Why the Mental Health System Is Failing — and What Needs to Change

You believe there are critical shortcomings within the current healthcare system concerning mental health, which led you to write your book, Has Medicine Lost Its Mind? Why Our Mental Health System Is Failing Us and What Should Be Done About It. Dr. Robert Smith, welcome to Beyond Diagnosis.

Thank you.

As a distinguished professor of medicine and psychiatry, you believe there are critical shortcomings within the current healthcare system concerning mental health. That is such an interesting title. And as we were chatting just before, you said that the title to that just dropped in your head whilst you were at a conference talking, wasn't it?

That's exactly right. Yeah, thank you for inviting me.

Oh, you're welcome.

This—

I'm, I'm loving your mission. We've been chatting about it, and you know, it is such a needed mission around, like you said before, raising the consciousness around mental health, what the doctors need to be doing. So why do so many mental health issues go untreated and misdiagnosed?

Yeah, no, it's a terrible problem and it quite frankly is largely unrecognized. I've been in this business since about 1978 in the academics, the research part and the training part of it. And I and many others have worked assiduously to try to get medicine to improve mental healthcare, but it is refractory. It doesn't do anything. And what I'm going to tell you is probably kind of scary to some of your viewers and listeners. Medicine, mental healthcare is conducted 75% or more by men, by primary care doctors like I am. The problem is we're not trained to do that. And the result is predictable. We miss most diagnoses. When we do treat, it's usually the wrong treatment. And the downside of that is, of course, unrecognized mental disorders lead to unnecessary divorces, school failures, job failures, addiction, homelessness, incarceration. And I'm not saying you can cure all those things if the doctors were trained, but a large number of them could be prevented in the first place. And, but don't blame your doctor for this. It's not their fault. They're not trained. And if you talk to any of them, I'm just at a meeting recently and talking to them. Bob, What am I supposed to do? There's no psychiatrist in my town. I do the best I can. Another one said, you know, there are 3 or 4 psychiatrists here, but it takes 10 months to get a patient in to see them. The point here is that psychiatry and psychology see no more than 25% of all mental health patients. Untrained primary care docs are seeing 75% of the rest of them. And the solution is simple. Train the doctors who provide the care. And yet medicine doesn't do this. Has medicine lost its mind? I mean, that's where what you were saying, this came up in a meeting. I'm presenting this. Has medicine lost its mind? Well, that became the title. If you look at a little deeper level though, that's just kind of rhetorical. Has medicine lost its mind? Well, the answer is yes, it did lose its mind. And maybe we can talk about that if you Absolutely.

We'll get to that a little bit further down in the conversation because this must be— I find that absolutely astounding that someone would go through all the years of studying psychiatry, psychology, and yet they only get a tiny portion of the people who actually require their services.

That's correct.

And why is that though? Are they not recommended to them, or is it a Billing? Is it the system? I'm not understanding why that is.

It's this system. That's a good question. And it is this system which focuses almost entirely because this mind-body split and basically the mind was just sent off elsewhere. It just was not viewed as medicine's province. And they focused just on physical diseases. And that That is part of it. And then training, you know, doctors go through training for 4 years of medical school, 3 to 5 years in residency. It's all focused on physical disease. Well, not all. I've actually got the data on it. 2% of that time is on mental health issues, but that's nothing. And so that's why doctors are not competent in mental health problems. There evolves then during this time in education, a culture of medicine which dismisses the psychological, the social, the emotional, the mental health. And it is devastating. There is a study from the British Journal of Psychiatry shows that 49%, that's half, of all entering medical students are interested, very interested in psychiatry. By the time they graduate 4 years later, 4% is all that remain interested. And something then is happening, and it's this culture of medicine. Physical disease is important, but psychological, social, emotional, mental things are not. And it It gets to the point where medical faculty not only dismiss these issues, but they actually disdain them. A doctor, a student, just maybe addressing somebody's emotion, a faculty often will say, why are you addressing that touchy-feely stuff? We're just interested in real objective disease. And so it is a culture that's perpetuated. And think of that again, all of this influence across 7 to 10 years of training. training. Doctors are basically being brainwashed into this isolated physical approach that excludes the mental, the psychological, social.

