The One You Feed - Eric Maisel: Rethinking Mental Health

Episode Date: November 8, 2017

Dr. Eric Maisel is a prolific writer, to say the least. His numerous publications span the human experience and explore how to interact with the various situations that one may encounter. In this interview, he discusses a couple of his books and spends a great deal of time explaining how he thinks depression should be treated vs how it is currently being diagnosed and treated. It's a different way of thinking about this subject and if it's a topic you're interested in, you owe yourself a listen.This week we talk to Eric MaiselEric Maisel, Ph.D., is is the author of more than 40 books. His titles include, Why Smart People Hurt, Making Your Creative Mark, The Van Gogh Blues, Mastering Creative Anxiety, and Creativity for LifeIn addition, Dr. Maisel is at the forefront of the movement to rethink mental health. He writes the Rethinking Psychology blog for Psychology Today and among his books in this area are Rethinking Depression and The Future of Mental Health.His latest book is called Overcoming Your Difficult Family: 8 Skills for Thriving in Any Family Situation. In This Interview, Eric Maisel and I Discuss...The Wolf ParableHis book, Overcoming Your Difficult Family: 8 Skills for Thriving in Any Family SituationHis book, The Future of Mental HealthThe smartness to understand what's going on with your familyThe strength to make the changes that you need to makeThe strength to be calm, or have a difficult conversationHaving clarity about what's going onAwareness of the situationThe courage to make change because change has consequencesThe skill of presenceBeing resilient - family members, especially siblings, don't go away like other relationshipsVisualizing the "calmness switch" within youThe importance of learning one anxiety management tool because you will have anxiety in lifeHow you name the problem often directs you to the situationThe importance of languageThe importance of knowing the causes of things regarding your healthLiving intentionally, identifying your life purposes and making meaning in your lifeHow thinking that all we are is matter, chemicals etc can lead people to feel less excited about livingEach person has to make the decision to opt to matter, to decide that you matter and that your decisions matterThe cultural trance of tvwww.madinamerica.comStigmatization of mental healthThe three parts of personality: Original Personality, Formed Personality, Available PersonalitySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this modern world, with so much that we have, people are nevertheless not feeling like they have enough because they're not living their life purposes. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Eric Maisel, PhD. Eric is the author of more than 40 books, and his titles include Why Smart People Hurt,

Making Your Creative Mark, The Future of Mental Health, The Van Gogh Blues, Mastering Creative Anxiety, and Creativity for Life. In addition, Dr. Maisel is in the forefront of the movement to rethink mental health. He writes the Rethinking Psychology blog for Psychology Today, and among his books in this area are Rethinking Depression and Natural Psychology, The New Psychology of Meaning. His latest book is called Overcoming Your Difficult Family, Eight Skills for Thriving in Any Family Situation.

If you're getting value out of this show, please go to oneyoufeed.net slash support and make a donation. This will ensure that all 185 episodes that are in the archive will remain free and that the show is here for other people who need it. Some other ways that you can support us is if you're interested in the book that we're discussing on today's episode, go to OneYouFeed.net and find the episode that we're talking about. There will be links to all of the author's books, and if you buy them through there, it's the same price to you, but we get a small amount. Also, you can go to OneYouFeed.net slash book, and I have a reading list there. OneYouFeed.net slash shop, and you can buy t shirts, mugs and other things. And finally, one you feed.net slash Facebook,

which is where our Facebook group is. And you can interact with other listeners of the show and get support in feeding your good wolf. Thanks again for listening. And here's the interview with Dr. Eric Maisel. Hi, Eric. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. You have a name I'll remember. Exactly. This should be pretty straightforward in that regard. I'm happy to have you on. We're going to discuss two of your books today. One of them is called Overcoming Your Difficult Family, Eight Skills for Thriving in Any Family Situation. Our other thing we'll talk about is a book you wrote called The Future of Mental Health. So thank you for coming on. Let's start like we

