Mental Health Curriculum with Ross Szabo

Ross: final takeaway for me really is we need to change the mental health spectrum that we use in this country. for most people, the mental health spectrum that we use is, on one side you have people who are sane, in the middle you have people who have like mild mental health disorders, and then the far end you have people with severe mental health disorders, and this spectrum is broken.

 

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I’m also sane at the same time. I can’t be on polar opposite ends of the same spectrum the same time. If you think about physical health, we tend to think about an issue we are experiencing, and what we need to use to function. So, if we have a cold, we think like, I might take some cold medicine, but I can go to work. we have the flu, we know that like, that’s it. If we tear an ACL, we know that we’re gonna need surgery and rehab and then our own work and then it’s gonna be difficult before we can fully use our knee again. It’s really time to start thinking about mental health in the same way. What’s the issue we’re experiencing? What’s the support we need along the way? And framing it from that perspective instead of you’re sane or you’re insane.

 

Bruce: Welcome to the Future of Psychiatry podcast, where we explore novel technology and new innovations in mental health. I’m your host, Dr. Bassi, an addiction physician and biomedical engineer.

 

Today I’m with Ross Szabo, who has created a mental health curriculum that is used by over 200, 000 students and teachers.

 

His curriculum, although simple, is quite unique. He wants mental health to be taught in schools much in the same way that physical health is taught. He advocates for conversations that should be happening daily about how we feel, signs and symptoms, treatments, diagnoses and more. He was just on the Dr. Phil show and the Dr. Phil podcast speaking about this new innovative curriculum welcome Ross. Let’s start off by telling us a little bit about yourself. How did you get involved in helping improve mental health literacy? 

 

Ross: I always joke with people that you don’t choose to become a mental health advocate. Uh, Mental health advocacy kind of finds you. It’s not like you have this perfect life and then you’re like, let me tell people about it. Uh, So I come from a lot of lived experience. I grew up in a family with a history of severe mental health disorders and addiction.

 

Went through my own trauma between 11 and 12, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was 16. When I was 17, I attempted to take my own life. Eventually graduated from high school on time. Went to college, relapsed with bipolar disorder, and really struggled for the next four years in and out of treatment centers battling extreme alcohol abuse.

 

And then around 22 was really the first time that I started that I had these issues and and doing something more proactive to work on it. And, you know, since then, it’s obviously been a journey. Uh, we, We all find our own ways of dealing with mental health. And, And I think through each decade of my life, I found different ways to address it.

 

The advocacy piece actually started when I was a senior in high school. I had some really unfortunate misunderstandings from people. And so I actually started sharing my personal story when I was 17 and then had the opportunity to be the Director of Outreach for the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign, which was started at the White House in 1999.

 

And it was the country’s first public health approach to mental health. So from 2002 to 2010, we actually created the first large scale mental health assemblies that were ever happened in this country. And, uh, I had the opportunity to train over 50 speakers and write a book and speak to over a million people.

 

Uh, I burned out. I did what anyone does when they’re exhausted. I joined the Peace Corps. Um, Came back from the Peace Corps and saw that mental health awareness had really taken off. When I started sharing my story nationally in 2002, there were only two other young mental health advocates in the whole country.

 

When I came back from the Peace Corps at the end of 2012, so just 10 years later, there were millions of young mental health advocates. And awareness had really taken off, but what I saw was now there was a gap between awareness and actually teaching skills. So I started my own company to create mental health curriculum in 2013.

 

And then in 2017, I became a founding faculty member of Geffen Academy at UCLA, which is a school for students in grades 6 through 12. Where students have a class where they learn about mental health once a week, every single week of their education. And then in the summer, we actually host a mental health education institute where we teach teachers from around the world how to implement mental health literacy and how to use their personal stories effectively.

 

Bruce: So you recognize there was an exquisite lack of education in the field of mental health? Growing up and also as a patient, what is the benefit of educating somebody? Why do you think it’s helpful to do that proactively rather than retroactively

 

The Comparison that I always use is physical health. With 60 years of physical health literacy research, we know that when someone can name the body part, they can identify when they’re sick. They can seek help sooner, but more importantly, physical health literacy about physical health. The issue with where we are right now is, when I say the words physical health, you all know what that means. You know it’s naming your body parts, it’s exercise, it’s knowing your family history, it’s eating healthfully, it’s taking care of your body. The place we’re in right now, because mental health awareness expanded so rapidly is, when you say the words mental health, there is not the same equivalent of understanding.

 

Some people still think mental health is just for people who have severe mental health disorders. Some people think mental health is going to a spa and getting massages and facials. Some mental health is, any emotion, right? So, like, Now you have people who, when they experience any kind of nervousness, are labeling it anxiety.

