Radically Genuine Podcast with Dr. Roger McFillin

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (00:19.813)
Welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. I'm Dr. Roger McFillin. Today's guest is living proof that the psychiatric industrial complex can steal decades of your life and you can still claw your way back to humanity. Angie Peacock is an Army veteran who was deployed to Iraq in 2003, but her real war didn't begin until she came home. Over 13 years,

The VA and civilian psychiatrist put her on more than 40 different psychiatric drugs. At one point, prescribing 18 medications simultaneously. So think about that. 18 drugs at the same time. Now that's not healthcare. That's systematic poisoning in my opinion. And when she was cold turquied off benzodiazepines in 2016, she couldn't walk for two and a half years. She couldn't shower.

She had a hard time speaking. She experienced suicidal ideation every waking moment for three straight years. She lost her sexuality completely for 16 years, not just diminished, completely erased. The medical establishment that did this to her, they call this treatment resistance and fired her as a patient.

Today, eight years after escaping psychiatric drugs, Angie has conducted over thousand coaching sessions, helping others navigate the hell of psychiatric drug withdrawal. She appeared in the documentary, Medicating Normal. She went on to earn herself a master's degree in social work, the same time her brain was literally rebuilding itself from catastrophic injury. But here's what makes Angie different from every other recovery story that you'll hear. She's not gonna pretend it's over.

She'll tell you straight that possibly she's 80 % healed, she still has symptoms. She'll look you in the eye and tell you even at 80 % life is worth living. That even with permanent changes, you can rebuild something meaningful from the ruins psychiatry has left behind. So this isn't a story of triumph, it's one of survival. And for the thousands of people currently trapped in psychiatric drug dependency who've been told that our suffering isn't real,

Angie is proof that you're not crazy. It's the system that is. And she's a great resource to learn from because she's in the trenches with this and she's had the experience herself. Angie, I to welcome you to the Radically Genuine podcast.

Angela Peacock (02:51.224)
Thank you, Roger. That is the best intro I've ever heard that explains the hell that I've lived.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (02:57.689)
Well, for those of my audience who have not followed your work, I'm a big fan of what you're doing because I think it comes from a place of such compassion, such heart caring for other people. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've experienced in the mental health system, both as a veteran seeking help and now as someone who's helping others navigate it?

Angela Peacock (03:23.618)
Well, when I think back to a young 23 year old who just experienced a major life trauma being in a combat zone away from her home, I feel like the worst thing I ever did was ask for help. And I know that's like the narrative that we all share in mainstream, know, ask for help. Don't tell me about your problems. Go see, go find a therapist that can listen to you, go find some meds so that you can get back to work, you know, stop crying and

It completely derailed my life for about 20 years being on meds, coming off of them and trying to heal from them. And so that's not a little thing to lose half of your life to a system that made you believe you were broken forever. You would take pills for the rest of your life and you would never graduate college. You'd never be in a relationship again. And this is just your life. You're just a mentally ill, chronically ill person. Yeah, I lived hell. I don't know what else to say.

My entire life revolved around being a patient, going to therapists once a week, going to the psychiatrist once a month, getting bed refills, filling out questionnaires in the waiting room, thinking about things I was going to tell the therapist on my way to the therapy appointments. Like I lived, ate, and breathed everything that they teach and it did not work for me. It made my life worse.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (04:40.003)
Now, I know that you were prescribed psychiatric drugs even before you served. But I don't want to go all the way back there if that's okay. I'm more interested in your experience as a veteran and what was happening when you returned to civilian life when you left combat zone, like just kind of what you were experiencing and what that is like for those of us who are civilians and haven't experienced that.

Angela Peacock (04:48.387)
Yeah, that's fine.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (05:09.187)
ends up happening when you're done with your deployment.

Angela Peacock (05:13.206)
Okay, so basically when I trace everything back, it all started in the combat zone. And if I can give you an example, it's like when you play a video game about war, it like, you think you kind of got it real, like, but then when you actually go there and there's loaded weapons and there's guns and there's bombs going off and there's a threat to your life that puts your nervous system in sort of a survival mode. So you're protecting your buddies, you're trying to stay alive, you're hypervigilant, you're not sleeping. All these things are normal in a combat zone. Okay.

Then they gave us antibiotics. Doxycycline was the drug for anti-malaria prevention. So I started taking that every single day. And what I now see that happened was that blew out my gut bacteria. I started getting mental health symptoms. I started having panic attacks and it's all related. It's partly because I was in a war zone and partly because my physiology was disrupted by those drugs. Okay. So then I develop...

An infection in my colon, I dropped 40 pounds within a month and now I'm like 100 pounds overseas eating as much food as I could and I could not hold it. So after six months, I got medically evacuated back to Lahnstuhl, Germany where they evaluated me for why is this rapid weight loss, diarrhea, gastrointestinal distress, migraine, high heart rate, all these things. And then the day after I came back, my convoy was hit that I was supposed to be on. So then I got to watch my soldier come back wounded.

in surgery and then when he told me what happened, I literally could not contain the amount of emotion I felt in that moment. Like I was mad, I was hurt, I had survivor's guilt, I was sick and it was just everything inside my little 24 year old body that could not contain the amount of emotion that I felt. Okay, so I did what I was told like a good soldier. I went to the psychiatrist office. They explained this as post-traumatic stress reaction. Here's a benzo and then I started to get worse and worse and worse.

So I can't emphasize this enough that when you send young people overseas and they see these traumatic things, but they come back to the United States, those things that are normal in a combat zone are seen as disorder when you're on American soil. And I actually think it's opposite. It's like, you should be feeling hyper-vigilant. You couldn't sleep. And then I always hear that excuse and I, maybe you could give some feedback about this, but like, well, yeah, but you should be able to turn that off and go back to work and be normal. And I would argue.

Angela Peacock (07:37.09)
You can't though, like you may never completely turn it off. You might with some time and some love and some compassion, it might die down a little bit, but you can't unsee what you've seen just as being a human being that's an animal. Like that's not natural.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (07:52.591)
I couldn't agree more. I think what's most shocking for me and probably the people who listening is that you see a psychiatrist who is within the system, right? He is in the military. If anyone should understand what would be a typical and an expected reaction to what you were going through, you would think it would be medical professionals and mental health professionals who are in the military. What do you think leads them

to view this as symptoms as some illness instead of a human response.

Angela Peacock (08:26.2)
three letters and one number, the DSM-5. I mean, that's what they're taught, okay? But it's so wrong. It's like, there's no humanity in there, okay? So I understand.

It's dogma and narrative first and not like humanity. Like, and it's really a shame because if I think about my generation, as you know, more veterans have died by suicide, not by combat. It's because of this bullshit that they believe about what is happening to us. And then we as veterans believe that because they're the authority, they're the experts on post-traumatic stress. And there's all this money going into that whole engine. And then I get paid disability on top of it because I have post-traumatic stress. So now I have to take my medicine.