normally do with the parable though. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I'm not sure what it means, but I can tell you what it

brought to mind, and that is that for myself, and maybe I think for everyone, we'd better feed both wolves, I think. Not exactly equally, but I'm not sure we want to, in Freudian language, equally, but I'm not sure we want to, in Freudian language, repress the bad wolf and act like it's not a part of us. I know that I need to create the occasional revenge fantasy in me and get even with the world in my mind. And maybe that's feeding the bad wolf. I'm not sure how the metaphor goes exactly. But I think if I didn't do that, I wouldn't have a way of getting rid of that anger and upsetness and bile. So that's what came up for me was that probably have to feed both wolves, but not in equal measure. You certainly want to feed the good wolf more, but there's some way in which you have to, I'm not sure what the right language would be, befriend or honor or understand or deal with the other one, the shadow, the darkness, because it's there.

It's in us. We know it from human history and current politics and everywhere. We know it's in us. And I don't think it does us any good to act like we don't share that darkness with other people. I agree completely. My experience has been that wolf, at least in my case, seems to know how to feed itself fairly well. But I agree with you 100% about, and that's one of the things I like about the parable,

and listeners have heard me say this probably 50 times now, but it doesn't really talk about caging the bad wolf in any way. It doesn't talk about, you know, lock him in a cage or beating him down or starving him. It just sort of indicates, hey, like, you probably want to give in a cage or beating him down or starving him. It just sort of indicates, hey, like, you probably want to give a little bit more attention to this one. So, I agree with you 100%. So, let's start off with your book called Overcoming Your Difficult Family, Eight Skills for Thriving in Any Family Situation. Let's talk about what a couple of those skills

are. I think we could talk about what a difficult family is, but I'm not sure that that's even necessary. I mean, I think we all have an intuitive sense of what that's like. Some people out there may be blessed enough that their family doesn't feel difficult, but I bet a big part of the audience immediately goes, yeah, I need to read that book. So let's jump right into the content of it. What are these skills that we need? Well, I identify eight skills, and I think they're all valuable. I want to say as a headline, I don't expect anybody to learn eight skills. I think we have trouble learning one new thing. So I think it's more to hear about them than to actually learn them. It'd be wonderful if you acquired these skills. But I'm more thinking that it's good

to know about them, even if we do acquire them or not. The skills are smarts, and that's just the smartness to understand what's going on in your family. The strength to make the changes that you need to make takes a lot of strength to even hold an important conversation. Sometimes we have to work ourselves up for a week or a month to say the thing that's on our mind. Another strength is calmness. It's hard to make any changes in life or in our family if we're too anxious or too agitated or just running around with our head cut off. So there's a certain kind of calmness that we need to generate in ourselves, require for ourselves, so that we can deal with difficulties in our

family. Fourth skill is clarity, and that's similar to smarts. It's just really being clear-eyed about what's going on. Freud was smart about defenses, and Jung was smart about the idea of a blind eye or blind spots. We can live in a family forever and not really ever quite get that our mother's completely depressed or that our father's an alcoholic. We know something's going on, but we may not have the clarity to really name it or face it. Fifth skill is awareness, which is a cousin to clarity. The sixth is courage, and it takes courage to do the things we need to do to make change because change incurs consequences. You know, you say something, maybe it's just one sentence, but suddenly you're on the road to a divorce because you finally said that difficult thing that you needed to say. And

now you and your mate understand that you're heading for a divorce. So it takes courage to say that one sentence, because we know that there are going to be consequences to our words and our actions. The seventh skill is the skill of presence. And that's the idea that if we are always running around or running away or running toward or running, then it's very hard for us to either know what's going on or to make the changes we need to make. So the idea of presence is settling into the moment, not rushing away from what's going on, being sort of a rock in the middle of the living room and really knowing what's going on. And the last skill is resilience. And everyone knows we need

