Mental Health In A Broken World with Dr. Ahona Guha

EP27 - WW

Toss in seemingly insurmountable global problems like climate change, pending economic crises, natural disasters, pandemic, and random gun violence and the wave of despair only builds. And these pressures don't begin to include personal factors such as physical health, finances, and family issues that can influence how we see the world and how it impacts our personal well being.

One of the many unfortunate aspects of a broken world, whether it's real, imagined, or something in between, is the toll it takes on people. And the impact can be pretty devastating. Think trauma, anxiety, depression, burnout, and more. Recognizing this toll is the first step to overcoming and lessening its combined impact, but it's only the first.

More can and needs to be done to make sure a broken world doesn't eat you up. Thankfully, our upcoming guest is an authority on the dangers a broken world presents and what can be done to repair its damages and protect yourself going forward. As the author of Life Skills for a Broken World, our guest is in a perfect position to help us put the pieces back together.

We'd like to welcome Dr. Ohana, Guha. we'll speak on some very important issues. This Is not necessarily a super light topic. I don't mean to minimize what we're going to talk about.

We're going to talk about challenges that people have and mental health, wellness, and whatnot in today's world. And we're jumping off on this because of your latest book, which is Life Skills for a Broken World. And in your background, you have dealt with a range of mental health issues, including trauma and abuse, among other things.

People who, this triggers depression, anxiety, obviously a range of emotional challenges. What brought you to this area of work?

[: 00:02:39

I was probably looking for ways to heal that which I couldn't heal, but it also matched my curious brain really well. And I've always had a strong interest in working with people. And so when I went back to study after a range of things happened and I talk in my book about my own marriage and divorce at the age of 23, and I was thinking about the way in which I could find meaning and purpose and feel like I was connected to a bigger cause really, than just living selfishly in a Little silo.

Mental health felt like a good fit. Forensic psychology only became an interest a little bit later and it was when I was applying for postgrad programs like the doctorate that I eventually did and it felt interesting and it felt like a good fit but it was a bit of a spur of the moment.

I'm going to pivot away from just the straight clinical psychology and move into this dual role and it's been such a great fit for me.

[: 00:04:13

How does this book I'm assuming, it doesn't take a great assumption to say that it's an outgrowth of your earlier work, but where is it outgrowing and how does it sort of differ from some of your earlier writings?

[: 00:04:28

And it's also and broken up into really small scales. So it's far more of a broader framework that's more introductory framework, whereas Reclaim really jumped into the topic of complex trauma in some detail and also brought forensic psychological work. This is more mental health work for the lay reader.

Right.

[: 00:05:09

[00:05:19] Dr. Guha: Well, I, think that the world is not in a great place at this point in time. Obviously here in Australia, we had masses of waves of COVID lockdowns. So I think here in Melbourne, we were on a sixth wave of lockdown and there was a lot of anti vaccination anger that was starting to brew and really split the community.

Cost of living had started to shift a little bit, which is now completely out of control. Geopolitical strife, we obviously have a lot of at this point in time and we didn't really have that then. I don't think Russia had invaded Ukraine. There were a lot of things happening and a lot of distress, a lot of really spiraling rates of mental health, distress, climate change, a lot that made me start to think that, well, we really messed up the world and the phrase that broken world started to percolate and it does feel to me like we've stuffed the world up, whether it's fully broken or whether it's chipped or fractured. I'm going to leave it to your listeners.

[: 00:06:20

Do you think there are different degrees of stresses on people? Yes. And it's different in the developed world than the underdeveloped world or other areas, but I think you get what I'm getting at.

[: 00:06:43

And obviously, I'm not the thick of it, so it's hard for me to rise above and notice the themes. But this seems to be what I'm saying.

[: 00:07:26

[00:07:33] Dr. Guha: I think same existential angst, the sense of what is gonna happen to me and what is gonna happen to my family. Will I be able to access the things that I always thought that I'd be able to? How is climate change going to change things for me and for my country? What's gonna happen to us as a human race?

This seems to be the question that a lot of people are asking now, and I think that's relatively universal, or at least that's my experience.

[: 00:08:00

[00:08:19] Dr. Guha: I think it's a bit of both, or really a bit of all three. So, in the field of mental health, we talk about the broader biopsychosocial framework, which is really the biological, the psychological, and the social. So, when you're thinking about biological, you might have a person's genes and their temperament, and we know that certain types of mental health disorder are quite strongly heritable so passed down through the family line.

We also have a person's basic temperament, but also things like what they would experience or exposed to when their mom was pregnant. Typically

[: 00:08:54

[00:08:54] Dr. Guha: we have springing from that initial temperament, just a range of things around how happy a person can be.

