Ali Zeck

I have swallowed psychiatric drugs w/ the promise of healing my #mentalillness which actually was #CPTSD from #trauma. The drugs made me even more psychotic. I’m almost four years off all psychiatric drugs & no longer obey the pseudoscience of conventional #psychiatry-never again

I am worn out watching stories like the Lindsay Clancy case and now the Presley Gerber tragedy send conspiracy theorists straight to “psyop,” “Illuminati sacrifice” or “satanic ritual.” Labeling every disturbing event a psyop is intellectually lazy—it substitutes a preselected narrative for investigation, does a profound disservice to the truth and can actively obscure the real harm that needs to be identified, understood and stopped. I am also a conspiracy theorist and a really good pattern recognition expert and I deeply distrust governments, powerful institutions and hidden systems. Where I part ways is when things that are actually harming or killing real people every day get dismissed as fake because the documented explanation is not theatrical enough. When every disturbing death or act of violence is immediately transformed into an elaborate ritual, the far more ordinary danger disappears, is forgotten or even mocked. People are being prescribed multiple powerful psychiatric drugs, sometimes by multiple doctors, without adequate coordination, meaningful informed consent or recognition of how those drugs may interact and the dangerous adverse reactions they can produce as well as the inherent dangers of even trying to stop taking them. Go take a look at the hundreds of sites devoted to tapering, drug interactions and withdrawal where people have either been totally abandoned by their doctor or even blamed for their reactions to the drugs. Adverse drug reactions can alter cognition, behavior, perception and impulse control, while withdrawal from some drugs can be profoundly destabilizing and even deadly. Opioids and benzodiazepines can dangerously compound one another’s effects, suppressing breathing and potentially leading to oxygen deprivation, coma, cardiac arrest and death. Yet when patients deteriorate, their symptoms are often interpreted as proof of worsening mental illness rather than possible medication effects, leading to another diagnosis, another prescription and another layer of chemical complexity. People can become confused, agitated, suicidal, cognitively impaired or physically incapacitated under the umbrella of “care,” while everyone around them is told that the illness and not the treatment, must be progressing. That is polypharmacy, and it can cause serious injury, permanent disability and death. It does not require hooded figures, coded symbols or a secret ceremony. Sometimes the machinery harming people is fully licensed, socially trusted and operating in broad daylight. I know because I lived inside it. For decades, my adverse reactions were used to diagnose more illness, which justified more drugs, created more symptoms and buried me deeper inside the system harming me. I survived long enough to leave and understand what had happened; many people never get that opportunity. Presley’s death is now being investigated as an overdose, and the emergency call reported an apparent overdose followed by cardiac arrest. Toxicology has not yet established whether pharmaceutical drugs, illicit drugs or a combination were involved, but Presley’s publicly documented history of multiple prescribed medications, dependence, withdrawal and conflicting psychiatric guidance makes examining the entire drug picture necessary—not conspiratorial. And frankly, if someone wanted to divert attention from psychiatric drug injuries, convincing everyone to search for satanic symbolism and hidden psyops instead of examining prescription histories, drug interactions and prescriber accountability would work beautifully. The “conspiracy theory” is not exposing the hidden mechanism. It is helping the visible mechanism and outright harm remain hidden.

