What if most of what we knew about Mental Health was wrong? | Khaliya | TEDxBeaconStreet

my name is Kalia and as they said I am a Columbia University trained public health specialist focusing on mental health but what a lot of people don't know is that for me life was not always so easy up until about three years ago I sometimes struggled to even get out of bed I had been the victim of a violent crime and refusing to come to terms with it I quickly saw it enveloped me slowly but imperceptibly dropping a veil of sadness and fear over everything from the outside it wasn't noticeable I don't did not speak of what occurred and did a pretty good job at least in the beginning of putting on a brave poker face but I really started to suffer and the first year especially was where not just my behavior but my person me started to change on the inside it was horrible but on the outside I actually looked great try not eating for a year and yeah you look pretty good you get all sorts of compliments but keeping a secret like that changes person and it changed me it was like the best of times in the worst of times and that is why I'm here to you today to talk about the very thing that people usually avoid talking about and that is mental health and the question I would like to post today is what if most of what we knew about mental health was wrong when I think of mental health I think about three things that I think are going to change the face of mental health of Public Health actually blindspots neuroplasticity and psychedelic science and strange as it sounds these things are intimately correlated let's first start with blind spots many years ago I read a story that's stuck with me it was a book by one of my heroes Oliver Sacks and it was a collection of case studies on strange neurological conditions in particular in one particular story was a woman called mrs. s who's in her 60s and suffered a massive stroke which impacted the functioning of her right cerebral hemisphere she is or seems for the most part seemed for the most part unaffected she was intelligent humorous and a hundred percent still there but yet she suffered from a strange condition that would make it so that she could only see things that happened to be on her left field of vision so for example she would complain she wanted more food because the stewards hadn't given her enough and yet half of her plate the left half of course was untouched and Undine another one of my favorite examples was that if you took her to look at something 60 degrees to your left she would revolve around her wheelchair 300 degrees which is why they call it eyes right she could only go write this behavior was unusual to say the least but mrs. s didn't know she continued on happily unaware that she was seeing really only fifty percent of the world her mind protected her from what she did not know by pretending to know this is what I call blind spots and the truth is that we all to varying degrees have these blind spots and science does too I would even go as far as to say that some of the blind spots in the medical industry could be more appropriately called blinders like what they put on racehorses so that they can see only what they're shown and no more but we'll get back to that later so getting back to the question what if most of what we knew was about mental health was wrong what if we are all stuck with working with 50% of the facts and we're told that that was the whole picture I mean think about it wasn't it only 30 years ago that we were told the dietary fat was bad in the Nate to 1980s it was like a revelation and everyone jumped on the bandwagon doctors and laypeople alike and this idea persisted as issues as heart like heart disease diabetes and obesity rose to epidemic levels and non communicable diseases rose to be some of the biggest killers worldwide as they are today great ideas can spread but so too sometimes can bad ideas hang around and hang around so long that you forget that you have the option of questioning them last year the Journal of the American Medical Association produced a paper in which one of the authors said and I quote placing limits on fat intake has no basis in science no basis in science what else have we believed that in fact has no basis in science with food they say that we are able to disprove the prevailing theory that fat was bad by accumulating an enormous burden of proof in the form of people that despite following the appropriate folk protocols were in fact getting sicker dying even looking back at a critical juncture in time it had been decided that eliminating fat was the answer to our health problem or at least various lobbyists fiscal problems and the road was chosen but what if they had chosen another road and what if this kind of wrong turn happened elsewhere in science a wrong turn that we are only now beginning to understand is a wrong choice because we again see a pattern of disease that makes it impossible to ignore if we had taken the right choice humanity would be better off correct so it follows that if we are doing everything in line with a theory and everything is getting worse not better wouldn't it be safe to say perhaps that we had taken the wrong road such as I believe is the mistake we made with mental health and a mistake I would like us to take a look at today so let's take a look at it what is mental health in a nutshell mental health is the absence of mental illness just as being healthy is the opposite of being stick but in physical health there is not just sick and not sick you can be injured you can be healing there aren't really words like that in mental health so today I would like to introduce a new term and that term is mental injury to explain what mental injury is I would like you to think of a woman in your life someone you love a mother a daughter a child picture this person next think of somebody that you know is a veteran of war maybe you don't know one maybe imagine your friends friend picture them in your mind now picture this one out of every three to five women will be the victim of violence or sexual assault in their lifetime we are talking about more than one woman per minute and in the US alone one out of four veterans of war suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome and every new day 22 of them commit suicide now I ask you are these people mentally ill were they before or did they become so and if they became so that is there a way that we can fix it I think the answer to that question is yes by calling a mental distress mental illness we imply that these people are broken and that it is partially because many of the tools that we are using simply didn't work but because but mental injury carries within it as a term the seed of hope I hope that we will finally be able to use tools that do work so now that we have a working definition let's see who else is mentally injured well statistically mental illness mental injury affects one in four people over the courses of their lives and is projected to account for more than half of the global burden of disease and these numbers are growing rapidly particularly among youth because mental injury is not just PTSD it is also depression anxiety most people when they think of mental health and the tools that the psychiatric industry has made available think of SSRIs they think a prozac Zoloft paxil selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors that are often reused in these instances they also think of benzodiazepines valium ativan ambien klonopin used to reduce anxiety and help people sleep there's also the neuroleptics Ripper doll zyprexa seroquel these are the