Everyday Therapy: The Weekly Unravel

Jennifer Wright and Dr. Deschner talk about their unique approach to Ketamine Assisted Therapy and how they unfold a highly informed process towards addressing mental health issues as well as pain management. How is ketamine different than psilocybin based psychoactive treatment? What does it treat and what are the parameters around being a good candidate for it?

Emotions have a strong impact on our physical experience. We ache, we have migraine, we carry tension and emotions are at the root or resurface when pain is expressed. Cathey Keenan is a registered acupuncturists, Qi-Gong and movement instructor in Revelstoke, British Columbia. She joins me today to talk emotions from a Chinese Medicine approach to increase our understanding of how alternative approaches value the whole human experience not just a specific contained part of the body.

September is Suicide Awareness month. In this episode, I'm talking to listeners who are on the receiving end of someone else experiencing suicidal ideation or has recovered from an attempt at their own life. How can we best support someone who is considering self harm? Yes, we can tell them to call a crisis line but they would have done that already if that is what they wanted to do. What do they really need and how hard is it to provide that? What is your role and what isn't your role?

Dr. Melanie Parkin from Ascent Psychology joined me to further the conversation I started a few months ago regarding AI and mental health. Today we kept it a bit more broad by not soley focusing on AI but more so, the impacts to behavior change that digital media has on us across age demographics as well as our ability to tolerate our emotional distress. In a world of rapid fire distraction, how could we help ourselves and our children engage with it and not fall victim to it's avoidant behavior trap?

Avoidance is a behavior that is adaptive to not wanting to feel something the nervous system and brain deem is too uncomfortable or unsafe. It is a early adaptive behavior and we needed it to survive a particular time. The thing is, avoidance of distress perpetuates and maintains the experience of distress. So what we work so hard psychologically to avoid, we keep close by. Let's talk about it.