Speaker 1: There's a part of mental health diagnoses that is really
Speaker 1: no different than horoscopes, right They're just introvert extrovert personality test,
Speaker 1: same kind of thing. That's how they're being embraced today
Speaker 1: right now. But the stakes are so high with psychiatric diagnoses.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 2: ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 2: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 2: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 2: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 2: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 2: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 2: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 2: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 2: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2: Back on the show is Sarah Fay, an award winning author, educator, activist,
Speaker 2: and entrepreneur. Her work focuses on mental health advocacy and
Speaker 2: questioning society's happiness formula and how to create your own.
Speaker 2: Her debut memoir was Pathological, The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses. Today,
Speaker 2: Sarah and Eric discussed the highly anticipated sequel called Cured,
Speaker 2: which is a best selling featured publication on Substack.
Speaker 3: Hi, Sarah, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here again.
Speaker 1: I feel very honored to be a double guest. Wonderful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm really happy to get to talk to you again.
Speaker 3: I think our first conversation was really about two years
Speaker 3: ago around that timeframe, and it was around your book
Speaker 3: that was called Pathological, and it was about the six
Speaker 3: diagnoses you had been given psychiatrically and where that is.
Speaker 3: And what we're going to talk about today mainly is
Speaker 3: a new book you've written, although it's not quite in
Speaker 3: a book form at the moment, but it's been serialized
Speaker 3: on Substack, which is called Cured. But before we get
Speaker 3: into any of that, we'll start, like we always do,
Speaker 3: with a parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's
Speaker 3: talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there
Speaker 3: are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Speaker 3: One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
Speaker 3: and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf,
Speaker 3: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 3: the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second.
Speaker 3: They look up at their grandparent and they say, well,
Speaker 3: which one wins, And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
Speaker 3: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 3: that parable means to you in your life, life and
Speaker 3: in the work that you do.
Speaker 1: I love this parable and I've been thinking so much
Speaker 1: about it for the last couple of days because it
Speaker 1: was a spoiler. I already knew you were going to
Speaker 1: ask me and so, but really I never could have
Speaker 1: predicted when we talked the last time, because we talked
Speaker 1: right before Pathological came out. I never could have predicted
Speaker 1: what was going to happen with psychiatric diagnoses in the
Speaker 1: last two years. And so what I mean by that is,
Speaker 1: to me, the good wolf is when diagnoses are used
Speaker 1: by trained professionals to get people in emotional and mental
Speaker 1: distress help, and the bad wolf is when diagnoses are
Speaker 1: used by the public who don't have that training, often
Speaker 1: by teenagers and even children diagnosing themselves on social media
Speaker 1: like they're doing right now, and social media influencers with
Speaker 1: no training spreading misinformation. So you've got, you know, the
Speaker 1: good wolf is kind of diagnoses being used in the
Speaker 1: right way, even though they're flawed, and then the bad
Speaker 1: wolf is diagnoses being used by the public who really
Speaker 1: don't know enough about them. And I wrote Pathological to
Speaker 1: prevent that. But now what we've seen is that we've
Speaker 1: been feeding the bad wolf and that has really created
Speaker 1: a new kind of crisis. Instead of feeding the good wolf,
Speaker 1: which it was meant to do right, mental health awareness
Speaker 1: was meant to do that, and instead, basically you've got
Speaker 1: people who really don't understand the diagnoses, which is why
Speaker 1: I wrote Pathological about the DSM to educate people, especially parents.
Speaker 1: And just over the last two years, I've seen how
Speaker 1: young people on TikTok and Instagram are really diagnosing themselves.
Speaker 1: There's this idea that you can be undiagnosed autistic or
Speaker 1: borderline personality disorder or whatever it is, and then the
Speaker 1: statistics of how damaging that can be, and it really
Speaker 1: has saddened me in some ways. But I wrote Cuored,
Speaker 1: hopefully as a remedy to that or an alternative to that.
Speaker 3: It is sort of fascinating I'm not really on social media,
Speaker 3: so I'm talking secondhand here broadly, But you quote a
Speaker 3: study that found that eighty three percent of the mental
Speaker 3: health advice on TikTok is misleading. And we're not talking
Speaker 3: about like a few people are seeing this. It is
Speaker 3: huge on TikTok. I can't remember the impression numbers I
Speaker 3: was seeing, but they were huge numbers.
Speaker 1: Twenty four million people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean that's a lot of people,
Speaker 3: And so diagnosing ourselves is a risky sort of thing.
Speaker 3: And I think the other thing that's just fascinating to
Speaker 3: me is that people seem to almost want these diagnoses.
Speaker 3: And I understand that on some level, because if you're suffering,
Speaker 3: for me at least, and I think I've heard enough
Speaker 3: people report this, initially, some sort of diagnosis feels good.
Speaker 3: Like if I've got some unknown pain and I don't
Speaker 3: know what's going on, and I go to the doctor
Speaker 3: and they're like, oh, you're you've got a strained right quadricep.
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh, great, okay, we know what this is,
Speaker 3: and ideally we're going to be able to do something
Speaker 3: about it. So these diagnoses, I get why they can
Speaker 3: be helpful, but it's so strange for them to be
Speaker 3: almost a status symbol in some ways. And I agree
Speaker 3: with you that I think our desire to make mental
Speaker 3: health awareness go up is backfiring in some ways.
Speaker 1: It really has, and in the scariest, scariest way, And
Speaker 1: this was true of me. I've been pathological. I really
Speaker 1: show my trajectory from being someone who I got six
Speaker 1: different diagnoses. I took each one on as a label
Speaker 1: and they became self fulfilling prophecies. And I should say
Speaker 1: mental illness is very real. I had a severe mental
Speaker 1: illness for twenty five years. I know what it's like.
Speaker 1: There was something wrong. So I'm not doubting that these
Speaker 1: young people or whoever aren't in mental and emotional pain.
Speaker 1: And some of them may have serious mental illness. So
Speaker 1: I'm not at all saying that it's just that when
Speaker 1: you don't understand, and this was true for me, that
Speaker 1: deism diagnoses, they're subjective, they have racial and gender biases,
Speaker 1: they're scientifically and valid. There's no test we can use
Speaker 1: to prove them they're unreliable. So two mental health professionals
Speaker 1: can see the same person at the same time and
Speaker 1: give them two different diagnoses and then there's all this
Speaker 1: influence with Big Pharma in their creation, so what the
Speaker 1: DSM is. It'd be very different if the public was
Speaker 1: educated on that and parents knew, and everyone knew and
Speaker 1: was very aware and we had all the information. Christina
Speaker 1: Karen at The New York Times did a wonderful piece
Speaker 1: about how people are now going into therapist's office and
Speaker 1: psychiatrist's office and demanding diagnoses, like saying I know I
Speaker 1: have this, and so really almost putting the professional out
Speaker 1: of the equation in many ways. So there's nothing wrong
Speaker 1: with even identifying and labeling yourself if it brings you
Speaker 1: some relief. But in some ways there's a part of
Speaker 1: mental health diagnoses that is really no different than horoscopes,
Speaker 1: right They're just introvert extrovert personality tests, same kind of thing.
Speaker 1: That's how they're being embraced today right now. But the
Speaker 1: stakes are so high with psychiatric diagnoses. You know, they
Speaker 1: can be you know in terms of looking at it
Speaker 1: as a medical disease, as something that I need a
Speaker 1: medication for or I'm going to limit my life by
Speaker 1: and medications can be so helpful and so not helpful.