antipsychotics so you see there are a lot of things out there and I think judging from some of the eyes out there many of you have heard of these these avenues all work to change the chemistry of the brain and to make certain substances of the brain more or less available which produces outcomes along the lines of the desired response but most of these drugs were developed in the 50s 60s and 70s and began spreading into more widespread use in the 80s and 90s until now along with psychology these are the tools that we had been and that we still have but while these drugs all work on changing the levels of neurotransmitters none of them impact neuroplasticity and this is key now you may ask what is neuro plasticity neural plasticity is the brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life neuroplasticity is in the brain's ability to reorganize itself to compensate for injury or loss brain reorganization takes place by way by way of axonal sprouting where undamaged neurons grow new nerve endings to current connect with the other undamaged nerve cells forming new neural pathways to accomplish a needed function so for example miss s from Oliver Sacks book was able to function despite her injury by rerouting signals around the damaged tissue and an easy example to yourself of neuroplasticity is to dry try to your teeth with their non-dominant hand for a week in the beginning it will be hard but then suddenly it will get easy because neurons that fire together wire together or the more you encourage axonal sprouting around an activity the more your brain will create pathways that create make that activity faster and easier originally it was thought that our brains were the most plastic at birth and decreased in neuroplasticity over time natural ways to increase neuroplasticity are things like learning an instrument and exercise but one of the best way that these pathways are built is through repetition with age it was thought that our blant brains were less plastic but we are starting to rethink that hypothesis what if it was not so much that the brain was less plastic but that as an adult you had trained your brain so well at certain things that it was hard to fight getting off of the most-used pathways pathways neural pathways are there as learned patterns to help us get through life more easily and also to help us with survival for example in PTSD neural pathways are also altered your survival mechanism is triggered and it goes into fight-or-flight bypassing the prefrontal cortex and going straight into the primitive zone of the brain where the amygdala is this is the limbic system and the problem with this is that it's very hard to undo it is after all the mechanism that was put in place to keep you alive and one of the ones that gets the most hardwired the most quickly attempts through the years to address this have been largely unsuccessful cognitive behavioral therapy exposure therapy and SSRIs but these tools are woefully inadequate to their task what we need in this case as in the case of more mental injuries is to harness the power of neuroplasticity and to harness the brain zone power to heal psychiatric medications for the most part shackle the brain and control the level of neurotransmitters but don't necessarily create a change in behavior and don't necessarily create a change in the person neuroplasticity changes that which takes me to my third point psychedelic science no psychedelic science is not a misnomer it is a real science with real tools in fact when you look at the path not taken when we look at the fork in the road that led to the current tragic state of mental health and it is indeed tragic I think about the idea that perhaps we have spent the last 50 years solving for only half of the equation keeping the mentally ill alive but not healing them so when I asked the question what if most of what we understand about mental health is is not true I was also inferring what if we are not admitting to what we don't know what if we have been forced to wear blinders to not see the other half of the mental health equation the very side for the answers to these cries of suffering may be found psychedelics are characterized by generating hallucinations distortions of perception alters that altered altered states of awareness and some examples of psychedelics are LSD MDMA and ayahuasca some of these are also known as entheogens chemical substance is typically a plant origin that are ingested to produce a non-ordinary state of consciousness for spiritual or religious purposes many of these plants and substances have been used over millenia to help people understand the world and their place in it even wine is considered an entheogen because it was used by the Greeks and Egyptians in the work in the worship of Dionysus what entheogens on the whole really do particularly in the case of LSD MDMA and ayahuasca is to help create new neural pathways by increasing rapidly and often in sort of challenging ways neuroplasticity two levels commonly seen only in children when LSD was discovered for example so potent were its effects that the CIA immediately started doing large-scale experiments thinking that they had found a tool for mind-control and the public at large also started doing large-scale DIY experiments with mixed results now just to be clear I am NOT promoting the use of psychedelics I am however promoting the use of science for example if I told you that there was a drug currently in trials that in severely depressed treatment-resistant patients healed the patient in three to four sessions in sessions with a 72 percent success rate you would say that's crazy that can't possibly be true but it is true and this is just one of the psychedelic drugs that is currently in trials and it is one of the many that show real promise specifically in treating depression and PTSD but for a number of other things involving the element of pin neuroplasticity these other trials have been taking place all in the last few years that's why you haven't heard of it when the ban which has been 50 years now on psychedelics was lifted for certain specific research streams major institutions such as John Hopkins NYU and Imperial College London have persisted in the in the face of huge obstacles to progress this science and groups such as the multidisciplinary Association for psychedelic studies the Berkeley Foundation and the Hefner Institute are in my opinion heroes for keeping the of this research alive for more than 30 years waiting for the moment when the scientific community and the public at large would lift up its head and acknowledge its own blind spots acknowledge what it doesn't know and acknowledge what the rest of the brain health and mental health practice has been ignored for far too has been ignoring for far too long it took me years to get over my own mental injury years of suffering that could have been avoided in years of suffering that men and women of the world vets who have served our country victims of violence and perhaps even the 10% of you who were out there in the audience now on SSRIs who could and should be leading fuller clearer happier life free of blinders and free of blind spots together we can solve the mental health crisis together we can push to bring this science back into the mainstream mental health is a human right in these people the mentally injured they deserve to heal to [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 149,982

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Health, Achievement, Activism, Mental health, Public health, Public Policy

Id: EgxO1uu_9Rc

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2017