Dr. Samantha Boardman on Turning Stress into Strength

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In honor of Mental Health Awareness month, we welcome Dr. Samatha Boardman. Dr. Boardman is a New York based positive psychiatrist who is committed to fixing what’s wrong and building what’s strong. She writes the popular newsletter called The Dose and is the author of Everyday Vitality, a book about leaning into our strengths to bring about positive change.

Historically, psychiatry has focused on the diagnosis of disease and the treatment of individuals with mental illness. Positive Psychiatry takes a more expansive approach, focusing on the promotion of wellbeing and the creation of health.

Dr. Boardman is passionate about cultivating vitality, boosting resilience, and transforming full days into more fulfilling days. Today Dr. Boardman sits down with Dr. McBride to discuss finding wellness within illness, strength within stress, and how to live with anxiety rather than being defined by it. Dr. Boardman is here to help!

Join Dr. McBride every Monday for a new episode of Beyond the Prescription.

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on her Substack at https://lucymcbride.substack.com/podcast. You can sign up for her free weekly newsletter at lucymcbride.substack.com/welcome.

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The full transcript of the show is here!

[00:00:00] Dr. McBride: Hello, and welcome to my office. I'm Dr. Lucy McBride, and this is Beyond the Prescription, the show where I talk with my guests like I do my patients, pulling the curtain back on what it means to be healthy, redefining health as more than the absence of disease. As a primary care doctor for over 20 years, I've realized that patients are much more than their cholesterol and their weight, that we are the integrated sum of complex parts.

[00:00:33] Our stories live in our bodies. I'm here to help people tell their story to find out whether they are okay, and for you to imagine and potentially get healthier from the inside out. You can subscribe to my weekly newsletter through my website at lucymcbride.com and to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's get into it and go beyond the prescription.

[00:01:01] Today's podcast guest is Dr. Samantha Boardman. Samantha is a positive psychiatrist, a clinical assistant professor at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, and the author of a book called Everyday Vitality. It's a book that combines her research as a clinical psychiatrist in New York to help readers find strength within their stress.

[00:01:24] I met Dr. Boardman through a mutual friend. I started reading her book and listening to her talk on Instagram, and it was clear that we had a common interest in helping people marry mental and physical health. Today on the podcast, we will talk about when is therapy not appropriate? We'll talk about medication, we'll talk about Zoom versus in-person therapy, and we'll talk about leaning into our strengths as opposed to focusing on the negatives. Welcome to the podcast, Samantha. I'm so happy to have you.

[00:01:53] Dr. Boardman: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I'm a huge fan.

[00:01:57] Dr. McBride: So today, Samantha, I'd love to talk to you about many things. One is your definition of health. What does it mean to be healthy? So let's just start there.

[00:02:07] Dr. Boardman: Great place to start. And so I think my definition of health has really changed over the past 20 years. Like you, I went to medical school and then I did a psychiatry residency. The definition of health for me then was the absence of illness. And what I thought of myself as doing my role was to make people less miserable as a psychiatrist.

[00:02:30] And I've gotta tell you, I got pretty good at misery along the way. But one day I was actually fired by a patient who said, when I come to see you, we just focus on what's wrong with me. We don’t really focus on what's going on, what's wrong with what's going on in my life?

[00:02:47] And she was right. I was so fixated on symptoms and dialing down the issues, dealing with conflicts in her life and that type of thing, and less focused on what makes life meaningful for her, what she enjoys doing and where she finds purpose. It sort of woke me up and I ended up going back to study applied positive psychology, which was sort of the opposite of everything I had learned in medical school, in psychiatry residency.

[00:03:14] I studied optimism. I studied resilience. I studied post-traumatic growth. All these data-driven experiences that were really absent in my education and so much that had been focused on pathogenesis, which is the study and understanding of illness in switching over more to salutogenesis, which is the creation of health.

[00:03:36] So this is a really long-winded way of saying, I think of health as so much more than the absence of illness, and I'm deeply interested in how we can help people create wellness within their illness and strength within their stress, and add vitality even into their very busy lives. And as you know, when we ask patients, what's most meaningful to you?

[00:03:57] What do you care most about with your mental health? Or your health in general? People say, I want to have a good day. I want to feel energetic. I want to feel strong. I want to be able to give back. I want to spend time with friends and family and those types of things, that's what salutogenesis is—creating experiences of health and joy and meaning and vitality and energy for them in their everyday lives.

[00:04:24] Dr. McBride: It's so important because just like you discovered along the path of your training and clinical work, I too realized that my job isn't just about helping people not die. It's about helping people live. And it's not enough to tell people at their annual physical, “Hey, your labs look fine. Get a little more exercise, eat a little healthier, and I'll see you next year.” Not dying is good. But what about living? What about having agency over our everyday lives the 364 days a year that you're not in the doctor's office? And what has always struck me since I was a pup of a medical student is that self-awareness is like ground zero for our health.

[00:05:14] When we are able to pull the curtain back on who we are as people to understand not just our genetics, but really our stories and how our stories inform how we feel—literally our body parts—and then how we organize our everyday behaviors and thoughts around the narrative that we tell ourselves, and that's really why I became in interested in mental health and why I find your work so compelling is because I think we're having a moment in our culture where mental health is more acceptable to talk about; where people are more empathetic about mental illness.

[00:05:55] I still think we don't have a great understanding of what mental health is. And to begin with that we all have it. And I wonder what you think about this concept of everyone having mental health and it's just on a continuum versus mental health versus mental illness. And then secondly, to what extent do you think just mere self-awareness is an important ingredient in having mental health?

[00:06:25] Dr. Boardman: Both [of those are] awesome questions and I think that kind of you have it or you don't is this binary, and really limits us about either you're mentally healthy or you're not. And I think that's sort of the way I was trained. Not to be critical of my training, but that was either: you need to be hospitalized or you don't, you're ready for discharge… and not kind of looking at all of those other factors that you look so closely at.

[00:06:51] They kind of give you and provide for you even this scaffolding around you to help you make better choices, to have more better actual days in your week. And this idea that how do you find wellness within illness? And it's something Dr. Ellen Sachs was the one who first I heard speak about this and she was a graduate student.

[00:07:13] I think she was at Yale where she had her first psychotic break and she was diagnosed while she was a student there as having schizophrenia and having a psychotic illness, and her parents were told at the time that they should remove all the stress from her life, that she should withdraw from school, that it was too much for her to bear and that, you know, that maybe she could get some very simple job somewhere.

[00:07:38] Maybe she could pump gas. She could do something that was not going to strain her or stress her in any way, and that most likely she should be hospitalized over again and again, and she might