Transcript of Being Sane in Insane Places: Diagnosis is Broken & Data is the Answer

Rosenhan study was called on Being Sane in Insane Places, and its conclusion was absolutely devastating to psychiatry. It revealed two primary issues. Mental health diagnosis are entirely subjective. Doctors weren't looking at data. They were observing, they were interpreting, and they were making assumptions. The label became the lens. Once the word schizophrenia was attached to the client, every behavior was now interpreted as evidence of the schizophrenia. I want you to think about how dangerous that is. Your brain is wired for deception. But here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to Listen. Welcome to another episode of Decoded. I'm your host, Busy Gold. And today's episode is all about diagnosis and why I believe data is the real future of the mental health industry. I want We're going to set the scene by talking about something called the Rosenhan experiment. Back in the 1970s, a psychology professor named David Rosenhan decided to run what would become one of the most infamous studies, and in my opinion, the most damning scientific experiment of all time in the mental health field.

He and seven colleagues walked themselves into psychiatric hospitals across the country. Many of these people were doctors themselves, some were psychiatrists, and they all decided as part of this experiment that they were going to report the same exact simple symptom. It was a single symptom. They were all going to report that they were hearing voices. There's no elaborate backstory, no violent outburst, no other erratic behavior. Just one sentence, I hear a voice. That was the experiment. Every single one of them was in turn admitted based on their self-reporting. To me, this is where it gets the most disturbing. From the moment they walked in, part of the experiment was that they all had to stop faking their their singular symptom. They were to act completely normal. They answered questions honestly. They behaved just like any other visitor to the hospital, not somebody admitted. But what the staff saw wasn't normal. They started to see pathology. If a pseudo patient took notes, they deemed that obsessive writing. If they paced the hauls, that was nervous agitation. If they sat quietly, that was withdrawn affect. Even though they were acting perfectly sane, They were locked up for days, weeks, some even months.

The average stay, 19 days. The diagnosis, in all cases, schizophrenia, now in remission. What does this actually tell us about diagnosis? It tells us that once a person is labeled, everything they do from that point forward starts to get interpreted through the lens of that label. In a way, label itself starts to distort reality. This experiment should have changed everything. But as you know, it didn't. Rosenhan's study was called on being sane in insane places, and its conclusion was absolutely devastating to psychiatry. It revealed two primary issues. Number one, mental health diagnosis are entirely subjective. Doctors weren't looking at data, they were observing, they were interpreting, and they were making assumptions. Number two, the label became the lens. Once the word schizophrenia was attached to the client, every behavior was now interpreted as evidence of the schizophrenia. I want you to think about how dangerous that is. If you watched my previous episode on the label limit, you know how I feel about labels. Once you're labeled as depressed, crying is now proof of your depression. If you laugh, it's masking. If you sit quietly, it's withdraw. If you're energetic, maybe it's manic. No matter what you do, diagnosis finds a way to describe and explain it.

One really important thing to remember here is that this isn't just a narrative about the danger of labeling and diagnosis in the realm of a psychiatric hospital, although certainly that was where they ran this study. This is actually something that is far more baked into the entire modern foundation of psychiatry. To be honest with you, that foundation hasn't really changed much in the last 50 years. I want to shift gears and talk a little bit about the DSM, because the DSM is something that is used in all clinical settings. It is the Diagnostic and Statistical manual of Mental Disorders. For many people that I talked to prior to the last two years, the DSM is considered the Bible of diagnosis. Over the last two years, I've noticed a change. Maybe this is because some therapists and psychiatrists are starting to wake up to some of the strings that are being pulled behind the through big academia, through big pharma. Or maybe it's just because people are finally bold enough since COVID to start pushing back against a previously existing system and maybe question the status quo a bit more. Because in the last two years, most of the therapists or psychiatrists that I've met with merely brush the DSM off as an insurance code book and have said things to me like, Well, you have to categorize something according to the DSM so that you get paid.

