From Psych Wards to Everest: Surviving Bipolar, PTSD, Addiction & a Deadly Avalanche

The air blast of this avalanche just took us. I took a photograph after this of my face. Ended up on National Geographic cover, right?

Right.

And so that very much launched my life and career into a new phase. At the same time, it triggered all of that internal turmoil that I was living with. Cory Richards is a world-renowned photographer and climber.

Known for capturing the raw edge of human experience. While battling his own inner extremes.

When people are in survival mode, they'll do Crazy shit. My maladaptive behavior was focused mostly around drinking and sex because I was so hungry for connection. There's two ways to rewire the brain. One is through intense experience and one is through.

Cory, welcome to the Dr. Hyman Show. It's so great to have you.

Thanks for having me.

When I meet people who've done extraordinary things, like climb the highest peaks in the world, done dream feats of human endurance and stretch the limits of what's possible for human beings. I'm always a little bit in awe because I'm like, damn, I don't think I could do that. Like climb Mount Everest. And, you know, you know, these are outer challenges.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That are extraordinarily hard. There are massive amounts of training, planning, mental fortitude, sort of a mental toughness that makes you go when your body says no.

Yeah.

And you've also had to climb very deep and hard places in your inside life. Yeah. And I'm very curious about how you sort of kind of leaned into the external challenges as a way of navigating your internal peaks that you had to climb.

Yeah. I mean, it's been an interesting journey because I think so often There's a natural tendency to try to solve internal problems through external means. And that can be very, very healthy at times, and it can also be very maladaptive. And I think for me initially, it was a very healthy expression because it gave me a way to anchor in the world. It gave me a way to try to counteract some of the stories that I had learned about myself in my adolescence when I was really going through sort of the introduction to a mental health journey.

That's a nice way of putting it. Yeah, yeah. Being in psych units and living on the street.

Yeah, yeah.

Institutions for years.

Yeah, I mean, I was institutionalized and then I was on the street and then I, you know, I dropped out of high school. And so when I rediscovered climbing, 'cause I started when I was five and then I lost it, but when I rediscovered it, it was very much a way to anchor. And then photography as a sidecar to it sort of gave me a voice. And I think, but in many ways it was more an examination of self. Initially, that was, I think, a very healthy thing. And then over time it became less healthy.

You mean your attempt to kind of seek salvation in great achievements of human endurance was not actually helping you on the inside?

It never really does. at least in my experience, it never fully helps you resolve that internal turmoil. It gives it a vehicle to express, but it doesn't necessarily resolve it, if that makes sense.

You've done some of the hardest things, like climb Mount Everest without oxygen, which very few human beings have ever done.

Yeah.

It seems like a crazy thing to do, but they call it the death zone up there for a reason. Yeah. And those, those, those are extreme feats of what a human being could potentially do with their body. But the mental challenges, I wonder for you, were those harder?

Oh, by leaps and bounds. Mental challenges are always the harder thing, in my experience, because they're more complicated. There's this very hard reality of climbing mountains or you know, descending rivers in Africa, it's a container and there's the physical world that you're moving through where in your mind, it's a whole universe unto itself. So the barriers and boundaries in there are much more immaterial. And because of that, it is much harder to sort out where you are on the journey. and what the progress is. And it's very difficult.

So basically you've got a circumscribed task, which is to climb a mountain or descend a river or do some crazy shit. But it's a very circumscribed, defined- It's very clear.

It's very delineated.

Piece of work. But the piece of work to heal and sort through what's going on on the inside is a very different- It's just nebulous.

How do you even define growth? The only way that I've found to define growth is messy, right? Like it's not clear and you're backsliding and you're regressing and devolving at times. And that feels like you're going backwards, but it's always forward motion, but it's just messy. You know, it's just a messy, messy process.

And you describe a lot of this in your book, which is sort of a memoir.

Yeah.

Call of Everything, A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within. And I've been in the mountains and it's so quiet there. It's so peaceful, it's so still. And you feel like you can hear the sound of God there. And yet the internal turmoil was just still happening.

I mean, in some ways it was almost amplified by those environments because when it's so quiet externally, you're made aware of how loud it is internally, right? And so I could find moments of calm and I could find moments of skies. But oftentimes that was when I was engaged with doing something very hard because it demanded a reduction of, of that noise inside my mind simply to survive.

Yeah.

When you're about to die, you think about it.

It's like, not dying. Exactly.

How to not die.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I've been in those situations. Not as many as you, obviously, but, you know, and it's like everything just kind of goes away and you focus on the task in front of you so you don't. fall off a cliff.

Exactly.

Or fall off a mountain or something.

Whether it's a metaphorical mountain or not, anytime we're in survival mode, we're going to have an element of flow. And that is because we're uniquely programmed to survive. The funny thing about survival that I've found is that it's reaction-based versus resilience, which is a response, right? And so the shift from reaction to response, I think is part of that internal growth because as somebody who's dealt with, you know, bipolar and these, these difficult mental struggles, it's very easy just to default to a reactionary thinking. The other interesting thing about that is survival is not values based, right? When people are in survival mode, they'll do crazy shit. When people are in a resilience mode, it's slower and it's underwritten by value. And the values are actually guiding it. So that shift into a resilience mindset has been one of the most important things I've done. And I would say that climbing and photography was actually mostly survival.

I mean, it's so brave of you because it's one, it's a brave thing to go, Climb Mount Everest. But it's a much bigger thing to talk about mental challenges that you have. They're still prevalent. You know, 25% of Americans struggle with mental illness. You know, suicides, death to despair, opioid, you know, eating people, eating themselves to death, anything about the people that get to a thousand pounds, 600 pounds. I mean, that is just a response to trauma.

Yeah.

Not being able to navigate it and.

Not having a path. And not having the tools to. not having the infrastructure. Judith Herman, who's a Harvard psychologist, in 1995, she basically said, look, all psychological dysfunction is really one diagnosis, which is trauma. It's all an extension of trauma. For the, I mean, yeah. For the most part, trauma has become a buzzword now, and everybody's learning about it, which is so important. And at the same time, there's this overcorrection where we're sort of believing that by knowing our trauma and being able to voice it and explain it, that that is healing it, which isn't the case. In fact, it becomes a new narrative that I've observed stops people on the- Self-identify with it. Exactly. We reinforce it by telling, oh, this happened to me. This is, and now this is my new story. And I did that for Decades.

