Podcast 208: How to find the root of anxiety & depression & begin the healing work

dr ellen vora i am so thrilled to talk to you and to have this conversation i just have a feeling you and i are just going to talk non-stop because we have the same heart the same vision the same kind of thinking when it comes to mental health and i'm just thrilled to interview you so thank you so much thanks for having me here it's nice to be with the kindred spirit oh it is it is it's so good it's so wonderful thank you so much well can you people have heard you're incredible by you have such an impressive i mean english major from yale and then your medical background and then you move over to the way you've challenged the norm in the biomedical model and the neuroductionist approach of psychiatry to really look at whole people and the holistic approach it's just beautiful it's like what i've been trying to do for 38 years with my research so that's why i'm so excited to hear you talk about what you do in such an incredible way so before we start can you just tell us a little bit about yourself that's not in your bio you know a little bit about you what motivates you how you got where you are today great yeah i think probably what unifies what's not in my bio but it's really relevant is that i'm in this struggle like everyone i think that's the only reason i can really do good work with my patients is that i have come up against a lot of the same obstacles and barriers and challenges that the people i'm helping are coming up against and i think about the fact that like i teach a lot on insomnia i am a sleep procrastinator like beyond most people and i i'm busy talk about that yeah i'm a night owl right like to me i i love social connection and for why is it that the conversation never really gets good until midnight exactly i preach you know go to bed at 10 but i do until something pulls me in the other direction which to me is perfect it's sort of the advanced college seminar approach to how do we balance doing the right thing for our body and our overall overall well-being with the fact that the goal is not just perfection the goal is a fulfilling life you know and sometimes oh the right trade-off yeah that is brilliant and i don't mean to interrupt you there but what you've just said there has just set so many people free because i write lots of books as i've told as you know and i work through the night because i have no disturbances and that's then i'll sleep in in the morning and i know that's not the ideal pattern but it works for me and i'm so glad how you've said that sometimes you've got your ideal but there are times in your life where fulfillment will override so it changes your pattern that great conversation that goes on all night which changes just it compensates for that what may have happened biologically because you didn't sleep but that there's another benefit there's a trade-off that's actually really good so i'm so glad you raised that point yeah we could talk about that alone quite extensively it comes up all the time in life the real work is discernment it's making the moment-to-moment choices of what's the act of self-love right now you know is it the 10 p.m bedtime is it the 4am bedtime it can so good that is so good yes let's definitely dive into that if not in this conversation in another hopefully this one will start it and i'm a parent you know i have a four and a half year old daughter and so if nothing like in life kicks you in the face quite like being a parent i don't know you know so i think i've got four kids yeah yeah i can't imagine 18 books and four kids god bless you know it's just it's hard and it's survival and i think that people like me come into parenting very precious you know i was sort of like how do people wind up so messy with it you know why are the kids eating french fries off the floor of the minivan i'm just going to have my beautiful baby in the carrier we're going to walk down the street and it's just going to be blissful and everything will be organic you know it's like and now i just made the energy my earlier self in the face you know it's like and and i think that yeah the reality is that you know parenting which is like the greatest drug you know it's this transcendent experience it makes everything in life less convenient but deeper and more transcendent it's really humbling and so equalizing and just lets you realize there's just spiritual growth and like all the micro moments with kids that you realize all of your shadow all of your blockages it just helps hold up this mega mirror on where you still need to grow so and then i think with health i struggle like with health at this point i'm fairly in balance but that's after about a 10-year very inefficient process of learning how do i get my body in balance and this was all part of the crisis that i was in throughout medical school and a part of residency was i don't really think i'm i'm helping my patients thrive like i could tell i was helping patch them up in a certain way people would get on a very elaborate cocktail of psychiatric medications they'd be patched up to an extent they wouldn't be as quote-unquote symptomatic as they were coming in but like there was still this gut check of are they thriving in their life like am i proud of this work and oftentimes i would actually come to the awareness that you know you're always on that delicate balance around do no harm and i would sometimes really think it was a judgment call whether i truly was doing no harm and so for me there was it was such a crisis and i couldn't get my body healthy couldn't get myself feeling well didn't really think i was getting my patients feeling well and i went on a long autodidactic journey of how you know looking at other modalities eastern modalities how different disciplines around the world think about health and healing to find an approach that actually made sense to me that actually moved the needle for my patients and for my own struggles that's incredible and it really has been a journey you started off as an english major and then transition can you tell us just a little bit about that because it's such a great story that you know how you've got to where you are today and so highly credentialed and so much that you study but you've almost gone full circle haven't you back to ancient medicine that's true yeah yeah i think i'm a weird combination i think to make it through medical school it's helpful to be someone who you know it's very hard working and sort of in a chinese medicine sense like somewhat metallic kind of like just like sort of you go you get on a track it starts freshman year of college when you take general chemistry and then you just keep checking these boxes and it's a never-ending path you know you take orgo and you take physics and you take math and biology and all these labs and then you take the mcat and then you apply to medical school and so on and so forth and i am someone who you can put me on a path and i will keep going with inertia but i'm also pretty radical and and sort of kind of a weirdo and a questioner and marching to the beat of my own drum i think those two things don't go hand in hand all that often that you're like i will jump through every hoop you give me and mark to the beat of my own drum you know i can relate to that i can relate to that yeah that's why i work kindred space and so so and so i always felt like i'm different here and i guess in a way you you could have saved me a lot of trouble in med school as i was trying to pick my specialty and i was so tormented by that decision and i was like or tortured by the decision i was thinking you know all these different specialties i was considering and they could have just told me if you were an english major in college you're going to be a psychiatrist so like yeah going around yeah yes yeah like in college you get to this height of what i'm really passionate about are the complexities the gray areas the nuances of what it is to be human on this rock barreling through space with no certainty and we're sort of here to try to feel fulfilled or connected to purpose or to experience love or whatever it is or to show up in service or shift the whole enterprise from fear to love and i think that i was like really thick in that by the end of college and then med school is this sort of like careening to the bottom of a pit where you're back to learning like the cut and dry sciences which are cool like science at its most extreme is totally magic you know it is very spiritual very i always say science and spirituality is the same thing they are at the extreme yeah but learning nephrology in med school is not spirituality the tools of the trade kind of thing the basic basic mechanics and so i you know i think that i felt pretty disenchanted i was like this is not engaging me i don't feel as lit up or turned on by this material so i i found psychiatry as the place where it's like okay at least here we're exploring the depths we're groping in the dark of the human condition and that's where i like to be but then in residency in my psychiatry residency it kind of took the mental health or human condition and turned it into a cut and dry science these symptoms equals this diagnosis equals this medication and as you said you spent how many years doing that you did instead of learning about the variability of humanity which you'd learned more as an english major here you learn to diagnose and attach a label and attach your medication yeah yeah and kind of missing the person kind of completely missing the person i remember there was a moment in my i think i was in my third year of med school i was in my surgery rotation and we're standing around in the or we're doing an appendectomy so someone came in with appendicitis we're removing the appendix and you're kind of just talking while you're doing the surgery there's a radio playing in the background and i'm making small talk but i'm also like trying to get something out of this experience and i turn to the surgeon and i'm like so why do people get appendicitis yeah to me that felt like the obvious question yeah yeah i thought i was asking too stupid of