resilience in life, but we need it especially in dealing with family matters because these are people we keep seeing. It's not like a co-worker that maybe after three years, we'll no longer have to deal with because we've moved on or he's moved on. Family members, especially siblings, typically will go through our whole life sort of bound together with siblings. So we need resilience to deal with the nonsense or crazy making things or difficulties that go on in our family because they're going to keep going on essentially till the end of our time. Yeah, for sure. Let's talk about a couple of those in a little bit more detail. You talk about something called the

calmness switch. That sounds like a wonderful thing to have. How do I develop a calmness switch though if I don't have one? For a lot of people, right, it doesn't seem like an option, just flip it on. There are probably 20 kinds of anxiety management tools that folks could learn. I say that not to scare people by a large number, but rather to impress people with the idea that whatever your style is, if it's more somatic, if it's more cognitive, if it's more meditative, if it's more breathing, there's probably an anxiety management tool for you. And you probably want to learn one because we all are susceptible to high anxiety. So learning one anxiety management tool is a big deal thing to try, to attempt.

Simplest one is deep breathing. As I say, there are cognitive tools. There are all kinds of tools. The one you mentioned I think is really in a, the best if you can pull it off. It's essentially a visualization. And your listeners may know the idea of visualization is just getting an image of something, often with verbal cues. It started in Northern California, where so many things start at a hospital hospital where cancer patients were given the opportunity to visualize their healthy cells fighting off their disease cells. That's sort of the short history of visualization.

And that turned out to be a very powerful device. This visualization is you visualizing a switch inside of you where when you flip it, you just suddenly, instantly, and maybe even permanently become calmer. Now, if this makes no sense to you, or if you can't see it, then this isn't your best anxiety management tool. But if something about it is resonant, then you might want to try it. Even though it's just flipping a switch, you're really having a whole conversation with yourself about, I think I'd like to be calmer, more calmness, fewer histrionics, fewer dramatics. It's really you talking to yourself and telling yourself that you want to be a new way. And flipping the switch is just a metaphor for that conversation that you hold with yourself. What I really like about what you said there is that there's about 20 different tools.

And I love that idea of exploring until you find the tool that is right for you. Because I think a lot of us with things like anxiety or depression or different things, we try something. And when that something doesn't work, we say, well, this is just the way I am. I was that way with my alcoholism and addiction. I gave it a shot. I went into treatment and I came out and I used again. I thought, well, that's that, right? Like I went in, I did it. I did treatment. And, you know, the idea that I might need to keep trying it or that I might need to try it different ways. Thank God I got that idea. I think it kind of got beaten into me, but it was still, I just think it's so helpful because

some things work for some of us and some things work for others. Yeah. I work as a creativity coach and I train creativity coaches. And when they're in training, they always want to ask me, what should I have done here as if there was one thing to do? And I always tell them to think of the phrase, one of many, that there isn't a thing to do in life. There are many things to try and you have to try one of them. You can get paralyzed if you go down the other road of thinking, oh, there are so many things to try. Therefore, I don't know what to do. Therefore, I'm not going to do anything. We don't want to go in that direction. We don't want to be paralyzed by possibility. But it's wonderful to realize that there are virtually, I would say, an infinite number of possibilities for any kind of challenge, because every kind of thing that

you might try has all kinds of gradations and modulations. So that's a long-winded way of agreeing with you that there are lots of things to try. I have a book out there called Mastering Creative Anxiety. And in that book, I have the whole 20 toolkit, 20 kinds of anxiety management strategies. So folks are interested in seeing that whole menu. That's the book of mine to turn to. I love what you said about that idea of one of many, because a lot of times I think people get into like, what should I do? You know, as if there's one right answer to things like this is the way out or this is the way through. And, and we're so focused on finding the one right answer that we don't just get out there and try different things. And I agree 100%. I actually don't think there's a right answer to nearly anything. I think there are answers. If you believe that you have a thing calledological, then you would kind of automatically think, well, there are probably lots of things that might help with despair. Could be relationship stuff, could be job stuff, could be I decided that life was a cheat and I'm just down on life. I can imagine all kinds of things that might be causing my despair. So language is so important here. If we go with the current labeling system, then we reduce our options for self-care. That's a fascinating idea. Talk to me

