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Get Me to the Gray, presented by COJA Services Inc., is a podcast about the conversations we’re told we shouldn’t have. Hosted by journalist and author Paula Lehman-Ewing, the show brings people with fundamentally different ways of seeing the world into honest dialogue—where we name what divides us and keep talking anyway.
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GMG_Ep15-Fred_Moss-MAIN
Paula (Host) (2): [00:00:00] There are weeks when something happens in the world and you realize you've been waiting for a specific conversation without knowing you're waiting for it. This was one of those weeks
and the moment the HHS announcement landed, I knew I wanted to talk to Dr. Fred Moss. Dr. Moss has spent 45 years in psychiatry. He's treated more than 30,000 patients across hospitals, nursing homes, correctional facilities, private practice, and he has spent much of that career openly questioning the system he trained in.
His books, Creative Aid and Find Your True Voice, and his program, Un-Doctor Reset, are built around the premise that many people labeled mentally ill are not ill so much as unheard, disconnected, living inside systems that don't know how to listen. Welcome to the show, Fred.
Dr. Fred Moss: Thank you so much for that warm introduction. I look forward to our conversation.
Paula (Host): So I wanted to talk to you... I mean, a big thing [00:01:00] that I think we can agree on in, in terms of the announcement is, is that over-prescribing is a fact. I remember growing up with a classroom of kids on Ritalin, right?
Over-prescribing, is, is surely happening. I wonder how you hold the, what I find equally true, which is that under-prescribing can also be catastrophic. Do you hold both of those at the same time?
Dr. Fred Moss: The, the way medicines have their place, it is not clear at all that medicines are the best choice. It's never clear that medicines at all are the best choice. They are a choice. They are definitely a choice, and they're not only a choice, they're a choice that sells to hundreds of millions of people.
And hundreds of millions of people kinda translates to billions of dollars, even in profit margin, each and every day. The fact that it's a [00:02:00] choice, however, does not represent that it's the best choice. There are so many other choices that effectively can absolutely cure and heal that which we call mental illness, that even medicine don't even profess to be able-- They don't even promote themselves as such.
There are no medicines that you take in psychiatry that declare that they're going to cure a condition. In fact, there are no conditions in psychiatry for which the neuro set up, you know, the, the neuro- transmitter theory has been proven to even exist to cause those kind of conditions. So the preset, the set of, like, having a chemical imbalance, and this is the only and best way to alter that, is very controversial to begin with.
So it's never my first choice, actually. For someone coming to see me, no matter what level of serious danger that they may think they m- are in, it is never my first choice to consider medications, because I've worked with so many [00:03:00] people who have actually not only relieved themselves of their, like, acute circumstances, but created a situation far beyond that which is usually advertised of being healed entirely, cured entirely from the condition they thought they had.
Now, is there such thing as under-prescribing? The way that I could see under-prescribing being a particular issue is if somebody has now been used to taking a medicine for a long time, and you only give them a small portion of that medicine, that will c- that can cause some significant discomfort.
But as far as coming out of the gates, it's never so that I think that medicines are the first choice.
Paula (Host): I guess 'cause I come from a, a criminal justice reporter background, so I've seen these situations where there's a, a mental health crisis, and there's a police intervention, and it goes haywire because the underlying mental health crisis was never addressed.
They're either off their prescription, [00:04:00] or they weren't ever put on a prescription. And I know for me that, like, having been on SSRIs, that it wasn't so much a crutch or a, a choice as it was, like, a rope, to help me out of what I needed during that time in my life. So I wanted to know, like, if when you look at that, if I'm taking it from a, not a medical point of view, but a personal point of view of someone who has, you know, looked depression in the face most of her life and known th- from my own case study that- Sure
I do better on medications than off, then how do you reconcile that?
Dr. Fred Moss: Yeah, there's a lot of ways to reconcile it. But the first way is good for you. Like, full support for what you did and what you found, and the idea that this is the best that you know or that you've been taught about how to deal with your, sense of a disturbing mood, in this case, [00:05:00] calling it depression.
Like, if you have found something at that level that helps you, I'm not here to argue that at all. By all means, please continue using that which helps you. I really do mean that. However there may have been other interventions that were available that even might have created even better results, and that's the things I don't wanna rule out.