Speaker 1: So and I'm not laughing at that, but in many
Speaker 1: ways there were God send for me and they have
Speaker 1: been very, very unhelpful, both for me and others. So
Speaker 1: you know, that's not to discount medication. But you know,
Speaker 1: again that study was unbelievable. So eighty three percent of
Speaker 1: people on social media giving advice, particularly TikTok, in this study,
Speaker 1: ninety one percent had no mental health training. Fourteen percent
Speaker 1: of the videos were potentially damaging content. And then what
Speaker 1: was so fascinating to me, because it feels like everyone
Speaker 1: is saying they have ADHD, is one hundred percent of
Speaker 1: the videos in their study on ADHD we're misleading. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's just what what what are we doing? And then
Speaker 1: the algorithm puts you in a silo of misinformation, and
Speaker 1: so it just gets reinforced. But going back to what
Speaker 1: you were saying about some of them are cool, they're
Speaker 1: cool diagnoses, and then they're uncool diagnoses. And there was
Speaker 1: a study on stigma and mental health awareness, and what
Speaker 1: they found was the stigma for certain diagnoses anxiety depression
Speaker 1: ADHD and in some ways very high functioning autism. If
Speaker 1: you are one of these exceptional people, the stigma for
Speaker 1: those went down. If you're calling yourself neurodivergence. So these
Speaker 1: are not like the people with autism and the young
Speaker 1: people that I worked with in the New York City
Speaker 1: public schools who are nonverbal, who are extremely low functioning,
Speaker 1: that is in the uncool category. So also anything with psychosis,
Speaker 1: the stigma against those has gone way up, which is
Speaker 1: really fascinating. So we're just in a very weird, scary position.
Speaker 1: I interviewed Martin Rafferty, who's with Youth Era, which is
Speaker 1: an exceptional organization in Oregon where they really help youth,
Speaker 1: and he said something really really scary to me, which
Speaker 1: is I asked him about recovery, because if you are
Speaker 1: over identifying with these diagnoses in a mental health system
Speaker 1: that does not mention recovery, you are just given the
Speaker 1: diagnosis and sent on your way, like there is no
Speaker 1: such thing as recovery. In twenty five years, I never
Speaker 1: heard the word recovery. But he said that young people
Speaker 1: who he works with and he's very tapped into, they
Speaker 1: have disavowed recovery. They don't even want to recover, so
Speaker 1: they really do embrace their diagnoses. They refuse it, and
Speaker 1: they want the negative symptoms, they want the positive symptoms
Speaker 1: and some of that can be good because being a
Speaker 1: human means that you know, there's mental and emotional suffering.
Speaker 1: We don't get to escape that. But they're pathologizing it,
Speaker 1: and that can be very damaging.
Speaker 3: You and I talked about, and I've talked about with
Speaker 3: lots of people on this show, this idea of diagnoses
Speaker 3: and labels and all of that, and I think they
Speaker 3: are useful until they're not. And that's my framework for
Speaker 3: so many things, is like, is this useful? And I
Speaker 3: think that's the lens to look through these things at
Speaker 3: because to your point, the DSM is the diagnostic statistical manual.
Speaker 3: It's the way that psychiatrists and psychologists look at and say, oh,
Speaker 3: you know, you have these symptoms that means you have
Speaker 3: this thing, or you have these symptoms for three months,
Speaker 3: then you have this thing.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: That's for people who are wondering what DSM, that's what
Speaker 3: it is. It's the guidebook. And the point that you made,
Speaker 3: which is good, is that it's a highly unreliable guide meaning,
Speaker 3: like you said, there's no scientific validity to it. There's
Speaker 3: no like I can give you a test and find
Speaker 3: out that you're bipolar too, and so I could describe
Speaker 3: my symptoms. And you said this to one psychologist, and
Speaker 3: they could be like, you have bipolar, And I could
Speaker 3: describe it to another psychologist who could be like, you
Speaker 3: have depression, and another one who might say you have ADHD, right,
Speaker 3: and according to the DSM, they would all sort of
Speaker 3: be correct in their own way, because these symptoms they
Speaker 3: just cross over in so many different ways. And so
Speaker 3: taking on these labels or diagnoses getting back to where
Speaker 3: I started can be helpful, like I said, until they're not,
Speaker 3: because you are taking on an identity that in some
Speaker 3: ways doesn't even really exist. We don't know what mental
Speaker 3: illness is at this point. I mean, it's sort of
Speaker 3: frightening to say, but we just don't. We don't understand
Speaker 3: the cluster of symptoms that seem to show up. The
Speaker 3: models that make the most sense to me are sort
Speaker 3: of the biopsycho social models, which are saying like this
Speaker 3: is some combination of biology, psychology, and culture and the
Speaker 3: people you're around. I think that's the best model for
Speaker 3: addiction too, which is the thing I'm most familiar with.
Speaker 3: And so we don't know what it is and what
Speaker 3: you're doing. So well, you did in pathological and you're
Speaker 3: doing here is trying, I think, to get us to
Speaker 3: loosen our grip on believing things about ourselves that may
Speaker 3: or may not be true, and being open to the
Speaker 3: fact that this is more fluid than we think it is.
Speaker 3: And the important thing that you're talking about is this
Speaker 3: idea of recovery. Yeah, say more about recovery from mental illness.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to stop. I realized I just launched
Speaker 1: into the DSM. So maybe I'll define the DSM, okay,
Speaker 1: so that we can put that back in so I
Speaker 1: don't just launch into this. But the DSM is the
Speaker 1: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It started in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty two and it was started by a small
Speaker 1: group of psychiatrists who at the time, unsurprisingly were white,
Speaker 1: heterosexual men, and they came up with about close to
Speaker 1: about ninety diagnoses, and it was a way to try
Speaker 1: to order and categorize and take mental and emotional pain
Speaker 1: and give essentially a language for doctors to talk to
Speaker 1: other doctors about patients. It was never meant to be
Speaker 1: in the hands of patients ever, so until the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: patients never knew their diagnoses. You just got therapy you
Speaker 1: never needed to know it. And then in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: they did a revision of the DSM that was really monumental,
Speaker 1: and it created a checklist of symptoms for diagnoses, and
Speaker 1: so basically you could go through and say, yes, insomnia, yes,
Speaker 1: and hodonia, which is a loss of interest in things. Yes,
Speaker 1: eating too much, but note these are symptoms of depression
Speaker 1: in the DSM. But note that it's also sleeping too much,
Speaker 1: sleeping too little, it's eating too much, eating too little.
Speaker 1: And you're like, well, I'm going to fit one of those.
Speaker 1: So exactly, Yeah, they turned it into a checklist, and
Speaker 1: they you know, kind of the criticism was it's this
Speaker 1: restaurant menu of diagnoses, and that it was very reductive
Speaker 1: and it wasn't helpful. This was what from mental health professionals. Now.
Speaker 1: The twists that happened in this sort of plot of
Speaker 1: how diagnoses have come into the culture is that the
Speaker 1: DSM became a best seller. It went on the bestseller list,
Speaker 1: and it became the American Psychiatric Association's primary income stream.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's just phenomenal besides big pharma. So suddenly
Speaker 1: it was in the hands of all kinds of people.
Speaker 1: So it got into the public, and then more and
Speaker 1: more and more, and they expanded the diagnostic criteria and
Speaker 1: added diagnoses, so that we now have over three hundred
Speaker 1: different psychiatric diagnoses. So it's very hard not to find
Speaker 1: yourself in the DSM. I mean, we all have been there,
Speaker 1: and especially when we're not well. And again it's very
Speaker 1: different when you're dysfunctional. I was to the point that
Speaker 1: I could no longer live independently. You know, they were
Speaker 1: basically telling me that I would most likely die by
Speaker 1: suicide and I would never hold a full time job, etc.
Speaker 1: So I was really given this very very dismal prognosis.
Speaker 1: So that's the DSM. In terms of recovery, recovery is
Speaker 1: another well kept secret for some reason in the mental
Speaker 1: health field. Part of that is because there is no
Speaker 1: recovery in the DSM. There's no page on recovery. I
Speaker 1: think it's mentioned once, and so really we have mental
Speaker 1: health professionals right now who have no training in recovery.
Speaker 1: That's phenomenal. Can you imagine if all of our doctors
Speaker 1: knew nothing of recovery from broken bones and a fib
Speaker 1: and stroke or whatever. I mean, that's what we're living
Speaker 1: in right now. And so if you went into a
Speaker 1: doctor's office and he told you you have a FIB,
Speaker 1: see you like, have a good day. You know, here's
Speaker 1: some medication you will never recover. And you know a
Speaker 1: FIB is hard. You know, there are certainly physical diagnoses
Speaker 1: that we don't recover from, and not everyone will recover
Speaker 1: from mental illness. But my feeling was that I was
Speaker 1: not given the chance, and everyone should be given the chance.
Speaker 1: I had a psychiatrist who also really alerted me to
Speaker 1: the DSM and the realities of the diagnoses that we receive. Wonderful.
