AI's Impact on Mental Health: A Deep Dive | Jessa White DSH #764

So it's very fair to say that in the future, we might not be able to discern or even care to discern about whether an AI robot that we're talking to is real or not.

Wow.

We won't even care.

And so we are going to have children born today will have an option to have an AI best friend that will remember everything about them for their entire life.

All right, guys, we got Jessa White here today, trauma therapist.

We're going to dive into what causes trauma and how to solve it, right?

Yeah, something like that.

It's a deep topic.

And I think we were just talking earlier.

Almost everyone we know has probably gone through something traumatic in their lives.

Yeah, that's the thing is trauma can mean something different for everyone.

So your trauma could be something that happened in childhood.

Your trauma could be something that happened last week.

Yeah.

You can be experiencing trauma just being alive in the world today.

Right.

There's a lot of trauma everywhere.

Depends what you focus on.

But the childhood trauma stuff is nuts because I just found out I had it without even realizing I had had it because I just thought it was normal.

And then one day you wake up and you go, this maladaptive behavior that I have isn't normal.

And someone says, no, that's a trauma response.

Right.

I'm sure you get a lot of patients with childhood trauma, right?

I do.

Yeah, that's my specialty.

So usually early onset childhood trauma, people come in with it and

they're usually around your age or older and they start asking questions and they start remembering things.

And we're working on repressed memories often.

You know, the hippocampus, it shuts down a lot during trauma.

So whether it's a pre-verbal trauma or one that happened in early adolescence, you forget it until it emerges in some, like I said, maladaptive behavior in your 40s.

All of a sudden, you're shaking when a car backfires and you have no idea.

And then in therapy, we uncover that you were in a country with civil unrest.

And the sounds of bombs were your lullaby at night, but you didn't even remember that.

And they'll go back and say,

mom, what was going on when I was five and then mom explains and all the pieces come together that's crazy

well they say a large part of your brain is formed ages zero through six right of course attachment your your your psychological development your emotional development how you love

your needs all of those that's crazy that you're able to dive back into those memories yeah and you have to be careful as a therapist too there's a growing body of research of people who can therapists who can even plant memories if they're not careful whoa yeah that's scary that's scary That's like that movie.

Which movie?

I don't know what the name of it, but the guy was planting memories in his patients and then having sex with them.

It was a weird movie.

Oh my God.

You didn't see this?

No, I would never.

No, no.

Oh, wow.

No, I don't want to see something like that.

That'll scar me.

I can't.

But it's the true thing.

It can't happen.

You know, somebody who's not trained in the way they need to be can end up.

Do you see a lot of veterans right now with PTSD?

I don't know.

PTSD, it's something that because when it was first being studied, you know, military funding, that's why PTSD is so affiliated with veterans.

But nowadays, most of the people that I'm seeing with PTSD have early childhood trauma.

It's, you know, a parent that neglected them.

It's bombs in the country they grew up in.

It's different than just going to war now.

You can get PTSD from a really bad relationship.

Geez.

And what do you see?

Does a trauma lead to depression a lot of the times?

Trauma can lead to depression, but it's very challenging because depression can be a biological thing.

Depression can be a state.

It can be a trait.

So it's challenging to answer whether or not if you have trauma, that's going to lead to depression.

There's definitely a correlation, but it would be

hard to say a causation.

And what do you say to people who think depression is a weakness?

So imagine that you're on a hike, okay?

And you are struggling.

You are huffing, you are puffing, and somebody walks next to you, and they have a rucksack on, and it's full of bricks.

And you look over and you're like,

how the hell are they doing this?

Like, I'm struggling.

How are they doing this right now?

Now, let's say that you pass them again and you get to the top of the mountain.

And then they reach you up at the top of the mountain.

And they're 30 minutes after you.

Are you going to say, wow, that person is weak?

Or are you going to say

it makes sense that it took them a little bit longer or it was a little harder given the weight that they're carrying?

Right.