And now you've developed an entire generation who believes themselves to be mentally ill after being actually having a normal reaction to something horrifying that I can't even explain to civilians what it's like to see someone who's dead on the side of the road and you watch them die. Like you guys don't ever get to see that in America the way that we see it and it's normal to us.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (09:32.966)
It's combining that and then having to be at such a hyper vigilant state in order to stay alive or to keep your brothers and sisters alive. So you just experience emotion. You experience a reaction. They send you to a doctor and they prescribe a benzodiazepine.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (09:55.141)
How was that explained to you and how did you think about it at the time?

Angela Peacock (10:00.352)
I did not know what that meant. I just thought, I need help. This is the help I'm getting. There was no thought about it. And remember my psychiatrist wore camouflage. So my psychiatrist is a military officer in uniform at the time of prescription. So there's an added layer there. It's not just a psychiatrist. It's also an officer that earned his way to that rank and that authority and that I'm supposed to respect and obey. So

And that's kind of subtle. Like you don't think about that when you're sitting in your doctor's office, but it's there. Okay. So, and as a 24 year old and my worst day of my life, how am I supposed to be understand that when I'm like in Germany, 4,000, 5,000 miles away from home and I just left Iraq? Like, I don't, you don't even have the capacity to understand that. And even coming out of that stress and trying to honestly like to drink a beer in a German bar, like the day after leaving Iraq, it's a weird.

experience just all by itself. So I don't think kids have, we were kids, we were just kids. I don't know what to say.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (11:04.346)
Yeah, so you're in the hands of an officer and a medical professional. So you're trusting their authority, not only as a medical professional, but as an officer, which you are trained to follow orders. And of course, what we know about benzodiazepines is they create dependence very quickly, right? So was there any indication to you that this is a drug that could create dependence, that this would be only provided short term, that it is maybe help you

Angela Peacock (11:13.486)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (11:32.198)
for sleep for the night or something like that? Or was it communicated in terms of like being medicinal and this is what you do if somebody is having a post-traumatic stress reaction?

Angela Peacock (11:43.95)
No, there was no, there was no explanation. remember getting a pamphlet of information and I looked at it and it just said like, what is post-traumatic stress disorder? And then the scary part about that is because I was in such a hypervigilant state and I'm reading this pamphlet, my interpretation of that at 24 was, oh my God, I have a brain disease. Oh my God, something really bad is happening. So much so there's a pamphlet about it. I didn't feel comforted by that. I thought my life is over. Like I'm screwed, you know?

And especially within the military, the stigma at the time, I hate that word. We can talk about that later, but the stigma is if you ask for help, you're going to lose your career. So then there was that extra like, kind of need help, but like I can't ask for it. And then eventually, you know, a couple of months down the line, part of my story is that I had panic attacks from ear infections that was probably from the benzo, honestly, because I was getting all these weird symptoms as tolerance grew. very quickly.

that they saw it on the machine and I couldn't deny it anymore. So at that point they're like, you're having a panic attack, aren't you? And I was like, well, yeah, there it is. It's on the blood pressure monitor. So then at that point I was taken to behavioral health. At that point, my kettle full of trauma and all my emotions that I was repressing trying to keep it together, they all came out. And at that point I was given the order that I was going to be medically retired and I'm not allowed to be around weapons, no more soldiers.

No more leadership positions, you're on staff duty. Take your pills, go to your appointments. You're being medically boarded out of the military. So I lost my career because of that, just because of asking for help.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (13:16.176)
So our veterans, our soldiers in combat, they're incentivized to not go seek help when they're struggling.

Okay, so we're in a situation here where I've studied post-traumatic stress and trauma reactions my entire career. And one of the things is very clear to me, and I communicate this to everybody I know, that the way to create a post-traumatic stress reaction in somebody is to invalidate their experience, develop avoidant coping mechanisms of suppression or avoidance like...

name it as an illness, describe it as something that's abnormal, develop a fear of not only that internal experience, but any of the situations that they're going to be returning to. That in itself is going to create mental distress. And that's exactly what they're doing. They're labeling it as an illness. They're trying to suppress a normal human response of energy that has to move. They're not there to support somebody in being

going through something that is extremely challenging, they're trying to create a robotic non-human who doesn't think or feel, but rather is just a killing machine is kind of the way I begin to start conceptualizing it. So they don't really care. That doctor didn't care enough about you as a human. They're just trying to blunt symptoms, right? And seeing if you can get back in the game.

Angela Peacock (14:54.156)
Yep, exactly. Because I was set for redeployment within two months. And then once my kettle blew, it was like, nope, you're not going to redeployed. And let me say, I was an exemplary soldier. I had no signs of mental illness. I made it seven years in my career. Rank of sergeant about to be promoted to staff sergeant. Top of my game. Like I was the go to soldier. I went to all kinds of schools. They sent me to schools because I was smart and I had my stuff together.

I worked for commanders, I worked for first sergeants, I knew my job, I led my soldiers like my soldiers loved me. Like I could not have been at the height of anything more than I was at my career when I got deployed. And asking for help absolutely ruined my career, it ruined my health, it ruined my mental health. All of it.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (15:40.655)
Angie, the psychiatric industry talks a lot about evidence-based treatment and best practices. Is from your experience, is this typical for what other veterans are going through and other soldiers?

Angela Peacock (15:52.12)
yeah. yeah. I just had, I had a veteran last week. I'll change some of the details, obviously. that was prescribed five meds by VA cold turkey, off too. And now they're still on a couple more and it's happening today. And I can name the VA. Like it's, know, and it's not just errant overprescribing, but it's horrible. Deprescribing and the poor veteran is in the cross hairs because they don't know what the hell is going on.

These these so they have you start the way this is how I conceptualize it. You start with a problem. This is for everybody, not just veterans. You have a problem and you get put on medication and you enter the treatment paradigm. Okay. Then you have a new problem because now you have your problem, your original problem, plus a bunch of medication, plus a bunch of treatment. Okay. Then something will happen along that route that either breaks your understanding of what you think you're going through or you get further harmed or you get destabilized because all the medication changes.

Now you have a third problem and then you have a fourth problem when you're trying to get off the damn meds and now you feel mentally ill like worse than you ever did so these Everybody is trapped in the crosshairs of this because we don't even know what the hell we're dealing with anymore and Mental health is just marching around like we have a mental health pandemic. We need to treat You know

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (17:14.213)
Yeah, not even considering that it's iatrogenic and, you know, we are, we are actually creating long-term customers, patients, we are inducing mental illness. So you, you start with a benzodiazepine. How does it go from there? What is typical?

Angela Peacock (17:16.728)
Hydrogenic, exactly.

