June 18, 2025 • 56 mins
On today’s show we talk about a subject that’s carried a lot of stigma over the years: mental illness. But more recently, there seems to be a growing awareness and willingness to talk about mental health issues among both younger and older people, in part, spurred by the experiences of isolation, loneliness and disruption brought about by the COVID pandemic. We know, in fact, that one in five adults today experience a mental illness and one in 20 adults experience serious mental illness, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Certainly, we’re more open about it, but it’s still a difficult conversation. In today’s episode, Dr. Steven Lesk, a practicing psychiatrist for some four decades, discusses his new book, Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness. It’s a fascinating book that offers a perspective you probably wouldn’t expect. Dr. Lesk spent his medical career dedicated to those affected by schizophrenia and, in his determination to find the answer to its origins, he integrates insights from psychiatry, neuroscience, anthropology, and perhaps surprisingly, evolutionary biology. He’s not only a psychiatrist, but a groundbreaking theorist.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome to forty five Forward with host, journalist and speaker
Ron row Out. Ron's mission is to make your second
half of life even better than your first. Most of
us are just approaching our half life when we reach
the mid forties, with many productive years ahead. Ron is
here to help prepare us for this kind of longevity
(00:30):
by providing vital strategies to shift the traditional waiting for
retirement model to a continuous, evolving journey of compelling life chapters.
So now please welcome the host of forty five Forward,
Ron row Out.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Hello, everyone, Welcome to forty five Forward on Bowld Brave TV.
I'm your host, Ron Roell. On today's show, we're going
to talk about a subject that's carried a lot of
stigma over the years, mental illness. Now, in the last
few years, there seems to be a growing awareness of
mental health issues among both younger and older people across
the country, in part I believe spurred by the experience
(01:25):
bl had pandemic, sort of the isolation and the disruption
we all experienced. Now we know in fact that the
healthcare crisis in the country as such today that one
in five adults experience of mental illness and one in
twenty adults experienced serious mental illness, and that's according to
the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Certainly we're more willing
(01:48):
to talk about mental illness, but it's still a difficult conversation.
So I'm gratified today to have the opportunity to have
on my show doctor Stephen Less. Doctor Lesk is a
practicing psychia for many decades, and he'll be talking about
his book Footprints of Schizophrenia, The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness.
(02:09):
It's a fascinating book that offers a perspective you probably
wouldn't expect. He uses his determination to find an answer
to the origins and persistence of the disease by integrating
insights from psychiatry, but also neuroscience, anthropology, even evolutionary biology.
He's not only a psychiatrists is an innovative theorist. So
(02:31):
there's a lot to talk about, and without further ado,
let's meet our guest, doctor Stephen Lesk. Doctor Lesk, welcome
to the show.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Hi, thank you very much. I look forward to having
a chance to explain my theories and win over some converts.
I hope great.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Right, And of course, you know, you know the show
was forty five forward. But it affects people of all ages.
And you know, first how many people in America today
have schizophrenian and why is it so important in your view?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Well, I could say that schizophrenia is the big Kahuna
of mental illnesses. It affects one percent of the population worldwide,
So in this country alone, it's about three and a
half million. And if you think of that and all
their families and caregivers, it's a massive number of people
involved with this disease and uh a loss of productivity
(03:30):
and of course emotional pain and difficulties for them and
their family. So it's a huge problem. But it's stigmatized
and no one talks about it. You know, one in
one hundred everyone has either has a relative or knows
someone who has a relative with schizophrenia. But do you
see it on television? Do you see it in the
news ever? Never. It's so stigmatized, and it's stigmatized because
(03:55):
we don't understand it properly. And that's why I'm trying
to change.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Well, I'm glad you are, because, as you just pointed out,
you know, you think, well, this is sort of a
you know, marginal issue, but as you point out we
you go to any sort of social gathering or any
conversation with people and you start talking about mental health
issues and schizophrenia or you know, other kinds of mental
(04:21):
health problems, and invariably the conversation goes, yeah, I have
someone in my family or I have a friend. So
it basically does affect everybody, and it's really it's really
a mainstream problem. So I'm glad you have this book.
And before we dive into the book, talk a little
bit more about just you know, I think a lot
(04:43):
of people just have a very superficial understanding of super
you know, and sort of stereotypical. You have schizophrenia, So
talk a little bit about you know, what we know
about it. I know there's not we don't a lot
we don't know about it, but what do we know
about it? And describe a little bit about the you
know what what the effects are.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Okay, Well, just a quick comment is that the book
is not just about schizophrenia, It's about all mental illness.
But imagine yourself. You know, you're going along through high school,
you have some friends, you know, you have a family,
reasonable family, You're doing okay, and maybe around the end
of high school, the start of college, people start treating
(05:23):
you differently. They look at you oddly, they act like
you're saying weird things. They may say, I'm worried about you.
Then people start noticing you're withdrawing from others, You're not
taking much care of your appearance, you seem uninterested in people.
(05:45):
And then you may start saying strange things like the
government has a poisoned all the peanut butter, or you know,
someone's following me, or the government has hacked into my computer.
And then gradually it becomes pretty clear that there's been
a change in your thinking. You don't realize it, but
(06:06):
everyone else can see it. So you find yourself as
a schizophrenic in the situation of everyone's treating me differently,
but I'm the same person I was, you know, a
year ago. Clearly that's not true. So then hopefully you're
brought to a psychiatrist or other mental health professional to
make the diagnosis, which isn't that difficult to make, but
(06:31):
certainly over time it clarifies. In that window between let's
say sixteen and twenty five, if you're beyond twenty five,
you're probably pretty safe that you're not going to get it,
although there are exceptions. So what people are noticing is
that your thought process has changed and you think as strangely,
(06:52):
you entertain delusional ideas. You may talk about voices coming
out of the events. You know, feel the government is
after you and things like that, and you withdraw from people,
and like I said, you stop taking care of your appearance,
and you functionality always diminishes once you have a diagnosis
(07:15):
of schizophrenia. Now there are some high functioning schizophrenics, no lawyers,
you name it. But for the most part, your function
is going to decrease once you get that diagnosis.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
M and.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
I do find internet, and of course the show is
forty five forward. But you know, for a lot of
people who are in their forties and fifties and olders,
you have children, you know, who are dealing with this issue.
So I think it does affect every family in many ways.
So so those are some of the symptoms. Now, I
know one of the issues and what you deal with
(07:53):
with don in schizophrenia, but mental health in general, as
you point out, is looking at some of the causes
and it's difficult to ascertain. And at one point you said,
we don't know anything. I mean really. I mean, we're
at the very beginning of our understanding a lot of
these ways. And you know, as I've been reading about it,
(08:14):
you know, I've been learning a lot, and you know,
not surprisingly, the more I'd learn about the more I'd
realize I don't know very much at all. So but
talk about some of the causes, and I know that
a lot of it has to do with the the
with dopamine. But to talk a little bit about that,
about we know about what the triggers are, and the
(08:36):
complexity of the triggers.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
Well, you know, some of the things I say may
surprise you or shock you. But my theory says this
that mental illness is entirely due to the evolutionary moment
that we find ourselves in. So what does that mean.
That means that fifty years ago there was no mental illness.
(09:00):
Thousand years in the future there will be no mental illness.
But because we're in this very unique evolutionary moment, we
are seeing mental illness and up to twenty percent of
the population. And you know, I can go into detail
on that, but that is, you know, a fact that
has many implications and which psychiatry is totally reluctant to
(09:24):
even entertain, let alone you know, agree with. They won't
even look at this possibility, and that, I think is
a shame. A geneticist named Dobzanski once said that nothing
in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
If you can look at where something came from, your
(09:47):
understanding of it multiplies, you know, infinitely, And we have
to do that in order to know what we're treating
and where we're going. You know, I've said that psychiatry
is in the dark ages. A lot of psychiatrists are
dissatisfied with the profession. I was just a couple of
weeks ago giving a poster session at the Minnesota Psychiatric
(10:11):
Society meeting, and a lot of young psychiatrists came up
to my poster and said, Wow, this is fascinating. Why
don't we ever hear about this because no one will
consider it. No one is willing to think along these lines.
So this is, you know, a situation that's not obvious.
(10:33):
I mean, we're all in the midst of evolution, but
we don't see it. You don't look around every day
say oh, look we're evolving here. You know. On the
other end, if you think back to just in my lifetime.
When I grew up, there were no cell phones, there
were no computers. TV was this weird box with a
flickering screen in the middle. Now everyone is on a smartphone.
(10:55):
TVs are this, you know, sharp colored, flat screens that
are all over. We're progressing at a maximally rapid pace,
but not everyone has kept up on it. Now, in
regards to dopamine, we have to discuss language. You can
do that now if you want.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yeah, well, I just go in a little bit. I mean,
I know that I guess that a lot of the
theory is about, you know, the causes are related to
either excessive or deficiencies of dopamine in the brain and
how that affects you in terms of you know, symptoms. So,
(11:38):
but I don't think people really understand the relationship to language.
But talk about that first, just just the issue of dopamine,
and then we can get into well, what has that
got to do with language and our evolution.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Well, every mental illness this again, this is according to
my theory, every single mental illness and some physical have
to do with the desuppression of dopamine, which means that
as we you know, advance through adolescence, we learn to
suppress dopamine in certain tracts of the brain that we
never could before, the musolympic musocortical tracts. We do suppress
(12:12):
dopamine in the nigrostriadal tract, which is a motor track.