While this used to be considered the Bible in psychiatry, now it's essentially been termed a billing code book, and every single treatment plan that you create for a client or a patient now runs through this DSM. But there is a dirty secret about the DSM. It isn't science in most ways that people think of science. There are no blood tests that confirm depression, no brain scans that prove anxiety, no genetic marker that absolutely unequivocally lights up for bipolar disorder. Sure, there's some phenomenal work by people like Dr. Amen, who does a variety of different brain imaging scans to show which parts of the brain are over or underactive, etc. I've worked with many clients who have previously gone to Dr. Eamonn. The problem is these tests, they're not a one-size-fits-all approach. Just like somebody who has struggled with chronic and autoimmune symptoms, knows that you could be feeling the worst you've ever felt and potentially come back with normal labs. The DSM is built on clusters of observable behaviors and self-reported symptoms. And honestly, that's it. This leaves two glaring problems that I know from a break method perspective, we are built on the foundation of having seen these problems and created solutions for these problems.

So problem number one, observation is completely biased. Clinicians are humans just like you. They bring their own worldview, they bring their own expectations, even their unconscious biases. But most importantly, they are also operating through a distorted lens of their own brain pattern. One doctor may see trauma, another sees borderline personality disorder. The same behavior, two different labels. Another big issue is that self-reporting is completely unreliable. Clients exaggerate, clients minimize, clients misremember, and most importantly, clients deceive themselves. Self-deception is something that every single human being experiences on planet Earth. As you know from previous episodes, this can be skewed positively or negatively. Nonetheless, we all experience it, and it is one of the ways that we accidentally perpetuate our own destruction, that we start to minimize or justify some of our terrible behaviors, the ways that we start to be certain that someone said something to us that they may not have actually said. This is why two different people can walk into two different offices, and they can walk out with two entirely different diagnosis. The field calls this low inter-rater reliability. I call it shaky science. This is the actual truth. The DSM is less like a microscope and more like an opinion poll.

It tells us what a group of experts thinks they see, but doesn't tell us exactly what's happening inside of the brain. For decades, psychiatry has dangled the hope of biology holding the real answers to mental illness. It's a chemical imbalance, right? Don't you guys remember that? Or we're We're going to find and isolate the gene, or we're going to discover the exact brain circuit. But I will tell you, as somebody who has lived through the last 40 years on planet Earth, the last 12 of which have been embedded in the mental health field, The previous years surrounded by people with diagnosed mental illness can tell you that we spent a large chunk of my lifetime truly believing that chemical imbalances caused things like depression. But all of those Those theories or promises, they just continued to dissolve right in front of our eyes. Study after study has failed to find a clear, consistent biological marker for depression, anxiety, bipolar, schizophrenia. You take your pick. The biological markers They're simply not there. Sure, we can point to correlations, serotonin transporters, amygdala activity, cortisol levels, but correlations themselves are not causes. And yet millions of people have been told that they're sick because they have chemical imbalance.

An imbalance that's never actually been proved to exist in any way that it's actually been sold. So where does that actually leave us? It leaves us with the idea that mental illness is in fact real, but it's not real in the way that we've been taught. Here's my hypothesis. Mental illness, I don't think, is just random chemical chaos. And I also don't believe that's a fixed genetic curse. My work has taken a stand against that multiple times and one every time. I truly believe it's a distortion in someone's filter of their perception of reality. Every single one of us has a unique brain pattern type, and that pattern is going to influence how we filter our own reality, what we notice, what we ignore, what we assume, what we fear. When the filter is distorted, your perception of reality is distorted. That distortion is what gets you to justify, minimize, or excuse your behavior. Here's the biggest catch. You don't see this distortion. To you, it feels like reality. You don't realize that you're wearing a pair of glasses. You think that this is objective reality until work like break method or something else, teaches you how to reverse engineer that lens so that you can realize, Oh my God, there's a hole in the world out here.