Presley Gerber, Cindy Crawford’s 27 year-old son, died yesterday in a rehab facility. His cause of death is undetermined. He spoke openly about drug addiction, and I am not erasing that history or claiming his prescribed medications actually caused his death. I am examining what he said about his journey through the mental health system.⁣ ⁣ Presley said he had seen 15 psychiatrists and described being offered what he characterized as “20 medications,” with instructions to take one if he felt this way, another if he felt that way and others “as needed.” His prescribed drugs included buprenorphine—an opioid—and benzodiazepines including Xanax and Valium. He spoke about changing doses, withdrawal, conflicting advice and not knowing whether he was taking “a little or a lot.” At one point he said, “Don’t give me that much freedom. I need some direction.”⁣ ⁣ I don’t care if you believe his death was a psyop or have theories about the Gerbers, because the treatment story Presley told is my story and the story of countless others. It is not a psyop when it is happening to real people.⁣ ⁣ I had access to psychiatric care, too. For decades, psychiatrists misdiagnosed me, prescribed one drug after another and failed to give me meaningful informed consent. When I experienced adverse reactions, they became evidence of more mental illness, resulting in more diagnoses, more drugs and deeper entrapment inside the system harming me.⁣ ⁣ Whenever tragedy strikes, we hear that the answer is more access to mental healthcare, as though access guarantees safe, competent care. Presley had money, powerful parents and resources most families could never obtain, yet he still sounded like a frightened man buried inside the help.⁣ ⁣ Lack of access is not the only danger. Fragmented, medication-heavy psychiatric care can also endanger lives. More doctors can mean more labels, prescriptions and contradictory instructions, with no one responsible for the pharmaceutical picture.⁣ ⁣ If we demand more access without asking access to what, prescribed by whom, based on which diagnosis, with what informed consent and with what consequences, we are not helping. We are harming

So many people have difficulty holding seemingly incompatible truths about the Lindsay Clancy case because it is easier to choose one villain, damn them and call the case solved than to sit with truths that appear to contradict one another and that might feel uncomfortable. However, this case is far more complex and far more painful than any single villain can explain. ***Disclaimer: I am not defending the murder of three innocent children by looking at these truths. Here are some uncomfortable truths to consider: A mother can deeply love her children and still cause them catastrophic harm. Love and harm are not always opposites when the mind has been chemically altered. A person can turn to psychiatry for help and become progressively more sick and destabilized under its care. Starting, stopping, switching or stacking psychiatric drugs can profoundly alter sleep, cognition, perception and behavior. A person can seek help from trained professionals and be deeply injured by the treatment they receive. The same person can see five doctors, receive five different opinions and diagnoses and leave with five different drug protocols. It’s called “practicing medicine” for a reason because clinical judgment is not infallible. A person can have an adverse reaction to a psychiatric drug and have that reaction interpreted as worsening mental illness rather than treatment injury. The resulting diagnosis leads to another drug, which can create more symptoms and more harm. It’s called a “prescribing cascade” and I experienced this when my acute benzo withdrawal was used to diagnose me with bipolar. The fact that she was a nurse does not mean she could predict every risk, interaction, side effect or prescribing decision involved in her own care. Medical training may provide knowledge but it does not make someone immune to illness, an adverse drug reaction or misplaced trust in treating professionals. Saying “she should have known what she was experiencing and gotten away from her children” assumes she still possessed the insight, judgment and reality testing required to know, and those are precisely the capacities psychosis can destroy. Two people can take the same psychiatric drug at the same dose and have radically different experiences. We absorb, metabolize and clear drugs differently and our brains and bodies can respond differently to the same exposure. It’s called pharmacodynamics. Your own response to a drug does not establish what another medication altered brain can experience or do. An adverse reaction does not have to happen to everyone to be real. You cannot always reliably diagnose yourself as unwell from inside a mind that has become altered. Not having personally experienced psychosis does not make psychosis any less real and you cannot use what your intact mind would have known, felt or chosen as proof of what someone in a psychotic state was capable of knowing, feeling or choosing. A person can drive, hold a conversation, complete errands and appear to function while psychotic, dissociated or profoundly detached from reality. A person can physically commit an act without possessing their ordinary judgment, cognition or agency at the time. Someone recognizing altered cognition does not erase the children or minimize what happened to them and does not mean they support a murderer. A tragedy can be exploited by institutions without having been manufactured by them. It can really have happened but still be exploited or manipulated to drive public opinion or outcomes. Questioning Lindsay’s psychiatric treatment does not require declaring the murders, the trial and everyone involved part of a psyop. Trying to understand how this happened is not the same thing as excusing it. The truth is already devastating enough. We do not need to flatten it into “She’s evil—fry her” or inflate it into “The entire thing was manufactured” simply because complexity makes us uncomfortable.

