Original subtitles

[music playing]

I just met this woman that scared

the living shit out of me.

OK, so listen.

I don't know if she's possessed or what.

[music playing]

My highs were always extreme.

I remember this one time where I hopped in my car.

I'm driving from Los Angeles back to Toronto.

Day two, day three of no sleep and I

feel that euphoria kick in again.

I'm feeling fantastic.

I'm driving through Zion National Park.

I hit a deer at 70 miles per hour.

I totaled my car, barely made it through.

Barely made it through, it was really scary.

There I am, and the car was still working,

drove home the whole way but still feeling this euphoria.

My life wasn't always so out of control.

My name is Ross McKenzie Jr. When I was young,

my future looked bright.

Nice save, Ross!

Star athlete, class valedictorian, lots of friends,

and a picture-perfect family.

Then I was robbed.

At 21, I had a psychotic break that got me arrested

and institutionalized.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on lithium.

My life changed the minute I was slapped

with that label 20 years ago.

When I was hospitalized, I was told by psychiatrists

and by doctors, you're going to have

to take this medication for the rest of your life.

And probably the worst thing they

said that was the hardest thing to hear at the time was,

don't expect to do anything special with your life.

You're not going to really amount to anything

because you're going to have to live

a very simple, quiet existence.

It's a very painful experience to go through.

When he was medicated, he was certainly not anything

like the son I had known.

It was very frightening.

For those of you that aren't aware,

lithium is-- it's an element found in the Earth,

but it's a very toxic element.

Side effects of lethargy and weakness and brain

fog, and along with the fact that it

starts to just wreak havoc on all your organs

and starts to affect your thyroid and your kidneys

and your liver.

I didn't see any emotion.

I mean, he sat in a chair and didn't move for months.

It was horrible to watch.

He just appeared that this was more numbness.

And all I could think at the time was,

get your butt off that couch or that chair.

But I knew that he couldn't do it.

Was I bipolar?

I don't know.

What I do know is that I felt isolated and different

from those around me.

The drugs were hurting me more than helping.

Something didn't feel right.

I questioned my diagnosis and the lithium

that sucked the life out of me.

I was determined to get my life back.

Yes, so basically what I'm looking for

is just something where I'm going to be setting it up

on a tripod, probably going to be measuring out

the distance at the same time.

But it's really basic what I'm using it for.

OK, yeah, that should be pretty simple to solve.

Full of drugs and full of questions,

I decided to record my journey as I

try to heal myself naturally and become normal,

whatever normal is.

In February, 2010, I went to an experimental clinic

in Costa Rica to safely detox off of lithium.

I knew from experience that to do so

without the proper medical support

could be dangerous, even fatal.

So in the last five years, I attempted twice

to go off of lithium.

And what I learned is that I did it

under not safe and not proper conditions,

and both of those years had really

kind of disastrous consequences, extreme lows, two,

three months of debilitating depression

where I couldn't pick myself up off the floor.

That was hard to watch him.

Sadness, the-- a lot of crying, no interest in doing things

Here is the chemistry lab.

Get all cleaned up, all that lithium that was gunking up,

trying to come out of my skin.

And at the end of the month, I will be off lithium and drug

free.

It's February 4, so I have been here for a couple days now.

You can see I've just got little-- underneath here,

I've got these little electrodes right at the top of my temples.

And again, just stimulating currents into the brain.

Just to let you know that I'm definitely

starting to experience detox with lithium,

and manifesting as a screaming headache.

It's kind of interesting in the body

as you start to release this stuff, the toxicity,

the body starts screaming and actually really wants it.

Hello again.

The last few days have been excruciating.

I couldn't wander around.

I couldn't sleep, body aching, just

started vomiting this stuff up everywhere,

my body rejecting it.

I literally felt like I was going to die.

The end of this week to go and then two more full weeks.

I can't wait to see my mom back home

and my friends and my family.

Tonight is the last night that I will ever

be taking lithium again for the rest of my life.

I've been told, I've been assured

that once it's released and detoxed

and then the repair has taken place that my brain function is

going to come back full force.

Ah.

OK, oh God, start again.

I can't quite imagine what that's going to feel like,

but I know it's going to feel fantastic.

So his journey to get off the medication

has been a long one and many tough times,

and he's spent a lot of time with us during this.

And I've sort of blanked on a lot of that

because it went on for quite awhile

that I just blanked on everything around that.

Go, go away.

I want to do this.

It's been about a year and a half,

just over a year and a half that I've been off of lithium.

And it's been amazing to feel myself getting my life back.

This new found feeling makes me wonder what other chemicals are

coursing through my body.

The next stop on my journey leads me

to Dr. John Dempster, a naturopath who

treats all kinds of conditions from cancer to diabetes.

It's his work with metal toxicity

that caught my attention.

I'm Dr. Dempster.

Come on in.

Excellent.

So Ross, some of the things we're

going to be doing with you is we're going to be assessing

has there been any residual effect of any toxicity.

We're going to be measuring some specific toxins with you

like metals.

We will be measuring some neurotransmitters with you,

dopamine, glutamate, serotonin, the chemicals that

can aggravate anxiety, depression

if they're out of balance.

But one of the first core things that I need to do

is actually do some blood work with you.

I need to make sure that your liver, your kidneys, everything

is working and processing fine, because we want to make sure

that you're capable of handling some of these therapies

that we're going to do with you.

I know you've been exposed to lithium

and you've been on it for some time.

And I know you're off it now, which is great.

