Mental Health Month 2026 Fernando Alessandri, PhD "More Than an Answer"

0:09So we're gonna start off with a little bio on doctor Fernando Alessandri. He earned his MS in clinical psychology from Divine Mercy University in 2011 and went on to earn a PhD at the University of Mississippi in 2016. His training included a practicum, internship, and postdoc at Veterans Administration Medical Centers in Honolulu and San Diego. Welcome, doctor Alessandri. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Great. Thank you, Natalia. This is awesome. And thank you everyone that's joining in, taking out some time for this. As a therapist, I was thinking maybe we start with a little mindfulness because I know people are coming. Life is tight. Everybody's running in all sorts of directions.

1:04I think I already checked with Natalia that you can hear me okay. I hope if anyone can't hear me, they'll put something in the chat, and we'll address it. But let's do a little mindfulness. So if you're comfortable, I invite you to close your eyes, take a deep breath, and I just want you to picture what you've already been through today. Meaning, if you can remember waking up, what was your first the first thing you saw, the first sounds you heard, what it was like, where you ended up next. Maybe you took a shower, got dressed. Maybe you ended up in a vehicle of some kind. If you're in some kind of transportation, just picture the number of sites that drifted by as you considered your day, where you were going, where you were coming from, just the overall assault on the mind that we all experience every day from so many things going on.

2:15And just wanna create a chance to breathe and to acknowledge and to prepare to finally slow down and really be present, Just recognizing it's already been a swirl, and the day is not over yet. You have more to come. And just kinda giving a little breathing space to that because it's already been a lot. And by centering, by acknowledging it, taking that breath, maybe wiggling the jaw, a lot of us tense up our jaws a lot or like that. And so you gotta counter it, wiggling it, rubbing your eyes, kind of finding those little reliefs, taking the deep breath, and just kinda centering yourself so you can be more fully present here. Because if there's something still weighing on you, if your car is illegally parked, you're not gonna be fully present.

3:14We often need to take care of what's pulling at us, give it a little bit of attention, and then it usually calms down a little. Alright. So let's dive in. Thank you for participating in that. Alright. So I put on here this old mechanical machine that was very important for World War two to help the military decipher messages. And that seems to be, you know, another age we're living in where we have so much communication going on, and and we don't know what's what. And people are constantly offering to help us. And, like, if you go on anywhere, everything is just sucking for our attention all the time. It's look at me. Look what I did. Hey. Somebody come over here. I'm do I find myself doing it.

4:01Obviously, we had to drum up, you know, attention on this. And, again, to validate that, wow, we are being bombarded all the time, and we need to step back. But, also, we need to do a lot of filtering and saying, okay. What is for my good, and what's a distraction, and things like that. So let's proceed. Let me do some disclosures. So I'm presenting my own ideas. None of this was vetted through Divine Mercy University. They, you know, I like the saying, take what you like and leave the rest. You may not agree with everything. It may not all be useful. My goals are to not bore you and to make this worth your time. I have a lot of creative pursuits, so I'll probably be mentioning throughout. My humor just comes and goes all over the place.

4:49So I might meant I'm not here to sell T shirts, but, yes, I make T shirts and mugs. And I just wrote a book, and I have all these things going on. So just, I have a private practice, and I'm expanding into coaching to be less limited to psychology and more psychology and more drawing in from my other backgrounds and also to cross state lines and country lines. I come from a cog cognitive behavioral background and with an emphasis on attachment and spirituality that we're connected and that there are bigger things going on, but and that ideas matter. The stuff floating in our head is part of our environment. So even though, like, I initially start with behaviorism, just like where are we on the same level as animals as we navigate our environment, Then we have to add thoughts to that and then the navigation of relationships and social and spirituality.

5:42So those are kind of my perspective. I use my same brain, my same mind when I'm doing science or if I'm on jury duty being asked whether to convict someone or not. And in my religious thinking, it's all the same to me. I don't like, oh, let's put that kind aside and now do something else. For me, they're all it's a unified experience. Divine Mercy University is a Catholic university. So I just wanna kinda mention this, the squeaky versus squeaky clean in the tradition of saints, you have your Saint Therese of Lisieux, very pious, very holy, only lived to 23, probably didn't do a lot wrong. But a lot of us come from a more squeaky, not so squeaky clean tradition. There's some squeaks, and, we've done wrong, and we've hurt people and all sorts of things, and all are welcome here.

6:37Okay. So, yeah, I went to DMU. It was they helped me transition to psychology. I had had twenty two years of experience mentoring kids and then adults and college students. And and those were always on the side, but it had provoked interest in mental health. Like, what else is going on here? I knew a lot about the spiritual sides, especially the Catholic tradition, Christian traditions, but gained a curiosity. And so finally, with the economy of 2008, was trying to make it in Hollywood, and I had been in advertising. And I decided to pursue psychology, and and DMU at the time was called IPS. They were very welcoming and helped me make that transition even though I had, like, no background in it.

7:18But a lot of I was like a kid in a candy story, very eager to learn. So that was 02/2009 to 2011, then I went on to a PhD in Mississippi. And then okay. I made a mistake of praying to God that he make me a good therapist. I didn't wanna be the kind that was clueless that, you know, sometimes you see them on TV or maybe you've met them in person where they have pictures that just show wealth and unrelatability. And, I did make the mistake of praying that God would make me a good therapist. And because of that, I think he sent my life in extremely roller coaster y directions. And the upside of that has been that I've had to move around the country a bunch to follow my son. The upside of that has been the amount of experience they've been able to accumulate in the last fifteen years.

8:08So it took me to three VA medical centers. I had a post a great postdoc in what's called SMI, serious mental illness, focused on psychosis, bipolar trauma. My own dissertation work was on trauma. And I was always interested in brief therapies for trauma because I was horrified at a crisis center where we would have people between three days and twenty one days. And the staff was afraid to touch trauma, and the nurses just wanted to inject everybody and keep them all calm. And it was like, my goodness. You have these people. A lot of them were frequent flyers, meaning they came back a lot, either because of suicidality or addiction. And trauma were the big three I saw a lot, and then couples and, like, relationship conflict, literally, that was getting violent and stuff.

8:53And they didn't wanna touch trauma. And I was like, this is ridiculous. You can't say that your only cure for trauma requires that you have someone for, like, a year of attention. We have to have short ways to get at this stuff and give people the tools to handle it even if what we start, we were not able to finish. There was this whole mentality that it's like a Pandora's box and you just don't touch it. It was absurd. Anyway, so that has guided me a lot. And then, yeah, in addition to working with veterans, I've worked with community mental health. Okay. I think Natalia already mentioned this stuff. But more recently, prisons and a forensic hospital and trying to understand who's getting locked up and issues around that.

9:34Okay. Let's move on. So with AI, I found this cartoon. I thought it was very appropriate. It's you know, some of it is amazing. I think we probably all are using it already to summarize a lot of information, but we're kinda wondering, well, what's inside? What are the risks? What's this gonna do to us? What's it gonna do to therapy? So we're not we're sorta hesitant. Do we let this thing in? To what extent do we let it in? What's going on? As therapists and in other professions, I think we're working on people's unsolved miseries. There's so much depression, suicidality, loss of hope, hopelessness, reliance on pills, and all sorts of addictions and things where we're seeking answers. There's a lot of hope that maybe we can just get some sort of vision or a hologram or, you know, some sort of wise people from somewhere that are gonna give us the answers.

10:35Growing up, Hitchhiker's Guide was very popular. I grew up in New York. People were reading this. I have yet to read it, actually, but I just remember the answer to the the questions of the mysteries of life, the universe, and everything was 42. And there is still sort of that mentality on some sides where if we could just give people the answers, everything's gonna be okay. And within Christianity, you know, we could say, well, we think we have the answer. We have this relationship with the creator and all this stuff. But even moving beyond that, there are some things where we are just gonna need a mechanic, where we have to respect this area, this domain of just what are the human science, what is beyond the relationship with God, where even if you're a believer and you think God's gonna lead you through that thing, it's still, okay.