Speaker 1: He's a serious biopsychiatrist. I mean, he believes in psychiatry wholeheartedly.
Speaker 1: He's not even a critic of it. But he was
Speaker 1: very honest with me and he said, you know, these
Speaker 1: are flawed. These are just really flawed diagnoses. And that
Speaker 1: really opened my mind, and that's why I wrote Pathological
Speaker 1: to bring that information to other people. And then he
Speaker 1: also told me a story and we were talking about something.
Speaker 1: It was apropos of nothing, and he told me about
Speaker 1: a patient of his who had schizoephective disorder. So that
Speaker 1: is a combination of schizophrenia with bipolar features, and so
Speaker 1: it's a very very grave prognosis. And really, I mean
Speaker 1: the idea that you could recover is just not there.
Speaker 1: He never mentioned the word recovery, but he said, you know,
Speaker 1: she came from a wealthy family and he treated her.
Speaker 1: So they had everything at their disposal. That's important because recovery.
Speaker 1: We don't have a mental health system that supports it either.
Speaker 1: You know, they had everything at their disposal. And he
Speaker 1: said that he treated her, and he wasn't boasting in
Speaker 1: this way, but they worked together. She got off all
Speaker 1: medicaid and became an executive at Google. And I was like, what,
Speaker 1: First of all, you don't recover from mental illness, and too,
Speaker 1: you do not become an executive at Google. Now, I
Speaker 1: do not want to be an executive at Google. But
Speaker 1: it seemed to like embody health and like productivity and
Speaker 1: wellness and all this kind of for better or worse.
Speaker 1: Like it seemed like, oh, that's that's it, you know,
Speaker 1: And I couldn't believe someone had healed.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think it's interesting in this idea of recovery,
Speaker 3: because I mean I was in recovery from addiction. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's what we call it. When you go to a meeting.
Speaker 3: I was in twelve steps.
Speaker 2: We call it.
Speaker 3: Recovery, and the idea is there is recovery. So it's
Speaker 3: interesting when I got my first sort of psychiatric diagnosis
Speaker 3: of depression, I think that I didn't take it on
Speaker 3: in the way that you did, because everything in my
Speaker 3: mind was in the context of recovery. I also had
Speaker 3: hepatitis C from my needle use and was treated for that,
Speaker 3: and I was one of the lucky few back then
Speaker 3: a lot more common now where it kind of just
Speaker 3: went away. So it was this weird sort of thing
Speaker 3: because the doctors didn't know what to call it, because
Speaker 3: if you test me, you'll detect that there is some
Speaker 3: degree of viral load of that, but it is so
Speaker 3: low that it hasn't done anything and infected my liver
Speaker 3: in all these years, and so I've never known what
Speaker 3: to call it. Do I call myself cured? I mean
Speaker 3: kind of. It's interesting to me that my view indo
Speaker 3: mental illness was always one of that there's some ability
Speaker 3: to get better. I don't know how much better, but
Speaker 3: it's interesting to me that you took them on and
Speaker 3: the way they were presented to you as basically life
Speaker 3: sentences and very predictive of your future capability and capacity.
Speaker 1: Yes, And I did what a lot of young people
Speaker 1: are doing. I made it my identity. Then you are
Speaker 1: locked into it. You can't recover, you don't want to recover.
Speaker 1: It's your identity. And someone had told me what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about right now. And I've spoken to so many
Speaker 1: young people who are very resistant to this. I tell
Speaker 1: them I would have been too. It was my identity.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to lose that. Who wants to do that?
Speaker 1: But your analogy with hepatitis C, that is it. Because
Speaker 1: we're never going to be without depression, We're never going
Speaker 1: to be without anxiety. Psychosis is probably the most extreme
Speaker 1: example of a symptom that not everyone experiences. But distraction, irritability, insomnia,
Speaker 1: sleeping too much, eating too much, All of these symptoms
Speaker 1: are part of the human experience. So I think what
Speaker 1: you said is sometimes there's a viral load there. It
Speaker 1: will always be present. But do we have it anymore?
Speaker 1: And people say to me, do you still have a diagnosis?
Speaker 1: And my psychiatrist did give me one. He had never
Speaker 1: told me when I first went to see him. He
Speaker 1: said to me, I don't know what you have And
Speaker 1: that's what kind of changed my whole view of diagnoses.
Speaker 1: And then after when we were on the road to recovery,
Speaker 1: he since declared me cured. But here's the confusing part.
Speaker 1: I am still on medication. I've been on it for
Speaker 1: ten years. It's going to take me about ten years
Speaker 1: to go off of it safely, and so he and
Speaker 1: I are really working toward that. And it's very hard
Speaker 1: to go off these medications. So anyone listening to this,
Speaker 1: please do not do it without medical supervision. I tell
Speaker 1: you I'm on the ten year plan, and that's okay
Speaker 1: with me. But so wait, I'm taking a medication. Doesn't
Speaker 1: that mean I'm still sick? And so on his records,
Speaker 1: I still have a diagnosis because that's how you get medication.
Speaker 1: So it is very confusing. But I know for myself, well,
Speaker 1: first of all, I'm thriving in my life and that
Speaker 1: is part of it. But I have terrible anxiety. I
Speaker 1: mean just crippling my neck right now, so terrible because
Speaker 1: the thing's going on in my life. And that's okay.
Speaker 1: It's very different than it being a pathological condition. And
Speaker 1: I see the difference. I know the difference.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have not known for several year years now,
Speaker 3: How to talk about depression in myself. I don't know
Speaker 3: what to say. I don't know whether to say I
Speaker 3: still have it, I don't have it. I'm prone to
Speaker 3: low moods, I'm prone to anedonia, but not to the
Speaker 3: degree I used to be. And what's a normal amount
Speaker 3: and what's in the amount. That's just my temperament, my personality,
Speaker 3: my makeup, and so I don't know what to say
Speaker 3: about it. Like I literally get sort of like, I
Speaker 3: don't know, I battled with, I struggled with, I had
Speaker 3: I have. I don't know what to say about that,
Speaker 3: because exactly to your point, with alcohol and drugs, I
Speaker 3: don't really use the word recovered. We'll get into that
Speaker 3: in a second. But it's pretty easy for me to
Speaker 3: say I'm in recovery very heavily, because it's just gone.
Speaker 3: I just don't do those things, and I haven't for
Speaker 3: fifteen years this time. These other things, as you said,
Speaker 3: are a lot harder because we all have anxiety at times,
Speaker 3: we all have low moods at times, we all have
Speaker 3: a feeling of disconnection at times, and so what degree
Speaker 3: of it becomes a diagnosis of something you have and
Speaker 3: obviously there's no right answer. And I think we've learned
Speaker 3: the same thing with alcoholism and addiction. They give you
Speaker 3: some strange twelve question test and if you answered seven
Speaker 3: of them, you were an alcoholic. And now we know, like,
Speaker 3: it's a lot more nuanced than that. Right, All this
Speaker 3: stuff is on a spectrum. And so we talk about
Speaker 3: alcohol use disorder and they'll plot you somewhere on this
Speaker 3: line right between no problem to serious alcohol. I don't
Speaker 3: know the exact terms, but we don't talk about psychiatric
Speaker 3: diagnoses in that way that you're on some sort of spectrum. Right,
Speaker 3: it's this idea that you cross this line, and now
Speaker 3: you have this thing. Ellen Langer, who's a professor at
Speaker 3: I believe, Harvard, and she wrote a lot about mindfulness,
Speaker 3: but she also has written very compellingly about something she
Speaker 3: calls I think she called them border conditions. And what
Speaker 3: she was talking about was there's been a number of
Speaker 3: studies done. Let's take somebody who is right on the
Speaker 3: line of diabetes or non diabetes. If you're at a
Speaker 3: blood sugar of x, you are non diabetic, and a
Speaker 3: blood sugar of X plus one you are diabetic. And
Speaker 3: this is a test where they are actually measuring something
Speaker 3: unlike psychiatric diagnosis, which are even farther off. But statistically
Speaker 3: there's no big difference and one point of blood sugar.
