Footprints of Schizophrenia w/ Dr. Steven Lesk

Footprints of Schizophrenia w/ Dr. Steven Lesk

February 7, 2024

On this episode we’ll interview Dr. Steven Lesk who has a groundbreaking theory that weaves evolutionary evidence with neurological findings. His conclusions promise to forever change the lives of the mentally ill by generating much-needed cultural dialogue about this stigmatized illness, and ultimately by provoking new psychiatric and pharmacological research.

Episode Transcript:

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[Music] Mark azoulay is an industry leader in

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Psychotherapy and men’s mental health he’s helped countless guys get back on their feet deepen their relationships

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and Excel in their lives now he’s taken all that he has learned and is sharing it with you in each episode Mark will

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interview an expert in the field of masculinity and men’s work we’ll cover topics such as emotional intelligence

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masculine identity anger management Financial Health trauma recovery marriage and divorce ethics and

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spirituality tune in and become a better man welcome back to the show I’m your

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host Mark azulle and I’m here with Stephen lashk MD he’s a psychiatrist uh

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that works out of Minneapolis and he works with schizophrenic patients I’m really excited um to talk to you Stephen

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because I you know I’m a therapist but I don’t typically work with that level of Acuity and that level of mental health

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and you have an incredible new Theory that’s coming out in your book um called the footprints of schizophrenia um an

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evolutionary roots of mental illness that I’m excited just to to learn about because my my program didn’t really

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cover uh clinical mental health in that way so Dr Le welcome to the show well

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thank you very much I’d be happy to expound on my theory in detail which I

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enjoy doing quite a bit great yeah so before we dive into the theory itself

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let the listeners know a little bit about yourself like how did you get into this how do you start to develop this Theory what’s your education um who are

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you well I would say I’ve always been interested in how the mind works and what what makes us tick I did bachelors

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in uh psychology at Clark University which is the only place that Freud

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actually spoke uh when he came to America I got a master’s degree a medical degree and then I did um you

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know typical rotating medic medical internship before I ended up in Psychiatry and did a residency I was a

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chief resident at nasso County Medical Center on Long Island but um what always

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Disturbed me about Psychiatry and as I said before you go into Psychiatry you do a rotating internship you do

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Dermatology surgery uh you know gastroenterology when I got to

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Psychiatry I noticed that patients would be diagnosed let’s say with schizophrenia their would come in and

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say to the attending psychiatrist well what is schizophrenia and all I heard was catchphrases like uh chemical

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imbalance genetics it’s its connectivity I was never satisfied with that and I

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kept you know working I did many things I was chairman of the department at the Brooklyn VA I worked at State hospitals

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for many years had my own private practice in Minneapolis um now I’ve been work

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working for a a company in an outpatient clinic but maybe 10 years ago I decided

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you know being the diet in the wool nerd that I am who better to come up with a

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better theory for schizophrenia than myself so I started broadening my knowledge

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base I read some anthropology I read some uh darwinian Evolution language

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Theory read some books on language Theory developmental psych ology and Clark University is very strong in that

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also they had hes Werner there at one time and I started to put together a

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theory that after a certain point I thought I I really had something here

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and I would read articles and say to myself you know my theory explains that um so I would write letters and

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articles and things like that it didn’t seem like the scientific Community was terribly interested and at some point I

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realized if if I’m going to get this out there I’m going to have to write a book for popular consumption that uh people

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will be able to pick up and and uh examine so I worked for several years

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writing it and it took several more to find an agent and to get it published

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but here it is and it embodies my entire Theory which I think is an advance I

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think it’s a game changer and I think if we can uh get people to look at it uh

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it’ll change a lot about uh what our research direction is and reduce stigma

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for schizophrenia I mean there has been no real comprehensive theory of schizophrenia ever it’s been a centuries

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old mystery now if we have a theory that makes sense people will stop you know

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coming up with their own theories like possession by the devil and you know

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internal D internal LSD creator or that

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it’s something contagious or things like that so I’m hoping that my book and

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Theory will have an impact globally on the understanding of schizophrenia

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research directions and to reduce stigma and that would be very satisfying to New

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World yeah I I think that that’s a great story and I love that you are kind of taking it upon yourself right to like

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get it out there see like test it right in the marketplace of ideas and see if it’s useful for people um and yeah like

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you said you have you know over 40 years of experience of working with patients like this so so you know what you’re

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talking about you know I guess to I have a ton of questions but to start I think for our

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listeners can you define what like the life of a schizophrenic patient looks

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like because I think we have a lot of stereotypes from movies and and media of

