 You come from a profoundly religious background, don't you? I do is there a connection between what eventually happened with you? at a level of mental health and that religious background and then Just to throw a monkey wrench on top of the monkey wrench Okay, I'm gonna try to explain it simply what is actually very complex I was gonna throw my second wrench first. Oh, there's two rings. There are two wrenches ready Okay, the first is I want to know the connection between your religious background and where you ended up mentally, right? The second is I kind of want to tease something that needs to come up in the conversation There's a lot of literature these days about the so-called De-churching of America the increased Secularization of America the turning away from faith just generally across the board I as a Jew frankly find the term de-churching a little chauvinistic, but okay, we'll let it be it's like hello There are non-christians out there, but okay So on the one hand, I'm inviting you to comment on the religious background that you come from and how it played into it On the other hand, I'm inviting either of you to comment on Whether in a religious perspective or in the community Affiliation that we get from churches. There is in fact something that would contribute Sense of community to people's mental health. Yeah so my journey is a very personal and individual journey I Was four years old when my parents got visited by a Christian religion and they accepted that religion and I grew up in that religion So I didn't know any better But what I found out later many years later of suffering and turmoil is that I'm Even though I am a person of faith I do believe in God and I move back to this day to this day, but I'm not a religious person I don't sit well with rules and structures. Mm-hmm. That's not me Mm-hmm, and that was part of my distress Not knowing that this was me the proverbial trying to fit the square page of the round Absolutely, that was my my issue But I didn't know that so instead of because of my strong faith I couldn't really Look into myself and say hey, maybe you just don't belong in this religion. So what the mind does It tricks you and it pushes you into anxiety It pushes you into a severe depression and it helps you collapse. So you start Cocooning That was my experience that was your experience You know what a new understanding of a word has just come to me and I want to check it out with both of you correct me if I'm wrong, but you kind of had a Bipolar existence didn't you yeah, I did you had The role you were supposed to play the family and absolutely you were supposed to fit into and over here Is the real human being Pedro Diaz? Later known as Peter Diaz okay, but Am I right that there was absolutely my polarity to your absolutely and this was my issue I had tipped all the boxes and I was good at it. I wasn't I was an elder in the congregation You know I was good and yet I was not happy because I wasn't living my real life as such and Of course as part of my journey. I thought but this is it religion is done So does that mean I don't believe in God and for a few years I was like You know Well, God doesn't like me because I've let my religion obviously he can't like me But but I still believe in him. I still feel a connection. I still feel his guiding hand so to the other Do the other stuff that we were talking about I? Believe that religion has got a very important role in society Religion can hold society together and I think part of the problems that we can we see now Is that religion has taken a third a? Third step of importance for people sometimes, you know It's funny that you say third step because there is the idea of thesis Antithesis and synthesis and in a way what you did was Integrated synthesize exactly you integrated. I have a question for you Oh, yeah, but that's a difficult journey to go through and there's a lot of turmoil and when we're talking about mental health We often talk about these metaphors of people going into the cave or into the forest or into the hole and they need to kind of Figure out how they're going to synthesize that So they can come out and recover and there are as we said earlier So many stories of people who have come through that process and when they've studied them because Academics like to study everything There's two themes that the academic and you never They they find these two things that keep coming out in people's stories Concepts of spirituality the other one is sexuality that none of the professionals ever want to talk about because it's kind of taboo And we don't want to go there We just want to focus on that medical kind of approach, but it's so important for so many people It has to be a kind of conversation on the table to be had Have you have you said I just want to make a side note People can experience the symptoms of mental health distress Through physical things that are happening in their body For example, you can experience the symptoms of schizophrenia if you get given a Medication and then all of a sudden you start hallucinating. That's basically schizophrenia For you can experience depression with a number of medications that people receive regularly some of them don't respond well to it But this is not an illness. It's just a response to something Women can women and men we can be hormonal and that can also produce distress We've got postpartum depression as well and prepartum this depression in effect But that is completely different to the To the other aspect that we're talking about the existential Crisis that for some reason we used to talk about it and it was strong before the 80s and Now we don't tend to talk about it and that's why so many people have got problems believing that you can actually recover because they don't understand the mental health is at core An existential crisis that needs to be resolved Hi, I'm Emmy Golding director of psychology for the Workplace Mental Health Institute We hope you liked the video if you did make sure to give it a thumbs up We have more and more videos being released each week So when you subscribe you'll get a notification letting you know when a new one's just been published so make sure to hit that subscribe button and Don't miss out on this vital information for yourself your colleagues and your loved ones