EP 150 WTH?!? Transforming the Narrative of Mental Illness with Dr. Fred Moss

Hi, everybody, welcome back. I am Dr. Greg Eckel and this is what the health and our topic today is transforming the narrative of mental illness. And I love it. I have got Dr. Fred Moss on the show today. He's a recovering retired psychiatrist with over 40 years of experience in mental health. Across various roles, he's known as the undoctor. He is a transformational restorative coach on a mission to empower his clients by undiagnosing, unmedicating and undoctrinating your life, allowing you to reclaim your true self. Throughout Dr. Fred's life, he has embarked on awe inspiring storylines residing in various locations around the country and the world as a traveling doctor. And those experiences have afforded him a unique understanding of how mental health is defined across culture around the world, which I think brings a very interesting component to this story today. By unraveling the complexities of mental health, Dr. Fred seeks to challenge conventional definitions and treatment methods, guiding us towards our authentic, true voices. Dr. Fred, welcome aboard.

Thank you, Greg. It's really great to be here. Really, really appreciate it. Looking forward to our conversation.

Yeah, me too. And I'm curious, I love this. You're recovering retired psychiatrist, so please share what transpired in Dr. Fred's world to basically inspire you into this path.

Okay, good, good question. So it's recovering and retiring. I'm in the process of retiring. I'm not quite retired at this point. And the idea that, you know, basically I've been in the conventional psychiatric or medical world since I graduated medical school in 1988 and I went into medical school strictly to become a psychiatrist. And frankly, because I hated psychiatry at that point, I already hated psychiatry because it was already turning into a medication based field. In 1987, things changed drastically when Prozac was introduced to the world. That's probably before your time, but when Prozac was introduced, it was on the COVID of Time and the COVID of Newsweek. There was talk of putting it into the water system, into la. It was the cure all. And the idea was that biological psychiatry and chemical imbalance as a cause for psychiatric illness is what it got into vogue right around then. I have never been a big fan of either of those approaches. I feel like it's very clear to me that the heart of all healing is when two people connect and resonate harmonically with each other. Creativity, communication, conversation. And this connection is what causes that ultimate healing. Now this is true with all conditions of all types everywhere. Like this is true with non psychiatric conditions as well. And, and we all know that that's why we're having this podcast. The reason either of us are excited is because we know we're going to connect with each other and hopefully connect with some of our listeners. The idea is that connection in and of its own self creates healing. So the conventional psychiatric field didn't always know that and still doesn't always know that. They're still very caught up in the, you know, in the paradigm that psychiatric illness or psychiatric disease is actually caused by chemicals being out of whack, I don't have that at all. I have being anxious in an anxiety provoking world, or being depressed in a very sad and scary world, or being slaughtered with the idea that you can't get stuff done, or being traumatized, or being afraid. All these things are just normal human reactions to a profoundly challenging world at this point. So being well adjusted to a profoundly sick society is no sign of mental health. I believe that was Krishnamurthy who said that. And the idea here is that when I finally started to step out of psychiatry conventionally and started taking people off their medicine and then started undiagnosing people, what I found as a regular, reliable outcome was that people got better, sometimes way, way better. And frequently their diagnosis entirely disappeared. So the opportunity really came to me that maybe the conventional pathway to deal with psychological imbalance or dysfunction, this pathway into the regular mental health world, isn't the best way to actually deal with mental health imbalances. That's when I became the undoctor. And I had already began to take people off of medicine and then realized it wasn't the medicine's fault. And medicine is inert. Medicine is just a thing. You can't blame something that isn't even alive for the problem. The idea is that people think there's something wrong with them and then they know that there's something wrong with them and then make the assumption and then make the commitment that there's a pill out there that can fix them. So it's in the diagnosing where the real trouble is when people start thinking there's something wrong with them, which we all do, you probably think there's something wrong with you. I know there's something wrong with me. Almost everyone knows there's something wrong with them. And that's normal to know that there's something wrong with you, but in fact there's nothing wrong with you because this is a super challenging world. And it's very likely that there's no mental illness and no chemical imbalance whatsoever going on, even if you've had prolonged discomfort in the world of depression or anxiety or confusion, it's completely okay to have that. The idea is you are the author of your life. And with connecting with another person or several other people or a vision higher than yourself, healing can indeed take place and does in methods that are way different than what the conventional psychiatric model has to offer.

