You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 85. Mark McDonald.mp3
Dr. Mark McDonald: And I mean this literally right now in 2023. We no longer have the power as individuals to make decisions about our lives. Major, major decisions. To live or to die. To take risks or not. How we raise our children. Whether our children should go to school or be schooled at home. There are laws on the books now that are being pushed. to ban homeschooling, to make it illegal, a punishable offense. If you decide, for example, that your son, who says he's a girl at age five, isn't really a girl, he's actually a boy, you can have your parental rights stripped from you and your child can be put into the social services system as a ward of the state. Ten years ago, that would have been considered criminal by the government. Now it's considered criminal on the part of the parent. My, how we have shifted.
Stephanie Winn: You must be some kind of therapist. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Mark McDonald. He is a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist in private practice in Los Angeles. He's also the co-host of the podcast, Informed Dissent, The Intersection of Healthcare and Politics, along with Dr. Jeff Barkey. A few months ago, they had me on to discuss our film, No Way Back, The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care, along with Kat Cattinson, a detransitioner who I've also separately interviewed on this podcast and who was featured in our film. Dr. McDonald has also written two books, United States of Fear, How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, and Freedom from Fear, a 12-step guide to personal and national recovery. So today we're going to talk about psychiatry, mental health, mass delusional psychosis, nutrition, and a lot more. Thank you so much for joining me today, Mark.

Dr. Mark McDonald: Great to be on, Stephanie. Those are exactly the highlights of my passions and interests since 2020.

Stephanie Winn: Well, let's talk about 2020. Before we started recording, that came up and I have alluded a few times in previous conversations to how a lot changed in my world and I'm sure in many other people's worlds in 2020. I feel like it was a dividing time that humanity kind of split off in a few different directions. And I have been rethinking what happened to me and everyone I know. in 2020. And so I'm grateful for this opportunity now that it's been three years to sit here and speak with someone who wrote a book inspired by the events of 2020. So you talk about this in the United States of fear, how America fell victim to a mass delusional psychosis, which is As you mentioned, a term that you coined, there have been similar phrases used, mass psychogenic illness and things like this, but you coined the term mass delusional psychosis and you used it to describe the events of 2020. That's a pretty strong phrase. What has led you to see the events of 2020 as a mass delusional psychosis?

Dr. Mark McDonald: What started in my practice when I started seeing kids coming in who were acting irrationally, they were becoming, I would say, acutely ill with anxiety, almost like OCD, like acute onset obsessive compulsive disorder. And I was thinking, why is this happening? And their parents would come in and their parents were anxious as well and obsessive, almost like they were reacting to some kind of immediate trauma that had just befallen them. And they weren't doing things that I felt were reasonable in reaction to their anxiety. They would come in with masks on their face, even though they were healthy. They would be afraid to leave their homes out of fear of contagion and infection. They were isolating themselves and their children, actually, in a way that seemed overbearing and excessive, given the information that we had at hand of the risk of harm and mortality from this Chinese Wuhan virus that had hit our shores a few months earlier. And I started to think, well, is this just me? Is this just my practice? Is this happening elsewhere? I began speaking with other colleagues. I obviously was reading the news. I became almost hyper-informed on the psychology and the emotional reaction to this wave of viral infection that was not unusual, really, compared to the last 10 or 15 years. We've had flus, we've had even some of these Hong Kong viruses that were mixed vectors from pigs or chickens, avian flu virus, that were actually quite deadly in some cases, and yet didn't spark this level of panic. So I was wondering, what's going on? What's driving this, number one? And is there something else behind it besides just simple, natural fear reaction. And the answer to the first question was, what is taking over our country right now on an emotional, psychological level is fear. Everyone is really, really scared. And that, I think, was objectively noticed and was reported widely throughout the country. That wasn't really even a political issue, it was just a statement of fact. So then I asked myself, well, what happens when fear overtakes an entire society, not just a small group of people or one race or sex or a city, but everyone? When I say everyone, obviously there are exceptions to this, but I'm talking about, widely speaking, out of the 330 million Americans alive in 2020, You had 60, 70, maybe 80% of them deathly afraid. And all of a sudden… And that's when the process began of my putting the pieces together and reaching a hypothesis that I wrote about in detail in my first book, as you noted, United States of Fear, How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, that fear had become a fuel, almost like gasoline in a car. that was driving along the nation comprised of all of us. to do incredibly irrational and self-destructive to ourselves and to others acts that were not in our best interests, which is exactly what happens when people are overtaken by panic and they just start to act on a kind of reptilian brain function where they just do things to preserve their survival, even though in retrospect, they don't really make a lot of sense. And in fact, they could be detrimental. Like, for example, if there's a theater that has a fire and people are scared, they all rush towards one exit rather than, say, separating off into groups and going off into all four corners where most people would be able to leave easily. You only do that because you don't have the capacity to think rationally anymore. You're overtaken by fear. So my hypothesis was that Americans were acting irrationally against their own interests. purely because they were scared. That was how all of this got started. And of course, that led me down this long path of asking the question, well, why? Why would an entire country become afraid? And why would we be so susceptible to what I later coined a fear virus or a pandemic of fear? Because I always felt, and still do now, that the real risk, and I think this has been proven by the assessment of the damage after the fact, the real risk to ourselves in 2020 was never a virus. It was actually the result of irrational and self-destructive behavior as a result of fear.