I remember hearing, I remember listening to this interview and the lady was saying that she worked in a hospital and she wanted to go further into finding out why their patients were having this particular condition. And so she started asking them questions about their emotional health. Her superior told her off. She said that her superior told her off because she said, don't go to places within them that you don't have the answer for, or that medicine doesn't have something to— like a pill or something for.

Yeah.

You know, there's not a pill for your emotions. There's not a pill. You know, you— it's actually— you have to be skilled. And you know what you're saying, I find A little frightening, Dr. Robert, because when you look at the number of people that have mental health conditions, it's starting to actually become greater than our chronic diseases of like cardiovascular disease or diabetes. It's starting to surpass those numbers.

Mental disorders, Rita, you're right on it, are more common than heart disease and cancer combined.

Wow.

They're the most common health condition in the US, and I suspect in all of Western medicine. My data are in the US, but I suspect in Australia and all the rest of Western medicine as well. Mental disorders are devastating, as we've discussed. One of the other problems that comes up, and this is to come almost completely unrecognized. Medicine's forte, as we're talking about, is physical diseases, chronic physical disease, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, strokes, emphysema, what have you. All these physical diseases, these all, almost all, are caused by psychological and social lifestyle factors, which medicine avoids. Drinking, smoking, eating too much, not exercising. These are all psychosocial factors, but medicine ignores these in its focus on physical disease. And so chronic disease patients suffer. For example, 17%, that's some 30 million people in the U.S., have co-occurring depression, anxiety, drug addiction, along with their chronic physical disease, diabetes, maybe.

That's—

If the mental disorder is not treated, the physical disorder does not get better. And so it is devastating also to physical disease when we exclude The psychological and social, and it goes even beyond that in prevention and treatment. Medicine basically allows diseases to occur and then treats them. Now, I've eighty percent of these lifestyle factors are responsible for heart attacks, strokes, diabetes. Why not address them before the disease occurs and prevent it? This way, the person never gets the diabetes, the heart attack, or the stroke, and they live a happy retirement. Right now, what happens? We let the disease happen, then we treat it. But We're not curing it. People still are paralyzed from a stroke, have lost a leg from their diabetes, or are impaired because of their heart failure. They can no longer even play golf because they're so short of breath. That does not have to happen if medicine would, instead of letting the disease happen, prevent it in the first place.

Oh, 100%. 100% with you there. And because you think about it, when someone has depression— and I'm not saying all, I won't generalize here— but what do you usually do? You tend to have maybe bad eating habits because depression makes you want to sometimes, if you lean that way, towards emotional eating. Or like you were saying, drink or drugs to try and numb the feeling that you're having. which obviously doesn't make you feel good because that's why you're depressed. You know, it may be— there may be, you know, biochemical reasons as well, but, you know, you have to look at the emotions to that. And, you know, and what is the behavioral change around that which will then, like you're saying, help either improve your condition or prevent, which is what we all want.

So it's quite understandable. People, Say with heart attacks, heart failure, cancer, emphysema, where they're breathing oxygen all day long. These are not happy lives. They could have been prevented, but they're not now happy lives. And when people can't do things they used to do and they want to do, they get depressed.

Yes. Yes.

They get anxious. They start using drugs. They start drinking too much. They become isolated. And that aspect of these chronic diseases is never recognized because treating it empathically, doctors can still help these people live a better life. But that's not happening.

When it comes to why doctors have the bigger portion of the pie here, is it because they're not, Referring out. Why don't they refer out if they have someone come to them and they specifically have a mental health issue and that seems to be the primary? Why are they not referring out?

