Antipsychotics

Aajonus described psychotropic drugs as compounds that lodge in the brain and nervous system and alter the very structures responsible for synaptic communication. He stated plainly that he believed these medications get into the RNA and DNA of the synapse and permanently change them, making the resulting behavioral and neurological damage extremely difficult or in some cases impossible to reverse. He said this not as a theoretical claim but as an observation drawn from watching patients who had been medicated for years and who continued to exhibit erratic and unstable behavior even when attempting to follow a corrective dietary protocol.

He described the state of being on these drugs as fundamentally incompatible with coherent functioning. His phrasing was direct: "You're going to be inebriated. You can't expect a drug to be sober." His point was that patients on psychotropic medications cannot be evaluated for psychological progress or dietary response in any meaningful way because the drugs themselves prevent coherent neurological activity.

One of the most emphatic points Aajonus made about antipsychotics concerned what happens when patients stop taking them. He consistently stated that withdrawal from psychotropic drugs produces severe, sometimes homicidal and suicidal behavioral changes, and that this fact was documented in pharmaceutical animal research but deliberately omitted from public-facing information and clinical warnings.

He described experiments in which rats, mice, and frogs were exposed to psychotropic compounds and then had them withdrawn. Frogs, which he noted are among the most sensitive test animals and are administered substances simply by having them placed on their skin, do not naturally fight. But when withdrawn from these compounds, they began killing each other. Rats and mice, including bald mice that he described as so gentle they could be tortured without retaliating, would rip each other's throats out upon withdrawal. He stated that the drug companies were aware of this data and chose not to include it in their public communications or clinical advisories.

He connected this directly to mass violence events in the United States, specifically naming Columbine and a school massacre at a technical college. He stated that he received this information from medical doctors who sent him the medication records and research, and that in every case he examined, the perpetrators had been on psychotropic medications and had stopped taking them, typically seven to ten days before the event. None of them had been warned, he said, that withdrawal from these medications was likely to produce violent, homicidal, and suicidal behavior.

His conclusion was unambiguous: "Never give your children psychotropic medication. Never let a doctor do it. You're asking for severe trouble. That almost is unreversible in some situations." He also stated that the difficulty in stopping violent behavior once these drugs have been administered can persist for years afterward.

For patients in acute states of psychological agitation who could not be persuaded or were not capable of following a fully raw diet, Aajonus described a specific situational use of cooked starch as preferable to antipsychotic medication. He was explicit that this was not his preferred approach but a harm reduction measure for circumstances where medication would otherwise be administered.

He gave the example of a husband whose wife had been forcibly drugged through a legal process orchestrated by her ex-husband. In that context, Aajonus described providing a preparation of three pints of raspberries blended whole with six tablespoons of coconut cream. He also referenced cooked rice cakes with butter as a tool he would use rather than medication to manage violent or dangerously agitated behavior, because the cooked starch could absorb certain neurological waste products without causing the long-term structural damage that psychotropic drugs produce.

His reasoning for cooked starch in these situations was rooted in the work of Dr. Elnora Van Winkle, a neuroscientist who spent between 47 and 52 years at Milhauser Laboratories at Columbia University cataloging the chemicals of the brain and nervous system. She identified that the body produces certain psychotropic compounds as byproducts of trauma and stress hormones, and that these compounds store in the body like other toxins. When they are released during detoxification, the body re-experiences the same emotional and behavioral states that were present when they were originally produced. Aajonus found that cooked starch, consumed with large amounts of raw fat, was the most effective dietary tool for absorbing these released compounds and preventing them from causing destabilizing behavioral episodes. He referenced this as the reason he originally included cooked starch in the first edition of "We Want to Live," though he later modified his recommendations after observing that patients who ate cooked starch regularly accumulated advanced glycation end products and acrylamides in ways that harmed the intestinal tract.

Aajonus documented multiple patients who had been on antipsychotic or psychotropic medications for many years and who, through the Primal Diet and specifically through the introduction of high meat, were able to stop their medications and stabilize.

The most frequently described case involved a woman who had been on psychotropic medications for between 18 and 27 years, a range that appears across multiple telling of the story with slight variation in the stated duration. She was taking seven different psychotropic drugs, with daily pill counts ranging between 27 and 28 pills per day, with each medication partly intended to counteract the side effects of another. One of those drugs was Prozac, which Aajonus noted carries side effects including kidney damage, lung damage, and neurological dysfunction. The woman was a well-known yoga teacher with instructional videotapes. Despite being on the Primal Diet for approximately a year and a half, she continued taking her medications throughout that period because her psychological instability made consistent adherence impossible. She would go on and off the diet in cycles tied to her mood states, and during difficult periods would consume large quantities of coffee, chocolate, and other high-caffeine foods that worsened her condition.