Geez, yeah, there's. So you just dropped so many truth bombs there. Let's see the way in the. The first one I want to start with is this notion of which you have dispelled the myth. But so many times I will see patients that come in and say, well, I was told I have a chemical imbalance and that I must be on this medication the rest of my life. So when you're talking about, you know, maybe mental health, mental illness isn't what we think it is. When you have. How do you help somebody come to the realization that no actually is not a chemical imbalance in your brain?

Well, that's a great question again. And there's really two schools of, you know, two challenges for me as a clinician. There's the group of people who have already made the decision that there's something wrong with them and then sought help and naturally received it and are now taking medicine or receiving some form of interventional therapy of some sort of. Those people are really hard to turn around because at one point they bought the bullet, at one point they bit the bullet, at one point they decided, there's something wrong enough with me that I need to start putting this toxic chemical into my body every morning. Let me just say something real quick, a disclaimer, which is there's probably some listeners out there who are really happy with the treatment they're receiving. They feel like they're on the right therapy. They were on the medicine. It's saving their lives. They couldn't imagine their life being any better than it is. And they, you know, and they attribute psychiatry or their psychologist or social worker or counselor to being the assistant in their, you know, in their life transformation in a positive direction. This conversation does not suggest that those people should. Are wrong or should change their horse in midstream. These people should stay. If you found something that works in your life, in any area of your life, please keep doing it. Like, of course, of course keep doing it. This conversation is for the hundreds of millions of people, however, who don't meet that criteria and are pretty sure that their diagnosis has been improper. They've been under diagnosed or misdiagnosed or over diagnosed or whatever they've been. And are now receiving a treatment that they know is not optimizing their life. That's what this conversation is about. And when we start looking at that, we start seeing that the people who have already decided there's something wrong with them are much more big, a much bigger challenge. Because if all we do is take away their medicine, all they want to know is, well, what am I going to take now? Because I need fixing. I'm obviously damaged goods. Unlike the people who are thinking about coming into the system who think there's something wrong with them and they've been given a recommendation to go get some professional help. These people maybe haven't yet crossed that starting line. Those people, it's easy to actually have a conversation with them and let them know that they indeed have nothing wrong with them. It's much easier because they in fact haven't already committed themselves to the notion that they're damaged goods. Now the truth is, even the people who have committed that they're damaged goods might learn like 20 somethings. They're very easy, not very easy. But this is a group that is actually easier to work with because most of them have been pushed into therapy by adults older than them. And they have never bought the bullet. They're just doing what they're told. And they know that it's wrong, that they're wrong, that they're not wrong. They already know that. So when I come around them, they're eager to relearn that there was nothing wrong with them in the first place. And that's a different group as well. But the older group or the group that has been on medicine for a while and been counting on being fixed or repaired or upgraded or something, that group is a little more difficult to convince as the undoctor now.

So on that, I mean, there's some nuances there and I'm glad you gave us that disclaimer. One of my monikers is where east meets west naturally. And earlier on in my career I was anti drug and I'm full on. That was one of my biases and I'm still lean that way as a natural, natural therapeutics, naturopathic doctor, Chinese medicine practitioner. But do you feel like there is a role for medications in psychiatric treatment?

I could ask this question enough times that I have a few different ways of answering it. And the answer is the only time I will prescribe medicine is if someone's already on it and is telling me that it's helping. Okay, so there's that role. Yeah.

So you know, we have this mental health crisis and we're seeing an enormous amount of prescriptions being for anxiolytics and depressive medications. And you know, you gave us that lovely quote of being well adjusted to a, to an ill world is not healthy. And so that aspect of having the discomfort, having, having those conversations and transforming the way you look at your suffering or your symptoms is a big piece. So again, we're not saying do not stop your medications if you're on medications and if they've given you some relief and kept your head above the water, by all means stay there and get into this conversation around can we get underlying to the root causes and really explore in a human way. You know, one of those definitions of healing is to witness and empathize with love another's suffering and, and just being present in it. It doesn't mean, you know, it's not like something to run away from. Right? The only way is through so navigating that together. How do you do that?