 

Any kind of sadness, labeling it clinical depression. And so, we need to really be specific. And we can do that with a public health approach. It doesn’t need to be therapeutic. It’s a way that we can follow the public health approach for physical health and really have some success with it.

 

Let’s getting back to those misconceptions that you were talking about earlier. 

 

What do you feel are the biggest misconceptions about educating the public about mental health approaches? Is it that tendency to over diagnose normal feelings and put them into a pathological bucket?

 

Ross: Think that there’s a couple of things. One, we have categories for physical health. So, You know the difference between a sprained ankle and a broken leg. You know the difference between having a cold and having the flu, you know the difference between diabetes and cancer because we’ve been taught that from a really young age.

 

There are different categories for mental health need to start teaching that. So, you know, Everyday influences are things that affect us every day. They could be positive or negative depending on the experience. Stress could be good or bad. Sleep could be good or bad. Body image could be good or bad.

 

Self compassion could be good or bad. But these are things that occur every single day that affect everyone. The next category for that would be your environment. The home you grew up in, the school you go to, your workplace, the way you’re raised. Like, That’s a very different category of how it affects you.

 

The next category after that would be significant events. So experiences, big life experiences that don’t happen as frequently. Experiences with loss, change, or rejection that affect us. Um, And they also can be positive or negative. And then there’s a category for mental health disorders and a category for developmental disabilities.

 

We need that separation because to your point, What’s happening right now is people are having everyday experiences and saying it’s a mental health disorder. And when that happens, it’s it’s really difficult for two reasons, and I’m sure you know them. One, you’re pathologizing a typical emotion. So you’re someone who’s nervous, who, you know, could do some work to just get calm, and get the butterflies out of their stomach, do whatever it is they’re doing, and you’re making it more severe than it is.

 

But the more damaging thing, really, Is you’re dismissing the experiences of people with severe anxiety disorders or just anxiety disorders in general Because you’re looking at them and saying like, oh, why don’t you just calm down? I’ve been been there. I know what it’s like so can really teach that separation To to help people just understand it a little bit more.

 

And people always ask me like well doesn’t teaching about it Have more people self diagnosed And it just really doesn’t like I can stand in a room of 6th and 7th and 8th graders and have this conversation and none of them leave there being like, I have an anxiety disorder.

 

They actually leave there with the opposite. 

 

Bruce: What 

 

society thinks is that if you talk about mental health disorders, more people are going to have them. Um, and so, you know, it’s been interesting to see that just explaining these differences really helps.

 

What do you feel like is the main drawback or consequence to poor literacy? 

 

Drawback is you do dismiss the experiences of people with severe mental health disorders. You do conflate the experiences of typical emotions, but more importantly, you just leave people in a space where they don’t have words to describe what they’re going through. And so then they’re going to rely on more unreliable sources because they don’t actually have those words.

 

They’re going to rely on social media. They’re going to rely on all these other places. Because no one’s giving them a structure and a framework to operate from. And, as a society, we then don’t normalize conversations about actual mental health. We confuse people with that conversation and we make it harder for them to get help.

 

That’s a good point. 

 

You bring up a really good point. I think by educating people, they do tend to talk about it more and share more about it on social media, and in order for influencers to develop more catchy types of videos, I think they they tend to gravitate towards topics that may be controversial, Or a little bit dramatic and I think there could be a one consequence could be a spread of misinformation as well, through our original purpose, which was to spread understanding and conversation about it.

 

I do feel like it, it almost can backfire on the social media piece. I think people also need to be educated about where are they consuming their information from. Yeah, this individual might have had a bad experience with x, y, and z, but that’s not to say all individuals would have that same experience that person had.

 

So it can lead to a little bit of a biased perspective depending on who they get the information from.

 

It is and if about the approach to physical health, we’ve been clear and successful with it for so long. But they did start from a place of, what do we teach? How do we teach it? What’s that? What are the steps here? 

 

And, I think even going beyond just the language piece, there are other parts of mental health literacy that are important to one is brain development and understanding how brains work.

 

There are so many times where when I’m teaching, my students are going somewhere else and explaining that, the digital age keeps us trapped in our limbic systems. And when we’re in our limbic systems, we can only use our sympathetic nervous system. And when we’re only using our sympathetic nervous system, we don’t feel like we need to eat. We don’t feel like we need to drink water. We don’t feel like we need all these other things. And even just giving people those basic, the basic understanding of brain development, obviously there’s ways to go deeper into neuroscience, but that just basic understanding is so important.

 

And then, another big piece of mental health literacy for us is peer support. Every school in this country. Every night has one kid begging another kid to stay alive. And it’s something that puts kids on the front lines of mental health even more than mental health professionals. And there’s a lot of dangerous ways that goes.

