It’s now clear that COVID-19 isn’t going away. As we recently learned from Dr. Paul Alexander, the vaccines we have aren’t stopping the chain of transmission, so they can never extinguish the pandemic. New variants will keep emerging and there will be seasonal ebbs and flows of the disease. Yet for nearly 2 years, the public has been taught to be in a state of constant panic, creating a huge surge in mental illness. Psychiatrists have largely been treating these patients in the typical way—with medication.
Our guest Dr. Aruna Tummala is a board certified psychiatrist and a pioneer in the field of integrative psychiatry. She explains an entirely different approach to treating the mental health pandemic. - Hi everyone!
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It's clear now that COVID-19 is not going away.
As we learned from my recent conversation
with Dr. Paul Alexander,
the vaccines don't work to stop the chain of transmission
so they can never extinguish the pandemic.
New variants will keep emerging
and there will be seasonal ebbs and flows of the disease.
Yet for nearly two years,
the public has been taught
to be in a state of constant panic,
to be hyper risk-averse.
This also is not sustainable.
Joining us now is the perfect person for this discussion,
Dr. Aruna Tamala, a board certified psychiatrist
and also a pioneer in a field called integrative psychiatry.
Dr. Tamala, thank you so much for joining us today.
Hi, Cindy, how are you?
So I wanted to talk to you specifically
about the two issues I raised.
Clinically, what psychiatrists are seeing
and what they're doing about it
and also what you see as a better way to approach
and live with COVID moving forward.
So let's start with the clinical trends.
What can you tell us?
As expected, we are definitely seeing
that the underlying epidemic or pandemic, if you will,
is actually the mental health pandemic.
Right from the beginning with all the policies,
with all the panic and the fear that's set in,
we in the mental health field did anticipate
that we will be seeing an increase in depression, anxiety,
across the age spectrum.
And unfortunately, we've not been wrong.
A recent study also found an excess of over 100,000 deaths
with regard to opioid overdose.
And opioid overdose and other drug addiction indices
are also indicative of the state of unrest,
mental unrest, if you will,
that we are seeing in our society today.
So across the mental health spectrum,
we are seeing an increase in many different illnesses
in the past year.
And the second issue that you talked about
is how are we responding to this crisis?
And this is where I have really chosen a different path
that began, my journey began many years ago,
but it really, the time for the kind of medicine
that I practice, I think is now.
So the typical response to this crisis
has been to treat with psychiatric medications.
Once we start doing this,
in terms of starting somebody on a medication,
the end goal or how long are you going to take a medication,
that is never really discussed.
And early on in my career as a psychiatrist,
I began to realize the harms that these medications
actually pose to people.
And the benefits are very, very overstated.
So the harms are understated
and the benefits are overstated.
That is what prompted me to look at mental illness
and its treatment from a very different perspective,
from a holistic perspective.
And now with COVID, what we are seeing is that
it is actually the health of our immune system
that determines whether you're going to succumb
to this virus or any other infection.
And it is once again, the health of our immune system
that helps us cope with stress.
And many, many new studies have shown that depression,
anxiety, psychosis, schizophrenia, autism,
across the mental health spectrum,
it is actually inflammation and immune system disturbances
that contribute to these mental illnesses.
So it's not a surprise when I see studies coming out
that says that people with schizophrenia
or bipolar disorder are at high risk
for adverse outcomes with COVID.
That's a no brainer for somebody like me,
who does not see a difference
between somebody having an infection
or somebody having hallucinations and depression.
To me, they're all manifestation of a disease
in the whole mind-body system.
And that is what we need to address.
So let me just ask you about the prescription
of psychiatric drugs.
Now, presumably people have anxiety, they're depressed
because of all the changes in their environment
that the pandemic has been inducing.
So what I want to know is, are these psychiatric drugs
the correct solution to their problem?
So from my perspective,
the use of psychiatric medications itself is predicated
on a very, very flimsy theory of chemical imbalance.
And especially now with this whole issue with COVID,
what we are seeing is that it's a psychosocial stressor
that is giving rise to all of these mental health conditions
and how, yes, that does create an imbalance
in terms of how our neurons are talking to each other,
how our adrenal system is talking to the brain
and vice versa, but how is taking a pill
that is going to adjust your serotonin levels
or dopamine levels actually going to help you
to cope with what's happening in the outside world?
The only way it's going to do that
is by numbing your experience of what's happening.
It's not going to give you coping skills,
it's not going to improve your stress resilience,
it's only going to numb.
And this is a very big pitfall with modern psychiatry.
It numbs our patients to their life's experience without,
and it actually drops them off an opportunity
to delve into why they are having these issues
at this point in time in their lives.
So there's a very psychospiritual aspect to it as well.
We know from a holistic integrative psychiatry perspective
that there is a better way to address mental health issues.
And guess what?
This one way of balancing your immune system,
bringing your whole mind, body, spirit into alignment
is also the same response for dealing with COVID as well.
Can you explain that a little bit more?
That sounds very interesting.
So what I stumbled upon when, in my own career,
what happened was that I became very jaded
with the practice of psychiatry.
I was doling out medications month after month
to new patients, but deep down,
I knew that they were not getting better,
but I did not have any other avenues
that I could use to help them
until I discovered holistic medicine.
And then all of a sudden,
I began to recognize the role of nutrition,
the role of the gastrointestinal system,
the role of the immune system, the hormones.
And it was an explosion of education for me,
which I brought back to the patients that I was seeing.
And in addressing illnesses in this holistic way,
I found that it is actually the health of the immune system
that is crucial for health of every other organ system
in our body, including the mind-brain system.
And of course, when you're talking about the immune system,
this is what is at stake for people
that are succumbing to COVID.
Early on, it became clear,
I don't know if you remember the term cytokine storm,
that cytokine storm was actually responsible
for the mortality and morbidity that we were seeing.
The COVID virus itself was not directly killing anybody.
What was happening is that the immune system's response
was being triggered into a cytokine storm,
which is an over-exaggerated immune response
that then attacks the body's various organ systems
and results in even in death.
And why the cytokine storm happens
is actually because of chronic medical disease,
like obesity or heart disease, high blood pressure
and high cholesterol issues.
These are the underlying factors
that actually increase your susceptibility
to COVID infections.
These are the same factors
that will increase your susceptibility to depression,
to anxiety, to dementia, all of these conditions.
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