But we need to check to see if there's

been any residual effect of being on lithium,

and we need to start to understand,

has there been any damage done to any

of your neurological tissue.

So we're seeing a little bit of adrenal fatigue here.

What's happening is your pupil should constrict,

and it should hold.

Yours is actually doing this.

It's actually enlargening when the light hits the eye,

and that's not what we should be seeing.

So what is adrenal fatigue?

What's that?

Well, it means there's been a stress on your body.

As I started coming out of the fog,

it was clear I had more questions.

What are some of these psychotropic drugs doing to us?

I drive to Austin, Texas, for the answer.

I reunite with my friend Gwen Olsen.

She's the one who told me about the clinic in Costa Rica.

Gwen was the top sales rep for some of the biggest pharma

companies.

Now she's their top critic.

Oh my gosh, you're here.

Hi.

How are you doing?

So good to see you.

It's good to see you too.

Oh my gosh, you look so good.

Aww, thanks, you too.

I cannot believe how healthy you are since the last time I saw

you.

I know, it's a little bit different since the last time

we caught up.

Just a tad.

I know.

No minor meltdowns, I take it, since I last saw you.

No, that was a bit of an interesting ride.

Before detox, I was on lithium for 16 years.

And I know that was a long time.

Every time I bring that up, especially people, they're

like, wow.

That's a long, long time.

16 years is a very long time, and I understand your concern

about that.

But lithium is a natural salt, OK.

It's highly toxic, as you know.

But it is something natural, whereas the other drugs

are synthetics.

And you never generally find a psychiatric patient

that's just on one or two drugs.

They're normally on a cocktail of various drugs.

And that's where I see the biggest problem

with those individuals who have been

on long-term psychiatric treatment

with a number of different drugs.

They seem to have the greatest difficulty in weaning off

of the drugs because of those drugs are actually

designed to be addicting.

Right.

So those drugs are much more difficult to get off of,

and I think that that's pretty much a part of the agenda

that you've been on a drug for 15 years,

and you get off of it in two weeks' time,

you're going to go into an absolute tailspin.

And they know that.

But then when you come back two weeks later

and you're having a meltdown, you're

going to be told that, well, we're sorry,

but you're going to have to be on these drugs for the rest

of your life because you have a brain chemistry imbalance,

and this is what we have to do to treat it.

Right.

So that's the way that they keep everyone captive, everyone

prisoner in the system and on the drugs.

So now not only do you have depression.

Now you're so severely depressed that you can't get out of bed.

You can't function.

You can't work.

Or not only did you have anxiety,

but now you're having panic attacks because

of the withdrawal from the drugs.

And people do not identify that as withdrawal.

What they think is that they're having an exacerbation--

Exacerbation of their disease or whatever.

-- of their own disease symptoms-- exactly.

And then they freak out, and they go back

on the drugs for the rest of their lives.

This is a disease.

It's a spiritual disease as much as it is anything else.

And you need to figure out what the root cause of the problem

is.

There are so many different things

that can lead to psychiatric symptoms.

And people simply need to do their homework.

So that's what I would advise you

to do is get to the root of it all.

And once you have, then you'll know all the answers.

So it is 1:00 AM November 24, and you're probably

wondering what on earth is in my mouth.

I thought it was good to actually check in and see

that this is part of reality, because I still

can have these waves of anxiety.

It's this excess of energy in my body.

And where I've put that sometimes is actually

it's gone to a behavior that's been actually quite painful

and caused damage to myself, like chewing my lip.

One of my goals through this process

is to actually rid myself of this behavior

so that when I feel this energy come

on that know how to move it through the body

without actually going to a behavior that has-- yeah,

it's been a self-mutilating obsessive compulsive behavior.

Hey Ross, good to see you.

We gave you a call because we have

found some things we're going to talk about, OK?

We did two tests with you, and we

started by looking for recent exposure

to mercury in your blood.

Have a look at this.

Two big metals that are coming out on top of the other ones,

and that's lead and mercury.

OK.

These are neurotoxins, and these are serious.

And what these can do, these can actually disrupt how we feel,

how we think.

These are not only disrupting brain chemistry,

but they have the potential to create

serious illness such as cancer, heart disease.

These can be the triggers into drop into a psychotic episode.

These are environmental toxins that we are not born with

or were not supposed to be born with,

and that's something that we're going to try and bring these

down with you.

And it's going to take a number of treatments.

This may actually take between 30 and 40 IV treatments

to bring these down.

What happens is metals, if they come into our body,

it's a very hard process for us to get them out.

If they're stored, we actually have to in there,

and we have to grab them and drag them out.

And that is actually a process called chelation.

Chelate means to grab.

Have you had some food today?

Yep.

Lots of water?

Yeah, some.

Good man.

So we're not-- we don't have your chelator in the bag yet.

I'm going to go add that in right now.

That whole-- that drains in a half an hour.

Yeah.

That's fast.

Pay attention, Ross.

I learned pretty early on and when

I was young to keep my mouth shut.

When I would go to speak up, it wasn't accepted very well,

and I would get shut down.

Keeping my mouth shut doesn't work so well for me anymore,

doesn't work at all, actually.

By not speaking up, I think that's contributed

to a lot of anxiety and a lot of depression.

I think that's what's caused an enormous amount of my symptoms.

I actually had moments where I was so emotional

today where I actually I was buying into, oh my god,

am I not well again at all?

And I know that's bullshit too.

