The Dark Side of Psych Meds on Oral Health | The Gaslit Truth Podcast with Dr Teralyn Sell and Therapist Jenn Schmitz

I’m going to say something that might irritate you a bit: if your gums are receding, your teeth are failing, or your bone density is dropping, and the only answer you’ve been given is “brush better” or “that’s just aging,” you’re not being treated, you’re being dismissed.

On this episode of The Gaslit Truth Podcast, Dr. Teralyn Sell and I go straight at something I see often in my therapy office: people doing everything “right” and still watching their oral health fall apart. That’s not random, and it’s not just aging. Especially when I’m working with people on or coming off psychiatric medications, or those carrying a heavy toxic load, the pattern is too consistent to ignore.

We brought on Stephen Hewer to break this down from a systems perspective. One of the biggest gaps? Calcium. Not just taking it, but whether your body can actually use it. When usable calcium is low, the parathyroid response can start pulling from your bones, while calcium ends up in places it shouldn’t. So you can have bone loss and calcification happening at the same time, and we’re still oversimplifying it.

Oral health isn’t separate from the body. If your gut is off, your liver and kidneys are overworked, your pH is imbalanced, your gums and teeth will reflect that. Yet we keep treating symptoms in isolation and missing the bigger picture.

We also talk about toxic exposure, including Stephen’s own experience with mercury from dental amalgams and the long road back from gut shutdown. This isn’t fringe, it’s just not talked about enough. From there, we get into gut repair, probiotics, fermented foods, and why deficiencies can show up as anxiety, cravings, and dependence on stimulation or sedation.

This is where mental health and physical health collide. What gets labeled as anxiety or dysfunction is often a physiological signal that something deeper is off. But instead of asking why, we suppress it.

If this challenges what you’ve been told, good. You deserve more than surface level answers. Go listen to the latest episode of The Gaslit Truth Podcast and start asking better questions about what your body is trying to tell you.