Rethinking Mental Health: Human Connection, Healing, and the UnDoctor Approach with Dr. Fred Moss

In this episode of the Making Hope Happen Radio Show, host Erin Brinker welcomes Dr. Fred Moss, a board-certified psychiatrist known for his unconventional approach to mental health. Dr. Moss shares his journey from traditional psychiatry to advocating for holistic healing, emphasizing the transformative power of genuine human connection over medication and diagnosis. The conversation explores the limitations of psychiatric labels, the societal factors contributing to mental distress, and the importance of practices like gratitude, meditation, service, and creativity for optimal well-being. Dr. Moss also discusses the role of trauma, the epidemic of loneliness, and how aligning with one’s authentic self can lead to profound healing. Listeners are encouraged to rethink mental health, embrace connection, and discover practical steps for personal growth and resilience.

Transcript

Erin Brinker: 0:00

Erin, welcome everyone to the making hope happen radio show. I am Erin Brinker, and I'm so glad to have you with me today. Got a really interesting guest for you, so I've had a lot of doctors on the show from people who specialize in women's health to men's health, to, you know, mental health, to all of the different kinds and some talking about issues impacting physicians. And today I have a psychiatrist who has a, well, let's call it unorthodox view of mental health, and stick with me. It is really an interesting conversation, and let's get started without any delay, except that I do want to say what I what I often do, what I'm grateful for. I'm grateful for the fall. Yes, it's slightly cooler. It's still warm outside, but slightly cooler than it was. It's October. It is officially fall before we know it will be in the holidays. Whoo, so all right without any further delay. Let's get started. Well, I am very pleased to welcome to the show Dr Fred moss. He's a seasoned board certified psychiatrist, and he boasts an illustrious career spanning over four decades. His journey began in Detroit, inspired early on by an elder brother in the same profession, his commitment to holistic healing was further cemented during his tenure as a child care worker, emphasizing the essence of genuine communication. A proud graduate of Wayne State University, Dr moss pursued his medical studies at Northwestern University. He specialized in Psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati, and broadened his expertise with Child, Adolescent fellowship, further branching into geriatrics, forensics and drug rehabilitation, empathy, curiosity and authenticity characterize Dr Moss' approach. His dedicated dedication, rather to offering individualized care, shines through as he dives deep into his vast repertoire of interventions to find bespoke solutions. Dr Fred Moss, welcome to the show.

Dr. Fred Moss: 2:05

Thank you. It's really great to be here. I look forward to our conversation. Thanks for having me on.

Erin Brinker: 2:09

So first, tell me about yourself, how you ended up going into psychiatry. What you know this family member, an older brother or sister and so kind of what, what drew you into psychiatry,

Dr. Fred Moss: 2:21

yeah. So, yeah, we'll talk about that. I think that I it started from this first second that I was born, and so I really do mean that I I was I was born into a family of chaos and disarray and a fair amount of conflict between my two brothers and my parents, and they were 10 and 14 years old when I was born, and in my job, and it was even preconceived like before I arrived, is was to bring joy and happiness, like we had talked about before, joy and happiness and unity to a family that was in this chaos, disarray and conflict.

Erin Brinker: 2:52

Okay, that's a tall order for an infant or anyone.

Dr. Fred Moss: 2:56

Yeah, not that big a deal. When I arrived, I just hit the time card and off I go. You know, a bundle of joy is how I came out, and I was, like, fun and cute and smart and easy to go with, and, you know, fun to listen to and fun to fun to watch. And, you know, apparently I did a pretty good job for a couple years. I think my brothers wouldn't say that. I've been continuous, but I've done pretty good, you know, pretty good early on, of really creating that sense of unity. And early on in my years, I remember being in my playpen and watching my parents and my brothers interact with each other, like watching them talk to each other, and feeling like, I wish I could do that. I'm not. I'm too much of a little boy. I can't quite do that. Where do you learn how to do that? And I heard about this thing called school that that would probably be a place where you might learn that. So I looked forward to starting school, and by the time I started school, I was pretty precocious, given that, of course, I had these two brothers, and I knew a little bit about sex and drugs and rock and roll, and I knew about things that you know, how to write and how to read and how to do simple math upon arrival in kindergarten, which was more than most of my peers knew. So this led me being somewhat aboard, if you will, like under a, you know, under under no one, no one really required me to do much more than I already had. So under assigned, if you will, and I got by being bored, I really and wanting to communicate. I was just a really talkative little kid. And there's no, no teacher who ever forgot having Dr, having Fred as a student. Let's put it that way. And I was really looking to learn how to communicate, and what I instead was learning, and I remember being disappointed about this was, you know, sit down, be quiet and do what I say was what I was learning. So this is not the essence of open discourse. This is a way to, you know, get to the next grade. This was disappointing, and I wondered where I was going to learn. And it seemed like I was learning more outside of school than inside of school, but maybe the junior high would be the right place. And so when I went to junior high, was kind of excited, like, this must be where the big kids learn. And no, it got a little worse there, and then it got. Worse in high school. But one thing that didn't get worse is I knew that I commute, I could communicate outside of school, so I hitchhiked around. I rode my bike past the boundaries. I went to places I wasn't necessarily in. You know, encouraged to go to by my family, just so I could meet new people and communicate. That's what I wanted to do more than anything. And when high school was over, I spent, I had spent a lot of time outside of high school, during high school, for sure, and when high school was over, I decided I'd give college a try. I had heard that, you know, Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan would be a good place to go. And sure enough, I got myself into Ann Arbor and was there for about a year and a half, and then dropped out because, my goodness, Ann Arbor is a good place to communicate, but not the University of Michigan. And so off I went again, and this time I got on a bus as the hitchhiker fool that I've been in the past. I got on a bus, took all my stuff, and took a bus all the way to Berkeley, California, where I would learn what my life was about. That was Wow. So I spent that summer in Berkeley, and I did, in fact, have a beautiful summer of learning a lot about what my life was about, but it wasn't really sustainable. And there was, you know, my family was a little concerned about me, which, retrospectively, I guess I could get but I wasn't very concerned about me, but they told me that there was this new industry they thought I would have a good aptitude for and they wanted me to consider going back to school and trying it out. You may heard of the industry. It was called computers. And, you know, the only computer that was in Michigan was the one, indeed on Ann arbor's campus. It was like a two, two acre facility called the computer building. And, you know, I went back and I flew back. They gave me a flight ticket. I flew back, and I started doing computers and punch cards and batch jobs galore, Up All Night in that computer building, and it was like, no, no, no. I get that I could be good at this, but this isn't what my life is going to be about. I refuse, and I dropped out one more time. Now this time I promised that there would never be any way that I would go back to doing university or any kind of conventional school again. And I told my family that they knew that, and they my mom told me I had to get a job. You know that that's what moms do. So she got me an application for a state mental health facility for adolescent boys as a childcare worker. And so in January of 1980 is when I started being a childcare worker, and I thought I would only last for about three weeks when the orientation ended. But on the fourth week, my friend Paul, later became a really good friend, convinced me that I should go try out the floors and up to meadow view five we went, and I was scared, but jeebus, yeah, I was so scared. Man. Why? What was scary? This wasn't going to work out. And it worked out like, there I was, you know, I was like, Okay, I'll go back on Tuesday, I'll go back on Wednesday, maybe I'll even last longer than three more weeks. And I kept on going back, and before too long, I'd gone back three weeks and three months. And then, you know, I decided that I was actually pretty good, because all I really had to do was communicate with these people, and that's what I really wanted to do in the first place. And all I had to do was not treat them like they were any worse or better than anybody else, or any privilege or not privilege. None of that like just be with these kids and understand them and connect with them, and, you know, resonate with them and and you know, harmonize with them. And that's what I did, and I got pretty good at that.