Yeah, it partly is that, that's what I've mentioned already, is there are no psychiatrists there. I mean, it's very hard to get a psychiatrist. It takes an average, there are data on this in the US at least, you know, 7, 8 months to get a psychiatry consultation. Most doctors, 2/3 of doctors say they can't get one at all. And so that's part of it. But another part of it, even if psychiatrists and psychologists are available, the doctor has to recognize the problem in the first place. When they hear problems that should elicit the need to ask about, say, depression or drug use or anxiety, They don't do it because they don't know to do it. And again, it's not their fault. They're simply not trained in it. Many of them are also imbued with this culture of medicine that simply dismisses the psychological, emotional, social aspect.

It's such a shame. And, you know, I know that a lot of my listeners are people who feel unheard when they go to a doctor.

That's right.

You know, they're talking, but they're not getting it through because Sometimes I find the doctor will dismiss it, not because they're trying to say the person's wrong, but it's a way of covering up. Like you're saying, they're not trained in it and they're not gonna say to you, I got no idea. So they kind of dismiss and then the patient's left unheard. Is that why you developed, which I think is fantastic, you developed the first patient-centered method to train medical professionals about building those strong partnerships? Between professional, medical professional, alternative professional, whoever, and patient so they can start to feel heard. Is that your reason behind it?

Yeah, no, that's what we did and we developed and it's in a textbook now that's used widely throughout the US and abroad. In fact, we're just putting it into the 5th edition. It's called Smith's Patient-Centered Interviewing: An Evidence-Based Method. What we did was to first develop a systematic method highlighting the part of emotion and then how to be empathic around it. And we systematized that into behaviors. It's not rigid, it's very flexible. It meets the individual patient's need. And having systematized it, we were able then to do rigorous research studies called randomized controlled trials on it. And we did several of those, and it, it's easily learned by doctors and easily taught, and in turn is associated with improved patient outcomes. Patients just love it. Satisfaction levels in patients were just sky high when doctors use this. And this would be compared to a control group where people where doctors didn't use it. And so this should be taught to doctors throughout medical school. Many schools in the US now do train doctors in interviewing, and this is one of the textbooks they use. But it's usually in the first year of medical school, and, you know, 4 years later and then the 3 to 5 years of residency later, it's washed out. They've forgotten it. And as I mentioned earlier, faculty, this culture of medicine, often dismiss it. Don't waste your time talking about the patient's emotions. We need to be objective, they'll say. Or don't get too involved with the patient. Or others will say patients don't like to talk about those things. And so all the effort of this culture is focused on physical, which is counter to the very precepts of the interview, which is to develop the patient's psychological, social, emotional life as well as their physical disease problem.

And I love it that you've developed this because it's so forward-thinking and it is something hopefully will go right across the country and ripple its way to Australia as well here. Because this is what you need. You need more of a patient-centered, it's not the doctor over you, in cooperation with each other, you know, I think always gets the best result.

I suspect it probably is being used in Australia. It has been very popular. We're now putting it into its 5th edition, but it's used throughout the Western world.

Great. So tell me, Dr. Robert, how would someone know if you should see a doctor if you do have depression, anxiety, or another type of mental health issue?

That's a good question because it cuts to the core of this problem. People having any sense of unrest, and I don't mean just getting upset because you lost your keys or something like that, but anybody that has unrest, distress, for, say, a 2 to 3, 4 week period of time and it persists or it keeps coming back, this should alert you to something going on. And by and large, it's depression and/or anxiety. Those are the very common problems in primary care. Self-assess. How do I feel? Do I feel depressed? Blue, down in the dumps, losing energy, can't concentrate, can't do the things I want to do. Those sorts of things should alert you that you are depressed, anxious. Anxiety more is can't concentrate, flighty, worrying about what people think all the time, worrying about failing. And, and Depression and anxiety often go together, and they kind of get lumped together, and treatment is pretty much the same also. So those sorts of symptoms should prompt you to think that I may have a problem. Given that, there are questionnaires you can take, and in fact, on my website, there's a simple place you can go and get a 2 to 3 question answer questionnaire and determine if you have depression or if you have anxiety, and it's easily determined. And the website is robertcsmithmd.com. Don't forget the MD because there's too many Smiths out there, otherwise you'll never find me.

