February 11, 2025 • 60 mins
What does Mental Health, Psychiatry, and the Ouija Board have in Common?
Dan Nelson, is the author of Ouija Board and the Skeptic (Mad In America) and holds a BA in Philosophy, MA in Human Resources and Industrial Relations. Through twenty years of working in management systems, he knows that systems are designed to output a particular product or service and that the system was the cause of any and all undesirable results the system outputs. In this article, he states that the mental health systems are responsible for their lack of ability to assist some who live with mental health challenges.
Dan writes, “Psychiatry's practices are so entrenched, its methods so accepted, that skeptics and outsiders are often dismissed as uninformed or unqualified simply because they haven’t undergone the same training that instills confidence in its frameworks. But skepticism, especially from those with lived experience, isn’t just valid—it’s necessary. It forces us to question whether our tools and methods truly serve those they claim to help.”
We respond to our lives, our challenges, our struggles. Too often mental health issues are a normal and nature response to trauma. As Dan points out if the psych industry isn’t looking at the systems around their clients and changing those systems, and instead they medicate and work with the client to be able to tolerate the difficulties they are dealing with – they aren’t solving the morning. They are applying a band aid.
A good example of this is how our systems are designed to pathologize the victim is schoolyard bullying. Too often the victim is expected to learn to develop new skills to deal with the bully. Often they must be extricated from the school to be protected. The bully, too often, is not confronted or restricted in ways that would prevent the bullying. Dan demonstrates how we can take that same example and apply it to the mental health system where victims come forward with mental health challenges caused by environmental factors and yet the industry will medicate the victim instead of looking at how to change the environment. The DSM and psychiatry is accepted to often without including the possibility (like with a Ouija Board) that perhaps it is not truth.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Jelly Roll
Dan Nelson, is the author of Ouija Board and the Skeptic (Mad In America) and holds a BA in Philosophy, MA in Human Resources and Industrial Relations. Through twenty years of working in management systems, he knows that systems are designed to output a particular product or service and that the system was the cause of any and all undesirable results the system outputs. In this article, he states that the mental health systems are responsible for their lack of ability to assist some who live with mental health challenges.
Dan writes, “Psychiatry's practices are so entrenched, its methods so accepted, that skeptics and outsiders are often dismissed as uninformed or unqualified simply because they haven’t undergone the same training that instills confidence in its frameworks. But skepticism, especially from those with lived experience, isn’t just valid—it’s necessary. It forces us to question whether our tools and methods truly serve those they claim to help.”
We respond to our lives, our challenges, our struggles. Too often mental health issues are a normal and nature response to trauma. As Dan points out if the psych industry isn’t looking at the systems around their clients and changing those systems, and instead they medicate and work with the client to be able to tolerate the difficulties they are dealing with – they aren’t solving the morning. They are applying a band aid.
A good example of this is how our systems are designed to pathologize the victim is schoolyard bullying. Too often the victim is expected to learn to develop new skills to deal with the bully. Often they must be extricated from the school to be protected. The bully, too often, is not confronted or restricted in ways that would prevent the bullying. Dan demonstrates how we can take that same example and apply it to the mental health system where victims come forward with mental health challenges caused by environmental factors and yet the industry will medicate the victim instead of looking at how to change the environment. The DSM and psychiatry is accepted to often without including the possibility (like with a Ouija Board) that perhaps it is not truth.
Music by Shari Ulrich and Jelly Roll
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to Vancouver Call Up Radio cfr oh one
hundred point five FM. We're coming to you from the
unseated traditional territories of the Squamish, Muscream and Slighway tooth
nations around Vancouver, BC. I'm your host, Bernadine Fox, and
this is this show that dares to change how we
think about mental health. Welcome to Rethreading Madness. We have
(00:27):
ever been fir No, what the hell I'm gonna do
when I can't seem fine? Away under over to You're
listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver Call Up Radio cfr
(00:47):
oh one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernardine Fox and
I have the pleasure speaking with a person by the
name of Dan Nelson today. Dan holds a graduate degree,
but he says his most valuable lessons come from personal
experience in what he calls the school of hard knocks.
I think you have a lot of classmates there, Dan.
In that school of hard knocks, he is a passionate
(01:10):
advocate for rethinking societal norms. He writes about trauma, resilience,
and alternative ways to build a more humane world. Dan
believes in the power of storytelling and personal observation to
spark change and foster understanding, which makes him one of
a perfect fit for what we're doing here at Rethreading Madness.
(01:33):
He's born and raised in the Midwest, USA. He holds
a BA in philosophy and MA and Human Resources and
Industrial Relations, and he is acutely aware of how system
design and operation is the cause of any and all
undesirable it results that system outputs, and he has applied
that to the mental health system in his article we
(01:55):
Giboard and the Skeptic, which was published in January of
this year by Madden America, which he begins by saying,
excuse me, I'm going to read this out one second.
I am not a psychiatrist. I'm not even a therapist.
I'm someone who struggled with mental distress and the systems
(02:16):
meant to help. If there's one thing I've learned, it's
this our approach to mental health often misses the forest
for the trees. It focuses on the individuals as though
they exist in a vacuum, ignoring the environments and systems
that shape their lives. Dan feels this is a mistake
and he is here to talk about that and how
(02:38):
it might be better addressed. So welcome, Dan, thank you,
thank you for having me. Are you're welcome. We're so
glad to have you. So tell us a little bit
about Luigi Bord and the skeptic just the article in general.
Can you tell us a little bit about sort of
overall what it's about.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Well, now you've got me going back to read it. Oh,
you know, I think a lot of it, the lived
experiences includes the adverse childhood experiences.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So let's just stop there, because adverse childhood experiences could
seem to a lot of my listeners as just being
sort of, you know, talking sort of generally about people's things,
But it actually is a measurement tool, right.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Ah, yeah, And I call it ACE, the ACE test.
It's Adverse Childhood Experiences ACE, the ACES. And yeah, you
can go you can go to ACES too high dot
com and take a test. It's ten ten questions, right,
It doesn't take long at all. And they've identified that
(03:51):
people who have experienced, uh, these these adverse experiences during
their development have predictable problems or encounter predictable outcomes later
in life. And it has to do with the impact
(04:13):
of stress response chemistry on the developing human brain. And
so when whenever any person is subjected to stress, the
body involuntarily releases this stress response chemistry like cortisol is
one of one of the major components of it, and
(04:35):
that release actually has an impact on the structural reality
of a person's brain.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
One of the things, oh sorry, one of the things
that I read recently is that childhood trauma can in
fact reduce your IQ by seven to eight points, which
I just found shocking, but I don't doubt because of
what that child has to deal with on a constant
basis if they're going through trauma. But you were continuing,
(05:06):
I'm sorry, I interested.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Well, the hippocampus is one of the areas that they
did MRI studies on what seventeen thousand people and to
make to gather to arrive at these conclusions. But the
hip hippocampi amgdale. The endocrine systems are impacted by that
(05:30):
stress response chemistry, and so for example, someone who has
a high ACE score may also have a smaller hippocampus
due to that you know, biological response, right, and so.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
And what does the hippocampus do in our lives.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
That's it's a processing center that they've got you know,
it doesn't have more. It's emotional regulation is part of it.
Memory and recall, I believe, and again I'm no expert,
and the reward system, I believe is also included with
hypocampal function. It's very basic things. And when these basic structures,
(06:15):
you know, their functionality is also presumably you know, altered
by the physical alteration of these areas of the brain.
So while it's the brain that is responsible for how
a person reacts or responds to the world, it's the
brain's exposure to the world that impacts its construction. It's developed.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Absolutely. One of the things that you said in your
article was that you said that I view some challenges
in psychiatry as fundamentally ethical issues, not exclusively clinical ones.
Can you expand on that a little bit?
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Well, yeah, I guess whenever you talk about how something
should be, or how something is wrong, or how something
can be better, you're in the You're in the arena
of ethics, aren't you. I think it was ge Moore
that made the point that whenever you say you should
(07:16):
do this, you are asserting that you have a better
idea of what should be, and you know it is
an ethic. You're in the field of ethics. There tell
us about.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Your OIGI story. You included that in the article about
being at a party where a group of people about
to dog bar and I thought that was a really
good example of what we deal with around the issue
of trauma and psychology and counseling.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Well, I was at a party at at a place
at Black's Gaslight Village in Iowa City, Iowa, and there
were a group of people there and I'd say they
were probably I don't know, dozen fourteen sixteen people in
a room having fun. And I happened to walk into
(08:07):
this one and I saw somebody, a couple. There were
I think two people with their hands on the OUIGI
board marker or whatever you might call that thing, moving
it around and communicating with the spirit named Harry, and
some of the things that were being revealed just seemed
implausible to me, and I expressed some kind of skeptics
(08:31):
I don't know quite what I said, but it was
enough for somebody to announce, well, this won't work if
there's a skeptic in the room. So I quietly excused
myself and yeah, as I say in the article, I was,
you know, as I walked out I was amused by
the realization that these folks are now left believing whatever
(08:53):
that Ougi board says.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Yeah, I think he used the word obliged to believe. Well,
I found it was really an interesting thing because, of course,
I mean, if you want to be in the room,
you can no longer be a skeptic, at least at
the very least, you have to be quiet about your skepticism,
and you need to be open to believing or or
else it's your fault if something doesn't happen, even if
you've done it silently.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Right, and we might, you know, it's it might. We
might make an analogy between a Ouigi boor and the DSM.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
For example, Right, So make that analogy. I'd like to
hear how you do that. I think that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
So the people who believe in that Ouiji board, I
believe in it because of some somehow they've arrived to
the belief that it is credible. Isn't that right?
Speaker 1 (09:40):
I think they come to it. I would say it
a little differently, So this is how I would say it.
