Healing the Soul: A Holistic Approach to Mental Wellness with Dr Sam Zand on The Healers Café with Manon Bolliger

biological, it’s psychological, it’s environmental, and it’s spiritual. How are we ever to track our spiritual health with metrics, you know, let alone our biological or psychological health completely and so while we’re using the DSM and the PHQ nines and all these surveys and scales and assessment tools, really, I think the introspection of self, if we want to understand what we’re going through, is just simplifying it into those categories and not adding any metrics to it, how am I doing biologically? How is my physical health, how’s my sleep, my nutrition, my activity, how is my nervous system regulation? And then let’s look at the psychological health. How was the conversation with self? How is our self image? How is then our social and environmental health, our relationship with the world around us? And then spiritually, how do we interact with those things that we cannot define, whether consciously or subconsciously. And so I think to try to objectify this, this journey into numbers and surveys, does a disservice in many ways, and it becomes that open conversation that could use some professional guidance. It can also be done individually. It can be done with technological tools as well. But I think just being open to all of this overlapping is the key, rather than trying to simplify it.

Manon Bolliger  07:06

Yeah, no. And I like the distancing you have with statistics, you know, because I know in as a naturopath, now no longer practicing, I have to say that publicly. But what’s interesting is that they, you know, patients will come and say, Well, they say, the stats about my condition, blah, blah, blah. I said, well, the stat about you individually is individual. And that’s the bottom line is, you know, you have to, in, go introspective in a lot of the assessment. So how let’s see, where can we start with all your wealth of knowledge? Maybe, maybe describe a little bit then, yeah, when a patient comes in, what’s sort of the process that you might, you know, so they, they may be, they may call themselves depressed, or they’ve been labeled so by somebody, right? And they’re coming in, what do you where do you go from there?

Dr Sam Zand  08:13

Great question. We train clinicians, you know, every month, new clinicians and new states, and the number one thing we start with is rapport building. Is meeting the patient where they are, meeting our community member, whoever it is, where they are, because that’s the one of one quality that you talked about that I think is most important in my space as a psychiatrist, if I was a surgeon, Yeah, everybody’s different, but more or less physics are the same, and someone has a different chemical makeup, a different genetic makeup, a different cardiovascular history. But the one of one here is that not only is everybody different in their biopsychosocial spiritual makeup, but where they are in their journey is different, and the way that they believe that they are doing, the way that they perceive themselves, the way that they perceive the visit itself. I just saw a 16 year old today who she didn’t sign up for the visit. You know, with me, her parents signed her up, and that’s a very different approach to care, because she’s not looking for care. She’s feeling like she’s being made to feel wrong, like there’s something broken that needs to be fixed. And so starting with her, I wouldn’t just jump into you know, how are we doing? Tell me about all the things in your life, because then she’ll start to feel judged, and she’ll start to feel like, well, now I need to defend myself and not talk about the bad things in my life. Maybe focus on the good or blame others so that I’m not made to be the bad one. It’s my parents who need the therapy, not me. So the visit with her is very less clinical and more so exploring what’s important to her and just letting her vent and tell me about how much you hate your parents, like I’ll just start there. And so meeting. Using the patient where they are is, I think the key from there, we do an introspective exploration together so that we don’t feel judged, we don’t feel there’s something wrong with us. And then we use our experience and knowledge and intuition to start to prioritize what the person’s ready to work on. Shed A flashlight on things maybe they didn’t notice that need to be worked on and be empathetic and compassionate and gentle about it. And then, if asked, we’ll talk in clinical terms, in DSM terms, but I never bring it up.

Manon Bolliger  10:34

Wow, that’s so refreshing. Yeah, it’s from a naturopathic perspective, though, I should again, this is not publicly accepted by the board of naturopaths, because we are very much trying to be green allopaths. So, you know, using these fancy terms and the diagnosis is something that you know is looked highly upon, right? You know, it’s when you’re trying to achieve something instead of recognizing what you have. That’s that. But anyway, I’m not in in that. But the first thing I would do is they, they’d say the what their diagnosis is, and it’s like, so what do you know about this? What? How true is it for you? And it’s like suddenly they kind of lose that hold, and it sounds like the moment they don’t identify that this is absolutely them, and there’s no way out of this. It’s like healing becomes a possibility, a dialog really happens, you know? So it’s great not I love not labeling immediately, it’s so hard, you know,

