More than 50% of all complaints medical doctors receive are for physical symptoms that originate in the mind.
In this week’s episode of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, Mayim and Jonathan sit down with Dr. Paul Conti — Psychiatrist, President of Pacific Premier Group, and author of What’s Going Right: A Powerful New Method for Optimizing Your Mental Health — for a conversation that unravels what the mental health and medical fields have missed: that trauma lives in the body, but emerges from the mind.
The problem: The DSM — the book at the center of modern psychiatry — is a laundry list of labels with no explanatory mechanism for where they come from or what we can do about them. If we don’t bridge the gap between information and healing, the body and the mind will continue to suffer. Even Lady Gaga’s fibromyalgia was connected to sexual assault, weaving her physical crisis with her mental health. Trauma shapes longevity, disrupts immune function, and can be passed down genetically to the next generation. When mind and body are treated separately, the tools to break that cycle remain out of reach.
This is one reason for the growing popularity of AI “therapists.” They listen to what we have to say, instead of shuffling us out the door.
But as psychiatry and medicine converge, Dr. Conti believes that healing is possible. It becomes accessible when we look at the whole story. Ancient philosophy and cutting-edge neuroscience, including research informed by psychedelics like psilocybin, are filling the pages — pointing to a generative drive in us, a spirituality that overarches everything and anchors us to our route to health and happiness.
In this episode, this conversation also explores:
