StarTalk Radio - Wrestling with Mental Health, with AJ Mendez

Episode Date: May 10, 2019

Neil deGrasse Tyson investigates mental health, wrestling, and more with AJ Mendez, aka AJ Lee, former WWE wrestler and author of “Crazy Is My Superpower: How I Triumphed by Breaking Bones, Breaking Hearts, and Breaking the Rules”. With co-host Chuck Nice and neuroscientist Dr. Heather Berlin, PhD.NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/wrestling-with-mental-health-with-aj-mendez/Photo Credit: © Cathy and David Photography, via theajmendez.com Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

From the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and beaming out across all of space and time, this is StarTalk, where science and pop culture collide. This is StarTalk. I'm your host, your personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm here with Chuck Nice, co-host. Yes, that's right. Chuck Nice Comic.

That's right, sir. Tweeting. At Chuck Nice Comic. Love you, man. Well, love you too, man. Thanks for, you're my man. You're here when I need you. Absolutely.

It wouldn't work if it went any other way. Okay. You're always here when I don't need you, Chuck. I don't know what it is about you. Get the hell out of here. Yeah, whenever I, every time I look up, you're here and I don't need you. Chuck. I don't know what it is about you. Get the hell out of here. Yeah, whenever I... Every time I look up, you're here and I don't need you. You got a very good point.

Today's show, we titled it Wrestling with Mental Health. Okay, so... Yeah, so what we have here is we're featuring my interview with AJ Mendez. A professional wrestler.

Yeah, she's a professional wrestler. Right. As in like WWE, WWF? All I know is that it begins with WW. Yes. I forget which one it is. Whatever the next one is. She's a professional.

And what would one have to do with the other? She wrote a book called Crazy Is My Superpower. Nice. And in it, you know, she struggles with her bipolar disorder. Right. And tried to find how to take control of that or possibly exploit the fact that it exists in some way that can serve her life. And so I just thought this was a fascinating story and a fascinating case.

Absolutely. And my notes say she's WWE. WWE. E. That's right. Superstar under her stage name's AJ Lee. Yeah. AJ Lee.

So I sat down with her in my office to discuss. Nice. Just who she is and what she's about. Okay. Let's check out the first clip. How did you navigate a path into the professional wrestling ring? Well, when I was growing up, I tried to find solace in- We're always growing up.

I know. Yes, okay. When I was physically this big. Okay. Pretty much the size of a large Cabbage Patch doll. Okay, yeah. I tried to find solace and escape in the world of fantasy and fiction.

And so that was comic books, that was anime, that was video games. But I found such an escape in these worlds of fantasy where there were superheroes that were strong in fighting crime, and the good guy would win at the end of the day. And then I found professional wrestling, and these people were flesh and blood superheroes

in spandex. They're bigger than life. They're bigger than life. Yes. And so from a young age I saw that it just spoke to me. And I saw a place for me that wasn't represented. Who was the superhero you wanted to be? I loved, and in the book I kind of shout out, the Dark Phoenix saga in X-Men. I thought that was a time when Chris Claremont was making women stronger and more of the leaders.

And then to have this character that was a good guy but then could change and was the bad guy, I related to that duality. And so I was so obsessed with that version of Jean Grey. Did you want to be the good part or the bad part or both? I wanted to be somewhere in between. I love when those lines blur. You know, I don't know if that's a common

among people in fandom, because so many stories rely on... Well, historically, so many stories relied on, that's the bad guy, that's the good guy. And maybe the better stories are where that's more nuanced. I think so, because where it's easy to know, okay, you have Superman and he's the good guy, sometimes maybe they're too good. Maybe it's impossible to achieve that level of purity.

So I always kind of related to the people who maybe had a little bit of dark thoughts that were maybe, you know, a little tiny savage who was swinging and hitting people in school. Maybe I did that. And to know that you could be redeemed, but you could also give in to those instincts, that was fascinating to me. Very interesting. Cool. Very, very, very, very good.

So we're going to bring in Heather Berlin, our go-to person about brain, in the next segment. Right. But before then, have you ever seen a professional wrestling match? What do you think of them? You know, I'm not necessarily a fan. I'm not a detractor. That sounds very euphemistic, Chuck.

Well. You're not necessarily a fan. Well, the thing is this. You don't want them coming after your ass. Yes, exactly. And I don't want their fans coming after me either because they're quite, how shall I say, spirited. No, I'll put it like this. It's not for me,

but I have spent so much time around people who enjoy wrestling that I know a lot about. So the most celebrated among them, the ones that I think have the most pageantry, are they any different from a superhero? Because they're doing super, super things in the ring. True. I mean, some of them are superhero-like.

I would say the difference is like what she was talking about with the nuances in the story arcs is that superheroes tend to be virtuous and good and righteous and forthright all the time. Right. Whereas the wrestling... Sometimes the bad guy wins. Right.

