Medication. (ft. Dr. Armin Tadayyon)

hello hello hello welcome back to this episode of yna you're not alone i'm joined here today with my co-host cena what's up well here we go and cheyenne hello so today's topic is on medication and this format is going to be a little bit different for today we have a pre-recorded interview with a doctor that we know uh so i'm gonna play his introduction and we're going to be reiterating questions that we asked him during the interview and we're just gonna be having a conversation afterwards

so hello hello hello welcome back to whiny you're not alone uh today's topic is going to be on medications my name is dr harman paleon i'm currently a first-year anesthesiology resident at the university at buffalo in new york okay so that's a little intro on our guest and so the first question that we asked dr ted iron is so in your experience especially through the medical field it feels as if medication is a very touchy topic it's something that a lot of people

either are very against or very for then there's the middle which is which is a bunch of people who don't really know which side they're for it and don't have the information for so i asked dr armin tataon in your experience in the medical field have you ever had a client patient or whoever split between the three types absolutely we see that all the time um i mean one of the biggest things that right now that kind of creates this disparity is the coveted vaccine right

that's a certain type of medication uh like it's a it's a vaccine but um it's something that you put it's a it's a you know synthetic uh drug that you put into your body to have therapeutic effects right so you have people who are completely for it people who are completely against it and you also have people that hey you know i don't know where where to really stand what are the facts another one you know pertaining to this channel are the use of psychiatric medications you know

some people may see for example being on ssris or snris for depression anxiety as a stigma and they don't really want to be on that or for example other people come in and they have been dealing with you know depression for a significant amount of time it's it's to the point where they feel debilitated throughout their uh day-to-day life and as and what they're asking for is medication they're looking for that one pill to fix it they don't want to sit through therapy and they don't want to

you know do that they're looking just for a pill that will be the answer so there's there's really a lot a little big disparity there between you know the people who are wanting to jump into hey i want i want to find that magic bill versus hey i don't know what this is what's what's getting put in my body i'm i'm kind of wary about this so i really believe in trying to understand medication it try it's the first step of trying to understand your body and how you grew up and how medication

has been implanted into your life whether you did take advil as a kid or whether your parents did give you some sort of medication to help you when you were feeling sick but i think with mental health it's kind of a little bit different because it's all the chemical imbalances in your brain and which side you want to go on whether you want to get therapy or whether you just want the answer resolved in um and we'll uh has his own experience with medication so will were you ever in that

kind of situation where you were more on the left or more on the right or more in the middle and how did you respond to like going on to the side that you did yeah i mean for me uh i've had a lot of experience with like trying different medications i had always been kind of open to i would say in his words how he put it is he described it either as like hey you're kind of against it you don't know what it's going to do or like you're kind of on like okay i'm trying to find this

magic pill to like solve the problems and that's kind of the side that i would lean more to is i thought i was open to the experience of you know trying to figure out um how these medications can help me uh pretty much the entire time so it was easy for me to like go see somebody and not even even that part wasn't that hard i've always been open to just trying to understand like hey what's going on maybe it is like a chemical imbalance um and these medications could help me and i know i i

do know people who they don't even take advil so you know i can understand that other side as well but for me i've always been kind of like on that open concept of like hey this could help me maybe not what's the worst case i try it doesn't work i don't take it yeah and i think that's the most important uh factor of the whole thing is you asking the right questions on whether you want to take the medication that's prescribed to you or not and honestly you kind of look at the

results of other people right like you see hey that person has taken this medication and has helped them a lot and i've also seen other people who've taken the medication who it might not help them a lot and they've had to test different types of medication until they get to the right one and we're so we're stuck i think the reason why it's so touchy is because that both sides are so to the extreme that some are like the medication is what you need and some are

like the medication is not what you need and you can find holistic views or you can find different um herbal medicines that can help you it's not all about medication and it shouldn't really be like that we shouldn't really have this difficulty on what side we have it's more of trying to understand what you want for your body and what you believe that through your experiences and through someone who is an expert in the field of medication believes that it's the best for you and

in the end you need to understand that the information and the facts that are presented to you are the information the facts that they have so you need to figure out whether though whether you want to accept those facts or information and if you want to test whether this medication will help you in the end yeah also just to quickly add when i began my experience with medication it always the reason i think is that people are kind of afraid to it afraid of it is the medication aspect

but they never experts will never push medicine on you unless you are you know that you have severe mental problems and that's okay but for me it's just started out with talking to somebody and they suggested it at first and i actually i didn't do it at first i was like you know this is helping like uh like trying to get to the core root of these problems right um but over time it evolved into okay let's try medication like they will if you go see an expert

they will usually start with hey you're just going to talk to them you're not going to they're not going to say like oh right off the bat here here take this like it'll sedate you like it's that's how it goes yeah and the next question that we asked dr ted i own is why do some people believe that medication they are prescribed or the magic pill is the isn't the answer to their problems i know there's a lot of people out there who are still very worried about getting

medication prescribed going down the trend of fear in the health world of what doctors are prescribing do people really have this fear and why not just take the medication to really answer the fear that they're having i think the first problem that comes in um i don't think it's much of a fear but you know or i i don't know what i'm putting my body i think when it comes to psychotropic medications for example like antidepressants and we have tons and tons of years over 50 years of data

showing that this stuff is is helpful it's beneficial and it's it's neuroprotective it protects neurons but i think one of the major you know hesitations that people have to getting put on especially psychiatric medications would be compliance you know i don't think uh the idea of taking the the pill is as scary as i have to do this every day for who knows how long possibly the rest of my life and i think it comes into the point of you know i don't want this medication to

control me i don't want to i don't want this to be something that i'm doing every single day uh for the rest of my life or for the next 10 years for example so it's a it's a major major question i think what the hesitation comes in is of compliance a lot of patients from what i've seen like to take things prn as we like to say as needed and it doesn't really work like that with some you know psychiatric medication like antidepressants you need at least two weeks of antidepressant of

regular use on that antidepressant for them to at least have some type of an effect so i think the the major fear is is compliance you know i don't wanna i don't wanna be controlled by something i don't wanna take something for an extended period amount of time and where control comes in i believe he makes a really good point because my father has to take lots of medication for his heart and so i think the one thing he always complains about is i have to go take my pill i have to go

take the next pill i have to go and get them refilled and i have to continue this life cycle because it keeps him alive and so i do believe where doctor tadayon is saying that control plays a factor in how we look at medication brandon do you feel as if control would be the issue or do you believe there's like some another issue why people won't take that magic pill um i feel like why some people would not take that magic pill is mostly likely the side effects

kind of like how you describe how like your dad has to take medications for a heart um i think i could kind of say like with my own mom um this was a while back i want to say five maybe even five to ten years ago i remember my mom was working at the bank and she fell down the stairs and she fractured her leg but then the the prescription or the pill that to put her on was a xanax just so it could help her with the pain and things like that and at first she did take it and it did help

but the only thing she didn't like about that pill was that the side effects that i gave her it gave her basically made it feel like a zombie as she always described to me and like i could notice like on a daily basis how her mood always changed like she wasn't herself when it's low-key that kind of scared me in a way because like i know how my mom is and how she's around the house like she's always up and going like she's always conversating things like that i know how she is but