When you learn how to take that distortion off and start to truly correct back to objective reality, you can start to see why some of your patterns of self-sabotage, procrastination, chaotic relationships seemingly chased you your entire life. You, in many cases, sought them out, ignored red flags, justified allowing that person into your life, or maybe even had a blind spot to your own behavior. Because all of these justifications feel true, and they feel like a part of you you can't see outside of your own disordered perception, guess what? You're going to to your therapist as if they were true. The end result is a system that is built on distorted self-reporting, interpreting those distorted perceptions, and then in turn, producing diagnosis that further reinforce the distortion. Can you see why people get stuck? Self-reporting can not only cause delay, a roadblock in healing, it can be flat-out dangerous. And this is how most of therapy works. The clinician asks narrative-based questions like, How did that make you feel? The client then describes their version of reality, and the clinician interprets and matches it into a DSM label. But what if the client's perception itself was distorted?

What if their self-deception is actually what's guiding their narrative-based response? You end up in a therapy container that is built much more on fiction than data. And worse, because the DSM validates it, this fiction gets locked in. This is why so many people spend years in therapy, maybe without ever experiencing real tangible change, because the system is looping inside the client's distortion instead of actually breaking it. It would be the equivalent of trying to fix a broken GPS by asking it for directions on how to fix the broken GPS. You see how ridiculous that sounds. Here's where we're at today. The mental health field has virtually been recycling the same theories for the last century. Freud, Young, yes, there have been DSM revisions, different packaging, similar or same foundation. I'll tell you one of the primary reasons, the funnel of big academia and accreditation processes. To try to get something new or not travel pushed through, you have to spend a ton of time sighting why it's the same as or built off of something that's already been approved. That, to me, is not only anti-science, it's anti-innovation. All the while, rates of depression, anxiety, Suicide are all skyrocketing.

Clearly, this approach hasn't been working. We are at an inflection point. All you have to do is take one look on social media, one look on the news, to see that something is terribly wrong. The fabric of humanity is unraveling, sadly, at the seams. We aren't getting better, we are getting worse. The question is, do we keep doubling down on narrative-based therapy, labels and guesswork, or Or are we finally ready to push against the system a little bit and break the cycle? I think the path forward is pretty clear. It's data, and not in some pro-technocracy, anti-human way. When you strip away a person's distorted narrative and the distortion of their perception of reality and all of their filters and their excuses and justifications and self-deception, and instead, you look at the historical data points in a person's life, you find some shocking patterns emerge. Patterns that actually predict thoughts, emotions, and behavior, and even decisions that you're likely to make at different phases of your life with extraordinary accuracy. According to the mental health establishment, this shouldn't be possible. And yet it is. If you're just simply a byproduct of your genetics and you have no agency over what happens to you, we shouldn't be able to actually make things work with break method.

And yet We do. Patterns repeat not because of bad luck or broken brain chemistry or just because it's in your genetics. It's because your brain is wired to protect itself. And unfortunately for you, the method of choice for protection is exactly what causes your suffering. It is in the form of self-deception. It is in the form of a distorted perception of reality that continues to reinforce and feel justified doing the same damn thing that you've always done. This is precisely where I think brain pattern mapping comes into the picture. It doesn't ask a client to tell us your life story. It doesn't rely on accurate self-reporting. We use data, objective markers, predictive algorithms, things that can actually be looked at and understood through the lens of science. One of my favorite parts of brain pattern mapping is that the way the whole session is divided, we actually get to see your patterns of self-deception at work while you're taking the diagnostic evaluation. I can't tell you exactly how we do this because it will destroy your ability to accurately take the test. But there are sections of the diagnostic that allow you to try to explain what you think is real and not real.

All the while, our predictive algorithm has already run, so we would know what is actually there underneath the surface. One of the things that I found that was interesting, as I've been running this now for many years, but this actual algorithm now consistently for almost two years, we'll see different clusters come through brain pattern mapping, especially based on different podcasts that I'll go on. And when I was on Dave Asprey's podcast back in, I don't know, March or April, we had a huge influx of clients poor through brain pattern mapping. And one really remarkable thing stood out about Dave Asprey's clients. Their self-awareness stress was incredibly high and accurate. So typically, when we look through people's brain pattern diagnostics, we'll see what the accurate brain pattern prediction is, and then we'll see how they're essentially either trying to describe it or dodge responsibility for it in one form or another. We'll see the inconsistencies or where they're actually contradicting themselves. There's also a place in the diagnostic where people have to self-order how they think their behavior unfolds, all the while we know already with the model how their behavior actually unfolds. In essence, what we're looking at are these two parallel tracks, what we know versus what they think they know.

