The Healing Power of Communication: Rethinking Mental Health in Elder Care

In this enlightening episode of Advice From Your Advocates, Attorney Bob Mannor sits down with Dr. Fred Moss, a psychiatrist who’s redefining what mental health care can look like—especially for older adults. Together, they explore how genuine communication and human connection often achieve more than medication ever could.

Dr. Moss shares his decades-long journey through psychiatry, from witnessing the over-medication of elderly patients to discovering that true healing begins when people are treated as humans, not diagnoses. This conversation challenges traditional ideas about dementia, mental illness, and medication management, offering a fresh, compassionate perspective on what it means to care for the mind and spirit in later life.

You’ll learn:

• Why communication is the foundation of all healing
• How holistic approaches can improve outcomes in dementia and elder care
• The surprising ways medication can sometimes worsen mental health
• Why “there may be nothing wrong with you at all” might be the start of healing
• How connection—not correction—leads to better quality of life for seniors

Whether you’re a caregiver, elder care professional, or simply someone passionate about mental health, this episode will leave you rethinking what it truly means to heal.

Learn more about Dr. Fred here: https://welcometohumanity.net/

Host: Attorney Bob Mannor, CELA, CDP

Guest: Dr. Fred Moss

Executive Producer: Savannah Meksto, CDP

Assistant Producers: Samantha Noah, Shalene Gaul

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Elder Law Meets Psychiatry
• 0:39 Dr. Fred Moss’s Path To Healing
• 3:18 Communication Over Medication Philosophy
• 6:14 From Prescriptions To Personal Breakthrough
• 7:50 Defining Holistic Care For Seniors
• 8:33 Geriatric Unit Case: Deprescribing Results
• 10:56 The Medication Pile-Up Problem
• 12:19 The Undoctor: Undiagnose And Unmedicate
• 13:49 Dementia Vs Mental Illness Labels
• 15:22 Dementia Villages And Daily Life Design
• 17:03 Books, Resources, And How To Reach Fred
• 18:25 Key Takeaways And Closing CTA

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

You're listening to Advice from Your Advocates, a show where we provide elder law advice to professionals who work with the elderly and their families.

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

Welcome back to Advice from Your Advocates. I'm very excited about the podcast today. We've got Dr. Fred Moss, and this is a topic that I've wanted to cover for a long time, and it's something that we've seen in the law office a lot lately. We're getting a lot more folks that are coming into the elder care journey with some mental health issues, and it creates its own serious set of challenges. So, Dr. Fred Moss, welcome.

SPEAKER_01: 0:34

Thank you, Bob. It's really great to be here. I really appreciate it. It's an honor and a privilege. So I look forward to our conversation.

SPEAKER_00: 0:39

Tell us a little bit more about yourself and your journey to become a psychiatrist.