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what that is but I’m curious like in a day-to-day lived experience what is schizophrenia like for somebody well

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imagine yourself uh you know going through high school things are going all right you have a circle of friends

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you’re academically okay then around the end of high school maybe 15 16 17 18

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everyone starts treating you differently they look at you like you’re saying strange things and to you you know

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you’re the same person with the same thought process but everyone else notices that you’re starting to say

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unusual things like uh you say there are voices coming out of the vents or you

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feel that the all the food is poisoned or that satellites are tracking you the

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FBI is following you you stop uh paying attention as much to your appearance you

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kind of uh forsake your friends and and become isolated and that’s kind of an initial

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trajectory of schizophrenia which is a chronic mentals it doesn’t go away and

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once you get the diagnosis usually your functional expectation go down so a lot

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of schizophrenics will live in group homes they’ll be given their you know meals and

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medications um many of them will not marry or reproduce uh some will hold jobs some

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will not hold jobs and if they do it tends to be fairly menial but there is a group of what we

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call high functioning schizophrenics and of course if you saw

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the movie beautiful M Jonathan Nash Nobel Prize was clearly schizophrenic if

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you read the iconic book of the center can at Hole by Ellen saxs she went to

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Oxford and Yale all the time having repeated psychotic breakdowns uh weij

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and Wang wrote a book recently the collected schizophrenias that was on the

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bestseller list for the months um Bethany yaer who went to college so

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there’s a group of high functioning schizophrenics schizophrenics can can be in all walks of life but on average

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their expectations functionally are are reduced yeah and I I I think it’s it’s

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important to underline and I think it’s it’s scary for a lot of people that it doesn’t really manifest until puberty or

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even young adulthood right in the early 20s so it’s very my understanding is that’s very hard to diagnose until it’s

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it hits you know until you’re in it is that correct yeah there may be some warning signs uh like some kids will say

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that you voices uh or there may be certain eccentricities you know of thought or

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changes in beliefs suddenly you become obsessed with a certain singer or cult

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or something but it is hard to to uh guess whether someone’s going to become

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schizophrenic or not there’s a movement of foot to Define what they call ultra high risk for psychosis patients and uh

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they’re working on that but it’s not at the point where we could say you know so

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and so could be medicated even before the showing signs of schizophrenia the

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ultimate goal would be to medicate them before it sets in they’re not there yet

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and of course you you don’t take a medication lightly you don’t just give it to someone who you’re not sure is

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going to need it but um once it sets into full-blown schizophrenia around the

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end of high school early college becomes pretty clear generally yeah yeah so before we talk

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about your theory you mentioned some of the previous theories and and what you’re saying I agree with that I think it’s like not well defined and a lot of

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psychiatrists and psychotherapists certainly like we kind of throw up our hands at it being like I don’t I don’t know right I don’t understand this it’s

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weird but it’s been interpreted like you said as you know demonic possession I think some cultures it’s almost like a

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shamanistic witch doctor thing like they’re tapped into something more true true than reality right I think for like

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in common media it’s like oh they’re crazy and maybe even violent I think that’s linked a lot in media where it’s like they seral Killers or they

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sociopaths or something right um and then yeah stuff like chemical balance which doesn’t really mean anything

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because if you can’t Define what chemicals are imbalanced it doesn’t help right um so yeah I mean if you can speak

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a little bit to that of what the current state of understanding is because it it seems like maybe the least understood

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one out there um from I would say so uh I mean we know it

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involves dopamine we know that every medication we use to fix it blocks

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dopamine uh but that’s kind of our level of understanding so you find we find

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ourselves as psychiatrist sitting in offices talking to patients who don’t

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understand that they’re ill using medications that we don’t fully understand treating an illness we don’t

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fully understand and it’s very uh frustrating and of course I have made

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the statement that Psychiatry is sort of in the Dark Ages you know if you go to

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another specialist you sit down you tell them your symptoms they examine you they

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run some tests and they say well you’ve got you know diabetes or you’ve got heart disease high blood pressure

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psychiatrists have not one single blood test or x-ray that can give you a

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diagnosis so we rely on what it is the patient tells us maybe sometimes what

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the families tell us and their history of treatment and things like that to piece together the best diagnosis we can

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of course sometimes there are multiple diagnoses and then we struggle to find

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the right medication or group of medications uh and of course our medications really aren’t where they

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should be a medication that helps one will not help the other so we’re we’re

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kind of in the Dark Ages and I’m hoping that my theory will Advance us at least

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to parody with the other Specialties just having like something