The DSM is created, it's got this stamp of approval
by the you know, big heads of psychiatry and it
gets published out and it's thick and it's extensive, and
you are told it's truth.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Right, that's right. The Ouigi board, Yeah, they didn't have
training in it per se, but they somehow arrived at
the idea that the results of their Wigi board activity
is credible and then reflection of the truth. So yeah,
the psychiatrist who has their training basically in a psychiatric
Ouiji board by using a DSM, right, And so they've
(10:25):
got faith in that that that's a valid tool of
conveying truth, and so they trust it, just like the
folks trusting the Wuigi board trust the results of the
Oigi board.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
And so what do you suppose happens? Or do you
know what happens to people who express skepticism of the DSM.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
If you're a psychiatrist, you know, I really don't know
much more than what I might have picked up on
mad in America. I don't have a you know, I
was people concerned about me took me to a licensed
person who said that I had, you know, borderline bipolar disorder.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Borderline bipolar like those are two different disorders.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
That's what I was. That's how it got back to me.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
A new one.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
I didn't know that was a new one until you
just said, no, that's what it was. That was I
was borderline, and maybe they weren't using the term borderline.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Technically, what happens there is some confusion that happens because
borderline personality in quotes disorder is b p D and
bipolar disorder in quotes is also b p D, and
so sometimes I think people can get it mixed up.
They're two very very different things.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Well see they I learned something here myself.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
One is is it manic depressive? Basically it used to
be called manic depressive, So you have really big highs
and really big lows and the other one. And there's
a lot of controversy over whether it exists or whether
it's just something you call. People who've been traumatized and
out of that trauma respond in certain ways.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Well, I think that's true. I think that's in general
with any of what they call mental illness, is just
they put a label on a biological reality, and doing so,
I think they cause a whole class of damage right there.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Right, Yes. One of the things you said in your
article is that without the skepticism being allowed, and especially
from those with lived experience by saying it's not valid
that we were forced to question whether our tools and
methods are truly serving those they claim to help. So
(12:49):
if psychiatry and psychology and the DSM are simply taken
at face value without any criticism or skepticism allowed about it,
then there is no checks and balances.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Well, it seems to me they're in a sense barking
up the wrong tree. You know, they're looking for the
root cause, or they presumably want to cure and heal,
so they're looking for the root cause of the maladies
or the distresses that they label, and that cure isn't
(13:27):
going to be effective unless it does address and eliminate
the root cause. Well, the root cause of a person's
distress isn't within the person. It's caused by the system.
Exposure to these systems that give them adverse experiences.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
So would you say that adverse experiences also create difficulties
like bipolar because then we're getting into this both about
chemical imbalance, which I don't you know, I think has
been just proved.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
But yes, you know, in a verious experience doesn't need
to occur during development years to be impactful. You know,
what about the people who develop PTSS. I understand it's
now called post stress post traumatic stress syndrome as opposed
to PSTD, which.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Is actually like that. I think that's a better term
for it.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
But I still find myself using again the acronym p
P S T D just because it's meaningful. People know
what it means, you know what I mean? But anyway, yes,
I mean they you know, exposure to too much adverse
conditions I believe can can harm a brain of any age.
(14:51):
But when it happens when your your brain is developing, uh,
there is no knowledge of it ever being Another way,
that is, that's just a person's lived experience, you know, yes.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Which doesn't mean they can't feel and find other things.
But at that place where you're you know, you're raw
from that trauma, you're going to be responding to it naturally. Right,
there's natural and normal responses to trauma.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Right right. And you know one example is smoking. It's
viewed as an addiction, but you know that's one thing.
If a person with a score of an eight ACE
score of four is significant and somebody with score of
four is more likely to smoke two, three, five, I
(15:46):
think it's at least twice as likely to smoke. And
higher your ACE score goes, the more even more likely
you are to smoke, to the point where if you've
got one of you know, somebody that's you know, score
seven or eight, not only are they going to smoke,
they're going to be it's really going to be hard
to get them to quit. That we don't understand, but
you know, the NIH will You can find articles on
(16:07):
there that will say exactly that that if if you've
got somebody who's resistant to you know, cessation of smoking,
consider whether they have a high ACE score because that
might make them kind of treatment resistant. If you know,
there is there are studies that demonstrate that nicotine improves
(16:31):
the performance of a smaller hippocampi, of a smaller hippocampus.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Rather and what does how does it improve the performance
of it?
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Oh? What is it? It might improve functional memory, working memory.
I'd have to look it up again. But the and
there's more than one, but there are studies that show
that there is some improvement in brain function in people
with smaller hippocamp i do due to nicotine. And so
it only makes sense that someone in a compive world
(17:01):
who is disadvantaged by having a smaller hippocampus might have
more benefit from smoking than somebody who has a zero
ACE score. A majority of people don't have that score,
and so you know, we live in we live in
a country where majority rules. And so until everybody understands that,
it's empathetic towards the idea that this isn't the addiction
(17:24):
it's been labeled to be. It's actually a valid biological
response to trauma. You know, they they, I mean sin
taxes in the United States go back to the very
beginning of the country on tobacco considered a sin or
an addiction. But it's in the end, it's not even
(17:44):
a disorder. It's just a biological response and there are
reasons for it that because we don't understand it doesn't
give us the right to judge it.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
And no, I agree. I used to smoke three packs
a day. I was eventually on three medicasions to breathe
so I could have my three packs a day and
had to develop my own cessation program because even the
BC Cancer Agency couldn't tell me how to quit. And
(18:13):
I did that. But part of how I did that
just to sort of push back a little bit on
what you said was that I understood it as an addiction,
and in that understood that when I I have a
very high ACE score. So when I took a buff
of a cigarette, that nicotine released dopamine in my brain
(18:34):
and so I felt good. And so I actually kept
myself out of being in a major depression by smoking.
So just by triggering dopamine over and over and over,
and when I tried to quit, I did go into
you know, that typical thing that they would call a
clinical depression.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
It was like a.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Black cloud, little re sat on my head. So I
had to create my own program, and I did that
and I quit. And I haven't smoked for what year
is it? It's twenty twenty five, so I haven't I
haven't smoked for thirty years almost. So there you go,
But we need to just take a little break, folks.
We'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
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Speaker 1 (19:28):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver. Co Op Radio
cfr OH one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernardine Fox
speaking with Dan Nelson, who is the author of an
article called the Ouiji Board and the Skeptic published last
month in mad in America. Dan, you you talk about
how psychiatry, but I'm assuming you mean the mental health
(19:52):
field kind of focuses on the tree as and can't
see the forest, and that you in that how you
just you know, describe that more? Was that that expertise
they get from going and getting their training and their
stamp of licensing, that it grants them the confidence to
(20:13):
as you say, diagnose and mental illness and I say
that in quotes, but doesn't give them because of that,
it doesn't they still end up lacking adequate knowledge of
the person's lived experience to understand their situation. And that
it focuses down on just that one person and that
(20:33):
one person's symptoms and difficulties and doesn't talk about the
people around them. So can you tell me more about
why expanding and that mental health professionals need to be
looking about the people around them to more better understand
Why is that necessary?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
So it seems to me a lot of people in
the psych industries when they talk to you about your speriences.
They're they're interested, of course, but maybe more to the
end of checking out, checking checkbok and a d s
M guide. Right, you see what I'm saying. That's why
(21:16):
they they they're they're they're listening to you to diagnose
what's wrong with you. That's their perspective. That's what they're after, right,
is a diagnosis.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Right, And so just so folks know, the d s
M is the Diagnostic Standards Manual. It lists every diagnoses
mental health diagnoses that you could possibly have in the
United States. I will tell you it does not used
in Europe other other forms of diagnosing people. He's used
(21:48):
in Europe. And in each diagnosis there is a list
of criteria. That's what you mean by checking them off, right,
there's basically a checklist, you know.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
I just think there's something that's very interesting and aside
about the DSM is it's something that gets updated, you know,
as they make breakthroughs in their diagnostic capabilities. But up
until nineteen seventy three, according to the DSM, homosexual homosexual
people were mentally ill. Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 1 (22:23):
I think they called women who didn't clean their house
mentally ill too.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Oh my god, you know, I mean it.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
You know, I don't know about nineteen seventy three, but
I know that there was a time and place in
at least Canada where if your husband didn't like what
you were doing around the house, he could just literally
take you to the asylum and drop you off, and
their job was to fix you so you would go
home and clean properly. So so I do think that
(22:50):
we have come a long way since nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
But I don't mean to use the term again. I mean,
I mean LGBTQ plus is probably the right way to
say it, but to use the term that they used
and the way they looked at it, that's the term
they used at the time. And so.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
And of course we're kind of shaking in our boots
about what's happening in the States around the LGBTQ community
and how terrified they are right now about what's about
to happen. And that's totally aside from what we're talking
about here. But it is no, no, it's okay, it's
just I can't, I can't not say it out loud
(23:31):
because present so, why is it important for the mental
health professional to be to expand their view of the
person out into looking at their family, their community, their workplace.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Well, if you accept the fact that the root cause
of a person's distress lies outside of them, then you've
got to ask the question, well, what what what are
what outside of them is causing it? What relationships do
they have that are causing these reactions? We need to
(24:08):
look at them as reactions instead of symptoms. And so
often we don't get the story about how that person
is treated by those in his orbit or her orbit,
that person their orbit. So and and in the end,
the people in their orbit are also responding to societal
(24:31):
pressures and systems that are dysfunctional, and the root cause
of it is in the systems themselves. But the a psychi,
you know, a psych professional is just as powerless as
anyone else to attack those systems if they were to,
you know, to change policy or to change the way
(24:52):
things are that are that's causing these reactions and individuals.
But you know, that's the older national politics, the laws,
the way things are, the economic reality, the political reality,
the religious institutions all contribute to explaining a person's troubles.
(25:18):
Some of that might come from a similar to rabbit
Shapolski's idea and his recent more recent book about determinism
and our lack of free will, and he talks about
distributive causes, meaning a person, the behavior you see from
a person right now isn't necessarily or very much at
(25:39):
all a reaction to the immediate circumstances that everyone might
you know, ascribe to being the causes of his reaction
or her reaction, their reaction, those causes if you really
wanted to know, you'd have to know every biological detail
about the person's development and environment, going back to pre
(26:01):
natal how was his mother, what was his mother experiencing
while the person was And then and then it goes
even further back to that, you know, it goes how
how did we evolve? You know? And that kind of
brings us into like the evolutionary mismatch idea, you know,
tell me about that well. And again, this is a
(26:23):
term that I just discovered here recently. It's something that
I arrived at from my own thinking. And I kind
of I'm reluctant to use these terms because I don't
know what supports them or how they arrived at them,
but they sure sound a lot like how I arrived
at mine, you know. But basically the idea that brains
are programmed or wired for certain historical conditions under which
(26:47):
they involved, but our environment no longer matches those conditions.