Somehow we've gotten to this point in time

where emotions are not cool, and if you have emotions,

that somehow that needs to be diagnosed,

and you need to be medicated with it.

Let's just get to the root cause of these issues.

Let's find out so people that buy into this,

I have this disease.

I'm told I'm going to have to kind

of deal with these symptoms and manage

these symptoms for the rest of my life,

but no room for transformation, no room for healing.

And actually, I found myself getting really pissed off

about that.

Where does the personality end and the disease begin?

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Side effects may include trouble concentrating,

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diarrhea, constipation, dry mouth, drooling, night sweats,

dry heaves, hair loss, insomnia, unusual risk taking behavior,

decreased inhibitions, no fear of danger, weight gain,

weight loss, hallucinations, unusual thoughts, death,

and halitosis.

I thought it was appropriate, given

that we're doing a film on mental illness

and mental health that I would dress up as the Mad Hatter.

I'm about to go out with my lovely lady,

and we're about to go out and hit a little Halloween

festivities.

That is that for October 31, 2011, Halloween.

Ross went to the lithium clinic in San Jose, Costa Rica,

which is where I lived for 12 years.

I showed up to sell some of my products,

and he was at breakfast.

I made handmade soap, cream, mud masks.

There was Ross and a friend of his,

and we sat down and had breakfast together.

You're like, uh, yeah, you don't need

to bring your whole computer and hardware in to deal with that.

I think he's one of the kindest, most loving people I've ever

met in my life.

One of his major journeys in life

is to make everybody around him comfortable and happy.

So I think we're fortunate in the fact

that in our relationship, we've both done a lot of work,

whether that's psychological work, whether it's

interpersonal work, whether it's spiritual work.

And so we're very open with each other.

And then they're just like, [inaudible].

We all know somebody who's going through some very deep pain

and who unfortunately has turned that pain

into some sort of action that got labeled.

And I think Ross now sees it more as his duty

to say, hey, there's more avenues

to talk about that pain.

Letting go of some of the symptoms

that come along with having 18 years of suppressing

regular emotions, I think that's very struggling.

I've definitely seen him depressed.

I've definitely seen him go through not wanting

to be around people and just disappear.

It took me a long time to realize that Ross actually

believed that he had things he needed to let go of,

and he needed help letting go of them.

Parmenio's a gentleman who lives in Cartagena.

He's a naturopathic doctor by trade,

and he has an ability to contact spirits and work

with them to do psychic surgery.

He's worked with my dad, my mom.

So [inaudible], I was just going to ask you too,

you know this journey I'm on of self-healing and I've been

medicated with lithium for quite a long time,

and so I've just wondered if there's-- you get any sense,

like do you think when it comes to that he may be able to help

me out?

I can not tell you what to do, but I

think that it would be good for you to try something like this

because I think he has helped a lot of people.

And also, he was born with this gift

that he is able to talk to spirits.

And I don't know if the word is channeling,

but maybe that's what he does.

I mean, I have seen miracles happening.

So for you in your case, he probably

will do a detox in the spiritual world.

It's important for me not to be afraid of the anxiety.

The freak outs are real, and the freak outs

are not because I'm sick but because I'm human.

I get to feel upset.

I get to feel sadness.

I get to feel anger.

I really like the fact that I get to feel all of my emotions.

It's a very new experience for me,

because when I was on lithium, I was completely

deadened and flatlined where I didn't have access to that,

not allowing or creating the ability to heal.

My father died before I started this journey.

He never got to see me off the drugs.

Parmenio, can you explain what we'll

be doing today in today's treatment?

[speaking spanish]

I was wondering if, today if you were working my father's

spirit for the treatment.

[speaking spanish]

OK, muy bueno.

[music playing]

[speaking spanish]

[music playing]

[speaking spanish]

Lithium?

[speaking spanish]

It's January 25, 2012, and I had my first session with Parmenio

today.

I noticed when the session first started,

I could feel my father's presence

and felt myself getting emotional.

Just as my father was getting ready to pass on

and those last couple months of his life,

and one of the last conversations that we had

was me really asking him.

I said, I need your help when you cross over,

and whatever you can do in the other realms

and the other dimensions to help me sort this out.

But I think what was the most amazing part was just

how Parmenio, at the end, I just, I said thank you.

And he responded back to me.

He said, don't thank me.

Thank your father.

Even though I felt great, part of me was skeptical.

I detoxed off of lithium two years ago.

How could it possibly show up now?

So I turned to Dr. Dempster.

Hey, Ross, come on in.

Yeah.

We just got the results in from--

They came in.

--the cotton ball that we had tested with the lab.

Right.

Truthfully, I was very skeptical of the treatment

you were doing down there.

Right.

And I've got to show you.

The lab sent back the results, and not

only did it detect mercury, but it detected lithium.

What's interesting about that as well is that I brought back

a little tiny piece of after the treatments were done.

But there was a big jar, and so there

was a huge amount of that cotton that was discolored.

So this is just kind of a fraction of what was pulled.

So--

This is very interesting to us.

Wow.

Even the lab was interested.

Everyone's just sort of scratching their head

on this one.

It was worth the trip to Colombia.

That's right.

Good job.

So it's February 8, 2012.

It's actually officially mental health day here in Canada.

The days keep rolling, rolling.

We're living in a wacky world, that's for sure.

Feeling very rough today and very emotional.

Incredible challenges with the woman

who I love dearly and loves me dearly.

And yeah.

Just causing a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress and just

the fear or being alone and actually taking care of myself.

I'm done for now.