Angela Peacock (17:29.118)
so then, yeah, good question. So it started with clonopin within two weeks, I got worse, but they told me that was your PCSD emerging. We're going to treat it. Don't you worry. You're getting into an inpatient or intensive outpatient program. Then it was adpaxel that I couldn't sleep. And I've read some of these records recently, so it's kind of fresh in my mind. But then it was I had I still had that heart high heart rate. So then I get diagnosed with sinus tachycardia.

which is probably just like nervous system issues from the, you know, combat zone or whatever. Excuse me. then, and then it turns into, okay, Paxil doesn't make me feel good. So let's switch to Zoloft. And then next thing I know within two years, so that was July, 2004 by September, 2006. Now I am dependent on opiates and I'm on 18 medications. So in two years, they create an

Well, it also had three surgeries in there in four months, which is where the opiates came from I'm on hormonal stuff for the surgeries now. I'm on migraine medication heart medication antidepressant antipsychotic Sleep medication another benzo and as needed benzo like all of this within two years and I am collecting disability laying on my couch and my husband leaves Because he's like what the hell just happened to the wife that I thought I married within two years

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (18:55.228)
What did that feel like to be on all those drugs?

Angela Peacock (19:00.45)
The way I like to explain it, I love Peter Bregan's term for medication spellbinding, but to anyone listening, when you are on 18 medications, it literally takes away your ability to understand there's anything wrong with that. Like I didn't even know there was something wrong with that. I just thought I'm listening to the doctors. They're going to fix me up. I'm to be okay. And I didn't even know it was not normal to be laying on the couch all day watching crime TV. One like I didn't even have an inkling of this is not okay.

Like there was nothing in there.

Like complete submission, I guess is the word

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (19:36.456)
So the drugs kind of induce this state of being where you're essentially like half the person that you were previously. And the way that your mind is now working is that you're not even in a state where you can judge that as a concern. It's like you've completely changed your personality, I would imagine.

Angela Peacock (19:56.238)
And it's worse because honestly I get gaslighting from our community now because you look at me, I'm articulate. I had brushed my hair. You know, I like I'm wearing clothes. Okay. Back then I had dreadlocks in my hair. I wouldn't shower for weeks at a time. I could barely manage to get groceries out of Walmart at midnight when the least amount of people were in there. I'd run in terrified, grab a bunch of food and run out. I thought that was my PTSD. No. Now looking back, was all that whatever word you want to use. All the meds were so f-

fucking me up. Excuse me, can I curse on your podcast? I hope so. Okay. I was not a functioning human being. I didn't have friends. I didn't date. I had zero sexuality. I lost my femininity. I was like a dirty tomboy squatting in a house that I was renting from a friend of a friend with no lease for 400 bucks a month in St. Louis, Missouri. Like I didn't look anything the way I look now. Okay. My capacity was like a fourth grade reading level. I think my gaff score, I think it was like a 42 or something when they did that.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (20:28.06)
Yeah, please.

Angela Peacock (20:55.662)
Or no, I'm sorry, a 22. Isn't it the lower is the worst functioning? I mean, it was like so low. OK, the only thing I could muster was going to my appointments and laying on my couch. That's that was my life for like 10 years.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (21:10.258)
So yeah, obviously the professionals in your life were witnessing you deteriorate to that degree. So what was their perception of you?

Angela Peacock (21:18.766)
Everything was perceived through the lens of DSM five. So, or four at the time. So it was, for instance, I'll never forget this. And it still hurts me to this day. Like when I told, um, one of my therapists, was sitting outside waiting for my appointment because somebody else was in there before me and I wrote out these song lyrics and they were really emotional and dark and you know, emo kind of music. And I said, this is how I feel. And she read the, she read the lyrics and she was like, Oh my God, are you suicidal? Do you need to go inpatient? And I was like,

I don't know, maybe, you know? And then I was like, what's happening to me? I was like, I've lost my sexuality. It's like, it doesn't exist. I don't feel anything but anxiety and panic and fear and depression. I don't feel gratitude. Like what happened? And so it was kind of like the first time I started to kind of wake up and then she was like, this is your post-traumatic stress. Like we need to do something. You need to go to a program. So always, it's always been either blamed on me or the illness or the trauma.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (22:09.298)
So they blame it all on the illness.

Angela Peacock (22:15.894)
Or even like the sexuality stuff, like I suffered with PTSD for 16 years total. The PSSD was blamed on that's your sexual trauma because I was sexually assaulted in Korea before I got deployed. So it was always tight. And I'm like, okay, but I had a normal sex life. I didn't have trauma when I got married. Like I don't, so it would, and this happens to others. We get talked out of our intuition. We get talked out of this voice. That's like, something's wrong with this. And my voice was very small, but I continually got talked out of it.

like all those years, like, no, nothing to see here. It's your, it's your, it's your disease.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (22:51.452)
And these drugs also mute that intuition, right? Like that emotion, that spirit, that intuition, like the things that are alerting you that something is wrong, the drugs themselves are gonna do everything they can to blunt that experience. In fact, if you became angry about your treatment and what was happening to you, that of course would then be viewed as a symptom of an illness to drug.

Angela Peacock (23:15.948)
Yeah. I went to that treatment program because of that suicidal whatever. And I actually, it was, was actually a good program. was for female veterans. However, I was the only one that was a combat female veteran at that time. Cause it was like, I was in the first kind of wave to come home, but they were mostly treating sexual trauma with women veterans. But I cried too much during trauma therapy and they gave me Geodon and anti-psychotic and they said, you're too emotional.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (23:43.077)
jeez.

Angela Peacock (23:43.094)
And looking back on them, I'm like, I was trying to process my trauma and you interrupted that process. Like, thanks.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (23:49.354)
It doesn't really make any sense. So this is where I'm really confused about the use of evidence-based or best practices because it seems like the psychiatric industry has almost done the opposite of everything I've known and learned about human resilience, emotion regulation, and what a human being needs to be able to recover from a trauma event or a series of trauma events. They actually do the absolute opposite and almost everyone deteriorates.

Angela Peacock (24:12.95)
Opposite. I agree with you.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (24:17.691)
Your story is not unique. I've witnessed this my entire career and I just ask the questions like how in the world can this be evidence-based mental health care? There's no recovery. There is just you are identified with an illness and you are being managed for the rest of your life, never even considering whether the treatment itself could be creating the harm. It's like the entire training, it's like the entire industry lacks the capacity

to be able to ask that key question is what am I, is it possible what I am doing is actually inducing harm on the person? Somehow that has got brainwashed out of these professionals.

Angela Peacock (24:58.99)
There's no insight. No, but I think it's worse than that, Roger. I wanna take a step further. They take you further away from healing and further away from yourself had they not just left you alone. And I think I put this on X recently. I was like, from now on, I don't trust anybody in any system. I wanna hear from people that actually heal from stuff. I don't want some opinion from some academic who thinks they understand what I've been through. You don't fucking have a clue.

If anything, your opinion matters less because you don't know what you're talking about. You just don't. So like if you look on YouTube, I never thought I would say something like this, especially coming from WashU. You know, I graduated WashU. It's very prestigious in the Midwest. Like evidence based practice was all over my program. I know all about that. OK, guess what? Guess who knows how to heal anxiety? People that have recovered from it. Guess who made my anxiety worse and led me further away from ever recovering from anxiety? The fucking system did. So.

That's radical, especially in our age where some of that stuff is snake oil. You have to have a discernment, but like, I don't want to listen to a fucking therapist ever again. Tell me what they think about my life. You haven't a clue.

