Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPLive: Conquering Invisible Enemies - Mental Health Masterclass on Clubhouse with Dr. Daniel Amen, Dr.Caroline Leaf, Amy Morin and More! | Uncut Version

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, join Hala for a Live Recorded Young and Profiting Episode with world-renowned mental health experts to discuss insights and break the stigma surrounding these invisible enemies experienced by so many across the globe. Sponsored by Talkspace. Get $100 off your first month with code "CLUB": https://bit.ly/3ycazFx   **Meet the Panel**   Dr. Robin Smith Author, Psychologist, Former Therapist-In-Residence on The Oprah Winfrey Show who has worked with Fortune 100 companies on conflict management, diversity and inclusion training   Dr. Caroline Leaf Neuroscientist, author, and speaker at Switch on Your Brain   Dr. Daniel Amen Double Board-Certified Psychiatrist, 12-Time New York Times Best-Selling Author, Founder of Amen Clinics   Amy Morin Editor In Chief at Verywell Mind and Psychotherapist. Gave one of the most popular TEDx talks of all time - The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong, viewed over 30 million times.    Jonas Koffler Social Innovator and NYT bestselling author   Nidhi Tewari  Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) specializing in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Founder of Mental Health Matters club on CH.   Dr. Carlene MacMillan The CEO of Brooklyn Minds, Harvard-Trained Psychiatric Leader.    Dr. Owen Muir  Psychiatrist and Co-Host of Frontier Psychiatrists Daily on Clubhouse Kate Rosenblatt - Talkspace Senior Clinical Manager, provides online therapy through the organization.   Social Media:   Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Follow Hala on ClubHouse: @halataha Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Shopify. Shopify simplifies selling online and in-person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash profiting. This episode of YAP is sponsored by Ole Body. Why do you shower? The most obvious answer is cleanliness, but there's way more to it. If you listen to YAP, you know that cold showers can improve your energy

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They completely changed how I thought about my body care routine and my shower. You can find ole body care products in the store or online. Ole body, fearless in my skin. shower. You can find Olay Body Care products in the store or online, Olay Body, Fearless and My Skin. You're listening to YAP, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show! I'm your host, Halla Taha, and on Young and Profiting Podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world.

My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life, no matter your age, profession or industry. There's no fluff on this podcast, and that's on purpose. I'm here to uncover value from my guests by doing the proper research and asking the right questions. If you're new to the show, we've chatted with the likes of XFBI agents, real estate moguls, self-made billionaires, CEOs, and bestselling authors. Our subject matter ranges from enhanced and productivity, had to gain influence, the art of entrepreneurship, and more. If you're smart and like to continually improve yourself,

hit the subscribe button, because you'll love it here at Young & Profiting Podcast. and today we're hosted by the biggest club on the Clubhouse app, the Human Behavior Club. I am super excited for this amazing masterclass. It is presented by Talkspace and we've got an amazing celebrity panel with Dr. Daniel Aiman, Dr. Caroline Leif, Dr. Robin Smith, Amy Marin, Jonas Coffler, and so many other incredible experts in Clubhouse influencers and doctors who are going to be talking all about how to conquer our invisible enemies and help our mental health. I'm going to be introducing the panel more thoroughly throughout the show and I encourage all of you guys to tap their bios, poke around, make sure you follow them here on clubhouse and on Instagram. And mental health is something that is so important. I'm super passionate about it. We all are at YAP and that's why today's session

is all about conquering your invisible enemies in honor of mental health awareness month. Okay, so I definitely wanna get into this conversation. We've got a loaded panel. I wanna help inspire others to take better care of their own mental health and conquer their invisible enemies, like I said. So again, we have an amazing panel.

Most of our panelists are here. We have Dr. Daniel Aiman. He is a celebrity doctor. health and conquer their invisible enemies, like I said. So again, we have an amazing panel. Most of our panelists are here. We have Dr. Daniel Aiman. He is a celebrity doctor. And he's the director of Aiman Clinics. Dr. Caroline Leif should be joining us soon. She joined us back on episode number 114. She's a neuroscientist and the author of

Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. Dr. Robin Smith is a former therapist in residence on the Oprah show. She's considered the trauma surgeon for the heart and soul. Jonas Coughler will be joining us soon. And he came on episode number 45. He is a co-founder of Radical Wellness. Kate Rosenblatt, she is a senior clinical manager at Talkspace. We've got the lovely Amy Marin.

She's a psychotherapist and the international bestselling author of 13 Things Mentally Strong Women Don't Do. We've got Dr. Carlene McMillan, she's a psychiatrist and co-founder of the Brooklyn Minds. She's also a fellow clubhouse creator first program finalist and her husband Dr. Owen Muir, he's a psychiatrist and CIO of Brooklyn Minds. And then lastly, Nidhi Tawari, she is an EMDRI movement therapist and founder of the Mental Health Matters Club on Clubhouse. So welcome to this amazing panel.

So happy to have you guys all here and we're going to get started into this amazing panel session. I'm going to start off the conversation. It looks like coronavirus seems to be slowing down at least in America. And I'm from New Jersey on the East Coast, and we're all starting to resume many of the activities that have been off-limits. So for example, I just signed up for the gym again,

and I'm about to start going to in-person gym classes for the first time in a year. So over the past year, I've talked about mental health a lot on my podcast, given the current situations. And a lot of my guests have mentioned that mental illness is the next pandemic that we need to tackle after coronavirus. So can somebody on the panel give some stats and shed some color in terms of the breath of the problem when it comes to mental health around the world?

So if anybody wants to kick the, oh, Dr. Robin is here. So Dr. Robin, I'm going to kick it to you. I know you just joined, but I know you have an opinion on this topic. So how would you describe the state of mental health in the world and then anybody else who wants to contribute to this flash your mic and I'll kick it over to you afterwards? So Dr. Robin, take it away. Yes, thanks, Halum. You know, really glad to be here with you

and in this room, your room. And it's such an important question that you're asking. It's bigger than in some ways and it's older. It's more ancient than COVID-19. I mean, COVID-19 came, it feels like out of nowhere. And we know it harmed many people and lives. And I know it personally touched your life as well, Hala. But mental illness and really struggling with

emotional distress is ancient. It is something that has been going on since the beginning of time. And it's also something that has been under reported. It has been hidden because of shame and blame. And so this is a new era. When you say that mental illness is the next pandemic, it's just actually the pandemic that we have refused to take seriously. I couldn't agree more. And does anybody else on the panel looks like Daniel and Dr. Caroline

and perhaps Jonas wanted to chime in? So Daniel, why don't we start with you? What do you think? Well, I'm so excited to be with all of you and a number of my friends. Depression tripled from February of 2020 to August. And it was already at epidemic highs, suicide from 1999 to 2018 went up 33%. Well cancer went down 27%. Why? I think we're working on

the wrong paradigm. We do brain imaging. I have nine clinics around the country. And what we've discovered is most psychiatric issues are not mental health problems, they're brain health problems. And if you get your brain better, your mind will be better. Nobody really wants to see a psychiatrist. No one wants to be labeled as defective or abnormal, but everybody wants a better brain. So I think we have a very serious marketing problem.

We need to change the conversation, I think, from mental health to brain health. And if we do, we'll get a whole bunch more people excited to have better brains and better minds. I really like that positioning in terms of the fact that you think that the marketing is a big problem, and I definitely agree with that. So, Dr. Caroline, what are your thoughts in terms of the fact that you think that the marketing is a big problem and I definitely agree with that. So Dr. Caroline, what are your thoughts in terms of the state of mental wellness in the country and also in the world? Hi everyone. Hi Daniel, hi, so I'd love you to be an Amy's. Couple of my friends on the panel sent us to see you. I think it's such a mess and not only

is it a mess now it has been for years and it's never been something that mental health has never been handled well and I agree that you know to suddenly say that there's a new pandemic with mental health is wrong because we've always had mental health issues from the beginning of time life is filled with adverse circumstances so it's nothing new it's just that every generation is facing something different and dramatic and every year we face something different and dramatic as a global society And then we have all our individual issues the problem is that only 3% of leaders and 4% of

leaders in the church and 3% of leaders across the board are actually speaking about mental health and even though there is about the own mental health, you know with authenticity and vulnerability So it's made out to be, there's no space that's being created for genuine people, to be able to express how they feel. And it's a very normal reaction to be back in with life, because life is tough. And things like depression and anxiety are not illnesses per se. They are actually warning signals that there's something going on in your life and you have a narrative. I think we need to level the playing field and we need to allow people to express themselves more easily and to make this whole, it shouldn't be just, oh, there's something wrong with them, they've got to, you know, they're that's

in crazy. It's reall battling and we all battle in different cycles of our life in different ways and we need to make that okay. And there's so much research, I've done research on this, there was a study that came out of University of Tokyo and Texas was recently showing that the way that we view mental health has a massive impact on our physical and on our physiology. So the whole psycho neuro biology of the human is very important to consider. So in the West we have a very strong philosophy of, as soon as you have some like depression or anxiety, it's seen as a symptom to suppress something bad versus generally in the eastern philosophy when you see something like that happening in your life, a pattern of depressionary anxiety or something or a combination because

they never happen in isolation. That is actually a helpful messenger. And when you've heard like that, these are immediately when you view something like that as a helpful messenger, it doesn't make them nice to go through. But the research shows that, you know, your physiology changes. You'll have 1400 neurophysiological responses that now start working for you instead of against you. You know, so there's a massive body of research that's moving in the direction of we need to be more open and more accepting. And I know we talk about that, but we're not doing it. There's a talk, but the people are still seen as crazy or as there's something wrong with them. It's still a fix, the insurance policies and we don't have sufficient

community and global and social allowance for people battling as a norm. And there's always the sort of thing that I've going to go hide. People are hiding there. They scared off. As Daniel said, they scared of psychiatrists, they scared of and it shouldn't be like that. We should be able to express ourselves. I think the last thing just very quickly is that what's not been spoken about sufficiently in our eyes about this is that just before the pandemic hit a trend had already been observed between 96 and 2014 and fed this federal data on this and then subsequently many many many studies and showing that the rate of people going younger, which has been, I mean, living longer has been, has been trained for years,

but this train started reversing in the mid 90s and has got so bad, just before the pandemic hit, people were dying 18 to 28 to 25 years younger than they normally would. And that's in this current advance in medical technology and everything like that doesn't make sense. And when they track it back, they call it death of despair and that's the goes to the increase. So, I'd rate Daniel was talking about and the increase and this is before the pandemic.

And it's they're tracking it back to mismanagement of mind. People are not being allowed to process their narrative that they've just been labeled and stuck in a box and we not open it opening things enough. So, we can open things more, we can help. And I can give, sorry, one quick example, a fantastic study came out of COVID. I mean so many great studies have come up. This was fascinating for me. We're elderly people we know are betting more

with isolation because they're technological skills and not as good as maybe the young generation. However, the levels of depression with people 65 and older have been much less over this time than your 18 to 24 year olds, more or less that age group. And one of the reasons they say is that as the elder generation have got context, they have the thing, well we got through other stuff, they've got memory, they've got context of this two-shot parts, whereas the younger generation don't have enough of that context yet, yet they have the skills to reduce the isolation, the technology skills.

So the proposal is that we need to be having community workshops where we've got the older younger generation helping each other, the older generation giving context and the younger generation giving technological support. And in that way we bring communities and diverse age groups together to start solving this problem. Long answer. It was an amazing answer. So thank you so much for giving all those incredible insights

and also giving some solutions. So I'm going to quickly just rattle off some mental health stats, and then we'll kick it over to some of the other panelists. So 450 million people currently suffer from mental illness according to the World Health Organization. One in four Americans currently suffer at least one mental illness, and that occurs with the rest of the world based on my research.

Almost one million people die due to suicide every year. It is the third leading cause of death amongst young people. So Jonas, I know that suicide is actually a story that's close to your heart, and I'd love to hear your perspective on the state of mental illness in the world. Sure, I mean, I can't speak for the entire globe, Hala, but your context is very helpful. I think some of the driving factors and certainly one that impacted my younger brother, Ben,

who took us on life in 2018, was loneliness. And what we know from leading data from companies like SIGNA is that the rate of loneliness is heightened today and that one in four people feel acutely lonely, which is a real problem. And if we think about the factors contributing to loneliness pre-pandemic, and now we think about what we do with the reality of loneliness today with people being isolated in their homes,

cut off from work, and cut off from friends in a normal regular fashion, that really weighs on our psyches. And so people are feeling extremely lonely, extremely cut off. Certainly in the US things seem to be trending in the right direction. I can certainly say that for the first time,

I had a meal out at a restaurant this week, leave or not, being back in Austin. But lonely, this is a real thing. It's not going away any time soon. And while we do have social media, which theoretically connects us, certainly, this is an example of that. The problem is that we're not interacting face to face in the real world, as often as we might want to. And it certainly is impacting us negatively. I think if we think about what we do going forward and how we come out of this in a healthier way, part of this is being willing to take some risk and reinsert ourselves into the normal life,

especially if we've been vaccinating and we feel confident doing so. So scheduling time with our friends and scheduling time with our coworkers. So we can actually have that human connection. That's the piece that we're greatly lacking. And there's tons of other data that we can look at. But I think if we think of one in four people being impacted by either depression or anxiety acutely and any given day, and part of that being driven by the fact that we're so lonely and cut off,

we need to rethink how we can physically interact with people. And part of the problem I would argue, and part of the reason why I launched Lada, I mean you start up, is to bring people together so they can start exercising again. I think the lack of physical activity is one of the real contributing factors here. So we're isolated, we're stuck at home, staring at a screen of electrons all day. When we need to get back into our bodies and engage in some kind of a rubig activity,

whether it's jogging or dancing or walking or hiking, doing something in nature that will take us out of our minds that trap where we might feel anxious or depressed and simply to start moving and that will impact our health immensely. So that's one of the things I tell you, I know coming full circle, when Benny took his own life before he had done that,

one of the things that gave him a great sense of contentment in life was getting outside and exercising and hiking with other people. And that's one of the things that prolonged his life, Tyler, and so that's one of the things that, you know, I think for those tuning in, I would encourage them to do more of, get outside, spend time with your friends, exercise, let the blood flow, breathe in oxygen, and don't feel trapped because you're not.