Yesterday I saw my feed flooded with World Suicide Prevention Day posts, but suicide prevention should happen every day, because until we start asking better questions and understanding what’s really behind suicide, people are going to keep dying. I’m a survivor of multiple suicide attempts, and every year I watch people post the same things: You matter. Please stay. Check on your friends. Call the hotline. And then we go right back to participating in the families, relationships, medical systems, institutions and power structures that can make people’s lives feel unbearable in the first place. We’re very comfortable intervening once somebody wants to die, but we are considerably less comfortable asking what HAPPENED to them that made death feel like relief? And that’s why, as someone who has actually been there, I think a lot of what we call suicide prevention is bullshit. Posting a hotline number isn’t prevention, it’s crisis intervention, and crisis intervention absolutely matters. A hotline can interrupt an acute crisis and save a life, so I’m glad it’s there, but if we’re actually talking about prevention, then we need to start looking at what was happening long before that person reached the point of wanting to die. Where are we when someone is being abused, lied to, controlled, blamed or psychologically destabilized until they no longer trust their own perception? Where are we when they’re trapped inside a family system or relationship that isolates them, where telling the truth costs them human connection? Where are we when someone is being harmed by a medical treatment and nobody believes them, or when a person or institution with more power is crushing someone who has very little? Where are we when someone is traumatized and desperately trying to survive something while everyone around them keeps asking what’s wrong with them instead of looking at what is happening to them? Sometimes suicidal people don’t need another graphic telling them they matter. Sometimes they need the abuse to stop, someone to believe them, help getting out of the system they’re trapped inside, or someone willing to stop asking “What’s wrong with you?” and start asking “What happened to you?” Sometimes they need help understanding how they got to the point where death began to feel like relief and sometimes we need to examine our own participation in the suffering we claim to care so much about preventing. Because we cannot meaningfully advocate for suicide prevention while refusing to look at the ways we participate in, excuse, enable or remain silent about the things that can drive another human being into psychological collapse. Suicide prevention should begin long before somebody wants to die. So yes, post the hotline, check on your friends and tell people they matter, but then look upstream. Look at the relationship The family system The power dynamic The medications The medical systems Or the institution and the circumstances that person is actually living inside. And then look at ourselves, because if we’re going to spend one day a year telling people their lives matter, maybe we should spend the other 364 behaving like their lives actually do matter. That’s suicide prevention.

Whenever a victim of abuse comes online and talks about what happened to them, inevitably someone shows up with: “You’re still playing the victim.” “You clearly haven’t healed.” “Why are you still talking about this?” So let me explain the difference. Playing the victim would be believing that we have no agency over our lives now, that what happened to us excuses everything that we do today and that we are permanently helpless because other people harmed us. Understand that talking about being victimized is not the same thing as living in victimhood, and that someone can have agency now AND tell the truth about the times when they did not. I can rebuild my life AND talk about what nearly destroyed my life at the same time. I can heal AND name who harmed me, what they did and what the consequences were. And I can use my own experience to point out patterns and systems that are still harming other people. Healing is not amnesia and someone being silent is not evidence of their recovery, because many times talking about what happened to them is exactly what people do once they finally have enough agency to tell the truth about it. So step off when you feel the need to attack a survivor of abuse who’s brave enough to share their story. If someone telling the truth about what happened to them makes you want to shame them into silence, you might want to get curious about what that says about you—not what it says about their healing.