I'm tired.

And yeah.

I got the phone call from Ross.

He was in New York City at the time on the student exchange.

His voice was sped up.

He wasn't sleeping.

And I knew that the behavior and what I was hearing

wasn't the brother that I knew.

Hey, hey, can I buy you dinner?

I know you don't know me.

I don't know you.

I'm serious.

Let's go right now.

Come on, come on, just come on.

Come on, come on.

I'm on the streets, brother man.

I'm hungry and I'm homeless, man.

OK, OK.

He told me he was feeding people in the soup kitchens all night,

and he was giving away his clothes and his money.

Here, you need some money?

Here, just take it.

Take it.

And then when I heard he thought he could fly off the Empire

State Building and land safely was when I said, are you

willing to come home?

Hey, hey, hey.

If I went right up there to the top, I could totally fly.

If I could do it, I would do it.

I'd fly.

I'd just fly.

When he arrived at the airport, I picked him up, and he-- you

know, at Toronto International Airport

where you have that border that you walk through.

Well, he jumped over it and landed in front of me, big hug,

and his eyes were glazed.

And he had lost, I don't know, 30 pounds and just sped up.

Planned an intervention at Grant Valley Hospital.

Everybody's world was rocked because here's

this prodigal son excelling at everything,

and then all of a sudden something's off.

The state he was in, the amount of weight he had lost,

I just said, you could be in jeopardy

of having a heart attack.

Will you come to the hospital with me?

So he said, oh my god, yeah, of course.

And we went into the hospital, and the whole family was there.

The doctor was there, and it was clear

that they needed to admit him.

There were pieces of Ross that came out

that I'd never witnessed before.

I remember him turning to my dad and going, so,

what the fuck do you think of me now?

I'm a big chick magnet.

I drive a convertible.

Fucking proud of me now?

So the truth was coming out.

And my dad, he didn't know what to do with this.

Ross somewhat got trapped in the mirror of my father,

if that makes any sense.

There was a lot of pressure in terms of being the number one

athlete, in terms of whether it was scholastically,

whether it was socially.

I think Ross felt a lot of pressure

to live up to whatever it was my dad expected

of him, which was a lot.

So it's May 3, 2012, and we're on our way to Philadelphia

to the American Psychiatric Association Conference.

It's at the headquarters in Philadelphia.

And there is also going to be a global demonstration going on.

I have no idea of the numbers, what to expect.

But I know that it's been promoted

for the last few months.

[music playing]

It's taking me a long time to find my voice.

But once in Philly, I find others

who aren't afraid to speak up.

Laura Delano was diagnosed bipolar as a teenager.

She treated her symptoms with drugs

and quietly accepted her condition, until now.

Hi.

Hi.

It is an honor to be able to call myself

a psychiatric survivor, especially one representing

my generation.

My generation has grown up believing

that if we can't focus on our work

because we're distracted by the boy we have a crush on,

by the upcoming game we're playing in,

or by the constant bombardment of media from which we can't

escape, we have a brain disease and subsequently medicated

with brightly colored capsules and bitter tasting pills.

During my 13 years in the mental health system,

I believed that I was broken and incapable

of being fixed, that I needed psychiatry

to create a life that came anywhere close to being

considered normal, that my emotional suffering was

due to something wrong with my brain and not the fact

that I was a young girl trying to make sense of herself

in a culture based so much on performance achievement

and perfection, that the emptiness I felt inside

was because I was severely borderline.

I kept waiting and waiting for the day

to come when my psychiatrists and my medications

would give me a life worth living,

and that day never came.

Instead, my life became lonelier, emptier, and number

than it had ever been before.

The profound anger I have today for those

still labeled and still trapped within the biomedical paradigm

of psychiatry is a healthy one that fuels me and motivates

me to do whatever I can to make a change.

We got some labels.

Get your labels, hot labels.

Anyone else want an ADHD?

Yes please.

Bipolar!

We've got bipolar.

Human rights.

When do we want them?

Now!

Human rights.

When do we want it?

Now!

You're on the wrong side, psychotic.

Now he's labeled psychotic.

Label charts.

Not people.

Label charts.

Not people.

I'm here today as a psychiatric survivor.

I'm a psychiatric survivor.

I'm a psychiatric survivor.

The first time I ever met the psychiatrist,

he gave me six prescriptions.

Prozac, Zoloft, trazodone, TOPAMAX,

which I ended up overdosing on.

I had lithium toxicity at age 16.

Wellbutrin, trazodone, and Lamictal.

I'm a licensed psychologist.

Two-year-olds who have temper tantrums

are told that they have bipolar disease,

and they're medicating young children,

and they're absolutely destroying lives.

My favorite label of all of them was an at-risk.

Hey, hey, APA, how many kids did you kill today?

You know, I don't know what they're protesting.

If they're protesting being labeled, say, like bipolar,

it would be like saying somebody's

labeled because they have cancer.

And is that a label?

I don't think it's a label per se.

I think it's a condition of the mind,

and it's eminently treatable.

So that's what psychiatrists tries to do.

It tries to resume-- restore normal functioning.

What do we want?

Human rights.

When do we want it?

Now!

I've traveled 600 miles.

It's the first time I've travel alone in 11 years.

It's that important to me.

I'm here today to rip up my bipolar label.

Yeah.

I am not a label.

And the day I stop apologizing for myself is right now.

We cannot be stopped.

We cannot be stopped.

We cannot be stopped.

This book is the root cause of the protesters' anger.