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to grab on to right because I know so much of Psychiatry is trial and error right it’s going through kind of the

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most popular drugs the lowest risk and then escalating and for you know some of my clients that are you know that take

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medication it can be months if not years until their you know specific cocktail gets figured

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out right and uh we don’t have any reliable information on

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what algorithm to use obviously if you’ve diagnosed depression you’re going to start with an anti-depressant you’ve

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diagnosed schizophrenia you’re going to use an antis psychotic but aside from that it’s basically trial and error I

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mean I don’t want to give the wrong impression we help a lot of people but you know it shouldn’t take as long as it

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does our medication should be better the theer side effects more reliable across

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the board yeah yeah so let’s move into your theory so if you could give you know

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give us like the headline first right like like what does your theory do that’s different and then we can dig

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into the details um as we keep moving forward here essentially what my theory says is that schizophrenia and mental

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illness in general is a result of recent changes in evolution brought about by

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language what they call homins or humanlike animals have been around for

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millions of years 6 seven million years language has only been around for

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50,000 and I like to use the analogy if you take three yard sticks each one

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representing two million years so that’s six million language has been around for less than the last inch and it totally

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revolutionized the way we use our brains so you have something incredibly new

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incredibly different in how we use our brains and at this moment in evolution ar time not everyone’s on board with it

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we’re still in this transitional phase and those that are least on board with it we call mentally

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ill yeah okay okay yeah so that I’m curious yeah there’s a lot there um I

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guess the question comes to mind is do you think animals could have mental illness because I know some people say like their dogs have anxiety right or

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the cat’s depressed or there’s some level there right is that just jection

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or enation or is that just is there anything to that or is it language is dependent to have a mental illness yeah

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according to my theory uh if you don’t have language no mental illness which

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also means that cavemen had no mental illness were so busy scraping out an

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existence trying to survive Hunter Gathering um didn’t have time for meal

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us you know there was no question about suicide they were just lucky to survive d today we weren’t even at the top of

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the food chain once we got language uh by 10,000 BC Homo sapiens

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had wiped out all the other species of homo we fanned out across the globe and

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now we own the world so language literally transformed our existence as

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Homo sapiens and we were better at it than any of the other species of homo

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like neanderthals they probably had primitive language but they avoid voice box uh was not capable of anywhere near

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the number of sounds that ours is their brains were actually bigger than ours but they couldn’t do the language thing

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the way we do Homo sapiens have a real talent for symbol formation and language

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and that propelled us uh to owning the world I like to say we went from the

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jungle to the Disco it happened really fast yeah 100%

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right because you know when I think about what language gives us it gives us the ability to record history right and transmit knowledge across Generations it

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gives us the ability to you know use strategy and tactics right to communicate in you know a survival

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situation and to plan ahead of time it gives us the ability to talk about the future and the past to actually bring

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time into our perception I mean there’s a lot that I imagine happens when you’re able to you know yeah symbolically

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communicate your internal state it moves you out of that survival mentality well for the first time could

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participate in our own thought process prior to that we we couldn’t our minds were on total autopilot now we can use

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conscious thought and we can reason and decide for ourselves if what we’re doing is in our best interest or not and all

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of this is involved with dopamine and the suppression of dopamine which I think goes along with uh the acquisition

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of language yeah okay so as as we’re moving towards our commercial break here

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I’m curious if possible would you able to Define what you mean by mental illness then in using this model like

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how do these two interplay well I uh you know go along with the standard uh dsm5

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diagnosis you know we have the major mental oses of schizophrenia major depression bipolar anxiety disorder OCD

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we have autism we have PTSD all of these are within the rubric of Mental Illness

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but according to my theory they all happen because of this recent change

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from pre-linguistic to post-linguistic uh mentality and that when people become

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mentally ill there’s a regression back toward the pre-linguistic uh state of

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mind and for schizophrenics they go all the way back to pre pre- language

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prehistoric mentality yeah I mean that’s starting to make sense to me right I the meaning I’m

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making is if if you have language like you said you can introduce things like doubt right or you can introduce things

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like anxiety or confidence or self-esteem like all these kind of

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reflective meta Consciousness is all language dependent and and I find that a lot of my clients that struggle with

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mental health it’s in that right it’s in the how they perceive themselves or how they believe other people perceive them

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um versus a more survival basic existence is that kind of what what you’re saying yes and uh language

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essentially gave birth to civilization yeah and civilization you know required that people could get along and have a

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social strategy and it also uh required morality and a super ego you know the

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Golden Rule so all of this you know language begat all of these things and

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the institutions of you know higher learning education jurus Prudence you

