The Gaslit Truth Podcast

Send us Fan Mail

“Safe and effective” sounds like a promise, but what if it’s just a marketing stamp pasted over weak benefit and loud safety signals? We sit down with psych nurse David Wayne (Describe Health on X) to dissect the Strawn et al. clinical trial that helped push Lexapro (escitalopram) for pediatric anxiety and to ask the question parents deserve answered: what does “works” mean if the child doesn’t actually feel better?

We dig into how anxiety outcomes are measured using tools like the Pediatric Anxiety Rating Scale (PARS), why conflicts of interest...

Send us Fan Mail

Schools are getting sued, teachers are burning out, and parents keep hearing the same slippery phrases: “reasonable accommodations,” “board policy,” and “trust the process.” We’re not buying it. We sit down with family law attorney Jason Wright to explain why special education support so often turns into delay, confusion, and conflict, especially when districts treat every request like a threat to their limited resources.

We get specific about how the system works in real life: why parents are labeled as “biased” the moment they push back, why having an advocate can change the ton...

Send us Fan Mail

Nobody tells you that one “helpful” prescription can echo for decades, but that’s exactly what Martin Cranford lived. After 9-11, with aviation layoffs looming and a first baby on the way, anxiety shows up fast and an SSRI seems like the obvious answer. Years later, a new problem appears: Restless Leg Syndrome. What follows is a real-world look at how SSRI side effects, dopamine agonists like pramipexole, and the nightmare of augmentation can collide with a too-fast taper and turn a treatable symptom into a full-body crisis.

We walk through what r...

Send us Fan Mail

The recovery world loves simple rules, but real people are complicated. We’re joined by Michael Gonzales, a veteran interventionist known for challenging the one size fits all approach to addiction treatment. Michael gets brutally honest about the years he spent presenting an abstinence-only story while privately using cannabis to manage PTSD, function in daily life, and keep moving forward. We talk about the hidden shame that comes with “purity tests” in recovery culture, and what it costs when professionals and communities punish honesty instead of supporting stability.

We also get practi...

Send us Fan Mail

Medications can change symptoms, but they can also drain the nutrients your brain depends on to function. We get blunt about the trade-offs people rarely hear when they start psychiatric meds, and we connect the dots between nutrient depletion and the exact complaints that get labeled as “depression,” “anxiety,” or “brain fog” in the first place. If you’ve ever wondered why you feel worse over time or why tapering feels impossible, this conversation gives you a clearer, more grounded framework.

We talk through the nutrients that commonly get depleted by psychiatric me...

Send us Fan Mail

The rehab world sells hope, but what happens when the business model rewards volume over care? We sit down with Ronnie Costa, a recovery coach and chemical dependency counselor whose life began in Providence’s crime-heavy mob culture, where money, status, and violence looked like a plan. Ronnie shares how that environment shaped his choices, how opioid addiction with OxyContin and later heroin nearly ended everything, and what finally made sobriety stick after years of chaos, arrests, and close calls.

Then we go where most conversations stop: the treatment industry itself. Ro...

Send us Fan Mail

A federal plan says it wants to curb psychiatric overprescribing and elevate informed consent. That sounds like progress until you remember informed consent was always supposed to be the standard, and most people never received it.

We unpack the HHS MAHA action plan and the “dear colleague” guidance that urges shared decision making, regular risk-benefit reviews, and more non-medication approaches like psychotherapy, nutrition, and movement. We also cut through the noise about the messenger and keep the focus where it belongs: patient autonomy, psych med injury, withdrawal-aware care, and what safe depr...

Send us Fan Mail

Rehab can make millions and still send people home sicker, more medicated, and more likely to relapse. That’s the uncomfortable starting point for our conversation with Dr. Cali Estes, a global leader in addiction recovery who’s trained tens of thousands of professionals and also paid the personal price of loving someone who couldn’t stop using.

We dig into the addiction treatment industry from the inside: rushed assessments during detox, questionable diagnosing, and the quiet incentives that reward “attendance” more than healing. Dr. Cali Estes breaks down body brokering and kickba...