So maybe you can walk us back through your early life and what happened in your family and in your life where things broke down when you were a teenager and you ended up hospitalized in a psychiatric unit, institutionalized for months in the streets. What was that and what happened to you and what was going on in your internal world at that moment?

Very early on, I realized I had a loud interior landscape. And I remember that from a very, very young age. And by virtue of that, There was a sense of isolation where I was almost trapped in my own mind and thus engaging with the external world felt difficult. And there was a sense also of like on the outside looking in. Now, I think that's pretty human. As I grew into adolescence, there was a lot of violence in my home. And it was, it was between my brother and I. He was only two years older, but to me, he was like, He was my adult. You know, my parents were loving, they did the absolute best they could, but families are crazy intricate. The dynamics of families are wildly complicated.

Yeah, you throw a bunch of humans with unsolved tasks into a small container and daily basis.

And- yeah, yeah, see what happens. And so that violence It wasn't as simple as brothers beating each other up. It was rage-based violence. And rage, I would actually say, was the more traumatic component of that. And it was his rage that perpetuated it. But then I learned also that when he beat the hell out of me, I got attention. So for many years- My parents. From my parents. We both did, right? So it was a means of having our emotional needs met. both of us. But then because I looked like the victim, the attention that he was getting was very detrimental to his sort of sense of well-being and self value. And I learned that, well, if I feed into this, then guess what? Like I, I get all the attention. I get all that soft attention. But ultimately it didn't work. It just amplified the violence. And then I remember I was 12 and I just had this moment, this night. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't just, I was so unsettled and I was in my family's den and my mind just sped up to the point where I couldn't track my thoughts. And it was almost, it was just these almost flashes of black and white. And the only thing I could remember is I could track it to my heart beating. The noise was so profound and I remember just sort of collapsing and pulling at my hair and trying to make sense of it. And it was at this time that, you know, I was a smart kid. I went to high school two years early, and I'd gone from getting straight A's to getting basically failing everything. And so then it was, that was the first time I was medicated with SSRIs. And then about, God, I'd say about a year later, eight months later, my mom was like, Hey, Can we go to primary children's hospital and sort of try to get a handle on this? And I knew something was wrong, so, or something was off. So I agreed and we went, there was sort of this evaluation. I remember the therapist so clearly. I remember like Enya playing in the background.

Wow.

I remember the smell so vividly. And, And then as we were leaving, this guy, his name was Ivan, came up. He's like, oh, we've just had a bed open up. And I was like, what? So I thought I was leaving, and then I never left.

Your mom checked you in.

She checked me in. And, I mean, that's gotta be a.

Very disorienting experience to be that young and be- Hugely disoriented. -In a hospital.

And I think what's so interesting is that at that point, There's a splintering of stories, her story and mine. So my story becomes one of abandonment, right? Her story is one of love. I'm trying to help my child. Both those things exist concurrently, but they are conflicting, right? And resolving that both individually and collectively over time is incredibly hard. It's very hard work to do. After that, I was put in a long-term institution or care facility for eight months. I ran away three times. Heavily medicated, I just- Heavily medicated. Heavily medicated. It was actually there that I got diagnosed. And again, I'm very much like you. I don't love diagnosis because I think they come with tremendous baggage, huge stories, especially in mental health. There's a story of brokenness that's inherent in mental health issues.

Something is wrong with- Well, it's so stigmatized, right? In our culture. And the labels really are kind of just descriptions of symptoms.

They don't- They're just a container. Cause or why or what's going on. They're just a container for a set of behaviors.

Right.

Right. But they come with the story of dysfunction, illness, I mean, we call it mental illness, right? Or we have. that implies something and it's very hard story to get out of. And like we were saying earlier, now we're in this culture of like we're owning it sort of in not necessarily a healthy way.

Right.

And that actually perpetuates the stigma. Oh, I can't do that. I'm ADHD or I can't, you know, my triggers prohibit me from being in this environment. So that's hiding behind it. and further stigmatizing it.

Yeah, it's identifying with the diagnosis.

Exactly.

As opposed to saying, oh, this is something that I can heal or work.

With or work alongside or turn into a superpower. During that time, you know, I ran away from this place three times. And the last time my my dad, who's very big on agency, was like, Great, you can run away. You can do whatever you want, but you can't come home.

And how old are you?

I was 15 at this point. and some people would say, well, that's the worst thing a parent could do. Child abuse. Child abuse, right? Quite frankly, they, I, I fought them in no way for that. They were scared of me. I was, you know, erratic. I wouldn't listen. Like, really, home was just a bed and a source of food, and then I'd leave and do whatever I wanted. So there was a learning that rules in, in every way are arbitrary, and I just broke every rule because I had no respect. for them. And I remember watching them change the locks on the house and just being like, well, now what? For the most part, I was kept off the street by family, friends, and friends. But there were times that I was in chapter eight in the book, profoundly dark experience that some people would categorize as rape, and some people, the way I describe it is a much different interpretation of that. But all that to say that there were things that happened that almost certainly to you. To me. Or there were things that happened in my life. I try to stay away from the language of to me.

To or for.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, things happen, right?

Yeah.

And they had an impact. And that took years to res, like this sort of quasi homelessness took, I don't know, two years to really resolve. You know, and then I ended up in the hospital again when I was 17.

So imagine when you were out, you were off your medication.

Sometimes, like if I, especially when I was running away, the medications would just run out. You know, like I was actually still, I would take them because one of the stories that I picked up is that my mind was dangerous. And if I didn't take the medications, I was going to go crazy. That was so deeply ingrained in me that I, I didn't want to go crazy. I didn't want to scream at trees. So I kept taking them. and I think that was actually to great benefit that I had picked up that story that I was gonna go crazy.

Yeah.

