 Which is why I like to discuss and start any topic on mental health actually directly from the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ. The reason I like to start there is because once we understand how integral this is from our own tradition, it's a lot harder to say it's not us. Often I would hear growing up and like many of you likely, people would say those mental health issues are not part of our Muslim community. Those are not our problems. Those are other people's problems, right? And we would talk about how the treatments, which I'm going to discuss today as well, people would say no, no, no, no, no, we don't do that. We have what's better. We have the Quran and the Sunnah. We for sure have the Quran and the Sunnah, but I'm going to illustrate how from within the Quran and the Sunnah, we get clear understandings of how it is we treat all types of illnesses mental health included. Does that make sense? So we start our conversation today with a Sahabi. His name is Abu Umamah and the story goes as this. The Prophet ﷺ walked in to the Masjid one day and it was in between prayer times and he found Abu Umamah sitting in the Masjid, but it wasn't a prayer time so it was kind of strange. So he says and he asks Abu Umamah, what are you doing here in between prayer times? And Abu Umamah says, I am here because of worries that afflict me and because of my debts. O Messenger of Allah, why is he sitting there? His worries, his what? His anxieties and his debt. Now we'll pause because I'm going to tell you what the Prophet said. It's a dialogue back and forth. The Prophet says something. He says something in return. We'll get there in just a moment, but listen to what happens here. Let's pause for a moment. What does the Prophet ﷺ do when a Sahabi tells him, I'm overwhelmed with my worries? Now he doesn't say to him, there's no space for that for a believer. He doesn't say to him, if you are a strong Muslim and believer, you shouldn't have worries. No, none of that. None of that is in the hadith. What is in the hadith? Well, the Prophet ﷺ responds to Abu Umamah and he says, should I not teach you a few words that if you say them, Allah will remove from you your worries and will pay your debts? And it's a hadith, it's actually a dua, that all of us know because it's part of the adhqaad, it's part of the adhqaad or adhikr that we say in the morning and evening. Why? Learning from the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ that he taught Abu Umamah and that he himself, the Prophet of God himself would make daily dua. As soon as I say this dua, you'll all know it, but we may not have connected the back story of how this dua came about. And how did it come about by Abu Umamah saying that he was so anxious? Now, I want to just say this, when the Prophet responds in this way, what does he do? Number one, he acknowledges what Abu Umamah just said to him. He doesn't deny it, he acknowledges it, I'm not sure that was loud. Secondly, what does he do? He validates it by saying, let me give you some tools, what is he doing? He's validating, this is a real human emotion. This is a real struggle. And then when he teaches him, he says, let me teach you. And he teaches him, our Prophet ﷺ is a teacher. When he teaches him these tools, what is he doing? He's giving him behavioral change, action, that he can implement and actually get better. And so what is this dua? You know what inshallah, how does it start? Allahumma. إني أعود بك من الهم والحزن والعاجز والكسل والجبني والبخلي والمضالع الدين والغلبة الرجال. I'll translate. Oh, Allah, I seek refuge in You from anxiety and sorrow or grief. From helplessness and laziness, from miserliness and cowardice, from being heavily in debt and from being overcome by others. SubhanAllah. You know this and look how it starts. The very first thing in the dua is. اللهم إني أعود بك من الهم from anxiety, from worries. It's a beautiful thing when your Prophet ﷺ validates, acknowledges and gives you tools to help this. He doesn't say, I have no bad weak iman, none of this ﷺ. In fact, this kind of thing repeats itself over and over and over again in the seerah. Where something comes up, some sort of human emotion comes up. It could be fear, it could be grief, it could be anxiety, it could be trauma, something comes up. And the Prophet ﷺ validates it, makes space for it and gives us tools to help us through it. This is our deen. This is why I love this deen. But sometimes we don't fully understand it all the way. And so that's part of our discovery together, insha'Allah. So it's a dua that we read daily. And if somebody were to say, like this is part of the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ, his own sunnah. And if we were to say, people that have mental health issues, like anxiety or others, are somehow deficient or somehow they're weak in their iman or their Islam, or they're not relying on Allah enough or any of these things that many of us have heard of these things. I've certainly heard these things, right? Then how does that explain how the Prophet himself, ﷺ, himself the most perfect of all humans? Khayri khalqillah. How is he then and why should he make a dua against anxiety and grief? Do you see what I'm saying? So we're not below this, right? Nor are our children or our loved ones. And so let's continue, insha'Allah, because now that we have these tools and he actually taught Abu Umamma to recite this dua twice a day, right? Recite it twice a day and it'll help. And how does Abu Umamma respond? How does the story conclude? Abu Umamma later says, I did this, right? I did this and Allah took away my worries and he fulfilled my debts, insha'Allah. So