M and then that can be I believe that's the
cause of a lot of distress, anxiety, depression, you know,
on and on is.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
And so let me just stop you there. So our
brains are wired for environmental conditions, are you? But but
now our environmental conditions have changed and our brain has
not evolved. What are those changes?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Well, so our brain, our brains, it seems like, evolved
for small, tight knit hunter gatherer groups. And it could
be that that's where our brains kind of stopped evolving.
Maybe like like the horses has met its evolutionary limit,
you know what I'm saying. And it's not just that
(27:41):
our systems haven't evolved. I think they've kind of mis
evolved because they they were unsound in their foundations in
the first place.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
That's interesting because I always think of evolution as being perfect,
right that that that's the idea you get that evolution
happens and so you lose something. So we losed we
lost a tail at some point because we didn't need
the tail anymore. I don't know if that's real, but
that kind of idea. But you're saying that in some
ways evolution makes mistakes.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Well, evolution doesn't really aim for perfection. I mean it might,
it might kind of in a sense achieve it. You might.
We might say some organisms are perfectly evolved for their ecosystem,
but it gets there by selecting traits that are basically
just good enough for survival and reproduction, and through that
(28:33):
process that may arrive at some proximity of perfection. You know.
But our brains, you know, our brains were and I
see other people writing about this. It's not like it's
my idea. Some people say our brains were wired for
success in the Stone Age or in the hunter gatherer stage,
(28:56):
and just like I wonder if it's just like the
whole you know that we haven't made advances or horse
breeding hasn't made advances, and how fast a horse can
go for you know, like a hundred years, and it's
not from lack of trying, of course, everybody's trying to
make the horse go faster, but they basically kind of
hit an evolutionary biological constraint.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
You know, yeah, well, that seems to be really reasonable
that they you end up hitting that wall because you
are still we're so far away from mental health at
this point. But if you you know, a horse has
bones and muscles and ligaments, and exactly they can only
(29:39):
go so far going in terms of getting faster. So
so see, let's see if we can try and bring
that back to the issue of mental health.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Okay, well, i'd say, you know, our instincts, emotions, and
our cognitive biases are tuned in for a past environment,
and so anxiety, depression, addiction, chronic stress, all these things
stem from the fact that our brains aren't designed for
our modern way of life, you know, social media and
all the corporate hierarchies and all the demands and pressures
(30:11):
of modern life.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
But isn't it also true that we've only really used
like ten percent of our brain or did they decide
that that was that we were using more of it?
I remember at one point they figured that out.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
So I think that's I think that's been debunked. But okay,
I don't know. I really don't have an opinion on that.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Okay, that's okay. One of the things that I liked
about what you said in your article was that and
this goes back to the whole notion of pathologizing trauma
that by focusing on the individual as the sole source
of the problem, often leaves these environmental factors untouched. And
in some ways that also goes back to the thing
(30:53):
that we know that happens in social constructs is that
one person in the family is considered the problem, and
everybody else can hide their issues behind the fact that
this one person is acting out or has a mental
health challenge or whatever, and they become the problem and
even and so you can almost see from that that
(31:15):
they would have an unwritten and unacknowledged desire to keep
that person's mental health challenge triggered and acting out because
they can. Then they're not responsible.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Well, think about it. Think about a kid who's being bullied.
I was going to damage. We know how damaging that
can be.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yes, it is damaging.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
And what's funny is people talk about how mean kids
can be, but gossip is a full form of bullying
and adults are really good.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Oh, I've known too many adult bullies who never got stopped.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
And you know, if somebody wants to help, you know,
so this kid's bullying, bullied, and this kid's distressed. Well,
what is the response of some the psyche professional who
wants to help, What is that reponse, or what is.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
The response of the parents. There's also the parents in theretic.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Industry wants to say, well, what's wrong with the kid.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
That's right, that's what happens exactly.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
This kid and his problems, and we need to fix
this kid. But the best they can do is just
make them more tolerant of the bullying they're receiving. They
don't go to the bullies in that kid's environment and say, hey,
do you realize the damage you're doing to this this
this colleague of yours by picking on them like that?
You know incessantly, it's it's damaging. You don't know that
(32:38):
the extent of the damage you're doing. Nobody, ever, and
nobody takes that tact.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Nobody, Well I do, just so you know, I'm a
very vocal person that says, if your kid is being
bullied in school, get them out of school. Don't even
send them there, because the schools are not dealing with it.
They will protect the bully and ask the child to
do something different, just as you said, so that the
bully doesn't bully them, and I just I have seen
(33:06):
too many times the damage that's done to children, because
it's a very good example.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
But yeah, by the time the kid gets professional help,
I say, there are quotes around it, the focus is
already on them. They've already misfocused the source of the distress.
The reactions that this kid is having is a reaction
to something. If you don't eliminate the to something, you
(33:33):
haven't addressed the cause. That's right, So that's the whole.
But by the time the kid goes to the therapist's office,
he's isolated, and the therapist doesn't take the time out
of their day to say, well, tell me the names
of these kids that are bullying you, and then going
around and individually talking to those kids. You know, that's
not part of the therapy. They're not getting paid for that, right.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
So, in fact, the distress is seen as pathology.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Right. So, well, I can't do any The therapists can't
do anything for the kid's bullying situation, the reality that
the kid lives with every day. But all they can
do is make the kid feel better, right and maybe
put them maybe put them on some meds. So they're
not so impacted by the pain that's inflicted on them.
(34:20):
But they're not doing anything to address the cause. They're
just helping the uh, the oppressed better tolerate their oppression, right,
And that's generally speaking, what the psychic what the psych
industry seems to do. Because and again I can't blame them,
because they can't they can't change the systems that cause.
(34:42):
It's the dysfunctional systems that really causes to be at
each other's throats and to compete against each other and
to not have any empathy for one another or any
of that. You know, let's look out for number one.
And so it is a it's a it's such a
deeply ingrained systemics sidal issue that you know, all they
can really do is deal with the consequences. Well, they can,
(35:06):
you know, provide some relief to the individual through some therapies,
of course, but to get to the root cause, not
only do they go to the first line, which would
be the person, the bullies or whatever in the person's orbit,
but then the look at the community. The community is
the same all over the country anymore. No communities are
(35:26):
really unique, you know, we're all you know, dancing to
the same economic and political tunes, and so but the community,
how does the community treat that the people in that
person's orbit and that person, and then how does the
state maybe you'd say, is the next one out of
the county or as it gets bigger. You know, it's
(35:48):
all driven by the systems that are set up to
governess all. Whether those systems are political systems or what
have you.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah, they're all different systems, and so there doesn't seem
to be any overarching mechanism that is able to look
at it and say, okay, this, we'll just talk about
the bullied child. This child's being bullied, and these are
the systems that are supporting this from happening, And what
(36:16):
can we do here or here or here to make
it so that the child is not being bullied and
that the bully who's causing the problems is the one
who's getting the help that they need. We just need
to take a little break here, folks, but we'll be
right back.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
I am not okay.
Speaker 5 (36:38):
I'm barely getting back.
Speaker 4 (36:41):
I'm losing track of day, lose asleep.
Speaker 5 (36:46):
And i am not okay.
Speaker 6 (36:51):
I'm hanging on the rails.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
So if I say fans.
Speaker 6 (36:56):
No I learned how it will how No I came baby,
only one who's holding off of your line.
Speaker 5 (37:13):
But God knows, I.
Speaker 6 (37:15):
Know when it's all said.
Speaker 5 (37:17):
At the time, I'm not okay, but it's all gonna
be all right. It's not okay, We're all gonna be
all right. I wool up to day, I hormostaining me,
(37:44):
had the devil on my back.
Speaker 6 (37:47):
And voices in my head.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Some daz it.
Speaker 6 (37:51):
Ain't all bad.
Speaker 7 (37:53):
Some days it all gets worse.
Speaker 5 (37:56):
Some Jesus swear I'm batter then in their dirt.
Speaker 6 (38:03):
I no, I came be the only one who's holding
off of your lie.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
But I knows.
Speaker 5 (38:17):
I know when it's all said a time, I'm not okay,
but it's all gonna be all right. It's not okay,
but we're all gonna be all right, gonna be all right,
(38:39):
gonna be all.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
I know.
Speaker 4 (38:47):
One day we'll see the other side the paint on
ourselves in a holy wire time, and we all gonna
be all right.
Speaker 6 (39:02):
Hand no gotchat be the only one who's holding off
of you. But God, no sign.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
No.
Speaker 5 (39:17):
When a saucy and I'm not okay, let a song
gonna be all right. It's not okay, O ver all
gonna be all right. I'm not okay. Let a song
gonna be all right.
Speaker 7 (39:42):
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Speaker 1 (40:25):
You're listening to read Threading Madness on Vancouver co Op
Radio CFR one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernardine Fox
and I'm here with Dan Nelson having an incredible conversation
about our brains and childhood trauma and systems and where
they all just don't meet properly. One of the things
that I wanted to talk about was how focusing just
(40:51):
on the emotional impact of trauma or other things cannot
give us a full picture. As I was explaining to
Dan when we were on the break, I do a
lot of work around therapy, abuse and exploitation, and we
recently started to focus on and asking people specifically what
(41:11):
kind of physical reaction might you have had from this?
And of course we're getting all the same kinds of
things that people talk about around stress. These are stress
responses and they are happening here, and it just goes
to the level of catastrophic damage that these people are
going through, which is often not recognized. But the other
thing that I wanted to that I realized is almost
(41:33):
a perfect example of this is coming from it from
the other perspective, which is that you talking about your
environment and the person in the environment being impacted and
then having a response to that, and the environment not
being considered as a part of that response or as
(41:54):
a cause of that response. So if you take exposure
to organophosphates, which is for all easy markers, is organo
phosphates are agent orange as they were used in Vietnam,
but they are now used as pesticides. No, I think
organo phosphates are herbicide. But what they do is they
(42:19):
impact on your aceatocholonase acetocholonase, I think that's the word
for it. But they also will cause anxiety. So if
you're out in your garden and you're using organo phosphates
and you get exposed to it in a way that
is destructive to your system, you will end up with anxiety.