a question yeah and he was like we don't ask why it's like we cut we don't ask why and we cut we don't ask why that's very shocking and i'm like you know all i do is ask why like from the minute i wake up in the morning to throughout my dreams at night it's all why right it's yeah it's making sense of this it's learning it's growing from what's coming down the pipeline at us from our experiences and with health especially you look around like we're in so many you know we could list the different epidemics we're in we're an anxiety epidemic and insomnia and the loneliness and you know we're many others on top of the obvious panda it's like i feel like why is is our path forward you know it's like how do we move out of this why did it come to be what can we do differently going forward and so to me like actual progress is all about why is understanding the roots and the underpinnings of why things are out of balance oh that's incredible you know for 38 years i've done cognitive neuroscientific work around the human condition and worked in africa and worked that's why i grew up and worked with the work across everything from learning disabilities dementias traumatic and just trying to understand the science of thoughts and how minds work and the depth of the human condition and i even went after my initial phase of research i did this okay i'm not going to do lab work i'm going to actually work with humans and actually try and understand what this thing means and then came back into more formal clinical trials and whatever but the whole thing was as you say to try and understand and ask the question why do people do what they do and the big conclusion at the end of the day is you just never stop asking those questions and so everything i've developed has been based around become aware self-regulate and find out why and then reconceptualize embrace process and reconceptualize and i say all that to say that i didn't mean to go on about that i just wanted to say that to say that i hear what you're saying i hear that we've got to keep asking those questions otherwise we will become dry and clinical and forget all about the human and the human experience and you know if you're dealing with psychiatry you're dealing with a human every medicine if you that appendectomy you're still dealing with a human why did they get what did happen to cause that you know so in the context of their whole life you know and i think about that i mean certainly with mental health it to me it's it's an obvious approach is to take a holistic approach to think it's not just what is your genetic chemical imbalance and what pill corrects that to me even if that is you know on some level getting at some truth of mental health and i continue to sort of question that but even still it's not like it's not pertinent what are their sleep habits what is somebody eating how's their digestion how are their relationships what is their job like are they disenfranchised in their life are they marginalized do they feel like they have a locus of control or autonomy in their work do they have a connection to purpose and meaning so these things are determinants of our mental health but they've been a bit you know they're they're just pushed to the side they're not even considered when you look at those traditional psych evaluations i mean there's just a little list of symptoms but there's absolutely nothing to do with the whole person's narrative you know that's what the clinical ties i do we look at the person's narrative it's the most important thing you've got what is it look at look at what's going on our country at the moment with racism i mean this is an this this is a a toxic issue that is affecting the perpetrator and the perpetrator you've got to look at the whole story if you're treating a black indigenous person of color in your practice and you're evaluating the chemical imbalance in their brain like you've missed it 99.9 of why somebody is showing up in your office and saying things are hard right now so yeah and and you know there's something about psychiatry which i also really love which is that it's it's extremely humbling because you never get it you know you're never arrived you're just every time i feel like i reach like this false peak of like okay have a couple really really good patient journeys that i've been you know witnessed to and it's like okay i understand how to approach this problem and like i kind of know how to walk with someone down that path and then the minute i ever arrive at a place that's like i get it you know then it's like you'll meet someone and it just throws it all upside down which is great you know i love to be thrown upside down in these ways and to just realize there's just no dogma that holds water under all circumstances human mental health is infinitely complex and you kind of have to show up as a total beginner to every patient what you've just said now so powerful just say that again i mean that is just so powerful you've got to literally say they have to show up as a beginner with every patient and i think it's critical if someone's listening and they're not you know a mental health practitioner it still applies in our lives right like yeah if when we have a conversation with a friend to show up as a beginner when we're approaching the conversations that we're having right now around racism and racial injustice to show up as a beginner we all i think like really are uncomfortable being so flawed and bad at things we feel like we should have already known i certainly have done my fair share of being sort of working this out in practice where i'm sitting across from a patient and i feel like when i don't know what's out of balance in someone when i don't know how to approach it you can feel really like it's very triggering to be like shoot like i can't admit that i don't know i can't like they should have been seeing an older better smarter psychiatrist someone more inside the box you know and then you you kind of wade through all the ego and all the triggers and you get back to a place of like being in alignment with intention which is like well i am giving this person my meticulous attention i'm showing up with integrity and i think like that's probably worth more than any amount of i've got it all figured out and i think this is true in our conversations these days it's like showing up with generous deep listening and observation and a kind of comfort with the fact that i don't know i love that that's beautiful because that's that it kind of goes to the basic core of how one can build a relationship and as if as you know from research the most important element of helping someone whether you're a psychiatrist or psychologist or whatever you are is the relationship it's not the actual techniques it's the actual relationship that is built and how that makes the person feel you know so i love that and taking that attitude of it's just started so you don't know anything start at the beginning as though you're a beginner because that person's an individual case study that's so good being said i think the technique i do find that more and more i'm also practicing witchcraft at the same time as sort of listening and observing and bringing a beginner's mind to my patients i've like i just it's sort of become more and more i almost do it on involuntarily like that it's almost like a reiki or an energy work i'm doing at the same time you're sort of talking here and energetically impacting here and i had a patient i had a session yesterday and he was very constipated for about three days and we talked about everything coming up and he had a big emotional purge in the conversation so you know who knows what the real cause was but i was also sort of like energetically just sort of like focusing on his bowels you know and just like that work and of course i got the email like 10 minutes after the call you'd never believe what just happened don't bring me the evidence please i'll believe you the email's good enough yeah well that's amazing but you know you talk about the the energy and that's part of my work has been i developed a theory years ago on the on the mind because i felt that's an area that just just like so misunderstood and i've been trying to understand that for 30 years that's a lot of people scientists do is you know you start your research and you spend the rest of your life trying to understand it and basically trying to understand the mind and unconscious mind subconscious and the unconscious because there's so much confusion around that and one of the things just to talk about the energy is that what i do understand now for after 38 years well i'm starting to understand i should say is that our unconscious mind is the biggest part of us and quantum physics is a great way of understanding mind and and energy is what we are the most basic level and it translates into the physical cells and what we see so that energy when we are toxic we're not dealing with stuff or like this guy had a big issue coming up and an unconscious mind knows truth it's very wise and unconscious mind is connected to wisdom it's immersed in wisdom the scientists have shown the gravitational fields that in quantum physics and they can be measured and they have the values of love which is so interesting and at our core so if you've got toxicity i'm just relating to this because my audience knows have heard me teach this stuff so often start relating to what you've just said to help them understand the context of what you're saying so that in that energy can get blocked if you toxic and it literally does block on an unconscious level and your mind brain connection exists so your mind and brain are separate but inseparable so that is going to then reflect in your body your body will manifest i've just done a clinical trial showing that once yet again that you're going to have whatever goes in your mind it's going to affect your your body and your non-conscious and your brain are going to be reflecting that very quickly your conscious mind is a little bit slower to actually kind of wake up but your body will express that so when you talk about we impact each other people when you're