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Beyond Happy Pills: A Science-Based Exploration of Mental Health Medication

For years, medication has been used to treat mental health conditions, but have you ever wondered how it actually works? In this fascinating discussion, Bey and Kirsten sit down with Dr. A. John Rush to dive into the world of antidepressants. From popular SSRIs to cutting-edge laser treatments, they explore how these drugs affect the brain and help people manage their mental health.

Then, we turn to the future of mental health treatment. Dr. Rebecca Brachman joins in to discuss her groundbreaking research on preventative medication. Is it possible to take a pill that would ward off depression and anxiety before they even start? Tune in to find out.

Links for Today’s Episode:

Learn more about Dr. A John Rush’s work

Learn more about Dr. Rebecca Brachman’s work

Transcript
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Hello. Hello.

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I'm kirsten. Michelle Cillis

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Yeah, and I'm the Bull Bey and this is the

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So Curious podcast presented by the Franklin Institute.

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Today we are going to learn about some of

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the ways that medication is used to treat mental health issues.

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First, we'll be chatting with Dr. A.

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John Rush to discuss current forms of medication used to treat mental health.

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And then we're sitting down with Dr.

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Rebecca brockman to learn about her

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research into the emerging field of preventative mental health medication.

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And to round us out, we'll be joined by

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Marguerite Nicosia from the Shanti Project for another Mindfulness segment.

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Yeah, okay.

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I'm really looking forward to this episode, Bey, because I feel like no

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matter how much medication I take, it's still such a mystery to me.

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Like, you put this little thing in your

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body, and then all of a sudden you're better.

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I'm taking, like, gummies and vitamins and stuff like that.

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I have no clue how that works. Right.

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And also, I'm thinking about being on different mental health medications and

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how long it takes for them to get them right.

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I don't know if you know anyone who's been on them, and you'll be, like, trying these

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different cocktails for five years before you figure out what works.

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Yeah.

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What's also interesting, too, is, like, you know, a lot of people suffer from

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anxiety, but a lot of people are taking different medications to treat anxiety.

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So it's not like a one pill fits all kind of a thing.

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And so there's got to be some kind of,

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like, chemistry profile somewhere in there.

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I'm trying to sound scientific.

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I don't know.

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It's a chemistry profile.

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No, that's so true, because it's like, okay, someone takes Ativan for anxiety,

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and then someone takes Quantum for anxiety, and it has the same effect, but

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it could work completely different in the other person.

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But it's like, how if we're all humans.

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Right, we all have the same kind of digestive tracts and systems and uh uh.

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Science explain. Well, hopefully Dr.

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Rush will help us figure some of that stuff out.

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Dr. Rush.

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Welcome to So Curious. John.

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Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what it is that you do?

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Sure. I'm a psychiatrist by training.

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I got schooled mostly in the Northeast, and one of the places was the University

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of Pennsylvania, where I did my residency in psychiatry.

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And I worked with a guy named Aaron T.

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beck, who's the father of cognitive therapy.

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And I helped him develop and sort of write the first book on psychotherapy.

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It's called cognitive therapy and depression.

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It's beck. Rush.

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Sean emory. I'm Rush.

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After my residency, I got very interested in depression.

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And the reason for that was it was kind of a mystery illness.

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You could treat it with medication, you could treat it with therapy.

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And so I spent my whole life, as they say,

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in depression, bipolar depression, unipolar depression, medications, brain

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stimulation, psychotherapy practice guidelines, biomarkers you name it.

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And I hung in academia for a very long

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time until I came back from Singapore in 2013.

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I'd spent five years there as a vice dean

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for clinical sciences, and then I become a consultant.

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So I mentor individuals.

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I also deal with institutions like

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pharmaceutical companies, device companies, academic organizations, and

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still get to do a little bit of advice on research.

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So most of my research is in clinical,

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meaning the patient is the subject and the disorder area is depression or suicide or

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bipolar disorder, anxiety, that kind of stuff.

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And it's all aimed at how do you get more people better, sooner and safer?

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We love that. That's the name of the game, right?

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Yeah.

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Your back story and your career is extensive.