11:35But what are the efforts I need to make? What do I need to put in? And what are the human resources I need to to get to look at my car, to get to look under the hood here? Even if you journal, like, journaling is great, and I'm gonna talk more about it at length later. But maybe the inspiration is still gonna be something very practical. Did you check the timing belt? Okay. So we got a lot of people asking, what's wrong with me? And they wanna know about anxiety and depression and bipolar and schizophrenia. People are self diagnosing, and they wanna know about addiction and impulsiveness. And they're your readers, people that are reading the self help books, And I'm pro all that. I prefer I'm not it was funny because in, at my second grad school, I was involved in interviewing.

12:25And the people I always thought would be great candidates to become psychologists always got rejected. And I think it was because they were I had been an older student. And I don't know if some of the faculty was intimidated. They wanted people they could form. They didn't want people that already came with a lot of ideas and a lot of life experience. And there's a danger to producing always 22 year old therapists. Like, okay. Yeah. But, but, anyway, so I'm all for a lot of self help and finding what resources you can first. And, therefore, yeah, some AI to try to summarize the things. So part of what I'm doing here is trying to organize where does it fit, because it's great. If we can take all this knowledge that's out there, all the books that have been written, all this stuff, and have it in your cell phone, I mean, that's a great resource.

13:18I'm not gonna deny that, and I don't think we need to be afraid of that per se. So it's just a great tool, a great resource. But at the end, when it comes time to talk to someone and Jean Paul too used to talk about information overload. Like, how crazy is it? There's just too much information at some point. And today, we have the added that was thirty years ago, forty years ago. Today, we have the added problem of misinformation and some of it deliberate. This is the last thing we wanna show up and do is talk to a robot. Like, when we're trying to sort through it all, we're gonna need more. I put this picture. People are familiar with the film Napoleon Dynamite. Well, I wanna say two things.

14:09One is feel free to use the chat to tell me if you're connecting with what I'm saying. You could put question marks. You could put smiley faces, like, just some way to know if I'm on track or if people are are piecing out. Okay. But I put yes. Pedro. Vote for Pedro. So what we get out of AI is only gonna be as good as your prompts. So in this case, Pedro thought the way to to win a win a woman's heart was to bake her a cake. Right? So we're not gonna get very far with it if if we're just not even asking it good questions. So I think that has become okay. Sorry. Yep. Yeah. So how are your prompting skills? Like, are you even able to talk to it very well? In my experience, very few clients come in even knowing what the right questions are, and it really helps when they just give up on that.

15:10So I I all I know is that I'm stuck. All I know is something's not working. Can you help me figure it out? That tends to be kinda one of the better starting places. At times, I even fill in those blanks for them. Like, hey. We're in prison. You're in prison. Like, this is is this where you thought your life was gonna go? How did you end up here? And in that environment in particular, it's amazing how many people would say things like, oh, but this is my last time or, hey. I'm never coming back here again. And I'm like, oh, do you know the difference between a wish and a plan? And And they'd be like, what do you mean? Like, well, a wish is just like, yeah. You hope I never come back here, but a plan is, like, real steps.

15:53Like, like, really figuring out what trips me up because nobody in there meant to end up there. There's so much, more to it. And so all the back and forth that has to happen the the other reason I put the Pedro thing is I in preparation for this talk, I I threw out to Alexa, hey. And she might answer. I just used her name. But I threw out, hey. I'm thinking that maybe learning guitar would improve my marriage. And she doesn't say, well, that's a dumb idea. It's always, like, this really positive. And I'm not saying it's a dumb idea, but it's this weird thing that she's kinda programmed to be, like, super supportive and not very critical thinking. Like, there's just a lot still wrong with it all.

16:39So we have to be really be be careful of the awareness. Like, one day, I I always get book title ideas. I don't know. I'm never gonna have time to write them all, but I kinda wanna write one that would be called rediscovering the power of doubt. Because in the prison environment, I would hear horror stories about attorneys that just I'm sure they were just overworked, but they seem to do a really lousy job defending the guy. These were all men in a male male prison. I was like, don't they remember to doubt whether they have the whole story? Like, because our especially in therapy, clients are leaving all sorts of things out. That's one of the problems with PTSD is they actually don't even remember so many factors.

17:28Like, they'll just tell you, oh, I'm I'm really upset at myself because I killed a guy. And you go pulling the thread, and it turns out, oh, so you didn't just go randomly kill someone. You were sent to war. You were in a war zone. Okay. And how much sleep had you gotten? And how much and so you have to help them include pieces that they don't even think count or or anyway, there's just so much. So we're gonna often get a lot of superficial stupid ideas like, well, let's bake a cake. Yeah. It might help something somewhere, but there's usually, like, a bigger context missing. And I don't know that AI is gonna help us fill in context and stuff. Alright. We do know that getting stuff off our chest helps telling other people.

18:15Now that's actually one of the biggest barriers. It's why there's so much isolation is because people are afraid to do that. They don't know when to do it. They don't know how to prepare listeners. They don't know how to say, hey. I I need to share some really deep stuff, but here's what I don't want. I don't want advice. I don't want judgment. I don't want this. I don't want that. But the doing and and so it can backfire. So a lot of people have disclosed in the wrong settings at the wrong times to the wrong people and end up even more isolated. So this stuff is tricky, and you do need some you know, I I come to this. I was gonna say expertise, but not a lot. Like, I don't wanna say, okay.

18:59Everybody stay dependent on therapists. It isn't about creating and maintaining dependencies. It's more about understanding the limitations of the instrumentation that we depend on. Okay. So sharing is is helpful in the right settings. This is not a talk where I brought in all the stats and all that stuff. I know you're gonna have four or five more talks. You can ask AI to give you that stuff. This is more somebody's real world experience. Because one of the biggest problems really is solitary confinement. This is not what my prison looked like. There I mean, there's so much backlash against solitary confinement. There's so much confusion. If I was in prison, I'd actually wanna be alone a lot, with some of the social company there.

19:48But human beings are ending up extremely isolated. And I think that's another of the fears that we're talking about here. It's like, what is going on in society? What is going on when we make it so easy to not need anybody? It it there's a backfiring of ending up just because you can be alone, should you always be alone? Those are the questions we need to kind of explore. And then what are the the ways yeah. We're isolating from each other. Anyway, I'm getting confused on that thread. As far as the profession's concerned is they are trying to turn us into bots. They are trying to make this field like a manufacturing endeavor. In several workplaces, we've had to talk about RVUs. What's your relative value unit?

20:40How much are you producing? How many widgets are you cranking out? What's your productivity? Now I'm not someone who doesn't, like, understand or respect that. Like, I'm entrepreneurial. I try to start things that I hope make money. I'm terrible at it, but I like thinking about it. So I am very sensitive to, like yeah. When I started trying to do t shirts, I really wanna do the eco friendly, but then those are 12, and these guys can get you the shirt for 5. I can't sell a shirt for $30. So, like, all this stuff does have to make sense at some point. So I'm not just like kumbaya. Like, there's an understanding, but we need to figure it out better. A theme I didn't make a slide on, but I love this thing that I've heard is something Einstein said, which is that if you give me a if you give me one hour to solve a problem, I'm gonna spend fifty five of those minutes trying to understand what the problem even is, and then I'm gonna solve it in five.