Stephanie Winn: It sounds like from the very beginning you weren't swayed by it the same way those around you were. And I'm thinking back to that time in my own life and it was so surreal because at first I was like, well, it's just like a really bad flu, right? And you know, and then, but But the fact that everything is shutting down and the way people are behaving, there is that element of social contagion. I was telling you before we started recording, I remember the first time that a friend refused to hug me because of this virus. It was someone that I was renting a room in my house at the time, too. And, you know, we were both kind of keeping each other company during an otherwise kind of lonely time when both of us were single at the time. You know, here it is three and a half years later. I'm engaged, thankfully. But, you know, I remember like just that. Thank you. But, you know, just that that breakdown and in the normal relational structures that keep us whole, which as a doctor with a holistic view, I'm sure you think about, you know, in terms of whole person wellness and the kind of feel good chemicals in our bodies when we're maintaining relationships. So I remember the fear setting in and like, just that feeling of, oh, oh, you're taking this really seriously, aren't you? And then, like, and then, you know, the store is closing and everyone's stocking up on liquor and toilet paper. And and so there's there's a sense, well, nothing like this has ever happened before. And we wouldn't be doing this if there weren't something really, really potentially destructive here. Right. So it seems like it's a combination of the fact that it's it's an invisible threat, something microscopic. that could be anywhere, and the fact that the people around us had never behaved like this before. And also, I remember right before reading this, I think it must have been a blessing that for some reason, right before the pandemic, I had read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. And there was some research, and I've probably mentioned this on this podcast before, but I think it's very relevant here, that there was some research in that book about how moral rigidity is closely linked with the emotion of disgust. And disgust is an emotion that we experience on a visceral level to keep us safe from things that have the potential to contaminate us. From an evolutionary perspective, we didn't always have such great sanitation as we do today, so it makes sense that we have this disgust response. And there were experiments that Haidt referenced in this book where even the slightest visual cue or behavioral cue, anything in your environment or actions that reminds you of the capacity for contamination makes people behave in more morally rigid ways. So I remember learning that right before the pandemic and then wondering what is this doing to us psychologically. We're seeing hand sanitizer and masks everywhere and signs reminding us to social distance and you're not allowed to hug your friends and you can't see people's faces. But that being said, I think I was really scared. I learned early on about long haulers and how bad life was for them. And then, you know, the unfortunate irony is that now I am a long hauler. I took measures to avoid getting sick. I lived a very restricted lifestyle for a very long time because I was swept away in the fear and I didn't know how bad it was going to be. When I finally did get COVID, I never fully recovered. So as someone who has this personal experience, I can't see it in a black and white way. I know that there is something to be afraid of if you're talking about something that has the potential to permanently alter your life. And at the same time, there is also a case to be made that the worst thing to fear is the fear itself. And can we really assess the damage from the breakdown in society, from the impact on youth's mental health, the impact on relationships, the impact on, like you say, our fear and what that's done to our ability to function harmoniously as a society? I just don't know that there's any way to calculate it.

Dr. Mark McDonald: It is incalculable. And I would even posit that if we had done absolutely nothing, if we had all just completely ignored this and let the chips fall where they may, didn't treat anyone with the infection, which is essentially what we did anyway, and many people were actually actively killed in hospitals who weren't sick to begin with, that's a whole other discussion about sadism and power that's just terrifying. Even if we had done absolutely nothing in terms of lockdown, shutdown, masks, just let us go about our way. I posit that today we would be better off in terms of damage assessment than had we done what we actually did in terms of lives lost, in terms of economic collapse, in terms of increase of crime, drug addiction, drug overdoses, the breakup of families, the destruction of a generation of children educationally and psychologically, the rise of the incidence of autism, sexual dysfunction, the now pure overwhelming gripping addiction of devices over the younger generation that we may never be able to break them from, which is going to lead to a dysfunctional decade or multiple decades of adult Americans. And these are just some of the problems that are so profound that we instigated, we caused these. This was not a result of the pandemic. Absolutely not. I would say 99% of the loss of life and life giving forces in our country that occurred after 2020 was entirely non-viral related. The fact that there were some people that were harmed or died of that doesn't take away the meta point that I'm making, because public healthcare and public health policy is never designed to save the life or protect the life of one person. It's designed to help the community and the organization of the country. And we didn't do that. We actually, to quote that kind of famous observation that was made early on that was so jarring to me, we were quarantining healthy people supposedly for the sake of the sick, which is an inversion of public health policy and is completely irrational. We damaged the bulk of the population through quarantines and the sequelae of that ostensibly protect sick people, and yet it didn't even do that. So it failed in its goal. It also damaged the people who weren't sick to begin with. So I think that there's something that preceded what went wrong in 2020 that explains why we made such bad decisions. And one of the pieces that I believe is critical is that we quietly shifted sometime before 2020 into a culture, a society that devalued courage, risk, intrepidness, assertiveness, the value of living a full life, and we replaced it with a worshiping of safety. We have become a safety culture, and it wasn't so obvious to me until 2020 hit that we had become that. I never really noticed it that much, but you can see signs of it if you look closely. Mothers, for example, driving their children to public or private schools around Los Angeles and other cities around the country in large cars, Ford Expositions and vans, and dropping them off right at the front door of the school rather than letting them walk on their own, and doing it consistently and insistently every day as if walking to school was this terrible risk for their child. Now, I understand that in some cases it is a risk. I get it. This has totally changed from when I was growing up where it was the exception. Now you have traffic officers in front of public schools. guiding hundreds of vehicles of moms a mile long to drop off their children to school, that to me is a sign of safetyism or the worshiping of safety over the important experience of a child to go off in the world and explore. And maybe he'll fall and scrape his knee. Maybe he'll have to report a stranger lurking on the corner to school officials. But he'll learn these lessons of life that he's not going to make if he's just bundled up in a car with a helicopter parent dropping him off to this secure setting in the school. And this is just one of many examples I could give about this creep of safety. And I think because of that creep, we were so susceptible to these screeching cries of, stay inside, stay apart, you will all die if you go out into the air and breathe. 20 or 30 years ago, we would have laughed at that and said, are you crazy? This is absurd. But many Americans just nodded their heads and said, absolutely, we believe that. And they went along with the ride. And then once the evidence came out that that was actually not only unhelpful, it was destructive, people just doubled down and they kept doing it. And they trusted the government The higher authority government, more than they trusted their family, their friends, their community, people that were really on the ground and should know better, because they were so attuned to this vertical hierarchy of authority that has also been sort of broken down in the last few generations. The family is no longer the core structure of our country. the American system of communities as we know it is gone, our cities are broken. We just have a higher concentration than ever before of centralized power in Washington and local schools, communities, counties, states have kind of evaporated. So there's a lot of different things that have happened that I think went into this mix that allowed us to be so swept up in this craze in 2020 and to react in a way that not only didn't help people who were sick. It also put healthy people in harm's way. In other words, we kind of did the exact opposite for both groups, the sick and the healthy, that we really should have done. And that's a profound error that still has lasting consequences today, and I think will for at least another generation.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, it's like we didn't get to have an open conversation as a society about which values should guide us in this. You know, it wasn't there wasn't this sort of weighing of we as a society and as individual humans have various needs. And sometimes those needs can be in conflict with each other. Sometimes our need for safety can be at odds with our need for love or meaning or fulfillment. And, you know, life is a constant balancing act and a process of negotiating our needs with ourselves as we change and as our priorities shift over time, as well as with our loved ones. And so it wasn't like there was a group of people saying, hey, we're really concerned about safety and we're worried about the sick and vulnerable and others saying, yeah, we get that, but we're really concerned about these other things that the safety measures you propose jeopardize and it wasn't a negotiation. It was, it was very authoritarian. It was like, if you don't adopt this particular attitude about safety, then you are, you are basically a terrorist was kind of the implication. I mean, it wasn't the language used, but maybe in some cases it even was.