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You mentioned Singapore, you mentioned all these different things.

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I'm going to ask you a couple of

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clarifying questions and some examples to follow it up.

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what is behavioral medicine and some examples?

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And what's cognitive therapy and some examples?

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So behavioral medicine has to do with behavior.

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That is, what people do and how they think.

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And it's a very broad concept.

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So behavioral medicine can aim at things like phobias.

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People are afraid of getting on an airplane, afraid of walking across the

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street all the way out to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, serious mental

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illnesses that can be quite disabling, where the intervention can be either

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medication or some sort of behavioral or training kind of intervention.

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And one of those training interventions turns out to be cognitive therapy.

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And cognitive refers to thinking.

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So how does your thinking mess up your life?

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Or put it another way, are you bringing

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biases from your past or your background that are getting in your way of seeing

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opportunities and solutions to your current problems?

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And cognitive therapies like aimed at

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trying to help you recognize that whatever you learned from the past may or may not

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fit the current and certainly not the future, and to become a little bit more

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flexible and adaptive in your thinking and your behavior.

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How do you think of and explore the

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thought of people being controlled by their emotions?

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Or we control our emotions.

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A lot of those either or questions are

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usually both and answers, meaning when our emotions become too strong too quickly, we

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find ourselves letting our emotions overtake our behavior.

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And, you know, some of that's automatic.

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Like when you're under a danger threat,

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something awful is going to happen, your body reflexively operates.

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Your emotions actually drive you to do the right things, get out of harm's way.

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The so called fight response, that's a good thing.

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On the other hand, sometimes we get more

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emotional than it's necessary to do it all, to deal with the problem.

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stoic philosophers like epictetus or Marcus Ceruleus said things like, it's not

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things, but what we make of things that happen to us that upset us.

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So it's our interpretation that we put on everyday events to some of us, failing a

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test or not doing well on a test is a motivator.

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For other people, it's such a pushback and a slap down, then it takes them a lot

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longer to get off the mat and get back in the game.

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Yeah.

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It sounds like emotions are natural, and it keeps us safe and out of harm's way.

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But if we give ourselves some time, we can

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allow that rational side of our brain to maybe kick in for a second and guide us

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through the rest of whatever issues we might be facing.

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Yeah, and I want to talk a little bit more about medication.

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I know you've done a lot of work with

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ssris and researching can you explain what ssris are?

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And then also what are some other types of drugs that are used for mental health?

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Ssri. That stands for selective Serotonin

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reuptake inhibitors, which is a long mouthful.

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That's why we get ssris.

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And serotonin is one of probably 30 neurotransmitters in the brain.

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Neurotransmitters are chemicals that help one nerve talk to the other nerve.

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So when a nerve is fired, there's an

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impulse that goes down the axon to the synapse.

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The synapse is the space between one

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neuron and the next neuron, and that's a little tiny space.

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And the way it communicates is the neuron

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that comes into the space releases a chemical, a transmitter, which crosses

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that space and gets on the other side of the space to a receptor.

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And that receptor, when enough are occupied, the second neuron fires.

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So the first neuron speaks to the second neuron through these neurotransmitters.

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Other neurotransmitters you might know

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about, like norepinephrine serotonin, is one.

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There's a whole bunch of them.

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What happens after the first neuron fires?

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They go to the receptor on the second neuron, and that fires the neuron.

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Now, what do you do with the neurotransmitter?

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They don't waste it, so they put it back

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in the synapse, and it's taken up by the cell that gave it out to begin with.

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That's called reuptake.

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And these agents block the reuptake, which means it puts more serotonin into the

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synapse, and it makes those synapses fire more rapidly or more easily.

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That's what happens at the cellular level.

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The question is always what happens at the brain level?

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Is that the reason these things work?

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That's a little more murky, because we

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don't really have the full story on the biology of depression or schizophrenia or

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bipolar disorder or lots of things in the brain.

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We have someone parkinson, and we have

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some ideas on some of these, but it's not all been mapped out.

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So one of the issues is we have different

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drugs that do different things to these neurotransmitters.

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Some block them, some affect metabolism in

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another way to lots of different chemical avenues.