That's right.

It was robertcsmithmd.com, and you, you'll find in there, I think it's on the homepage, uh, you'll, you'll find, uh, these questionnaires you can take. And, and there are others. You can go online and find questionnaires. But if you suspect this, take it to your primary care doctor. If you can, to a psychologist or psychiatrist, but that would be unusual. Take it to them and say, I think I'm depressed, anxious, or I'm worried about drinking too much alcohol or smoking marijuana or taking too many drugs, street drugs, or taking too much Vicodin and OxyContin. Whatever it is, and be explicit and say, I would like to see a mental health professional. Now, psychologists are very good for doing, and they're often more plentiful and more available, are very good for doing therapy. And sometimes it works just as well as drugs and medication. Or perhaps the primary care doctor can administer the antidepressants and the psychologist can work on the broader issues. And so that's what I would recommend. But be upfront when you go to the doctor, have it be the first thing you say. I am concerned about X and I would like to see a mental health professional.

And thank you for those resources as well where people can take the quiz because that's one of the things people go into appointments with healthcare professionals and don't know what to ask or what to say. Or they go in, they sit down and They just expect the doctor to start, start and finish the whole appointment and not actually ask enough. And it's usually when you leave the appointment that you go, oh, I should have said, or I could have asked.

Yeah.

But you just feel sometimes anxious in an appointment because it's the old stereotypic way of, what do you know? You don't know more than a doctor. Whereas we have to reframe that, that we do know more about ourselves. And like you were saying—

Rita, I sometimes tell people to write it down beforehand. And it isn't just mental health things. If you need medications refilled or, you know, if you think you need a chest X-ray, whatever it is, write it down beforehand. 1, 2, 3. The most important thing first, the mental health issue here. And then give it to the doctor upfront. Right away when she or he comes in and says, how are you doing? Fine. I'd like to discuss this, this, and this.

Yes.

Doctors actually appreciate that. It organizes what they're going to do and it helps them address what the patient is interested in in a timely way so that it doesn't happen to the doctor as often as the case. The doctor's standing up to leave the room and the patient says, oh, by the way, I'd like X, Y, and Z. Well, that takes the doctor more time. And so if you give them what you want upfront and don't hesitate to be assertive, most doctors will listen to this. But say, I need this done and here's what I'd like to see. And doctors would be very responsive to this. They actually appreciate it.

People to advocate for themselves. I love it. Also, someone who does have mental health conditions, as we've been talking about depression, anxiety, and they do go to their doctor, they're usually prescribed medication as the first and sometimes the only solution. What are the risks to this approach and what alternatives should patients consider?

Anybody who thinks, as we were talking before, maybe they're depressed or anxious, one of the most effective ways to treat that is physical Hmm. There are other things you can do. Journaling. Write, keep track. It's a diary, maybe some people call it, but I call it journaling. And don't, don't just write about poetry or something, what you see outside. Write about your feelings and what's going on in your life. Not only identify the feeling, but what the feeling led you to do, what behavior that followed it, and is that what you want to be doing? And as you write this each day, You don't have to write pages, just maybe a small paragraph. This is very helpful. There are what are called mindfulness meditation techniques. This is very effective, and it's taking time for yourself. Many of us don't take time for ourselves. And so take some, learn how to do meditation. It's very easy. Many people can self-instruct in it through available videos and things online, or you can even go where people are training in meditation. But it's very effective. I've done it myself for years. These sorts of self-help things are great. I mean, not smoking, not eating too much, eating the right things, and so on. All of these are helpful. But of all of these, I would advise exercise first and foremost. And you don't need to go out and run a 100-yard dash. It's good. Start walking. Pace yourselves. If you're not used to exercising, take it a step at a time, but gradually ratchet it up. You should be doing something, you know, 3 to 5 times a week, if not more. Every day is great. But all of these things are very helpful self-care items.