Send us Fan Mail

You can walk into family court feeling certain you’re the “good parent” and your ex is the “toxic one,” then walk out stunned that the judge didn’t seem to care. That shock is exactly what we’re tackling with award-winning Austin family law attorney Jason Wright, a straight-talking divorce and custody lawyer who reminds clients that family law is about what’s legal, not what feels fair.

We dig into the myths that spread online and quietly sabotage cases: the idea that labels like narcissist or gaslighting automatically matter, that “moms alway...

Send us Fan Mail

GLP-1 drugs are being sold like a clean shortcut, but the body is not a simple math problem. We sit down with returning guest Dr. Josh Hellman, MD (Harvard-trained physician and lifestyle medicine expert), to get painfully honest about peptides, GLP-1 agonists, and what patients often do not hear before starting semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) or tirzepatide.

We break down what peptides actually are, why dose and delivery can change everything, and how GLP-1 medications can push signaling to extreme levels compared to normal physiology. Then we get into the stuff that...

Send us Fan Mail

Chronic pain gets treated like a character flaw far too often, and that’s the first injury. When you’re told “the scans look fine” or “it must be anxiety,” you’re left holding pain that is real while also being made to feel crazy for having it. We wanted a smarter, more honest conversation about what chronic pain is, how the brain and nervous system can keep the signal alive, and what “pain recovery” looks like when the goal is function, meaning, and getting your life back.

We’re joined by Dr. Mel Pohl, MD...

Send us Fan Mail

Gum recession. Tooth loss. Bone density dropping fast. When those problems hit, most people get handed a brush-up-your-hygiene lecture or a “that’s just aging” shrug. We wanted a deeper answer, especially because we keep seeing oral health fall apart in people taking psychiatric medications and other prescriptions, and in people carrying a heavy toxic exposure history.

We bring on Stephen Hewer, trained in nutrition and known for clinical work focused on structural health, jawbone integrity, gum health, and restoring bone density. He breaks down a key idea many supplement labels ignore...

Send us Fan Mail

Your doctor says withdrawal should be short because the drug “leaves your body.” Then you stop an SSRI and months later your sleep collapses, anxiety spikes, your body hurts, and you’re told it must be your “condition” coming back. That gap between what you were promised and what you’re living is exactly where protracted withdrawal hides. 

We walk through what protracted withdrawal and PAWS can look like after antidepressant tapering and other psychiatric medication tapering, including delayed symptoms that hit long after the final dose. We get into the why: neuroada...

Send us Fan Mail

One bad assumption can burn down a life: “It’s just stress” or “you’re just falling out of love.” We sit down with Sabrina Lane from Loving Through the Storm to talk about what happens when antidepressants and antidepressant withdrawal collide with marriage, grief, and trust. Her story starts the way so many do, with a therapist recommending Lexapro at a specific dose to “take the edge off,” and it escalates into a chain of medication changes, emotional blunting, and a home that stops feeling like home. 

We dig into the hard parts pa...

Send us Fan Mail

What if the kindest thing a therapist can do is hold the line? We dig into the boundary problem hiding in plain sight: missed sessions waved off, late cancellations uncharged, and vague money talk that quietly devalues the work. With guest Aron Gilbert, a social work psychotherapist and founder of Boston Evening Therapy Associates, we unpack how a flimsy frame sends mixed messages to people who came to change their lives—and how a clear, consistent structure actually makes therapy safer, deeper, and more effective.

We start by challenging the false di...

Send us Fan Mail

Forget the “born an addict” script. We dig into why the broken-brain narrative persists, where the DSM and twin-study talking points get overextended, and how neuroadaptation—not destiny—explains the very real deficits measured after substance use. From dopamine to GABA and glutamate, we unpack what’s actually happening in the brain, why SSRIs often miss the mark, and how a smarter plan uses testing, targeted nutrition, and careful deprescribing to reduce cravings and restore balance.

We share what we see in practice with high-functioning drinkers and people who’ve cycled through reha...