And then you, when you kind of were kind of out and about, like something and you kind of lifted yourself up to kind of get back into place of doing something, right?

Yeah, I ended up living with my aunt and uncle in Seattle, and because I was out of Salt Lake, I think, and out of that environment, even though I had dropped out of high school, I'd gotten my GED by that point. But I think living in an environment where it was not the deeply ingrained tapestry of my home life was so beneficial. And it was there that I sort of rediscovered climbing and I discovered photography and started to go down that path. And that was, again, that's where it became healthy. that's when it was generative.

So when you were in your teenagers, were you using drugs and alcohol and were you self-medicating as many people with mental illness do?

Yeah, oh yeah, I love drugs. And I still love drugs, but in a very different, I have a very different relationship with them now. For me, actually, I would say that the vast majority of my maladaptive behavior was focused mostly around drinking. and sex, right? That was because I was so hungry for connection. That was a source that at least felt like there was some level of desire to have me in your life, even if it's like that, you know, even if it's a very short-lived thing. But I think that was actually those were my behaviors that really kind of were the most detrimental drugs again, because I had this story of I was going to go crazy were a little bit more. I had a more tenuous relationship with them.

So those, those. The alcohol and those drugs you were more afraid of because you felt like they were alcohol.

I wasn't, but. But, like, more psychoactive drugs, like. psychedelics and, you know, cocaine, all those things I was much more reticent of. Later in life, of course, I've used psychedelics as, as part of my mental health journey, and that's been wildly generative.

And did you, when you, when you started sort of your journey back to yourself, which sounds like where you've come almost full circle and like, yeah, gone through this horrible sort of childhood and traumatic childhood with, you know, in itself was traumatizing.

Yeah.

From the trauma of trying to deal with the trauma.

Yeah.

Right.

So meta.

So meta.

Right.

You kind of got back into a world of physical endurance and climbing and also of trying to see the world through a lens, which I imagine was your way of sort of reimagining the world and your relationship to it.

Yeah, beautifully put.

Tell us about how you kind of got from that dark place into sort of this attempt to try to heal that through these external things. And what were the limitations of that? because you think, oh, you've conquered so many things. You've pushed so many limits.

Yeah.

And yet it didn't quite do what you wanted.

It did until it didn't. So part of it was being with my aunt and uncle. I got three jobs. I started saving money because I wanted to go climbing. I wasn't at school. And that was such a beautiful observation that photography was really a way for me to try to interpret and understand the world that I was moving through. One of the things that I write in the book is that there was a sense that if I looked hard enough at anything or anybody, I could see my own reflection because there is a shared experience, not just with other people, but with the natural world in the entire world, entire physical world that we live in. There is a reflection of ourselves that exists. And I think photography was a way to try to see that and anchor myself to the world. Also, it gave me a very real voice, meaning that coming from a place of feeling like I really didn't matter that much and I wasn't wanted, there was no belonging. To have my name printed, in ink on a page with my expression sort of was this proof that I had a place in the world. And I loved that. And I also used that for validation. Over time, it became maladaptive in its own way because I was mistaking validation for love or external attention for love, which is not the same thing. I mean, that's like the likes on Instagram, right? Oh, look at me. Like, everybody loves me and you're like, that's not love, bro. But then the physicality of it also was trying to, I think, get out of my mind and marry somehow my mind and my body. And it was a way to get all the angst out. And then it just got harder and harder and harder, meaning like the climbs got more and more difficult. Then I got more and more attention because then I'm getting sponsored, I'm going on bigger trips, and I was just, filling myself with that, but it becomes much more dangerous too.

In what way?

Just more dangerous climbs, right? More dangerous endeavors. You're going to higher altitudes, harder ways, and that is sort of its own swelling of hubris and ego that allows you to escape what's actually happening inside, which is also driving it. So you don't want to resolve it because you want it to keep fueling you.

Yeah.

There's the fear that if I am actually somehow healthy... You're happy, then you.

Won'T want to do the whole thing.

Exactly, exactly.

Out of all success comes out of somebody chasing pain away somehow.

Chasing pain away, getting their heart broken. I mean, look at the vast majority of amazing art is all about getting your heart smashed, right?

That's what I was wondering when I was in college. Is there a place for art without suffering? Like, did art come out of joy or light or beauty or magic or wonder?

I actually think all art is an expression of love. But oftentimes it's coming through the lens of pain. But in my mind, it's love trying to be expressed. And so the reason we create during pain and crisis is because the love feels suppressed, it feels pushed down. And so art is the expression of love coming through you.

And you can see in your book, Bipolar Photographs from an Unquiet Mind, it's sort of double entendre, bipolar, like both poles and everything in between. It's an incredible book, a beautiful book of photographs from all around the world that you've taken and how you see the world and what you see. the things you photograph that reflects who you are. Yeah. And I imagine in some ways it was very healing to do that for you.

It was healing. I mean, the photographs, putting the photographs in a book, putting them into bipolar as a collection was very healing. The memoir, the color of everything, the way I often refer to them is they're actually one book. There's the internal exploration and then there's the external manifestation of it. And so they're really companion books where one, you get to see how my mind was interpreting the world around me, but the other one, you get to see what was really happening underneath it.

Yeah.

And what was at many times driving it.

I mean, some of these pictures are just stunning, you know, and I, you know, often wanted to go see what it would be like to go to Mount Everest or K2.

You should.

The top peaks. But I'm like, Dude, come on, look at you.

You're ready to go right now.

I actually had a dream of to backpack and hike and be in the mountains. and I had a dream of being an expedition doctor and wanted to be on expeditions. And I actually was a wilderness medicine doctor. I didn't know that. In Idaho, I was a family doc and I was part of the backcountry rescue team. So we learned, no kidding, rescue people from really rugged mountain conditions. But it wasn't climbing Mount Everest, but.

With like no oxygen. Well, my friend Dr. Luann Freer, she was the one that actually sort of was like, I went to Everest in 2012 and she was like, and got evacuated. And she's like, I think you had a panic attack. And this was after the avalanche. My point in bringing that up is she never climbed Everest. She just created the Everest ER. And that was her life for years and years and years.