There's the person who's portrayed as the bad guy. And sometimes the bad guy becomes the good guy, and sometimes the good guy becomes the bad guy in their narrative arcs. Okay. You know? Okay. And so, for instance... So this would attract a geek subset maybe

because Super Heroes is very centered in the geekiverse. Yes, and I mean, a lot of them are extremely charismatic. I will tell you that. One of the most famous wrestlers of all time from the WWE. Rock. That's right, you know. Dwayne Johnson. Can you smell what The Rock is cooking?

And people would go insane. Uh-oh, somebody has seen all of these matches. Well, no, I'm telling you, I have not seen any of these. These are the people that I hang out with. Chuck, that was like a flashback. That worried me, the way you did that. Your eyes were like totally. Well, maybe I've seen him.

He's a very attractive man. That's all I can say. You know? And then, of course, like, John Cena is another one. So these guys go on to become... And they're good actors, yeah. Yeah, they become, you know, super popular actors. Well, part of their superhero strength is imparting pain on others.

Right. So that's an interesting question about pain in pro wrestling. So I broached that topic. Nice. With AJ Lee. So let's find out this concept of pain in pro wrestling. Sweet. So one of the things about professional wrestling

is the appearance of moves that would impart pain, but in fact don't. Right. How much of the performance is the illusion of pain to an audience that doesn't know that it's not actually imparting pain? So it's a little bit of a team effort. You need the audience to come in

with this suspension of disbelief. They need to think that if I throw a person toward ropes, they're going to hit the ropes and come back at me. It is that they want to believe. And then so much of it is trying to make it look like you are killing your opponent while simultaneously keeping them alive. You know, it's dangerous.

It's not good for the sport if you kill everyone. It's really not. No one's going to want to work with you. Right. And so it's this combination of taking care of a person's body and it's called selling. Them really selling the moves for you. So there must be some move school where you come up with really creative. I mean, I've seen stuff.

It's like, my gosh, how did that even work? Right. Right, right. like you said, some people, they jump up, the legs wrap, you fall down, but bones don't break, even though it looks like they might, but they don't, and somehow all the body parts work. There are techniques that you learn at the very beginning to, I can slip right now outside on the street and I'll fall in a way to protect my neck and my spine.

It just becomes your instinct. So there's different parts of the body you can kick that are safer that make a really loud noise so it sounds like it hurts. And it hurts, but it doesn't really injure you. And it's really, there's tricks to the trade for sure. So is it fair to say that the people who go to see professional wrestling, they're going to be entertained and to watch highly physically fit people

mull one another, but in a way, but in an entertaining way. Definitely. That's just what it is. Yeah, and I think it's like this kind of unspoken agreement with the fans. It's like, you know what you're getting. You have to suspend your disbelief when you enter

the doors and just kind of, you know, feel the moment. But I would compare it to like a Cirque du Soleil mixed with Saturday Night Live. There's improv. So much of it is planned and, you know, the finish.

But sometimes maybe the crowd doesn't like what you're doing. You have to change it on the fly. And you have to figure out a way to speak to your opponent without anyone seeing when you're surrounded at every angle. So it's an art form in that way, and it's a dance. And it's a little bit of everything, of every entertainment industry. So how do you prevent yourself from getting injured? And when you do get injured, did you have any regimen to come back from it?

How did that all come together? I think what made it more difficult for me is being bipolar and being on certain medications. When you get injuries, some people are like, okay, I'll take a painkiller. I couldn't do that. I didn't trust myself doing that. I didn't think that was safe. So I had to kind of power through all that stuff. Wow. Yeah.

So, interesting fact. When you think of injury, you think of what could break a bone. Right. So, but generally people don't think about acceleration rather than speed. Okay. All right. So, they say speed kills. about acceleration rather than speed. Okay. All right? So, they say speed kills. Yeah.

That's false. Okay. Acceleration kills. Acceleration kills. And negative acceleration, which we have a word for it, deceleration. Right. Deceleration is the most common thing that will kill you in anything. Okay.

So, that's why high jumpers, that's why pole vaulters right when they land on the other side they don't land on cement right yes exactly because if they land on cement well they don't they don't anymore in our day yeah i remember when it was a man sport you know so you fall and they reach their top speed and if you hit the cement you go from that top speed to zero in a fraction of a second.

Right. That breaks bones. Okay. So what you want to do is spread out the time over which you slow down. And arithmetically acceleration is

the change in your speed divided by the time. So if the time gets large your acceleration becomes less. So they land on pillows. So you hit the top of the pillow. Right.

And then they stop their motion by the time they squish to the bottom of the pillow. Right. So you spread that out. That's where they can pop up and take another pole vault. Right. After, and not just be scooped off the ground. So as is the truth. Those were the early pole vaulting matches where they just shoveled

you up. This isn't caveman time. Right, exactly. Ooh, Trog can't do it. Trog has won the gold medal, but he can only do it once. Alright, so, if you're not, if you don't want to get injured,

whatever it is you're doing while you're moving, make sure that you come to a stop over the longest amount of time possible. Okay? Right. If the ropes that the wrestlers get thrown into were made of steel, then they probably end up ripping the vertebrae on their back. Oh, God. Okay?

