Training Without Conflict® Podcast Episode Sixty: Dr. Josef Witt-DoerringSSRIs, Dogs, and the Chemical Lobotomy No One Wants to Talk About - with Dr. Josef Witt-DoerringIn this episode, I sit down with Dr. Josef, a board-certified psychiatrist, former FDA medical officer, and one of the few voices brave enough to speak publicly about what SSRIs are really doing to people… and what that means for dogs.The so-called “safe and effective” narrative is crumbling.What we’re seeing instead are emotional numbness, cognitive damage, and permanent changes to the brain, and not just in humans.While the AVSAB continues to push SSRIs as a behavioral fix for dogs, the evidence of harm is mounting. In this conversation, we dismantle the myth of the “chemical imbalance,” and challenge the blind faith many trainers and veterinarians have placed in psychiatric drugs.If you’re a trainer, vet, or dog owner who cares about animal welfare, this is a conversation you can’t ignore.For more information about Dr. Josef, check out:https://www.instagram.com/taperclinichttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT0HW8jp8xDuczBnO7Kg7rAIvan Balabanov is a 2-time World Champion dog trainer, Ot Vitosha Malinois breeder, trainer of Premier Protection Dogs and founder of the revolutionary Training Without Conflict® dog training system.For more information about Ivan Balabanov's Dog Training School and information on how to train your dog using the Training Without Conflict® system, check out:https://trainingwithoutconflict.comhttps://malinois.comhttps://premierprotectiondogs.comPlease like, comment, and share with your dog friends💪🏼
Chapter 1: What are SSRIs and how are they used for dogs?
Where do I start? I've been mocked, dismissed, and told to stay in my lane. All because I question the rush to medicate dogs with SSRIs. For fear, for anxiety, aggression, OCD, leisure activity, pretty much anything can be, we should supplement at least with SSRIs. The typical response I get is, you're not a veterinary behavior specialist or you're not an educated dog trainer.
But here is the thing. I understand bad science when I see it. And after working with dogs for over 40 years, including some of the most complex behavior cases imaginable, I can tell you this. Not one time have SSRIs helped me personally to have a breakthrough with a dog. Not once have they solved the real problem that the dog had.
In this conversation, I hope that we can bring clarity to why that is. Because the narrative around the drugs needed to be challenged for the sake of humans and animals. For decades, the public has been sold a beautiful but, at the same time, dangerous story. The depression and behavioral issues stem from a simple chemical imbalance, a serotonin deficiency.
It was repeated in ads, in doctor's offices, in textbooks, in everyday language. But the science just doesn't support it. The most comprehensive and very current review to date by Dr. Joanna Moncliffe and her team looked at every major area of serotonin research and found no consistent evidence that low serotonin causes depression.
Chapter 2: Why is the chemical imbalance theory being challenged?
In fact, the only reliable pattern was that long-term antidepressant use might actually lower serotonin and not restore it. So if this theory doesn't hold in humans, Why is it being used to justify prescribing psychotropic drugs in dogs? Here in the States, we have a culture that celebrates dogs having behavior problems.
Many dogs going through some kind of behavior modification are supplemented with SSRIs. And we clearly have a serious problem. That's why I invited tonight Dr. Joseph Witt Doering. He's a board-certified psychiatrist, a former FDA medical officer, and one of the few professionals willing to expose the real story behind modern antidepressant use.
Now, just so I'm clear, I brought Dr. Joseph on to do most of the talking here. He presents this case better than anyone I've seen, and I've been following this for the last five years quite intensively. So yeah, I'll jump here and there to draw parallels from what I see in dog training. Ask questions, of course, but Primarily, I will allow you to do the talking. Again, thank you for being here.
And if I'm missing something as far as your credential, go ahead and tell my audience. But yeah, let's get going.
Well, thank you so much for having me. You didn't miss – I think you got the biggest parts. Yep. So I'm a board-certified psychiatrist, and I've been doing this for over 10 years now. And a big thing that makes me a little bit different from other people is I'm an expert in drug side effects. And that's what I was doing in the pharmaceutical industry and at the FDA.
And in my day-to-day job now is I run a private practice with my wife. We're in 10 different states across the U.S. And we help people safely come off medications when they've started to have side effects. And so... That's likely where Ivan has kind of found me. I talk a lot on Twitter and on YouTube about the problems that I'm seeing in my patients.