Kids learn to do that, you know, they learn to
have coordinated movement. But with language, we learned to suppress
dopamine in those other tracts. Now, when schizophrenics break down,
there is a huge rush or desuppression of dopamine in
(12:34):
those tracts, and that is exactly what we target with
our medications. But no one is talking about why is
this happening in the first place, And I'm trying to
explain it and connect it to language. So every mental
illness has something to do with dopamine, and a lot
of physical illnesses think of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's is indirectly related, Huntington's, Korea, Turet's,
(13:01):
restless legs, stuttering. All of these things are dopamine related,
and you know, we have to put that together. We
also know that any chemical like a stimulant that surges dopamine,
like amphetamine or the medications we use to treat ADHD,
which we have to be very cautious with any medication
(13:23):
that can surge dopamine can lead to psychosis schizophrenic types
of thought, so we know that dopamine is a key.
The dopamine theory of mental illness has been around for
fifty years or so or more. It's the central theory
and we still haven't come up with anything better because
it's so central to what's going on. So for most
(13:46):
of us, we're able to suppress dopamine in those tracks
completely adequately eighty percent of us and that's it. But
for the twenty percent to have mental illness, there's a slippage,
there's a desuppression, like I say, the Big Kohonos schizophrenia,
there's a massive surge of dopamine when they break down,
(14:07):
which leads them back to primitive thinking, the type of
thinking we had prior to language, the type of thinking
that you know cavemen had, and it's also the type
of thinking that people have when they use psychedelics, that
we all have when we're asleep. We have that same
kind of primitive thinking and that children have. They don't.
(14:28):
Children don't think with the same rules that adults do.
They have more primitive thinking, and gradually they learn by
suppressing dopamine to advance to you know, adult reasoning, you know,
rational thought, the reality principle. So all of this is
interconnected and we have to look at that if we
(14:49):
really want to understand mental illness, which is why I
have said that psychiatry is sort of in the dark
ages right now, and I'm trying to lifted up a
bit with.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
This theory, right So, see, this is important because you know,
I think I may be typical of sort of a
superficial lay understanding of it because when you know, previously,
when I thought about dopamine, you think about, well, the
release of dopamine is a pleasurable thing, right, that you
get like like when you you get a runners high
(15:23):
or whatever. But in excessive amounts that you point out,
that's where the downside really comes in. So yeah, when
I first was looking at them, why would you suppress dopamine?
But now I understand what you're saying about.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
It has many functions and it is a reward chemical.
You know, evolution made use of dopamine because evolution only
rules on mutations. It can't rule on your day to
day behavior. So evolution found a chemical that rewards, you know,
(15:57):
naturally selective behaviors like brokeryation of finding food, defending yourself
against the predator. You get a zets of dopamine as
a Pavlovian reward. But there are other ways in which
we use dopamine in the brain, and those are the
ones that I'm focusing on with this theory.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
So the treatment, so far as I understand, has been
from a medical point of view, medications has been you know,
a sort of a cocktail of suppressance. Is that correct?
I mean that's what we do so far.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
Every medication we use for mental illness blocks dopamine, either
directly or indirectly. Now, if you look at the antipsychotic
medications that are specifically for schizophrenia, they go into your
brain and there's a receptor. Dopamine is a chemical that
one nerve cell releases and it goes across the synep
(17:00):
It gets hooked up to a receptor where it does
what it's going to do, which is stimulate the next neuron.
We give chemicals that fit right into that receptor and
block it so that this huge surge of dopamine is
now dampened down because it can't get through to that receptor. Now,
the same type of thing happens with antidepressants, but only indirectly,
(17:24):
because what antidepressants do is stimulate something called an autoreceptor,
and that autoreceptor dampens down dopamine. So every single mental
illness we have has something to do with the desuppression
of dopamine, and we have to look at that and
of course those other physical illnesses that I just mentioned.
(17:47):
So dopamine is a key player in what we're seeing,
and it has evolutionary roots as to why we're seeing
it now in certain people, and we're not going to
be seeing it twenty thousand years from now if we
survive as a race.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Right, right and now, but before we can talk a
little bit more about this, I don't believe that in
reading some of your background that you mentioned that last
year they have today approved the first new schizophrenic drug
in several decades. It's called I guess called benfie. How
(18:26):
to pronounce it? That's that, right, ben?
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Yeah? Yes?
Speaker 2 (18:33):
And so so so what is this? What is this
is drug? How is this different from the medications we
have now?
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Well, surprise, surprise, Uh. Its major effect is on dopamine,
but it does it differently, you know, instead of you know,
as I just said, blocking dopamine dopamine. And another note
is where a setyl colline are sisters, so if one up,
the other goes down. So what we're trying to do
(19:03):
with schizophrenia is dampened down dopamine. So if you surge
acetyl coaline, dopamine is going to recede. And that's what
this medicine is doing. And it is new, it's the
new approach, but it's doing the same thing ultimately to
decrease the effect of dopamine. And we'll see. It's a
(19:24):
little too early to tell, but I've heard good things
about it. Time will tell how effective it is and
how you know what kind of side effects we're going
to see. You know, I do think some patients get
nausea from it and things. But they've combined two medications
to try to counteract the effect of a surge of
(19:44):
acetyl coling. They've also put in an anti acetyl coaling
medicine to work outside the brain. So it's interesting, it's different,
but the ultimate effect is the same, but it comes
at it from a very different direction.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
And is this available now for patients.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
Yeah, it started to be available a few months ago,
I believe.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Okay, all right, okay, well, we have a lot more
to talk about, but we are going to take a
short break. Folks. When we come back, though, we'll be
talking much more about mental health issues and mental illness,
not only schizophrenia but related illnesses. So don't go anywhere.
We will be back with much more with doctor Steven Less.
Speaker 4 (20:32):
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(20:52):
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(21:15):
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Speaker 2 (21:33):
Welcome back, folks. We're talking today with doctor Stephen Lesk
about mental illness. He is the author of the recent
new book Footprints of Schizophrenia, The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness. Now,
before we get dived back into his work in his book,
I want to just let you know that if you
tell your friends and colleagues if they missed this show
today on a live show, don't worry. They can find
(21:56):
replays of it on bowl Brave TV's YouTube channel and
just click on my forty five forward playlist. And they
can also find audio replays on major streaming platforms like
Spotify and Apple. So with that, let's continue with doctor Lesk. Now,
tell me, I know you've dealt with, you know, people, patients.
(22:17):
So what is life like today for a personal schizophrenia.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Well, like I said, it's a very baffling thing because
they don't understand that they're thinking has changed. All I
see is that other people are treating them differently. Now again,
their functioning tends to go down because they're not thinking
in adult terms anymore. They're thinking in kind of a
primitive way, what I call the primitive organization. So they're
(22:44):
not able to negotiate a complex you know, civilization that
we're in. And they often end up in a group home,
you know, where they're given their meals, and they may
hold a you know, kind of menial job, or they
may not work at all. They often don't marry, they
often don't have kids. What we call fecundity ratio is
(23:06):
much lower than the average person. And that's something that
has to be explained because Darwin said that any mutation
that reduces your reproductive rate and your ability to function
will quickly go extinct. And that's exactly what schizophrenics have.
Lower reproductive rate and lower functioning. It's not going extinct.
(23:27):
And why is that Because it is not a genetic illness.
It is an evolutionary glitch that we're going to have
to work through over the next ten twenty thousand years.
That's very different, and we've misplaced our focus on genetics.
Genetics is like the engine light in your car. If
the engine light comes on, you don't go to the
(23:48):
mechanic and say can you fix my engine? Light you
go there and you say something wrong with my engine.
That's what genetics are. They show vulnerability to an illness.
You may have a high vulnerable vulnerability or a low.
That doesn't mean you're going to get the illness or
you're not, because people with low vulnerability can get schizophrenia
(24:08):
and people with high plus. It's not just genetics. There
are things in the environment that increase your risk of schizophrenia.
Growing up in an urban area increases your risk. Being
born in winter months increases your risk. Having a father
whose elderly increases your risk, having you know, abusive parents,
(24:28):
head injuries, all these things can increase risk and genetics,
but that's not the illness. The illness is something else.
It's a return to a more primitive thinking because dopamine
has resurged. So this is a very tough life for
people to live and they often require a lot of
support and hopefully they have a family that supports them.
(24:51):
But as I said before, there are some higher functioning schizophrenics.
A book by a woman named Ellen Sachs, The Center
Cannot Hope. She's a lawyer, she went to Oxford. She
went to Yale all the time having psychotic breaks, being
put on medications, going off medications because she insisted she
(25:12):
wasn't schizophrenic. And that's very typical of schizophrenics. They don't know,
they haven't know this, and they don't like the medications,
so they go off and it's very frustrating for their
caregivers and parents. But anyway, she did the same thing,
but she got through law school and she became a lawyer,
your mental health advocate lawyer. I'm not sure she's still practicing.
(25:35):
And there are many very high functioning Look at Jonathan
Nash from A Beautiful Mind. That movie very pretty accurate
portrayal of schizophrenia. He won a Nobel Prize. I mean,
Ruegian Wang wrote a book called The Collective Schizophrenia that
was on the best seller list. So there are many
high functioning ones. But the average, on average, anyone who
(25:58):
gets a diagnosis of schizophrenia is going to suffer a
decline in their functioning and life trajectory, and their mortality
is they live less long than the average m hm.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
So how would you shift the focus on the I
know that part of your your approach was that you know,
you just got frustrated with the sort of the catchphrases
and the generalities, and you know of a lot of
your colleagues. So how would you shift the focus of
(26:35):
work on schizophrenia. I mean, you'd say that this is
something that's going to disappear, you know, twenty thousand years.