then just seeing like that slightest change from from the very beginning when she first took that pill and then weeks and weeks going by and have to take it like it just completely changed her in a way so i guess like things like that will make people not want to take the pill and i mean even for some people like for example if they were to take and they feel like a hundred times better and things like that they feel happy like i feel everybody is different with their

body chemicals and things like that of how they react to the pill and when you see somebody change too after medication you're kind of like it kind of gives you that like okay i don't really want to take medication now for anything because i see what i'm seeing in another person kind of affects how i feel about it and especially if you have someone who's going through life and death experiences with medication where it saves them and needs to keep them alive you're kind of like

it's so hard you know like i just see that you know like one second you're um so excited about like whoever it is to stay alive because of the medication but you see them change too because it does change the chemical imbalance in their brains so with your experience with medication will i know that you went through this whole beginning process of the magic pill being the answer was the magic pill the answer i mean it took it takes a long time like a lot of the medications i so it through my

experience i have been on medications like that where it was like very mind suppressive and and that's fine like some people like need that and that's okay but i didn't like that and that's all it took for me to say like i said like this is not the one i don't like there are thousands of medications to try uh and they will just try something new um if you you can they were very receptive you know you can talk to them for 30 45 minutes if you want to and they will say like we'll get down to the

core route of like what the issue is uh and try a different medication for me on this like controlling factor it wasn't just like i never really thought like okay like this like if i didn't like the medicine i just didn't take it i tried a new one like it was fine and it was just the process of finding them uh with a lot of those medications it just takes like usually uh what he said with like ssris they need to be in your system for a certain amount of time usually like a

baseline i would say a good two weeks before you like will start seeing the effects or the benefits the downsides like anything like that it just needs to build up in your system and so like how i would schedule like appointments is it would be on a monthly basis because that first two weeks is a buildup of the two weeks after that you're really experiencing how this medication works and for me on the controlling side it was just like it took me years to find the correct medication

that i felt suited me and through that experience like comes with like so sometimes they would send over um a pill that wasn't on my insurance and it would be hundreds and hundreds of dollars and all they all they needed to do was just change like i have a bunch of off-brand stuff too they could have just said oh send this it'll be like four bucks yeah but like they don't know that you know like they just send the medication so like there's other issues internally

like that where like oh you have to call them back and say like uh that's too expensive like try a different one um sometimes it's like like i said it's just the wrong medication for you and you you'll call them and you'll just stop but like you still have that appointment set up maybe three weeks from now and you have to wait to go see them again to try something new so it's a trial and error it's a process of trial and error but honestly like where where i'm at now is so it the benefits

outweigh all the negatives that i've gone through with it like i have the medicine that i like uh that makes me feel as much me as possible and that journey is worth it and i totally agree with you on that so the next question that we asked him is is medication a last resort or is it usually the first step in making a decision whether medication is right for you or not that's a that's a great question i think the answer that question depends on the person for example um if somebody

let's say we create let's say hypothetically somebody's dealing with a significant amount of depression throughout their life they have the inability to really construct the future um you know they they they have difficulty finding joy in their life so what would be the first step for them well what what would they be comfortable with um you know if we're making major steps towards changing your perspective on life changing your outlook on life you have to be comfortable taking those first steps

so some people might be comfortable with starting you know medication starting an ssri daily and then checking in with their psychiatrist in 30 days from now other people might be a little bit hesitant on starting a new medication but they might be open to the idea of cognitive behavioral therapy um and that might be the best for them so so really what really matters most is what is most comfortable for the patient and what the patient feels uh is going to be the best step

for them so some might start out with medications some might start out with cognitive behavioral therapy and then they can be adjuncted for example if somebody participates in cbt but doesn't find that much relief and wants to um add more than what they could add on his medications or if somebody starts on with medication doesn't seem that much relief what we could add on is uh cvt so for the uh listener and viewer i want to explain to you what cbt really quick is and so

therapists they go through different theories and there's many different theories that they can go through there's play therapy there's dbt dialectical behavior therapy there's cbt cognitive behavioral therapy and emdr eye movement desensitization and reprocessing there's many different theories and many different therapists use many different theories but the main one is cbt and cbt pretty much is reframing your mind to think about things in a different light and a

different opinion so not allowing yourself to stick onto one topic and telling yourself things it's reframing the way that you see and the way that you maybe even see life uh a lot of therapists enjoy cbt because a lot of clients achieve their goals and in therapy with cbt it's just a quick explanation on what cbt is um in my experience in therapy and with the therapists i've conversated with is cbt is extremely helpful it's something that if you do want to go to therapy i

definitely recommend you talk to your therapist about what theories they go through and then researching those theories because you want to make sure that sometimes some therapies don't some theories don't work on and every case scenario is different and so we definitely recommend to the listener viewer do your research and maybe even ask your therapist what kind of theories they plan on um going through or what they specialize in very important but like he was saying it's kind of

in we're in this medical world now where your opinion kind of goes into two different directions um cheyenne i know that you have not had the experience with medication maybe not had the experience with cbt but when you're in a decision making process what do you think like helps the person benefit more do you think people like want to go towards medication do they want to go through to therapy is it difficult would you say if you were ever in that process to try to choose the route i think

it really just matters on your upbringing and what type of medical practices your family uses or what just whatever they do because i know um on my mom's side she's she likes very like holistic doctors and uh like eastern medicine practices so it it really just depends on what you're comfortable with what your family has introduced to you since birth and i mean it i think really that that's what factors in on the decision making when you want to decide whether or not you go to therapy

whether you take western medicine whether you take eastern medicine or just what whatever works for you yeah and i totally agree especially when your environment and how you're raised kind of shapes about what kind of direction you'd rather go in which is either uh go through and see a therapist because i do know in a lot of families and i just want to mention i saw this really funny tweet it was about this woman who would say oh mom i'm going to therapy and the mom was um very uh what's it

called the mom was not ever had heard of therapy and whoever she spoke to about therapy was quote-unquote crazy and so she asked her daughter like you're not crazy why are you going to therapy so in different yeah different international countries we all look at therapy sometimes as this person needs a lot of help and i think the issue with therapy is looking at many difficult disorders such as schizophrenia multi-personality disorder bipolar disorder these disorders that

are very like um that have a lot of mental effect on the person and people quote-unquote call them crazy um however i do want to let the listener viewer know that you are not crazy for going to therapy you it is your decision and i believe in it a hundred percent and if you want to go either route whether will here has done the medication route i've gone through the therapy route um many people different uh go through different routes onto what they believe but never allow

someone to make you feel like that you could you you're viewed in a different way because you go to a therapist because there's many many people who do and there's many people who come back and say that they're doing ten times better than they were there's so many different types of therapists exactly doesn't mean anything and so remember not only that you are not crazy you are just a person going through different different chemical imbalances and if you believe that

medication could be a route for you we definitely find that talking to your doctor or are listening to our podcast can not only give you the information that you need to make your decision but hopefully in the end that the decision you do make is the right one for you and don't worry about going with medication and then switching to a therapist because i've seen a lot of that too you know medication tried didn't work and i've also seen people go therapy didn't work and go to medication