There are many interventions out there that even can create better results even though it sounds like in your particular case or in other cases like this, if you get results, you feel like it might be the best choice. And what I'm suggesting is there's so much downside in the prescribing of medications.
There's so many unseen, unheard, and s- frankly, unspoken downsides to so many different medications that the person who's taking it might not even notice. And it is in that possibility that it perpetuates the symptoms it's marketed to treat, and that is really what the industry is built on, as a matter of fact.
The [00:06:00] industry is not built on sending you away from the industry. In my case, my job is to actually meet my clients and absolutely get them out of my books as soon as possible, so they no longer need me and no longer need mental health at all.
Paula (Host): Well, part of the critique is, is also that-- part of the critique of over-prescribing is that people put on the, get on the medication, and then they're taken off the radar, and there's no supervision or reanalysis of when to take them off. So, so there is also kind of a double-edged sword. So like, "Well, let, let me get them off the books," because if unmonitored, it can also go quite wrong or even- Yeah, we're not taught-
become more dependent.
Dr. Fred Moss: Most doctors don't have a clue how to take people off medicine. We're only taught three things, and that is to s- really start medicine, add medicine, change medicine, or increase medicine. Or that's all that we're really here to do, add, change, or increase. Doctors are not trained in medical school or in residency to properly take people off of medicine.[00:07:00]
So the tacit understanding that we're gonna only take this medicine until I reach a certain point and then we'll come off of it, that day frequently does not occur. Because what really happens in real life is that someone starts believing that the medicines are doing their job, and in the reduction or the consideration of tapering off this medicine, discomfort returns, and that dif- comfort is often associated with the conditions that were existing prior to starting the medication.
And one feels like their symptoms are back, like their symptoms are back. But really what's happening is upon discontinuation, these medications frequently cause a spike in the actual symptoms that the medicine is attempting to treat. And in that process, of course, you reach a point where, "Wait, I don't like taking medicine that much," but coming off of medicine is even more difficult.
And so therefore, given those two choices, I'm just gonna go back to medicine instead of dealing with the nonsense of worry about being in withdrawal or being uncomfortable or [00:08:00] In many cases believing that what really is happening is that old condition has been sitting in the corner doing push-ups, waiting for me to come off of medicine so that it could come back.
Now, maybe that's not really what's happening, but it's possible for that for, you know, once you start believing that, once this clinician and/or the client starts believing that, that becomes the context from which we dance
Paula (Host): so let's talk about, you said that it's actually causing more harm than, than people might realize.
Yeah. So walk me through what that looks like. You know, I think it was kind of the announcement-- I'm gonna get to the structure that, that you look at as an alternative in, in a moment. But the announcement did focus-- It wasn't focused on like systems that don't hear patients. It was, it was very much blaming the medications themselves.
So let's get into why those medications are harmful, like in, in your opinion. Like what, what is the [00:09:00] unsurfaced conversation about that?
Dr. Fred Moss: Well, I think the surface is, number one, we really honestly have never identified in this case that serotonin reuptake is-- it has anything to do with creation or it, it, or with depression per se.
There are no elegant or eloquent studies that's actually suggest that, despite public understanding that that is actually a proven fact. There simply is not a proven fact at all. So what these things do, it's, you know, the analogy I like to use, a little bit crude, but I think it would at least hold the water for the conversation we're having here, is that let's say that you had,
Let's say we had a really annoying mosquito bite on our elbow, a deeply annoying mosquito bite.
And mosquito bites, as you and I know, can be very annoying. They can actually, you know, take up, take over our life, be entirely con- We're always concerned about it, something that's very disturbing. And you came up to me and asked me if I knew anybody who could help you with that, and I said, "Yeah, I happen to know a clinician, you know, a little ways from your home who's got, a [00:10:00] hundred percent cure rate.
He specializes in actually elbow mosquito bites." So you're like, "Okay, let's go." And so, you go to his office and you meet him at the door, and he's got the pristine office, you know, pristine white office, and he's got a sliding glass door and a receptionist, and he's got some art on the walls and some diplomas, and he's wearing a white coat with his name embroidered.
He's got the whole thing going down. And he calls you back to his office and he kinda looks you up and, wants to do a full psych physiological, physic- physical examination. And so, he asks you to lift up your sleeve and And sure enough, right here you got this little bump. And he takes out his magnifying glass and he's like, "Yeah, yeah, you got a mosquito bite there."