You're going to say that, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The mental side of things, I mean, definitely slept on, but it's almost as strong as physical for some people.

Absolutely.

I would argue people with depression are stronger.

People with anxiety are more resilient.

They're tougher.

Their character is something to be applauded.

I mean, do you know how hard it would be to wake up and navigate life every single day with anxiety?

It would be more hard to do that than it would be to be,

let's just say, completely comfortable and at ease within your body.

Yeah, I had it for months at one point.

Daily anxiety and depression.

It's so hard.

It was tough.

I thought the world was ending back then, to be honest.

You get so in your head to start overthinking.

It's crazy.

Everything.

And the thing with overthinking is that overthinking leads to overthinking.

It's called worry stacking, right?

So you're worried about one thing and then you're worried that you're worrying and then you're worried that you're worrying too much and you're worried you're not in the mind.

And it just keeps going and going until you feel like you're carrying a rucksack full of bricks of worry.

And that's the heaviness of anxiety and depression.

Would you say majority of your clients are female?

That's a great question.

Not anymore, luckily.

I am in private practice, so I do kind of try and keep an equilibrium with race and age and gender.

And so I'm a little bit more specific.

But yes, the research does show that women tend to seek out counseling more often than men.

But that doesn't mean that men aren't dealing with mental health issues.

No, I tell this to people sometimes and they look at me like, whoa, my male clients actually cry in therapy more than my women clients do.

No way.

I swear.

Like,

I swear.

Wow.

Yeah.

I might have if I had a female therapist when I went, but I'd an old dude.

So something about him just.

Yeah, I didn't cave.

I didn't cave.

But I think it's okay to cry.

I used to be really against it, actually, but now I tear up a a little bit, you know.

Were you against it because someone told you to be against it?

Society, or society, yeah, just programming to be tough as men.

I think most men are just like, that's a form of weakness.

So just that programming, you know.

Yeah.

Do you think that's changing though?

A little bit, but there's still a lot of influence on society, like certain friend groups, if they see you crying, like, you know what I mean?

Yeah, it makes me think.

I had a friend who is, he's a male and he has a friend who's a male who's, they're pregnant, they're, you know, in a relationship and they're pregnant.

And they're like six months months along so the baby's due in three months and I asked my friend I said what's what's the gender that they're having and he said I don't know I said well aren't they due in like three months these guys talk almost every single day and they had never said

this is the gender my baby is or this like men don't talk about that stuff I was like what do you guys talk about so it really worried me in that moment if you're not even sharing with your closest friends the gender of your baby, how could you be sharing what you're going through emotionally?

Yeah.

You know?

I've made an attempt to share more over the recent years.

I think it's important.

Thank you.

I kept a lot bottled in for years.

On behalf of all straight women, no, not straight, on behalf of all women looking for men in this world.

Thank you for breaking that barrier.

Yeah.

Well, there's that stigma where like you show emotions, it's weak as a guy.

You know, what do most girls think about that, you think?

For me, this is maybe given my profession,

I think the opposite is weakness.

I find when a man says something to me like, well, I'm just mad at you for and gets that, I'm like, oh, we're doing this right now?

Really?

Because you're not mad.

You're actually feeling insecure.

And that is attractive to me if you can say, actually,

I'm feeling insecure that you didn't text me when you went out with your girlfriends.

Instead of, I'm mad that you went out with your girlfriends and didn't text me.

I'm like, you're not mad.

You're nervous.

Right.

That's a good point.

So I'd much rather have an emotionally aware man name what he's feeling.

I think that's hot.

Okay.

Okay.

Speaking of lonely people, you have an interesting take on AI.

I do.

And how they're going to be companion pals with people.

I do, yeah.

Something that I find really interesting within AI and neuroscience is this body of research coming out about our prefrontal cortex.

And our prefrontal cortex is responsible for a ton of things, you know, critical thinking, some of our fine motor skills.

But there's also an area in there that helps us with reality testing.