There are other people around you who would really benefit from spending time with you in motion. I love that. Thank you so much, Jonas. I think that's such an interesting perspective. And I really couldn't agree more like, I can't wait to get back to the gym because I feel it myself that I just, I want to be able to dance and dance with other people and, you know, sweat and get those, you know, endorphins going.

And I think it's super important and something that we're all been missing for a long time. So Amy, I know that you conducted a study at very well. If you want to go over the results of your mental health study, that'd be great. Yeah, at very well-mined, we did some research. We reached out to about 4,000 people in the United States to sort of get the pulse of how people are dealing with the pandemic and aftermath, and now that the restrictions are starting to lift. And what we found is that it's really the younger generation that is struggling the most. It's Gen Z, who is up to about age 24. And that's the population that seems to be experiencing the most symptoms of depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts. And it seems to be that their biggest sources of stress right now are financial concerns,

concerns about work. So we're looking at people who are just getting done with high school, just getting done with college, they're entering into the world and they're struggling right now. And during the pandemic, there's been so much focus on, say, their grandparents and their physical health of the older generations. But I think it's so important right now to pay attention to the mental health of the younger generations and to think more about how affected they have been by this and how this whole year is a huge proportion of their lives in comparison to say somebody who's 50, when you're 24 and you weren't able to do anything for an entire year, that's a big deal.

And we're seeing the aftermath of that. And I think we're going to see it for quite a while. In fact, we found that within the last two weeks, almost 30% of Americans say that they've felt down to the press or hopeless. 28% said that they feel bad about themselves and 21% reported thoughts of cell harm or thoughts of suicide.

And again, it was highest for Gen Z. Really, really interesting stuff. Okay, so to close out just like level setting, getting the context out for everyone. So everybody who's tuning in really can understand the state of mental health in the world. Kate, I would love for you to kind of close this out. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Hala. And it's so great to be on this panel with all of these wonderful mental health professionals. And yeah, I mean, just to sort of echo what everyone saying COVID has impacted our mental health in every way. Personally, and even professionally, there was this great study McKinsey did on 1,000 employers and they

found that 90% of employees reported COVID had a negative impact on their health and work performance. We definitely know that having some mental health issues of course can make it hard to kind of focus at work even if many of us are still working remote. Working at Talkspace, I'm a therapist as well, so I've been seeing so many clients throughout over the course of my career, but especially here in New York City over the last year

and a half. And I guess the one thing I'll say to that is that I guess, really, so many people that come to therapy feel like they have to be in a crisis to seek mental health counseling or to seek psychiatry. But really mental health can be something that we, you know, look at every day. This is may we're in mental health awareness month, but I think we would all sort of advocate for taking care of our mental health every day and that you don't have to wait for sort of an earthquake moment in your life to seek therapy.

I think that's a really great point, Kate. Thank you. And thank you to all of our amazing panelists. If you guys haven't yet, make sure you tap their bios. Check them out. Follow them here on Clubhouse. Follow them here on Instagram. So like I said, this episode is sponsored by Talkspace. Talkspace has thousands of licensed therapists with years of experience and numerous specialties,

including depression, anxiety, relationship issues and so much more. Join millions of users who are already feeling better with the help of Talkspace. Go to talkspace.com and use code club for $100 off your first month of Talkspace. So we're gonna keep the conversation going. And my next question is for Dr. Daniel A. Men.

And I want to understand how you define mental illness and what are some of the most common mental illnesses people suffer from? Well, as I said before, I'm not a fan of the term mental illness. I think it shames people. It's stigmatizing. And it's wrong.

Their brain health issues that steal people's minds. Have a book. I wrote about this called the end of mental illness. People just get it when I talk about it this way that everybody wants a better brain. Nobody wants to be called mental. So being called mental is not a good thing. It's a bad thing. It shames people.

Being called a brain is a good thing. Everybody wants to sort of be called a brain. Now, if you look at, so what are the most common brain health mental health issues people have? Number one, anxiety disorders. Before the pandemic, 30% of the population endorsed that they would have one of the anxiety disorders, like generalized anxiety, panic disorder, OCD, PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.

So the group of anxiety disorders are the most common. But before the pandemic, A lot of people were suffering that number likely doubled. The second one is depression in all of its forms, but I say depression sort of like fever, right? Doctors used to give you the diagnosis of fever. Nobody does that anymore because fever does and tell you what's causing it or what to do for it. I think depression is exactly the same way, but it affects a lot of people. Third are people struggle with ADHD, tension deficit hyperactivity disorder, also called ADD. It's the same, it's just different eras. When I trained in 1980, the DSM 3 came out and it was ADD with or without hyperactivity. And then the powers that be just decided to

change the name in 1987 to ADHD. And then addictions are common in some, in sleep issues, often, we're all around mental health, brain health issues, and then things like bipolar disorder, which I think is one of the current fads in psychiatry. It's like everybody sort of gets a diagnosis of bipolar too. When one of the big lessons we've learned from our database, so we have 183,000 scans. We've done itamen clinics. We actually think you should look at the organ. You're treating before you go about messin' with it. And so we do a study called SPAC. SPAC looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how the brain works.

And one of the big lessons we learned is mild traumatic brain injury ruins people's lives. And nobody knows it because they end up to see psychiatrists or psychologists who never look at the brain. And I think undiagnosed brain injuries often get diagnosed as bipolar disorder, especially bipolar too. And then of course, there things like schizophrenia, we've chipbacks 1% of the population, but did you know that COVID is actually increasing the expression of psychotic disorders?

I have about 60 COVID scans that I've seen, and it's fascinating. What we've seen with people who actually get COVID is it activates their limbic or emotional centers and the brain, making them more vulnerable to being diagnosed with a psychiatric problem. Did that answer your question? Yes, 100% it more than did,

and duly noted on brain health and mental health instead of calling it mental illness. So I will make sure to try to say that for the rest of the session and make sure that I don't promote any stigmas around this topic. So thank you so much for pointing that out. And a super interesting about the COVID insight that you just gave. That's scary for me because I got COVID so hopefully, you know, no negative impacts here. So I'd love to kick it to Dr. Caroline Leif. I know that, you know, you've got a lot of opinions in terms of what happens to the brain when it comes to conditions like depression. So I'd love to hear from your thoughts. What

happens to us neurologically, biologically in terms of our brain when we suffer from mental health conditions? Thanks for the question, Hala. And yes, it's a really important question. So the way I explain things and understand it from my research, which has kind of been 38 years now, actually, I've trained around the same year in the 80s, is that, and I spent my whole career studying, looking at mind and brain and sorts and memories and emotions and what are they and what do they look like in the brain and the mind and what I've come to realize and understand through my research and I've still been clinical trials and things and I've practiced for nearly

25 years, is that the mind is not the brain and the mind works through the brain and the brain responds to the mind is not the brain and the mind works through the brain and the brain responds to the mind. And in that process, mind drives everything. So if we are alive, our mind is active. If we did, there is no mind operating. So the fact that we can see a response in the brain and in the body, and if you do a spec scan or QEG or EKG or anything like that, we are seeing in a person who's alive, we are seeing that the body and brain are responding

to the mind. So that's the one aspect. And I see mind as being the majority portion because mind is driving everything. Without mind there's nobody function, there's no brain function, without that aliveness. And I explain mind as how we think, feel and choose and basically on a quantum, on a physics level

we can talk about electronegetic forces and gravitational forces and things that work done by Einstein. So it's an old science, it's not like it's brand new science, but there is new science talking about the fact that we have specific gravitational fields around humans that aren't there when you are dead. So mind is for me in that category and I believe that mind drives everything because that we see and that's not just saying I worked at a lot of work in traumatic brain injuries and CTE and Alzheimer's and autism and that kind of thing when I first started out and I was trained that the brain couldn't change. That was literally and I challenged that and I did some of the

first neurocastas to research back in the 80s and I'm never saying to my neuroscience professor in the 80s neuroscience was really in its infancy. So we did more sort of neurology and stuff but I remember saying that hey I don't agree that the brain can change because we're always experiencing new stuff we never the same from moment to moment there's always new experiences and that stimulated a positive study where I started working with traumatic brain injury because my professor said okay well see what you can do with TBI and if you can make any changes there, then you know, we're talking something. We're saying something. I did a TED talk on

the third-deckiness question of can the mind change the brain? And I showed that with directed mind input, you can direct the neuro-pastocity of the brain and you can alter functions on a socially emotional cognitive level. I showed a 35 to 75% improvement. I continued doing this because people were severe learning disabilities and cognitive disabilities. And over the years, we deep into in the field research in traumatic war torn countries like Rwanda and a partake in South Africa and three or four days a week in these environments looking at people's mind, the brain, the mind-brain connection, the impact, etc. And in my most recent clinical trials, I showed what has been shown by demonstrated by so many studies in this field.

Now, the direct connection between when our mind is, our minds are always a mess. Messing minds are very normal. Let me say that upfront, we have a messy mind, we have a wise mind. This is the easiest way to understand this. And our messy mind is like the frontline of the world, how you experience life. So right now we're all experiencing this discussion. So we immerse in a discussion and this is electromagnetic light waves and sound waves and words and all these things that our mind is processing into our brain as a literal genetic

change and we're going to literally grow dendritic branches and we're going to store these memories as little vibrations. So we literally at the moment making microscopic changes in our brain. You've been like neurosurgeons as we're listening. We're changing. So this is a positive experience because you're learning about brain. But what happens if you've been bullied or you've been raped or you've had COVID experiences that have been negative?

Those are experiences that have been built into your brain as toxic versions. So toxic thoughts are real things that keep our mental real estate. And they are very, and so there's a very, very strong physical change in the brain. We know from research that the neurobiology of the brain of the body is literally wired for love. I'm quoting Nobel Prize-winning scientists to actually say we wired, literally wired for love. We don't have structures and parts of our brain

and body that are wired for negativity. What we wired for is making a mess because life is experimental. We can't control events and circumstances, aka COVID. We don't know what's coming around the corner. And we can't control people. So but the only thing we can control are responses to certain, you know, if we can control how we respond. And in the moment of a trauma, you can't even control that really.

You just cope. And you build these thoughts into your brain and they create these these destructive thoughts that are real physical things made of protein and what most people don't realize is like the COVID virus activates an immune response that we all know that that that means to say we all know that the COVID virus creates a immune response in the brain of the body so the immune response is sending our dealing for sites and dealing for sites and macrophages and so on to the site of threat which is the COVID virus and it's trying to eliminate that. That's the design of our body. We all get that. But I don't think most people realize that

a thought which is the is made of memories like a tree has many branches and roots. A thought has many branches and roots which are memories and those that's the data of the experience and the emotions and the emotional data. And that is real, it's proteins, it's in the brain, it's also in the DNA of every cell of our body, and I did work on research on telomeres showing that the telomeres which are the ends of chromosomes, which are proxy for how we manage our mind and how we manage our responses to life. They were shortened, was this management or was not doing anything, just getting stuck.

And when they do that, impacts the souls that our body are making. We make about a million souls every second. And the quality of those souls throughout the brain and the body will then become getting to a vulnerable state. So over time, if we don't manage our mind, we will see the damage that Daniel is talking about in the brain. We will see that I see that on my QEG mind, we will see the damage that Daniel is talking about in the brain. We will see that I see that on my QEG studies, we will see that there is an effect because our telomeres on functioning, that's just one thing, I'm just giving you one thing.

There's a whole of it, nothing works in isolation in the brain of the body. There's a whole downward spiral effect into your hormone system, your inflammatory factors, et cetera, et cetera, which we also showed in my recent research, confirming other existing research. But essentially, we're going to see a response in the brain so as we have this COVID experience and the isolation and the various different individual unit narratives each person has, that is built into the brain as a physical toxic folded protein tree with abnormality. It's in our DNA changing the functioning of the telomeres and it's in the area of our mind as a subatomic particle wave and these are distorted environments that are being created in our body. And we are actually both to manage quite a lot of that. We can deal with

Mace because we pretty much experimenting. None of us know what's coming up. What we not designed to do is not manage the Mace. And what we're not giving in my opinion, where I think has been from the beginning of time, mental health has been so badly managed, and I agree with Daniel, we shouldn't be calling it mental health, I call it mind issues, this and the effect on the brain. So it's a similar approach. And basically, we should be getting away from the word mental, I agree. But from the beginning of time, you human, you're a mess. You're going to be a, you're going to go through cycles of being up and down and sometimes it's better than other times, but we've got to recognize that.