Erin Brinker: 8:19

What did you learn about yourself through that process, because you're seeing kids who have likely experienced some trauma, maybe they have mental health issues that that also needed to be dealt with. What did you learn about yourself as you were helping them to kind of work through their issues

Dr. Fred Moss: 8:35

that I wasn't very much different from them, and none of us are. That's what I really learned. So there's this preconceived notion that they're, you know, they had it worse, or something like that, and then we all have it rough, you know. And the idea was that I could relate to them along every lines, just like they could relate to each other. And what I learned about myself is that maybe there's nothing wrong with me and maybe there's nothing wrong with them. We're trying to get through this life without a owner's manual, without a recipe book, and we're bumbling, stumbling and tumbling all of us, and we're pretending like we know what we're doing. If we do what most people do, we think we must be doing something right. And that wasn't really the case. These are great kids who, you know, on non pretentious children, as as I was always intending, hoping to be myself, and I could learn a lot from them about how to how to interact. These are just kids who found themselves living in a state mental health facility, but they weren't much different from the people living outside of the state mental health facility, in fact. And you know, they're just people who are assigned to living in that setting.

Erin Brinker: 9:34

You know, we just, some people just are able to keep their crazy hidden a little better, but we all, all of us, carry a bit a bit of crazy with us,

Dr. Fred Moss: 9:40

right? Not just a bit,

Erin Brinker: 9:45

okay, a lot, a lot

Dr. Fred Moss: 9:47

like all of it, like we think we actually know what we're doing. And, you know, we really, we really feel that way, especially if we get support from the outside world that what we're doing is good, or what we're doing is right, or what we're doing is noble, or whatever we think. Then we think we're really must be doing something well. But the truth is, none of us really know what we're doing or why we're doing it, not really. And I know you can make a case. Yeah, I know what I do, what I do. You know, like for me, I really am on a on a mission about human connection. Because what I really found then, and what I knew when I was three, and what I continue to know, maybe now more than ever is that there's never been a medicine created. There never been a treatment created. There's never been anything created that in the world of healing that is more profound and more effective and more astonishing in its impact than a human connection. So at the heart of all healing is a human connection. And that's what I was learning back then, and that's what I've taken I've taken with me. And so when I decided one more time to go back to school, because this time I was going to be a psychiatrist, and my brother 14 years older than me, he was already a psychiatrist, so I knew that there was a pathway to do that, I went back to school one more time with the sole intention of just holding my breath and getting through another eight or nine years of school with, you know, completing my undergraduate school, going to medical medical school in Chicago, and then coming out in Cincinnati, and, you know, doing my residency, and starting my family and all of those things, I decided that that psychiatry would be the place where I could be A representative of human connection, despite the fact that psychiatry was headed in an alter a totally alternative direction, which was this whole notion of Biological Psychiatry, or if there's something uncomfortable in their life, it's about you, like there's something wrong with you if you're uncomfortable, if there's something wrong with you, if you have you know, if you're moody, if you're scared, if you're anxious, if you're depressed, if you're awkward, if you're distracted, all of those things, there's something, there must be something so called wrong with you. But that wasn't the case, and I really didn't like the fact that it was being called a chemical imbalance, because frankly, that's been disproven many, many times.

Erin Brinker: 11:56

That has been debunked. They don't, they there's, it's never been proven that that that we have a serotonin problem, even though that's what the SSRIs are ostensibly created to address.

Dr. Fred Moss: 12:08

Well, not really, and even they don't do what they say they're going to do. But you're right. You know, it was 1987 when Prozac was introduced, and that's when the whole world shifted on a dime. At that moment, that's when this whole notion of Biological Psychiatry and chemical imbalance became the real deal. And Prozac was the first SSRI, you know, the grandma of them all. And it was on the cover of Newsweek, all by itself. And when it was created, and that green and white capsule, and there was talk, like very serious talk, about the idea that it was a panacea, that it was, you know, going to create happiness where happiness wasn't and and even that this should go into the water systems of the big cities like Los Angeles and New York, was a really, very real conversation about that. And you know, what's really sad about it is that we don't blame a log for burning in the fire. We live in a very difficult life. And you know, judu Krishnamurthy said it, well, I think the best I've ever heard anyone else, which is said it is no sign of mental health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. And when we really start looking at that's what we're dealing with here, a profoundly sick society, being uncomfortable, being depressed, being afraid, being anxious, being distracted, like Welcome to humanity, is what that is, you know. And if you're not feeling those things, it's because you're not telling your truth. And if you are feeling those things, it's just part of being human. Now, the truth is, you can choose to continue to feel those things, or you can take on different practices, and there are different practices that can literally undo some of those intense default experiences of feeling miserable and staying miserable. You don't have to stay miserable. That's the exciting power to be at being human. We're no longer we're not a slave to the habits that brought us to today, and we can really step away from that and in the world of exploring joy or happiness, or say, freedom or power or optimization. At some level, if you take on different ways of looking at the same data, your life changes drastically. And this is what I then became a real, deep proponent of as a psychiatrist. But for many years, I was doing something that I wasn't aligned with, which was actually diagnosing people and then medicating them. You know, there was already sunken cost for me to be a psychiatrist, and I had to kind of squeeze in my humanity around the edges that was unsatisfactory to me. And then in the last decade or so, I've decided that I can no longer align with being that kind of person. I just took people off of medicine. In 2006 I took much of my practice off of medicine, and there was just these great results. You know, these people got better, way better, reliably better, profoundly better, and their diagnosis typically just and totally disappeared into thin air. So when I learned that, the