But what do we do now? And I guess you
started to talk about some of it in terms of
just support for those with schizophrenia.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
Well, you know, this is why I wrote the book,
and this is what I'm doing with interviews. I'm trying
to promulgate this theory. And like I said, I was
at a psychiatric meeting presenting a poster on it. So
I'm trying to push this theory forwards so at least
people will consider it. If they don't agree with it,
that's fine, but I want it to be considered. You know,
(27:11):
psychiatry is in the dark ages. Can you think of
another specialty that has no blood tests, no cat scan,
no X ray to make a diagnosis. All we can
rely on is what the patient tells us. And patients
are not always in the best condition to relate what's
going on with them. Like I said, a lot of
them don't believe they have an illness, but others are
(27:33):
telling them, you must see a psychiatrist. So if we
don't understand the patient's retreating, and the patient doesn't understand
that they have an illness, and we don't have a
good understanding of the medications we're prescribing, this is a
dark age's situation and a lot of psychiatrists are not
happy with where psychiatry is at, and I'm trying to
(27:54):
offer a solution. If people could look at this, we
might refocus our research efforts away from genetics. Genetics is
not going to solve the problem. It's not a genetic illness,
and we could start focusing on, you know, how it
is that dopamine desuppresses and what we can do to
(28:15):
try to prevent it before it happens. Now, there are
studies on what we call ultra high risk for schizophrenia,
and these are kids in their early teens who are
showing potential signs that they might become schizophrenic in the future.
And then the question is if we can identify them
with great accuracy, we could justify medicating them prior to
(28:40):
anything happening. But you know, first of all, the medications
are not benign. They're horrible. The best medication we have
for schizophrenia is called closipine. Clacipine can cause seizures, drooling, weightain,
bowel obstruction, and it can cause a whole bunch of
other side effects on neutrainea. When this medication was first
(29:04):
used in Europe, they had to stop using it because
people died from drop in their white blood counts. It
was only brought here when we established this policy that
they must get a blood test every week, and now
they're terminating that requirement. You know, in hopes that things
will be okay, but anyway, our medications are not where
(29:26):
they should be. They have many too many side effects.
We don't know which medication is going to work for
which patients, so there's tremendous trial and error that goes on.
They take too long to work. Antidepressants take six to
twelve weeks to work, and if they don't work, you're
starting from scratch. So that's why they've developed other medications
(29:46):
and on medications to give with antidepressants both augmentation to
try to get them to work without having to go
through the whole thing again. But we're not where we
should be in psychiatry. And I'm not here to put
down some psychiatry. I love my profession. I've helped a
lot of people, but we're not where we should be,
and I think it's because we refuse to look at
(30:09):
evolution and what role that plays in all of what
we're seeing. You know, you can, you can put a
bicycle together, but if you leave the pedals off, it
may look good, it's not going to get you anywhere.
You've got to have the whole machinery to get somewhere.
And this is a piece of the puzzle that is missing.
(30:29):
That's what I'm doing. I'm trying to get the word
out there so that people will look at this. And
I want everyone. I would like everyone with any kind
of mental illness to go to their provider and ask
them what is the role of evolution in mental illness?
And if they shrug, give them this book or you
read it and tell them about it. We have to
(30:51):
get the word out and there's so much resistance. It's
it's sad. It makes me sad to see how much
resist to.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
The Yeah, well, certainly, you know, I think our society is,
you know, looks at quick fixes and medications are quick fixes,
and they make money and they you know, they they
work to an extent and people, you know, I've got
issues in my family, and it's precisely what you said,
(31:22):
which is, you know, the frustration I have with just
you know, the trial and error, and also you know
that they're we we you know, it's hard for us
to treat it as an integrative whole focused on something
like dopamine. So we just sort of said, well, this
will deal with bipolar, this will deal with you know,
(31:46):
anxiety disorders, this will deal with depression. Without thinking then
it's just like it becomes this cocktail and we don't
know what the inter relationship effects are of these medications,
so it becomes is really a problem. And then and
as you said, the the the person you know with
the disability does doesn't want to take these you know,
(32:08):
they're they're trying, and as you point out, this is
part of the issue, and I get it, they don't
want to think that they have a problem. You know,
they don't you know, there's so there's denial and they
don't see it. And so you're battling with the patient
a lot of times. But in looking at your approach,
(32:28):
then so you would then basically folk refocus the research
on the role of doping and habit, you know, and
are there ways to deal with it? And I think
understanding the function of it a much in a much
clearer way, other than you know, the superficial notions we
have of you know, the layman has, oh, it's you know,
it's reward, you know function.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
Yeah, And you know, when I was doing my residency
and I would listen to the attending psychiatrist explain to families,
you know, you know, parents would come in and their
kid had just been diagnosed schizophrenia, and they would say, well,
what is schizophrenia? And all I heard them say was well,
it's a chemical imbouance, or its genetics, or it's connectivity
(33:12):
or whatever, which means nothing. These are catchphrases. We have
to have something deeper, which is why at some point
in my career I said to myself, you know, someone
has to come up with something deeper. And I started
reading anthropology, text reading Darwinian evolution, reading about language, and
it started to come together and gel into a theory
(33:35):
that made so much sense to me. And I wrote
letters about it, and I wrote papers no interest whatsoever,
and I realized I had to write a book for
a public consumption that will explain this theory. Then maybe
more people will be exposed to it and they will
demand from their providers. You know, why aren't you looking
(33:55):
at this? And that's what I'm trying to get at,
To get patients to see this and bring it to
their providers and demand that they look at it and
consider it. That's all. If you want to disagree with
I'm not, you know, infallible, but let's take a look
at this. You know, we could be doing so much better.
(34:15):
Psychiatrists help a lot of people. And I'm not putting
down medications or psychiatry or anything else, but we have
to do better than we're doing because there's so many,
you know, flaws, and psychiatrists are so kind of demoralized
and desperate that we're trying to use psychedelics, which we're
(34:36):
used back in the sixties and seventies. They are not
going to help people. They're going to harm a lot
of people. They may help some, but we're so desperate
for a pill, a magic pill, that we're going back
to that it's like the mad hatter, you know, that's
that's not the way to go. If we weren't so desperate,
we would be along a path of gradually getting better
(34:58):
and better in what we're doing understanding it. Once you
understand an illness, you can work out ways of treating
it and investigating it and studying it. But if you're
just all over the map, it's genetics, it's this, well,
of course we're not going to be focused. Then you
bring in the whole issue of drug use and alcohol use,
(35:19):
which is rampant among everyone, but especially mentally ill or
desperate for some relief. That's throwing gas on the fire.
You know, we've got problems here, and I think this
point of view will make a difference. That's why I'm
doing this. It will make a difference.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Yeah, it's you know, and it's going to be require
a sort of a persistence of vision because you know,
in our environment today, I mean, I think we're just
you know, cutting research and I'm not sure what's going on,
you know, mestically, I don't. There seems to be no plan,
you know, that's in place except to you know, cut
(36:01):
people and cut costs and without an investment in these
sorts of issues. Again, I think that, you know, I
think that part of the greater message is that this
is a pervasive issue. It's not, you know. And I
I deal with the space of you know, dealing helping
people as they get older, you know, which involves some
(36:23):
you know, families and taking care of younger people as
well as themselves as they get older. And you know,
I still think there's persistent agism, and we think that
this is a you know, some sort of silent populations
like no, we're all going there, that's we're all getting older.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
You know.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
I find it ironic that, you know, and yeah, that
we're you know, we're we're we're looking at the possible
you know, insolvency of social security, which will happen roughly
the same time as demographically we will officially be an
older nation. There will be more people over sixty five
(37:04):
than under eighteen. We're not putting this together. We need
to invest in these things. So so yeah, and in
terms of you know, your book, I mean, I we
talked about your hopes for higher theory. We used basically
just to explore this issue, and I think just be
(37:29):
open minded to it.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
I think that.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
It's difficult, it's innovative.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
That's how science progresses. It's like evolution. You know there
are mutations and some aren't helpful, so they go extinct
than others are and they persist. Same thing with science.
It's based on hypothesis, and some hypotheses will prove to
be true and very helpful, and others will go extinct.
And that's the way it is. But if you block
(37:57):
access to certain pheses from coming forward to be examined,
you're eliminating a lot of potentially very useful issues and items.
And there's no reason for it. There's a certain sense
of a kind of fear or prejudice or something about
new ideas that that is disheartening. They should be welcomed
(38:21):
and examined, and some of them have to be discarded.
But you know, if we were at such a great place,
you know in our profession, I'd say, okay, well maybe
we're not interested in hearing something new right now, but
we're not. We need something like this, and I'm trying
to bang the drum to get get it in to
(38:41):
where people are going to consider it more and at
least have an idea that this may be playing a role,
because without it, it's just a too big a piece
of the puzzle.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
M We have to take another quick break doctor When
we come back, though, folks, we're going to have one
more wrap up session the Doctor Less, so don't go anywhere.
We still have a lot more to wrap up and
to give you information about where he can get his
book and they find it more about his work. So
(39:14):
we are going to take a quick break. We'll be
talking much more in our last segment with Doctor Less.
Speaker 4 (39:24):
Mike Zorich a three time California state champion in Greco
Roman wrestling at one hundred and fourteen pounds. Mike blind
sis birth, was born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a
six time national placer, including two seconds, two thirds, and
two fourths. He also won the Veterans Folk Style Wrestling
(39:44):
twice at one hundred and fifty two pounds. In all
these tournaments, he was the only blind competitor. Nancy Zorich
a creative spirit whose talents have taken her to the
stage and into galleries and exhibitions in several states. Father,
a commercial artist who shared his instruments with his daughter
and helped her fine tune. Her natural abilities influenced her
(40:07):
decision to follow in his footsteps. Miss Zurich has enjoyed
a fruitful career doing what she loves. Listen Saturday mornings
at twelve Eastern for the Nancy and Mike Show for
heartwarming stories and interesting talk on the BBM Global Network.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Welcome back, folks, This is Ron Roell forty five. Forward
back with our final segment with doctor Stephen Lesk talking
about mental illness on schizophrenia in particular, but a much
broader perspective that involves schizophrenia. So before the break we
were talking about evolution, and during the break I was
(42:41):
talking to talking Leus about about you know, getting the
book out there, getting a discussion about these ideas. And
also then he's got some other books coming down which
also touched on the idea of evolution. So talk about
you've got one, actually two more books to talk about
these books and what your premises are.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Well, the most recent book is The Predator called the
Predator Factor. And if you think about, you know, the
life that we evolved in. We lived in a jungle.