So their happiness set point, how they're prone to thinking, how they see the world, how they experience emotion and their own capacity to maybe regulate emotion. And then we've got the external social forces as well. So you can have the biological and the psychological factors down pat. Things can be great, but then if you're exposed to something catastrophic like a war, obviously your mental well being won't be great.

So I think it's really important always to look at all three, and we tend to, I think, discount sometimes the social for the biological and the psychological, especially in the field of clinical psychology. But I think it's really important, especially in my forensic work, to look at all three together, really.

[: 00:09:43

[00:09:51] Dr. Guha: Feels like a more challenging space or thing to address. Possibly, if you're talking about things like access to housing and food security, changing the social welfare system, introducing subsidized healthcare for everyone. These are difficult things to introduce and require political will. And I think based on the founding ideology of certain countries, there may not be that political will. I think it's easier maybe to focus on the individual and say, let's just teach you CBT and teach you how to change your thinking with the idea that's going to change who you are. It just feels like it's more accessible possibly. And also mental health has been, very individually focused since it's inception. Thinking about the days of Freud, really.

[: 00:10:39

If you want to have a discussion on climate change, you're going to bring up a whole range of issues.

[: 00:11:13

change

because it feels like that you're hard and I'm curious about, but that's a form of learned helplessness that no matter what I do. And I think that's where the wheel is

falling down really

[: 00:12:01

But then older people have culturally or familiar experience war and other tragedies and economic consequences. So again, it's not one simple answer, but how does age wise affect this, impact?

[: 00:12:35

I think my experiences has been that there are older people who are also quite anxious about it, and more when they're thinking about their own families and what life is going to be like for future generations. But maybe I think as we age, there is sometimes a sense of comfort and solidity that can set in possibly and a sense of this is my world and I know how to interact with it.

And maybe we are as open to engaging with new. Information, and I'm by no means saying that's true for all people.

[: 00:13:38

[00:13:38] Dr. Guha: Curious about whether that gives people a certain sense of ability to manage it because they're not engaging with some of these thoughts as much. Maybe because it's not personally relevant, or because they're not on social media as much,

[: 00:13:51

I'm going to paraphrase this what is the saying that give me the power to know what I can change and the understanding to know what I can't change? Wherever anyone is politically they can't necessarily by themselves, stop the political rhetoric on either side or the hatred, or, but they can lessen it around themselves perhaps, or not engage in the same way.

[: 00:14:13

It feels like there's infringement and strong anger directed from both sides with no one willing to budge or take a step forward. And when I've suggested a step forward, I've been attacked for being complicit with genocide or, whatever it is, which I absolutely think by the way, is happening, but I just feel like that anger and that hatred directed toward people isn't going to solve the issue..

[: 00:14:44

[00:15:03] Dr. Guha: I very good question. I like we'd have to dive into political ideology for that, certainly not equipped to hmm.

about that, and thinking about the work I do with clients, I mean, with, relational issues, it's usually about People halfway and really listening to the other person's perspective as well.

So people are looking for that. But you're right. I haven't read a lot of writing about compromise. And I'm curious about whether it's this anger driven self righteousness that maybe everyone has in the sense of I'm right. You are all wrong. That we all prone to have because of course we think that we are right.

We know our brains, we know our history, range of ways of thinking, and I don't think that that kind of thinking's encouraged anymore. Is it that maybe you've got some of the answers, but you don't have them all, and you won't because one person can't hold complete truth.

[: 00:16:02

[00:16:19] Dr. Guha: There is so

[: 00:16:20

[00:16:21] Dr. Guha: Yeah, no, there is so much flaky and flawed advice. You just have to jump on TikTok, which I'm too old for, but I, in a second, I'm through. And you just have to see Instagram influencers and therapists and just read a little bit of the self help literature. The crazies that are sweeping the world, so really simplistic understandings of if you fix your attachment style, everything is going to be great, manifest your greatness just some very unkind of research on evidence based thinking, icebox which May help, but certainly aren't going to change the world.

So I wanted this to be really evidence based and very practical and something that people could actually bring in and apply to their own lives. And it provided lots of prompts throughout, but also lots of exercises to try and some extra reading for those who want to go into things in A bit more detail and it was my intention that this be something that people could pick up when they're feeling down and they can flip to the right chapter and find some words and find a way forward, really.

[: 00:17:24

[00:17:37] Dr. Guha: I absolutely think there is a firm limit to this book set out in the introduction that if you have diagnosable mental health issues or specific strong symptoms then you should special help and this is just an adjunct Hmm. What I would say is that if there's any strong distress, and I'm using a very broad word deliberately because there are people who don't know how to identify and how to explain the distress, so they don't have the vocabulary around saying I feel depressed or I feel anxious.

But if you're depressed Or if there's a lot of emotional distress, or if you're engaging in behaviors that don't quite make sense, that are affecting your quality of life. So thinking of things like binge eating, compulsive substance use or if there are certain things happening that maybe mean that you unable to engage with the world.