21:47I think most of from what I can see of how businesses are run nowadays and organizations, I think it's it's the opposite is what's happening. People are spending five minutes. They think they understand the problem, and they're coming up with solutions that every time they fix one thing, they break three more. It's really crazy. And that's even some of the legal stuff that I saw in the prisons. The amount of stuff people have sued for, and we seem to have the worst lawyers, they lose everything. So everything was resulting in more and more rules, more checkboxes. And the more check boxes and the more documentation, the fewer people a therapist is gonna see. So all this stuff, we really have to be careful about how much backfires when we go to fix something.

22:37Okay. Again, I go on many, many tangents. And then okay. So yeah. And they're putting these these meters on us. I remember when I finished grad school and got my first job, it was at a place where they wanted thirty minute sessions. It was thirty minute sessions. And in the interview, I was very open, like, don't people burn out here? How are you doing? That's that's crazy. And they were like, oh, you know, if they all show up, we're gonna reduce that. You're not gonna have 14 people a day, but there was a risk of 10. It was it was pretty intense. Luckily, there were a lot of no shows in that environment. So they kinda knew what they were doing in terms of like, I could give an extra fifteen minutes if I could see on my schedule if someone didn't show up.

23:23So peep some people were getting forty five minutes, even an hour. Other people, thirty. Like, it just depended. And now, really, I've shifted my views on this. Some people need five or 10. I I was gonna say if there are any priests on this, I wish you could create your calendar software so that, you know, you you have a two hour block of the five minute confessions for the people that don't need all your attend you know, don't need an hour, but then you offer a few hour long and improve on some of how that is done. I think there's a lot of variability with the inmates. Very few needed an hour or even forty five. There were some weeks where, you know, the five minutes good enough. Anyway, there's a lot of variability, and so some of the technology might help us solve some of this.

24:09But the amount of pressure is crazy. Okay. Now some of the ideas that are coming out is, why don't we clone a guy? Like, I thought this was a joke when I saw it, but look at how many outlets were covering this that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have enough time to meet with everybody. And so if you wanna meet with him, you're gonna be able to meet with his AI. And I'm like, I don't know. More than one of someone's kind of a lot. So, somehow, I don't think that's really the answer. Okay. Now, again, I wanna be careful of not just being all about lamenting, oh, those better days. Like, everything was so much better in the past. Like, come on. That is only true until winter. You know? I don't wanna have an outhouse.

25:05I stole this line from a an ad on a it was a photo I saw years ago for a camping goods store, and it just said now is the winter of our discount tents. But, like, let's not just be about lamenting or trying to slow down progress. Like, it's more about figuring out where things belong because I want my own bathroom. I want my own home. Unfortunately, some are gonna look like this, but, like, we need to get people housed. And, you know, you need a certain amount of technology and progress, in my opinion, that it's worth some trade off because I'd rather have this than the outhouse. Okay. And I also wanna say this isn't just happening in therapy. Obviously, these concepts, the dehumanization is has been going on a long time.

25:55So I wanna be fair and say this isn't just happening in health care. Like, education did it a long time ago with these massive classroom experiences. So the inhumanity can just creep in anywhere, and we have to go kind of figuring out where is it creeping in in my practice or in my life. Are people just becoming files for me? Are people just cases? Like, that's kind of the ugly side, especially of working in hospitals and prisons and I guess universities. There's such a danger that people become numbers, people become cases. And so we need to find ways. And I'm not saying it's avoidable in a sense. I don't know. I might have more ideas on that. But but it's nice to look at a picture, excuse me, like this once in a while and be like, wow, those all represent human beings.

26:53And do I consider that? Do I reflect on that? And then my cynical line at the end is people are going to find ways to get individual attention. I think we need to put that individual attention really early in life because this is the fallback. This is the fallback is you know, people in prison were hurt, and they grew up with the philosophy, oh, I'm actually on my own. Nobody really cares about me. Everybody's just controlling and doing their thing, so I'm just gonna do the same. They don't have an eloquent philosophy about it, but it's in the behavior. A lot of times, they don't even know what antisocial personality is. Like, they're they've heard the phrase a lot, and they think it means, yeah.

27:38I don't like these people. I wanna be alone. I'm antisocial. And so explain. No. It's that you reject the rules. You don't play by the rules. You you wanna be the an exception. I think, well, that doesn't apply to me. I don't have to wait in line. Anyway, whole other category. But so there's dehumanization happening in so many contexts. I will gripe a little more about this, which is sad at you could spend twenty years in prison and never even get a full course of therapy. And not because there aren't the resources. I mean, that's some of it. But it's also like, especially the hospital I worked at in New York, there literally wasn't time. They were moving those people around from group to group, these mandatory things, and it was just it was so bizarre that there wasn't it was extremely hard to have a regular meeting time with anybody to for a course of twelve weeks, let's say, and do an evidence based therapy or something.

28:33It just wasn't set up for it. And so back to the idea that there are so many things in society that we're answering they're like solutions to who knows like, I'm not even sure what the problem was. I mean, this is an obvious one. Somebody needed to get locked up because they were dangerous. But I don't know. I I hope the future is better, but we gotta really start asking, what was the purpose of this thing again? Why why do we have this? These these were the old mental hospitals that were closed down that I don't know if at some point or it's looking like things might get reopened. But so the dehumanization is a theme. And then the awareness, like, why is in many circles someone considered a hero for killing the health care CEO the CEO of UnitedHealthcare?

29:26And, again, we can go small and say, oh, naughty man. He shouldn't have done that. Or we could say, wait. The number of people that were enthused by this is an indicator that he may not have had the authority to do what he did, but maybe the guy that got it deserved what he got. Like, it may not have actually been an injustice, but a problem of authority. Who has the authority to say something very evil is going on in their bodies? They're just not being counted. Alright. Alright. So now as therapists and I'm going back and forth because I realized how varied the attendees are. Actually, let me look at that question real quick. What percentage of inmates with mental health? What are your thoughts about mental okay.

30:16I do wanna address that. So alright. The way it was organized is there was there's something called EOP, the enhanced outpatient. So they have the state hospitals and then coming down the level. The highest level we had at the level four maximum security facility is EOP, And there is a whole yard of people, and each thing holds could hold a 100, but they try to do single cell. So I don't know. What was that? 500 300 people in there maybe? I don't know. It's more. I I worked in that for a year and then another year and three months in the step down from that, more maintenance level. But there was an issue there too where there's a lot of faking. So there's a lot of bad thinking in terms of, oh, if I say I have a mental condition, it gets me this other housing, and that gets me away from these enemies because I bought a lot of drugs I haven't paid for yet.

31:14So they had drug debt, and their lives were in danger. So they're using mental health as an excuse, but then you eat with them and there's it's fake. So but you're not allowed to call it that because then you get sued. Like, if you call it malingering, like, there's just it's a very thorny, complex environment. And so this is tricky too because whenever they got in trouble within the prison, we were constantly there's a rotation system to be assigned to evaluate, was mental health involved? And sometimes I was like, how could it not be involved? But what they really mean is in that moment. So if someone knowingly is acquiring drugs and it's premeditated, we're not gonna call even though, yeah, there's an addiction there, they're not gonna get a lesser punishment.

32:05There wasn't much punishment, though. But they're not gonna get off because anyway, I'm all over the place. It was tricky. I'd say a lot of people that do have mental health issues don't know it, and then there's a lot that are faking, but they need some help too. It was just kind of, like, bigger than mental health. It's sort of life journey, maybe coaching, actually, to help people understand where they're at and what their missing pieces are. No. Sorry. On that question so if if you're working in a in a prison, no. I mean, I was there to help the actual inmate. Like, I learned this at a VA. Luckily, I had one mentor that say, if it's ever a choice between the veteran or the system, choose the veteran.

32:58Like, I've learned to throw institutions under the bus because a lot of what we do is validate people's negative experience and say, yeah, this place sucks. But even knowing that, what is still within your power? Where is your autonomy? What how can you make this better? If you don't like, let's say today, the only positive thing that's gonna happen for you is a cute little bird is gonna land near you or a squirrel. If you don't take a minute to look and enjoy that, that's on you. And learning training people to be more aware of what's within their control and to stop spinning like, I had to stop spinning my wheels on trying to change Sacramento. Early on, I was like, well, this is terrible.