Erin Brinker: 14:54

question that about that because, because there are, and I would say that most of America. Erica is is being over medicated. Right now they know the percentage of people, especially young people, who are taking SSRIs and other psychiatric medications is has never been as high as it is. Now it's really off the charts. But there's a there's a difference between kind of those, the depression and anxiety, the generalized depression and anxiety, and then people who have really severe mental illnesses, the bipolar this, like the schizophrenia, the, you know, borderline personality disorder and other personality disorders. So can you kind of differentiate those so that people are clear about what you're talking about?

Dr. Fred Moss: 15:34

Yeah, I'm not saying. I am not in agreement exactly with what you just said. And so once you declare yourself as having one of those conditions, and an authority gives you the sort of a stamp that there is your condition. Now you then become that. Not only you become that, but the medicines that you take in, the treatments that you actually willing to have intervene create that. In other words, if someone was following an entirely regimen of, you know, the 20 things that come with the moss method, like, you know, really, watching what they eat, watching what they drink, and watching their meditation and their gratitude, their nature, their creativity, their spirituality, their service work, their walking, you know, being with pets and sleep hygiene and pampering themselves, all those things everyone can do. So I don't really have it that necessarily, there's a natural propensity to have bipolar disorder. In fact, Bipolar disorder is created upon receiving that diagnosis, and once you receive that diagnosis, everything you thought about bipolar disorder is then put into your lap. In other words, if you're living a very clean lifestyle, if you're doing some of the things that you know you can do, it isn't the same, but once you start taking the medicines, they are designed, in fact, designed to induce or increase or perpetuate, or, in fact, cause the symptoms. Are marketed to treat. And then it really looks real, because, in fact, the medicines have created the chemical imbalance that you thought you had in the first place.

Erin Brinker: 16:59

So are you saying that bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia don't exist?

Dr. Fred Moss: 17:06

I'm saying they are simply conversations. And I will say this, let me, let's put this into perspective. Number one, they're simply conversations that are subject to transformation. And when schizophrenia was first designed, it was less than one, less than point 1% of the population. Bipolar disorder is a very odd disorder that talks about having too many moods. It's an effort to homogenize society rather than really get that people are allowed to go explore whatever their moods are. And what's really very clear here to me is that if you have bipolar disorder in St Louis or in Sacramento, and you take that to Reykjavik or Johannesburg or Auckland, you might not have that disorder anymore. In the same clinicians might review you and think that you're great, think that you're gifted, think that you're a shaman, or they may think you got something worse, just because one clinician thinks you have bipolar disorder, another clinician thinks you don't have a bipolar disorder, unlike like a broken arm, like if you have a broken arm in Sacramento or St Louis, and you take that to Reykjavik, you still have a broken arm. If you take it to Singapore, you still have it's actually a standard that holds true in all cultures, and, you know, by all reviews, by all diagnosticians. So not true with psychiatric conditions, very culturally specific and very diagnostician specific as well. So one of the things that happens frequently is that someone with a psychiatric disorder will come who thinks they have a psychiatric disorder, has been told and agrees that they have a psychiatric disorder, will come to my office. They have like seven different diagnoses, or like 11, and all that says to me is that they've gone to at least 11 different clinicians. That's all it says it doesn't mean that they have 11 different disorders. It means that they've been them the whole time, and they've been outside of the bounds of what the diagnostician is used to calling normal. But let's make another thing clear, which is diagnosticians are not incentivized to call you normal. As a matter of fact, they can't call you normal. If they call you normal, they will not get paid, right? They need, they need to give you a diagnosis of abnormal, even if you're the most normal thing that ever has been walked the planet.

Erin Brinker: 19:07

But, but let me ask you this, and I hear what you're saying. And certainly, there were studies where college students went into mental institutions and they were all done, they were all fine before they went in, and they were all diagnosed with things. And there was a study that was run, and I'm, I don't remember when that was, but I think it was, yeah, in the 60s and so. But there are behaviors that that so we'll use by, we'll use bipolar disorder. So the the like, really increased spending, really increased sexual promiscuity, really, and, you know, like the manic behaviors. And we've seen, Kanye, Kanye West, for example, when he, you know, he's clearly in a manic episode, and you know the kind of delusions and things that happened to him, you know that that, to me, is not on the is not on the scale of what I would say normal. But I

Dr. Fred Moss: 19:57

understand. I understand. So there's ways to tie. Toxify yourself, and you can get that way. And if we were to really look at Kanye West or anyone about what the practices are that are leading to these conditions, I propose that we could get underneath this and see that this is not a way of being. This has to do with the cocaine that he snorts every day. To do with the cocaine, with the Coca Cola he drinks too much. It has to do with the fact that he, you know, drinks too much coffee, or he eats too many adderalls or whatever the hell he does, but now we have a chemical imbalance. It shows up as if it's real. What I'm saying is that at the heart of the matter, we're all little kids not having a clue how to live, and we're all doing our very best all things considered, considering all the toxins, and not just internal toxins of what we eat or what we take in our mouth, but what we take in with our eyes, what we take in with our ears. Do we spend time actually being of service for service sake? Do we spend time looking at spirituality for mystical sake, for a higher power sake? Do we really sit still, silent and and, you know, contemplative in our meditative state? Are we really putting forth a gratitude practice? Do we, in fact, watch what we eat and what what we drink so that we're not eating toxins that absolutely cause mental health discomfort and this, you know, derangement or imbalance. What I'm suggesting is at the heart of the matter when and I have been with some of the most wild people that the planet has to offer, for sure, inside of the jails, inside of prisons, inside of my travels, I've been introduced to people that otherwise would be considered several, you know, several layers outside of the norm, which, by the way, has never been defined either,

Erin Brinker: 21:44

which is also, that's a moving target. I do know that.