Speaker 3: But what she has found and others have found, is
Speaker 3: that it makes a tremendous difference in the outcomes of
Speaker 3: those people. And you might think that getting the diabetes
Speaker 3: diagnosis is positive because now you get treated for it,
Speaker 3: but they find almost exactly the opposite. They find that
Speaker 3: the minute you are now in that category, you are
Speaker 3: treated differently and you do things differently. And they've seen
Speaker 3: the same thing in like children with like IQ, like
Speaker 3: if you're or like one point above, you're in normal classes,
Speaker 3: and if you're one point below, you're in special ed classes,
Speaker 3: and your outcomes are dramatically different. And it's not because
Speaker 3: you had a one point difference. It's because of what
Speaker 3: happened after that and what you internalized about yourself. And
Speaker 3: so even in these things where we're measuring something a
Speaker 3: little bit more than we are in psychiatric diagnoses, this
Speaker 3: labeling has profound implications.
Speaker 1: What you just said is so resonant and so important.
Speaker 1: And that's what I found in my life, is that
Speaker 1: even if I hadn't thought it was, you know, a
Speaker 1: death sentence. It still limited me so much and it
Speaker 1: definitely dictated my path, no question. Now that I've recovered,
Speaker 1: there is a lot of regret. You know, I feel
Speaker 1: like I lost twenty five years of my life to
Speaker 1: the DSM in some ways. And you know that's not
Speaker 1: fair to put on a book, but it really does.
Speaker 1: It does feel that way. Sometimes I think what would
Speaker 1: I have done? Where would I be right now if
Speaker 1: I hadn't been pigeonholed or said, you know, sort of
Speaker 1: slap with this label and thought that I was limited
Speaker 1: in any way. But it's interesting. What you're talking about, too,
Speaker 1: is what is the measurement and how do we do
Speaker 1: that right? And I write about this and cuored I
Speaker 1: didn't want to tell anyone, And actually the first time
Speaker 1: I was on with you, I thought, wait, I think
Speaker 1: I'm better. I thought I was. I think I'm really better.
Speaker 1: And I didn't want to say anything in our first interview.
Speaker 1: I didn't feel like I could tell anyone. It was
Speaker 1: like a big secret because I thought someone would say, one, no,
Speaker 1: you haven't and you can't. And two I just thought
Speaker 1: it wasn't possible. I had not heard of the recovery movement.
Speaker 1: I had no idea that people had been recovering from
Speaker 1: mental illness since the sixteenth century and that this was
Speaker 1: a thing and that there were all these people out
Speaker 1: there advocating for it. I just had never come across it,
Speaker 1: and so by not told my psychiatrist at that time.
Speaker 1: But I went to lunch with my father and I decided, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm going to take a chance, and I said, Dad,
Speaker 1: you know, I think I'm better. I think I'm well.
Speaker 1: And he looked at me and he said, I know
Speaker 1: you are. I know you are. And it was like
Speaker 1: I get chills because it was the best day of
Speaker 1: my life, and especially because I'd had such a fraught
Speaker 1: relationship with my father and now we are very close
Speaker 1: and just feeling like, oh wait, he sees it and
Speaker 1: we've talked about and he said, I've never seen anything
Speaker 1: so complete. I've never seen such a complete, massive change.
Speaker 1: And so much of it came from believing I could.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's end. So much of it was that.
Speaker 1: I mean, there were a lot of other things, and
Speaker 1: I really detailed them and cured learning how to manage
Speaker 1: my mind, learning my emotions. I had a panic attack
Speaker 1: last night you know, I knew, now, okay, there isn't
Speaker 1: something pathologically wrong with me. You're having a panic attack.
Speaker 1: And sometimes we can't do that for ourselves. But I
Speaker 1: really have learned to talk to myself. And then, of
Speaker 1: course diet. I have a very extreme diet and I
Speaker 1: don't need any sugar. I don't need any white flour.
Speaker 1: There are things I had to do, and these are
Speaker 1: things that we have seen really help. I drink no
Speaker 1: caph I don't drink alcohol. I obviously take no drugs
Speaker 1: besides psychiatric drugs. And you know, I have two cats
Speaker 1: that I give my life to, so we know that's
Speaker 1: very healthy. I go to bed at the same time
Speaker 1: I wake up at the same time. There's just a
Speaker 1: lot there that goes into recovery that a lot of
Speaker 1: people are in a place where that would be very,
Speaker 1: very difficult. And then just going to the term recovery
Speaker 1: is so interesting. So four cured because I serialized it
Speaker 1: on a platform called substack. So substack is essentially we
Speaker 1: could call it it's my own personal media magazine. So
Speaker 1: it is a newsletter. If you sign up for it,
Speaker 1: you will receive emails from me, but it's also a blog.
Speaker 1: So basically it is on the Internet and you can
Speaker 1: go on there and it would be like visiting a website.
Speaker 1: And so what I did was part of my dissertation.
Speaker 1: So I do have a PhD in literature, and part
Speaker 1: of my dissertation was on serialization in the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: and I love it. It's just so amazing. So all of
Speaker 1: Dickens's novels came to people chapter by chapter. It was
Speaker 1: portioned out. We didn't have single volume novels at that time,
Speaker 1: so in the nineteenth century, and so that was how
Speaker 1: storytelling really came to be. It was not here's a book.
Speaker 1: So you can imagine television pre Netflix versus television now,
Speaker 1: you couldn't binge on a novel. So yeah, and I've
Speaker 1: always loved that form. And so I mean Agatha Christie
Speaker 1: serialized and f Scott Fitzgerald. So it did move into
Speaker 1: the twentieth century. And so I decided we went to
Speaker 1: my publisher with Cured, which was the sequel to Pathological.
Speaker 1: They had optioned my second book, and they passed. And
Speaker 1: part of the reason that they passed was that it's
Speaker 1: not the book and they said that is just that
Speaker 1: Pathological came out at a time when again, people just
Speaker 1: wanted their diagnoses. They didn't want to be questioned, they
Speaker 1: didn't want to be educated, And that has shifted so much,
Speaker 1: and there's so much publicity now happening about the need
Speaker 1: for not getting rid of diagnoses. I in no way,
Speaker 1: I down't have a system to rep place it, so
Speaker 1: I can't do that. But it is about knowing the
Speaker 1: truth and empowering patients and empowering parents to know, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is what this diagnosis is. It's useful here, it's
Speaker 1: not useful to this degree, and maybe I can help
Speaker 1: my child understand that and myself. So we went to them.
Speaker 1: But you know, I spoke with my editor and my
Speaker 1: agent and they said, why don't you serialize it on
Speaker 1: substack and why don't you bring it to people? Partly
Speaker 1: because I really wanted to enact social change. And my
Speaker 1: agent said the most phenomenal thing to me. She said, Sarah,
Speaker 1: books don't incite change, They reflect unchange, They reflect on
Speaker 1: social movements. And that may or may not be true
Speaker 1: across the board, but I think generally she's right, and
Speaker 1: so yeah, yeah, by bringing it to people and then
Speaker 1: I was able to record it, so there's an audiobook.
Speaker 1: But what I was able to do as part of that,
Speaker 1: it's this living thing on substack. So I was able
Speaker 1: to interview other people who've recovered, so it isn't just
Speaker 1: me to kind of give evidence of that, and their
Speaker 1: stories and their trajectory is so different from mine, right,
Speaker 1: Some of them still embrace the diagnosis, some of them don't.
Speaker 1: Some of them, you know, are transgender and had addiction issues,
Speaker 1: and so there's so many different dimensions to this. And
Speaker 1: then I was also able to interview so many people
Speaker 1: in the mental health field, those who do agree that
Speaker 1: recovery is possible and those who don't, and that was
Speaker 1: also really phenomenal. So it became this other thing. I
Speaker 1: was able to interview Larry Davidson, who runs Samsu's Office
Speaker 1: of Recovery. We do have an office, my friend, So
Speaker 1: there is an office in the US government that we
Speaker 1: have for recovery. So the US government has acknowledged it.
Speaker 1: It was early two thousands that they first acknowledged that
Speaker 1: mental health recovery was possible, and so the government has
Speaker 1: been trying to bring it to people for two decades,
Speaker 1: but because of big Pharma, because of other things, it
Speaker 1: just has not gotten in because of people wanting their
Speaker 1: diagnoses not listening to this idea of recovery. It's just
Speaker 1: not gotten into the media mainstream, so it hasn't reached people.