Dr. Fred yeah, that's exactly right. The idea is to harmonically resonate, to get someone to actually listen to someone for who like to actually be there and connect with another person is exactly where healing emanates. From respect to this idea that there's some sort of pandemic level increase in mental illness in recent years, what we really can point to is there's multiple different reasons why people might be imbalanced in the present day and age. And some of that could be some of the things they're taking into their mouth, some of the things they're breathing, some of the things they're watching on tv, some of the people and things that they're listening to, some of the things they're seeing in social media. There's all sorts of ways to get imbalanced. And it still doesn't mean you have mental illness. It just means that you've been toxifying yourself. And there's an opportunity to detox, there's an opportunity to infuse good health patterns into your life, whether that is mindfulness or nutrition or movement or being of service. There are a lot of ways in using creativity, music, art, dancing, singing, drama, cooking, writing, gardening, multiple different ways to actually assist ourselves in stepping into our greatness and letting behind the things that are disempowering us. This is fairly simple. We knew this stuff as children. I didn't get this information from the American Journal of Psychiatry, that's for sure. That's not where this is coming from. Where I got this is from a life actually fairly well lived in multiple different arenas where it doesn't take a genius to see that that's what people want is to be connected to. It also doesn't take a genius to see that when you do good things for yourself, hydrate yourself, when you get out into nature, when you're in love with another person or a certain organization or anything like that, or your pets, when you do healthy things, sure enough, it translates to a healthy life. And the more of those we can incorporate into our life, the way less likely we're going to run into problems that will then be categorized by someone else, by the way, as mental illness.

Interesting. Yeah. So this concept of your mental illness is just a conversation away. And accessing that, where does creativity fit here?

Yeah, So I say that mental illness is just a conversation, and here's why. You know, if you have a broken arm and you go to Singapore, you still have a broken arm. If you have a broken arm and you go to Auckland, you still have a broken arm. You got a Reykjavik, it's broken arm. You got Little Rock, you're going to. You got a broken arm. If you have symptoms of mental illness like, you know, in San Francisco and you go to Singapore, you might not be diagnosed with mental illness at all. If you go to Nairobi, you might not be diagnosed with a mental illness. You might actually be promoted to the tribe. If you go to Reykjavik, you might have something that entirely. You might be more in line with your cosmic self. There's all sorts of different ways of looking at whatever this mental illness is. It does not have a unique ubiquitous definition. Without a unique ubiquitous definition, it is nothing more than a conversation that's culturally based. It's simple as that. There is no definition for what mental health is. And therefore, how do we have the audacity to declare that we understand what mental abnormality is? We don't even know what normal is. None of us have a good definition of that. So what ends up happening is the clinicians are calling people abnormal when they fall outside of the box of what the clinicians have defined as normal. So it's really in the eye of the beholder much more than if the eye of the beholder says there's something wrong with you and you agree that there's something wrong with you, now you've got a match, you can walk away saying, I was finally told that I have the blip. And because that's good, because now I have an explanation for the fool that I've been or the things in my life that I don't appreciate about my Habits like I relinquish responsibility for my life sometimes by getting that diagnosis. You know, it turns out that psychiatry is the only subspecialty that I know of. That if you tell someone who comes into your office that they're okay, that there's no problem, they get really angry with you.

That the person coming in gets angry with you.

That's right, yeah. If you tell them there's nothing wrong with them, they just, they, they're coming in to find out exactly. That there's something wrong with me. Doctor. That's right. But if you do that with an oncologist or a cardiologist, if they say you're okay, you're like, cool.

Yes.

With, with psychiatry, I've tried that before. You know, number one, you don't get paid by any third party payer. So every single person who comes into a psychiatrist will get a diagnosis because you can't. If you write no diagnosis, there's no payment coming.