SPEAKER_01: 0:44

Yeah, so I think I was born a healer. You know, I really do. I arrived to a family that had two brothers, 10 and 14 years old, and there was a fair amount of chaos, disarray, and conflict in a home. And I think they were looking forward to me coming in as a bundle of joy and bringing some sort of peace and unity to this family and, you know, so much turmoil. And I think I did a pretty good job for a few years, but I became very enchanted with the whole idea of communication and the effect that communication could have on others. And I remember that from a very young age. And I was always interested in learning how to talk or how to interact with other people. I thought it would happen at school, but of course, as you and I both know, it doesn't happen inside of those classrooms, that's for sure. And the more I learned that in elementary school, the more I got disappointed. But I was precocious. I had these two brothers, so no teacher could stop me from talking, and no teacher, you know, no teacher has forgotten having Fred as a elementary school student either, for those of them that are still here. Anyways, we move forward and I really start noticing that people are leaning on me. You know, people in high school friends and colleagues are leaning on me to tell me their story, and I'm very interested in telling, you know, telling and listening to stories. So I become a communicator. I mean, I really realize that I can communicate, but the the truth is I'm not learning it in school. I'm learning it in the streets, I'm learning it in between class, I'm learning it after school, those kind of things. And uh I dropped out of college and then went, got on a bus and went across the country to California to find my life. And I actually did find my life that summer, but it was unsustainable and came back and tried college one more time in the computer field, actually, and dropped out again because I didn't like batch cards and punch, you know, punch cards and batch jobs. And so off I went. And my mom, you know, was okay with me never going back to school again because I told her that was the case. And she got me an application for civil service work as a uh childcare worker in the adolescent state hospital. And I that was for the first time I was communicating. That's what I was doing. These were just kids who were not even in unfortunate situations as I saw it. They were just who they were, living where they did and why they did and all that. And I got to communicate with these, we call them kids, but they were only like five years younger than me. And communication was a way to heal, and it was a way to heal them and me. And I didn't like the direction psychiatry was taking. And that's why I went into it. I really felt that I could bring some form of communication into a field that was losing its reliance on communication as being a for a form of treatment. And I felt like I needed to be a stand for that. So I came into the field really already sort of disrupting what was happening. And as I was there, as I was in school at medical school, there was the advent of Prozac, which changed the world, as you know. I mean, so totally changed the world. And the whole definition of mental illness got shifted. The whole idea that there might be something wrong with us when we felt uncomfortable was introduced to the world. The idea that if you feel sad, if you feel angry, if you feel scared, if you feel frightened, if you feel hopeless or helpless, or if you feel distracted or awkward, those are the problems with you. Well, that's not the case. It's never been the case. You know, having those experiences in a life like this makes total sense to all of us. And as I became a stand for, well, maybe that person isn't very sick, actually. Maybe the treatments themselves or the medications or the actual therapies are perpetuating conditions that they're marketed to deal with. And I spent my whole life sort of, you know, jumping, you know, my whole career, anyways, working within the system from the belly of the beast. I've had about 30,000 patients. I've written over 100,000 prescriptions, but each of my prescriptions that I've written has been a little bit of a soul sacrifice because I never felt like medicines were the answer. And I mean that, like all the 100,000 prescriptions, I felt a blip on every single one. And that level of duplicity wasn't acceptable to me. And I eventually had to break and did. So the levy broke, I'd say, first in 2006, but ever since it's been gradually breaking with a couple, you know, fractures here and there. And recently I've decided that I needed to create a way that was more consistent with my core values and who I am as a genuine, authentic person. And that was this idea that communication was at the heart of all healing, all healing indeed. And that psychiatric diagnoses and psychiatric medications and therapies often actually induce, increase, perpetuate, or even cause the symptoms they're marketed to treat. And they certainly secure those diagnoses once you obtain a psychiatric diagnosis and begin treatment. And it doesn't not necessarily be the healthiest way to deal with our discomfort. So I've designed many different programs to deal with that discomfort. You know, Buddha was among many of our sages or philosophers in the past who suggested that discomfort was a very significant and central part of life. And it is. I mean, let's face it, I've already had some troubles today waking up on getting out of bed. You know, so like I've had to battle some demons, and I think most of us do in the morning just to get out of bed. And, you know, that's what life is. Life is a challenge. And so when we really respect that and look at each other and realize connection is what we're after in order to heal ourselves, then we can start understanding that the resonating harmonic nature of a communication conversation that leads to human connection is indeed what we're really after and a much more potent medication and much more potent therapy than anything that's ever been designed by the conventional medical or a conventional psychiatric system. So that's who I am. I've written a couple of books. I've been on several stages, I've been a podcast guest for over 250 different episodes, and I've been a podcast host for over 300 episodes as well. Just the whole idea is the same obsession I had when I was little Freddie, which was I want to learn how to communicate. I want to be with people, I want to get the things out of the way that prevent me from being able to communicate effectively. And I don't just want to speak now. I want to speak and I want to listen. I want to learn. I always am a student. And I think that we're all in the same place. So I like looking across the table at my what they might call themselves client uh patients. I like leveling that ground, removing the power gradient, and just being human to human with people because that's where the real connection and that's where the real healing and you know the real wealth takes place.

SPEAKER_00: 6:56

I think you use the term holistic healing, which is a term that I like a lot. We use it in our practice with seniors and in the working with families with a loved one with dementia, and we call it holistic planning. And I think it's a it is a good use of the term. It seems like that's what you're really kind of talking about here is the kind of looking at the whole picture and the whole person. And I'd like to talk to you, I know that you have a particular passion for working with the elder care community. Talk to us about that and how your work as a holistic healer kind of interacts with those in the elder care community.

SPEAKER_01: 7:33

Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for asking. Yeah, I've worked I've been a medical or a psychiatric consultant or sometimes the medical director at multiple different nursing homes, about 40 of them. And I've worked on geriatric units as well. And I have a good story out of a geriatric unit in Southwest General Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio area. And I was hired there as a uh traveling doc to help a bunch of people on a dementia unit, supposedly, I think they called it an Alzheimer's unit. And um, you know, when I arrived there, uh, most of the clients were screaming at night or, you know, falling asleep in their soup or forgetting their children's name or scratching at the staff and all those things that can really happen on those units that make it make them undesirable for the most part for to stay there, hard to work there and hard to be with the people, whether you're family or friends or colleagues or or caregivers. And I waited for a couple months in there, and then I started doing something pretty radical, which had a really remarkable phenotype, a remarkable outcome. And that was I started taking these people off of all their medicines. You know, I with the help of some of the attending physicians that were working with me in other specialties, we started taking people off their medicines just to see what would happen. And it wasn't just the psychiatric medicines, it was really looking at what are the medicines that are superfluous, anyways, and how can what can we do? And the more medicines I took these people off, the more alert, aware, and conscious that they became. Such that, no kidding, this is what happened. We had about 16 people on that unit. And before too long, they were playing volleyball with the beach ball in the middle of the unit, and they were winning, you know, playing trivial pursuit and shocking people with their memory. They were certainly remembering their children. They're no longer falling asleep in their soup, they're no longer screaming all night, they're no longer combative with the staff. And we started realizing that the medicines themselves were an absolute considerable contributant to all the negative behaviors that we had otherwise learned was just a natural flow of what dementia does over time, and that the geriatric unit were housing organic concerns. When in fact, more often than not, what we learned is that the geriatric unit was feeding uh gas to the flame, gas to the fire by treating these people with overarching, overwhelming amounts of medication that were messing with their whole wherewithal, their whole capacity to work with people. We had people fall in love on that unit. The naysayers would be like, oh, Fred, you started getting a much easier population, apparently, on the geriatric unit. No, we didn't get an easier population. We just had a treatment plan at work, and a treatment plan at work was to remove these medications because they were causing so much damage implicitly. And most people didn't really even realize that. And when we removed the medications and started treating these people like humans, just like I did on that adolescent unit, we got healing at an extraordinary level, and that was really rewarding.

SPEAKER_00: 10:21

That's great. We've noticed this, so we often get involved at the point that the family member is in either the hospital or has been transferred to, excuse me, a skilled care facility. And what we've noticed with regard to medications is often they were on perhaps too many medications while they were at home. They go to the hospital, they get they don't stop those medications, but they add new ones, sometimes that were clearly meant to be temporary, like because of the agitation or you know, being in the hospital and how that can be disconcerting. And then they don't stop those, they go to skilled care. And now the doctor at the skilled care was often adding medications, and no one was looking to take off the old ones, and they're just adding upon them, adding upon and adding upon. And it's one of the things that when we've advocated for folks, of course, we're never going to tell people stop taking their medications, but we do advocate that the family talks to the doctor and says, is all of this necessary? Uh, you know, was all of this intended to be permanent?

SPEAKER_01: 11:19

Well, it's a really good point you bring up too, and it really shows that you are deep in the industry to understand that flow of treatment. And, you know, us doctors, we were never trained how to discontinue medication. The public thinks that we were trained to discontinue medicines because of course that would be a doctor's job, but we were never trained to that do that. We're trained to add, increase, or change medicine. So when symptoms happen, we add increase or change medicine. And like you said, you know, you don't want to cross over your scope and tell people to stop medicine. It's the same kind of thing among my colleagues in that if somebody else prescribes some medicines, it's audacity for me to go in there and remove those same medicines that someone thought was useful. So it's not simple to remove someone else's prescription because you don't know what patch they thought that they were, you know, covering over. And so, yeah, medications accumulate. And that's what the undoctor is all about. As the undoctor, which is one of my monikers, I undiagnose, unmedicate, and then undoctrinate people by really walking through safe processes to get off their medication, but not only off their medication, get them off their diagnosis. Because as soon as we start believing that we have a diagnosis, then we start being compelled to treat that diagnosis by fixing ourselves or fixing our parents or fixing our patients. And if we start realizing maybe we don't have a diagnosis, like maybe we really don't, maybe we the treatment itself is inducing or perpetuating or causing the symptoms, then we get a whole new ground to start from. And that's when we start getting people a rise out of the clouds and start winning trivial pursuit games at 85 years old after having been declared Alzheimer's.

SPEAKER_00: 12:53

I'd like to get your opinion on something. And it's my perspective that when we're dealing with this, there is a distinction, and maybe not a medical one, I'm not sure, but between a dementia diagnosis and a mental health diagnosis. And maybe they overlap, but I think as soon as we start calling in mental health diagnosis, a whole different series of things happen within the long-term care community. Often as soon as we call it a mental health diagnosis, many of the long-term care facilities won't take that patient. And so is there a distinction and how do you deal with that classification?

SPEAKER_01: 13:31

No, I of course I don't think that there's much of a distinction. They're both in the eyes of the diagnostician more than anything. Now, in the world, what you're talking about is very real. There's like a bi-modal way of looking at it. It's almost like a dual diagnosis when you have dual diagnosis like drugs and you know, some drug abuse and mental illness. But in your case, there's another dual diagnosis here, and that's the dual diagnosis of dementia versus mental illness. And I think the idea is if you have dementia, it's permanent, and the best we can do is slow down the progressive deterioration and that you're not going to get any better. And we know that, and that somehow your mental illness, you know, whatever mental illness diagnosis that you've agreed to take on in the past is going to not be, is going to be overwhelmed or outdone by the dementia. So we can't treat your dementia if you have mental illness because you know that makes it too complicated. But we can't treat your mental illness if you have dementia either, because then we don't have access to you. And so there's this whole idea that these two things are different when in fact, as you heard of my philosophy, that they're both essentially caused by the same thing, which is at some point you take on that there's something wrong with you, and then you take on getting fixed, and the things that you're using to get fixed aren't actually healing you. And so they don't even slow down the deterioration. They appear to give little bursts of it of slowdown, and at the same time, they're worsening the conditions more often than not. And we start looking at progressive deterioration, which is associated with dementia, or we start looking at conditions, major psychiatric conditions, at least the diagnosis of those, which essentially are considered incurable and only containable. So it's a mess either way, and the bridge between those two diagnoses, as far as I'm concerned, is not very real, but I see, of course, how it works inside of the belly of the beast.

SPEAKER_00: 15:16

Yeah. I had an opportunity, I mean, it seems to be in line with your philosophy. I had an opportunity to visit the dementia village in Hokovic, the Netherlands, this year. And it seems that they really adopt this philosophy that you're talking about. There's really not a lot of medications. They allow people to live their life, they try to keep them active during the day, which means that they're sleeping at night, and it's a whole village. I'm sure you're familiar with it. Yeah. What do you think of that concept?

SPEAKER_01: 15:44

It's phenomenal, of course. But it's natural, it's obvious, it's simple, it's real. I mean, yes, it's phenomenal, but that's only because the prevailing conversation has gotten so far off of Main Street that it looks like Main Street is phenomenal. And it's just like, no, we oh, we're gonna treat people like people and see how that works.

SPEAKER_00: 16:01

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 16:02

Yeah, it's gonna it's gonna work okay, I promise. Just treat people like people. That's a good plan. And instead, it looks phenomenal because there's a you know, a majority of people are have gone down the conventional allopathic route and find themselves having their conditions worsening so that just staying on Main Street looks like a miracle. Treating people like people looks like a miraculous intervention when it's like, hello, pretty, you know, pretty straightforward.

SPEAKER_00: 16:26

That's probably the best, you know, concise explanation is just treating people like people there. And that they did talk about and we observed they don't really have a lot of behaviors there. They don't have a lot of sundowners or things like that. Of course they don't. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 16:41

That's because they're caused because those conditions, behaviors and sundowners, are directly associated with the diagnosis, the treatment plan, and the medication.

SPEAKER_00: 16:53

So I want to make sure that our audience can learn more about everything that you've been talking about. You mentioned that you have several books. Can you tell us about some of those books and what's the best way to find them?

SPEAKER_01: 17:03

Yeah, I have a couple books. One book I have is called The Creative Eight: Healing Through Creativity and Self-Expression. It's a fun, easy read, and I people tend to like it. You can find that one on Amazon, or you can find that on my website, which is welcome to humanity.net, or my other website, which is the one I really want people to go to, which is called drfred360.com. So that drfred360.com, you get every piece of who I am there. It's a really cool, slick website that people enjoy, and you can contact me there too. There's a place to contact me if you want to have a call to talk about yourself or someone else you know or someone else you're caring for. It would be my pleasure. Or it, you know, I also do expert witness work for what that's worth. So I've done a fair amount of cases, about 35 different cases that I've been a consultant on and been retained on about 35 cases. So I like doing that as well for your friends and colleagues. And my other book was called Find Your True Voice. And Find Your True Voice is exactly what it's aimed for, which is the idea of moving the things out of the way that are in the way of you being genuine and authentic in your interactions. And then uh, you know, I teach a lot of courses, and these days I'm doing something called an undoctor reset, which is helping people, in fact, take care of themselves and get off their diagnosis, off their medications, and give their lives back, no matter what their age is and no matter what their so-called condition was before they came insomnia.

SPEAKER_00: 18:23

Very good. What are some key takeaways you'd like to leave our audience with?

SPEAKER_01: 18:28

Yeah, so I think the one key takeaway that I like leaving audiences with is the idea that maybe there's nothing wrong with you at all. Maybe there's nothing wrong with you. Maybe there's nothing wrong with him or her or them either. Like maybe there's nothing wrong with them. It's a challenging, obstacle-filled, ch you know, hurdle-filled life. And we don't have a manual. We don't have it, we don't have an owner's manual, we don't have a recipe book, we don't have a template to work from. And it's a difficult life, you know, it's difficult to be human and we choose to do what we do. There's some people better at it than others, I suppose, or some people who are meaner than others, some people who are more sad or have taken on a sense of despair. But the truth is we can change our lives. And at this moment, we are not a slave to the circumstances that brought us to now. So we have an opportunity from this point forward to do things different, to say things different, to think things different, to be a different person. And we really do have that capacity, and each and every one of us has that capacity, even the ones that we have cemented into the corner with a psychiatric diagnosis. So, in fact, maybe we don't have anything nearly as wrong with us as we think, and that bumbling, stumbling, and tumbling through this world is sort of the status quo to be expected.

SPEAKER_00: 19:37

Great. And thank you so much. It's been a very interesting conversation. If you've enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to subscribe to Advice from Your Advocates. And you can find us at any place that you listen to podcasts. So thank you for joining us today, and we'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_01: 19:58

Thanks for listening. To learn more, visit Manor Lawgroup.com.