What is starting to genuinely concern me about the conversation surrounding Lindsay Clancy is how many people in the “truther” community are immediately positioning themselves at: I KNOW what happened. It was a psyop. I know it was manufactured. These aren’t coincidences. THIS is what they’re doing. And once you position yourself at I KNOW, you aren’t investigating reality anymore. You’re defining reality through a conclusion you’ve already reached and then everything gets absorbed into it. Any slight coincidence proves it. The media attention proves it. Missing evidence proves it. Someone disagreeing with you means they’re asleep or they’re in on it or someone presenting contradictory information may actually be part of the psyop. At some point, this becomes a closed loop system and new information is no longer allowed to update your understanding of reality because everything has to be interpreted through the conclusion you’ve already reached. But the ability to update our internal maps matters because adaptation is fundamental to survival and evolution. We have to be able to take in new information—even information that contradicts what we currently believe and allow it to change the map because otherwise you’re not testing your beliefs against reality anymore.—you’re testing reality against your beliefs and rejecting whatever doesn’t fit. And at that point, what could possibly change your mind? I believe in healthy skepticism. I was absolutely speaking publicly back in 2020 about questioning everything, and I’m certain I did plenty of “I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY’RE DOING.” Except I didn’t know. I saw patterns. I noticed inconsistencies and I had suspicions. I connected dots and sometimes became so convinced of what those dots meant that I stopped distinguishing between what I actually knew and the conclusion I had drawn from it. Some of my conclusions may have been right, some may have been wrong and some I may never know, but suspicion isn’t knowledge, pattern recognition isn’t proof and certainty isn’t discernment. But I do believe that governments lie and I believe institutions manipulate people. I believe pharmaceutical companies deserve intense scrutiny and I believe there are things happening today that we may understand very differently twenty years from now. But I also believe in the intellectual humility to say: I DON’T KNOW—and to continue applying discernment in every direction, including toward the beliefs and conclusions I currently hold. And yes, for everyone accusing me of being “in on it,” you got me. I’m in on the psychological operation to get you to question everything—including your own conclusions. I’m trying to manipulate you into holding space for new information, distinguishing what you know from what you think you know and allowing reality to change your mind when the evidence warrants it. I’m even trying to get you to use your own reasoning instead of outsourcing it to whichever person on the internet currently claims to know what’s really happening. Guilty as charged—lock me up.

A lot of people have responded to my posts about Lindsay Clancy by telling me none of this matters because the entire case is a psyop, but before we even get into whether it is or isn’t, I need to express something: When people are discussing their very real experiences with psychiatric drugs and you walk into the conversation with “Nah, psyop,” you are erasing real people and dehumanizing them and stripping them of their lived experiences. What happened to me wasn’t a psyop. It was my fucking life and I spent years in and out of psych hospitals, survived multiple suicide attempts and had horrific side effects from those drugs as well as the terror and years it took to fully come off of them through withdrawal. I lost time as a person and as a mother and much of my memory from that period is blurry. My adverse drug reactions weren’t manufactured or a psyop. My withdrawal period wasn’t a psyop and my altered states and suicidality weren’t manufactured and the grief I’ve had to go through also wasn’t a psyop. And I am hardly the only one. The FDA warns that severe benzodiazepine withdrawal can include hallucinations, psychosis, suicidal ideation and behavior, and homicidal thoughts. A large U.S. study estimated roughly 89,000 ER visits annually from psychiatric-medication adverse events. These phenomena existed long before anyone knew Lindsay Clancy’s name. So maybe Lindsay Clancy is a psyop. But I wasn’t. And okay, I’ll bite—Lindsay is a psyop to accomplish WHAT? Are you claiming the underlying event was manufactured? Or that a real tragedy is being amplified or exploited to influence public opinion? Those are two radically different claims. If you think it’s manufactured, maybe it is. If you think a real event is being exploited, maybe it is. But the reality for many of us out there that survived polydrugging from psychiatry or those who lost loved ones to them wasn’t a psyop—it was our lives and we paid a heavy price for it and it’s STILL happening right now to people out there.

PSYCHIATRIC DRUG LABELS: “May cause serious neuropsychiatric adverse effects—including, depending on the drug, suicidality, agitation, akathisia, mania, hallucinations, psychosis, confusion and abnormal behavior.” CATASTROPHIC EVENT OCCURS WHILE SOMEONE LIKE LINDSAY CLANCY IS TAKING MULTIPLE PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS PHARMA: “Hold on now—an adverse event doesn’t establish the drug caused it. Correlation is not causation.” THE INTERNET: “Absolutely. We must be extremely careful about causal claims without sufficient evidence.” ALSO THE INTERNET: “SHE’S EVIL. SHE’S A DEMON. FRY HER.” I’m not excusing what Lindsay Clancy did-I’m saying there’s more going on than most want to take the effort to think about.