And I also use my research background from being at the FDA and in the pharmaceutical industry to try and break down complicated things like drug studies and research and make them accessible for people. Yeah.
Very cool. So, yeah, so when I get accused of not understanding the neurochemistry, when I question the deserine dogs, how does that parallel with what happens to criticism in human psychiatry when that comes? Because that's almost...
very quickly the moment you voice opposition or even question you're pretty quickly at least in the dog world put in place like you you don't know what you're doing or what you're talking about how how is that in your field yeah so i'll talk about humans first and then we can bring it bring it back to dogs so um
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Chapter 3: What are the side effects of SSRIs on humans?
But if you tell someone, well, there's probably a genetic problem wrong with you and this drug is going to go into your mind like a magic bullet and fix the issue, it can seem a lot more justifiable. It's like, well, I'm not papering over my symptoms. I'm not hiding them or masking them. I'm fixing a medical problem. Now, Ivan, you mentioned Joanna's paper just a moment ago.
And I think that was a big boom, right? I mean, that kind of exploded in 20, whatever, two, three years ago.
yeah yeah and so this was a really big deal at the time you know a group of researchers led by joanna mong brief and out at university king's college london they essentially did a review of every single study out there that had looked at serotonin in depression and so looking for correlations you know in these depressed patients when we bring them in if we if we draw the central spinal fluid
you know out and we look at the metabolites of serotonin you know are they are they lower you know they never found it you know they would do autopsies of the brains of people who had a lot of depression and they would look for the concentration of you know serotonin receptors on the neurons absolutely no difference and then they also touched on
really high-tech brain imaging studies, things called functional MRIs, where you can look at structures in the brain, and you can also look at the way the physiology of the brain changes. And they got all these people with depression, and they got normal people, and they could not find any reliable differences between them. So what this means is that
There is no underlying chemical problem that we're seeing with people who have depression, at least not one that we can test for. Maybe we haven't found it yet. But the idea that we are fixing well-known problems with these drugs is false. This doesn't mean that there can't be things out there like temperament. We know that temperament is kind of genetic.
But it's not this easily understood thing where it derives from this one thing in the brain. It's likely polygenic, meaning it's made up of multiple different genes. But that's not a disease. This is just normal human variation that you get some people who are more nervous and some people who are more extroverted.
Yes, like me having an opening to a podcast when I'm nervous.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's just normal human variation. I mean, some people are taller, some people are shorter, some people are more athletic and less. And all of these different things have survival advantages, and they're completely normal. And so what this paper by Joanna Moncrief
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Chapter 4: How do SSRIs affect dogs differently?
And so my like follow up question to this is like, if the science was always that shaky, why did psychiatry and media and pharma and everything, why did they kept pushing it so aggressively? Because... Like, I mean, they had to have a little bit of an idea that that's not quite the case, or did they? Or how, why it became such a mainstream? It's just like, oh yeah, you should.
You go to the doctor and within five minutes, with a less conversation. I will tell it before you answer maybe. Like I remember myself way back in the 90s when I first came to the States from Europe and I broke with my girlfriend. And at that time, I had two young graduates from school, psychiatrists, and I still remember the girl looking at her boyfriend, like, we should put him on something.
And then they both look at me and I'm like, what are you guys talking about? And I can only imagine if at that moment I was to accept that which way my life would go from there on, how little I knew and how much I would have trusted doctors, right? But how come that it's pushed so aggressively to everybody that it's hard to argue?
Well, see, a lot of this comes down to commercial forces, right? And so I mean, most doctors have known for a long time, essentially, depression. Why do people get depressed? Well, it could be due to life circumstances or it could be due to maybe things we don't understand.
And so I think we've always had this idea that there was this interface between maybe your temperament and just the natural variations between people and then also stresses in one's life. What the drug companies wanted to do was they wanted to downplay the life hardship. When life hardship leads to depression and anxiety, they want to downplay that because that's not what their product fixes.
They wanted to paint depression and anxiety as more biological than it was because that's what they had the solution to do. And when you have a group of powerful companies who have billions of dollars of marketing spend, And in the US, they used it on television. You know, there are old ads from, you know, the 2000s, where there's this bouncing Zoloft blob.
And it says in the black and white, you're going into this big, nice, beautiful colors, and you're happy. Yeah. I remember exactly.