So what's real and what's not real, that's right in front of us.

And as technological advances happen, this area of our brain is adjusting.

So it's very fair to say that in the future, we might not be able to discern or even care to discern about whether an AI robot that we're talking to is real or not.

Wow.

We won't even care.

Interesting.

And so we are going to have children born today will have an option to have an AI best friend that will remember everything about them for their entire life.

Is that good or bad?

I mean, it depends.

I have some opinions it's good.

I'm obviously

safe to say that there's some negatives.

Yeah.

Anything in life is going to have negatives and positives, but there's people with AI girlfriends already.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Virtual avatars.

I just did a research study with a company that all your listeners know, but I can't say because I signed an NDA.

I was teaching the AI to be a compassionate and empathetic listener.

Oh, wow.

I was teaching the AI how to respond and ask questions using supportive reflection and cognitive reframing.

And I was teaching the AI to speak to people like a therapist does a person in a session.

Right.

And I think that can be great for people to have someone or something.

Again, with reality testing, they might not even know it's something that they can talk to at any time that's providing providing that insight for them and that compassionate and empathetic ear.

That's interesting.

But also on the flip side, if you train this AI to do that, are you worried about your job?

I was like, look, I either jump on or I get kicked out.

I might as well see what's going on.

I don't think so, only because

human empathy is going to become even more important.

Yeah, that's tough to teach a robot.

It is.

I think it's going to be great for empathetic listening, supportive reflection, asking questions that can help us to think about things deeper.

But

you can't take away this.

I mean, I'm looking at you right now and it's

nice.

That's why I film my shows in person, honestly, because it just beats Zoom, in my opinion.

There's just, you can't describe it, but it just feels better, right?

Yeah, of course.

In person, I can feel your energy.

You'll never be able to feel an AI's energy.

And if AI is listening, I didn't say that.

You don't want to get on their bad side.

Terminator, those robots are coming for you.

It'll be interesting to see if it gets to the the point where you can't tell if it's human, though, for real.

You think that's within our lifetime?

Yeah.

I don't, I don't only, or I not only think that it's within our lifetime, I think that we're not going to care whether it's real or not anymore.

Wow.

Because its responses are going to be so much better than the real people right in front of us that it will be preferred.

I could see that because people are so innately negative.

Like, I'd say more than 50% of people are kind of negative.

How many times have you gone to your best friend feeling alone or afraid?

And they they start talking about their stuff?

100%.

Yeah.

Narcissism.

Yeah.

That's that's everywhere.

Especially in LA.

I'm sure.

AI is not going to do that though.

Yeah.

AI is going to be that companion, that friend, that support, that opportunity to talk about yourself with something.

And given if our brain changes someone.

Yeah, that is interesting.

They can already clone animals.

So being able to clone humans and then add this in there is definitely within reach.

I just used a software the other day.

It was a a still photo of me and I typed in a prompt and it created a video of me talking and saying things in my voice and my tone, everything.

I mean, it even did my hand gestures.

My hands weren't in it.

Holy crap.

I got to test that.

It was insane.

And so once we start putting faces to our AI and they're, you know, following us,

we won't, we won't care anymore.

Yeah.

Right.

I read this great book by, it's a trilogy by Neil Schusterman.

And in that, one of the main protagonists, Grayson Tolliver, he has an AI that he ends up loving like a parent because his parents weren't emotionally available for him.

Wow.

Deep.

On the day of his graduation, the AI said, Grayson, it's your graduation.

I'm so proud of you.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think I had some trauma from my parents not being emotionally there for me.

You know what I mean?

And that's where I kind of want to lean into there is a positive side to this AI.

Yeah.

Just because like all my friends' parents were at their sporting games, I was there alone.

I think that hit me deep, you know, without me even realizing it now the question being do they care right and i always felt like i had to prove myself and just never got

almost their like acknowledgement on like what i did does that make sense of course yeah yeah what i did what i'm doing where i'm going do they care that's the question and i feel like that's part of the reason why i work so hard now actually Because you want to prove to them?