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But exactly which ones of these matter and

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which kinds of people, with which kinds of illness, that's a little more mysterious.

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So we know what they do chemically, but we

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don't necessarily know exactly how they work therapeutically.

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And I tried one, it didn't work.

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Then I tried another one, it didn't work.

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Or maybe some combination works and

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there's kind of a fishing expedition going on.

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And honestly, we're not really very good at picking one and then knowing, oh, this

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is the next best one and this is the next best one.

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We're getting there. But that's why we're looking for things

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like biomarkers, things that we can measure in the person to tell us which

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drug to use, for example, or whether they're going to get sick or better.

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We do that a lot in other medicines but a little tougher in brain diseases because

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the brain makes us very special compared to, obviously the other animals.

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You hinted at it just a second ago.

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You talked about the murkiness of it.

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It seems to be a common thing that people have to try a bunch of different

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medications for their mental health conditions to find the one that works

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right, to find the one that's productive or healthy for them.

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Why is it not one size fit all?

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And can you talk more about that murkiness?

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Sure. Two things.

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Number one, mental illness is not the only

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domain if you have congestive heart failure.

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We got eight or nine drugs.

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Which ones and which combination should you get?

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It's a little murky right?

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And infectious disease.

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We can take the bug out of your body and then grow it in a plate and put different

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drugs on it and see which drugs kill the bugs.

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So now we can target the treatment, but we can take stuff out of your brain and put

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it in a plate and figure out which ones will make your brain better.

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Sounds a little harder.

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Maybe one day in the future.

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Well, actually, I'll tell you about

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something that's really interesting in the second.

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It's called anatomically focused psychopharmacology.

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But the murkiness comes about for two or three major reasons.

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Number one, when we talk about depression, it's really not the depression.

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They are the depressions.

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There are many different kinds of depression.

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We have to be able to realize that depression, like schizophrenia, like these

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other conditions are syndromes, that is, different causes that come out looking the

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same in the clinic in terms of signs and symptoms.

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And that's why it's a little murky.

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We got to figure out what is it about this

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person that says this is the right drug or this is the wrong drug.

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Also, we can make mistakes with the drugs.

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I love this conversation,Yeah!

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Especially about bringing up the murkiness

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and staying in the murky part of this conversation, the murky part of the war is

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how do you navigate the complexities of ethics, of prescribing something that we

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don't fully understand yet, but knowing that somebody really does need help?

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Yeah, I think the question about the

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ethics is a very important one because you really have to explain to the patient,

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here's what we know the drug could do to you good news and also bad news.

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We know the side effect risks.

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We know a lot of that.

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But the exact mechanism for why it does

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what it does number one, we're not so clear about it.

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And number two, it can be different in different people because these medicines,

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we know what they do in animals, but we don't know what it does in every person.

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And we're all different.

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On mice and rodents have been brought up a lot.

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Yeah, we've been hearing a lot about how

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we have a lot of treatments that we know what they do to mice.

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We get it in a mouse, maybe, not a person.

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So I would love to go back to what you

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said about the new treatment that's coming up.

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Recent years, maybe in the last ten years,

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there has been developed a number of devices that stimulate the brain and not

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by putting you to sleep, but while you're awake.

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It's called rtms regional or repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation.

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It's a magnet.

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It's given maybe three or four times a

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week for four or five weeks for depression and for other indications.

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And it's not like electro convulsive therapy that's old, that's still used.

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It's very effective, but you don't want to use it very often.

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It has side effects that you want to try to avoid.

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But this newer one, there's no anesthesia,

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you're not put to sleep, there's no seizures.

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They're now developing more portable

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types, things that you could use even at home.

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So that's a whole evolving story. Wow.

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What they're doing is they're rebalancing the circuits in the brain.

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So think about depression is maybe too

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much emotion and too little thought just to simplify it a little bit.

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Is it maybe a way to connect the thinking

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part of the brain and put it in better control of the emotional part of the brain

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because it's maybe slipped away because of the illness?

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So that is a stimulation approach.

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Now, they recently developed some methodologies to put pills in capsules.