Oh, now you just made me love wrestling. Okay, but they're made of these sort of these elastic. So I throw you into the rope. Like a bungee. Like a bungee cord. It takes you a while to come to a stop. Right. And that energy is preserved in the rope,

and you just bounce back. Right. So, and have you ever played on a wrestling mat? Never. In a professional mat, it's very springy. No. You're not thinking of that because you're paying attention to the wrestlers.

Right. But if you look at when they get thrown down, it actually has give to it, spring give to it. Right. So that you don't, you know, break your spleen getting slammed onto the mat. Right. It takes you a few inches to go in and then come back at and then that. But you hear it when they hit it. It's bop, bop, bop, bop.

Like you hear that kind of. You really are a fan. You've been to these matches. No, no. The way you. Oh, yeah. No, I'm not. I'm telling you, blah, blah. Like you hear that kind of... You really are a fan. You've been to these matches. No, no. The way you... Oh, yeah. I'm telling you, I'm not. Really?

I can stop any time. You're reciting to me what the mat sounds like after they get thrown onto it. Yeah, that's kind of what it's telling. So it's all about acceleration. And so if you're in a car accident, your chances of survival are much greater if the car takes a long time

to come to a stop. That's why airbags deflate when you hit them. Well, that's why you have airbags. You hit the bag of air instead of the dashboard. True, because the bag with the air actually deflates.

It will cushion you to have more time for you to come to a stop. When Dale Earnhardt died, his car accident was, he was going 200 miles an hour and then zero in a fraction of a second. Right. When Dale Earnhardt died, his car accident was, he was going 200 miles an hour and then zero in a fraction of a second.

I said, he's not surviving that. People didn't see a twisted wreck. They didn't see flames. They didn't see tires rolling down. That's the good stuff. The usual spectacular crashes. That's when you know the driver's okay. That's more likely to be okay

because it took a long time for that car to come to a stop. Right. And that's why they have these videos and they walked. Right, they get out every time and wave to the crowd. So the and they walked part is,

well, here is, it's because, oh my gosh, look what happened to the car. Right. And the car, you know, breaks into pieces over 100 yards and the guy gets out and walks because it took that long

to come to a stop. So it really should be called, of course they walked. Of course they walked. If you know physics. Physics 101, of course they walked. If you know physics. Physics 101. Of course they walked. Unless you ruin everything.

No, I'm sorry. So Chuck, getting back to AJ's bipolar disorder. Yes, right. She wanted to sort of reclaim the word crazy. Right.

In her own way. So let's find out what's behind that. Check it out. It was a very conscious decision to use a word that might be divisive, that it might make people, I might rub people the wrong way and I've always kind of enjoyed that.

And the point in doing that is when you have these words that make people go, you give the word, letters, power over you. And so for me, every, I've been labeled so many things. I've been called bitchy, I've been called loud, I've been called impulsive, I've been called poor, ugly, freak, rebel, crazy.

I didn't call you any of those. Doesn't mean I'm not thinking them. You're nice. No, no, no. You're nice on the outside. I try to avoid labels because they're excuses for not thinking more deeply about the nuances of who a person actually is. Definitely. And these were things that were used against me.

They were sharpened and used as a weapon against me. And when you own it and when you say, oh, being crazy has given me power and it's given me talent that I wouldn't have if I wasn't. And being short and looking different than the other girls made me successful. It was the reason for my success. I own it now and I control it. I have the power. And I think that's the first step

in destigmatizing mental illness, is there shouldn't be hush words. We should be able to talk about it, joke about it as I do. I take nothing so seriously where I can't make fun of myself. And that's kind of the first step in the conversation starting.

There you go. So, Chuck, when we come back, we're going to bring in Heather Berlin to get to the bottom of this. So we'll be right back. Stay with us. this is star talk we're back on star talk we're featuring my interview with aj mendez professional wrestler who suffers from bipolar disorder,

but turned that into her superpower and wrote a book, Crazy Is My Superpower. And Chuck and I have been talking about her in the wrestling ring, but to take this any steps further, we need some real brain expertise here. So we bring in Heather,

Heather Berlin. Yes. No stranger to StarTalk, not only on the flagship, but also you've hosted our StarTalk All-Stars. Yes. No stranger to StarTalk. Not only on the flagship, but also you've hosted our StarTalk All-Stars. Yes. So thank you for doing that. Happy to be here. Wonderful to have you. And of course, so we're first airing this in Mental Health Awareness Month.

All right. The month of May. We get a whole month. A whole month. Wow. So tell us, what is bipolar disorder? Because I don't really know. And I bet many people don't really know. Ah, okay. And I bet many people don't really know.

Yeah. So bipolar, it's not just one thing. There are actually different types. We can put it in different categories of bipolar disorder. Yeah. So basically, in general, it involves having both depressive episodes and then manic episodes. Is manic the opposite of depression? Yes, yes.