So you notice that friends don't stick around, and this is a constant pattern that you've had. Then there may be cause to go and seek professional help just to understand What's happening. And and of course, if you're feeling suicidal, any of that really intense distress, that is absolutely a time when you seek professional help instead of picking up a book, though a book can be a nice adjunct sometimes.

[: 00:18:54

[00:19:00] Dr. Guha: One of the things that I did when I was learning about my own mental health in my early 20s, and I didn't have much of an emotional vocabulary at all, I mean, I'd go in to see my own psychologist and she'd ask me how I was feeling, and I'd go, I don't know, I mean, I must have been so I and annoyed by it.

I did that for and years until I finally learned to talk about how I felt and built the words around that. But a lot of what I learned was obviously through my own therapy, but also through a lot of reading, lots of learning from other people who'd gone before.

[: 00:19:32

What should we be thinking about instead of what we are?

[: 00:19:46

So I think not pathologizing negative emotion is a really big takeaway, that we're all going to feel this entire range of emotion. We'll be happy, we'll be hopeful, we'll feel awe, we'll feel joy, we'll feel love, we'll feel excited, but we're also going to feel sad. We're also going to feel scared.

We're also going to feel anxious. And good mental health, I think, is being able to experience all of those states when they're evoked by the world around us. Being able to understand why they are coming up and being able to tolerate them for a while, because it's important to sit with discomfort instead of just pushing it away.

And then being able to process and let go and move through.

[: 00:21:09

[00:21:30] Dr. Guha: I think if you're talking about clinical very serious anxiety and depression, then I'd say that those are harmful, but those are more extreme. Reflections of less kind of serious states that, that actually signal to us that there's something happening here that we need to pay attention to.

So if you think about Anxiety, back in caveman days, people who were looking up at the sky and marveling at the stars and the rainbows, they'd be dead because they stepped on a snake, yeah?

Whereas there was people, maybe more like me, who kind of, skulked around looking in the grass going, there, are there snakes here?

And there was that instinctive anxiety about there might be danger.

But they were the ones that survived, so using anxiety as an

example, it's a skill that we have, it's a way of looking out for danger because that's how we stay alive. Obviously now the things that we feel anxious about are so amorphous, anxious about, Whether you're going to achieve your financial goals or you're anxious about the future of the human race, there's nothing that we can really pin that fight flight response down to, and that's why we stay in chronic states of anxiety.

[: 00:22:42

[00:22:50] Dr. Guha: Yeah,

it is.

[: 00:22:51

[00:22:51] Dr. Guha: I think the challenge is learning to use it. So I was very anxious in my teens and my early twenties. And I always looked for the bad things that were going to happen. And over time, the felt sense of anxiety is dropped away. And that's because I think I've worked out that the worst really happens.

I've spent so much time catastrophizing, but like, the worst case has never happened. And if it does, I'm probably able to cope with it. But now I can use the way my brain works, which is looking issues in my work, and I can direct that a little bit more constructively, instead of this. free floating panic.

[: 00:23:29

[00:23:33] Dr. Guha: absolutely.

[: 00:23:34

Before we dish out some health hacks, we want to again remind everyone of the hundreds of exclusive discounts members of our WellWellBeing community enjoy. These include everything from fitness and athletic equipment to personal care products, organic foods and beverages, and more.

Joining our WellWellBeing community is easy and free. Just visit WellWellUSA. com, go to Midland's discounts on the pull down menu, and you'll see the sign up sheet. Signing up takes seconds, but the benefits can last for years. Enjoy. Okay, so maybe your world is broken, or perhaps just a couple of pieces are out of whack.

What are your options to prevent it from all crashing down on top of you? First off, it's important to recognize that there's a lot of flawed advice out in the market when it comes to dealing with mental health issues. This includes suggestions for both self help as well as professional support. This doesn't mean sound support and advice aren't available, but it does mean it may require some effort to find out what's right for you.

It's also important to remember that people experience the world differently, based on their age, emotional makeup, and physical health. This in turn can alter the remedies they need to bring more order and stability into their lives. Professional help is always an option, particularly for those with chronic depression or anxiety.

Engaging in binge eating, having suicidal thoughts, or whose behavior changes radically or in alarming ways. But it is also equally important to realize that everyone is going to have bad days. When they are anxious, sad, depressed, or burnt out. These emotions are natural. Recognizing that we are all likely to experience these troubling emotions at times is an important step to not letting them overwhelm you or put you on a destructive path.

Ultimately, this means learning to sit with discomfort and letting it pass naturally for your own good. Well, that's it for this episode of What the Health. We'd like to thank Dr. Guah for her time and insights, and we'd like to recommend everyone think about reading her latest book, Life Skills for a Broken World.

Thanks again for listening, and please come back.

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