Speaker 1: Larry Davidson, who also is at Yale, which has an
Speaker 1: amazing center for recovery, mental health recovery, and they're doing
Speaker 1: really the pre eminent research on it. But what he
Speaker 1: said to me was recovery. The name of it is
Speaker 1: problematic because it is so associated with addiction, and so
Speaker 1: it just was used and they haven't come up with
Speaker 1: another one. And I use the term cured ironically. Right,
Speaker 1: There isn't a cure, right, single, there's no magic bullet.
Speaker 1: But can we cure the verb? Can it be an
Speaker 1: ongoing process in our lives of living more well? Whatever
Speaker 1: that means to that person.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about this idea. Recovery is the word that's
Speaker 3: being you used, so let's stick with it for now.
Speaker 3: What is recovery from mental illness?
Speaker 1: So I asked my psychiatrist this when he declared me well,
Speaker 1: and for him, he said, it was that you have
Speaker 1: not had an episode in a year, so you've not
Speaker 1: had some sort of crisis in one year. Now, That
Speaker 1: was him so there is no overall definition of it,
Speaker 1: but there are two models. So there's clinical recovery and
Speaker 1: then there's personal recovery. And so clinical recovery is what
Speaker 1: we went by for a very long time, and that
Speaker 1: means that your psychiatrist declares you cured, well, recovered, and
Speaker 1: it is purely their decision and they decide your trajectory. Now,
Speaker 1: the problem is with this, they call it the clinician's illusion.
Speaker 1: And when you are in the mental health system, psychiatrists,
Speaker 1: mental health professionals, they see people who are not well.
Speaker 1: So their view is no one can recover, not all
Speaker 1: of them. But it's understandable why they think that because
Speaker 1: they're only seeing us. But the minute we're well, we're
Speaker 1: out of their office. We're not seeing this anymore.
Speaker 3: Twelve step programs have the same thing, right. What they
Speaker 3: see is the people who go out and come back.
Speaker 3: The idea then is if you go back out there
Speaker 3: and drink, you come back, because that's all that we see.
Speaker 3: We don't see the people who just disappear and either
Speaker 3: decide they don't need twelve step help anymore, or go
Speaker 3: back to some form of drinking that doesn't get them
Speaker 3: to the same point. Right, And it is an illusion
Speaker 3: because you're only seeing part of what's happening, and there
Speaker 3: are more scenarios out there occurring than what they're seeing.
Speaker 3: So I understand why clinicians would be the same way, right,
Speaker 3: they see the people who are still suffering.
Speaker 1: Right, and so it makes total sense. But because that's
Speaker 1: not even in the conversation, it's unlikely that a clinician
Speaker 1: is going to say, you know, I think you're well,
Speaker 1: and I think we can go for this. So there's
Speaker 1: something called personal recovery, and that is when you and
Speaker 1: the clinician decide together that you are well. And that
Speaker 1: is why I think right now, as long as medical
Speaker 1: schools are not teaching recovery, and as long as recovery
Speaker 1: is not a part of the DSM the way it
Speaker 1: should be, what we need to do is really empower
Speaker 1: people to be saying, can we have this conversation about recovery.
Speaker 1: Can we talk about what is my path to recovery?
Speaker 1: What would that look like, and decide together when I've
Speaker 1: gotten there. Now, that doesn't mean you stop seeing a therapist.
Speaker 1: I still see my psychiatrists because, as I said, it's
Speaker 1: going to take me a very long time to get
Speaker 1: off medications, and I could have chosen to stay on medications.
Speaker 1: I mean, in some ways my body is fully dependent
Speaker 1: on them. If it turns out that I cannot get
Speaker 1: off them because the withdrawal symptoms are so bad, that's
Speaker 1: fine with me. There are long term side effects I'd
Speaker 1: like to avoid, but if I can get it as
Speaker 1: low as possible, that's great. I'm good. So again, I
Speaker 1: don't want people to feel this pressure of Okay, then
Speaker 1: I have to be this normal person. I'm so not normal.
Speaker 1: My life is so non normal I cannot tell you,
Speaker 1: but it works for me.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's interesting because you're saying that you're borrowing from
Speaker 3: the recovery movement. But there's a couple different definitions, and
Speaker 3: one here is from the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance,
Speaker 3: where they say recovery is the process of gaining control
Speaker 3: over one's life and the direction one wants that life
Speaker 3: to go on the other side of a psychiatric diagnosis
Speaker 3: and all the losses usually associated with that diagnosis. And
Speaker 3: I think the other thing you're saying here, and you
Speaker 3: had misconceptions about what recovering might be, right, Yeah, you
Speaker 3: thought it would mean you're off all medicines. You thought
Speaker 3: it would mean you're not in therapy, And I think again,
Speaker 3: if we go back to the recovery from alcoholism that's
Speaker 3: primarily out there, which is twelve step recovery, that we
Speaker 3: see people are in recovery or recovered, doesn't mean that
Speaker 3: they don't go to meetings anymore. Right, So it's the
Speaker 3: same sort of idea. But you are having panic attacks, right,
Speaker 3: or had a panic attack, So talk to me about
Speaker 3: how that fits into the concept of being cured or recovered.
Speaker 1: Again, we're not going to be able to escape depression, anxiety,
Speaker 1: all these you know, distractability, irritability, those things are still
Speaker 1: part of me. The difference and why it's just a
Speaker 1: whole different world and why my mind is so different
Speaker 1: is because I don't think there's anything wrong when those
Speaker 1: things happen. I don't think it's a sign that something's
Speaker 1: gone horribly wrong. And before I did it was an episode.
Speaker 1: Now there are points where I was in total dysfunction.
Speaker 1: And what I want to also emphasize is that you know,
Speaker 1: I suffered from suicidality for five years, chronic suicidality. That's
Speaker 1: a very different situation. You know. Again, those are extremes.
Speaker 1: That is not something that should be dismissed, you know,
Speaker 1: or said, oh, this is just part of the experience,
Speaker 1: although some people argue that is part of the human
Speaker 1: experience and that we shame people for it in a
Speaker 1: way that we shouldn't, and I believe that too. I
Speaker 1: don't think it's you know, definitely get help, but I
Speaker 1: think that also we tend to shame people. It's got
Speaker 1: a lot of stigma. Suicidality does in a way that
Speaker 1: I wish it didn't. So I don't think that anything
Speaker 1: has gone wrong. I don't rush to my psychiatrist. I
Speaker 1: do not change medication dosages in any way. And again
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that someone who isn't in crisis wouldn't
Speaker 1: do that, but that's the difference. I don't need to
Speaker 1: do that, and it does change with time. But I'm
Speaker 1: also going through a lot right now. I run a
Speaker 1: business on substack, I'm a writer. I teach it Northwestern.
Speaker 1: I mean, I have a very full life, so it's
Speaker 1: not surprising to me that I have anxiety, and it's
Speaker 1: not surprising to me that I have these lows because
Speaker 1: my life is so up, up, up up, you know.
Speaker 1: It's like there's so many things going on that when
Speaker 1: actually the weekend comes or I have a day off,
Speaker 1: I'll find that I get kind of depressed. I get
Speaker 1: a little low because I'm going at this rate, you know,
Speaker 1: And that's just very different. But the emotions are so uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: and they're so often that I want to run from
Speaker 1: them too. I want to say, there's something terribly wrong
Speaker 1: with me when I feel these Lisa Felman Barrett, she's
Speaker 1: at MIT, I think, but she has a wonderful book
Speaker 1: on emotions. And when I read her book, that really
Speaker 1: helped me realize I didn't even know what an emotion was.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that an emotion was a sensation in
Speaker 1: my body. I had no emotion education. I was emotionally illiterate,
Speaker 1: you know, illiterate about emotions. And what I did was
Speaker 1: I really studied what they are. And I could say
Speaker 1: I didn't know what anxiety felt like in my body.
Speaker 1: It just was terrible. And now I'm thinking, oh, okay, well,
Speaker 1: my chest feels like it's about to collapse and it's
Speaker 1: just awful, and I feel like I'm jumping out of
Speaker 1: my skin and all I want to do is stop this.
Speaker 1: Oh I'm having anxiety. This is normal. This is a
Speaker 1: part of the human experience. One thing that's really helped
Speaker 1: me is evolutionary psychiatry and psychology has been very helpful.