Yeah, absolutely. That's great advice. And I find that whenever I exercise, my mood just elevates. It's just, you just feel more energized throughout the day. One of the things I do find, especially with depression, is the motivation behind doing that is sometimes— and that's where I guess we don't want to rely on medication. I mean, I certainly, I'm not keen on being on any medication in my life.

No.

But sometimes just to get us started, would you say just to get yourself started if you're on maybe a little bit of an antidepressant or something that helps you have more motivation for these lifestyle changes. But the key is to get off them.

Medications are very effective for both depression and anxiety. And again, these are the common problems in primary care. And people may also have PTSD or other things, but Anxiety and depression are also present along with those. Chronic pain is another issue. Medications in a patient properly diagnosed, and then the medication properly used in an adequate dose and over a long enough period of time, and where the doctor follows the patient up carefully, are highly effective for depression and anxiety. I mean, you can expect, oh, 40, 50, 60% response rate in this done properly. Now, primary care doctors are not taught how to do that. But if, if this is done often by a psychiatrist, if it is done in this way, you can expect that kind of a good response. Psychotherapy, and this is what psychology can do for depression and anxiety. Psychotherapy is as effective as medications. And so if you don't wanna take medications, psychotherapy can do the same thing. Now, here's the good news. If you do both of them, psychotherapy plus medications, and get a primary care doctor that knows how to prescribe the antidepressants, it magnifies the effect of each. And so that's kind of the ideal. People need to know then they need to take these medicines regularly. And often they take it, need to take it for a year or so. But there is a very powerful effect of them. They do work used properly.

What would you say to the fact that sometimes when we get put on a medication from a primary care doctor, uh, you never get off it. Like, sometimes you become—

Yeah.

Is that— I mean, that's something that I will— more people need to be asking and talking to that. Like, if you get put on an antidepressant for depression, or even maybe for your anxiety, and you start eating well like we've talked about, and you're exercising and you feel really good, well, obviously the first thing to do is not to take yourself off it yourself because you're feeling better, but to actually speak to your doctor about, do I really need this? Because if you don't advocate, do I really need this, you're going to be on them forever. That's one of the issues I have around being on medication is sometimes you're on them for no reason anymore.

Yeah. I mean, it somewhat depends on which medications, but on antidepressants, Generally, if people have not been depressed before and they take them and they respond, they can get off of them. And it varies. The recommendations— some people say they can get off them as soon as 3 months. Most people would say probably a year. And then you gradually taper the drug off and see how things go. The depression comes back, you resume it. A different problem exists, though, for many people with depression. is they've had depression for years. They've been treated, they get better, they go back and they get treated again, and so on. Once the depression recurs, oh, 2, maybe 3 times, you probably do need to stay on it indefinitely. Again, watched closely by your doctor and hopefully also doing psychotherapy in conjunction with it. Other uses of medications— we're not talking about antidepressants now, but things like benzodiazepines and, and other drugs of that sort— be very careful about taking those long-term. This is Valium and Xanax and stuff like that. These drugs, by and large, should not be used other than very, very short-term, if at all. They are a Addicting medications. And these are the kind of things, if you've been taking them for a long time, don't just stop them because you are addicted to them and the doctor will have to help you get off of them. But these are the kinds of things that untrained doctors have often fallen back on to prescribe. And again, it's not their fault. They just aren't trained in this.

Yes, absolutely. And it is, it's not, it's not Blame and shame. It's about education.

And that's right.

And I think that's what you're all about. And what I really like about your mission, because you have a mission here and I think it's brilliant, I just love your mission, is also you identified how within the traditional medical system we don't use an integrative— they don't use an integrative approach. It's a very siloed approach. And you're all about the mind-body, which I find incredible, you know, being a traditionally trained doctor. So do you want to talk a little bit more about that, about your appreciation for that and what you would like to see around that in the healthcare system?