Manic is like, you know, being basically high on coke. Yeah. It's kind of the... Right. Not that I would know. Not that there's anything wrong with that. No, yes, exactly. But no, when people are manic,

actually, you know, they often enjoy the manic episodes. They have racing thoughts. They have a lot of energy. They don't really need a lot of sleep. They feel very creative. But they can also be impulsive and go on shopping sprees and things. But it actually, subjectively,

feels really good to be in these states. Sounds a lot like meth. Yeah, pretty much. But not everybody has, there's differences in terms of the severity of the manic episodes. So some people have what we call hypomania, which is kind of a mild episode of mania.

Hypo as the opposite of hyper. Yes, yeah. But they're still manic, but it's just a more mild manic episode. Right. And so if you have both a major depressive episode and then you have a hypomania, you have what's called bipolar 2 disorder.

Type 2. Type 2. Oh, cool. Bipolar type 2. Oh, it's like a mental version of diabetes. Right. Thank you, Chuck, for that deep insight. Deep physiological insight.

I should have went to medical school. Actually, in astrophysics, we have type 1 and type 2 supernovae. Supernovae? Yeah. They have two different origins. Right. So type 1 is basically when you have a major,

you have a manic episode, and you don't necessarily need a depressive episode. Usually you'll eventually get one, but just having one major manic episode, you'll get diagnosed with bipolar type 1. And then usually eventually you'll have some sort of depressive episode down the road. What causes it? Why do some people have it and others not?

That's a really big question. That usually means you don't know the answer. Well, we have a couple of answers. You have some hypotheses. We have some hypotheses. We have some hypotheses. Yes. We know that at least 85% of variants, it's related to genetics. So there's a huge genetic component to it.

We know there are general patterns of brain activation that we see in people with bipolar disorder that have to do with regulating emotion. So parts of the brain, the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, which regulates the amygdala and emotional parts of the brain, doesn't work as well. Chuck, how's your amygdala? Oh, it's in terrible shape. I can tell you that right now. And their amygdala seems to be like super active, very active, but it's not as active in the prefrontal cortex. So they can't modulate those strong emotions as well.

And so your amygdala, is that where your fight or flight comes from? Is that your kind of lizard brain? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's your like primal. Primal.

Yeah. And you need the higher order parts of the brain to contain that. Exactly. I mean, if you get angry with someone, you just punch them without actually regulating this primal behavior. Right, because normally you have that urge, okay, I'm going to, I feel like

punching you, for example, Chuck, I don't know. And then another part of my brain would say, wait, you know what, that might not be the best idea. And then that part of your brain says, punch him harder. Right. Exactly. So it's the same thing with, you know, these urges, but also with emotions. So you might have a feeling of extreme sadness

or extreme happiness. And normally our brain kind of modulates it because we want homeostasis. We want to be kind of in our kind of comfort zone. But when there's dysregulation there, then you have these high highs and these low lows. So what's the treatment? So we, you know, treatment has not really evolved that much in the last 50 years. Still. Electroshock therapy. No. The first line treatment is still basically lithium which is a basic element in the periodic table.

Don't ever do that people. Just letting you know. Thank you Chuck for your medical advice here. Just going to let you know man don't ever do that lithium. Lithium salt. There's actually

cosmological lithium not very much of it in the universe. Oh interesting. Very little of it but it's there. The Big Bang made some lithium I'm just saying. Was very much of it in the universe. Oh, interesting. Very little of it, but it's there. The Big Bang made some lithium. I'm just saying.

Was the Big Bang depressed? Big Bang. You know, Big Bang has issues. Right. Self-medicating. Self-medicating. It doesn't understand its origin. Who am I?

Why am I here? The Big Bang has existential anxieties. The Big Bang has it. There's no hope for any of us. I'm going to suggest that you take some cosmological lithium. Actually, it probably is. I don't think we make it otherwise. You get it from nature.

Yeah, it's from nature. Yeah, so it's Big Bang lithium. That's it. Exactly. And so that's the first-line treatment. Then we have other variations. We have anticonvulsant drugs, which are also considered to be mood stabilizers.

Now, antidepressants, interestingly, you would never give them alone to treat bipolar disorder because it actually can throw you into a manic phase. Yeah, so it's just like, I'm going to take my antidepressants. Like, all right, this is awesome. Everything is awesome. Everything is awesome. Yeah, exactly. And you don't sleep for five days.

Exactly. I'm totally fine. I don't know what your problem is. I'm doing great. Well, we've got a clip of AJ talking about treatment. Oh, great. Let's see where she takes us on that. How early in your life were you self-aware that you had bipolar disorder?

Because you bring it out in this book. I think for many people, it's their first time knowing this about you. Is that correct? It is. I can't remember a time when I didn't feel like there was something a little off with me, but I was only officially diagnosed when I was 19, 20, so it took me a while. But once I got diagnosed, everything kind of made sense. And whatever stress factor the bipolar disorder had on you, you were nonetheless still creative and productive as a student. Definitely.

So when you're diagnosed at 19, is there medication to tamp it down? Or how does that work? Definitely. And forgive my ignorance of it because I don't know. You know, a lot of people get intimidated about the long road to recovery. And sometimes people get misdiagnosed as just being depressed. And antidepressants are really dangerous if you're bipolar. But when you find the right diagnosis, it's a bit of a struggle to get your perfect formula for treatment.