Dr. Fred Moss: 21:47

So if the normal is not defined, how do we have the audacity to describe abnormal?

Erin Brinker: 21:54

That's true. That's true. So let's, let's talk about, you know, the the healing, the healer in that, in that work that you're doing, that it's that you know what you eat and how you live and the habits that create kind of optimal health, and then mental health. What does that look like?

Dr. Fred Moss: 22:12

Yeah, so healing, the healer is just a function of a lot of people who went into a trade, you know, went into a trade like nursing school or social work, or maybe doctor or psychologist, you know, they went into something hoping to get out on the other side and have a new trade where they can actually do that, which would their ideal was about what that job entailed, only to find out that the job isn't anything like what they thought it was right and they, you know, I have to spend all their time doing paper paperwork or or living within the compliances, or, you know, busy working their schedules, or billing for ucrs, or whatever they're doing, like it's just not what they thought it was.

Erin Brinker: 22:52

But Isn't life like that? I mean, all of us, we get out of school and we think the world is going to be some way, and then reality hits us in the face, and some people can pick themselves up easily and some people can't.

Dr. Fred Moss: 23:03

I don't know that life is guaranteed to be that way, but it is the way that it's set up inside of the way that the trade and the education are formulated. So you are, in fact, spat out with a different position than what you thought you were going in to obtain. That's very, very common. But what happens then? And it sounds like it happened to you, and it sounds, you know, it certainly has happened to me, is that we stop in our tracks at some point, like, No, I can't continue to do this. I need to do that which I came here to be, right? And then we step into being healed ourselves and finding our own unique track, whether it be our bus ride to Berkeley or whatever we have to do, we find our own unique track to being aligned with ourselves, to forgetting that it's much easier to be aligned with ourself, to be resonating and harmonic with our own core intentions, than it is to be somebody else pretending to be somebody else in order to protect that person From all the you know, shame and blame and disregard then might happen if we say the wrong thing to the wrong people.

Erin Brinker: 24:06

So being aligned with ourself is not meaning putting ourselves above all people at all time. It just means that we're walking authentically with who with the gifts that we were given

Dr. Fred Moss: 24:17

exactly, exactly. We don't have to look outward for that stuff. By the way, it's been there the whole time, it will be there the whole time, and we've just muddied it up with all these different ways of learning how to be somebody else in order to, so called, protect ourselves. And you know, one can make a case that we learned that in first grade when we were told to sit down, be quiet, and do what I said, rather than actually explore what's interesting to us. So yeah, being aligned with ourselves, and moving this stuff out of the way that's in the way to that's presently in the way to find yourself or be with yourself, is a real, serious challenge of our life. And we have a methodology inside of the moss method and inside of Welcome to humanity, to help people actually get aligned with their self again, so that when they're resonating with another human. Men. It's actually them resonating rather than the person that they pretended to be. You know, Henry David Thoreau said it this time. We'll quote him where he says, the massive men go through life and quiet desperation and then go to their graves with their songs still in them. And that's because we're all pretending to be somebody else instead of ourselves thinking that it's protective. Now I see that to be one of the most tragic aspects of all of humanity. Imagine going through life and having nobody ever actually get to know you. Like, what a bummer. Yeah, what a terrible bummer. And that's what we're all headed to if we don't take if the default is to go that direction, you have to, like, step up and actually make a commitment to find your true self, you know, and that's what's really important.

Erin Brinker: 25:45

So that would necessitate for everyone to just be dissociative, going through their entire lives one more time. Please. You would in order for you to live your life as someone else or doing things that you are supposed to be doing, it requires that you dissociate with who you are from who you are.

Dr. Fred Moss: 26:02

And that does that. You've just done a great job at completely debunking the whole diagnosis of dissociative disorder. Exactly. Every one of us is doing it anyways.

Erin Brinker: 26:11

100% interesting, exactly. So, so Okay, let's, let's say I'm a patient. I've, I've just been fired from my job will say I'm an accountant and I'm getting a divorce. I'm 35 years old, I've got two kids, and I'm an absolute wreck. How would you start with me?

Dr. Fred Moss: 26:30

There's nothing wrong with you that we'd start with that that's really important. There's nothing wrong with you and your life is completely miserable, let's face it, but there's nothing wrong with you inherently. So having this equation that got created in 1987 with Prozac was that if there was something that was highly miserable or intolerable or untenable, you know, if there was something going on in your life that was causing massive pain, that meant there was something wrong with you, per se. So the first place we get is, I can get this. I can be with you. I can resonate with you. I can listen to you. I can care for you. I can be a human with you. And when we really get that, there's a sense that, you know, all of a sudden, I'm not alone. All these things that are happening. I lost my job, I got my two kids. I'm having a divorce, you know, I got money problems, I've got health problems. My mom is yelling at me all those things that happen, we can get that I am a mess, but we can also get that that's an internal experience of emotions. And in fact, how you feel internally doesn't have to dictate how you behave yourself. Ooh. How do you separate that? How you separate that is with meditation and gratitude. We start getting that I am not my experiences, I am not my feelings, I am not my thoughts, I am not my circumstances. There is a person here who's experiencing life as it is and then judging and assessing whether it's good or bad, and then collapsing ourselves onto those experiences. But what meditation has to offer, what Gratitude has to offer, really what spirituality and much of the list on the moth method has to offer is being able to separate this core self from the experiences you're having internally or externally. It sounds kind of odd for people that don't don't have experience with it. It's like trying to explain swimming to somebody who's never been in a pool you're not going to really be able to do that, or trying to explain what a mango tastes like to somebody who's never had one, right? That's you're not going to be able to do as well, so, but what really does happen inside of this remarkable age old, you know, time tested, effective means of managing life is inside meditation. You really do get access to this person, to the center, to this core that is experiencing those things, but doesn't have to become those things.