Dr. Mark McDonald: Well, you were arrested. I mean, if you kept a restaurant open, not forcing people to use it, if you just said, I'm keeping it open and people are welcome to come or not, they can make their own decisions, weigh their own risks, informed consent, that's always been the rule in medicine. Essentially, America is all about informed consent, isn't it? I mean, we are informed of our choices based on the risks and rewards, and then we're free to make them as long as we don't actively harm someone else. That's been the American way, and that all got thrown out in 2020. We were told, no, this is the only way. You don't have the right to make decisions for yourself anymore, even when they don't affect other people. Remember the iconic image of the paddleboarder that was out in the ocean in Santa Monica, California, all by himself at a beach that was closed off? There was nobody within two or three miles of him. and the police arrested him, the Coast Guard came and yelled at him through a siren and the police on the shore arrested him and put him in handcuffs for violating a beach closure order because he was putting people at risk, a paddle boarder in the ocean. I mean, that's one of the biggest examples of starkness that I'm talking about. Who was he putting at risk exactly? Himself? I mean, that's even a joke, but let's say he was, doesn't he have the right to go out and run the risk of getting sick while paddleboarding on the open air in the ocean, there's certainly more risk of drowning. And that risk has been present forever, right? That never changes. Unless there's a riptide or a shark, the beaches are never closed because there's water at the beach, which means you could potentially drown. We don't ban bathtubs because infants could potentially drown, even though they do every year. Because we know that bathing overall is better than being dirty, even though a few children will die of drowning. This is not a complex concept or one that people would disagree with, and yet it was completely tossed in 2020. And the only way that this could have occurred is that people were scared and they weren't able to make the argument I'm making right now. They were so scared, they just looked towards a power figure and an authority figure and followed the orders of what they should do. That is terrifying to me because that means that we no longer, and I mean this literally right now in 2023, we no longer have the power as individuals to make decisions about our lives. major, major decisions to live or to die, to take risks or not, how we raise our children, whether our children should go to school or be schooled at home. There are laws on the books now that are being pushed to ban homeschooling, to make it illegal, a punishable offense. If you decide, for example, that your son who says he's a girl at age five isn't really a girl, he's actually a boy, You can have your parental rights stripped from you and your child can be put into the social services system as awarded the state. Ten years ago, that would have been considered criminal by the government. Now it's considered criminal on the part of the parent. My, how we have shifted.

Stephanie Winn: Whether you've been a longtime listener of this podcast or you're new, odds are you know I'm deeply concerned about the gender ideology crisis affecting today's youth. What's often not talked about are the medical practitioners who are pushing this ideology on vulnerable people, or the doctors who are taking a stand against them to protect kids. Which is why I was so excited to find a group that's doing just that. It's called Do No Harm. They're fighting for patients and against identity politics. and they have information for everyone, whether you're in the medical field, a concerned parent, or just a thinker who wants to learn more. Visit DoNoHarmMedicine.org slash Some Therapist to learn more. That's DoNoHarmMedicine.org slash Some Therapist. So I'm wondering what all this does to our brain chemistry. So earlier I was talking about how cues of safety and contamination affect moral rigidity. I'm thinking about things like oxytocin, for example, this time that you weren't allowed to come close to people and how that might mess with oxytocin, which affects things like our ability to trust people. serotonin, dopamine. As a psychiatrist, do you have any thoughts on the impact of what happened in 2020 to our brain chemistry, and then how that might connect to the things you were seeing in your office? Like you called this acute onset OCD type behaviors, more autism, for example.

Dr. Mark McDonald: Yeah, I actually think it's had a profound effect. I mean, I know for a fact that there's been a tissue change in the brain in the last two or three years. The IQ points of infants that were born after 2020 dropped by, I believe, 10 points over an 18 month period. That was proven about a year ago.

Stephanie Winn: Sorry, what dropped?

Dr. Mark McDonald: IQ. So the intelligence quotient of infants is now 10 points less in 2022 than it was in 2019. And that means that babies that were born during the pandemic, I shouldn't say that, during the lockdown, the pandemic is irrelevant in this case, during the lockdown, after 18 months were 10 points less intelligent than babies 18 months after birth that were born two or three years before the lockdowns. So that's- That's scary. That is frightening, isn't it? And this is clearly due to both isolation, prolonged deprivation of human contact, and of course, visual stimuli and cues because these babies were born not even being able to see faces in many cases for over a year. And we know from child development that if you don't see faces, if you can't see lips moving, if you can't see smiles, you can't acquire language. And language learning disorder referrals, so therapy referrals for language learning disorders, has increased in some cities up to 300% in 2022 compared to 2019. 300% increase in some cities, mostly urban areas where people were all locked down more than in rural areas. So those are two measurements that are not even my opinion, they're just simply reported in the literature, but I can tell you observationally from seeing my own patients and seeing people socially out of the office in the last couple years, I strongly feel, based on my own observations, that there has been a intra-brain chemical change in the way that people interact with their environment, including with other people socially. I can say that young people, people that were going into, say, the dating world, around the time of the lockdowns and have now been three years into it, not really back to normalcy because our world is still changed, they have begun to rely on non-face-to-face interactions almost exclusively for dating. They are unable, emotionally incapable of having a face-to-face exchange with a potential date because they don't feel comfortable, they don't feel rewarded, all they feel is fear. Their fear mechanism has overwhelmed their mechanism for chasing down something good and achieving a positive chemical outcome. And they've transferred that over to non-dangerous, 100% safe activities that provide the same chemical reward, but without any risk at all of any emotional damage, much less physical damage. As an example, video games, pornography, electronic means of providing pleasure to oneself, auto-eroticism, has now superseded actual physical encounters with men and women, especially the young ones. And I know that this is true societally because it's been reported for the last year and a half that those in the teenage to mid-twenties age range are actually having less sex than 10 years ago in the same age range. Now, whatever you feel about sex outside of marriage, that's not the point. The point is that there is less coming together of male and female, men and women, than there was before. That's a behavioral shift and it must be coming about because of some kind of chemical change in the brain. And I think our brains have been essentially rewired to strive for behaviors that reinforce chemicals that are not encouraging us to be our best. So I am very concerned about this as a psychiatrist, and I'm seeing more and more demands from patients for drugs to help them feel better, because they seem to be in a permanent state of depression, anxiety, or fear. And I know that it's not organic. I know that it is an environmentally induced problem, And our environment, unfortunately, hasn't really returned to normal fully, especially in cities. And so I think this problem is perpetuating.