No offense, I know you're a therapist. Kind of. Right? I know you're burning out too. Me too. I know.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (26:09.373)
Yeah, I don't know how much longer I'll be doing this, Angie, to be honest with you. You said earlier that even in your, that you're in recovery now. I mean, you've done a lot of work personally to try to heal from what's been done to you and you're serving others too. You said that even in your community though, that you experienced some backlash. Can you share more about that?

Angela Peacock (26:30.446)
I the PSSD community hates me because I recovered from PSSD. And it's like, we don't want to hear hope. We want to hear that it's permanent. And they're scaring large groups of people. And the permanent word, even now I have symptoms. Yes. Okay. I've had, I've been off psych drugs. It'll be 10 years in January. I still have symptoms. I do not identify with that P word. I just don't. I have seen way too much stuff happen inside of me that's changed.

And the things that are left, it's just kind of lingering. like in the background. It doesn't run my life as I guess my relationship to it. So I think it's all in perception. Like would a doctor say that's permanent? Sure. But do I, I mean, I see changes all the time still. So I get that. Then I get like people in my community will say, you, well, you went to school twice a week. So that means you didn't have it as bad as I have it. And I'm telling you.

I had severe akathisia to the point like I've seen thousands of people at this point, okay, either in groups, online, or I've worked with them individually. I had some symptoms that I've never even heard people say before and I've had, I had homicidal thoughts for years coming off these drugs, okay? I've only heard four other people come to me that have told me the amount of urges and thoughts that they had for people. To me, that's like the top of the severity level. I'm not trying to make myself

worst case. I know I'm not the worst case. I don't want to be. It's fine. But I'm saying like, people don't understand like for me to survive, I had to make myself go to school with homicidal thoughts and akathisia and sit in a chair and study the people's faces around me to stay in reality. That's how desperate I was. And I was so sick. And so I get that. And then I get, well, you weren't ever really mentally ill. There's an article, Vice News did an article with me and Ivus Aftab. And they used me in a really fucked up way to say,

Well Angie was not really mentally ill. So she was misdiagnosed. Do you know how? Fuck all of you. Okay. If you knew, I can't even explain, thank you Roger for giving me this opportunity to talk about this, because this stuff I have to bottle up. The hell that I've been through for 20 years, mostly on my own, with no help, and then have my own community, or people that act like they've been through this, just kick me while I'm down.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (28:29.193)
They did that to Laura Elano as well.

Angela Peacock (28:53.176)
fighting for my fucking life. Just for me to sit here and be as well as I am today is because of me and the human spirit and my body's ability to heal. Nobody gave me any of this health. If anything, I got kicked the whole time, you know? So, yeah.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (29:14.397)
Yeah, I mean, I'm so sorry to hear that, but I've heard this before too. You the establishment tries to, in order to kind of maintain their credibility, you know, would have to talk about you as a case of misdiagnosis and mistreatment as if, you know, there's all these cases where they are having an effective response. But you are the prototype really. You're somebody, you serve this country. You were in combat. You had the reaction, the response that...

would be expected in those situations if you weren't detached from your emotional states, right? There are certain people that can just detach completely from their emotions and they live their life that way. And then we call that sane, you we call that stable, but you have a human reaction and then you get harmed by their treatments and their treatments are drugs. You go all the way up to 18 drugs. I don't know how that's not malpractice.

Angela Peacock (29:55.758)
Mm-hmm.

Angela Peacock (30:11.478)
It should be. I've considered suing the VA for what they did to me, but I think they would say that standard of care. You were that sick that we had to put that much med on you. I don't know. That's more gaslighting, you know.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (30:22.314)
Yeah, which you can't say both. You can't say that you were never mentally ill and then say you were horribly sick and you required 18 different drugs. At some point you come back and you shine the light on the paradigm, know, on what is the standard of care in inducing that type of harm. So it seems like I believe you received that label that is...

Angela Peacock (30:32.504)
Yeah.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (30:50.236)
inevitable for anyone who stays in psychiatry long enough, and that's treatment resistant.

Angela Peacock (30:54.158)
Mm-hmm treatment resist. Oh, yeah. I actually got there from a civilian provider. I got fired twice I think the one that put me on the 18 was a civilian provider and She fired me and that led me back to VA VA I found a new doctor there and he said who put you on all these meds and I was like well it was a combination between

One VA doc that I lost as a provider because the turnover and then a civilian provider picked me up, signed off on that and added more to the cocktail. And so then that psychiatrist cold-turkeyed me off of 10 or 8, I don't remember, but he left me on like half of them. And I went through a horrible hospitalization for 30 days, getting cold-turkeyed off 10 drugs. hallucinated.

I mean, I was terrified. There was people with like serious mental illness diagnoses in the hallway and I would talk to them and they made sense to me. And I was like, I told the doctor like, you got to get me out of here. Like I'm going to completely lose it, you know? And then I went through like two years where I was so angry. It was like this rage that, and now I look back, I was like, that was probably mild acathesia. And I just didn't recognize it at the time, but nobody could talk to me. I tried to go to AA to get some kind of community. I was not an alcoholic, never have been, but I was like, I need people.

You know? So, yeah. And then it took me another 10 years to get off the rest.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (32:18.526)
So Angie, maybe you can offer some insight here. I'm sure people are listening or asking this question. How in the world can a medical professional, a physician, cold turkey someone, take them off their drugs so rapidly without concern about what that's going to do to them physiologically? I think the average lay person would say, yeah, that's fucking nuts. Like you can't just give a person mood and mind altering drugs and then abruptly stop those drugs.

What's the mentality there?

Angela Peacock (32:48.37)
It happens every day. Honestly, my clients are filled. I hear hundreds of stories at this point of just like, you know, a one-on-one session with someone for an hour when they tell me their whole story. I've heard five of them today. Okay, it's standard care. These doctors, as soon as you, okay, here's the problem. You go into the doctor's office and you say, I have really bad anxiety. They say, okay, let's treat it. And they give you a pill.

Then when you complain of depression or like side effects or something else is going to happen because you're going to get an effect from that drug. They see that through the lens of mental illness. They give you another drug. Then if that cocktail doesn't happen to work, okay, well, that didn't work for you. Let's try something else. So all this changing of meds and cold turkey and switching and let's get on the hospital ward, put you on meds for three days, see how you react. It's too fast. I don't know what else to say. The human body is not designed to have these chemicals interrupting.

Complex neurotransmitter systems that the human mind is so incapable of understanding We and then when a mentally ill person with a diagnosis tries to report that that's also seen through the lens of illness It's ridiculous. So it's always the same you get put on meds you feel worse then that's identified as mental illness They don't know how to get you off. They don't even recognize this. I like we said earlier. I'm trojanic It could be coming from the meds. You're more suicidal. Let's get you off. No, that means you need more It's just this more mentality

for Switch.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (34:14.409)
Yeah, I mean, here's the cycle. Somebody becomes suicidal or even kills themselves while on the drugs. It's blamed for their underlying illness. If they kill themselves or become suicidal during withdrawal, it gets blamed on stopping their necessary medications. how do we break this cycle of psychiatric gaslighting? Like, how do we make a change in this? Because this is

Angela Peacock (34:30.736)
meds, relapse.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (34:42.729)
This is like the low hanging fruit in my opinion. And as you, as you say, it's like still standard care.