We had no cars, no grocery stores, nothing. We woke
up every day and we went out, risking our lives
to try to find food somewhere. Half the time we
(43:24):
were attacked by wild hyenas, lions and things if we
broke a leg, we were basically dead because there was
no treatment for it if we got an infection. So
this was an intense situation and it called the crucible
of evolution, where if there's a mutation and it's helpful,
it's quickly adopted, and if it's harmful, it quickly goes
(43:47):
extinct under this intense heat, the crucible of evolution. But
now we form civilizations, which are product also of language,
and those civilizations have neutralized twenty percent of these predators.
And so we're also seeing an increase in longevity recently.
You know, just one hundred years ago, many women did
(44:09):
not live to menopause at all. The average length longevity
in the eighteen hundreds was forty So it's a very
recent phenomenon that we're living into the seventies, eighties and beyond.
But this issue that you know, the intensity of the
crucible of evolution has died down so much that we're
(44:33):
seeing all these social phenomenon, you know, like increase in
youth depression, anxiety and suicide, low birth rates, people are
choosing not to have children. That was not a decision
that people made when I was growing up. It was like, oh,
I'm going to have a family, I'm going to have kids,
and you know, I know what gender I am. You know,
(44:53):
I didn't have to think about that. People are withdrawing
from these social roles and their having you know, gender
boundary issues that we never saw before. So all of
this relates back to what I call the luffing of
evolution because the heat intensity of it is so much
less now and we have so much time that we live.
(45:16):
I mean, if you knew your lifespan was thirty, which
is maybe the average lifespan of a caveman, things are
a lot more intense than if you know you're going
to live to a hundred. So that's one issue that's
you know, my new book called the Predator Factor that
I'm looking for an agent. Then I also wrote a
book called Entropies Desire because while I'm was figuring out
(45:37):
this theory about schizophrenia and mental illness, it became clear
to me that schizophrenics, like I said, regress to a
more primitive, simplistic type of thinking, and that the second
law of thermodynamics is involved with this. Because what is
the second law of thermodynamics entropy? It craves this disorder chaos,
(46:02):
low energy. Instead of order and repetition and clear boundaries,
it seeks disorder, and that's exactly what happens to us
schizophrenic when they break down. The thinking goes from adult
ordered rational thinking to primitive, disordered thinking. And that is
(46:23):
partially because it gratifies entropy, what I call entropies desire,
which is the name of the book. And of course
all physical illnesses are the same. As we age, entropy
causes our proteins to break down faster than we can
repair them, and gradually it catches up with all of us,
and entropy wins. I mean, we all don't live forever,
(46:47):
and this is all part of entropy. And then the
other part of it is that entropy has been inserted
into all animals as what Freud called the death instinct.
Every animal has to learn to hunt down and kill
and eat other animals, and that serves the purpose of entropy,
which seeks to transform everything back to the inorganic, everything living,
(47:12):
back to the unliving. So we have adopted some of
that ourselves, and of course civilization demands that we don't
do that. But still there have been wars, genocides, holocausts, crusades,
forever when this impulse, this death instinct comes out anyway,
despite the fact that we have civilizations that are supposed
(47:33):
to prevent that. So all of these things are interrelated.
And I don't want to throw too much out at once,
but yeah, well so much that we need to look at.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
Yeah, well I think that, but it does make sense.
I mean, you know, certainly if you look at you
know what nature does to habitats. You know, that's it's basically,
you know, if you have a lawn, you know, created
lawn and you let it go, it resorts to entropy,
(48:06):
and you know, it feds into different plants, and it
fills in spaces and it you know, it's it's that
the you know, the prim and proper lawns is not
the nature of things.
Speaker 3 (48:17):
You know, it goes back to a disordered state. And
if you think of all the other planets, they're all
balls of dust or gas. Entropy has turned every other
planet into a dust bowl of lifeless you know, dirt
and rocks. We're the only planet so far that we
know that has life. And I said in my book
(48:40):
on Entropy that the purpose of life is to defy entropy.
But entropy has one on every other planet, and so
far we haven't found any that have anything like what
Earth has. So you know, what entropy is trying to
do to us is to turn us into Mars or
the movement of dust. And it may succeed at some point.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
Hope.
Speaker 3 (49:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
Now, so how do you see your own life in
terms of your revolution of your thinking? Is? Is this
a surprising thing that you've come up with it? I
bet you didn't expect this along when you set out
in your career.
Speaker 3 (49:20):
Well, I didn't expect it, and I knew that something
more had to be there, because you can't just toss
out catchphrases. If you go to an orthopedis and say
I have a pain in my knee, he does an
MRI and X ray and he says, here's why you
have a pain, and here's what we can do about it.
Psychiatry doesn't have that. We're lost, it's a chemical imbalance.
(49:44):
It's just we need to be more specific. So I
broadened my horizons and started reading things that I thought
must have something to do with what we're seeing, and
it did you know, there's some luck involved, but it
did you know kind of a nerd. I spent my
whole life reading articles and staying with the literature. And
(50:05):
I still review psychiatric articles for a continuing medical education company.
But you know, I came across this theory and I
started to work with it. It's like a car, you know,
you kick the tires, but you have to sit in
it and drive it around a little and then see
how it feels. And I think if psychiatrists will do that,
they'll see how comfortable it is and how much sense
(50:27):
it makes. You get in the car and suddenly, yeah,
this is this thing feels good. That's what people have
to do. But if no one's heard of it, they're
not going to do it. You got to go to
the used car lot and drive it around.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
But it does seem like it's a challenge in our
current environment, you know, because even you know, our whole
funding structure of research is geared toward certain outcomes, and
you know, I you know, I have friends and family
who have been involved in UH research, scientific research, medical research,
(51:04):
and it's tough. You know, you spend half your time
trying to correct grants and trying to fit into the
philosophy of granting institutions. So you know, and I think
that they're they're you know, I think we are focused
on you know, very specific disease. I mean, we're obviously
we're focused on cancer research.
Speaker 3 (51:25):
You know.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Now there's a big, you know push on Alzheimer's indventure research.
That's fine. I'm not in arguing against that, but I
think in the whole area of mental health, I think
there's still I just sense that there's a reluctance of
you know, from well from an institutional perspective, well in
(51:46):
terms of you know, government institutions, agencies to understand the
importance of it and how to fund this area.
Speaker 3 (51:55):
Yeah, there's a blindness, especially in regard to the issue
of evolution. I mean Alzheimer's. There's an intense, uh, you know,
research on this. But think about it. It's related to dopamine,
A cetyl colin and dopamine, our sisters. So why why
are we saying that if you don't look back into
our you know, evolutionary past, you'll have no idea. But
(52:17):
if you do, you will have an idea. And that's important.
If you're a researcher in Alzheimer's, you want to understand
why a setyl collin is diminishing, just like in Parkinson's
why is dopamine dropping and these dopamine cells are dying
because we've using dopamine in a totally different way now.
(52:38):
And if you don't know that, you're in the dark.
You're you're scratching around trying to find an answer. And
I worry about all specialties and science. You know, if
we're not open to new ideas, we're going to block
and discard a lot of things that could really help mankind.
Why why why should we be so closed minded? Because
(52:59):
it's easier to stick with they tried and true, it's easier,
but it doesn't get you anywhere.
Speaker 2 (53:05):
Yeah, yeah, I think that, you know. One of my okay,
my catchphrases is that people resist change, and they're they're
more receptive to change when the pain of not changing
overcomes the fear of change.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
Yeah, is at that point?
Speaker 2 (53:24):
Yeah, Well, thank you for a really enlightening show, doctor Leska.
I've learned a lot. I hope our audience has. I
hope people recognize the importance of it, you know, especially
well as I have a forty five forward audience that
that they are in a position to really take, you know,
take a step in this direction, really looking at it.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
So get the book on Amazon and bars and my
website Stephen Lesk md dot com because Prince of Schizophrenia
the evolutionary roots of mental take a look at it.
And I have presence on TikTok under the theme published
author on X. I have YouTube videos too, so they're
(54:10):
always to kind of get a sense of what this is.
Speaker 2 (54:12):
About, right, So important, it's really important, and so they
can get a lot of this on your website, right, yeah, Stephen, Yeah,
Stephen lesk dot com.
Speaker 3 (54:25):
Right, Stephen Lesk md dot md dot com.
Speaker 2 (54:27):
Good, okay, very good, Okay, okay, Well this has been
Ron Rowell, a host of forty five Forward on Bowl
Brave TV. Thank you for spending this hour with me
and learning a lot from doctor Lesk. If you have
comments for me, you can send suggestions for my show,
please email me at Ron dot roel gmail dot com.
(54:52):
I want to thanks off my thanks to to Alex,
my engineer who helps me through every show. And I
wanted to say in terms of next week, be sure
to join me next Wednesday at seven pm Eastern time,
and I'll be talking with Diana Yin. She's the CEO
and co founder of Better Age, which is a public
(55:14):
benefit corporation committed to improving the health and well being
of older adults and narrowing the equity gap of their efforts.
So until then, folks keep moving forward. Forty five Forward.
Speaker 1 (55:31):
This has been forty five Forward with host Ron Rowell.
