Latest / Radically Genuine / 146. On God, Love, Religion and Escaping the Mental Health Trap with Eric Maisel, PhD

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146. On God, Love, Religion and Escaping the Mental Health Trap with Eric Maisel, PhD · Radically Genuine

• Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (00:01.318) Welcome to the Radically Genuine podcast. I am Dr. Roger McFillin. In a world inundated with diagnoses and labels, and let's face it, there's a lot of them. They can range from a psychiatric diagnosis somebody has to the color of their skin, to their religion, to their political affiliation. Have we lost touch with the essence of the human experience? Our society is struggling with an unprecedented surge in mental health related issues, yet we must ask, are we truly facing an epidemic of illness or have we pathologized the very nature of being human? At what point did the struggles of everyday life morph into symptoms requiring medical intervention? We live in an era where the language of psychiatry dominates our understanding of the mind. But has this medicalization of our inner worlds enhanced our well -being? Or has it stripped us of our ability to find meaning in our pain? Have we sacrificed our collective wisdom on navigating life's challenges at the altar of the illusion of quick fixes and pill bottles? As mental health labels proliferate, do they illuminate our understanding of the human condition? Or do they cast along shadows? obscuring the rich tapestry of human emotion and experience? Are we witnessing the rise of genuine disorders or the clever marketing of human suffering as a commodity? In our quest for normalcy, have we narrowed the bandwidth of acceptable human behavior to the point where any deviation is seen as pathological? And in doing Have we inadvertently created a society less capable of resilience, empathy, and meaningful human connection? What forces drive this paradigm? Is it born out of genuine concern for human welfare or is there more insidious motivations at play? Political control? Profit? The suppression of dissent? The normalization of conformity? As we stand at the crossroads, we must ask ourselves. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (02:23.73) What is the true cost of viewing the human experience through the lens of a disorder or a label for that matter? And more importantly, how can we reclaim our narrative, find meaning in our struggles and rediscover the transformative power of human resilience? To have this discussion and more, our guest today is Dr. Eric Maisel, who's a psychotherapist, a coach, teacher, and an author of more than 50 books. They include Rethinking Depression, How to Shed Mental Health Labels and Create Personal Meaning, which was published in 2012, The Future of Mental Health, Deconstructing the Mental Disorder Paradigm in 2015, and his most recent book, Your Mind published in 2021. His contributions are diverse and vast. His interests include creativity, the creative life, the profession of creativity coaching, he founded, issues of life purpose and meaning, mental health and critical psychology, and parenting in a quote unquote mental disorder age. I've recently been exposed to to his work and find him to be a critical thinker in an age where most in the mental health field are regurgitating the same tired platitudes as our collective well -being worsens and the mental health outcomes of standard care are clearly and measurably worsening those who choose such a path. Dr. Eric Maisel, I to welcome you to the Radically Genuine Podcast. Eric (04:06.37) Thank you so much, Roger. think the introduction said it all, so I think we're done. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (04:10.334) That's just the tip of the iceberg here. We have to really go underneath. What's beneath the water? What's that foundation? And those are the critical questions that we have to ask. And we have to get people to critically examine and think again about our lives. I mean, it's so easy to become habitual and automatic thinkers. If I have your age correct, I believe you're 77 years old. Eric (04:35.742) That is exactly correct. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (04:37.702) Okay. You do have a Wikipedia page, so I'm able to get your age. There's an old saying that dates back, I think it's like an actual Chinese curse is may you live in interesting times. And I think you have lived in interesting times and certainly been exposed to, I guess, shifting cultural landscape on humans' understanding of the experience and the pain and struggles of living. So I'm curious to get your perspective on how the communication Eric (04:41.826) Hehehe Eric (04:50.273) Indeed. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (05:06.928) of emotional struggles has shifted over the course of your lifetime. Eric (05:13.452) way back when in the early 1900s, the British language analysis professors were really smart about how language works. Philosophy moved in an interesting direction back then from arcane wonders about metaphysical things to exactly how language works. Bertrand Russell is one of the folks from that era of Wittgenstein. There are a whole slew of them who wondered, who would ask questions like, If you call a horse's tail a leg, does a horse have five legs? Just how does language work and how does language enter the mind? And then Orwell came along and started or continued that thought pattern, that trend, wondering aloud about what happens if the government says war is peace and peace is war and everyone's equal except the pigs are more important and all of So those were my early influences. I thought I was in math and physics growing up. I thought I was a little science boy. I went to a math and science high school. Started out in college in physics, but actually kind of understood that none of that interested me, never had exactly interest to me, except maybe the bigness of numbers. I liked how far apart stars were, just the bigness of numbers. But human things interested me more than. art science. And way back when, growing up, I was already that kid who was pointing a finger and wondering why the emperors who had no clothes was thought to be clothed. I grew up in a Jewish and Italian neighborhood in old Brooklyn. I did not understand why on Fridays the Jews would go to synagogue and why on Sunday the Italians would go to church. I already thought that religion made no sense and that gods were made up. That struck me at the age of three four or five or six. And I also thought one of the threads in my life is authoritarianism. I thought that all of my friends' dads were authoritarians. I was happy not to have a father. I felt blessed in not having a father. Eric (07:35.704) When I was young, I read Sartre's Les Maux, his autobiography, in which he remarked that he was happy that he'd never had a dad laying full length on him. He had the same sentiment that I had. And so that was one of the threads that's always interested me. I just had a book come out called Parents Who Bully about authoritarians and the family. Authoritarians and public life had been looked at a bit. That was an important literature from the 1950s. Theodore Adorno and researchers at the University of California Berkeley tried to figure out not who Hitler was, but who Hitler's followers were, who those sheep were, if they were sheep or if they were just mini tyrants or who they were. And a big authoritarian personality literature grew up. But no one ever quite looked at authoritarians in the family. what it's like to be bullied by a father or a mother or a sibling. So that's always been an area of interest to me. And then to circle all the way to the thing that we're probably most likely to talk about the most. My mom had three sisters. My mom was a solid person. And one of the aunts, Aunt Rose, was a solid person, let's call her. And then the other two aunts had lots of nowadays, they'd be called mental health problems, whatever we'd want to call them, but they'd be called mental health problems. And one of the aunts was institutionalized in Rockland State Mental Hospital, which is north of New York City. I was growing up in New York. And I'd go with my grandfather. I was a little kid. probably five to Rockland State Institution to visit Aunt Anne. Eric (09:21.836) And so that was an early experience for me of just that notion of difference and also sympathy for that person because that's who my grandfather was. He would bring her, this sounds a bit grotesque, but he would bring a newly killed chicken from the chicken market. And I don't know what he thought that anybody at the institution was going to do with a newly plucked chicken, but that was his offering. He was coming to say, still love you and hope you get better and all of that. My brother ended up doing his PhD at Yale in sociology and his dissertation was on recidivism rate at mental institutions. That is, it's been a sort of a family business to think about these things. And I don't know where to land exactly, but I understood very early on that what was going Maybe it was at the beginning of my therapy training in the first courses, I began to understand that what I was being told made no sense to me. That diagnosing on the basis of symptoms or symptom pictures made no sense to me. That's not the way medicine works. Medicine's interested in what's causing something, not just how something looks. In medicine, if you come in with a rash, it's not okay to just call it rashitis. and be done with it as if that's an answer to the question. So something about it made no sense to me. Let me just say parenthetically that I also noticed that all of my fellow students were incurious. They didn't seem to be hearing the weirdness of what was being told to them. They were just making notes and answering questions for tests. And you can see how a professional class arises if no one is questioning what they're being told at the student level, they're just taking it in. If someone says, here's the DSM picture of X and here's the DSM picture of Y and you need to be able to make a differential diagnosis or whatever, and they're just nodding, not taking the meta step back and wondering what's this document? What is the DSM? What is the ICD? What are these things? What are they trying to sell or tell me? So very early on, I didn't believe Eric (11:48.032) the pseudo medical model of mental disorder diagnosing. didn't believe in it. Got my license, did that work for a while as a therapist, but I knew I was going to segue out of therapy soon because I did not believe I was diagnosing mental disorders. I believed I was just dealing with folks who had problems with living and