In this week’s Substack Live, Mayim and Jonathan unpack their recent conversation with Dr. Paul Conti: psychiatrist and author of Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic, and the clinician who assessed Lady Gaga during her psychiatric crisis. His central argument: the lens through which you approach your own suffering may be the very thing keeping you stuck in it - and psychiatry needs to evolve to help you see that.
Mayim breaks down one of Dr. Conti’s most profound suggestions — that if a diagnosis becomes your sole identity, the brain will actually reinforce it. Every time you return to a problem as the primary fact of your existence, you deepen the groove that rumination is creating in your brain. He’s offering a clinical framework for redirecting attention toward what is functioning, and why that reorientation affects real mental health improvement.
More than half of the physical complaints that walk into a general practitioner’s office originate in the mind not as fabrication, but as the body’s honest response to unprocessed psychological overload. Mayim and Jonathan sit with what that actually means: your back pain, your gut issues, and your chronic fatigue may not be separate problems requiring separate specialists; they may be indications of a system under pressure that needs focused psychological care.
In this live, they also explore:
Why internet self-diagnosis and social media labeling can be dangerous — and what the actual clinical criteria are for knowing when something needs professional attention versus when you’re just wired differently
The case that many mental health challenges are spiritual in nature, and what it means that our healthcare system lacks a framework for treating them that way
How chronic background stress erodes your capacity to handle normal life — and why you often can’t see it happening, because your baseline keeps shifting without your awareness
Practical takeaways from the recent episode with Dr. Stacey Sims, Exercise Physiologist and Nutrition Scientist, on women’s health, protein timing, and what actually happened when Jonathan snuck a bolus of protein into Mayim’s bedtime routine
“If I am trained to constantly look for everything that’s going wrong, that adds a level of stress on my body and my mind that impacts the entire system. So I may have these horrible stomach aches — and it may be that I’m just so negative, so fearful, constantly in a state of protection.”
“We went from people not talking at all about mental illness to a label for everything. Sometimes we’re just different. Sometimes we’re just on a spectrum of behavior and coping mechanisms.”
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