So that mess, in the mess environments that we live in, as a result of people's messy decisions, affect us, and we affect others. And that effect is going to play out in our mind and in our brain and in our bodies. And over time, that increases vulnerability of the brain in the body to disease and changes in the brain in the body up to 35 to 75%. So we saw, for example, in my recent clinical trials, we saw in my case

studies, we did very, very in-depth case studies and single subject within multiple different designs. And we saw that we had a lot of millennials in my research and we saw they were identifying literally as Diane depression, like that is the identity, just getting stuck in rem research and we saw they were identifying literally as the eye end depression, like that is the identity, just the getting stuck in remination and so on at the beginning of the study and we looked at what kinds of things, DNA, blood, QEG, sacrolytic, psychological testing, narrative, the whole story, looked into huge amount of factors and we found that people were like stuck and what we saw in a QEG which matches was the oxygen and blood flow and that you'll see in a sphysombal at spik skin and if you're more eye-scan is what we call a blue brain. So flatlines are the

different way brain waves were not rolling like they should like they the way it's rolling the sea from the depths of the waves to the breakers on the beach and crashing on the beach and the little waves going back in and out. We want that kind of balance of waves across left and right side of the brain, which activates the 200 different sections of the brain which have individualized connections and that's unique to each person. And we saw people like we were crashing with under in the midst of all these traumas crashing and we basically introduced them to mind management and being able to just understand, hey, when I feel depression and anxiety, I'm not mental, I'm not broken, I don't have a neuropsychiatric

brain disease, I have a response in my brain, my brain certainly not functioning, I could show that certainly there's inflammation, the immune system has recognized that toxic protein of that toxic salt in the same way as it's recognized. The COVID protein in the COVID virus and it's a threat to survival, so it sends out immune factors, there's inflammation at that side, your body's trying to heal. When you don't deal with the stuff and you keep suppressing it,

the inflammation increases, and that increases the sex, like a whole cycle of low grade inflammation across your body, it affects your telomeres, it affects your home assistant, even prolactin, I mean, I can go on and on and on,

with all the tons of research in that area. So there is a response, but that's not the course. Short TBI traumatic brain injury, there's an injury in the brain and I totally do it with a doctor. And then you'll let those that we are, that's such an undeniable, undenugned area, we're in it for years. That we've got to look at if there's damage to the brain because the mind and the brain are a feedback loop.

That is going to feed back into the brain. My TBI patients really, really battle with emotional status too. But once I trained them in their mind and how to manage their mind and how to build their brain, I would do a ton of brain building in the works that I do, which is literally regrowing areas of the brain in a really fun way. We saw massive changes in brain function in those days I use CT scans. But we saw changes in the behavior, cognitive, socially emotional. So in sum and in closing, mind changes brain, and brain influences mind, and we will see the impact,

but when we change our mind, we can also change our brain. But that's not being taught, it's hard, it's hard work. But we are able to do that, which is what's so powerful. I just, so there we go. How long? Yes. Yeah, no, I didn't want to interrupt, but it is what's so powerful. I think that's what I think. Paul? Yes. No, I didn't want to interrupt, but it's Dr. Robin here. I just wanted to say something as I'm listening to all of this.

I think it's important as we are talking about the brain and the mind to remember that there are many people in this room right now who are not necessarily trained experts and they may not know all of the technical terms that some of us are aware of, but what they do know is they know suffering and they know joy. And I think it's really important that for me, joy. And I think it's really important that for me, the themes of what we're talking about, each of us in different ways using different examples and different research and studies, is to really talk about normalizing, not pathologizing. So to normalize struggle, to normalize suffering, to normalize the ways in which we are all trying to make meaning out of very challenging and difficult situations and circumstances and relationships. And I think that when we have an appointment with someone and maybe it's for the dentist and

we might say to someone, oh, I need to get off this call. I have to get to the dentist, getting my teeth cleaned or I'm going to get my eyes examined. We don't feel that same kind of comfort because we've not had good role modeling and not good examples around what it means and that's why what Dr. Aiman is talking about is really so very, very important to understand the difference and you know from, you know, talking with me that I don't use the word mental illness because I think it not only does it mislead people and shame people, it also is such a hopeless term and it can make people feel helpless as well. But if we have more examples of people who say I have to go right now because I have, you know, my partner and I have couples therapy or my children and I have therapy, that it's

so important that we teach by what we are actually doing ourselves as healers. So I'm talking about, where have each of us done the work, done the work of the soul, done the work of the brain? I think as Dr. Aiman is talking, and I'm so familiar with your work and have great respect for what you have created and seeded into the world. One of the things that is so important about the brain, we think of brainwashing as being negative, you know, that someone has brainwashed

you. We don't think about how important it can be and helpful to find ways of washing the brain from toxic and destructive and limiting beliefs about the self and about others. And so this invitation tonight, as I see it, for all of us, healers and those who are in the room, is to feel encouraged tonight, to feel inspired. And I would say not just tonight, because we know that there are people from all over the world. So there are people where it is morning already. And that there is such great hope and opportunity, very concrete opportunity for the ways in which we've normalized suffering

and thought that there was no way out. And to realize that Dr. Caroline was saying that it's hard work, it is hard work. But I always tell people that it is also very hard painful work to remain defeated and suffering. It's just that we are more familiar with that than we are at being liberated. And so I just am inviting each of us

to feel the hope in what everyone is talking about tonight for your individual life and circumstance. And so whether you understand all of the statistics and all of the language, know this. And don't miss this. You who are here in the room. And I think it says it. Jonah, who was,

Jonas, who was sharing about your brother who died by suicide. I mean, even that, I don't use the word committed suicide because that is as if it were a crime. And so, Jonas, I so appreciate the invitation that you're putting in front of all of us. I call it the three B's, which is to move your body, move your brain, and then move your burden. So I'm just, you know, I'm grateful that we gathered tonight and hope that each of us

in the room is applying this to how it impacts us individually the people in our homes and then of course collectively as a tribe and village in the world. Young and profitors, do you have a brilliant business idea but you don't know how to move forward with it? Going into debt for a four-year degree isn't the only path to success. Instead, learn everything you need to know about running a business for free by listening to the Millionaire University podcast.

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in terms of the mind and the brain and how they're different and how they relate. If you guys are interested in that, go check out episode number 114. I had Dr. Caroline on my show, and Dr. Robin, amazing, inspirational information for everybody tuning in. You always are inspiring and motivating

and thank you so much for that as well. So I saw Dr. Carleen was flashing her mic, so I'd like to throw it to her to hear what she has to say about this topic. Yes, thank you, Hollis. So this is Dr. Carleen. And I do think that all of us on the stage share an appreciation for wanting to be careful with the language that we use and wanting to reduce stigma.

I think I do offer a little bit of a different angle on some of the terms like mental illness. So I do use that term as a psychiatrist, but I say things like living with bipolar disorder or living with borderline personality disorder rather than saying, you know, this person is a schizophrenic or this person is a borderline. I think that's the type of language that really can be quite dehumanizing. But I do think that for a number of individuals, those terms can be organizing and they can help people make sense of things that are not. And so if that type of language, like bipolar disorder, is working for someone, I believe it's appropriate

to use it, it's just that we should say living with. And I think that can still be quite a hopeful message for someone. I know myself, have a history of depression and go to treatment for it. I don't have a problem saying that. My husband here on the stage is very open about his bipolar disorder and calls at that. But he is not bipolar disorder, right? That is just one facet of who he is. So I do

think that when we look at people, we should look at kind of the whole person and really figure out what language works for them so that they can understand themselves. This is Dr. Carly, and I'm done speaking. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And I think the whole purpose of a panel is to have alternate perspectives and, you know, just share information and everybody who's tuning in can kind of make their own decisions about how they want to approach the situation. So thank you. I saw Kate, you want to flash your mic? What do you have to say?

Yeah, thank you, Hala. This is Kate from Talkspace. And I do just want to share also that when we talk about mental health, it's important to sort of note that we can also look to nutrition to optimize our brain health and our mental wellbeing. I know that when our brains don't get enough of the nutrients we need, our thoughts, our feelings,

everything is really impacted. Like, for example, serotonin, which is this neurotransmitter linked to mood, if we don't have enough specific nutrients like iron or B12, our bodies just can't even provide enough serotonin. So what I really want to say, and you know, and some of my work with talk space clients as therapists, I definitely encourage clients who are just like struggling right now. I just asked them, you know, when is the last time you've got lab work done and to definitely talk with, you know, a primary care doctor or prescriber about just sort of what these labs show and if there's any deficiencies that can definitely be,

I guess something worth looking into. So I just wanted to share that for anyone out here as well. If you're working with a healthcare provider, it could be something to talk with them about. Yeah, 100%. I think nutrition is definitely key when it comes to your body and brain health. So I think that's a great point. So we're going to continue this conversation. And I want to pivot back to COVID. So COVID for a lot of you guys on the panel do know me pretty well. And a lot of you guys we haven't met before. You might be coming on my show in the future, but we really

haven't gotten a chance to talk. And if you do know me, you probably know that my father passed away from COVID last May. and I got actually his anniversary of his passing was this past Saturday, a one-year anniversary, and I caught COVID because I was taking care of him and my whole family got sick. And we were one of the first families. I feel like that I knew at least and all my friends knew and New Jersey who got impacted. I feel like I was like one of the first families that got impacted. So it was a really scary time. And I'm not alone.

There's so many people who have suffered from grief, three million lost souls all over the world. And to make matters worse, not only losing someone, but then not being able to visit them in the hospital for me was really traumatic. And I just want to talk about grief. And I know that Amy, Dr. Robin, I'm sure other of you guys on the panel talk about grief and how to overcome trauma. I'd like to talk about grief. And I know that Amy, Dr. Robin, I'm sure other of you guys on the panel talk about grief

and how to overcome trauma. I'd like to pivot to Amy. I know you talk about this quite a lot. Can you explain the difference between healthy grief and unhealthy self-pity and kind of what you recommend that we do for those of us who are suffering from grief due to COVID and due to any any reasons that we would suffer grief. Absolutely. So my experience with grief is not just as a therapist, but it's also personal. I lost my mom when I was 23 and then when I was 26, my 26-year-old husband died of a heart attack. And shortly after that, I lost my father-in-law and realized quickly that knowing about grief is

one thing, but going through the emotions and the pain is just having the head knowledge doesn't always do it. It's one of those things that we tend to try to go around the pain because we don't wanna go through it, but grief is the process by which we heal, and you have to go through the pain. And, but that doesn't mean that we have to do it alone. Support is so important when

we're grieving and just being able to reach out to other people who can understand our pain. Can go a long way toward helping us heal. And it's about knowing that there's no timeline for grief that's so often people will think you should feel better in six months or there's the magical one year mark. But that's not the case, and that grape often comes in waves. You might be fine one minute, and the next minute you're in the grocery store looking at something that reminds you of your loved one, and you might suddenly burst into tears.

And that's okay, it doesn't mean that you haven't healed or that you aren't grieving the right way. There's no right or wrong way to breathe, but people are really uncomfortable with our sadness. You might find that your friends and family don't know what to say or they try to cheer you up. Which goes back to why it's just so important to have support from other people who understand what it's like to be grieving a loved one. And as you said, Hall of the anniversaries can be

tough. The anniversary of the day that you lost someone, their birthdays, there's so many dates, seasons, times of year that might bring things up for you, certain holidays. And for us to just be aware of that and to know that it's okay to ask for help, it's important to talk to people and really pay attention to our emotions. There's so much power in just naming how you're feeling and to not judge yourself for those emotions. So whether you feel guilty, you feel incredible pain and sadness or you feel intense anxiety, just taking some time in honoring and noticing those feelings goes a long way towards helping us feel better and then knowing that it's okay to feel those things, but also you don't

want to stay stuck in a place of pain and that it's important to have healthy coping strategies which could be anything from knitting to exercising to painting, just knowing what kinds of things help me express experience and cope with these difficult feelings that I have. Thank you so much, Amy. I think that was super insightful. And I saw Jonas flashing his mic

and then I want to pass it to Jonas and then Niddy, because Niddy, I know you talk a lot about trauma in your mental health club. So just to pick up on Amy's point, I think it's really important that we do acknowledge that we are leftively in a state of great grief right now relating to COVID and how I feel for you and your family immensely.