a little bit about depression as a potential condition. And do you believe that depression exists as a condition? Do you believe it's a variety of different symptoms that get labeled under one word? Talk to me about that. I think that's fascinating. Obviously a big subject. And let me start by saying that maybe two or three years ago, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health came out and said, nobody heard him because the pharmaceutical companies are too powerful. There is no such thing as depression, said the director of the National Institute of

Mental Health. What he meant was it isn't useful to add the label depression to what a person's experiencing unless we mean something by it, like we understand what's going on biologically or anatomically or physiologically. Just adding the word to a symptom picture is not how medicine works. Medicine doesn't diagnose by symptom pictures. It uses symptom pictures to find the causes of things and then bases its treatment not on the symptom picture, but on what will treat the cause. In psychiatry, there's no interest in causation. Sounds like a mouthful, but there are no tests for depression. There's no interest in testing. The amount of time that a psychiatrist spends with a new patient nowadays is 15 minutes.

That means that only a certain transaction can go on in those 15 minutes. There's only time for me saying I'm depressed and you agreeing that I'm depressed and writing a script. That's all that can go on in a few minutes. So I'm saying a lot all at once. A, the thoughts and feelings are abundantly there. I'm not saying that people don't feel despairing or don't manifest the symptoms that get you that label. The symptoms might be under eating, overeating, oversleeping, undersleeping. So there's an array of symptoms and some number of them get you the label depression, but it's really not a legitimate enterprise. If I were to take it out of this context, and if I were to say to you,

I'm eating a lot and sleeping a lot, and you were to say to me, oh, you're depressed, I think you would realize that it's not fair of you to just jump to that conclusion. Maybe I'm hungry, and etc. You would need to know why I'm overeating or under eating or oversleeping. You want to know the why of it. Modern psychiatry is not interested in the why of it. The document that psychiatrists use, that all therapists use, the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, is silent on causation, nothing in it about causes, and silent on treatment. It just has these symptom pictures. It's really a shopping catalog for professionals. A document like this should not be silent on what causes things. The books that doctors use are not silent

on what causes things. This book is silent on what causes things. That should immediately raise suspicions. Now, you might say, well, but don't antidepressants work? That's a big subject, but let me just give a headline or two. A, lots of studies that suggest that a large percentage of what's happening there that makes it look like antidepressants work is what's called the placebo effect. It was a big study not so long ago that maybe 50% of the success of antidepressants is somebody believing that they feel better because they're now taking something. So that's a piece of it. But the bigger piece is that these are chemicals with powerful effects. They have effects.

I am not saying that an antidepressant doesn't have an effect, nor am I saying that you might not want that effect. I want to be very clear here. If you're in a deep hole, if you're suicidal, if you're in a really dark, gray place, you may want the effect that an antidepressant can produce. That's different from one saying that it's a medication for a disease. For it to be a medication, there has to be a disease. And I hope I was making it a little bit clear that there's no known disease there. There's just a symptom picture and a label. So if I can say that all one more time, antidepressants are not medication. They're chemicals with powerful effects. And yes, you might want those powerful effects, but you also

might not want to be taking chemicals that are not treating anything in particular. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah? Really, no really.

No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think there's so much truth in what you said, because I think there's one extreme is to look at the medical psychiatric profession as you walk in, you say you're depressed, you're

handed a pill, you walk out. And that seems to happen an awful lot. Your family doctor does it, your psychiatrist does it. And I think that's one extreme. My approach to my depression has been to kind of throw the kitchen sink at it. From my experience, it has taken medicine, it has taken therapy, it has taken exercise, it has taken eating well, it has taken a spiritual approach. It takes all of that for me to avoid, let's call it a symptom picture, because that is kind of what it is, right? For me to avoid my symptom picture is mainly I feel completely dead inside, right? I can't concentrate. I can't think.

