although it wasn’t unreasonable given what had happened so so they seemed to stabilize him they did this propofol sleep which seemed to help and we figured maybe he wasn’t sleeping right because some people go into benzo withdrawal and they can’t sleep so we’re like i don’t know what happened but thank god he’s back although he was a little like honestly i would say stoned he seemed kind of stoned but i was like i don’t care he’s at least he’s relaxed thank goodness um and then about three weeks later the akathisia came back and the doctor there was like what is going on and so that’s where he was diagnosed with akathisia and that doctor said i can’t help because i can’t use any medication to help him it’s the medications causing these problems and there isn’t anything i can do and um at that point well we were like well at least that makes sense right it’s not it’s a side effect um and they ended up using they ended up using a and a partial opiate um so this is something that it’s been difficult to know how much of this to talk about and how much of it not to talk about because since i we put out a video saying hey you know dad’s in rehab this is what’s going on because people are going to find out anyway and we’re back in september 2019 yeah um that was september 2019 yeah and because we’ve always been pretty honest about what’s going on and it was like he’s writing these self-help books he’s having a hard time like we can’t it’s worse if we kind of keep that hidden so we’ve been and it was so much to bear that telling keeping people updated when he just disappeared was was ideal but the problem with that is i’ve had probably 3000 people email me asking how dad’s got his akathisia under control because there are people who are suicidal living daily with akathisia being treated with psych meds and that are probably worsening the symptoms because akathesis just so poorly understood so anyway so what he what he did was he started using a suboxone which doesn’t it’s like uh it’s a partial opiate and technically they use it to treat people who are addicted to opiates to get them off of it um which obviously wasn’t his problem but it also has calming properties and it’s used to treat akathisia yeah so if you there are studies online too if you find someone who really knows what they’re doing um they can safely use opiates to treat akathisia because you can’t use any of the other sedating drugs like any of the psych meds can trigger it ssris snris antipsychotics really really can benzodiazepines like he tried all of them so um the serbian clinic had tried everything it was insane they tried everything because they had stabilized him initially but it turns out akathesis a little bit more complicated it’s delayed so it doesn’t happen necessarily it doesn’t necessarily happen as soon as you take the medication for my dad it happens three weeks later so that that’s why he kept getting better and then the akathisia would come back the akathisia would come back so um so when we’re in serbia for three months trying to stabilize him because this doctor is just like i can’t believe this because it’s fairly rare and his was so severe that it was very rare um and he so we ended up flying him home um i i came home actually to organize the transfer my husband stayed there with um we got covid when we were there that’s not even like that yes that’s i did you did okay so and then caught it in the hospital is that correct or am i wrong i don’t know where we caught it from but um so when we got to serbia serbia is interesting it was completely open completely open so going from the states to serbia was like whoa and the government had said there are no covid cases there i remember the one said yeah so the golden star golden star yeah and we were so not like because my dad was we weren’t concerned covid was like least on our list of problems um so anyway then then elections happened there were and then they shut down the country like days after elections they were like oh covid is everywhere um mandatory quarantine and then there were riots um my nanny at that point got hit on the outskirt of a crowd with tear gas because of the riots because people were like hey you said there was no covid and now it’s everywhere and you just like their elections are a little off so so we we all it was either quarantine at home and not see dad at all or quarantine in the hospital and at this point so yeah yeah so i was like no freaking way are we doing that so we stayed in a in a room in the hospital and 11 days into quarantine my daughter probably was the first one to get symptoms she just had an upset stomach and then my nanny had an upset stomach and then i had an upset stomach but it was like whatever it’s like an upset stomach it’s not that bad so quarantine was over this is 14 days we moved back home um and as soon as we got home the hospital is like jordan has we tested him because they’re testing all the time jordan has covid and we’re still all sick right but we’re like no freaking way like are you kidding me so we all got covid including my nanny everyone at the hospital got covid um igor the head guy of the hospital he’d already had covid like a lot of people had had antibodies already there um and then they treated dad preemptively so you can take like some of the protocols involve involve antibiotics and