Sure. Basically, the healthcare systems, I said, Mental health training is only 2% of all training, and psychological and social training independent of mental health problems is in the same ballpark. And so that needs to be vastly increased so that our graduates from medical schools— I don't mean to make them all psychiatrists, that's not the intent. But what they need to be is competent in mental health issues as they are in physical disease issues. That's what we're advocating. Having done that, they can then, with each individual patient, incorporate not just disease parts, but the psychological and the social parts that go with it. That's a holistic approach. And again, it's this systems-based scientific approach. It is holistic. And it basically, what it says is that consider all parts of the problem, not just one or two. Medicine just considers one part of the problem. And who's the subject of the science of medicine? The individual, the person. In their environment and also their physical disease. So you need to address physical disease, psychological aspects, and social aspects and how they all integrate and go together. Medicine ignores the psychological and the social and focuses just here. And that's what the problem is. Medicine is called, and science is called reductionistic. It looks at just one part of a big problem. Whereas all other sciences look at all parts of the problem and how they interact.

You know what, as you were talking, I was also thinking that the doctors need the education around that. And because we have been indoctrinated with the way of their view of this reductionist approach, I feel that when you talk to a lot of people, they have the same approach. They think, I have a mental health issue, it's got nothing to do with anything else I'm doing. I just have that. It's in isolation. So we want to— you want to see the doctors being educated. What would you like to see from the patient? Like, if someone's listening to this and they do have depression, anxiety, or some form of mental health, what would you say to them to encourage them to take ownership of their health?

Psychiatry and medicine are not the only ones that follow the mind-body split, which is the dismissal of mental, emotional, psychological, and social things. Society is afflicted with this.

Yeah.

This is why you see so much stigma to mental health. People don't like to talk about emotions. People will talk at a cocktail party about all sorts of things, but people don't talk about their emotions their feelings. They don't talk about what's personally relevant to them. A, it's suppressed in them, and B, the person listening to them doesn't want to hear about emotions. And so there's kind of this collusion among groups of people and individuals in society as a whole to avoid mental health.

Yes.

Emotions. And so, so-called raising emotions to one's consciousness is important. You come back again to things like meditation. Work with emotional people. Start to identify your own emotions. See emotional movies, something that's moving to you and emotional. What gets you emotional? Be it angry, but they can be positive emotion too. Joy, satisfaction. Learn to identify your own emotions. Now, having said this about society, society is much less imbued with the mind-body split than medicine. The reason is that all of these rampant problems Isolation we hear of. People are isolated. 40% of people feel isolated. They don't talk to other people. They've never been touched by another person. Doctors see this in the office. People have never been touched until the doctor touches them. And so isolation is rampant. We're all on our phones anymore. We're not interacting with other people. That's a form of isolation, even though it's— there's some electronic connections. It's not the same, and it's shown to have devastating effects in youngsters. And so we need to overcome all of this loneliness and so on. And meditation helps. This helps the consciousness raising of this. And so it just— I can't emphasize enough about this. Then Along comes COVID, tripling during this time of loneliness, tripling of mental illnesses. And so society has recognized better than medicine the psychological devastation to the population from all of these things. So population is ahead of medicine, but it still exists out there and people do need to raise their own consciousness to what they're feeling emotionally. And when you see someone with a mental health problem, or you see someone of a different race than you, instead of responding to them stereotypically, respond to them and say, as an individual person, and see what your feelings are about that. And then say, do I want to act on that feeling? Maybe it's a person with alcoholism. How do you feel about that person? Do I want to respond to that person with that presumably negative feeling you had toward them? Or do I want to respond to them as an individual person? And so there are many things that can be done. But by and large, society is better recognizing its aversion to mental and psychological and social than medicine is.

And it does speak so much to our need for connection. for our mental health. And also for us, I, I think of depression and I think sometimes it stands for depressing our own emotions, not allowing ourselves to feel our emotions.

Right.

There seems to be, you know, this thing like if you talk about emotions or if you are emotional, it's a bad thing because you're not logical. You know, you have to think about everything logically. Whereas, you know, we need to actually acknowledge it.