So that's my symptom picture. And I found a way that works for me to mostly deal with it. But it has certainly been very much a holistic thing. And I agree with you, I think of depression a little bit like I think about alcoholism. And I used to think of alcoholism, I came up in a 12-step program as, you know, we talk about it as a disease. And I've always been like, that doesn't really make sense to me. Like, there's so much complexity going on here. There are so many causes, so many conditions, so many factors that to call it a disease sounds thing doesn't really make any sense. It sounds to me, I think of calling it like a syndrome or a collection of what you called symptoms.

Here's a very big part of it, and you probably know this, though you may not use my language, and that is you having this show means that you're attempting to live your life purposes. Yes. That you're trying to live intentionally and with purpose. The whole idea of life purposes and living intentionally is left out of psychiatry. And so much of what is called depression is probably what one might think of as existential depression, namely people just doing stuff all day long and never having the opportunity or never making the opportunity to live their life purposes or to make meaning in their lives. For me, that's awfully important. If you're not living your life purposes, and you can tell by the way I'm saying it that I don't believe there is a singular purpose to life. I just believe there are life purpose choices, the things we hold as important.

And that can't be singular because, the things we hold as important. And that can't be singular, because we hold lots of things as important. So from my point of view, one of the stepping stones to feeling better, I wouldn't say happier, but rather more proud of ourselves and less sad, less despairing, is to identify what's important to us, identify our life purpose choices, identify what's important to us, identify our life purpose choices, have a life purpose check-in each morning, maybe for half a minute, and see to what extent we can actually get to our life purposes on a given day. This is very high order work because most people, even if they can identify what's important to them, whether it's activism or service or writing their novel or their relationship or whatever it might be, even if

they can identify what's important to them, they're just as likely as to not be able to get to it on that day, because they have to spend their 10 hours at their day job, and an hour in traffic each way, and et cetera, et cetera. So most people are not living their life purposes, and I think that's the root cause of so much of this despair. I don't want to use the depression word. So much of this despair that people are experiencing in this modern world with so much that we have, people are nevertheless not feeling like they have enough because they're not living their life purposes. So let's talk about the symptom picture that presents for me, which is this emptiness,

this lack of ability to concentrate, this deep anhedonia, where if you ask me about my life purpose, you know, nothing sounds like a good life purpose. Do you believe that that's the result of a long period of time of not living a life? And I'm oversimplifying here, but do you believe that that state is a response because i don't know that i guess you call it despair but it doesn't feel like despair in the typical sense of the word despair where it's it's you know an active fretting it is more just like nothingness and so from that perspective how do you work with people that are kind of in a spot like that where life purpose seems an awful long way away because I can't even think about what I might want for breakfast? Well, part of it is the way we're trained not to think about life purposes.

There's no place in our education, whether it's at the breakfast table or in school, where this idea, ideas of making meaning and life purposes are brought up. So this would have to be actually a new education. I have a book on this called Life Purpose Boot Camp. And it's the work of this Life Purpose Boot Camp to begin to identify what feels important, to identify what has been experienced as meaningful in the past, because we can a little bit predict that what might feel meaningful in the future might connect to what's felt meaningful in the past. That is that there's some work to do that most people have never tried to do. Now, I think you're saying that you have tried to identify your life purposes and have trouble doing it. But actually, I would guess that that's not work that most people have actually tried to

do is create this menu or list or what have you of life purposes to see a kind of master list of life purposes that might include activism and service or however one would want to say it for oneself. And then go, oh, I for oneself and then go oh i do think that's important i do think that that i would be made proud by my efforts if i did those things on a daily basis because as i said before i think we're in this game not to be happy but to make ourselves proud by our efforts this is the old existential ideas of personal responsibility that while we're here our life is a certain kind of project. We have to step to the plate and live that project. So I'm selling a whole existential picture all at once of personal responsibility of stepping to the plate,