Aajonus described having repeated difficult phone conversations with her, during which she would yell at him and hang up. After a year and a half of this pattern, he told her directly that the situation was unsustainable and that she needed to try high meat. She initially refused on the grounds that the raw food diet already made her feel socially ostracized. She hung up, then called back approximately an hour later and agreed to try it. The result, as he described it, was that within 10 to 20 minutes of eating the high meat she stopped taking her medication and, as he put it on one occasion, "all of a sudden stop cold-turkey and be happy." He stated that this outcome would be "impossible in any other situation" but that it worked repeatedly across every case he observed.

He featured this woman and another patient on Ripley's Believe It or Not, which first aired July 17, 2002 and was subsequently aired more than 40 times in two years, making it one of the most frequently rebroadcast episodes. He described the two patients eating high meat alongside him on camera, both having histories of psychotropic drug use, and both having experienced significant improvement through the dietary protocol.

A second case Aajonus described repeatedly involved a man he characterized as "the most depressed, cynical person I'd ever met," a large man who had become a landscape artist because, as Aajonus put it, he hated people. This man had also been on and off psychotropic medications and had gone on and off the diet in cycles similar to the woman described above. When Aajonus finally persuaded him to try high meat, the effect was immediate happiness. The man subsequently ate one to two pounds of high meat daily, essentially as his entire diet, and transformed into someone visibly cheerful and engaged when Aajonus visited Nevada City.

A third case referenced in the question-and-answer materials involved an elderly woman in an advanced state of Parkinson's disease who was being tapered off several medications including Seroquel (an antipsychotic), Lexatin, and Orfidal. The Seroquel morning dose had been eliminated by the neurologist but the nighttime dose was retained because the woman was experiencing nighttime hallucinations. Within three days of beginning to reduce these medications, the woman showed measurable improvement. Aajonus's correspondent in that case reported beginning to give her one serving daily of a preparation that was not fully specified in the excerpted passage, along with 2 raw eggs with banana or orange juice each morning and 2 to 3 ounces of stone-pressed olive oil with 1 to 2 ounces of unsalted raw cheese in the afternoon.

Aajonus's main clinical tool for addressing the conditions that antipsychotics are conventionally prescribed for was high meat, meaning raw meat that had been allowed to ferment and rot over a period of weeks to months in a closed jar opened periodically to release gas. He explained the mechanism in biochemical terms that fit his broader framework: the bacteria present in properly fermented raw meat pre-digest the fats and proteins to the level of finite particles that can immediately feed the brain and nervous system, bypassing the digestive steps that a compromised gut cannot perform. Because the brain and nervous system are directly nourished by the end products of bacterial digestion of fat and protein in the large intestine, eating high meat effectively delivers those finished nutritional compounds directly.

He observed consistently that patients eating high meat experienced a shift from depression or psychological instability to happiness and sometimes silliness within 10 to 20 minutes of consuming it. He compared this timeline directly to that of psychiatric medication, which requires hours to days to produce any effect and must be taken continuously. He also noted that the effect of high meat does not require ongoing dosage in the way that antipsychotics require daily maintenance, though his patient who ate one to two pounds daily did so by preference rather than necessity.

His framework for depression, distinct from other psychiatric presentations, was specific: "Depression is low bacteria. So they're not the same things." He stated that psychiatrists and psychologists treat anxiety and depression identically with drugs, which he considered a fundamental error. Anxiety, in his framework, is the body's nutrients requiring physical utilization, meaning the solution is exercise. Depression is insufficient bacterial activity in the colon, meaning the brain and nervous system are not receiving the pre-digested fats and proteins they need to function. High meat and high eggs directly address the second condition within minutes.

Aajonus's position on why psychiatric drugs cannot heal the conditions they are prescribed for was rooted in his understanding of the brain as a physical tissue that requires specific nutrients in specific forms. He drew from his own experience of autism caused by mercury in vaccines, which he described as a neurotoxin that disrupts synapse firing and jams ganglion and axions, creating the kind of communication failure he experienced throughout childhood and early adulthood. In his view, the pharmaceutical approach attempts to stimulate a damaged brain rather than detoxifying it and allowing it to regenerate. He stated that if the brain is poisoned and cells are dead or malfunctioning, stimulation through drugs cannot help; the only paths forward are removing the toxic material and allowing the tissue to regrow, or detoxifying and then allowing growth.

He was placed in multiple experimental programs at UCLA in the 1960s intended to address his autism and neurological dysfunction, including LSD experiments. He was given 720 to 732 micrograms of LSD, a quantity he noted should have sent 10 or more people into profound hallucinations, and it produced no effect in him whatsoever. He interpreted his immunity to all of these pharmaceutical interventions in retrospect as fortunate, noting that had he responded to them, he would likely still be on them or would have died from their long-term effects.