praying for someone when you're laying on hands when you are whether you're sending good intentions it's all the same thing you are helping people to respond to that wisdom and release that energy and it's a prompt from your subconscious mind into a conscious mind we need to listen so you are helping him do that so i just use my little five cents worth of neuroscience mind body science to orientate what you said it makes me tear up i am i fully i feel so seen in sort of my beliefs with what you just said and yeah it's i think about this especially as it pertains to autoimmune disease i think a lot about autoimmunity another one of our current epidemics and i've always thought that like it's almost like we have a little bit of an either or mindset like is this starting from a like is this a physical material chemical issue like is roundup in our food causing dysbiosis or an imbalance in our gut flora and causing intestinal permeability or leaky gut which is allowing certain particles of food to get into the bloodstream and provoke the immune system and through molecular mimicry it's attacking our own joints or whatever it is yes or is this a psychospiritual phenomenon and i think actually what's really true is it's always both and i'm not even sure there is a chicken or the egg or that it even matters it's sort of like there's divine timing to how these things converge in our lives and i think about with autoimmunity i think culturally right now we have a lot of conditioning that gets in the way of us experiencing a state of self-love we've mixed up like what self-love is that it can have a component of humility like we sort of think it's arrogance or being conceited and like actually like a sort of place of recognizing your own whether it's divinity or just like that you're just a flawed human trying to do your best like anybody else and that that's enough like to be able to be in a state of self love and celebrating yourself while being humble like that's not our cultural memo you know we don't get that memo too in that state of mind and i think that that relates on some deep cyclospiritual level to the fact that our immune systems attack our own tissue like we kind of have in the very deepest sense like an attack on ourselves and i think that it's an entry point you know for how we heal i absolutely totally concur with what you're saying and it's just the most recent trials that i've done show that if you i teach about mind management that's kind of what i brought it into to help mind brain the science of thought and just seeing people in our control group who didn't get any mind management but but became aware of all these issues like you've been describing but didn't have a way of managing their mind how they got so bad i mean it down to the even the telomeres in nine weeks shortening significantly which is quite something and obviously the cortisol we saw significant changes in homocysteine everything that you that has been predictably confirmed but the in the experimental group you give someone mind management and you tell them it's okay anxieties we all experience that it's a normal thing yes there'll be cases in times where it's where it gets out of hand and it can become toxic but you can learn to manage it and just giving them the tools of managing that mind changes the energy in the non-conscious mind teaches them how to tune in and teaches them how to start becoming aware of how they can deal with all the things going on in their life that autonomy that leads to that awareness that leads to that dealing with those toxic thoughts and reducing the toxic stress and just the changes in well-being it's unreal it's like a little literal path to empowerment that we saw changing in their physiology their brain physiology neurophysiology their life and didn't mean it was all great and perfect i always talk about freaking out in the love zone you're still going to cry and have issues but somehow there's a level of autonomy that's come in and there's a level of being able to reduce that energy not you talk about an energy you talk about someone who impacted you some i didn't get the name of some spiritual healer who said to you that anxiety is unprocessed sound and you went on to unpack that so he he explained it to you and you kind of worded that as suppressed we don't deal with our issues we suppress them and that's a lot of what my work has been in my recent clinical trials show that when you suppress your thoughts it changes how your brain you can see it in a qeg you can see it in your your behaviors it there's an actually evidence of suppression and if you don't you have to embrace it and process it and go through the pain et cetera et cetera and you were saying that kind of stuff so i was all excited and i thought gee we got to talk about this you mustn't stuff our stuff down does that do do you recall you know it's funny i can't remember who which energy healer this was but i i certainly recall this and it's to me it's just part of my overall understanding of what makes us up like it is energetic and it is vibration and like in mental health we have this saying what we resist persists and it's like when something's so good when we're feeling when an emotion wells up like we have this sort of cultural like we're emotion phobic you know we don't we if we're at work and we start to cry we say i'm sorry i'm sorry yeah you start to cry at any point in our life we like suck it back and we do the weird breathing thing like you know and it's like we're never letting it flow like we just need to let it all flow and it's sort of there's a paradox here like everyone thinks that if they can just like push the feeling down or under a carpet that it that it goes away but no emotion has ever been successfully pushed under a carpet no trauma or experience like it stays in there in a very energetically real way exactly and it impacts our well-being it impacts in in sort of a chinese medicine perspective like the flow of chi or the flow of energy around the body and beyond and so i think that like with my patients one is i just make it very i give people permission to let it be big you know even in a psychiatrist's office i'll i'll see patients like say sorry for crying it's like you're saying sorry to your psychiatrist for crying you're in surround sound tissue boxes like i have this effect on people this is what this is about let this flow let it be big and to give people sort of like a new understanding of like oh yeah maybe i can let this be big and really have a good cry and let it flow and i want my patients to do whatever practice excavates energy well for them and that looks different for everyone for me i love to do a particular shaking exercise i learned it when i studied integrative medicine at the university of arizona and they put on this shamanic drum music and you just shake and you can do this for two minutes and you experience a shift yeah and you feel like i mean what's really sacred is when like deep buried unconscious thoughts bubble up you know something that was sort of i think of it as like it was lodged in my hip or something yeah it comes up and then i can look at it and it's usually like a very core personal exquisite emotion you know it's not like something you can point to it's not necessarily a memory it's an emotion that was within me and now i have practices for letting these things flow and you feel lighter afterward you feel more capable of taking in the new feelings i think we have an expanded capacity to feel deeply and to feel empathy when we have a really good system for metabolizing our feelings and moving through it and so yeah i just want people to to lean into what they're feeling and to have some practice of shaking or dancing or journaling or painting where it's like you let what's in you you make it manifest out in the world you move that energy oh i love that because energy cannot be lost it can only be transferred as we all know that's a basic principle so you people and i always tell people that i always teach on thoughts and the thought has got emotions and i always use these images i don't know if you've ever seen my images of the toxic tree for a toxic sort and then i use a healthy inequalities healthy tree for a healthy thought because thought that the memories are both in the dendrites and the neurons and they look like trees but you know just for people to recognize that a thought is such an enormous thing and it's inside of it it's got all this information which are memories and the memories have got emotions so thought is this massive huge tree that just never stops growing and it's got all these the information and emotions and when people can start recognizing that that's going to take years to embrace and process and reconceptualize you know so just just basically saying what you're saying just in a different way and it's so important to get it out and to be able to transfer that energy because if you suppress that thought it would explain explode volcanic mode as you said so the shaking or crying or the screaming or the tapping or the breathing those are that such great great basic fundamental energy releasing and then you can do more intellectual work on the on the process you know that's i love that i love what you're saying you also said like resistance is a dance against our feelings you made that comment i listen to one of your you see make all these great comments that are i think i'm always in like a trance state when i'm on a podcast it was just so great though but resistance is a dance against our feelings and that's so true you mean you're resisting you know you're resisting what you've got there you're kind of trying to push away from it and avoid it it just like to use like a freudian term like things proliferate in the dark like when we resist and push things back right like they redouble their efforts and anxiety quite a bit these days anxiety falls into this parameter this framework perfectly where when we feel anxiety coming on the idea of strong arming it or white knuckling it anxiety doesn't play that way you know it really just it seems that and it says no i will make my voice heard you know and so