there was a concluding part of the story, subhanAllah. And so now as we think about, you know, how do you get a response like this? Somebody could say, well, isn't that just a dhikr? Isn't just just a dua? No, it's more than just a dua. It's actually, it's action because also in the narrations of hadith, we get another dua, another, excuse me, hadith of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam in which he's asked by the Sahaba, O Rasulullah, should we seek out treatments? Should we seek out treatment? So for anybody who's doubting, okay, maybe this is just a dhikr in Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and that's enough, the answer isn't not enough. Why? Because we have this hadith that says, O Rasulullah, shall we seek out treatment? And he says, Oh, there's two narrations. Oh, I'll translate. The Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was asked by the Sahaba, he was asked, shall we seek out treatments? Like as in to say, is it enough to just say dua? Is it enough to just do dhikr of Allah? Is it enough to just pray? And he responds and he says, seek out treatments, O servants of God. Because Allah does not send down a disease or an illness, unless he sends with it a treatment or a cure. And we see this for those of you who are in the medical field, you know that there are some illnesses and diseases that have cures. They never come back again. And there are others that have what treatments? Because it's a chronic condition and you have a treatment for it, but it's not going to necessarily completely be eradicated and go away. Subhanallah. This is our tradition. And so when I see this, I see it's very practical. It's very empowering. It tells anybody who's doubtful about actually getting the help they need or maybe it's their loved ones, most often it's themselves having a hard time getting that help, right? That you have a tradition of this Dean, if we call ourselves Muslims and we follow the Sunnah, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. And then here is his Sunnah, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. And for anyone who's thinking, kind of listening to this and thinking, OK, fine, we understand this is what's in the Sunnah. Let me take you back. Look, can we all collectively for a moment? This is not very fun exercise, but let's just all collectively for a moment go back to 2020. When the pandemic broke out, what were you experiencing? A lot of anxiety. A lot of uncertainty. A lot of dread. Just not a sense of clarity about what's happening until now. Maybe it's a little better, but there's still you can put yourself back in those days and remember the sense of uncertainty. And uncertainty is one of the main functions of anxiety. We're going to talk about what are the symptoms of anxiety in just a moment. But let's just talk about something we all have experienced. We have all gone through the pandemic. And when you think about that, what are the questions that ran through your head? How long is this going to be? When is it going to end? Will I get sick? If I did get sick, will I die? We all know people, subhanallah, that have passed away. Allah, alhamdulillah. And we know people who've gotten really sick. And we know people who've lost their wealth, with people who lost their jobs, people who had a hard time paying their rent. I mean, we have all these stories within our communities. And then we have the stories of living in close quarters with family members or loved ones or maybe alone, depending. Right. And we have the whole things of suddenly becoming homeschoolers, which learning Zoom and figuring that whole story out. And then many of us have missed major milestones. You remember in that period of time how many graduations were missed, how many weddings were missed, how many online Zoom baby showers that you attend. I certainly attended several, all right. It changed our life. And there was a lot of questions around, is this ever going to get better? Will we ever resume back to baseline? In the first year, let me give you some stats. In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, it said that anxiety, a global prevalence of anxiety, was raised by 25% globally. And if you look, and this is by the WHO, and when you look by January of 2021, almost a year into the pandemic, 41% of adults reported anxiety or depression. That's nearly half. So if we take this room about down the middle, I know that this is the reality of all of us here. Most of us here, because if it's not you, it was your child. And if it's not your child, it was your loved one. If it's not your loved one, it was your elder. The reality is, so many of us have experienced this. And now they say that the stats have actually stabilized, but you know where they stabilized to? It went from 41% to 32.8. That's still one in three adults have anxiety in this current today, in this current climate. And then you look at the youth. So let's take ages 18 to 29. The rates there of anxiety and depression six times higher than it was in 2019, just the year before, six times higher. So when they say the youth were hit the hardest, they really were, right? Because there was so much that happens. And of course, in such a formative age as well, it's difficult. So the reality is on one level or another, we've all experienced this anxiety. So I hope we've passed that. And now let's move from a pandemic to kind of a regular everyday life. Maybe it's helpful if I define anxiety for a moment because it maybe means something different for everybody. I think we all have a sense of what it means, but the formal definition, kind of a simplified version of the definition is that