Erin Brinker: 28:43

It reminds me of Aristotle's question, does a fish know that it's wet 100% and because if you, if you are, if you are living the way that you've always lived, and miserable throughout the whole thing, but you're living the way that you always live, it hasn't occurred to you that there might be another way,

Dr. Fred Moss: 28:59

exactly, exactly, and there really might be another way, and that's what the practices are really aimed at, is opening the doors to the possibility of other ways, exactly.

Erin Brinker: 29:08

So, when did you start really seeing this, bringing this kind of work together with your patients? Because I, you know, you get out of medical school, medical school, you have you've said, fixed costs. Are you, you know, sunk cost? You have to, you know, pay your student loans, etc, etc. And at what point did you say, Yeah, I'm not in this anymore. I'm I'm done with the status quo. This is not working.

Dr. Fred Moss: 29:33

I think most of my med school colleagues, and certainly my residential colleagues, the ones that we had, 12 of us at the University of Cincinnati, would already say that it was, well, started back then. So I was already calling, you know, calling out the whole theories and the idea I was doing that back it's just an extension of little Freddy at three years old. It's not an extension of post doctor. So at post, all that really happened is I got twisted and contorted during medical school, so that by the time I came out, I was now asked to be a oak so important doctor with a white coat, and all those things that I have to do to take care of inpatients and outpatients and insurance forms, and, you know, residential patients and orphanage patients and nursing home patient, that all of those things sort of asked me to do something that was misaligned with who I really was, and I found a way to get that done, but around the side, like I had said earlier, squeaking around the edges where there was this character that was like, Look, this is bullshit. Like, seriously, like, this is both, like, the center chord of what we're being taught isn't real, and there is something way more powerful and way more real that's in the world of human connection and interaction that actually works to cure and to heal, rather than to contain or slow down deterioration, which is all the mental health industry really contain, really describes itself as under no conditions is the mental health industry described that it's going to cure your mental illness. No, once you have whatever they say you had that you will now agree you have. You actually have a propensity towards that in their world anyways. To have it recurve, to have it happen again, to have it be part of you. I am like once I have an episode where I've been declared manic or declared, you know, depressed or narcissist or whatever it is that I've been given, there's a sense that, okay, I guess I'm stuck with this the rest of my life. You just don't have that with other fields. And so what's really here is the possibility of getting that there is an alternative way to look at the same data and allow yourself to heal from the conditions that you otherwise thought were probably permanent, because that's what the industry told you. Wow.

Erin Brinker: 31:50

Okay, so I'm processing this. And one of the things you know, looking at the data now and the explosion in these diagnoses, the world that we live in has changed dramatically. People no longer have faith communities. Families are scattered all over the country. The people are connecting via a device that they're staring at all day long. And so there's this artificial connection. And so the in that environment, you know, I think that we're reaching a crisis level. What are you seeing?

Dr. Fred Moss: 32:22

Yeah, of course, we're reaching a crisis level, but we're not because there's something wrong with us. Well, lean back on Krishnamurthy again. You know, we're being asked to live a life that's outside the bounds of of healthiness, and we're being asked to do things that humans, up until this point, have never been asked to do. So of course, it leads to confusion, it leads to chaos, it leads to disarray, it leads to depression, leads to fear, leads to anxiety, leads to distractibility, leads to aimlessness, leads to hopelessness, leads to funny thoughts, all those things happen. It's okay. There's nothing wrong with us. So once we start getting that there's nothing wrong with us, we're walking through this temporary experience on the earth together, and we get to see that the what really does cure is finding someone who gets you is actually getting another person inside of that experience is just a, you know, an epiphany. It's just an explosion of health that takes place at that moment. I've worked in some of the maximum security prisons and in California, you know, Pelican Bay and Folsom and Salinas and, you know, these are supposed to be like some of the sickest people in the world or something, yeah, but not, not the inmates, everyone else, maybe, but not the inmates. And the inmates are so, so healthy because they actually have nothing to lose. It's very interesting. It's not across the board, by the way. Of course, there are people there who you know aren't I wouldn't want living next door to me, but that doesn't make you know they're all just trying to express themselves in whatever way they can, given all the limitations and the gifts that they have,

Erin Brinker: 33:56

but they, many of them, have, I mean, made objectively harmful and evil decisions, murder, rape, armed robbery, you know, kidnapping, you know the things that would land you in a in a maximum security prison. I mean, yeah, I mean, maybe they're just, they make really bad choices and they need to be locked up. Or there's some, maybe they're broken. Maybe it's from trauma. I don't know.

Dr. Fred Moss: 34:19

I don't know either, and I think you have to be very careful before you generalize what you know. Not you. I'm not. There's not a direction to you. We have to be very careful before we generalize what we think is going on in the prisons with those people who, so called, made those decisions. And once you start looking at the core of those decisions, normally, you can actually follow the thinking all the way through to whatever act led them to, you know, be, be to get their offense. You can follow through their thinking of how they got to whatever they got to on the day that they finally did that, which we now call to be a, you know, a counterproductive act that led them to life in prison, like murder or rape. Yeah, murder or rape. Indeed, you can start listening to what. If you can open yourself up and listen to them for the human that they are, you can get whatever they thought was going on at the time and see how at least their mind worked, even if you don't agree, or if at some certain point you would have done something different, what you can really get is it's just another human here. It's literally just another human here who made some decisions that landed them behind bars. By the way, I'm not even sure that they're more behind bars than we are, but that's a whole different question as well.

Erin Brinker: 35:30

Interesting. So what? Okay, so that's that that is a new way of thinking, and it's but it's begging a lot of questions about what you do with a population that is that maladaptive to society,

Dr. Fred Moss: 35:45

they're not well, you like I said, once you meet them, you start realizing that they're just humans, and they're the most non pretentious humans I've ever met. And inside of that process, there's an eye to eye that can happen that is so extraordinary. There's such a connection waiting to happen. Most people don't give those people the time of day because they're either afraid of them or they have whatever preconceived thoughts they have. But in a society where people are struggling, the best move, what I've ever found ever for anyone, and I don't know that I can ever be altered from this, if I could learn a better move, I would do it is to actually understand somebody, listen to somebody, be with somebody, and get somebody as best as you can, and, you know, stay right in there while they're sharing their truth with you, whether or not you agree, or they're or they're, you know, completely diametrically opposed in all of their decisions, doesn't stop the possibility of listening to them like they're human. What that's fair, because they are human. They are human. And once that happens, that you can do that you can see a explosion of healing taking place in some situations that happens instantaneously and spontaneously upon them, getting that you get them. It's an explosion. I've never seen healing take place anything like that with any of the tools or any of the modalities associated with conventional or any unconventional mental health treatment.