Speaker 1: So understanding that we are programmed for these emotions. Anxiety
Speaker 1: is a very helpful emotion. When you are living on
Speaker 1: the savannah and you have to go hunt for your food,
Speaker 1: you know, and you're being chased by lions. But when
Speaker 1: I open my email, I am not being chased by lions,
Speaker 1: and yet my body is designed to react that way.
Speaker 1: And so that makes me really understand, Okay, this is
Speaker 1: just how I'm programmed. Now I can understand it on
Speaker 1: an intellectual level. I can stop. I can just sit
Speaker 1: for a second, feel the terrible allow the terrible emotion,
Speaker 1: not enjoy it, but accept it. And sometimes it goes away,
Speaker 1: and sometimes it doesn't. And then I live with it
Speaker 1: and I go through my day, and you know, that's
Speaker 1: just how I've learned to really adjust.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's a really helpful way of explaining it.
Speaker 3: They also talk about recovery centering on three basic principles,
Speaker 3: improving health, living a self directed life, and striving to
Speaker 3: reach our potential. And again, I think the point you're
Speaker 3: making is that personal recovery does not mean you're free
Speaker 3: of symptom and that's what clinical recovery would say. Clinical
Speaker 3: recoveries you're free of symptoms. And as we've said, some
Speaker 3: of these things like depression is part of the human
Speaker 3: condition or at least low moods, right, so you're not
Speaker 3: going to be completely asymptomatic. And so I think the
Speaker 3: question is when is it bad enough that you feel
Speaker 3: like you want or need more help than you're getting.
Speaker 1: I was just going to say, that is why it
Speaker 1: is so important for patients and people to be empowered
Speaker 1: with all of this information. Right now, we're just blind
Speaker 1: in this mental health system. And I don't think the
Speaker 1: mental health system is bad. When Pathological came out, I
Speaker 1: thought my editor and I and Herbert Collins thought we're
Speaker 1: going to get so much pushback on this from psychiatry.
Speaker 1: I was on MPR with the head of the steering committee,
Speaker 1: Paul Applebaum for the DSM, with Thomas Insel, who was
Speaker 1: former head of the National Institute for Mental Health, both biopsychiatrists,
Speaker 1: and both said, you're right, the public deserves to know psychiatry.
Speaker 1: The mental health system is not resistant to these things.
Speaker 1: It's the public that is and that is phenomenal, and
Speaker 1: they're the ones who need that empowerment. And I think
Speaker 1: that we could all work together beautifully, beautifully if people understood,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of the information that I haven't pathological
Speaker 1: and what's in cured and you know, then again talk
Speaker 1: to other people and spoke to others. Thomas Intel has
Speaker 1: a wonderful book on recovery as well, so really going
Speaker 1: toward that. But you're so right that where it comes
Speaker 1: down to is it will be in the individual, Like
Speaker 1: when is this a problem for me in my life?
Speaker 1: When am I not seeing it being a problem. But
Speaker 1: we also have to get to a place where mental
Speaker 1: and emotional pain isn't necessarily a problem, right, That is
Speaker 1: what we think we have, This happiness addiction, you know,
Speaker 1: in some ways, I don't mean to use the word
Speaker 1: addiction flippantly, but like this happiness obsession, let's put it
Speaker 1: that way, this kind of cult of happiness where we
Speaker 1: think we're all supposed to be these happy instagrammy and individuals,
Speaker 1: and it's just not what life is. That's not what
Speaker 1: it's actually supposed to be like, and that's not the
Speaker 1: full human experience.
Speaker 3: So listener, consider this. You're halfway through the episode Integration reminder.
Speaker 3: Remember knowledge is power, but only if combined with action
Speaker 3: and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute
Speaker 3: to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a
Speaker 3: detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause
Speaker 3: and reflect. What's your one big insight so far and
Speaker 3: how can you put it into practice in your life? Seriously,
Speaker 3: just take a second, pause the audio and reflect. It
Speaker 3: can be so powerful to have these reminders to stop
Speaker 3: and be present, can't it. If you want to keep
Speaker 3: this momentum going that you built with this little exercise,
Speaker 3: I'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders
Speaker 3: SMS list. I'll shoot you two texts a week with
Speaker 3: insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a
Speaker 3: nice little nudge to stop and be present in your life,
Speaker 3: and they're a helpful way to not get lost in
Speaker 3: the busyness and forget what is important. You can join
Speaker 3: at one you feed dot net slash sms, and if
Speaker 3: you don't like them, you can get off a list
Speaker 3: really easily. So far, there are over one and seventy
Speaker 3: two others from the one you Feed community on the list,
Speaker 3: and we'd love to welcome you as well, So head
Speaker 3: on over to one you Feed dot net slash sms
Speaker 3: and let's feed our good wolves together. It's really tricky
Speaker 3: to know what is acceptable level of suffering, and acceptable
Speaker 3: is maybe the wrong word, but it's the one that's
Speaker 3: coming to mind. And I think about this a lot, right,
Speaker 3: I still have low moods, I have antedonia, right, and
Speaker 3: these things will happen, and the nature of it when
Speaker 3: I'm in it is to believe that it's always this way,
Speaker 3: that always has been this way, and it always will
Speaker 3: be this way, and that is not true. And yet
Speaker 3: the question for me is is it worth increasing my
Speaker 3: medication dose when I'm in the middle of one of
Speaker 3: those And I don't know. And the answer for me
Speaker 3: for years now has been no, I don't. I'm on
Speaker 3: a very low dose, and I've stayed on a very
Speaker 3: low dose largely for the reasons that you have described,
Speaker 3: which is our brains become dependent on them. It's fascinating
Speaker 3: to me that you're on a ten year plan. I
Speaker 3: thought I was doing really good to be on a
Speaker 3: one year plan in the past, and which still seemed
Speaker 3: like an incredibly long time. Anyway. Maybe we'll talk more
Speaker 3: about that in the post show conversation, but it's just
Speaker 3: difficult to know. But what I like about this idea
Speaker 3: of personal recovery so much is that we become responsible
Speaker 3: for our mental health, and a doctor or a clinician
Speaker 3: is part of that, but it's not all of it.
Speaker 3: And there's all these other elements that you talked about.
Speaker 3: You've talked about diet, You've talked about sleep patterns, right,
Speaker 3: And I've said for years, like I throw the kitchen
Speaker 3: sink at my depression, right, Yeah, Like it has been
Speaker 3: a lifestyle overhaul that has allowed me to be I
Speaker 3: would say, very high functioning. But it's been diet, it's
Speaker 3: been exercise, it's been sleep, it's been talking to other people.
Speaker 3: It's been doing things that I like. It's been playing music,
Speaker 3: it's reading books. It's all of it. And I don't
Speaker 3: want to position that as an ongoing struggle because the
Speaker 3: things that tend to make me quote unquote better in
Speaker 3: that regard are also many of the wonderful things in life.
Speaker 3: And so I love this idea of recovery. I'm curious
Speaker 3: about recovery versus recovered. And this is a debate that
Speaker 3: has happened in twelve step programs forever. There is a
Speaker 3: phrase in the AA Big Book, we are people who
Speaker 3: have recovered, and so there are people who use that phrase,
Speaker 3: and there are other people that say that's not accurate,
Speaker 3: like we're in recovery. And I've always sort of I
Speaker 3: think of myself as in recovery, not recovered. But again,
Speaker 3: we've sort of ascertained that my working with labels is
Speaker 3: fairly fluid. So I haven't gotten too hung up in
Speaker 3: the debate. But is there a similar debate in the
Speaker 3: recovery movement in mental illness?