I keep hearing the word AGENCY in the Lindsay Clancy case. “Lindsay had agency. She chose the doctors, the drugs and her treatment plan.” But a person can have agency when they walk into a doctor’s office and say, “I need help.” They can also have agency when they accept medication prescribed by licensed professionals because they have been told this is the responsible, medically appropriate thing to do, but that does not mean they necessarily retain the same degree of agency through every mental state that follows. And before somebody says, “Well, people take meth or heroin and do terrible things too” — that comparison actually raises the question more rather than answering it. There is an enormous difference between knowingly taking an illicit intoxicating drug and taking a medication prescribed by a physician for the express purpose of making you mentally well and following an expert’s advice. And yes, addiction can destroy agency too, but I’m not interested in demonizing addicts to make this point—I’m interested in something much more uncomfortable: What happens when the substance capable of altering cognition, impulse, perception, agitation or behavior comes through the medical system or the medication itself? I know what happened to me—25 years of altered cognition, multiple suicide attempts and severe akathisia, internal restlessness and agitation and now, ten years off of the drugs those symptoms are all gone. Yes, my treating therapists, doctors and clinicians all agree that I had severe adverse reactions to the drugs which my then treating practitioners wrongly attributed to “mental illness.” And Yes—I voluntarily sought psychiatric treatment and I voluntarily swallowed medications prescribed by professionals—that was agency, but when I developed severe adverse effects, akathisia, suicidality and states in which my own mind and body were no longer operating normally, pointing backward to the moment I swallowed the prescription and saying “Well, you chose to take it” would be an absurd understanding of agency. I chose treatment. I did not choose the adverse reaction, I did not choose the altered state and I certainly did not possess exactly the same decision making capacity inside that state that I possessed before entering it. This does not establish what caused Lindsay Clancy to kill her children. That is a factual and medical question, and I am not pretending we know the answer simply because psychiatric medications were involved, but if we’re going to have a serious conversation about culpability, then we also have to be capable of having a serious conversation about capacity. Because “she took the pills herself” is not the end of the agency question—it is the beginning of it and at some point for many, many people, taking a psychotropic drug that alters cognition does not mean that we retained the same agency when the medication profoundly altered us. Black box warnings on these drugs exist for a reason.

I have never seen anything quite like what is happening around the Lindsay Clancy trial. As someone who spent decades inside the psychiatric system—at times taking multiple psychotropic drugs simultaneously and surviving multiple suicide attempts, I shudder at the lack of nuance, compassion and the outright cruelty surrounding this case from people who have never spent five minutes inside these experiences themselves. I have spent years inside profoundly altered states and years outside of them—I know the difference. There is an astounding arrogance in applying ordinary assumptions about agency, choice and “personal responsibility” to altered states you have never experienced, particularly when we are talking about medications that carry FDA warnings for suicidality and, in the case of benzodiazepine withdrawal, severe reactions that can include psychosis, suicidal ideation and homicidal thoughts. And before someone inevitably decides that I must really be “mentally ill,” because that makes my story easier to dismiss, I’m not going to rewrite my recovery into some neat little package. I came off psychiatric drugs in 2016 after being on and off them for 25 years and I was not suddenly fine and remained profoundly unstable for a period of time while dealing with prolonged withdrawal and an extremely destabilizing situation in my personal life, and I did have one final suicide attempt in 2017, but I’m fine now with a solid “mental health” check from multiple practitioners. Which is precisely why I can finally look backward and ask what the hell happened to me and why, when I look at Lindsay, I see a woman who was losing herself while desperately trying to save herself. I see someone who knew something was terribly wrong and kept reaching out to the very system we tell people to reach out to when they’re falling apart. She didn’t refuse help—she went looking for it again and again—just like I did. So what happened between the woman asking for help and the woman who killed her three children? What changed? What broke down and did the system she entered for help actually understand what was happening to her? I know enough from surviving that system myself to believe those questions deserve a hell of a lot more attention than they’re getting. At Point A, we have a previously highly functioning woman, labor and delivery nurse and a mother of three who knows she is deteriorating, frightened and knows something is wrong and is desperately trying to get help, and she DID seek it. But I want to know what actually happened. What changed? What broke down? What happened as this previously functioning woman was losing herself while simultaneously recognizing that she was losing herself and still desperately reaching out for help? She didn’t disappear overnight—there was a process. She sought psychiatric care, saw multiple clinicians and entered specialized perinatal treatment. She went to emergency care. She reported insomnia, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, fears about medication and feeling worse and eventually, she voluntarily admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital. At Point B, months later, she has killed her three children, attempted to kill herself and survives with permanent paralysis. What the hell happened between those two points, because there is an entire story between A and B, and people seem desperate to collapse it into a single explanation—she’s evil, she’s demonic, she was non-compliant, her husband did it, it’s a psyop or she planned it, and the reality is NONE of us know the answer and I would contend that even Lindsay doesn’t know what happened to her, and unless you’ve personally experienced it yourself, please sit down, and say, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” I’m not trying to tell you who Lindsay Clancy is—I’m asking what happened to her.

