Episode 5: Permission to Fight with Kim Witczak

A note before you listen: this conversation is about suicide and the loss of a spouse. If you' or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available in the US by call or text at 988.

When Kim Witczak's husband died, the official story didn't add up, and she refused to accept it. That refusal turned a grieving thirty-seven-year-old who had never thought her voice mattered into a drug-safety advocate who took on the FDA and helped change the warning label on every antidepressant in the country.

Kim is a globally recognized drug-safety advocate, speaker, and former FDA Consumer Representative.

Woody died by suicide five weeks into an antidepressant he'd been given for insomnia, a risk that was known and had never been disclosed to him. We get into what it actually takes to fight a system when everyone tells you to sit down, the scripts she had to put down first ("someone competent is in charge," "no one is coming to save me"), "borrowed hope" and how she held onto it in the days she couldn't feel any of her own, and the line she borrowed from Woody that still drives her: "I'd rather try like hell and lose." Sherry, who lost her own brother to suicide, meets her on shared ground.

It's an episode about giving yourself permission to fight, for the truth, for your own voice, and for a life worth living after the one you planned falls apart.

Kim is on Instagram (@kimwitczak), LinkedIn, and Substack, and her book The Cost of Trust is out later this year.