What we end up finding is that not many people are highly self-aware of what they do, or if they do know what they do, they may not understand in what order they act that out in everyday life. The thing that stood out about Dave Asprey's client base was that they were incredibly accurate with describing not just what they do, but in what order they actually do that in their everyday life. Now, I'm certainly not saying that these people didn't also come to us with a host of other things that they were coming ready and wanting to work on because they absolutely were. But this just shows somebody can pursue self-awareness and become incredibly aware of what they do and in what order they do it. The awareness alone doesn't solve the problem. In many cases, I think some people just become more self-aware assholes. And a lot of times, they end up adopting different sorts of maybe spiritual or consciousness or therapy speak to justify verbally what they're doing or why, or at least own it as radically honest. I think it's important that we remember that there's a bridge here. I think on one hand, the mental health establishment tends to broadly keep people in containers that may go on for too long, the approaches may be too soft, are not confronting enough, not addressing the real underlying root causes early enough, and may not actually empower the client with a little tough love to use their agency to also get out of their own way.

We have to keep in mind that awareness is just a step It's not the final step. Some therapy containers don't even get their clients to a place of real awareness where they can actually articulate to you the underlying motivations that drive their behavior. Some can. Then when we look over at the spiritual and more consciousness-based communities, a lot of what you see there is the weaponization of spirituality or consciousness language that really just justifies or radically owns why they don't want to change their behavior. Big picture here. We all need to be able to not just become aware of what we do or in what order we do it, but fundamentally understand why we do it. It's very rare that I see people even that have spent, some of them, hundreds of thousands. I've even had a client, shout out to the client that's listening to this shortly that knows what I'm saying here, who spent hundreds of thousands. I want to even say he spent over a million dollars seeking help. Your brain isn't broken. It's running an old code. Break method is a system that maps your neurological patterns, decodes your emotional distortions, and rewires your behavior fast.

No talk therapy spiral, no getting stuck in your feelings. Just logic-based rewiring in 20 in 20 weeks or less. Head to breakmethod. Com and see what your brain is really up to. If you don't have the right system and the right structure to not just understand what you do and in what order you do it, but fundamentally why it's happening, you won't be able to rewire it. And approaches that work won't be soft. They won't be sweet. They won't put up bumpers. They won't put the client's feelings up on a pedestal because For a person to heal, they have to be able to confront the distortions that their brain pattern is actually seeping into everything that they see, their relationships, how they communicate, how they look at themselves in the mirror. It literally is like a mind virus. And if you aren't willing to help that client confront that virus, it's really challenging for them to heal. I hope and pray that the mental health establishment is able to put on the breaks, ask some better questions. And I do see therapists all the time, every single day, come into my practice, come into brain pattern mapping that are like, Hey, I am done bearing my head in the sand, pretending that this is working, this isn't working.

Something needs to change. And something does need to change. Because in a lot of therapy containers, awareness isn't even happening. That's why I think people then go seeking medicine ceremonies and spirituality communities because they want to understand what it is. But what you're really looking for is not just the what, it's the why. And the why is something that is incredibly formulaic, and it all exists in your historical data from the setup of your childhood. It is all but 90% of your nurture. Your nature, sure, it'll be expressed here and there. But nurture will override your nature every damn time. To me, I really see this new push toward everything being excused by genetics as the new chemical imbalance. It is not just because of your genetics. Epigenetics proves that you can override and turn on and off your genetic expression based on your environment, even your belief. We have to get out of this cycling in the drain of putting on bumpers and wanting to keep clients comforted rather than we want them to heal. Real. I'm telling you, the path to that is data. It's not narrative. It's not going to be looping in years of a therapy container.