steroids preemptively which i wasn’t a huge fan of because my dad doesn’t react well to medication and i was like why don’t you wait for the symptoms before you put him on medication because he doesn’t react well um so they ended up using so we weren’t allowed to go visit him because he was in like we weren’t allowed to go visit him for five days and i got there and he was in the worst shape like i he was just he was so agitated it was hard to believe and and just give an example of how that would do you mean he was sort of physically agitated sort of facially agitated you know when he was talking he was basically facial moaning like um the easiest way honestly there are videos of people with akathisia on youtube it looks like so it was bad and everyone in the hospital was freaked out um and i was like there’s because he was way worse than he was a week ago um and i was like oh my god are they using fluoroquinolones because at this point i’ve i’ve read so much on this stuff it’s absolutely absurd and i know that there’s a class of antibiotics that you’re not supposed to give to people who are in benzo withdrawal um because it’s called fluoroquinolones and i was like please like please let them not be using fluoroquinolones turns out they were using fluoroquinolones and the side the interaction is not very well read well known it’s just absurd that these things kept happening they don’t use fluoroquinolones as much in the states because they have side effects um people can get like poisoned from them they’re they’re just a intense class of antibiotics so he turns out he was on fluoroquinolones and i flipped and was like we’re pulling him out now even though it wasn’t safe because he was akathisic like we’re pulling him out now unless you stop the fluoroquinolones now um and andre talked to the head doctor who was also really stressed out at this point because it’s like what am i doing wrong i’ve tried everything and he was a really good guy he’s probably the best doctor i’ve met um but he was super stressed out he was pissed off being questioned um but he did drop the fluoroquinolones and dad got a lot better really quickly so okay but so this was after we recorded this freaking podcast being like hey i’m stably doing better and then got like yeah covid and akathisia and i was like it was like oh my god this again so anyway he’s after that he was put on suboxone the suboxone helped a lot with the akathisia but it was still kind of there we go home so it’s september so he’s home finally um we’d left in january september we hadn’t been home for nine months yeah um he’s home so he hasn’t seen your mom in nine months mom came mom came to florida to visit okay um and then went home and we’re trying to keep her stress levels very low because of how sick she was it was just like he didn’t want you know it was better for her to not see this um so she came to visit in florida and she also came this was so this was really hard on dad this was really hard on everybody uh she came to serbia and literally the day after she arrived um they locked everything down and the head of the hospital said we’re going into quarantine and you should go home because you’ve had cancer you’re at a high higher risk you should go home and we were i was so angry because i was like dad was so looking forward to seeing her and then it was like you gotta go home two days um but we did end up getting covid and she didn’t so you’re probably right about that to be honest yeah um at the time it didn’t feel good but we did end up getting covid and she didn’t so um so anyway we get home and he’s doing like he’s still not in good shape he’s waking up late he’s and he’s akathetic so it’s the pacing the uncomfortable crawling sensation he’s still in discomfort and his pacing and his yeah yeah numbness burning sensations like really bad neurological stuff this is nine months after you did the detox no yeah yeah so he goes to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist puts him on an antipsychotic and i go my my husband and i had a made it had a fit right we were like we have seen this happen a whole bunch of times he was diagnosed with akathisia in three weeks we’re gonna be totally fucked um yeah and people yeah and people because they hadn’t it because everyone was completely stressed out and people here hadn’t seen what was going on they were kind of like just take a break guys you need to take a break which was true because i’m just thinking you’ve never done that you’ve been in full kind of medical mode for the best part of the year yeah yeah um so we’re like okay we’ll take a break maybe this will work like you know just like maybe it’ll work because initially it works he’s feeling better so it works so then they add in an antidepressant three weeks later the it was so bad again it was it was like 12 hours of akathisia um and and so um andre and i got got involved again and said that psychiatrist is fine oh first first what happened is we called our family doctor and said he’s akathetic again the psychiatrist isn’t listening he’s treating him for bipolar it’s making the akathesis worse can we have a referral to another psychiatrist and our doctor said no just like leave it alone just let them do it and we were like okay so we had to switch gps so then we did you get the feeling at that point that you’re