Yeah.

Was creating a medical facility to care for climbers. Climbers and Sherpa and high altitude workers.

Crazy. So I want you to take us to this sort of this moment where, and it tells the story of when you were climbing in winter.

Yeah.

A mountain that never been climbed in winter.

Yeah.

And Pakistan. And something catastrophic happened. So tell us what happened in terms of the actual events, but also what happened on your inner landscape.

Okay. So just so people know, there are 14 mountains in the world that are above 8,000 meters. So 26,240 feet roughly. Five of those are in Pakistan and the other nine are in right on the border of Nepal and Tibet, and then there's one down in India. After all those peaks were climbed in the early '80s, there was this crazy idea, and it was really the Polish doing these sort of nationalist expeditions to start climbing these peaks in winter. So it was like, okay, now we've done it. Now we've been to the top. Now let's try to go there in a much harder way. So all nine that are south of Pakistan had been climbed, but over, I think, 26 years, 16 expeditions had gone to Pakistan to try to do one of the winter ascents, and they had all failed. And so in 2010-11, I was invited by an Italian guy, Simone Moro, and a Russian guy, Denis Urubko, to try to do one of these peaks, Gasherbrum II. And that is the 13th highest mountain in the world. So we ended up climbing it in this very short weather window, about a 12-hour weather window. and then we got hit by a.

Storm on the descent.

You made it to the top.

We made it to the top. And in winter, I mean, just to put a perspective, I was feeling Mount Everest. Even climbing the summer, it's like snow and cold and like 30 below. Like, what is winter like?

That's not winter. What is winter? If summer is 30 below, what's winter? Winter is like this. We got up on the summit day, we're at 6,800 meters. There's three of us smashed into the sardine can of a tent. That's really a two-man. We're sleeping head to toe. I mean, it's incredibly cramped and tight. We wake up in the, well, at 11 p.m. you can barely sleep at that altitude. Oh, my sleeping is like, yeah, no, that's like trying to sleep at, you know, an ACDC concert. So we got up at 11 and, you know, I had my altimeter and my thermometer hanging from the ceiling. It was minus 51 centigrade in the tent. Without the wind chill. Without the wind chill. So that's like minus 60 Fahrenheit. It's terrible.

Right?

But they did like, I loved it at the time. I absolutely adored it. And we start climbing through the night, you know, six or eight hours later, we're sort of, it was almost as if it just happened. We were on the summit. It's almost like I blacked out, you know? And then the weather came in, I think on the summit, it was registering.

At minus 80 without the wind chill. Did you get frostbite where you have enough clothes?

I mean, how do you, how do you protect against that cold weather? Well, you're wearing these huge down suits.

Yeah.

They kind of look like spacesuits.

Yeah.

And you've got a ton of layers on, but it's tricky because if you layer up too much, you start sweating, which makes you cold. So if your feet are sweating in that kind of temperature, your toes are going to get frostbitten. And it's very, very tenuous too. You have to be very, very careful because if you say you drop a glove or a mitten, I mean, that hand is gone.

Right.

You know, you can't handle stuff. at that temperature. It's kind of like grabbing dry ice. So we got to the summit and I'm, I was, I became, I didn't know this by the way at the time. I became the first and I still am the only American to summit any of the 8,000 meter peaks in winter. So we start descending and this storm hits us and it just starts dumping snow. And we got back to camp one and we had a, you know, it's relatively flat, but it's this huge glacial valley that's just, If you look at pictures of it, it looks like sliced bread. These crevasses just kind of, as the grade gets steeper, they just spill over. I have video of it where, like, the snow is up to our waist, and I heard above us this sort of crack, sounds a little bit like thunder, and I know what's coming. And I turn and I look, and the cloud ceiling was very low, and then the air blast of this avalanche just took us. And then we're in the snow and.

It- and you're tumbling around.

I mean, it's just like being in a washing machine. It's very violent, it's very loud. Your mind goes absolutely crazy trying to make sense of what to do, how to make it stop, how to not die, and yet it's flooding with memories at the same time. So the idea that your life flashes before your eyes is accurate, but in my experience, there was It wasn't poetic. It was just like random shit going through my head. But a million thoughts in a second. So you're living this elongated timeline in a very short timeline. I just remember being angry, and then I remember just kind of resigning to the fact that I was gonna die, and there was nothing I could do about it, and then stopping. and realizing my face and my head were kind of above the surface. And then my first thought was, well, Simone and Dennis are dead, because there's no way all of us survived.

Your climbing partner.

My climbing partners. And there's no way I'm going to dig them up. I don't have a shovel, and the snow is going to compact very quickly. I could pull the rope that we were tied to, to see if I could get down to them. My thought was, well, there's no way I'm going to get to them in time.

Were your hands free?

One hand was free. And so I started kind of thrashing and flopping like a fish, trying to get out of it before my body heat would actually kind of freeze me in a sort of a cocoon. And then I heard Simone's voice. And it was so confusing, 'cause I was like, you're dead. You're dead. There's no way you're alive. And then I felt him on me. He was more on the periphery. Somehow when he was leading, he was ahead when we got hit, and somehow I ended up ahead when we stopped. We'd gone over several big crevasses. There were huge chunks of ice in the snow. So any one of these things could have killed any of us. And then I heard Dennis's voice too. So somehow we had all survived. And really that is because the impetus of the force was actually the air blast. in front of the snow. And then we got hit by a little bit of the snow. And that's how we all were mostly on the surface. And then- Since you were kind of.

Ahead of it in this- yeah, yeah.

Because we were on basically flat ground. So what happens is it slides off the steep ground and the snow starts to slow down, but it actually amplifies the force of the air blast. And so we got thrown about 500 feet. And then I felt Simone's sort of hands on me and digging me out. What happens in those moments, the way trauma works is basically it stores a memory. So trauma is not the event itself. It's the mind storing the memory in the hippocampus. And when it's very traumatic, it then triggers the amygdala in this fight or flight area into your sympathetic nervous system. And so that shuts down your prefrontal cortex. So you have no logic and reasoning and you're just living in this recycling loop because your mind is telling you everything is a threat. That's what we call PTSD, right? And that recycling system becomes so problematic that then we search for any way to slow that down, to zone out from it. That's why there's so much substance abuse in people with PTSD. That's why there's anger, that's why there's violence, because you're trying to express that.