We need real, action-oriented, sustainable changes. Let's reflect back on the Rosenhan experiment, because when I see clients in and out of my Zoom rooms all day long, there are plenty of scenarios that mirror the Rosenhan experiment, but they're happening in our everyday life today. Especially when you look at families who, sadly, took the bait of, My child has a learning disability or my child has ADHD, and they got their kids on big pharma when they were, I don't know, 7, 8, 9, 10 years old. Your child now, as they move into teens and adulthood, not only do you not have the influence of big pharma, but again, you've got this label trap happening. Everything that that child experiences now is seen through this filter of their pre-existing label. It's just like the Rosenhan experiment. That showed us the cracks in the system 50 years ago. The DSM has spent decades just papering over those cracks with thicker and more labels, more Complicated, changing language. The changing language is one of the things that gets me, and I know I talk about this in the label limit itself, that for something to be scientific, there needs to be some concrete element to it.

When you look at how definitions change over time, you start to see that things are really not as concrete as we like to believe that they are. A lot of people, not me, like to just believe in the man in the white lab coat. I have many friends and colleagues who have dedicated massive portions of their adult life and so much of their finances toward pursuing a career in the medical field. I want to commend a lot of those people because many of them now are starting to ask the right questions to challenge some of these paradigms. It doesn't take many of these people to start asking the right questions to wake other people up. Some of these paradigms, like the DSM, have to be challenged. We have to be able to ask questions about why the foundation hasn't changed. These cracks are far too big to ignore, and yet systemically, doctors are effectively taught to ignore them or in many cases, somehow mystified into believing that the crack isn't really a crack and to, in fact, deny their own personal senses. When I've met with certain therapists and psychiatrists, either on my show or in other settings as well, because I'm surrounded by people like this in my everyday life, it doesn't take much to ask the right questions to see that their own personal experience is often at odds with what they were taught to do.

They what approach they were taught as the correct approach. When you ask the right questions, you can tell that there's this desire where they're like, Yeah, but... There's always a, Yeah, but. Anytime you're in a field for a long time and there's something in the back of your mind that actually tries to push back or excuse your own personal real life experience with the yeah, but, where you're going to feed the line that the system wanted you to believe right into it, we have a big problem. That is paradigmatic entrenchment. That is where you've been taught inside of a certain paradigm and through a variety of different mechanisms that we've covered in other podcasts, when you start to see the cracks or you start to see overlaps where maybe this thing doesn't quite behave like I was told it was supposed to, you're afraid to ask questions because you don't want to be ostracized by your peers. You don't want to be attacked. So you refocus and continue to toe the line. I hope that when you're doing this work if you are doing this work and you continually bump up against this experience of your own sensory experience not matching with what you've been taught is the objective, concrete truth, that you pivot That you take a chance on yourself.

Maybe you let intuition lead the way because that is where true innovation, I believe, will change the trajectory of our mental health crisis. We need innovation more than ever before. I do believe that academic institutions are counterproductive to most innovation because it does function like a funnel. We have to be able to ask ourselves these questions, How were we led to believe that something was a chemical imbalance, and we all just bought that narrative and chewed it up while big pharma capitalized on it, all to find out that that's not actually real. Mental illness is not definitively a chemical imbalance. It is more of a distortion of perception. For For the first time in history, we do have the data to map it, predict it, and rewire it. I do think that this will be a revolution in the mental health field because the future of mental health has to be something more concrete, not another century of guesswork or narrative-based loops or even a container where a therapist, through their own brain pattern and their own bias, can see what they want to see without there being any other data underlying that. That is a dangerous place to be.

That is exactly how we end up in our own personal Rosenhahn experiment. Data is the key to breaking out of our mental health crisis, and it'll be sustainable if we can get it into the right hands, if we can get the people, unfortunately, that are protecting the paradigm for a variety of reasons, some of which are just cognitive dissidence, to actually start asking the right questions. If this had it worked already, wouldn't it have already worked? Wouldn't we be in a better place today than we were 50 years ago? The question that I want to leave you with is, will we, as a human collective, have the courage to step into it? Will we have the courage to say, We can't sustain this that much longer. Our mental health crisis can't continue to rise the way that it has. I work with children and teens all the time, and They are far worse off than back in our millennial, gritty days. Obviously, I realized for some of you watching, I'm 40. I think sometimes people mistakenly think I'm in my early 20s, which thank you. I appreciate you. But it's funny to think that I'm now one of those people that's like, Back in my day as a millenn.