Angela Peacock (34:49.756)
To me, this is a radical thing to say. Are you ready? Two things. Radical responsibility. The individual has to see what they see and take themselves out of the matrix and save yourself. Number two, save yourself because nobody's going to help you. They're not coming for you. You don't want their treatment. Honestly, like it scares the shit out of me to think Stephen Stahl is coming out with a de-prescribing handbook for mainstream psychiatry. I don't know what that's going to say. I just saw a reel earlier about the national

the Neuroscience Educational Initiative, NEI. I don't even know what it is, but there was some doctor standing up there talking about deprescribing that it takes courage and that you need to know how fast or how slow to go. And I'm like, my God, here we go. Like there's going to be a tsunami of harmful deprescribing because poor patients are going to think my doctor knows how to do this and they're going to fuck them up worse. And they're going to come find us in the online communities because we know we've done it. We know how to do it. We know how to.

We've kind of figured it out. Let me put it like that. That doesn't mean it's easy. That doesn't mean it's life, not life threatening. That doesn't mean you're at risk for relapsing. It means all of that. And it's like, save yourself and you got to take radical responsibility for your mental health. You better educate yourself and get a bachelor's degree and like what they did to you. And then you got to figure it out. That's the only way I cannot, I've had to take it all back into my own hands and take all my power back, all of it.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (36:16.267)
And as you spoke about earlier, that's extremely challenging to do when you're brought up to trust somebody who's in an authority position and to trust medical providers. I mean, we have this authority bias that exists in our country. Even if you're a civilian, let's say you're not in the military, you're not trained to follow orders. You are like conditioned to believe that the doctor is always right. there's words that are used. Like if you don't follow the doctor's orders, you're non-compliant.

Right? It's almost set up in a militaristic way that you are to follow orders. And if you don't, then there's something wrong with you. Like you are the problem. How do you even begin to create radical responsibility under our current

Angela Peacock (36:59.654)
I mean, there's even people that are not capable. That's not a judgment. It's that they have been so injured by ECT, TMS, ketamine. Their brain has been hammered with these strong, powerful chemicals for decades. And then they send me, I get emails all the time. I would get emails from 85 year olds. I got one the other day that said, I'm 85. My doctor messed me up trying to take me off his antidepressant. I want it out of my body. I can't stand feeling like this. Please help me. I'm on social security.

And I'm like, what can I do? It's so helpless. Okay. I have, I had a veteran, this is last year, a veteran's son emailed me and said, the VA just cold turkeyed my dad off of Benzo. He's suicidal. He said, I think he was like 78 years old or something. Angie, can you please just call him and tell them he's going to get better because we are trying to hang on. We figured this out, but the VA cannot help him. So we have like people that are older, people that are so cognitively impaired from long-term antipsychotic use.

people that are poor, they don't have access to coaching, they don't have the education level to even Google like what to look for. People with psychosis that their parents will contact me and say like, I don't think my kid ever was schizophrenic, he just smoked marijuana and went bananas. And now he's been on these meds for 10 years and I gotta get him off. Like he's not living a life. So this is like, it comes in all different ways. And then not to mention kids, I have a bunch of young women who are trying to get pregnant and they're like, why didn't anybody tell me that Lexapro

comes out in breast milk, I don't want to feed that to my child. Like it shows up in all kinds of ways. And you know, cause you're on the FDA hearing and that was amazing when I saw that.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (38:42.111)
Yeah, I mean, it's to be honest, I've transitioned to see this as evil in a spiritual battle. I can't see it any other way because all available evidence is very clear about the dangers of these drugs. We see people deteriorating. We have all the numbers. We have the statistics. There's nothing in my heart or soul that leads me to believe that this isn't intentional at this point. I mean, it is an attack on human life and human dignity.

And the degree it's being pushed through major media outlets, through the way they train the medical establishment, makes me feel that it's a coordinated attack on our culture, on Western societies.

Angela Peacock (39:27.378)
Even if we dial it back a little, it's willful blindness, which means they see some of the harm, but they look away on purpose. It's also capitalism because, everybody who's listening, go check your retirement accounts, go check your stock portfolio. If you have portfolios or anything with pharma, you are complicit in this because they're doing exactly what you're paying them to do. They are making profit for their stockholders. So I think it's

even if it's not, like even if we just say, okay, it's not a spiritual battle, it's something else. There's willful blindness and there's us as complicit and there's so much. But I agree with you and often that's a topic that comes up in some of my support groups about they put out my light, Angie. They turned my humanity off. I have lost all my feelings, my personality, my identity, my ability to earn money for myself, my ability to handle relationships, to reach my goals, my human potential.

It puts out everything. It's not a little thing for somebody to get completely derailed from their life and their potential to be given to got any. I mean, it tests your ability to hang on like it's I can't even emphasize like how life changing this whole thing is.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (40:42.39)
To me, your story inspires hope. So I am interested in how you've survived all this and what your recovery process is like. How did you get to this place in your life and what's still to come for you as far as being able to kind of restore your health?

Angela Peacock (40:50.876)
dog barks

Angela Peacock (41:01.522)
Good question. Okay. A lot of it was taking my power back. Like I had to stop using the system. And you know that that looked different in different stages. At the beginning I did try to convince my psychiatrist for about 14 months. I would bring him papers to read. He kept denying me. Then I realized like Angie you're banging your head against the wall. He's never gonna believe you. This is dependent on his paycheck not to hear you. And how could he live with himself if he knew what he did to you? Then I still tried therapists and I was like...

I just want you to hear what I've been through. And then they would gaslight me in some other way or change the subject or tell me it was going to be okay. And I was like, this isn't going to work for me. So I did a lot of healing in this van, believe it or not. I took, took off in a van when I was four years off and I was touring the country with Medicaid normal, doing film screenings and events and talking through it and sharing my story and talking to people that have been through it also, and talking to professionals like you that would be on the panel with me that, you know, gave me so much validation and so much healing.

The filmmakers kept me going. You know, they would tell me like, we just interviewed Bob Whitaker and he said, you're going to heal. Don't worry. Keep going. And then it kind of turned into a lot of crying, a lot of grief, a lot of sorrow, a lot of, I mean, you call it like exposure. Like I had to like relearn how to walk, relearn how to shower, standing up, relearn how to exercise, being in my body again, getting my sexuality back, experimenting with that. Like.

learning how to get back in my body because I was so dissociated for so long. My healing has mostly come, if I had to pinpoint it, just being with whatever came up and stop fighting it, learning how to feel again, and then being with people that have been through this too, and being validated by them, and watching other people heal from this has helped me. And I still feel like a heavy sense of betrayal, of regret.