For more than a decade, writing has been the place where I made sense of my own life. It became the workshop where I wrestled with psychiatric injury, an abusive marriage, chronic illness, grief and the long process of rebuilding a life that often felt impossible to understand while I was living it. I wasn’t simply telling stories—I was searching for coherence, and somewhere along the way I realized that making meaning out of complexity is simply how my mind works. Lately, though something has shifted. I don’t feel silenced and I certainly don’t feel as though I’ve run out of things to say. What has changed is that I no longer feel the same need to process my own life in public because so much of that work has now become integrated. I’m still writing—I’m in the process of writing my memoir—but it feels as though those stories finally have a home that allows them to be told with the perspective they deserve. What has surprised me is where my energy has naturally gone instead. For years I thought I was simply writing about trauma, family systems, psychology, health, relationships, and human behavior. Looking back, I can see I was doing something else entirely. I was learning how to decode systems. Whether I’m looking at a family, a relationship, a business, a belief, an illness or a creative project, my mind naturally begins asking the same question: What is the system that’s producing this outcome? Once we understand the system, we stop chasing symptoms and begin understanding causes. When people can finally see the structure they’ve been living inside, they often discover that the next step becomes remarkably clear. Over the years, people have reached out asking whether I work with clients, and until now the answer has always been yes, but very limited, because I’m not interested in becoming another “coach”with another framework or another list of steps to follow. I’m not a coach. I’m a systems decoder. I help people identify the patterns, layers, assumptions, relationships and invisible structures that are shaping their lives so they can stop fighting symptoms and start understanding the architecture underneath them. Every person is different, every system is different and because of that I don’t believe transformation comes from formulas—It comes from seeing clearly. I’m opening space for a limited number of one on one clients for people who are ready to think differently about the problems they’re trying to solve. Whether you’re navigating family dynamics, relationships, leadership, creativity, health, or a major life transition, my role isn’t to tell you who to become. It’s to help you see what you’ve been unable to see on your own. Looking back, this doesn’t feel like a career change at all—it feels like the natural evolution of everything I’ve been doing for the last decade. I spent years learning to bring coherence to my own life, and now I feel called to use that same capacity in service of other people. If that resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you.

The abusive family system organizes around the abuser by enabling, normalizing, and minimizing the abuse. Then they spit out and reject the scapegoat—the one who knows the truth and calls it out. This person is the “black sheep” who leaves the system carrying the darkness the family won’t. Then the family helps “launder” the image by appearing normal. “See we’re good! It was that person who was the problem.” But this family system is not free. It is burdened by the lie it keeps protecting and keeps asking future generations to organize themselves around.

I don’t have a problem with people who took the shots—I have compassion for them that they were indoctrinated from an early age to implicitly trust people in white coats. I did this for decades with psychiatric drugs and trusted the professionals. Where I take issue is with so much harm documented and attributed to the shots and psychiatric and other Big Pharma drugs, people who are totally rigid and incapable of breaching their comfortable sleep that there might be something to look at with these things, and they attack and demonize those who speak out who have been harmed by them. And especially the professionals, who are always supposed to be evolving in their profession but who refuse to give up their allegiance to unproven “science.”

Walking away from my family is one of the most guttural, pain filled experiences of my lifetime, but I could no longer stop trying to plead truth into a system that survives by not seeing it. it made me extremely ill for decades. But in my darkest hours, I ask myself would I rather have the grief I deal with now or return to the confusion I had when I was in it, and I’ll choose grief every single time. My grief is clean. The confusion is not.