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know U all of that uh was a child I think of language and conscious thoughts

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and even more than that you know you can view language as a means of communication description Etc but it

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also is a means of defying entropy and I go into that in my next book great well

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we’re going to move to our first commercial break when we get back we’ll dig more into the details of the theory um so if you’re listening out there and

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you’re struggling with mental illness or you have a family member or a loved one you’re going to want to hang on and hear

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uh what Dr Le has to say so we’ll see on the out of the commercial [Music]

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podcast welcome back to the show I’m here with Dr Steven Les and he’s the author of a book called Footprints of

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schizophrenia evolutionary roots of mental illness and we’re talking about just that the evolutionary Roots so um

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if you’re listening we did have a little bit of technical difficulty at the end of our last segment when Dr Le was talking about the connection between

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language uh and entropy so I want to give you a chance to to communicate that again to our listeners um what that

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point was there okay well um you know as we learn language our minds go from a

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more chaotic disorganized state to one of much greater organization and

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coherence you know we uh follow the developmental trajectory of

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differentiation of Parts uh integration and hierarchical structuring of parts so

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our brains become much more complicated and uh structur

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now entropy is the second law of Thermodynamics and the classic example of entropy is if you put a steaming cup

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of coffee down on the table come back 20 minutes later it’s luuk warum because

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the heat has dissipated uh into the surrounding environment due to

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entropy um entropy seeks to keep everything in the lowest state of

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organization the lowest state of energy possible so you could say and I said this in my book that the brain of a

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homos sapiens is the most anthropic an anop anti-entropy most antrop substance

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in the universe we’ve achieved such a high level of organization and energy

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but when people regress uh with mental illness not only do they go back to a

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prehistoric state of mind that we had for millions of years and certainly millions of years has the

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momentum over 50,000 but they also gratify entropy which is kind of lurking

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in the background of all of this and there’s a tremendous release of energy

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and at that point uh people are stuck in a primitive state of mind at least with

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schizophrenia but some of the other mental illnesses are cyclical they’ll come and go and have uh you know normal

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periods in between not so is schizophrenia and I think the reason is that uh it gratifies entropy to such a

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great extent that you’re stuck there you’re Frozen can’t get out of

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it yeah so I’m I’m curious with schizophrenia do you believe that it’s

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purely biological or is there a genetic component or is there a trauma component like what what makes the Mind move

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towards that more primitive State what’s the trigger or the stimulus well my

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theory is that it’s primarily an evolutionary glitch and it has to do with this moment in evolution that we’re

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in that doesn’t mean that uh genetics or environmental influences don’t increase

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your vulnerability to it we know that a lot of environmental issues do increase

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your vulnerability uh if you’re born in winter months if you have an elderly

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parent if you have an urban upbringing as opposed to R head trauma you know

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abusive parents these increase your risk and genetically there’s an increase as

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well if you have a first-degree relative with schizophrenia your risk goes up but

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I don’t think we’re ever going to find a schizophrenia Gene we’ve been looking for decades we haven’t found it we never

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will uh two people with the exact same genetics identical twins if one of them

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has schizophrenia you would think that if this is a genetic illness 100% of the

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time the other one but it’s less than 50% the other thing is that you know

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Darwin made it clear that any mutation that reduces your functionality and your

25:40

reproductive rate is going to go extinct relatively quickly schizophrenia shows

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no signs of going extinct at all so I don’t think it’s primarily genetic I

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think genes and environment can shift the vulnerability but I think it’s

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basically just an evolutionary glitch that we’re in and 1% of the population is going to be schizophrenic across the

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board that’s across all geopolitical ethnic and socioeconomic boundaries

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which is not typical of genetics you look at a disease like uhal cell anemia

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it tends to Center in black people or Tacs centers with ashkanazi Jews

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schizophrenia is uh you know all across the board 1% everywhere you

26:30

go yeah that’s very interesting I didn’t know that that it just it’s just almost constant in that way yeah so you

26:39

mentioned the role of dopamine you know and I think you to catch your listeners up if you’re not familiar dopamine the

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way I think of it is it’s kind of the reward chemical in the brain it’s the feeling of hey job well done mission

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accomplished I got something right it can feel like a click or something right kind of something clicking into place um

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and it’s you know the center of so many brain functions uh but I’m curious Dr Les how do you see dopamine playing a

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role here in schizophrenia well I think once we got language our whole relationship with

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dopamine changed and um dopamine uh was used by evolution in

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essence to try to reward behaviors that were evolutionarily um positive Evolution

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can’t rule on anything but mutations if you have a certain mutation