Stephanie Winn: You're talking about, among other things, a problem with our motivation in young people. And this has concerned me, too. I guess my beliefs on this are very far from politically correct. And they're just based on my observations of human nature. which are based in the idea that men and women are different, for example. And so my perspective just as a therapist and a human being witnessing the human experience is that females have this maternal drive that'll cause us to give, even in situations where it might not be warranted. And that males, though, they sort of will rise to meet whatever bar females set for them. Right. So in a time when if you wanted a woman, you had to marry her, then men would rise to meet that demand because that was what was expected in a society. And if in order to marry a woman, you had to you know, have a respectable career and reputation and yada yada, then men would do that. If they had to be valiant, they would do that. But as females set the bar lower, then males have less to strive for. Now then you introduce the type of online pornography and the abundance of online pornography that males have access to, and the satisfaction that comes from video games that give sort of an artificial sense of having accomplished something, even if you haven't actually accomplished anything meaningful in your life that impacts the material world or other people. And where is young men's motivation? And this becomes a serious problem for women who want to grow up, who want to, you know, and who can feel their own biological clocks ticking. It seems like we've really kind of set up a sort of a Peter Pan culture for young men. I guess my views, like I say, they're not politically correct. I don't know how much you agree or disagree, but you are talking about the dopamine reward system and people's motivation, excuse me, to to pursue relationships at all and to do whatever is difficult in order to overcome the obstacles to getting what you want.

Dr. Mark McDonald: So what you're describing is the attacks on masculinity and specifically what's called the toxic masculinity attacks, which began intensifying maybe five to 10 years ago and have now reached a kind of fever pitch. And they have essentially taken away the motivation of men to be men. And it's become a real, I think, destructive influence and effect on not just men, but also on women for the very reason you described. Women looking around and saying, where are the men? We don't have men anymore. So women lose just as much, if not more than men when masculinity becomes redefined as toxic. A man that I greatly admire for his ideas, Jack Donovan, wrote a book called The Way of Men, a while back, and he described the four core tenets of masculinity. And in his view, they are, and this is true across cultures and across time, they're not culturally specific. They are physical strength, courage, mastery or competence, and honor. They are not inherently moral. They are not inherently virtuous. They just are what they are. You could even say that the mafioso is a masculine man because he's physically strong, he's courageous, he defends the honor of his family, and he's very competent at extorting money from businesses. That doesn't make him a good man, but that makes him a masculine man. In order to be a good man, you have to use those traits, grow them, and imbue them with virtue and morality. And virtue and morality are culturally dependent. They are not universal and different cultures describe moral and virtuous in different ways. You could even say that Hamas is a masculine group. They will risk their lives for their cause. They honor their religious beliefs. They're physically strong. They go out and kill and murder people. They're certainly competent in building rockets and bombs with pieces of scrap metal and fertilizer. They're very resourceful. They build tunnel systems underneath Gaza that are hundreds of miles long and survive against a formidable adversary, which is the IDF Israeli military. But nobody would say that these masculine men are good or virtuous, at least nobody that's rational would. The left certainly does. So my point is that if we just simply say that anything that's masculine is toxic, we are begging the question of what does it mean to be good and to do good? Well, it means that you have to have these four qualities, but you also have to have them expressed underneath the moral or virtuous fabric. And once you take away the possibility, even, of having these traits become good, and you take away the definition of what is virtuous and moral and make it very, very confusing, then at that point, you really don't have the possibility of inculcating young men into adulthood and the role of being good men. And I think this has really been a terrible catastrophe for our society, for our nation, and it's hurting men, it's hurting women. And if we don't call it out and we don't reaffirm those qualities of masculinity, physical strength, courage, honor, and mastery, I think we're doomed.

Stephanie Winn: I agree. And I just interviewed Leonard Sachs, who wrote four books, one of which is called Boys Adrift. And in that interview, I'm not sure if he came up with this definition or if he was quoting someone, but I recall him saying that one of the messages he sends to young men is being a man means using your strength in the service of others. And so that's sort of that fusion of what you were saying, those traits of masculinity as defined by Jack Donovan, with also some kind of virtuous motivation. One of the questions I asked Dr. Sachs, and perhaps I can ask you the same question, although it's a bit of a loaded question, which is, who are you most worried about? So are you more worried about boys or girls? Are you more worried about the babies born during the lockdowns or those who are coming of age now, what populations concern you?

Dr. Mark McDonald: Well, I used to say that I was most concerned about the people that were pulling the strings, the people in positions of power and authority who were narcissistically driven and sadistically motivated. And I would consider those people to be people like Anthony Fauci. I think that he's a narcissist and a sadist and an immoral human being. And I think he's been directly responsible for the deaths of millions of people. I put him in the category of Goebbels and Hitler's henchmen. And there are many others in politics and also in media, people who run Google and Facebook and Bill Gates. These are really loathsome characters in my view. And I used to put these people in the class of, I'm really worried about them in the sense of worried about what they're going to do. I now feel less motivated to go after these people. And I'm more, and I wouldn't say go after exactly, but I'm more concerned about the state of mind and the potential for damage and evil to be caused by our fellow man, our fellow citizens, our communities, the people that are on our right and left, the people that are around us at our level. I was so demoralized and almost depressed at a certain point when I realized that none of the evil that occurred in 2020, 2021, 22, 2023 could have happened without the complicity of most of America. And I believe still today that if we don't reform ourselves, If we don't become a more virtuous people, we will get the government that we deserve. We will get the media that we will deserve. We will get the corporations we deserve. We will essentially reap what we sow. And so I think that if I look towards the future, my greatest concern is really the generation that's coming up, not because they're inherently evil, but because they're not going to be able to do good unless we teach them what is good and unless we give them the skills and capacities necessary, such as inculcating the four qualities of masculinity, teaching virtue, teaching morality, containing and controlling excessive femininity, which has done far more damage than excessive masculinity recently. The problem that we have in our society with criticizing the sexes is that we're very quick to criticize aggression, violence, and rape on the part of men, and rightly so, but we don't criticize the excessive receptivity, inclusivity, forgiveness, waiting, allowing for second and third chances, which taken in excess invites evil, invites damage, violence, harm, because it's a sign of weakness. And so if we're still so unbalanced in the way that we create our society, teach our society, inculcate values into young children, if we teach all boys to become girls, for example, or at least asexual, and we teach all girls that as long as they're acting out of female principle, they can do no harm. And then we attack men for defending goodness and protecting women when they're being injured. and we isolate people, we deprive them of education, we teach them to be fearful rather than courageous, we teach women to pursue careers rather than family, and men to sort of lay down on the tracks when they're unjustly criticized. These are all awful things, and we're doing this to a younger generation now that's going to be taking over. They're going to be our doctors, our leaders, our teachers. I've already seen the outcomes of this in the medical school classes that are graduating. I've seen it in new hires and businesses. I've seen it in new teachers. They don't know what they're doing. They're so lost, so confused, and yet they are so passionate that what they are doing is right. I'm sure you've seen the libs of TikTok videos of these young teachers in public schools, primarily, who are active predators and groomers of Children of sexualizing children. that we would never have tolerated a generation ago. We would have put them in prison, and yet they're creating the next generation of our adults. So I am obviously disappointed and upset, and I want to see accountability for older people and for people who led what I consider to be the greatest damage done to a civilization in human history since 2020. But I think if I want to just be a little more dispassionate and more objective about it and less narcissistically driven and thinking about the greater good, I think we really need to be more concerned about the young people and saving them, because if we don't do that, then I don't think we have a civilization, a culture to perpetuate. I mean, ultimately, if we allow the transgender movement to take over, we will have an infertile generation that will not be able to reproduce biologically. I mean, that is the end point of transgenderism, is extinction. and you put in environmentalism and you put in all of the tribalism on top of that, we won't have humans to procreate and reproduce and we won't have energy or fuel or food to eat. And then it's basically game over for human civilization. I mean, that's an extreme stark statement, but that's kind of where things are heading right now if we don't right the ship.