And you're like, "Yes, sir. That... I thought that's what it was. That's why I'm here. I heard you're the best." He goes, "Yeah, I am the best. As it turns out, I have 100% cure rate." And you get really excited about it. You're like, "Okay, man, I've had enough of this thing. It's, been several weeks. I want it out of my life."[00:11:00]
So he says the term that, you know, most psych- most doctors know the term and certainly the public's heard of it. He says something like, "Okay, well, we can definitely do that. You have to sign this form and, it's only gonna hurt for a minute." And you're like, "Okay. Let's, let's do it. I'm in." And he takes out a saw and cuts off your arm at the shoulder.
But, but- And he said, "Let's come back, let's come back in two weeks." You see, what we do in psychiatry is if we stay myopic enough, we think that our depression is released, but really what happened is so many emotions were also released. We no longer have frequently the capacity to actually enjoy life at the level we were either, but we don't notice it from within.
So it looks like a low-level, low-level depression, and that's one thing. Our entire capacity to experience emotions is what SSRIs come after, including depression. [00:12:00] So we get a smothered depression, but we get smothered in multiple other areas and then have to deal with things that we call side effects, whether that's, you know, the typical side effects or even very proven statistics that increase in suicidal ideation and increase in homicidal ideation, violence, and self-despair actually take place very frequently with the use of SSRIs.
Paula (Host): Well, I... So I wanna separate those, because, yes, I think, like, the, the FDA black box on SSRIs has always... ... may cause suicidal thoughts, or actions." There is a lot- Yeah, I've seen that
Dr. Fred Moss: Thousands of times I've seen that in my practice.
Paula (Host): Yeah. No, I am not disputing that. But I am gonna take issue with the fact that it has homicidal ideations, 'cause there has not been an evidence-based link between s- SSI- SSRIs and anything other than self-harm versus
Dr. Fred Moss: homicide. Uh, that's actually not true. M- most of the school shootings are done by people who have at one time taken SSRIs or taking them when they, when it happens.
That's, [00:13:00] that's- So increased violence, increased violence while on SSRIs is pretty obvious, actually.
Paula (Host): Okay, but that's also a, a... I think that's a misleading claim, because, I mean, most mass shooters have complex psychiatric histories- So the presence of psychiatric medication tells you very little about causation
Dr. Fred Moss: typically?
No, actually, the only way it got complex was 'cause they were on many, many different runs of different psychiatric meds. That's how you change actually from disorder to disorder. So it is hard to separate the horse from the cart, for sure.
Paula (Host): So here's what I'm wondering. The, what you're ca- wh- let's go back to your analogy of, of chopping someone's arm off for a s- mosquito bite.
Because again, you know, we're talk- we're not talking about like nerve receptors and reactions to environmental factors, right? We are, we are talking about drops in serotonin levels and chemical imbalances-
Dr. Fred Moss: I'm not done with that.
Paula (Host): Okay. So then tell me what makes [00:14:00] a person depressed.
Dr. Fred Moss: That's a really good question. We actually have some significant choices that can separate ourselves out from our mood. We can s- we can do many different practices so that depression actually becomes, at some level, a vol- a volitional activity in managing the world around us and the world from within.
We become very, very interested in being resigned or being, you know, m- m- like, incapacitated or not interested or unmotivated. And in fact, we can spark that up in nearly every single person without considering that that can't happen. Once we say it can't happen, I think it's Henry Ford who said, "Whether, whether you say it can or whether you say it can't, you're, you're right."
The idea here is that we can actually get people who otherwise look like they are clinically depressed and, can't move or incapacitated or don't wanna go to work or have trouble getting out of bed or taking care of themselves, with a very powerful conversation [00:15:00] of meeting them exactly where they are, this is what's critical, actually connecting with another person, both sides tend to heal.
And the healing can be profound and can be permanent in areas of life that otherwise we've been taught like, "No, we don't have access to that through conversations. We need to instead, you know, take some chemicals."
Paula (Host): So be, be more specific. So if you take, someone who has never been on medication, has their first suicidal ideation, you would suggest putting them in a room with someone who also has suicidal ideations and having them hash it out?