Erin Brinker: 37:07

So what role does trauma play in all of that? Because we're, you know, lots of people grow up, whether they've been to war or they grew up in an abusive family or whatever, violent neighborhood. What role does trauma play?

Dr. Fred Moss: 37:19

Trauma is an experience that we, really, pretty much all of us, have. You know, you know you don't have to be in a street where there's drive bys to call it trauma. Whatever you have is that your as greatest trauma is a big trauma for you. So almost everyone, if not everyone, has had their form of trauma, and trauma happens. And then what we have is a tendency, a default tendency to relive that trauma, default tendency to think that it's still happening as false, a false tendency to try to resolve it in our thoughts and our feelings in a default way of being. But one can be taught to just dismantle themselves, to disconnect themselves from that sense that it's still going on. And you can use several of the modalities and gifts and tools that I said earlier with the moss method, and there are others as well, to at least disconnect, if not loosen the jar, some significantly, so that the trauma is no longer being experienced as ongoing or recurrent, because it isn't ongoing and it isn't recurrent, and then the possibility even becomes that you can transfer that to being of service for others who have experienced similar trauma. And there's a tremendous amount of healing that takes place like that. So inside of healing to healer, for instance, there's this whole idea that when one can resonate with an experience because you've had a similar one for yourself, then you become available to others who are having that similar experience in such a way that, yes, indeed, they feel connected, they feel understood, they feel resonated with, and healing can take place for them before it gets out of hand. So trauma is a big deal. But trauma isn't what causes the damage. Trauma is something that happens and then how we enter, how we interface with that, how we react, or even, should I say, respond to that is a little bit up to us. So we have several different opportunities, and if we don't do anything, more than likely, and especially with these medications, which actually freeze the trauma in place. So once you start taking medicines for the trauma you had, you can be sure that you'll have that trauma on an ongoing basis, because that's really what the medicine are designed to do is to stop the evolution away from experiencing the trauma.

Erin Brinker: 39:25

Well, you know, addiction works like that. So if you that, you essentially freeze your development at whatever, whenever it was that that addiction started, and so that alcoholics then are trying to avoid, or addicts are trying to avoid dealing with with bad feelings. Well, those feelings well, those feelings are always there, and they're going to be sitting there cooking until you're clean and work through them the hard way.

Dr. Fred Moss: 39:46

And there's some notion that those pills and those substances are different than psychiatric medicines, and they're not. So the truth is, this is another form of dependency, as all psychiatric medicines are. And in fact, these. Medicines are very well designed, even though they're given a prescription, and a big old, you know, well trained, well educated physician wrote a little note and said that you can take it. That doesn't mean that these medicines are doing you any good. Now, before we go much further, I do want to say this disclaimer. I thought about it earlier, and I waited a little longer than I normally do, and that is, there's a group of people listening to this interview right now who are pretty sure that they have been properly diagnosed. They love their therapist, they love their intervention, they love their therapeutic you know, they love their treatment plan, and maybe even they love their medicine, and they wouldn't trade it for the world. And what I want to say to them is, please keep doing exactly what you're doing with all due respect, and I mean that in all serious goodness. Because if you've reached that place in any area of life where you wouldn't want to trade what you have with anything else in the world, this is the best it's going to get. And you're pretty sure about that, and you don't want to even consider alternatives, then you need to bottle that, because that is a very rare occurrence. And if that's happening in your life with respect to your mental health, then good for you. Please keep doing exactly what you're doing. Okay, no kidding, this conversation isn't even really for you. This conversation is for the hundreds of millions of people, literally, who are pretty sure they've been misdiagnosed, underdiagnosed, overdiagnosed, mistreated, undertreated, overtreated, mismedicated, under medicated, over medicated. These are those people who really know in their heart of hearts that they're not getting the best out of life anymore, and that it has something to do with how they now perceive themselves, or the things that they're taking in, or the treatments that they're involved in that aren't optimizing their life. And what's very possible is to optimize your life, no matter what has happened up until now.

Erin Brinker: 41:38

So let's talk about loneliness, because you talked about community playing such an important role in living an optimized life. You know when, specifically, as it pertains to mental health, the number of lonely people, especially seniors, is off the charts at the moment, and so, so what does loneliness do? And you know, how do you create community when you don't even know where to start?

Dr. Fred Moss: 42:02

Well, there is a big difference between being alone and being lonely, number one and but I hear what you're saying exactly, and I don't want to diffuse it with that truth, but that is an important truth. Being alone and being lonely are two different things. Lonely. Being lonely is the processing of the area being alone. So once one alone, one can say, I'm alone and I wish I wasn't alone. So I'm not aligned with the way things are going right here. And that level of of of, you know, of space between how things are going and how you wish they were going creates this non this experience of loneliness. So loneliness is a very painful experience, and in fact, if you're not interacting with someone, well, you're missing the number one cure available to humans, and that's in the world of human connection. So if, in fact, you're connecting with no one, you are starving yourself at the number one cure, the number one healing resource, the number one medication known to all of humanity over all of time, and that is being with another human. When we really get that, that's really what we're all after, then that possibility exists that even if you're lonely, there are things you can do to alleviate that loneliness. Number one, a you could become okay with being alone. That's a little bit of a hard process, but could be theoretically gained. You know, you could, again, you do a lot of bunch of meditation, a bunch of gratitude, a bunch of spiritual of spirituality, a bunch of, I guess, service work requires somebody else, but, you know, do some creativity, do some pampering. You can get yourself so that you're actually okay with the process of being alone. That's one way. It's not necessarily the recommended way. It's a little bit difficult to do all of that alone. So the other way to do that is you really can reach out. You really can call your child, you really can talk to your friend, you really can go to the library, you really can take a walk in the park. You really can do those things and then reach out to other people. When you do that, it's amazing that you know, once you've gone a little bit of time without being with someone, and you decide to have the courage, because it does take courage. You're afraid of being rejected. It takes courage to go out there and say hello to somebody, or go, you know, just make yourself known and meet somebody or or to call a friend or call a family member for fear that you're going to be a burden, or, you know, you're Brinker, you're like a Debbie Downer to their life instead of all that you can actually reach out and alleviate your loneliness by one simple way, which is, go call somebody. Go be with somebody. Go walk with somebody. Like that's the way to that is the cure for loneliness, after all,