He also cited that he was immune to all the psychotropic drugs used in these experimental programs, a fact he attributed to the degree to which his brain had been damaged by vaccine mercury. The pharmaceutical compounds simply had no tissue to act on in the normal way because the relevant neural structures had been compromised. This did not lead to healing; it led to him being dropped from each experimental program as a non-responder and remaining in worsening neurological and psychological condition until he discovered dietary intervention.

Aajonus expressed particular alarm about the administration of psychotropic and antipsychotic medications to children, connecting what he saw as the elimination of physical education from schools to an increase in pharmaceutical prescribing. His argument was that children naturally produce high levels of physical energy hormones and require extended periods of vigorous physical activity, which he described as 8 to 10 hours of activity per day, not necessarily structured exercise but sustained movement. When that outlet is removed and children display the predictable restlessness that results, the psychiatric system reclassifies normal high-energy physiology as ADD or ADHD and prescribes medication.

He stated that approximately four million children in the United States were on medication for ADD or ADHD diagnoses at the time he was speaking, and that in his view these children were simply people whose bodies are physiologically oriented toward sustained physical activity. He described looking at the eyes of a 10-year-old girl brought to him by her parents in Chicago and being able to read the number of activity rings in her iris, which indicates how much hormone the body produces for physical energy and how many hours of activity per day the person requires to metabolize those hormones stably.

He gave the example of a teacher from New Zealand who had done well on the Primal Diet and was hired by a Catholic school to work with difficult children. The same dynamic he described elsewhere applied: the pharmaceutical industry's economic interest in converting hyperactive children into lifelong drug users by convincing doctors and then mothers that medication is necessary, rather than identifying physical activity as the appropriate intervention.

His warning about school shootings was framed entirely within this pediatric context. He stated that every perpetrator of the school massacres he had information about had been on psychotropic drugs and had stopped taking them seven to ten days before the event. He described the animal research data on withdrawal violence as evidence that this outcome was predictable and known, and that the failure to warn patients and parents of this risk was a deliberate omission rather than an oversight.

While Aajonus did not provide an elaborate step-by-step protocol specifically for withdrawing from antipsychotics in the source passages, he made several relevant statements. He described some of his patients as going through extended periods of being simultaneously on psychotropic drugs and on the Primal Diet, which he acknowledged produced instability because the drugs interfere with coherent functioning and consistent adherence. He did not force rapid cold-turkey discontinuation in these cases but continued working with patients through their cycles of drug use and dietary compliance.

In a separate context discussing epilepsy medication, he articulated a general principle for medication reduction: "It worked best to wean herself or himself over a comfortable period of time by reducing the dosage every" period. The source passage is cut off, but the principle of gradual reduction rather than abrupt cessation is present. For high blood pressure medication specifically, he recommended reducing by half every five days until eliminated over approximately a two-week period. Whether he applied the same specific formula to antipsychotics is not explicitly stated in the sources, though his general framing was consistent.

He also described the role of high meat in making discontinuation possible where dietary intervention alone had not succeeded after a year or more. In every case he described at length, it was the introduction of high meat that created the conditions under which patients were able to stop their medications and maintain stability.

Aajonus did not treat psychiatric diagnoses as diseases of unknown origin. He consistently mapped them onto specific toxic exposures and nutritional deficiencies. Mercury from vaccines was his primary cited cause of the neurological damage he experienced. He described mercury as disrupting synapse firing and jamming the ganglion and axions, which are the structural components of neural communication, producing an inability to think clearly or rationally. He noted that the same mechanisms apply in industrial pollution more broadly, with 80 percent of disease in his view stemming from industrial chemical exposure, and a significant portion of that coming from medications themselves entering the body and creating accumulating damage.

For paranoid schizophrenia specifically, he addressed a case in which a woman exhibited paranoia, violence, hallucinations, and extreme anger. He noted that blood sugar dysregulation, specifically carbohydrate allergy combined with carbohydrate addiction, could be sufficient to produce full psychotic presentation. He also acknowledged that physical brain damage from accidents could produce similar states if the damage caused excessive stimulation to the anger center of the brain or an inability to buffer neurological impulses to that center. In his framework, these are all physical, biochemical, and structural problems requiring nutritional correction rather than pharmaceutical management.

The neuroscientist Elnora Van Winkle's work on what she called the biology of emotions was important to Aajonus's understanding of why people experience recurring emotional crises without obvious current-life triggers. Her finding, which he described in detail, was that byproducts of earlier trauma and stress hormones can store in the body as chemical compounds and that when these are released during detoxification, the body re-experiences the emotional and behavioral states associated with their original production. This explained to him why people who had suffered severe psychological trauma would cycle through apparent psychiatric episodes even when their external circumstances were stable: they were detoxifying stored neurological waste products.