Chris Paige, a licensed clinical social worker with over 30 years of experience who is based in Kansas, USA, shares his deeply personal and unexpected journey through the psychiatric system. What began as a prescription for Klonopin to manage stress following a divorce quickly spiraled into years of dependence, withdrawal, and misdiagnosis. Chris describes the alarming ease with which benzodiazepines were prescribed and the lack of informed consent about their long-term harms. As he faced severe withdrawal symptoms, including memory loss, tremors, and akathisia, the medical community largely misunderstood his condition, mistaking withdrawal for worsening mental illness. Now a withdrawal coach, Chris is dedicated to helping others safely navigate their way off psych drugs. This episode delves into the dangers of psychiatric overprescription, the medical blind spots around withdrawal, and the power of self-advocacy in reclaiming one's health and autonomy.

You can find out more about Chris and related organizations here:

• Chris Paige on X: https://x.com/ChrisPaigeLCSW
• The Institute for Akathisia: https://akathisiainstitute.org

Transcript (AI generated)

00:00:00    so I called my primary care physician I said hey can you give me 10 half milligram clopin tablets to use just as needed you ever have a thing you've done in life that you regret more than anything that would be that phone call I really should have been to a different type of AA meeting which would have been a athesia Anonymous but there is no akathesia Anonymous once you take a psychiatric medicine your credibility is gone on as a as a reporter of your own [Music] experience hi I'm Daniel Owens from

00:00:44    inner Compass initiative welcome to ICI stories where we give people the chance to take back control of their story when we enter the mental health system we become psychiatr we end up giving up ownership of our narratives often without realizing it we let others Define what is happening to us and why we take on their language and Concepts and incorporate them into our identity but then for some of us we reach a point where we start to think that something is wrong something doesn't quite feel right that the story

00:01:18    that we're being told about ourselves doesn't quite fit with the reality we're experiencing bit by bit we start to question and probe and with it comes a an emerging sense of our our El as narrators of our own lives until eventually we we're ready to tell our own story as we see it there are many stories like this this is one of them okay Chris thanks for joining us here um first of all could you just give us a bit of a brief introduction about who you are where you're from uh and what's your professional background Etc basically

00:01:53    I'm Chris Page I am now a uh withdrawal coach um but I've been a licensed clinical social worker in the United States for the last 34 years um I am currently living in Kansas City Kansas first of all we we want to start right at the beginning so what was your life like before you entered the mental health system you know who was Chris pagee back then um well first I like to start off you know I grew up um in a family of divorce I was adopted um moved a lot or fair amount as a kid um which I think kind of created

00:02:30    the foundation for my entrance into Psychiatry um my life was was going pretty well except um as I would imagine a lot of your audience I had a life stressor that occurred um and that was a divorce and the divorce was very painful as divorce is for many people and it was at that time which I was in my early 30s at that time I had never taken a psychiatric medicine up until that point um and it was at that point when my stress really started to grow and I would imagine there was a fair amount of

00:03:04    grief and I think some of my own trauma history from childhood was getting stirred up to so I was you know I was pretty stressed I was really anxious and uh really the precipitating event that led me to um to ever take a psychiatric drug was running into my ex-wife with her no her new boyfriend about two months after our divorce and that was very distressing the next day I was actually uh with a colleague of mine working on um some doctoral level uh social work um policy that we were kind of working together on and she

00:03:43    just noticed I was completely agitated and stressed out and said you know I take this medicine called clonin you should maybe talk to somebody about taking some clopin I'm like okay I will do anything at this point to uh manage this anxiety and you know after you know I was already in thei at that point and in many ways it's you know when I speak to other colleagues now the early 90s here in the United States was kind of the Pinnacle of of psychiatry in the sense that we were just beginning to introduce meds on a more

00:04:18    widespread um level and I used to work at you know my one of my first jobs was working in a psychiatric hospital and on a Child and Adolescent unit and we used to get kids at that point for 2 three months at a time and some of those kids would be in the hospital for two or three months and never given a medication it was just they were there for all the different programming and a stable environment and three meals a day and art therapy and physical therapy and all these different things but as needed

00:04:50    medicine would be introduced in a much more conservative would probably be a good word a conservative way of introducing it I never saw kids on more than one Med that's another thing that was kind of historic back then um so that was really my entrance so so you know I I called a colleague and actually said hey you know would you be willing to prescribe me some clopin and as everybody knows at least in the 90s in the 2000s and the 2010s doctors really didn't have much hesitation prescribing benzodiazapines