33:38We should train. And it's like, Sacramento didn't care. So learning, like, how to really navigate your life within what you have, what's in your control, what you're missing out on that you need to pay closer attention to. Sometimes it's that first cup of coffee in the morning. If you accidentally drink it all distracted, that's nobody else's fault. You should have savored it. Anyway, I don't know if I answered Matt's question there about myself. I mean, I don't have answers for the homelessness issue. There's a lot of separation between people that have chosen to go off the grid. They're the sophisticated people that go off the grid, meaning they buy property and they're able to build, put up solar and stuff like that.

34:25But then the people that just say, screw this. I'm not showing up for nine to five. I'm going to live on the street. The first month is nasty, but then you get used to it. There's just so much variability in who's out there. I don't know that we're anyway, I I that's gonna be a whole other talk. Let me keep going on this. So we have people asking these kind of questions. How well is AI gonna do with questions like, am I accepted? Do I have value? Am I in danger? Like, those anxiety questions. It might give you some logical explanation of anxiety, but, a, it's not gonna know what it feels like to have anxiety. It's not gonna be able to get into your subjective experience or just have that relatability to answer any of these.

35:14Like, why do I procrastinate? And, again, these things, if you develop a good enough prompt, it might help you come up with some battle plans of like, hey, can you give me 10 steps toward conquering this? And there's a certain percentage of the population that's gonna be fine with that. They're the go getters. They make goals and they pursue them. But I don't know. Again, you're sort of getting you're back to, like, great. Now you've helped the people that were fine with the giant lecture hall and never had any problems with how the system is set up to help those people succeed. The people that are fine with this way of doing k through 12 are still the ones succeeding that way. Like, we're obviously missing huge numbers of people that we're they're just not we're not helping them succeed and to answer these questions at that more individual level.

36:13As humans, I think we love delving into this because we struggle with these things. Especially, I I got very interested in this one. Why can't I remember stuff that I wanna remember? Why can't I focus? And yet, why are there some things I can't forget? I was like, There's this whole ADHD side. I can't focus here, but I can't forget this stuff. And that told me, well, each is not only a deficit but might also be a resource. Wouldn't it be great if I could move that muscle over to here? Like, what's getting in the way? And that's the type of stuff I get very curious about and and wanna figure out I wanna help people access. So, like, that mindfulness exercise we did at the beginning wasn't just to prove I'm a therapist or it's like the idea that if you come in with all sorts of baggage, you're you're gonna be divided when you're trying to listen to me.

37:05Are there little techniques we can use to put some of the baggage down? And it turns out that just acknowledging stuff is a big one. Like, there's one I love. I I use this example with with inmates, with men. I use, like, a sports analogy because a lot of them grew up thinking real men don't have emotions or don't talk about emotions, all that nonsense. Real men just suck it up. And some of them would tear up when I would use this example. I'd be like, oh, okay. But like, let's say there's a kid. Let's say you're a coach and your kid's on the team, and he gets hurt. And he's like, I need to sit out. I got hurt. If you say, oh, don't be a wimp. Get back in there. Suck it up. You're risking that now the kid is gonna hate the sport and hate you.

37:58If you lean in the other direction and say, oh my gosh, that sounds serious. You're hurt? Okay. You better sit down. Why don't you sit out for a while? And then you say, actually, I'm thinking you might need to sit out the rest of the season because this sounds really serious. I think a lot of kids are going to be like, wait, what? I'm good now. All they needed was a little bit of validation and a little bit of a a space to make up their own mind. And the way you give someone that space is by taking them uber seriously so that something flips over. Because in my experience, the thinking doesn't change if you're still trying to prove, no. But I'm really hurt. No. But I'm you don't understand.

38:44I'm really hurt. Like, if I'm still trying to prove that, nothing's gonna change. But if we lean in the other direction, new objectivity comes. So I use this for depression. Like, man, when you don't wanna get up in the morning, you don't wanna go to work. And, you know, you could you could, I forget what that's called, waffle there for, like, three hours. I don't wanna go, but I should go. I don't wanna go. I should go. It's better to say, screw it. I'm not going to work today. Something about that feels amazing. Let's say, I'm not going in. I just got a day off. This is awesome. I am not going in. Wow. What am I gonna do today? And I already feel better. I feel more rested. A big load is off.

39:24And within two minutes, I'm already like, but is this how I wanna waste a vacation day? Don't I wanna take a real trip? Oh, you know what? I think I'm gonna go to work. That second order thinking would have never come if I stayed in the waffle stage. So sometimes it's better to just put an idea to rest with some decision, even if it's a bad decision, caveats, legal claimers, whatever. But sometimes it's good to play with going to an extreme. I use the extreme thing a lot because it's what anxiety doesn't it's how anxiety works. Anxiety works by making you afraid and making some things unthinkable. So if we have a game plan for the unthinkable, then the thing isn't as scary. It's when we're like, oh my god.

40:12I couldn't even think of that. Oh, what? Ah. We get paralyzed. So we need to sometimes just say it. I remember one of my sisters was getting a PhD, and I and it sound and I was like and she was so nervous preparing for her defense. I was like, oh my gosh. I don't know. You better pass because I don't know if I could if if you don't pass, I don't know if I'm still going to love you. And she laughed and that just kind of lightened it up. Like, Okay, that's ridiculous. This is silly. So there are times when it helps to just kind of pop those bubbles. Because again, back to these questions. And then at a prison, people have been told they're monsters, like this thing you did is horrific, or someone coming back from war or things in our culture that people are told, well, you gotta choose something, so do something.

41:05And then later you're like, oh my gosh. Did I actually do that? Like, there's stuff. Right? And then there's OCD. Did I turn off the stove? There's we're all walking around with something, and I don't know that AI it's gonna be able to offer pieces, but not the bigger piece. This is a long question. I don't Loretta, I'm gonna try to read that. Earlier, you mentioned trauma. That's awesome. You need to lean into it. You need to go toward it. One of the key symptoms that maintains PTSD is avoidance, and I'm mentioning that in the middle. Yeah. People need the space. They need to get it off their chest, and they need to know it's okay to say those things, that there's so much that is okay to say and deal with.

41:54Let me yeah. The other oops. The other problem right. We need a personal response. That is gonna get to the heart of this. Am I talking to a person or a robot? I don't like fake validation. I once had a supervisor tell me after a group I led or something, she said, oh, you're really good for your level, which is something a robot could have said. And it was meant to be whatever, like empathic, but it was like, Oh my gosh, do you not realize what a backhanded coward just like, that's just weird. Like, oh, you're really improving or you're better at something now. And the robots are gonna get a lot wrong. My other quick experience on that is how much are people really gonna tell these things because everybody's listening.

42:49That's not a secret device. Like, I've started to write some apps, and I think people hesitate. I did it because it's gonna be convenient. You don't have to see 10 pages. You could just see less, and then it opens up more depending on where you wanna go. But I think people don't wanna put all their stuff on the Internet. So again, just so many questions. Alright. So what do we want from our therapists, even clergy, coaches? Like, this applies to so many. It's like, yeah, we want answers. But, like, remember when the answers were quit smoking, exercise more, lose weight? Like, gee. Thanks, doc. How much do I owe for that? So we have the high quest. So we need answers and support. In prison, I didn't have answers for how to get out of prison other than stop getting, or whatever they were called.