It's the book that creates all these labels,

the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,

or the DSM for short.

It's often referred to as the Bible of psychiatry.

Published by the American Psychiatric Association,

it's used by clinicians and psychiatrists

to diagnose psychiatric illnesses.

The current edition has 365 diagnoses

and defines the ways our brains can go awry.

Once a label gets dispensed, that

means drugs can be prescribed to treat it.

For Robert Whitaker, the labels didn't make sense.

So he made a career debunking what

he calls the myths behind mental disorders.

There's sort of a story that has come out

of the APA over the past 30 years in a form of care

and a belief in what's possible.

And I think a meeting like this is really

looking for perhaps a different vision of what's possible.

I've read his bestselling books, Mad in America

and Anatomy of an Epidemic.

I wanted him to explain to me why

we're seeing more people diagnosed with mental illnesses

than ever before.

I wanted to first ask as a journalist, how

did this topic of mental health, how did it

become such a passion for to research and write about it?

From 1994 to 1998, I had a company

that reported on the business aspects

of bringing new drugs to market.

Came upon studies by the World Health Organization

that found that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia

in the poor countries of the world did better, much better

than in the rich countries of the world.

And so I wanted to know why.

I found that patients in the poor countries

weren't being maintained on medications long term, most

of them.

And this belied everything I knew as a journalist

to be true.

Because my understanding was anybody diagnosed

with schizophrenia needed to be on the meds for life

because they were like insulin for diabetes.

And then once I began reporting on it and researching,

it became clear to me that the story we as a society

were telling ourselves about making great advances

in understanding the biology of mental disorders

and great advances in treating mental disorders,

it wasn't a true story.

And that myth, that delusion, was

causing a great deal of harm.

Why do you think we're seeing such an increase in psych

labels and psych medications?

The only real way to understand it

is through a capitalistic lens.

So you make drugs, what do you want to do?

You want to increase the market, right?

So the way you increase the market

is you expand the definitions of who needs the drug, right?

I remember calling up someone at a pharmaceutical company

and asking them about the chemical imbalance theory.

And he says, well, it's not really true.

And I said, what do you mean it's not true?

Uh, we say that to get people to take the drugs.

He said that to you.

Yeah, and I'm like, well, I didn't know that.

It's a business success story.

What are your thoughts today with the DSM-V coming out?

What are your thoughts on the DSM-V?

Listen everybody's going to be in DSM-V. Every single person

can find themselves in DSM-V. Actually, I

think they can find themselves in DSM-IV.

But trust me, you'll be in DSM-V. I'll be in DSM-V.

And it means--

I'm already in DSM-III and IV.

OK, you're already in III and IV.

Technically.

But what I'm saying is, we've allowed

so many categories of feelings, emotions,

moods that if you go to a psychiatrist

or actually if you go to your doctor complaining

of some unease, you will be eligible for a diagnosis

and a treatment.

Here's what is really, really exciting

about what just got discovered and what's going on.

A man by the name of Allen Frances, who is literally

lead editor of the fourth edition of the psychiatric

Diagnostic and Statistics Manual,

he is actually coming out to say that what he has done

and the manual that he created, he is actually mortified by it.

And I want to just read a quote because I

think it's really important.

This is Allen Frances quoted as saying, "We made mistakes that

had terrible consequences with the Diagnostic Statistics

Manual number four.

Diagnosis of autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,

and bipolar disorder skyrocketed."

And Frances thinks that his manual

inadvertently facilitated these academics and in the bargain

fostered an increasing tendency to chalk up life's difficulties

to mental illness and then treat them with psychiatric drugs.

Again, this isn't about an attack on everyone.

This is about, let's create the awareness.

Let's actually get things right, and let's move forward

in creating a new reality so we can get people help

and not actually get people into a situation where there's

more and more sickness and illness being created

that actually isn't even real and doesn't even exist.

When he was young, seeing the doctor at CAMH and saying he

still wanted to come off lithium, and the doctor said,

oh no, he can't.

And Ross said, why don't you try it and see how it feels?

And with that, the doctor walked into the door,

and that was the last time I think he saw the doctor.

I'm not knowledgeable enough about the whole disease.

But seeing him the way he is now--

Any other questions?

--I think there may be some misdiagnosis.

I think there's a possibility.

I'm feeling better and better each day,

and I'm really happy about that.

I am so delighted now to see the changes.

And I've had people recently ask me how Ross is doing,

and I said amazing.

Much more focused.

I go back to the place I call the battlefield

of my fight over my bipolar disorder.

I was a patient at the Centre for Addiction and Mental

Health, CAMH for short.

I wanted to be off my drugs.

My psychiatrist wanted me on them.

It was a struggle that ended when my doctor delivered

the final blow, accept the treatment or leave his office.

I've gone through a lot of changes since them,

but what about the system?

I reach out to Dr. David Goldbloom,

the senior medical advisor for CAMH

and the chair of the Mental Health Commission of Canada.

Now, along my journey, I've met people

who have been prescribed medications.

Right.

And then with that, then they're prescribed

more medications to kind of deal with the side

effects of those medications, getting into like a cocktail.

I don't think we are over medicating

with psychotropic medications.

If you look in community surveys,

most cases of depression are still missed in the community.

So if you've got depression in Canada,

the greatest likelihood is you're not going to be treated.

Does that mean that the right people are always

getting the right medication?

No it doesn't.

Inevitably, some people have been misdiagnosed.

That's abundant throughout all of medicine, right?