Tune in each week as Ron tackles the many aspects
of health, finance, family and friends, housing, work, and personal pursuits,
all as part of an integrated plan and to take
charge of your unretiring life during these uncertain times. Wednesdays,
(55:54):
seven pm Eastern on the Bold Brave TV network powered
by B two Student outs
Welcome to forty five Forward with host, journalist and speaker
Ron row Out. Ron's mission is to make your second
half of life even better than your first. Most of
us are just approaching our half life when we reach
the mid forties, with many productive years ahead. Ron is
here to help prepare us for this kind of longevity
(00:30):
by providing vital strategies to shift the traditional waiting for
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So now please welcome the host of forty five Forward,
Ron row Out.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Hello, everyone, Welcome to forty five Forward on Bowld Brave TV.
I'm your host, Ron Roell. On today's show, we're going
to talk about a subject that's carried a lot of
stigma over the years, mental illness. Now, in the last
few years, there seems to be a growing awareness of
mental health issues among both younger and older people across
the country, in part I believe spurred by the experience
(01:25):
bl had pandemic, sort of the isolation and the disruption
we all experienced. Now we know in fact that the
healthcare crisis in the country as such today that one
in five adults experience of mental illness and one in
twenty adults experienced serious mental illness, and that's according to
the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Certainly we're more willing
(01:48):
to talk about mental illness, but it's still a difficult conversation.
So I'm gratified today to have the opportunity to have
on my show doctor Stephen Less. Doctor Lesk is a
practicing psychia for many decades, and he'll be talking about
his book Footprints of Schizophrenia, The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness.
(02:09):
It's a fascinating book that offers a perspective you probably
wouldn't expect. He uses his determination to find an answer
to the origins and persistence of the disease by integrating
insights from psychiatry, but also neuroscience, anthropology, even evolutionary biology.
He's not only a psychiatrists is an innovative theorist. So
(02:31):
there's a lot to talk about, and without further ado,
let's meet our guest, doctor Stephen Lesk. Doctor Lesk, welcome
to the show.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Hi, thank you very much. I look forward to having
a chance to explain my theories and win over some converts.
I hope great.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Right, And of course, you know, you know the show
was forty five forward. But it affects people of all ages.
And you know, first how many people in America today
have schizophrenian and why is it so important in your view?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Well, I could say that schizophrenia is the big Kahuna
of mental illnesses. It affects one percent of the population worldwide,
So in this country alone, it's about three and a
half million. And if you think of that and all
their families and caregivers, it's a massive number of people
involved with this disease and uh a loss of productivity
(03:30):
and of course emotional pain and difficulties for them and
their family. So it's a huge problem. But it's stigmatized
and no one talks about it. You know, one in
one hundred everyone has either has a relative or knows
someone who has a relative with schizophrenia. But do you
see it on television? Do you see it in the
news ever? Never. It's so stigmatized, and it's stigmatized because
(03:55):
we don't understand it properly. And that's why I'm trying
to change.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Well, I'm glad you are, because, as you just pointed out,
you know, you think, well, this is sort of a
you know, marginal issue, but as you point out we
you go to any sort of social gathering or any
conversation with people and you start talking about mental health
issues and schizophrenia or you know, other kinds of mental
(04:21):
health problems, and invariably the conversation goes, yeah, I have
someone in my family or I have a friend. So
it basically does affect everybody, and it's really it's really
a mainstream problem. So I'm glad you have this book.
And before we dive into the book, talk a little
bit more about just you know, I think a lot
(04:43):
of people just have a very superficial understanding of super
you know, and sort of stereotypical. You have schizophrenia, So
talk a little bit about you know, what we know
about it. I know there's not we don't a lot
we don't know about it, but what do we know
about it? And describe a little bit about the you
know what what the effects are.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Okay, Well, just a quick comment is that the book
is not just about schizophrenia, It's about all mental illness.
But imagine yourself. You know, you're going along through high school,
you have some friends, you know, you have a family,
reasonable family, You're doing okay, and maybe around the end
of high school, the start of college, people start treating
(05:23):
you differently. They look at you oddly, they act like
you're saying weird things. They may say, I'm worried about you.
Then people start noticing you're withdrawing from others, You're not
taking much care of your appearance, you seem uninterested in people.
(05:45):
And then you may start saying strange things like the
government has a poisoned all the peanut butter, or you know,
someone's following me, or the government has hacked into my computer.
And then gradually it becomes pretty clear that there's been
a change in your thinking. You don't realize it, but
(06:06):
everyone else can see it. So you find yourself as
a schizophrenic in the situation of everyone's treating me differently,
but I'm the same person I was, you know, a
year ago. Clearly that's not true. So then hopefully you're
brought to a psychiatrist or other mental health professional to
make the diagnosis, which isn't that difficult to make, but
(06:31):
certainly over time it clarifies. In that window between let's
say sixteen and twenty five, if you're beyond twenty five,
you're probably pretty safe that you're not going to get it,
although there are exceptions. So what people are noticing is
that your thought process has changed and you think as strangely,
(06:52):
you entertain delusional ideas. You may talk about voices coming
out of the events. You know, feel the government is
after you and things like that, and you withdraw from people,
and like I said, you stop taking care of your appearance,
and you functionality always diminishes once you have a diagnosis
(07:15):
of schizophrenia. Now there are some high functioning schizophrenics, no lawyers,
you name it. But for the most part, your function
is going to decrease once you get that diagnosis.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
M and.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
I do find internet, and of course the show is
forty five forward. But you know, for a lot of
people who are in their forties and fifties and olders,
you have children, you know, who are dealing with this issue.
So I think it does affect every family in many ways.
So so those are some of the symptoms. Now, I
know one of the issues and what you deal with
(07:53):
with don in schizophrenia, but mental health in general, as
you point out, is looking at some of the causes
and it's difficult to ascertain. And at one point you said,
we don't know anything. I mean really. I mean, we're
at the very beginning of our understanding a lot of
these ways. And you know, as I've been reading about it,
(08:14):
you know, I've been learning a lot, and you know,
not surprisingly, the more I'd learn about the more I'd
realize I don't know very much at all. So but
talk about some of the causes, and I know that
a lot of it has to do with the the
with dopamine. But to talk a little bit about that,
about we know about what the triggers are, and the
(08:36):
complexity of the triggers.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
Well, you know, some of the things I say may
surprise you or shock you. But my theory says this
that mental illness is entirely due to the evolutionary moment
that we find ourselves in. So what does that mean.
That means that fifty years ago there was no mental illness.
(09:00):
Thousand years in the future there will be no mental illness.
But because we're in this very unique evolutionary moment, we
are seeing mental illness and up to twenty percent of
the population. And you know, I can go into detail
on that, but that is, you know, a fact that
has many implications and which psychiatry is totally reluctant to
(09:24):
even entertain, let alone you know, agree with. They won't
even look at this possibility, and that, I think is
a shame. A geneticist named Dobzanski once said that nothing
in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
If you can look at where something came from, your
(09:47):
understanding of it multiplies, you know, infinitely, And we have
to do that in order to know what we're treating
and where we're going. You know, I've said that psychiatry
is in the dark ages. A lot of psychiatrists are
dissatisfied with the profession. I was just a couple of
weeks ago giving a poster session at the Minnesota Psychiatric
(10:11):
Society meeting, and a lot of young psychiatrists came up
to my poster and said, Wow, this is fascinating. Why
don't we ever hear about this because no one will
consider it. No one is willing to think along these lines.
So this is, you know, a situation that's not obvious.
(10:33):
I mean, we're all in the midst of evolution, but
we don't see it. You don't look around every day
say oh, look we're evolving here. You know. On the
other end, if you think back to just in my lifetime.
When I grew up, there were no cell phones, there
were no computers. TV was this weird box with a
flickering screen in the middle. Now everyone is on a smartphone.
(10:55):
TVs are this, you know, sharp colored, flat screens that
are all over. We're progressing at a maximally rapid pace,
but not everyone has kept up on it. Now, in
regards to dopamine, we have to discuss language. You can
do that now if you want.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yeah, well, I just go in a little bit. I mean,
I know that I guess that a lot of the
theory is about, you know, the causes are related to
either excessive or deficiencies of dopamine in the brain and
how that affects you in terms of you know, symptoms. So,
(11:38):
but I don't think people really understand the relationship to language.
But talk about that first, just just the issue of dopamine,
and then we can get into well, what has that
got to do with language and our evolution.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Well, every mental illness this again, this is according to
my theory, every single mental illness and some physical have
to do with the desuppression of dopamine, which means that
as we you know, advance through adolescence, we learn to
suppress dopamine in certain tracts of the brain that we
never could before, the musolympic musocortical tracts. We do suppress
(12:12):
dopamine in the nigrostriadal tract, which is a motor track.
Kids learn to do that, you know, they learn to
have coordinated movement. But with language, we learned to suppress
dopamine in those other tracts. Now, when schizophrenics break down,
there is a huge rush or desuppression of dopamine in
(12:34):
those tracts, and that is exactly what we target with
our medications. But no one is talking about why is
this happening in the first place, And I'm trying to
explain it and connect it to language. So every mental
illness has something to do with dopamine, and a lot
of physical illnesses think of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's is indirectly related, Huntington's, Korea, Turet's,
(13:01):
restless legs, stuttering. All of these things are dopamine related,
and you know, we have to put that together. We
also know that any chemical like a stimulant that surges dopamine,
like amphetamine or the medications we use to treat ADHD,
which we have to be very cautious with any medication
(13:23):
that can surge dopamine can lead to psychosis schizophrenic types
of thought, so we know that dopamine is a key.