43:41Sorry. Stop getting the write ups. Answers were not as important in that setting as support. Like, you can get through this. Your brain, your anxiety is telling you that one more thing, and you're done. That's how anxiety works. Anxiety is a terrible scorekeeper. I also wanna write a book that would be an answer to a book called the body keeps the score. Because one problem with anxiety is it's a terrible scorekeeper. Meaning oh, let's say you buy a lottery ticket. How many lottery tickets does it take for you to stop playing the lottery? Because you're getting feedback. Like, oh, that was a waste again. Oh, that was a waste again. Oh, that was a waste again. So you need feedback. Anxiety, unfortunately, every time you're afraid of a blind corner, you do it, and there's a brief relief.

44:32Just like when you wash your hands with OCD, there's a brief relief. But guess what? You're immediately on to the next one. But if you start writing down how often you're wrong and I used to print calendars for people and say, okay. What's your biggest darkest fear? If I go to Walmart, I'm gonna get shot. That happened with a lot of veterans. Like, I can't go to Walmart. I'm gonna get shot. Okay. Write it down. And every day, you come back and you got it right. Wrong again. Wrong again. Wrong again. After seven days, you start slipping. Fourteen days, you go back and fill in the wins. You by thirty days, that thought is gone because you need to be a better scorekeeper. Again, I'm lost on why I said that, but I hope it helps someone.

45:16So we need answers and we need support, but then there's more. I kept trying to figure out there's more. Then you need tools. Well, how? What? How do I do that? I said print the calendar. Print a calendar. Find little use an app. Use this. Use that. We we need some tools. It's and I where I was ray raised as a therapist at Ole Miss, they were very against just being a supportive therapist. In prison, it was very good to be a supporter. But, you know, they're very into the evidence based practices. And so, like, I'm not just support. We're we're here to change was the emphasis, which I think is a good one. It it just depends what people are dealing with. But so in the prison, I was delivering all this.

46:01These poor guys hadn't they were getting so little respect. Because once you're in there, you do not wanna fall in the hands of a prison system because all that stuff you learn about rights and stuff, I mean, eventually. But when it comes down to, hey, CO, custody office, can I get another roll of toilet paper? That's gonna be based on that relationship. And so, there's a lot of suffering that once your rights are lost, like, so much more gets lost. That's what should be on the Billboard. Hey, kids, don't go to prison. Not because it's immoral, not because crime is bad or evil. It's because you don't want to fall into these hands. You don't want to become a case number. So half of what I was bringing in was not like a new mindfulness exercise.

46:47It was just respect, a sense of confidence. Like, I think you still have a lot to offer. You may be here. This may be what's happening in your life now, but restoring a sense of their value and dignity and even some camaraderie, if I could, not so much in that setting. Humor. Definitely, I used a lot of humor. So these are things that AI is probably not gonna give us. People are walking in with shame, confusion, guilt. And just the fact that we can offer nonjudgment is a big step, and we're ahead of AI on that. AI is very sensitive to what somebody programmed as offensive or not. I left the last one blank because we all need to figure out, wait. What do I offer? What can I offer? What's my value added proposition?

47:40Okay. So this is church lady from Saturday Night Live, and I've had this experience even on my phone when I'm trying to type some words. Like, even the phone doesn't want you to be offensive. Like, I start typing f, and it gets nervous. And you, oh, it starts hoping I'm trying to spell fudge or, you know, like all these things are trying to teach us. And it's kind of good feedback that a lot of society has become what they initially targeted as church lady, I think, has gotten you know, the Catholic church is always what do you call it? The, the pilot test of of human nature. So it has thousands of years of experience on what could go wrong. So my theory is when it became legal in 03/25, now you had money and sponsorship.

48:32Uh-oh. Career path. Like, it just some people are gonna abuse it. Right? But then you try to add corrections to these things. But so society is only just starting to make these mistakes that I wish they would study big older institutions to say, oh, how are we gonna make sure this part doesn't happen or that part doesn't happen? Alright. Okay. This is just again, it helps if you're a wounded healer. It that idea of the church lady or that AI thing, you know, these voices coming down on high, they're not gonna be relatable. They're not gonna know now I get that you don't have to have a heart condition to be a good heart surgeon, but you do have to be a pretty experienced human being. You have to know what these struggles are about.

49:24And it might help if you I'm not saying go out and commit terrible things, but it's amazing what perspectives come when you hit rock bottom. And I know in my life, I've been knocked off my high horse, and it I would never go back. Like, it's made me a much better human being and a much better therapist, and it would fit those categories of embarrassing and, like, shame and all those things that come up. But we move forward, and that's what we're trying to help clients do. Okay. This was to get if we wanted to cover more on trauma, the idea that the Pandora's box let me just see where I am in my slides. Okay. There I'm starting to get into I wasn't sure how the timing was gonna go, and I wanted to have room for discussion.

50:14That was gonna be more specific stuff on a passion of mine, which I think has a parallel with AI, where my dissertation work had to do with comparing expressive writing, which is just having people so there was a guy in the seventies named Pennebaker, who is the one that started really looking into stress and health. And does stress make your immune system go down? And he produced real evidence, great stuff. So there's been forty, now fifty years of expressive writing where it's where the whole journaling tradition comes from. And he was finding that anyway, that's gonna be a specialized area. I don't even know how long I've been talking, and I wanna kinda maybe leave room here for questions on this specific top you know, things I've already said, AI related.

51:09I think it's maybe people can someone can unmute if they wanna ask a question. Let's just it looks like I've been talking an hour, or is that just that hour might be when I connected with Natalia. I'm not sure. Yeah. It looks like we're coming up on an hour. Any burning questions, thoughts? So, doctor Alessandri, Carlos submitted two questions. What general guidelines would you offer to use AI constructively for military veterans, and what are their parallels between veteran and convict populations? Okay. I'm a bit ADHD. So if if if those are things you have on text, drop them into the thing. When you ask for guidelines, do you mean as a veteran or as a clinician guiding a veteran? So, like yeah.

52:15I'm not sure where. Okay. So if someone's looking into their own mental health and thank you for that compliment. Like, just, like, I don't know, like reading books. Some people wanna burn books. It's like, no. Look in books for what you find useful and make sense to you and that moves you forward. I think learning to ask AI questions is a whole skill set unto itself that you're only gonna get better at with time, with with practice. And I think it's a great tool for just learning, like, so I don't have to go to the library. I don't have to go find the book. It will sift a lot of information for me. But you have to have that power of doubt concept I mentioned. What is it leaving out? Like, a great prompt nowadays is ask the thing I'll just say chat g b t to critique itself.

53:16And I'm amazed. I loved when I heard that because now I ask it, critique your answer, and it tells me every reason why though everything it just said isn't gonna work. Like, I'm trying to promote my book, and I was like, okay. Give me editors. Who what editor where would read this of retirees? What are retirees reading? And then I asked, but are they gonna read it? And they're like, no. Or, like, it's crazy. So a lot of it is gonna be trial and error. I don't really necessarily have a good answer. I don't know. That one's that one's so big. Is this Natalia, were able to were you able to is that the same question? Yes. That is the same question, but Gloria just asked another one. But the second part to Carlos' question was for military veterans, and what are their parallels between veteran and convict populations?

54:15I mean, goodness. So PTSD is very common in both settings. And I have to say combat PTSD is not the hardest one, right? If you go fight enemies in a foreign land and people are shooting at you, it's unpleasant, but your mind isn't confused. Like, when you come back home, that is actually quicker to treat because you're trying to update the brain on on what's going on. And so stuff that happens at home is worse. So sexual abuse in the home is bad. Violence in prison is bad because you're still around it. Like, am I safe now? Like so when you're still in a situation, it's harder to recover than when it truly was something in the past, and I'm in a different setting now. I wanna do this quick little speech that people find helpful.