et cetera. So I may not be able to get at exactly the thing that you were saying. If I were working with a client, I would want to know if somewhere along the line, he made the decision that life was a cheat, because most postmodern people have. Without knowing it, because we've all grown up in an age of science, we kind of know that we're just excited matter. We don't really think we matter. Somewhere along the line, we've gotten the idea from science, rightly so in a certain sense, that we don't count, that we don't matter. So each person has to make the decision to opt to matter in the face of only being excited matter in the universe. The universe doesn't care about our decisions, I do not believe,

but we have to care about our decisions. We have to opt to matter. So I think you can see that there's a certain kind of discussion dash persuasion that I would go into with a given client to help move that client towards the idea that you've probably been, I'll call it brainwashed, it's just what everybody has learned, brainwashed to believe that you don't particularly matter. Maybe that's been your experience, that's been your experience, that you don't feel like you particularly matter. Well, now you have to change your mind about that. Change your mind about that and decide that you're going to matter in your own ways, in your own light, and make certain decisions as to how to live your life based on that realization that you must opt to matter. Pill sounds a little bit easier, Eric.

I'm kidding. I mean, I'm making a dark joke. That's why the DSM way, that's the number one paradigm. That's why it's spreading worldwide. That way of dealing with depression is spreading to every corner of the globe. We use this book in America, we use this book called the DSM that I mentioned, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The rest of the world uses another book, the ICD, International Classification of Diseases, but both do the same thing, push you towards pills.

Both do exactly the same thing. And new things are happening, which to my mind are awful, namely giving kids prophylactically antidepressants, namely predicting, trying to predict which kids are going to be depressed, even if they show no symptoms now. That's horrific to me, to start putting kids on powerful meds and then to wonder why there are addiction epidemics. Putting all these ADHD kids, supposed ADHD kids on speed and then wondering why there's problems with speed when they're older strikes me as just horrible. But at any rate, that was a long-winded response to what you mentioned, the pills are easier. Not only are pills easier, more and more of them are being

promulgated all the time. Right, and you can make money on them. I mean, I'm certainly, I have, I feel like in certain respects that medication probably, I don't know if I'd say it saved my life, but it certainly helped me in a tremendous way. And I have a feeling that exactly like you do, that there's a profit motive, but, you know, even further, like you said, looking for life purpose, looking for meaning, staying away from our culture to a certain extent. Like, I don't watch much TV because, for me, it damages me. Now, I'm not saying that happens to everybody, but for me, I'm very susceptible to it. Yep. And it promotes a certain kind of cultural trance where we can't sort of do our own work or live our own life because we just get caught up in this trance. Even if it's not necessarily negative news, we just caught up in it and can't do our own

thinking. I want to say one thing, which I don't want to forget to say, and that is there's an excellent website called madinamerica.com run by a guy named Robert Whitaker, who did a book called anatomy of an epidemic. I'm their editor for parent resources. I know them well, and I don't know when our conversation is airing, but they're doing a many month long webinar series on getting off psychiatric medications. Oh, wow.

Because that's its own very tricky business. Yes. You know, if someone were to hear me and go, wow, I want to get off my meds, you can't just stop from today, Taro. That's very, these are powerful chemicals. So if anyone who is listening is thinking, well, I'd like to investigate

getting off my meds a little bit, I would really suggest this webinar series. Go to madinamerica.com, look up their continuing education offerings, and it might be interesting to folks. That's wonderful. Thank you for that resource. I think that's a great one. © transcript Emily Beynon Staying on this topic a little bit, it looks like we're going to spend most of the conversation here, but staying on this topic, you know, one of the things that there's a lot of conversation about lately is stigmatization of mental health. So you have these people who say, I'm depressed, and it's good to come out and say that because we stigmatize feeling this way. And people don't ask for help. And people don't get

help. So there's this sense of, hey, we should be talking more about this. And trying to break the stigmatization trying to break the well, just, you know, pick yourself up by the bootstraps and feel better. Where does your thought on depression not being an actual thing in the same way that we've been talking about, how does that play into this whole discussion? That whole stigmatization conversation is still inside the paradigm. People who, whatever side you're on with respect to that, the end result of that is still the chemical fix or the expert talk of psychotherapy. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really.