there's two routes in front of you definitely figure out what which one's right for you and we'll go from there yeah and even with cbt like we we didn't directly address it on like the last episode of bouncing back but we talked about it's basically what it is you know changing your negatives to positives and i've seen a lot of people even people here who didn't go the medication route who use that you know like there's hey you don't even necessarily need to see a

therapist to get the benefits of those things so you can also do personal research but just like cena said like listening to our podcast getting uh good information from any sources that you can find that's like where it really just starts as long as you just start it you know you'll you'll figure out on your own what you what you think and then that's where you can begin to try things so the next question is are there any alternative paths that you've been seeing that have worked for patients

regarding their feelings of depression anxiety or whatever they're dealing with absolutely cognitive behavioral therapy right so checking in you know seeing a seeing a professional mental health professional um regularly and frequently you know checking in with somebody once uh once a week and really diving into the behaviors and the cognition that leads to those type of outcomes which is for example like depression anxiety and really deconstructing those behaviors

and implementing new behaviors that have more positive outcomes so cogno behavioral therapy is a great alternative i've actually seen studies that have shown where you use ssris alone compared to cet alone and both of them are equivocal they both create an improvement in symptoms compared to placebo at the same amount now if you adjust them together the the effect is synergistic so they even have a greater effect when added together but even individually they're equal to one another

so like dr ted i don't mentioned as it's equivalent with cbt medication it can be used as both it's whatever again you feel comfortable with figuring out what you personally need in your life and the only person who knows you the best is you so maybe it's time to take that step of whether maybe i do need to go speak to a doctor or maybe i do need to go see a therapist and so now it's just honestly figuring out how you feel about yourself being self-aware and just figuring out how you can help

yourself and what we try to focus here on yna is not only to help you get the information that you need but speak to professionals who can actually give you even more information about what direction might help you the listener and viewer to get to the place that you want to be in your life and truly to live your best life and i think that's what the most i think that's what we're all trying to do right we're all just trying to live our best life be happy try to

live life the way we want to just want to be me man yeah exactly right i just want to be me and so we'll go on to the next question so the next question we asked dr armin is uh that we think uh one thing that a lot of people have a difficulty understanding in the medical field is the relationship between anxiety and depression so for you as a doctor how do you diagnose it differently how do people understand and how do you identify with the difference between if

they have depression or if they have anxiety yeah right so that's it's a depression has its specific um uh diagnostic features right so the one that we learned in medical school is signage e-caps right so it's uh excessive sadness daytime you know sleepiness insomnia appetite changes weight changes um sleep pattern changes inability to find joy in something that you found pleasurable before that is the main cornerstones of uh depression right so and and to be con to

be diagnosed with major depressive episodes you have to participate you have to have this for about two weeks straight so two weeks straight of this type of behaviors would lead to a major depressive uh episode or major depressive diagnosis so the dsm-5 is is the is the bible of psychiatry and psychology it is the diagnostic manual for which uh diagnoses can be made so like for example let's say you go to a psychiatrist and you uh say you know how does a psychiatrist determine if you're

depressed or if you're sad you know what i mean so depression is like a long-term sadness it's something that you just feel like you know i don't know i didn't get the job i'm sad right that doesn't mean i'm depressed so how does it how does a psychiatrist determine uh to put the diagnosis of depression on you well the way that psychiatrist does it is by using the dsm-5 i would highly recommend looking into that it's super important like for example like ptsd

right how do you get how do you how are you diagnosed with ptsd per the dsm-5 you need to have experienced or witnessed a a traumatic event and traumatic is defined as like a where one's life could have been ended or it was very um like fatal to one's life and thirty and you have reoccurring memories or episodes of this event after 30 days so that's ptsd now let's say i got it like i remember i don't know when i was like early 20s i i backended somebody like a in uh by a red light and um

i i mean nothing really happened i was just a fender bender uh but for like two weeks i just like whenever i would like go to that uh uh you know stop at the back a red light you know i kind of like tense up a little bit and just be reminded that me slamming in the back of this lady's car at like 30 miles an hour right right so that was less than 30 days that's called acute stress disorder so somebody has acute stress disorder and if it persists after 30 days then

it's ptsd like these are things that like the dsm-5 um uh uh make or or create the diagnostic criteria to give the listener viewer again a little bit more info about what the dsm-5 is dsm is the book that psychologists therapists and psychiatrists they use this book to pretty much uh diagnose you with whatever you're going through so if it's depression they go through a kind of like a checklist to see if whether you have these certain effects that the dsm-5 says that you do for people who

have depression um just quick little info for you guys uh what i have to say to trying to understand depression and anxiety um one one way that i know that i'm feeling pretty depressed is my i have issues with my anger and i get annoyed extremely easily by the littlest of things and i know that if i'm continuing down that path for several days that my depression that i'm feeling depressed towards something and something's kind of like anchoring me down to the ground or drowning me and

with depression uh will i know you have more of the side of anxiety and the feeling of medication with the anxiety when you were taking the medication did depression and anxiety start to go away or did it feel as if the medication was only focused on anxiety and you still felt depressed uncertain in certain times yeah so my initial like diagnosis however many years ago three four years ago maybe uh was like a little bit of depression but more more anxiety than

depression and it just that's just how it was so we start there's medications that i guess uh help both and so i would take one pill to relieve both or that's what we tried um for me not none of those worked at all it took a lot of figuring it out and it was more of like deciphering like okay what feelings are related to this little bit of depression and what feelings you know in your head are related to this uptake and anxiety and so eventually it kind of got split down the

middle we figured out what where when where and i got anxiety medicine and i got depression medicine and so the anxiety medicine itself took a long time to find but it really helped and it turned out in the end that i didn't really need depression medication and so i was off of that um but those medicines can also like the struggle with figuring out what the right medicine is is they can counteract each other right they can also like say like hey this medicine really helps my

anxiety but damn like now i'm feeling more depressed and then you'd stop the medicine to try to find something new and you realize okay yeah it was just the medicine let's try something else but yeah there's there's distinctive medicine to say like okay we're just going to give you this for anxiety we're going to give you this for depression we're going to give you this for this this for this or like it can also be grouped into one thing depending on like how you're feeling and let me give you

the view of on what happened in my therapy sessions so i don't have much anxiety i have more depression and so we use tools that are focused on helping anxiety that didn't really work for me but when we use tools for certain depressive um states and mental um moments or episodes uh they helped a lot more and so you can find your uh you lean sometimes on one side you have more depression than you do have anxiety or you can lean more on the side if you have more anxiety than you do have

depression and with medication and with therapy you can find out which side you lean on more and figuring out what will work best for you so the next question that we asked dr ted ionis can medication be prescribed for both anxiety and depression at the same time is it two separate prescriptions for both of them or can you be just given one absolutely so actually um anxiety and depression the treatment of anxiety and depression is the same so for example um usually they're they

come in pairs right so you know everything you got to remember everything's on the spectrum we have like venn diagrams and these venn diagrams are these overlapping you know ovals you can't fully say like i have this um you know very rarely you could say i have this but i don't have any other other things usually um psychiatric disorders or or mental illnesses uh do come in you know a variety of things depression and anxiety is a major common one and the really the the the treatment options for