It's not, it doesn't like run my life. It's just, it's kind of like a sadness that just kind of stays with you. Like what could have been, or some grief of like what they took from me and what could have been. I never had children. You know, I'm still, 46. I am not in a relationship. I find it really hard to relate to normal people. So I still feel like that is yet to come. Like I haven't fallen in love. I would like that sometime, you know, a normal human thing.

Angela Peacock (43:25.552)
And I don't know, it's just, the human spirit, think, it's not individual to me. And often people will say like, well, you're a military, so you're different than I am. And I'm like, no, there's something in you that wants to live. There's something in you that will fight for you when you feel like you don't have it. And I guess I just kind of tapped into that somehow out of survival, out of fear. I didn't want to kill myself and let them be right, you know?

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (43:51.968)
Now you're serving others, think, somewhere in terms of like a thousand people or something you've been able to work with. How are you helping them?

Angela Peacock (43:58.5)
A lot, a lot, yeah.

Angela Peacock (44:05.274)
Well, the story is very similar to mine that people get hurt by the system and then they kind of figure it out and they spend, you know, weeks or months researching like what actually happened to me? What do I believe about what happened to me? Where do I go from here? And so I'm just kind of like there is like a navigator. I do a lot of listening, a lot of unconditional love. I don't use any therapeutic technique or diagnose or treat mental illness. That is not I'm just having conversations with people.

And I will share my own experience. I'll share experiences with people that are in our community that have healed or recovered strategies that they've used, things they've done. A lot of it is community. Like I host, think about 20 groups a month and our groups can range from like eight to 30 per group. So it's healing and community. It's hearing your buddies talk about the same thing that you've been through and like, how are we going to do this? And we kind of hold each other's hands and we are just marching in the dark.

trying to get away from all these layers of pain and misdiagnosis and all the medication and people are tapering. It's a lot of like uncertainty to be honest with you. Like they don't know how it's going to go when they taper off. We don't know if they're going to get all the way off. That's totally up to them. I'm not telling them what to do. It's like a month by month kind of process, just trying to figure it out on their own. And I'm just kind of there to just like be like, you can do this. I did it. It's hard. It's not easy. It's life threatening in some cases.

You can, it's hard. And maybe you don't want to, that's up to you also. You have a choice, you know.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (45:38.414)
It's really the power of love and compassion and trying to inspire hope. I loved what you said is that you don't use any therapeutic techniques because the more I move along in this work that I do, I'm always evaluating like what is the primary mechanism of action when people do heal, when people get better, when they go overcome things in their lives. Is it because of any one like

intervention or homework assignment or technique or any of those things. Like I always come back to the answers. No, what happens is it's two people in a room together. And if you really listen and you really care, there's something that's created in that environment where you inspire another person to do something that's hard to maybe to think about things, maybe in a new way that they didn't just from getting to know who you are.

and just the power of that connection. And we've professionalized it to an extent where we've commodified an entire industry, unfortunately. And we've changed the culture because we are tribal. you know that as being in the military itself, as the sense of connection and community, it becomes family. And you love and you care for that person.

And what I've just witnessed in culture over the past few decades is we start outsourcing that, right? Instead of like hugging somebody up and saying, you know, I'll cook you dinner or I'm here for you you need me. We say, we make referrals to a therapist or you go, you know, you're supposed to go see the doctor, right? That just feels like a breakdown in our culture.

Angela Peacock (47:23.142)
Yeah, absolutely. I just interviewed a guy from Australia who has this project called Just Listening. And we were talking about, like, I'm just here to listen. Like, his entire building is just people trained to listen and shut up and be present with somebody who's having a hard time. And I asked him, is it that simple? And he's like, yep. And I was like, I've noticed the same thing. Like, it's really that simple. But our society is trained to pass people past the buck. Like, go see a professional. I can't listen to you.

But I would argue the person in front of you is talking to you. Like, why are you passing them off? You know, but the average person, and I hate that, that that's why people hire coaches and therapists and all the things, because those people actually are invested in listening to you and trained in listening to you. But the average person doesn't even know how to do that, you know? So I know it sounds oversimplified, but that's why I try to build those communities. Like, I feel like you guys need to be here for each other. It's all we got. They're not coming.

They're not going to save us. anything, they're going to kick you while you're down. You got to kind of stay away from them and hold on to each other. And I think by modeling, like empathetic listening and just presence and love and whatever you want to call it, that helps other people learn how to do that. And then they do that for each other. And there's a ripple effect from that. So.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (48:42.85)
Yeah, it's of my opinion that the way that modern therapists are trained, for example, that they are, they're trained under an energy of fear. So they're afraid of their clients dying by suicide. They're afraid of that person not making improvements that they could prove to the insurance company. When somebody does talk about questioning their will to live, now it becomes a

know, threat to their license and they treat that person in terms of like having to protect that license by managing that case and getting them into a hospital. And everything we know about the statistics there is that you're most likely to kill yourself coming out of a hospital because you'd go into a prison for the most part and they put you on drugs that are going to increase the likelihood that's going to happen. We've lost our sense of humanity, our collective humanity, our language of suffering.

You know, all that seems to have gotten, again, in my humble opinion, it's an intentional medicalization of it for financial purposes or something even more evil. And it's very hard to find therapists who can see a person outside of these categories and outside of these symptoms, because it's drilled into them. They don't see a soul in front of them and they

can be able to be there and be present for that soul and help and assist and guide them and inspire hope. It's that whole medicalization of the entire human experience.

Angela Peacock (50:16.976)
Yeah, I graduated in 2019 and majored in mental health, clinical mental health. And I will tell you, I resisted learning any of this crap. So I had to learn CBT. I had to learn ABT. Then my Dean of Mental Health pressured me like, if you say you're going to help people with PTSD, then you need to take prolonged exposure. And I was like, no, I read the study. People voted with their feet. They felt more traumatized. They left. I've done it myself. I'm not teaching that. And no, I'm not going to put somebody through that. So

I think it's little an added thing to what you said is like the average therapist has this bullshit in their brain. And while you're talking, they're going through the Rolodex of like, what is this? What is that? Okay, it's this. So that's how I treat it. Or that's what I say. Or this is the question I ask. It's not about me listening to your soul and being present for you and trying to understand where you're coming from and entering your world. That's not what's happening. It's the opposite. It's like I have stuff that I was taught.