But if you just fight through that... It's balancing the chemistry of you. It really is. It is. Even relative to someone else that could have the same diagnosis. Yes, two people are not going to have the same treatment. They're not going to have the same medication. Or just how they treat themselves in life, whether it's meditation or exercise or therapy.

You have to find the right cocktail for you. And I found that, luckily, early enough to gain complete control over my life. So I like the fact that you've included exercise and meditation as part of what is the cocktail. Yes, definitely. The cocktail is not just the chemistry that you ingest. It's the rest of how you manage your life. I think so. And I think not only is there, you know, a science

behind it of your, you know, the serotonin and the endorphins that it's releasing when you get that high. But there's something about feeling capable and feeling strong and, okay, I can lift this weight or I did a four mile run. And just feeling capable is something that will bring you out of any funk that you're in. Heather, I'm curious, in modern day, what is, it's probably not, probably can't answer this in a general way, but then be specific if you need to. What is the mixture of drugs versus couch therapy in your universe. And when do you say, we can fix this, just lay down on a couch and talk about your problems? And when do you say, I got a pill, call me in the morning?

Right. So the thing that's important to remember is that every thought you have is related to some underlying brain, physical brain process. So once thoughts become to a place where they're so abnormal or in a sense so hard to control, whether they're negative thoughts or even highly positive thoughts, then you really need to look at the underlying neurochemistry and see, is there a neurochemical imbalance that's causing the imbalance of these thoughts or emotions? And if there is, it's usually one answer is not enough we find that the best effects is there's a synergistic effect when you treat with a medication with to a brain that needs it and together with talk therapy or psychological therapy so it's healing the thoughts in the brain at the same time you'll get a better effect than either on its own. That being said, though, if there's somebody who might have some sort of psychological problems, but they're not related to a neurochemical imbalance, then taking the

drugs can actually do more harm than good. Absolutely. So is it possible that an emotional problem can lead to a neurochemical problem? So you start off with a trauma or a problem, and that problem actually changes your brain to, alters it so that you actually have a neurochemical problem. He's asking about a friend of his. Absolutely. Well. The friend of trauma.

I'm trying to save some money. That's all I'm doing. Let me ask Heather. Maybe I can cancel my appointment this week. Well, I might have to charge for this then. It's always this sort of, it's a dance between our brain is constantly getting information and interacting with its environment and it's developing and changing because of the environment. I mean, that's what memory is.

Memory is an actual physical change in the brain. So we do know that, especially in the developing brain, which is most vulnerable, if you're exposed to a stressor and especially to repeated stressors, it actually releases cortisol and it can affect things like the development of the hippocampus, for example. So people who have early life stressors. That's why they talk about how impactful childhood trauma can be, even late into adulthood. Yes. I mean, trauma at any stage can be impactful, but it's even more so in childhood because the brain is still developing and is much more vulnerable. And so we know that in older, when we look at adult brains, people who

have certain psychiatric illnesses have smaller hippocampi, have smaller amygdala. And then the question becomes, is it because they were exposed to early life stressors or is it because they might have a genetic predisposition? They were born that way and they don't have this neuroprotective factor. Like maybe having a larger hippocampus and amygdala protects you from developing psychiatric illness when you're under stress. So we just, we don't know what came first, the chicken or the egg, but yes, environmental experiences can certainly affect the brain. Chuck was a big man on his hippocampus. Oh, God. That's a scientist.

For the next clip. Trying to be funny. I asked AJ. So for the next clip, I asked AJ, is there any part of her personality that she either credits or blames on her bipolar disorder? Check it out.

For me, it is the source of my powers, if you will. I find that I believe in myself possibly a little too much sometimes. You know, I was, I don't think a lot of people thought you could go from homeless to being a champion on television or that you can go from being underweight and sickly to being in wrestling, into an athletic career. There's a lot of people that didn't think a pro wrestler was smart enough to write a book by herself. Not to put words in your mouth, but you would say that being bipolar, in a way, defined who you came to be.

It definitely did. In childhood and as an adult. Yes. As a kid, whether I realized it or not, but looking back, I know, as far as I can remember, I have been bipolar. We just didn't diagnose it. But it made me braver. It made me tougher. It made me a little brazen, and maybe that rubbed people the wrong way, but at least I was always honest.

It rubbed them an honest way. Yeah. And, you know, I'm the kind of person that can't really keep my mouth shut if I see there's some sort of injustice in the world. Even if I have to stand up alone, I'm going to stand up. And then you could just say, otherwise I'll kick your ass. Exactly. It's for real. I mean, why not?

Okay. And so being, like, extra empathetic because you have this large range of emotions. I can feel other people's pain, maybe a little too deeply, but at least I understand them. And so it is the source of, I think my best qualities have come from being bipolar. And I'm afraid to think of who I would be without it. See, I'm going to push back on that just a little bit. Well, let's find out something from Heather.

