TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: Feeling Stress: Medication or Meditation?
Date: 08/30/24 Length: 1:00:09
Daniel Lapin 0:00
Greetings, Happy Warriors and welcome to the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show where I your rabbi, reveal how the world really works. Thank you for being tuned in, and thank you very much indeed for all that you do, for your help in promoting the show and making others aware of it. I really appreciate it every time you tell somebody who's a like minded person and who you think is somebody who would appreciate and enjoy the show every time you tell somebody about it. That means we have a chance of a new subscriber, and talking of subscribers, if you haven't yet become a subscriber, now is the time to bring a smile to your Rabbi's face. Wouldn't you like to hear me gurgle in delight? Wouldn't you like me to put on a face of sheer exhilarated happiness? Of course you would. And the way you do that is by increasing our subscriber base. Easy to do, and something that we very much indeed appreciate. Now the title of today's show is feeling stressed meditation or medication, and that is the reality of what is happening in the United States of America today, as well as in other Western countries, a huge increase in the number of people who are seeking and obtaining treatment for mental disorder far more than ever used to be in the past. And what's more, it seems to be connected to lifestyle. For instance, it afflicts white collar workers far more than blue collar workers. How can that be if this is a germ or a virus that's spreading across the country, how can it possibly tell the difference between white collar workers and blue collar workers? But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, shall we? Why don't we start off taking a look at absenteeism from work. Well, there's an emergency room doctor who is well up in his profession, with whom I'm fairly close. And he told me something he said, in the last six years, the change in people's behavior towards showing up to work, he said, is unbelievable. And we're talking about doctors, right? So it's the white collar of the white collar elite. And he says that when six years ago, when you were on call, you hardly ever got called, because it was a point of pride that every doctor showed up for his or her shift they just did, and the idea that at the last minute you get a call because somebody didn't show these were professionals. They were people who took their work seriously. They are doctors for heaven's sake. He said, about five or six years ago, it began to change dramatically, and the change has accelerated since then, amazingly enough, to the point where he said today, when you're on call, the likelihood is you're going to have to go in because somebody doesn't show up. Why does somebody not show up? They tell you afterwards, and it's not because they had pneumonia, and it's not because of the sniffles and they didn't want to infect people at work. No, it's because they felt stressed, or they felt anxiety, or they say, I need to look after my mental health. You never heard these things six years ago, and now it is very common. What is going on? Well? Business Insider magazine of August 2024 runs a big story about how Americans are now taking huge amounts of sick leave. It never used to happen, it was rare. Do you remember there used to be people who'd say, I've worked for 40 years. I've never taken a day off for sick? You know, people took pride in the fact that they didn't duck work because of sickness or anything else, and now it's very much so however, it's again, it's not everybody. It's Gen Z people, for the most part. Now, what is Gen Z? Gen Z is roughly speaking, teenagers up to about the age of 30. I. And so if, if I could just run through the way they categorize these generations and again, this is not carved in granite. It's not something that you have to assume to be 100% accurate and precise, because, of course, it isn't. But in general, this is a cultural meme. You hear it spoken about the silent generation. Those are people between the ages of 80 to 100 and again, they try to give them characteristics, okay, traditional values, work ethics. They the you know this, you know who these people were, the next generation, the baby boomers. They're from about 60 to 80, approximately, that's how old they would be at the present time, right? August, 2024, or nearly September, their things, they're into personal fulfillment, right? Baby Boomers really were into that. This is, you know, this what? It's what people say. This is not me saying it. This is just a sort of grab bag of cultural memes about these generations, Generation X. So they are about from the age of 44, to about 60. Say, roughly, with them, they're big into diversity. They're big into work, life balance. Again, maybe yes, maybe no, but, but that's what Generation X is. Millennials? What are millennials? Well, they are about from the age of, shall we say, 28 to about 43 and what are millennials into social activism, entrepreneurial activity, and so on. Again, that's what they say. Generation Z, as I said, you know, say 12 years old to 27 approximately. And they're digital natives. They're said to be digital natives, meaning that they've never known a non digital world. And they're they're also into politics, and apparently this is the group of American workers who take off more sick leave time than any body else at all, and so sick leave is up by nearly 60% in the last four years. Now, because I said the last four years, one could easily be tempted to think that this has something to do with the covid scamdemic that afflicted so many countries, between 2020, and 2022, and maybe BS and maybe no, we'll take a closer look at that as we move along. But this we've never seen before. We've never seen an increase in four years of nearly 60% in people taking their sick leave.
