Brooke lives in Reno and featured in a prior Reno meeting organized by David Antonuccio which had Bob Whitaker as the speaker. She had previously met up with Bob and has since done podcasts for Mad in America. When she learnt Kim, Angie, David H and of course David Antonuccio would be in town for a follow up Reno Meeting, she sat a bunch of skeptic around a table and pressed record. It worked.
She has a new book that makes tough hombres blanche and faint. The perfect present for anyone who doesn’t think antidepressant withdrawal is real and deadly and rolling a pharmaceutical is just as safe as playing roulette in Reno. A must read for anyone exposed to SSRI Tik-Toxification.
She is also an award winning chef, a chef to elite athletes and more…
David is a Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Nevada where he taught for 32 years, while also working at Reno’s V.A. Medical Center. His clinical work and research interests cover the behavioral treatment of depression, anxiety, and smoking. He has received numerous awards and authored or coauthored over 100 publications including articles on the merits of psychotherapy rather than medication for depression. He now makes music with Michael Pierce in a group called Rainfall.
Angie is a U.S. Army combat veteran, psychiatric drug withdrawal consultant, and healing coach. After surviving years of overmedication and polypharmacy following trauma from her military service, she now educates individuals, families, and organizations on harm reduction and safe deprescribing of psychiatric medications.
Her story is featured in the award-winning documentary Medicating Normal (2020), which explores the risks of long-term psychiatric drug use and the challenges of recovery. Angela’s past advocacy roles include Legislative Policy Fellow for the Veterans of Foreign Wars and Student Veterans of America, Military Veteran Liaison for the Benzodiazepine Information Coalition, team member for The Withdrawal Project and Social Impact and Outreach for Medicating Normal- the film.
In 2022, she founded HeartCore Collective, supporting individuals healing from psychiatric drug injury to reclaim their autonomy outside of the system.
Kim Witczak is a globally recognized drug safety advocate whose activism began after the sudden death of her husband from undisclosed side effects of an antidepressant. Her advocacy helped lead to FDA’s Black Box suicide warnings on antidepressants.
With over 25 years in advertising and marketing, Kim brings a unique perspective to FDA reform, transparency, and patient safety. She co-founded the nonprofit Woodymatters and served three terms from 2016 to 2025 as the Consumer Representative on the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee. She also co-organized the international Selling Sickness: People Before Profits conference and serves on multiple patient advocacy boards, including USA Patient Network, Inner Compass, Conscious Clinician Collective, and MISSD (Medication-Induced Suicide in Memory of Stewart Dolin). Kim works to amplify patient and family voices, advocating for accountability, informed consent, and transparent healthcare. See KimWitczak
David Healy
The Podcast was aimed, and shot on October 3. It has been fired this morning on MiA – The Real World is where the Harms Are
It also features here:
There is a Transcript Here.
mary H. says
Reading the transcript of Brooke’s podcast was really inspirational. Alongside numerous passages with which I completely agreed, I found this piece to fit my exact concerns:-
“I am extremely concerned about the expertise of de-prescribing psychiatric drugs going mainstream because I don’t think they understand fully that it’s not just taking the drug away. There is a whole unlearning or un-brainwashing, whatever you want to call it. There are layers upon layers of trauma and betrayal, so I am extremely concerned about the expertise.”
My deepest fear is the lack of compassion. We saw it with sleeping tablets a number of years ago – people , mainly women I would guess, having their prescriptions withdrawn from day one without any concern whatsoever about how they would cope with their withdrawal. We have also seen it with the prescribing of Diazepam ( in particular) where, previously, you could expect a prescription from your doctor, suddenly it was as if you were asking for a doctor’s life to dare to expect them to prescribe diazepam. Now, we’re on to deprescribing in general – our concern, of course, being psychotropic drugs. Will they DARE to take for granted that deprescribing is equal to ” just stop taking”, because, if so, we are going to have many, many cases of utter catastrophe. Even the tiniest reduction can, for so many, make life very near impossible to bear. Just imagine the result if the doctors were to get the idea in their heads that the way THEY see it has nothing to do with the way the PATIENT CAN TOLERATE IT. We must hope for a decent dose of common sense being prescribed to every prescriber!
An excellent podcast – an excellent side-effect of the main Reno Meeting.
Dr. David Healy says
M
This is probably one of the most important points made. It is difficult to see how deprescribing can be done safely without the person the meds being in charge, being the Guide, and the doctor the learner, the apprentice – which is just not a role they are used to and likely to buy into
D