55:18And I didn't make up it's called the hand model of the brain where you teach people, like, look. This is your spinal cord. It ends in a lower brain. This is like a puppy. This is I call it my watchdog. This one controls everything that I share with animals. So my breathing, my heart rate, digestion, all the autonomic stuff, all the automatic stuff that keeps going when I'm sleeping and stuff. On top of that, you put that big red boxing glove. That's your human brain. These two brains are not always in sync. So this guy is like, what is that? What about the ah, ah, ah. And a lot of inmates and some veterans and other people are like, I need drugs. I need a cigarette. And they're letting the dog dictate the the thing, and that's backwards.

56:01This one has to become the adult and the one that's gonna say, yes. It feels like you need that, but that's not what you need right now. What we really need is something else or you know? So a gentle adult brain that's gonna help the lower brain to start making peace with reality, with, like, oh, that was a false alarm using terms like false alarm. It felt real. Yeah. It feels like I'm in danger, but am I? No. My bad. Oh, wrong again. Making a note of that. Like, oh, my bad. So that we learn to do little exposure exercises ourself. Every time I hear this noise does not equate with the trauma that I went through. Like, I I hung out at a place with police horses growing up. We would go and shovel, and they would let us ride sometimes.

56:50And I wonder, how did you prepare these horses for riot work? I mean, the poor horses had to hear a lot of gunfire, and there was no way around that until gunfire became irrelevant. That's called exposure therapy and habituation. You get used to something, but you don't get used to it if you stay afraid of it. So a lot of people are afraid to do the homework, and there's dropout from trauma therapies. I thought that was crazy too. Why are you having these people do the hardest stuff at home? They're experts at avoidance. We gotta do this stuff with them. And it's called exposure. It's it's called the imaginal exposure because you're stirring it up, but sitting with it, and then look around, smell, touch, get in touch with this environment, then dive back in, then come out.

57:30Like, you have to help the two brains reconcile that, oh, that's past stuff. It's not now. It's still unpleasant. It's sad, but it doesn't remain physical if I do the exposure part. If I, you know, put myself in situations where, okay, I'm gonna let all these nasty feelings come up. Because you know what? That's what happens when I exercise. But I realize that's not really a heart attack. I'm just running, and my heart's getting conditioned. And this sweat, it's okay. So it's okay to sweat during trauma work. It's okay to cry and blow some snot. And these are just normal processes, but they slow people down because they're so afraid. And we have to just normalize like, oh, yeah, that's just what the body does.

58:12Like, whatever. It'll it'll pass. You don't have to do it in public. Like inmates, you don't gotta go cry in the day room. Like, do it in the shower. Go do it in your pillow, but stop bottling this stuff up. Okay. And then, Talia, if you see things pressing, it how a verbal prompt could help me because, sifting through this. So Gloria asked, in dealing with AI, while it is a popular trend, and, yes, while we may need to embrace its emergence. No. I I have sorry. I'm able to see that. I'm just saying, like, if I miss one or Sure. No problem. And I'm okay with people unmuting unless you have it set that they can't unmute to make it a discussion now. It's easier to navigate in the chat. Okay. So let me oh, someone's saying, Deborah, okay.

59:13ADHD and PTSD, there's a huge overlap, and you can't you're not supposed to diagnose ADHD. When I was learning the real like, all the testing and stuff, I had a very good supervisor. He's like, if they have all this trauma and stuff, it's gonna mimic ADHD. Like, you're not so the issues with memory, if you're fearing for your life like, if you think about it, when you have PTSD, you're basically a computer with too many apps running, and the whole thing slows down. So, yeah, you're not gonna take in you're not gonna record new information very well, and you're not gonna retrieve it. Those are the two memory problems. Either it never recorded or I just can't find it. I know I used to know, but I can't find it.

59:55So all these things get kinda messy and overlapped. That's why when you do the exercises and I guess we're not gonna get to that part, but I meant to I guess, hopefully, you'll send out the PDF to all the participants with my contact info. There's some brief exercises you can do. I call it the brief trauma organizer because it's the idea that humans get bored when everything's organized. So if I'm ever gonna get bored with this stuff, I need to organize it. Like, okay. These are the events that happened. This is how I felt about it. This, this, this, this. And the more words, the better. Yes. This is not that. So I just made emotion lists so people can check them off. And they love it. Like, oh, oh, oh, it's so validating.

1:00:40You just see it on a page. And not just two or three words like happy, sad. No. That's barbaric. It's really getting into the nuances and the contradictory ones and telling them, yeah, you can feel opposite stuff at the same time. Like when you get a job, people say, oh, you must be so excited. The real answer, yeah, and terrified. What if I move my family across the country and I bomb it? Like, yeah, it was exciting, but it was terrifying. All this stuff is going on all the time inside of us. So AI, I know I've gotten a bit off topic. For people using it therapeutically, I don't know if it's gonna be some trial and error because, again, I'm for self help. So encouraging a client to look up some stuff, why not?

1:01:30Especially if they're working with you, that's great that then they're gonna be able to bring it back and bounce it off you and grow that way. I don't have anything specific recommendations because I like to make my own worksheets. Like, I'm a very impatient therapist, and I don't have an hour to wait for a guy to come up with three emotion words. I'm going to show him a list and he's going to pick. And I remember finding that with high school kids like, Oh my gosh, these kids that would not talk could easily sit there circling a page, and I would get incredible amounts of information. So AI might come up with ways to mimic that. But, again, I think one of the barriers is gonna be who who wants to talk to that thing and how much of your stuff do you really wanna put on the Internet?

1:02:18I'm more concerned also with this talk with, like, where, you know, the big like, the Kaisers and the UnitedHealthcare, they're wanting all this stuff because they want to provide fewer in person hours. And that is a very sad and pathetic trend. And we're going to see the consequences in other numbers. Like, those numbers might improve. They might be able to say, oh, more people are being seen now by these bots. But I'm still gonna wanna see the number of suicides and other ways that we might see more and more people getting off the grid, becoming homeless. Like, there's so much going on right now. You're gonna have to contact me. I encourage I don't care if I get, what is this, 67 emails. Contact me for some of these sheets.

1:03:10I try to put stuff on my website. One of them is called incapables.org. There's a idea that there's so many people dismissed as incapable, and they have so much. And I try to put stuff on there. I did wanna what other slides? Yeah. We're not gonna get into this other than Yeah. I mean, I kind of talked about it, but I see that we're real late. But, well no. Okay. Whoever's hanging on is hanging on. So in here, I tested the expressive writing where you write three essays, and there was no evidence. The the meta analysis showed that it didn't matter if these people were writing their essays a month apart, a week apart, or a day apart, or within the same day. So I was like, well, then why not create a two hour window where someone comes in and they give you three thirty minute essays and some breaks in between.

1:04:03And then we competed that against this brief trauma organizer, a series of worksheets with a therapist, and the green one did better. They both did well for people. It was great for people. So that I'm gonna call the AI. Okay. They sat there with just a few prompts, and they journaled about their most horrific experience. And, you know sorry. I did leave something out. If they found that if you change the topic, it's the green line. You don't improve. But three essays on the same topic, you keep getting better and better. So that was cool. So then I was like, okay, but what could a therapist accomplish in that same amount of time? And again, both were good I can't both were good for PTSD, but having a therapist there was a bit better.

1:04:54And, and this is only like one two hour session, ninety minutes really. And there's not much change immediately after the session. That's the immediate post. But fourteen days later, a lot had improved for both groups. And thirty days later, so the flat line means the improvement stuck. That's really awesome. From a brief intervention that could have been done at these inpatient facilities. I did it again later with veterans. I had good results. Okay. Depression, my thing, was better because sometimes just writing one of the problems with self help is rumination. Like, you just get lost in your own thoughts, and that's going to happen with AI. You need kind of another human to say, Wait, stop.

