Don't Tell Your Doctor You Are Depressed: Here's Why

if you clicked on this video looking for a scathing critique of the mental health care system in the US well I'm here to tell you you're in the right place because today I'm going to be talking about why you should not tell your doctor if you're depressed now this might surprise you because you've probably been told a million times if you're suffering get help and usually people turn to their doctors for help but I'm here to say that we should maybe think twice about that and what may be even more surprising to you is that

I'm a board certified psychiatrist right I'm a doctor who specializes in mental health care so why would I say something like this well that's exactly what we're going to be discussing today and so let's jump into the heart of it the problem is simple mental health care in the US is bad and honestly it's really not that much of a secret anymore if you've ever gotten Mental Health Care from a family doctor seen a psychiatrist you might have even sensed this already and here's what the issue really is medical providers have given up on trying

to figure out why people are unhappy and how to fix it let me repeat that one more time most doctors have stopped looking for the root causes of Mental Health Care problems instead what we're seeing is doctors diagnosing patients on lists of symptoms that don't require any testing and then they use these diagnoses to pretend that it explains why the people are upset for instance take major depressive disorder for example to get this diagnosis you need five out of nine symptoms no lab tests no Imaging you just report the symptoms and then suddenly you have

major depressive disorder and most doctors simply stop there they tell you well you have depression as if it explains why you're depressed and kind of subtly implying that you have some kind of brain disorder but for many people this is complete nonsense mental health conditions are often caused by much more than faulty brain chemistry or genetics or some kind of chemical imbalance yeah many doctors don't even try to figure this out they ask about symptoms they prescribe medications and then they move on without addressing the real issues that are making people feel unwell so here's

what you need to do before you accept one of these diagnoses that is subtly implying that you have some kind of broken brain you kind of want to look at your life and I think about three main areas in your life to pay attention to one it's work this seems to be one of the major reasons why people end up with anxiety and depression they're having problems at work they're lacking Direction in their careers and they're not enjoying what they're doing and so that's one area to pay attention to the next big one is relationships

with your friends and your romantic partners that would be the second biggest thing in people's lives that affects them and finally I would say prior trauma now the ways prior trauma can really shape you is it can kind of change your personality sometimes I mean if you've grown up in an abusive environment you start to see other people and the world as threatening and that can affect how outgoing you are it can affect you in relation ships there's all sorts of ways that bad experiences in your past can play out in the present and affect

your life in negative ways leading to things like anxiety and depression after you've looked at your life you want to look at your diet now a poor diet is one of the most common hidden causes of depression I I'm going to say that again because people usually roll their eyes when they hear this and they do it because most doctors don't talk to them about diet and so they have this perspective as if well if no one's ever talking to me about it it's not important but what I can tell you as a doctor that

works full-time taking people off psychiatric medications one of the main reasons people are able to come off is that they've changed their diet they've identified some kind of sensitivity they've beat the insulin resistance they've cleaned it up and they're feeling a lot better and so you want to look at high carb diets that are filled with empty calories like if you're having a lot of refined flowers and if you're eating a lot of bread you may be consuming a lot of calorie empty food that is just spiking your blood blood sugar causing energy crashes and

fatigue next you need to remove foods that are simply Toxic by that I mean seed oils not only do seed oils cause a lot of oxidative stress and inflammation in your body but the manufacturing process of these seed oils it actually produces toxins which we then ingest which damage our body seed oils can cause all sorts of physical and mental problems in people and so move away from them start cooking in Tallow avocado oil or even olive oil you'll feel much healthier and Fin finally you need to make sure that you're not malnourished due to

conditions like celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity because some people are just not going to be able to tolerate gluten and it's going to damage the gastrointestinal tract and it's going to make it very hard to absorb the nutrients that people need so really have a close look at your diet and finally you need to have a proper medical workup not some 15minute medical workup that you get in a busy Family Medicine doctor's office you need someone to really spend time with you someone to take a proper history understand your home and your environment and

your exposures someone who's going to look at your medications for instance the amount of people I've seen who are on Statin and just feel terrible and lethargic and are having brain fog and anxiety and they think they have a mental health condition but their Statin is actually causing a toxicity you want someone that's going to look at all of the medications you're on and make sure that it's not having some side effects like anxiety and depression another thing that your doctor needs to talk about is the role of caffeine and nicotine in your life if

you're on too many stimulants that's going to cause a lot of anxiety and eventually it's going to cause fatigue I know that seems counterintuitive but if you're constantly consuming lots of stimulants which essentially getting your adrenals to pump out adrenalin that's keeping you awake if you are constantly doing that you're going to burn them out and then you're just going to feel fatigued and exhausted all the time so your doctor needs to be talking to you about substance use like caffeine and nicotine they need to also be looking at real medical issues like obvious ones