Stephanie Winn: There's a word you used earlier that I think is significant here, and it's sadism. And maybe we could use some synonyms like malintent, right? But in naming that, you're acknowledging that in all humans to some slight degree, and in some more than others, there is a maliciousness, right? This shadow aspect of the human psyche that we don't like to look at. And then you named some social and cultural trends that render us vulnerable to that maliciousness getting in and doing damage. And I want to kind of define it this way, that anytime you give people a cheat sheet that says, here are the people you can trust and here are the people you can't trust, you are laying the groundwork for all kinds of Trojan horses to get in. Because you're saying that it's really just that simple, that sussing out good and evil is as simple as looking at the color of someone's skin or what sex they are, what, you know, what have you, right? And it's an easy way out that doesn't work. It's an easy way out of the moral and maturational dilemma of learning to trust your instincts and to have some kind of guidance system for knowing who you can trust and how to recognize other people's intentions, how to recognize whether you hold the same shared values as others, not only in terms of the values that you advertise or declare that you have, but truly in the values that you live by. I think anyone who's taking those tasks seriously realizes that they require significant effort and thought and intelligence and moral scrutiny. But the ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum would like others to believe that they can tell you very easily the answers to who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. And so and then you kind of define that as like the toxic femininity as the way you described it in terms of endless receptivity and this idea that if you If you're operating according to this sort of set of rules, then you can do no harm, right? As long as it's in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion, for example, then you can do no harm. It creates a tremendous shadow that goes unchecked. If you're looking for a simple way to take better care of yourself, check out Organifi. I start every day with a glass of their original green juice powder mixed with water. It contains moringa, ashwagandha, chlorella, spirulina, matcha, wheatgrass, beets, turmeric, mint, lemon, and coconut water. 100% organic with no added sugar. It's the best tasting superfood supplement I've ever tried. It's super easy to make, and it makes me feel good. Organifi also makes several other delicious and nutritious superfood blends, such as red juice, immune support, protein powders, a golden milk mix, and even superfood hot cocoa. Check out the collection at organifi.com slash sumtherapist. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I dot com slash sumtherapist. And use code sumtherapist to take 20% off your order.

Dr. Mark McDonald: I think you're right. I think you're describing this path towards tribalism and mutable characteristics being more important than what you can develop and grow inherently as an individual human, that your identity becomes associated with groups rather than with you. It's almost a return back to what the Bible criticized a millennia ago, which was the matter of law, that you were held accountable for the sins of your father. And that's kind of where we've come back to now, isn't it? If you're white, you're held accountable for the sins of white people that preceded you by 200 years. And that's essentially what affirmative action and reparations is about, isn't it? And yet the Bible made it clear that that was immoral. One is not accountable for the sins of the family. One is accountable for one's own sins, period, end of story. And that was a step forward in the evolution of morality, of humanity. It allowed us to have a more just society. It allowed us to stop raping the daughter of our neighbor if he raped our daughter. Because we realized that the daughter of our neighbor is a separate human being, and she doesn't take on the guilt of her father. In order to equal things out, we don't just rape the other girl. We go after the man who raped our daughter. It sounds so obvious today, but that wasn't obvious several thousand years ago. In fact, it was revolutionary, because back then they considered the tribe to be the unit. So if you damaged the member of the other tribe, the just response was to damage the other tribe, and any member in it was equally damageable. But we went beyond that. And the United States is really founded on those kinds of principles, that evolved moral principles of individual rights, individual freedom, the sanctity of the man and woman as a unit, separate and apart from the family and the community, and then also the strength and power and need for the entire nation to be built up of communities that are voluntarily determined which means man and wife as the basic one. You choose your wife, not in all countries. Some wives are still forced to marry. In the Middle East, forced marriages are still very common. And I'm not talking about arranged marriages like in India, where you have the choice to say no. I'm talking about forced marriages. You say no and your throat is slit and your body is dumped in a sewer. That's still practiced in many nations in the Middle East and Muslim countries, but we don't accept that because we don't see women as property. But now we're being told that no longer do we have these kinds of choices. Parents don't have the choices that they can make for their children anymore. It's the state that makes those choices. So we're going down a very, very dark and dangerous path. And I would actually say that you could summarize everything that you proposed and what I'm kind of amplifying as a return to free biblical times. We're actually going backwards, not to pre-civil rights era, not to pre-modern era, to say feudal times or the medieval period, although in many ways we are. I mean, we're now saying that we have lords over us and we, the peasants, have to give of ourselves and our production, our money, our cows, our grain to the Lord in exchange for the promise of safety. Does that sound familiar? And of course, the Lord doesn't really provide us with safety because he's corrupt. And that is the present state of our government today. Corrupt government and a bunch of peasants who are forced to give everything they have to a lord that isn't going to really provide safety anyway. It's just going to enrich his pockets. But let's go back even further. Let's go back on a moral level, not a political social one. I think we are returning to a pre-biblical period of morality. We are returning to a period where child sacrifice is now morally virtuous. We are returning to a time when the practice of sacrificing children and infants, similar to what the Incans and the Aztecs did in what is now modern-day Mexico, is now being proselytized as a new religion. And we are actually literally teaching children to sing prayers and give praise to Aztec and Incan gods. I'm not even embellishing or exaggerating. This is happening in public schools right now in the United States. Children are being asked to pray to Incan and Mayan gods who sacrifice children and split their blood on altars to appease the nature gods of rain and sun. This is pre-biblical morality.

Stephanie Winn: I hear you describing the cult of Moloch, this idea of child sacrifice, and I think if we look for it, we can see child sacrifice in many ways, but I have not heard these stories before of children in public schools being asked to worship ancient gods. Can you explain what you're talking about?