 

One, most kids are successful in talking another kid out of taking their own life. That gives them a false empowerment that now they can do it all the time. And then two, it traumatizes that kid. Because the next time they get a text from that friend or a phone call from that friend, they now live in a state of panic of, am I going to have to talk them out of suicide again? Is this going to be another night where I don’t sleep because I’m so worried about this person? 

 

And so at our school, we don’t do suicide prevention trainings because I don’t want to put teenagers in a place where now they think they can prevent suicide. We give them the basic things of what they can do.

 

They can help their friends feel comfortable, they can ask questions, sometimes just letting someone know that you’re there to listen and you don’t actually know what to do is enough, and that they should tell someone that they can’t hold on this on their own, because more often than not, it actually either ends badly, where someone does die, or they just live in that state of trauma and they don’t know how to get out of it.

 

Yeah, it’s a huge burden that kid probably feels to be given that really deep, serious information about somebody not wanting to be alive. I’m glad that you teach them the tools that they need to recognize when they need to basically outsource or refer their friend to professional help rather than take on that responsibility themselves.

 

You know, I mean, All of you watching this know the way that it is for you as professionals. But, But you all went through years, years of training, years of experience, years of studying hours of, getting your licenses, everything else. And these kids are put in those situations on at least a monthly, yearly basis. Like it’s hard.

 

What kind of feedback have you gotten from individuals? I’m sure there’s probably really powerful and moving feedback of lives that you’ve affected in countless ways. 

 

The feedback varies. So when the, when students are in my school, they don’t know that no one else is getting this education. So a lot of times uh, they’re kind of like, well, why, why do we need to know this? Or why can’t I have a work period? What’s going on in, obviously that’s not all of them.

 

There are a lot of them who go through it and really have these wrecking. Like, Just kind of realizations and things that, that help them and that would be a majority of kids. 

 

The biggest time it sets in is when our students graduate. When our students graduate and go to college, that is when they often reach out immediately and are like, Hey I didn’t know that other people aren’t getting this information.

 

And they’re so stressed out and they have so many issues and they don’t know how to talk about it. They have no framework for it at all. And so I’m I now see why we did this. I now see why all this happened. But obviously it also changes their interactions with their parents. A lot of times our students are the ones going home and leading these conversations with their parents, where they’re the ones who are able to have a framework and explain things and talk about things, which is really powerful.

 

And then from our mental health Education Institute in the summer, You know that the stories from that are really amazing. You have so many teachers who go back to their school and say they’re now more prepared for mental health than they ever were before because one, they have a framework to use in the classroom, but they also have a framework for themselves.

 

I think the most powerful feedback we get is that our mental health Education Institute actually improves the mental health of the teachers who go through it. And then, the second part of the Mental Health Teacher Education Institute is giving teachers guidelines on how to normalize conversations about mental health.

 

And there are so many teachers who care in this country, but they’ve never been given guidelines on how you interact, how you share a story, what you do, how you take care of yourself. And so they’re oftentimes so grateful for that information.

 

That’s so interesting. Yeah, I’m sure that these tools you’re giving them empowers them for the rest of their life, especially in a huge transition like going off to college. They’re going to look back and think about how valuable that was. 

 

In talking about the curriculum, you mentioned in one of your other videos that you described it as evidence based, which I’m sure our audience love.

 

And also using humor to to teach a point, can we talk a little bit more about that? Because I think that’s something that there’s a thirst for among clinicians because they recognize it’s valuable to use humor in a mental health setting. But I think they also find it very challenging to use it tastefully and appropriately in the right context.

 

What’s your approach like for that for using humor and teaching mental health?

 

Humor is a good release. When you’re talking about serious issues, when you’re talking about a lot of things that people have gone through. There is that nervous energy that builds up where people do need a moment to laugh or do need a moment to just exhale. And so when I’m working with teenagers, you know, you’re not, uh, balancing it, if you’re not including some humor, if you’re not, lightly joking around with them, doing things like that, it’s just not going to resonate. And so in the classrooms, I spend a lot of time joking with students, uh, having them roast me back, things like that, because it just humanizes it more. I think what’s tough for mental health professionals a lot of times is feeling that pressure of being the expert and feeling that pressure of having to have the solutions.

 

And once you do get all those degrees and everything else happening in your life, it’s hard to not relax, but… feel like you can walk that line between professionalism and more like a, an unorthodox approach. So I think it’s important one to have moments where you’re talking about like how absurd something is or how funny something is.

 

Self deprecating humor tends to work the best, especially with teens. And then also letting them have moments of lightness, even in classes where we talk about some more difficult stuff. We’ll always end it with what are you grateful for or what’s something you’re proud of or what’s something you wish you could do more things like that so that the weight isn’t just always on the heavy parts of it because when it’s when it is that we’re not activating parts of our brain that are going to help that last anyway.