When I make a diagnosis, I'm often

doing so at a 90 degree angle to the trajectory

of somebody's life.

You're not with them before they got ill.

You're not with them necessarily a year or two later.

You're coming in at a 90 degree angle.

I guess at this point, I wanted to talk about the mental labels

and the manual responsible for them.

You know, the DSM is now going into its fifth edition.

And it started out to be a shared language

of communication so that health professional A could talk

to health professional B about a patient

and know that they were talking about the same phenomenon--

Right, speaking the same language.

--that they were seeing, a shared language.

So I wonder if you could walk me through the process of how

a new disorder is actually entered into the manual.

Firstly, they have a kind of open process

where people can lobby, if you will,

for clinical concerns that they have

that they think should be considered

as a possible diagnosis.

For every one of the groups of psychiatric disorders,

they have an expert panel, psychiatrists, psychologists,

social workers, people with expertise

in that particular area.

And some diagnoses will make the cut,

and some will not make the cut.

And I think that they've been actually

quite scrupulous in trying to control and contain

the influence of pharmaceutical companies.

The challenge is that some of the people who

sit on the DSM committees have affiliations

with drug companies.

When he first was admitted, I know

that they misdiagnosed him, and they

thought he might be schizophrenic.

He did not want to be in there.

He was pretty angry with me too because I

was the catalyst in getting him in.

And when he escaped, that was the worst night.

My boyfriend Luke is picking me up tonight.

Because really there's nothing wrong with me.

It's just I have all these tears.

They just keep falling and torturing

and falling and torturing.

Do you know what it feels like?

Mm-mm, no.

It's hell.

And no one is helping me.

And there's different kinds of tears.

There's tears of sadness like when something really bad

happens to me like my grandma died.

And I was crying because I knew I would never see her again.

Then there's flower tears.

And flower tears are the shapes of petals.

But it's the acid tears.

Can you protect me from the acid tears?

They burn holes in my skin.

Hello?

Hi there.

I just need--

Can I help you?

--need to use the phone.

Oh, [inaudible].

I just met this woman that scared

the living shit out of me.

I don't know if she's possessed or what,

but I need to get to the Toronto airport,

and I need to get to South America.

So I need you to help me.

Look, I will pay you back.

I [inaudible].

I need to leave tonight.

Look, I'll be at the corner of Young Street and Lake Shore

Boulevard.

Please, I just need you to do this, OK?

I'll see you there.

OK, bye.

Excuse me.

Wait a second.

Excuse me!

Yes, a man just broke into my house wearing hospital garb.

Yeah, everyone's OK.

Just that whole sense of not having any control

over anything, which I guess none of us do anyways.

But when you love somebody so much

and you know they're in trouble and they're

somewhere out in the streets, and they won't let us anywhere

near him, and they had the police

looking for him and dogs looking for him,

and then to later find out they beat him up

because he was resisting-- he was panicked.

Somebody in the hospital was saying they were the devil

and they were going to kill him.

I mean, he was panicked.

Excuse me, sir.

Can you give me a lift to the airport?

I just need to get to the airport.

So that's I guess when they put him in the straitjacket

in the white padded room, wouldn't let us see him.

I just can't imagine what he went through

or anybody goes through.

What I know now if I'd known then, it's horrifying.

When I witnessed what was happening for Ross,

unfortunately I looked at my parents,

and I went, what the hell?

And you're surprised?

Just coming to Laguna Beach now.

I'm going to see my sister Laura who

has been here for more than 10 years.

I have lot of memories here.

My parents had to get a place here.

My dad came out on business and fell in love with it so much.

It was amazing to spend my summers here.

Yeah, and just a lot of incredible memories.

And this is a place that-- where I,

probably one of the places that I feel my dad's spirit most

strongly resides.

Oh my god, you're here.

Welcome.

Now I'm getting a chance for the weekend

just to relax and visit my sister, Laura.

She's one of my best buds, and kind of just

be able to chill out for the weekend.

It's been a while since I've done a class,

but I did a yoga class.

Yoga's a huge part of what's really

important to my own personal practice and staying grounded

and saying well and staying balanced.

And it's just something that's so important to keep up.

It's amazing.

This is like a moving, sweating meditation that is so good.

And the benefits of just staying consistent with it

is huge of just staying grounded and focused

when, you know, the world can just be nuts

and swimming around.

It is September 21, 2011, and I'm here

getting my second chelation treatment.

It is my eighth chelation session today.

17th chelation treatment right now.

I have at this points done 20 chelation sessions.

So it's January 10, 2012, super freaking stressed today.

It's actually a great challenge for me

because I have to constantly get better and better.

Things are heating up, and this process

is getting more stressful.

And stress is not a good thing for me,

and I start to feel unbalanced.

And coming through this whole ride

and being able to manage and stay balanced

is probably my biggest stress challenge to date

as far as any kind of work environment I've been in.

And today I'm not feeling as grounded,

and you can probably see that.

We're bombarded.

We're bombarded.

I'm just feeling really out of sorts.

I just had a complete explosion and blowout.

Bombarded.

This thing happened so quick.

Phone call, it was an email, and I didn't do the reply all.

And then frick, are we at this place again?

Like it goes both ways.

I'm a fricking bonehead.

I think the tension in your head, tension in your jaw,

really, really intense.

You start to feel unbalanced.

But you know what?

This is also being human.

I embrace that too.

And the last thing I want to do is be numbing out

from the intensity of what's going on,

because it's really important to be on, right on it.