Like I, I know it's more complex than that, I'm just trying to, to figure it out what the model actually looks like.
Dr. Fred Moss: I wouldn't be averse to that, by the way, as long as both of them were interested in the solution and getting each other to understand each other.
It isn't a matter of sharing the same ideation. That doesn't, that's not the only way to understand somebody. So one doesn't have to be suicidal to understand somebody who's going through suicidal times You can [00:16:00] do that just by connecting on a human-to-human basis, and that's what my books are about, and that's what my whole status is about.
For me, taking people off of medication has led to hundreds of actual cures where people never went back to psychiatric for any reason anymore, and they were able to find themselves and ground themselves in the practices of humanity that are time-tested and proven over the centuries that are listed in the Moss Method.
Things like gratitude, meditation, creativity, watching our nutrition, watching our hydration, being with pets, getting out in nature, spirituality, being of service. That's a big one. All of those things, when we start really looking at those things, can actually bring someone from a very depressed mood back to being steadier and considering life for, in areas that they forgot about.
Paula (Host): So, so tell me, I, I wanna get into specifics, 'cause I wanna be, really be able to, and I want our listeners to be able to actually see the model. Because for me, everything that you said, you know, the spirituality, gratitude, I, [00:17:00] I practice all that in, in... I'm in, I'm in a recovery. So I practice all that, and it certainly gets better, but I'm not able to actually walk that road because I have so many potholes that would stop me from actually finding gratitude, from actually finding spirituality.
There's too much crap between my head and a higher power that, that I, I think trying to figure out how to pave that road would've taken longer than my life expectancy at that point.
Dr. Fred Moss: Well, maybe you're right, and again, congratulations for finding the direction that really works for you.
Paula (Host): if we take these claims about violence and harm, and we dismiss the, and we sort of have this erasure of under-prescribing. That's kind of what worried me, is that I absolutely believe that there can be harm. Sure. I believe that over-prescribing has a body count, but I [00:18:00] also not just believe, but know personally, that under-prescribing has a body count.
And so I'm trying- Yeah ... to figure out, like, how we look at those early interventions- Yeah ... and absolutely give credence to them without erasing what's very true for a lot of people, which is that this is what works. And to have kind of done interventions to find what works would have taken far longer than someone would have
Dr. Fred Moss: I'm not sure which one takes longer. In my world, when I connect with somebody, it's instantaneous and there's no side effects, and it has the chance of being permanent. When I actually hear somebody for what they're going through and actually land with them- The effects are profound.
The instantaneous nature of healing that takes place in the face of human connection is exquisite.
Paula (Host): I would agree with that. I mean, like I said, you know, a lot of what I do in terms of, like, the spirituality and the [00:19:00] gratitude, that all comes from hanging out with other people that share addiction issues and, like, having that human connection and, and talking about how we walked out of it. But, like,
I- I'm wondering, so is that... is, is then the pra- the idea that, like, everyone should just go see you versus, like, making this sort of, The conversation's already happening, right? Like, the, I think the American Psychiatry, Society released in February their, guidelines for, for deprescribing, and so, like, that conversation's ver- that, that conversation is already happening.
What I'm worried about is that most of the news and the reaction didn't come from psychiatrists. It came from a more, like, political announcement from someone who's not a doctor. Hmm. And so I'm trying to figure out what is true and what is not and what we can do as a society, 'cause I don't think we can all get that [00:20:00] instant, relief, because we can't all go to you.
Dr. Fred Moss: No, I'm not the, I'm not the only person under any stretch of the imagination who knows how to communicate. I'm not that person. I'm a communicator, but I'm not the communicator, and what I'm suggesting is you don't need a doctor, actually. You just need somebody to get you. You need somebody to resonate harmonically with.
You need someone to understand you and see you, that for that which has otherwise not been seen or heard. When that happens, it is a deep, profound, extraordinary experience of healing that takes place at that very moment, and often the entire course of life can shift on the back end of an extremely powerful conversation or two that actually is much quicker than anything that any medications even suggest that they're gonna take.
Paula (Host): I think one thing that I feel like we might be talking past each other, is my understanding of mental health as an actual [00:21:00] medical issue, where it seems like there, you know, th- I've heard you say a few times, like, what you call depression, what you know as depression or, Like what we would think of as a mental health crisis, and for me, those things aren't something I call.