depression anxiety is exactly the same so giving ssris selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors which are called antidepressants are also first line for anxiety treatment and they're also called anxiolytics now it goes so anxiety comes in many different flavors right so in depression we have depression and we have we have major depressive uh disorder right it's a depression and then major depressive disorder and anxiety there's a multiple variations of anxiety for example

there's social anxiety disorder generalized anxiety disorder um you know panic disorder which is a fla which which is a subcategory of anxiety um so all of those um mostly when we're referring to generalized anxiety disorder the treatment's going to be the same as for depression that's going to be antidepressants or anxiolytics such as ssris or snrx now when you get to more severe where you have like panic attacks the medications uh utilized at boarding uh treating panic attacks right aborting

those panic episodes so if you feel yourself for example getting a panic attack coming on you reach for this uh certain medication and that medication is going to kick in very quickly and abort that that panic attack that you would have had versus like anxiety medications where you have to take them for at least like two weeks for the for for the levels to get therapeutic in your body so as he explained we kind of go into the detail of the spectrum which is really important so brandon sometimes

when we are at a level of trying to understand our depression and anxiety we have different subcategories of depression and anxiety as we go down the list sometimes we have social anxiety sometimes we have panic attacks sometimes we have major depressive disorders sometimes we have uh depressive disorders that are dead in different levels and situations have you ever felt as if you've had maybe social anxiety or depression and it's felt like it's on a spectrum where the anxiety is taking

over and giving you more of a panic attack rather than the depression leading you into the panic attack so for me personally uh social anxiety is the one that usually gets me the most uh for an example like for me personally like when it comes to big social settings um i tend to get a little too over ahead of myself um i just find it hard to talk in big settings for some reason i personally mean i just feel like uh what do you call it like kind of like out of the circle if that makes sense um

and i'll try to explain a little bit more so basically like when people are talking things like that like i'll be trying to relay or trying to think of how to continue the conversation but most of the time i just don't know how to do it and it's just that and it gets to my head over time so basically like when people ask me things that social stuff like that i tend to just like i call like a blackout so i kind of spaced out a lot and then like then from there like

the anxiety starts catching up to me so i have to think of something off of the fly and then half the time it's something that doesn't even correlate what is going on so then from there i kind of just like take myself out of the circle and i just kind of go do my own thing or like when it starts breaking up the anxiety onto me like i just either go outside and just try to like work on it or how to calm myself down but over time um i've managed to work on that little by little so i don't

have those experiences anymore so usually like what i do to help with those experiences is just that i just kind of just stick myself out there just in the blue and just try to conversate try to just work on like my social skills things like that i know a lot of people out there have problem with social skills and honestly that's okay we all have gone we all been to there we have gone through that but the best way how i personally to me is to fix that is just just keep

on talking no matter like if people say like oh like i sound dumb or stupid because that's how i personally feel at times a lot um i just ignore those in my head and just keep on continuing to try to conversate just keep on continuing just to work with people just talk to people then eventually it will come natural to you so that's kind of the best i could kind of explain it yeah and i totally think that in situations when we're in a group setting especially when you don't

know a single person you start to overthink and you're like well i don't want to be that loner in the corner not talking to anybody that that guy that guy yeah you don't want to be that guy so it's definitely something that uh i think a lot of people will start to understand about how to deal with their social anxiety so the next question that we asked doctor taran is why does a medication work for everyone and how do you distinguish that from someone who may be abusing the medication

great great question so um first let's attack the first question so why doesn't the medications work for everybody so the answer to that is monoamine oxidase theory so monoamine oxidase theory states that depression and anxiety really are the result of neurotransm imbalance of neurotransmitters in your brain so there were many studies where they took a bunch of individuals and they looked at the relative amounts of neurotransmitters throughout their brain and these major

neurotransmitters include like uh serotonin norepinephrine dopamine um and they looked at a a lot of these and what they found is that people with depression you know most a lot of them had low amounts of serotonin so that's where the antidepressants ssris come in the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors these these medications are are pointed at increasing the amount of serotonin in your brain so that works for some but then what they also found out was that people who were diagnosed with

depression had fine normal levels of serotonin but their norepinephrine was though so um serotonin was okay dopamine was okay but norepinephrine was now so these individuals wouldn't benefit from ssris which increased serotonin these individuals would benefit from a type of medications called snris selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors um so if you give somebody with a has an ssri you know who has low amounts of norepinephrine you give them an ssri it's not going to help but if you give

somebody who has no low amounts of norepinephrine and you give them a drug that is aimed at increasing amounts of norepinephrine that is uh um that's that that will be helpful now monoamine oxidase theory isn't that clear either because it shows relative differences for example uh someone might have low serotonin another person might have little norepinephrine but another person might have low serotonin and low norepinephrine so you know it really depends it really depends per the individual

it has been proven that mental illnesses change the way that your brain work you know for example like depression will rewire your brain ptsd my research uh uh after uh that i spent several years researching on was the way that ptsd alters neural connectivity in combat veterans returning from iraq and afghanistan what i discovered was that having the diagnosis of ptsd physically all altered the way that different parts of the brain communicated with each other wow um

yeah so it's it's it's not just a perception right so having depression having anxiety having ptsd is really like a pathologic it's really something that is an imbalance in your brain it's not just the way that you change you know you you feel like i just need to get happier right i just need to do this no there really is a science behind it and the level of neurotransmitters in the way that your brain is communicating with different parts of your brain is altered

so these medications you know there's a whole way of approaching how to treat these things in these different ways and and we have to find that well but the hard part is really understanding you know what what's wrong with this particular individual's pathology right or physiology and then finding the treatment that is best geared towards uh fixing that problem right so if i give like you know a phillips screwdriver for a flat head it's not going to help so i think this is the most beautiful

part about being human is that we all have our own crazy chemical imbalances in our brains some people feel more depressed some people feel more anxiety some people feel um have different levels of serotonin to the epinephrine and what i want to tell you is that it's okay to not be okay you know like you thinking that you need to be happier or you need to feel this way or feel that way it's truly a chemical imbalance in your brain it's something that has a physical toll

in your mind that you sometimes don't even have full control of so when you are going through depressive episodes and anxious episodes that these things are not it's not like they're supposed to be normal and that we all have this and we all have that no it's it's your brain going through its levels of rewiring that it knows how to protect itself or how to feel or maybe not how it's supposed to feel so don't think that hey i'm feeling depressed today because of this or that

it truly could be just a chemical imbalance of where that where you woke up in the morning right chan like yeah like i mean i i think it definitely like clears up the stigma that we that a lot of people have were mental illnesses and depression and anxiety they're all just kind of like in your head like you just get better yeah yeah like it it's mostly just biochemistry and sometimes we can't help it and so everything that he's saying is like these are the things that people use to actually help

like their chemical imbalances in their head to help with the depression to help with the anxiety yeah in that case there's no other way to do it yeah like you need to get that help yeah and so that's something that we are really glad for you the listener here to understand and we'll get on to the next question so the next thing we asked was during the rewiring of the brain certain mental illnesses can really change how you think how you feel changing several emotions and how you

address people it seems like as you go through life with different mental illnesses the brain we rewires itself does the medication help the rewiring can you go back to what and who you were before the mental illness so so if you if you're diagnosed with depression right so the rewiring in your brain has changed so the goal of medications and it doesn't necessarily just have to be medication it's also cognitive behavioral therapy right cognitive behavioral therapy looks at