And that I haven't even experienced myself, but I'm going to try to interpret that for you and tell you what to do about it and put you in some normalized box that, oh, you have an attachment problem, so you should be over here. that. It's it's takes you away from yourself.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (51:28.59)
What's interesting is I do believe that you have the capacity for natural resilience and coping and adaptation, right? And that natural process that somebody goes to, let's say it's a trauma response. The natural process would be, maybe they're doing what they need to survive in one moment, but when the moment is right for them,

They allow themselves to start feeling again. They emote, they feel the emotions that are valid to the circumstances. They talk about what's internally. In the best case of scenarios, you know, it's with the closest people in their lives. If it was like in your situation, even in a professional environment, if they have the capacity to be able to do that without judgment, they will naturally walk down that path.

to finding that healing and recovery, a lot of people just have to be told, it's okay, right? Like what you feel is expected in this situation, allow yourself to do that. And that's the challenge with, and I've done prolonged exposure and I've done cognitive processing therapy. And I've ultimately said, okay, I know the person needs to experience what they're feeling. I know they need to reintegrate at some point, but it can't be on my

watch. It can't be a random Tuesday at 4pm, because that's when they have their appointment. Like that doesn't that doesn't make any sense, right? But you can create an environment for them if they want to use that time to do that. Or at another time when they're alone or with there's someone else, you just encourage like how natural and normal it is to be able to feel that. And the worst thing you can do is like judge or label the what they're experiencing.

Angela Peacock (53:02.694)
Right. Yeah.

No.

Angela Peacock (53:26.066)
pressure or make them dig. Yeah, I have an interesting perspective about this because that's happened to me where think of it like this. When I came off the meds, I was in a fight or flight state for several years. And then once those physiological changes kind of bounced out, healing progressed naturally. So things would pop up that I needed to work on. I didn't have to go digging. I didn't have to go to therapists, but I learned how to trust myself that whatever healing needs to take place, it's going to show up. And then I will have the capacity to know what to do with it.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (53:27.009)
Any type of press.

Angela Peacock (53:55.538)
But I had to do a lot of self-education. I had to read a lot and study different things. I went to trauma conferences and I did IFS certificate. I did one year of SE, somatic experiencing training. I was trying to figure it out for myself and what made sense to me and what pertains to me and what's bullshit. You have to have some discernment, but I didn't have to go digging. It would come up and that's the smart thing that the mental health industry doesn't understand. The nervous system knows how to heal itself. It's your job to stay out of the way.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (54:23.191)
Yeah.

Angela Peacock (54:23.194)
and to listen and to trust that process and stop interrupting it with drugs and these stupid 12 week EMDR sessions. Like, no, I don't need that. Actually, I need to trust my body and learn how to listen to it and navigate that and have a relationship with myself and my own healing process. You're not the expert here. My nervous system is my body is my, you know, it's even some spiritual stuff in there. you know, recently I dated someone.

and it triggered some kind of abandonment shit in there. And I was like, okay, here it is. I'm gonna work on this. I know it ain't the guy. It's this old wound that I have. Okay, cool. I laid down, I put my hand on my chest and I just felt it. And I was like, okay, I don't know what this is. I don't need to know. I'm just feeling it. And then all of sudden I got this memory when I was like 13, where I got left after soccer practice and there was no ride home and I felt stranded and abandoned in my limited understanding. And I thought like, nobody loves me.

And so this guy just triggered that, you know, and then it was so wild. I just started yawning and I was like, what is going on? I was like, I don't know. Like, I don't know what that means. Let it happen. I don't need a therapist to tell me how to do that. I just don't. I don't want a therapist to interrupt that. You know, I don't want an interpretation. And I was thinking, I don't even maybe know what just happened there, but whatever happened, it's got to be for my good. Like, it's fine. Thank you, guy, for triggering that so I could feel it.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (55:27.023)
Mm.

Angela Peacock (55:46.118)
And that's kind of what I've been doing recently, you know?

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (55:49.488)
So we have this VA system and if you were appointed head of the VA system, I'm just curious to know what changes would you make? Like what would you then begin to implement?

Angela Peacock (56:00.698)
God, I have a whole report on that that I just thought about this morning that I need to write and publish it somewhere, but it's multi-level. So patient health education would be like step one, informed consent for psychiatric drugs and treatment, pharmacy intervention with pharmacists actually being trained in how these drugs interact and how they impair a person's system, giving people choice, giving them risk benefits and alternatives.

training, overhaul of all therapists to start to see side effects and adverse reactions to drugs instead of seeing everything as a trauma response or something stuck in their body or something you need to do EMDR about, all those things. Listen, I am so cynical at this point. I have given up hope that that bureaucracy is ever going to change. And again, somehow we have to empower veterans on the individual level because bureaucracies like this, psychiatry,

I am not going to hold my breath. will not see it in my lifetime. I don't think. And so it's up to consumers. It's up to TikTok and X and podcasts to educate the general public to wake up that your mental health is not yours. They took it and you got to get it back because they're not really going to help you the way you think they are.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (57:18.925)
Yeah, I think, you know, I see things in a similar way. Like when the administration changed and the Trump administration came in and Bobby Kennedy was hired for HHS, there was some opportunities for me to join the U S government, joining HHS to kind of implement some of these shifts and changes. But I ultimately came to the conclusion that like, that's not the path. Like it's not going to come from the U S government. In fact, it's just going to be a fight every moment that I would be in there.

with the pharmaceutical interests and the psychiatric establishment. And that's not how we're gonna make changes. We're gonna make changes grassroots. We're gonna have to educate the populace that we don't buy what they're selling anymore.

Angela Peacock (58:02.31)
I think that is the only way. I actually had that conversation with David Cohen from UCLA. He's in the Medicaid normal film. He's been writing about this for 30 years. He has several books, chapters, journal articles, all about psychiatric drugs and the impact of iatrogenic harm, all the things. And I said, David, what do you think is going to change it? And he said, Angie, it's getting worse. They're screening kids younger. They're putting pregnant women preventatively on antidepressants. Like it's worse than ever. They don't count people in state care, like people that are

forced into treatment and forced injected. None of this is counted. It's getting worse. And then I said, I actually think it is getting worse, but in a different way. So many people are being harmed that that has a ripple effect. And at some point we're going to hit a tipping point where enough people have been harmed. COVID woke a lot of people up, enough people start to see through this. And then we're just going to withdraw care and the whole establishment will collapse. However, I mean, you just see it in psychiatry. It's like, now it's psychedelics.

Okay, now it's TMS. Now it's let's develop other drugs. Like they just play the winky dink. They just, it's just gonna like whack a mole. know, like let's just move around. We're gonna act like we don't see this. Every year I look in the APA manual or the APA annual conference. I look in there to see if they have a deprescribing. I have yet to see that. Have you seen that yet? No. So in one breath, they'll say the social determinants of mental health. They'll recognize poverty.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (59:23.396)
No, no.

Angela Peacock (59:30.232)
or low socioeconomic status or access to healthcare as a way that people can exhibit mental health symptoms, but they don't see it, they're doing it. I'm like, ugh, what year am I gonna see this? I give up, I don't believe it. So that's why I just work, I keep my head down, I love who I can love, I help who I can help, I do my best to be equitable about that, and I can only do so much, one person.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (59:56.463)
Yeah, they're not going to voluntarily put themselves out of business. The market's going to have to do it. And, you know, that's, think my life mission for the rest of my life is to try to awaken as many people as possible, you know, and, what David said about it is getting worse. yeah, they are trying to get more and more people on the drugs at a younger age. And that's why they put screening measures in school and the more parents they indoctrinate into this mental illness paradigm.