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And the capsules can be open with a

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certain frequency, like infrared that can go into your brain.

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You don't feel it, and you give the drug to the person.

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But the drug only comes out of the capsule

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when the beams are actually all congregating in a particular place called

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anatomically specific or spatially specific psychopharmacology, meaning we

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only give you the drug in the part of the brain.

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You need the drug.

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And we don't give you the drug anywhere else because it's in the capsule.

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And the capsule keeps the drug from opening its mouth and messing you up.

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Mind blown. What?

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Yeah, it is really mindblowingMindblone.

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This is crazy. Yeah.

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Now, very experimental. It's done in animals.

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Yes! They're working on it in people, though.

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And I think you may see this come to fruition in five years or less.

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Oh, my goodness.

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It keeps you going as a researcher. you know. we've only just begun.

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Yeah, some futuristics, I mean, but not that far off, right?

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Yeah. No, I love that.

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And you've clearly seen a lot in medicine from what you observe.

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Is medication enough for patients?

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And do you think lifestyle or therapy or

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other things kind of play a more sizable role into someone's wellbeing?

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There's two pieces to that.

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One is some people don't need medication.

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They need to change their lifestyle and they need to solve their problems.

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And therapy is not only the best, it's the right thing to do for those individuals

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and don't bother with medication at all, period, ever.

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On the other hand, there are people that you can do therapy on all day long.

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And if they have a very severe genetic,

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biological kind of problem, like, say, bipolar disorder, they're really going to

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need some medication to stabilize the brain's nonfunctioning pieces.

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But also they'll probably need some therapy in order to undo some of the harm

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that's been done inadvertently by being so depressed up and down all the time.

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That's not good.

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And so how do you repair your occupational

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relationship, your marital or your partner relationship and so on and so forth?

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So that's where the therapy comes in.

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Indeed, there is evidence in some forms of

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depression, the combination is really ideal, better than either alone.

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And in others, one is as good as the other.

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And lots of times you don't need one.

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Just one will do the trick.

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And that's kind of where we're still at

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this business of where do I plug you in to do what?

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To help you the least burdensome and most effective and safest way.

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Thank you so much for being here with us today.

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Oh sure! Thank you so much.

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Yeah, we really appreciate it.

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This was very, very informative in so many ways.

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We love the work that you're doing and keep it up.

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We love being able to keep this conversation of mental health going.

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And just a quick note to throw in there.

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Nine eight eight is the new Suicide and Crisis lifeline phone number.

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So for anyone listening and who needs that, use it.

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Dr.

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Rush touched a bit about what the future of mental health medication treatment

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might look like, but our next guest is going to give us a bit more insight.

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Dr. Rebecca brockman.

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Hey, Dr. brockman.

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How are you? I'm good.

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How are you guys? Great. Great

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Excellent. Glad to have you.

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Could you introduce yourself and what it is that you do?

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I am Dr. Rebecca brockman.

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I have a PhD in neuroscience.

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My expertise is in molecular psychiatry

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and neuroimmunology, particularly as it relates to psychiatric disorders.

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My day to day work is mostly not at the

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research bench anymore, but for a decade it was nice.

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And so what is preventative psychopharmacology?

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So pharmacology is just sort of a fancier word for drugs or medicine.

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And in most of the rest of medicine, we think of treating disease of alleviating

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the symptoms of disease and also preventing disease.

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And in psychiatry, for the most part, all

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of our drugs are only what's known as palliatives.

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They only really address symptoms.

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We have no cures, we have no

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preventatives, we have no preventions or prophylaxis.

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And up until very recently, it wasn't even

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something that we were very much thinking about as a possibility.

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So I think that the way to really think about it is the space that comes before

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disease develops, before a psychiatric illness would develop.

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And that's not going to be a plausible space for all disorders.

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Right.

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I think some of them are probably potentially you're born with, but for some

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that are later onset and that have a very clear cause, say, post traumatic stress

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disorder, now there's this space of thinking about ways in which we could

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prevent that and also if there are pharmacological, ie.

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Medicines that could be delivered

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beforehand before an exposure that might be protective.