Daniel Lapin 8:05
What's that all about? And before I delve more deeply into what that's all about, can I also please take this opportunity of issuing a hearty invitation for you to become part of our community of Happy Warriors. And I mention this because it's all very well to be a listener to the podcast and and I appreciate that, and I do my utmost to make sure that you receive real value for the time that you invest in this podcast. But there's more to it as well. First of all, for Happy Warrior members, we now have a bonus every week. There's a bonus program that expands on the topic or another topic altogether, but always with something that is directly helpful to your family or your finances, your faith, your fitness or your friendships, and that is one of the benefits of being a member of the happy warrior community. There are many others. You get access to a vast library of ancient Jewish wisdom, always material that will be useful to you in one or several of the five F's that you know and love so well, all of that is available to members of the Happy Warrior community. So for instance, today we're speaking about feeling stressed meditation or medication. We're speaking about what appears to be an epidemic of mental health, a lot of stress, a lot of kids on stimulant drugs. And there actually is a solution, from ancient Jewish wisdom. There actually is something that each. Every one of us can implement in our lives, and I'm going to talk about that in the bonus section, which is something special for our happy warrior members, because we love our happy warrior members. It's as simple as that, you're part of a community, and we metaphorically have our arms around each other, we metaphorically have one another's backs. There's a community you can talk to and interact with and find out what's on other people's minds. Very often, you can have the enormously satisfying experience of helping other people, because people come onto the happy warrior discussion group and things are worrying them, and they'll say, Hey, does anyone have an idea of what I can do about this issue? And you'll feel great to be able to provide a solution that changed somebody else's life. And likewise, you might be in a position where you need guidance from somebody who's been going through exactly what you are undergoing, maybe somebody who's already come out the other side successfully and can give you some handy pointers to avoid some of the pitfalls lying in wait down the road. All of that is part of what motivates the Happy Warrior community to be part of that community. Because, you know, we all, we all need to have friends, we all need to have connections, and you can't really have too many. So happy, worried community is one of the ways of achieving that. We take, we took a look at material from two human resource firms. One is called day force, and the other one is called us gusto. And they've got some very interesting information as well. They say, first of all, it's mostly, it afflicts mostly white collar workers, like I told you, and it's heavily under 35 so it's, it's those generations. And you remember, I've taught you in previous podcasts that a generation is about 25 years approximately, and and so people under the age of 35 we got to ask ourselves, then, what are some of the things that people under the age of 35 have experienced? Well, I'll tell you just two things right off the bat, and I'm sure you've thought of some as well. Folks under 35 have had much more likelihood of being raised by divorced parents. That's like, that's a big thing for people under the age of 35 I'll give you another one. People under the age of 35 stand a very high likelihood of having been put in daycare while their mother is at work, very high level. So does this have a an impact? Yeah, I think so. I'll give you just one example in when you're being raised by your parent, and I don't know if, you experience this, or you practice it this way with your children, but most of our children certainly practice this with the children they are raising, which is that if you know, if your child, let's say you got a toddler, and your toddler trips and falls over, and his first instinct is to start crying. You don't jump up in panic and hysteria and swoop in and scoop the child up and you don't, you know, it's not a big deal. And if you want the child to sort of acquire better physical coordination and better physical skills. Fine, you know, let them have these little, minor mishaps. It's not a big deal, and the child becomes stronger through each of these little experiences.
Daniel Lapin 13:53
However, if you spend much of your childhood in professional daycare, well that's totally different, because in daycare, they don't want the children to exhibit any kind of unhappiness or unease, partially because parents are watching on video with their account, with their phones, and partially because there are government regulations and a tremendous amount of reporting, and there's a whole lot of paperwork. So the bottom line is that one of the huge differences between being raised in daycare and being raised by your mother or your father is being allowed to experience the world, even if there are little mishaps here and there, because, as you know, anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But if you were raised in daycare, you never had that experience. So would you be surprised to discover that people who were raised in daycare when they got to university and an election went against the way they like? That they would burst into tears and they would require a day off from lectures and from teaching in order to regain their mental equilibrium and their mental health right? Because if you've never, ever experienced any real life disappointment, which in daycare, every attempt is made to ensure you don't well, then you have absolutely no idea, and you grow up in your understanding of a world in which there is no pain, there is no disappointment, there is nothing untoward that happens and well, that's not exactly how the world really works, is it? And so those are two of many other differences that afflict the cohort of people under the age of 35 they are the rate. By the way, the rate of people who take off sick time at work for people who are over 35 is less than half of the people under the age of 35 so it's very clear. I mean, that is a statistically Ultra significant result. And so clearly the age being that generation of under the age of 35 that's a huge part of this thing. Then we have something that the chief economist at the HR consultancy, US gusto came up with, says that it's all about mental health. That's the main category when people take up six days. It's not the sniffles and it's not pneumonia and it's not mumps or measles or chicken pox. Overwhelmingly, it is mental health issues which is extraordinary in sort of adding to this extraordinary thing, more and more talk at work is about mental illness, more than ever before, and there have been some very interesting surveys on this, and enough of them to provide a fairly convincing case that people are more and more obsessed with mental illness. And again, you know if, if you've lived for more than a few decades, and you've been in the workforce for more than a few decades, then you know that this never used to happen. Nobody, nobody would come to work and say, I had to take off a mental health day yesterday.
Daniel Lapin 17:43
I mean, it would have been cause for an outburst of uncontrollable, raucous laughter, but now, oh, it's wonderful. We're taking this so seriously. This is so good, but you really have to ask yourself, is it so good? Because is it good for the American economy? Is it good for your pocketbook if more and more people are working less and less because of mental health, and it's so important and it's so valuable that they're treating their mental health seriously, but you just have to ask yourself, if there are fewer and fewer people building things and fewer and fewer people providing services, then there are fewer and fewer people buying those things and and acquiring those services. And that means that the economy is shrinking. That's one of the reasons that you need more and more people in an economy. If the population declines, then you have a deteriorating economy. There is no way around that. For a long time, there was talk about, oh, we'll make up for it with creativity. We'll make up for it with artificial intelligence. We'll make up for it with technology. But no, that is simply not the case. If the population declines, you have declining economy. And if you ever wondered, you know, what was the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, what was in her head when she decided to bring in 2 million Muslim males from the Middle East and North Africa? Well, it's very simple. What was in her mind was German population decrease in Germany. Germany's fertility rates are calamitous, and Germany population, in order to maintain the economy, needs more people. And she assumed that all people are exactly the same. The productivity of all people is exactly the same. Culture is totally insignificant. It makes no difference whether you bring a person from Al. Nigeria, or you bring a person from Sweden, it makes absolutely no difference. Well, it turns out that it does make a difference, and it's nothing about skin color, but it's everything to do with religious belief and cultural customs and convictions. There's a an international consultancy called com psych, and they did a global survey of 6000 different corporations, and they discovered that mental health issues are up by 300% in the past five years. So from 2019 to 2024, mental health issues at 6000 companies worldwide are up 300% again. There's never been on record a five year period where there's been that size of increase in anything, but right now it's a huge increase in mental health issues. That's very interesting. What's going on here? Well, some of the reasons that are being advanced is, well, covid. Did it? Covid left people with a lingering sense of anxiety. That's what did it other people say, Well, you read about layoffs and people losing their jobs, so that causes these mental health issues. The trouble is that there have been many, many, many times in history, even in the last 100 years, where there have been huge layoffs, there have been a failure of many companies. There have been failures of whole industries in certain parts of the country. And again, we never, ever saw this kind of increase in mental health issues. They Oh, it's because of a sense of reduced loyalty. Companies don't have the same loyalty to their employees, so that leaves people feeling anxious. Look, you know, I'm sure these things all are factors, but you can rule them out as the main determining factor, because, again, we've never seen anything approaching this level of obsession with mental illness or mental health that we're seeing now. And I dare say that there's every likelihood that your company makes special allowances for mental health issues. We also know that an increasingly large and very significant part of America's health budget is now going on mental health we also know that the DSM five the latest edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of the Mental Health Professions has just been increasing in size. It's getting bigger and bigger and bigger, with more and more and more classifications of behaviors that are now termed to be mental illness, needless to say, billing by psychiatrists and psychologists. Billing is based on the metrics in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. So it's become an increasingly important book, and meanwhile, the prevalence of mental health issues climbing and climbing and climbing also on LinkedIn, which, along with other media, I look at LinkedIn periodically, simply because it tends to be the social media of choice for business usage, primarily, and again, through Searching that website, more and more articles showing up on mental health. Mental health is your right. Sick days are there for you to use for your mental health? Well, if there's possibility of a day off work, I think I could probably convince myself that I have mental stress almost any day of the year, not a problem at all. Look, I'm sorry to be sounding so skeptical and perhaps even cynical about this, but there's something very important going on, and I can only try to bring it to your attention in the limited amount of time we have available by being quick and specific about what's going on, that doesn't mean that I have no empathy for people who are suffering from mental illness, because I have empathy for people suffering from any illness. I say a prayer every single morning. One of the prayers I say is asking God to heal all those of every background to heal all those who are sick. My question is, how much of what goes under the heading of mental illness is, in reality, just a normal part of the challenges of. Daily living, see, because we don't do this sort of thing in when it comes to areas like sports. We've just seen the Paris Olympics for whatever they're worth. You know, since when do we say to a prize winning gymnast or a prize winning athlete? You know you can take a day off. You know you're stressed. You tell me you're feeling anxiety, you take a day off from practice. Take a day off from training. You never get that. You just have to power through the pain, because they realize that that's how the world really works. And in any event, think about the fact that the reward you receive for anything is proportional to the pain. Jack LaLanne of the old Jim years, used to say, no pain, no gain, and it's very real. If you take great pleasure and pride in an accomplishment, I guarantee you that accomplishment wasn't easy. It wasn't something that everybody does, or even everybody could do, but you did it and you felt really good about it. It was hard. And so there really are two ways of relating to the challenges of life which reward those who tackle and succeed in the hard tasks life rewards are those of us who persist and push through the challenges and do the things we may not feel like doing, and do the things we may not enjoy doing, but they are the things we need to do. And life rewards us, but if you're not made of the right stuff, then you retreat from challenge and you find refuge in the claim of mental stress. So now that we've established that there is apparently this massively increasing obsession with mental health. There really are only two possibilities or three really, either there is really more mental illness around or number two, more and more of normality is being viewed as mental illness, or number three, both.
Daniel Lapin 27:26
So since there really is this dramatically increasing obsession with mental disease, mental illness, mental health, I've got to look after my mental health. I can't come into work today. That's what people are saying. Either there really is because of capitalism or because of the global warming or climate change, all of these things are causing me mental stress, and I can't cope, and I need a mental health day, so maybe that's real. Or alternatively, maybe something has made far too many people lose track of what normal life is about and about the challenges inherent in normal life and the value of those challenges, and instead, everything pathologically gets viewed as stress, anxiety inducing, making me have mental health issues. So it's either one of those two, or else it's both. Those are the only three possibilities that I can possibly think of. Who's this affecting? Again, it's not 60 year old and 70 year old people. It's not 50 year old people who've been working for 20 years, no, or 30 years, no. These are people in their 20s, and they are claiming to be more depressed, more anxious and lonelier than any other age group in the country, what is going on? And, you know, you read about stuff affecting teens, mood disorder, self harm, suicide, and talk of suicide, you know, you're hearing about that with with pre Generation Z, right? Very much a factor with teenage girls. And obviously it's now been associated with social media, and much of popular culture is sort of pushing this, and you almost feel as if you're you know, you're out of it, if you're not suffering from some kind of mental disorder, and you get special treatment and you get a lot of sympathy. So are we actually generating this spurious epidemic of mental problems? You know, there's a survey after survey showing more than half of young adults are worried about this, and more than a third of young adults are worried about that. This is sort of thing that that goes on and on. We hear it all the time. Well, something very interesting happened in 1990 I think it was, that when George H W Bush, right, Bush Senior, issued a presidential proclamation, yeah, this was in the middle of 1990 and it was to mark. It was halfway through his first term, his only term actually to mark the dawn of a new and exciting era of neuroscience. He proclaimed the President Bush, it is proclaimed that the 90s would be the decade of the brain. It was going to be a 10 year scientific blitz that promised to make the human brain totally understandable, to take away the mysteries of the brain and they you know, if you look at the Public Relations statements and the editorials of the time, they speak about how things like Alzheimer's and schizophrenia and autism and depression and Parkinson's and Huntington's and also every form of addiction, well, these are all things in the brain, and now, because of this newly emerging discovery in the early 90s of PET scans and MRI scans, we're going to be able to really understand the brain in a way we've never been able to before. And they spoke. I mean, some of these predictions, you read them now, and they're either sad or hilarious, but they almost guaranteed that by the end of the decade, the brain would yield up so many of its secrets that millions of patients who suffered from these various disorders would be able to be cured. And how would they be able to be cured? Well, with pills. Obviously, okay, that that's exactly what happened. Perhaps more precisely is precisely what didn't happen. So that's what they were trying to do. That was the goal and and what they said was that the idea was that with the development of many new drugs, psychotropic drugs, stimulants, that what would happen is scientists would start to tackle the different mental health conditions that had so far eluded ordinary psychiatric practice and so and everything came together. It was sort of a perfect storm, because around about 1990 the folks who were sort of the disciples of Sigmund Freud, with his psychotherapy and unconscious repression and all the stuff that Uncle Sigmund came up with. By about 1990 the psychiatric profession was about ready to dump it and and they said, Look, you know, it's almost embarrassing all this Freudian nonsense. They look we are scientists. We are doctors. Psychiatry has to move into the scientific era, and it's got to be part of biology, not some weird concoction that sprung from the fertile imagination of an Austrian Faker, really. And that was the that was the decision. That's why they said it was going to be the decade of the brain. And the idea was simple. And again, I'm taking you back. What's it? 30 years, right? Little more. 30 years 1990 the idea was that during the decade from 1990 to 2000 as a result of President George H W Herbert Walker Bush's proclamation and decision, psychiatry is going to join up with the rest of medicine and discover the biology of mental illness. Now I just need to remind you here, in case there's any listener who doesn't know that, here we are in 2024 and there still is no biology of mental illness. You can go through the diagnostic and statistical manual, and different psychiatrists will come up with different diagnoses of different patients. And. And there is no you cannot draw blood, you cannot do a scan. You cannot do anything that will show a biological basis to any mental illness. If somebody you know, God forbid, a person, dies of a certain disease, you can do a post mortem and find out what it was, but you cannot do a post mortem that will reveal any mental disorder. Some people may not know this. I want to make it very clear there is no biological basis for any mental disorder. And the reason I stress this, and I really want you to understand it is because I want to expose you to the idea that it is actually that all mental disease is spiritual and that, and I've told you this before, that psychiatry and psychology, in Most cases, a are an attempt to treat a spiritual disorder with a physical remedy, like a tablet or a shot. So the but going back to 1990 they were still determined that they could pull blood or look at something in your urine or do some kind of examination and search, and then they'd be able to say, Oh, there you are. This is, it's very simple, you know, you've got attention deficit disorder, you've got depression, in exactly the same way that a cardiologist can take an angiogram and then they would look at and they'd be able to know, the cardiologist would know exactly what the problem is with the heart. And so they were saying, You see, in the same way, a psychiatrist will do a scan of the brain of a schizophrenic person, and then he'll be able to say, Ah, got it. The diagnosis is schizophrenia. And any psychiatrist that looks at the scandals are schizophrenic, accepting had never happened, of course, and and yet, back in 1990 IT people in and again, it's so interesting for me when I go back and read some of the papers that came out in the psychological and psychiatric journals of the time that spoke about the breakthroughs just around the corner.
Daniel Lapin 37:29
And you know, we tend to do this. You may remember many years ago, the breakthrough of autonomous cars was just around the corner within no time at all, within three years, they said you will be getting around town in an Uber that has no driver. Well, you know, many years have gone by and that hasn't actually happened. This is a very big tendency, particularly in the arrogance of scientism. Scientism is a belief system that is, in a sense, its own religion. It is the belief system that says everything can be explained and resolved by science. And so with the arrogance of that outlook, scientists and and doctors said that the biological basis for mental illness was going to be understood within just the next few years, certainly by the time the decade was up, and that is, again, it wasn't crazy, because you got to remember people being taking medicine for decades and decades, right? And medicine is is nothing but chemical compounds designed and created in order to bring about certain biological changes in your biological body. And since there is no soul, because that is the starting position of secular psychiatry, there is no soul. And this, this is what came about, very strongly in the 80s and 90s. Everything is biological. And so in the same way that you can take a medication to get rid, you know, of a certain organism. So it is you take another medication to get rid of depression or you get rid of anxiety. That was the dream. And they were saying, Look, you know, in the same way that people who suffer from diabetes will take insulin. People who suffer from some kind of mental disorder will take a chemical they will cure that. There's no difference. You've just got to correct the chemical imbalance. That was the popular phrase at the time. Well, again, I don't have to remind you that that dream never came true, but what did happen is that big pharmaceuticals became bigger and bigger and more and more powerful, and then something happened which you've seen on your television screen as many times as I have, and that is on television drugs can now. Advertised. Do you know, I think that there are only two countries in the whole world that allow this bizarre thing. Ask your doctor if Zoloft will help you. New Zealand allows it, and the United States, every other country bans advertising of pharmaceuticals to the lay people, to the patients. So the you know the ads, you know how they all read. You know when you feel the weight of sadness, you may feel exhausted, hopeless and anxious. These are the symptoms of depression, a serious medical condition. You're not alone. It affects more than 20 million Americans and and then, while the cause is unknown, depression may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals between nerve cells in the brain. Prescription Zoloft works to correct this imbalance. Talk to your doctor about Zoloft. When you know more about what's wrong, you can help make it right. That's That's how it was. And so at this during this period as pharmaceuticals Were coming out with more and more and more of these drugs that, you know, the the xanaxes and the Zoloft and the probe whatever, whatever it is called the F the pharmaceutical companies were getting more and more powerful, and they get the Federal Drug Administration to agree to allow television advertising. So now somebody goes and sees his doctor and says, you know, I've been listening to ads about Zoloft. Can I try some of that? It sounds like it could really help me. And meanwhile, you know, the doctor has a kind of deal from the Zoloft pharmaceutical representative going on so more and more Americans started becoming patients for these kind of medications. Then they also started with children. Now let me tell you something, if the school would have come to my parents and said, the teacher suggests that Daniel goes on to a drug because the teacher's having trouble coping with him, which was certainly true. My father would have said, then put the teacher on drugs. My father wouldn't have allowed me to be put on a drug. I was doing what perfectly normal 11 year old boys do you know, and one of the things 11 year old boys do not do naturally is sit at a desk for seven hours a day listening to an uninspired teacher drone on uninspiringly. And so yes, I did act up, and along with many of my friends. And you know, of course, back then, there was no Adderall, there was no Ritalin. But now it's crazy. It's difficult to do to get exact figures, but I've looked at a number of surveys, I've looked at the number of prescriptions. I've looked at studies from the International, the the the family, ifs group Never mind whatever it is. But bottom line is, four out of 10 students, no, not students, because it doesn't impact girls as it does boys. But add Attention Deficit Disorder, ha, HDD, hyper Attention, all of these things heavily tilted towards boys more than girls. So it seems likely, and the figure sounds amazing, but if you think it's crazy, just do what I did and speak if you know, if you can meet a group of high school boys, or you have a chance to see them, you know, at church or at some sort of get together, whatever it is, but if you can get a few boys together. And just say, by the way, how many of you know somebody who's on adderall or ritalin? You'll see that the estimate of four out of 10 boys is about right. And you know, ask them, How many of you have are or have been on Ritalin or Adderall? You'll see four out of 10 in all around the country, seems to be a pretty That is unbelievable. Four out of 10 school children, school boys, males, is on a very powerful stimulant, and many of them then self medicate. Afterwards, they go to college, and they discover for a period of time. It helps them. But like everything else, the Piper does have to be paid by the end of the story, and Ritalin and and and Adderall, it's not, you know, dangerous stuff the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, has. Said that Ritalin Prescriptions have gone up six times in the last five years. Isn't that No, no, in the recent five year period? Incredible. That's never mind unofficial usage. But this is prescriptions that have gone up that this is pretty amazing, is it not and so this is the kind of thing that we're dealing with. So what happens? Well, it's it continues, and more and more people are under medical treatment for mental disorder. You know, like America, never knew such a thing, never saw such a thing. But it's now more and more of more. By the way, the Zoloft ads I was quoting from, and I'm sure you've heard it or seen it, they they credit they take pride with bringing mass awareness to the symptoms of depression. Some people saw themselves in in in that sad mode and decided to ask for Zoloft. But the ads also helped to make people buy into this idea that mental health is just a case of chemical imbalance. All it needs is a few chemical adjustments to your to your brain, and everything will be just fine. So that goal that psychiatry had set up at the start of the 1990s to map the biological basis of mental illness. It never came to pass.