If you go to a mental health professional and say
(42:39):
I have anxiety, they may never get it that what
you've been what has happened to you, is that you've
been exposed to a toxic chemical that has impacted on
your physical being and causing that anxiety. So that's coming
at it from another perspective. So rather than coming at
it from the emotional difficulties that people are having and
seeing what that environment that they're in, it just it
(43:03):
reverses it in some ways. It made it make more
sense to me what you were talking about.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Yeah, I like that example. That's good.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
So so let's talk about ace and how that impacts
on people and the physical stuff. What kinds of physical
things have you.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Well, there's a whole host of in addition to the
you know, uh, I don't know, mental issues that somebody
might encounter that they you know, and things like smoking
and depression and suicidal ideations and things like that. There's
physical health problems that arise, like heart disease, is cancer, COPD, diabetes, obesity,
(43:51):
g I problems. They can they find a correlation between
having high ACE scores and these physical malage as well.
And you know, when our healthcare system here in the
States anyway, is very specialized and siloed. It's full of silos.
(44:12):
Everybody views just like the mental health professional views the
person in a vacuum. So do so does meant the
health industry kind of in general. You know, your your
cardiologist tells you about your heart and your gas are
now gas aretologists excuse me, tells you about your GI
and you know, and uh so everybody looks at you
(44:33):
from the the as through the lens of their specialty,
and nobody really has a holistic view or even an
understanding that these disparate seeming problems that this person are encountering,
I'll have a common cause, and that's having an ACE
score of or something.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
You know, I just realizing as you're talking that I'm
as guilty of this as everybody else because I have
met people who had horrendous childhood trauma, continuing trauma that's
come out of that childhood trauma that they're still coping with,
you know, when it comes from a family, you're still
coping with that trauma and the things that people are
(45:11):
doing to you as an adult. And then you think
that that is overwhelming, But then that person also has
consistently ending up with health issues over and over and over,
until you think this person is just going to break
from the amount of things they're having to cope with
all the time. And it just occurred to me as
(45:32):
you're talking that all of those things go together. It's
not trauma, and you know, their physicality, it's all the
same thing. It's and of course it's one body. And
I feel a little stupid that I didn't get that before,
But there you go. We're trained to not think that way.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Well, and everybody again, nobody's making any money by actually
solving the issue, by actually addressing the systemic causes that
these things. All these things require repeat visits, you know,
and so it is profitable and it's good for the
medical industry, but it might not be so good for
(46:12):
the patients that they continue to treat the symptoms without
addressing the causes, and they're actually treating the symptoms as
if their causes, it seems to me.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
Sometimes yeah, or even even treating the cancer, say, for instance,
as the cause of the cancer is their anxiety or
their inability to have resolved the trauma from their childhood,
which still puts it on the person that ended up,
you know, puts all the responsibility and like, of course
(46:46):
we're responsible for our own healing, YadA, YadA, but at
some point it has to be mitigated by what they're
going through at the same pome.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
And it's you know, the scientific apparatus has to has
to operate on data, and so they might arrive at
the root cause of a person's problem, as they say,
dysfunctional or a diminished hippocampus, and that that's where they'll
that's where they'll sit. Well, there's a reason why that
is that way too. You haven't got to the root
(47:16):
cause yet, but you act as if you have, see
what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
So one of the other things we were talking about,
and there's a risk of going someplace that I said
we weren't about to go. You were talking about when
we were on the break there that maybe the human
brain has gotten to its evolutionary breaking point. And I'm
just wondering, because we were going to talk about the overview,
like what what needs to happen to make these systems
(47:41):
work better? And I can't think of anybody better than
you to know that, because you understand systems.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
Well, how do we? I don't know that I'd say
it's a breaking point. I would just say maybe we've plateaued.
Maybe the just like you know, the ability of a
horse to run any faster despite doing all we can,
they haven't run any faster for a hundred years, and
before prior to that, they did make market improvements in
the horse of speed, but now they can't do that anymore,
just because they're the kind of an evolutionary limit. So
(48:11):
I'm saying that maybe, and I have no idea, maybe
the brain is the same way. Maybe the reason that
some of these folks are claiming that their brains are
wired to survive in a in a more historical period,
maybe they're right about that.
Speaker 1 (48:30):
And I personally, as a person, would be totally bored
running around gathering plants. I just would. I just I
can't imagine going back there and that would be my life.
I would be the one building things that I had
no business building.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
So give you a more general experience, and returning to
the rhythms of nature actually may be very beneficial to
mental health. And you know they they've got the therapeutic
farms in Ireland that are having a lot of success
with that very thing. They'll take the stress people and
what is their treatment. They have them live on a
farm and do farm work, and and the camaraderie and
(49:14):
the natural rhythms that you of. You know that you're
now exposed to nature's and natural rhythms as opposed to
the natural rhythms of the city or what have you.
And that is that is good therapy for for plenty
of people. And so and I wouldn't I wouldn't suggest
we go back to loin clause.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Like that.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
You know, we could take what we have developed is
still sustainable and do much better than our ancestors did,
uh technologically even you know, even though we would it
would be a return to a way when when things
were simpler and work better for them. Just for the
(49:59):
human brain, when the when our environment did match the
brain that we have evolved.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Is there no other way is there is there some
you know, it seems to me that if what we
have is a disconnect between all the different parts of
our system that are operating in silos, as you said,
and are causing problems or causing themselves to be to
have to be blind to some issues, is there a
(50:26):
way to build a system where there is some over
arching dvantage, where somebody is responsible in that person's life,
one person's life, to make sure that all the other
pieces are talking to each other.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
You know, I think I think people who establish complex
systems of governance, like political systems, economic systems, social or
even religious greatly over estimate their ability to do so.
And and that's you know, these things get out of
(51:08):
hand and they and they don't work very well. Can
you think of any of our systems that actually, uh
deliver but they're supposed to consistently, there's always there's These
are very complex systems, and there's lots of opportunity for
air and they're not very well designed. And you know,
even I think about uh, think about the Artemis Remember
(51:31):
that rocket that they were going to shoot up here
and they did eventually, I don't know it was in
the last year or two there's there's like a pinnacle
of human cooperation and systemic uh perfection that they could do.
And here the thing stands on the on the launching pad.
It got delayed from weather and it started leaking fuel
all over it, so you know, and and everybody said check, check, check,
(51:55):
ready to go, ready to go, ready to go. And
you know, I mean, even in that very cooperative situation,
a system can't isn't It will still fail. You know,
we still have rockets that blow up, and everybody says,
oh that I should have worked. Well, we can't. We
aren't as good as making systems as we think, especially
(52:16):
I think political and economic systems. They don't. They don't.
If if the intention if that, if they were designed
to elevate a few, well then they're working perfectly, and
the people who are elevated by view of them as
working perfectly. But they weren't designed to elevate everybody. If
(52:42):
they were, they're failing miserably. Would you agree that wasn't designed.
They weren't designed actually to result in the satisfaction of everybody.
They were basically designed to elevate a few above the
rest and have those few elites be super satisfied and
everybody else kind of you know, beholden to their overlords.
Speaker 1 (53:08):
Yes, and that I wonder whether or not, because you
and I live in America, if that's our perspective, because
that's what we kind of live with in America. And
if we were to take this issue and go, say
to Norway or Finland, where the individual has more consideration
(53:30):
put into them by the systems around them, whether or
not it would be different.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
Well, I think you can if you're stuck in North
America look at the systems that they had prior to colonialization.
You know, people could There were people that were trading
great distances without the use of money. For example, nobody
had there were no hierarchical laws from sea to shining Sea.
(54:02):
Now that was an infection that was imported with the colonialists.
You know, in their history on that mass continent of
eur Asia, they had conquerors like Genghis Khan and Attila
the hun and and people like that, and that established
a tradition of concentrated power. Actually you just here.
Speaker 1 (54:24):
Yeah, Actually you just reminded me of a program I
did with Norman Leech on decolonizing mental health and what
he I hope I don't bastardize this. He talks about how,
of course you can. I mean you just think about
psychiatry and mental health profession. It is colonialized, It is
(54:45):
power based, and you know, one power is is you know,
imposing stuff on the little person basically, And in decolonizing
mental health, he talked about how they recognize you, RECOGNI
eyes that you are just one piece.
Speaker 2 (55:02):
You can.
Speaker 1 (55:02):
I love this, you are one piece of a lot
of things happening, and that you are not responsible for everything.
So even if you did something bad, it's not you're
not responsible for the whole that all all these different
parts of that experience have a part in that. And
so it's about just recognizing your place is not it's yeah,
(55:28):
it's just I think I just bastardized it, but it is.
It is taking away that power base and making it
more land based. And and you know, I would say,
from your perspective, realistic and that we're not you know,
as the individual, we are not fully responsible for everything
(55:49):
that happens to us or through us, because we're part
of an environment that acts on us as well.
Speaker 2 (55:57):
I believe Robert Schappolski would take it further to say
we are not responsible for anything.
Speaker 1 (56:04):
We sound like all I could go.
Speaker 2 (56:08):
It does change our ideas about blame punishment.
Speaker 3 (56:13):
I don't think.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
He takes what you were just saying even further. And
this guy, I think would know, but uh he And
that's what his book says, is it's talking about a
life without free will and uh and that is exactly
how he casts it, that there are so many distributive causes,
he calls them, that human being can't be really held
(56:40):
responsible for the result of all these distributed causes that
are outside of their control. That, for example, like ACE
research tells us, you know, no child that was a
subject to adverse conditions chose those conditions. They didn't choose
to have their brains sculpted by stress response chemistry. And
(57:02):
yet the society treats them as if they are the
cause of their problems. They didn't choose any of that.
They act, we act as if it's a matter of
changing their will somehow. Well, no, you're trying to change
a biological reality, is what you're trying to do. But
I have I do like what you're saying. And I
think the Industrial Revolution had a lot to do with
how the concept of land and labor took us away
(57:28):
from humanity scriptus of our humanity. And there's a that
was another article I wrote called psychiatry Capitalism and the
Industrial Machine makes that point, and that's on Matt in America.
Speaker 1 (57:42):
Yeah, but if from a First nation's perspective, and I'm
not First nations, so I'm talking, probably somebody who's indigenous
would say this differently. But I'm not sure the white
people who came here when they were doing hunter gathering, farming, etc. Etc.
Stuff operated from a humane place because the things they
(58:03):
did we're not humane at all.
Speaker 2 (58:06):
Oh, I would agree with that.
Speaker 1 (58:10):
Yeah, Dan, thank you so much for coming and chatting.