It is not an easy road.

And just because maybe some side effects of medications

are released, you know, I still find I'm managing, like again,

right now I'm managing stress loads.

And it's something that's really important

to know that you have to have your tools.

You have to have your tools in place.

If you don't, jeez, I mean, things

could just get-- things can go haywire.

As tension builds in the body, it takes time to chip away

and release that tension again.

Why don't I show you where we were before?

This will be the easiest way.

Yep.

So this is where we were when we first did our test, right?

This is where our mercury was.

This is where our lead was.

Look at where we are now.

Wow.

You've done very well.

That's huge.

And we've gone from a level of 17 in mercury down to 7.1.

That's huge.

Yeah.

So less than half.

And these, again, these are powerful neurotoxins

that we want to get down.

Right.

And we want to get you down into the green,

so we've got a little bit more to go,

but you've done very well.

The lead generally takes longer to get down,

but it's still coming down very nicely,

and we've gone from an 11 to a 4.6.

OK.

I'm impressed with this.

I'm happy with your progress right now.

What I'm noticing now is that I'm allowing myself just

to live life and experience normal ups and downs.

And yeah, I get stressed out sometimes,

and I deal with that.

But the difference now is that a huge difference from what

it used to be before is that when

I was diagnosed bipolar and medicated,

I spent every second questioning every mood, every thought.

And I was always in a state of, am I too high?

Am I too low?

Am I too sad?

Am I too this?

Am I too that?

And I couldn't even live life.

To be in this place now is a huge, huge different shift,

and I'm just going to just ride with it because I'm

enjoying this new state of being.

OK, thanks for the-- bah, excuse me.

Thanks for the pink flamingos.

They're great.

Between dad's bad mood, my mom overflowing the Jacuzzi,

they're not bad, and I've had a good life with them

And I'd like to thank them much, and I

hope they bring me up well, because [mumbling]

OK, I can't do it on my own.

Thanks very much, and I've got to go because I'm very nervous.

OK, thanks, bye.

When Ross was really young, I saw him

as this really sensitive person who

everything affected him really deeply.

And he didn't really show his emotions all that much.

I mean, he'd go and hide to show-- to express his emotions.

So I always felt really protective of him.

It's like I was always watching and making sure he was OK.

And it wasn't easy growing up in our family.

We talked about everything, but how we felt about things

wasn't always OK.

So we kind of had to keep that to ourselves

or be told that we were wrong for feeling the way we felt.

Whatever move we made, we were always

going to get in trouble for something.

I feel like I'm making up for some growth.

I realized I was asleep at the wheel for a long time.

I spent so many years on auto pilot.

I think there's times I denied what I'm actually feeling.

I spent a lot of my life going outside of myself for answers.

And I think what I'd like to learn

is this concept of going within.

I have to fix myself.

I know someone who can help me confront my feelings,

feelings that I've buried for so long.

Dr. Charles Whitfield is a physician

based in Atlanta, Georgia, and specializes

in psychological trauma and recovery.

We met last year at a mental health conference

and have been in touch since.

In his 30 years of research, Whitfield

found that most of his patients were misdiagnosed

with some form of mental illness.

So Dr. Whitfield, I'm here today because I've

been reading some of your books, and it's

been starting to get me to ask a lot of questions

just about my own experience.

You talk a lot about post traumatic stress and all that,

and I'm curious to learn more about that.

Well, what I've noticed with my countless number of patients

over the decades is that when I take a careful history,

including a drug intake and a trauma history,

probably more than half have in fact PTSD-- Post Traumatic

Stress Disorder.

But when I hear the term post traumatic stress disorder,

I'm think-- like immediately my brain goes to, like, people

that have come back from the war and veterans and things

like that.

So how does that relate even to me?

Well, it sounds like you certainly

had a series of acute traumatic stress

experiences in your history that you just told me.

But what about before that?

In your childhood growing up, what was your family of origin

like, and how did your parents and siblings

and other people around you treat you?

[cheering]

My father wanted a son forever.

So we always called Ross the golden child.

He always had this sensitivity.

I mean, we loved him from the day he came into the world.

And he grew up in a pretty overpowering family,

a very strong domineering father who liked to take up space.

I've also been blessed with three wonderful children.

I don't tell them this enough, and I

want to tell it to them in front of all of you.

I'm particularly proud because not only

are they sensitive to people-- all three of them--

but in their own way, they're carving out

their own personalities.

And they believe in what they believe.

And it isn't always what Donna and I believe,

but they have the strength and the courage

to go ahead and do it anyway.

He viewed us as a reflection of him and an extension of him.

So when we didn't measure up-- and he

was a very tough man on himself--

if we didn't quite measure up, then that scared him.

If Ross excelled, my dad felt OK about himself.

There was a lack of a separation of where my dad ended

and Ross began.

You stupid fucking idiot.

What is your problem?

He could be verbally abusive.

He could be physically abusive.

He could be emotionally abusive.

He did that a lot with Ross.

He'd be running back and forth across the ice screaming

and yelling every time my brother even

let a shot get close.

I guess Ross just really never spoke up.

I mean, he kind of just squashed it in.

God dammit Ross, in the first half on the breakaway,

I told you to shoot left, and you shot it

straight at him, completely open net.

You've practiced that a million times, and you missed the net.

You're 10 feet away.

What is wrong with you?

I scored both goals.

But you didn't win.

Two off the post, one off your head,

how many opportunities are you going to miss?