The dopamine theory of mental illness has been around for
fifty years or so or more. It's the central theory
and we still haven't come up with anything better because
it's so central to what's going on. So for most
(13:46):
of us, we're able to suppress dopamine in those tracks
completely adequately eighty percent of us and that's it. But
for the twenty percent to have mental illness, there's a slippage,
there's a desuppression, like I say, the Big Kohonos schizophrenia,
there's a massive surge of dopamine when they break down,
(14:07):
which leads them back to primitive thinking, the type of
thinking we had prior to language, the type of thinking
that you know cavemen had, and it's also the type
of thinking that people have when they use psychedelics, that
we all have when we're asleep. We have that same
kind of primitive thinking and that children have. They don't.
(14:28):
Children don't think with the same rules that adults do.
They have more primitive thinking, and gradually they learn by
suppressing dopamine to advance to you know, adult reasoning, you know,
rational thought, the reality principle. So all of this is
interconnected and we have to look at that if we
(14:49):
really want to understand mental illness, which is why I
have said that psychiatry is sort of in the dark
ages right now, and I'm trying to lifted up a
bit with.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
This theory, right So, see, this is important because you know,
I think I may be typical of sort of a
superficial lay understanding of it because when you know, previously,
when I thought about dopamine, you think about, well, the
release of dopamine is a pleasurable thing, right, that you
get like like when you you get a runners high
(15:23):
or whatever. But in excessive amounts that you point out,
that's where the downside really comes in. So yeah, when
I first was looking at them, why would you suppress dopamine?
But now I understand what you're saying about.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
It has many functions and it is a reward chemical.
You know, evolution made use of dopamine because evolution only
rules on mutations. It can't rule on your day to
day behavior. So evolution found a chemical that rewards, you know,
(15:57):
naturally selective behaviors like brokeryation of finding food, defending yourself
against the predator. You get a zets of dopamine as
a Pavlovian reward. But there are other ways in which
we use dopamine in the brain, and those are the
ones that I'm focusing on with this theory.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
So the treatment, so far as I understand, has been
from a medical point of view, medications has been you know,
a sort of a cocktail of suppressance. Is that correct?
I mean that's what we do so far.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
Every medication we use for mental illness blocks dopamine, either
directly or indirectly. Now, if you look at the antipsychotic
medications that are specifically for schizophrenia, they go into your
brain and there's a receptor. Dopamine is a chemical that
one nerve cell releases and it goes across the synep
(17:00):
It gets hooked up to a receptor where it does
what it's going to do, which is stimulate the next neuron.
We give chemicals that fit right into that receptor and
block it so that this huge surge of dopamine is
now dampened down because it can't get through to that receptor. Now,
the same type of thing happens with antidepressants, but only indirectly,
(17:24):
because what antidepressants do is stimulate something called an autoreceptor,
and that autoreceptor dampens down dopamine. So every single mental
illness we have has something to do with the desuppression
of dopamine, and we have to look at that and
of course those other physical illnesses that I just mentioned.
(17:47):
So dopamine is a key player in what we're seeing,
and it has evolutionary roots as to why we're seeing
it now in certain people, and we're not going to
be seeing it twenty thousand years from now if we
survive as a race.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Right, right and now, but before we can talk a
little bit more about this, I don't believe that in
reading some of your background that you mentioned that last
year they have today approved the first new schizophrenic drug
in several decades. It's called I guess called benfie. How
(18:26):
to pronounce it? That's that, right, ben?
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Yeah? Yes?
Speaker 2 (18:33):
And so so so what is this? What is this
is drug? How is this different from the medications we
have now?
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Well, surprise, surprise, Uh. Its major effect is on dopamine,
but it does it differently, you know, instead of you know,
as I just said, blocking dopamine dopamine. And another note
is where a setyl colline are sisters, so if one up,
the other goes down. So what we're trying to do
(19:03):
with schizophrenia is dampened down dopamine. So if you surge
acetyl coaline, dopamine is going to recede. And that's what
this medicine is doing. And it is new, it's the
new approach, but it's doing the same thing ultimately to
decrease the effect of dopamine. And we'll see. It's a
(19:24):
little too early to tell, but I've heard good things
about it. Time will tell how effective it is and
how you know what kind of side effects we're going
to see. You know, I do think some patients get
nausea from it and things. But they've combined two medications
to try to counteract the effect of a surge of
(19:44):
acetyl coling. They've also put in an anti acetyl coaling
medicine to work outside the brain. So it's interesting, it's different,
but the ultimate effect is the same, but it comes
at it from a very different direction.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
And is this available now for patients.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
Yeah, it started to be available a few months ago,
I believe.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Okay, all right, okay, well, we have a lot more
to talk about, but we are going to take a
short break. Folks. When we come back, though, we'll be
talking much more about mental health issues and mental illness,
not only schizophrenia but related illnesses. So don't go anywhere.
We will be back with much more with doctor Steven Less.
Speaker 4 (20:32):
Mike Zurich a three time California state champion in Greco
Roman wrestling at one hundred and fourteen pounds. Mike blind
six birth, was born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a
six time national placer, including two seconds, two thirds, and
two fourths. He also won the Veterans Folk Style Wrestling
(20:52):
twice at one hundred and fifty two pounds. In all
these tournaments, he was the only blind competitor. Nancy Zurich
a creative spirit whose talents have taken her to the
stage and into galleries and exhibitions in several states. Her father,
a commercial artist who shared his instruments with his daughter
and helped her fine tune her natural abilities, influenced her
(21:15):
decision to follow in his footsteps. Miss Zurich has enjoyed
a fruitful career doing what she loves. Listen Saturday mornings
at twelve Eastern for the Nancy and Mike Show for
heartwarming stories and interesting talk on the BBM Global Network.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Welcome back, folks. We're talking today with doctor Stephen Lesk
about mental illness. He is the author of the recent
new book Footprints of Schizophrenia, The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness. Now,
before we get dived back into his work in his book,
I want to just let you know that if you
tell your friends and colleagues if they missed this show
today on a live show, don't worry. They can find
(21:56):
replays of it on bowl Brave TV's YouTube channel and
just click on my forty five forward playlist. And they
can also find audio replays on major streaming platforms like
Spotify and Apple. So with that, let's continue with doctor Lesk. Now,
tell me, I know you've dealt with, you know, people, patients.
(22:17):
So what is life like today for a personal schizophrenia.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Well, like I said, it's a very baffling thing because
they don't understand that they're thinking has changed. All I
see is that other people are treating them differently. Now again,
their functioning tends to go down because they're not thinking
in adult terms anymore. They're thinking in kind of a
primitive way, what I call the primitive organization. So they're
(22:44):
not able to negotiate a complex you know, civilization that
we're in. And they often end up in a group home,
you know, where they're given their meals, and they may
hold a you know, kind of menial job, or they
may not work at all. They often don't marry, they
often don't have kids. What we call fecundity ratio is
(23:06):
much lower than the average person. And that's something that
has to be explained because Darwin said that any mutation
that reduces your reproductive rate and your ability to function
will quickly go extinct. And that's exactly what schizophrenics have.
Lower reproductive rate and lower functioning. It's not going extinct.
(23:27):
And why is that Because it is not a genetic illness.
It is an evolutionary glitch that we're going to have
to work through over the next ten twenty thousand years.
That's very different, and we've misplaced our focus on genetics.
Genetics is like the engine light in your car. If
the engine light comes on, you don't go to the
(23:48):
mechanic and say can you fix my engine? Light you
go there and you say something wrong with my engine.
That's what genetics are. They show vulnerability to an illness.
You may have a high vulnerable vulnerability or a low.
That doesn't mean you're going to get the illness or
you're not, because people with low vulnerability can get schizophrenia
(24:08):
and people with high plus. It's not just genetics. There
are things in the environment that increase your risk of schizophrenia.
Growing up in an urban area increases your risk. Being
born in winter months increases your risk. Having a father
whose elderly increases your risk, having you know, abusive parents,
(24:28):
head injuries, all these things can increase risk and genetics,
but that's not the illness. The illness is something else.
It's a return to a more primitive thinking because dopamine
has resurged. So this is a very tough life for
people to live and they often require a lot of
support and hopefully they have a family that supports them.
(24:51):
But as I said before, there are some higher functioning schizophrenics.
A book by a woman named Ellen Sachs, The Center
Cannot Hope. She's a lawyer, she went to Oxford. She
went to Yale all the time having psychotic breaks, being
put on medications, going off medications because she insisted she
(25:12):
wasn't schizophrenic. And that's very typical of schizophrenics. They don't know,
they haven't know this, and they don't like the medications,
so they go off and it's very frustrating for their
caregivers and parents. But anyway, she did the same thing,
but she got through law school and she became a lawyer,
your mental health advocate lawyer. I'm not sure she's still practicing.
(25:35):
And there are many very high functioning Look at Jonathan
Nash from A Beautiful Mind. That movie very pretty accurate
portrayal of schizophrenia. He won a Nobel Prize. I mean,
Ruegian Wang wrote a book called The Collective Schizophrenia that
was on the best seller list. So there are many
high functioning ones. But the average, on average, anyone who
(25:58):
gets a diagnosis of schizophrenia is going to suffer a
decline in their functioning and life trajectory, and their mortality
is they live less long than the average m hm.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
So how would you shift the focus on the I
know that part of your your approach was that you know,
you just got frustrated with the sort of the catchphrases
and the generalities, and you know of a lot of
your colleagues. So how would you shift the focus of
(26:35):
work on schizophrenia. I mean, you'd say that this is
something that's going to disappear, you know, twenty thousand years.
