What if most of what we knew about Mental Health was wrong? | Khaliya | TEDxBeaconStreet

my name is Kalia and like they said I'm a Columbia University trained public

health

specialist who focuses on

mental

health

but

what

a lot of people don't realize is that life wasn't always so easy for me until a few years ago three years. Even getting out of bed I had been the victim of a violent crime and refusing to accept it quickly I saw that it was slowly but imperceptibly enveloping me, letting a veil of sadness and fear fall over everything from the outside I was not noticeable I did not talk about

what

happened and it did a job pretty good at least at the beginning of putting on a brave poker face, but I really started to suffer and the first year especially was where not only my behavior, but also my person, I started to suffer. the change on the inside was horrible but on the outside i actually looked great try not to eat for a year and yes you look great you get all kinds of compliments but keeping a secret like that changes the person and it changed me it was like the best of times at the worst times and that's why today I'm here to talk to you about the subject that people generally avoid talking about and that is

mental

health and the question that I would like to post today is what if

most

of what I

knew

that mental health was

wrong

when i think about mental health i think of three things that i think are going to change the face of public health mental health actually blind spots neuroplasticity and psychedelic science and strangely enough, these things are closely correlated, first Start with blind spots Many years ago I read a story that stuck with me, it was a book by one of my heroes, Oliver Sacks, and it was a collection of case studies about strange neurological conditions, in particular, in one story in particular, it was a woman named Mrs. s who is 60 years old and suffered a massive stroke that affected the functioning of her right brain hemisphere she is or seems to for the

most

part seemed in his most unaffected part was intelligent humorous and one hundred percent still there but still suffered from a rare condition that would cause him to only see things that were in his left field of vision, for example, he would complain that he wanted more food because the waiters hadn't given him enough and yet half his plate was half left. of course it wasn't touched and Undine another one of my favorite examples was if you took her to look at something 60 degrees to your left she would turn her wheelchair 300 degrees that's why they call it eyes to the right she could only write this behavior. it was unusual to say the least, but mrs. s didn't know she continued happily unaware that she was really only seeing fifty percent of the world her mind shielded her from what she didn't know by pretending to know this is what I call blind spots and the truth is we all owe these spots blind have varying degrees and so does science.

I would even go so far as to say that some of the blind spots in the medical industry could more appropriately be called blinders, like the ones they put on racehorses so they can only see what they are seeing. shows and no more but we'll come back to that later so let's get back to the question of what if most of what we

knew

about mental health was

wrong

what if we're all stuck working with 50% of the facts and I was told that was the whole picture, I mean think about that, wasn't it only 30 years ago that we were told that dietary fat was bad for Nate's until the 1980s?

It was like a revelation and everyone jumped on the bandwagon, doctors and laymen alike. and this idea persisted as problems such as hea Like heart disease, diabetes and obesity rose to epidemic levels and non-communicable diseases became some of the leading causes of death worldwide, just as they are today in day. you have the option to question them last year the Journal of the American Medical Association produced an article in which one of the authors said and I quote that limiting fat intake has no basis in science no basis in science what the more we have believed that in fact it has no basis in science with food.

They say we can disprove the prevailing theory that fat was bad by piling up a huge burden of proof in the form of people who, despite following the proper popular protocols, actually got sicker and died even looking at it. at a critical point in time it had been decided that cutting fat was the answer to our health problem or at least to various lobbyist tax problems and the road was chosen but what if they had chosen another path and what What if this kind of wrong turn occurred elsewhere in science? ignore if we had made the right choice humanity would be better off right so it follows that if we are doing everything according to a theory and everything gets worse instead of better then wouldn't it be safe to say maybe we made the right choice ? wrong way as i think is the mistake we made with mental health and a mistake i would like us to take a look at today so let's take a look what is mental health in a nutshell mental health is the absence of mental illness simply as being healthy is the opposite of being a stick, but in physical health there are not only sick and not sick, you can be injured, you can be cured, actually there are no words like that in mental health, so today I would like to introduce a new term . and that term is mental injury to explain what a mental injury is.

I would like you to think of a woman in your life someone you love a mother a daughter a child imagine this person next think of someone you know who is a veteran maybe not I don't know one maybe imagine your friends friend picture them in your mind now picture this one in three to five women will be a victim of violence or sexual assault in her lifetime we're talking more than one woman per minute and in the US alone, one in four veterans of Guerra suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and every new day, 22 of them commit suicide now.