No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's still in the paradigm, or in the second. There are, by the way, two paradigms. One is the pseudo-medical cause and effect, mental disorder, symptom picture paradigm. Then there's the second paradigm of psychotherapy, which is the expert talk paradigm. That is that there are folks who

actually know things and they are the experts and you go to them, et cetera. I've been writing about and trying to promote a third paradigm called humane helping, where the person you go to doesn't act like an expert, but acts like a co-investigator, co-conspirator, if you like, trying to actually figure out what's going on without any special expertise. It doesn't need any fancy degree, really, but just needs the ability to stay with you, listen to you, maybe have some suggestions, maybe know how to offer some exercises or provide some resources, but basically is in a more peer or mentoring relationship than in some kind of expert relationship. That's a long-winded way of saying I'm not so interested in the stigmatization

conversation because I think that actually it promotes the first paradigm of chemicals ultimately. Because you can, obviously, if you're a pharmaceutical company, you want more and more people to bravely come out and say they have a thing so that you can provide them with a thing that will help them. what I think is an illegitimate paradigm, unfortunately, because I understand that the person who wants to not be stigmatized is not attempting to help the paradigm. That's not his or her motive. But I think that's the ultimate result of this conversation is that it helps pharmaceutical companies. Right. But you would certainly say that if you are suffering from sadness, despair, you know, let's use your description of the emotion, the old-fashioned emotion, as I think I've heard you call it, if you are suffering, you should still get help. Absolutely. And then there's a question as to what help to get, of course, but absolutely you should get help. And it would be nice if you realized that there

is more help than the two kinds of help that I've mentioned, which is psychiatry and pills and psychotherapy and expert talk. There are lots of other things from, you know, therapeutic wilderness experiences to mentoring to certain kinds of, et cetera, et cetera. It goes on and on. I have a number of books on this subject out. One is called The Future of Mental Health. One is called Humane Helping, which tries to paint a picture of the multiple kinds of resources that are out there and how maybe you might want to go to one of them first.

To repeat what we said earlier, if you're in a deep hole, if you're suicidal, obviously you might want to go to the chemical fix first because that gives you the window of opportunity to stay alive and then look at the other resources. But if you're not in such a deep hole, then maybe you might want to go to some other kind of resource before you started down the road of chemicals. Yep. Before I went on medicine, I, you know, I really wanted to make sure like, was I doing what I should be doing? You know, in my case, at that time in my life meetings, you know, where was I going to meetings? Was I exercising? Was I eating well? I believe meditation is important. Was I meditating? And when I was kind of doing all those things and still really suffering, I went, okay,

I give for right now. But I hope that's part of what this show does is I'm trying to expose people to lots of different ideas and to say, if you still feel lousy, don't give up. Try something else. Look a different way. You know, just keep going. And I want to throw in another idea it's going to be hard for folks to hear it in the midst of the conversation we're having because

we're covering a lot of ground which is great but it's the idea of personality being made up of three parts in my model and the first part of it is what i call original personality that's who we are when we come into the world our original original endowments, our original proclivities. Psychiatry and psychology pays no attention to that, acts like everybody comes into the world the same. If you've had kids or puppies or kittens or any kind of creature, you know that every creature is itself from the get-go. What this means is, and in the medieval times, folks thought that people came in one of four flavors, four humors, one of which was melancholia. That is, ancient folks thought that maybe a full quarter of the world was born sadder than the rest. It may be the case that any given person's original personality contains extra sadness.