 

Yeah, I always noticed that there’s a little bit of a dissonance there between what we’re taught in training Versus what actually resonates with a patient in person. I think a patient wants a human connection. They want to know that you’re real. Especially when it’s virtual and you’re, there’s a setback there because you’re not in person, but they want to know that you’re relatable, essentially.

 

And then what we’re taught is To maintain professionalism and not give anything that could alter the expression of their own emotions from a psychoanalytic type of approach, you want to not disclose anything and be careful of your reactions and your facial expressions and how your posture is.

 

And that almost teaches trainees to be a little bit too concrete and robotic, I think. Which maybe makes it a little bit more challenging to have a therapeutic alliance. So it is a really difficult thing. I think people need some time to find their stride and what’s comfortable and suitable for them, in their setting.

 

But I think that’s really cool and interesting that you have tried to incorporate this into your approach with the kids. I think that’s right. You’ve hit the nail on the head that it also depends on your audience and the age group and the generation that they’re in that you’re using their lingo.

 

They are in difficult places too because of the liability aspect, even at some schools I go to when students go to school counselors and the school counselors have to stick to the script that they have been trained on because if they don’t stick to the script that they’ve been trained on, somebody could sue them or something could happen.

 

The students will often say, like every time I go to this counselor, it’s just the same question. It’s it’s robotic. It’s not engaging. It’s not interaction. It’s not a conversation. And so You know, I think it’s tough. I think there are a lot of people who are afraid of the litigation and things like that, so they’re going to stick to what they know because that’s what they know, but when you’re treating someone, any kind of human aspect you can add is important.

 

And I do think in some ways the lack of humanization that people are taught as they go through med school and everything else, it’s not applicable as much as it was in the past.

 

So you saw this need, you had this desire, you had this motivation. And you also felt it needed to be evidence based. How did you go about developing the curriculum and have you refined it and changed it at all over time based on feedback?

 

So I had the opportunity to go out and speak to millions of people. And so I think a lot of times when we develop curriculum, it’s often done in a lab or it’s done based on research where somebody comes up with an idea and they’re like, Well, we need to teach about this.

 

And so then they try to figure out how they can get My curriculum design was actually opposite. It was, I went out and had a focus group of literally millions of people and saw, Oh, here are the biggest gaps. So the interesting thing about that when we started piloting the curriculum it was resonating already because it was already filling the gaps that so many people had said they were missing, or so many people had said they didn’t, have right?

 

And that that piece didn’t change much. The original curriculum was really, here’s a definition of mental health. Here is the categories of mental health challenges. Here’s how you can change the spectrum of mental health to be more like physical health. These are what coping mechanisms are and how your brain works. Here’s how to support a friend. 

 

And that curriculum from my company was available, you know, 2013 to 2016. When I started the school and became a founding faculty member of the school, Well, then we needed a lesson about mental health once a week, every week from grade six through grade 12. And so my core curriculum now had to shift to how do we follow the adolescent development milestones of all these people grade six through 12, and give them different variations of it so that they’re not completely bored. in that regard, what we started looking at was, okay, well what are kids in middle school most concerned about and what, what can we give them to deal with it? How can we teach them? How can we focus on that? And then it was, what are kids in high school most concerned about? How can we adapt to that?

 

How can we have enough repetition where they’re building skills, but enough variety where they’re not bored. so that that was a much bigger transition from going from, you know, roughly Probably like 15 lessons to around 220 lessons.

 

That’s interesting. Interesting dilemma, too. And challenge for you to keep it. Helpful and applicable for what their interests are at the time also, not make it too boring or too repetitive or they can actually get new information about, uh, you know, the next lesson .

 

And that’s the hardest thing because I have honest with you. You know, A lot of social emotional learning programs will use the same measure every day, right? And so they’ll start and from a very smart place, they start teaching that in first grade. But literally by the time a kid is in third grade, they’re like, I learned this in first grade.

 

I don’t want to do it again. That’s for babies. And so you do have to really be creative in how you teach these things because obviously mental health has a lot of the same principles, but how you engage and how you talk to people about it is really important.

 

What is a typical student’s… Feedback like from year two versus year one do you see like the stigma just melting away from people or that’s what I’m imagining in an ideal world, but are people still pretty reserved about opening up about mental health issues, even though we’re trying to, you know, you’re, you’re trying to do a better job a normalizing it

 

That’s really great question. So I do think there’s a big difference between a public health approach and a therapeutic approach. So we never unpack emotions or really discuss a lot of therapeutic things in the classroom because… It’s not, that’s not replicable. We wanted to create a program that other schools could do.

 

What we hear from our students is that they’re more open and have less stigma talking about it in their personal lives, and that’s what you would want. That’s what you want to see. And that’s what the hope is. We walk that line of, here are all the skills you can build for mental health, here’s the vocabulary you can have, here’s how your brain works, here’s how all this other stuff can occur.