It's Yeah, yeah. And it says, you know, if you're suffering from depression, you may, you may have a chemical imbalance that's going to be fixed by these drugs. Now, I think for most people, it's understandable that a drug company is going to play shenanigans and they're going to market things in a way that increases the amount of sales.
But the thing that most people don't realize is that the medical community, especially the leading academics, have been corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry. Most people think doctors get corrupted because sales reps for the drug companies, they come in and they bring them sandwiches. And because the sales rep is sexy, it's meant to convince the doctor. I'm sure that plays a part.
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Chapter 5: What is the role of the pharmaceutical industry in prescribing SSRIs?
Now, the reason for this is they will let you run their clinical trials, they will write publications for you, and they will fly you around the world. And all of these things will bolster your curriculum vitae. And that will allow you to get promotions.
But what this means is that for very competitive academics who really want to rise to the top of their profession, they're not going to speak out about the drugs. They are going to actively avoid saying negative things about it because as soon as they start doing that, they're not going to be supported by the drug companies anymore.
And so the influence and the power of the drug companies has corrupted academia. And then the final thing, the final reason why you don't hear about negative stories about these drugs is that for many companies, especially big ones, and you'll see this when you watch TV, they're running drug ads. A huge amount of profit in media comes from drug ads.
And so even then, they are going to be less likely to support any negative content that's critical. And so it creates this thing where you seem like a crazy person if you start saying things like, hey, these drugs don't fix chemical imbalances. They're just masking the problems. People go, I've never heard of such a thing before. I've only ever heard the opposite from people.
But it's just, essentially, it's just money from drug companies.
Kind of like how everybody was laughing at Tom Cruise in 2005, right? When he was on that interview, it was like, there is no chemical deficiency. And everybody was like, oh, that Scientology guy, right? Yeah, he's completely right. Right. Yeah. So that's just a very difficult situation to get out of.
But then let me, so if, and I don't know if that's even correct, but if depression, like in humans, let's talk about, so we don't talk about aggression in dogs, but depression in humans isn't caused by low serotonin. Do we, what are the SSRIs actually doing to people? Yeah.
Yeah, so I mean, when we think about the things that make humans depressed, and I mean, we think about, I mean, the main ones that Sigmund Freud would always talk about, he says, love and work. And I think that's a great way to think about it. We are social creatures. And so relationships tend to be some of the biggest things that make us unhappy. But we also need purpose.
And so we need to be doing something that we like. And so those two areas are significant. But then when we get outside of those things, I start to worry about drug use as well, especially overuse of caffeine and nicotine, but also things like cannabis. I also worry about medical problems that are missed. Big things can be dietary issues. We have a lot of people with dietary problems.
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Chapter 6: How can we safely taper off SSRIs for dogs and humans?
You get some people, the drug effect will stay there and it will work for them. But then you get some people where it just wears off and they need to go on higher and higher doses to get the same effect. Then they need to get on more and more medications to maintain it. And then we have some people who get worse. They develop a condition called...
tired of dysphoria, but it's essentially brain changes that make people have high anxiety, low energy, low and low motivation. And they get stuck in this chronically depressed state that's induced by the drug. And if we're not even talking just about what the drugs can do to people, there's also an opportunity cost about being on these meds.
You know, what if because you went on these medications long term, you never experienced the impulses to fix your relationships or to go and find that job that you should actually be doing? You know, you did quit the one that you're doing now. But what if it means you neglect a health issue that was making you anxious and that's just festering in the background?
I mean, if you don't fix these problems at their root, they get worse. And so I worry about all of the long-term problems with these medications long-term. And let me tell you this, this is the exact same with dogs because before I got on this podcast, I did some research. I couldn't find a single clinical trial in dogs that went longer than six weeks. And so these vets out there-
Dig a little deeper in those two studies. They're based on the owner saying how my dog feels after.
Yeah.
And we're also told for as long as I remember that they're safe and effective. This has been like one of the major slogans. Like, don't worry, just we will play with the dose or we can switch to a different medication. But ultimately, we know what we're doing. and it will be safe, you will be okay.
But as you mentioned all this, there is incredible side effects, and at least in the dog training arena, when I try to work with a very difficult problem dog that's been already for three years, I mean, dog's life is...
15 years max let's say three years a young dog on fluoxetine for three years gabapentin trazodone and some other cbd like just and without any outcome so finally everybody gives up and it's like let's euthanize it it's nothing's working we cannot change anything and When I look at the dog, there is just nobody. It's just this emotional blunting, like clearly, like with dog is very easy.
