Name: Balancing Technology When Addressing Mental Health
Uploaded: 2019-04-03
Duration: 20 min 19 s
Description: How technology can help diagnose mental disorders sooner, identify optimal treatments faster and ultimately help more people lead healthier lives.

Leanne, as you know I'm fascinated by your work, but for those of you who don't know, tell us what is precision mental health treatment. And how is technology deepening our understanding of mental health, and how we both treat it and prevent it? So first of all, it's a great pleasure to be here and share these new insights that we are developing through the research. And I believe it will transform the way that we understand mental health. So the idea of precision health applied to mental health is that Your own brain is really your best asset and that currently how we actually understand health and mental health. It's very, very fragmented. So, with the infants we have developed a way of quantifying how your brain actually functions. How you manage to regulate your own emotions, your thoughts. How you determine your decisions, and how that optimizes your everyday function. And thus we can understand the continuum of when that actually breaks down. So the precision comes largely from being able to measure something that has been inaccessible. And secondarily from understanding when we move from a healthy state of stress to one of uncontrollable and unpredictable and therefore the brain becomes disrupted and is a way to actually deploy these enzymes in to actions and those actions can be earlier detection Earlier tailoring of treatments when needed. And I think one really important truth that we've seen is, if you have a way to actually understand your own brain in action, and to measure it, it's very empowering, and it gives you a way to make [ UNKNOWN ] More immediate choices and move upstream as we've talked about. And it's also way to breakdown some of the stigma that we have around mental health because it makes it tangible. Catherine, I have it on good authority that many people in the audience who are far too close to their phone. [ LAUGH ] What Immediate steps, what we call Thrive Microsteps would you recommend to help them deal with that relationship? You and I feel that you are in many ways like the girlfriend who comes up and tells us, that guy? Forget it, he's no good for you. Except you're now telling all of us, that phone, forget it, too much of it is not good for you, so tell us. I felt more like a couple's therapist a lot of the timeand actually, cuz a lot of people would say, I'm okay but what about my boyfriend, girlfriend, partner, spouse? So [ LAUGH ] I think one of the most important- I gave a few suggestions this morning but I'd like to clarify that when I say break up with your phone, I don't mean throw away your phone or give it up completely. I mean, just as you would a human relationship, you actually want to find something that's healthy and that feels good right. So to clarify that. But that speaks to a bigger point which is that I think we tend to think about these two, all or nothing. We think it's either all good or all bad. You can even see this in Apple's new screen time feature, which lets you see the amount of time you spend on your phone. It acts like all screen time is the same. Which is really weird to me from a business perspective because it's Apple saying that its product is bad. So that's weird. Because if you think about it, time spent in an Instagram spiral is very different from time you spend on Google maps trying to get to this conference. So I say that because I think a lot of people tend to put up a little world and then they think no they're totally fine. To which I say like just cuz everybody else around you [ LAUGH ] Sounding fun all the time, does not mean it's normally okay. And second as you come in this room, almost playful attitude or curiosity about what do you love about your phone cuz they're truly amazing. What doesn't feel so great and you wanna keep who you love And minimize what you don't. And the answer to how to do that for every single person is gonna be different which is fine. So I recommend asking yourself that question, what do you love, what do you not love so much? What do you kinda love but then feel gross afterwards like junk food? And then start by experimenting the steps to minimize the [ UNKNOWN ] that are not so good Recognizing that nothing has permanent when comes to your phone. Facebook not gonna lose your data if you delete the app, right? You can do that and then reinstall it ten minutes later if you want to, it's totally fine you're just trying to find something that works for you. So they having this non- judgemental attitude is actually without recommend. Starting with, you have to have that framework in mind to have a positive goals image in earlier before you start to implement more granular changes like, rearranging the apps on your home screen so that you don't you have temptations, your phone should be a tool not a temptation Things like that or getting a standalone alarm clock, or getting a watch, things like that are useful when they put in a broader context when you know what you're positive goal is. Cuz otherwise, you'll rely on will power, and will power will get you nowhere when it comes to having change. Great, I'm very glad here for reminding us that will power Doesn't go very far at all. Now, as a resident, we learn it along this panel. You actually have lived your entire life absolutely surrounded and sometimes drowning in this world of social media. You have done something about it. You have launched 20 and you can tell us where the name came from. And to actually deal with the unintended consequences into cars respond. There is an awful lot of good stuff. We are only addressing here the unintended consequences. Well, first of all, I'm very excited to be here. Thank you so much. And for those of you who don't know, Ariana is actually on the board of Twenty. We're super privileged to have her. She's a wonderful entrepreneur and shares the same mission and vision of what we're trying to do to help people balance their relationship with technology. I think Catherine, you said something really important, which is It's not about trying to figure out how you throw out the baby with the bath water, right? How do you really focus on those positive outcomes, and how do you use technology