It's something I understand to be part of the human brain. So can you explain how it's not? Or am I-
Dr. Fred Moss: Yeah, I just
Paula (Host): don't think it is ... Am I understanding
Dr. Fred Moss: I think that the rhetoric that you're speaking towards is the most common rhetoric that's taught inside of the industry and has been taught to us over the last 70 years.
I think that's very common to think what you think. It may be different than what you think, and what I'm suggesting is that there's a humanity there that can be adjusted through connection in a far more profound, far less dangerous way than medicine in my world. Is it for everyone? No, it isn't, and you're a great example.
It's not your choice to go in that direction, and you see it as just being what's so, [00:22:00] that depression is a medical condition. It isn't how I see it. I don't see depression. I see that as a human experience, part of the human condition, that each and every one of us can actually relate to, and once we relate to somebody and resonate harmonically in connecting through conversation and communication, that's when the profound healing takes place.
Frequently, it has, it is sort of blocked if you're already on medicine. So this... And again, that's not something that would be internally noticed. That would be something that once you came off medicine, once one comes off medicine, they become more available to connect with other humans in areas that they didn't even know that they were missing.
Paula (Host): Okay. So I can see that. And I know that there has been evidence, and I don't even think that, the American Psychiatry Association has, has adopted or endorsed the chemical imbalance theory. So I can understand that, and I agree with you. That is definitely a message that's pushed as truth.
But antidepressants [00:23:00] have worked maybe not because of the serotonin bal- like deficiency, but maybe because of neuroplasticity, anti-inflammatory, effects, changes in stress response. So like, there is a review of that and a body of work that looks just as that. And it's, I feel like saying antidepressants don't work is not evidence-supported.
Dr. Fred Moss: Nor is it anything that I said. What I said is that there are several choices that are way better than it. In fact, cutting off your arm works to remove its mosquito bite. It really does. There's no question about whether or not that mosquito bite is gone. It will be gone. And so what I'm suggesting is, I'm not saying that, cutting off an arm, it works.
It literally works And so that's what I'm suggesting, the collateral damage and the, the dampening of mood, emotion, and availability in wa- ways that the person who's taking the medicine often does not [00:24:00] even see.
Paula (Host): Mm.
Dr. Fred Moss: And maybe even other peoples won't, won't necessarily notice it direct, but there's a new melancholy that gets created.
Paula (Host): Right. So, so let's talk about... 'Cause so I, I think I keep dancing around, like, the, the source- Mm ... in my head, which is this, Joanna Moncrieff, luckier psychology study in 2022.
And so that has been kind of a load-bearing study for, sort of disproving chemical imbalance and, and, and looking at these, these other e- effects. I feel like the, what's being said publicly in terms of... Like, she has herself said that her view h- is misrepresented, that it's being used to tell people to stop their antidepressants, which was not her conclusion.
So the scientist who did most of the under- who did most to undermine the hypothesis, of ser- of serotonin imbalance actually has to [00:25:00] had publicly distanced herself from how her work is being used. So how does that, how does that come off to you?
Dr. Fred Moss: I think what I'm saying is I get more success, way more success, like profoundly more success connecting with others than using medications.
For 30,000 patients, I have written well over 100,000 prescriptions in my life, and I've had an opportunity to see a lot of people on the back end. What I notice when I help people come off of medicine or when I treat med- people before they start medicine, is that the gains are much higher, much more measurable, much more profound than they would be when I start medicine, which tends in fact to perpetuate the conditions it's marketed to treat.
So that's what the industry is built on. The industry is not built on cure. My assumption is yes, it does, because I've actually seen it hundreds of times.
Paula (Host): Right. So, so, and I absolutely, do not wanna dismiss the importance of human connection and finding the right [00:26:00] psychiatrist and psychologist and finding that human connection and working through them in the ways that you've described.
My issue is the other-
Dr. Fred Moss: I, I already said, it's not about seeing a psychiatrist or psychologist, it's about connecting with another human.
Paula (Host): Yes. It's about connecting with another human. And I, and I-- some of my greatest lessons have not come from doctors or psychiatrists.