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Chapter 7: What alternatives exist for managing anxiety in dogs?
The only easy thing, I guess, with the dogs is, as dangerous as it is, is that With a human, they can get close to being off of the medication and then things go very bad and they jump back in because they start to feel, as you are explaining it very well, I can actually let you explain this.
But with the dogs, the way we, you know, it took me, typically it takes me about three to four months just for the dog to start to get a little bit excited about anything. Even when you tell him, hey, don't be a bad boy, or hey, you're such a good boy, and you get the same kind of dull look from the dog, and there is nothing to work with.
And it really just prevents, in my opinion, for dog behavior modification. actual success because the dog just doesn't care. He's like, I don't care kind of attitude, which makes it very difficult to encourage or discourage any behaviors and get anywhere with it. But it was very nice how it gets so complicated, how people think Some psychiatrists argue that it's, yeah, it's not addictive.
It's very easy to, you know, leave it alone. But it's actually, that's not the case. Can you tell a little bit about how difficult it is and what happens usually, why people get back in it?
So, yeah, so coming off psychiatric meds, especially the antidepressants for humans, can be really challenging. So... there's a huge variation in what people experience coming off these meds. I talk to some people and they've been on the meds for three, four years. They can come off in two months, no problem. They go back to their life. In fact, I actually think that's the majority of people.
But there are some people that when they try and come off, For reasons we don't understand, their brains are just not very elastic. They have a very hard time adapting to the drug being removed. And then they can develop really severe withdrawal problems. And sometimes these can go on for years. It's a condition called protracted withdrawal. And it can make the person very unwell.
It's not the most common outcome, but it can happen. And because of that, I mean, that's what I do now. I find these people who are having a really hard time coming off the drugs, and then I do these very gradual, slow tapers to help them come off, typically after they've failed to come off quickly. Yeah.
Ivan, do you have any difficulty getting the dogs off medications when you take over their care?
Yeah, that's what I was kind of trying to say that I don't, it's not difficult because I know of trainers that will just cold turkey kind of do it. I know that that's not correct, so I do take time. But again, I'm trying to do it on my own to some extent. I don't see... What I see is I gradually start to see the dog becoming... just reacting to normal life better.
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Chapter 8: How should we approach behavioral issues in dogs without medication?
Yeah.
So it's very difficult to say, um, what happens with the dog because we i mean no no way to measure and the only thing we're left no way to talk to them we're left with their body language and how they go in everyday life what they do um so from
Typically, and again, it's not everybody, some dogs are, you don't see this dramatic difference in behavior and mood, but the dogs that I work with, the really difficult dogs that end up working, coming here, they're just very flat. And, and so they're like, they're so flat.
I don't even know if that's even a good description to describe it this way, but to where you don't really see, like, if it gets worse, what more it can be besides they, they cannot just go in a corner and start crying. Um, but they just don't get excited in a good or a bad way. They're just very, it's like, okay. yeah, you're petting me, or yeah, you're telling me.
And that makes it very hard to read them. The interesting thing is that the way the medications are coming into the dog world, it's really based on the human experience in psychiatry. And it's basically kind of copied into the dog world. with the idea that it will do the same thing, but it's became such a common problem that to me the most dangerous thing right now is that,
These medications are not that they are just overly prescribed, but they are so easily prescribed by anybody. Like any, I feel that any veterinarian doctor, a dog will come to the office and the owner will say, my dog is too rambunctious and he's charging other dogs on the street and... chances are they may walk away with an SSRI prescription.
Because the, and that's, I'm speculating here, but because the animal veterinarian behaviorists, which they get some extra school, of course, and they get educated on the medication, but all the education is exactly taken from human psychiatry. And so my assumption is that if they're using it, then they can use it, and you can I mean, you can get a prescription.
Like I know that I can go to any dog veterinarian with my dog and convince them. They're very easy. And on top of that, I will go online. There is like this dog website that sell medications and stuff. And tomorrow I have it. And off we go on medication. It's really, really sad. And the sad part is that
The majority of the dogs, and I'm talking the majority of the dogs, like I remember one of your, I don't know, was it a podcast? But you had some really good presentation at one place where you had a big circle and you put a percentage and you were talking how there is this 5% of people that really need it.
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