Wanting to be everything that you could be for yourself

and to make this man proud of you

and always feeling that you never

could achieve that is like a no-win situation.

So he ragefully, verbally, and psychologically, emotionally

abused you then, it sounds like.

Jeez, I think young Ross has got one on there too.

He does.

Yeah.

I had-- yeah.

There was quite a bit of that.

And see, that's the most common cause of child abuse,

except that it's more subtle, and it's harder to remember

and it's harder to put together and realize

that that was really abuse.

And what you likely experienced was an age regression,

and that's when we suddenly feel little, small, and totally

insignificant, and we zone out completely.

That's two big bits of trauma that you experienced,

it sounds like.

Father son traumatic experience and abused

mentally, emotionally, and physically

by the Canadian mental health system,

it sounds to me like you probably don't have bipolar.

So that I-- I wasn't dealing with

and I wasn't bipolar at all.

I was actually dealing with post-traumatic stress.

Correct.

Ah.

Hm.

They burn holes.

They burn holes.

They burn holes.

I just need you to do this, OK?

And my dad, I know he came from a really dysfunctional family.

And he was just this really sweet guy with this huge heart,

but he was troubled.

Looking back at the relationship with my father,

it makes sense to me that I may have

suffered post-traumatic stress.

And it's a condition I feel I can work through naturally.

It is really a special day today.

Today is the day we're actually driving to San Diego

to see Peter Levine.

Peter Levine is a person who's created somatic experiencing.

The core of this work is about trauma

and it's about releasing trauma from the body that actually

gets held and stuck in the body.

And there's a lot of anger still sitting in the body.

And it makes sense to me because what

I learned from a very young age, it wasn't OK to express anger.

And so, you know, when I would have situations like that,

I would just constantly swallow it.

What I'm realizing now is actually swallowing that energy

every time and that energy sits in the body

and can cause issues.

Do you want to say a little bit about your anger?

Growing up, it wasn't OK to express it.

Yeah.

And how is it to be with it now, with the aggression?

It's OK.

I still notice that it's a scary place to go to.

Yeah.

So let's just go inside for a little bit now,

and just explore your inner experience,

and just report what you're noticing.

That I just-- I just remember the terror.

Do you see yourself with your father?

Yeah.

Pay attention, Ross!

I see a very large man who was sitting in shame.

This is really important that you're

able to see that, the shame that's underneath this rage.

And now maybe see if you're able to allow an image

to come up to see your father around the age of seven,

to see him as a child around that same age.

I see it.

You see it.

Can you also imagine seeing you at that age

also together there with your father at age seven?

Yeah, we look like twins.

We're both at that age.

You look like twins.

Yeah, we're actually enjoying each other's company.

Yeah, really the enjoyment just to be together.

Yeah.

And he's encouraging.

Encouraging, yeah.

Yeah, he must've been really, really proud, proud of you.

I also noticed too just that exercise

of going back and having my seven-year-old play

with my father's seven-year-old was--

there was a real shift in compassion.

Exactly.

Exactly.

It started to develop right when you could see him

as struggling with his own being shamed.

And you can certainly easily imagine his father

doing similar things or worse.

And his mother always told him how much

she hated him every day.

And his father was alcoholic and very abusive.

It's actually quite remarkable the man that he turned out--

with his flaws-- considering what he went through.

Yes, right, and to know from that place of compassion

that he did the best that he could.

Yep.

Looks like you have another tool.

Mm-hmm.

Just got to have my final visit with Dr. Dempster

and get the results from all the work

that I've really been focused on doing with him.

And the results were just more than I could have asked for.

I've been feeling amazing, especially

these last few months.

More focus, more concentration, the ability to get things done

and stay focused for long periods of time, something

I never-- last year at this time wasn't even

a possibility for me.

The most important thing of all of it

has been about healing the stuff with my dad

and I, this incredible, incredible guy,

and we had our stuff to work out.

And so as I come to the end of this journey,

we're going to go back to where my sisters and I delivered

my father's ashes and his favorite fishing hole.

And so to get to go back there and pay tribute

and to go out in the ocean and have a moment is just-- gosh,

it's a dream come true.

I feel so blessed to be able to finish things off this way.

So I'm getting ready to go.

So that's it.

Bye.

As I look at root causes of what I went through,

what was causing symptoms, I think a big part of it

was the relationship with my father

and actually healing with my father.

This was a place where we spent a lot of time together.

It was kind of like a ritual coming up here.

And because this is where I feel him the strongest,

this would be a great place to have closure

and to be able to really move forward.

All the challenges, all the stuff I was working through,

all the anger that I had for so many years

doesn't feel like it's a part of me anymore.

It's surreal being back here.

It's a real feeling of wow, you know, we really did it.

My dad loved fishing, so we would come out here,

and he'd be up at like 5:30 AM.

And I would have a hard time waking up.

For a lot of the years when we were coming up here,

I was still on lithium in that foggy, drug-induced state.

I think because he loved it so much,

there's a part of me that just really got into it as well.

In the beginning, I found it really challenging

to be out there in the cold for so long.

But as time went on, I really started

to enjoy the ritual of it all.

Being out on the water for 12 hours,

there would be hours that would go

by where we wouldn't say a word.

It was almost meditative.

This is my favorite picture of us.

We're both kind of laughing and smiling,

and that's how I want to remember the relationship.

I know he knows what I'm doing right now.

And I know he-- he's in-- he's in-- I

know he's in full support.

Everything's on the right path, and it feels good,

and it's emotional.

Yeah.

[music playing]