More than 11 percent of Americans take antidepressants, including rising numbers of kids and adolescents and even pregnant women.

The majority of Americans believe that depression is linked to a chemical imbalance in the brain, and that drugs can fix this imbalance—just as someone with Type 1 diabetes might take insulin. But that’s not true, according to board-certified psychiatrist Josef Witt-Doerring.

“There’s never been any evidence that there’s been a chemical imbalance,” Witt-Doerring says. “There is no way to differentiate patients who are depressed from those who are not depressed using any objective markers.”

Instead of fixing a chemical balance, what antidepressants really do is mask symptoms, he says.

A former FDA officer and now director of TaperClinic, Witt-Doerring helps people safely get off of psychiatric medications.

In this episode, we dive into the realities of antidepressant drug use, what most patients often aren’t told by their doctors, and how a patient can be weaned off of psychiatric drugs safely and avoid devastating withdrawal symptoms.

How do these drugs affect people long-term? Are they really safe for pregnant women? And what kinds of potential side effects do they have?

And we dig into perhaps the most taboo subject of all: Is there a link between antidepressants and mass shootings?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.