Yeah.

Through it, then by virtue of that, it becomes sort of a life path that you can't get out of. There's two ways to rewire the brain, only two. One is through intense experience, and one is through repetition. And so that's why when people have these intense experiences, it changes the brain entirely. And then oftentimes the only way out of that is repetition, which is much, much harder.

What do you mean by repetition?

Meaning you have to change your neural pathways. You have to change what's going on in your head by repeating new patterns over and over and over again to get out of the trenches of the shift that happens during a traumatic event. You can also have profoundly intense experiences that are very positive that change the wiring of the brain. For example, psychedelic use can facilitate that. That's why people have this big blowout experience and all of a sudden they're freed from years of addiction because they had a positive, intense experience.

And so when you were in that avalanche and then you came out of that, you already had experience and were living with PTSD and trauma from your child, you already having struggles with bipolar illness. When you came out of that, what shifted? Did you kind of have an exacerbation of the PTSD experiences? Was it a vehicle for you to sort of navigate a new way out of all those? What happened?

Well, yes is the answer to that question. Both, all of it. When we have complex post-traumatic stress, which is, you know, deeply ingrained, repetitive, traumatic experiences, say for example, like my childhood, it's much more likely that you'll have a PTSD episode when something big happens like that. So what happened was I took a photograph after this of my face.

Ended up on National Geographic cover, right?

Right.

And this story blew up well beyond the climbing world. And so that very much launched my life and career into a new phase. which was very, very positive and generative and changed the course of everything for me. At the same time, it triggered all of that internal turmoil that I was living with. And so I started to unravel internally. There was the hyperstimulation of the external world, which was something that I knew how to navigate because of childhood. And yet, The trauma inside started leading me down some very, very dark paths, specifically with substance abuse. And after this experience?

After the avalanche.

But it was subtle, and then it kind of grew. And then there was anger, there was a lack of memory, there was... It wasn't like, Holy shit, I survived.

Now I have a new lease on life and let me be free. It was like the opposite.

You went into a darker... Well, I wanted that. Again, they existed concurrently, right? So I wanted intellectually the new lease on life. But what I was experiencing internally was, why is this getting harder? Why is this actually louder in my brain now? So I used the external success again to quiet that down, but internally I was like, Give me anything to make this stop. Just give me anything.

And when you say this, can you kind of describe what this feels like?

It's like an internal hum. that never goes away. It's like a, it's like the way I describe it in the book, it's.

Like.

The edges of the world become fragmented and sharp, and yet there's a dullness to your perception and ability to function. It's like living in a haze where you've had too much coffee, you've gotten yelled at by somebody that you love, you know, like it's like all the worst shit and you, so you're stuck in these rumination loops. you know, having conversations and arguments with the person that cuts you off in the Whole Foods parking lot. But it's like all the time, you know? It's just so deeply uncomfortable. It's like jagged edges in your mind that is ceaseless and constant and will never, ever shut the fuck up. You can't find a moment of calm.

Well, it's interesting that you call your photography book, Photographs from an Unquiet Mind. And in the color of everything, you kind of have a flip way of talking about that voice, really, about how to get you to be quiet. Yeah. So can you kind of walk us through that?

Well, the photographs were made in, you know, throughout a life of very, you know, this disquiet. And the memoir, is all about the journey to find the quiet and where I found some of that. Which is not to say that I live with a very quiet mind, but it's about the process through which I've found ways to regulate and to manage the dysregulation and to manage the highs and lows. But again, it's not as if it just is an instant resolution or or it all just goes away. I just went through something recently where I was like, just got my heart absolutely smashed. And it was like, I feel good. I feel good. I feel like, you know, in the past three months, there were the fires, nine of my friends lost their homes.

Los Angeles.

Yeah. I left a relationship that I had been in for a year and a half. My dad died. And then I, fell madly in love, and then it got-- and then that just ended super abruptly in a very confusing way. And so you look at the kind of dysregulation that that causes.

Yeah. Any one of those things is enough to knock you off your feet.

Right. And then you're doing four of them.

Right.

A bunch of life comes at you. Yeah.

And then you think, well, I've really done a lot of personal work. And then there's this vacuousness after all of this loss. And it was instantly back into these patterns, these pathologies. And so in some ways, it's like-.

And you say the pattern, you mean the narrative in your head?

The narrative in your head and the behaviors and like, not necessarily substance abuse, it's different. It's a different expression now, but it's just like, wow, I'm grabbing for anything to calm this. And it's a good barometer and roadmap for, oh, this is still where I need to do some work. It's because it's easy to be regulated when things are going your way. It's much, much harder to stay regulated when the world falls apart. And that's usually where you see your markers for growth. You see what I mean?

Yeah, that's when the shit goes down that you start to have a place where you'll have, someone said to me, either you're happy or you're growing. I think that's really true. And it's what we do with that. You know, some people come up against that and they hide, they run, they.

Numb, they, They tell a story of brokenness.

Yeah.

And they don't actually use it as an opportunity for growth, right? They use it as a sort of.

An excuse for fuckery.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah. That's one way of putting it. And I think that, you know, it's easy to fall back into that, right? Yeah. Because it's sort of easier, it's our culture sort of supports it. We don't have structures and systems to help us navigate out of that. And I think the psychedelic revolution is really interesting to me because it's a way talk about trauma collectively, talk about destigmatizing mental illness, to sort of understand that the brain has this plasticity that can shift out of trauma. There's a sort of funny joke in medicine that neurologists pay no attention to the mind and psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain. And a lot of the things you're describing are brain dysfunction. That is a response to external triggers or external influences. And it could be anything from actual psychological trauma to changes in your metabolic health to inflammatory change in the brain that come from toxins, diet, or various external factors that drive mental illness. So mental illness is sort of the end result of many potential causes.

Right.