Heather, clearly severe mental illness is contraindicated in evolution, we might think. We might think that if you can't really function or you're not connected to reality, that would have been selected out evolutionarily, but apparently it hasn't. Is there any insight in your profession about that? Yeah, well, a number of the psychiatric illnesses don't develop until you make babies. Exactly. So there it is.

It might have an early advantage in some sense, and then afterwards, but now we're surviving longer. But in general, it usually is more harm than good. And it's hard to say, let's say, for example, in general, it usually is more harm than good. And, you know, it's hard to say, let's say, for example, what she would be like.

She might still have all those positive traits without the disorder. I think. Wait, wait, wait. Go ahead. But wait. But wait. Not to be devil's advocate, but suppose you found a way to snip, nip tuck in the brain so she never had bipolar disorder. Then, according to her, and I believe her, she would have never become the person who she is.

But that is because she is ascribing her achievements to the bipolarism. This is my point. So who are you as a mental health professional to say who should or should not have one illness or another, if the fact of overcoming the illness is what shapes who you become in life? But see, here's the problem. Did I ask you this question? I'm sorry. You have an MD after your name?

No, just PH. No D, just PH. I'm PH balanced. I don't have just pH. I'm pH balanced. I don't have a PhD. I'm pH balanced. pH 7. Or unbalanced. Go ahead, Heather.

No, so... pH balanced. I have a PhD. I have a PSB, not a PhD. Okay. So, the amount of suffering, subjective suffering, that the illness causes the patient is one of the measures that we use in terms of the diagnosis. So because most of it is subjective, some of it is out behavioral, you know,

if someone's acting out impulsively and then it's affecting other people. But say something like depression, we have to ask the person, how do you feel? How much subjective suffering is this causing you? And if a person says, you know what, I'm perfectly fine with my mental illness. This is, you know, I think it brings me, you know, whatever, my creativity, you know, that's their choice. So I'm not saying we need to eradicate all mental illness, but I think it would help to eradicate human suffering. And the majority of the time it causes more suffering than it does good. Really good answer there. Yeah. Thanks.

You're like, yeah. I wasn't saying yeah to that. Yeah, it was a good answer.. Yeah. Oh, thanks. You're like, yeah. No, I wasn't saying yeah to that. No, I mean your Chuck's version of that. Yeah, it was a good answer. It was an answer. I was thinking to myself. I just think that we... No, that's very cogent.

Thank you. That's very insightful. Thank you. I think all human beings have a tendency to attribute their success to things that otherwise they would not if they didn't have that success. Something called abnormal. Right. Exactly. So for instance, you know, OK, let's just take I was bullied as a

kid. Right. But, you know, there's a part of me that feels like, you know, the fact that I never backed down from bullies and the fact that I was able to handle it makes me a stronger person. And therefore, I am who I am today because I was bullied. Right. And then my wife will say, no, could you just imagine yourself if you were loved and nurtured and only. You understand? Right.

So like I'm saying. Oh, I see. So you after the fact. Right. Describe why. Right. When it might have been that way anyway. It might have been that way anyway.

Or you might have been better. Yeah. Even better. Exactly. How about Van Gogh and Beethoven? Rumors that they were both bipolar. Okay, so there's this sort of myth because people take these very sort of prominent case individuals and say, look, that person was super creative and they also had some sort of mental illness.

Therefore, those two things must go together. But the truth is when you look at the epidemiology and the statistics, it's just not true. It just happens to be because there's a certain proportion of the population that develops these types of mental illness. In the Venn diagram of artists and people with mental illness, some of them are going to be both. Exactly. And there's also

some highly creative people who don't have mental illness. So it doesn't necessitate it. If anything, they were good artists despite it. M.C. Escher, for example. He grew up in a wealthy family. Right. Highly productive. Had it all.

Had it all. Loved it, everything. Right. Nobody's making a movie about his midnight torment. Right. Right. Right. And he gave us all those great drawings, and he was an awesome rapper.

Yes. M.C. Escher, of course. Oh, my God. Heather, I thought you were quick to do that I know I know well you say rapper

and it goes I go straight to my husband I'm like what rapper huh and I get all distracted I'll tell you my rap name what MC squared

oh my god twice in the same show we gotta take a break when we come back more of my interview the Star Talk interview with AJ Mendez, professional wrestler. And we're crazy.

Here's her superpower from StarTalk. Unlocking the secrets of your world and everything orbiting around it. This is StarTalk. We're back for my final segment of StarTalk, featuring my interview with A.J. Mendez, professional wrestler, author of Crazy Is My Superpower. And I've got Heather Berlin here to help us out because we're talking about neurological issues.

Yes. And I have Chuck here. So for my next clip, she describes just what she had to do in her life to deal with this affliction. Let's check it out. There's definitely evidence that the Hispanic community

reports their mental illness less, and they get less treatment. There's this feeling of machismo and this tough-as-nails sort of mandate amongst our families. And so that was one thing against me. Being a tiny woman was another thing that was against me. And I think there's something about being young and naive and kind of just hopeful that you can really do anything in the world and not knowing the realities of the world that somehow it didn't stop me. It just made me want to kind of fight for it harder. If more people felt that way. I hope so.