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that improves your ability to survive and procreate it succeeds if it reduces

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your ability to survive and procreate it goes extinct but evolution can’t rule on

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day-to-day Behavior whether your caveman leaves his cave and searches for berries

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or tries to kill an animal or hunt a mate uh it has no uh sway there so

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dopamine was used as a reward mechanism kind of a pavlovian reward and anything

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that the caveman would do to further his survival and reproduction was rewarded

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with this dollop of dopamine and internal chemical feel-good uh process

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now once we got language you know we we gained conscious thought and we could

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decide for ourselves what was evolutionarily favorable or or

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disadvantageous so we didn’t really need that although you know dopamine still works that way and we were able to

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suppress dopamine in certain tracks that we could never suppress it before I

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think all of us and cavemen as well suppressed dopamine in the nigr trial

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tract that’s a motor tract that involves dopamine and as we learn you know

28:52

coordinated movements we suppress dopamine to bring it into uh

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into alignment with its partner acetal Coline so there’s a gradual process of

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um becoming more fluent in our movements uh we love to do things as kids bounce

29:11

balls hit with sticks uh you know throw things and we gradually learn coordinated Movement by suppressing

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dopamine once we got language we could use the same suppressive um trait in these other

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tracks miso and misoc cortical and that is what gave us the big advantage and

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I’ve made a statement in my book that the suppression of dopamine might be the greatest accomplishment of homo

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sapiens wherever they are because um no

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other species could do that and because we did it when we supress dopamine our

29:52

egos are strengthened and our ability to gate out unwanted thoughts and

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intrusions into our mind is strengthened we also the Mind expands the left side

30:04

of the Mind expands the right-handers to accommodate language we secrete

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chemicals like bdnf brain derive neurotrophic factor vegf that literally

30:16

expand our brains and uh we complexify so the

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basic um issue with language is a suppression of dopamine and for most of

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us that works very well for 80% of us but for those that are subject to or

30:36

vulnerable to Des supression of dopamine that can result in mental illness and my

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theory states that every mental illness involves some form of despression of

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doping that’s really fascinating that’s really fascinating because I’m hearing and please correct me wrong I’m just following along here what I’m hearing is

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because homos sapiens because humans are able to suppress dopamine we can kind of direct our evolution in a way right we

31:02

can prioritize things we can focus on things that might not be immediately survival right but they can give us a

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leg up whether that be intellectual Pursuits or philosophy or history or politics whatever art right like we can

31:14

just like Channel it into something Beyond just the animal but what I hear you saying is people that have

31:20

significant mental illness they’re not able to really do that and they exist in a more primitive state or a more

31:26

survivalist state am I following along correctly well they do it’s you know like schizophrenics they will learn

31:33

language well they will go along through high school doing pretty well um but at

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some point it all falls apart and they regress back the type of mentality we

31:45

had prior to language that what I call the Primitive organization and that’s where all the

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trouble begins and I think the same is true for the other mental illnesses

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Maybe on a lesser scale that they involve despression of dopamine now

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despression of dopamine happens in other situations so for example if you take

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some uh psilocybin you’re going to see a despression of dopamine your ego is

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going to shred and you’re going to be subject to all kinds of hallucinatory phenomena

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Etc children uh aren’t suppressing dopamine the way adults do and their

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thinking is clearly different from adult you know child will say the Moon is a

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big fat man who will eat you and you just kind of Pat them on the head and say well that’s cute but they gradually

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learn you know realistic Thinking by suppressing dopamine we all use this

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primitive organization in sleep when we’re sleeping our dreams reflect this

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primitive kind of thinking that really doesn’t make sense to the awaking mind

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the reality testing mind so what we’ve done is in suppressing dopamine gaining

33:00

language we’ve adopted what Freud called the reality principle we’re able to gate

33:06

out unwanted impulses and thoughts that were able to expand our mind and uh

33:13

everything flowed from that and the mind is kind of like a muscle the more you use it the more it expands the less you

33:20

use it the more it’s subject to atrophy so this might be

33:26

oversimplification but are you saying that the schizophrenic state is is more

33:31

how primitive man lived like were we living in a world that had more hallucinations or more of these almost

33:37

psychedelic experiences before we evolved into Homo Sapien no I think that

33:43

uh without language this doesn’t happen um okay okay they live we were like

33:51

animals I mean we weren’t even at the top of the food chain we just scraped by an existence you know intuitively as

33:57

best we could and our brains were on autopen Now once you get language you

34:03

know you do suppress dopamine and all of these changes take place and it’s the loss of that when they regress back to

34:10

that six million year old mind that causes all the problems they can still talk but their thought process is

34:17

childlike and children use different rules of thinking than we do so they’re caught back in a more primitive mode of

34:24

thought but they can still talk and express things I also have a about

34:30

hallucinations why they suffer from those yeah so so it sounds like yeah the the the software kind of goes back but

34:38

the hardware is still more advanced right there still has the language centers you still have a full cortex so there’s this glitching right that you’re

34:45

talking about where it doesn’t quite line up in fact I use the analogy it’s like putting a uh a software program

34:52

from the 1980s into a new uh you know Mac Book Pro some things are going to

34:59

work a few things will not work at all and some will kind of sputter along you

35:04

have a totally different operating system within the same machinery and

35:09

it’s just very problematic you know and people see it in the way schizophrenics

35:14

talk but they are not aware of it you know this term anosognosia schizophrenics are truly not

35:22

aware that they have an illness they just uh suddenly notice that people are treating them

35:28

differently yeah that’s that’s wild um so yeah you talked about the hallucinations and a theory about that

35:34

can you go into that a little bit more well what happens is um uh there’s an

35:40

illness called um Charles banet syndrome uh that as we get older people who have

35:46

no Mental Illness but they lose their uh uh sight and hearing start to

35:54

hallucinate and the reason for that is that the you know Executive Center of the brain needs that input like I said

36:01

without sensory input there’s a strong likelihood of atrophy so the brain

36:07

creates its own input essentially by hallucinating and we can treat that we I

36:13

have several patients with that Char p syndome and the same thing happens um at

36:18

night when we’re sleeping there’s sensory deprivation there’s no noise input there’s no uh visual input we’re

36:26

in a dark room and a comfortable bed and the uh Executive Center of the mind is

36:32

left deprived and therefore elicits dreams that come

36:38

about same thing with schizophrenia when they shift from the adult type of

36:44

organization to this primitive organization it leaves the uh adult

36:50

organization the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex uh centrally deprived

36:55

and it therefore elicits these hallucinations to try to avoid atrophy

37:01

and we know that atrophy is a fairly common happening in schizophrenia happens fairly often yeah

37:09

that that is really cool so it does the brain’s trying to survive right by creating these hallucinations so it can

37:15

continue to function um and not yeah not just atrophy away so we’re going to move

37:20

to our next commercial break when we get back I want to talk specifically with some action steps of how somebody could

37:26

support an individual with schizophrenia how they might get involved in research or or in um charity work cuz I think

37:33

this is a it’s a horrible problem you know I mean it it just sounds like a a really difficult existence um so I’m

37:39

sure you have some resource that you can share so if you’re listening hang on in there and we’ll see you on the other

37:53

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and [Music]

39:20

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www.men theapy podcast.com now back to the men’s therapy

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[Music] podcast welcome back to the show in this segment we try to talk about action

39:51

steps so there’s something that our listeners can take away um with all the information Theory presented here so Dr

39:57

Lech how can somebody I guess notice schizophrenia in their family maybe it’s a good place to start and try to get

40:04

help as early as possible well I mean certain things um

40:10

are pretty common schizophrenics uh SK children who Hear

40:15

Voices should probably be brought to a psychiatrist there are children who Hear Voices That Remain normal but that’s

40:23

kind of a warning sign that something bad might be going on other eccentric

40:29

beliefs changes in how they view the world things like that can be of concern

40:36

and it’s certainly uh concerning if someone starts talking about demons and

40:41

uh feeling like they’re possessed or that they see ghosts or things like that so whenever you hear things that are

40:49

like that especially voices don’t hesitate to take your child to a

40:54

psychiatrist just for an evalu valuation and uh it’s always better to air on the

40:59

side of caution than to ignore these things yeah I know you also want to talk

41:06

about medication and I think that’s critical here right I mean so me as a psychotherapist for our listeners a

41:12

psychotherapist just does talk therapy we’re not able to prescribe and we are not very effective in working with

41:18

severe clinical mental health such as this because there is a biological component um so I am going to kick it

41:23

over to the psychiatrist on the call here talk about medical intervention that can help with these types of things

41:30

well first of all um you know every medication we use for schizophrenia and

41:35

even for depression suppresses dopamine and that you know kind of backs up my

41:41

theory that mental illness is a despression or surge of dopamine but these medications if we’re

41:48

talking about the antipsychotics they literally block the dopamine receptor and the newer ones

41:54

also block ser 2 a receptors which are involved in psychedelics and the the goal is to lock