I wrote a book, I don't know if you know this, but I wrote a book about 15 years ago called the Ultra Mind Solution, how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first. Yeah. And in that book, I basically call myself the accidental psychiatrist because what I was doing was helping people address physical complaints that they had, not a disease or digestive issues or psoriasis or whatever the heck it was. And they would tell me that their ADD was better, their bipolar disease was gone, that their schizophrenia was improved, that whatever it was, dementia would get better, depression would get better, PTSD would get better, panic attacks would go away. I mean, and I was like, well, what's going on here? Yeah.

Yeah.

This is not what I learned in medical school.

Right. Right.

This is something fundamentally different. And it's a sort of got me down this rabbit hole of asking the question about what the causes are and what is the brain need to heal in order for the mind to heal. It's a lot harder to heal the mind if the brain is not working.

Right, right. Exactly.

It doesn't mean you don't have to do the work once your brain is healed. Yeah. But it's a much easier path than dealing with all the physiological things that are driving brain disease.

And so like, for example, this is like the ACEs scale, the adverse childhood experiences. Scale, right? Like, so if you have, you know, it's basically a questionnaire of 1 to 10. Did you have this happen in your childhood? Did you have this happen?

And if you- Like, did you have a divorce in your family? Was somebody in jail?

Were you abused? Were you yelled at? Exactly. Were you ever hungry, right? Did somebody ever hit you so hard that there were marks, right? And the more you add this up, there's this profound expression of both physical ailments and behavioral ailments, right? So like, you're, I don't know the exact figures, but you're far more likely to be a smoker, you're far more likely to attempt suicide, you're far more.

Likely to, 30 times more likely to attempt suicide. Right, I mean it's crazy.

A high score, much more likely to be depressed or, get divorced. One of the things that's so beautiful that you're talking about, and one of the things that we miss is also the integrated system of the heart, because the heart is not a metaphor. As we're learning so much more about it, there's mirror neurons in your heart and your mind, and emotion processing in some way starts in the heart. And then, you know, the signal for it travels up your vagus nerve, and then it starts this bilateral conversation between your mind and your heart. So it's not just this metaphor. So in my mind, wellness is the integration of the mind, the body, and the heart. And there's three components that when they're working in concert, you are stepping into a place of more holistic wellness. But you're absolutely right. It's an inside out and an outside in job, and it can work both ways. And it does work both ways.

As an elite athlete, when you started working with all this, on, you know, both internal and external. You know, you try to manage it in some ways by doing all these crazy things. Yeah, yeah. Most people think or not.

Yeah.

And it helps you in some ways. For sure. And I think probably take you out of a maladaptive behaviors that, you know, although people say climbing to Mount Everest is crazy. Yeah.

What's the scale?

But it's sort of a socially acceptable crazy.

Right.

It's like what we look up to, you know? Yeah. Were there things that you found helpful? that helped quiet your mind that were not these extreme endurance things such as what you ate or because you were obviously extremely fit and healthy and from that perspective, but also what was food a part of this? How did you use things like meditation or supplements or other things that helped you to sort of regulate? Because you seem pretty well regulated now, and I imagine compared to how we were, it's a big shift.

It's a huge shift. And there were many modalities outside of therapy. That was one, right? But in my daily life, there are some very basic things that I try to hit. One is journaling, like literally mind dumping. And it's not, I'm not trying to write well, I'm not trying to be pretty. It's mind vomiting.

Yeah.

And it's called purging. Yeah, purging. I do that in the morning if I can. Just get to it, vomit what's going on, and you just get it out.

So basically what we're talking about is your inner dialogue, that's your lower self.

Right.

You're not keeping it inside. You're basically, it's like having shit literally inside you. Instead of being constipated mentally, you literally get it out. You get it out.

You just kind of purge or bomb it out.

It's a mental suppository. Yeah, exactly.

Basically, it's just- yeah. Yeah, it's so powerful. It's so powerful and consistency is key with it, right?

Doing it regardless is great, but consistency.

Is really- do you wake up every morning in your journal? I wake up in the morning. I meditate. One of the things I've really learned is to remove the roadblocks. If you think that meditation has to be sitting up straight with your legs perfectly crossed, trying to get a blue light shooting out of the top of your head, you're missing the point. If you remove all the roadblocks to these things. So I wake up in the morning, I prop myself up in my bed a little bit, and I meditate. I don't try to sit up straight because I've found that that means I won't Do it. Then I go to the gym or I do my sort of morning pages or, you know, those can happen whatever time it happens. But by then, you know, by the time nine o'clock rolls around or eight o'clock, meditated, journaled, exercised.

So it sets the foundation for your day.

Exactly. It sets, and so again, I've tried to be the guy who does it at five o'clock and then you do that. Fuck that. Like that is a hurdle, right? And then you'll feel the sense of failure when you don't hit it. And then I have other pillars, which are community. I do a lot of men's work now, where it's, we call it the treehouse, and we are just a group of people who are committed to our own growth and the growth of other men through the messy work of change and accountability. And that provides the structure for one of the other pillars, which is community. Right? So spending time with other people. Dan Buettner, who started Blue Zones, has done a lot of research on this. He's a dear friend and a mentor where it's like, good guy. Spending a lot of time with people is actually healthy people is really good for you, you know? And then creativity. So you hit that creative, whatever it is, doodle for 30 minutes while you're on the phone. Just be creative in some way. Giving. and that could be simple. That could be listening to a friend, not trying to fix it, just listening. That is a huge gift. So there's, I try to hit all these things and then diet, of course, I try to get enough food. I try to bias protein, basically for, for muscle function and get plenty of greens and veggies in and kind of stay away from sugars and bad carbs.

And you notice that those adversely affect you when you do. go off the.

I'm just foggier. Yeah, foggier. And I don't feel as good in my body. I feel lethargic. It doesn't mean I don't love them. I mean, give me some pizza.

Right.

You know, like, just being mindful of that. And then with supplements, again, it's. My supplement sort of regimen is very, very basic. It's vitamin D, it's Omega-3s it's, you know, maybe some probiotics at different times. I also supplement with, like, a super greens. thing in my, in my protein shakes and fiber because I have naturally high cholesterol. So when you're eating a lot of meat.

