"It just doesn't work": Psychiatrist Josef Witt-Doerring uncovers alleged "dark truth" behind mental health drugs and their "honeymoon period"

Psychiatrist Josef Witt-Doerring recently talked about the widespread usage of antidepressants and mental health drugs during his appearance on American conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson’s podcast.

On Friday, August 29, 2025, the CEO and Medical Director of TaperClinic opened up about the alleged side effects of psychiatric drugs on The Tucker Carlson Show. When the 56-year-old talk show host asked Josef Witt-Doerring if his view of psychiatry changed after he took it up professionally, the latter said:

“What I started to notice in my intern year was that it just does not work. And I mean, this is the heart of it. You put people on these medications without understanding why they’re unhappy. You know, and so firstly, it’s like, how could you expect to fix someone if you don’t understand why they’re unhappy?”

Josef Witt-Doerring further detailed the alleged “dark truth” that he uncovered while studying psychiatry. He claimed that drugging people when they are “unhappy” is an issue as drugs “wear off over time.”

Josef Witt-Doerring also discussed the alleged "honeymoon period" of mental health drugs, claiming:

“So people...get this experience where they’ll say, ‘This drug has saved my life. I’m more functional.’ Yeah, during the honeymoon period, where your body hasn’t adapted to it. Because our bodies...just adapt to the drugs over time. And so I would just see them wear off, and the people would start accumulating more and more drugs, and then they would get slowly sicker.”

However, Josef Witt-Doerring said that the medications actually work and they are not a “placebo thing.”

“And they work. This isn’t a placebo thing. These drugs, they turn down your emotional range, they are numbing. And if you’re someone who’s seriously anxious, you will experience that as therapeutic, maybe even life saving,” he said.

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Josef Witt-Doerring claims putting people on drugs like SSRIs is a “guinea pig experiment”

Psychiatrist Witt-Doerring, during his appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, claimed that after seeing how the drugs are developed, he realized that psychiatrists are practicing, “so far outside of what the evidence shows.”

When Tucker Carlson questioned if drugs could be prescribed “outside of science,” Witt-Doerring alleged:

“Yeah, the whole idea that it makes sense to put someone on an SSRI for years at a time is not supported by the clinical research at all. It’s a complete guinea pig experiment. It’s an experiment happening on a mass scale… Maybe 7 to 10% of Americans are essentially on an experiment where there’s no clinical trial evidence that says that these drugs are safe.”

Antidepressant Pills Illustrations (Representative image via Getty)

Witt-Doerring further claimed that anyone who has their eyes open will see that the drugs “clearly wear off over time”, and that this is likely why patients have to keep on going up on the dose. He also said that doctors claim that the mental health medications are “safe and effective” but that they are only allegedly studied for 12 weeks in the clinical trial.