00:05:22    because we really weren't at the knowledge point we are in it today so he had no issue giving me you know a prescription for some clopin and the first clopin I ever took I remember it felt like all the an you know all the air in my anxious body was just released all the pressure was gone I was like oh my gosh this feels so much better and as anybody that's taken a benzo aspine that was effective for them knows the effect can be pretty immediate so to go from a nine or a 10 um on my anxiety scale down down to a

00:06:00    two or three within 20 minutes is pretty seductive and pretty enticing and so needless to say that beame you know began my journey into Psychiatry so I started taking clopin first as needed and then daily were you given a diagnosis at this point I was not given a diagnosis um honestly because it was a colleague that was treating me kind of off the books but if I was going to diagnose myself at that point I had I I I think I had some you know some post-traumatic stress from childhood getting activated by the

00:06:37    divorce combined with you know some some I think normal healthy anxiety that anybody feels after a profound loss in their life and some grief and depression so at the beginning the Mets were beneficial for you I'm assuming they um and and um and how how long did they how how long did it last before you started to encounter problems with them I would guesstimate about two to three years and I was convinced I had Ms I had you know a Tremor I was having memory issues and I was terrified you know and

00:07:17    so I actually made an appointment with a neurologist because I actually stopped the clonic and I called my mom I remember saying I think it's this medicine I'm taking and she said wellow you know maybe you know maybe stop it or talk to your doctor and I said I think that makes sense and so didn't really talk to a doctor I just figured as probably most of us figured uh that have ever taken a psychiatric medicine that we could just stop it without any consequence and so I think we all know stopping a milligram and a half a clopin

00:07:46    or two milligrams a day a clopin is a pretty pretty hefty dose and um so it just take it made the Tremor more severe you know it made my memory issues more severe so I consulted with a a neurologist and in 2004 he said to me I think it's because you stopped the clonin I reinstated and over the next probably four months I tapered you know off of a milligram and a half a clonin which I think for most of your listeners would you know recognize that that's a pretty fast taper off that uh dosage of of

00:08:20    clonin and I don't remember anything specifically bad happening per se when I got off the clopin and accept retrospectively which I think is how many of us figure out what happened to us we look back and go oh I didn't realize that was that at that point um it probably you know started me down a road of higher rebound anxiety you know it probably sensitized my system to be more sensitive to things um which then I think led me to um you know use clonin again one other time there this time it was a

00:09:00    little harder to get off of and I said I'm never taking this stuff daily again daily is the problem you know if I just don't take it daily you know maybe if I take it every once in a while it won't be a problem so I go a couple years without taking I go a couple years without taking any and then I experience you know I'm in a really really challenging business relationship I'm working way too much uh my dog dies I'm you know I'm you know selling my home I'm displaced you know there's a lot of Life stress and at the

00:09:34    same time um I get a prostate infection and I go to the urologist and I tell them I have a prostate infection and he gives me cyof floxin or cypro as most people know it which is a fluoroquinolone antibotic and in 2013 when this happened there was no blackbox warning on CL or on cypro for neuros psych atric issues meaning insomnia agitation depression things like that I started you know I stopped sleeping um I think my life stress at that time also was kind of tipping over and causing other you know kind of

00:10:14    concentration issues and stress related issues so I called my primary care physician I said hey can you give me 10 half milligram clopin tablets to use just as needed you ever have a thing you've done in life that you regret more than anything that would be that phone call she prescribes me 21 milligram tablets and over the next three three and a half months I take a an accumulated amount of 16 total milligrams okay and I remember I'll will never forget I'm sitting on my friend's father's back patio and the three of us

00:10:52    are having a beer on a Friday afternoon and all of a sudden I get that feeling oh my God is that am I in benzo withdrawal how is this possible I thought it was just from daily use I thought if I ever use it every once in a while it couldn't cause this I started going into kind of a tolerance paradoxical place where I would take the clopin at night and instead of it causing me to go to sleep it would cause me to be awake and I stopped sleeping now I know why the military uses sleep deprivation as a enhanced

00:11:27    interrogation technique because it makes you crazy you literally go crazy yeah and I was probably sleeping maybe two hours a day three hours a day still trying to somehow manage my life things were falling apart I felt like I was like on an ice you know a lake of ice with no skates on trying to run as fast as I can and the faster I ran the more my feet would fall out from underneath me and I'd hit my head on the ice it was just the beginning of the most profoundly helpless experience that I've ever had in my life