the way that your thoughts and behaviors are associated with each other and then what what it looks to do is to disconnect those behaviors without the use of medications so um both ways look at the way of rewiring your brain back to more of what it was prior to this uh illnesses uh develop but remember these illnesses he's developing isn't like a flip of switch right like two days it's not like you know today you're normal tomorrow you're abnormal it's consistently just

driving away and driving away over a significant period of time that eventually leads you down this path and you're like oh my god how did i end up here right so um these these medications aim and and cognitive behavioral therapy aims at going back to normal physiology levels of specifically like neurotransmitters and rewiring your brain to be more um to be more connected to the areas which it used to be now how does how do people you know abuse their medications well it really

depends on what medications you're referring to so for example antidepressants such as ssris and snris it's very difficult to abuse those um anything that i've seen within the medical field of ssris and snris being taken extensively were due to individuals attempting to end their own life they've taken a lot of you know it was a suicide attempt they wanted to overdose on drugs so they breach for their antidepressants or our medications fortunately these medications you know

we can be countered in the emergency setting but these medications aren't ones that normally typically get abused medications that typically get abused are medications that create instant relief or they create euphoric effects and people begin uh individuals begin associating the use of this medication to a relief from their previous state and if i take more then i'll have more of a greater relief than my previous state so um one example of medications that can get uh

abused is anxiolytic so for example um panic disorder when you start having a panic attack you reach for um some type of anxiolytic sometimes most commonly in something like a benzodiazepine that you take that that its onset is literally minutes and it will suppress any type of anxious drive and really calm you almost immediately so this is a quick you know gratification that relief that you get from um this medication so people see that as a way of hey if this

provided me with some relief maybe if i take more i won't ever have this again or maybe if i take more um this is the only way that i see what normal looks like so that it's it's kind of like habit forming you know what i mean it begins this this habit where you know this helped me before so one helped me before so maybe two will help me even more or maybe three will even help me even more or maybe i have to be in the state to just not to just not even feel like that

anymore and that's that's how addiction gets gets to be created so the where he expresses the thoughts of rewiring is extremely important because as our brain goes through different phases of life and scenarios your brain continuously rewires itself to make sure that it continuously find whether it's new information whether it's new scenarios whether it's new experiences whether it's something it just continuously goes into this motion of rewiring and when you go through

these depressive episodes and panic panic attacks your brain rewires itself to make sure that it's prepared for different situations and also it tries to understand and help to really figure out what's going on will did you feel any rewiring during your process of taking the medication yeah i mean me personally i was on like panic attack type anxiety medication and so i can really see why and i can understand why that it's very it can be taken very abusively um at the

time it all kind of goes full circle at the time um it was like as a as a kid like you don't really you're not given like you know something as severe as xanax right but you're still given um some type of like something zupine like that's usually the what people look for when they're treating anxiety uh something i don't know i just don't know what those medications specifically are called but it's just meant to calm you down stop your thoughts process pretty much it's

just blunt it's meant to sedate you basically and and that's fine it doesn't last like like the entire day right it's just when you're having this onset of a panic attack um you you would take it or i would take it with five minutes and it's fine like it it really helps and there were times where like they say okay like over time um if you were taking something like that um every other day uh to which i was the medication doesn't necessarily stop working but the effect like the first

time you take a medication like that it really it really hits you like you know it's working you know for sure it's working and not that you get used to those effects or it's either you get used to it or uh like he said the effects kind of like come down because you're still taking the same dose you know as you keep taking something you need to up the dose to feel the same effects it's kind of like that first people say about the first highlight you're always chasing that first high

right that people deal with and uh there were times where okay like to my therapist if the panic attack was bad enough take two of those uh but really try not to do it and there were only maybe like one or two instances where i ever had to do that but when i did have to do that you i can definitely see why those are taken abusively and why they're prone to do it because you you feel really good it really helps it doesn't just like blunt your feelings but it adds more dopamine and serotonin

into your brain and it's that high feeling that i assume people are chasing it's the euphoric effect is what i keep coming back to what i think is the biggest issue when it does come to um those kind of medications that have those kind of effects to help you they need to go through the euphoric effect the euphoric effect helps you feel a lot better but also the euphoric effect is what you started chasing and where the addiction slowly goes uh where it slowly starts beginning and we're

going to start getting more into the addiction side of the episode as we slowly enter into the next couple questions so we're gonna jump into the next one why does the human brain tell us what if if i just take another take more i just keep taking more and then i'll just feel better great question and i think the answer to that question is honestly is that the human brain itself think of it as very fertile soil you have farmland and the soil is so fertile it wants to grow

whatever you put into it all it wants to do is give back what you put into it it doesn't care what you put into it doesn't care if you put in negative thoughts positive thoughts etc it's just going to give back what you put into it so in a very bit any big fertile soil if i plant a bunch of poison and and and weeds and and a bunch of just really bad plants that fertile plant that fertile soil is going to give me more of this shrub of this of this poison of this of these really you know

like poison ivy and these really bad shrubs it doesn't care what i put into it it's just going to give me back whatever i put into it on the other hand if i put into it you know i i take care of the land i i focus on putting in roses and daisies and etc and and i feed it these things it's gonna give me back those things the human mind itself is not smart the way that i like to think about it the human mind itself is just something that is wants to thrive and it will give back whatever you put

into it so i mean think about this uh have you ever heard you know day by day uh i get better and better in every single way imagine like thinking to yourself you know oh today i did this i'm i'm so grateful just find three things you know like you just hear from these self-help books just find three things that you find really grateful well what are they trying to do they're trying to just feed this fertile soil just some little grateful things for it to give back more

grateful things to create these habits so that you're consistently focusing on the positive and your mind is constantly giving you back that positive now on the other hand let's say you get home from work like oh my god i was so stupid i i can't believe i said that i can't believe i did that oh i i can't believe you know i didn't do this oh gosh i'm i'm so dumb i don't deserve this and you keep saying that to yourself all you're giving to that fertile land is just that negativity and

that fertile land is just going to give you back that negativity i think this part of the episode i want to really dive deep into to help you guys understand what the soil in your mind is like i think you do need to look at your brain as kind of a farmland because again and we've said it i believe plenty of times on our podcast yeah negativity positivity planting the right seeds in your mind but i want you to understand again sometimes we do go through experiences

that we don't understand when we're putting in a poisonous shrub or we don't know when we're putting something in that's going to give us more negative effects than positive effects until we get hit by the negative effects and then we decide this plant needs to go so let me ask you guys this how do i take care of my soil how do i plant know to plant the right seeds and when it's time to take those time to remove a plant or seed what can i do or what can i figure out to not

only help my mental health but also maybe help other people around me to see if they can plant the right plants i think it's just all about putting yourself in the right environment and seeking professional helps or what whatever you're comfortable with um i mean we all need help and sometimes we all need to take a step back from our life and really look at it and kind of like a bigger picture like grand scheme of things uh because you can't really see this whole field of view when you're