Yeah, that definitely was it for years

trying to prove them wrong.

Do you feel like you have?

Yeah, I mean, now they support it, but

yeah, when the money and the views and stuff.

But no, it definitely hit me deep.

So I think a lot of guys are dealing with that too.

They are.

And even as I listen to that and I picture what it was like for you, the little boy that goes to a sports game and his parents aren't there,

I'm not saying that AI can't provide or will be able to show up at your game.

That little boy now, who had no one to turn to because society said, don't talk about your feelings with other other men, might turn to their AI on their phone and say, Hey, whatever they've named it, I'm feeling really sad right now because my parents didn't show up.

And the AI, if taught properly, will respond and say, It's fair that you feel sad.

It's going to make sense if you feel your shoulders sinking and your stomach twisted.

And if you're wondering if your parents care about you, that's the normal thing to think right now.

Right.

And now, nine-year-old you is

normalized the emotion, was able to say it out loud and express it.

That seems like a positive to me.

Definitely.

And it's available 24-7.

Yeah, I'm a fan because the biggest thing is loneliness.

You just get in your own head.

So if you could just have someone a message, and if you can't even tell it's AI at a certain point, then why not try it?

Yeah, Vivek Murthy, our U.S.

Surgeon General, he came out with a statement in 2023, I believe.

And he said, loneliness is as dangerous, as harmful, as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Holy crap.

That's crazy.

And I was very lonely growing up, bouncing friend groups, you know, feeling like I didn't belong anywhere.

Having no consistent, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Being an only child also.

What if AI was your consistent?

That'd be fire, because yeah, the kid, the time I grew up in, everyone had a sibling or something, like a best friend or a friend group.

So if I had my boy, Patricio, or whatever the AI is.

Patricio?

I named mine Gabe.

Gabe's a good one, too.

Yeah.

So with your patients, is there an age range that you're seeing is hot?

Like, are teenagers dealing with a lot from what you've seen?

Yeah, so I don't personally work with adolescents right now in practice.

I do know that, you know, if you look at the numbers, in the 1990s, we were seeing 5% of adolescents reporting depression.

Current numbers are standing at about 25%.

Holy crap, one in four.

And that's just self-reported.

And that's self-reported.

And those numbers have gone up for, you know, so many variables, it's hard to really say just one.

But obviously awareness is going to be a big one.

Destigmatizing mental health is another reason why it's on the rise.

But I also think that teenagers are alive during a very interesting time.

If you look at the environment, by 2040, there's estimates that we're going to run out of water.

Whoa.

That's scary.

It doesn't matter if you're an environmentalist or not.

It doesn't matter if you heard it on a documentary one time and then you walked away from it.

If you're 12 right now, you're going to be in your 30s when we're running out of water.

That existential dread, that existential angst is there.

And I believe that's also attributing to these kids coming out with really high levels of cortisol.

Jeez.

High blood pressure.

They're not coming out of the womb with that.

Not coming out of the womb.

Coming out currently with that.

Oh, got it.

Got it.

Yeah, they're feeling these.

No, still at that age, that's concerning for sure.

I knew that cortisol at 13, honey.

And they're growing up with social media with cyberbullying.

If they look a certain way, they get bullied.

Yeah, that's tough.

Back when I was in school, I just got bullied in person, which is tough too, but I feel like cyberbullying is pretty damaging.

Of course it is.

And also the amount that we place on numbers, you know, like even just looking at your podcast when you guys reached out to me, it was an instant yes.

Why?

Why?

Because you have a lot of followers?

Why did you reach out to me?

Because I have followers.

So what have we done?

Have we deduced people to a metric, to a number?

And now we're putting kids, 13-year-olds out there and saying, you are what the numbers say you are.

Their prefrontal cortex isn't developed enough for them to understand that I'm more than this algorithm tells me I am.

Right.