Yeah.

And you have naturally high cholesterol, you got to be careful. But it's very simple, you know.

And has that affected how your brain is in terms of how your, your mood is and cognitive function and inner dialogue and the swings of mood?

I would say it has, but it's by virtue not only of the like, the actual chemical reaction in my body and what that's doing and the reduction in inflammation, but it's also the consistency. Being consistent with things in your life in general creates a foundational sense of stasis. Because it's reliable.

Agency and not being at the effect of the world, but being in charge of your world.

Agency, it's so interesting you say that agency is How do you mean? Like you said, it puts you in control and it takes you out of a state of this is happening to me, to this is happening, and I get to choose my response to it. When you're not an agency, you're reacting to it and you're always looking backward, not having agencies living in a place of blame. So it's backward focused. This happened to me and that's always in the right.

Victim blame.

Yeah, victimhood is like, and we're fostering victimhood right now. And that is, we are a culture right now that is rewarding victimhood.

It's really true. We have a victim-based culture. I mean, the whole sort of woke movement is really about, I'm the victim, I've been abused, it's the oppressed oppressor narrative.

Right, right.

Which has a place, but it seems to have gotten kind of way over Yeah, to the other end where- well.

It'S the extraction of agency. You know, it's like we get to just be in the trauma of it and we get to sit in it and we get to stay victims. I'm not saying that when terrible things happen, there's not a place for being a victim. You are a victim of something happening. There's a time and a place for that. The goal is not to get stuck in it. When I was writing my book, and I say this in the book, I started writing from a place of victimhood. Look at how hard my life has been. And look at what I've overcome. And look at what I'm a survivor. And then I realized, oh my God, even claiming that I'm a survivor keeps me chained to the trauma. Because I'm still always in reference to the thing that happened. Versus there's data and then there's the stories we create around it. The data is the event. And then there's the stories that we spin up to find meaning and navigate life with that.

That's right.

But we have to be very careful about the stories we're telling.

That's right.

And right now, as you point out, we are stuck in a story of this happened to me. But when I look back now, and I look at the relationship with my brother, I look at my family, I look at being institution, I am literally profoundly grateful for it. and that's the shift.

That's the alchemy that made you who you are.

Exactly. I literally would not be sitting here with you. Had all that stuff not happened.

Right.

You wouldn't have gone through all these crazy peaks.

I wouldn't have done that.

It's interesting, you know, so what you're talking about reminds me of the sort of profound, extreme examples of where one would think that it would be impossible to have this perspective. And there's three stories that I kind of things that I've heard that really kind of always echo in my mind. One was, you know, Victor Frankl's book.

Man's Search for Meaning.

Man's Search for Meaning. Search for Meaning. Where he's- Favorite book. He realized, you know, he was in a concentration camp and, you know, he, the only thing he could control was his response to his environment.

Yeah.

Couldn't change the environment. Right. Couldn't change what he was getting to eat or how he was being abused.

Or the fact that people were in.

Crematoriums burning next to him. But he realized that, you know, he had agency over his mind.

Yeah.

And he, he said, you know, between stimulus and response, there's a pause. In that pause lies a choice. In that Choice lies your freedom. And so he was free, even though he was in a prison.

Right.

And I remember, I heard about Nelson Mandela, where he was in Robin Island.

Yeah.

In, in prison, you know. Yeah. Hard labor.

Oh, my God.

Splitting rocks with a sledgehammer and. There was a moment where he was so angry at his oppressors, at the white jailers and the guards. And he had this moment where he realized that they were actually just human beings and that if he chose to love them instead of hate them, that he was no longer in prison.

Right.

And during his inauguration, And I had news of people who were at that inauguration. It wasn't filmed, but after the inauguration, there was a sort of a lunch, and he had the prime minister here and the head of that there, and he moved them away from the chairs next to him, and he invited in two of the jailers who he got to know who were his jailers and the guards during his imprisonment in Robin Island and welcomed them and embraced them. and he had gotten to know them and they'd gotten to be human beings with him. It was really quite an astounding story. And the other story was when I was a young medical sort of student and I went to Nepal on an expedition, or Kachenjunga, which is the tallest peaks there. And I wasn't climbing it. I was just trekking. And we were studying this small village and doing a public health survey. after I went down to the town in Nepal called Bodh Gath, which is where all the Tibetan refugees hang out. And I was really interested in Tibetan medicine and I wanted to learn about Tibetan medicine. And so I found there was this Tibetan doctor, this old Tibetan doctor that was practicing there. And I found someone who was a translator and I got to sit with him all day and while he was seeing patient after patient. And He told me the story of how he spent 22 years in a Chinese gulag where he was beaten and abused and tortured. And, you know, they took away all the things that mattered to him of his sort of sacred Buddhist prayer. And I said, what was the hardest moment for you there? He said, well, the hardest moments were those moments where I thought I might lose compassion for my Chinese jailers. I was like, Wow. You know, so it sort of speaks to how, how we see things. And Gabor Mate talks about, you know, the fact that trauma isn't what happens to you.

Right.

It's the meaning you make from what happens to you. And I think when you're little, the story you tell, the story you tell. And like when you're little, it's hard because, you know, you, you don't have this perspective. You don't, you can't kind of call on your higher self that easily. You're, you know, you don't have agency. You don't have agency. You're a little kid. You're at the effect of your parents. I mean, you're, you're kind of a, you are a dependent. That's what they call them, dependents. Yeah. But when you get older, like, you have to sort of re-tell that story.

You have to unlearn.

And you have to retell that story in a way that doesn't hold you as that victim. Right. And it sounds like your journey was through that dark tunnel of victimhood and survival. But out the other side of it, you figured out how to actually Tell a different story. So can you, can you walk us through how you got from that place where it was hard and you were a victim to the place where you were in power and, and actually in charge of your own story and narrative and how you were able to retell that story in a way that allowed you to become more free?