they have to do testing they have to look at things like anemia that make people fatigued they need to ask you about your sleep and you're snoring to make sure you don't have sleep apnea or some other autoimmune condition but here's the part that a lot of doctors Miss and this is why I'm I'm actually a big fan of functional medicine you want someone who's going to look at less common but serious issues now functional medicine doctor they're going to look at things like Celiac sensitivity they're going to look at your gut health they're going

to look at your nutritional profile they're going to look at all of your vitamins and your amino acids and try and identify if you're having problems absorbing these Foods because of gut problems and then they're going to help you fix them they also look at things like hormonal imbalances and even toxins like mold now if you were like me when you heard things like mold toxicity or metal toxicity in the past maybe you rolled your eyes because no one ever talked to you about that but from what I've seen working in this space for a

while these things are legitimate and I have seen people suffer from things like mold toxins and they've suffered for many years and it's been m diagnosed because doctors have never asked them about it and so that's why I think going the extra mile and seeing someone like a functional medicine doctor can be so important to getting to the root cause of what's going on with you and so to summarize these things the problem with the medical system right now is that we often don't look for the underlying reasons why people are unhappy and we don't

take the time to help them with these underlying reasons we're so quick to diagnose them with questionnaires or a list of symptoms and then just say hey you've got depression and a brain illness and you need these medications and this system is failing so many people and so let's talk about that now why is the system failing well here's the harsh truth this is what I've seen working in this space for 10 years I think that a lot of doctors have been manipulated into providing poor medical care now you might be wondering how is this

happening well let's go into it I think a lot of doctors they don't realize how much of the medical literature is really just pharmaceutical Marketing in Disguise so many of the Articles out there about drugs they born within the medical Affairs which is essentially the marketing department of a pharmaceutical company I used to work in these departments and so I know what it's like and they published paper with the purpose of trying to make doctors see their drugs in the best possible light and so they overhype the benefits and then minimize the harms a lot

of doctors also don't understand that their academic leaders you know the the heads at Harvard and John's Hopkins and wherever they are that these people are highly swayed by Drug Company money and career incentives to skew their recommendations towards being very Pro medication and to having a very mental illness is a biological imbalance type of perspective on things and so your regular doctor on the street they look at you know God up there at the at Harvard and they say you know who am I to question that this guy's always talking about medications he's always

talking about biological problems that must be what's right but they don't see that these people are highly compromised by the career advancement and the money that they've been getting from these drug companies now the next issue is that I think doctors also fail to recognize how their Impressions have been shaped by constant exposure to drug Centric narratives and also brain illness style narratives imagine this I mean if you were in medical school and then you're in your residency and then you were practicing and the whole time you're in each of these settings what you were

reading in the journal articles and what your teachers were telling you and your colleagues were telling you was always it's well you know we should use these anti-depressants for this you know this is a chemical imbalance if you're constantly hearing that because those are the messages that are essentially being manufactured by drug companies who are trying to push that perspective out there because it helps them sell medications it's very easy to get caught up and start believing that that's all there is to mental illness you know well you know it's treated with the drugs and

these are brain abnormalities it must be that because that's what I'm always hearing and they don't stop to ask themselves the question well why am I only hearing about these conditions being brain illnesses and that the drugs are the best way to fix them they don't notice that there's an agenda behind that and that there's actually people that benefit from them thinking that way the next issue is that a lot of the clinical guidelines like for instance the American Psychiatric association's guideline on depression which says that anti-depressants should be used as a firstline treatment for

depression no matter the severity they don't realize that these guidelines again were written by these academics which made it to the top of their institutions because they were very Pharma friendly and they helped them run the clinical trials and generate a lot of research and they got a lot of exposure and so the doctors reading these guidelines they don't realize that it's been shaped by a very specific group of biologically inclined doctors to make people see the problem in a certain way and they also don't realize that a lot of the negative research about drugs

is buried and never published and all of this creates this kind of environment where doctors start to become afraid to trust their intuition because I was like that I went into Psychiatry originally thinking wow you know there's so many reasons why people could become unhappy and the drugs are going to be a small part of that and I'm going to learn about their life and I'm going to learn about their physical health and I'm going to be coordinating all of these professionals that work on life and physical health and we're going to help these people

and then yeah maybe we'll use some drugs sometimes and I felt that way I think a lot of people intuitively feel that way about mental health issues but once you get sucked into the whole industry I think you forget that and then when you may want to practice in that way in the future you're now afraid because if you're not going to give this anti-depressant straight away when someone depressed you're going to say wow I don't want to step out of line I don't want to go against the standard of care what if something goes