1:05:38Where are you going? Stop. And AI is probably not going to tell you that. So depression did better. Physical symptoms. I think I should have stretched this out so you can still see. Okay. They're still getting a 10 or 15 improvement. 15. Anyway, those were the physical symptoms. The thought suppression got a little better. Acceptance got way better, having someone not only talk about the problems they're having now, but can you picture a time when you are healed, when this isn't your identity? That improved. And these are things, again, that can be delivered very quickly. Rumination improved. Again, I know. Oh, wait. Yeah. So people bring resources. They're not usually starting from scratch.

1:06:28I don't know. Did I show a guy in a I had a picture before of a guy in total, like, life support. That's usually not what we're dealing with. They bring resources. A human, I think, is gonna navigate that faster than AI will. Okay. This is just a pun. Okay. And this was just some of my website stuff. Okay. I am playing with having a a coaching practice separate from therapy because of, like, state lines and country lines. T shirts are just funny ideas I get. Incapables is where I'm putting resources for this kind of stuff. And then I did just write a book that imagines, like, James Bond when he's, like, 84 in a nursing home, and it's kind of a critical look at a lot of modern stuff. Not so much AI in that one, But let me see if I can add to this chat.

1:07:40I don't know if you guys are able to grab this stuff. Or as soon as it's over, it's over. But if you get the PDF or if you click on them now and but email. Just email me, and I'm happy to share as much as possible. So that has been, what, hour and forty. There's 62 people still here, so I kinda need a sense if people want me to show more stuff or that's good for today. There are some questions that came in, doctor Alessandri. Deborah wrote people are already seeking AI for real relationships and connection, like marrying an AI husband. This generation is comfortable with screen presence, not human connection. It's gonna be, I think, the way of addiction. Like, you do get a hit. You you get a dopamine rush.

1:08:41You get some satisfaction, but it's a pretty sad investment. So I think we need to encourage people. I don't know. There's a certain amount where, like, I don't know. It's it's gonna be gentle dialogue to hope that they want more and discovering the underlying anxiety that makes them think they can't handle real because that's an unfortunate thing. A lot of people are not very skillful, and they have contradictory desires. So in a sense, they're solving it because they want, you know, the emotional support machine, which is just weird. So it's not gonna pay off. They will in little bits. Just like washing your hands with OCD, it helps a little, but then it so the reason avoidance is a big problem with PTSD and anxiety, basically, every time you get a little fix for it, the lower brain thinks, oh, that was good.

1:09:51And so it thinks so it's called an escape mechanism. If I'm doing my PTSD homework here and I'm not breathing right, and I put it all away and run over there, guess what? I'm gonna take a deep breath over there. I'm gonna be like, oh, glad I got away from that stuff. And then this guy's gonna celebrate and be like, yay. I saved them again. He's like, no, you that's the ops the wrong thing to do. You should have stayed put and just dealt with it till you got to the other side. So I don't know. Part of me is a little cynical. Like, if they can't intuit that this is not a good way to go, like, we're not gonna be able to help people that don't wanna be helped. So some of them, we're gonna have to pick up on the rebound.

1:10:34Like, the prison population is people that are now at that ground level that are starting to wonder about that lower crack in the door and saying, oh, maybe I did miss something in life. Maybe there was more. And so I would just be encouraging people to, a, don't do it from a lack of confidence that they can't learn to have real relationships, and then hope they're gonna be more ambitious. Unfortunately, I'm discovering there's a lot of people with very small mindedness. Like, unfortunately, a lot of the staff at the prison, I kept thinking, man, these people are doing time as much as the inmates. Like, they're just trying to save for retirement, and they are not trying to make the world a better place.

1:11:18They're just doing time. It was just the saddest thing. It reminded me of waiting for jury duty. People just making endless chitchat about nonsense is very sad, but some people choose smallness. And I think we can try to encourage having purpose. Like, why are you really what are you here for? What can you give? What legacy do you wanna leave behind? Are you just trying to amuse yourself for the next thirty, forty, fifty years? What a strange ambition, but okay. On the other hand, you know, we have to respect it. Like, leave it if that's their choice. Yeah. I mean, that's never Richard, like, that is never gonna be a a real relate. Like, what a waste of time, to to spend, to invest a lot on that.

1:12:09You're better off playing video games. At least you're getting those skills, and now I hear you can be an air traffic controller. Alright. I hope this was useful. Again, I'm very approachable. I love to do this kind of stuff. I'm older than I look, so I see myself as like, man, I only got a few years left to share what I've learned, and so that tends to be my attitude. So please feel free to reach out. I guess I could There were additional questions, doctor Alessandri. Okay. From an anonymous attendee added, I relate to your life story so much. I am discerning to apply to a PsyD program at the age of 32. Transitioning from a career in teaching and marketing for the past eight years after hitting rock bottom in my life.

1:12:53Any advice on how to move forward with this career pivot? I think that's awesome. I mean, you're gonna have to apply to programs and take the loans or however you can fund it, but you're bringing a lot of real life experience that's gonna be very valuable to people. You know, when I was looking into it, I had to learn what's a social worker, what's a licensed clinical counselor, what's a psychologist. And even when I became a psych, I was like, I don't wanna do testing. Like, I probably would have been happy with a social work degree and been done in three years. I'm glad I did my path and the whole dissertation and learned more. But and the schooling part is just one piece. Like, later, it's more up to you and what you wanna learn and keep learning and go after.

1:13:48And populations, I've gotten a chance to work with different populations. Those are decisions you get to make. I mean, I don't know really what the question was in that other than I totally support what you're doing. If that's what you're feeling, you know, if you feel it, go for it. You're not making a mistake. Like, Oh my gosh, the amount of mental health. Like, there's gonna be jobs. Well, I don't know. Right? We're talking about they wanna replace us, but there's gonna be need. Let's phrase it that way. There's gonna be need. So the next question that came up was from another anonymous attendee that wrote, how will the profession of therapy change with the rise of AI? Yeah. I mean, I would just be speculating.

1:14:37I think maybe you should invite a lawyer or invite an insurance person to give these to give the really depressing news of, you know, I I can I can imagine Kaiser or whoever saying, like, okay? You get 10 sessions with a chatbot and two real sessions or some combo of that, and it's just gonna be stuff they can check off and say and they'll probably fund research so that they could say, oh, but we offered the gold standard. That's what they defend in court. All you have to defend is, is this what your peers would have done? It's just nonsense. Like, there's so little. And they come up with all this measurement and it always sounds good, but like, oh, okay, make the goals measurable. But it ends up now we have to work really hard to try to write some sentence in our documentation that looks like he will go from smoking 10 cigarettes to eight cigarettes in three day.

1:15:41Like, what is this nonsense? Like, navigate the nonsense. That's, it's gonna affect they're definitely the the bean counters that really want AI to take over and to meet this incredible need, but it's gonna I think it needs to be broken up. These monopolies on health care, I think I think something radical has to happen so that people can actually get services they need without I don't know. I don't know where the future I don't know how we're gonna pay for it all. I I again, there could I don't know. Yeah. I'm sorry. I don't have that as well thought out. So another question that came up, doctor Alessandri, is we were created for relationships. Young people only know AI relationships slash counseling, etcetera.

1:16:43Will they know what they are missing? I think deep down, I suspect. I think there's a lot of fear. I used to hang out on an app called Vent, and there was a lot of cries for help on there. And I didn't say I was a therapist. I just vented my own stuff, but I often gave advice. And there was just a lot of there are a lot of cries for help, but there's also, like, a lot of conditions. Like, basically, a lot of people saying, give me what I want. And so there's a lot of insistence that if I think my car is gonna run better on milk, I'm gonna put milk in the tank. And they're just wrong. But who am I? You know, like, it's their life. That's a choice they get to make. I think it's stupid. And hopefully I'll see you on the rebound.