Send us Fan Mail

Trusted care should never start with a wink and end without a chart. Naomi Moore joins us to share how her husband John, a pediatric nurse and devoted dad, went from seasonal life stress to a devastating, rapid unraveling after an off-the-books antipsychotic prescribed by his own brother. Over five months, a cascade of medications—long-term Lexapro, new olanzapine, sleep aids, and later duloxetine—collided with missed warning signs, superficial check-ins, and zero meaningful informed consent. The result was a medication-induced suicide that shattered a family and exposed the cracks in a system that...

Send us Fan Mail

What happens when a crisis call for help becomes evidence of a crime—and the pill meant to steady your mind may have helped set the fire? We sit down with Ben Bathan, a former senior technical artist, to unpack a nightmarish chain of events: a therapist who directed specific SSRIs and dosages, years of escalating side effects, and a conviction for criminal threats after calling a “confidential” emergency line while in a psychotic state. The story presses on a raw nerve—how medication that can alter judgment, aggression, and impulse control is treated...

Send us Fan Mail

The Gaslit Truth Podcast is hosted by Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz, exploring mental health, psychiatric medication withdrawal, therapy culture, and informed consent.

In this episode, Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz talk about the problems diagnosing bipolar disorder

A Wall Street Journal apology letter, a new album on deck, and a claim that top doctors say “not bipolar”—the Kanye headlines practically beg for hot takes. We wanted to do something different: slow it down, map the timelines, and ask what happens when a possible trauma...

Send us Fan Mail

The Gaslit Truth Podcast is hosted by Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz, exploring mental health, psychiatric medication withdrawal, therapy culture, and informed consent.

In this episode, Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz talk about the problems when a spouse diagnoses the other with a mental health disorder. 

What if the story you’ve been told about mental health—diagnose fast, medicate faster—misses the point of why you’re suffering? We sit with psychiatrist Dr. Josef Whitt Doerring, a specialist in deprescribing and withdrawal management, to unpack ho...

Send us Fan Mail

A lot of partners arrive with a plan: diagnose the other, prescribe a podcast, and force “the work” through an ultimatum. We blow the whistle on that dynamic and unpack why pressure backfires, how pop-psychology labels fuel contempt, and what ethical therapy actually looks like when one spouse is sent in to be “fixed.” Along the way, we explore the emotional mismatch many couples face—one person wants depth and naming, the other wants specifics and steps—and why checklists, chores, and box-ticking rarely create intimacy.

We go deep on the medication m...

Send us Fan Mail

The Gaslit Truth Podcast is hosted by Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz, exploring mental health, psychiatric medication withdrawal, therapy culture, and informed consent.

In this episode, Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz discuss the martyrdom that exists in therapy practice and the dismissal of client violence. 

A therapist in Orlando was murdered by a former client—and our profession’s first reaction was to ask why she didn’t protect herself better. We refuse that narrative. We dig into the uncomfortable truth that mental health culture quietly...

Send us Fan Mail

The Gaslit Truth Podcast is hosted by Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz, exploring mental health, psychiatric medication withdrawal, therapy culture, and informed consent.

In this episode, Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz talk with Medical Journalist Rob Wipond author of Your Consent is Not Required. 

The stories we tell about “care” rarely match what happens behind locked doors. We sit down with journalist Rob Wipond, author of Your Consent Is Not Required, to unpack how ordinary people are swept into psychiatric detention through vague laws, crisis-line escal...

Send us Fan Mail

The Gaslit Truth Podcast is hosted by Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz, exploring mental health, psychiatric medication withdrawal, therapy culture, and informed consent.

In this episode, Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz talk with Chana Studley, trauma survivor to hollywood award winner. 

 You’ve been told you’re broken. Chana Studley arrived with police reports, X-rays, and years of panic to prove it. Three assaults in her twenties spiraled into PTSD and decades of chronic pain, yet the most life-changing shift didn’t come from retelling the wors...

Send us Fan Mail

The Gaslit Truth Podcast is hosted by Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz, exploring mental health, psychiatric medication withdrawal, therapy culture, and informed consent.