Interesting. Yeah, it's so true. I actually have never had that conversation with psychiatrist before. But wow, you're right. You want to go to the oncologist, you want them to say, no, there's nothing wrong, you don't have cancer. No, your heart's fine, sir. So what do you do? I mean the component of this is somebody's head's underwater, they're suffocating in symptoms and they don't feel right. Dr. Fred. And they're coming to you and you said, well, it's just your perception.

Not at all. Okay.

Okay, so what do you say?

No diminishing, no minimizing at all. Absolutely there.

Thank you.

Feeling out of place is very real. Their experience of feeling sick or disconnected or hopeless or helpless or nervous or fearful or tired or any of those low vibration experiences, all very, very, totally real. So it isn't like it's just in your head or just perception. But we're going to go at this in a different direction and find out what's been happening in your life. What have you been doing with yourself? What has the world been doing with you? What are some of the possible implications of the way that you're living life leading to the so called symptoms that having maybe you're eating way too much sugar, maybe you're drinking too much coffee, maybe you're watching too much pornography, maybe you're having, you know, you're, you know, you're, you're being bullied at school. There's all sorts of things that could actually lead to some very real psychological discomfort and psychological dysfunction for sure. Yeah.

And then what. So how. What is the appropriate time to undoctor yourself here? Yeah.

Before you get started. Okay.

And then the next best time is.

You realize that you're not. You're not getting the life that you want from the treatment that you're using, that you really are ready, ready, willing and able to undo yourself from the idea that there's something inherently wrong with you. Are you. That there's nothing wrong with you in the first place. Sure.

And. And so that conversation is the transformation of understanding. There's. It's an aggregate of life that's pushing your head under the water, that's causing or creating the symptoms, that is your suffering, not feeling well, and then rewriting that narrative of with, you know, re. Energizing into things that actually feed your soul or feed you back to health.

Exactly. And you know, this idea, first of all, no one is pushing your head underwater. There's nobody who's walking into your office with their head underwater. That's not happening. That's just an experience. That's a way of actually defining one subjective experience. So that's not. To use words like that. You have to be a little bit careful because that's. You're not. You haven't seen anybody who came in with their head underwater, even if they.

No, this is. But this is what people do say to one.

They say, yeah, they say that underwater. But the idea is you get to define how your life is going. You are the author of the description of your life. You can have the same data and not be living a miserable life. It turns out that misery or suffering, it is somewhat optional. In many cases, there is an opportunity to look at your life as it is going, same exact data and switch on a dime to see that you are not suffering nearly as well as much as you thought you were just one minute ago.

So that. That actually is a conversation I had over dinner last night. The topic came up as what is suffering? How do you answer that?

I think suffering in some ways is. And it's a way that we metabolize pain or misery or trauma, some of the things that push us in certain levels. It's almost a way to. It's almost a luxury in some ways. It's almost a default system that in some ways we get to call ourselves suffering and it takes us out of the game. I know what it's like to suffer. I've suffered myself. It's not like I'm. It's not. I'm not exempt in any way, but.

Oh, yeah, I suffer with the best of them, I can, I can do it. Yeah.

And I think there's an opportunity to get that there is some choice. And there is, you know, it's an option to not suffer as nearly as much as we choose to do on occasion if we just go with the default experience.

Yeah, it is. So there is a choice in the matter.

I think so.

Even when, even when there doesn't seem to be a choice, I do think. No, I think, yeah. And that sense of overwhelm, because it seems like, you know, I have kids in their, in their teens and early 20s and, you know, the friends come over identifying as I as anxiety or depressed, and it's almost as if they're. People are putting on the diagnosis. And because we've been educated about these diagnosis, it becomes their identity. It's like, oh, I have this. And now I'm part of this group that has anxiety. And that group's on the rise. Actually, did you hear, you know, the 43% increase of anxiety this year? And so, like, my tribe is growing and it's like, but, you know, how do you uncouple somebody when they have swallowed that pill? When they have, when they have gotten that down?

Yeah, there's just a conversation to have that maybe that isn't the way it is. You know, you have to undo it from the ground up. You have to undo the notion and get that anxiety is also a filtered experience, one that you can be anxious if you're afraid for what's going to happen in the future. You can be depressed if you regret or resent something that's happened in the past, or you start realizing that some of these things are really up to you. At some level, you have a capacity to modulate how upset you are about any certain thing going on in life. Yeah.