watching it like right here and like that's how it feels most of the time when we're dealing with these issues like the anxiety the depression is just like up front right in our faces when really if we take a step back we have the input from other people and from professionals from things we see living life in general and it just all kind of correlates with each other and just helps us achieve that yeah and how cheyenne was describing again when it's in your face when

depression and anxiety is just beating you and punching you in the face the soil is going to get it's going to get harder to plant the right positive seeds that you need right when you're feeling depressed and when you're feeling sad and when you're feeling anxious it's hard to be like yes if i tell myself i'm going to be okay everything will be okay yes if i say the right things to myself i'll be okay i've i've been in extremely depressive episodes and maybe you can touch a

little bit about the anxious episodes but when i'm in my depressive episodes and i try to tell myself yeah i'll be okay yeah this happens it doesn't help i feel as if it makes it a lot worse and i just keep spiraling and it doesn't help so i think the thing that i have to say when you're in in your in front of when you're in front of depression depression is staring you right in the face when depression is punching you in the face it's hard to be aware of that situation

because sometimes i'm blinded that i'm not sure if i'm really feeling depressed or maybe my emotions and my chemical imbalance are just not correct right now i don't know but i think what i keep going back to and what the what a core thing that i'm trying to understand is everybody goes through these things everybody has these situations everybody has an episode maybe not at as extremes as me or maybe not as difficult as i do but when i go through these depressive

episodes i need to remind myself not only am i not the only person who's going through this but this is something that will pass i can't stay depressed forever i can't be anxious forever i can't i can't be sad all the time i know at one point things will look up and again i think it goes back to our bouncing back episode when you fall and you hit rock bottom trying to get back up and climb the the stairs of of an incline is much harder than when it was falling but if you keep

reminding yourself the little things about the little seeds i guess that we like to plant in our soil right the little things that to remind ourselves when the rain is coming and when it's not sunny at all um that this cloud will pass so i think if you've got anything to say about your anxious episode and how you helped yourself in in your periods of life please feel free to share yeah just real quick like i mean it's tough to say like for me personally it seems like and even with other people

that i see it's more i feel like sometimes you just add this these negative plants to your field accidentally like you don't realize you're doing it until it's in your like until it's grown it's in your face and then you can help identify a problem but kind of like how i think about it like this is like maybe like i don't know like you're in high school you missed the bus and now like oh your mom's gonna be pissed that she's gonna drive you to school but like damn now your day is like already

in the [ __ ] and now you're gonna go the rest of your day and all you're gonna see you're like you're gonna get in that mindset and you're gonna notice how easy it is to see more negative things throughout that day and sometimes it's just on a daily basis but you know like grow that to like existential crisis and big life problems that like you don't necessarily like you have to go through those things and you will find your own way to go through it but if you you might not mean to take

the negative side of those things you just accidentally do it or accidentally think it or accidentally say something to yourself and from there it'll grow and you will start realizing that more and more and to me it was just more of a process of in in the beginning how how to uh distinguish those problems at the very beginning so that i could better change my thoughts right as it's starting so that way that that seed doesn't even sprout i'm gonna spray it with some damn

weed killer you know it doesn't it doesn't even grow it's it's already out of the ground before it starts and i think that what i'm trying to say is being able to change those negative thoughts positively before those negative thoughts can sprout any further like just addressing it as fast as you can whether that uh whether you need to go talk to somebody or you're able to figure it out for yourself it's just being able to address those problems as quickly as possible and when you plant

bad seeds plenty of times you start seeing the little hints of when it's a bad seed before it fully grows into the plant and it is itself sometimes you get into it you get used to it yeah and you figure out what's good for you and you figure out what plants are right for you and what's used to plant and what seeds to uproot and that's something that we here at yna are glad to share with you guys and we're going to jump into the next question what are signs that someone is abusing

medication and what happens when you take medication that isn't prescribed for you yeah so that's so what are signs that that people are abusing medication so signs that people are abusing medications for example so let's say uh somebody's using benzodiazepines to abort their panic disorders and you know they're only prescribed one per day um what are signs that they're abusing one they're running out of the prescription earlier than their refill date or they're going to their doctor and

they're saying hey i know you gave me five milligrams before but it's not really doing its job anymore

and i need 10. now the doctor upsets 10 and then you know they come back a month later hey 10's not doing the job we've got to up it some more and it's this constant drive for more and more dosages now like for example and you know benzodiazepines have very high abuse potential so these are more controlled substances another control substance is that that we use for mental illnesses or are or as pharmacological methods are for example for add and adhd we provide adderall or

which are which is basically which is methamphetamine we provide ritalin which is meth you know derivatives of methamphetamines these also have very high abuse potentials and people can be coming in like hey doctor i'm having trouble difficulty you know concentrating um constantly being you know interrupted i can't finish my work and they get prescribed you know they get the diagnosis of add or adhd they they're prescribed adderall and then next week or two weeks later they

come back hey this isn't doing much i need more or i need to up my dosage you're constantly like changing medications or changing the dosages or up in the dosages are signs that um you know your met somebody is abusing their medications so when it comes to abusing medication it seems like the most important effect that we keep um coming back to in the core thing is the euphoric effect we realize that in places where we do abuse medication we are always chasing that one high we're always

chasing how we feel it seems like it becomes difficult these days to truly understand why we abuse medication but it starts with you it's when we start abusing medication is when self-awareness disappears you stop trying to understand how you how much medication you're taking but instead you're chasing the feeling of feeling better and so addiction plays a really big part of this because it slowly leads itself into the feeling of not only um losing self-awareness but

focusing so much on that euphoric effect will was there a time where you felt as if there was any way that you could stop yourself from taking the medication because you knew that maybe you were getting addicted to it or was there no signs of that and you just knew um from the from being self-aware and how you were feeling that the medication was starting to over over not fix the problem but you were not chasing the euphoric effect anymore no signs of it no i'm just kidding um it's it's really

hard to say like with uh with depression medication you usually get to the feeling of like you're trying to suppress these feelings and then with i'm more on the anxiety side which i'm more familiar with it's more of like you're you people you would get those people chasing the euphoric effects but with depression you're kind of hiding the feelings with anxiety you're kind of get giving an extra sense of like happiness or you're trying to like be happy and so that's where those

euphoric effects come from for me like finding the right medication and i dealt with both is finding like that middle ground um even now i'm only taking anxiety medication you still have to find out hey like are you is this you know altering my way of thinking as depression medication did and there was a lot of medications that i took on both sides that would either i would be like a walking zombie i wouldn't you know and like i said these uh when you go back to visit it usually

takes a couple weeks before it gets in your system and then you got another couple weeks on it and then you go see them and you talk about how how does this make you feel you decide you want to continue a new medication but there are those medications that really do essentially suppress that emotion on the depression side and though that those are medications i didn't like and there were times where i kept taking because they were they do help they weren't they

were helping but they were not allowing me to be self-aware they were not allowing me to not necessarily have thoughts of my own but address the core problem um you know i talked about uh the onion example from i think meditation uh when you find when you're able to find the core problem you're able to better find a solution for yourself that maybe doesn't even require medicine medication can't help of course but you need to find that medication that won't suppress or

increase that euphoric effect uh that essentially will lead you to addiction and with most people like i don't even think um personally that people are chasing like the high it's more of like they j they don't go into it to chase the high they go into it for help and then they feel this and they say wow this is what feeling good feels like i have not felt this way in a long time and that's where maybe addiction begins but they don't realize it um right you know that's what i can say on that