That's a good point. And in fact, Rita, you hit a nail on the head. Coming out of the Scientific Revolution where all of this began, it was called the Age of Reason. Oh, the Age of Reason. That's intellectual. That's cognitive. That's linear thinking, which is the antithesis of Now, we're not saying everybody just runs around expressing emotion. They have to be joined. The intellectual and the emotional go together, and they have to be integrated. And that's part of growth and development. But certainly, we have to use both parts of ourselves. And this rich emotional part is what many people suppress, medicine included. Yeah.

Yes, yes. Well, you know, what I'm hearing here is that the medical system needs an overhaul, and that's something that you're very rich in doing, which is fantastic. And also, the patient needs to start taking, uh, ownership of their own well-being, being an advocate, start, you know, getting into a connection with self. and connection with others. Start feeling your emotions. Seek the help. And obviously, if your primary care physician does not know how to help you or just hands you medication and nothing else, well, see someone else. That's the thing. Go to someone else.

That's right.

And, you know, I know you say psychologists and psychiatrists, but there are many, I think, counselors and, uh, you know, uh, mind-body, you know, energy healers that work on the mind as well and the emotions. I mean, there are other alternatives. Um, they don't necessarily fit into the realm of your area, but I do feel that they do have a place where if you can't get into a psychiatrist or a psychologist for 8 months. Don't do nothing. You know, maybe see a counselor, speak to somebody, you know, who can help.

There are many good counselors. Psychology, they do counseling. There are mental health nurses, nurse practitioners that do this, and any number of medical social workers. Some of them are trained in mental health. All of them do a tremendous job in counseling. And I can't recommend that enough.

Yeah, absolutely. It's about being active. I've absolutely loved this discussion and I think it is so important. So before we go, tell our listeners how they can support your mission to fix modern medicine, basically.

Yeah. And let me preface that by saying what I think needs to be done, what you're doing, what I'm doing, But we're activating the public. But basically, the public needs to know how bad things are and to get angry about it.

Hmm.

That in turn, they go to their politicians and the politicians will get something done. And what is it that the politicians should do? We've said that medical education is the fundamental defect in medicine and this mind-body split. That's where the brainwashing takes place and why once graduated doctors don't know anything but physical disease medicine. Medicine itself is not going to change on its own. People have been telling it to change since the 1970s and there's been absolutely no change. And so this is why we're going to the public to get the public informed and enraged, get their politicians going. Okay. Once the politicians get this, what they should do is set up a federal commission who investigates medical education for how well it is meeting the healthcare needs of everyone. That includes mental health and chronic disease. And you've already heard that there will be found derelict in doing that. But it will also look at medicine to see how scientific it is being, and it will be found that medicine is not matching the holistic approach of all other sciences. With that, medicine will be forced to change because the feds will then guide what medicine must do. To answer your question specifically, my website again, I said it earlier, robertcsmithmd.com. On the very landing page when it comes up, go to Act Now. This has the email address of various people from the president to the surgeon general to the National Academy of Medicine to your congressmen and your senators. Plug their email in. There is then a letter which advocates what I've just said, that medicine, that mental health is in shambles. The politicians need to get involved and instigate a federal commission investigating medical education. That's what this says in essence. Many people who will be writing a letter like this will have mental issues themselves where they have been mistreated or misinformed somehow, or maybe someone and their family. Put that paragraph in there too. But in any event, there are the emails and there is the letter. Plug 'em in and send it. It's as simple as that. And it is, this is something that you in specific, each individual in the public can do.

Absolutely love it. And I hope everyone who's listening does get really passionate about their health because you need to be really passionate about it. And it's not Even though you are looking to heal yourself, you need the system around you to be healthy and inclusive and holistic to get the best result. So I hope everybody goes to your website and does that and supports your mission. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate your wisdom, Dr. Robert.

Well, Rita, thank you. And thank you also, I mentioned it earlier, for raising consciousness to these mental health issues and self-responsibility issues that you are doing. It's critical. So thank you.

Thank you very much. All links will be in the show notes. Pop there and do connect. Thank you so much again.