I ask if these people are mentally ill. a way to fix it I think the answer to that question is yes by calling mental illness mental anguish we imply that these people are broken and that is partly because a lot of the tools we are using just didn't work but because bu Mental injury leads inside as term the seed of hope. I hope we can finally use tools that work, so now that we have a working definition, let's see who else is mentally injured. Well, statistically, mental illness affects a person. in four people in their lifetimes and is projected to account for more than half of the global burden of disease, and these numbers are growing rapidly, especially among young people, because mental injuries are not just PTSD, but also depression, anxiety , most people when they think of mental health and the tools that the psychiatric industry has made available they think of SSRIs they think of a prozac Zoloft paxil selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors that are often reused in these cases they also think in the benzodiazepines valium ativan ambien klonopin used to reduce anxiety and help people sleep there are also the neuroleptics Ripper doll zyprexa seroquel these are the antipsychotics so you see there are a lot of things out there re and I think judging by some of the eyes, many of you have heard of these pathways, they all work to change the chemistry of the brain and make Certain brain substances are more or less available, producing results along the lines of the desired response, but most of these drugs were developed in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and began to spread into more widespread use in the 1950s. 80's and 90's up to now along with psychology these are the tools we had been and still have but while these drugs all work to change neurotransmitter levels none of them affect neuroplasticity and this is key now you may be wondering what neuroplasticity is neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to reorganize itself through the formation of new neural connections throughout life neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to reorganize itself to compensate for injury or loss Reorganization of the brain takes place carried out via axonal sprouting where undamaged neurons develop new nerve endings to to adapt to current conditions. connect with the other undamaged nerve cells forming new neural pathways to achieve a necessary function eg the young lady in Oliver Sacks book was able to function despite her injury by rerouting signals around the damaged tissue and an easy example for you of neuroplasticity is drying try your teeth with your non-dominant hand for a week at first it will be difficult but then suddenly it becomes easy because the neurons that fire together connect to each other or the more you encourage axonal sprouting around one activity, the more your brain will create.

The pathways they create make the activity faster and easier. Originally, our brains were thought to be the most plastic at birth, with their neuroplasticity declining over time. Natural ways to increase neuroplasticity are things like learning to play an instrument and exercising, but one of the best ways these pathways are built is through repetition with age our white brains were thought to be less plastic but we're starting to thin out that hypothesis, what if it wasn't so much that the brain was less plastic, but that as an adult you had trained your brain so well on certain things that it was hard to fight your way off the most used pathways, the pathways, the neural pathways are there? as learned patterns to help us get through life more easily and also to help us with survival, for example, in PTSD, neural pathways are also altered, your survival mechanism kicks in and you go into fight or flight without going through the cortex prefrontal and going directly to the primitive area of ​​the brain where the amygdala is this is the limbic system and the problem with this is that it is very difficult to undo it is after all the mechanism that was put in place to keep you alive and one of the Which Gets the Most Wired The quickest attempts over the years to address this have been largely unsuccessful, cognitive behavioral therapy exposure therapy and SSRIs, but these tools are woefully inadequate for their task.

What we need in this case, as in the case of more mental injuries, is to harness the power of neuroplasticity and harness the power of the brain area to heal. Psychiatric medications for the most part chain the brain and control the level of neurotransmitters. , but they don't necessarily create a change in behavior and they don't necessarily create a change in the person neuroplasticity changes which brings me to the third point psychedelic science not psychedelic science it's not a misnomer it's real science with real tools actually when you look the road we didn't take when I look at the fork in the road that led to the current tragic state of mental health and it's really tragic I think about the idea that maybe we've spent the last 50 years only solving half of the equation keeping the dead alive mentally ill but not healing them, so when I asked the question, what if most of what we understand about mental health al isn't it true?

I was also inferring what if we don't admit what we don't know, what if we have been forced to wear blinders to not see the other half of the mental health equation the same side where the answers to these can be found. cries of suffering psychedelics are characterized by generating hallucinations distortions of perception alters that alter altered states of consciousness and some examples of psychedelics are LSD, MDMA and ayahuasca some of these are also known as entheogens the chemical is typically of plant eaten to produce a non-ordinary state of consciousness for spiritual or religious purposes, many of these plants and substances have been used for millennia to help people understand the world and their place in it Even wine is considered an entheogen because it was used by the Greeks and the Egyptians in the cult of Dionysus. to help create new neural pathways by rapidly and often defiantly increasing neuroplasticity two levels commonly seen only in children when LSD was discovered, for example, so potent were its effects that the CIA immediately began doing large-scale experiments scale thinking they had found a tool for mind control and the general public also started doing large scale DIY experiments with mixed results now just to be clear I am NOT promoting the use of psychedelics however I am promoting the use of science For example, if I told you that there is a drug currently in testing that cures severely depressed patients resistant to treatment in three or four sessions in sessions with a 72 percent success rate, you would say that is crazy that it cannot be. true but true and this is just one of the psychedelic drugs foundcurrently in trials and is one of many that show real promise specifically in the treatment of depression and PTSD, but for a number of other things that involve the element of neuroplasticity of the pins, these other trials have been carried out out in the last few years which is why you haven't heard of it when the 50-year-old ban on psychedelics was lifted for certain specific streams of research, major institutions like John Hopkins NYU and Imperial College London have persisted in the face of daunting obstacles. for the advancement of this science and groups like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the Berkeley Foundation and the Hefner Institute are, in my opinion, heroes for keeping the research alive for more than 30 years waiting for the moment when the scientific community and the large general public would raise their heads and recognize their own blind spots would recognize what they don't know and recognize what the rest of the brain and mental health health practice has been ignored for too long has been ignored for too long it took me years to get over my own mental injury years of suffering that could have been avoided in years of suffering that men and women of the world experience who have served our countries victims of violence and maybe even the 10% of you who were in the audience now with SSRIs who could and should lead a fuller, clearer, happier life, free of blinders and blind spots together we can re solving the mental health crisis together can push to bring this science back into the mainstream mental health is a human right for these people the mentally wounded deserve to be healed