Dr Sam Zand  11:42

removing constraints if they’ve already been built, and not adding those constraints if they haven’t been subject to that. Most of our patients have been in mental health work or psychiatric work, so there’s a lot of unwinding and unlearning. But those who are brand new to it, I think it’s such a wonderful opportunity to reinforce that there’s nothing wrong with us when we focus on Diagnostics, we’re looking for what’s wrong instead of we could spend a whole session focusing on what’s right and just building somebody’s brain that way. And there’s nothing wrong with that approach, but it’s not taught, because it’s not in the diagnostic culture that we’ve been trained in.

Manon Bolliger  12:19

So where, do you feel, or what are the aspects that have contributed to what I would call the downfall of of psychiatry, in its, you know, in the way that I would say it was practice still is by some, but definitely there’s a move away from that. What do you feel has made it so, you know

Dr Sam Zand  12:46

what? I think, frankly, it’s just that it has not been effective. I mean, we go back, what is it, 80 years, and we have the lobotomy, you know? And we evolved from that, and it was killing one in three people, are one in six people who were in the procedure, right? One in 10, maybe, I’m not sure, but far too much to kill anybody because they’re feeling depressed or anxious. Now we’ve evolved from barbaric strategies of tying people up and doing lobotomies to a hyper focus on psychopharmacology. And you know when you think about the 50s when psychopharmacology became an industry, it wasn’t malicious. And I think that’s my maturity, and my growth is I used to demonize big Pharm. I still don’t have the best thoughts about them, but I have a little bit of more hope for us all societally.

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Dr Sam Zand  14:47

than I did before, because in the 50s, you think about psychopharm was trying to solve the schizophrenic issue in which we were improving upon alternatives of tying people up. Now instead, we can give them. Pill, and maybe that actually makes them more functional in society. Now, it wasn’t the best outcomes initially, but it opened a door that made sense when we applied that same strategy to daily depression, to just bread and butter depression, to the well worried that doesn’t make as much sense, in my opinion, to change somebody’s entire chemical makeup, because what’s the alternative approach. What’s the alternative risk if we don’t? And so all of a sudden, Prozac in the 80s becomes the new marketable item, right? And it’s popular and it’s fun and it’s easy. I think because we’ve then let psychopharm dictate how psychiatry has practiced for so many years, we’ve just blindly been following this and instead realizing that only 30% of people get better on this medication, and after a year, really, the numbers are showing maybe 10% after the burnout, continue to feel better. Are we even really doing anything? The serotonin hypothesis is largely questioned and sometimes debunked. Then society loses hope. They’re like, I’m not doing this anymore. Somebody, perhaps, the drug company said we have to do better, and there’s something else, because this maybe isn’t working. We’re losing clinical buy in, and we’re losing patient compliance. It was 2019 that I think we really took a turn, and that’s when spravato got FDA approved for depression. When that happened, the first thing that stood out to me, I didn’t know much about ketamine or esketamine, is that the dosing frequency twice weekly for the first month, once weekly for the second month, once every one or two weeks after that. So I’m thinking, no longer are we telling somebody there’s a chemical problem that needs to be daily, adjusted more. So we’re saying there is a brain optimization that can happen once a week or once every two weeks, and then we learn there’s so much more therapeutic potential after the brain opens with this type of medication. So that, to me, has been now the doorway to a whole new way of practicing psychiatry that becomes experiential. It’s more about neuroplasticity and opening the brain rather than changing chemicals in the brain. And it brings us back to our homeostasis. It brings us back to our inner healer, because we just want to get the clutter out of the way so that we can be our best self, rather than add more to the mess.

Manon Bolliger  17:19

That’s beautifully stated, also from the the actual experience of what it’s like to, you know, to deal with a person like that has this issue, right? Whereas, when you’re sitting on the outside from, you know, pharmaceutical companies, you know, they’re, they’re driven by, obviously, profit, because they’re shareholders. But it’s true, if a product doesn’t work, that’s also sort of their end, you know, I mean, not necessarily right away, because,

Dr Sam Zand  17:48

yeah, they try to squeeze it as long as they can.