1:17:37But on some level, we have to accept that not everybody wants like, if the planet's gonna blow up and there's some sort of Noah's Ark version of a spaceship, not everyone's gonna get on it. And that's the choice they get to make. But I think deep down they know and they want it and they crave it. They crave the real deal. But again, there's just a lot of trauma. There's often horrific stuff in their family of origin, a lot of despair. And so we do have to nudge people towards a new hope that you're at rock bottom. There's nowhere lower to go, so let's get moving in a positive direction. And I think I found that at the prison where people thought they were either hopeless. I mean, definitely with suicide watch.

1:18:29I mean, definitely there were some real ones, and you had to find reasons why the game is not over yet. So the next question is by Matt. Do you think there is a systematic motivation for perpetual therapy versus actual healing? Yeah. So there's a lot of people using a therapist to for friendship, And those therapists maybe don't always push back enough, you know, to get off the meter, get out of the cab, like stop paying for this, start joining some support groups, start joining some activities. But, yeah, I mean, there are there is abuse of therapy of people that just wanna have someone to talk to all the time who's not gonna judge and not gonna do what a real friend would do. So I think we should our goal should be to not be needed.

1:19:33Our goal should be to help that person achieve individuation, ability to be in relationships. Like, we should be pushing them away in a in a good sense, helping them think in terms of change and progress and getting back an hour of their week. When I was at one place, I remember they wanted us to keep it thirty minute sessions and 12 sessions. Like, okay. So by session four or five, start saying, you know, why don't we skip next week? Why don't we do two weeks? And then why don't we do four weeks? Like, some ways to start practicing what that's gonna feel like. And then and I don't know if my employer knew I was doing it, but so I got to stretch them out to eight months, but not a weekly session.

1:20:32I'm not sure if I missed, some questions. If I did, feel free to add them in the chat, everyone. I do believe I missed Patricia's question. How can AI be used therapeutically in positive ways? Yeah. That's one where I tried to answer before where it's like, I don't know yet. But that's like saying bibliotherapy. Like, how how can I use books in my therapy? Like, yeah. It's great to give people books to read or recommend books. But then the human cleverness is to say, I may not give them a book about anxiety. I might give them a book about I'm really into biographies right now, but I'm blanking. Like a really good biography. Because learning about someone that had setbacks and overcame them could be helpful.

1:21:25So I don't know how to use it yet. It's just a a a resource. It's a tool, though. It's not a replacement for what we should be doing as therapists or people in any kind of supporting role or teachers or so many other things. It's just a resource. I mean, that's a tricky question that's gonna need more thought. I'm not burning to use it, though. I'm not like, okay, because I'm coming up with my own structured stuff. I want some structure. There are times when I think therapists make a mistake or people make the mistake. There are some that just wanna tell their story over and over again for no therapeutic purpose. It's not for exposure. It's not to habituate. And so then you need to get at that.

1:22:17Like, why? What is really going on here? I don't know. For me, I'm an old guy. So for me, AI is just a way to summarize information that I don't have time to access. It's just a shortcut that way. Yeah. I don't have much more on that. Any other thoughts or questions? I appreciate the kind words people were sharing. Seemed like some people got something out of this. I'm happy. I hope people reach out, email me. But maybe yeah. I did yeah. It's two minutes. I wanted to end five my time, so maybe this is a good place to wrap up. Thank you for joining us, sister Catherine, Anna. Thank you, everyone still on the call. We really appreciate you joining us this evening. I did add the link to our next presentation, which will take place May 7 at 6PM eastern.

1:23:40I will add it again in the chat. I will also, share the presentation doctor Alessandri put together. As he mentioned in this webinar that I could go ahead and share it with everyone. He also shared his contact information in the chat box. We really appreciate your time, your questions, your interest on this topic. You're all so welcome. Like, you guys are being very positive. I really that because I sometimes I just think I'm babbling. I try to organize it, but it was it was tricky. But I hope I helped share concerns and resonate. It looks like it's resonating. I wish I could do a podcast. Again, it's an organization thing. I'm just like, I wanna do one called contemplating evil, or it would either be called contemplating evil or evil incorporated.

1:24:47Because in prison, I was like, okay, if someone doesn't believe there's a devil, you just spend a week here and you'll know there's a devil. Because in science, flipping a coin should be fiftyfifty. When 95% of things are going wrong, it's like somebody's doing something. It was just crazy. And I just find, like, oh, but what I laugh is that God incorporates evil in everything, and Lucifer just gets more and more pissed off. And God's not doing to piss her off. He's just like, oh, I could use that. And so he adds it. Like, oh, we could use oh, yeah. That fits. It's like a like Lucifer is just like this annoying child that thinks is very delusional. And the father actually is interested in the child and keeps using what she gives him.

1:25:37And she gets frustrated and thinks he's doing it to mock her, but it's like, oh, we could use that. Anyway, it's funny stuff. If you have idea if you wanna yeah. Oh, I don't no. I have not seen that show. I don't even know what it is. Other podcasts. I've actually started reaching out because I wanna promote my book, and I don't know how to get book reviews and all that. But I don't even know how to get on podcasts. I'm I'm I'm really bad at self promotion. I used to work in marketing, but it was copyright. I just like words. I love plays on words. And, if you know how to get on podcasts, send me some advice. I'll keep asking AI, but I don't think it's been that helpful. If you go to jamesprochester.com, that's it has all sorts of links.

1:26:34If you're okay with Amazon, it's got Amazon. If you hate Amazon, it's got something called Lulu. I used a, a pseudonym because the story on the book is it was originally written by a friend. It was a script a friend wrote twenty five years ago. We're both trying to make it in Hollywood. Never went anywhere. Either the concept was hilarious. I opened it again in '23. I said, can I rewrite this? Because it it was very thin. I said, can I rewrite this? And I started rewriting it, and then I realized Hollywood's not gonna make they're gonna change everything. So I was like, let me preserve it as a book. So it took two years to make the book. This is the other cover. There's a yellow large print and then a more Hollywood cover.

1:27:15And it's like James Bond. He's 84, but I can't say that. But, like, some comeuppances and the me too, you know, all that womanize. It's just I think it's a fun ride and a lot of commentary on modern craziness. Juanita, I don't know what the rest of the population is. I can, I can honor that and say a prayer at the end, or maybe you're already gone? But let's see. I guess if people are not interested in prayer, they can they can we can say goodbye now. Okay. So let's for Christians can bear with this, but for Catholics, in the name of the father, son, holy spirit, amen. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Holy Spirit, for any way you might have touched people's minds and hearts with this presentation.

1:28:18Father, we ask you to help us follow your lead on where you're leading us in our lives. Help us to be quick learners. Help us not to resist. Help us to really trust and know that even when you lead us through pain, it's for a good purpose. We grow from it. Help us to have that confidence that if you do play a game, we play along and not get mad, that we really play along to your tune, which is always leading to a good place, but you don't you don't bombard us with evidence. You prefer that we trust, and then you like to show what you've been hiding and waiting for us with. And we ask our lady to intercede for us, to help us when we might be having a hard time going to God directly or just other ways to support us in our journey towards our ultimate end, and to be in that relationship, to take it seriously, but to also know what we need to improve in to serve our fellow people so that things are in the right sphere when I need more knowledge to seek more knowledge, when I need more prayer to seek more prayer.

1:29:39And, again, I think the simplest prayer is the one we were given, so I'll end with that. Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen. In the name of the father and holy spirit. Amen. Thank you all for joining, and I hope to hear from some of you on email. I am gonna bounce out now. Thank you, everyone. That concludes our presentation. We really appreciate you joining us this evening, and we hope that you enjoyed the talk, the conversation, the presentation, and look out for upcoming four presentations left to bring awareness, humans over algorithms.

1:30:45Thank you again. Have a lovely evening. Thank you, Natalia. Thank you, doctor Alessandri. Alrighty. Bye.