Erin Brinker: 44:32

right. And, and I have to say that there, there are so many seniors, especially who they've retired from their jobs. Maybe their kids are not in, not in the same community, or they're just busy and they have all of this capacity to still impact the world around them. They're not sure what to do. And my answer is always whatever, whatever your passion is, puppies and kittens or veterans or, you know, low income kids, go find a nonprofit to volunteer at, because you you. Can still make an impact and still have a connection and give you purpose. And when you think that you don't have one, because you're no longer working

Dr. Fred Moss: 45:08

right, it's just a thought process. This idea that I don't have a purpose is really just a thought process, and we all can fall into that. I know, frankly, even though I may sound like I know some stuff, there are several times in a day where I get to, what's the effing point I get to that? You know, I get to it. I do. And where I are, no one gets me. Or why do I got to be so different, or all those things, you know, right? That is very much inherent inside of the human condition. So when we get to those spaces, we don't have to go volunteer at a nursing home or a soup kitchen. It's not the only way to do service. Helping anybody do anything is service. And, you know, we don't have to be a candy striper in order to do service. We can do stuff that is very small and it that might be even, you know, helping the neighbor bring groceries into their house or something, or, you know, raking the leaves or take, you know, asking someone to go for a walk with you, or any of those things. You know, that's that it. There are multiple ways, especially in our present way. And you said something about staring at the screen, after all, me and you are having a very robust conversation at this very moment, and neither of us are even seeing each other. No, we're not. And that's really interesting, you know that. But to say this is like a disconnected conversation would be completely unfair and completely inaccurate. Indeed, what's really here is connection, even available using this virtual process.

Erin Brinker: 46:33

So let's talk a little bit about gratitude and the power of gratitude to transform where you are in life.

Dr. Fred Moss: 46:42

So in the list of the moss method, number one thing is gratitude. So grad it's it does it. The moss method has 20 things in the list, and the number one thing is gratitude, not because it's the most important, but it's because it's the first thing you can do in the morning before you even get up out of bed. So I know for me, and I did it today, and I do it every single day. I wake up and I'm a little bit discombobulated, somehow disorganized or disoriented. I'm like, what, what? What's what? And what are we? What are we up? You know, what are we doing today? What's i? What? Who like? Who's like? Is that my wife, you know, like, those kind of things, you know. And I have a little bit of that. And before too long, within a few seconds before I climb out of bed, I put my hand on my heart, or both hands on my heart, and I come up with 10 things that I'm grateful for. Now I have done this enough times in a row that it takes me less than 10 seconds to come up with 10 things. And by the way, the first thing I come up with is my wife, because, after all, if I'm going to say it out loud and wake her up, she should know that she's number one on my list. And then number two, three and four are my cats, desposito Winston and Valentino all the time. Now sometimes I just call my cats and that's then becomes number two. So now I'm left with the burden of coming up with eight more things, rather than six more things. If I actually split my cats out as being two, three and four, plus, I have to choose which cat I want to make two. It's all pretty

Erin Brinker: 47:56

complicated. And they understand you. I have four cats. I They understand you. Oh yeah, they

Dr. Fred Moss: 48:01

know what I'm up to for sure, Valentino. Valentino is very aware that I'm super grateful for him, and so is despot Winston. Now, when we start looking at that, we start realizing that in that gratitude, all I've done is reset my point of view. I've reset the filter, I've reset how I'm looking at the world, because the world can be a hell hole. It's not very hard to create 100 reasons why you think the world is a hell hole, right? It's really easy to get 100 reasons why we should be depressed, or 100 reasons why we should be afraid, 100 reasons why we should be like anxious, like there's 100 reasons that we would take us four seconds, four minutes, I'm sorry, to come up with 100 reasons for any of those things if we work together, and in fact, some of those things, we could probably take a break and do it in four minutes. But when we really start looking at, you know, the power of gratitude, what it really does is it a lot like it. When I pick Alexandra and then pick Winston, desposito and Valentino, there is something like a charge of, okay, at least it's worthwhile for these four, right? But then I go to the sun and go to the moon, or I go to, you know, the sun and the moon or the stars or my porch or my mentors or my teachers or my leaders or my work or my friend or my patient or my sister or my brothers or my mom or my dad, you know, not that's, I don't know how many I just named, but somewhere near 20, because it's not very hard. Once you get going, people are like, What if I can't come up with 10? Well, if you can't come up with 10, lower the bar and then come up with 10, you know it's there's 10. It's not. You don't have to worry about that. And that's true wherever you're living, wherever, if you're on the streets, if you're homeless entirely, there's still absolutely 10 things in the world that you can be very happy about. It rewires

Erin Brinker: 49:46

your brain too. I mean, there are neuroscience to back up how thinking about gratitude and intentionally thinking about gratitude can change how everything is wired in your brain, not everything, but at least your because i know that i. I'm a ruminator. If something goes sideways, I ruminate, I think about it, and I have to intentionally change my thinking, create new neural pathways, so to speak.

Dr. Fred Moss: 50:09

Yeah, yeah. There's no doubt about it, whether it's, you know, whether it's proven by studies or not, isn't really so important. It's the experiential. The experiential aspect of is very real. And on on days where I'm slow to do gratitude, or I get up out of bed without it, I notice it like, within minutes, I'm like, Oh, wait, here's 10 things. You know, I put my even if I haven't got to the shower yet, my hands on my heart, I'm saying those 10 things. And the power of it is, is extraordinary, you know, enormous.

Erin Brinker: 50:44

So what are some of the other habits that people can do every day?