And I will say my own father passed last spring as well as did my father-in-law in the summer. And so as a family we're coping with that and it really helps to be able to be open about it, about the range of emotions you're feeling related to the loss that you might be experiencing. And even if you haven't lost someone to COVID, perhaps you're just dealing with this,

feeling of being isolated as we talked about earlier and feeling lonely. And those are all real. So it's good to be vulnerable about it. I think it's important to find peers that you can trust and have this conversation with. I think this is a really big piece of the self-care journey. And one word that Dr. Robin shared

is the word encouragement. And within that word is the word courage. And so what I want to impress upon everybody here is that healing takes courage and that we're all human and we're all experiencing this in different levels of intensity. And so be courageous and be willing to be honest about where you are in terms of your mental health. And once you do that, acknowledge it,

it really gets a lot easier because the weight is lifted and you can start building the coping skills and you can seek the support you need, whether it's with talk space or whether it's a group of peers. And so I'll leave it at that, Holly, and turn it back over to the floor. Thank you. Okay, so let's kick it over to Niddy and then Dr. Robin. Thanks, Holly. This is Niddy speaking then Dr. Robin. Thanks, Hala.

This is Nidhi speaking. I love that Amy, you and Jonas and Hala, I wanted to thank you also for vulnerably sharing about your own grief and loss journey, that there is a collective grief experience that we all have been navigating. And I do a lot of work with individuals who are survivors of trauma. And when I mention that word trauma, I think so many people think, oh, I've never had a traumatic experience. I've never gone through war or a natural disaster. And so I don't have trauma. But we have to start broadening the lens of what we consider to be traumatic.

That trauma is really anything that is too much, too fast or too soon for the nervous system to handle. And when we're thinking about this in the context of this pandemic, that is all of the above, right? We had moments of grief and loss where we couldn't actually mourn the loss with our families. We couldn't reach out to support and hug and have physical touch and attachment and connection to people. And so, you know, it takes a situation where grief is normally difficult and complicates it by adding in these additional factors. And so I think that if people are able to kind of look at some of those experience in their lives, things like bullying and divorce, grief and loss, all of these things being considered potentially traumatic depending on how you experienced it, I think that perhaps

then there would be more of an acknowledgement when the symptoms start to show up, right? Things like feeling on edge or feeling really shut down, having difficulty with sleep and appetite, dreams, nightmares and avoidance of certain triggers that may bring up the memories of those traumatic experiences. So I just wanted to add that into this conversation that, you know, what we're all describing is absolutely grief and loss. And for many people, it was experienced as a traumatic experience.

And there was actually quite a few research studies done in 2020 and 2021 about COVID-19. And while people didn't necessarily meet the DSM-5 criteria for PTSD, they checked off actually quite a few of the boxes that typically go alongside that diagnosis. And so what that showed us is that these trauma-related symptoms still can occur, even if you didn't directly experience COVID,

you watched it through the media or experienced, the fear and hypervigilance that we all went through over the last year and a half, or if you truly got it yourself or had somebody else who passed away that many people still have those trauma-related symptoms show up in their lives. So yeah, I think it's had a widespread impact, and we're going to see more and more of the ripple effect from the last year and a half or so

in the coming years ahead. Yeah, 100 percent. And, Dr. Robin, you are known as being the trauma surgeon of the heart and soul, so I'd love your thoughts on all the grief that's going on and what we can do to overcome it. Yeah, thanks, Hala. And for, you know, Amy sharing and Jonas and Niddy, I mean, it's, um, those of us who have known sorrow in our own lives, I mean, when I was listening, Amy, to your story and the cascading losses that hit your life. And I've had some of that in my own life years ago. My significant other we were in the Caribbean and all was well. And then all was not well.

He collapsed, a cardiac arrest on the beach and died. And it's a long story, a very, very tragic story, young life. And my young life being very altered. My mother died last May, not quite a year ago, but it will be, not from COVID last year, but somewhat unexpectedly she had lived an extraordinarily great life. And she, very quietly in her own home dies very peacefully. We happened to be there. So that part of it was sweet and COVID was happening. So this woman who lived this amazing kind of rock star life, we were trying to figure out, you know, what 10 people would be allowed. I'm in the Philadelphia

area to come to her service. And so one of the things when I think about trauma and what I know about grief and loss and trauma is that a part of what makes it even more difficult. And Amy was talking about this, are the rules and let's call the regulations that other people or we ourselves try to abide by. So we have a timeline or our job has a timeline or we read somebody's book that talked about, you know, a timeline and how they went back to work or they started dating or after six months or, you know, a year and a half and so you figure, okay, if I'm, you know, if I'm okay, then I can do that as well.

And so one of the things that is so important as it relates to COVID, but just grief and loss in general is that there really are not any rules other than what your own heart dictates in terms of what it needs. And a lot of that requires slowing down. I mean slowing down even right here, right now, in this room. And asking yourself this very bold and brave question, which is what does my ache need? Rumi, the great writer and thinker and philosopher, has a quote that I love and I think it fits so well here that the wound, W-O-U-N-D, the wound is the place where light enters. And so often, we are covering our wounds up and we're ashamed of our wounds

and we're trying to get our wounds, you know, into gear, you know, people will, if you hear, when I do, you know, my cub house events every Sunday morning at 10 a.m. in the east, people often will call and if they begin to cry, they'll say, I'm sorry, I don't say what are you sorry for? And isn't it interesting that when our tears show up, and I believe our tears are our teacher,

that we apologize for our humanity. So a piece of what this moment is offering is that we really lean, and I mean lean all the way in to what it means to be fully human, and that is to have losses, and you know, as we've heard each person share that sometimes it's the birth date or the anniversary, but sometimes it's not connected to anything in particular except for that your heart aches. Or how about the times where someone feels joy and then they feel guilty? Like, am I allowed to smile? Am I allowed to ever laugh again after a smile? Am I allowed to ever laugh again after, you know, the death and the loss of someone who suffered and died alone in COVID? When we think about what happened to, you know, so many people in COVID and how I know you've shared about this, people who had to say

goodbye to their loved ones over a device, over FaceTime, and where physicians were serving as priests and rabbis, simply because family members could not, were not allowed into the hospital. So there is not only the grief of death, but there's the grief of all of our rituals that helped us celebrate. People that had babies were really excited until COVID showed up. And here all of a sudden, they were going to have maybe their first child, someone who works as part of my team,

was going to have her first child. And there were all these plans. And then maybe your husband couldn't even come into the hospital with her and her mother was not allowed to come to her city. So we really want to look at the fact that COVID and I want to also bring up what is happening in the United States around race and that black people, black and brown people in particular have been killed, have been murdered. And so that issue is also something as we talk about what has just hit us and hurt us and injured us, mind, body and soul that we're looking at, not just COVID-19, but we're looking at a country here in the US that is very, very confused about what it means to be our brother and our sister's keeper. And so I hope that as we talk about

you know grief and loss and trauma and the hope that is possible, that we realize that sometimes we have a friend who really can walk with us or family, but I want to caution all of us and those who are suffering tonight with grief and loss and trauma. You know, you may have thought that, you know, your best friend is going to always be there and understand. And every time you talk to him or every time you talk to her, you leave feeling disappointed like they didn't get it. You know, they didn't get it or my sister is not getting it.

And so what I really want to encourage you to do is pay attention to that part of you that feels that somebody is missing your grief and sorrow because it's sacred and you don't want to share it with anyone who isn't able or willing or doesn't have the capacity to hold it and hold you in ways that really are constructive and nurturing and soft and tender in such a tough time. So don't grandfather your family or grandmother so that we are gender sensitive. Don't grandfather anyone into being close to you unless they have earned the right to walk with you and next to you. That was beautiful, Dr. Robin.

Thank you so much for your thoughts. I'm going to pivot to Dr. Daniel Aiman. So we're in a back channel and Dr. Daniel Aiman just mentioned that he actually lost his father on May 5th. So 10 days before mine and he had a virtual funeral. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and also about mental discipline. If you can define that for everyone and tell us why it's so important. Well, it's really mental discipline that helped me get through his loss.

I had a hard relationship with my dad. When I told him I wanted to be a psychiatrist in 1979, he asked me why I didn't want to be a real doctor. Why I wanted to be a nut doctor and hang out with nuts all day long. So he's a Middle Eastern father who was hard. And the last five years of his life though, he was my best friend. He had a health challenge, never listened to me. And when he listened to me, he lost 40 pounds, helped his hard heel,

and we became super close. So his death was very hard for me. But what I talked to my patients about is mental discipline needs to be the same as physical discipline. That if you want a healthy body, you have to make thousands of decisions over and over and over again. You cannot be 50 pounds overweight on Monday. Have a salad for lunch and expect to be trimmed on Friday. Right? That's insane. You need habits that you put in your life every day that help you. And, in a new book I'll call, your brain is always listening. I talk about something called positivity bias training. So many of my patients who struggle with anxiety, depression, trauma,

grief, who have high ACE scores, and it would be good for us to talk about the ACE test, which is a first childhood experiences, because people who score it scored on a scale of 0 to 10, and people who score over 4 die earlier, then people who are under 4, they have an increased risk for 7 of the top 10 leading causes of death. My wife has a score of 8, my nieces who we adopted both have knives. And so that trains your nervous system to be hyper vigilant and to always watch for bad things to happen. But my wife and my nieces who live with me'll do an awesome because we work on mental discipline. So, I start every day with today is going to be a great day.

Soon as my feet hit the floor. And if I forget, it's on the top of my to-do list. That way, my unconscious mind will start finding what I'm looking forward to today, hanging out with my friends and doing this tonight, rather than just what the brain naturally does is look for what's a threat, what's wrong, especially if you grew up in trauma. As I go through my day, I go, is this good for my brain or bad for it? Which is actually the mother tiny habit.

It's the most important tiny habit you can do because if you love your brain, you start making better decisions for it. And before I go to bed at night, I always put myself to sleep with a prayer, and then I go, what went well today? And I've been doing this for years. And the day my dad died was an awful day. I was actually in my bathroom getting ready to take him to the pulmonologist because he just wasn't getting better from COVID than he'd been two months since he had it.

And then I got a call from my mom. You know, it's like a nightmare that he stopped breathing. What does she do? She's on the phone. I'm calling 911 driving to the, I mean, it was a mess. And so when I went to bed that night, because it is my habit, I set a prayer and then I went, what went well to that. And then the supervising part of me, I always have this great technique. I learned from my friend Stephen Hayes, give your mind a name.

So you can psychologically distance from it. Well, my mind is named after my pet raccoon. When I was 16, her name was Hermie. Well, Hermie starts yelling at me, like you're a bad son because you're gonna go really on the worst day of your life in 38 years, you're gonna go what went well today. Right, so the critical part of my mind is getting after me, but because it's my habit,

I remembered the interaction between my mother and the police officer. I'm doing a program with the new port beach police department. So he was actually one of my students. Officer Darling shows up and he's like Mrs. Aiman because someone died at home, we have to do an investigation. And my mom in this intense grief looks at him and says, do you think I was cheating on him?

Do you think I had him killed? And it was hysterical to just how she could sort of separate herself from the moment and make light of it. And then I just remembered the hundreds of texts I got from my friends. Because when you're from a big Lebanese family, everybody knows something good or bad happens literally within three minutes. There was just such an out point of love for my dad and for me.

And then my brain went to, before the mortuary took him away, I sat with him and just helped his hand. And it was just so soft. And then I went to sleep because mental wellness is a practice. It's not something. And we actually have, right now we have a 30-day happiness challenge. So people can sign up for it. It's free, 30-day, day happiness challenge. So people can sign up for it. It's free 30dayHopPinusChallenge.com.

And what we do is just these little tiny habits to put in your life to optimize your brain, your mind, your relationships, and your soul, which is ultimately why do you care living each day with purpose? And we need to talk about this just like people talk about losing weight or getting cardiovascularly fit. And it's a new direction, right? I'm not treating your depression, I'm optimizing your brain, I'm optimizing your mind, I'm optimizing your relationships, and ultimately your deepest sense of meaning and purpose. So I hope that's helpful.

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They completely changed how I thought about my body care routine and my shower. You can find Ole body care products in the store or online. Ole body, fearless in my skin. This episode of YAP is sponsored by Talkspace. Mental Health Awareness Month is a worthy thing to celebrate, but it shouldn't just be our focus for May. It's important to be working on your mental health all year long, and the positive effects of therapy can create lasting changes in all areas of your life, from your relationships to your career to your

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and Talkspace.com for $100 off your first month. I love actionable advice on Young and Profiting podcasts. So learning from your personal experience and how you dealt with your father's deaths through mental discipline is so interesting to learn about. So Kate, I know that you have a few things to add on this topic. What do you have to say? Yeah, I mean, first of all, Daniel, thank you so much for sharing that. I'm just sort of sitting here nodding along and my my heart just really goes out to you and I think you just, you know, when you're talking about mental discipline,

that's something that I talk about with my patients all the time here at Talkspace. And that's like when we're trying to make those, you know, like, I guess changes to, I guess change any sort of mental health behavior, I talk with them about kind of making these almost like one degree turns. There's this great neuroscicitis.

You talk about that. And one degree turns meaning like, what is like a really small thing that you can do? Sort of like what you were saying, Daniel, of like saying one mantra to yourself when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed. Like those small changes can really add up over time to actual habits. You know, and that can be so supportive of our mental health when we're sort of promoting

our brain health. And again, not to mention everything I mentioned earlier today about really looking to nutrition top to my brain health and mental wellbeing as well. But yeah, I think just wanted to really emphasize the importance of mental fitness and mental discipline and just how much these sort of like one degree turns can take us in the direction we want to go. Awesome, thank you, Kate.