They've, they've, they've come from other people who have walked through life and done all the stuff and now can teach me what they've learned. But help me understand the next step, because if we're wrong about the mechanism, right, what does that tell us about the medication? If we're wrong to buy into this unproven idea that th- that there's a serotonin imbalance and that we can fix it with SSRIs, what does being wrong about the mechanism tell us about the medication?
'Cause I mean, aspirin worked before we knew why, right? But like, what makes [00:27:00] psychiatr- psychiatric medication different?
Dr. Fred Moss: Well, again, I, it-- you pick up aspirin, but aspirin's very controversial as well. And so if, you know, to go to those two medicines. But it isn't that psychiatric medicines are very different than the others.
I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is that to call it it's an-- like as if it's addressing simply the serotonin, pathway isn't even necessarily true at all. So we take these pills, and we're told what we think that w- a fitting model for how they might be working in the best of worlds, only to learn that that model doesn't exist.
Paula (Host): 'Cause I, I do feel like not just in this area of psychology, but in, in so much of what we absorb now, it's hard to find what anyone's actually talking about, 'cause it all has this, like whether it's from the right or the left, it all has a, an agenda, like and a, a rhetoric behind it.
And I think that, like that's one of the [00:28:00] reasons I wanted to talk to you is to really figure out what the harms are and what the alternatives are. And if it's a matter of, you know, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, like maybe, maybe we all need to be sort of retrained on how to communicate effectively and how to recognize signs of depression and work our ways out of it.
Is that, is that sort of where you're going?
Dr. Fred Moss: Of course we need to be retrained. We are losing our capacity to communicate effectively. I don't think that that's ye- you know, that's not like hidden news.
We spend a lot of times having difficulty communicating effectively, vulnerably, being our true self, establishing our own authenticity, our own genuine, honest core values. Most of us do not have access to that or do not have access to sharing that with other people or listening for it from others and giving ourselves the, the compassion that is required to communicate effectively with another person so that they can feel heard, so that they can explode into this [00:29:00] possibility of actually healing a condition they thought was permanent.
Paula (Host): Yeah. I mean, following from that in terms of looking at what's real, what the evidence shows, I think that's one of the reasons why I was troubled that it was... just in researching this episode, I hadn't realized that the psychiatry, society had already published guidelines for de-prescribing, that this was already kind of in the conversation and very much so.
And so to that end of not being able to decipher, like, me being... I, I had no idea the chemical imbalance was what you called rhetoric. Like, I had no idea. And it, and, like, and, and that theory, like, in, in looking at it, has legs. Like, the, the psychia- the psych- most psychiatrists don't espouse that that is a proven thing.
The issue with the announcement, I think, that this coming from not at the, you know, that the news picking up [00:30:00] on this and a- after RFK says it versus after the, Psychiatry Association says it, is that it's kind of layered with iffy facts. I mean, I- we're gonna, we're gonna disagree on the mass shooting ones, but there's other, there are other claims in there that withdrawals are worse than heroin, which is categorically untrue, and they found that to be.
Like, there have been studies. It's, and it's a completely different sort of withdrawal anyway from withdrawing from, like, serotonin than w- withdrawing from opioids. So I think that, like, you know, layering in that, does that cause any concern for how your message is getting out there? Is that, like- I'm, I'm not sure
people are picking it apart as a political decision versus a, a health one? Yeah,
Dr. Fred Moss: we agreed not to go political for this conversation, and of course I'm not gonna do that, as you asked for. And so I think what I'm [00:31:00] saying is de-prescribing doesn't mean you can't prescribe. They're not getting rid of antidepressants.
That's not what the i- deal is. They're gonna help people get off of the medicines they're on, especially if it's proven to be causing more harm than good, and they're gonna show doctors how to do that because right now we are not properly or naturally trained to do that. So the idea of taking people off of medicine and perhaps showing them a way to actually get way better than they thought they could even get using other means- Makes it, puts it in its place as one of the choices that are available, perhaps not the optimal one, perhaps not even the quickest one, and, you know, really, really looking at what are some of the options that are available.
Under no conditions am I hearing anything or seeing anything about the removal of antidepressants from the marketplace. I don't think that's gonna happen any time in our lifetime, actually. And that's not what's being asked for. It's a matter of looking at the possible inherent dangers or the possible inherent, risk or [00:32:00] losses that take place, when we use antidepressants and opening up the door for considerations of other treatments that might be, in fact, profoundly more effective.