 

And in class we talk about it from a skill based perspective, but then when they are in their own personal lives, that’s when they might be having less stigma. 

 

So we hear from parents a lot that it has changed their households and that it’s a little bit easier for them to talk about, but it is not a perfect thing. It’s just, you think about our public health approach to obesity. We’ve done more in this country to try and approach obesity than ever before. But now we have more obesity than we’ve ever had, right? And if you look at something like obesity well, socioeconomic status affects that, biology affects that, and then there are factors in our society that affects that, right?

 

We live in a country that says don’t be obese, but we don’t rein in fast food, we don’t rein in the chemicals in food, we don’t rein in the ingredients that people are allowed to use, and then we are like, why are people obese? It’s a similar thing for mental health in this country. 

 

We tell people they should have mental health. And then, I don’t know, you could argue that a lot of what we do in the environment in this country wouldn’t even allow someone to have mental health, especially someone in a lower socioeconomic status. So when we talk about the changes, we also have to factor in what else is affecting people.

 

That’s so interesting. Yeah. So I’m imagining. You’re approaching it from a preventative stance as early as possible. I feel like that’s at least better than trying to do it later on after issues and symptoms have developed, though. You’re doing the most you can do to try to mitigate those causal factors that you were referring to 

 

with that, you know, like, look, to be honest with you, the public schools in some of the biggest cities where they’re underfunded, a lot of these public schools are literally just providing the first tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy. They’re providing food, they’re providing shelter, they’re providing safety, they’re providing water, and we we can’t overlook the fact that for a lot of these large cities, that’s really all they can do.

 

The education piece they get on top of it is, is, is helpful, and I’m not saying it’s not, but If you’re a kid who’s relying on your school for your meals, what is your home environment going to do to support mental health? And then there are public schools, obviously, even in the same city, that have more funding, that are doing more, that are able to have more in effect. Um, And then obviously there’s independent schools, private schools throughout this country that can do more and have probably better access to a more comfortable and safe environment. But we can’t have this conversation about mental health without talking about the factors that influence it.

 

You mentioned One thing I think people would be interested in hearing about is how they can go about changing or helping change, incite change in their child’s school to talk more about mental health. Say they’re listening to this podcast, they think you have really great ideas and their child’s curriculum really doesn’t include a whole lot.

 

And they want to maybe advocate on behalf of the students to, to create some change in their school’s curriculum. How would they go about doing that? What is your business model like? Is this an open source type of curriculum that they can take and hand deliver to the school for them to look at and maybe incorporate in their school? Or tell us a little bit more about that.

 

We run a mental health education institute at Geffen Academy at UCLA every summer. So the the easiest thing people can do is connect their school with our mental health education institute. We offer an in person training and an online training and that is, you know, one of the easiest things that can happen.

 

We have the benefit of being a school at a public university, so we can host these trainings and offer CEUs and do all these other things. And a lot of people come because, again, we’re at a public university. The second thing people can do is if they’re not able to do that, my website is humanpowerproject. com And that’s really where the curriculum lives outside of this So there are people who find me privately through that company, through that website. And that’s a easier kind of just hey, here’s this curriculum, let’s implement it. Those would be the best options. Either going to the Mental Health Education Institute at Gaffin Academy at UCLA, or contacting me at humanpowerproject. Com

 

do you have any tips or suggestions for how they might go about approaching a school board or educator to incorporate something like this in terms of maybe describing some of the benefits or the reception that it’s gotten?

 

If you’re in a public school setting, or in a charter school, or in a setting where there’s bureaucracy, you’re gonna have to go… Through the bureaucracy, the thing that I think works there is mentioning again that the surgeon general put out this advisory for the youth mental health crisis and asking the school, Hey, what are we doing to teach about this to normalize it?

 

What are we doing to go upstream to start this conversation in a preventative way? And here’s this approach that is public health approach that does have effectiveness that Does help students develop a framework and a vocabulary and understand what they can and can’t do in a lot of situations.

 

If you’re in a private school or independent school situation, then, the bureaucracy is much less. You can actually just go to the counselors or to a wellness department and say, I found this curriculum, I’d really love to teach it. I’d love to know more about what’s happening at the school.

 

How can we implement this more? Or go and say, have you considered going to this mental health education institute? Because I think it could really benefit our school. Those would be the kind of things to do. I think the one thing if you’re approaching independent school or a private school is what we hear, what our college admissions department hears at our school is colleges are now realizing that this program exists and they’re more willing to accept kids who have an understanding of mental health because colleges are so overwhelmed in this crisis.

 

UCLA has 57 counselors and they can’t keep up with The amount of students seeking help. But when you dig deep into what students are seeking help for, it is not severe mental health disorders. That’s not the number one thing. Obviously they are doing that. I’m not saying that’s not happening, but the more common thing is just, communicating with a roommate, dealing with dating, dealing with basic life skills that we’ve been able to teach from sixth through 12th grade.

