How Psychotherapy Can Become Mainstream Stigma Podcast - Mental Health

I had the most educational, and enlightening conversation with Dr. Cameron Sepah and I’m lucky that I captured it digitally and can share it with everyone! 
We talked about a range of topics from his education at Harvard and UCLA, to his time growing a digital health tech startup from 6 to 300 employees and now his efforts running his own private practice while advising multiple venture capital funds on their investment strategies in and around digital health investing.
Dr. Sepah is a venture capitalist, an investor, an executive psychologist, an assistant clinical professor at UCSF Medical School, he’s a founder, a CEO and someone whose public commentary on mental health, and human performance to be very educational and insightful.
In his private practice, he helps CEOs, and VCs optimize for health and performance using evidence-based approaches.  We had an incredible conversation about evidence-based treatment, stigma, and psychotherapy will have to evolve in order to become mainstream (just like jogging or physical fitness).  The answer is in and around the idea of how we select our sexual partners and goes back to Natural Selection.
You can connect with Dr. Cameron Sepah directly via his Twitter and LinkedIn, and keep up to date on his work via his newsletter which I highly recommend.
HERE ARE SOME OF THE THINGS WE DISCUSSED:
Dr. Cameron Sepah talks with us about growing up in San Diego, then attending Harvard for his undergraduate degree and UCLA for his Ph.D in Clinical Psychology (Psychoneuroimmunology).  We talked about his love of people and passion for understanding them from a very early age and how that drove him toward his educational focus and profession of choice because he wanted to apply his learnings to helping people.


While in college at Harvard, he worked in a cognitive neuroscience lab doing research with Stephen Kosslyn.  Their research included looking at how Buddhist monks can control their emotions, one of them to the point where he could avoid reaction to a gunshot next to his ear.  We talked about this study of learned emotional responses in our conversation in this episode.
While in graduate school at UCLA he focused on several areas including anxiety disorders, and behavioral medicine/health psychology.  He did a lot of work around using behavioral interventions to manage chronic illnesses including obesity and diabetes.  We talked a lot about some worrisome and fascinating statistics and facts around these diseases including:

a.  Only 12% of people have zero metabolic issues (blood sugar issues, diabetes, obesity, etc.).

b.  This is the first time in history that most adults have abnormal blood sugar levels.

c.  We live in a profoundly sick society.


Diseases of lifestyle kill more people now than diseases of infection do. We as humans are dying mostly from diseases of excess.  We talk about why, and how this is relevant to the mental health struggles of many people who Dr. Sepah has treated over the years.


Individual or group therapy isn’t set up to solve the breadth of the mental health problem set in society.  It’s not that it isn’t effective, but most people can’t afford it, don’t have the time, or don’t have the energy or resources to show up in person and do what they need to do.  So why should providers expect people to come to them, when providers could come to patients, digitally and conveniently?  We talk about the emergence of digital access to care at length and Dr. Sepah’s contribution to developments in that space.


Dr. Sepah moved to Silicon Valley right after getting his license to practice.  He wanted to help people with metabolic diseases, so he joined the founding team of Omada Health where he was able to help far more people than he could in an individual practice.  Their business helped over 250,000 people lose over 2,500,000 pounds while he was there.


We talked about the mental health crisis in the