And yet it's true. Our grit has gone away. Our emotional resilience has gone away. People are very quick to get labeled now. Now everybody's in Everyone's on a medication. When are we going to put up our hands and say enough is enough? This is not sustainable. Because it's not. And what we've been doing hasn't been working. Our entire system is built to gatekeep and prevent true innovation and true healing modalities to come forward and actually solve the problems. Why is this? I have a variety of theories. I know some of them I've expressed on different episodes of the show. But I want you to ask yourself that. Why are we so stuck? Why do we create and support systems that do seem to want us to stay not only stuck, but getting worse? What are the options for moving to the next phase? How do we save ourselves? Do we keep playing the game of the system from the inside? I know some are hopeful that they might be able to break it from the inside, and I certainly used to be a break it from the inside type of gal. But I think I've landed much more on a, we have to run a parallel track to the system itself and continue to bring the science, continue to bring the data, continue to present ourselves professionally, although outside of the system.

And while pushing a boulder up a mountain, it's still worth it. Your voice can still be heard. There are a variety of different podcast hosts and people that are out there that are waiting to find out the next innovative thing that won't gatekeep you. So if you're at home listening to this and you're feeling inspired because you feel like you have a piece of that innovation in you, pursue it. We need the innovation because the paradigms and the theories of 100 years ago that are still so prevalent in our society, they're holding us back. And being taught to see through those lenses are also holding us back because it's hard to see past what you've been told to see, just like the Rosenhan experiment. As soon as a clinician sees someone as schizophrenia, even completely normal behaviors start to fit the bill. This is a moment that we have to draw a line in the sand and put up our hands and say, No, we're not going to do this anymore. We're going to ask the right questions. We're going to equip the right people, and we're going to drop out of this idea that there's only one way to be an expert, because that's often not the case.

Many of people who have completely wildly shattered paradigms in our world, who have solved so many problems. In fact, maybe even been killed for solving those very problems. They didn't come through this academic funnel. True innovation often comes from one source. If you're listening and not watching, I put my hand up to the sky because it's going to come from divine inspiration. That is where we truly solve problems in a unique creative way. That is our God-given design as human beings. We have that ability. When we, unfortunately, push ourselves through a meat grinder of academia of the world, we often stop seeing in this very beautifully expanded way. I'm certainly not saying, Don't go get educated, because education is also incredibly important. But until we are able to correct the restrictions and gatekeeping and contamination that exists in some these more academic institutions and funnels, people have to be willing to go it alone, to go it on the side, to push against the status quo. Because we haven't really for 100 years, and look where it's gotten us. So I hope this episode highlights how dangerous it can be to just automatically believe what they tell you.

And instead, ask hard questions, trust your senses, Look for people who may be innovating on the outside of something. Even though you may have been taught, experts have to have the following acronyms behind their names, because I truly believe the next round of people who will save humanity from itself will be the real innovators that didn't come through those institutions. If you've been enjoying Decoded, please share it with somebody who needs it. I know some of these episodes range from inspiring to dark and then somewhere in between. But as that exactly how our world is? We have to be able to bring a little bit of levity and, of course, our connection to God into these dark times so that we can try to see clearly and try to discern what's really going on. Because the darkness by itself, without that levity or without that spiritual connection, it would just be all-consuming. I know for one, being in the practice that I am, I hear dark things all day long. And because I know that my work is mission-driven and purpose-filled, I'm able to navigate through those hard times and continue to pursue something that I know has the ability to change the world.