wrong what if one of my colleagues is going to be lining up to be an expert against me in a malpractice case so for a lot of these doctors now they're afraid to go against these guidelines which are so focused on just pushing drugs and in some ways I I can sympathize with that a little bit I mean they have hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and maybe for them a lot of the time it's well if I just practice in line with the guidelines I can go to bed at night and if anything

goes wrong they can say hey guys I'm just following orders and I think to a lot of them it feels safer to practice in that way now the next reason why the system is failing is that our insurance system simply incentivizes bad care doctors are paid more for quick 15minute visits than for taking more time with their patients the hospital system and the doctor if they see four people in 15-minute visits in an hour compared to maybe one person and they spend more time with them they're going to make nearly double for seeing four people

and then also the doctors themselves they're going to start gravitating towards seeing people in these shorter periods of time and what this essentially does is it makes a doctor pick between two things I'm going to make half as much money or I'm going to spend time with my patients and really help them and the sad thing is is that you have a lot of people who will just choose to see people in shorter periods of time and because of that they're not going to spend time helping people with non-drug treatments they're not going to take

time to really take a very thorough history they're not going to educate them about diet they're not going to motivate them about dying and help them overcome barriers that they're having because well it just takes a lot more time than saying hey you know this list of symptoms it says you're depressed don't worry we have a treatment for that we're going to use this medication that's a lot faster in the same way at the during the followup visit it's a lot faster if instead of asking you what's been going on in your life they say

well how's the medication working how do you feel about the dose maybe we'll bump it or maybe we'll keep it the same and so they work in this system where they want the visits to be really quick and they just end up Gra gravitating towards using drugs this is really bad this is really bad for everyone's health and honestly it's not that much of a secret I mean the patients know it and even a lot of doctors know that there's something wrong with this I talk to my colleagues all the time and they're burnt out

and many of them are actually leaving this system and it's a shame but I don't blame them because the system is broken because doctors aren't spending the time to work with patients to actually figure out what's wrong with them and then to find a solution for them that actually helps they're not taking the time to realize hey you've got a relationship problem don't worry I've got a great interpersonal therapist who's going to help you with with your wife they're not taking the time to say okay you're really struggling with motivation and and what you're doing

in work and you want to find a way to do something else don't worry we've got a career coach who's going to help you with that they're not taking the time to say well there's something wrong with your diet why don't you come back in 2 weeks I'll take an hour we're going to walk through doing a whole food paleo diet together so all of these things that could be really helpful to the patients it's it's not happening and honestly this isn't the care that we would want for anyone is certainly not the care that

we would want for a loved one so we have this failing system let's talk about the dangers of how we're practicing at the moment and why I think we shouldn't be telling our doctors if we're depressed well now for one there's a good chance that they're going to miss the problem and then they're just going to put you on a drug that masks the symptoms and being on a drug that is simply papering over the symptoms of a real problem is bad for several reasons the first reason is the original problem that led to you

getting on the drug that may just fester and get worse I mean if you're having dietary problems that are making you feel sick if you don't address them it's just going to keep on getting worse and worse and that's going to be harmful to your health but the other reason is that papering over symptoms with drugs is not a great long-term solution most people who take psychiatric medications within 6 to 2 years they end up needing to bump their dose because their bodies don't like being on them these drugs disrupt our neurotransmitters and then it

throws off the physiology in our body and so we end up sending signals back up to the brain to downregulate The receptors and try and bring back a balance well what that means is the effect of the drug wears off and then if you want to keep on having that effect to mask the underlying problem you end up on higher and higher doses what happens then well one eventually there's nowhere to go and you completely maxed out on a drug and then you get another drug laid on and and this is how we see people

end up on four or five different medications through building tolerance to the drug and then needing something else an other issue that I see happen a lot is that people will start to have a lot of side effects someone who takes an an to depressant might all of a sudden have a manic episode and then they think that they have bipolar disorder and that they need all of these other more powerful medications and this is really awful but what's really worse than this is the fact that a lot of doctors don't really talk about these

downsides when they prescribe the medications I think it's incredibly rare that a doctor would say hey well this medication it's not really going to fix the underlying problems just masking it and we don't know how long it's going to last for they're not saying these things to people they're not giving them a heads up and in many ways I think they're setting them up for a lot of problems down the line and honestly this really hurts me in my heart because you're meant to be going and seeing your doctor to get help but the only