to drive those positive outcomes? So 20, to answer your question, the name comes from kinda the colloquialism which is what's your 20, where are you? And the way the app works is really about showing you where your friends are and who's physically available to actually meet up with you in real life. So the focus of our product is really, how do we optimize for face- to- face human interaction, versus just digital connection? And I think some of the stats that have been important to us when we started the company was You look at teens today versus 20 years ago spend roughly half as much time with their friends in real life as they did outside of school. You also see, over the last few years, people spending obviously an inordinate amount of time being digitally coordinated and obviously some of the correlation between people spending so much time online. And that reduction in time in real life. And also, what we see is that when people are together and have real human connection and all the mental health advantages that come from that are completely clear and unequivocal. Leon, I spend literally some of my time every day talking to people about your work. And because we also like it to have developed this partnership with you, I thrive to take your work and create Programs based on your work to take into companies to address the problem of mental health among their employees even before mental health symptoms have emerged, which actually makes it much easier because if you address it as a stress and burn out problem, everybody is going to. Acknowledge that they are stressed and burned out. If you say come Sado can help you with your depression and anxiety, a lot of people are not going to come forward. And I would love now to ask you to explain what are the foundational principles of your work, on which our programs are based? And And The Hilton Hotel actually are one of our first partners. They're going to be bringing your work the way thrive have done into workshops into to all of their employees. So immediately we're going to start seeing the impact of all the academic degrees that you have done. But please. Walk us through, instead of me walking everybody through it as I do. I would love to share a couple of examples which I think may make it more tangible. As background to that though, the examples I'm giving you are based on that foundations that you're describing which means that Over the past several decades, what we've done is used functional imaging, so an MRI that takes snapshots of your brain in action. So for example, over five minutes, it'll take multiple snapshots, which continue actually what you Brain is doing. And we built up thousands and thousands of those datasets and then also over the last ten years, I've run the first international trial to take that information and ask how well does it do, in explaining the variation that we have in predicting treatment outcomes. That those data sets have now been accelerated in terms of our interpretation in the same way that the Human Genome Project did. And there is a project called the Human Connectome Project that we're part of, which is mapping in the extraordinary detail [ BLANK_AUDIO ] The human brain, and that gives us a way to actually have an entry point into understanding mental wellness. How are we functioning? And then right through to if we do experience burnout and that that becomes untreated and eventually turns into a disease of depression that is like a stage four cancer. So the example to give you is one of the people who was taking part in the research is an example of how these experiences don't discriminate. He was incredibly productive person, a CEO He'd been a CEO for nine years, he was at the point in scaling up his company, and he had decided that he could no longer cope. So he had a point one day of saying, I can't actually get into the office, and He ended up coming totally coincidentally into our study because he happened to hear the time on the radio an advertisement for our study and he said I haven't heard these concepts of brain health before. So he come to see us and he just described his story of over nine years. What you would interpret as a gradual development of [ UNKNOWN ] where at first it was stressed that was challenging and exciting and built his resilience as he built the company and he was excited to go in each day. And then as they were accumulated stresses that felt uncontrollable He more and more had to find ways to cope differently. And he described basically going home and collapsing every night in order to force himself to get back to work the next day. And ultimately he came to the decision he had to quit. In between he experienced The current situation that we all have probably had some experience of. Which was who do I see about this problem? I try my family doctor, I try psychology, psychiatrist and there was just a try and error process. And what we know is that only about 30 % of people will Do well on the first intervention. When he saw us, we scanned his brain and he had a way that the normal emotional function of your brain occurs, he had a basically a short circuit, that we call negativity bias. All of us are prone to noticing negative things, we need to. We need to in order to manage risk. His negative emotion [ UNKNOWN ] becomes so overactive it was stuck. And that meant that every single action that he was making, and every decision, was effortful and literally exhausting his brain. And as a consequence of having that That map of his experience, we could actually guide him to a whole different kind of intervention. So he now several years later is doing really well. He said it felt like a miracle, he had his life back from understanding, and from the right intervention. And since that time we've identified now at least eight different ways that you have types of disruption. And one I know you describe beautifully is a rumination brain as well. Well yes, because what is so interesting is once you identify these different pathways that lead to depression and anxiety, you can intervene at earlier and earlier stages So if you identify negative bias [ UNKNOWN ] as the pathway that even check will lead to depression or anxiety, you can [ UNKNOWN ] it's an incredibly exciting discovery. Because after all, the whole essence of what we are trying to do over the last two days here is to intervene at an earlier and earliest