In this episode, Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz explore the new USDA Food Pyramid.  Does food matter?  You would be surprised what some professions think. 

You’ve been told the food pyramid represents the best nutrition science. We pull back the curtain on how wartime scarcity and surplus grains set the foundation, how lobby power shaped what landed on your plate, and why f...

Send us Fan Mail

The Gaslit Truth Podcast is hosted by Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz, exploring mental health, psychiatric medication withdrawal, therapy culture, and informed consent.

In this episode, Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz explore whether modern mental health care may be unintentionally perpetuating distress, through a candid conversation with Dr. Richard L. Blake on the limits of psychotherapy, rising anxiety despite treatment, and the evidence for breathwork as an alternative path to healing. 

What if the system designed to heal us i...

Send us Fan Mail

The Gaslit Truth Podcast is hosted by Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz, exploring mental health, psychiatric medication withdrawal, therapy culture, and informed consent.
In this episode, Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz discuss the billion dollar industry of sleep, including melatonin, sleep aids, and how therapy and psychology intersect with mental health care.
Ready to stop buying sleep and start getting it back? We went live for our 100th and pulled apart the billion-dollar promises of Big Sleep to reveal what actually works: aligning hormones, respecting...

Send us Fan Mail

The Gaslit Truth Podcast is hosted by Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz, where they examine mental health myths, psychiatric medication harm, therapy culture, informed consent and brain-based healing.

In this episode, Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz sit down with author and clinician Ryan Rogers to discuss political bias within therapy and trace how graduate programs, professional culture, and social media turned “therapy as activism” into a norm—and why that trade-off leaves people in pain without the skills they need.<...

Send us Fan Mail

The Gaslit Truth Podcast is hosted by Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz, where they examine mental health myths, psychiatric medication harm, and informed consent.

In this episode, Dr. Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz explain blind tapering, the psychology of psychiatric medication withdrawal, and the role of therapy in tapering safely.

What if knowing your dose cut is coming makes you feel worse? We dig into blind tapering—masking dose reductions during psychiatric medication withdrawal—to explore how anticipation, noce...

Send us Fan Mail

Psychiatry shouldn’t make people doubt their own pain. We open with a hard truth—gaslighting is baked into too many mental health encounters—and then chart a different route with psychiatrist Dr. Hector, who practices “medicine for the soul.” He shares how the White Butterfly ethos grew from Greek mythology and how SPECT imaging can reveal recognizable trauma patterns without reducing people to a diagnosis list. You’ll hear about the “diamond” and “triangle” signatures in the brain, why chronic gaslighting and prolonged stress can hit just as hard as a single event, and how valid...

Send us Fan Mail

The moment you think you’re doing the right thing for your child’s mental health can be the moment everything turns. Sheila joins us to tell Tre’s story—a 25‑year‑old nurse, athlete, and gentle soul whose life unraveled in a matter of months after a cascade of psychiatric prescriptions, missed medical workups, and a system that documented his suicidality yet never built a safety plan.

We start where too few clinicians do: the biology. Tre’s persistently low testosterone never received proper endocrine evaluation. Instead, treatment pivoted to antidepressant...

Send us Fan Mail

What if the hardest part of coming off an antidepressant isn’t the first cut, but the last milligrams? We sit down with Dr. Mark Horowitz—clinician, researcher, and someone who’s been through withdrawal himself—to unravel why standard advice fails, how the brain adapts to medication, and what a safer exit really looks like.

Mark shares his first taper attempt after 13 years on Lexapro, a methodical plan that still crashed into panic, derealization, and hours of daily terror. That lived shock led him to survivingantidepressants.org, hyperbolic tapering, and ultimate...

Send us Fan Mail

The story you’ve been told about depression is tidy, catchy, and comforting—and it doesn’t match the evidence. We sit down with Professor Joanna Moncrieff to unpack why the “chemical imbalance” narrative took hold, what her 2022 umbrella review actually found about serotonin, and how a drug-centered lens helps us make wiser choices about antidepressants. Instead of assuming pills fix a faulty brain, we look at how psychoactive drugs alter consciousness—sometimes helpful in crisis, often numbing across the emotional spectrum—and what that means for informed consent.