We run out of time. I can't. It's been a
fascinating conversation. We will do it again. I have no
doubt You've made my brain hurt trying to keep up
with you. But I appreciate that. It's it's it's actually
something that I enjoy. So thank you so much for
(58:32):
coming and chatting.
Speaker 2 (58:33):
For having me. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (58:36):
It was yes, okay, and we'll be right back, folks,
And that's our show. In this past hour, at some
point we talked about decolonizing mental health, and god knows,
I am not an expert on what that is or
what it looks like, but we did discuss it with
Vancouver expert Norman Leech last June, and you can find
that program on our podcast platform. It's called Decolonizing Mental Health,
(58:58):
and I encourage you to take a listen in here
or how Norman describes it, rather than relying on mine.
It's a refreshing perspective on trauma, mental health and moving
past the obstacles those things bring to your life. My
thanks to Dan Nelson for engaging in this conversation about
systems around mental health issues. Music today was by Sherry
Alrich and Jelly Roll and to you our listeners, thanks
(59:20):
for joining us today. Stay safe out there. You've just
listened to Rethreading Madness, where we dare to change how
we think about mental health. We air live on Vancouver
co Op Radio CFRI one hundred point five FM every
Tuesday at five pm or online at co opradio dot org.
If you have questions or feedback about this program, I
(59:42):
want to share your story or have something to say
to us, We want to hear from you. You can
reach us by email Rethreading Madness at co opradio dot org.
This is Bernardine Fox. We'll be back next week. Until then,
will ever been fir
You're listening to Vancouver Call Up Radio cfr oh one
hundred point five FM. We're coming to you from the
unseated traditional territories of the Squamish, Muscream and Slighway tooth
nations around Vancouver, BC. I'm your host, Bernadine Fox, and
this is this show that dares to change how we
think about mental health. Welcome to Rethreading Madness. We have
(00:27):
ever been fir No, what the hell I'm gonna do
when I can't seem fine? Away under over to You're
listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver Call Up Radio cfr
(00:47):
oh one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernardine Fox and
I have the pleasure speaking with a person by the
name of Dan Nelson today. Dan holds a graduate degree,
but he says his most valuable lessons come from personal
experience in what he calls the school of hard knocks.
I think you have a lot of classmates there, Dan.
In that school of hard knocks, he is a passionate
(01:10):
advocate for rethinking societal norms. He writes about trauma, resilience,
and alternative ways to build a more humane world. Dan
believes in the power of storytelling and personal observation to
spark change and foster understanding, which makes him one of
a perfect fit for what we're doing here at Rethreading Madness.
(01:33):
He's born and raised in the Midwest, USA. He holds
a BA in philosophy and MA and Human Resources and
Industrial Relations, and he is acutely aware of how system
design and operation is the cause of any and all
undesirable it results that system outputs, and he has applied
that to the mental health system in his article we
(01:55):
Giboard and the Skeptic, which was published in January of
this year by Madden America, which he begins by saying,
excuse me, I'm going to read this out one second.
I am not a psychiatrist. I'm not even a therapist.
I'm someone who struggled with mental distress and the systems
(02:16):
meant to help. If there's one thing I've learned, it's
this our approach to mental health often misses the forest
for the trees. It focuses on the individuals as though
they exist in a vacuum, ignoring the environments and systems
that shape their lives. Dan feels this is a mistake
and he is here to talk about that and how
(02:38):
it might be better addressed. So welcome, Dan, thank you,
thank you for having me. Are you're welcome. We're so
glad to have you. So tell us a little bit
about Luigi Bord and the skeptic just the article in general.
Can you tell us a little bit about sort of
overall what it's about.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Well, now you've got me going back to read it. Oh,
you know, I think a lot of it, the lived
experiences includes the adverse childhood experiences.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So let's just stop there, because adverse childhood experiences could
seem to a lot of my listeners as just being
sort of, you know, talking sort of generally about people's things,
But it actually is a measurement tool, right.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Ah, yeah, And I call it ACE, the ACE test.
It's Adverse Childhood Experiences ACE, the ACES. And yeah, you
can go you can go to ACES too high dot
com and take a test. It's ten ten questions, right,
It doesn't take long at all. And they've identified that
(03:51):
people who have experienced, uh, these these adverse experiences during
their development have predictable problems or encounter predictable outcomes later
in life. And it has to do with the impact
(04:13):
of stress response chemistry on the developing human brain. And
so when whenever any person is subjected to stress, the
body involuntarily releases this stress response chemistry like cortisol is
one of one of the major components of it, and
(04:35):
that release actually has an impact on the structural reality
of a person's brain.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
One of the things, oh sorry, one of the things
that I read recently is that childhood trauma can in
fact reduce your IQ by seven to eight points, which
I just found shocking, but I don't doubt because of
what that child has to deal with on a constant
basis if they're going through trauma. But you were continuing,
(05:06):
I'm sorry, I interested.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Well, the hippocampus is one of the areas that they
did MRI studies on what seventeen thousand people and to
make to gather to arrive at these conclusions. But the
hip hippocampi amgdale. The endocrine systems are impacted by that
(05:30):
stress response chemistry, and so for example, someone who has
a high ACE score may also have a smaller hippocampus
due to that you know, biological response, right, and so.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
And what does the hippocampus do in our lives.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
That's it's a processing center that they've got you know,
it doesn't have more. It's emotional regulation is part of it.
Memory and recall, I believe, and again I'm no expert,
and the reward system, I believe is also included with
hypocampal function. It's very basic things. And when these basic structures,
(06:15):
you know, their functionality is also presumably you know, altered
by the physical alteration of these areas of the brain.
So while it's the brain that is responsible for how
a person reacts or responds to the world, it's the
brain's exposure to the world that impacts its construction. It's developed.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Absolutely. One of the things that you said in your
article was that you said that I view some challenges
in psychiatry as fundamentally ethical issues, not exclusively clinical ones.
Can you expand on that a little bit?
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Well, yeah, I guess whenever you talk about how something
should be, or how something is wrong, or how something
can be better, you're in the You're in the arena
of ethics, aren't you. I think it was ge Moore
that made the point that whenever you say you should
(07:16):
do this, you are asserting that you have a better
idea of what should be, and you know it is
an ethic. You're in the field of ethics. There tell
us about.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Your OIGI story. You included that in the article about
being at a party where a group of people about
to dog bar and I thought that was a really
good example of what we deal with around the issue
of trauma and psychology and counseling.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Well, I was at a party at at a place
at Black's Gaslight Village in Iowa City, Iowa, and there
were a group of people there and I'd say they
were probably I don't know, dozen fourteen sixteen people in
a room having fun. And I happened to walk into
(08:07):
this one and I saw somebody, a couple. There were
I think two people with their hands on the OUIGI
board marker or whatever you might call that thing, moving
it around and communicating with the spirit named Harry, and
some of the things that were being revealed just seemed
implausible to me, and I expressed some kind of skeptics
(08:31):
I don't know quite what I said, but it was
enough for somebody to announce, well, this won't work if
there's a skeptic in the room. So I quietly excused
myself and yeah, as I say in the article, I was,
you know, as I walked out I was amused by
the realization that these folks are now left believing whatever
(08:53):
that Ougi board says.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Yeah, I think he used the word obliged to believe. Well,
I found it was really an interesting thing because, of course,
I mean, if you want to be in the room,
you can no longer be a skeptic, at least at
the very least, you have to be quiet about your skepticism,
and you need to be open to believing or or
else it's your fault if something doesn't happen, even if
you've done it silently.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Right, and we might, you know, it's it might. We
might make an analogy between a Ouigi boor and the DSM.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
For example, Right, So make that analogy. I'd like to
hear how you do that. I think that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
So the people who believe in that Ouiji board, I
believe in it because of some somehow they've arrived to
the belief that it is credible. Isn't that right?
Speaker 1 (09:40):
I think they come to it. I would say it
a little differently, So this is how I would say it.
The DSM is created, it's got this stamp of approval
by the you know, big heads of psychiatry and it
gets published out and it's thick and it's extensive, and
you are told it's truth.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Right, that's right. The Ouigi board, Yeah, they didn't have
training in it per se, but they somehow arrived at
the idea that the results of their Wigi board activity
is credible and then reflection of the truth. So yeah,
the psychiatrist who has their training basically in a psychiatric
Ouiji board by using a DSM, right, And so they've
(10:25):
got faith in that that that's a valid tool of
conveying truth, and so they trust it, just like the
folks trusting the Wuigi board trust the results of the
Oigi board.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
And so what do you suppose happens? Or do you
know what happens to people who express skepticism of the DSM.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
If you're a psychiatrist, you know, I really don't know
much more than what I might have picked up on
mad in America. I don't have a you know, I
was people concerned about me took me to a licensed
person who said that I had, you know, borderline bipolar disorder.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Borderline bipolar like those are two different disorders.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
That's what I was. That's how it got back to me.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
A new one.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
I didn't know that was a new one until you
just said, no, that's what it was. That was I
was borderline, and maybe they weren't using the term borderline.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Technically, what happens there is some confusion that happens because
borderline personality in quotes disorder is b p D and
bipolar disorder in quotes is also b p D, and
so sometimes I think people can get it mixed up.
They're two very very different things.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Well see they I learned something here myself.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
One is is it manic depressive? Basically it used to
be called manic depressive, So you have really big highs
and really big lows and the other one. And there's
a lot of controversy over whether it exists or whether
it's just something you call. People who've been traumatized and
out of that trauma respond in certain ways.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Well, I think that's true. I think that's in general
with any of what they call mental illness, is just
they put a label on a biological reality, and doing so,
I think they cause a whole class of damage right there.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Right, Yes. One of the things you said in your
article is that without the skepticism being allowed, and especially
from those with lived experience by saying it's not valid
that we were forced to question whether our tools and
methods are truly serving those they claim to help. So
(12:49):
if psychiatry and psychology and the DSM are simply taken
at face value without any criticism or skepticism allowed about it,
then there is no checks and balances.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Well, it seems to me they're in a sense barking
up the wrong tree. You know, they're looking for the
root cause, or they presumably want to cure and heal,
so they're looking for the root cause of the maladies
or the distresses that they label, and that cure isn't
(13:27):
going to be effective unless it does address and eliminate
the root cause. Well, the root cause of a person's
distress isn't within the person. It's caused by the system.