stage And therefore prevent that growth of all these diseases. And now Catherine, you have addressed that. When it comes to children, which is of course one of the earliest life stages we need to intervene. And you have a great study that you describe about the impact of the steel face. We focus a lot on what is the impact of addiction on the children, their own addictions to their phones but you've identified how the impact of their parents addictions to their phones is affecting them. Yes, so one of the inspiration for writing my book was my own experience when I had a baby. I've had I've done mindfulness training. I'd like to think of myself as pretty self aware. But I had these moments of realizing that she was looking at me the middle of night and I was looking down at my phone. And it really made me upset because I realized I don't want that to be her impression. Shouldn't be human relationship and I also don't want it to be how I'm experiencing motherhood. Because what's the point of like living your life if you're not living your life you're just looking at- in my case, antique doorknobs on eBay and it's a true story. [ LAUGH ] I have plenty of doorknobs on my nobs- on my doors. Anyway. But I'm also a science journalist by training and something was going on at the back of my mind where it made me think of something that I had heard of before. And it occurred to me, it was something called the still- face experiment, which is an experiment I recommend Googling if you want to get teary any point today. It'll be the person that comes out a short clip. And it was an experiment where the researchers had Parents interact normally with the baby for one minute and then they said, All right, we want you to be completely still faced and not have any emotional response at all. For just one minute and watching it is so painful because this baby goes through all of these stages of what's going on and the guy narrates it as it goes or what's going on and understand start screaming trying to get out of its restraint like in its little seat So it's making these animalistic sounds like screeching sounds. And then it snaps back and the mother is like, it's okay, it's okay. And it's very moving. And what I realize is that, when it comes to our phones with our babies, I mean their eyes are developed so that they can focus just as far as their parents face. So that they can establish human connection and learn how to relate with humans. So, what does it mean that we are all essentially still facing our children? And that is what I was doing to my own daughter. So, to me, that was a really big wake up call that made me realize how important this is from a very early age to be aware of how we're interacting with our phones around our babies. And basically in a sense everything you are doing now with 20 is acknowledging this key importance of human connection. So tell us some of the implementations of 20, like what you are doing on college campuses. How is it spreading? Sure. Yeah. And I would say the main focus and metric that we optimize for is how many real life experiences we drive as a result of the platform. And in the last month on a handful of college campuses, we seen 25, 000 resulted as a byproduct of people using the platform and most of our testing the data is really been around college campuses. In college students and we see that what's really unique about 20 is you can actually share anything you've done in the past, right? You only can share what you're doing now, and what you're planning do in the future, which one is obviously meets the functional need of trying to meet up with friends in real life. And secondly, it reduces some of those social comparison issues that come along with traditional social media where I see some amazing highlight or something you did. Last night I'm focused on that and how that reflects and relates to me when I'm currently doing. How do actually we engage, how do we actually resolve more real life human connections as a result of people using the product. And you know what's interesting is the more people live in Silicon Valley Know about the unintended consequences of these inventions. The more they protect the children and themselves from their use. So exactly what you're saying about the real human interactions So often if you go to a party in the valley there will be a sign in the front that says no social media allowed. And these are the people who brought us that world. But they know that, hey, if this is going to interfere with real human connections, don't do it. And in a sense what you are doing is kind of encouraging that to happen and to also make us aware of what we're losing when it's not a big part of our lives. And the same with children, again, the shift towards having more and more Interactions with chickens and Legos rather than iPads and iPhones. [ LAUGH ] So, if we bring all that together, let's just end with a few seconds from each one of you as we are under a minute. And are you optimistic? Absolutely! Yes. And for me, it is just the sheer acceleration of our insights, so, from understanding the brain, the fact that we now have the capacity to deal with the volume of data that we derive from those measures and that the national dialogue has changed. Like it's now possible to talk about these problems and tackle them. So yes. Catherine, I'm optimistic and pessimistic. The more I learned the more I get freaked out is the pessimistic part. It's a big deal, guys is not trivial. It's changing our brains says big deal. But I'm optimistic that this is becoming something we're talking about, and that there's more of an emphasis on just what you're doing. I mean, facilitating real life conversations and interactions. Yeah, I'm very optimistic. I think everyone at 20, at our company, we're really highly passionate about using technology to drive positive outcomes. And I think the technology exists, and the awareness exists that this is a problem, and the demand exists that people do wanna meet up with in real life And now I'm optimistic because you all exist and because you're doing what you're doing. Thank you so much. Thank you. [ APPLAUSE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Balancing Technology When Addressing Mental Health

Health

How technology can help diagnose mental disorders sooner, identify optimal treatments faster and ultimately help more people lead healthier lives.