it's like only when we actually surrender and say like okay let me feel this that's when it can actually sort of the wave can crest and resolve and i think about this a lot in my practice the way i talk about it with patients is that it's like we have false anxiety and true anxiety and false anxiety is a big focus in my practice it's the sort of and it's not to invalidate any like to say like your anxiety isn't real that's not the idea that you know it's probably could stand to be reframed but it's basically using julia ross's this is her thinking around false moods this comes from her book the mood cure and it's basically that there are physiologic mundane events that trip our body into a stress response and that stress response can feel synonymous with anxiety can feel like a panic attack but it was actually just a blood sugar crash and it was actually just that we're sleep deprived or over caffeinated or under caffeinated or we're in introduce withdrawal between our lexapro doses you know these different things that can put our physiology out of balance and then we've we label that as mental illness and so in my practice that's the low-hanging fruit we start with all the ways that someone might be getting tripped into a false mood into a false state of a stress response that's manifesting as anxiety but then what remains after that is what i think of as true anxiety and that's not something to pathologize that's not something that we should attempt to medicate away you couldn't breathing exercise or blood sugar that away if you tried you know it's basically something to honor and listen to and embrace and it's here to convey information to us i think we're uniquely in a moment in time right now where we're starting to understand that when there's like an awakening force pushing that we should actually let down the guard and listen and listen and listen because like our anxiety you know when our when we have true anxiety that sense in our gut that inner knowing of like something's not quite right here it can be about our own personal lives you know as something out of alignment in the work we're doing or in a relationship or you know whatever it may be or are you actually here as more of an activist like are you the one who's sort of a prophet attuned to something out of balance more globally whether your mission is racial injustice or climate change or mental health being a broken system whatever it is or a combination of everything important right now and to basically that that anxiety is conveying a message and when we actually let it get its message across that anxiety is sort of like i'm satisfied now thank you i will see myself out of the room and what you see is someone now just channeling that energy purposefully but they're not saying i feel anxious anymore they're not identifying with that sort of it doesn't feel like a like a pathology or like a symptom anymore that is so beautifully said and so counter to the current paradigm or narrative of youth symptoms sometimes sometimes you have an anxiety disorder which is like a pronoun of giving someone cancer or something which is what people have got in their minds what you and i'm so glad you've explained it so eloquently and beautifully because that's also what i've been teaching for years and and and the process i developed is to help people to listen to those as warning signals and to celebrate them it's so wonderful to hear a doctor a psychiatrist who has got all this experience who's you so educated saying that same thing this is the message that we need to get to the world that you anxiety is not a disease you don't have to as to animal creep i'm sure you know who genuine creep is to be medicalizing misery be pathologizing pain you don't need to pathology that's not how to treat it that way to do this to embrace it and process it and reconceptualize it and you know that's just you've just explained that so beautifully and and that's totally what i teach and totally what my read my most current clinical trials show that when you do that when you do exactly what you've just described you reduce anxiety by 81 i mean that's massive and it's never going to go away i always tell my when i was practicing but i tell everyone that i now talk to you it doesn't go away but you learn to manage it so it will reduce so the toxic effect of anxiety will reduce by up to 81 just through mind management which is awareness and reflection and the why and the processing all that stuff and we all can do that and i love how you've stressed that we've got to look at the physiological as well as the what could be a toxic tumor or toxic habit so there's the two elements so once you've eliminated the physiology we mustn't forget that then to deal with the the other component that could just be what's going on in your life as you say collective the collective global covert 19 putting us making us think again people forgotten how to think and they're seeing a lot of things about themselves that are making them anxious which they haven't even thought about for years so it's supreme stuff coming up or the racism issue which is years and years of being suppressed it's now in our faces we've got to get uncomfortable we've got to deal with it we can't push it back down we'll go back more toxic we have to process through it we can't do this dances as to quote you we can't we can't do this this emotional dance we have to deal with our stuff what i love about this it's that it actually does bring more hope than our current psychiatric orthodoxy like where we're at right now and these are all stepping stones like our current orthodoxy is to basically it's the disease model it's basically saying you know this mental illness of yours is not a moral infirmity good glad that that's been canceled but now we say it's a genetic chemical imbalance you know it's corrected with a pill and that's great we've sort of worked to lower the stigma around mental health we've given some people sort of an amount of hope that like there's a fix for this and then now we are ready to shift into the next paradigm with this because at this point there are sufficient you know there are millions of people who have found for one reason or another this model didn't meet their needs so and this is where like the nuance and the thoughtfulness around how i address medications this is like so important yes let's talk about that because you're an absolute expert when it comes to explaining this in my book i sort of open this paragraph with like strap on your seat belt and like be patient like this is this is nuanced because there's so much that is sensitive and really charged around this i'll say like as the caveat initially is that i'm actually not dogmatically against psychiatric medications and i'm i'm i appreciate i'm grateful to the people the sort of other holistic psychiatrists who have been very courageous and going forward and saying like you know that they want to stop prescribing psychiatric medications for everyone and i that's given me bravery to kind of say hey that's what i'm sort of starting to send you in practice however as we talked about before i've been doing this long enough to know that like any dogma i hold tightly to i get kicked in the face and it's like i've had patients who have been so helped by their psych meds so to me it's like if that's what's working for you hallelujah you know that's not something to question this conversation that we're about to have is not a reason for somebody in that position to second-guess themselves or to doubt it or to think it's somehow a morally superior thing to do to get off of meds that's not what i mean at all i think if you've found something that works for you consider yourself a lucky one go forth take your meds and then if you are sort of the millions of people who haven't been addressed in this conversation whose needs haven't been met who haven't been met whether it's that you're not helped by meds or you were initially helped by meds but the effect faded over time or you feel like you've fully been chewed up and spit out by the mental health world and you've kind of cycled through every med and every dosage and every combination and you're losing hope you're feeling demoralized or maybe you're helped by meds but you experience side effects it's sort of for all of these people where it's like we're not giving them hope because we're not having a conversation about all the other things people can do to feel better and it turns out there are a thousand other things we can do to feel better and not only are there other options and other avenues to explore but i've come to even realize that like as you said like anxiety is not the disease it's like anxiety depression adhd these are not the answer they are a symptom they're telling us something is out of balance here and it can be physical it can be mental it can be like a spiritual yeah and so it can be all of these things but basically i feel like my job often when someone comes into my office and says here's how i'm suffering is to look under the hood and think like well where is the imbalance where is one of many possible imbalances and sometimes it's not a genetic chemical imbalance at all sometimes it's a thyroid condition sometimes it's hormone imbalance or a micronutrient deficiency like someone could be deficient in vitamin b12 or vitamin d or magnesium these are really common or someone is inflamed in their digestive tract and so it can be all of these different actual root causes of how they're feeling and if i were to start them on meds like sight unseen and just say this meets criteria for clinical depression let's start them on an ssri antidepressant i'm actually missing the point i'm missing the true underlying cause in their case and so to me it's it's a hasty and sometimes inaccurate or specious kind of approach and it misses the true imbalance at the root of their mental health issues and so i'm always gonna like ask why and say like why is this person feeling depressed and it might be serotonergic that's sort of its own whole big can of worms yeah that's causing the imbalance in the search energy transmission but it's investigative work