Speaker 1: We're not even at that point yet, Okay, I wish
Speaker 1: we were. That's where we have to get. And I
Speaker 1: think that's so so smart and such a wonderful way
Speaker 1: to look at it, which is that maybe there isn't
Speaker 1: an answer, maybe it doesn't have to be one or
Speaker 1: the other, that maybe what that indicates is a level
Speaker 1: of care that you need at that point, or a
Speaker 1: level of support. Right. So, if I feel like, because
Speaker 1: I've interviewed so many people who consider themselves either in
Speaker 1: recovery or recovered from serious mental illness, often so We're
Speaker 1: not talking about what Samson defines as any mental illness,
Speaker 1: which is high functioning. We're talking about people who really
Speaker 1: went into a low functioning period of their lives, and
Speaker 1: some of them felt no. I still have this diagnosis,
Speaker 1: I still very much identify with it. This is who
Speaker 1: I am and this is where I am. But I'm
Speaker 1: in recovery. I'm not sick anymore, whereas I have absolutely
Speaker 1: no interest in that because I know how powerful my
Speaker 1: brain is and that self fulfilling prophecy. I did it
Speaker 1: for so long that I don't even want to know
Speaker 1: what's on my medical records because I will adopt it.
Speaker 1: I don't go buy horoscopes. I don't go by you know,
Speaker 1: I'm an introvert. As an extrovert, I don't like that
Speaker 1: because it just makes me into something, and I don't
Speaker 1: want to be something.
Speaker 3: I tend to agree. I take all those things Myers
Speaker 3: Briggs or Aneagram tests or all of that stuff with
Speaker 3: a huge grain of salt, you know, because I always
Speaker 3: find even answering the questions hard because I'm like, well,
Speaker 3: you know, would you rather go to a party or
Speaker 3: stay home and read a book? And I'm like, well,
Speaker 3: what's the party, what's the book?
Speaker 1: You know? I did?
Speaker 3: How much did I sleep last night?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: Like? What else? I mean, like, I can't answer that.
Speaker 3: I'm going to need a whole lot more information to
Speaker 3: answer this question. And so I again, I find them
Speaker 3: sort of mildly interesting. But like you said, I will
Speaker 3: not go see a psychic, even if if I'm walking
Speaker 3: by like a free psychic, I'm like, no, I don't
Speaker 3: want whatever you say, even the little bit that will
Speaker 3: get caught.
Speaker 2: In my mind.
Speaker 3: I don't want it there good or bad, because I worry,
Speaker 3: like you that like it will linger there in some
Speaker 3: way and in many ways. And you talk about this
Speaker 3: near the end of Cured. Is that what we're talking
Speaker 3: about here, to a large degree, is what is the
Speaker 3: story we're telling ourselves about our mental illness or whatever.
Speaker 3: And stories are extraordinarily powerful. The story we tell ourselves
Speaker 3: about it is really important. And you've chosen to tell
Speaker 3: yourself a story of I am recovering, I am recovered,
Speaker 3: and that that has been really important for you in
Speaker 3: getting to a place where you're much better than you
Speaker 3: used to be. If that's a phrase you're comfortable using.
Speaker 1: Yes, one hundred percent, I mean I consider myself well,
Speaker 1: and you know I don't have a diet diagnosis. I
Speaker 1: you know all of that, and yet if someone else
Speaker 1: wanted to say, no, I have a diagnosis, I'm in
Speaker 1: recovery and I am living what you just said, which
Speaker 1: is the definition of it is striving to reach my
Speaker 1: full potential. That is so important. And some people might
Speaker 1: condemn that and say it's so capitalist, and you know
Speaker 1: all of this probably, but striving to reach your full
Speaker 1: potential could be being a great mother to my cats.
Speaker 1: I mean it means that I am gardening. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: gardening every day, and I am making sure I create
Speaker 1: a carve out that time for myself. I am sleeping
Speaker 1: well right. Striving to reach my full potential does not
Speaker 1: mean I'm an executive at Google. I don't want anyone
Speaker 1: to go work at Google.
Speaker 4: Your vibe.
Speaker 3: Part of your book that made me laugh Cured, which
Speaker 3: is not a book yet it's a serialized substack, and
Speaker 3: your substack is wonderful. We'll have links in the show
Speaker 3: notes to it. But you talk for a little bit
Speaker 3: about Jocko will Nick, who for people who don't know,
Speaker 3: he is like an ex military podcaster, but he is
Speaker 3: all about like you know, you go get it, you
Speaker 3: kill it, you crush it. You like discipline, mental fortitude, toughness, right,
Speaker 3: and you compare him, maybe even in the same substack
Speaker 3: with people like Brene Brown and Kristin Neff Yep, that
Speaker 3: cracked me up. I just thought of like the Jocko
Speaker 3: will Nick Kristin nef cage match, and that just made me,
Speaker 3: made me happy and made me laugh. I've interviewed Kristin
Speaker 3: a couple times and she's wonderful. But I think about
Speaker 3: this also, and I think about it in this way
Speaker 3: that there is a place for a Jocko will Nick
Speaker 3: type approach. I think with my thoughts where I sort
Speaker 3: of say, like enough, no more, I'm not thinking this anymore.
Speaker 3: And I may have to do that five hundred times,
Speaker 3: and at the same exact time, there is a place
Speaker 3: for Okay, I can't seem to fight you like I'm
Speaker 3: just gonna let you be here, yeah right, yeah. Knowing
Speaker 3: when to do which of those things I'm painting with
Speaker 3: very broad strokes, but when to sort of fight and
Speaker 3: adjust and when to allow and accept when it comes
Speaker 3: to the contents of our own brain is so nuanced,
Speaker 3: and so I just loved putting those two in the
Speaker 3: same sort of sentence group because it defines for me
Speaker 3: very well what that struggle or what that challenge is.
Speaker 3: And it's one that I talk about on this show
Speaker 3: all the time, trying to figure that out, that nuance. Yeah,
Speaker 3: where have you landed with it?
Speaker 1: Well, it's funny because that was a period of time
Speaker 1: I was in the cult of Jocko. As I say,
Speaker 1: there's just this cult around him. He loves jiu jitsu,
Speaker 1: and he's liked a hundred burpees and tell me if
Speaker 1: you feel bad, you know, kind of like what he says.
Speaker 1: And so I was like, Okay, I'll do a hundred
Speaker 1: burpees and see if I feel better.
Speaker 3: The answer is yes, I do feel good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel worse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, at least for seventy five to eighty five of
Speaker 3: those burpies, I'm feeling worse right.
Speaker 1: Well. When I was in partial hospitalization programs, it was
Speaker 1: the cult of Brene Brown. It was the cult of
Speaker 1: Kristin Neff who Brene Brown. I feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: with vulnerability and the sort of cult of vulnerability that
Speaker 1: can be very hard, you know, people from marginalized communities,
Speaker 1: It can be very difficult from people who've had suffered
Speaker 1: from mental illness. You know, we are already vulnerable, like
Speaker 1: you know, a white woman with a great job and
Speaker 1: you know, upper middle class, and you know, to make
Speaker 1: yourself vulnerables very different than someone who is in a
Speaker 1: psychiatric hostal you know, doing that it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: just so so different. So you know, I understood that.
Speaker 1: But at some point what I had to do for
Speaker 1: my recovery was to be hard on myself. I just did,
Speaker 1: and I just had to say no. And I did
Speaker 1: end up having a life coach, being in a life
Speaker 1: coach's program. And one thing she said that stayed with
Speaker 1: me is that your brain is like a toddler running
Speaker 1: around with a knife, you know, like that is your
Speaker 1: brain is just wild. I think of it as and
Speaker 1: this is again evolutionary psychiatry and psychology. Our brains are
Speaker 1: evolutionarily designed to keep us alive. That is it. They
Speaker 1: are not designed to make us happy, They are not
Speaker 1: designed to give us what we want to make us.
Speaker 1: They are designed for us to stay alive, seek pleasure,
Speaker 1: and avoid pain. And that is it. And so you know,
Speaker 1: when I'm negative, that's all my brain is designed to do.
Speaker 1: So I just say, I get it, brain, you're looking
Speaker 1: for danger, You're looking for everything to be terrible so
Speaker 1: that you keep me alive. And I always say thank you.
Speaker 1: I love thank you, Brain. You're doing a great job
Speaker 1: and you're awful, you know. So I've learned to really
Speaker 1: talk to myself in a very sweet way and get
Speaker 1: to know my brain and have a really good relationship
Speaker 1: with it, and just get that it is just very,
Speaker 1: very mistaken most of the time. Now, sometimes there are dangers,
Speaker 1: and that's real. So I also don't want to discount it.