Dr. Fred Moss: 50:50

So meditation is a great habit, you know, sitting still and silent, and then having some sort of mantric center where you can get like what you had asked earlier, where you can get I'm not my experiences. You know, you know, you let your thoughts go and you're like you notice yourself off track, and you bring yourself back to center with their touch points, or with your mantra or or with a visual or a listening. There's multiple ways to do meditation, but all of them have that certain one thing that come back to the center from wherever your thoughts took you and be calm, compassionate, accepting and forgiving of yourself for having your thoughts go offline because you start realizing, well, I'm not those thoughts. How could I be those thoughts if I'm actually describing them? I'm not their thoughts, I'm not the feelings, I'm not the emotions, I'm not the sensations, I'm not the circumstances. And meditation is extremely effective. You know, time tested and proven. As mentioned, this is something that's been going on since the beginning of time. You can make a case for even biblical characters, or whoever you think are the first characters on on the planet. All of them, you know, found access and found success inside of doing meditation over the years, because it really works. Now. That's the same thing, as we said earlier. They can't really explain how meditation works in the same way that you can't really explain how what swimming is, if you've never been in a pool. But meditation is one of those things that I think is really high powered, and then another one is getting out in nature. So getting out in nature, you don't have to study when you're out in nature. You don't have to actually learn what that squirrel is doing. You don't have to actually see a deer. You don't have to actually see a roses or a creek or an ocean, but all those things can be very helpful. And you really just see that this is how nature goes this. And we are part of nature. In fact, we are nature. And you could start seeing that there's a perfection in the flow of nature, even if it's just around the block, by the way, and you once you start incorporating that, this can also recenter us, and, you know, put us back in touch with our core just by being out in nature and being out in the sun each and every day. We were intended to do that when we were when we were brought to this earth. And now we spend so much time staring at these screens and sitting on our cubicles and thinking that life takes place in front of us on those screens or in between our two ears, when, in fact, there's a whole world going on out there that can be remarkably revitalizing. Another one is spirituality. So inside of the world of spirituality, you know you have whatever you believe is a higher power. And if you believe nothing's higher power, then have that nothing be your higher power, whatever you like. And once you start taking place that you know you're a small cog and a small cog in a huge wheel, and there's a real opportunity to get in touch with what your temporary purpose is on this earth. And if you believe that there's before and after lives, what that all is entailed, you can follow that through spirituality and get again, a tremendous amount of re optimization and revitalization and renewal. Another one is in this world of service. We talked about that briefly. Whenever we are helping another person, it seems that all of our negative experiences goes away instantly, at least diminishes significantly whenever we're helping someone, even if it's just sharpening their pencil, we get an opportunity to explore what it really means to be of assistance to others. There are several different organizations, rehab organizations, including at the very bottom of that list, all the 12 step programs that recognize that service is at the heart of all you know, of all humanity and we really are here for others, even more so than for ourselves. So when we find ourselves drowning in our own self pity and our own self worries, one of the things that's really an easy way to go is start, you know, it's go, help somebody else. And so that's another one. And then creativity is probably the fifth one that comes to mind, although there are many others, nutrition and hydration and movement and, you know, sleep hygiene and pets and things like that. But creativity is another one, because this is just another form of communication with each other, with all of humanity, through art and music and dancing and singing and drama, cooking and writing and gardening, all those things. Are creative in their own right. Cause also a diminishment in our sense of self loathing and our sense of, you know, fear and anxiety, and in its expression, create another opportunity to express ourselves, which, of course, you've heard me say, being self expressed and then radically listening is the ultra form of connecting with another person, and that's becomes available inside of the creativity and

Erin Brinker: 55:23

radically listening, and we only have about 30 seconds left. Radically listening is making me like intentionally listen to what is spoken and unspoken in your communications with someone, right?

Dr. Fred Moss: 55:36

Yeah, for sure, we're radical listening is goes far beyond just simply. Look, if you're going to count on what everybody says to be exactly what they mean, you're not giving them very much credit. You say a lot of things that you didn't actually mean. Plus, we're saying it on the fly without any kind of rehearsal, and we're putting together our words and then our sentences and then our thoughts and then our feelings and throwing it across the ether to the other person and hoping that they that they receive it in something similar to how we meant it. There are so many moving pieces inside of the verbal communication realm that it's a good idea to see what's else is going on besides simply vocal interaction.

Erin Brinker: 56:14

Well. Dr Fred Moss, this has been a lively and enlightening conversation. How do people find and follow you on social media and find you on the web.

Dr. Fred Moss: 56:22

So the UN Doctor reset is the thing I'm working on the most. And you can find that as UN Doctor reset com, and I invite people to come over there and take a look, and you get access to me there with a with a discovery call by doing that, and it is what it is. You know, I'm helping people learn how to come off medicine, come off their diagnosis, and get their life back. And I'm helping people learn how to become an un doctor. So other people in their world could do that, because you don't need a license or education to become an un doctor. So the UN doctor is a lot of fun, and that's that's my central focus these days. But another place to find me would be at Dr Fred 360 com. That's Dr Fred 360 com, and everything I do, and including a bunch of freebies and my books and all my podcasts. You know, 500 or so podcasts are loaded on there, so that's a cool place to do it. And on social media, you can find me at Dr Fred moss in multiple different places. You know, I like LinkedIn more than any but I unfortunately sometimes hang out in meta on both of the meta places and and then do a little little bit of x as well. But social media is a place to learn. You know, YouTube is I'm growing my YouTube channel quite a bit. It's a great place for me, and that Welcome to humanity sits on YouTube and but in reality, if you just want to get a hold of me instead of over riding you. Dr, Fred, 360 calm is what I'm about and on Doctor reset, comm is what I'm up to.

Erin Brinker: 57:45

Well, Dr Fred Moss, thank you so much for joining me today and for your interesting and enlightening life's work and conversation. So thank you so much.

Dr. Fred Moss: 57:55

You're welcome. Thanks for having me on. It was a great conversation.

Erin Brinker: 58:00

Well done. Well, that is all we have time for today. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I always appreciate you, know, spending some time with you. I'm Erin Brinker, you've been listening to the making hope happen radio show. For more information about the making hope happen Foundation, go to www, dot making hope.org. That's www, dot Making Hope. Dot O, R, G, have a great one, everyone. I'll see you next week.

Unknown: 58:31

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