Angela Peacock (59:58.864)
No, no.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:00:26.196)
yeah, they're, they're going to be successful, but, I see communities waking up and I think it's spreading, you know, like a wildfire to an extent. but it's, it's a powerful enemy that going against, the whole establishment pushes this through. own the media. They push it through social media. You get stuck in that algorithm. Someone's vulnerable and stuck in that algorithm. You know, they're getting constant information about their brokenness and their disease and seeking out help and.

being driven to more drugs, they become easier to access. You jump on these websites, hims or hers or whatever, you just got to fill out a screening measure and then you can get your drugs sent right to your home. You're not even under medical care. Not that you were ever under medical care to begin with, but yeah, the goal is to push more in people. And so that's why I see it as anti-human. I see it as an anti-human movement. It's an attack on life itself. And when you attack the most vulnerable in our society, children, pregnant women,

You know, you can't tell me that that's not a spiritual attack. And so that's what I'm going to fight against for the rest of my life. I'm going on a panel soon. I don't know if you're going to be at the ICI Intercompass Initiative.

Angela Peacock (01:01:34.01)
Yes, I am on that panel about veterans healing from the mental health system with Derek Blumke. Yep, I'll be there. I'll see you in person.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:01:39.612)
Good. Good. I can't wait to connect with you. I'm on a panel talking about what is the future of mental health care? What's the future of therapy? boy, I've contemplated this enough because I think when we talk about the system in itself, its presence in our culture has been a negative.

So how can I be planning out for a future of the professional health industry when I think the professional health industry has caused so much harm? I think it's back to local communities. think it's about to education about what it means to live well. think there's more of a greater spiritual connection. I think we have to re-see what disease is. And in the instances where we require a professional health industry, those people are well-trained on a...

Angela Peacock (01:02:13.211)
I agree.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:02:32.505)
a whole different paradigm that offers hope and supports natural recovery and resilience.

Angela Peacock (01:02:41.04)
Yeah, when I think about that, I also think about a paper that I read in my master's program about HIV education in barber shops. They were teaching barbers how to share about health education to prevent the spread of HIV, like in the Bay Area. And I was like, my God, that's genius. Like go straight to the community, train each other how to listen and how to care and how not to try to fix people and send them off. Like, I feel like that is the opportunity right there.

It's hard for us to think it's so simple. It just is. But I don't know.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:03:15.011)
Yeah, it's, it's interesting because I've, can't tell you how many interviews I've done in my career to try to hire a therapist. I'm interested in like finding healers, you know, like those huge people with huge hearts who just love other people and, and, you know, just believe in healing and understand like our capacity under the right conditions and the best healers, you know, where you feel it energetically, like, know, like when I'm sitting with you here, even though we're on a screen, like I feel that energy.

Angela Peacock (01:03:26.278)
Good point.

Angela Peacock (01:03:44.092)
Feel it, yeah.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:03:44.822)
a lot of, lot of, when I feel that and I engage in these really critical conversations and I see the outpouring of like love, it's people who never went into the education system. You know, it's cause like, once you go into that, you're, you're part of this mass indoctrination into it. And so many people believe it to be true. Like they, they believe the DSM Bible is actually like research based.

Angela Peacock (01:03:56.112)
Woof woof!

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:04:13.297)
And they have no fucking idea how that thing was developed. Like, and they think it's based on sound science, which is my, I've had it.

Angela Peacock (01:04:17.714)
Yeah, no, it's a bunch of white guys at a table started this whole thing. Like, come on. No offense, but yeah, voting like four weeks of PTSD means you have a disorder. Like, come on. What who says?

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:04:23.973)
Yeah, voting, really, right? Like voting for symptoms and so forth.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:04:32.177)
And then they do field trials based off their bullshit. And then where it really falls down, like it falls apart is when they try to do like inter-rater reliability. And so like you

Angela Peacock (01:04:42.216)
yeah, yeah, we did it in class. We would do experiments with that. We would read vignettes and then argue about the diagnosis like in school. Like I think these bipolar, no it's borderline personality disorder. No, it's PTSD. We would argue about that to show the point.

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:04:55.729)
which is a microcosm of like exactly what happens because none of it's fucking real. You know, so you can, you know, you can make up anything. so if you're just going to have symptoms on a checklist and they all overlap each other, of course, you're to be able to see whatever your bias is in that moment. The problem is they act like it's real. They act like the illusion, the illusion is real. And it's about awakening people. Hey, it's an illusion. It's not real. We've created it more than this.

Angela Peacock (01:05:12.604)
Yeah. Yeah.

Angela Peacock (01:05:23.57)
Yeah, the other point that I want to make that kind of you touched on is about healers. Like often I call myself a healing coach and I'm like, I don't know, because I've always like, I'm like, what am I doing that helps people? I don't get it. Like I'm always I'm always looking for the words or the language or like maybe I should write about this. And I'm just I don't have the energy to but I'm like, what is this? And then I'm like, wait, I'm actually helping people while they're suffering. Like I'm trying to help them navigate suffering.

And I think the industry, the wellness industry does this too. Like you're supposed to be well and feel good all the time. And there's not supposed to be anything wrong with you. And it's just like we're flatlined or something. And there's just these beliefs that we have stuck in ourselves from society that no, actually you're supposed to suffer and you learn and you grow from suffering. And there's benefits there. There's gifts there that you don't get any other way.

And I don't and I tell my people this all the time. I'm like, I don't like how we get it. We do get gifts from this. I hate the pain we had to go through. It wasn't even ours. It's not your fault. You know, and a lot of us blame ourselves. Like, how did I not know this? Or like, I'm educated. Like, what was how could I not see this? You know, my intuition was telling me and they talked me out of it. All these things that are not our fault. And then it landed on us anyway. And we have to figure it out. There's no other way, you know. And so I think it's a lot of like helping people.

just navigate their own suffering, whatever shape that takes and not having the answer. And I think if you have an answer, you shouldn't be doing this. Like let them go through it. It's hard, you know?

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:07:04.21)
Well, that was well said, Angie. It's really been an honor to have a conversation with you. I enjoyed it. Looking forward to spending some time with you in person. Can you, I know you're probably really busy. Are you putting out your information out there, like a way for people to.

Angela Peacock (01:07:20.146)
I have lots of videos like my YouTube channel. I interview people that have healed from this that are going through it I I have share my own thoughts my entire journey like every six months I posted a video through the whole process So I don't even watch those back because it's traumatic. I don't want to know but I do that I have a website we have support groups I see people one-on-one a lot of it's really private and sacred and quiet and I'm like okay with that I like I don't want to be a professional with a bunch of diplomas and Have to cover my tattoos like I just want to be human being

you know and just do what I can while I'm here. it's Angie Peacock MSW and my website is angiepeacock.com

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:07:52.37)
What's your YouTube channel?

Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D, ABPP (01:07:59.898)
Excellent. Check it out. Angie Peacock, I want to thank you for a radically genuine conversation.

Angela Peacock (01:08:06.866)
Thank you, that was so fun, thank you.