and as we move into the next question we really try to understand not only what addiction is but how we can get started and so the next question for dr ted i own is is addiction hereditary can i get it from a family who also suffers from addiction yeah that's a great question you know so the question there is addiction hereditary and this comes nature versus nurture right so what's is it genetic or is it environmental you know i don't know the answer to that

one imagine yourself for example being very young and you see your parents as you know as young children do as very heroic figures or as as figures of authority where you derive your principles and your ethics from now if you see these individuals you know being addicted to something or being you know you see that sense of control as like their happiness is derived from one particular item or one particular you know by doing this habits or you know by drinking for

example they derive happiness from drinking or they derive happiness from abusing their prescription medications maybe and you see them as you know this is where you're deriving your your principles and your ethics and your values from as a kid these things can be easily engraved into you so that that's the idea of nurture right it's environmental not really genetic on the other hand it is possible to have genes that can make you [Music] more susceptible to addiction compared

to somebody else right maybe somebody else would require a little bit more relief from that pain in order for their brain to be like hey let's try this again or hey maybe if we take two this time we'll have more relief versus somebody who just had relief once maybe they don't you know genetically if they're wired to to go down that route much quicker so like you were saying well relief plays the most important part right like you keep taking that one to keep feeling

better and then you start feeling the normal feelings of feeling like you have everything figured out and that the mental illness is not there anymore yeah especially for those people who've gone through it for so long right and brandon i gotta ask you has there been any situations that you know of or that you couldn't understand where addiction can be either environmental where it is nature versus nurture where the feelings of what you're surrounded with play an important part or is it

more do you think the focus of genes where i can feel more addicted to it because my grandfather my and my great-great-grandfather had this feel of this illness of addiction and they were always addicted to something that they kept doing i think it has to do with environmental um reasoning behind that because i feel like influence also could play a factor into that so for example um let's say if a kid a young kid like sees like his parents either they're doing something bad

whether it's like they're taking drugs or taking pills all the time so they see that throughout their entire life and they start having these little things going to their head like wondering like what mom and dad is taking things like that so i feel like that could play a factor and also that to influence as well so depending what your environment is that um people are more prone to either take the substance or not depending where you're at so and i know like out there like in poorer

communities people are more likely to take a substance or even get addicted to the substance because they don't have a way to either get out or try to escape some sort of feeling that they're having that they don't like so they'll lean on to that you know what i'm saying so i just feel like environment plays a big factor genetic wise um to be honest i'm not too sure i mean it could possibly be genetics as well but mostly i what i've seen environment plays a big factor into addiction

especially when you're young especially when you're starting off and you're just trying to learn about life and trying to understand and like dr tadayon said where we look at our family as heroic figures but when we see our family go down difficult paths with alcoholic abuse and drug abuse and we see that in front of our face we kind of lose that feeling of being there with the family and losing that heroic effect of who they are so i truly believe that environmental plays a

part but i also can agree with the point that genetics can seem to be a part of getting addicted to things but again i think it all starts with being self-aware and you can beat addiction but it's going to take time it's not something that you're going to be able to beat like right away everything takes time it takes practice it takes a lot of understanding your mental health it's a lot of understanding who you are and figuring out what things you do get addicted to i have friends who are

dealing with um beating alcohol that and being around friends who are partying and who have difficult um who have difficult time just being around those kind of people makes it harder for them not to just go back into drinking again and being addicted again so it's also maybe sometimes how you who you surround yourself with those people who if you go and tell them like hey i'm dealing with alcohol abuse i need you guys to help me if we're around please don't offer me a drink or

be in those kind of situations you know it becomes difficult too right um so as we play a big part of understanding what what our friends and family can do it kind of leads into the next question and what we asked dr ted i own was what are things i can ask friends or family to see if they're abusing medication what are signs to look out for when things um uh things that are not of nature can occur yeah so i think you know i don't you get it first in order to find out if somebody

is is abusing or you're you're you're concerned about someone right and you're concerned that somebody might be abusing their meds or they might be they're going down a path that might not be the best path how do you approach that how do you bring that conversation well i don't think me personally i think the way to approach it is to look at the individual and look at what's most important for them and address the topic that what they think is the problem is you know sometimes for example uh

it's it's difficult to be like hey you're taking these drugs i see you you know acting weird i see you that you're running out of your prescriptions quickly i see you upping your dosages you know you can't approach it that way it really but it also you know could be like hey i've noticed you're not as happy as you used to be or hey i've noticed that you you know you haven't gone you know played basketball like you used to play basketball what's going on and maybe we

can go play basketball again or maybe we could go do this it's really building that rapport with with the individual and building that rapport with the individual where you feel like they can confide in you and they then they trust you and they know that you have their best interests at heart it's different for different people right some people need tough love right sometimes you need to show them tough love other people tough love is just gonna it's just gonna

squish them right it's not it's not what they need it's not what they want maybe they just need connection maybe they just need support um you know maybe they just need somebody to listen or maybe somebody just you know feels a little bit closed off and they just need space but just reaching out and saying hey you know i've noticed if you need somebody to talk to i just want you to know that i'm here and going approaching it in a always in a very non-judgmental way remember we're all

wearing glasses looking through our world through our particular lenses and filters right this is the way that we see the world and the way that we see the world may not be the way that the other person has seen the world so we have to be willing to take off our glasses begin to imagine what is their perception like and then approach them in a way that best suits them and that is non-judgmental that is not non-confrontational that is safe supportive and it builds

rapport chan i think when it comes to the conversation it seems like it's really difficult sometimes for people just to even have that conversation how do i even start that conversation if i'm abusing medication and you see me changing what can you what can what can you say to me like how do i how do how do i talk to my friends about this well it's it's hard because i mean as humans like we want to be right about everything and we want to know what to say and we want to be able to give that

advice but a lot of the times like our ego can get in the way of what we think is right and wrong and a lot of the times it's if especially if you don't know exactly what you need to say to your friend like you you need to drop that ego and maybe point them in the direction of a professional especially when you kind of come at them like just wanting to fix their issues you're not always going to be able to put yourself in their shoes you know you you need to be able to walk a mile in their shoes

and even if they are your best friend your close friend you're not always going to be able to grasp onto something that's relatable and give them the best advice for it so a lot of the times like you you really just need to be a good listener and you need to be able to internalize sit there and really process what they're saying to you the pain that they're going through if it's an addiction you can kind of like send out feelers for them to latch onto a conversation with you but

when it comes to professional help like they you need to point them in the direction that is best for them not what you think is the right thing to say in that moment in time i really loved how you said listen and i feel like as humans these days we feel like we lose one of the most important parts when we do get into a conversation where we don't have that connection we don't understand what that person is going through so we have to try to absorb whatever we can from the person

that's describing how they're feeling and the issue is we do just give our two cents way too quickly exactly we just can't we when you don't know how to connect with someone and they're dealing with something that you've never dealt with you kind of go down the road of i'm just gonna throw them things that have helped me in other situations that might be able to help them when the things that you're saying actually and throwing your two cents right away can actually