42:04

anywhere from 60 to 85% of the dopamine receptors and this restores the balance

42:10

for the schizophrenic toward the more adult organization and away from the

42:15

Primitive organization or at least it sets a limit on it but it doesn’t do everything and it is helpful if

42:23

schizophrenics can continue to take courses read things it’s called cognitive

42:29

restructuring that can help promote the March back to adult thinking um but it’s

42:37

not for everyone not every schizophrenic can do it but we have antis psychotic medication and once the diagnosis of

42:43

schizophrenia is made the person will have to be on one the rest of their life there’s no real debate about that the

42:52

unfortunate news is that they have lots of side effects you don’t don’t know which one is going to work for which

42:58

particular individual and some that work for one other will not work well for another we can’t predict what side

43:05

effects someone’s going to get so they’re very imperfect and I’m hoping that with my theory things will advance

43:13

to the point where we can come up with better medications more focused medications uh that work better for for

43:19

almost every yeah so you you mentioned psychedelics in there right and that is the current wave um in Psychotherapy and

43:27

psych Psychiatry um I’ve had psychedelic experiences and I’ve had hallucinations right I haven’t heard voices per se but

43:34

my I’ve noticed the quality of my thought has changed and sometimes my thoughts are either louder or or not existent um that kind of ego death uh

43:42

experience but I’m curious yeah what role do psychedelics play in this ongoing research and Theory because it

43:47

seems like a way to to test right to kind of like twist the levers and and flip the knobs and things you know well

43:54

my all the psyched ICS work the same way they stimulate serotonin 2 a receptors

44:01

now we don’t know what that does but my theory is that that ushers in a massive

44:08

surge of dopamine or despression of dopamine just like the schizophrenic has

44:13

and your ego gets shredded and you go back to this primitive organization where your all the rules of thinking are

44:20

changed they’re childlike and that creates this sense of uh being in a

44:26

strange world you know strange psychedelic world so what I think psychedelics do is in essence

44:33

deconstruct the mind and then as they leave your body you get a chance to

44:39

reconstruct it kind of reconstruct your ego maybe in from a more advantageous

44:45

point of view the problem is for some people it’s a less advantageous point of

44:50

view and they are really stuck in a bad situation for a long period of time

44:56

there was an article in the Journal of the American Psychiatric association about a woman who decided to try cocy

45:03

and twice uh she was a high functioning person went to a good college uh

45:10

accountant suddenly she uh lost interest in everything quit her job dropped her

45:17

friends felt terribly depressed and paranoid and they struggled to help her

45:23

all kinds of medications and treatments including trans cranial magnetic stimulation finally they were able to

45:30

help her with medication that promoted dopamine because it seemed as if she had

45:36

in essence burnt out her dopamine receptors so there are risks and I don’t

45:42

think it’s a great idea to give a mentally ill person a chemical that deconstructs their mind yeah and favor

45:49

that hopefully we can use it to learn more about how the mind works and create

45:54

better chemicals that aren’t as risky yeah I just want to highlight the

46:00

last thing you said right it’s it’s a the drum that I bang too where I think psychedelic research is awesome and I’m

46:05

for it and like I said I’ve tried it personally however I do think doing it with a therapist or with a professional

46:11

is critical especially if you do struggle with mental health because it is really unknown um there can be

46:17

significant risks around that because we don’t know how it works and and you are a test case in a lot of ways um so I

46:24

think there could be an impulse especially in Colorado where a lot of stuff’s becoming legal to just do it on your own you know over a weekend kind of

46:30

casually and I would strongly recommend again especially if you’re struggling with mental health issues um to seek out

46:35

a professional at the very least to consult you and help you set up and help you integrate your experience if they’re not able to be there with you so I just

46:42

want to just put that PSA out there because it is it’s important I think to to share that yes

46:49

definitely yeah so you know as as we’re kind of moving on here you you talked

46:55

about you have new book coming out that’s focused on entropy um and you said a little bit about that early on

47:01

can you say more about what might be in that second book I think entropy is going to be the

47:07

uh key concept of the 21st century um entropy lurks behind lots of things

47:15

mental illness physical illness uh social behavior things like Wars murders

47:23

Etc it’s kind of similar to what called the death Instinct you know we all have

47:28

a part of us that um somehow seeks you know

47:34

disintegration disorientation and uh animals of course

47:40

as opposed to plants have to learn to be killers they they hunt down animals kill

47:45

them and eat them that’s part of their uh kind of entropic Heritage that we all

47:51

have and humans have this also but because we’re in C civilizations we’ve

47:57

had to curtail you know our impulse toward murder and of course Freud’s

48:02

famous edus complex where we want to murder the father and take over the mother for