Dr. Mark McDonald: You can just look it up on the internet. There's stories of it all over. It's happening in public schools and it's also happening at university campuses. There are teachers in public schools and professors at universities who will and have given lessons on what they call aboriginal or native tribe religions and teach children that these religious practices of these tribes are morally equivalent to Christianity and Judaism. And they will teach them how to chant and how to pray to these nature gods, which were the gods that the Incans and the Mayans and the Aztecs prayed to while they were slitting the throats of children and virgins and spilling them down the altars of their pyramids.

Stephanie Winn: I presume they leave that part out when they're teaching the children. They don't tell them about the child sacrifice. Exactly.

Dr. Mark McDonald: They don't mention anything about the actual physical sacrifice of the children and of the women. They leave that part out because it obviously would be so shocking and the children and the parents would immediately pull their kids out of the school. So when The parents then look up these gods and these prayers and then challenge the instructors on what this implies. You know, what are you covertly supporting? And they ask them, well, do you support the practices of these people, including the sacrifices? Then they change the subject. And I mention this because I think that this is a more explicit example of the sacrifices of children that are being implicitly supported in the public schools and universities, exactly in the way that we are explicitly supporting the sacrifice of young girls and young women and children in general through chemical castration and genital mutilation of the transgender movement. And so my point is that we are, as a society, we are indoctrinating young people, young children, adolescents, and young adults into a path of self-sacrifice and infertility and ultimately species extinction under the guise of virtue, under the guise of inclusivity, under the guise of goodness and kindness and receptivity and inclusion and diversity and affirmation, all of which are simply covers and code words to disguise what's actually happening, which is not really any different than what the Incans and the Mayans and the Aztecs did. They just did it more, they did it outside of a surgical suite. But there's really very little difference in the end point. If we are saying that girls should have their breasts cut off and their vaginas removed and boys should have their penises cut off and they should be castrated, how are we really any different than the savages that ran these ancient civilizations who believed that by spilling the blood of a child or a virgin, they were going to get a better crop. I don't really see much difference, actually. It seems very similar to me. And it's the same people, by the way, who are promoting both of these movements. They're both coming from the left, not liberals, not conservatives, not independents. They're coming from the left exclusively. I know nobody that supports this wholeheartedly who is not on the left.

Stephanie Winn: Well, it sort of seems based in this whitewashed myth of the noble savage, this glamorization of indigenous cultures and romanticization of ways of living that are closer to nature, which a certain part of me can get on board with and has been on board with, I think, more naively. in the past, and it reminds me of sort of the idea of Thomas Sowell's sense of the constrained versus the unconstrained visions for humanity, that there are people with this unconstrained vision that believe that the sky is the limit. There's no human nature to grapple with that's always been there and always will be. There's this idea of, on the one hand, kind of infinite capacity for progress to evolve into a utopian society, and also this romanticization that some cultures have always had it right from the beginning, and it's really just the evil industrializing white man that has come in, that has destroyed this indigenous knowledge, and that the indigenous knowledge was perfect, whole, and complete, and saintly. Whereas I think, you know, those of us and perhaps working in the field of psychology has something to do with it. I think that, you know, my experience being a therapist for 10 years, maybe you can relate because I don't know how long you've been practicing psychiatry or how that has shaped you as a person. But I think those of us who deal so intimately with human nature, we see past the culture and the times and we see that there are some things that are just kind of universal or fundamental. to human nature and we realize that there is kind of this myth of progress and limits to what we can achieve as a species. At the same time, we value some of the things that we have achieved and taken for granted. The fact that we no longer sacrifice children or force women to marry men that have been preordained and, you know, there are so many things that we take for granted and that we have the luxury of having these safe schools where teachers can romanticize foreign cultures just like there are luxury beliefs that people hold about how trans people would be so very safe and welcome in Palestine. I mean, you know, could you be any more detached from reality? Probably not. you know, such are the luxuries afforded by a safe and prosperous society.

Dr. Mark McDonald: It's true. I mean, just today I saw a satire on that of two foolish and naive pro-Palestinian left-wing students at Columbia University, supposedly, saying that they're really happy that the Palestinians in Gaza are inviting them for a rooftop party. And someone pointed out that's to throw you off the rooftop, which is literally what they do in Muslim countries to homosexuals in many Muslim countries, not all, but many. Certainly, you're not welcome in any Muslim country if you're gay or lesbian and transgender. Forget it. And I think you're right that there's a luxury that we have in the West of romanticization, which you don't have if you have to live in the reality, the hard reality of nature. Nature is not kind and loving. Nature has wanted to destroy us from the very beginning. And it's to our credit that we have learned how to fight back and how to protect ourselves against nature. But our nature as humans is often overlooked by this very decadent society and this mindset that somehow people are always good. They're born good. They're born a tabula rasa. This is the foolish notion that was perpetuated by Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France. And many French intellectuals bought into this, that children only go bad because of the environment. Well, we're not born good, we're born impressionable. And we always have the capacity to do evil. So we're always fighting those urges. And we can improve, we can evolve, we can move towards a better state and a better society, but we will never, ever be idyllic. And I think the left is very foolish and destructive because it sacrifices the good, and I would say even the great, on behalf of the attainment of the perfect, which is never ever attainable. And we're willing to destroy everything because we can't achieve perfection, rather than accept that life is, as you said earlier, it's a series of compromises and imperfections and suffering to a large degree. And the attempt to eliminate all suffering ends in horrible, horrible catastrophe, and it has throughout all of time. And I would say that beliefs to the contrary are universally immature. And this is what fundamentally ungrounds the left from reality. The left in every case is wrong. They have never been right about anything. And the reason for that is that it's an immature philosophy. And it's immature because it denies the reality that life is hard, that people can do evil. And this is really important. And I think this is probably critical to what's happening today in Israel. And it will happen in the U.S. when we incur the same violent revolt and attack, which is coming, I'm sure, is that In order to fight evil, you must be ready and willing and have the capacity to exert necessary violence. And Jordan Peterson mentioned this in an interview with Fox News maybe a year ago, when the consultant representative interviewer said, hey, you're saying men should be aggressive. Aren't you saying men should be like beating people up? That's a horrible thing to say. He said, no, no, no. I'm saying men must have the capacity for aggression. Because if you don't have the capacity to be aggressive and to be violent, you are weak by definition. And weakness invites violence and evil and exploitation. You cannot do good if you're not strong. The weak cannot do good because they can't stand up to the evil. And by attacking the strong, by attacking the capacity for violence, by attacking the capacity for aggression, we are essentially giving in to evil. We are continuing to be weak. And a weak mindset includes the idea that people are inherently good. And so if they're inherently good, why should we be prepared to fight? This is an immature, childish, naive, and destructive philosophy, and it started way, way back in the early 1900s with Vladimir Lenin and came through Karl Marx and then was taken up by Mao and Pol Pot and all these horrible people. pulled this foolish ideology together all from this silly idea that came back to the French philosophers, that somehow we can create the perfect society and that if only people are managed well by these angels that are somehow coming down from heaven and filling in the commentariat and the groups that are running our politics, that everything will be great. And we know from history that in every single case, it's led to nothing but death, famine, and the worst loss of life in human history, which is, of course, what happened after World War II under Stalin and then under Mao, 100 million lives lost, all to leftists. So this is my way of saying that we who are of rational mind and living in reality, we must come together as a nation, as a people, to attack and reject, with whatever violence is necessary, the left. I don't care if people are liberal or conservative or independent. I don't care. But if you're not anti-left, you're not doing good. And if you're not doing good, then what are you here for?