Joanna walks us through the...

Send us Fan Mail

Electricity doesn’t care about intent—and when it meets the human brain, biology, physics, and ethics collide. We sit down with Sarah Price Hancock, a nationally certified rehabilitation counselor and former professor who became an advocate after sustaining injuries from electroconvulsive shock treatment. Her story pulls back the curtain on how misdiagnosis, catatonia, and “maintenance ECT” can unfold in a system with scant dosing standards, limited specialty training, and a consent process that often breaks down when people are most vulnerable.

Sarah explains electroporation in clear terms: high-frequency pulses can open cel...

Send us Fan Mail

Start with a simple premise: what if the “problem” wasn’t you, but a system that muted your body’s signals and called it care? We sit down with Rachel Reynolds—garden coach, sensitive soul, and antidepressant survivor—to trace a decade-long arc from teen prescriptions to tricyclics, stacked medications, and a side effect no one wanted to own: urinary retention so severe basic routines became a battle. Her story is candid, specific, and, ultimately, empowering.

Rachel maps the medication maze—Prozac’s early lift, the slide to amitriptyline, and a carousel of add...

Send us Fan Mail

Most headlines shrug and say, “we may never know why.” We refuse that answer. With clinical psychologist Dr. Toby Watson, we examine the uncomfortable pattern linking widely prescribed psychiatric medications to spikes in suicidality, aggression, and even homicidal ideation—especially when starting, stopping, or changing doses. The data trail is stark: a small cluster of antidepressants, anxiolytics, sedatives, and stimulants accounts for the vast majority of severe violent reports, while black box warnings arrived years late and adverse events were often buried or recoded in trials.

We talk plainly about informed consen...

Send us Fan Mail

Comfort can feel caring—and still cost you your future. We sit down with Daniel West, a rule-breaking physical therapist who argues that “slow and safe” rehab keeps people stuck, while blunt truth and early, focused movement produce real functional gains. Daniel brings hard-won perspective from his own car accident and years of hospital work, including a devastating story about a 25-year-old who died after being encouraged to stay in bed. His point lands with force: informed consent means telling patients the actual risks of immobility and the physics of recovery, not wrapping them i...

Send us Fan Mail

The spark didn’t just fade—it was blunted. We bring on Cliff Yates, a 35-year veteran of the LA County Sheriff’s Department and stand-up comic, to unpack how SSRIs can quietly reorganize a relationship’s core: intimacy, memory, judgment, and even the stories we tell about each other. Cliff walks us through the gut-punch details—a cruise retold as isolation, affection replaced by aggression, and a warm home recast as a staging ground for divorce—while we map those moments against medication switches, taper attempts, and the confusing dance between “relapse” and withdrawal.<...

Send us Fan Mail

What if the root of mental illness isn't just in your brain, but in how your entire body processes energy? Dr. Ruth Dottin, a board-certified psychiatrist, takes us on a journey that challenges everything we've been told about psychiatric care.

After years of practicing traditional psychiatry, Dr. Dottin confronted an uncomfortable truth: many of her patients weren't getting better despite medication, and some seemed to be getting worse. This realization led her to explore metabolic psychiatry, a revolutionary approach examining how our body's metabolism directly impacts our mental health.

...

Send us Fan Mail

"Does that mean I'm broken?" This question haunted Michelle Reittinger after her bipolar disorder diagnosis in 1998. Like countless others, she believed the psychiatric narrative that her condition was incurable, neurodegenerative, and would require lifelong medication management. What followed was a harrowing decade-plus journey through the mental health system that nearly cost her everything.

Michelle's raw, unflinching account takes us through the escalating cycles of medication failures, four psychiatric hospitalizations, 12 rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, and multiple suicide attempts. The poignant moment that finally anchored her to life came while watching her four-year-old...