Manon Bolliger  17:53

After numerous researches, actually, finally, you know, the side effects are shown that people lose full disc or discouraged in that, you know, but

Dr Sam Zand  18:05

fascinating fact, there are zero SSRIs in clinical trials right now. You know, we have evolved past that. It’s the new lobotomy. We’re not making it anymore because we realize it’s just not as effective as we once thought. Now, I also don’t want to shame anybody who’s on SSRIs. I still write SSRIs, they still work as poorly as we thought they did, you know, but when they work for people, they work well. They just in percentages, they don’t work for most people. And so, to your point, we’re evolving, you know, old tools. If you’re a surgeon using a scalpel from 70 years ago, your patients wouldn’t be too happy. And so we need new shiny toys to actually work.

Manon Bolliger  18:43

So how can, can you describe a little bit further this, this sort of spiritual, you know, component to this journey, this inner journey,

Dr Sam Zand  18:56

yeah, that’s my favorite part about how modern psychiatry is meeting ancient cultural medicine. You know, shamanistic practice, spiritual work in old times, if we were feeling depressed, if we were feeling anxious, we were having panic attacks, if we couldn’t sleep, in most cultures, we would come together. We would come to help support that person. We’d use community. We’d go to our elders for wisdom and advice. We’d go to nature for answers. We go to our spirituality for faith and support. None of that is in modern medicine. And so what ends up happening, I think, when we start to apply strategies that opens the mind and pulls us out of our default mode network that’s filled with societal pressure and clutter and distraction, and all of a sudden we get back to these humanistic ways of understanding that what I really need and miss is connection in my life, what I really crave is fulfillment and giving back and feeling like I have purpose and I can be of. Service. This is inner wisdom that we all have. We just have to get rid of the clutter. And so that wisdom, I think, connects us to the spiritual elements of life. Why are we here? What’s the point? What happens when we pass? What was this life like before? My Existence? Are we truly connected? Or is this an individual experience? The brain starts to open up. And I don’t think Prozac or Wellbutrin does that really as well as what we’re seeing in these neuroplastic peds and experiences.

Manon Bolliger  20:30

Well, definitely. I mean, the few that come, you know, to get support naturopathically, often say they just feel dumbed down, like less able to absorb anything, and that’s not a good way to process anything, is if you can’t actually experience or go through it. You know, it’s not about repeating. I mean, that was the old psychology, repeat, repeat, until brain is wired to believe the same thing again. But I think also, all the development in neuroplasticity has opened up the pathway to, you know, so many more options. Yeah, there

Dr Sam Zand  21:11

was a recent story Michael Pollan wrote, I believe it was in the I forgot which publication, but he talked about, I’m not sure if you’ve seen it as experiment where they found spiritual leaders from all different walks of life, and they brought them through Johns Hopkins and NYU, a combined research program where they gave them psilocybin. And I think the skeptics would say the spiritual, the religious skeptics would say that this drug might change the way we feel. They might alter our perception of what we know to be true in our religious faith. But in fact, the exact opposite happened for most of them. They actually leaned fully, more into what they felt spiritually. They were able to even most of them said it was the top one of the top profound spiritual experiences they had. And these are spiritual leaders who spend their entire life or career connecting with their spirituality. And so it just reminds you that the human experience gets in the way of spiritual connection, and if we can remove some of that clutter and get in that meditative state, whether it’s through medication or meditation, then all of a sudden we open a channel to spirituality that even the most practiced spiritual leaders notice benefit from. That, to me, is an interesting part of this work. Psychiatry is a industry, if you break down the etymology, psyche, meaning soul, Greek word Ayat tree, healer, or healing. And so we’re healing the soul here. We’re not really just focusing on emotions or chemicals or brain patterns. We’re trying to help people understand a part of life that isn’t scientifically understood, and everyone has their own unique meaning and sense of understanding that I think is important in this journey. Yeah. Um,

Manon Bolliger  23:00

yeah. Yeah, no, that’s very interesting. The one thing that came to me is, you know, this awakening process that so many people talk about, there’s spiritual people talking about it. There’s also not necessarily spiritually aligned to any particular faith, but this increase in consciousness that is happening, whether it’s planetary or because we’re in the Age of Aquarius, or I’m not going to go into all the theories, but there’s many of them, but one of the things that is coming out so much is the Need for community, the reconsidering all the our core values, and also maybe some of the history that we didn’t know about ourselves. You know that the the frequencies, the healing available from this world nature even more pronounced? Do you have any comments on that whole field without admitting I, you know, anywhere in there,