Paula (Host): And I think, and I'm not... And I apologize, I, I do not wanna focus on, like I told you, a politician. I don't want this to be an RFK episode. This... But I, I do want to make sure that if people are hearing this and the news around it is highly politicized, when really it's a real issue that people have been, people like yourself have been working on, where do they go to find the, that real issue?
Where do they... Uh, uh, 'cause it's, right now, if you go to look at it, whether it's on a podcast or if it's from the announcement or if it's from CNN or MSNBC or Fox News, you're getting a politicized version of a real issue that you have studied and that you have real evidence to back up. And so I'm trying to figure out, not [00:33:00] necessarily to politicize this conversation, but how people can get themselves out of the political framing to learn about the real issue.
Dr. Fred Moss: Well, you make a choice to go to a doctor, you know? Y- you get to go to a doctor when you feel like you have a condition that's worthy of being treated. And just as an aside, psychiatry is such a... You know, when you don't feel well, we tend to pathologize a sense of being uncomfortable.
When we're feeling uncomfortable or miserable or suffering in some way, we think that there's something wrong with us, and then we go to a doctor, and the doctor is then put on a treadmill that he or she has been taught on how to manage those particular buzzwords that you show up with. The aside that I think is pretty humorous is that it turns out that as a subspecialty, psychiatry stands alone as being a specialty for which when you tell somebody that you think they're normal, they actually get pissed off,
People come in loaded up, fairly certain that there's something wrong with them, and what they want more than anything at that point is to be confirmed that there's something wrong with them. And they just wanna know what it is. They don't need to know if it [00:34:00] is, because they already know if it is.
So, you know, people are already committed to knowing that there's something wrong with them, when in fact knowing that there's something wrong with you could just be a natural occurrence associated with simply being human, 'cause I don't know anybody who had never thought that there was something wrong with them.
Paula (Host): Well, amen to that. As someone who is constantly reflecting on what normal really means and if I actually wanna be it. So, Fred, you've been very generous with your time. Please tell our listeners where they can find you, where they can find your work if they wanna learn more.
Dr. Fred Moss: Well, first of all, I wanna congratulate you for your courage in taking on this topic and in speaking to me earlier this week, and realizing that we're gonna have some bumps in the road to deal with today, and how graceful and conscious and well- good listening you have been today, and opening up the floor for somebody in a couple areas who might not be entirely aligned with the way that you think.
And I tr- truly appreciate that. That's a sign of an extraordinary podcaster. So your listeners should know [00:35:00] that. And the other thing is, if you wanna find me, I think the best way to do that is at my site drfred360.com. There you can see everything I've done, all the books I've written.
And then the mothership is called welcometohumanity.net, which is a similar site, sort of a generation before, but it's still cooking along.
And then I'm having a retreat where we're taking on this exact topic, and that retreat is set up as welcometohumanityretreat.com. And I invite any of your listeners to take a look at that. We are super excited to take on this exact issue, and issues associated with it in September in, Charlotte, North Carolina.
Of all the, social media sites, LinkedIn, you can find me there at, @drfredmoss, and I have a YouTube channel as well, so I'm really all over.
I've been told before not to answer that question with six answers. So maybe if you're gonna do anything, go with drfred360.com.
Paula (Host): Okay. Well, I'll make sure to put everything I could find and fit in the show [00:36:00] notes. And so people will be able to get in touch with you. And you said the retreat is in September in Charlotte?
Dr. Fred Moss: Yeah, the retreat is September 17th, in Charlotte, and, it's a four-day immersive retreat where we're taking on caregivers, basically, really. People who give, give, give, give, give and then don't spend enough time taking care of themselves, and we're putting all these people together so they can share and, you know, be with like mind as we explore what it means to be a giver and what it means to be a giver and run into the brick walls that often come in that direction So I'm very excited about it.
We have some great leaders and some great, great things that we're taking on in a multidimensional fashion.
Paula (Host): Yeah. Talk about suffering that goes unheard. I definitely know a few caretakers in my life that could use some care for themselves for sure. Yeah ... all right. Well, thank you for joining me and for sitting with these hard questions.
Dr. Fred Moss: All right. You're welcome. Thank you as well.