That has to be attributing.

And then add the environment is withering away and add in, you know, just all the stress that these kids are going through.

That's tough.

Yeah, we're running out of gas too.

Running out of a lot of things.

Even our air we breathe and tap water is bad.

Plastics in our fish.

Microplastics.

There's microplastics in our rain.

Like when I was a kid, I would put my hands out and I would spin around in the rain.

And now I'm like, oh, that's not good for me.

I would drink that rain.

I'd be like, I'm like catching snowflakes.

Now I'm like catching, you know, Dasani plastic water bottle.

Bro, for real.

There's also a myth, you can't be a therapist if you have your own trauma.

As a mental health therapist online today, a lot of people reach out to me and say, I want to become a therapist, but I have trauma.

And so it's always added with this but as if it can't happen.

You can be a therapist with trauma.

You have to be working on it.

Yeah.

You have to be in therapy working on it.

You have to.

If you have dad trauma and I have dad trauma and mine's unresolved and I'm your therapist and you bring up dad in session.

Whether I'm aware of it or not, my sympathetic nervous system just rose.

I had a cortisol stress response because I am now in my space of trauma.

And part of the work of a therapist, large part of it, is that you are borrowing my regulatory system.

So you're talking about your dad and while I'm calm, you're able to be calm.

But if I haven't worked through my trauma, I'm not going to be calm.

So if you want to be a therapist and you have trauma, you can.

You just have to be actively working on it.

Yeah.

So that your body knows when they bring up dad, it goes, don't worry, honey, you have a space that you talk about this in.

You don't got to feel it right now.

Yeah, that's good to know because I'm sure there's potential therapists that feel shame for having their own traumas, right?

No shame.

Sometimes it's your golden nugget.

Sometimes it's the thing that makes you the best therapist in the whole world.

I had a client once say to me, This is going on, this is going on, and the way she made me feel was this.

And I myself had felt that way in my life before.

And so I turned to her and I said,

It must be so hard to have your mom, who was supposed to be your nurturer, need you to nurture her.

Hmm.

Steve.

And this client broke down.

Oh, she imagine.

How did you know?

And I said, I just could see it.

And the truth is, I felt it.

Wow.

First time you met her, you felt it?

I felt it in myself.

Whoa.

That's my trauma.

Oh, so you had unresolved trauma.

But I knew it, and I felt it in the room at that moment.

And I could tell by her story that she's felt the way I felt.

I didn't need to disclose.

Me too.

My mommy, da-da-da-da.

I didn't need to do that.

I just said, I bet it was hard to have to nurture someone who was supposed to nurture you.

Wow.

That's deep.

And with years passing by and people carrying this trauma, is that something they can release ever, like decades of trauma?

Of course.

Yeah, I've got a client in,

let's just say, upwards of 65.

And this client and I are releasing some things.

Wow.

Yeah.

Through some somatic interventions and traditional talk therapy and some journaling and meditation exercises.

She's releasing and it's really beautiful.

What's a somatic intervention?

Yeah, I do a lot of different kinds of interventions with somatics, but one of my favorite ones is maybe when you're releasing anger, actively releasing it in the room.

So leaning into whatever the emotion you're feeling is.

So you might see if something that's happened in your life makes you mad.

I'll say, all right, let's talk about it.

And I'll start pounding on my own legs.

And then they'll start pounding on their legs.

And then we just keep pounding and clapping and smacking things and allowing that movement of anger to move through the body at the same time as telling the story rather than staying stoic and still.

Sounds cool.

So you're just transferring the energy out of their body almost.

Correct.

Yeah.

Which a lot of somatic therapists believe that it stores in our body as kind of these frozen orbs.

And so if you can shift it and move it out.

I could see that.

That's what acupuncture is, too.

And rape.

Have you ever tried that?

I I have, uh, it didn't work for me.

Oh, damn.

You got some deep trauma then.

Didn't it work for me?

Reiki, I've heard of, too.