48:08

ourselves so what happens is that entropy gets um suppressed in a sense in

48:14

Civilization but it finds a way to come out in other ways like Wars genocides

48:21

mass murders and I think we need to have much more awareness of that and of

48:26

course it underlies all illness you know I use that classic example of the teacup

48:32

that cools over 20 minutes you could say that we’re all teacups gradually cooling

48:38

as we age and you can see that we more or less deteriorates over time which is

48:44

an entropic uh impulse so entropy lurks behinds a lot of things and mental

48:51

illness because it has to do with that mental or organization versus

48:56

disorganization entropy favors disorganization all the way and we defied it with language when we uh

49:04

adopted this adult form of complex thinking so it has many branches many

49:10

implications and my book is going to explore them as much as possible to see

49:16

what we can learn from it and I think you know it may be helpful in terms of

49:22

uh looking at um things like global war Waring even mortality itself that at

49:28

some point we might be able to avoid mortality and become immortal if we can

49:35

figure out how to best counteract entropy if you look at something like a

49:40

sequoia tree some of those trees live for thousands of years and what have they done they’ve essentially defied

49:47

entropy by lifting massive weights of wood Against Gravity and storing

49:53

potential energy anytime a potential energy that goes against entropy so

49:59

these massive patries have lived for thousands of years and we may be able to

50:05

learn from that something about uh enlarging our mortality and living

50:12

longer and defying entropy better but right now the most defying part of us

50:19

against entropy is our brain our mind yeah well this has been a fascinating conversation as we move toward towards

50:25

the end here I want to ask you a final question which is you know gazing towards the future you made a claim in

50:31

your book that in the future there’ll be no more mental illness I’m curious if you want to detail that um as we wrap up

50:37

well you know my theory is that mental illness is a result of the fact that we’re in this evolutionary moment very

50:44

recent transition that totally revolutionized our minds and not everyone’s on board with it yet but as

50:51

we go through time maybe 5,000 10,000 years every everyone will be on board I

50:57

think we’ll be using our minds and mentality a lot more and our physicality

51:02

a lot less and we will not see the type of mental illness we have now is

51:08

defined great well that’s that’s interesting so if you’re interested listeners in that check out his book uh

51:15

Footprints of schizophrenia evolutionary roots of mental illness um so Dr Les

51:20

where can people learn more about you I have a website Steven lek md.com

51:26

and they’ll see uh videos there YouTube videos there’ll be a fairly in-depth

51:33

explanation of my theories uh but of course the most detailed explanation is in the book Footprints of schizophrenia

51:40

you can get it on amazon.com bonsen noble.com but I’m hoping that I can really change

51:49

the way people view mental illness to reduce stigma redefine our research

51:55

goals that we do better in terms of the treatments we we have to offer patients

52:00

you know 1% of the population is schizophrenic you don’t read about it you don’t hear about it nobody talks

52:07

about it it’s got to come out of the woodwork and into the uh Limelight a

52:12

little better and I think that way uh people will be less afraid of it

52:18

schizophrenics are not to very interesting wonderful people who have a

52:23

different way of of thought yeah thanks much for joining you know if you’re listening check out the book if

52:29

you’re a professional if there’s someone in your life that has schizophrenia or if you’re just interested in Psychology and Neuroscience and Medicine in general

52:36

I think it’s a great thing and it’s always good to hear different theories and to get on the ground floor of what

52:41

might be the next wave of treatment um and understanding so um be sure to check

52:47

us out too so if you like this podcast uh like it share it give us a five-star review really helps if there’s someone

52:52

who you know who struggles with schizophrenia or is trying to make sense of their reality share it with them um

52:57

it’s great to get this information out there with as many people as possible and check out my website ad men’s

53:03

therapy. online where we offer individual counseling men’s group Retreats uh we just actually launched a

53:08

book club um that’s starting at the end of March we’re going to be reading through some masculinity books the first

53:14

one being iron John by Robert blly which is a classic book on masculinity and masculine Theory so that’s open to

53:20

everybody whether you’re a client or not it’s not therapy it’s just a discussion group it’s a place to kind of play around with big ideas um so check it out

53:27

go to our website men therapy. online uh so Dr Les thank you again for joining us on the show thank you so much for having

53:33

me I was really enjoying it and hope it helps yes and listeners thank you so much for tuning in and we’ll see you

53:39

next week another episode of the men therapy [Music]

53:46

podcast thank you for joining your host mark aile on the men’s therapy podcast

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