New Podcast Release: Murali Doraiswamy
The latest episode of "Lives Well Lived," the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, is now available.
Kasia and I had an enlightening conversation with Murali Doraiswamy, who is widely-published professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, in North Carolina. He is an expert on dementia, and practices yoga. Below are some highlights from our discussion, quoted directly from the conversation. You can now listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.
On the definition of mental illness:
Murali Doraiswamy: “The definition of mental illness is based on who defines it. If you're a medical doctor and a psychiatrist, you define mental illness as a disorder that reflects a change from your previous level of functioning. It's a change in your mood, in your personality, behavior, and it lasts for a specified period of time so that it's not a transient change, most often anywhere between two weeks or 30 days at least. And it causes significant distress to yourself, potentially others around you, and it also impairs your functioning... So the difference between depression and everyday blues is that depression is that you're down more often than not, more days than not, for at least two weeks and it's causing a significant impairment. That stated, it's a very fine line and it's a continuous line. We are challenged all the time to tell if someone truly has a mental illness or whether it's just a passing phase of life or bereavement or adjustment problem.”
On the rise in mental illness awareness:
Murali Doraiswamy: “There's been a concerted effort to encourage people to come forward because something like 30 to % of people were never seeking treatment because of stigma and fear of how it would impact their job, how their peers view them, et cetera”
On the role of social media in mental health:
Murali Doraiswamy: “Facebook was really focused on selling us as the product. They wanted to make the algorithm as addicting as possible. They weren't really focused on the consequences. I don't think they intentionally were trying to create harm. They were just trying to make the platform engaging and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in making a platform that almost bordered on being as addicting or more addicting than even cocaine... So in a sense, I think they were forced to create a mental health team.”
On cultural differences in mental illness:
Murali Doraiswamy: “Coming from India, we study the mind in a very different way. We're very much interested in spirituality. We're very deeply interested in collective happiness.
Whereas in America, I found it was a country deeply interested in individual happiness.
There's a test that we use: there's a whole bunch of people in this picture. And the person in the middle is smiling, and all the people surrounding that person are actually quite sad, and when you ask different cultures to rate how happy that person in the middle is, Asians rate the collective happiness of the picture, whereas Westerners tend to rate the individual happiness of the person in the middle. I was very interested in understanding this really profound East versus West definition of happiness. And I wanted to see what impact it has on, satisfaction as you get older and why it is.”
On psychiatry and happiness:
Murali Doraiswamy: “Psychiatry never uses the word happiness. The goal of psychiatry, if someone is ill, is to get them back to what we call as a normal state or a new timing state. I think to make someone truly happy and to make someone truly flourish, these are tools that psychiatry does not have. Those require a different kind of a field, almost social psychology, positive psychology.”
On training the brain to be happier:
Kasia de Lazari-Radek: “Do you believe that we can train our brain to be happier on its own without any drugs, any psychedelics and any psychiatric drugs?
Murali Doraiswamy: “I think so, 100%. I think Eastern wisdom, again, the yin and the yang and other similar philosophies are good. You want to accept both the positives and the negatives, the good and the bad, the sad and the happy. They're part of one whole and they are what unite to make you. I think meditation helps, being in nature helps, kindness helps, gratitude helps. I believe really focusing on collective happiness is the source of lasting happiness.”
On lifestyle and brain health:
Murali Doraiswamy: "What you should do is follow the old adage, what's good for your heart is good for the brain. Because the biggest of slowing of memory in old age is the blocking of small blood vessels in the brain… So if you get eight hours of sleep, then the odds of plaque buildup are much lower. We did a very large study of about 40 million people. And what we found was people with peak memory slept for ideally between six to eight hours a day. They exercised three to four times a week for at least 30 minutes. And their diet was generally a low saturated fat diet, preferably more leaning on the vegetarian side with only occasional meat or fish. So keeping control of all your numbers, keep your cholesterol low, keep your glucose low, keep your blood sugar low.”
On happiness in life:
Kasia de Lazari-Radek: “We would like to ask you how you view your life. Where do you draw your happiness and what's ahead of you?”
Murali Doraiswamy: “Ultimately happiness comes from serving others, not from serving yourself. I've become very much against violence and I'm very much against violence in all forms whether it's to people or animals and also very much against inequality. I really want to work to eliminate poverty and illness by providing free care rather than living in this very sophisticated system that I'm in right now where care is affordable for the rich but not for the poor. So I think I want to go back to where all humans are equal and we're living a simpler life where we're finding happiness through simple pleasures rather than expensive pleasures. I think I’m coming to a point where I want to find true happiness by serving the community, establishing a charity back home in India and just helping others.”