That doesn't make that sadness a mental disorder. It makes it a lifelong challenge, but it should not be considered a mental disorder. And this idea that we may be born a certain way, sadder than the next person, more anxious than the next person, more intelligent than the next person, more sensitive than the next person, more this, less that, is completely ignored by both psychiatry and psychology. And that it's just wrong that it's completely ignored. I couldn't agree with you more.

I think that is such a true statement and that it is ignored. And I do think that one of the challenges of labeling things as disorders does make feeling bad in any way, shape, or form almost a crime, right? And I totally do not agree with that. And I think the lens I put it on is my alcoholism, right? Is that that, on one hand, was a significant problem, right? I mean, I ended up homeless, I ended up nearly going to jail, I was dying, you know, I mean, there were a lot of problems there, right? At the same time, that is such a core component of what has made me who I am, and reflects the strengths that I have.

And so, I always talk on the show, we talk a lot about this idea that any character trait taken too far in either direction becomes maladaptive. And so that idea of melancholy, yes, I mean, I think that's the way I was born, but I think that one of the things we're actually pretty sure about is that high tolerance is a birthright or a birth problem. That is, some people can drink 23 beers and still be somehow moving around, and another person has one or two, and they're knocked out from it. That's a biological difference. And I worked in this field, in the addiction field, and I had the opportunity to look under a microscope at cells of alcoholics and non-alcoholics and how the cells had adapted to alcohol and the genuine difference in size. There was biological stuff there that was real and that forced the psychological dependency. If your cells are crying out for stuff, that makes it very hard to not do that thing. So if that's a feature of original personality, something like high tolerance for a given

substance, that's something one should be aware of one's whole life and take special precautions to deal with because that is part of your biology. It's not that it's a disease. It's a part of your original endowment. For better or worse, maybe in some cases worse, but as part of your original endowment and should not be called a disease. We're running out of time here. I want to just follow your last train of thought through to the end and then we'll wrap up. You mentioned the original personality, so now I got to know the other two. The second I call formed personality, which is the us that accretes over time, kind of the way we are cemented over time. And the third I call our available personality.

That's our remaining freedom to be the person that we want to be or ought to be. And I see that available personality almost as an amount. If you're actively addicted and you're running around town looking for a fix or a drink, you have much less available personality than when you enter into recovery. It's like that amount increases of available personality. So that's my kind of simple model, but it works for me of original personality, formed personality, and available personality. I love that idea. It echoes a little bit, let's not get into this discussion. We're going to have to have you back on. But one of the things that came out of positive psychology that really made sense to me

was this sense of exactly like you said, some portion of my happiness level is determined by my biological setting. Some portion of my happiness level is determined by the experiences I've had in my life and the ways that I have been conditioned. And then there's the remaining part that I can work with. And that part is not insignificant. It's not everything, but it is not insignificant either. And that was really helpful to me to a normalize how I was feeling to recognize like, okay, I'm not going to go from being the kind of person I am to, you know, Ronald McDonald. That's not going to happen. But I've got lots of room to move still, and I've got a lot of ability to control and impact the direction of my life and the direction

of my overall state of mind. And in my language, I say that everybody can use a personality upgrade. And I think that's true that we can, everybody would be well advised to use their available personality to deal with those things they know they ought to deal with. We all have stuff to deal with. We have available personality available and we should use it. Excellent. Well, Eric, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I think we will probably, there's a lot to dive into here, and you've got more books than the Bible, almost. And so, I don't think there'd be any shortage of things to talk about. I do want to point people back to overcoming your difficult family, eight skills for thriving in any family situation. One of the things that I thought was really useful in the book that I wanted to talk about and we didn't was the approaches to communication, that there's a

lot of ways we can be more skillful in how we communicate with our family. And we can go from either no communication or, you know, fighting to finding a place where we're able to say what we want to say. And we're able to do it in a more skillful way. And so there's lots of great stuff in the book about that. Thank you. We'll do that another time. Another time. Thanks so much, Eric. Thank you.

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