you're getting to the bottom of it so that you can address it in a targeted way at exactly the place of imbalance i love that approach and i think what's what is interesting though just i want to ask you a question in terms of the the medications is what about the people are being so i'm so informed now i've watched this shift over 30 years i've watched the shift from people working in a much more psycho spiritual and holistic way sorting my own practice over 25 years to wanting more and more meets not i didn't i don't prescribe obviously but they would be i would be getting people off me to get their mind management going but then swung back to a huge emphasis for the last 30 years on meds and the studies are showing that it hasn't actually improved mental health it's worse there's the side effects the chemical imbalances are myths it hasn't ever been proven the neurobiological correlates you know this is a huge area of very solid science showing that this is not actually a very good way of treating people and that patients are not getting told this so when they told and i know you wouldn't do that but that people are getting put on these drugs but without being told the side effects that they can actually make an informed choice so they get on them and then there's all these side effects and then they time withdraw and you speak about this and as well with withdrawals not the disease coming back because there was never a disease in the first place it is the process of withdrawal that is affecting your body and what about about telling patients about the isn't happening about the fact that the placebo trials actually were actually more effective and you know that there's a lot of bias and that's not been spoken about but people are finding that out exactly so you say the dsm is a protocol for selling pharmaceuticals i quote i'm quoting you z so i've thrown a lot at you and if you can unpack that because this is an area of as you know massive controversy people can get incredibly upset about the medications and even as you say that's helping them because sometimes people aren't such a bad place that they personally might stand my people that watch me know my stand is because i've done so much scientific research around this i am really weary of the drugs because of the side effects and would rather go for the alternatives and holistic approach but there are some people that are in a place for were they totally psychotic and broken from such terrible trauma that they need a 48-hour help just to get through but this long-term concept of you've got to be on this rest of your life there is a chemical imbalance theory this is a lie to people so how do we navigate that i've thrown so much at you i should have you there's like 10 million things on the same responsibility okay good guarantee i'll keep quiet no that's fine it's a big conversation but i think it's one that needs to be had and then if we could follow that by withdrawal because that's a question i get so much of so you unpack this however you want so so and to me it's so important to caveat this that there are people right now who are helped by their meds yes and what we're about to talk about is like just like we have the placebo effect we also have the nocebo effect so this conversation sort of risks making you doubt the benefit you've had so it's almost like i want to be like earmuffs like if you're helped by your meds like we don't need to mess that up i think that to me yes in large meta-analyses ssri antidepressants don't separate from placebo in mild to moderate depression they do for severe depression these meds like placebo is nothing to sneeze at you know it's like it's an effect it's very real yeah i would be fine with these meds if they were a benign placebo if this was truly just a you know million person you know sort of placebo experiment but they're not benign there are side effects and to me even more damning is the difficulties people go through when getting off of the meds now if you are helped by them it's also important to say it's not that you've been fooled like they don't do nothing they do something do they correct you know genuinely correct the underlying imbalance i don't know but i think that what they do is to me they sort of narrow the range of affect so if you're very symptomatic and just you know crying uncontrollably and frequently and it's really getting in the way of your life i think ahmed can narrow that so like the lows are a little bit less low the highs are a little bit less high and life is a little bit more narrow and in certain situations you could con you could call that an improvement and you could see how this is maybe a bridge to you starting to get into a place where you can make the diet lifestyle changes where you can do the work and therapy where you can change your mindset like if that can get you into the chair and get you into that action seat then okay you can make a case for that i think that what we also see is that and i love robert whittaker's oh he's just the best he's brilliant yeah the madden america it's one of our main referrals that i give people as well on the site as links is his work here and his book native epidemic is someone everyone should read everyone should read anatomy epidemic and to me like it's it's you should read it and there's so much to it but a quick takeaway that's really important is that we are more medicated than ever you would think that we'd be better but we're actually more disabled by mental illness our mental illnesses have more chronicity rather than less with us being so medicated and this is something i feel like i witnessed firsthand in my practice is that if if you give me a patient who's not on meds like to me that's just delightful like we can work a few sessions get them shifting their diet and lifestyle shifting their mindset and they are flying out of the nest no problem if you give me somebody on meds it's a harder journey and it's not a journey i shy away from but it is a harder journey and i find that there is something in how they they sort of like take something that was going to be self-limiting like a state of crisis in life and they sort of make it chronic and so this feeds directly into withdrawal so there's a silent epidemic right now of people who decide for one reason or another to get off of their psychiatric medications and we don't need to sort of get into the why like some people do it for side effects some people do it because they don't want to be on meds some people are family planning some people are dealing with interactions with other meds what have you some people just don't feel their refills you know like they're yeah whatever you know whatever chaos happens it's a struggle right to be in mental health care and that's not always working for somebody so so basically someone's getting off of meds and we first of all do not have any system in place for how to support people with this process we're not taught it we're not taught it our education is in large part kind of marionetted by the pharmaceutical industry and of course they're not going to teach us how to get people off of meds you know like starbucks isn't going to train its employees how to get people to quit caffeine exactly exactly that's so it's basically like we're not taught how to support patients and there's a little bit of like the kind of party line on the street is like well maybe do a little taper maybe spend a couple weeks at 50 and then go off or like sometimes there's a thing of like take it every other day don't do that and then really problematic is that there's a real denying an invalidation of people's struggles when they are in withdrawal and you'll see someone say well ssri withdrawal is not a thing it's not actually like this is in your head or you're just being anxious or you're being annoying and so patients get met with like a lot of being very dismissed and resistant and no one's sort of stepping in to support them on the process can i interrupt you for one second this is where it's quite scary that the medical profession specifically psychiatry is not keeping up to date with the latest research because if they did they would even see that who's issued a statement saying that they it's absolutely confirmed that they've changed the nrc guidelines have changed as well in our ce guidelines that there are side effects of coming off withdrawal effects of coming off antidepressants so you know they it's a matter of doctors also keeping up to date with what is happening sorry i just wanted to insert that yeah so this is so important as we know like these things always there's such a lag in terms of how they're adopted down downstream where you find somebody in their like dusty private practice and are they validating a patient's experience you know yeah staying current and to me what ends up happening a lot of times is someone goes off their psychiatric medication and then what their psychiatrist or their primary care doctor whoever's prescribing it says to them when they get symptomatic is this is relapse and so this is an indication to go back on the medication this shows us wow you really were depressed you really still are depressed you really needed this medication that was really helping you that is quite a distortion and i don't mean to say there's no such thing as relapse of depression there truly is but there's a trump card here you cannot diagnose relapse when you're in the context of acute withdrawal that is gonna eclipse any potential for relapse because you are in a much more sort of like prominent state when you're in acute withdrawal and so when patients are getting off of psychiatric medications to me i just want them to realize they are in withdrawal they might feel very symptomatic people feel anxious irritable they have insomnia they have crying spells they don't feel like themselves i hate to say it but very frequently people have suicidal yes i think it's just so important for people to recognize this is not me this is not relapse this is not i'm broken and it's hopeless this is withdrawal from a mood altering a mind-altering medication and the more we consider once we understand that we