So the next topic I want to talk about is a little controversial and it's on the topic of medication and psychedelics because I think there's a couple of schools of thoughts when it comes to this. Dr. Caroline, I know that you have a strong stance on this topic and I also know that Dr. Carleen and Dr. Owen are proponents of psychedelics. So why don't we start with Dr. Owen? We didn't really hear much from you. What is your stance on psychedelics and how have you used psychedelics in this space and what are your thoughts on that? You know, it's not, I think just psychedelics

we're talking about, it's effective interventions in psychiatry for 30 years. And this is quoting my friend Dan Carlin, who's now the chief medical officer at Minemed. When he was working at Pfizer, they worshipped at the altar of 50% better. And so the standard by which all of our SSRIs and other antidepressants, for example, are judged, is a 50% reduction in symptoms.

Now, I have very few patients who come to me and say, I'd like to feel halfway better. But most of them want to be in remission. They don't want to be suffering tremendously, which people are coming to me are on average. And so when we're thinking about psychedelic medicines, we're not talking about getting high and going to a fish concert. That's a different intention. We're talking about evidence-based treatments

and the studies that have been coming out are remarkable. So for example, maps came out with a study just last week on MDMA assisted psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, which by the way the Cochrane review of all the prior available treatments only has Vemla vaccine as an effective treatment for. That is accepting of course for psychotherapy like NIDI does with EMDR and other modalities. But not everyone can tolerate those therapies. The dropout rates are very high.

We had an effect size of above 0.9. That's better than any medication for any condition in all of psychiatry with the exception of stimulants in ADHD. So we're talking about an order of magnitude difference in how potent these interventions can be. And so I think the only controversy in my mind is like, how are we going to deploy these at scale? And how are we going to get them paid for us so people have access to them and not just the wealthy, right?

People who desperately need these treatments because as nitty can talk about, adverse childhood experiences are extremely common, especially among kids who I was seeing when I worked at Bellevue and in the state hospital system. And there are the kinds of people who are gonna need interventions that work. And I think that's what psychedelics, I hope, will prove to be. Interesting.

Dr. Daniel, Aiman, D.E.V.E. alternate thoughts on this or Niddy, do you wanna chime in? Well, I'm hopeful, but you know, people were super hopeful about cocaine. And before I use cocaine, then they were super hopeful about opioids. And I'm hopeful, and I want to see more research. I have actually done some before and after studies with IBA game, which is a psychedelic, and for some people it was really helpful for other people it wasn't, and it seemed to really drop the function in their brain. So lots of people are getting on the bandwagon. I just want to see more research on large groups of people.

But, you know, whatever we use, I'm a huge fan of plant medicine. I own a supplement company. I love saffron. I'm saffron head to head against pro-zac paxols, so locked. Effects are a meppermin. We're shown to be equally effective. The Dr. Owen pointed it out, right? Equally effective. It may not be equally effective. The Dr. Owen pointed it out right, equally effective,

may not be that effective. What we're not talking about, other one of us mentioned it earlier, is why aren't we doing like the really simple things first, like diet and exercise? I mean, exercise head to head against prosaac and zooloth was found to be equally effective. Exercise, visual, um, great nutrients. Let's start there learning, teaching people on scale, not to believe every stupid thing they think. I call it kill in the ants, the automatic negative thoughts. And once you've done those things, once you've really worked to optimize your brain, your mind, your relationships, your purpose, and you're still suffering, then medication and perhaps TMS can be really helpful. My huge fan of hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

And my experience with psychedelics and my patients, it's not as effective as I would like. I mean, I have great success stories with ketamine, but it seems like about 20% of people I've sent for ketamine get a lasting positive response. So I think we should all be scientists and what that means is we should all be curious. Being scientific doesn't mean diminishing other people and dismissing other things. Being scientific just means I'm curious. Show me the evidence and let me test it for myself.

Thank you so much, Dr. Daniel. That was super great insights. It looks like Jonas has something to add. Jonas, I'll kick it over to you. Great, thanks. Hello. I want to build on what Daniel was speaking to and Owen as well. And Ydi, look, I think the evidence overwhelmingly is positive positive and I think it's good to be cautiously optimistic. I also think

it's very clear that, directionally, we are on the verge of a new frontier in terms of revolutionary approaches to integrating plant-based healing modalities. And clearly part of that is going to be by leveraging psychedelics. There's no question about it. The research is there, but we definitely need to figure out how to scale it and how to scale safely. But I also want to say this, that the healing journey is, you know, we can look at the data and that's objective, but it's also very subjective and that the pieces that we're talking about here are really mapping to an integrative approach to a lifestyle that is based on health and wellness and well-being. And it is optimizing how we orient to the possibilities that are low cost and accessible to everyone. So talk therapy, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, that is certainly one path.

Nutritional well-being and making better choices about what we put into our body, such that we can function at a higher level, is critically important. Exercise, the big, my big premise, and one of the things I'm focused on in my new book, is this idea that we have to do things that actually move us, and the movement itself will drive us toward health, physically, mentally, emotionally, in terms of resilience and so forth. But all of these things, or it's a mental, emotional, physical, relational, nutritional, spiritual, they all tie into our integrative whole as a human.

And so I think for those who are, again, listening in and in despair, please know that you have to look at your life as a whole spectrum and you are by no means your identity is tied to the affliction that you're dealing with whether it's anxiety or depression or poor diet. So please be mindful that and know that you can change and that the opportunity for you to change is it can be very, very simple and it could start with just getting a good night's sleep. Thank you, Jonas. Okay, so we're gonna start transitioning to the Q&A guys.

I have a bunch of people on stage already who have their questions that we're gonna kick it over to before one final question. So the last question is about obstacles. So Jonas alluded to it just now in terms of people not being able to afford services that they need. And the World Health Organization estimates that two thirds of individuals suffering from

mental illness choose to avoid seeking help for their conditions. And that's based on a couple of factors, including but not limited to the stigma that is associated with mental health, which we've been talking about all night. The lack of education around mental health, the expensive health care costs. So I want to know from your perspective, how can we overcome these types of obstacles so that we can start to see an improvement in the mental health and society? So let's kick it over to Niddy first and anybody else who wants to chime in, flash your mic.

Yeah, I think this is such an important question, hollow, that mental health stigma is something that is absolutely still pervasive in our society. And I think it's a multi-basseted problem. I think it depends on the messaging that we received from our family system and our communities, regarding what it means to perhaps struggle with our mental health and brain health from time to time,

where we told that emotion expression was a form of weakness, was talking about problems, something that was discouraged, and therefore we may not see the value in talking out those problems and challenges with a therapist, right? So I think that that is one component of it, but then I also think there's a cultural component

of it as well, you know, certain cultures may not look at mental health as something to be considered at the same level as physical health. So we're looking at treating people in a cultural context. And then lastly, I do think that media plays a role in stigma, right? So for example, there have been multiple movies made about dissociative identity disorder that depict violent parts of self and people that are just, you know, that really harm others

as a result of being diagnosed with that condition. And as somebody who works so often with individuals with that diagnosis that have complex trauma, I can tell you that that is so far from the reality of individuals that are coping with that diagnosis. So in terms of being able to overcome and break that stigma, I think that one Discussions like this helped to normalize the conversation. I think that we have to look at the fact that everyone at some point in time is going to go through a difficult Challenging circumstance and your mental health and well-being may be affected by that circumstance. And so being able to recognize one We're not alone and that two there's support out there and there's value to seeking out that support. You know, I think one of the most hopeful messages and one of the most research, you know,

most highly researched topics in the mental health field in recent years is the idea of neuroplasticity. And it's the idea that our brains are s-mallable, that we can still heal and change some of these internal patterns, these memory networks, these experiences that have been stored a certain way in the brain and body, that there's an opportunity to be able to overcome and heal and move through those experiences. And for other types of mental health diagnoses, that there's an opportunity to manage them differently, so that they're not impeding or functioning to the same degree. So I think it's a multifaceted problem

that requires a multi-layered approach. And I think, how are you hosting conversations like this is such a critical component of that. So I thank you for that. Of course. So we're gonna move on to the Q&A portion of this conversation. Really excited to have a lot of different people

from the audience come up on stage. And I'm gonna start off with Katie. So Katie, you have a question for Dr. Aiman, please unmute yourself and ask your question. Great. Thank you. Yes, I do have a question for Dr. Aiman. In your use of spec scans, what is it that you can primarily use them for to be able to diagnose or look at people with brain injuries, with TBI and depression. What is it help give you as a tool to help with the diagnosis and the recovery process? Well, thank you so much for the question. Yes. Respect is a nuclear medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity. it looks at how the brain works. And it basically shows us three things.

Healthy activity, too little, or too much. And then our job is to balance it. And I often say, how do you know unless you look, that making diagnoses based on symptom clusters with no biological data is how they diagnose Lincoln with depression in 1840. It's got to change. And we've been doing it for 30 years. And you go, so how does it help you?

Well, with traumatic brain injury, one, it helps you know if someone's had one and if there is lasting a fact, because not all people who have a traumatic brain injury have lasting effects, if your spec scan is abnormal right away after an injury, it's actually not predictive. But if your spec scan is abnormal nine months later, it's predictive that you're gonna have trouble unless someone works to rehabilitate it.

I did the big NFL study at a time when the NFL was in active denial about traumatic brain injury and football. And it was so clear. We saw high levels of damage, but that sort of wasn't the point. I think most nine-year-olds, when they realize brain is soft, skull is hard, skull has sharp bone e-rangers, hit it repeatedly, even with the helmet on, you're going to cause trouble. 80% of our players got improvement when we put them on a rehabilitation program. That was the point. I can show you how much better you can possibly be with the right interventions. And Spectre has actually been shown to be

predictive of how people do from traumatic brain injury. With depression, the first thing I learned in 1991 when I started ordering scans is depression is not one thing. Depression is 10 different things in the brain. Sometimes depression comes from having too little activity. Sometimes depression comes from having too much activity. Sometimes depression comes from having too much activity. Sometimes depression comes from being exposed to toxins, like drug abuse that the patient didn't tell you about, or mold exposure.

Sometimes it comes from infections like Lyne. And the scans, they're different patterns for trauma, for toxins, when the brain works too hard or not hard enough. And so I came to believe that depression is sort of like fever. You know, it tells you what's going on, but it doesn't tell you what's causing it or really what to do for it. The scans have just been the never-ending teacher for me.

And when I first started doing it, they're actually all-day conferences at the American Psychiatric Association in 1992 and 1993. And then the APA got very uncomfortable with SPACT because it doesn't at all support the DSM. It's sort of like, and Tom Ensill's director of the National Institute of Mental Health basically called the DSM, a very troubled document. Because again, it describes what it is.

It doesn't like schizophrenia. It doesn't talk about why it is. And what imaging does is it gives you a look at the underlying biology so you can target treatment to your individual patient's brain rather than a group's cluster of symptoms. I hope that makes sense. And when I saw my brain, and it wasn't great, the first time I scanned it, I developed a concept that has been so helpful to me. I call it brain envy.

I scanned my mom the week before, and she had a stunningly beautiful brain for a six-year-old woman. At 37, mine wasn't nearly as nice. And so I wanted her brain, I had come from this very competitive family. And so I had brain envy. How we say Freud was wrong.

penis envy is not the cause of anybody's problem. Haven't seen it in 40 years being a psychiatrist. But I can get people to love their brains. And the scans do that. You develop like a personal relationship with your brain. Then you never want to hurt it once you see it. Thank you for answering that question. Katie, are you satisfied with Dr. Amin's response?

Absolutely. Thank you so much. That was incredibly helpful. Thank you for coming up and asking your question. So I see a really interesting question for Dr. Robin. And I'd love to have Dr. Janie Levy ask this question. I love it. I think it's super interesting. Thank you so much. Hi, Dr. Robin Smith. You know, my question is sometimes I will encounter The question is, sometimes I will encounter where people can over-spiritualize mental health challenges and not get the help they need.

So I was wondering what your thoughts are around mental health and that fine line of over-spiritualizing as a way to cope and deal with mental health issues. Thank you, this is Janie. Thank you, Dr. Janie. That's a wonderful question. Some of you may know that I'm not only a licensed psychologist, but I'm also an ordained minister.

And that can be confusing for people because when they hear the part of me that is driven by science, then they wonder where is the balance of spirit. And I think what's interesting about your question is that one's faith, whatever that means to someone, can be a resource. It also can be a place of hiding, a place where you go to not feel can really be used as a drug. I mean to numb you, to numb a person, from what is hurting. And so my thoughts about this are to overspiritualize often means that you're separating yourself from being a human. The part of you that is just like the rest of us and that struggles.