And there are so many of you out there that do have that ability and may just need to hear me tell you, Hey, you have that ability. Wake up and get to work. Because we are out there. There's many of us, and we're not necessarily going come through the same systems that maybe we've been taught to believe people have to come through. But each one of you may have something unique to offer up to the world. And I hope that you take action on it. I hope that you ask questions. I hope that you start to find more people like you who want to ask more questions because it can be really lonely to be in the world looking around at all the darkness and all the systems that are crumbling right before our eyes, all the sickness, all the mental illness, and not know what to do with it. I think part of the reason I feel so hopeful is because I've seen what break method can do. I've seen how this formula, when applied to all different types of issues, from suicidal ideation to overcoming PTSD to even simple things like procrastination. It works, and it works consistently because it's built on data.

It's not some made-up art form that can be interpreted one way or another. It's concrete. And I do think that right now for us to break through this place where we've been stuck, we need some things that are concrete. We need some things that are quantifiable and consistent. And we need to do whatever we can to motivate people with tough love and the right level of nurturing to face some of these self-deceptions. Because when we do, people heal, and they heal radically, they heal rapidly, and they heal sustainably. And I think the sustainable part of this work is the most important, because what I continually hear from clients is that you can't unsee what you see in a break. Because once we're able to figure out what distortion went into that lens of glass, you can't pretend anymore that what you're seeing isn't distorted. You see And for some people, it hits you like a ton of bricks. For some people, they laugh about it because it feels so absurd. And for others, it feels like freedom because they finally understand why they've done what they've done in their whole life. So it's my hope that every single person learns how to take off the glasses prescription and see objective reality, because when you do it, you immediately have more empathy and understanding, even for people that have tried to hurt you or are currently hurting you.

And when we find empathy for people, we're able to find forgiveness. And forgiveness is something that truly sets us all free. Think about how many people are still spiraling in their heads and ruminating over hurts done to them by mom or dad or sister. We're still locked up in cycles of envy or jealousy. When we're able to actually see the truth and make all of these corrections, there's so much forgiveness and grace that's available to the people around you. And then you can go out there and help other people do this work. You can go pay that forward. I do think that that really is going to be the future of mental health because really all of us have our own issues. Some of us are better at masking than others, but every single one of us has a pattern of self-deception that very much runs our behavior, our relationships, our career aspirations. I mean, in brain pattern mapping, there's even a cluster of questions where once we know the answers to two of them, we can predict verbatim what somebody is going to write in a certain section of the brain pattern mapping test.

That's how formulaic we are. And imagine what we would be capable in the world if every single one of us, even in the form of maybe an educational institution, were required to do this. Imagine how much more we would understand about ourselves and how we contribute both positively and negatively to the world. What relationships would change, what schools would look like in a different way? How many marriages would actually last instead of get divorced? How many kids would not have to grow up with oppositional defiant disorder, OCD, because of the way their parent did? The generational ripple is profound. So the future of mental health absolutely rests in data, and it's an inconvenient truth to the mental health establishment because it's essentially the opposite of what's been happening over the last 100 years. So I hope that this episode has empowered you to ask some questions and to think more deeply about how something like the existence of the Rosenhan experiment may have even affected you in your life in therapy or with a label of a learning disability or ADHD, how one label can very much alter the entire course of your life. What are we going to do about that?

I have some ideas. If you want some more ideas, you can certainly go back I can't listen to other episodes in Decoded. But if this episode spoke to you, please do share it with somebody who needs to hear this, who needs to maybe wake up and realize that the Rosenhan experiment really exposed a pretty significant crack, and the more you look and dig, the more you realize this establishment is on shaky ground and it is ripe for disruption. And that is precisely what we are dedicated to doing, both on this show and in my work with Break Method and Brain Pattern Mapping. And of course, in my book, Your Brain is a Filthy Liar. So next episode, we are meeting with Dr. Stephanie Peacock. We are going into muscle activation syndrome and how it can connect back to postpartum depression and other hormone-related issues. I've been really excited about this episode for a long time. I've followed Dr. Stephanie, and I love everything that she posts on social media, so I'm really excited to share that one with you. And please do give us a follow on Instagram, share this episode, and I will see you next week.

Your brain is wired for deception. But here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen?