🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

Thank you Awais Aftab for presenting at our grand rounds! The complexity of consciousness is humbling, the boundaries of suffering & disruptive behaviors are constantly being reexamined. I am struck that the nosological ambivalence of the 20th century continues into the 21st.

What constitutes a meaningful life is deeply personal and subjective. Sources of meaning can be fragile: Relationships end. Purposes change. Beliefs are challenged. The search itself often becomes a source of meaning.

We make sense of the world through stories. History, religion, science, anecdotes—all are examples of narrative structures that model the world, collapsing immense complexity into something a human mind can grasp. The most important story is the one we tell about ourselves.

Finding a good therapist is hard. So when left with few options, it’s no surprise people will turn to AI chat bots. The big problem with pure LLM “therapy” ➡️ If we are not challenged, we will never change. I think LLMs have a role, but more as an augmentation to IRL therapy.

A big problem with psychedelics as treatment: The economics of individual sessions include high labor cost, limited patient volume per day, and scheduling difficulties = high price. This can make the treatment too costly and inaccessible by the poor. Solution = Group sessions

Covered the ER overnight. A young person arrived after a serious injury, pronounced dead on arrival. Their mother arrived later, her screams echoing through halls. A hospital is both a house of hope and grief.

Suffering—physical pain, emotional grief, existential angst, appears as a fundamental, unavoidable aspect of the human condition. It is woven into the fabric of biological existence & conscious awareness. Despite the discomfort, it may be the most powerful catalyst for change.

This is a big problem for college students, but does not necessarily translate into more specialized education like med school. You are in a secured room for all three medical license exams. You have to think on your feet in fast paced settings (hospital, ER). No short cuts.

1981 Omnibus Budget slashed federal support for state mental hospitals; promises of community clinics were never funded. By the early 1990s, the population of street-homeless w/ psychosis quadrupled in major cities ➡️ jails became de-facto asylums.

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say ‘My heart is broken.’” —C.S. Lewis

Money solves a surprising number of problems. Not every problem; it doesn’t touch grief, betrayal, existential dread, illness, etc., but many of the stresses that make those things worse: uncertainty, delay, inaccessibility, exhaustion, vulnerability—can be softened.

Spirituality as a Therapeutic Approach for Severe Mental Illness: Insights from Neural Networks mdpi.com/2752538

If you shut yourself off from pain and grief, you also shut yourself off from the possibility of healing.

If you are directly paying someone for “mentorship,” you are their customer, not their mentee.

One can have mental health issues and amplify them with an LLM vs starting from a relatively “normal” baseline and acquiring new symptoms. I’ve seen a few cases in my residency. This technology only became widely available less than 3 years ago—we are witnessing something new.

When FDA approves psychedelics and they become part of routine psychiatry, we will wonder why we allowed a tyrannical government to literally ban and criminalize life changing medicines.

Intergenerational trauma is at the core of many conflicts around the world. No one alive today is responsible for the injustices of the past, but the consequences ripple through generations. Trauma begets more trauma.

This image is the reality we are always forgetting. We dream ourselves into existence, but we were never separate to begin with. Those with altered states, whether from meditation, deep spiritual practice, psychedelics, or even mania can glimpse this.