being perceived as the problem i was completely yes 100 but where’s that we get up clearly at that moment did you feel that before that moment or is that the first time you felt as if you were being with us is the problem or no i’ve been problematic for a while right this is this is not new i’ve i’m i’m pretty pushy when i think something is wrong and because of because i’ve had issues with an autoimmune disorder that i’ve managed to get under control with an absolutely absurd diet i’ve had to be pretty pushy um i’ve had to be pretty pushed so did you maintain that diet throughout this whole period we’re discussing through all these hospitals so the diet never changed um no it did change when we were in serbia it got it expanded a bit a little bit he had like fruits and things it didn’t seem to make much difference like he he was just so screwed um i’ll get to the diet in a sec let me let me wrap up because it so the family gp said no i won’t give you a referral to another psychiatrist so you think a new family gp yeah so we got a new family gp we got we’re like that’s it the meds have to go so when he came back from serbia he was on the suboxone and he was also on a sleeping pill to help him sleep at night and at this point we’re like everything has to go because it turns out you can get akathisia from like every everything and sleeping pills like anti-psychotics antidepressants benzodiazepines opiates much much rarer but um those ones so we’re like okay maybe when he came back from serbia because he was still on the sleeping pill that was giving him this underlying akathisia and then it was made worse by these two new other drugs so anyway um over the next two week period with this other gp everything was removed except for suboxone um and he slowly got better but it was not fast and it was really quite bad but it was instead of 12 hours it was eight hours and then it was like six hours but even a minute of this akathisia makes people insane because it’s so uncomfortable so it was still like hours a day and he’d go to bed and he’d be like oh my god i feel normal it’s going to happen again in the morning so at that point i went on this rampage and i contacted i’d done this before but i did a new search now that i knew that we were looking for akathisia to try and find akathisia experts and i found one in vancouver and in the uke all the way up until this point when it was diagnosed in serbia what were you calling it before then benzodiazepine withdrawal got it yeah so akathisia because of benzodiazepine withdrawal not akathisia because of psych meds which is what it was so anyway so we do a whole but i do a whole bunch of consultations with i talked to five different specialists akathisia specialists and tell them the whole story i had typed up like 12 pages of medical notes with everything that had happened sent them all over to these akathisia specialists and just like plus i was getting thousands of emails from people telling me what worked for them so there’s a lot of information and i i had dad do a couple of consults with these doctors and we finally found this akathisia specialist who goes so it turns out people who take ssris for a very very long time especially if it’s at a high dose if they stop taking it not only can they have protracted withdrawal which causes insomnia impending doom panic people usually treat that by going sugar-free and low carb because they’re so sensitive their brain is so sensitive that it reacts to chemicals light smell and high carbs like sugar and so i we thought okay that maybe that’s why when we went low carb because we’re eating meat right because everything else was causing this horrible impending doom i was like maybe that was ssri withdrawal and so this the psychiatrist said yeah that’s that’s from the ssri withdrawal and the interesting thing is i had that similar so i went on this meat diet and i stopped taking ssris that i’ve been taking for 11 years and i had these reactions with carbs that were just absolutely horribly absurd and they don’t happen anymore so i still have an autoimmune disorder that i have to deal with but these impending doom insomnia reactions stopped happening and a lot of people i’ve talked to who do this meat diet are getting off of meds and so i think it must have something to do with that and according to this psychiatrist you can go on a low carb diet to help ameliorate some of these psych side effects so apparently people who are on ssris for a long time if they start up again on a benzodiazepine or an antipsychotic they’re way more likely to get akathisia than the general public so he looked at the case and he said yep he took those for 14 years he went off and then when he went back on they caused going up and everything caused akathisia and he’s been on he was on psych meds for the whole year so that’s the akathisia and what you have to do he’s like the opiates help so just stay on that get off of everything else and wait and it was just like what and this guy was he just moved he moved to toronto five months um not toronto just outside of toronto five months ago so he’s just new here i think he’s from australia um and he’s an actor he’s like one of the top akathisia specialists in the world um and he explained everything and so now dad is once all the antipsychotic stuff were gone um and he started he’s