Think about how transformed the world would be. I think we get jaded. We just give up. Yeah, and you give up, especially when it gets hard, when there's the first roadblock. Yeah, you measure the forces

and then you look at your fuel supply and you say, I don't have enough. I'll just go the path of least resistance. Exactly. But the world is shaped by those who take the path of most resistance. Definitely.

Such as yourself. Damn, did I say that? Yeah, good one. So coming from a Hispanic family, as she said, it's underreported mental illness. Could you comment on just what the challenges are for any person to be candid or honest about their mental illness just as a person separate from what might be cultural? Yeah. There's a lot of stigma and there's definitely cultural. Still.

Still. Yeah. Cultural variation. It's gotten much better. I mean, much better. It used to be. And everyone talks about, you know, I go to my therapist. Yeah.

That used to be. You never used to hear that. Right. Everybody's talking about it. Yeah. It's become. So it's in the sort of public zeitgeist and it's accepted. However, in cultures where, you know, there's still this kind of, you know, you're supposed to don't cry and, you know. Yeah, and in war veterans, I mean, they're free to admit to their PTSD because, you know, they don't want to lose their jobs and they don't want to, you know.

And so it's a process. It's getting better. PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Yeah, yeah. But there are people who are breaking the stereotypes and they're sort of role models that are like these tough, big, macho men who are like, look, I have this mental illness

and I'm getting treated for it and that's okay. There are ads in the subway now with, who's our big swimmer guy? Michael Phelps. Michael Phelps. Oh, you don't take the subway apparently, Heather. Okay. Ads in the subway. Okay.

The real people take the subway. There he is saying, therapy has helped me. It can help you. And he's just out there with it. And he's a famous guy. And there are other famous people. The actress in La La Land, her name is Emma Stone.

Emma Stone. She came out and talked about her childhood severe anxiety and OCD and did a whole obsessive compulsive disorder. And so, you know, when you get people like this who are willing to come forward and speak up, it makes it better for everybody else

and easier to come out. That seems to be true for everything. So, for example, come forward and speak up, it makes it better for everybody else and easier to come out. And yeah. That seems to be true for everything. So for example, the number of people who went in for colon cancer screening after Katie Couric's husband died, that effect on the health of the country

and even the world was greater than any public service announcement that doctors could possibly make. Yes. I owe my healthy colon to Katie. That's for sure. Really? Okay.

So it's in your hands, celebrities. Yes. Power is in your hands. Oh, my God. I thought you meant my colon. So this whole celebrity thing, AJ is sort of part of that. Yeah.

Yeah. And again, her stage name is AJ Lee. So let's find out what she's been doing to try to get the word out. Let's check it out. So other than your book, do you have other ways to sensitize people to mental health? By the way, just to be clear,

when I was growing up, nobody talked about mental health. Exactly. Just, you did about mental health. Exactly. That just, you did not go there. Exactly. Yeah. And that's what, in my family, you didn't talk about it. It wasn't real.

And that's why it took so long to start helping myself. So my goal is to get people to start helping themselves a little bit earlier. I believe most people, it takes 10 years between onset of symptoms to getting any sort of treatment, which is terrifying what can happen in those 10 years. Not that it should take 10 years, just in practice. People generally, it takes them that long. They're denying it because they're afraid to acknowledge it. They're afraid of what it means if they have something wrong with them that needs treatment.

Meanwhile, if you've got some other physical ailment, you go immediately. Yeah. If you got a cut, you put a Band-Aid on it. If you're sick, you take cold medicine. If you break a bone, you go to the hospital. But when you can't see mental illness, people don't really pay attention. And so what we're trying to do is start people young. And so what we're trying to do is start people young. The Jed Foundation is an organization that focuses on youth and kids in high school or

grade school that have all these pressures from a million different angles and are just trying to figure out who they are. And some of them, on top of that, are trying to figure out the changes in their brain chemistry and trying to understand that. So they are really... It's amazing we survived middle school and high school at all. Really! And then imagine feeling a little bit weaker or a little bit sadder. And so they are a really great resource if you want to see if what you have is ordinary or if it maybe requires a little bit more treatment or a little bit more of an effort. So if you want to learn about symptoms and about coping mechanisms,

I would suggest people go to jedfoundation.org. Jed? Help. J-E. J-E-D. J-E-D. Foundation.org. Slash help.

And that's a really good jumping off point for, I would say, middle schoolers and high school kids. You make a great point because let's say you're struggling or you're sad. You don't know enough to know whether it's a clinical chemical problem or whether you just need to talk to a friend or both. Yes, exactly. And they have resources where you can see, you can kind of compare what you're going through.

Does it last longer than two weeks? Is your appetite changing? Is your sleep pattern changing? Little things. And whether it's happening in you or maybe your best friend is going through it, they have some guidelines that can help you out just getting started. And I'm also working with NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. And right now we have a campaign that's called, that is to fight stigma.