Daniel Lapin 46:47
Patients never ever got the benefits that were promised in what President George H W Bush called the decade of the brain. But what they did get was a myth about chemical imbalance that never quite could be established or proven, but it became deeply believed as the basis for understanding mental illness. So meanwhile, there are many psychiatrists on the other side of the story. One of my favorites is a psychiatrist by the name of Thomas Szasz, a Hungarian name. His name is spelt with an S z at the beginning and an S E at the end, with an A in the middle, s z, A, S z. Thomas Szasz, for many, many years, most of his career, was a professor of psychiatry at SUNY State University of New York in Syracuse, New York. He was at he died in 2012 12 years ago, a distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He was a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. I'm telling you all of that, just to you know that he's not a nobody, Thomas as was a real somebody. And he wrote a book called The Myth of mental illness. And he wrote another one called the manufacture of madness, which a lovely title, by the way, I wish I'd have thought of that. And and he really, he makes clear important things. He says, Look, we might use words like heartbreak, but to think that a heartbreak is a close medical cousin of a heart attack is rubbish. Or to think that spring fever and typhoid fever are cousins of one another, medically, he said, is complete and nut utter nonsense. And he said, Look, although he is one, he has to say that psychiatrists are the natural successors of soul doctors. And he's right on this, Soul doctors priests who dealt with the spiritual conundrums, dilemmas and vexations, in other words, the problems in living that have troubled people forever, the perfectly natural And the perfectly normal tribulations and challenges of running a normal life in this imperfect world of ours. And Thomas says, is it makes this case very, very strongly that that this is what has happened. We've sort of allowed the psychiatric profession and the mental health industry to take that which is normal and pathologize it. Here's something else that Thomas zazz said very nicely. As a theocracy is ruled by God or by priests, and as democracy is ruled by the people. Or the majority. So a pharmocracy, P, H, A, R, M, pharmocracy is ruled by medicine or physicians, and this is what he's saying. He's saying that the medical industry is taking over more and more and more of the life of normal people, as I indicated earlier in my own words, but here, in Thomas zest words, a genuine disease must also be found on the autopsy table, not merely in the living person, and it must meet pathological definition instead of being voted into existence by members of the American Psychiatric Association, which, by the way, is how mental disease gets established in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual they vote. And that's why, in an earlier edition of the DSM, homosexuality was a disease. They voted it away. And now in DSM five, homosexuality is not a disease, but homophobia is the mental disease continuous. Thomas as mental illnesses are really problems in living. They are often like a disease, which makes the medical metaphor understandable, but in no way validates it as an accurate description or an explanation psychiatry, says Thomas as is a pseudo science that parodies medicine by using medical sounding words invented especially over the last 100 years. And this is where he said, you know, just because a heartbreak can cause anxiety and depression. Don't think it's just another thing, like a heart attack. It isn't. There are two completely different logical categories, and treating one as the other constitutes a major error. So it's important to get this clear and to really understand so right now, you've got to ask yourself, what are the real life consequences to companies in which more and more people are taking mental health days off, and what is happening to a country? What is happening to the economics of a society where mental health is becoming a growing obsession, where in a five year period, there's a 300% increase in the amount of talking at work about all the mental problems. And needless to say, so much of what you've heard about the chaos on the university campus over the last few years, again in the category of mental illness, mental challenge, mental trouble, trigger words. Makes me anxious, etc, etc, etc. You've all seen it ad infinitum, but it's a serious problem. It's a real thing that we have to understand. It is happening. Solution, well, I'm going to be describing a very special strategy in terms of solution in the bonus program prepared for you lucky, happy warriors, whom we deeply appreciate. But in general, what each and every one of us has to keep in mind all the time is the book the holistic you with the five F's, and you got to remember that faith coping. And again, I don't mean faith necessarily as religion or faith in God, but I do mean the idea of the existence of a soul and of a spiritual entity that we are not so much beings, physical beings that have a soul. It might be the reverse. We might actually be souls that are attached to a biological being. But if you realize and you understand and you read more to gain deeper insight into the extent which we have a spiritual being and a physical being. And just as our physical being has needs like food and water and oxygen, and our spiritual beings have needs also