A lot of it was really writing the book, but that something happened concurrently with that where I did start doing more psychedelic work. And as I was writing the book, I was confronted by my own words, looking at them in black and white on a page. As I became more aware of my heart, my actual heart, I became more compassionate towards the external stimulus of my life. Because I started to see that, like Mandela or like Viktor Frankl, when you start to see the world as a collection of complicated, contradictory beings, there is a necessary Stephen: extension of compassion. And it also happens internally when you start to see yourself, you take agency and you start to see that you are full of contradictions. You are full of polarities. You know, we are all hypocritical at different times. And the more we're in search for survival, the more binary we become. That's a natural response of the brain. In writing the book, when I was confronted with my own stories, and I was coming more into contact with my heart, I realized that I could reframe the stories. I could abandon the narratives. I could literally rewrite them on the page. And what a powerful experience to do that as an exercise for people.

Does this sort of metabolize your life story in the process of the writing?

Yeah.

It's almost like a way of metabolizing your life story.

Yeah, yeah.

It sort of got transmuted into something else.

Well, and I saw I literally one day I had this sort of revelation. I love reading. One of my favorite books is the Power of Myth, where Joseph Campbell talks about how there are basically archetypes of humans and there are stories that we consistently tell throughout history and a half. And I started to see, there was this moment where I was like, oh my God, it's all a story. and I'm in charge of that. I have the agency to imagine, reimagine, and unlearn the stories that I've learned in a very conscious way. And it doesn't mean lie to yourself about it. It doesn't mean these things didn't happen. It means that my interpretation of them and the meaning that I'm giving them is my responsibility. and I have control and agency over that. And so you step out of the blame mentality and into the gratitude mentality where you see that the shape of you and all of your contradictions and complexities, all of that beautiful mess is yours to own versus somebody else's to control. or a memory to control. And there's so much liberation and freedom in that moment. Consciousness is storytelling.

That's important. I mean, I think most of us don't even realize we can retell the narrative of our life.

Right.

That we can change the meaning we ascribe to things.

Yeah.

That we can end our internal suffering by actually reimagining the narrative that we've created for ourselves.

Yeah.

You know, I've had to do that. And if, you know, if anybody who's sort of gotten to a place of more peace, you know, sort of, like I said, your interesting titles of your books are so different. One is, you know, photographs from an unquiet mind, another one's a journey to quiet the chaos within.

Yeah.

So it's an interesting- with polarity. Flip.

Right.

Right.

And that has been, my life has been defined on some level by polarity.

And there is, in the Hermetic teachings, that's what that- that was, I don't know if you meant to say that. My life has been defined by bipolarity. Bipolar.

Nice, dude. That was great. I'm going to keep that one. In the Hermetic teachings, which are basically underlie all religious philosophy, one of the principles of the seven principles is basically based around polarity. And so the idea is that every truth is simply a half truth. And until you incorporate the other half truth, which naturally exists, you are living in half truths, which are falsehoods. Right? It's, it's, and so part of my journey has been to become more compassionate towards, those seemingly paradoxical relationships and allowing myself to expand to include both sides of everything. And that extends to myself, meaning that the highs that create things would not be the highs that create things without the lows that balance against them. And so to say that I want only one would betray the law of polarity.

Well, it's true. I mean, most of us try to push away what's uncomfortable and seek pleasure. We avoid pain, we seek pleasure. And in a way that kind of misses the point of life, which is that it's all part of life.

It's all part of it.

And you can't experience one without the other.

Discovery demands discomfort. So if we're trying to constantly avoid the things that make us uncomfortable, we will no longer discover. And another one of the things that I talk about oftentimes is that certainty kills curiosity. So as soon as you become certain of your story, certain of anything, you're done growing. There's no more exploration. There's no more discovery. You're done. It's over. So grow your capacity for discomfort, lean into the things that are hard, lose your certainty, take agency, and grow.

Yeah. Yeah.

Welcome the questions.

Yeah.

I'm going to sort of what Rilke has a famous passage around that, which is beautiful about welcoming the questions because that's really where you find the answers, right?

Well, and it's funny that I, I opened the book with a Rilke quote, which is, Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. It just, you know, the idea to avoid suffering, there's a lot of that right now in the mindfulness wellness community where there's almost like a, it's spiritual bypassing where you're like trying to almost escape the necessity of pain. You're just like bypassing it. No, I'm just going to be mindful. And I think it's a misinterpretation of non-attachment.

I'm going to share that real quick quote because it was so important to me as a young man. And it's from a book called Letters to a Young Poet. Yeah, that book. That actually helped, you know, the poet kind of reflect on his own life. And it was this beautiful meditation. His letters were just mostly poetry, but he said, Be patient toward all that's unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything, live the questions now. Perhaps you'll then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Yeah. It makes me emotional because it.

I.

Mean, the one thing that I still have tremendous amounts of questions and especially right now in my life, it feels almost more confusing than it ever has.

Well, I'll tell you what, I'm 65 and I still have so many questions. So many unsolved things and so many things I'm still leaning into and learning and growing. And it doesn't matter what age you are, what point of life you are, you know, your story is one of inspiration, but also I think it's one of giving people a sense that they're not alone in these struggles and trials and challenges, whether it's just anxiety, depression, or just tough moments in life or that it's where more serious mental illness, that there's a way through.

Yeah.

Right, the only way out is through. And you've clearly demonstrated that, Corey, with your life and your life's work. And I encourage everybody to learn more about Corey. Check out his book, Bipolar Photographs from One in Quite Mind, his book that he just came out with, the Color of Everything, which is just a beautiful meditation on your life and experience. And in a way, you're sharing people the alchemy of your change and how you sort of shifted your narrative, which is, I think it's almost like you get to see the work in progress of that.

Yeah.

You can follow me on Instagram at, and your handle is just Cory Richards.

Yep.

Right.

So no E. No E. C-O-R-Y.

And, and, yeah, there's films you've made, there's all kinds of stuff out there, but I think, you know, we all find challenges in life and, your story of overcoming those challenges and continuing to overcome those challenges is inspiration for all of us. So thanks for doing what you do, being who you are and coming on the show.

Thanks for having me. This is great. Perfect. Loved it.

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