So when I hear people, I'll ask someone how they're doing during a very difficult time. They may just hop right over that question, right to that they're doing great because spiritually and then they give me, you know, kind of a bandaid on a gunshot wound is what I call it. So I think if we take our thoughts, if we use our thoughts and use the power as we've been talking about the brain, the power of our brain to be restorative, to face the things that are difficult and challenging. That's very different than denying them. Now, having said what I just said, the other piece of this is that sometimes we may overspiritualize something because it is the only way we know to function and to cope in that moment. And so it is something that you would not want to shame someone, but maybe help them through kindness and great compassion, make soft space for them to be with the complexity

of their feelings and not just a quick band-aid answer. So I don't know if that addresses what you were asking, Dr. Cheney. Absolutely, and I certainly appreciate the response, Dr. Robin. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Absolutely. And I certainly appreciate the response, Dr. Robin. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Robin. And for those of you who aren't yet, make sure you follow Dr. Robin. She's really active on this app. She's got a room in the Human Behavior Club every Sunday at 10 AM. So if you enjoyed her contributions to this conversation, make sure you follow her. Okay. So Dr. Jani, thank you so much for your question. It was

excellent. And we are going to move on to Dr. Marwa. Please ask your question to the panel. And anybody who wants to chime in, just flash your mic unmute and let's just keep it casual for the rest of the session. I want to just preface my question with a little story that will lead to why I'm asking the question, which is about the use of antidepressants or treating depression within the individual. This psychiatrist was interviewed, and he was telling a story about how he went to Cambodia, and he happened to go to Cambodia when antidepressants were just released in Cambodia.

And he was telling them that there's this chemical and antidepressant that will treat depression. So Cambodian doctors were like, what do you mean a chemical that will treat depression? So then a Cambodian doctor said, let me tell you how we treat depression. And he tells him the story of this farmer who his leg was blown, you know, in the war. He is a farmer in a rice farm and then he couldn't work and he got a fake, you know, prosthetic one and unfortunately he was too traumatized to work in the same field. So he started crying, he started being sad, classic symptoms of

depression. So the community got together and said, okay, so he can't be a farmer work in the rice fields. And they got he got them a cow, the community that got together and got him a cow. And then after that, well, the sadness was gone, the crying was gone. And then the Cambodian doctor looked at him and said, see Dr. Somofield, that is the cow was the untied depressant. So the question becomes, and there's nothing wrong with using medication because there is, there are cases that warrant the use of untied depressants as first line.

But when the causes of depression has to do with particular circumstances in society that gives rise to depression, and when the person who's has to do with particular circumstances in society, that gives rise to depression. And when the person who's taking the anti-depressants goes back to society that doesn't support and doesn't problem solve, how does that work? So I'm Marwa Azat and I look forward to the answers from the panel. Awesome. Does anybody on stage want to answer Dr. Marwa's question here? This is Dr. Robin, just one of the thoughts I have and I really appreciate your question because this is, I mean, Clubhouse is a global platform and it reminds us no matter how big we think

our little worlds are, that the world really is quite large and we are now connecting with that large world because of social media, because of Clubhouse and other platforms. But I love what you're asking about, because this issue around culture and what happens in one place that is seen as illness that is normalized in a different culture. We see this so much, or I see this so much, in terms of the Western culture, pushing away, suffering, pushing away, limitations, and depression, and sadness, and despair, where in Eastern cultures there is an embracing of it. There is a deep understanding that despair and complexity comes with being human. And so as I hear you tell, you know, this story, it reminds me, and I think it's important for all of us in the room, that what we know,

we know often in cultural contacts, and how we grow is by coming to know other cultures and other ways of making meaning that are different than our own. And they may not fit with who you are or who I am, but they work resolutely and robustly in other cultures and other families. And so thank you for the question. And just for reminding us that the same situation can be seen very, very differently simply by where we were born and who we were born to and where we were living and what part of the hemisphere we're in. So it's just a very important moment for us to wake up to and

lean into. So thank you. Thank you, Dr. Robin. It looked like Daniel wanted to also mention something. Daniel, did you have to something to say? Well, I love that example. When I was a medical school, was hammered to us, first do no harm. Use the least toxic, most effective treatments. And Americans' psychiatry changed in the 40 years since I decided to be a psychiatrist.

Because of managed care, we really used to be the primary care doctor for people who struggled with their mind. And that change, I mean, we had an hour or two or three, sometimes four, a week with our patients and really got to know them and got into their lives. And then in the early 1990s managed care came and decided they could pay psychotherapists,

marriage and family counselors, licensed professional counselors. And this is no way to demean them. They could pay them less. And we were doomed to be the prescriber, which I have affectionately termed the candy man or the pharmaceutical rep. And I hated that.

I never bought into it because it wasn't my training, but 85% of psychiatric drugs were prescribed by non-psychiatric physicians in 12-minute office visits. Think about that. When you start an antidepressant or you start an anti-anxiety drug or medication for sleep, they're insidious in that they change your brain to need them in order for you to feel normal. And of course, there's a place for them. But it's just never the first and only thing I think about. If somebody's depressed because they lost their place in society,

the work is get them back to a place that they, you know, might fit. That's the work. It's not which SNRI or SSRI should you give them. And we're just too quick to rely on them. And now 23% of women are taking antidepressant medication in this country between the ages of 20 and 60. And I don't know about you, but that's a lot out horrifying. We can do way better, and conversations like tonight hopefully will help us be better. Thanks, Dr. Daniel A. Men. And I'm really glad you brought up women

because it's something that we didn't get a chance to actually talk about today. But there's a lot of populations that are more impacted by mental health issues than others. Like women, for example, are impacted and more likely to suffer from depression twice as much as men, which is just crazy. And teenagers are more impacted.

And so there's certain pockets of people that we need to pay special attention to. And that brings us to our next question that I think is really interesting. It's from Sheila. Sheila, I would love for you to ask your question to kind of shed light in terms of the different groups that are impacted with mental health differently.

Thank you so much. I joined about, I want wanna say 30 minutes ago, but I've been like just educated a lot with the different opinions and thoughts that I've heard. So thank you so much for having me ask this question. So I have my name is Sheila Quarrer and I have an organization called Jenga Africa that helps young people in Africa

who are going through mental health issues, depression and suicidal issues and so on. This was a journey that I overcame after 20 years of battling with suicidal attempts and so on. And in 2013 was when I overcame everything. So I founded the organization because I saw a lot of people, especially young people in Africa, mostly Kenya, because that's where I'm from, suffering with mental health issues and no one really had a solution. So even looking back, I don't really blame the community

that I was in or my family for not knowing what to do because they didn't have the tools or the resources. I recently came to Kenya to get everything like started. So I've been like having lots of like media appearances talking about the topic and it's been been overwhelming getting the amount of emails of people who are just looking for help. So I have two questions. The first one is, and I'm directing this to Dr. Robin or Neethi or anyone who can be able to answer, how can you get people to open up, Stigmas huge in Kenya right now. People are not talking at all. And obviously it's because like some people attach mental health issues to madness and sanity.

Witchcraft, it's a sin. So much stigma, like it's like where do you begin? So my first question is we know that they're stigma and need to be talked about getting people to know that they're not alone and that support is out there, but how do you get them to get from that mindset of you're not alone. It's okay to speak up about your issue and just to step out and not look at yourself as weak or that you have an insanity problem. That's my first question. My second question is how do we move people from having this purely biomedical approach? I'm not opposed to medicine, but for me, I overcame my issues because God found me. And that's also another thing that I've seen people don't really like to accept because they look at it as a crutch, but what therapy couldn't do for me? I found it in God. So how can we and still other methods besides the biomedical approach to get people to receive some type of help? Awesome. Who on the panel wants to

give that two-part question a shot? Okay, let's kick it off with Dr. Robin. Yeah, so thank you so much for that question. And I love you're part of the world. Kenya, so as the world is opening up and safety comes, I want to put my feet on your soil sooner than not. But I will say this, it's so important when you ask, like, how do we break the silence, the stigma, being troubled, having a mind that is troubled and that it's not weakness, as you said, and it's not witchcraft. There isn't, you know, something sick or wrong with us, and we're not broken. And a part that is what I've found over, you know, 25 years of being in practice and, you know, being on television and radio and all of the things

and writing books is that my own willingness to tell people my story. You know, Dr. Aiman talked tonight and I shared some of my story and Aimee and Nidhi. I mean, people talked about their own suffering and their own problem-solving and their own healing. And so I have found that even when people want to deny or feel terrified of giving voice to this part of themselves that is, you know, suffering or struggling, that when I give voice to the parts of me that struggle, not that use to struggle, but kind of where's my struggle, you know, on May 18th. And, you know, what am I? How have I made a decision? Because being well, physically and mentally, and spiritually, and financially is a decision,

and it is a spiritual practice of habits and being ill and not taking care of ourselves is also ways in which we neglect ourselves in those areas. So I would just suggest and not to overly simplify this, but it is such a powerful tool to use yourself as the instrument of liberation by telling your story and your journey and what you're doing about the parts of you that feel fragile and robust. Like I tell people all the time that whether they're showing up at Clubhouse to be in a room with me or I see them on a street corner or in a, you know, grocery store and they're sharing something that I said that had meaning. said that had meaning, what I always want people to know is that I am fully human. I have Holes, H-O-L-A-S, which I want to be whole, WHOLE, which is a holy H-O-L-Y journey. And so if we normalize that we have homes, we'd have to have holes because we're

human. It's what comes with being human. And that we are fragile and we are strong. So that's not either or, but it is a both and. And I think if you can take that both and into your own life and back to Kenya, whether you know, mental wellness or mental health or mental illness has a stigma, you will help people find their voice when you offer yours. I have an asterisk for that if it's helpful. So I work with suicidal patients for a living all the time. I'm actually the author of Adolescent Suicide in Self-Indry with some colleagues. And I have bipolar disorder myself.

I was hospitalized for a suicidal depressive episode in residency. And the inpatient unit at the hospital I went to wasn't any more pleasant than I imagine some, you know, of your, you know, other places. The world can be when people are talking about suicide and thinking those thoughts. What I can say is that feeling understood is the way we can open the gates building that what we call epistemic trust, trust, and social information with people who are feeling so terrible. Because one of the problems is, you know, the positivity that people think will be helpful isn't. Because when people hate themselves, it sounds like a lie. And

they mistrust help when it's not helpful, which frankly, it often isn't. And so when you're approaching people who, you people who think this is demonic possession, I wouldn't argue with them about it. I'd be curious about their experience of demonic possession and how that's going for them, because it's probably not something they're a fan of if that's the way they understand the problem. And oftentimes, that's how people will,

you know, kind of tell the story of their experience. And that's not any more or less valid than a brain-based explanation to the person themselves. So what people are actually looking for on average is feeling that the person who's listening understands them the way they understand themselves. And that leads to an emphasis on validation as an approach for understanding people's experience. So being curious and not closing off your line of questions until you really feel like you're understanding it the same way that they are.

And at that point, they can kind of sometimes loosen up a little bit enough to be able to see things from alternate perspectives. But before that time, we're just kind of arguing from different vantage points. And that's pretty profoundly unhelpful for a lot of people. There are evidence-based approaches to this, and luckily for suicidality, everything with evidence is psychotherapeutic with the exception now of Janssen doing two studies in esketamine, good job industry for finally doing a study on a major depressive disorder with suicidal ideation, but those kinds of interventions are wildly expensive at this point in time and psychotherapy doesn't have to be. And it doesn't have to be experts who are trained up. I will agree with what Dr. Amin said previously, like psychiatry is a medical discipline, and we take it really seriously, and spending

enough time to kind of understand people's problems is, I think, a crucial part of what we do. Is that helpful to that, like, meaningfully answer your question about your situation in Kenya? 100% both you and Dr. Robben have been helping me just in that not to dismiss their reasons for thinking the way that they're thinking and more so just trying to find out where that comes from. And also like us Dr. Robbin said using your your story. And the stories that people can relate to. So the more relatable the examples, the better it's going to go. So hearing it from someone who isn't relatable to the audience isn't actually that helpful. Education is actually only modestly to mildly helpful,

but relatable people telling stories about their own experience and recovery being helpful. That really works. So I hope that's helpful and God's speed in what you're doing because people everywhere really desperately need the kind of help you're looking to provide. And I see that Jonas and Niddy have something to add.

So let's go to Jonas and then Niddy. Sure, just a brief coin, Sheila. First of all, I applaud the work you're doing. It's immensely challenging. And I think the important thing for you to do is to think about how you scale the story of empathy nationwide. And there are many ways to do that. And I would be happy to talk to you about how you scale the story of empathy nationwide. And there are many ways to do that. And I would be happy to talk to you about it offline,

but I've done this in other countries as well. One of the things to focus on is the ritual storytelling and how storytelling impacts community at the household level and more broadly intergenerationaly from elders to middle aged to children. And I think there is a common thread there and when you build that archetype the droplets filling up the bucket Overflow into a river and that river flows into a place where behavior change happens and acceptance happens and the embrace happens Spiriously you're on the right path, but again, this is about the journey and it's a long one and it's It's it's really

one of endurance. But you know, know that all of us here are here to support you. Thank you. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with the idea of modeling, right? I think that's such an important piece of being able to normalize these discussions on mental health. And one other thing I'll add in there too is, you know, when I've worked, I'm Indian American myself. And so culturally and Indian culture mental health is not necessarily something that has been at the forefront or something that's been discussed and there is quite a bit of stigma culturally and so I'm kind of hearing Sheila that there's some similarities there where perhaps it's looked at as something is

physically wrong or there's like a possession happening and I've found that in those instances being able to meet people where they're at, I think is so key. So to Owen's point, right, not pushing against that narrative, but finding where you can get the buy-in. So for example, with some of the clients that I've worked with that are from different cultures where there is such a strong stigma against discussions on mental health, I may start with somatic complaints, right?