Dr Sam Zand  24:04

I really do think that we need to tap More into understanding this human experience, not as an individual experience, but as a connected experience. And that’s not just the humans. That’s, as you alluded, to, the universe, the planet, the way that these things happen in waves, societally. You know, we, we outgrow our environment, and then we either need to change an environment or change something we’re doing, and all of that. If we think of the earth breathing in a way, right, the way that it absorbs the sun, the way that it the waves move, the way that it’s turning on its axis, all of this, there’s there’s some magic in that we don’t understand fully, and the theories that ancient civilizations understand that better than we do in modern medicine. In some ways, I believe that it’s kind of that when you’re taught one dogma, you’re blind to others. Yes. And so what fascinates me, and still young in my career, I want to learn more about other strategies that I’m not fully familiar with. I think it’s interesting how Western medicine has adopted some of it, though we think about magnetic waves, and the way in which I’ll go to Sedona, and people talk about vortexes and vortices, right? In the way that energy, and I’m not an expert in that, but I am an expert in TMS transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is actually harnessing magnetic energy to wake up parts of the brain that are dormant when we’re depressed. That’s our best attempt of the wizardry of this magnet, magnetic wave, right? But who’s to say that the person who’s seeking it directly from the earth is doing it right or wrong? I want to learn more about that. And hopefully AI and machine learning and all this bridges some of those gaps in education.

Manon Bolliger  25:53

Yeah, I hope it bridges. And I, you know, again, with technology, it’s always who’s in control of it. You know, it’s like, in and of itself, I think it’s, it’s all right. It’s like, if we are the ones who can use it, can create the relationship with, and it’s not governed by, you know, a generalized, you know, like, propaganda machine of sorts, you know, I think it could, definitely could be for our expansion. You know, I I’m not one who believes that we should throw away all technologies, because I have a feeling that we’re about to discover technologies that existed before that we have not been able to see like it looks like these, you know, car, electric cars, but without plugging in, were actually part of our history that we, you know, we’re, we’re not um familiar with or something.

Dr Sam Zand  26:57

Yeah, I believe that there are so many technologies that have been buried and yet to be rediscovered, and so it’s an exciting concept where let’s, let’s combine all wisdom and then figure it out. I think we’re getting there.

Manon Bolliger  27:12

Okay, we got one more minute. I’m just going to ask you to close with whatever you want to leave the inspired person with.

Dr Sam Zand  27:22

Yeah, I think that this conversation about spiritual health is so important, and when we’re looking out for our own wellness. In my experience as a psychiatrist, I can look at the biological we can talk about meds, we can even talk about therapy ad nauseum, but until we talk about the spirit, then we’re not really impacting the change at its core. And I think our computer processor, our soul, whatever you want to call it, that’s really the part of our health that needs the most nourishment. And the tough part is that words misinterpret the spirit, and so we have to learn how to evolve beyond the cognitive, beyond the words, and get more into the feeling. And this is where I’m a forever student and always trying to help others and light that path for them as well.

Manon Bolliger  28:06

Wonderful. Well. Thank you so much for spending your time educating us and sharing your

Dr Sam Zand  28:12

wisdom. Thank you so much for adding light to these topics and for your path. It’s a very interesting path that I’d loved hearing about, and I’m excited to see more of your engagement in this community.

Manon Bolliger  28:24

A couple of thoughts that have come from the interview with Dr Sam zand is just that, you know, the ability to be opened, that we may not have everything yet, that we’re constantly work in progress. Healing is work in progress, and to question everything, look up everything really be, you know, autonomous in your decision making and and look inside, you know, use your intuition. See what else can expand you, how other ways expose yourself, you know, so this is in psychiatry, which is, you know, one of the potentially most closed and hidden, you know, aspects of healing, because it was taboo to ask anything in that field at one point. And now it’s, it’s really opening, not by everyone, but by enough people, and that’s how change happens. So it’s very inspiring, and it’s it’s a great example of what is possible in healing and for all of us to be aware of this. So I love meeting people who are, you know, breaking through and advancing this for the sake of humanity.

ENDING: 

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