00:12:00    so again my primary was of no use you know she didn't understand what was happening um so I called it a place called point of return and they um they were a group that used to sell supplements and also had a doctor on staff that would prescribe people's benzos and taper them and I started working with point of return and I had reinstated at25 milligram of clopin with the to stabilize and then taper but I was getting sicker and getting worse so after a point of where I'd stopped working and I was really just getting

00:12:39    sicker and sicker my family convinced me to fly to Vermont I was in Florida at the time to go to a five-day medically supervised uh detox so I fly to Vermont my family my and sister see me I look terrible I probably lost 10 pounds I have dark circles and bags under my eyes I look I honestly look like a drug addict you know and that's what I think becomes the conundrum for many of us that go on this journey is we look sick we're taking a medicine you must be a drug addict you know you're using the medicine

00:13:21    inappropriately so uh I had a whole list of questions that I was going to ask when I went to the detox to see if it was an appropri at place for me I go into the you know the uh assessment area I guess the intake area and they're interviewing me and I'm like can I ask some questions and they're like no we can't answer anything so that was strike one and then I said I'm not doing it and my sister basically threw in a complete fit and I remember in a fit of anger I said to her fine I'll do it but if it goes wrong it's on

00:14:01    you well it went wrong and ironically she didn't seem to suffer any withdrawal symptoms um so it didn't end up being on her it ended up being completely on me you you also have another Paradigm which is the the kind of drug addiction Paradigm right as well that you kind of yeah uh you you fell foul of as well um and and I kind of I kind of get the sense that sort of was why you got pushed to doing the detox to some as well right and when you're in a detox you're with I the two classes of people that I

00:14:36    was with were people that were withdrawing from alcohol or people that were withdrawing from opiates or heroin so um so I get in the detox the intake is one of the most um humiliating experiences you know cavity searches strip down naked um you know put in basically a jumpsuit you feel like you're going more into a prison than into a detox center so I get into this detox center and uh I'm on a milligram and a quarter of clonin and they tell me they're going to get me off in five days by cutting 0.25

00:15:15    milligrams of clonin a day and the psychiatrist looks me in the face and says this is actually a slow taper well most of us that have been Ed ated in the snow a milligram and a quarter of clonic and if tapered correctly should take between 6 months on the short end to two to three years to four years for some people so every day I start to get the cut and um I'm just getting sicker and sicker and sicker and you know I'm getting I'm going this direction while the alcohol and opiate addicted people are going

00:15:58    this direction but three they're like let's go to the gym and play some basketball and I'm like hey let's go to the gym and find a place to jump off the roof and I'm just getting significantly worse you know I'm not sleeping I'm just pacing the halls of the unit all night long getting sicker and sicker and then they put me on some support meds to try to help me sleep and those help on and off but after 5 days they discharg me and because of family pressure I agree to go to an outpatient program

00:16:32    that's connected to the detox center it's this whole big campus that we're on so that night the first night in I had to stay in like a dorm um for that outpatient program is one of the longest nights of my life and I remember staring at my nightstand in this uh you know boarding house basically and seeing four medication bottles thinking I oh my God I went in on one medicine and now I'm on four how did this happen and you know I'm writing my family suicide letters and honestly if I could have figured out

00:17:19    how to adequately hook my um belt to the shower rod I wouldn't be talking to us right now but I'm in this dorm with like other people and I'm yelling all night like moaning like oh you know oh my God you know just screaming I'm inan I'm in I'm being tortured so the next morning I get disciplined in a sense and I call into the outpatient program and I'm like I can't come in and they're like if you can't come in today XXX are going to happen to you and I remember walking across there's like a quad an open you

00:17:53    know open quad area and I remember dropping to my knees and and thinking I know their Bridges pretty close to here I could go jump off of do I go jump or do I go to the outpatient program and this became kind of the the core of my existence for the next three or four years which was do I stay alive or do I give up I choose to go into this outpatient program they expect me to sit in groups I can't sit so I'm pacing around this outpatient program like a you know a raving lunatic and they diagnosed me with a social

00:18:32    phobia saying I can't participate in groups no I can't sit that was the problem and the irony is I was diagnosed with a social phobia where six months before I was on a microphone speaking in front of 350 people here's a news flash people with social phobias don't get on microphones and speak in front of 350 people with no issue so you know I get misdiagnosed um and I tell one too many people that day that I'm going to harm myself so then I get pulled into an office and basically told you have two