sort of ordinary things that should not have been put into some other category with labels like clinical depression or schizophrenia or what have Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (12:18.792) Can I ask you a question? What happened to your father? Eric (12:24.202) That's a long and interesting story. The fellow whose name I have, Maisel, actually died many years before I was born, so I'm not a Maisel, but I wear that name because that's what the name my mom put on my birth certificate or had put on my birth certificate. She had an affair with an interesting guy who was married and he was sort of big in New York politics. and they had a tempestuous affair except he also was an untrustworthy type. He gambled away a lot of her money. She didn't have much money but what she had he gambled away at the racetracks at Aqueduct or one of those New York racetracks. So he kicked, she kicked him out essentially out of her life. I met him once when I was 13 but I didn't know who he was. He showed up one day. My mama decided I needed to learn how to shave. that I needed a man in my life at least for a day. So apparently she could be in touch with him and she invited him over and he watched, I was already shaving, he watched me shave, he said okay and he left and that's my entire connection to my dad. What's interesting though apart from just that story is that he was an immigrant and you one of these Russian or Polish Jewish immigrants who made his way across the universe London and Cuba and here and there and made it to this country. But in the 1920s, he had a book published, which is really amazing for a recent immigrant to have a kind of eloquent book published on practical political politics, ward politics, how to get things done at the ward level. So I have, guess, some, this is a joke, I hope no one will take it seriously, some genetic connection to political activism and individualism and just trying to, my life purpose statement of myself is do the next right thing. That's works for me. And that's kind of a stance. think if all people just took that simple life purpose statement and lived it, we'd be doing a lot better. But that's the story of my father. I think he was an interesting, probably difficult. Eric (14:44.19) and dark -ish figure, but I didn't know him. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (14:48.594) When did you learn about him? When were you told about the relationship your mother had to him? Eric (14:54.674) I honestly don't remember, but I suspect it was connected to a time when she was worried about me, namely I had enlisted in the army in 1965, which would have made me 18, and that was not a brilliant time during the Vietnam War to decide to enlist. There were other things one might have thought to do than enlist, but I suspect that we maybe had some conversations when I was on leave. or something like that where she wanted me to know my heritage or that story just in case I didn't survive my time in the army. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (15:32.798) So when you were younger, I'm sure you asked her about who your father was. How would she have answered? You did not. Eric (15:37.806) I did not. I was so not interested. Seriously, as I said at the outset, I thought it was a tragedy that my friends had fathers. I thought that every, we would have, imagine a summer day in Brooklyn in whatever it would be, 1954 or something. We just were out on the streets, the kids were out on the streets all day long. It a different experience. We owned the streets. Cars watched out for us, we didn't watch out for cars. We played ball and the stick ball and all those things that anybody's of my age, we remember. We had a wonderful time. We were all friends, different ethnicities, different whatever, we were all friends. was all divisions were about who was the better ball player, not about race or color. was like, you get picked number one or number three for your team? That's all that mattered was that hierarchy of goodness of sports ability. So our days were wonderful till about five. When I wanted to, sun was still up in the summer in New York, as you know, sun's still up till 8 p or something. I wanted to continue playing. They were essentially grabbed by the nape of the neck into their family life at that period when the dad would come home. And there would be, you know, shouting and banging of things. And so I'm just repeating what I said earlier. I really was grateful. both not to have a father and not to do the ritualistic things that I thought made no sense, like going to shul or going to church, getting into those clothes, imagining there was a God who wanted you to wear a hat. I could not think of anything more ridiculous than the idea that somebody who makes a universe cares if you wear a hat or cares that you keep two sets of dishes and that the dairies stay away from them. None of it made any sense to So was happy to stay out of their universes and just play in the streets where life was good. I didn't like being inside any of their homes. I just wanted to be out on the streets where life was good. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (17:53.502) So it's clear that you're very much an observer of people and observer of culture and traditions and always asking kind of the deeper questions. So what is your experience to, if we use the word God or we use the word creator or universe, how do you think about this now? Eric (18:11.468) Well, I make a simple distinction, which is I believe that all gods are man -made, but I believe in mystery. I believe that we don't know a lot of things, but we don't know them. The second we act like we know them, we've cheated. I think there are lots of things that we don't understand, but as I say, the second we make some simple calculation about God wants, God is this or God wants this or what have you, I know that's man -made. I just know that's some person stating his or her personal preference or the rules and rules where he or she grew up. So I take religion to be a betrayal of our common humanity. I think it's a certain kind of betrayal where you act like you know something from on high and then I'm disempowered. You know something from on high, I just know stuff from here. I just know stuff from this level. So you're lording it over me by telling me that there's a book or you've had an experience or this or that that gives you some clear picture of the universe that I don't have. I just don't believe you. So that's my, I wouldn't say that's my experience of God, that's my experience of believers. I don't believe that believers have any insight into anything. think they're making things up. But to repeat, I do believe in genuine mystery. I don't think we've settled if this is reality or if this isn't reality or I don't think any of that is settled. For fun, I watch physics videos. I still have a little physics boy left in me. And so I watched physics videos about is there reality or is there time or what is time? I'm interested in those things, but there aren't answers to them. And there won't be answers to them. It's like wondering if there are pancakes before the Big Bang. We're not going to know that. Just can't be known. can make up anecdotal stories about pancakes before the Big Bang or some other cosmological story for fun. We can make them up, but that's not like knowing anything. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (20:10.088) So you accept the mysteries that exist and you're Eric (20:13.774) And that's right. I know I'm interrupting, but I just want to say, and synchronicities, I think it's statistically impossible that some things happen, which makes me believe in mystery. think it's just really weird if you're thinking about somebody you haven't seen in 20 years and they call the next day. That seems to me to be statistically not just improbable, but impossible. But that doesn't mean I know what's going on. I have no idea what's going on. I don't know why that happens. the second I act like I know why that happens, I'm lying about Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (20:47.518) Yeah, it's interesting. I had a session last week where I'm working with a young woman and we were talking really about gratitude. And I engage in a gratitude practice every day. And when I started doing that, it completely altered my existence, my reality. Obviously controlled my attention. You know, it had profound effects throughout the day, not just in the times that I was engaging in gratitude practice. And because I was more attentive and more aware of what I have in my life. It's even just simply like walking, you know, because we, we certainly aren't going to really, most of us aren't going to miss walking until we can't walk, right? So it's not like even in our consciousness, but then once you start cultivating that gratitude, then there's a feeling of just elation and, and, and thankfulness and gratefulness for some of the things you have and your ability to kind of create in that day. Eric (21:33.229) Exactly. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (21:46.372) And this is somebody who's suffering and struggling to a great extent with many different aspects of life. Most specifically things that have happened to her in her past that one would identify to be traumatic. And she leaves my office that day, goes to her car, looks down, and there's a rock with gratitude written on it. She brought it into the session the following week and said, this is you know, was right at as soon as I looked down as I opened my car door. And I can tell, you know, whole frame of stories and have on this podcast previously about these synchronicities. So if these things do exist, then we have to attach some meaning to it. We can say it's random and it has no meaning. You know, you think about somebody and they call and that has no meaning at all. Or we can attach meaning to it. So when you say synchronicity, what meaning are you attaching Eric (22:48.162) I'm not attaching meaning to it at all, I think, in the sense in which you're using the word. We all use that word slightly differently. It has significance. It has significance in the sense that it speaks to something that we don't understand that's perhaps very interesting. The way I think of meaning is that it's a motivator and a certain kind of psychological experience that we want, but that it itself isn't that important. What's important is that we live our life purposes, and that's separate from any meaning questions, where that's different, bigger than any meaning questions. So to try to line up this If I'm doing something that matches my sense of my life purposes, whether it's write my novel or be an activist