So the idea that perhaps there's stomach aches that are happening, or headaches that are happening, as a result of some of the emotional distress. And if we start with those physical symptoms, and eventually start to build up the capacity to mentalize and understand the connection between physical health and our emotional well-being, Well, by that point, we have developed the trust. We've started where the client is willing to begin, which is where they have buy-in in their physical health, and then eventually we're able to start to make those connections. And so, I think that's an important component as well,

is just being able to kind of lean in where someone is willing to start, and then using that as the opportunity and jumping off point to get the buy-in and strengthen that relationship. I just want to, this is Dr. Robin, just chill. I want to say one last thing, which is so important. And I think we've all said this in a different way. Also make sure that you are practicing great self-care because the journey of helping other people can take so much with all of your passion

and all of your commitment from you that make sure you are filling your own tank up, that you are doing things that bring joy and ease for your life so that you have something to give to other people from your overflow, not giving, and then you have nothing left for you. So fill your own tank up and make sure that you find ways to play and again find joy and ease so that you can do the work and be the work that you're called to do. Thank you all such amazing responses. So Sheila, I'm sure you're well satisfied with all of these answers to your amazing questions. So thank you so much for coming up on stage. Are you satisfied with all of these answers? 100 percent. I've actually already messaged Dr. Robin and Nathie I'm having a huge event August in Kenya to

like a whole bunch of schools over 30 different schools and it's just an amazing event and I'd like to have you guys this participation and to send you more information so if you could please just have a keep an eye out for that email. Hala who was the first gentleman that spoke to me? I think I was confusing Jonas and someone else because I'd like to message Jonas and the gentleman who's book. I think Owen was, yes, Dr. Owen. Owen, okay, perfect. Yep, you so much. Thank you, I appreciate it. Thanks, Sheila. So Alex, I see you have a question that I had as well in terms of social media and mental health. And we didn't get to cover it, so I'd love for you to ask your question about social media.

Sure thing. Thanks so much, Paula, for having me up on stage. It's always great talking to another podcaster, and hearing you just continue to crush it. So thank you for hosting. This has been great so far. And thank you to all the moderators who've done such a great job here. It's a briefly give a little bit of context about my question here. I have new online businesses.

They're more in startup phase. And because of that, I'm online a lot. And a little bit of context here that I won't be able to take a digital detox at this point in my life. I know that that isn't, or any sort of extended break from tech that just isn't realistic right now. So, obviously, because these are online businesses, I'm spending a lot of time on screens, which I know has many negative side effects.

And I can tell in my life from just a year ago, when I started this process, going from maybe five hours a day on screens to now 10 or more, I can tell that it makes a big difference mentally. I can't quite tell what it's doing, but I can tell it is making a difference. So I wanted to just hear from everybody here again,

without being able to take a digital detox or extended breaks necessarily, what do you recommend I can do in short bursts to make sure I'm prioritized my mental health regarding the negative effects that screens seem to have? Yeah, bam, if you're ready to take your business to new heights, break through to the six or seven figure mark or learn from the world's most successful people,

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Gain new skills and as little as 10 minutes on your phone, your computer, tablet, smart TV, and my personal favorite way minutes on your phone, your computer, tablet, smart TV, and my personal favorite way to learn is their audio mode to listen on the go. That way, I can multitask while I learn. Get unlimited access to every class and right now as the app listener, you can get 15% off when you go to masterclass.com-profiting. That's masterclass.com-profiting for 15% off an annual membership masterclass.com slash profiting. Sure, let's go to Kate and then Owen. Let's do that. Awesome. Yeah, Alex. Thank you so much for your question. And I'm so happy to hear that startup

founders like yourself are really looking at their relationship with tech and mental health because there's definitely a correlation there. So, I mean, I work with at Talkspace, I work with clients who also are founders of startups, and we talk about digital wellness a lot. And there's just a few, I guess, offerings I would share with you here. One is sort of in like the short term and one is like collecting data on yourself. So I mean, I've encouraged my clients to almost like track for a week or so, just basic things like, you know, when do you wake up, how much time do you spend on different apps or at work, you know, how does it make you feel? And also kind of noting like how are you sleeping,

what are you eating, or are you drinking water? I'm just basically gathering data on yourself and then looking at that at the end of the week and see if there's any themes that stand out or any places that you see that you can make some small changes. And like I was saying earlier, our brains are really beautifully designed to make these smaller one-degree turns that that add up like so basically just lots of small little changes. So that's like one thing, I guess, another just more immediate offering it is to kind of like change a few boundaries and settings that you have with your tech as best you can. So even just like we know

the research about the notifications and sort of the dopamine hits that we get. So what that sort of means for you or what I sort of tell my clients sometimes is like put your phone in grayscale, try and see what it's like to not kind of have the excitement of all of the colors or to try and move like the apps that you don't really need so, so much off to another page. So when you open your phone, all you really see is your email, your messages, do some basic things like that.

And just the last sort of thing to offer here for sort of how to support your mental health is, I mean, I'm biased as a therapist and also working in mental health is, I mean, I'm biased as a therapist and also working in mental health tech startup, talk space, is that, I mean, I would recommend therapy or like looking into working with, you know, a mental health provider. I know whenever I start working with clients and I imagine a lot of my healthcare, you know, providers here on the stage too, you know, whenever I talk with a client, I'm like,

I wish I met you six months ago. You don't have to really wait till things get so bad to come to see it therapist, but as it sort of relates to digital mental health, I'll have my clients just sort of send me a quick audio message or on talk space, you can send messages, you can have live video sessions. So that's a quick sort of daily or a couple of times a day way, you can sort of check

in with a therapist and kind of come up with a more personalized plan for you. I hope that helps. Yeah, that does a lot. So I mean, I just wrote down a few things and take inventory, collect data, set some better boundaries and test different things with your tech. And then like you said, the last mayors to get therapy very helpful. It's got a lot of great notes on that. Thank you, Kate. Awesome. Let's go to Owen and then Jonas. Briefly, I mean, absent like an actual mental health problem that you're identifying, like if you feel bad in some way, that's a good reason to like get an evaluation for why that might

be from a professional. Sleep is the guardian of mental health and 460 nanometer light that's bright blue light is present in all the monitors and screens. We have there are three photo receptors in the eye There are rods there are cones both of what you've heard of and in the 90s they discovered a third It doesn't actually project the visual cortex. It only projects to apart the brain, we call the super chiasmatic nucleus, which is the day night clock center of the brain. And so when we're looking at screens,

your brain thinks daylight, and that means awake. There are glasses you can get that are designed for lasers at 460 nanometers. And you can even get them over your actual glasses because if you're like me and you're working on a screen all the time, you probably already have glasses. And, you know, if you don't, they look much more stylish. But blocking that 460 nanometer light, starting at whenever dusk is in the part of the world you're in, is a great way to tell your brain its nighttime. So you will fall asleep more naturally,

and that is a godsend. Because actually sleeping appropriately is the thing that will keep you from going insane more than almost anything else you can do. So I hope that's helpful. And you have that. That's so good. I'll tell you what, I've been very proactive with this.

And that's why I'm asking these questions. And I have some of these glasses that you're referring to. I have not been wearing them because I have great natural light but I never even thought out wearing them as the sun's going down so starting a dust to wear those a lot of good points. Oh, and thank you so much. They've actually done studies and those in bipolar disorder and they do what's called virtual darkness treatment and so they'll give people 14 hours a day with acute mania of virtual darkness with those glasses versus placebo glasses. And in a week, you get a 70% remission rate of acute mania.

So it's a profoundly potent biological intervention. Dusk is the time when you do it. Super interesting. We're all about sleep education at younger profiting podcasts. So definitely agree with you that sleep is important. And I love my blue late glasses. Jonas, what do you have to add? Sure. So Alex, it's a cautionary tale tale really quickly. I'm a serial entrepreneur myself.

Obviously, very deep in mental health research for a variety of reasons, but personal and professional. But I will say this. I also had a TBI as Dr. Aiman knows and I talked about this years ago. But I had a massive stroke when I was working at a start of my 20s and part of that was due to overwork. So I want to caution you to prioritize rituals that are helpful and beneficial in terms of creating space in your life such that you have human hours and you operate around human hours. You don't need to kill yourself in the process of becoming successful. I love ambition myself and unapologetically ambitious, but I will say this, that you have to prioritize your sleep as Owen was saying, you have to prioritize your nutrition.

And you know, it might mean getting up a little earlier as opposed to spending more late nights. I don't know how you orient your schedule. I'm happy to talk about that with you offline, but look at your calendar for the week for the day and make sure you have white space so you can recharge and get outside and get your eyes off of the blue screen computer,

the electrons, because ultimately, you have to find ways to search for whatever balance it looks like for you. And the more you put it off, the more damage you'll do. One of the really quick tips that I think is incredibly helpful and this is based on the work of Dr. James Panabaker here at UT Austin is that to keep a journal and just carve out 15 minutes a day where you can get your eyes off the screen and tune into where you are emotionally, where your thoughts are and it'll help you unburden yourself

and hopefully be a huge stress relief for you. So I'll leave it at that. Yeah, that's so helpful. Thank you. So I'll leave it at that. That's so helpful. Thank you. Something I just started doing because I definitely don't want to fall on that overwork because I downloaded a little app that just tracks my hours. So like a simple way to clock in and out basically. And I'll completely admit it this year. I've been working 11 hour days, five days a week, which is too much.

And my goal is just to track 10 minutes per week. So every day, now I'm this week week I'm doing 10 hours and 50 minutes. And next week I'll do 10 hours and 40 minutes. My goal is to get it down to working 35 hours a week, starting in January 2022. And I'm going to be very serious about that. And, Jon, it's that really helped a lot here in you, say that as well.

Awesome. Well, so glad we were able to help you, Alex, thank you for supporting the event and asking your question. And we're going to move this along Caroline. I see that you are on stage or Caroline, most likely as I you pronounce it, and you have a very technical question.

I was hoping we would catch Dr. Aiman for this question, but he left, so hopefully somebody on the stage can answer it, do you wanna ask your question? Yes, thanks so much for having me, Hala, and I appreciate the strength of everybody who's been on stage and spoken. So, we've just talked about the importance of sleep and on my health coach, and I believe me, I really do believe that. I've got a kid who can't get a good night's sleep, thanks to some mild TBI's, some concussions.

And I just wondered, especially since Dr. Aiman isn't here, if a specs scan is an option, does anyone have any insight into whether a QEG is something that's helpful and do any of you use it in your practices? Carolyn, I'm done speaking. Data on QEG is varied. Where do you live? In the Northeast. So what you should do is go to the Healthy Brain Network, www.healthybrainnework.com. It is the largest neuroimaging study of youth ever attempted. It's being done through the Child Minds Institute. Your child will get 12 hours of language learning and neuropsychetesting, as well as a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan

that will cost you nothing. You'll actually be paid for your participation. That's the most comprehensive free thing you could get, and it's going to be a lot more reliable than QEG. So, that's what I do. If I lived in a world which I do, feel free to message me and I can send you the link. Michael Melhelm, who runs the program, is a friend and colleague, and they do really remarkable work. And it's like like they pay you

150 for that. It normally costs like $5,000. That was the biggest gift I've gotten in a long time. I'm so appreciative. I'm happy to help. I'm so glad that I was like, you know what? Let me just save somebody to answer those questions. So I'm so glad that we were able to help you. I felt so bad that Dr. Daniel Aiman left before you get asked your question. So I'm happy we were able to help you. I felt so bad that Dr. Daniel Aiman left before you get asked your question. So I'm happy we were able to help you. And yeah, make sure you direct message Owen and thank you Owen for all your amazing advice. Make sure you direct message Dr. Owen

so you can get that information, okay? Thank you so, so much, Halla. Of course. Okay guys, so we are wrapping this up Diana. I know you've been on stage and you wanted to give flowers to Dr. Caroline Leafs So even though she's left this is recorded for young and profiting podcasts is gonna be on the podcast So I'd love for you to you know, I'm you didn't give your flowers to Dr. Caroline leaf

Yes, so I Definitely wanted to share that with her and I know she did leave But I did want to just come on stage and say thank you all for your work because did leave, but I did want to just come on stage and say thank you offer your work because as an individual who has been doing her work as an attorney, I'm doing my work in my practice of helping women and helping organizations and diversity and inclusion, I did experience a significant shift after George Floyd was murdered. I along with a lot of Black women have experienced this and I come from that environment as a young person growing up in the church and realizing you know that mental health is not talked about and it is definitely something that we just believe we should pray away. But I just

want to say thank you so much for your research, Thank you for your work. Thank you for normalizing the conversation because sometimes we professionals and I'll speak for myself as an attorney can really speak above people. And we aren't speaking with people and having their voices heard. So thank you so much for your work. Thank you for normalizing these conversations

and helping individuals feel a sense of peace, calm, and focus that we can get through these challenges and we can come out on the other side, better people so that we can serve others. That's why we're here on this earth, is to serve them with everything that we have. So thank you, Hala, and thank you everyone for your work. Thank you, Diana.