00:19:10    choices you can sign yourself to the psych board voluntarily or we can get three people to sign you in and in probably one of the few moments of clarity I've had that entire time I said I'll sign myself in and for anybody in the United States if if you ever find yourself in that conundrum always sign yourself in because if you sign yourself in you don't lose your rights if they have to involuntarily commit you in this country you will never own a firearm you will have tons of other things on your record

00:19:46    that will really diminish your ability to be free not that I need to own a firearm but I'm just saying these are the limitations that are given to people and as a mental health professional it could have jeopardized my license that's another thing too so I preemptively and proactively said okay I'll sign myself in the athesia that day was some of the worst I'd had at that point I hadn't had athesia quite that severe yet and I was pacing I probably paced eight or nine hours that there and so I end up in a psych wward

00:20:19    uh the intake person was very kind they said I don't want to put you with the general population would you have any issue going to the LGBT unit I'm like I have no ISS with that so I got into a much calmer cleaner safer place than with the general psychiatric population um and so I was in there for six days again ranting and raving to anybody that would listen this isn't mental illness this is from the medicine I wasn't like this before this isn't who I am you get the condescending I it's okay sweetie we know it's okay it's okay

00:20:58    poor sure you were a therapist before this sure it's okay I was the pope you're right sure sure condescension it just reminds me of like film Noir or science fiction films I've seene from the 50s where you get the guy he's the wrong guy and uh he gets people chasing him and he's just a regular guy walking down doing his job and then a series of events happen and he finds himself being held down and inject injected in some kind of hospital and he's like you've got the wrong guy you've got the wrong guy I mean I used I

00:21:34    used to feel like like exactly that like I was the only one on a planet that understood what was going on and all the other you know residents of the planet didn't know what was going on and you know and as anybody knows the more you're told something doesn't exists the louder you get you know the more desperate you get so my time in the impatient unit ran out because my benefits wouldn't pay for anymore and I didn't even sleep the last night I was in the unit so they just charge me with no sleep I go back to

00:22:09    this outpatient program and around noon of that day I meet with the outpatient psychiatrist and he looks me in the eye and says you're seven days off of benzo if you think you're still in benzo withdrawal I recommend you go back to Florida I said can you hold on a second I went to a pay phone and said Mom book me me a ticket I'm coming back to Florida okay my refusal of treatment is one of the only Reasons I'm alive but when you're seen as an addict and you refuse treatment then you start getting the

00:22:45    messaging of well if you're unwilling to help yourself we're not going to help you oh you think you're smarter than the doctors you know that kind of messaging disparaging condescending and marginalize who we are so I go back home and somehow convince my stepmom to let me stay with them for like eight months and I am just a lunatic and because they're treating me like a drug addict they make me go to two to three AA meetings Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a day so I have severe athesia I'm sitting

00:23:23    in these groups sort of sitting in these groups going hi I'm Chris and I'm an alcoholic when I really should have been to a different type of AA meeting which would have been a akathesia Anonymous yeah but there is no akathesia Anonymous and so if you sit in an AA meeting and you're going like this all the time you know what people think you are a drug addict so it becomes the self-perpetuating reinforcing negative feedback loop we have S symptoms that mimic the original thing that got us on the med we behave in ways that are out

00:24:04    of our out of control and we mimic also substance abuse behaviors so we get thrown into these different bins and baskets that don't apply to our situation and then when we say this doesn't apply to our situation we're seen as treatment resistant or lacking Insight or any of the things we get labeled with or you know as if we're refusing you know oh Chris you're just mentally ill if you would just accept your mental illness diagnosis we could help you versus that's not what's going on I'm injured I'm sick just explain the the

00:24:42    the next period to uh going through this horrific uh situation of having athesia and and getting to where you are now what's the what's the trajectory there so I'm getting significantly sicker I actually call a doctor in uh I think he was in Fort Lauderdale he's actually somebody I think was one of the first people doing benzo tapering and I was at day 17 and he said he wouldn't reinstate me at day 17 because the Ashton manual said not more than two weeks I'm on these support meds which were sarakal rimon Gaba

00:25:14    Penton and uh what was the a Vistal so over the next seven eight months I stay with my stepmom I have given up my Psychotherapy practice I have sold a business I had to try to support myself to to survive this I am starting you know I have a great group of friends they're terrified they're like we'll send you anywhere we'll pay for anything so my other friend finds this rehab place that says they can help me get off because I was terrified of the cakon rimrod that can help me get off these support meds I called the medical