can work with that then we can mitigate the withdrawal experience it's usually in doing a dramatically more gradual taper than what doctors typically recommend it's not a two week 50 reduction it's sometimes a six month or a year long process to get gradually which i also don't want to make people feel hopeless with that because it's not like oh god this is going to be a year before i'm off meds you're you're effectively off meds at some point you know along that process yeah those last several months is really just helping your brain kind of rebuild receptors restructure synapses it's just keeping you out of withdrawal it's not making you feel particularly muddy no that's such a good way of saying it because it makes it a little bit more accessible it doesn't make it so scary it does take time and then but whereas if they dramatically if they cut as you say the 50 of or take half or every alternative that's too much of a shock for the system so i know these things like tapering strips and so can you talk now about you handle that really well by the way that was excellent excellent onsen because i know it's a very it's a very touchy subject in my encouragement if i just may wrap up around your que you'll answer these to encourage people to get informed get knowledge get you know read up find out they are great like robert whittaker's book explains a lot of the truth about those studies and will give and it's inaccessible language so you don't have to read complex studies to work out is there a scientific bias in the study which is very complicated to see if you don't know what you're looking for but there are great books and made in america has lots of blogs and things for people to be able to go and understand this and you have information on your site i mean there's quite a few places where people can so i really encourage people to get informed and make your decision based on facts not opinion not on feelings but on facts withdrawal how do people do that and obviously it's under medical care you you know you'll guide people through that things like taping strips and what does it mean if you shouldn't take you know cut down by half or skip a day why etc etc you could give us some steps and guidelines so the way i think about it it's i'm just going to like use an analogy and then get the sort of the steps i think about it very similar to cardiology if someone has blockages like sort of stenotic blockages or like you know plaque building up in the walls of their coronary arteries that's what's building slowly towards having a myocardial infarction or a heart attack and if that's developing gradually so if that develops precipitously if you just have a clot that goes to a coronary artery and occludes it that's a heart attack if you if they are developing gradually if that plaque is developing gradually your body actually has a chance to build what i think is called collaborative circulation so it's almost like your body starts to build new blood vessels that go around the plaque so and basically your body knows like this is risky let's have a you know plan b i think it's very similar with medication discontinuation is that you want to go gradually so that your brain starts building almost the equivalent of collaborative circulation it's not blood vessels in the brain but it's there's a lot that happens in terms of yeah it's down regulation and upregulation of receptors building neurotransmitters and that just takes time and raw materials you need good nutrition you need rest you need like all of this time for your body to do that kind of housekeeping work and so the more gradually you go the i find the less symptomatic the taper can be so what i'll usually do if someone's on like a straightforward taper like they're on 100 milligrams of zoloft and this isn't exactly medical advice because this is truly something to be working closely with a practitioner who supports this because this is it's a it's a unique and different and sometimes very challenging journey for everybody yes but i usually go down by about 10 of the original dose per month for the first several months so if they run 100 milligrams of zoloft we would go down to 90 and then to 80 and 70 and 60 and 50 working with a compounding pharmacy so some place that will actually build them the capsule that's exactly 80 milligrams of so wash which is not something commercially available we keep it more affordable by every time we get to a commercially available dose like you get to 50 milligrams from so loft you say compounding pharmacy we'll see in a couple months you go over to your local pharmacy and you get the commercially available dose more it's less expensive and then once you get to the end of the taper 10 of the original dose 10 milligrams becomes too big of a jump so then it's more like you you play around with it nothing's set in stone but you basically go as fast and slowly as the body seems to be indicating is the right speed and you know you're balancing like you want to get to the end of this taper with the fact that you want to go gradually and gently and people usually really know for themselves by that point like what's the right pace and we usually make an adjustment about once per month and i support the taper and this is the part that sometimes that's going to ask you so how do you support it wasn't are you big on that yeah so it's it's it's a very robust diet and lifestyle approach to giving your body all the conditions it needs to successfully rebuild and emerge from this like very sustainably well so it's something that resembles like a whole30 diet or a real food or paleo diet there's lots and lots of individual variability around that but more or less real food avoiding fake food lots like really prioritizing sleep prioritizing movement prioritizing meditation we throw away you know throw around the recommendation to meditate like you know it falls on dead ears yeah i know i know it's because everyone's saying it yeah but when you're actually pulling a medication it's well it's in a very cut and dry way like when you're when you're pulling a medication off you're kind of pulling out the rug from underneath you yeah and it puts your nervous system in a stress response and then what you really want to do is combat that by very targeted action to put your nervous system into a relaxation response so breath work or meditation or yoga neutra or whatever works for you something that you know puts you in that ah feeling at the end of shavasana that relaxation response it just helps balance your nervous system so you can get a comfortable baseline and then i will have people do certain supplements and certain detoxification supports basically just to kind of like it's a leg up to make the process go a little more smoothly that's excellent so and then you also you bring in the edges of the exercise as well so it's all so it's not just it's not just one thing you're not just taking them off a drug you're addressing the whole life and at the same time you're also dealing with the emotional stuff you're helping them to process that in the first place so there's a holistic approach and that is very unusual in this day and age for a psychiatrist to be doing because most of it's just diagnosed symptom medication you taking the time to spend this is a lot of time you're spending with the patient in a withdrawal process in that whole lifestyle change in terms of diet exercise the yoga the meditation the whatever they also do acupuncture yeah this is amazing i mean these are the chinese medicine you so you've brought in everything and you offer that whole combination to your to your patient yeah and that the idea of like time and time is the commodity that's been squeezed out of the medical interaction now you know like now that it's you know we basically are down to like 15 minutes or eight minutes with the patient and sort of the opposite of how you get good results in this care so i mean for me i spend two hours in my initial consultation with a patient but that gets very expensive and inaccessible so i also now just do online groups and make it donation-based and just scale and make this available broadly i think of it very much with an analogy of childbirth as you're how do you hold space for someone getting off of a medication and there's sort of that obstetric and i don't mean to sort of like just you know it's it's broad strokes about obstetrics but a kind of a reactive stance too something is challenging in labor and it's very reactive you need an epidural we need to go to c-section you know like oh no you know let's react and cut and do some very young or active intervention yeah and the midwivery approach is much more like you're knitting in the corner and every once in a while you're like you got this mama you know or you're like massaging your back and it's kind of like not so fear-based or so reactive it's basically like yeah this is a journey that you're on this is your sacred journey i am here to tell you to reflect back to you you can do this it's difficult but you can do this and it's basically much more of a supportive role and to me it's very important that i take a stance where if someone is freaking out in their taper i'm not freaking out you know i don't jump to a reactive or fear-based place with that i've luckily enough have done this enough times with patients that i'm not afraid that i see how strong people are how you know they can come back to purpose and intention and get through challenges but i think that when you come to your psychiatrist and you say i'm getting off these meds and i'm having dark thoughts a lot of psychiatrists really jump to a kind of medical legal protective stance and they say you gotta go to the hospital and to be honest it's sort of like it just spirals yes falls out of control and then somebody says oh god i'm even sicker than i realized like i really just needed to talk about these dark thoughts that are often sort of they're dystonic they don't feel like this is really there's not intent there's not like this is what i want it's more like it's scary and uncomfortable to have these thoughts come into my mind i want to talk about that with somebody