 

That’s so interesting, and that’s a really good point. You mentioned communicating, and I think we do have literature and English classes. And you also mentioned in one of your videos, the importance of being able to tell your story from a mental health perspective and from a non mental health perspective, and I think that was a really great important point for Children to understand because I do feel like you’re just thrown into the world and you’re just almost surviving day to day or hour to hour.

 

You don’t really understand quite who you are. You don’t have any sort of life experience to draw from. No previous job. You don’t really have a sense of identity that’s paired to that job. What is the importance that you’ve seen in helping guide students in describing their story?

 

one thing that works best is modeling how to do it. So. When I share my story, or at the Mental Health Education Institute, when we teach other people how to share their stories, the biggest part of it is, don’t share anything you haven’t processed. When you’re an educator in a classroom, make sure you’re sharing things, only sharing things that you’ve processed, because you don’t want to be in a situation where you’re processing with your students, or processing in some learning capacity.

 

The second piece of it is, making sure that what you’re going to share has a relevant point for a lesson you’re teaching. When I talk about addiction, I can share that three of my grandparents were alcoholics. And the number one factor for addiction is biological predisposition. 

 

Or I can share that age of first use is the second biggest determining factor. And I started alcohol when I was 12.

 

And kind of just going through making sure that I’m sharing a story that has a point and I’m not just sharing a story for my own emotional validation because Unfortunately, All of us need emotional validation, everybody. And you’re getting validation from your students on what learning, really healthy, really positive.

 

If you’re getting validation from your students for your own emotional needs, really slippery slope, definitely not healthy. And then there are other steps for adults to understand how to share their personal stories. 

 

One, again, it should have that learning objective. Two, the learning objective should be universal. It shouldn’t be a personal thing, where somebody is like, Yeah, so then I did this extreme rock climbing adventure and that is the only thing that works and everyone should do it. You know, You can do whatever extreme thing you do, but then it should be exercise benefits the brain or getting outside benefits the brain or you know what I mean?

 

and so when we do use personal stories in the classroom, it’s got to be something you process, it’s got to have a learning objective. The learning of the learning lesson has to be universal. And you’re basically using your story to get other people to think about their lives. We don’t really encourage students to share their own stories in a classroom, uh, unless it is something that they are confident about or something that they want to mention.

 

That’s so good to know. I feel like I’m learning a lot just by talking to you. I feel like maybe there’s a lot of benefit for clinicians and counselors in the training that you were describing earlier. You mentioned that doing this also helps work on your own mental health. And I understand, you don’t want to do that in session with students.

 

You shouldn’t be getting any sort of validation from the students. But how does… being a teacher make you a better student, a lifelong learner?

 

Well, one, I learn so much from my students. Opening the door to these conversations, Get you a chance to hear their perspective, their experiences and what they’re going through. And it’s really important to hold space for that because they do have a lot happening. I think sometimes we always try to, not always, but there are a lot of people who dismiss the experiences of young, people and they say, well, you’re just young, you’ll figure it out.

 

Or, you know, you’re just young and you just got to get through this, but that’s all they know. All they know is their, whatever, how many ever years of their life that they’ve lived. And validating that for them gives them more confidence to say, okay, this is real. And let’s be honest, like, you know, when people get cheated on in high school, that cheating lasts with them for the rest of their relationships.

 

They go into college not trusting people. They go into young adulthood, uh, yeah, early 20s, kind of being like, well, I got cheated on that one time. The second largest period of brain growth being 12 to 25, we know that what happens in that Can often last a lifetime. I joke with people a lot of times that being an adult is really just trying to either undo adolescence or relive adolescence, depending on your level of self awareness and so the, the listening and the validating piece for the the young people, the students is really important. 

 

You mentioned that people tend to dismiss or diminish a young person’s experience, but I almost feel like it should be the opposite. I feel like being a teenager is one of the difficult, most difficult times of your life where you’re, you’re really just going through motions of things that were told to you that you have to do.

 

So there’s huge sense of obligation and lack of independence. You don’t have any sort of financial authority to make any choices on your own unless you’re, doing crypto trading on the side or something like that. And you’re living in somebody else’s house. You don’t have any say in anything you do.

 

You have no sort of tools to draw from to deal with stressors at the time. I mean, I, I think that it’s, it’s the opposite. People should be supporting teenagers as much as 

 

they could uh, but that’s not always happening. Also, I think should recognize that, you know, that period of brain growth between 12 and 25 is so powerful. That most people with severe dementia or most people with Alzheimer’s, That’s the period of their life they can recall in a second.