00:25:48    director I talk to him I said how you g to get me off these other meds he goes well use Adavan I'm like really so you're going to take me off meds and now put me back on the original or a different benzo does it seem like I'm I'm a dog chasing its tail you know so now I refuse treatment from to my friends well that's going to alienate them combined with the fact that you know one of the biggest regrets I have is about six or seven months into my journey I EMA I have a amazing group of college friends that we have about 16 of

00:26:18    us on a email thread that we communicate with each other every day and I sent a group goodbye letter to everybody um which needless to say was not well received so over the next eight months I stay with my stepmom and this becomes the beginning of my flirtation with with killing myself um I would spend my days going to different ways of suiciding and about a year into it I get desperate my family's getting tired of me they kick my stepmom kicks me out they've had enough of me they've had enough of me I go back home

00:27:00    and I can't function I'm completely unfunctional so I then become the most most resourceful person on the earth I find somebody through benzo buddies a pych Survivor people out in Anchorage Alaska that agree to help me and even these people that are incredibly educated in psychiatric drug withdrawal don't understand what's going on with me and can't handle me so they kick me out they had promised me a year and they gave me three months and kicked me out and I'd lost my home in Florida all my social support was gone I had

00:27:31    nowhere to go I'm stranded 6,000 miles from any anybody I know my resources are starting to dwindle I'm in this little rented apartment in a city I know no one pacing every day just lamenting on honestly lamenting the fact that I don't have access to a firearm at that point and my best friend somehow reaches out to me and says hey you can come stay with me I I get on the plane I sit down the second they close the doors my brain goes you're trapped you're trapped you're trapped I grab a seat Bel I fly

00:28:08    to the back of the plane the flight attendants are strapping in I'm like I got to get off I got to get off the plane I got to get off the plane and they're like what what what what what and one of them gets up and picks up the phone back there to call the cockpit and then I'm like okay no no no I'll go sit down I'll go sit down I'll go sit down so I go back to my seat I fasten my seat belt I'm in the chair like like this I look like I'm getting tasered basically you know I'm like this the people around

00:28:33    me must have been really comforted you know in the post 911 world no nobody loves more than a guy on their plane looking like a complete lunatic yeah the second the pilot turns the fasten seat Bel sign off I unfasten seat Bel hop up spend the next seven hours in the back Galley of the plane just pacing back and forth wondering if I should open the door and jump out I don't know if anybody's seen the show Dexter but one rule I did create for myself was no Innocents get harmed in the process so I wasn't going to take

00:29:05    the whole plane down just to relieve myself so I get to Cleveland my friend handles me for a couple months and then another psych Survivor in Florida says hey I'll take care of you go down there and after a year and a half they're sick of me and they kick me out and it was just at that time which is about four years into my journey that I'm able to work a few hours a week and I can sort of support myself with the most minimal lifestyle but that's how I survived that part that is a very similar experience

00:29:39    to what all of us experience when we go through this this awful uh situation of iatrogenic harm you you you go to the doctor you trust the doctor you get this nice medicine the nice doctor gives you the medicine and then for some reason the medicine starts to harm you and you report it back to the doctor you say this medicine's harming me the doctor denies it won't recognize it you go to another specialist they won't recognize it and then bit by bit there's this slow horrific realization that you are on

00:30:12    your own you no one's coming to help you there's no Cavalry riding in riding to rescue you you know and you know when you get to the place where doctors have abandoned you or misdiagnosed you and you realize there's no resources for you then you have to practice the hardest thing for many of us which is radical acceptance you know that we have to accept the unacceptable you know and accept doesn't mean like Yay you know awesome it's more like okay this is my reality how do I deal it so going back to your this idea

00:30:47    of radical acceptance and just just tell us a bit about how you how you live through this this awful experience and came out the other side well um I didn't realize it at the time but I was using this concept called the Stockdale Paradox a lot of people in the United States know know a former Senator named John McCain and one of John McCain's uh biggest you know accomplishments really was that he was in a place called The Hanoi Hilton which was a North Vietnamese prison camp where he was held for two and a half years and