Speaker 1: So sometimes I sit down and I'll just write down
Speaker 1: my thoughts and look at which of these are facts? Okay,
Speaker 1: So basically, and this is again something a life coach
Speaker 1: taught me, which is so if I write them all down,
Speaker 1: you know, she's horrible, my cats hate me. Whatever it is,
Speaker 1: None of those are facts right now, right, So if
Speaker 1: it's not a fact, it's not necessarily a danger, and
Speaker 1: so then I can kind of piece it out and say, okay,
Speaker 1: until it's a fact that can be proven in a
Speaker 1: court of law, and we can get into whether or
Speaker 1: not they're really facts and all of that. But then
Speaker 1: I say, if it is a fact, though you know,
Speaker 1: like my business is failing, right, I get more specific,
Speaker 1: I'm losing subscribers or something. I'm not right, But like,
Speaker 1: if that were happening, that's real, and as a business owner,
Speaker 1: I should look at that and say, okay, but that's
Speaker 1: a business problem. That's a math problem. That isn't something
Speaker 1: you know, terribly wrong with me. So being able to
Speaker 1: distinguish between what is fact and what is just my
Speaker 1: brain trying to take care of me and the thought
Speaker 1: of we're in danger, you know, it's always on high alert.
Speaker 3: I think that you sort of hit on where I
Speaker 3: land generally with this, which is I am extremely kind
Speaker 3: to myself and I don't let my brain just run wild.
Speaker 3: And I think Kristin Neff actually does a decent job
Speaker 3: of describing this when she talks about what self compassion
Speaker 3: is right, because she says, like, think about a good parent, right.
Speaker 3: A good parent is not going to let the child
Speaker 3: eat all the ice cream. Yeah, but they're also not
Speaker 3: going to be like, you, pig, why would you want
Speaker 3: to eat all that ice cream? Right? They're simply going
Speaker 3: to say like, sweetheart, hey, look you can't have that
Speaker 3: ice cream. I know you really want it, but and
Speaker 3: they maybe if the context is there, explain, you know,
Speaker 3: here's why you'll get a stomach ache and the bahlah
Speaker 3: blah blah. So I think that that seems to be
Speaker 3: the answer. But people, I think, I think, often think
Speaker 3: that being kind to ourselves means we're not accountable to ourselves,
Speaker 3: and so I'm often sort of trying to strike that balance.
Speaker 3: Now in my mind of Jocko and Kristin Neff, I
Speaker 3: wanted to ask you about writing down your thoughts because
Speaker 3: you talk about this a fair amount and cured and
Speaker 3: I'm curious your process for it and when you do it,
Speaker 3: because thoughts are they're just constant.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right. If I was to write down every thought I had,
Speaker 3: I would just simply sit here and just be writing
Speaker 3: all day long, thought and this thought, that thought, this thought.
Speaker 3: So when are you doing it? And what are you doing?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: But what's working? What's working for you?
Speaker 1: Yeah, writing down all my thoughts would be free.
Speaker 3: It'd be like a Jack Carrouac novel. You'd be like,
Speaker 3: all right, this is not you know.
Speaker 1: So when I first started doing it, I would do
Speaker 1: what the life coach I worked with called a thought download,
Speaker 1: and I did it every morning. Okay, some people might think, oh,
Speaker 1: morning pages or something like that. No it's not quite
Speaker 1: morning pages, but it's a similar idea, which is so
Speaker 1: I would just write them in a line, So it's
Speaker 1: not a journal. It's just one line thought, one line thought,
Speaker 1: one line thought, and I would just do it. Now.
Speaker 1: At first, I didn't want to do this because I'm
Speaker 1: a writer. I feel like writing things down are very powerful,
Speaker 1: and if I wrote down my garbage thoughts and my
Speaker 1: negative thoughts, it would kind of make them more real
Speaker 1: or a little bit like imprint on me. But so
Speaker 1: far I've found that does not happen. And then what
Speaker 1: I would do was pick out just one thought that
Speaker 1: was troubling, and then I would, you know, look at it,
Speaker 1: as we said, from this more educated point of view,
Speaker 1: which was like another person that I've learned a lot
Speaker 1: from calls it the four ends, Like how can I
Speaker 1: normalize this? Like why would it be normal that I'm
Speaker 1: thinking this extreme thought? Like she hates me. Well, that's
Speaker 1: because we got into an argument like of course I
Speaker 1: think that, but is it true? You know? So I
Speaker 1: used to do a process of like looking at what's
Speaker 1: the circumstance. And this is again from a life coach
Speaker 1: named Brook Cristio. So I want to give credit where
Speaker 1: it's due. She didn't make it up, but she just
Speaker 1: does it in a way that it was. You know,
Speaker 1: people will probably recognize this, but you kind of look
Speaker 1: at the circumstance and then you put your thought in
Speaker 1: and then how does that make you feel? And what
Speaker 1: actions do you take and what's the result, and then
Speaker 1: how would you want it to be different? So I
Speaker 1: did that every single morning and night while I was recovering.
Speaker 1: I mean every single morning and night. And I would
Speaker 1: do it during the day too, so when I would
Speaker 1: have very crippling anxiety, I would do it things like that.
Speaker 1: So but then after a while, since I've now you know,
Speaker 1: I don't need to do it as much. I can
Speaker 1: kind of coach myself. I can, I can basically talk
Speaker 1: myself out of things in some ways. But I'll still
Speaker 1: do it. You know, as you were asking, I probably
Speaker 1: should have done it last night when I was having
Speaker 1: my panic attack. It did go away. But whenever it's
Speaker 1: interrupting my life, basically when my mind has stopped me
Speaker 1: from going about my day. So what does that mean? Well,
Speaker 1: I do write down what I'm going to do every
Speaker 1: day day, I don't give myself this empty space. I
Speaker 1: know some people love that and it's considered freedom. I
Speaker 1: find a lot of freedom in I know what I'm
Speaker 1: doing it each day, because then it allows me to say, okay, wait,
Speaker 1: no I'm not really doing what I want to do.
Speaker 1: So again, going to these measurements is this problematic. I
Speaker 1: just have ways of kind of measuring it, and that's
Speaker 1: just been really helpful for me.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I don't know who said it, but the phrase
Speaker 3: structure liberates, yes, for some of us, is really true.
Speaker 3: I think for some of us, structure is actually very freeing.
Speaker 3: It's not that way for everybody, but for some of us.
Speaker 3: The key being, of course, that we get to decide
Speaker 3: the structure. Structure imposed upon us is not liberating, but
Speaker 3: structure that we decide that we're going to put in
Speaker 3: place tends to be.
Speaker 1: I was just going to say. The other thing that
Speaker 1: was really helpful for me was Ethan Cross, who you interviewed,
Speaker 1: has a book called Chatter where he talks about self
Speaker 1: talk and just how we speak to ourselves. And I
Speaker 1: spoke to myself horribly. I always said it was like
Speaker 1: mean fifth grade girl on the playground, so mean and
Speaker 1: so really learning how to monitor that and just say,
Speaker 1: like you were saying, say to myself like, no, we
Speaker 1: don't talk to ourselves like that anymore.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's another great book out there. We interviewed him.
Speaker 3: His name's John Acuff and it's called Soundtracks, and it's
Speaker 3: about a similar idea. We are at the end of
Speaker 3: our time. You and I are going to continue in
Speaker 3: the post show conversation talking all things about this, but
Speaker 3: we might be talking about medication. We'll see. I don't
Speaker 3: know exactly, but listeners, if you'd like access to this
Speaker 3: poorly defined post show conversation or all ad free episodes
Speaker 3: and to be part of our wonderful community, we'd love
Speaker 3: to have you One you feed dot net slash join Sarah,
Speaker 3: Thanks so much, such a pleasure to get to see
Speaker 3: you again and talk with you again.
Speaker 1: So great to be here.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Eric.
Speaker 2: If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
Speaker 2: consider making a monthly donation to support the One You
Speaker 2: Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this
Speaker 2: monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits.
Speaker 2: It's our way of saying thank you for your support.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: We are so grateful for the members of our community.
Speaker 2: We wouldn't be able to do what we do without
Speaker 2: their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.
Speaker 2: To learn more, make a donation at any level and
Speaker 2: become a member of the one You Feed community, go
Speaker 2: to oneufeed dot net slash Join The One You Feed
Speaker 2: podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting
Speaker 2: the show.