 

And a lot of times it does go by in a blur, a lot of times it does go by with all these other influences. Even my students, and we are an independent school and our students, do come from environments that are safe and protected. I can’t say healthy because, everyone’s home environment is different.

 

But when they share what they’ve gone through, the, sexual assaults, the sexual harassment, the suicides in their families, the divorce, the dysfunction, the abuse, like, all kinds of stuff that they’ve navigated by 14, 15. It’s just a reminder that a lot of this is gonna affect everyone for the rest of their lives. 

 

And all we can hope to do from a school perspective is give them some tools and some normalcy that yeah, you didn’t choose to go through this and you didn’t choose to have to grow up this quickly, but you can try and work on coping mechanisms and work on ways out of it because the reality is, it doesn’t matter what community you’re in.

 

It doesn’t matter the socioeconomic status. People are going through a lot right now. They’re going through a lot. Yeah. And we can have conversations about what they can do for themselves.

 

Yeah, that’s a good point. In the moment, everybody’s own issues feel like the most important, disastrous time that they’re going through. 

 

Let’s shift and talk about the, your growth the growth of your mission. You’ve come a long way over the last 10 years, I’m sure. What types of challenges lie ahead for you?

 

What kinds of things are on your plate these days? And where do you like to see the, the model going from here?

 

Bruce: 

 

The biggest challenge is how do you scale up I have just had a meeting yesterday in Sacramento, uh, with, you know, people at, at the state level of education. And on the one hand, the model does exist. 

 

So what I was sharing yesterday was we already have a model for physical health education. It’s a funded bill in the California State Legislature. There are already teachers in schools. There is now a curriculum that they follow and all these other steps that every school district, no matter who they are, what they are, can do to take care of this. We need to find a way to do the same thing for mental health. The funny thing is, a lot of states have already mandated mental health curriculum.

 

They just don’t have a curriculum, and they don’t have a way for people to come rally around one kind of unified way of mental health literacy and implementing it. So the biggest challenge for the next 10 years is going to be, how do we scale up? And if you think about scaling up, there has to be different tiers The approach for a public school in a large city is going to be different than a well funded public school, is going to be different than an independent school or a charter school. So in our scaling up, we’re really going to have to be specific about how we do it, what the lessons look like, where it goes and what is managed from that.

 

That’s interesting. Yeah, you’re right. It’s not a one size fits all approach to every school. What kinds of ideas can you brainstorm? 

 

If somebody out there who’s listening is interested in going into this and innovating and moving the needle forward in terms of what you’re doing where would their effort best spent?

 

I think the other thing that often impedes mental health education is people come up with different ideas, different perspectives, so they start different organizations. A lot of those organizations and a lot of those things end up doing the same work, but in that fight for funding, the Hunger Games fight for survival, everybody seeks out their own money, things like that. So I think collaboration and partnership one of the most important things we can do. 

 

Don’t think you have to put pressure on yourself to come up with something different. We have satellites of this in a lot you know, cities and states because people are saying, this is what works. How do we bring it here versus this is what works.

 

So I’m going to create it. Um, I’m going to try and navigate this. When we find things that work, let’s collaborate, and let’s, let’s bring stuff together.

 

That’s a good point. And do you have any sort of recommendations for anybody who’s interested in innovating in mental health? Just generally speaking, maybe not in the curriculum space?

 

Ross: The best innovations that I see are identifying a gap that exists and trying to fill that gap. I’ve been able to have the opportunity to do that in a lot of ways. Originally, there were no large scale presentations or assemblies about mental health, and so I really asked how can we fill that gap?

 

Then there was no curriculum, how can we fill that gap? Then it was mental health education doesn’t exist in schools, how can we fill that gap, right? And so I think some of the best innovative ideas come from asking the question what’s missing and how can we fill it? I think that’s part of the reason you saw online therapy grow to the place where it is now, there I know people who don’t even have an in person practice Everything they do is online and that has come from the innovation of Okay, what if this was more accessible?

 

What if people could have more access to it when they do it? And so I think anytime you’re trying to innovate It’s asking what the gap is and what you can do to fill it.

 

Yeah. Totally. Are there any new novel treatments or innovations within psychiatry that excite you?

 

I’m not saying this personally, what’s going to be interesting is to see the continued rollout of psychedelics and their use for some of these severe mental health disorders, uh, that that early data on the therapeutic use of ketamine and, um, psilocybin MDMA has been fascinating to me from, from my layman’s perspective, it makes a lot of sense.

 

If you’re in a situation where you can’t activate these parts of your brain, and psychedelics give you a chance to do that, but it is guided and protected and safe with someone guiding you through it, uh, that’s a really interesting phenomenon to me, but I think the challenge is going to be how do you roll it out?