00:31:24    somehow survived and came out well there was a guy named Admiral James Stockdale who was also at the hanoy Hilton but he was there for seven and a half years he was the longest uh standing um prisoner who survived and they asked him afterwards how he survived and he said it was a dual focus and that's the Paradox okay on one hand I had an unwavering commitment to survive now does that mean that you know with a gun in my mouth I didn't come close numerous times yes but somehow there was this Divine force in me or higher power

00:32:08    or whatever it was that kept me from fully ever pulling that trigger so for me it became little little tricks you know as I'm pacing for hours a day counting 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 nine 10 109 8 76 5 4 3 2 1 that's killing time you know uh I mean God knows it was like this is your life negatively on steroids every negative memory I'd ever had in my life every negative thought I'd have in my life is bombarding me while I'm doing this but somehow I'm saying to myself it's the injury it's the injury this is

00:32:40    not me this is the injury this is not me this is the injury very hard to do doesn't mean I want everybody out there to understand that when I'm saying I'm doing these things they were to the best of my ability meaning that it wasn't perfect or even remotely close in any sense it was just enough that I'm sitting here today to to be part of this interview so it was you know killing time you know when can I make it to 11:05 and then 1110 and then 11:15 and then 11:20 again even in Alaska you know walking to

00:33:10    different places I could hurt myself they have all these tour buses I would stand on the side of the road step into the road step back step into the road step back in a bizarre way it gave me a feeling of a little bit of control didn't change my symptoms at all but it gave me this illusion of control that that I could end my life if I so choose chose which thank God I did not choose to do um it became you know I had a couple I had two people one of them being Nicole lamberson who became literally my

00:33:45    lifelines you know I had this W this amazing woman named Marsha for the first eight nine months of my journey she would spend five or six hours a day on the phone with me while I'm just ranting and she be i' be like I'm going to kill myself I'm going to kill myself and she's calmly going no you're not no you're not no you're not and it was just her voice was just enough to keep me from harming myself and you know it was I think having a buddy you know that you can find is incredibly important and the

00:34:17    gift of her was she was further along in her journey than me she wasn't as sick as I was so she could give me some hope and some perspective which was incredibly valuable um um you know so it's things like that that get you through the day do you think it made a difference you being a because you're you're a TR trauma informed therapist is that right yeah yes do you think do you think your background as a mental health professional and as a therapist played a role and helped you in getting through

00:34:48    this undoubtedly undoubtedly even though I do wonder you know it seems clear-cut to me but a lot of my coaching clients struggle with this idea of you sure it's the meds I'm like well I was one way I took this medicine and I became this way which was very different than this way how could it not be the medicine but I get it you know people it's not only that but it compromises our ability to comprehend things and remember things and believe things but I do believe Dan that you're right that my background

00:35:20    helped because it allowed me I think to have a clearer idea of what was happening to me excellent and and tell us how how is uh Chris Page today how did Chris Page get from that that horrific experience living dayto day um to where you are now so one of the other tricks I used was future oriented fantasies you know if I survive this I'm going to do X I'll have an opportunity to be on the other side and help people in this I'll be able to use my wisdom and knowledge to create hopefully more credible

00:36:01    science-based programming that we can then appeal to mainstream medicine to make these issues and conditions more mainstream understood and then one and then another one was to meet the love of my life and I'm sitting in a home in Kansas City Missouri with the love of or Kansas City Kansas with the love of my life um so that goal was met and then the other goal was to create a research institute to study athesia and I've created something called The Institute for athesia research and prevention and we

00:36:32    have some other good athesia organizations that are doing more um messaging I think to the public and also to professionals but my goal is to actually do research so we're creating an internship program to have psychology and Master's level interns do athesia research and my goal is to raise enough money to create a robust research program that people will kind of come to to do active research because athesia still Falls in this crack where it seen predominant as a movement disorder and movement I believe

00:37:08    is still a very important part of the diagnosis of athesia because how do you differentiate restlessness alone from athesia it's the movement but and I want everybody that says they have inner athesia to understand this everybody that has ever had athesia has inner akathesia that's how it works the inner causes the outer okay the outer is the expression of the inner and to have a research group that with you know I'm trying to get a couple neurologists I have a psychiatrist I have a psychologist who is the head of a

00:37:45    psychology department and I actually have a a student right now creating a scale for her doctoral dissertation to update the barn scale for athesia because anybody that understands a knows the barn scale is inadequate it's not comprehensive enough so the first thing we're doing as an organization is update is trying to update a scale create a scale to actually um you know distribute to doctors and mental health professionals so people have a better understanding of what athesia looks like because athesia like