mad at the akathisia’s lifted he hasn’t been akathetic now for a number of weeks which is the first time that’s happened he’s only on suboxone he’s gone he’s cut it down in half right so it’s going away he only needed it because of this akathisia covering the symptoms um and so it’s over now like he’s uh he’s anxious he’s very prone to stress he’s got ptsd 100 from the last number of years um but we know that the akathisia is caused by any medication basically that’s a psych med and it’s gone now but holy shit was that that was a bad year so we had christmas this year and he opened all his gifts from last christmas it’s been like it was it was just absurd we’re just like how the hell did that happen but uh we have a great gp now who completely understands what’s going on who who who actually knew about akathisia he was like why was he put on an antipsychotic if he has akathisia and i was like i don’t know that’s what i’ve been saying um so we’ve got a great gp and he’s doing he just he just released a podcast with matthew mcconaughey so he’s still not he still has to recover he’s walking a lot but he’s like the akathisia is not there but he can get up in the morning yeah yeah he’s he’s getting up at eight then he’s having a sauna he found we found saunas okay so when i when i talked to this a psychiatrist and he said this ssri withdrawal can have this impending doom panic i was like oh i had that for like two years after i stopped ssris but i had a baby and i was so convinced to control this without meds and i was kind i was like something makes me feel weird with those i don’t want to take those um so i had it for two years and one of the things that really helped was infrared saunas no idea why but getting in there and sweating made a massive difference if i could do that and my mom built an infrared sauna in the basement so dad goes into the infrared sauna in the morning um then he eats then he walks for like 10 kilometers oh wow yeah 10 to 15 he’s walking a ton so somebody walks with him every day um and then in the afternoon he works and so and his book is coming out in march and um yeah how do you think about prospectus am i think he’s going to recover fully i think from my experience which was not like his i never had like he had it so bad the akathesian stuff but from my experience it took a couple of years to recover from all the medication i was on i think that he’s we attempted to delay the book coming out by a year yeah yeah i mean we oh yeah like we had i had a call with a publisher when we were in russia and at that point my dad was like i’m never getting better just publish it and i was like am i gonna have to like it’s not even done like what do we do um but he worked on it through this akathisia period he worked on it and finished the book edited it did the audiobook he did so he was editing in florida and serbia um he’d finished right i think he finished writing in florida editing in serbia and then he did the audiobook in december um right at the right when we solidified that this was akathisia caused by it wasn’t just caused by benzodiazepines it was caused by anything there’s yeah and yeah so um he’s doing way better but i mean it’s been hard on my family like they were they were anxious about this interview because they’re like what’s it gonna cause and we figured because he has his book coming out in march we don’t want the questions surrounding the book released to be all health focused yeah no the logic of doing it this way it’s completely tense then you’ve got the pain around and they’re actually focusing on book yeah and at least there’s been like hints of you know there was a podcast and things so people are kind of up to date but um we figured what kind of feedback have you had online oh like horribly negative um negative like um yeah it’s been pretty hard on me uh because go on tell me mikaela we well we went to russia and it was like you brought you know your i get a lot of people being like you’re killing your dad you’re killing your dad with your diet and you’re killing your dad you know bring him to russia it’s trolls um but it’s really it was really hard especially when i was like in russia being like so they were all attacking you for being in russia for taking to russia yeah because they didn’t understand right and they didn’t know oh we tried a whole bunch of hospitals we called 57 of them right we went to one of the top rehab centers in the states we went to a hospital in canada like they did they were just like you just brought them to russia which like yeah i get it and then people don’t care if you’re removed but um it’s been hard so part of the reason yeah it’s been really hard and of course there’s a lot of there’s a lot of support too which is like jordan’s back like thanks for the help there um but you always see the negative more and it’s pretty easy to make it a negative story because i already have this weird you only eat meat diet um although i was really using that to treat health serious health problems and so is dad it’s not like i force feed him right it’s it’s up to him what he does but um it’s an easy story to twist because it’s like all meat diet goes to russia for a detox that you’re not supposed to do on these medications i get it but it has been hard because of how stressful the year’s been anyway i believe this is a