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Wow. And how did you get into this field?

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How did this start for you?

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I think the way all great science does, which is completely by accident.

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And we had been testing a drug in mice as an antidepressant.

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These are really early set of studies.

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So we were just piloting, which is before

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you do the experiment, right, you sort of like test the kinks to make sure

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everything's sort of working as expected and then you actually run the experiment.

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And so we had used the same set of mice.

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The drug that we were using, you metabolize it very quickly.

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So we waited a whole week before using these mice for some other pilot

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experiments, found this very unexpected, long lasting effect where even though the

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drug was no longer in the mice, they had a stress resilient, protective effect

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against stress that was showing up a week later, three weeks later.

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And initially when we were actually looking at the data from the experiment,

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we just thought the data didn't work, the experiment didn't work.

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We went and we retested it.

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We retested it and we retested it.

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And it seems to work well for mice. Wow.

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Right.Right

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The first step.

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I mean, this is amazing work.

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In what situations would use preventative pharmaceuticals?

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Like, who are you looking to help?

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To some extent that's still an open question.

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I can think of a very narrow set of uses that are more obvious, which are people

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where you can identify a known vulnerability right.

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That maybe they're biologically prone to be less stress resilient.

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And we know they're going into a very high stress, high risk situation.

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And less stress resilient means you just can't take a bad day.

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Is that what that means? That's a very, I think, important

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question, which is what is stress resilience?

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What is stress and depression in this context for you?

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When we use these words, unfortunately, we have not enough words to mean a lot of

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different concepts and depressions maybe I'll start with that as an example.

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Right.

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Depression we use to describe a clinical disorder.

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It's also a symptom of other disorders, and it's also a mood.

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When you or your friends are talking about feeling depressed, you may not be talking

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about the same thing as what a psychiatrist is when they're talking about

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they have a patient with major depressive disorder that's in a depressive episode.

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So I am exclusively talking about the end of that.

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It's not even a spectrum.

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I'm talking about the definition of the word for depression that is clinical.

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And stress, I think, is also this very

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amorphous word that means both the stressor, the thing you're experiencing

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psychologically, the thing you're experiencing biologically.

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There are many different things that stress means.

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And for the most part god, I may not even know exactly what I'm always talking about

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when I'm referring to stress because I'm sort of jumping around a little bit.

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But I think for the most part I am talking

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about the body's reaction, the stress response, the stress axis, as we call it,

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in response to an external stressor stimuli.

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But probably the most important thing to define here is resilience.

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And resilience is a homeostatic mechanism,

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quote unquote, that allows you to bounce back and recover from stress.

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And homeostasis is just sort of keeping your body in equilibrium.

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So metabolism is a homeostatic mechanism.

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Your thermostat, if you set it to 72 degrees, it is working on maintaining

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homeostasis, maintaining equilibrium in the room temperature.

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If it gets too cold, turn on the heat.

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If it gets too hot, turn on the air. Right?

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That sort of thing. So resilience is your ability to maintain

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homeostasis after a disrupting event and also to respond to it appropriately.

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Yeah. Dr.

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rockman, what is the science behind how these preventative drugs operate?

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That is a great question.

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I would say that we discovered

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antidepressants at least 70 years ago now and still don't know how they work.

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This is a very recent discovery, less than ten years.

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Maybe we can meet back here in ten years or 50 years and I will have an answer.

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Put it on the calendar, save the date.

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So what does the future of your research look like?

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The near future? Looks like, one, trying to figure out an

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answer to your question, which is how is this working?

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Two, how much does it translate to humans?

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There's only been one study so far that has tried doing preventative treatment,

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and that's for postpartum depression, looks promising.

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And then the third thing is trying to find different drugs that will have this effect

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and will work for different groups of people.

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That's the future of our research.

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And then I think there's a future conversation for society, which is when

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and where do we use these, assuming they do work in humans?

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That's super exciting.

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I mean, I feel like whenever we talk to

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people in any sort of medical or scientific field, it's always with the

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mice first, of course, but yeah, you never know how that's going to translate over.

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Yeah. And I'm curious as to what those

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conversations will look like and where they're going to happen.