who understands who listens and so often that's what people need it's like we don't need a hospitalization we need a one-hour conversation we need to get you back to seeing that there is reason for hope to recognize that these thoughts are external that they're the withdrawal that they're not you this isn't what you want and i think that that's that's the work and it can be very touchy but it's like this is you know there's a silent epidemic right now there's a lot of people struggling with this at home alone ashamed thinking it's just me thinking it doesn't apply to other people and i'm hopeful that we'll increasingly have a public conversation about the journey of getting off of psych meds and that that is in fact very universally difficult gosh what you've said is just so powerful and so important you know we need we need respite homes like they have in certain periods of history where they've had places that are beautiful where people can go and just immerse themselves for a time without being forcefully where the police or the first responders and the person is literally treated like a criminal criminal and removed from the loved ones and taken away and the fear around that and locked up and forced medication and talked there is this terrible scary and then that follows you the rest of your life it's just terrible we need that place where you're feeling broken just what you've described everything if we can get it one on one if we can change our medical system to be able to supply this kind of intervention and to get communities more involved and then to have homes some people just need to take some time out of life and just go and to a place where it's beautiful and safe and they can paint and they can talk and they can do what you've just described you know that's part of what i'm trying to do with the work that i'm doing and you and i need to talk about this more because we we needed we've got to i know it's robert's dream it's been satiria robert whitaker satyria house there's been a few projects around that have been so successful and the people have really gone through the the description that you've described now in in that kind of setting and it's worked but they've been shut down by the pharmaceutical companies because they there's no money in them because they're not taking drugs they get them off drugs and they get become fit back into society so you know it becomes up to people like ourselves to educate people and to get the initiatives going we can from a grassroots level rebuild the respite home concept and you know there's a few like dr peter kinderman in the uk is pushing for this and you know there's a lot of people that are now but we but there's a lot of talk we need to actually have action put into into place so people like yourself that already offering that you said group training that you're doing group sessions because of the affordability i mean that's just thank you that's just absolutely amazing i've created an app i mean we're all doing what we can and the more we collaborate the more we can actually do for people and you also mentioned just about the whole i just wanted to emphasize for my viewers i talk a lot about neuroplasticity and what you described with the withdrawal process so incredibly beautifully by the way thank you so much the way you described the whole concept and how to do it it's neuroplasticity your brain changes whatever you put in so epigenetically whatever you put in your mouth eats think it changes your brain so obviously it takes time for your brain to change back and what's so interesting which i've always told people with when it comes to withdrawal and change is it's more difficult to withdraw from the modern american diet which i know you know than it is from cocaine and if that you look at the list of addictions psychotropics are number four so if you can get off the sodas in the modern american diet you can get off psychotropics because it's like modern american diets number one and number four is your psychotropic cocaine is number seven so it's just interesting to give people a perspective that this is this can be done but we need more people like yourself we need you educating the other psychiatrists and doctors on doing this are you so there's my next question i say all this to say that that's the changes that we are experiencing with the drugs is neuroplastic the changes but you're coming off is neuroplastic and that's why it takes time it's the change of the change of the brain so to pivot now to the doctor question are you training other physicians or other psychiatrists are the medical world are they listening to you i know i'm training a lot are they listening to you are they hearing you and are they changing and is there a desire they are now yeah so i think that for the longest time like certainly in in residency when i was given like grand rounds presentations on this like nobody was receptive to it at that time it was like that's nice but i also was younger and hadn't you know there wasn't proof of concept in my practice it wasn't established so i get it then i worked for a long time in a large primary care group and i sort of went up at the podium and gave a lot of talks on these ideas and you know like the most outlier open-minded among them were sort of receptive to it but overall it was like this is too weird i've now gotten to the point where some people come forward and they say ellen it's really weird but like that stuff you were saying 10 years ago now it's coming true oh gosh it's like coming true it's been true so it's like now that the new york times has caught up you know like now it's now it's true so new york times needed to confirm the truth of it gosh so i have found that and i understand they have a responsibility to be like airtight in what they put forth so that just means that they're 10 years late to the game yes which is always the case 10 to 20 years before things are really applied from a scientific perspective into practice but it probably means they're also not promoting some things that are a little bit not valid so good for them but i think that in terms of training practitioners so now that i do these groups pretty regularly like every month i have a new online group i'm seeing that increasingly and i haven't like put it out as this is a practitioner training i think at some point i will do one that's specifically for that but it's just been like now 50 of my group participants are practitioners who want to learn this approach so it's so exciting and you see in this group it's like extra magical because this is the community element and people are supporting each other and we're all learning and you see you're not alone and being a seeker and sort of wanting to expand your understanding of what is mental health about but you see like it gives all of us more hope to see this tidal wave of practitioners who are saying i'm not satisfied with the model i was taught and i i suspect there's a better way and so i am seeing a tidal wave now and it gives me hope you know everything like everything about 2020 is like whoa we are in makeup cool we're in the moment we're in the moment we have such a great opportunity to change that's it's amazing i'm just looking for help yeah there's reason for hope and i'm so glad they that physicians are listening to you i find when i do my best i do also do a lot of seminars and conferences and things and we have so many doctors now that are learning and training and changing their mind and being approached on all different levels so i've seen a definite shift in the last probably five years but especially the last three years there's been a definite shift to this is not working we have to have another and your special primary care physician who very often as you know the first port of call that a person i'm feeling depressed and generally it's just a prescription is given because there's no training when you know you've been through medical training you wouldn't get trained even as a psychiatrist how much mind training did you get if you think of it isn't that crazy none yeah like exactly like cpt but apart that no and even cbts formulate you know that's like when i talk about cbt the five step protocol that i've developed it's the it's one of the things you could do in the first step only when you've done the actual human stuff you know the psycho spiritual stuff all the other stuff the address all the other elements but doctors are definitely becoming more aware but around doctors one position a day is committing suicide they're under so much stress and physical burnout and mental burnout and we know the statistics the medical not just doctors the medical profession in general but i've seen from my just my discussions with doctors and this is where i want to go with a question there's a thing that oh i can't admit that i am battling with emotional issues myself because then i'm not going to be seen as a valid physician or i've got to have it all together you open this discussion by saying you battle now you are highly qualified not just in one degree you have multiple degrees english major which i think opened your mind to a lot of stuff being an english major medicine psychiatry i mean you and chinese medicine acupuncture functional medicine you've really and your first statement to me was to all of us was you battling and that's what we've got to because what and i've been approached by physicians it's like they don't know how to manage their own mental health let alone help their patients with mental health and so there's this disconnect but then they've got to act like i've got the white jacket on i'm superior i know everything god complex but i can't live into the god complex that's a major issue and if you give off positions permission to feel the emotions we can then relate that's makes you so relatable what do you think about that what is your in a way like it's crazy that we think that it would be somehow something that detracts like to me it's the most important credential right is like i actually i really struggle to treat patients of anything that i feel like i haven't experienced in some degree myself because it's like