Exposure to these systems that give them adverse experiences.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
So would you say that adverse experiences also create difficulties
like bipolar because then we're getting into this both about
chemical imbalance, which I don't you know, I think has
been just proved.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
But yes, you know, in a verious experience doesn't need
to occur during development years to be impactful. You know,
what about the people who develop PTSS. I understand it's
now called post stress post traumatic stress syndrome as opposed
to PSTD, which.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Is actually like that. I think that's a better term
for it.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
But I still find myself using again the acronym p
P S T D just because it's meaningful. People know
what it means, you know what I mean? But anyway, yes,
I mean they you know, exposure to too much adverse
conditions I believe can can harm a brain of any age.
(14:51):
But when it happens when your your brain is developing, uh,
there is no knowledge of it ever being Another way,
that is, that's just a person's lived experience, you know, yes.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Which doesn't mean they can't feel and find other things.
But at that place where you're you know, you're raw
from that trauma, you're going to be responding to it naturally. Right,
there's natural and normal responses to trauma.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Right right. And you know one example is smoking. It's
viewed as an addiction, but you know that's one thing.
If a person with a score of an eight ACE
score of four is significant and somebody with score of
four is more likely to smoke two, three, five, I
(15:46):
think it's at least twice as likely to smoke. And
higher your ACE score goes, the more even more likely
you are to smoke, to the point where if you've
got one of you know, somebody that's you know, score
seven or eight, not only are they going to smoke,
they're going to be it's really going to be hard
to get them to quit. That we don't understand, but
you know, the NIH will You can find articles on
(16:07):
there that will say exactly that that if if you've
got somebody who's resistant to you know, cessation of smoking,
consider whether they have a high ACE score because that
might make them kind of treatment resistant. If you know,
there is there are studies that demonstrate that nicotine improves
(16:31):
the performance of a smaller hippocampi, of a smaller hippocampus.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Rather and what does how does it improve the performance
of it?
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Oh? What is it? It might improve functional memory, working memory.
I'd have to look it up again. But the and
there's more than one, but there are studies that show
that there is some improvement in brain function in people
with smaller hippocamp i do due to nicotine. And so
it only makes sense that someone in a compive world
(17:01):
who is disadvantaged by having a smaller hippocampus might have
more benefit from smoking than somebody who has a zero
ACE score. A majority of people don't have that score,
and so you know, we live in we live in
a country where majority rules. And so until everybody understands that,
it's empathetic towards the idea that this isn't the addiction
(17:24):
it's been labeled to be. It's actually a valid biological
response to trauma. You know, they they, I mean sin
taxes in the United States go back to the very
beginning of the country on tobacco considered a sin or
an addiction. But it's in the end, it's not even
(17:44):
a disorder. It's just a biological response and there are
reasons for it that because we don't understand it doesn't
give us the right to judge it.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
And no, I agree. I used to smoke three packs
a day. I was eventually on three medicasions to breathe
so I could have my three packs a day and
had to develop my own cessation program because even the
BC Cancer Agency couldn't tell me how to quit. And
(18:13):
I did that. But part of how I did that
just to sort of push back a little bit on
what you said was that I understood it as an addiction,
and in that understood that when I I have a
very high ACE score. So when I took a buff
of a cigarette, that nicotine released dopamine in my brain
(18:34):
and so I felt good. And so I actually kept
myself out of being in a major depression by smoking.
So just by triggering dopamine over and over and over,
and when I tried to quit, I did go into
you know, that typical thing that they would call a
clinical depression.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
It was like a.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Black cloud, little re sat on my head. So I
had to create my own program, and I did that
and I quit. And I haven't smoked for what year
is it? It's twenty twenty five, so I haven't I
haven't smoked for thirty years almost. So there you go,
But we need to just take a little break, folks.
We'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
If you want to listen to us anywhere you travel,
you can go into your Google Play Store and then
download the Radio Player Canada app and you can then
you can listen to your favorite radio station. Co Op
Radio CFR one hundred point five FM.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
You're listening to Rethreading Madness on Vancouver. Co Op Radio
cfr OH one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernardine Fox
speaking with Dan Nelson, who is the author of an
article called the Ouiji Board and the Skeptic published last
month in mad in America. Dan, you you talk about
how psychiatry, but I'm assuming you mean the mental health
(19:52):
field kind of focuses on the tree as and can't
see the forest, and that you in that how you
just you know, describe that more? Was that that expertise
they get from going and getting their training and their
stamp of licensing, that it grants them the confidence to
(20:13):
as you say, diagnose and mental illness and I say
that in quotes, but doesn't give them because of that,
it doesn't they still end up lacking adequate knowledge of
the person's lived experience to understand their situation. And that
it focuses down on just that one person and that
(20:33):
one person's symptoms and difficulties and doesn't talk about the
people around them. So can you tell me more about
why expanding and that mental health professionals need to be
looking about the people around them to more better understand
Why is that necessary?
Speaker 2 (20:52):
So it seems to me a lot of people in
the psych industries when they talk to you about your speriences.
They're they're interested, of course, but maybe more to the
end of checking out, checking checkbok and a d s
M guide. Right, you see what I'm saying. That's why
(21:16):
they they they're they're they're listening to you to diagnose
what's wrong with you. That's their perspective. That's what they're after, right,
is a diagnosis.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Right, And so just so folks know, the d s
M is the Diagnostic Standards Manual. It lists every diagnoses
mental health diagnoses that you could possibly have in the
United States. I will tell you it does not used
in Europe other other forms of diagnosing people. He's used
(21:48):
in Europe. And in each diagnosis there is a list
of criteria. That's what you mean by checking them off, right,
there's basically a checklist, you know.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
I just think there's something that's very interesting and aside
about the DSM is it's something that gets updated, you know,
as they make breakthroughs in their diagnostic capabilities. But up
until nineteen seventy three, according to the DSM, homosexual homosexual
people were mentally ill. Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 1 (22:23):
I think they called women who didn't clean their house
mentally ill too.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Oh my god, you know, I mean it.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
You know, I don't know about nineteen seventy three, but
I know that there was a time and place in
at least Canada where if your husband didn't like what
you were doing around the house, he could just literally
take you to the asylum and drop you off, and
their job was to fix you so you would go
home and clean properly. So so I do think that
(22:50):
we have come a long way since nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
But I don't mean to use the term again. I mean,
I mean LGBTQ plus is probably the right way to
say it, but to use the term that they used
and the way they looked at it, that's the term
they used at the time. And so.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
And of course we're kind of shaking in our boots
about what's happening in the States around the LGBTQ community
and how terrified they are right now about what's about
to happen. And that's totally aside from what we're talking
about here. But it is no, no, it's okay, it's
just I can't, I can't not say it out loud
(23:31):
because present so, why is it important for the mental
health professional to be to expand their view of the
person out into looking at their family, their community, their workplace.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Well, if you accept the fact that the root cause
of a person's distress lies outside of them, then you've
got to ask the question, well, what what what are
what outside of them is causing it? What relationships do
they have that are causing these reactions? We need to
(24:08):
look at them as reactions instead of symptoms. And so
often we don't get the story about how that person
is treated by those in his orbit or her orbit,
that person their orbit. So and and in the end,
the people in their orbit are also responding to societal
(24:31):
pressures and systems that are dysfunctional, and the root cause
of it is in the systems themselves. But the a psychi,
you know, a psych professional is just as powerless as
anyone else to attack those systems if they were to,
you know, to change policy or to change the way
(24:52):
things are that are that's causing these reactions and individuals.
But you know, that's the older national politics, the laws,
the way things are, the economic reality, the political reality,
the religious institutions all contribute to explaining a person's troubles.
(25:18):
Some of that might come from a similar to rabbit
Shapolski's idea and his recent more recent book about determinism
and our lack of free will, and he talks about
distributive causes, meaning a person, the behavior you see from
a person right now isn't necessarily or very much at
(25:39):
all a reaction to the immediate circumstances that everyone might
you know, ascribe to being the causes of his reaction
or her reaction, their reaction, those causes if you really
wanted to know, you'd have to know every biological detail
about the person's development and environment, going back to pre
(26:01):
natal how was his mother, what was his mother experiencing
while the person was And then and then it goes
even further back to that, you know, it goes how
how did we evolve? You know? And that kind of
brings us into like the evolutionary mismatch idea, you know,
tell me about that well. And again, this is a
(26:23):
term that I just discovered here recently. It's something that
I arrived at from my own thinking. And I kind
of I'm reluctant to use these terms because I don't
know what supports them or how they arrived at them,
but they sure sound a lot like how I arrived
at mine, you know. But basically the idea that brains
are programmed or wired for certain historical conditions under which
(26:47):
they involved, but our environment no longer matches those conditions.
M and then that can be I believe that's the
cause of a lot of distress, anxiety, depression, you know,
on and on is.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
And so let me just stop you there. So our
brains are wired for environmental conditions, are you? But but
now our environmental conditions have changed and our brain has
not evolved. What are those changes?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Well, so our brain, our brains, it seems like, evolved
for small, tight knit hunter gatherer groups. And it could
be that that's where our brains kind of stopped evolving.
Maybe like like the horses has met its evolutionary limit,
you know what I'm saying. And it's not just that
(27:41):
our systems haven't evolved. I think they've kind of mis
evolved because they they were unsound in their foundations in
the first place.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
That's interesting because I always think of evolution as being perfect,
right that that that's the idea you get that evolution
happens and so you lose something. So we losed we
lost a tail at some point because we didn't need
the tail anymore. I don't know if that's real, but
that kind of idea. But you're saying that in some
ways evolution makes mistakes.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Well, evolution doesn't really aim for perfection. I mean it might,
it might kind of in a sense achieve it. You might.
We might say some organisms are perfectly evolved for their ecosystem,
but it gets there by selecting traits that are basically
just good enough for survival and reproduction, and through that
(28:33):
process that may arrive at some proximity of perfection. You know.