Stephanie Winn: seems paradoxically that a naive view of humanity, in which there are these rose colored glasses, this unconstrained vision, this, this sense of the tabula rasa, I mean, we've talked about it in so many ways, but it's really, it's a reluctance to look evil in the eye that makes us vulnerable to evil and makes people vulnerable to becoming evil themselves by demonizing others, right? Where does the desire to demonize come from, to put things in terms of all good or all bad? Because what starts with this rosy philosophy and this romantic worldview leads to oftentimes the demonization of entire categories of people in ways that are dehumanizing and that condone violence in the end. So I, I know from You know, in my own life, it's my interest in psychology and spirituality that has sort of inoculated me to this. And I'm not sure where I'd be if I hadn't been forced to mature through my work in the field of psychology, because working in psychology just teaches you so much about human nature. And that's part of why I'm shocked and disturbed that there are so many people in the field who seem so naive about human nature.

Dr. Mark McDonald: I would say 80% of people in the mental health field are completely lost. It's very disturbing to me. And I think the societies to a fault in mental health are on the wrong path. I can't think of a single one that is supporting reality and health right now. And that includes the APA, American Psychological Association, the ACAP, American Association of Psychiatrists for Children. the AMA, American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, this board of therapists and mental health social workers in California. I mean, it goes on and on and on. Every single one, as far as I know, advocates for transgender therapy, affirmation, sexual abuse, and grooming of children. I mean, that's just one of the most you know, horrific examples, but it goes way beyond that. And I'm worried about the next generation of therapists, Stephanie, because I don't see them getting good learning. And I think they're being indoctrinated into actually harming their patients, which is, to me, is just horrible. It'd be better if there was no therapist in that case.

Stephanie Winn: I'm afraid that I agree with you more than I would like to. But let's turn towards solutions. So your second book was about freedom from fear. You said it was based on, modeled after a 12-step program combined with Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life. I know you mentioned him earlier, so it seems like he's been quite influential. You know, I feel like I, just as much as anyone else, have been vulnerable to my own fear addiction because the pandemic was isolating and induced paranoia for me and then, you know, not too long after, being a public figure who's critical of gender ideology has been enormously stressful. And so I probably need your advice as much as, as anyone else. And I'm wondering, how do you, you know, just starting with you on a personal level, how do you hold such critical views and, and such worries about what's happening in the world, and yet not to come to fear yourself? What is the antidote?

Dr. Mark McDonald: I think the antidote is to do the opposite of what everything I was just venting about for the last hour. And it starts with acknowledging that the act of expressing courage is not about extinguishing fear. It's about making a choice to take action in spite of your fear when something is at risk, something that matters to you. It's not about going to the gym for six months and then coming back and saying, look at the muscles that I built up. It's literally a decision that you make in every given moment, regardless of how you feel. I am a big proponent philosophically and clinically that we are not defined by our feelings or our emotions. We are defined by our actions. And if we allow our emotions and our feelings to dictate our actions, then what are we? We're just puppets. We have lost our agency. So the first step, I believe, is doing what's right, regardless of how we feel. And it can be done in small ways. It can be done in ways that don't require tremendous physical or financial risks, like saying hello to someone on the street when for the last six months we've turned away, or we've walked in the gutter, or we've put a mask on our face when a human being approaches us, look someone in the eye and saying good morning. For some people, that's terrifying. And they don't feel like that's a safe act. Well, if you keep doing what you feel is safe, you're never going to live. Certainly not going to live fully. So, I think acknowledging that you have an addiction to fear, if you do, and that you are intimidated by your fear is the first step towards then being able to make rational, conscious decisions to act in spite of your fear. I think that's a very important starting point. I'm speaking that for an individual point of view. I'm not talking about society at large. talking about each individual person. And as you go through these steps that I have in my book, you can see there's specific things, kind of like an AA, that can be very helpful in sustaining and growing that mindset. For example, in one of the chapters, I write about dropping the dealer. I think of fear addiction as like a drug. And if you're a drug addict and you walk to work every day past the drug dealer in the corner, how long do you think that you're commitment to abstinence is going to last, not very long. What if you're an alcoholic and you pass by a bunch of pubs on your way home from work every day and you've decided to stop drinking? How long is it going to be before one day you're suffering from a bad breakup or lack of a promotion? You say, you know what, I'll just go in and have a Sprite. How long is it going to be before you start drinking the beer again? Not very long. So avoid the dealer, avoid the sources that are perpetuating bad choices. In the case of fear, for many people, it would be media. Now, I understand completely that putting your head in the sand is not a solution, and I'm not advocating for that. What I am advocating for is to do a detox of media. If you're so scared, you're resonating with fear, you can't even make decisions for yourself that are basic and rational and healthy. So get rid of media for some time, and then titrate it back into your life. Shut your phone off, stop all the pings and dings, stop looking at the computer, read a book, read a magazine, and then slowly come back into news and information, but only from trusted sources. that have been right for the last three years and that are clearly not fear-mongering. And you have to be very careful and selective about those sources. I'll give an example of one that I love and trust, which is the Epoch Times. It's a printed magazine or newspaper and also an online digital journal. And they have amazing writings that are not fear-mongering. and they have to do with health and fitness and how to sew, how to cook, how to be a better parent, inspirational messages, meditation, nutrition, diet, sleep, exercise. Why not start with that? Why not reground yourself and then pull back into the politics and the stuff that's more contentious? And then, of course, moving further along, you want to find out how you can be helpful to others. It's one thing to be cured of your fear addiction, it's another to actually start doing good for others. Ultimately, what you want to be is a mentor, right? You want to be able to go to other people and say, I've been there. I was afraid, I was living in fear, I was paranoid, terrified, stuck at home, but now I can share my experience and I can help you go down the path that I've been down and free myself from that fear. And that's incredibly empowering. And it's also protective. It gives you resilience against relapse from that same fear addiction, just like being a sponsor in AA helps with relapse of alcohol. So I think that there's a really strong parallel here, in my view anyway, between overcoming fear addiction and overcoming drug addiction, porn addiction, video game addiction, gambling addiction. I think they're all addictions. I remember a girl that I passed by about six months ago on the street at night, young, 20 something, seemed totally healthy, normal. As she approached me, she reflexively reached into her pocket, pulled out a mask and put it on her face. And then as I saw her go past me, she took it off and put it back in her pocket. I don't even think she thought about, I'm going to get infected. I think she just did it instinctively. And the way that someone reaches into their pocket for a cigarette, although now maybe not so much a cigarette, maybe a carrot or a pencil or something to chew on when they feel nervous. I think it's like that. I think it's an addiction and it's reflexive. So you have to find ways to overcome those behaviors and then teach people how to do the same. That's my model and that's what I preach in my 12-step guide, Freedom from Fear.