help that they're dishing out is help where there's profit attached because a lot of the things that would really help people with anxiety and depression they're not scalable doing one-on-one relationship coaching is not scalable doing career coaching is not scalable spending a lot of time with a person to motivate them to change their diet it's not scalable doing functional medicine testing will you actually fix the underlying Problem by identifying it that's not a big money maker I mean that problem goes away the big money maker out there really comes from the drugs that people just

stay on indefinitely so we've really set up a system that doesn't really serve the patients it serves the people selling the drugs it serves the hospitals and in many ways the doctors as well who are getting incentivized to see people in really short visits all right so now let's talk about what you should do instead cuz I started off this conversation with a pretty strong statement don't tell your doctor if you're depressed here is what I would do this is what I would tell a loved one if they were having depression and anxiety I'd say

see a functional medicine doctor and I know what people are saying oh my God that's expensive a lot of them don't take insurance and the answer is yes it's true they are expensive and a lot of them don't take insurance but it's worth it because we're really talking about your health and doing this one time doing a thorough investigation making sure that you're not missing anything in many ways that's going to be the cheapest option for you it's going to be much cheaper than missing something and then spending decades on medication that you don't need

and so you want to go to someone who's really going to spend time with you who's going to look at your Nutritional Health he's going to look at your gut health and they're going to make sure that nothing's being missed and so that's the first thing go and see a functional medicine doctor who's going to take their time with you the next thing that I would recommend doing is fixing your diet you have to be honest with yourself is your diet really healthy for a lot of the people listening to this video it's probably not

on average Americans consume 60% of their calories from processed foods now processed foods because they have to have a lot of shelf life and because they're usually made with cheaper ingredients they're filled with preservatives and Seed oils and a lot of these things are just toxic to your mitochondria to those little organel within your cells that are producing energy and so you can literally be getting poisoned by your food into a state of feeling lethargic and fatigue so one of the best things that you can do is stop with the processed food and the seed

oils and shift the Whole Foods and using oils like avocado oil olive oil or even things like Tallow now the next thing you want to do with your diet you want to look at the types of foods that you're eating and you don't want processed foods like flour or rice or bread which are essentially just calories a lot of the time they're really devoid of real nutrients or they've been fortified with some chemical nutrients but it really isn't in the right makeup that you need you want to move away from having a lot of sugars

and a lot of refined carbohydrates and switch over to A Whole Foods diet I promise you you will be amazed with how much better you feel just by putting better fuel in your body now the last step is to work with a therapist or a coach now this is going to be only relevant for those people who believe that their anxiety and depression is coming from something within their life that they can identify if you're having relationship problems go and see an interpersonal therapist to build empathy to understand the other person to work on these

skills and understand it same with trauma go and see a trauma therapist that could be great if you hate your job and you don't like what you're doing you might not even see a mental health professional you might go see a career coach or you might just go back to school and that could be the best way to fix that problem for you and so it's only after you've done all of these things like seeing a functional medicine doc to rule out medical problems fixing your diet and then working with coaches or therapists on real

problems in your life it's only after doing those things that you should even look at a medication because yes there are some people who may have some anxiety and depression that's not going to be fixed by those things it'll be due to maybe a medical problem that no one's discovered or maybe it is just genetic but the thing is you don't want to settle for a genetic explanation until you've done your due diligence and you've really had a good go at ruling out all of the other issues where you could fix it at the root

because when you do that you either avoid medications or you take them at much lower Doses and it's a whole lot safer for you in the long run and so I hope that all makees sense to you why would tell people these days to not tell their doctors if they're depressed it's because the mental health care system is simply broken everyone knows it a lot of doctors even know it doctors hate working in this system but until this system changes telling any family doctor or gynecologist or psychiatrist you're depressed it's often just going to lead

to a one-way Street which is prescriptions and little else I wouldn't have this opinion if we had a better Mental Health Care system if when you saw a doctor and you said they were depressed there was good access to therapists and to diet and to comprehensive medical evaluation I would say depression screening is the best if you're depressed go and see a doctor you know people in the schools should be doing depression screening you know workplaces should be doing depression screening because then the solution would actually help people it would identify them and it would

funnel them towards something that actually works well what we're doing right now when we scream for depression or when we go to a doctor and tell them that we're depressed we're getting funneled towards just getting drugs and not really getting a lot of attention to the root causes and that's bad and it hurts people in the long run okay so that is my summary thank you for tuning in to my rant against my own profession essentially I want you to tell me what you think about this do you think I was too harsh let me

know in the comments below if you agree or disagree if you like videos like this that are critical of the mental health care System you're not going to want to miss this one here where I talk about how my experience at the FDA made me completely lose faith in anti-depressant medications