So at some point, that's the magic right there. Dr. Fred. So how do we, how do we help just having people get curious as to how do we get to that some point. And so it's, you know, because it's a willing choice, I'm sure you would say. You do not push or pull people into any therapeutic behavior. It's, it's. They, they've got to be willing participants. And in fact, they're the ones driving the bus. So how, what, how do you enroll somebody into that conversation or give them the possibilities that maybe there's a door over here that they could choose to walk through, even though it's a great unknown. What's the enticement of, like, what, what, what's the conversation look like?

Yeah, I think the conversation is you start really dangling out there, you might have a life that could work Intervention. Like, what if I could show you a life that actually worked without changing anything going on in your outside world?

Wow. Yeah. What if. What if you had a life that worked?

What if you had a life that worked? Yeah, exactly.

That's simple. That simple.

Yeah.

I love it. Well, Dr. Fred, what other things that would you like to share with the listeners and viewers of what the health here?

Well, I really appreciate the opportunity to have shared what I have shared already. And this idea that ment mental health is just a conversation and there might be nothing wrong with you or them is really important. The other thing that is really important is what people need more than anything these days is actually to speak their actual true voice, to speak our authentic self when given the opportunity. You're here for one life. And the mass of men go through lives of quiet desperation and go to their grave with their song still in them. That's Henry David Thoreau. And the idea here is that if you speak your true voice, if you actually speak your true voice, that's when people finally get to know you. If you don't speak your voice, no one will hear you. If you do speak your voice, at least people hear you. But if you speak your true voice, people will finally get to know you. And one of the greatest tragedies in life is to go through life without anybody actually knowing who you are. Many people are doing it now because they feel stifled or muffled or muzzled or silenced or censored, and they're choosing not to speak their truest voice because they're afraid of the impact. I invite people to actually take really bold steps into speaking what's really on your mind in all situations.

Oh, I love that. And I will second that. Thank you for that. That was lovely. That component. Just why that. Afraid. Afraid of others judgment. Afraid of disrupting.

Disrupting being misunderstood, Causing more damage than good being. And then, you know, being, of course, canceled or, you know, thrown off the. Thrown off the boat, thrown off the island.

Got it dispelled from the tribe. You're out. We're outcasting you and shunning you. Which is, you know, where. Where we started this conversation was around actually being present and connecting with another. So there is that fear is there. Right. I mean, it drives us. It's what gets us through those hard moments in time as well, is being vulnerable with our hearts open and connecting in that space.

Right.

Regardless of past evidence to the contrary. It's like the only way is through. You can't go around it, you can't ignore it, you can't stuff it. We have all of those behaviors trying to not address it. Have you found that, you know, the, the fear of the, of that ridicule or outcast like that is sometimes paralyzing to people. And that enticement when most people that I've heard that actually they, they muster the courage and they just go for it because they're sick of suffering, they said, you know what? I, this is one door I haven't tried, I have to do it now. Then they get through it and they say, you know what? That really wasn't that big of a deal. Have you found that?

Yeah, I have. You know, the idea here is that, you know, the going through that door, like actually, actually being able to, you know, to see that there is options, it takes some skill and some, it takes some, you know, it takes some real one. Please hang on one second. Sure. Yeah. Going through that door and really, you know, actually seeing that there is options out there is. It takes some very real courage and sometimes it is hard to muster that. It's hard to get people to understand that that's a real possibility.

Dr. Fred, again, thank you for coming on. What the health folks, if you like the show, please share it with your loved ones because you're not getting this information anywhere else. It's not coming through the TV at this moment in time only. Maybe you're screening there again. If you like the show, give us a five star review. Put in the show, in this review what you learned and what you're taking into your own life and getting into action on again. Everybody, thanks for tuning in. We wouldn't be doing it without you. Dr. Fred, thank you so much for the truth bombs you shared today.

Thank you, Greg. It's been a pleasure being on your show. I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you so much. Welcome.