or hug my children or whatever it is, if I'm doing that, I may or may not get the experience of meaning from that. I can't make the experience happen. On a given day, hugging my child may feel like the most meaningful thing I could have possibly done. On another day, I may be irritated with my child and I don't get the experience of meaning from And whether or not I get the experience of meaning, I think is irrelevant. We have to let go of it being important in our lives to get the experience of meaning. What's important is that we honorably live our life purposes. If we occasionally get the experience of meaning from that, that's a blessing. That's an accident. That's some kind of psychological accident that what's going on inside has coalesced into a certain feeling. The idea that life should feel meaningful is to me as odd as the idea that life should feel joyful. Life should feel joyful sometimes and sometimes life will feel something else. To my mind, meaning is a certain kind of special, but just a certain kind of experience that comes and goes. These, although this sounds sort of everyday, these are actually big ideas because if you come to believe that meaning comes and goes, Eric (25:06.776) then you should not be upset if a certain portion of your life is feeling meaningless. You should be able to say to yourself, it's coming back. It's just one of those things like joy. I'm not feeling joyful today, but it'll come back. That's a different way of looking at life than holding the belief that meaning's out there somewhere. There's something to seek. Once you find it, you have it. And then you're surrounded by it. You're suffused by meaning. That isn't the way it works. to my mind. The way it works is it's an accident, it's an artifact of evolution, this feeling of meaning. And we want it, we crave it, but we should not be chasing it. What we should be doing is living our life purposes, doing the next right thing, so to speak. And if the next right thing acquires us the feeling of meaning, wonderful. And if it doesn't, let's just slough it off. Let's not worry about meaning so much. think even though a lot of people don't use the meaning word, They're worried about it all the time. They're thinking about the experience of meaninglessness all the time, somewhere, somehow in their being, even if they don't use this language. And I would like to encourage folks to worry less about the meaning in their lives and think more about how to live a purposeful Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (26:23.646) Do you believe in the soul? Eric (26:27.566) It's a word that has no particular resonance for me. I guess if I had to give a yes -no dualistic answer, it would be no, if I had to give that kind of answer, just because I think it's a slippery slope to the place of acting like you know something you don't know and elevating an experience one might have had to a place that it isn't quite deserved. So it's not really that I'm against soul, so to speak, or that I really have an opinion about it one way or another. I just think it opens a door to a place that isn't okay, that it opens a place to acting like one knows something that I'm sure most people do not, that people do not know and can't know. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (27:17.278) Okay, so there's some robust science that exists in these certain academic labs written about for quite some time and they're in two separate areas. One of them is near -death experiences. I don't know if you've looked into the work of like a Dr. Raymond Mooney or some of these, you know, labs like in Columbia and so forth that kind of examine these phenomenon. And then the other is around like past lives. past life experiences where very young children can describe their past lives or even speak in a language that is like ancient and no longer spoken. So there's this unexplainable phenomenon and in unexplainable phenomenon, we try to make sense of it. well, I think we make sense of unexplainable phenomenon all the time. That's part of the human experience. We incorporate Eric (28:04.727) We Eric (28:13.434) Not if you mean unexplainable. If you're using, you're not using the adjective quite, you've stuck on an adjective that I think defeats the possibility of it being explained. If you were to say currently unexplainable, that would shift for me the conversation. But if it's just called unexplainable, then it's Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (28:33.963) Yeah, currently unexplainable. Yeah, I guess if we got in the time machine and we went back to the 1700s and we pulled out our cell phones, that would be kind of unexplainable to them, right? It's a phenomenon they don't understand. It's not in their consciousness. Eric (28:51.436) That's right. It would be currently unexplainable to them till we explained it. But what I think, I know you were going somewhere with it and I know I interrupted, but I think the movement from unexplainable phenomena to trying to explain them, I think is just too often illegitimate. The movement is, it's not that there isn't unexplainable phenomena. It's just the explaining of it doesn't work for me. I think it's just too easy. The explaining is too easy. that's God's work or the universe's love or something that moving from let's call it an is let's say that there is these phenomena are but you know the naturalistic fallacy and that's going from moving from an is to an ought and that's the idea that since somebody since there are past since we experienced past lives that means that we ought believe in a God, that ought doesn't work to me. There is the Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (29:53.372) Yeah. So even when even you mentioned before around like, evolution, right, like somehow make, you know, consciousness has evolved or, you know, through evolution, that's still a way that you're creating an explanation for something. Eric (30:11.04) Absolutely, I believe it's a metaphor. I have no idea that there is such a thing as evolution. seriously, I mean, to me, it's a working metaphor, it's not even hypothesis to me. It's a working metaphor that works for me in talking about the things I want to talk about. But I agree with you that it's equally unknowable how This picture of a tidal pool 15 billion years ago and some lightning thing hitting it and creating life, that's as weird to me as some other kinds of ideas about how it all began. So I'm not buying that. I'm not buying that. it's to me a working metaphor that, as I say, works in helping to explain something. Not explain, that's not the right word. In helping to chat about some things. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (31:07.379) It's interesting. It's almost like you're coming from a perspective that it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter at Eric (31:12.138) No, it doesn't really matter. What matters is doing the right thing. Now, we could have exactly that's the next question. That's the next question, isn't it? I don't have an answer for how one determines it. But let's just say, let's go all the way back to your introduction about normal. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (31:16.904) How does one determine what is the right Eric (31:36.046) We were saying, where are we with normal nowadays? What does it mean? Let's just take one example. If you are a soldier and you go fight in a war and you kill a lot of people who have no reason to be killed and you come home, Eric (31:56.066) The psychiatric profession says what's normal is to have no conscience, have no PSD, have no feelings about that. That's what's normal, is to be perfectly fine with all And what's abnormal is to have a conscience, have nightmares, have bad feelings about having done that. and relive the experiences, et cetera. That's abnormal. That's something we're going to label PTSD and call that a mental disorder. That you have a conscience is a mental disorder. I think in you and I talking, I think we understand words like conscience and humanism and values and this, that and the other thing. Yes, we could end up being stuck in the relativistic place of your values or your values and my values and my values. And yet I still think we understand something about good and evil that wherever it comes from. And I don't, as I say, it doesn't matter to me whether there's a God who posited good and evil into our brain or whether it's an artifact of evolution or whatever it may be. I do think that those feelings exist, those beliefs exist as to what's better and what's worse. There are lots of gray areas. Existentialists talk about these gray areas all the time. Should you stay home with your aging mother or go fight for your country? How do you make that kind of decision? What's the ethical decision? Eric (33:28.662) All of that's really difficult to understand in real life. It's really difficult to give you another kind of example about the difficulty. If you are kind of a Western medicine person and you're in relationship with an alternative medicine person and she gets diagnosed with cancer and she only wants to go to an alternative medicine doctor and you pull your hair out because you want her to go to a Western doctor, these differences are about values and stuff that's going to be with us, but I nevertheless believe that we have some core understandings wherever they come from about what's right to do and what's wrong to do with complications, with lots of complications. But I think we have those and I don't think we have to resort to, is that the way to say it, resort to extra human explanations for what's been baked into while at the same time not knowing why it's baked into Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (34:32.926) Just curious, do you meditate or have you meditated? Eric (34:38.924) I don't formally meditate. When I started out as a Psychotherapist intern, you know the 10 minutes between sessions. I was interning at a transpersonal counseling center in San Francisco where lots of things like meditation were in the air and done. And so I learned some quick meditative practices for myself to use between sessions with clients to clear the mind and to relax and to do all of those sorts of things. I have quick things that I do that work for me. just to amplify a tiny bit, I did a book called Ten Zen Seconds and the ten of that title is a long inhale and exhale, a long deep breath, ten seconds. And the idea of that book was to drop a useful cognition into a deep breath. Simple idea where you would say to yourself I'm perfectly fine or I surrender to this moment return with strength or some short set of words dropped into a deep breath because I thought that people could get the physiological benefits of deep breathing and the cognitive benefits of thinking the right thing all in one nice little package and I called those packages incantations from the world of magic. just like that word. I sell Eric (36:14.702) I'll just use sell as a loose word. try to sell clients on having these kinds of strategies and tactics, but having them be portable so that while they may do a great job of meditating for 45 minutes in the morning, that may not help them if they're having a conversation, an anxiety -producing conversation with their literary agent in the afternoon. So I want them to have something they can use then when the anxiety is really mounting. So I do believe in all of these tactics, techniques, strategies. I kind of personalize and individualize all of them because that's who I Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (36:51.752) Yeah, I asked the question because you're coming across to me right now as very heady, you know, a thinker and a deep thinker and somebody who is very aware of his own thinking and possibly even really enjoys it, right? And I can connect to you on that because in a lot of ways, a lot of my life has been that until some profound experiences have happened to me and I have gone deep into meditation. Eric (37:00.589) Mm -hmm. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (37:21.778) and then learn to detach from the content of my mind. And in doing so, there are some, I don't know, you can call them psychedelic or even paranormal type experiences, right? Where there's knowledge that exists outside of language. Or there is an experience that one has that can occur in that state. And some people, can use, you know, certain Eric (37:33.677) Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (37:50.76) plant -based medicines, you know, seem to achieve the same kind of wonderment or understanding of the unified nature of all things. And you feel this and you experience it and there's lessons learned that were never thought before. I've gotten to this place that there is a difference between thinking and knowing. And some, so there's a degree in our conversation that kind of suggests like, you know, our small self, our egos, our minds, you know, are always trying to make sense of things, and it's unexplainable, and we'll just make it up. And it could be used to harm people. And it has. And you seem, you seem very acutely aware of the potential for human beings to do harm. Eric (38:30.946) Absolutely. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (38:37.714) by achieving some godlike status where they think they know more than the average person. And they use that to negatively influence people, to do harm or to work under their behalf and ideologies or so forth. And that sensitive acuity to all that seems like it's powerful and it impacts how you see the world. Eric (39:04.078) To answer, it wasn't a question, but to address the first part of what you said, I will never have those experiences that you described because I don't like to go there. Just in the same sense that, know, I did my share of drugs as a young person, but I never liked them because they reduced my sense of personal control. And you're right that personal control, if that's exactly the way to say it, is important to me. So there are whole array of experiences that I'm not going to have. I guess I'll say on purpose. I'm on purpose not going to have them because I don't want to, so to speak, go there. So must I know things by thinking rather than knowing in the sense in which you describe it? Yes. I'll have to know things that way because as I say on purpose, I don't want to lose the control that would be required to go to the places that might produce knowing. I'm not sure that they do. mean, you know, that would be a separate question. Probably in my belief system, I don't believe that they're producing real knowing any more than I have ever believed that dreams are really about something working through anxiety at the moment or something that they're interpreting dreams, it has never made particular sense to me, maybe in the same territory of doubt, I suppose. But your basic point about sort of where I come from is exactly correct. It comes from just thinking about things and not having certain kinds of experiences that I don't want to Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (40:54.076) Yeah, interesting. And, know, and I wonder when we talk about consciousness, and if we are, you know, kind of creators of art, do you agree we are creators of our reality? Eric (41:09.293) influencers of our reality. Eric (41:15.999) I guess I'll take a pass on that sentence because I think it takes us to multiple places simultaneously. Eric (41:26.134) I believe that if you hit a stone, it will hurt. I believe in that sense of reality. This is an old question in philosophy about just the substantiality of things. So I believe in that. I don't think we create the stone. I think the stone exists. Do we invent narratives that then play themselves out? Absolutely. Are we held hostage by the things we think that aren't serving us? Absolutely. Do we do a poor job of getting what the Buddha called getting a grip on your mind? Do we do a poor job of that? Absolutely. So I guess I have lots of different kinds of answers to that. I would go in many different directions in answer to that question, I suppose. If I had to, again, give a yes, no answer, then the answer would be yes, that we do create our own reality in the sense that we are what we think, we are what we feel, we are those things that we are unaware of, that somehow percolate up in those strange moments where we do something completely antithetical to what we thought we ought to do, or that we really wanted to do. So all of that I do believe in, that we are that kind of creature, only half known to ourselves and stuck being, just to say this quickly, I have a simple model of personality that I share that I like, which is that personality is made up of three parts. Original personality, form personality, and available personality. Simple model. And that is, we already come into the world somebody with lots of instructions. Psychology doesn't pay much attention to that idea of original personality. It doesn't know how to pay attention to it. So kind of lets it go. But then over time, we accrete into who everybody knows us to be, this foreign personality. In my model, we have enough available personality, enough freedom left to become the person we want to become. That's my model. And that amount of freedom fluctuates a lot depending on where we are in life. If we're actively an addict, we don't have a lot of available personality. We're just running around town looking for a fix. But the moment we enter recovery, Eric (43:46.306) we have more personality available to us. Not a ton more, but more in that split second. So that's all by way of saying personalities, complicated. The sense in which we may have come into the world a little sadder than the next person or more anxious than the next person or this or that is not much taken into account in psychology because again, it's hard to know. How would you take it into account? How would you know that a person has a blueprint for being sadder or more anxious or what have you? I guess that's just a long -winded way of saying, I do believe that we create our own reality, but I don't know to what extent or really how to elaborate on Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (44:28.624) I mean, I think the mind is powerful. So when you, when you say that, you know, I don't want to go there, you know, mysteries exist or, know, the possibility exists that I can go to a different place of a higher state of consciousness, but I don't want to give up that control necessarily, or I have no desire to do so. Then in essence that, that informs a reality or an existence for you that potentially could be self -limiting. Eric (44:54.668) Sure, that's an easy one. Sure. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (44:55.708) Right? then anyone can do the same exact extra, actually we all do that, right? So our experience can be inherently self -limiting or it could actually propel us to extraordinary feats and experiences Eric (45:00.632) That's Eric (45:09.922) It could. mean, there are some premises in what you said that I know you hold them, I can hear that you hold them, and that is that when you go there, the place I don't want to go to, you've gone to a higher place. I think it's a lower place. But that's, that's, Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (45:22.686) interesting. would make it lower? we're both then like, all right, there's language. So we're talking about the use of language. So Eric (45:31.006) Exactly. Exactly. I guess it, let's use alcohol for a second. We know it's a disinhibitor. If you use alcohol to take yourself someplace, let's just say you hate your job or your relationship or something and you drink to relieve yourself from those feelings, I think that takes you to a lower place to be drunk, not a higher place. You may have an experience you like. You may have enjoyed punching someone in the nose in that moment or something. There may be something about that experience that keeps you wanting more of it. We have addicts. There's something about the experience that keeps you wanting to have more of it, but that's not a higher place to me. Now, know you're not, I know we're talking about apples and oranges here, but that's kind of my sense of what happens when you lose the control I want for myself is that you don't go to a higher place. You go to a different place. But to my mind, it's a less inhibited could be more surreal, more imaginative, more x, more y, more z, can have certain attributes that we might call positive and creative, but to me it's still basically a letting go of values, principles, morals, and what have you for the sake of a certain kind of experience, and so to me it's lower, and I know we're playing with language here, I Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (46:53.726) So how important would you say that the experience of love is in human development? Eric (47:04.66) It's like paramount. It's a big deal experience. However we are built, we are different when we are loving than when we're hating. We're better. As long as we're talking about love. You we're not talking about stalking somebody and calling that lover, but we're talking about love. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (47:30.13) But love also in multiple terms, like the compassion towards an animal and the protection of your kindness to others. Eric (47:35.885) Absolutely. Eric (47:40.458) Absolutely. All of the synonyms of love that are real synonyms of love I'm for, just as all of the synonyms for passion, love being one of them, but also enthusiasm, interest, curiosity. I think these are, just to use loose language, humanistic values that we know to value. We may not be able to hold on to them in a given moment because Our town just got bombed and we're angry and we want revenge, not love. mean, it's hard in many circumstances to love or feel compassion or not hold a grudge for centuries. We know all the grudges that have been held for millennia among religious groups or people. We know that. So it's not easy to do this thing that you're saying, but it's of paramount importance and anything we as helpers can do to promote love and compassion and enthusiasm and interest and curiosity. Just to circle all the way back, as I mentioned, when I was in training, as maybe I mentioned that I'm not sure, but when I was in training as a therapist, A, I would raise my hand and ask questions, but B, I was surprised by how curious the folks around me were in listening to these ideas about what the DSM was doing. There was this, such lack of energy and lack of interest and lack of curiosity and lack of enthusiasm and maybe to your point maybe lack of love that there wasn't really no love and to say it's strange to say there should have been love in the classroom but there should be love of this stuff that we're paying money to learn and it's going to be our profession and we're there not just for professional reasons but hopefully that there's some place in us that's moved by idea of helping or this idea of being curious about human beings. It's got to be something there more than sort of rote mechanical professionalism. That's all I saw was rote mechanical, maybe pseudo Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (49:49.832) So, would you agree then that experience of love is a higher state of consciousness than being intoxicated? Eric (50:02.35) This higher state of consciousness language. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (50:05.938) Right? you were talking about like, you know, I was talking about higher states or higher experiences versus lower ones and your point of comparison was like the change and shift in experience from being drunk, right? And there could be a rewarding aspect about that. And so you said that's a lower level of experience, right? So then would you agree that love is Eric (50:23.0) Correct. Correct. Okay, then in that context, I'll go with it. I'll go with it in that context. Love is not, love, yes. Love is, I'm grudgingly gonna use the language of higher consciousness and higher experience. I'm gonna grudgingly use it for love, because love really doesn't matter. So I'm gonna go there. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (50:44.712) Okay, good. All right, and then let's say that you did decide to shift your idea of control and higher states of being. And you entered into a practice that is centuries old and allows for a shift of consciousness. Let's just, we'll call it meditation, but there's probably others too. Let's say it's non -drug induced. And then you detach from the mind completely Eric (51:08.206) Sure, I'm following, yep. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (51:13.98) And you enter into this other place that's difficult to put to words and you experience, you experience only love and you experience a connection in a higher state of understanding about the Eric (51:23.522) Yeah, that's very clear. Very clear. I don't want to go there. I don't want to go there. I'll tell you why. Eric (51:34.962) So, Camus is one of my favorite writers, the French existential writer. And of course he wrote novels and plays and what have you, but he also wrote essays and he also wrote lots of letters. He ran the rebel newsletter Combat. There's a famous letter to my German friend that he wrote. And in that letter, he said, we just didn't think you Germans were going to be this bad. We kind of kept essentially loving you. We kept thinking fondly of you. We just could not believe that you would be this bad. Now that we understand it, we're going to absolutely kill all of the battlefield. We're absolutely going to fight to the death to stop you. It took us too long to stop loving Eric (52:30.412) And I don't know if this parses for you as a response to what you're saying, but I want to step outside of an experience like loving all humanity for the sake of understanding where I shouldn't be loving, where it's not a good idea to be loving, where I have to be watchful. This is part of my authoritarian personality interest, age -old authoritarian personality interest. I want to know that you're Hitler and I don't want to love I don't want access, I don't want to be, this is a funny way to say it, but I don't want to be trapped in loving. I want to love when I want to love and I want to be in some other state, I don't want to call it hate, but I want to be in some other state when you are dangerous to me. So I think that, I'm not sure if that was reply to what you were saying, but that's what came up for me is that I don't, I understand what you're saying about, wouldn't it be wonderful if that state could and permanent and what have you, but I don't think that that's where a human being should stand in that space of complete loving kindness. I understand the idea of loving kindness. I understand it. I think it's dangerous. I think it's wonderful and dangerous simultaneously. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (53:49.97) Yeah, I think I agree with your point there. think my counter is that it's possible that the most loving people can see evil more clearly even. even when it comes to, let's go to World War II, let's go to the Nazis and their war crimes. Defending oneself, protecting of others, fighting against evil can also be viewed as a loving act as well. Eric (54:00.129) I agree with Eric (54:21.934) I don't want to play with language here. I understand and I'll agree with that. But in war, terrible things happen. You bomb an installation that ought to be bombed, but you also kill 200 children in the neighboring school. That's not to me love. That's the necessity of Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (54:44.006) No, think you're, I you're taking it a step too far. Yeah, like, so if your house is burning, you know, leave it. Like run out of your home if your home is burning. If there is, if there is evil that is infringing upon the freedom or the rights of another person, the courageousness to protect others, you know, is a loving. Eric (55:07.693) Yes. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (55:12.376) act to sit there and to be completely maybe potentially nonviolent and let something let evil be able to harm people around you. don't know. I wouldn't put that in terms of like this passive passivity that is in love. we're getting a little bit further. I walking, I wanted to walk down a road to like construction, use of language and how it constructs reality. Because you and I work and live in a world where the Eric (55:12.587) I agree with Eric (55:35.022) Sure. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (55:40.67) idea of mental illness exists. And I think we're probably on the same page that that construction that I didn't identification of an experience in itself can be used to harm people has throughout history and is now and authoritarians, those who desire control can be placed into these positions power that can place a label on somebody that inherently both harms them, but could also strip them of their rights, their freedoms, and so forth. So I want to get your viewpoint from the perspective of someone who, you know, is 30 years my senior, is that shift in that into where we are in 2024, is that mental health treatment now Eric (56:14.998) Absolutely. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (56:35.294) ascribes to this idea of mental illness, that it's biological in nature, that it should be treated in a similar way that maybe insulin does for diabetes. And we must go to the doctor for our ills, our emotional struggles, this complexity of which you and I took 55 minutes to discuss today. And we could probably, it'd be a never ending discussion. I mean, that is philosophy, but we've reduced it to this. How did we get here? Eric (56:58.702) That's right. Eric (57:05.518) Well, this is a small subject. No, this is about as huge as it gets. I think, let me start by saying the analogy from physical disorder to mental disorder is so powerful. The analogy is so powerful that it itself keeps a bad thing going. Just the analogy works so well in the ear, so to So that's just a problem that we in the critical psychology or critical psychiatry areas have is that that analogy just strikes people as completely sensible. So how did we get here? Let's just go back, let's say 175 years or someplace to slavery. There were early psychiatrists, whatever they were called, they pre -Feridian times, but there were early psychiatrists who designated an uppity slave as mentally disordered because how dare you not want to be a slave that just showed In other words, it was a social control thing way back when. It's always been a social control thing. If you're a dissident in Russia, get, addition to going to Gulag, you get some mental disorder label. If until recently, as everybody, think everybody knows this, if until recently you were homosexual, that was a mental disorder till the social pressures forced the American Psychiatric Association to quote, change their mind. There's no new evidence of anything. Well, it's not a, it's a mental disorder on Monday. It's not a mental disorder on Tuesday. Eric (58:50.872) So this has been going on for a very long time. Our current iterations of it start roughly in the 1950s. I'm sure some most people are aware of this kind of the sequence of this, but in the 1950s, folks, guys, men around a table decided to create a document, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the Narcan Psychiatric Association. And they came up with a cool idea. This is just like doing business. Let's have a cool idea. Let's collect symptoms. Let's collect symptoms. Let's call them, let's collect things and call them symptoms. That's our first step. We'll call them symptoms. Then we'll put them together in, let's call it a symptom picture. That sounds cool. We don't know why eating too much and sleeping a long time and being sad and what, don't know why these things necessarily go together, but we'll say they go together. We'll say that as a statistical matter, they go together, whatever that So we've got a gambit going here right from the get -go that was