Thank you for giving your kudos to Dr. Caroline Leif. She joined Young and Profiting Podcast back in episode number 114, and she was absolutely amazing. I got so much feedback on that episode. People listen to it three times. She's a type of person where in five minutes, she says so much, you have to listen to it

over and over to really digest what she's said. And she is brilliant. So I totally agree. A lot of people who are on this panel today, like Dr. Daniel Aiman, Amy Mourin, Dr. Robinsfist, Jonas has been on my podcast. A lot of these folks who've been on the panel and many of them, hopefully soon, hopefully soon will be on my podcast

So definitely check that out and make sure you guys if you haven't yet follow everybody who's on stage Here on Clubhouse and on Instagram Diana. Thank you so much for your amazing contribution I'm gonna move you down to the audience and we're gonna start moving along here on the Q&A So we mentioned psychedelics earlier and a bunch of folks gave their perspectives. Cat, I see you have a question on the topic. Let's hear it. Hey, Hollow, thank you for having me. Yeah, I think, you know, I asked my question, I think about when you guys were talked a little bit before you asked it, but I am curious sort of from the remaining people on the stage

in terms of the promise of TMS and psychedelics, you know, as a psychiatrist, I was really fascinated by the, you know, some of the articles that I come out recently about the studies and sort of what people are hearing and experiencing in their own practices there. Oh, and do you want to take this one? I was thinking that you had experience. It is kind of my life. So, Kat and I have talked about this a little bit in the past. We were the first practice in New York to bring S. Ketamine to the market as it were because there's a pretty restrictive risk evaluation and mitigation strategy or RAMMS program,

which makes it practically speaking a pain in the ass to deliver. It's also very expensive. That having been said, I've been frankly shocked at the efficacy of esketamine in our patients because we have like really treatment of factory patients on average. And essentially at time point one, the average bek Depression inventory score is 39.5, which is stratosphereically depressed for

people who aren't, you know, fans of rating scales. At time point two, and it doesn't matter when that is, the average is a 50 rating scales. At time point two, and it doesn't matter when that is, the average is a 50% drop. And that is freaking remarkable in the most treatment or fractal repressions. Keep in mind, we have transcranial, mygenic stimulation as well. So these are often patients who've already failed or had it fail them. That intervention, which is also tremendously powerful. So I've been more wellmed, I don't know about overwhelmed, but significantly wellmed by how potent esketamine is and the effect sizes on, you know, on MDMA, assisted psychotherapy are huge. If you looked at the psilocybin studies

published in the manual journal medicine, like at a study, they didn't power to show a difference. They had a difference on every endpoint, except the primary one. Like literally every secondary endpoint had statistically significant outcomes, which when you're comparing two things that are both active agents, like aspirin, plavix, and stroke, generally takes 10,000 participants.

In a, is two study that was like, we wonder what will happen. They're showing statistically significant differences. That tells me we're talking about effect sizes that are huge. These are not just statistically significant. They are wildly more potent and tolerable than the interventions we generally have

at our disposal in the whole form. And the only thing close is psychotherapy. Awesome. Cat, was that a helpful response? Yeah, wonderful. Thank you. It's really exciting to hear about and I think that there will be more conversations on it in the future.

So we're really excited to hear about what's next. Getting any of it paid for. That's a whole other conversation and I look forward to having with you in the future. Awesome. Thank you so much, Cat. I'm going to move you down to the audience and we're going to having with you in the future. Awesome, thank you so much, Kat. I'm gonna move you down to the audience. And we're gonna take our last question here. Before we do that, I do wanna say that this was recorded

for Young and Profiting Podcast, we are sponsored by Talkspace. If you guys wanna get $100 off your first month with Talkspace, head to talkspace.com, use the promo code Club and you'll get $100 off. So we're gonna move this along to the last question, Kinesha, how can we help you here? I love your question.

I saved it for last because I think it's a great way to end the show on a positive note. Hi, Paula. Thank you so much for this space. I mean, it's been so insightful to hear all the conversations around mental health and the importance of sleep. As a Gen Z, I definitely do not get a lot of sleep, and I'll hopefully be working more on that. But something that I'm really trying to learn

about as I continue along my journey of spreading hope is what is hope and hopelessness really mean and what is then the correlation between hope and mental well-being and if there is a correlation, then can we use hope as a means of therapy? Let's start with Nidhi and the Noan. This is such a great question, Kinesha, because I think that hope is at the crux of mental well-being, right? Like the belief that we have the potential

to manage and overcome challenges and adversity, mental health struggles, right? I think it's such a key component of being able to see the growth that happens, right, as we invest in our own treatment and our own well-being. So I love that you brought up hope. And something that I talk to often with my clients who are survivors of trauma is that while it feels as though so much of their life has been defined by these experiences that

were traumatic, that even more exciting and something that's so important to keep in mind is that there's the opportunity for post-traumatic growth. And I think that when we put it in the context that we have the opportunity to discover more about who we are, to truly connect with our purpose, to self-actualize in a whole other way, without being encumbered by this past experience that was impacting us

and impeding our functioning in such a deep manner, that I think it brings so much hope to recognize that we can not only move through difficult experiences, but come out the other side so much stronger and with the capacity now to handle it in a completely different way. So I love the fact that you brought this up. Thank you so much for bringing hope into the equation and the conversation here.

Thanks, Nanny. Let's kick it over to Owen. I think hope is like, is the only thing that actually eventually heals us in the end. But the problem with it is it's a little bit like aspirin that's not coated for some people. It can be really hard on your stomach. Hope in its unvarnished positivity form for people who are hopeless is going to feel really toxic. And they won't necessarily tell you that. They'll smile a nod and say, aha, and we refer to that in the mentalization-based treatment model as pretend mode.

So you're agreeing to have this fake conversation. I've talked to hundreds maybe thousands of this point of people who've attempted suicide or are considering doing so. And when you drop the BS and you're like, so you want to die, huh? If they are so relieved to just actually be able to talk about how hopeless they are, that actually opens the door to feeling understood and being held in mind as someone who's experiencing hopelessness and that is something that's understandable. That actually allows you to restore that sense of curiosity, which is like the coded aspirin version of hope.

Like, you don't have to, like, hope the future's gonna be better, but you can be like, well, I wonder what's gonna happen next. And as long as you're willing to turn to the next chapter, the next day in your life, you're not going to kill yourself. If you have hopes that can be dashed, it's less doable. And now I deal with a select group of individuals who like have had hope eradicated over and over again. And so approaching them with a more gentle version of, you know, deep darkness, but yeah, it's understandable. Works for some of them. I remember I worked with a girl in the state hospital system

and you know, I showed up with a guitar and sat down and said, hey, what's going on? We're just gonna sing your note today. And she ended up like asking for my name, I said, what's that for? She's like, well, you're the best psychiatrist I've ever seen. I'm summarizing your name down in my book. And I was the covering doctor that day.

And that was the real moment for me where that moment of hope for her, like meeting someone who understood her for once, which is really so powerful. She wanted to write my name down was a moment I felt really dark about because I was like nobody else has ever gotten through to this kid in the 14 years of her traumatized life before. And so hope has both the power to inspire and the power to destroy. And I think curiosity is in the middle and that lets us get to the next day so we can find the hope that's actually there, but that we might not be ready to see. Awesome. What a great question, Kinesha. Thank you so much. And sticking on hope, I do want to close out the session and allow an opportunity for Niddy, Kate,

Jonas, Owen, all of our participants who are still here to kind of chime in. So sticking on hope, what hope do you guys have in terms of the future related to mental wellness and mental health and the improvement of mental health in society? I know we talked about a lot of the negatives today. So what positives do you guys see coming along the way and what hope do you have on this topic? Maybe let's kick it over to Jonas.

Sure, so from my standpoint, Hala, first of all, thank you so much again for creating the platform for us to have this conversation. And thank you to all of the other panelists for their contributions. I would say this, that we're on a journey and that change requires time and commitment and conviction as well. I think for us to move the needle forward in terms of humanity and this conversation around what it means to be human and the full spectrum of emotions and challenges and the opportunities to build resilience

and learn and grow together is really what this is all about. You know, I'm sure someone has their familiar with the Dan Gilbert's work, Stumbling on Happiness, this idea that we're constantly growing, yet we tend to forget. And it's tied to this idea at the end of history illusion, meaning we can't change. We don't have any capacity to change.

And the reality is that we're constantly changing. We're constantly growing. We're moving backwards and forwards, and we're dealing with kind of surfing the waves of, and the physicists who's alive every day. And so the thing that I want to leave people with is this idea that we do have the capacity to change and that we're all in this together and that to know deeply and fully that you're not alone and to not isolate yourself, because

that's the worst thing you can do. So please make the effort, have the courage, and be willing to get the help that you need, even if it's so simple as asking a friend and just to hold your hand or whatever it might take, but put yourself on that in motion so you can give yourself a chance to succeed and be well. Awesome. Anybody else have some closing thoughts before we close out the room?

There's like the most tremendously helpful study of all time being published in the very near future. Dr. Nolan Williams group in Stanford is about to publish the randomized control trial on accelerated intermittent theta burst stimulation and treatment or resistance depression. And I'll sum it up. Vustly 80% remission of treatment or resistant depression in five days. And people who fail on average 13 medication trials. 80% depression over in five days with no medications whatsoever.

Wow, Mike dropped. That's now. That's true. Amazing. Yeah, it's bonkers. Awesome. Well, guys, this was such an incredible session. Looks like Niddy just has some closing thoughts. I'd love to hear them, Niddy. Sure. Thanks, Hala. Well, first off, I want to thank you so much for this beautiful discussion

today. If people haven't already followed Hala, please do so because she's just awesome. And, you know, my closing thoughts are feeling very hopeful that conversations like this are happening, that people are starting to see the value in investing in their mental health, that we invest so much in our businesses, we invest in our appearance, we invest in so many different facets of our lives, but that our mental health is at the core of our well-being. So we have to invest time, money, energy, all of these things into taking care of ourselves, and I am just so hopeful and optimistic that clubhouse has provided a platform for these types of discussions

and that the young and profiting podcasts is also featuring these types of conversations on mental health and well-being. So yeah, feeling very hopeful and grateful at the end of this. Yeah, Kate, go ahead. Yeah, I just wanted to say a quick thank you so so much, Hala, for this room and a big thanks to everyone else who has been listening and contributed to this discussion. I'm definitely

feeling so hopeful that the spotlight is really being shining on mental health. You know, I'm sad for how it sort of has gotten to this point that we really need to focus on our mental health. But I'm just so happy that we are finally kind of looking at this, talking about this. And my hope is that, you know, at some point in our future, we can kind of see the connection between our minds and bodies and see the importance of mental health

as it relates to holistic health, like physical health, it would be amazing to have at least a once a year kind of like mental health check up, like we do sort of an annual physical and to be able to collectively sort of work towards kind of seeing that there's nothing really wrong here. You know, our mental health is definitely something that we need to continue to support. And there's so many different ways to do it, especially with access to digital therapies,

seeing a therapist from the comfort and convenience of your home. So I do have a lot of hope for the future of healthcare, of mental healthcare, and I really hope we can continue these conversations. Thank you, Kate. That was beautiful, guys. This was so uplifting.

I feel like it was so educational. We covered so many different topics. We went into the science of things. We talked about spirituality. We talked about social media. We talked about different groups and how they're impacted with their mental health and it was just such an inclusive

Totally complete conversation, you know, and a lot of the questions that I didn't get to ask the audience asked So just worked out perfectly. I really enjoyed this session I do want to say thank you to our sponsors talk space if you guys want a hundred dollars off your first month of talk space Use the code club for a hundred100 off on talkspace.com. And when this gets uploaded to younger profiting podcasts, we'll put that in the show notes. And for everybody on stage, thank you guys so much for your time.

You spent two hours, you know, you're obviously dedicated to the cause. We appreciate all your knowledge. Everybody, please make sure you follow all the mods here on stage, on Clubhouse, on Instagram. And again, thank you guys for your time. I think it was an excellent conversation. And with that, this is Hala and friends signing off.

What a great session. Thanks guys again. And we'll see you again next week, Tuesday at 8 p.m. in the Human Behavior Club. Are you looking for ways to be happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative? I'm Gretchen Rubin, the number one best-selling author of the Happiness Project. And every week, we share ideas and practical solutions on the Happier with Gretchen Ruben podcast. My co-host and Happiness Guinea Pig is my sister Elizabeth Kraft.

That's me, Elizabeth Kraft, a TV writer and producer in Hollywood. Join us as we explore fresh insights from cutting-edge science, ancient wisdom, pop culture, and our own experiences about cultivating happiness and good habits. Every week we offer a try this at home tip you can use to boost your happiness without spending a lot of time energy or money.

Suggestions such as follow the one-minute rule. Choose a one-word theme for the year, or design your summer. We also feature segments like know yourself better where we discuss questions like, are you an over buyer or an under buyer? Morning person or night person, abundance lever or simplicity lever? And every episode includes a happiness hack, a quick, easy shortcut to more happy. Listen and follow the podcast happier with Gretchen Rubin.