00:38:19    many of these other conditions is a mimicking symptom it looks very similar to a host of other psychiatric illnesses and that's why it gets misdiagnosed all the time or unseen all the time um so again you know my goal is to create something that tangible that can change the outcome for the thousands T thousands hundreds of thousands of people going through what was your perspective on the mental health system prior to this awful experience and how has it changed as a result of this experience I think two big things have

00:38:57    changed one is when I first started in the system I was fascinated by the concept of diagnosing of finding differences between conditions and being able to give people excuse me accurate diagnosis because I believed at that time that could lead to more effective treatment and then the second part is that you know these meds correct a chemical imbalance and they are effective and helpful and so that changed my Paradigm looking at instead of depression being a mental illness I now look at depression as an Adaptive

00:39:34    response to stress just think about this if I'm a mammal and the world is scary and overwhelming and I feel like I'm being attacked what's the primary behavioral manifestation of depression is isolation doesn't isolation protect me okay how does the fatigue of depression protect me it's like hibernating it forces me to rest it forces me to disengage so I think it's an Adaptive response to stress that we've pathologized and that's why I think the long-term studies on SSRI show they don't work and the reason they don't

00:40:13    work is because depression is a signal from our body to our mind that things aren't okay yeah that we need to evaluate things and look at our life and you give somebody a medication that numbs that you're denying a mammal of an opportunity to learn and adapt to their current life circumstances and when we try to numb out these protective Parts they just get louder so for any of you who have children when you ignore your child's complaints do they get quieter or louder they get louder our body works

00:40:50    the same way that if we try to ignore these complaints they only get louder because it's trying to protect us so you were you as as we've said you were in in the system as a mental health professional obviously you must have had a lot of colleagues that um uh in in that system as well how have you found your experience uh becoming an outsider kind of challenging this Paradigm how how have you found that experience in terms of interacting with colleagues and other and other people within the mental

00:41:23    health system the Pharma companies in this country have done a masterful job of tricking doctors into believing that they only have positive effects and that side effects are rare how many people I worked have have told their doctor of something and it says it right in the pamphlet and the doctor says that's rare okay because they've been duped yeah they've been duped and the only remaining issue I have with doctors at this point is not that they didn't know because that you know I did more research than any human you know a

00:41:55    doctor doesn't get off work and go you know my life is is on the line let me research this for 14 hours tonight they don't yeah okay but somebody going through this does and the pro the only issue I had with doctors that I still have is listen to me why do you not listen to me and I think anybody that's been injured by a psychiatric medicine understands this which is once you take a psychiatric medicine your credibility is gone as a as a reporter of your own experience yeah and that's the core of the problem

00:42:34    if doctor if we can even teach doctors you don't even have to know what an adverse effect looks like just trust your patient don't tell me that you think it's my illness when I am telling you as a reporter of my own experience that I know I was this way on Tuesday I took it on Wednesday and I'm this way on Friday don't tell me I don't know my own experience please just real quick we have to remember too all injuries are not the same some people have relatively mild they're disturbing and bothersome but

00:43:08    they can still function and work some people have an increasing level of disability and then some people are completely disabled so the person here and the person here are not having similar experiences so thus they have different ways they have to deal with this yeah like the three words that still can trigger me is when somebody says to me well I had to like I had to work or I had well I had to work too I couldn't so when you say I had to and you tell me that somehow I'm weak you're gaslighting my

00:43:45    experience please don't do that to us please yeah um and just just kind of summing up and bringing this all together looking back on your journey um what would you say has been the most transformative lesson you've learned that every moment in life is a gift and that we can recover from the most profoundly Dark Places that you there are people out there listening to this I'm sure that're at their wits end that think they can't go on another moment if you can go on another moment and then another moment moment and then

00:44:28    another moment you will eventually get to a place where you will get relief do I believe people recover 100% universally no do I do I believe everybody that does the right things and doesn't get in their own way of recovering experiences significant recovery yes I believe that 100% And my practice over the last four years Bears it out please hang in there there is another side to This I Promise thank you thank you so much Chris um any final words anything that we haven't covered that you you'd like

00:45:11    to add no just again Daniel thank you so much for this opportunity and thank you for everybody listening you know if you want any more information about me you just Google my name Chris Page P AIG G um there's plenty of other interviews and also if you would ever like to reach out to me about a coaching consultation I'd welcome that opportunity [Music]