If people can go to nami.org slash stigma free, they can take the pledge to stop shaming mental illness and start talking about it. And the second, it just becomes conversational and it's something that we're not so scared of. That really is the first step at any age to treatment and healing. So Heather, you straddle two worlds as I see it. You think a lot about mental health that might be cured by conversation or insights into what's driving people's thoughts, but you also have looked inside people's brains. What's the future of treatment of mental illness?

When will the day come where there are no mental asylums? Yeah, that's a big question. You know, where we're going... And is the future in... Once you know... I'm making this up, but imagine the day where you've mapped every single neuron. And you say, there's the criminal neuron

or there's this neuron, and let's snipip, snip, scrap, redirect. And now this psychopathic behavior is over. If only it were so easy. Because even if we map the entire brain, the complexity of what entails just having a simple thought, much less a mental disorder, we might not be able to crack that code. However, I do think we are getting closer in another direction

is looking at the human genome and mapping that on to cognitive function and to certain types of disorders. Now, I do think that we will be able at some point to, if using things like CRISPR, modify the genome and perhaps prevent some of these things before they even go on to develop. This is like home kit to gene splice. Yeah. CRISPR.

I mean, it's going to be, you know, at that sort of designer baby point. But there's a lot of obviously ethical issues with that. And you don't know what, at that level, you don't know what you're going to be sacrificing because of that. I think what's closer in terms of our lifetime is things like neural prosthetics. We're putting neural implants to stimulate parts of the brain to treat psychiatric illness. And also, really, another non-invasive novel treatment are the use of psychedelic drugs to treat these illnesses. So, we just got FDA approval for...

For LSD? Really? Really? FDA's come a long way. No, ketamine, right? Ketamine, yeah. Which is K. Yeah, special K. We have intranasal.

I don't know anyways. Oh, okay. So you see now, see you weren't- That's how wholesome I am. You weren't hanging in the clubs. No, I was not. Yeah, see you were too busy studying.

I was getting my physics, astrophysics PhD. Right, well, K, well, see when your pH balanced instead of PhD- You got a lot of special K. You know that special K. So basically it's an anesthetic.

It's a dissociative anesthetic that was used actually in children to put them out under anesthesia. But in small doses, you get these dissociative effects. It was a club drug. So I was there in the early trials of this because it's looking at depression,

major depression, not just as involving serotonin, but also the glutamatergic system in the brain, another neurotransmitter system in the brain. And miraculously, people with severe depression who are suicidal, who have tried every other drug, antidepressant, this has intravenous ketamine has amazing effects. I mean, and I see it in patients like anecdotally,

and then we know it from the research. So they just earlier this year approved intranasal spray, sort of a cousin of ketamine, an isomer, that will treat depression. And we are looking at things like psilocybin, now still in experimental stages, and basically the ingredient in mushrooms. So it's all chemical?

It's chemical. You're reminding us we're a sack of chemistry, and you're jumping in with your own set of chemicals. Right. We just saw. So my best friends are made of chemicals. Yeah. I think these are temporary fixes. They're not cures until we really understand how the brain works. Yeah. But for every successful chemical, that's evidence of a deeper understanding of what's actually happening chemically in your brain. Yeah. That's got to help going down the line. It helps.

It's a piece of the puzzle. There's a lot of pieces to the puzzle. There's, you know, the neurophysiology and the neurochemistry and the neuroanatomy and the genetic aspects and epigenetics. So there's a lot, but it is another piece of the puzzle that gets us closer to the answer.

Sweet. All right, we got to wrap this down. Chuck, you got any final thoughts? Oh, no. I think I'm going to say this down. Chuck, you got any final thoughts? Oh, no. I think I'm going to say my final thoughts. Sorry. Okay, what, Chuck? No, no, no, no.

You just reminded me to make an appointment to see my therapist. That's all. Okay, good. I'm glad. Well, I'm taking patients, so you can look me up online. Okay.

No, I mean, my thought is that I just really hope that we can get to the day where everybody can look at the brain just like any other organ. And when it's broken, we can look for ways to fix it. And we can work towards removing the stigma. I think it's really important. Yeah. So Heather, I'm going to disagree with you about something. Uh-oh. There we go. Mm-mm. There we go.

Okay. I just want to say that the universe looked really complicated until Isaac Newton came along and showed that the movement of the planets previously given unto mysterious divine forces were explainable by just a couple of equations. And so his genius simplified that which was previously imagined to be intractably complex, requiring divine knowledge of the universe

to even understand it. So dare I say, Heather, that however complex you think the brain is, maybe we are awaiting the birth of an Isaac Newton counterpart in neuroscience who, rather than become stupefied by

its complexity, becomes enlightened by its simplicity. And that is a cosmic perspective. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. You're a personal astrophysicist. I want to thank Heather Berlin for being on the show

Chuck you're still hosting Playing With Science that's right sir Playing With Science that's our sports spin-off our sports spin-off which you know

you can find Heather being a guest on that show as well I get around damn Heather I get around damn I have no loyalty

it was about brain injuries and yeah and you can brain related with sports we go to heaven that's going to be a lot boxing

football oh man it's a lot MMA it's all there it's all there alright we gotta go till next time I bid you

to keep looking up