Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctor's awake show, where I show you how bad States of mind, difficult life issues. Aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Hey people, thank you so much for tuning in today.
Speaker 1 00:00:33 Sitting here with my cup of cold ginger tea, my microphone, and a pretty important topic to discuss. So grab your own cup of something. If you want get comfortable and let's get into it. Now, if you're okay taking psychiatric medication, you may not want to listen to this episode. Also never stopped taking your meds without doctor supervision and therapeutic support. All right, I'm going to identify and explore a profound problem in traditional psychiatry and psychology and show how it prevents people from using their full potential to create true change and growth. Now, before jumping in, I want to address an issue with critiquing mental health practice. It's a highly sensitive topic. The awful stigma around mental health issues has people on guard against being put down and marginalized and rightfully so. Therefore, let me say in no uncertain terms, that I'm a champion of the fact that every human being has a life process to deal with and problems are unnatural.
Speaker 1 00:01:54 Part of it. In fact, we need problems without them. Our potential would go to sleep and we wouldn't grow. Problems are the voices of our subconscious are calling to wake up to the deeper dimensions of our lives. They're not just meaningless pathologies to get rid of, but we have to be careful not to misinterpret critiques of the system as indications of stigmatizing, people who are suffering to the contrary, the only way to make progress is to identify and challenge misguided methods. I know that casting doubt on current practices can be unsettling for some folks, but my goal is to promote a safer and more effective way of addressing what ELLs us. Okay, let's do this. When I lived in Switzerland, part of my doctoral research, involved looking at brain scans of depressed people. I noticed that what we did in the, and what the public thought we did were two entirely different things.
Speaker 1 00:03:04 I was where that there's always going to be a gap in what the public understands about science, but this particular misunderstanding disturbed me because of its implications. Psychiatry, big pharma work together to take advantage of the Publix science illiteracy each year, billions of drug company dollars, billions are spent on media campaign Hanes that exploit the fact that most people don't know how science works. These campaigns have been astonishingly successful at conveying a distorted picture of the relationship between the brain and mental health issues. The public consumes these ideas without being able to vet them. And then they become accepted commonplace ways of thinking our lab research involved correlating brain activity with people's depressed States of mind. Now these kinds of studies tell us nothing about a brain disorder causing depression or anything else about causation. The problem, however, is that the average person confuses causation with correlation.
Speaker 1 00:04:23 When you hear on the news that a certain illness or even event call it, why is that statistically linked to associated with or correlated with something thing, call it X. Do you think it means X causes? Y most people do, especially since the media likes to sensationalize these things, but statistical correlation or association or links has nothing to do with causation. It only means that two things are observed to happen at the same time. Otherwise you could say eating ice cream causes crime since an increase in the rate of these two events can be statistically correlated in the summertime. Proving cause and effect is a much more complex process. Scanning a depressed person's brain provides no information on whether the depression causes the brain activity. The brain activity causes the depression or a third factor drives both of these events. In fact, it gives no clues as to whether causality is even the right paradigm.
Speaker 1 00:05:41 For understanding depression, brain scans are highly effective for diagnosing things like neurological disease orders, strokes, and tumors, but useless. When it comes to understanding the contents of the mind. After 60 years of research still hasn't been a study confirming a biochemical cause of mental health issues. Not one. Let me repeat that. None nada, zilch when discussing the brain and mental health, all research reports use qualifying language such as might be, maybe could be, is thought to be in so on. This is because causation has never been demonstrated. There are only correlative studies showing brain activity that happens at the same time. A particular state of mind occurs without science literacy. The public doesn't notice how these unsubstantiated ideas have been marketed as established truths. The same is true for neurotransmitters. Like serotonin people have been convinced that depression is caused by a serotonin deficiency. Only problem is there are no studies proving it.
Speaker 1 00:07:08 There isn't even a way to diagnose a serotonin deficiency because there's no method to accurately test for it. And scientists don't know how much we're supposed to have in our brains. In the first place. There's a test that measures serotonin in the blood, but blood levels don't reflect brain levels. The blood test, this is only used to check for serotonin producing tumors outside the brain. All this is compounded by the fact that sir drugs like respiration, which decreases serotonin have antidepressant effects to bite what people have been told the medications they consume do not target and correct a serotonin deficiency nor any other kind of chemical imbalance. The FDA double-blind clinical trials for the most popular antidepressants have confirmed that. Most of the effect is placebo. The remaining effect comes from psychoactive ingredients, which rather than fixing a chemical imbalance actually creates one in order to produce a generalized altered state of mind that buffers your symptoms.
Speaker 1 00:08:23 The serotonin hypothesis has been around since the 1960s, but still has no studies to confirm it yet. Drug companies have spun it as an accepted fact in order to sell antidepressants without science knowledge, the public has had no choice, but to buy into this falsehood in order to instill this notion in people's minds, big pharma and psychiatry did something very clever. They appealed to our common sense. It makes perfect sense. I think that feeling depressed could be caused by a chemical imbalance. The problem with common sense, however, is that it can be wrong. For example, it makes total well sense to think the sun goes around the earth since you can watch it move across the sky. But in the 16 hundreds, Galileo proved that the earth actually goes around the sun. He knew this from his work in astronomy. Similarly in the early 19 hundreds, Albert Einstein's theory of relativity overturned the entire field of physics with theories that made mathematical sense, but were almost impossible to understand in a common sense way.
Speaker 1 00:09:38 There are lots of other examples I could tell you about where our census fail us, like the common sense perception that the earth is flat, but let's stay away from that one. The point is oftentimes science trumps common sense. If you don't have a rigorous science background and you hear enough times that depression is caused by a serotonin deficiency, you have no choice, but to believe it, and therein lies the genius of psychiatry and the drug companies. They know that because of medicines, fantastic advances in other areas, the uneducated public will easily buy into the notion of a chemical imbalance when it comes to mental health issues. They also know that the average person isn't analytical enough to identify the discrepancy between being told they have a specific identifiable chemical imbalance while being diagnosed through a questionnaire, instead of nickel test, think about it. If your mental health diagnosis is based on a brain chemical disorder, why isn't there a test to show this?
Speaker 1 00:10:49 Why is it determined? Two questions that have nothing to do with brain function? The answer is that mental health diagnosis has nothing to do with causes hypothetical or real. The psych manual, even explicitly States that the diagnoses no underlying causes principles or processes completely disjointed methodology with diagnosis being based on symptoms alone and treatment, at least in psychiatry being based on hypothetical causes. But most people have no awareness of any of this and they have no choice. But to go along with what they're being told, if you're suffering from chronic bad States of mind, you deserve more honest answers, more true knowledge and tools, not half-truths that lead to just masking symptoms with meds while marginalizing safer and more effective ways. Helping. For example, during the 10 years I lived in Switzerland, I worked with thousands of clients in a psych clinic in private practice.
Speaker 1 00:11:59 And in workshops, many of them came to me with diagnoses they'd received from their psychiatrists. A lot of them were on medications. Some claimed the meds were life-saving, but as I helped them process, their bad States of mind, everything began to change. Not only were most of them able to transform and heal their messed up minds, they became much more self-aware than they had been even before their problems had begun. In other words, they didn't just get better and go back to that. They were, they grew, this led me to the understanding that mental health issues are not diseases to suppress for life, but rather processes of profound, personal growth and change trying to happen. After a while, I had to explain to my clients, psychiatrists that while the meds had been taking the edge off, they're simple, they no longer needed them. In fact, the pills were just doling their senses.