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Where would you like to see those

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conversations happening, like in government or around the dinner table?

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I think it's for patients, for clinicians,

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for scientists, and for philosophers to have jointly.

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I'd love to see some wordsmiths in there because as I mentioned, we definitely need

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a lot more language to even be able to have these conversations.

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So throwing it out there.

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I'll start writing a song later tonight.

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Yeah, right.

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So do you think that there is a future

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where there would be, if we're talking preventative?

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In my mind, I don't know that this is the right term vaccine or some sort for

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something like depression, seasonal depression.

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So the working assumption but this is an assumption, right?

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A hypothesis, not a proven fact, is that there are people that are biologically

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more vulnerable to stress causing psychiatric disorders.

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So in the subset of people that are particularly biologically vulnerable to,

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say, ptsd or stress induced depression or postpartum or something else where there's

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a clear trigger, I could imagine a world where we are treating those people, where

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we can identify the biological vulnerability to bring them up to the

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baseline, where everyone else is that's less vulnerable.

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That I can definitely imagine.

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And that is probably my hope for the not too distant future.

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This larger question, again, when you

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start to look at both how we use the word depression and also the numbers, you're

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getting into such large numbers of the population that for something like

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seasonal affective disorder, it's possible.

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But it's a little less obvious to me that the work that's been done so far will

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translate there, because that's not necessarily caused by stress.

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And same thing for depression that's not

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triggered by stress, and where stress resilience would be protective.

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Not impossible. Not impossible.

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I think one of the things I'd also hope is

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that now that we have this idea of maybe being able to prevent some of these

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diseases, that we can start thinking about other things in the psychiatric space.

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But I think that will take much more

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thought and more research and won't come as immediately.

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And a lot of those things, I just genuinely have no idea.

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One example I can think of where this would have been useful would have been,

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say, front line workers in the early days of the pandemic, and if we had been able

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to identify both who might have been particularly vulnerable, but we knew they

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were going into a very acutely stressful, traumatic situation.

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I think the secondary effects of the

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pandemic, especially in healthcare workers, have been psychiatric.

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That would be an example of a case where you can imagine using those.

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I love what you're doing, both personally and just as a human in the world.

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Right.

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I think that this is such a cool thing to be a pioneer of.

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Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us.

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Seriously, we really appreciate your time.

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Thank you guys.

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Thank you so much to both Dr.

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Brackman and Dr.

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Rush for coming on to talk to us about their work.

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Hey, kirsten. Hey, Bey.

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Do you ever wonder whether this planet is even going to be around in 2030 years?

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Yeah. It can be overwhelming to think of how to

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deal with some of the biggest problems we're facing.

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Our friends over at the Franklin Institute

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talked to some of the sharpest minds working in science and technology.

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And I gotta say, I think 2050 is going to be a pretty cool year.

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MhmmCheck out the Road to 2050, a new

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docuseries from Franklin Institute at fi.edu.

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All right, well, now let's shift gears a

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little bit for another mindfulness segment.

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We're joined once again by Marguerite nicosia from the shanti Project.

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Well, we want to take a moment to say

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thank you for joining us and having this conversation with us and being a part of

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this segment and telling us more about mindfulness.

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Certainly kirsten and I need it.

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so thank you.

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I really like to tell people that

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mindfulness does not need to be complicated.

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It's almost deceptively simple because things like breathing, just paying

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attention to your breathing, it just brings it down to such an elemental level.

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But I think the power is in making the shift from our current kind of hustle

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culture more towards simplicity and bringing it back to kind of where humans

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are more meant to be, which is in the moment.

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So if you don't mind, I'd like to share

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the definition of mindfulness because it's so simple.

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Yeah. Why didn't we ask that?

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Because so it's paying attention to the

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present moment with awareness and non judgment.

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And I'll explain the non judgment piece in

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a while because that piece was hard for me to grasp at first.

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But the paying attention to the present moment is really the simple thing.

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Our culture is we are all training our mind to multitask and multipurpose.

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And there's science behind this.

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The human brain is much more efficient when it is unitasking, not multitasking.