I got a Reiki guy coming on next week.

Oh, nice.

Okay.

Have you ever done it before?

No, but the videos are crazy.

He'll have someone laying down.

He'll use his hands and the guy will literally convulse

just from the energy release.

See, I'm such a skeptic.

I shouldn't be.

And so.

No, I'm skeptical too, though.

Now I have to listen and figure out.

I'll send you his videos.

It's nuts.

And he could do it over Zoom, too.

I have so many questions.

Yeah, it's weird.

I'm going to try it and like see if it happens.

I don't know.

I've tried some interesting therapies.

It makes sense.

If it's storing in your body and someone's giving you the safe space to let things out, even if it was a cathartic experience that maybe you forced, right?

They say that with hypnosis, that often people feel this inclination to do it.

And even subconscious levels feel forced to do it.

So they do, but you're still doing it.

So there might still be an activation and a release of some of that trauma.

Yeah.

I might buy into it.

Yeah, we'll see what happens.

So there's this viral trend of people asking on first dates for attachment styles and love languages.

What do you think about that?

They're not just asking on first dates.

They're asking on dating apps now.

That's crazy.

It's like a full psychological interview before your first date.

And I just want to make this very clear.

I think that it's very hard to find a lifetime partner, and I completely understand why people feel they want to investigate people's attachment styles or people's love language.

But if we really understand the origin of attachment, we would recognize that John Bowlby and Mary Amesworth work on attachment theory.

That's a really deep question that you're asking somebody.

You're asking them before you've even gone to coffee what their unmet needs were as a child.

Wow.

I think that's a little too much.

Might be skipping some steps.

Yeah, when you look at it that way, for sure.

You're asking somebody to offload their trauma.

You're also making an assumption that if they say anxious attachment or avoid an attachment, you're assuming what those things mean and how they're going to interact with your attachment before you've even figured out what their hobbies are.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're trying to match their traumas, right?

I think that we can wait on asking people their attachment style until like the bill's been paid or something.

Just postpone going that deep, that quick.

People are skipping steps trying to look for the one.

And some of those steps are just sitting and feeling someone's energy and hearing their laugh and watching the way they fidget in their seat and feeling comfortable with that before you ask somebody the uncomfortable question of how did your parents love or not love you?

Right.

Yeah, it is deep.

I waited three years.

That might be too late, but

not.

I mean, you pretty much know if you're dating.

Like when we took the test, we pretty much weren't, like, we weren't surprised by the answers.

Exactly.

Yeah, but it's good to know the love language stuff.

The love language is a little bit different, but often what I find is if someone's love language is, let's say, gift

it's because they were in a deficit for that their needs their physical needs in their life you know maybe they didn't have a safe house or a safe bed or enough food and so that manifests as that so once you understand why people like physical touch or why people don't like physical touch that can be a trauma response right so people hear oh physical touch is their fifth love language but it's my first we're never gonna match and i'm like well it's their fifth sweetie because they were assaulted as a child and you just asked them that before you went to Starbucks.

Calm down.

Yeah.

No, mine literally don't match my fiancé's, but we know how to love each other.

You're engaged to each other.

Yeah.

Oh, congratulations.

Thanks.

But yeah, we know how to love each other in the way that they want to be loved.

Yeah.

And you can also say to somebody with the right communication, hey, I know your love language, your first is physical touch, but mine isn't.

But our middles are the same or seconds are.

Or what about we physical touch in this way?

Cause this is how I feel safe.

Right.

But if you end up turning down somebody immediately because you found out that you guys are not aligned, you're missing out on a great partner with good communication and other matches.

Absolutely.

Jessa, it's been really fun learning from you.

Anything you're working on now or want to close off with?

I'm working on becoming a better therapist every day and a better person.

Love it.

We'll link your socials below.

Thanks.

Yeah.

Thanks for watching, guys.

If you need therapy, hit up, Jessa.

Don't, I'm full.

All right.

See you guys later.