Kelly Brogan’s Covid-Denying Conspiracy Machine

Before Brogan went public with her Covid views, she beta-tested them with her online psychiatric clients. She had originally posted “What’s Going On” on March 11 to a subscription client group launched in June of 2019 called Vital Life Project, or “VLP.” Members pay $40 a month to engage with each other and Brogan’s video “musings” about her main themes, like rejecting “victim narratives” and tapering off of psychiatric medications as a spiritual awakening.

VLP functions as a gateway group into or out of a more structured online program called “Vital Mind Reset” (“VMR”), a 44-day boot-camp-style program for people wanting to live a life free of psychiatric diagnoses and medications. VMR launched in 2016 and now boasts more than 2,300 members, who each paid up to $1,000 to join.

I interviewed six members of that group who were dismayed by Brogan’s strange turn. According to those I’ve interviewed, a significant portion of Brogan’s online clients have struggled with long-term psychiatric conditions. They didn’t initially sign up for Covid conspiracism, but for tips on medication tapering with the help of a paleo-type diet, Kundalini yoga, and daily coffee enemas. After Brogan’s content began to change, some of them turned away and found each other through a private Facebook group.

Some were afraid of the impacts of alt-health conspiracism on people who might struggle with their grasp on reality. They were concerned that some VLP members might be easily sucked down Covid-denialist rabbit holes, having been primed by Brogan to view themselves as lightning rods for society’s hidden illnesses. Brogan writes that her clients are “canaries in the coal mine, sounding an alarm with exquisite sensitivity in service of the rest of us.” The interviews provided insight into how Brogan’s persona as a public health avenger interacts with her patient care. One former patient who engaged Brogan for psychiatric care shared her story of how she’d almost died after Brogan employed as much religion as science to treat her, and then stopped meeting with her just weeks before she was committed to a hospital.

“I felt starstruck,” said Jillian in an interview, recalling her first appointment with Brogan in her Madison Avenue office. (She has asked her real name not be used for privacy reasons.) “I was nervous, the way you would feel like if you were going to meet one of your childhood idols.”

“She’s extremely charismatic. She’s extremely beautiful. How could she be real? She’s too perfect.”

Jillian came to Brogan in 2018 at the age of 35 for help in completing her taper from Lexapro, an antidepressant she’d been taking for 13 years. Under psychiatric guidance, Jillian had already reduced her dosage by half. But like many who try to taper beyond that, she had plateaued and was starting to feel symptoms of withdrawal.

Jillian found Brogan online, and a friend helped her with the $4,187 initial consult fee, which covered a two-hour initial appointment and a one-hour follow-up; subsequent appointments cost $570 per 45-minute session. (Brogan’s intro materials at the time noted that she was an out-of-network provider, and that patients would have to submit invoices for reimbursement. Jillian’s insurance did not cover the appointments.)

She recalled waiting to meet “some kind of magical celebrity” in the gently lit, medical-spa vibe of Brogan’s office. “She’s extremely charismatic. She’s extremely beautiful,” Jillian said. “How could she be real? She’s too perfect.” The appointment felt comforting and validating, Jillian said, and more like a conversation with a friend than a doctor.

Charisma aside, Brogan’s initial consultations might have felt friendly and harmonious partly because of her intensive screening process, seemingly designed to guarantee that she’d only be treating patients who not only had the cash, but had already accepted her ideas as gospel. The “New Patient Questionnaire” that Jillian filled out was a long list of purity tests for applicants’ alt-health commitments. The form declares it “highly recommended” that applicants read A Mind of Your Own. It notes that patients must agree to forgo dairy and gluten after the first appointment and commit to eating red meat as part of her close-to-paleo dietary regimen. It asks if they have a spiritual practice, whether they believe in pharmaceutical medications, and whether they vaccinate their children.

Point eight measures the applicant’s ideological agreement with Brogan: “In Dr. Brogan’s consideration of all applications, it’s important that she feels patients share her beliefs not just about psychiatric medications, but all pharmaceutical products, including vaccines, antibiotics, birth control, and over the counter products.” The form then asks the applicant to show in writing how they share these beliefs.

Jillian, and several others I spoke to, recalled Brogan as claiming to have a 100% success rate in the difficult and under-researched field of tapering off of psychiatric medications. “We’ve been using these drugs for 50 years,” said Whitaker, the medical journalist, in our interview, “but there was never any study of how to get people out safe.” Psychiatric drugs, he explained, change a person’s brain structures, altering neural pathways and receptors. Withdrawal symptoms are so unpredictable, and so individual in nature, that the most vigorous discussions about tapering naturally occur at the grassroots level — in online forums where medication survivors, and those who are attempting to taper, can share their experiences and fears.

“Tapering off psychiatric medication is a soul calling,” Brogan writes. “It is a choice that you feel magnetized toward and will stop at nothing to pursue.”

Whitaker also explained that Brogan’s emphasis on holistic transformation resonates with an emerging language of recovery spoken within the psychiatric survivor community. Tapering off of medication, Whitaker noted, is spoken of as an “existential experience.”

In Brogan’s Own Your Self, the chapter on tapering marks a clear turn away from her evidence-based critique of psychiatry and polypharmacy, and into the world of spiritual journeying. “Tapering off psychiatric medication is a soul calling,” she writes. “It is a choice that you feel magnetized toward and will stop at nothing to pursue.” Brogan, who does not disclose whether she herself has ever tapered off a psychiatric medication, writes that the process is “a marathon of heroic proportions,” but she also confesses that she has “no mentors” and has learned “from patients and the arduous road of direct clinical experience.”

Effusive testimonials on Brogan’s website seem to confirm Brogan’s success. “You saved my life. Period,” wrote one client. She described the benefits of the recommended elimination diet and 4:30 a.m. yoga sessions. “I would be dead or living a life of death as I was, were it not for you.”

Jillian shared an email in which Brogan’s team asked for her testimonial only days after she completed the online VMR program in the fall of 2017. Jillian declined, feeling it would be premature, and knowing that the full impact of her taper would not be clear for months. “I find it very misleading,” Jillian said of the testimonial pages.

“There’s a period right after completing the program where people feel their best,” Jillian said. “It’s like you’re catching them during this honeymoon period.”

Cathy, an ex-patient who has asked that her real name not be used, said in an interview that her own testimonial about her tapering experience was used inappropriately by Brogan because it did not reflect the complexity of her journey. Cathy says she was actually describing work she’d done on herself before she’d even met Brogan, and that she’d omitted the setbacks she experienced after working with her. She supported Brogan’s marketing because she believed broadcasting her own hard work in self-directed tapering would provide inspiration for other women longing to taper.

Jillian followed Brogan’s dietary and yoga advice for months, and spent several thousand dollars on Brogan-endorsed dietary supplements and alternative therapists. In client notes, Brogan recommended that Jillian taper her 8 mg of Lexapro by .5 mg every one to two weeks. Jillian now says that according to her research within online tapering communities she believes this is dangerously fast compared to other protocols. Her withdrawal symptoms worsened. She developed akathisia, an unbearable shaking disorder that can arise when a medication tapering program is too aggressive. On patient forums, the shaking is known to cause acute anxiety, severe sleep deprivation, and as a high risk factor for suicide.

In a recorded phone message replying to Jillian’s plea for support, Brogan chides Jillian to rid herself of the habit of “narrating through the victim lens.” She tells Jillian to tell her story “as if you’re telling a story about a little girl who’s experiencing this struggle, but you know that she’s fine.”

By late May of last year, with her tremors spiraling out of control, Jillian turned to the Xanax and then Klonopin originally prescribed by her nurse practitioner — medications that can have powerful anti-anxiety effects, but are also notoriously addictive. Jillian was terrified of developing a new dependency. Brogan’s recommended supplements weren’t working for her and the yoga practices were inaccessible, given her state. According to Jillian, she knew she was breaking Brogan’s rules by taking the medications, but she was suicidal.

On June 5, 2019, Jillian and her husband scheduled an emergency call with Brogan. “I was asking for some kind of medication,” Jillian said in an interview. “I knew I needed to be stabilized, and she refused to prescribe me anything.”

On the call Brogan terminated Jillian’s care, according to Jillian and her husband, citing her unwillingness to prescribe, and explaining that the issue was Jillian’s belief that her case was far worse than others. Jillian recalls Brogan saying that because she was such a powerful “manifestor” her beliefs were causing her symptoms to appear to worsen. She also recalls Brogan speculating that Jillian was not old or mature enough to do the necessary work. In an interview, Jillian described the call as “the most terrifying and hopeless experience to have at that stage.”

Jillian then recalls that Brogan advised her to return to the nurse practitioner with whom she had started her taper to explore other medications. Jillian explained that the practitioner wouldn’t take her back, that she didn’t know how to help at this level of complexity and danger. Jillian and her husband remember that the call ended in a forlorn stalemate, with Brogan committing to email the nurse on Jillian’s behalf.

By the middle of June 2019, Jillian had been Brogan’s patient for 14 months, and had paid her $13,355 in fees. At the end of June, Jillian’s akathisia was so severe that she couldn’t eat or sleep or take care of herself. She was hospitalized for 10 days.

The next contact she had from Brogan was 11 weeks later. The email didn’t ask how she was, what had happened, or whether she was under the care of another psychiatrist. “You came to my heart this morning,” Brogan wrote, “and I just wanted to send you blessings for all that you are doing, working through, and on, in what I know is the absolute best way for you.”

In her email reply at the time, Jillian did not mention her hospitalization. She expressed gratitude for Brogan’s care, and excitement about the release of her upcoming book. But Jillian now feels that her fawning tone reflected “brainwashing” and her embarrassment and shame that she had been brought so low.

“I had ‘failed’ and didn’t want her to know,” Jillian wrote by email, “Since she was so adamant that I was her first and only client who couldn’t complete a taper.”

“This isn’t about bringing someone down, or being mean,” Jillian said when asked why she was telling the story now. “It’s about feeling a sense of responsibility to people. She told me that it was my fault. You don’t need someone to make you feel worse at a time when you’re suffering so much.”

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