brilliant. And that was, let's call things like being sad a symptom of something. Let's call being tired a symptom of a mental disorder. Let's call having a certain kind of thought a symptom of a mental disorder. Let's call having a hallucination a symptom of a mental disorder. Why not? Who's going to stop So these several guys sitting around created this document and the current thing that we all live by, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, got built from one day to the next, so to speak, with this idea that it was okay, that it was legitimate to call this, that and the other thing a symptom of a mental disorder, to package them together and come up with a label called a diagnosis. The obvious proof that this was a gambit or a gimmick, the obvious proof is that the DSM is silent on causation, has nothing to say about causing anything, and it's silent on treatment, has nothing to say about what to do about anything. Its whole thing is creating a shopping catalog for mental health professionals to shop for labels. That's its whole rationale. Eric (01:01:13.922) By the way, diagnostic and statistical manuals, shouldn't it be diagnostic and treatment manual if it was a real thing? What's mean in there? It's like your car breaks down and statistically it's probably your whatever. No, it's what do you do? The red light came on. What do you do? Well, I have nothing to say about what you do, which is as a statistical matter, came on. So there are a million problems with the DSM. And by the way, just Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:01:36.744) Yeah. Eric (01:01:43.886) completeness of this idea. The DSM is the American thing, which is being promoted and sold worldwide. But there's another document, the ICD, the International Classification of Diseases, which much of the world uses exactly in the same way. The ICD and the DSM are in lockstep about this symptom picture thing. Eric (01:02:11.636) It is nothing easier than creating a mental disorder in this Put anything together you like. Let me play the game. look, here's an eight -year -old. He's got a ton of energy. He's got so much energy that he has a hard time sitting still in class. Eric (01:02:36.312) has a hard time doing his homework. has no trouble. He spends three hours on video games. We're not going to take that as proof that he has attention. No, that's not proof of anything that he has perfect attention for the things that interest him. He just has no attention at church, at the dinner table, at homework or in school. That's where he has no attention. He can't pay attention. Well, this is wonderful. We've got many different places where he doesn't pay attention. Let's put, let's cobble that together and call that, hmm, attention deficit hyperactivity Let's give it a Eric (01:03:09.74) And since we don't have a pill for it quite yet, let's give him a second diagnosis because we may need something else here. So let's find another diagnosis that we have a chemical for and we'll give him that diagnosis. Now he has two nice diagnoses, et cetera. This is the way the game is played. The game is played to create more mental disorder diagnoses as possible so that you as a professional have a fuller shopping, Christmas shopping catalog of things you can. treat. And how do you treat? It's funny. Simultaneously, the mental health world says the following two things. It's biological and you need a pill. But we can also talk it out of you. It's called psychotherapy. So you don't really need a pill, et cetera. There's some very weird schizophrenic idea that on the one hand it's a horse and on the other hand it's a camel simultaneously. The idea, should strike everybody as wrong, that the idea that you hate your job and therefore are sad can be treated with a pill, that hating your job is something that can be treated with a pill should strike people as odd. Any more than saying, let's treat your hatred of your job with scotch. That'll work. You'll feel much Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:04:35.442) Yeah. Let's, but I want to take it to another level because as you mentioned earlier, one of the things that has always, you know, concerned you about maybe the nature of humanity is our willingness to be, you know, passive learners and to just blindly accept what is told by the authority. So we're at a very unique period in, American, the development of the United States of America. So many astute political observers and, historians might say that where we are right now in the United States represents late stage empire. You know, for example, there in a lot of ways like we've devolved into depravity, we're divided, we're overextended militarily, we're devaluing our own currency, we're in large amounts of debt. Our borders are pretty much wide open. And so although we've always been a country of immigrants, now there's lawlessness in its ability to be able to just come through Eric (01:05:11.352) Mm -hmm. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:05:34.526) the border. throughout the course of history, there's always been evil authoritarianism. There's been totalitarianism, fascisms, and so forth. And there's been a large eugenics movement. The eugenics movement didn't stop in, you know, in 1942. It's one that, you know, consists to today. There's very powerful people who believe that the world is overpopulated. There's too many, that there's a lot people who inhabit the earth are just nothing more than parasites really and using up natural resources to the point where we're going to maybe end humanity, right? And so these belief systems are, think, a more sophisticated manner applied to be acceptable, okay? So let's look at where our mental health system currently is. Psychiatry has more influence than at any point history. And the current mental health paradigm does really shrink the idea of what is normal and acceptable and increase the idea that somebody is disordered, is, is ill. And when there's a disease of the mind, how easy it is to devalue that person and to control that person too. And When I say things like I believe our mental health system does keep people docile, that the mental health system keeps them productive and potentially a system that is fundamentally at odds with human well -being, like for example, working for the corporation and having to leave childcare, you know, to another corporation to pay for, for example, or to hate your job or to hate lots of aspects of your life. Maybe you're not connected with nature. Maybe you're working under fluorescent lighting. Maybe the money that you make does not go as far as it used to. Everything costs more in the grocery store and yet we're funding foreign wars, right? And we're supposed to be okay with all those things. But then when you are not, when you're not and you don't feel well about it and you're angry and you're sick and you feel hopeless, Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:07:48.326) And those emotions, to me, have this like real fundamental value. And sometimes it's rising up against tyranny. You know, throughout the course of history for doing the right thing, for rights to right a wrong, we would have to come together collectively as a group. In my viewpoint, it's in the name of love. But generally speaking, it is to fight against tyranny and it is to support freedom. Isn't the field of psychiatry and this idea of mental illness isn't the right arm of tyranny and of government control. Eric (01:08:22.412) Absolutely. Absolutely. First of all, it's a non -medical specialty. It's a joke that it's in medicine. It's a non -medical specialty. The idea that psychiatrists know they're not diagnosing the way real medicine, are no blood tests, it's just not real diagnosing. And they understand the extent to which their treatments are not real treatments. Let me just give you one example of the difference between providing medicine for something because you know what's going on and providing medicine, to speak medicine, and having no idea what's going on. If a raging rhino is coming at Eric (01:09:14.636) We have drugs, have tranquilizers that can put it down. We could shoot it with a tranquilizer dart and put it down. That's not a treatment for whatever is causing the rhino to rage. It's not a treatment for that. It's just something we can do. We can pacify the rhino. We'll do that to children. That's something we can do and we'll call that treatment. And that's how psychiatric, so to speak, psychiatric medicine works. It's not real treatment. It's more like that kind of tranquilizer dart in a raging rhino. So there's Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:09:30.75) We'll do that to children in the name of medicine. Eric (01:09:53.582) But then we have the, and this is the human nature problem that perplexes us and makes us wring our hands. It's the extent to which people want these diagnoses. It's the epidemic self -acceptance of these diagnoses and the self -diagnoses. People just going online and saying, I see, I have ADHD or, I see, I'm on the spectrum. I see, this explains that I have clinical depression. people look to be hungry to have this kind of pseudo explanation for why what's going on in their lives is going on. And we can't stop them from wanting this. It seems to be an attribute of human nature to want to glom on to something that explains what's going on. So one of the reasons that psychiatry, think, has to win is this of human nature that people want what psychiatry is offering. They don't want the pill necessarily. They don't, they surely do not want the side effects of the pill, but what they want is an psychiatry gives them a clear answer to what's going on. You have X. You'll always have X. You have X. Live with it. Get over it. Move on. And aren't you glad that I've told you what X is now? Aren't you feeling much? This is the super placebo effect of the label itself, is that just getting the label makes people feel better, at least for a while. In my experience over time, they lose the likingness for that label. And they start to wonder after X years, not just about should I titrate off the 17 things I'm taking, not just that, but am I really X? Eric (01:11:54.968) Did I too easily buy X and should I let go of X now? So that's a baked in difficulty that we all face who are in the critical psychology or critical psychiatry lanes is that people easily buy these labels and seem to crave Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:12:15.078) And I would say it represents a delusion and part of my concern about the mind and how suggestible some people are that an idea can be created and someone can attach to that idea as if it's a truth, even when it does not necessarily pass the test of fact checking or empirical analysis. Yes, there is something seductive about the idea that I can take something quick and easy and it will relieve me of this pain of being human. Because to be human is to experience emotional pain. And what I find really insidious is that I think there's a paradoxical effect that occurs in the concept of mental health. That the more you obsess about it, the more you think about it, the more unhealthy we become, we get stuck in, you know, essentially this pattern of we're thinking always about ourselves. We're thinking always about the terms, what is wrong with us? What are we feeling? There's a hypervigilant to each experience that we have. And then there's a judgment and a label attached to it, right? So you experience the feeling anxiety or you experience some form of fear or sadness or loss or emptiness. And then there's the judgment of it and there's the rumination of it. And then there's the fight to get rid of it. And all of that creates mental suffering. And then we are constantly going and searching for ways to relieve it from ourselves. And probably where I might attach to some of the things that you said earlier about the meaning is that sometimes trying to attach a meaning to something keeps us in that cycle of struggle. Eric (01:14:10.882) Exactly. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:14:10.982) and suffering and pulls us away from what really does matter most, which is the now, the life that we have that's in front of us and to engage in that. So I'm a believer that the system in itself is part of social control, that any reasonable person who can think about this critically would understand that it keeps people stuck in the cycle. Eric (01:14:19.95) That's Eric (01:14:33.666) That's right. Just to piggyback on that, I still use Trump as a verb. I think our life purposes should trump our desire for meaning, as I said earlier. And I think our life purposes should trump our interest in our mood. I agree with you. I think we want to stop caring about our moods so much and caring about meaning so much and make the paradigm shift from there is a purpose to life identifying and naming our many life purposes, what's important to us, and living them. It's a very simple idea, but most people, if they think about it or if they're honest, would say they're not really living their life purposes. They may not even have identified what's important to them, except in the vaguest of ways, my family's important or what have you, but not really done this, so to speak, simple task of writing down a list of what's important to them and translating those important things into three or five or seven life purposes and then penciling those life purposes into the week so that you're actually living your life purposes as opposed to just being pulled about by your to -do lists and your moods and all of that stuff. So for me, an answer, not the answer, but an answer to the thing we're discussing is a more purposeful and intentional life where we make the decision, the conscious decision to care less about how we're feeling. and whether what we're doing is producing the experience of meaning and paying much more attention to just doing what we claim is important to us. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:16:11.272) So where I think we might come to some disagreement is around institutions. So where I agree with you is that religion can be corrupted. That the institution of religion is vulnerable to corruption and has in history will demonstrate Where I have questions and maybe concerns is that maybe two truths can exist at the same time. Where that if we look historically, if we look through biblical texts, spiritual texts, the writings of what might be considered spiritual masters in some degree, there are some profound lessons that are not that dissimilar, Eric, from what you're saying right you know, about that purpose of life. Now, it might come from a paradigm that, you know, that is divinely inspired, and it is God's will inside of you. Maybe it is your soul, is connection to the Holy Spirit, or the various words that different faiths describe it, is to live that out, and that exists within you, and you have a powerful purpose in being able to live that out, that you are ultimately a creator. and that there is a right and a wrong, and there are themes of love and do unto others as you would have done unto you, for example, and that interconnectedness. And all those lessons have meanings, right? And they're powerful meanings. Yes, they can be corrupted. Yes, they have. But the absence of that, the absence of having a way of integrating that into our culture, into our society, into the manner in which we make decisions that are moral. The absence of that I think creates more problems than it solves because human beings are ultimately seeking out something greater than themselves. What are your thoughts Eric (01:18:17.662) I would like to not agree because I'm sort of basically against a lot of people in a room for any reason. But I think I do agree that even though individual effort is really, really important, community and group and larger than group effort is what keeps civilization afloat. And so I am four institutions in that sense that I believe we need them to keep civilization afloat. I think they're inherently corruptible and slide toward corruption a lot of the time. So I think we may both agree about the dangers of institutions. To take one example, I'm four 12 -step programs. I think they have served a lot of people. And if you go into a 12 -step program, you kind of have to make a decision, not on day one, but at some point, about whether you're buying the higher power rhetoric or you're going to find your own language for that higher power rhetoric and still enjoy the benefits of community and the other attributes of 12 -step programs one day at a time, first things first. All that language is useful whether you're believing in a higher power. or not. So that may be a little bit of a model for how I think about institutions. That is that every institution may have its problem, like espousing a higher power language might have its own problem. But that if the institution is serving people and keeping civilization afloat, then we may have to maybe hold our nose a little bit but go into these groupings. for the sake of the power of group action and for the sake of the feeling of community. So I'm not sure if that's exactly an answer, or maybe I'm not sure if that exactly explains my stance, but essentially I'm against groups. I don't trust them, but I understand how group action is necessary for the things we want to remain in place. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:20:41.086) Yeah, I I look at certain quotes throughout the course of history that have, think, profound meaning and help people deal with some of the darkest times and evil that exists. For example, darkness can't drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. Dr. Martin Luther King. The night is darkest just before the dawn. 1650, Thomas Fuller. In the midst of darkness, light persists. Mahatma Gandhi. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. The darker the night, the brighter the stars. Dostoevsky. Stars can't shine without darkness. In the darkest times, hope is something you give yourself. Even in the darkest night will end and the sun will rise. The darkness always passes and the light comes back. Darkness is only the absence of light, turn on a light and it banishes the darkness. There's this historical meaning to the dialectical balance between love and loss, hate and... Eric (01:21:57.318) That's right. That's interesting and a clear explication of something. But see, would not be Martin Luther King. I'd be Malcolm Eric (01:22:15.254) I don't believe in the correctness of a lot of those sentiments as saving civilization from itself well enough. So we just have a difference of feeling or opinion. Just the way lots of African -American folks divide around, you Malcolm X or are you Martin Luther King? That's a division. which comes from a different sense of what's required for the same values to be upheld. What's required? So I guess I'll just put a period at the end of that sentence. I think there's a fundamental difference in feeling about what's required to stop the bad guys. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:23:08.926) Well, I think it extends a little bit beyond stopping bad guys. I also think it extends to our own internal world and our own internal So one of my concerns with where we are in the mental health system, the psych - labeling and it's war against emotion. And it is a war, right? It's saying that if you feel something too intensely in some way that the way towards health is to decrease its intensity or numb it or blunt it, right? You go into a doctor, they say, how do you feel? You've, you complete a symptom checklist. And if Eric (01:23:31.722) Absolutely. Yep. Eric (01:23:44.098) Yep. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:23:50.514) communicate in any way that you've been experiencing emotional pain. They're like, no, let's up the dose. But the truth of the matter is, is the light can't exist without the dark. Love and joy don't experience without its dialectical opposite, unless you can experience what it means to be unhappy, to experience emptiness, to question your life value and your purpose. I think it's very difficult fully engage in when its opposite exists, right? Like I talked to you about my gratitude practice. If I'm not aware of what it's like to be a paraplegic, then I will take my walking for granted. And so I believe that there has to be a greater acceptance of the dark. We need to bring back our collective language of suffering. Eric (01:24:27.467) Absolutely. Eric (01:24:48.789) Absolutely. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:24:49.766) And there are certain institutions that address that in religious movements, where it is a place where people find solace and seek a greater understanding and a way to deal with the pain and loss. God knows the mental health industry hasn't been able to do that. They've corrupted it. They've made it worse. And I think really good people, philosophers, people like yourself, deep thinkers, are comfortable entering into that dark space and comfortable with being people who even are considering entering their life without fear, without judgment. And now we're in a system where now someone even mentions the idea that they want to end their life. It's like you're supposed to take them to a hospital or something and save them against themselves. Eric (01:25:32.948) know. That was the key existential issue. All the existentialists said that this is what, this is the bottom line question that everybody faces, to live or not to live, and it's their choice. We're not going to use loose language, stigmatize those who choose that they don't want to play this game, that they got dropped onto this earth and they have the right to drop off this earth, not to. be encouraging suicide, but just to talk about it from that philosophical standpoint of it's an essential right of freedom to think about these questions. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:26:16.254) Yeah, I totally agree. And I feel like we're moving further away from that in culture. And I'm concerned about the implications. Eric (01:26:22.431) And it was one little tiny moment of pushback against psychiatry, I'm sure you know it, where not too long ago recently they wanted to reduce the amount of time you were allowed to grieve a loss. And if they could have done it, they would have, you know, stripped it to 20 hours or three hours of lost your child. That's five hours. But there was pushback on that, that was both unempathetic, inhuman and implausible to set some limit of X number of days or months on grieving. So every once in a while, it's just like in the wider world of politics, every once in a while, there's pushback against some terrible idea. And it gets pushed back a little bit. But then the tidal wave of the model returns. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:27:19.646) So we're in the late innings of this podcast or the fourth quarter, whatever we want to call it. And so this is a good transition because there's a book of years that I have not read, which is the future of mental health. And so we're having these, you know, these discussions and I haven't been able to read that book, but I'm just curious about if there is going to be a movement that is successful. Eric (01:27:24.779) Yeah. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:27:49.25) in the institution of psychiatry, the biomedical model and its allopathic foundations, if we're going to just deconstruct this and reconstruct it into something that better serves humanity, what is the future of mental health in your opinion and how do we get Eric (01:28:10.402) Well, you started that sentence with a clause about if there is a way, there isn't a way. So in my writings about the future of mental health, I think they win. And that's one of those dark things to say, but I think that their model can't really be supplanted by a model. So what I'm suggesting as the future of mental health is that individual practitioners do their part. It's that return to the individual effort. Yes, it'd be lovely if groups like the kinds of groups you're involved in, the kinds of groups I'm involved in could be massive help. That would be lovely. But I think each, it comes back to each individual practitioner in a group setting saying this doesn't make sense to me or in dealing with the client sitting across from him or her being human and allowing for human interactions and not selling the pill that's available. So to present the dark side of it, I don't think there is change possible in this direction, just as with, well, as we know, every three out of four ads on TV are drug ads or big pharma selling things. And that's increasing, it feels like exponentially, it seems like every minute there's another drug for your short eyelashes or whatever it is that you have a problem with, there's a new drug for it. In the short term, whatever that means, the short term, big pharma is winning. Statistically, it's winning. It's shipping more more pills worldwide. And more and more people worldwide are agreeing that they have X, Y, or Z. So in the short term, they're winning. I don't see an answer to that really, except the age old answer of that. We all have that image. Well, if you're of a certain age, we have the image. Eric (01:30:18.314) that Chinese fellow standing in front of a row of tanks in that Tiananmen Square time, that's what I'm suggesting, is that we all be that fellow. And whether that's a loving fellow or he's coming from some other place, whatever his inner landscape is, we need that guy, that gal standing in front of the row of tanks. And we need reports about those people, just as there was that one image during the Vietnam War of little girl on fire, fleeing. It was completely horrible, but it mattered. It sort of got under the everyday radar of people not being affected by body counts and all this pacification of villages and all that language. It got, it did something. So I think it's individual effort and then the luck of one of those individual efforts doing something, being somehow a little transformative or a little bigger than the next thing. Not much of a model, not much of a hope, but I do think, I mean, that's my honest appraisal of what I think is required, is each of us doing our part without a lot of hope that the model can be Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:31:37.478) All set. I guess I do believe we can overthrow the And that's important because I know too much about conformity and groupthink and human nature. And if people don't believe that there's a better way or potentially a higher calling, I don't know what motivates them to do things that are hard, that are difficult. Eric (01:31:50.54) Mm -hmm. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:32:02.832) And where I'm asking a lot of people in the mental health field right now, you're being trained from this specific model. You are trained to be a cog in the system of our, our, our greater medical care, which is, you know, one of the worst medical care systems in the developed world. Right? Yes, we are quite good at fixing knees and hips and emergency medicine, but we are quite horrible at restoring health. And so if you are going to be a cog in a system that harms, We have to, I think, appeal to that. And I'll use the word higher calling, that higher self, or your words, do what's right, right? Because we are going to die. Our life is limited. And although I may believe we never die, I believe the soul just transforms. And I think we have great purpose and meaning to all of this. I think a lot of people can connect with that. I want my life to mean something. in the good and in the service of others. And so when I see something that's harmful, clearly harmful, and there's an evil component to it, and there's a social control method to it, and where things like medical freedom and informed consent are at risk, and certainly not respected, then I would say we all have the duty and ethical duty to resist in the same way that you so artfully communicated it and to be able to stand up for our rights, our rights to medical freedom, our rights to informed consent. And because then I think then a mass resistance occurs because people are ultimately gonna act in the best interest of their own bodies, their health and their families. And so when that education is clear and we're open and we're honest, then that mass resistance will occur and that will die and it will be reconstructed into something that better serves humanity. Eric (01:33:54.008) Yeah, I agree. And I would hope that people could do it in a context of personal peacefulness and surrender and calm rather than being agitated. Let's call them peaceful warriors to use that language. Because we don't want people to be exacerbating their own sense of despair by just like we know that oftentimes it's brilliant to watch the news too much. Doesn't really help our inner life or our inner equilibrium to watch the news. Here too, we want people to be warriors on our side, but we also want them to be peaceful as they are warriors for their own sake so that they're living a life that feels good to them. And I think the frame for that is really to remember Camus ends his novel The Plague, which is an allegory about World War II where he, the allegory is that rats have infested a town and there is a plague. And of course the Germans are the rats, et cetera. But he ends the novel with a sentence that runs something like, the rats always return for the edification of mankind. And that's, those are marching orders for me to be peaceful with the understanding that fascists return. bad things return, this appetite for control and power and all of that return. So in that context, I'm not going to change that. We're not going to change human nature. We could play with the word evolve and say we can evolve into a new species, but that's just playing with that word. I think we are who we are as a species. And so we want to do our good work in the context of what's real. And if we stay. Eric (01:35:51.104) inside that understanding that we are one person doing yeoman work as one person but these things will happen then I think we can be more more peaceful. can turn from our activist hour to our loving hour of hugging our kids or taking a walk with an ice cream cone. We can make that shift more easily because we aren't still holding on to the let's call it the anger or whatever. We aren't holding on to the emotion that was generated by that activist hour. an hour ago. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:36:23.854) Understood well said for my audience sake how can people get in touch with you or where can they find your Eric (01:36:33.272) Sure. The main place is erikmaisel .com. Also, I let folks know I'm the lead editor for a series called the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry series. We've had five volumes come out with names like Deconstructing ADHD and Critiquing the Psychiatric Model and other books. We have one coming later this year called Institutionalized Madness about how psychiatry infiltrates all of our systems. So I invite people to take a look at those books and to visit me at my site. Roger K. McFillin, Psy.D., ABPP (01:37:16.638) Dr. Maisel, it was a fascinating conversation today. We went in so many different directions, but I think there were lot of core messages from it and I really do appreciate your time. I mean, I learned a lot from you. was an honor being able to talk to you. You're highly productive professional. So, you know, what you've been able to ascribe to as attaching your own meaning or lack thereof or, you know, a value in your life has allowed you to create and to contribute. And I think ultimately You know, I see it that way too, that we are creators and that that is meaningful and that's powerful. And, you know, I really do appreciate your, your time. was definitely a radically genuine conversation. Eric (01:37:59.138) Thank you, Roger. It's been wonderful and I'm glad we had a lot of time to do this rather than a brief interview. So thank