Daniel Lapin 54:18
dignity is is one of those, and a sense of being a giver, not a taker, and discovering that optimism is really one of the great moral acts of courage of our age. To be an optimist, you don't get born to be an optimist, the natural condition is pessimism, to have courage. This is a spiritual strength. It's not a biological strength. There's no injection you can get that will increase your courage or increase your optimism, but successful living depends enormously on things like courage and fortitude and persist. Distance and optimism, and these things come from your soul. They do not come from a chemical imbalance in your brain. That's what you've got to understand. And some of the great achievements of the past, and I think of Shackleton's voyage to the Antarctic where, after two and a half years of almost unimaginable pain and agony and difficulty, they all came home. Shackleton brought every one of his men back home to England. And the one of the things that Shackleton was very big on was he would allow no negativity of conversation, he was, very firm and and rigorous on nobody could utter a negative word and no negative thoughts, because he understood that these were spiritual qualities that could be undermined by talking in the Wrong way. And again, you too, when you understand the faith and the fitness. In other words, you understand the relationship between your spiritual body and your physical body, or between your soul and your body, would be a better way to put it, when you understand that you understand the interplay and you understand the physical actions you can take to change your soul, and you discover the ways in which your soul can bring benefits to your body, including physical health, because you've all heard of psychosomatic disorders, where something happening in your Mind, read soul causes a physical symptom, a physical manifestation, of a problem. But you can't do that if your perception of the world is entirely materialistic, if your vision of the world is utterly secular, and you have got it into your head that you entirely are nothing more than a few dollars worth of common chemicals put together in a cunning arrangement, and that anytime anything goes wrong with you, all you need are some chemicals in the form of a shot or in the form of a tablet or a pill. Well, then you're going to get absolutely nowhere, because you cannot solve soul problems with Body Solutions. It can't be done anymore, then you can solve body problems with soul solutions. You know, if you know, God forbid, somebody has a serious disease, believing themselves cured isn't going to do the trick. Now, being optimistic and positive certainly helps enormously. Any doctor of worthy salt will tell you that, but it all depends on truly understanding the relationship between body and soul and understanding that our souls are just as real and just as important motivators as our bodies are. Much of what we do is because we're hungry or thirsty or wish to fulfill another bodily yearning. But there are many, many things we do that are entirely the result of spiritual drive, because they do nothing for our bodies. They only do things for our souls. And so I got to tell you, to me, it is almost laughable that there can be any intelligent human beings left on the planet who don't understand that we have a soul as well as a body, that we are spiritual beings as much as we are physical beings. And my goodness, if the entire world of psychiatry and its many failings isn't enough to show you that an attempt to treat a spiritual problem biologically or physically simply doesn't work. If that doesn't do it, then I'm not sure I know exactly what does but for you, happy warrior, you certainly should do everything in your power, including studying the book the holistic EU, in order to really wrap yourself around this, because that is one of the first and most important steps in coping with what has become increasingly called your mental problems. No, they're actually spiritual problems, and you don't need medication. You really don't it can be solved spiritually, not medically, and so that gives you at least something to be going on.
Daniel Lapin 59:29
And for those of you who are members of a Happy Warrior community, see you on the other side, on the bonus track, where we will look at a very specific type of strategy to make this part of your life work more smoothly and more comfortably. So until next week, thank you for being part of the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show. I deeply appreciate it, and I want to wish you a week moving onwards and upwards with your family, with your finances, with your fitness, with your faith and with your friendships. I'm Rabbi. Daniel Lapin, God bless you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