Stephanie Winn: I think that's very helpful and practical, and thank you for summarizing it like that. I will take this opportunity, since you mentioned the Epoch Times, to put in a plug for my interview with Jan Jekielek on American Thought Leaders, the Epoch Times show.

Dr. Mark McDonald: He's fantastic. He came to my home and interviewed me for two or three hours.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, he's great. I flew down to LA for that and got to hang out with him in person. You can now watch No Way Back, the reality of gender-affirming care. This medical ethics documentary, formerly known as Affirmation Generation, is the definitive film on detransition. Stream the film now or purchase a DVD. Visit nowaybackfilm.com and use promo code SOMETHERAPIST to take 20% off your order. Follow us on Twitter at 2022affirmation or on Instagram at Affirmation Generation. And you know another thing that comes to mind for me when you describe fear addiction and reflecting on my own relationship with it is just how fear affects our sense of urgency. That's one of the reasons that we don't have as much capacity for rational thought or as much of a sense of choice when we're under the influence of fear is because it sends off our alarm signals that there's something urgent and there's no time to think or review our choices. And So I think it's just helpful to have your own ways of being aware of what triggers your sense of urgency and your sense that you only have one way that you have to react and that you have to react that way right away. You know, something like social media can definitely… spark a sense of urgency, but it's one of the easiest ones to evaluate. Social media is one of the easiest ones to logically, rationally evaluate and go, actually, there's, you know, this is, this will always be here, there will always be this app that I can open that will have an endless stream of alarming information. And, and, you know, is there anything? Is there anything on fire that I need to put out right now? Um, you know, for me, even, you know, my self-care sometimes consists of just remembering that, um, seeing certain accounts on social media just, you know, might spark a sense of fear of missing out or something like that. And, um, that I don't like having that, those emotions activated, so I don't have to open it. Right. Or I can open it, notice those emotions getting activated and then put it back away and attend to something in my immediate environment, which I will add, and I'm sure it's in your book as well. just the importance of efficacy. and competence in managing fear and anxiety. That if you can, you know, do something even as practical as just putting away that pile of laundry that's been sitting there staring you in the face for a few days. Like whatever those small steps are that you can take in your life to affect some meaningful change in the world around you usually goes a long way towards quelling anxiety. And it's usually our fear addictions and media things like that actually slow us down from taking those immediate steps.

Dr. Mark McDonald: That's an excellent point. I didn't mention social media because it was staring me in the face all the time, but I think that would probably be the lowest hanging fruit to eliminate those impulsive reactions to chase down your fear reactions and act on them, which is unhelpful. and we're inundated with it. We have these pocket devices called phones that are carried with us all day long, every day, and they're constantly pinging and notifying us of seemingly very important information. And as you said, very rarely is that information important and almost never is it immediately critical.

Stephanie Winn: Well, Mark, it's been A great conversation. Thank you for joining me today. I know you have a lot more expertise that we didn't tap into, like nutritional psychiatry is something you mentioned before we started recording that you've been really delving into lately and certainly a subject of mine. So I'd love for you to join me sometime in the future. But for now, let's talk about the places that people can find you. At the beginning, we talked about your podcast, Informed Dissent, the intersection of health care and politics with Dr. Jeff Barkey. And again, I will remind listeners that I've been on on your show along with Kat Kattinson. We also talked about your books, United States of Fear, How I Melt. How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, and Freedom from Fear, a 12-step guide to personal and national recovery. So I'll include those links in the show notes and also add them to my bookshop at sometherapist.com slash bookshop, where you can find as the top section, a list of all books written by people who have been on my podcast. And, for the ROGD parents in the audience, the second section down is just for you. It's my recommended rating for ROGD parents. You're also in private practice doing child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry. So, do you have a website, social media presence, anywhere else that people can find you?

Dr. Mark McDonald: called DissidentMD, which is a great clearinghouse for basically all of my work products and my books and my social media pages. But I should add that I just recently started an Instagram account called DissidentMD as well. And the very first reel that was posted, which was a clip of my discussion about fear and its origins in Washington, D.C. last summer at a conference, It hit 220,000 individual views and 35,000 reposts. It was unbelievably successful. So I decided to keep the account and keep posting because that one was such a winner. And it's now grown. I've started with seven followers, and I think it's up to 5,000. It just increased exponentially. So I am posting a lot about what I do, my writings, my nutritional recommendations, my affiliation with Fullscript, which is a company that dispenses branded supplements, and my recommendations for that. And I write about it on my Substack account, too, both psychiatric and supplement-based ideas and treatises, and my substack is also called DissidentMD. So if you remember anything about how to find me from this talk, just remember DissidentMD, and you can probably discover the pathway to any of those sites.

Stephanie Winn: That's a very convenient handle to remember, just like my sometherapist, DissidentMD. That's where you can find and DissidentMD.com. All right, Mark, thank you for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Stephanie. I hope you enjoyed this episode of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast. To check out my book recommendations, articles, wellness products, guest episodes on other podcasts, consulting services, and lots more, visit SomeTherapist.com or follow me on Twitter or Instagram at SomeTherapist. If you'd like to go deeper, join my community at somekindoftherapist.locals.com. Members can dialogue with other listeners, post questions for upcoming podcast guests to respond to, or ask questions for me to respond to in exclusive members-only Q&A live streams. To learn more about the gender crisis, watch our film, No Way Back, The Reality of Gender-Affirming Parenthood, at nowaybackfilm.com. Special thanks to my producers, Eric and Amber Beals at Different Mix, and to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, Half Awake. If you appreciate this podcast and want more people to find it, kindly take a moment to rate, review, like, comment, and share on your platforms of choice. Of course, just because I am some therapist doesn't mean I'm your therapist. This podcast is not a substitute for medical advice. If you need help, ask your doctor or browse your local therapists online. And whatever you do next, please take care of yourself. Eat well, sleep well, move your body, get outside, and tell someone you love them. You're worth it.