hurt the person because you're not taking the time to absorb the information that they're giving you and that is the issue that we have these days is like we don't genuinely listen to people and that's something that we really need to fix is we need to genuinely listen to people and see what they're dealing with sometimes when i'm upset and i'm in a depressive episode if i come to you and i start expressing how i feel and then you jump right into fix mode or here's

what i did or what i can do it kind of puts me off like you don't understand what i'm actually going through which is okay but i need you sometimes just to listen to me to listen to how i feel to understand my emotion all sometimes all you need to really do is go through the emotions with them and truly if i've had friends that have given me their two cents and it didn't help but i've also had friends who sat there and just listened and genuinely understood what i'm trying to what i'm

going through which helps me a lot more in the end is there anything that you think will when we when we lose this genuine generosity of listening what can we do to better connect with the people that we don't understand their feelings and put on the glasses that we need to actually understand who or what they're going through i feel like these situations usually happen when you're like face to face with the person right and that can make it harder because you also have to sit

there and they kind of i feel like especially with me like sometimes i actually not act i just i i expect a response right away and so like that push puts pressure on the other person or on you if you're the person helping um there's also the situation of where hey maybe they're just texting you where they're calling you and um i know there there are people who have talked to me and people that i've talked to and gotten help and it's good to address something right away sometimes that i've

found to help in is that um before you start getting into things you say like hey okay i understand what you know maybe they start and you realize this is this type of situation um uh right away just address like hey what what is this do you like what do you want from me and it's okay to ask that like do you want me to listen or do you want me to do you want me to help you fix it and right usually that other person in my experience is very open there you know

they might even say like i don't know and then you have to make a cautious decision to where i would say probably listen and sit with that information at first but again like shine said you're not going to know the answer to everything and there's going to come a point where you have to say like you know you can say like hey maybe you should talk to this person or hey maybe you should get help from somebody and that's okay to say especially if they're your i imagine if a situation like this

and in my experience it's always a close friend or someone who has that trust in you to come talk to you in the first place they are okay with any answer you give them for the most part as long as you're putting yourself in them in their shoes and not just saying oh this is what you need to do like get over it you know as long as you're receptive right and being receptive is extremely important again listen i loved how you said ask them what you need them what you need help

with sometimes all we need to do is just ask the right questions or just actually just sit there and listen and that person will tell you what you need what they need help with and if they say i don't know i think that's a perfect time to go and explore with them the issues that are resulting and what you guys can do because i mean if it's your best friend brother sibling whatever it is the person that's coming to you actually trusts you a lot i don't go and just

start blabbing my problems out to anybody especially my depressive episodes i go to the people that mean to me and that i can trust them so if someone's coming to you and describing what's going on in their life they really trust you and they need you at that time to just either listen help them with whatever they need so maybe sometimes ask the question of what do you need me to do and that's not a wrong question and phrasing it in the right way can also help them and as we go down this road it

kind of enters the next question that we're getting into and this is the next question we asked doctors had i own what advice can you give to someone who doesn't even know where to begin when it comes to substance abuse how to get over the what if and what is that mindset that's that's a great question and cena i think you know it embodies the way that that fear brings about in my opinion is isolation right feeling that you're the only person in the world that is feeling this

way and if you go up to your doctor and you want to begin the conversation that hey i've been feeling a little bit depressed lately or i've been feeling this way lately that they might judge you or that you're the only person who would ever think these things or that you know uh these things are so uncommon it's it's only you and you must be the the only one or the only person and i really think your podcast is it really embodies this that you're not alone right you're

not the only person that that's experiencing these things you're not the only person uh that is feeling this way that is afraid to talk to their doctor you're not the only person that you know that that feels scared there's a whole group of individuals out there and and and all feeling the same way as you and and the downside is that they've been siloed everyone's in their own little silo and being in their own little silos there's a lack of support and a lack of rapport and that creates

isolation and fear and negative thoughts so as as people you know as listeners are considering like hey i haven't been feeling myself i i've lost enjoyment in the things that i used to find joyful uh what is it that you know what how can i start your scam how can i even consider that maybe i do have some you know depressive symptoms or maybe i am you know going down a path that i really don't want to go down to that you're not alone you're not the only person there and and and and there

are other people including you know your doctors uh uh and and support subsystems that really care about you and they don't want you to see you going down there so taking that first step is courageous and that's that's amazing and and we applaud that and we applaud you the listener and viewer for going through some difficult situations some difficult times but i have to ask you gentlemen how do i get out of this isolation that ted doctor own is mentioning because we feel as if we get stuck

and we feel as if the world's against us and that it's only us that the world's gunning for because we only see through our lenses how do i get over this isolation i think one of the first steps of getting out of that isolation and being alone to our own thoughts is really just taking that brave step and just having a conversation with somebody or just reaching out to your friends and if you don't don't have any friends or anything reach out to a professional who really

knows what they're doing because chances are they've dealt with a lot of people who have been in the exact same situation as you and again like you don't want to go to the wrong person uh for very important life very important advice when it comes to your mental health and your mental state of mind you always want to surround yourself with the right people uh make sure that your environment is good for you and basically you just need to have the bravery to actually branch out and

want to help yourself and what i need to say to you the listener and viewer is you are not alone we all go through difficult situations we all go through difficult times in life we all go through difficult scenarios life is not easy i can ask all three of these gentlemen right here and i bet you they'll come back with the same answer that life is not easy i don't even have an out way no because we all go through our own complete different scenarios we all go through

different parts of life some people go through grief some people go through a breakup some people go through losing their their friendship that they've had for a really long time some people end up with different mental disorders later on in life whether that's ptsd depression anxiety i could name them all off for you however what i do need to let you know is you are not alone a lot of people go through these difficult situations a lot of people go through these difficult scenarios and

not and not everyone has the answer i don't have the answer to all of your mental health issues i don't have the answer to fixing what's going on in your life sometimes it takes years to find it truly does it took me a long time to figure out my ptsd took me a long time to finally figure out how to fight it how to get in the boxing ring every single day and throw a punch what i want to do remind you is that people do go through the situations that you're going through and

i know it's tough and i know it can be really really it could feel like it's just you i get that i've been there i feel like when the world is just throwing all the [ __ ] on top of your head feels like everything is just nothing is working for you that's when it gets hard to keep the mindset of just being like i can do this but that's what we're here for we're here to help you we're here to help motivate you and we want to figure out what's going on so that we can figure out how we can

let help you live your best life and that's what we're focused on and that's why we hear it you're not alone and that's what we want to do but please please please remember you are not alone people go through these things and we've got you and please don't forget to like share subscribe comment on whatever you guys want us to talk about maybe you got some topics in your head that you think we should we would love to hear it even some quick questions even some quick questions

doesn't matter it doesn't matter we really appreciate doctor armin tedeon coming on here and explaining from the medical perspective of what medication can do and we'll put his information in the description if you want to reach out to him or just see who he is yeah and check him out he's an incredible photographer i have to say don't forget we're here for you and we've got some amazing merch it's very comfortable we got the awesome yna t-shirts comfortable we still got our some

sweatshirts left we'll be bringing out new merch soon you can check out check it that out at www.sbsu.com and honestly we can't wait to see you at the next episode thank you for watching [Music] you