But our brains, you know, our brains were and I
see other people writing about this. It's not like it's
my idea. Some people say our brains were wired for
success in the Stone Age or in the hunter gatherer stage,
(28:56):
and just like I wonder if it's just like the
whole you know that we haven't made advances or horse
breeding hasn't made advances, and how fast a horse can
go for you know, like a hundred years, and it's
not from lack of trying, of course, everybody's trying to
make the horse go faster, but they basically kind of
hit an evolutionary biological constraint.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
You know, yeah, well, that seems to be really reasonable
that they you end up hitting that wall because you
are still we're so far away from mental health at
this point. But if you you know, a horse has
bones and muscles and ligaments, and exactly they can only
(29:39):
go so far going in terms of getting faster. So
so see, let's see if we can try and bring
that back to the issue of mental health.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Okay, well, i'd say, you know, our instincts, emotions, and
our cognitive biases are tuned in for a past environment,
and so anxiety, depression, addiction, chronic stress, all these things
stem from the fact that our brains aren't designed for
our modern way of life, you know, social media and
all the corporate hierarchies and all the demands and pressures
(30:11):
of modern life.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
But isn't it also true that we've only really used
like ten percent of our brain or did they decide
that that was that we were using more of it?
I remember at one point they figured that out.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
So I think that's I think that's been debunked. But okay,
I don't know. I really don't have an opinion on that.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Okay, that's okay. One of the things that I liked
about what you said in your article was that and
this goes back to the whole notion of pathologizing trauma
that by focusing on the individual as the sole source
of the problem, often leaves these environmental factors untouched. And
in some ways that also goes back to the thing
(30:53):
that we know that happens in social constructs is that
one person in the family is considered the problem, and
everybody else can hide their issues behind the fact that
this one person is acting out or has a mental
health challenge or whatever, and they become the problem and
even and so you can almost see from that that
(31:15):
they would have an unwritten and unacknowledged desire to keep
that person's mental health challenge triggered and acting out because
they can. Then they're not responsible.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Well, think about it. Think about a kid who's being bullied.
I was going to damage. We know how damaging that
can be.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yes, it is damaging.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
And what's funny is people talk about how mean kids
can be, but gossip is a full form of bullying
and adults are really good.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Oh, I've known too many adult bullies who never got stopped.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
And you know, if somebody wants to help, you know,
so this kid's bullying, bullied, and this kid's distressed. Well,
what is the response of some the psyche professional who
wants to help, What is that reponse, or what is.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
The response of the parents. There's also the parents in theretic.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Industry wants to say, well, what's wrong with the kid.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
That's right, that's what happens exactly.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
This kid and his problems, and we need to fix
this kid. But the best they can do is just
make them more tolerant of the bullying they're receiving. They
don't go to the bullies in that kid's environment and say, hey,
do you realize the damage you're doing to this this
this colleague of yours by picking on them like that?
You know incessantly, it's it's damaging. You don't know that
(32:38):
the extent of the damage you're doing. Nobody, ever, and
nobody takes that tact.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Nobody, Well I do, just so you know, I'm a
very vocal person that says, if your kid is being
bullied in school, get them out of school. Don't even
send them there, because the schools are not dealing with it.
They will protect the bully and ask the child to
do something different, just as you said, so that the
bully doesn't bully them, and I just I have seen
(33:06):
too many times the damage that's done to children, because
it's a very good example.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
But yeah, by the time the kid gets professional help,
I say, there are quotes around it, the focus is
already on them. They've already misfocused the source of the distress.
The reactions that this kid is having is a reaction
to something. If you don't eliminate the to something, you
(33:33):
haven't addressed the cause. That's right, So that's the whole.
But by the time the kid goes to the therapist's office,
he's isolated, and the therapist doesn't take the time out
of their day to say, well, tell me the names
of these kids that are bullying you, and then going
around and individually talking to those kids. You know, that's
not part of the therapy. They're not getting paid for that, right.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
So, in fact, the distress is seen as pathology.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Right. So, well, I can't do any The therapists can't
do anything for the kid's bullying situation, the reality that
the kid lives with every day. But all they can
do is make the kid feel better, right and maybe
put them maybe put them on some meds. So they're
not so impacted by the pain that's inflicted on them.
(34:20):
But they're not doing anything to address the cause. They're
just helping the uh, the oppressed better tolerate their oppression, right,
And that's generally speaking, what the psychic what the psych
industry seems to do. Because and again I can't blame them,
because they can't they can't change the systems that cause.
(34:42):
It's the dysfunctional systems that really causes to be at
each other's throats and to compete against each other and
to not have any empathy for one another or any
of that. You know, let's look out for number one.
And so it is a it's a it's such a
deeply ingrained systemics sidal issue that you know, all they
can really do is deal with the consequences. Well, they can,
(35:06):
you know, provide some relief to the individual through some therapies,
of course, but to get to the root cause, not
only do they go to the first line, which would
be the person, the bullies or whatever in the person's orbit,
but then the look at the community. The community is
the same all over the country anymore. No communities are
(35:26):
really unique, you know, we're all you know, dancing to
the same economic and political tunes, and so but the community,
how does the community treat that the people in that
person's orbit and that person, and then how does the
state maybe you'd say, is the next one out of
the county or as it gets bigger. You know, it's
(35:48):
all driven by the systems that are set up to
governess all. Whether those systems are political systems or what
have you.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah, they're all different systems, and so there doesn't seem
to be any overarching mechanism that is able to look
at it and say, okay, this, we'll just talk about
the bullied child. This child's being bullied, and these are
the systems that are supporting this from happening, And what
(36:16):
can we do here or here or here to make
it so that the child is not being bullied and
that the bully who's causing the problems is the one
who's getting the help that they need. We just need
to take a little break here, folks, but we'll be
right back.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
I am not okay.
Speaker 5 (36:38):
I'm barely getting back.
Speaker 4 (36:41):
I'm losing track of day, lose asleep.
Speaker 5 (36:46):
And i am not okay.
Speaker 6 (36:51):
I'm hanging on the rails.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
So if I say fans.
Speaker 6 (36:56):
No I learned how it will how No I came baby,
only one who's holding off of your line.
Speaker 5 (37:13):
But God knows, I.
Speaker 6 (37:15):
Know when it's all said.
Speaker 5 (37:17):
At the time, I'm not okay, but it's all gonna
be all right. It's not okay, We're all gonna be
all right. I wool up to day, I hormostaining me,
(37:44):
had the devil on my back.
Speaker 6 (37:47):
And voices in my head.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Some daz it.
Speaker 6 (37:51):
Ain't all bad.
Speaker 7 (37:53):
Some days it all gets worse.
Speaker 5 (37:56):
Some Jesus swear I'm batter then in their dirt.
Speaker 6 (38:03):
I no, I came be the only one who's holding
off of your lie.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
But I knows.
Speaker 5 (38:17):
I know when it's all said a time, I'm not okay,
but it's all gonna be all right. It's not okay,
but we're all gonna be all right, gonna be all right,
(38:39):
gonna be all.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
I know.
Speaker 4 (38:47):
One day we'll see the other side the paint on
ourselves in a holy wire time, and we all gonna
be all right.
Speaker 6 (39:02):
Hand no gotchat be the only one who's holding off
of you. But God, no sign.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
No.
Speaker 5 (39:17):
When a saucy and I'm not okay, let a song
gonna be all right. It's not okay, O ver all
gonna be all right. I'm not okay. Let a song
gonna be all right.
Speaker 7 (39:42):
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Speaker 1 (40:25):
You're listening to read Threading Madness on Vancouver co Op
Radio CFR one hundred point five FM. I'm Bernardine Fox
and I'm here with Dan Nelson having an incredible conversation
about our brains and childhood trauma and systems and where
they all just don't meet properly. One of the things
that I wanted to talk about was how focusing just
(40:51):
on the emotional impact of trauma or other things cannot
give us a full picture. As I was explaining to
Dan when we were on the break, I do a
lot of work around therapy, abuse and exploitation, and we
recently started to focus on and asking people specifically what
(41:11):
kind of physical reaction might you have had from this?
And of course we're getting all the same kinds of
things that people talk about around stress. These are stress
responses and they are happening here, and it just goes
to the level of catastrophic damage that these people are
going through, which is often not recognized. But the other
thing that I wanted to that I realized is almost
(41:33):
a perfect example of this is coming from it from
the other perspective, which is that you talking about your
environment and the person in the environment being impacted and
then having a response to that, and the environment not
being considered as a part of that response or as
(41:54):
a cause of that response. So if you take exposure
to organophosphates, which is for all easy markers, is organo
phosphates are agent orange as they were used in Vietnam,
but they are now used as pesticides. No, I think
organo phosphates are herbicide. But what they do is they
(42:19):
impact on your aceatocholonase acetocholonase, I think that's the word
for it. But they also will cause anxiety. So if
you're out in your garden and you're using organo phosphates
and you get exposed to it in a way that
is destructive to your system, you will end up with anxiety.
If you go to a mental health professional and say
(42:39):
I have anxiety, they may never get it that what
you've been what has happened to you, is that you've
been exposed to a toxic chemical that has impacted on
your physical being and causing that anxiety. So that's coming
at it from another perspective. So rather than coming at
it from the emotional difficulties that people are having and
seeing what that environment that they're in, it just it
(43:03):
reverses it in some ways. It made it make more
sense to me what you were talking about.
Speaker 2 (43:10):
Yeah, I like that example. That's good.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
So so let's talk about ace and how that impacts
on people and the physical stuff. What kinds of physical
things have you.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Well, there's a whole host of in addition to the
you know, uh, I don't know, mental issues that somebody
might encounter that they you know, and things like smoking
and depression and suicidal ideations and things like that. There's
physical health problems that arise, like heart disease, is cancer, COPD, diabetes, obesity,
(43:51):
g I problems. They can they find a correlation between
having high ACE scores and these physical malage as well.
And you know, when our healthcare system here in the
States anyway, is very specialized and siloed. It's full of silos.