Speaker 1 00:13:09 One thing I discovered, however, is that even though psychiatry says, these medications are non addictive, this is untrue. Many of these folks experienced withdrawal symptoms and worse problems than before they had started the meds, which is called a rebound effect. But working with their processes changed everything. The focus of the mental health field should be on developing and teaching methods for processing and transforming painful States of mind, not just on giving drugs and teaching coping skills, there's way too much emphasis on managing disease and too little on empowering people by giving them the tools to hack into their own States of mind in order to create real change. Being told that you just have to manage your problem implies you can't change it. What an ignorant and shameful perspective to give to people. It's a hypnotic induction that convinces them. They're ill for life. My entire career has been based on the fact that you can transform these difficult problems.
Speaker 1 00:14:23 You just need the right tools, big pharma and psychiatry take advantage of people by knowing that once an official explanation is given for their problems, regardless of how true it is, folks will defend that explanation at all costs. This is because when an authority figure tells you the cause of your difficulty, you feel a great sense of relief. Like finally, I understand my, and you therefore cling to the explanation. Some kind of understanding, even if it's wrong, often feels better than no understanding. The result is that some folks don't only buy into it. They become experts in it, religiously defend it, and can tell you with confidence all about brains, the scans neuro-transmitters and even genetic, without having even a basic science education in these fields. They'll say things like since depression runs in their family, it must be genetic without knowing that your psychology is also passed down through generations, regardless of genetics.
Speaker 1 00:15:33 They'll also assume that if it's genetic, it lies outside the realm of therapy intervention, to some extent, which will encourage them to minimize the role of actually working on their problems. This results in a sort of dissociation from one from one's own process, from one's own psychological growth, mind, body, and spirit. It gives people tacit approval for abdicating. The self-responsibility required for engaging with their own personal development. You know, I haven't illness that has nothing to do with me. It's just brain chemistry. All these ideas come from what they hear on the airwaves from each other or from their shrink. It's become a psychiatric culture of belief rather than of real science. It disempowers those suffering while creating a never ending income stream for psychiatry and the drug companies. Despite the fact that even the national Institute of mental health, the world's largest funding agency for mental health research has debunked the chemical imbalance hypothesis, the myth persists.
Speaker 1 00:16:51 And as they say, someone's laughing all the way to the bank psychiatrists. And to a lesser extent, psychologists have adequate science training and should know better, but it's not that simple. A growing number of practitioners view the psych diagnostic manual as a book of fictitious information based on ideology rather than science, but they can't act on this because insurance companies will only pay for diagnosed conditions. I know so many psychiatrists, psychologists therapists, and social workers who fudge diagnoses so they can get paid an inside joke amongst these professionals, is that when in doubt use the generic diagnosis known as adjustment disorder, which as you can guess can mean almost anything you want it to mean. The reason all this is important is because the chemical imbalance idea has become so pervasive. It convinces folks who don't have science awareness, that they have an illness on par with a medical illness and therefore require meds for life rather than using medication briefly in an initial crisis and quickly moving on to processing the problem.
Speaker 1 00:18:13 People have been convinced they're permanently sick. This is not only false, dangerous and irresponsible it marginalizes research into new therapy methods. It also creates a self reinforcing culture of disease instead of growth and transformation years of media campaigns and messaging from psychiatrists and drug companies have succeeded in spinning the data to their advantage. Now, if you doubt the power of these kinds of campaigns to influence hearts and minds, just look at a positive version of them. Years of advertisements on the dangers of smoking succeeded in turning around many decades of glorification of the practice, the result has been a drastic reduction in smoking rates for better or worse. The public tends to follow what they're told. When I look at the mental health field, I see an extremely fragmented picture, a mainstream tied to big pharma and the insurance companies, and literally hundreds of alternative approaches. Nowadays, you can go to any number of personal growth teachers, life coaches, and spiritual advisors, and can try an endless variety of therapeutic methods in the history of science. This type of fragmentation always occurs when a revolution is about to happen. Cracks appear in the status quo and new voices and visions arise. Who knows maybe the chemical imbalance idea that started 60 years ago will become a thing of the past and will truly learn how to process and transform our problems. See you next time, stay aware.
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