But what do we do now? And I guess you
started to talk about some of it in terms of
just support for those with schizophrenia.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
Well, you know, this is why I wrote the book,
and this is what I'm doing with interviews. I'm trying
to promulgate this theory. And like I said, I was
at a psychiatric meeting presenting a poster on it. So
I'm trying to push this theory forwards so at least
people will consider it. If they don't agree with it,
that's fine, but I want it to be considered. You know,
(27:11):
psychiatry is in the dark ages. Can you think of
another specialty that has no blood tests, no cat scan,
no X ray to make a diagnosis. All we can
rely on is what the patient tells us. And patients
are not always in the best condition to relate what's
going on with them. Like I said, a lot of
them don't believe they have an illness, but others are
(27:33):
telling them, you must see a psychiatrist. So if we
don't understand the patient's retreating, and the patient doesn't understand
that they have an illness, and we don't have a
good understanding of the medications we're prescribing, this is a
dark age's situation and a lot of psychiatrists are not
happy with where psychiatry is at, and I'm trying to
(27:54):
offer a solution. If people could look at this, we
might refocus our research efforts away from genetics. Genetics is
not going to solve the problem. It's not a genetic illness,
and we could start focusing on, you know, how it
is that dopamine desuppresses and what we can do to
(28:15):
try to prevent it before it happens. Now, there are
studies on what we call ultra high risk for schizophrenia,
and these are kids in their early teens who are
showing potential signs that they might become schizophrenic in the future.
And then the question is if we can identify them
with great accuracy, we could justify medicating them prior to
(28:40):
anything happening. But you know, first of all, the medications
are not benign. They're horrible. The best medication we have
for schizophrenia is called closipine. Clacipine can cause seizures, drooling, weightain,
bowel obstruction, and it can cause a whole bunch of
other side effects on neutrainea. When this medication was first
(29:04):
used in Europe, they had to stop using it because
people died from drop in their white blood counts. It
was only brought here when we established this policy that
they must get a blood test every week, and now
they're terminating that requirement. You know, in hopes that things
will be okay, but anyway, our medications are not where
(29:26):
they should be. They have many too many side effects.
We don't know which medication is going to work for
which patients, so there's tremendous trial and error that goes on.
They take too long to work. Antidepressants take six to
twelve weeks to work, and if they don't work, you're
starting from scratch. So that's why they've developed other medications
(29:46):
and on medications to give with antidepressants both augmentation to
try to get them to work without having to go
through the whole thing again. But we're not where we
should be in psychiatry. And I'm not here to put
down some psychiatry. I love my profession. I've helped a
lot of people, but we're not where we should be,
and I think it's because we refuse to look at
(30:09):
evolution and what role that plays in all of what
we're seeing. You know, you can, you can put a
bicycle together, but if you leave the pedals off, it
may look good, it's not going to get you anywhere.
You've got to have the whole machinery to get somewhere.
And this is a piece of the puzzle that is missing.
(30:29):
That's what I'm doing. I'm trying to get the word
out there so that people will look at this. And
I want everyone. I would like everyone with any kind
of mental illness to go to their provider and ask
them what is the role of evolution in mental illness?
And if they shrug, give them this book or you
read it and tell them about it. We have to
(30:51):
get the word out and there's so much resistance. It's
it's sad. It makes me sad to see how much
resist to.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
The Yeah, well, certainly, you know, I think our society is,
you know, looks at quick fixes and medications are quick fixes,
and they make money and they you know, they they
work to an extent and people, you know, I've got
issues in my family, and it's precisely what you said,
(31:22):
which is, you know, the frustration I have with just
you know, the trial and error, and also you know
that they're we we you know, it's hard for us
to treat it as an integrative whole focused on something
like dopamine. So we just sort of said, well, this
will deal with bipolar, this will deal with you know,
(31:46):
anxiety disorders, this will deal with depression. Without thinking then
it's just like it becomes this cocktail and we don't
know what the inter relationship effects are of these medications,
so it becomes is really a problem. And then and
as you said, the the the person you know with
the disability does doesn't want to take these you know,
(32:08):
they're they're trying, and as you point out, this is
part of the issue, and I get it, they don't
want to think that they have a problem. You know,
they don't you know, there's so there's denial and they
don't see it. And so you're battling with the patient
a lot of times. But in looking at your approach,
(32:28):
then so you would then basically folk refocus the research
on the role of doping and habit, you know, and
are there ways to deal with it? And I think
understanding the function of it a much in a much
clearer way, other than you know, the superficial notions we
have of you know, the layman has, oh, it's you know,
it's reward, you know function.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
Yeah, And you know, when I was doing my residency
and I would listen to the attending psychiatrist explain to families,
you know, you know, parents would come in and their
kid had just been diagnosed schizophrenia, and they would say, well,
what is schizophrenia? And all I heard them say was well,
it's a chemical imbouance, or its genetics, or it's connectivity
(33:12):
or whatever, which means nothing. These are catchphrases. We have
to have something deeper, which is why at some point
in my career I said to myself, you know, someone
has to come up with something deeper. And I started
reading anthropology, text reading Darwinian evolution, reading about language, and
it started to come together and gel into a theory
(33:35):
that made so much sense to me. And I wrote
letters about it, and I wrote papers no interest whatsoever,
and I realized I had to write a book for
a public consumption that will explain this theory. Then maybe
more people will be exposed to it and they will
demand from their providers. You know, why aren't you looking
(33:55):
at this? And that's what I'm trying to get at,
To get patients to see this and bring it to
their providers and demand that they look at it and
consider it. That's all. If you want to disagree with
I'm not, you know, infallible, but let's take a look
at this. You know, we could be doing so much better.
(34:15):
Psychiatrists help a lot of people. And I'm not putting
down medications or psychiatry or anything else, but we have
to do better than we're doing because there's so many,
you know, flaws, and psychiatrists are so kind of demoralized
and desperate that we're trying to use psychedelics, which we're
(34:36):
used back in the sixties and seventies. They are not
going to help people. They're going to harm a lot
of people. They may help some, but we're so desperate
for a pill, a magic pill, that we're going back
to that it's like the mad hatter, you know, that's
that's not the way to go. If we weren't so desperate,
we would be along a path of gradually getting better
(34:58):
and better in what we're doing understanding it. Once you
understand an illness, you can work out ways of treating
it and investigating it and studying it. But if you're
just all over the map, it's genetics, it's this, well,
of course we're not going to be focused. Then you
bring in the whole issue of drug use and alcohol use,
(35:19):
which is rampant among everyone, but especially mentally ill or
desperate for some relief. That's throwing gas on the fire.
You know, we've got problems here, and I think this
point of view will make a difference. That's why I'm
doing this. It will make a difference.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Yeah, it's you know, and it's going to be require
a sort of a persistence of vision because you know,
in our environment today, I mean, I think we're just
you know, cutting research and I'm not sure what's going on,
you know, mestically, I don't. There seems to be no plan,
you know, that's in place except to you know, cut
(36:01):
people and cut costs and without an investment in these
sorts of issues. Again, I think that, you know, I
think that part of the greater message is that this
is a pervasive issue. It's not, you know. And I
I deal with the space of you know, dealing helping
people as they get older, you know, which involves some
(36:23):
you know, families and taking care of younger people as
well as themselves as they get older. And you know,
I still think there's persistent agism, and we think that
this is a you know, some sort of silent populations
like no, we're all going there, that's we're all getting older.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
You know.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
I find it ironic that, you know, and yeah, that
we're you know, we're we're we're looking at the possible
you know, insolvency of social security, which will happen roughly
the same time as demographically we will officially be an
older nation. There will be more people over sixty five
(37:04):
than under eighteen. We're not putting this together. We need
to invest in these things. So so yeah, and in
terms of you know, your book, I mean, I we
talked about your hopes for higher theory. We used basically
just to explore this issue, and I think just be
(37:29):
open minded to it.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
I think that.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
It's difficult, it's innovative.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
That's how science progresses. It's like evolution. You know there
are mutations and some aren't helpful, so they go extinct
than others are and they persist. Same thing with science.
It's based on hypothesis, and some hypotheses will prove to
be true and very helpful, and others will go extinct.
And that's the way it is. But if you block
(37:57):
access to certain pheses from coming forward to be examined,
you're eliminating a lot of potentially very useful issues and items.
And there's no reason for it. There's a certain sense
of a kind of fear or prejudice or something about
new ideas that that is disheartening. They should be welcomed
(38:21):
and examined, and some of them have to be discarded.
But you know, if we were at such a great place,
you know in our profession, I'd say, okay, well maybe
we're not interested in hearing something new right now, but
we're not. We need something like this, and I'm trying
to bang the drum to get get it in to
(38:41):
where people are going to consider it more and at
least have an idea that this may be playing a role,
because without it, it's just a too big a piece
of the puzzle.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
M We have to take another quick break doctor When
we come back, though, folks, we're going to have one
more wrap up session the Doctor Less, so don't go anywhere.
We still have a lot more to wrap up and
to give you information about where he can get his
book and they find it more about his work. So
(39:14):
we are going to take a quick break. We'll be
talking much more in our last segment with Doctor Less.
Speaker 4 (39:24):
Mike Zorich a three time California state champion in Greco
Roman wrestling at one hundred and fourteen pounds. Mike blind
sis birth, was born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a
six time national placer, including two seconds, two thirds, and
two fourths. He also won the Veterans Folk Style Wrestling
(39:44):
twice at one hundred and fifty two pounds. In all
these tournaments, he was the only blind competitor. Nancy Zorich
a creative spirit whose talents have taken her to the
stage and into galleries and exhibitions in several states. Father,
a commercial artist who shared his instruments with his daughter
and helped her fine tune. Her natural abilities influenced her
(40:07):
decision to follow in his footsteps. Miss Zurich has enjoyed
a fruitful career doing what she loves. Listen Saturday mornings
at twelve Eastern for the Nancy and Mike Show for
heartwarming stories and interesting talk on the BBM Global Network.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Welcome back, folks, This is Ron Roell forty five. Forward
back with our final segment with doctor Stephen Lesk talking
about mental illness on schizophrenia in particular, but a much
broader perspective that involves schizophrenia. So before the break we
were talking about evolution, and during the break I was
(42:41):
talking to talking Leus about about you know, getting the
book out there, getting a discussion about these ideas. And
also then he's got some other books coming down which
also touched on the idea of evolution. So talk about
you've got one, actually two more books to talk about
these books and what your premises are.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Well, the most recent book is The Predator called the
Predator Factor. And if you think about, you know, the
life that we evolved in. We lived in a jungle.