what do i really have uniquely to offer here when i've been when i've been inside of a condition like i feel like i know my way around i know the pain points i know how to speak in a language that people say you get me like you understand this so i think like it's rather than something that should be shameful or somehow invalidates our capacity to help it i think it really is the asset it's the credential and i look at doctors and i think i mean i have a lot of strong thoughts about this we could go down a fairly radical tributary about the fact that i think doctors are also very medicated and i do find this is controversial this is delicate but i worry that the more medicated we are as a culture there's something that psych meds seem to do for some people which is that in the on-ramping and the off-ramping like when you're starting a med and when you're getting off of a med which is might be your tapering or you missed a dose or you changed your dose for whatever reason you're switching meds in those transition phases i see a significant uptick in suicidal thoughts alongside occasionally this very kind of lethal combination of being a little dissociated things feeling a little surreal and things feeling a little bit numb and a little impulsive that combination is incredibly dangerous so i worry sometimes that the fact that you know we're more medicated makes us more at risk of more suicide and i look at doctors and doctors can prescribe for themselves can prescribe for their friends like are just plugged in or sort of like you know psychiatrists i just feel like they're on so many psych meds you know because they're just like that's their world you know i think like dermatologists get a lot of botox and it's psychometric you know and exactly if you're surrounded by it and and i think that it makes doctors very fragile and i also know when i identify with this firsthand is that you go into medicine you don't go into medicine for the wrong reasons you know that's it's too many hopes too much of a commitment yeah too much of a commitment it's not a pretty journey it's not an easy journey there's nothing about it that's like this is an easy ticket for an awesome life you know it's never like that you go in for the right reasons and then over the course of the nine or ten years that you're in training you're sort of systematically you shift to it you arrive at a slightly different place some people and like i know my colleagues they are smart hard working their intentions are good some people find a pocket to practice in a way that's their passion they are practicing in alignment with their beliefs and they're out there like mother teresa and just like doing god's work and thank goodness for those folks and then a lot of people find themselves making a series of decisions because they're in a lot of debt or because they're burned out and they just need a good lifestyle or whatever it is people make a lot of decisions where they end up practicing in a way that's not perfectly in alignment with their truth with their values and i think that's a very toxic way of living our lives and i think about that like there were little pockets in my career where i was like entertaining those kinds of jobs and i sort of did the imaginary exercise of picturing myself showing up like waking up in the morning and going to work and doing that work and it would have crushed my soul and and i think that you know there is a way of i to me that puts people at risk of suicide is like feeling locked in and that there's no path out and you just feel like what am i doing to the world am i a force for good or not wow you said that so well so this is something that has to be addressed i think we should have another discussion just completely around that and we didn't even touch on the sleep and i mean this is like you and i could like in the beginning we said we could talk all day i want to make one comment about the withdrawal and the elixir pro and the doctors in my most recent clinical trial one of our subjects was who's in the in experimental was on lexapro and had tried it but nothing was working and depression like really severe and just everything like not sleeping the whole everything and who one of her things is first of all we put on the mind management and she went through the cycle of 63 days which is the whole neuroplasticity research i've done and honestly her the qeg the behavioral the physiology the narrative everything dramatic change dramatics she got it under control she was managing the depression lifted to a point which was managing which is amazing and it was sustained at 63 sustained six months so it's really a radical change the point i want to make in relation to that is mind management works when you get which is what you've been saying so there's evidence of everything you're saying i'm seeing this in my clinical trials because it's a very holistic approach too but also the interesting because i know you talk about lexapro use but i've heard you speak about that in terms of withdrawal tears on the experiment was was coming off it one of the things that we know with lexapro and any anti an antidepressant is your awareness of the ability to have insight is not very good and that was with her initial intake she wasn't even she could describe in her narrative how she was but when you when she filled in a traditional because if you had different traditional psychiatric protocols at scales that she'd seen before it was almost like she wasn't depressed and then her insight with the scale that i developed really looks at insight and what's really going on your nut consciously we could see how depressed she actually was so she was living in cognitive dissonance and a lot of that had actually affected and as she would she actually as as she got more mind management that became her awareness increase so her empowerment increased so i'm relating this back to doctors i mean there's a whole conversation around this but relating back to doctors who are on things like lexapro awareness insights is lacking we saw energy changes in the brain where your ability to actually integrate information from different areas of the brain which is not multitasking it is actually a natural internal function is not operating like it should so this leads to compassion fatigue and position burn this is very real so it's not helping it's making it worse and it also does something weird with the the dna the telomeres initially it ups them and then it decreases them so there's so much cellular health that's being affected too and so this is something that needs to be addressed and educated education for the medical profession not just the public so that's just here's where my brain fires too when you say this i so resonate with this and i think that you know i think about when we're on oral contraceptives and we're trying to choose our mate for life and it's like it actually impacts our ability you're really trying to smell on almost a pheromonal level yeah who is compatible with us it has to do with how different our immune systems are you know and i think that when that's impacted we might make different and perhaps worse choices about who we're compatible with because there's a barrier to that our ability to sense in that way and i think about it i'll admit this is sort of shameful for me but i don't know it's nothing to be ashamed of i want to sort of scratch that word but it's like this is this is something i don't admit publicly typically is that the couple months before my wedding i got botox for the first and only time of my life and yeah that's okay to waiting you got to do these things but so but i was still a psychiatrist and i noticed that i would sit across from a patient and i realized so much of my insight and my capacity for empathy and really understanding what someone was going through came from mirror neurons and murals in relationship to your facial muscles your face your mirroring and i was almost missing some data because my face could not and wasn't mirroring i was like sitting there like that's insane and it impacted my insight and i think that so many of doctors when we're really when we're actually able to be healers and not just technicians not providers but healers there's so much witchcraft happening under the surface wow and we want all of our cylinders firing you know we want all of our capacity for picking up and observing and sensing and listening and feeling and i think that i don't mean to say like if you're on lexapro that you're not feeling you know certainly i've had so many of my patients who couldn't get out of bed and then are on lexapro and they're thriving in their lives yeah it's not all you know there's just nothing 100 about this but i have had patients of meds who have felt like i am now for the first time feeling like myself feeling more deeply feeling more in general and i think that you know for us to to show up as as healers i do think it is helpful for us to be like really with a big antenna that is such a great example of just that's brilliant thank you for sharing that because it kind of wraps that up and and i'm glad you just you know we sometimes we just need you've mentioned wonderful patients that i think was didn't want to initially come off lexapro and then four years later once they had worked through whenever it was or four months or something they did and that's the thing maybe because it is suppressing the emotions but maybe they needed that hiatus and then but then they've got to be prepared to go through withdrawal because it is going to change the brain and the body so there's a whole but so there's so much and so much complexity and so much to see the person as an individual case study okay we'll have to stop here we'll never stop talking but this is just the beginning thank you for your insight your wisdom your work your contribution it's just phenomenal and i can't wait to talk to you again caroline thank you so much

Channel: Dr. Caroline Leaf

Views: 35,950

Rating: 4.8328691 out of 5

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Id: -82_C-aNWF8

Length: 71min 32sec (4292 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020