Adam Lane Smith sits down with Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, psychiatrist, medical ethicist, and author of Making the Cut, to break down what modern psychiatry is getting catastrophically wrong, why the chemical imbalance model is not just incomplete but actively harmful, and what actually heals people when medications and therapy alone are not enough.
What you will learn in this video:
1- Why reducing mental illness to a chemical imbalance in the brain has produced a generation of people who believe they will never get better
2- Why psychiatrists are seeing numbers on a sheet instead of people and what the system that created that looks like from the inside
3- Why physical activity four times a week is as effective as antidepressants for mild to moderate depression and why nobody tells patients that
4- Why relationships are the single strongest predictor of outcomes even in the most severe mental illnesses including schizophrenia
5- Why people in third world countries with schizophrenia often do better than people in industrialized nations and what that reveals
6- Why modern life has become voluntary solitary confinement and why dopamine binges have replaced human connection
7- Why the loneliness epidemic cannot be solved by more therapists and what actually has to happen instead
8- What Dr. Kheriaty would change about American psychiatry if he had absolute power and control
If you have ever been handed a prescription and sent home and felt like something essential was being missed, this conversation will show you exactly what that something was.
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Aaron Kheriaty, MD, is a physician specializing in psychiatry and author of five books, including most recently, Making the Cut: How to Heal Modern Medicine (2025). He is a Fellow & Director of the Program in Bioethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He also serves in consulting and advisory roles at the Brownstone Institute, the Zephyr Institute, the Paul Ramsey Institute, and the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.
https://x.com/AaronKheriatyMD
https://www.aaronkheriaty.com/