We had no cars, no grocery stores, nothing. We woke
up every day and we went out, risking our lives
to try to find food somewhere. Half the time we
(43:24):
were attacked by wild hyenas, lions and things if we
broke a leg, we were basically dead because there was
no treatment for it if we got an infection. So
this was an intense situation and it called the crucible
of evolution, where if there's a mutation and it's helpful,
it's quickly adopted, and if it's harmful, it quickly goes
(43:47):
extinct under this intense heat, the crucible of evolution. But
now we form civilizations, which are product also of language,
and those civilizations have neutralized twenty percent of these predators.
And so we're also seeing an increase in longevity recently.
You know, just one hundred years ago, many women did
(44:09):
not live to menopause at all. The average length longevity
in the eighteen hundreds was forty So it's a very
recent phenomenon that we're living into the seventies, eighties and beyond.
But this issue that you know, the intensity of the
crucible of evolution has died down so much that we're
(44:33):
seeing all these social phenomenon, you know, like increase in
youth depression, anxiety and suicide, low birth rates, people are
choosing not to have children. That was not a decision
that people made when I was growing up. It was like, oh,
I'm going to have a family, I'm going to have kids,
and you know, I know what gender I am. You know,
(44:53):
I didn't have to think about that. People are withdrawing
from these social roles and their having you know, gender
boundary issues that we never saw before. So all of
this relates back to what I call the luffing of
evolution because the heat intensity of it is so much
less now and we have so much time that we live.
(45:16):
I mean, if you knew your lifespan was thirty, which
is maybe the average lifespan of a caveman, things are
a lot more intense than if you know you're going
to live to a hundred. So that's one issue that's
you know, my new book called the Predator Factor that
I'm looking for an agent. Then I also wrote a
book called Entropies Desire because while I'm was figuring out
(45:37):
this theory about schizophrenia and mental illness, it became clear
to me that schizophrenics, like I said, regress to a
more primitive, simplistic type of thinking, and that the second
law of thermodynamics is involved with this. Because what is
the second law of thermodynamics entropy? It craves this disorder chaos,
(46:02):
low energy. Instead of order and repetition and clear boundaries,
it seeks disorder, and that's exactly what happens to us
schizophrenic when they break down. The thinking goes from adult
ordered rational thinking to primitive, disordered thinking. And that is
(46:23):
partially because it gratifies entropy, what I call entropies desire,
which is the name of the book. And of course
all physical illnesses are the same. As we age, entropy
causes our proteins to break down faster than we can
repair them, and gradually it catches up with all of us,
and entropy wins. I mean, we all don't live forever,
(46:47):
and this is all part of entropy. And then the
other part of it is that entropy has been inserted
into all animals as what Freud called the death instinct.
Every animal has to learn to hunt down and kill
and eat other animals, and that serves the purpose of entropy,
which seeks to transform everything back to the inorganic, everything living,
(47:12):
back to the unliving. So we have adopted some of
that ourselves, and of course civilization demands that we don't
do that. But still there have been wars, genocides, holocausts, crusades,
forever when this impulse, this death instinct comes out anyway,
despite the fact that we have civilizations that are supposed
(47:33):
to prevent that. So all of these things are interrelated.
And I don't want to throw too much out at once,
but yeah, well so much that we need to look at.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
Yeah, well I think that, but it does make sense.
I mean, you know, certainly if you look at you
know what nature does to habitats. You know, that's it's basically,
you know, if you have a lawn, you know, created
lawn and you let it go, it resorts to entropy,
(48:06):
and you know, it feds into different plants, and it
fills in spaces and it you know, it's it's that
the you know, the prim and proper lawns is not
the nature of things.
Speaker 3 (48:17):
You know, it goes back to a disordered state. And
if you think of all the other planets, they're all
balls of dust or gas. Entropy has turned every other
planet into a dust bowl of lifeless you know, dirt
and rocks. We're the only planet so far that we
know that has life. And I said in my book
(48:40):
on Entropy that the purpose of life is to defy entropy.
But entropy has one on every other planet, and so
far we haven't found any that have anything like what
Earth has. So you know, what entropy is trying to
do to us is to turn us into Mars or
the movement of dust. And it may succeed at some point.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
Hope.
Speaker 3 (49:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
Now, so how do you see your own life in
terms of your revolution of your thinking? Is? Is this
a surprising thing that you've come up with it? I
bet you didn't expect this along when you set out
in your career.
Speaker 3 (49:20):
Well, I didn't expect it, and I knew that something
more had to be there, because you can't just toss
out catchphrases. If you go to an orthopedis and say
I have a pain in my knee, he does an
MRI and X ray and he says, here's why you
have a pain, and here's what we can do about it.
Psychiatry doesn't have that. We're lost, it's a chemical imbalance.
(49:44):
It's just we need to be more specific. So I
broadened my horizons and started reading things that I thought
must have something to do with what we're seeing, and
it did you know, there's some luck involved, but it
did you know kind of a nerd. I spent my
whole life reading articles and staying with the literature. And
(50:05):
I still review psychiatric articles for a continuing medical education company.
But you know, I came across this theory and I
started to work with it. It's like a car, you know,
you kick the tires, but you have to sit in
it and drive it around a little and then see
how it feels. And I think if psychiatrists will do that,
they'll see how comfortable it is and how much sense
(50:27):
it makes. You get in the car and suddenly, yeah,
this is this thing feels good. That's what people have
to do. But if no one's heard of it, they're
not going to do it. You got to go to
the used car lot and drive it around.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
But it does seem like it's a challenge in our
current environment, you know, because even you know, our whole
funding structure of research is geared toward certain outcomes, and
you know, I you know, I have friends and family
who have been involved in UH research, scientific research, medical research,
(51:04):
and it's tough. You know, you spend half your time
trying to correct grants and trying to fit into the
philosophy of granting institutions. So you know, and I think
that they're they're you know, I think we are focused
on you know, very specific disease. I mean, we're obviously
we're focused on cancer research.
Speaker 3 (51:25):
You know.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Now there's a big, you know push on Alzheimer's indventure research.
That's fine. I'm not in arguing against that, but I
think in the whole area of mental health, I think
there's still I just sense that there's a reluctance of
you know, from well from an institutional perspective, well in
(51:46):
terms of you know, government institutions, agencies to understand the
importance of it and how to fund this area.
Speaker 3 (51:55):
Yeah, there's a blindness, especially in regard to the issue
of evolution. I mean Alzheimer's. There's an intense, uh, you know,
research on this. But think about it. It's related to dopamine,
A cetyl colin and dopamine, our sisters. So why why
are we saying that if you don't look back into
our you know, evolutionary past, you'll have no idea. But
(52:17):
if you do, you will have an idea. And that's important.
If you're a researcher in Alzheimer's, you want to understand
why a setyl collin is diminishing, just like in Parkinson's
why is dopamine dropping and these dopamine cells are dying
because we've using dopamine in a totally different way now.
(52:38):
And if you don't know that, you're in the dark.
You're you're scratching around trying to find an answer. And
I worry about all specialties and science. You know, if
we're not open to new ideas, we're going to block
and discard a lot of things that could really help mankind.
Why why why should we be so closed minded? Because
(52:59):
it's easier to stick with they tried and true, it's easier,
but it doesn't get you anywhere.
Speaker 2 (53:05):
Yeah, yeah, I think that, you know. One of my okay,
my catchphrases is that people resist change, and they're they're
more receptive to change when the pain of not changing
overcomes the fear of change.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
Yeah, is at that point?
Speaker 2 (53:24):
Yeah, Well, thank you for a really enlightening show, doctor Leska.
I've learned a lot. I hope our audience has. I
hope people recognize the importance of it, you know, especially
well as I have a forty five forward audience that
that they are in a position to really take, you know,
take a step in this direction, really looking at it.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
So get the book on Amazon and bars and my
website Stephen Lesk md dot com because Prince of Schizophrenia
the evolutionary roots of mental take a look at it.
And I have presence on TikTok under the theme published
author on X. I have YouTube videos too, so they're
(54:10):
always to kind of get a sense of what this is.
Speaker 2 (54:12):
About, right, So important, it's really important, and so they
can get a lot of this on your website, right, yeah, Stephen, Yeah,
Stephen lesk dot com.
Speaker 3 (54:25):
Right, Stephen Lesk md dot md dot com.
Speaker 2 (54:27):
Good, okay, very good, Okay, okay, Well this has been
Ron Rowell, a host of forty five Forward on Bowl
Brave TV. Thank you for spending this hour with me
and learning a lot from doctor Lesk. If you have
comments for me, you can send suggestions for my show,
please email me at Ron dot roel gmail dot com.
(54:52):
I want to thanks off my thanks to to Alex,
my engineer who helps me through every show. And I
wanted to say in terms of next week, be sure
to join me next Wednesday at seven pm Eastern time,
and I'll be talking with Diana Yin. She's the CEO
and co founder of Better Age, which is a public
(55:14):
benefit corporation committed to improving the health and well being
of older adults and narrowing the equity gap of their efforts.
So until then, folks keep moving forward. Forty five Forward.
Speaker 1 (55:31):
This has been forty five Forward with host Ron Rowell.
Tune in each week as Ron tackles the many aspects
of health, finance, family and friends, housing, work, and personal pursuits,
all as part of an integrated plan and to take
charge of your unretiring life during these uncertain times. Wednesdays,
(55:54):
seven pm Eastern on the Bold Brave TV network powered
by B two Student outs
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