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So what mindfulness does is it brings back a natural part of us.

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I'm sure you guys and everyone listening has things that they do where they get

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kind of lost in the moment, like they have either hobbies or art that they do, or

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even just the simple act of reading a book is emotionally regulating.

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Because when you are doing something that

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you enjoy and are intently focused on, everyone knows how that feels.

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Like time goes away and you just

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afterwards you think to yourself, oh my God, I just feel so good.

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And do you remember like, when you were a

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teenager, just laying on your bed and listening to music?

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Yeah.

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Like just that one thing of just really paying attention to the.

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Lyrics really being transported by the music.

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They really know me, man. Yeah, right.

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I think it's all of us, all of us who are teenagers.

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I think mindfulness is a natural thing

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that we are now paying attention to on purpose.

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And can you talk more about the non judgmental part of it?

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That was very intriguing for me. Yes.

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And by the way, that's attributed to Jon Kabot zinn.

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He is the pioneer who brought mindfulness

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from the east to the west and kind of made it more of a scientific study.

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So the nonjudgment part was beautifully

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explained to me by a colleague who explained it this way.

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And because I'm a visual person and an artist, this made sense to me.

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So he said, there you are laying on the

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grass, looking at the clouds, thinking, wow, so beautiful.

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And then your mind goes to there's a dark cloud coming up over there.

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Wow, I was going to walk to my friend's house later.

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Oh my God, I hope it doesn't rain.

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So now you've gone from this beautiful

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experience to in your head, thinking about the future, worrying.

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So that's where that judgment comes in.

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Instead of being in the moment and just enjoying it, you're future worrying or in

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the past or in the future, thinking about something, instead of just enjoying the

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present moment without judgment just as it is.

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And I'd like to also add that it's also important to talk about what mindfulness

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isn't, because it doesn't make your big strong emotions go away.

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It doesn't simplify your life.

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It just tunes you in better and helps you cope.

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And it gives you tools to self soothe or

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view a situation with compassion instead of judgment.

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So it's a way to help with our humanness more than anything.

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How can we implement mindfulness in those stressful moments?

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In those moments when we're pinged really badly?

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Yeah, because what you're saying about this rain cloud is so interesting because

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it's oh my God, how do you not think about that?

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It's going to rain

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and I'm trying to get to my friend's house.

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Yeah. It almost gives me, at least for me, like

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a physical reaction before it even gives me a mental one.

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So I'm really curious about what's the move, what do we do?

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But that's really cool that you're viewing

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it that way, because that's exactly what it is.

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The move is we call it, name it to tame it.

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And that's what I talked about.

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When you just take a moment and you tune in to what you're feeling, so

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that creates the initial pause, and then you take three deep breaths and it kind of

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regulates your system, gets the thinking part of your brain back online, the

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remembering part of your brain back online.

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It just helps you cope better.

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Thank you so much, Marguerite.

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And make sure you tune in for next week's

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episode where we're going to be looking at stress.

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It's something that everyone deals with.

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But like, what exactly is stress?

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And so rather than being stressed about

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being stressed and trying to get rid of it and damp it down, people like, leaned into

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their stress response and used it as a form of fuel.

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Be sure to subscribe to So Curious

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wherever you listen so you don't miss anything.

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You're not going to want to miss this. At all.

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If you are stressed and you miss next week's episode because you didn't

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subscribe, don't come back and say we did n't tell you to subscribe.

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Yeah, you'll be more stressed. You don't want that.

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You'll be more stressed that you missed out.

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This podcast is made in partnership with Radio kismet.

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Radio kismet is philadelphia's premiered podcast production studio.

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This podcast is produced by Amy carson and Emily cherish of Radio kismet.

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This podcast is also produced by Joy

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montefusco, Jayatri Das, and Aaron Armstrong of the Franklin Institute.

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Head of operations is Christopher Plant.

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Our assistant producer is Seneca White.

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Our mixed engineer is Justin Burger.

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And our audio editor is Lauren deluca.

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Our graphic designer is Emma seager.

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And I'm Kirsten Michelle Cillis.

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Yeah, and I'm the bull Bey. See you next week.

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