whole family who kind of been united about what the best thing to do is at each point imagine that that feels optimistic i mean family’s difficult we’re we’re good now but it’s been hard throughout the whole thing because for part of it part of it they like i we had certain family members that were like it does look like an underlying problem he was depressed it is an underlying problem and so there were times when it was just me being like this is medication there’s a side effects but then all the doctors are also saying it’s an underlying problems and you put any family under a whole bunch of stress and people snap so now it’s like things are so much better now everyone is like thankful and happy and just recovering because we are like weeks into finally figuring out what the issue was if it had been as simple as benzodiazepine withdrawal i think he would have been better in march exactly because they stabilized him on this it was such a low dose too like it’s i hadn’t nobody had any idea including the doctors and that these kind of small amounts can trigger such terrible symptoms with people and then i’ve had so many people reach out um mirtazapine is the other thing so eventually it’s suboxone and mirtazapine and mirtazapine is a medication that’s used to treat akathisia there are a whole bunch of medications used to treat akathisia all of them gave him akathisia except for mirtazapine so that’s been like a god send yep what about your mom’s health mckayla where what’s her prognosis good she’s getting like she’s not getting like you know you after you have cancer you have to get checked every three months yeah i think it’s six month points now so okay and she’s like she’s doing really given what’s happened and how traumatizing it’s been like she’s doing really well so and my brother had a baby like we’ve made it through and things are going to be really good um but it was a hell of a year i wouldn’t wish this akathisia on anybody and part of the reason do you think it will make full recovery or will that be doing better like i think it’s going to take him a little bit of time but when he’s not on any medication and he’s recovered from the damage it’s done yeah he’s going to be on fire i’ve i’m not concerned about that at all he’s anxious when am i going to recover and all this stuff but like this is new it’s going to take a while but i’m i’m absolutely certain that he’s going to be 120 percent extraordinary amount of responsibility haven’t you mckay or in terms of making judgment i mean it’s been you’ve been around the world for a whole year in very unlikely countries but with it you know with the young family but just on an emotional level to be the responsible of making these decisions that must have been exhausting and a bit terrifying wasn’t it yeah it was horrible you don’t have some medical training so you’re going to that’s a huge thing isn’t it shake on yeah i’ve done because of my experience being ill i’ve done a lot of research but no i don’t have training i just know like there’s this trust people have in doctors that i don’t have because doctors are just people right they make mistakes there are things that they don’t know i don’t i don’t trust and from the reaction i’ve had to medications the doctors have said that’s not possible and i i’ve had and i know i know it so when i saw how hard it was on my mom and i was like there my family had didn’t know what to do other than to leave them in the hospital for ect they didn’t want to do that they said no but we don’t know what to do no to that but we don’t know what to do we don’t know where to go like what are the options and i thought okay i’m i’m in a pretty good place like i could handle this for a while i’m completely burnt out um and it was like worse i was hoping it would be a smoother ride i was hoping we’d go there it would go easily and we’d be back in six months or three months um with dad better but like turns out it took a year but at least we’re here um but yeah it was stressful i definitely do not recommend any of the last year here i wrote it down like i was keeping notes because i was just like this is absolutely absurd yeah it’s an amazing way to look at my notes but i think that was incredibly comprehensive uh yeah yeah i’m good okay well thank you thank you and yeah yep for sure we’re just looking we’re looking to dad was hoping i don’t know what the article is gonna be like he’s hoping it’s not gonna focus entirely on health i said that i read the other stories and some of them were pretty health focused so we’ll see what he says tomorrow because he’s trying to you know get past this but we thought if people understood what happened and the reasoning behind things then we could just let it be it was like this happened don’t do some of these things and if you are on these medications like especially psych meds and your akathetic and you weren’t before maybe look at the meds right but people don’t know about it and there are some docs some specialists out there that can help if you know what the problem is um but yeah ideally we’ll just leave this be and then dad can go back to touring and writing and doing podcasts and being controversial and we cannot deal with uh health for a while it was like my entire life but yeah reach out if you have any questions thank you very very much hey thank you bye