 

For all the existing psychiatrists, what course or class are they going to take to get accredited for understanding psychedelic use? And then how are they going to be responsible for leading people through these very vulnerable, intense journeys? Uh, and so, you know, what’s what’s interesting about calling that an innovation is a lot of these psychedelics have been used by traditional communities for thousands of years.

 

So I don’t know that it’s an innovation as much as it is an innovation to the medical system to understand how to use something that is showing effects, but how do you get the entire system to do it? Are they going to start teaching psychedelic, um, accreditation in, in med schools? You know, what, What’s what’s going to happen?

 

And so it’s interesting. I’m, I’m interested 

 

It’s a very new and exciting time, especially when we have the opportunity to maybe revisit something that’s had some proven history there among other cultures, to be clear, I’m talking about the therapeutic use of use there. There is a difference, living in Los Angeles right now. The recreational use of psilocybin and ketamine is shocking to me, um, and people are doing that from a place of of all different kinds of emotions and connections and wanting certain things, but the actual therapeutic uses that I’ve seen, and then I know people who have gone through it, have massive benefits, and so I’m more interested in the therapeutic use, the recreational use I’m not excited about, and you know, there are students Who I talk to all the time, who have friends who are microdosing every day microdosing, psilocybin at age 16. 

 

I think that maybe should be part of the curriculum to not conflate any data there regarding the treatment use of medication or herbal or supplement for the treatment does not necessarily equate to broad and universal approval of that medication or supplement for any usage whatsoever.

 

I would say, final takeaway for me really is we, need to we we change the mental health spectrum that we use in this country. for most people, the mental health spectrum that we on one side you have people who are sane, in the middle you have people who have like mild mental health disorders, and then the far end you have people with severe mental health disorders, and this spectrum is broken.

 

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I’m also sane at the same time. I can’t be on polar opposite ends of the same spectrum the same time. If you think about physical health, we tend to think about an issue we are experiencing, and what we need to use to function. So, if we have a cold, we think like, I might take some cold medicine, but I can go to work. we have the flu, we know that like, that’s it. If we tear an ACL, we know that we’re gonna need surgery and rehab and then our own work and then it’s gonna be difficult before we can fully use our knee again.

 

It’s really time to start thinking about mental health in the same way. What’s the issue we’re experiencing? What’s the support we need along the way? And framing it from that perspective instead of you’re sane or you’re insane. And on this new spectrum, thinking about mental health, the same way you would think about physical health, using resources is in the middle because that’s where it is for physical health.

 

When we see people exercising or walking or running, none of us think what a weirdo, why are they doing that? We often think like good for them. I should exercise. We but we think about it and that’s important. Uh, So we need to get to a place where we are framing mental health that same level of functionality as we do our physical health.

 

Yeah, there probably was a time back in the 1890s where people looked absurd to, to lift up arbitrary weights, but now we accept that as working on their physical health, and to your point about overgeneralizing individuals with mental health issues, I think that directly ties into the whole gun control debate in regard to gun violence because how many times do you hear a legislator Saying it was because that individual had mental health issues.

 

We don’t say, oh, they had physical issues, therefore they caused it. It’s a total misrepresentation and a misunderstanding of mental health issues that if you have a mental health issue, it somehow leads you to becoming violent and want to, kill individuals. It just sounds silly to, to think of it like that.

 

But people do for better or for worse, just try to. to say something like Maybe it catches attention more. 

 

Bruce: Well, 

 

Ross, it was really fun having you on the show. I learned a lot, and I think this is really applicable to our audience and their children as well, and any nieces and nephews who are probably going through elementary school and finding difficulties in understanding their own mental health.

 

I think it’s really important and helpful for our entire country that This is on the table, just as the same way we have P. E. teachers, we need to have M. E. teachers as well. Thank you so much. 

 

Do you have any, 

 

Do you wanna have the last word? 

 

Anything we can do to normalize mental health, to have, uh, conversations and a framework for mental health literacy and to really implement this can make huge changes. And one thing that we know about human beings is when we do rally around something, we can make 

 

Ross: massive change 

 

and we can do it quickly.

 

So, Never underestimate what you are doing as a person and what that impact has on so many other people. Because it really can give them a language and a framework to work from that has changes and ripples through every aspect of their life.

 

Awesome. Thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it and explaining all your points so well. And if anybody is interested in reaching out to you, we’ll have links and resources in the episode page on our website. And and you can go there, telepsychhealth. com and navigate to that to connect with Ross.

 

Thank you.

 

I’d appreciate it if you please like and share the podcast with your colleagues. It would be especially helpful for us. And if you’d like, please leave us a rating on your favorite podcatcher. If you’re a clinician, I developed a course on how to start a private practice. And for patients, I’ve also developed a course on ACT and CBT based lessons for treating and helping anxiety.

 

And you can find those all on our website as well. Thank you so much. And I’ll see you in the next episode.