A Physician with Metastatic Cancer Takes Psilocybin with Pradeep Bansal, MD
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
Release Date: 05/13/2022
The Mommy (and Daddy) Brain Controversies: Adaptation not Deficit with Bridget Callaghan, PhD (Los Angeles)
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"We trained pregnant and never pregnant women and we tested them on their memory for these items immediately after they learned them and then we tested them two weeks later, looking at their long term autobiographical memory. What we found was that for the immediate test, the pregnant women did better than the never pregnant women on the baby relevant items, but they had equal performance on the adult oriented items. That gives some support to our hypothesis that when you actually test for benefits in cognition for ecologically relevant items you see them in pregnancy. But very surprisingly to...
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Two Psychiatrists Face the Illness of Their Daughter with Philip Lister, MD (New York)
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"The universality of guilt - I think that my life as a child therapist has a lot of advantages; we carry the idea that ‘we are all the ages we've ever been’ and those magic years never disappear. There are some great things about that - there are some problems with it too. That kind of irrational self-centered construction to explain what is intolerable and difficult to grasp comes from that. Early in this whole process, I remember talking to the pediatrician taking care of us: ‘Was it something in the environment? Was it the street we lived on? Was it that we lived in the basement?...
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Stigma: How Support Groups for Mental Illness are Helpful with John Tamerin, MD
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"Because I couldn't help my son, I couldn't do anything for him, I thought maybe I could start this group and help other people and other parents deal with this problem. What I wasn't prepared to face was just how lonely, how alone, how sad, and feeling hopeless I was. In a way, when the group began, I needed the group as much as the group needed me. I've continued the group although I need it for different reasons - at that point I needed it because I felt overwhelmed because of the problem with my son. Now I need it because I’ve grown to love the people of the group and I feel a...
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How Rituals Attach us to our Communities with Dimitris Xygalatas, Ph.D.
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"If you randomly assign people in two groups and you give them different insignia or you have them go through different practices, as we saw in this study, they come to like each other more. It's very easy to create this basic sense of belonging and identity. Ritual is particularly good at eliciting that kind of sense also because it triggers our intuitions about what we call phenotypic matching, this is the idea that we have ways, psychological mechanisms, that allow us to recognize those that are members of our groups, especially kin, so if you think about it who are your kin, they're the...
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The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"One of the things that is very exciting is that this is a very robust finding. In other words, sometimes in science people see something and then it's not replicated - Rapamycin’s impact on lifespan has been replicated. When I started researching this area 50 years ago, I never felt that we would find a pill that would have an impact on aging and lifespan. Aging is very complex - to find one thing that would have an impact was highly unlikely. So when this happened in 2009, I had a small part in this, it was really very exciting because for the first time we had something that could...
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The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"One way a child of Jody’s age deals with loss is that you don’t miss the person, in a sense you can become them. So, I have her step into the mother role, immediately trying to look after the younger ones and then wearing her mother sunglasses - it’s like she becomes her and then you don’t miss her so much. The neighbor is like an analyst figure, and she goes over and talks to this woman, Juliette, a very kind woman. I had Juliette say to her: ‘The way I see it, a death doesn’t happen just once, it’s like we have to keep being reminded that someone is gone - remember her - miss...
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"The best way to think about insulin resistance is that it’s pre-diabetes. In the course of developing type 2 diabetes, which we see in much higher rates in people with bipolar disorder compared to the general population, one starts off with normal blood sugar levels but elevated insulin. It is the elevated insulin that pushes the blood sugar down into the normal range. This is typically something that is missed by physicians because there’s been no medical indication to test for it [insulin level]. After the metabolic dysregulation progresses, patients become glucose intolerant, and at...
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The Value of Paternity Leave for Children and Families with Richard Petts, PhD
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"When paternity leave comes into the picture you have a situation where parents are home together. Those processes are able to develop for both the mother and the father - there’s time for fathers to bond with their children, there’s time for parents to figure out how to be parents together. It’s not so lopsided where mothers become the experts because they are there all the time. Mothers and fathers can develop that expertise together because they are both there at home at the same time. At this sort of crucial point where you figure everything out for the first time, I think it...
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The Role of Technology in Mental Health Care with Isaac Galatzer-Levy, PhD
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"There is a company called NightWare, that developed a feature for PTSD that uses components from Apple Watch. One of the primary symptoms in PTSD is intense nightmares which are very distressing, they disrupt their sleep and really drive a lot of symptomatology. This company created an app that detects when people with PTSD are having nightmares. It uses the existing sleep function [on the watch] to detect when they are having disruptive sleep. Then it uses the vibrating haptic to wake the patient up. So it is simply just disrupting their sleep, waking them up from a nightmare, and by...
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Disability, Psychotherapy, and Resilience with H. Penny Mishkin, MS, OTR
The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing
"I would say to any parent who has a child now or any adult who has a disability now - disabilities are looked at quite differently. They are accepted much more than they were when I was growing up. So, you can’t take things out of context, but I was just living a secret life and that wasn’t good, it really wasn’t. That was why I was remote, so what I would do is dissociate when I felt the pain of being so different and I really paid a price for that. I am not sure there was any way to get through it, I was a successful child by other standards, but emotionally I was very...
info_outline"I don't think anybody can truly describe the [psilocybin] experience. One can use phrases and words that are common - ineffable, mystical, powerful. All I can say is it was the most powerful experience of my life that I have gone through ever."
"We had another CAT scan in September of last year, in 2021, and it showed another small nodule. My oncologist said, ‘Don’t worry, we don’t know what it is, it’s very small.’ But a part of me as a physician and as a cancer patient now thought ‘On no, we’ve got another nodule - that means I am stage 4 again’. Before my experience with psilocybin this would have been terribly devastating - to have been given that hope six months ago with no nodules, and now again Stage 4. But now I say ‘Ok, if I have cancer again, it’s alright we will deal with it’. While I was somewhat anxious and I was a little bit low in spirits but it wasn't a gut punch."
Episode Description: Pradeep shares with us his journey from initial symptoms of what was diagnosed as a stage 1 cancer to its return as a stage 4 metastatic cancer. Faced with a disturbing depression he entered a clinical trial using one dose of psilocybin in a carefully monitored research setting. He shares with us the "indescribable nature" of his 8-hour psychedelic experience. He then reports on the profound life changes that have remained with him over one year later. His approach to life is characterized less by highs and lows and more by a dependable sense of equanimity even in the face of his ongoing cancer. Though now retired, his wish to share his experience with others is testimony to his ongoing commitment to healing others.
Our Guest: Pradeep Bansal, MD is a recently retired gastroenterologist from Long Island. He is originally from India and was in practice in the New York area for over 25 yrs. Apart from being a physician, he is an avid nature photographer.
Further Listening:
Episode 2: Psychedelic Medicines in a Therapeutic Context with Jeffrey Guss, MD
https://harveyschwartzmd.com/2021/02/26/ep-2-psychedelic-medicines-therapeutic-context/
Episode 23: Psychedelic Psychotherapy for PTSD: New Research with Ingmar Gorman PhD
https://harveyschwartzmd.com/2022/01/28/ep-23-psychedelic-psychotherapy-for-ptsd-new-research-with-ingmar-gorman-phd/
Episode 107: A Psychoanalyst Administers Ketamine with Gita Vaid, MD
http://ipaoffthecouch.org/2022/03/26/episode-107-a-psychoanalyst-administers-ketamine-with-gita-vaid-md/