(44:12):
Everybody views just like the mental health professional views the
person in a vacuum. So do so does meant the
health industry kind of in general. You know, your your
cardiologist tells you about your heart and your gas are
now gas aretologists excuse me, tells you about your GI
and you know, and uh so everybody looks at you
(44:33):
from the the as through the lens of their specialty,
and nobody really has a holistic view or even an
understanding that these disparate seeming problems that this person are encountering,
I'll have a common cause, and that's having an ACE
score of or something.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
You know, I just realizing as you're talking that I'm
as guilty of this as everybody else because I have
met people who had horrendous childhood trauma, continuing trauma that's
come out of that childhood trauma that they're still coping with,
you know, when it comes from a family, you're still
coping with that trauma and the things that people are
(45:11):
doing to you as an adult. And then you think
that that is overwhelming, But then that person also has
consistently ending up with health issues over and over and over,
until you think this person is just going to break
from the amount of things they're having to cope with
all the time. And it just occurred to me as
(45:32):
you're talking that all of those things go together. It's
not trauma, and you know, their physicality, it's all the
same thing. It's and of course it's one body. And
I feel a little stupid that I didn't get that before,
But there you go. We're trained to not think that way.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Well, and everybody again, nobody's making any money by actually
solving the issue, by actually addressing the systemic causes that
these things. All these things require repeat visits, you know,
and so it is profitable and it's good for the
medical industry, but it might not be so good for
(46:12):
the patients that they continue to treat the symptoms without
addressing the causes, and they're actually treating the symptoms as
if their causes, it seems to me.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
Sometimes yeah, or even even treating the cancer, say, for instance,
as the cause of the cancer is their anxiety or
their inability to have resolved the trauma from their childhood,
which still puts it on the person that ended up,
you know, puts all the responsibility and like, of course
(46:46):
we're responsible for our own healing, YadA, YadA, but at
some point it has to be mitigated by what they're
going through at the same pome.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
And it's you know, the scientific apparatus has to has
to operate on data, and so they might arrive at
the root cause of a person's problem, as they say,
dysfunctional or a diminished hippocampus, and that that's where they'll
that's where they'll sit. Well, there's a reason why that
is that way too. You haven't got to the root
(47:16):
cause yet, but you act as if you have, see
what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
So one of the other things we were talking about,
and there's a risk of going someplace that I said
we weren't about to go. You were talking about when
we were on the break there that maybe the human
brain has gotten to its evolutionary breaking point. And I'm
just wondering, because we were going to talk about the overview,
like what what needs to happen to make these systems
(47:41):
work better? And I can't think of anybody better than
you to know that, because you understand systems.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
Well, how do we? I don't know that I'd say
it's a breaking point. I would just say maybe we've plateaued.
Maybe the just like you know, the ability of a
horse to run any faster despite doing all we can,
they haven't run any faster for a hundred years, and
before prior to that, they did make market improvements in
the horse of speed, but now they can't do that anymore,
just because they're the kind of an evolutionary limit. So
(48:11):
I'm saying that maybe, and I have no idea, maybe
the brain is the same way. Maybe the reason that
some of these folks are claiming that their brains are
wired to survive in a in a more historical period,
maybe they're right about that.
Speaker 1 (48:30):
And I personally, as a person, would be totally bored
running around gathering plants. I just would. I just I
can't imagine going back there and that would be my life.
I would be the one building things that I had
no business building.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
So give you a more general experience, and returning to
the rhythms of nature actually may be very beneficial to
mental health. And you know they they've got the therapeutic
farms in Ireland that are having a lot of success
with that very thing. They'll take the stress people and
what is their treatment. They have them live on a
farm and do farm work, and and the camaraderie and
(49:14):
the natural rhythms that you of. You know that you're
now exposed to nature's and natural rhythms as opposed to
the natural rhythms of the city or what have you.
And that is that is good therapy for for plenty
of people. And so and I wouldn't I wouldn't suggest
we go back to loin clause.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Like that.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
You know, we could take what we have developed is
still sustainable and do much better than our ancestors did,
uh technologically even you know, even though we would it
would be a return to a way when when things
were simpler and work better for them. Just for the
(49:59):
human brain, when the when our environment did match the
brain that we have evolved.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Is there no other way is there is there some
you know, it seems to me that if what we
have is a disconnect between all the different parts of
our system that are operating in silos, as you said,
and are causing problems or causing themselves to be to
have to be blind to some issues, is there a
(50:26):
way to build a system where there is some over
arching dvantage, where somebody is responsible in that person's life,
one person's life, to make sure that all the other
pieces are talking to each other.
Speaker 2 (50:45):
You know, I think I think people who establish complex
systems of governance, like political systems, economic systems, social or
even religious greatly over estimate their ability to do so.
And and that's you know, these things get out of
(51:08):
hand and they and they don't work very well. Can
you think of any of our systems that actually, uh
deliver but they're supposed to consistently, there's always there's These
are very complex systems, and there's lots of opportunity for
air and they're not very well designed. And you know,
even I think about uh, think about the Artemis Remember
(51:31):
that rocket that they were going to shoot up here
and they did eventually, I don't know it was in
the last year or two there's there's like a pinnacle
of human cooperation and systemic uh perfection that they could do.
And here the thing stands on the on the launching pad.
It got delayed from weather and it started leaking fuel
all over it, so you know, and and everybody said check, check, check,
(51:55):
ready to go, ready to go, ready to go. And
you know, I mean, even in that very cooperative situation,
a system can't isn't It will still fail. You know,
we still have rockets that blow up, and everybody says,
oh that I should have worked. Well, we can't. We
aren't as good as making systems as we think, especially
(52:16):
I think political and economic systems. They don't. They don't.
If if the intention if that, if they were designed
to elevate a few, well then they're working perfectly, and
the people who are elevated by view of them as
working perfectly. But they weren't designed to elevate everybody. If
(52:42):
they were, they're failing miserably. Would you agree that wasn't designed.
They weren't designed actually to result in the satisfaction of everybody.
They were basically designed to elevate a few above the
rest and have those few elites be super satisfied and
everybody else kind of you know, beholden to their overlords.
Speaker 1 (53:08):
Yes, and that I wonder whether or not, because you
and I live in America, if that's our perspective, because
that's what we kind of live with in America. And
if we were to take this issue and go, say
to Norway or Finland, where the individual has more consideration
(53:30):
put into them by the systems around them, whether or
not it would be different.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
Well, I think you can if you're stuck in North
America look at the systems that they had prior to colonialization.
You know, people could There were people that were trading
great distances without the use of money. For example, nobody
had there were no hierarchical laws from sea to shining Sea.
(54:02):
Now that was an infection that was imported with the colonialists.
You know, in their history on that mass continent of
eur Asia, they had conquerors like Genghis Khan and Attila
the hun and and people like that, and that established
a tradition of concentrated power. Actually you just here.
Speaker 1 (54:24):
Yeah, Actually you just reminded me of a program I
did with Norman Leech on decolonizing mental health and what
he I hope I don't bastardize this. He talks about how,
of course you can. I mean you just think about
psychiatry and mental health profession. It is colonialized, It is
(54:45):
power based, and you know, one power is is you know,
imposing stuff on the little person basically, And in decolonizing
mental health, he talked about how they recognize you, RECOGNI
eyes that you are just one piece.
Speaker 2 (55:02):
You can.
Speaker 1 (55:02):
I love this, you are one piece of a lot
of things happening, and that you are not responsible for everything.
So even if you did something bad, it's not you're
not responsible for the whole that all all these different
parts of that experience have a part in that. And
so it's about just recognizing your place is not it's yeah,
(55:28):
it's just I think I just bastardized it, but it is.
It is taking away that power base and making it
more land based. And and you know, I would say,
from your perspective, realistic and that we're not you know,
as the individual, we are not fully responsible for everything
(55:49):
that happens to us or through us, because we're part
of an environment that acts on us as well.
Speaker 2 (55:57):
I believe Robert Schappolski would take it further to say
we are not responsible for anything.
Speaker 1 (56:04):
We sound like all I could go.
Speaker 2 (56:08):
It does change our ideas about blame punishment.
Speaker 3 (56:13):
I don't think.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
He takes what you were just saying even further. And
this guy, I think would know, but uh he And
that's what his book says, is it's talking about a
life without free will and uh and that is exactly
how he casts it, that there are so many distributive causes,
he calls them, that human being can't be really held
(56:40):
responsible for the result of all these distributed causes that
are outside of their control. That, for example, like ACE
research tells us, you know, no child that was a
subject to adverse conditions chose those conditions. They didn't choose
to have their brains sculpted by stress response chemistry. And
(57:02):
yet the society treats them as if they are the
cause of their problems. They didn't choose any of that.
They act, we act as if it's a matter of
changing their will somehow. Well, no, you're trying to change
a biological reality, is what you're trying to do. But
I have I do like what you're saying. And I
think the Industrial Revolution had a lot to do with
how the concept of land and labor took us away
(57:28):
from humanity scriptus of our humanity. And there's a that
was another article I wrote called psychiatry Capitalism and the
Industrial Machine makes that point, and that's on Matt in America.
Speaker 1 (57:42):
Yeah, but if from a First nation's perspective, and I'm
not First nations, so I'm talking, probably somebody who's indigenous
would say this differently. But I'm not sure the white
people who came here when they were doing hunter gathering, farming, etc. Etc.
Stuff operated from a humane place because the things they
(58:03):
did we're not humane at all.
Speaker 2 (58:06):
Oh, I would agree with that.
Speaker 1 (58:10):
Yeah, Dan, thank you so much for coming and chatting.
We run out of time. I can't. It's been a
fascinating conversation. We will do it again. I have no
doubt You've made my brain hurt trying to keep up
with you. But I appreciate that. It's it's it's actually
something that I enjoy. So thank you so much for
(58:32):
coming and chatting.
Speaker 2 (58:33):
For having me. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (58:36):
It was yes, okay, and we'll be right back, folks,
And that's our show. In this past hour, at some
point we talked about decolonizing mental health, and god knows,
I am not an expert on what that is or
what it looks like, but we did discuss it with
Vancouver expert Norman Leech last June, and you can find
that program on our podcast platform. It's called Decolonizing Mental Health,
(58:58):
and I encourage you to take a listen in here
or how Norman describes it, rather than relying on mine.
It's a refreshing perspective on trauma, mental health and moving
past the obstacles those things bring to your life. My
thanks to Dan Nelson for engaging in this conversation about
systems around mental health issues. Music today was by Sherry
Alrich and Jelly Roll and to you our listeners, thanks
(59:20):
for joining us today. Stay safe out there. You've just
listened to Rethreading Madness, where we dare to change how
we think about mental health. We air live on Vancouver
co Op Radio CFRI one hundred point five FM every
Tuesday at five pm or online at co opradio dot org.
If you have questions or feedback about this program, I
(59:42):
want to share your story or have something to say
to us, We want to hear from you. You can
reach us by email Rethreading Madness at co opradio dot org.
This is Bernardine Fox. We'll be back next week. Until then,
will ever been fir
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