basically it's an intense feeling of discomfort. An intense feeling of discomfort that drives people, right? To fear something, to be upset by something. And often the reaction to anxiety is also another A word. It's avoidance. We tend to wanna avoid the things that causes discomfort, right? The only problem is in human nature, what happens is as every time when anxiety goes up, so you avoid the thing that's causing you anxiety, this person causes you anxiety, going to this place causes you anxiety, so one is up, so you avoid it. Every time you avoid it, you get temporary relief. So the brain goes, okay, that's good. So the next time that person or that thing happens again, what happens, the brain says, oh, we should avoid it again. The only problem is when the first spike goes up, it only gets worse. So it spikes higher next time. So you avoid it and then higher next time and then higher next time. And the problem is it doesn't go away without strong help. Now I know someone here is going to say, don't we all have anxiety to some level? Yes, all humans have some level of anxiety. Not everybody has what we call clinical anxiety. How do we know? Here's one of the easiest ways I figured this out from the literature. They say that the average human being spends about a day, an hour of their day, one hour of their day total, feeling anxious. The average person, not a clinical anxiety, don't need to go see a doctor for this. But think about it, think about it with me. Everyone's a little bit differently, but for me I would think about, okay, maybe five minutes on anxious about, okay, what am I gonna wear today? What am I gonna eat today? Maybe 10 minutes about, you know, I'm in the car, I'm gonna be late, I'm gonna be late. That's a form of anxiety, right? Hurry up, hurry up. Or today's hot, did I give my kid a water bottle? There's a certain few minutes of anxiety. If you break it up through the day, everybody has a certain amount of anxiety. And everyone's a little bit differently. Five minutes for, oh my God, we're out of milk. Everybody has some level of anxiety every single day. However, a person that has clinical anxiety, it says they spend instead of an hour a day, five hours a day feeling anxious. So when they start to think, if the thought process starts with something, maybe it's as simple as we don't have milk right now, right? It kind of goes into a long worry that can last 45 minutes, an hour. Maybe they replay a conversation they had with a friend or a loved one and they just sit there and ruminate and ruminate over it. And that form of anxiety isn't easily just what? Brushed away. That is what? What is it doing? It's actually getting in your way. And that's how you know there's a difference. And so this is how we start to figure out, well, what are the signs? What are the symptoms? And so I know someone's gonna say, can't you just give us an easy list? Dr. Anil, okay, here's 10 things, but if you do them, you won't feel anxious. It's not quite that easy. And the reason it's not that easy is because there's different kinds of anxiety. The classic textbooks today will tell you there are five types of anxiety and I won't get too medical or too boring, hopefully, but at least it'll be some understanding of what anxiety means. Some say six categories. What are the five to six categories? Number one, you have generalized anxiety. Generalized anxiety, what do they mean by this? When I talk to my patients where I'm trying to figure out, do they have this? I'll ask them a question like this. I'll say, are there many different things that you worry about in your life? They'll say, what do you mean? I say, okay, think about buckets. Let's put a bunch of buckets together. A bucket for your family, one for your health, one for your wealth, one for your kids, one about your parents, one about your house, and we just make all these buckets. I say, do you have worries that enter into every one of these buckets? I say, yeah. I worry about the kids and I worry about my health and I worry about the money and I worry about my family. There's worries in every bucket. This is what we call generalized anxiety disorder if it starts to interfere with their daily life. Cause all of us can have a little bit of anxiety about all of the buckets, sure. But when it starts to interfere with your daily life where you're not getting things done, you're sitting there and ruminating about it or you're unable to do certain things effectively because you're anxious about these things all the time. And there are ways. In fact, there are actual measures that you can take if you're thinking maybe this is like me. There's standardized, we call standardized measures. The measure is like the GAD7, seven questions. But if you answer them, you're able to assess where you are in anxiety. Usually doctors give these out. Some of them are called self-assessment tools like the GAD7. You can take it yourself. You can look it up online, it's right there. And you're able to figure out, do I fall in this category? Do I need extra help for this? Or does my child or if I loved one? Another form of anxiety is panic disorder. And you'll see this. If you've ever seen somebody when your loved one or extended family has panic disorder, they get very anxious, like in intense anxiety, panicky about whatever it may be. And it doesn't have to be something that makes you panicky. And it doesn't have to make sense. Now, people don't like when I use the word rational, but that's the word that's used in the textbooks. It doesn't have to be a rational thing either. They can get very, very panicky about something. And sometimes it comes out of the blue when they feel a sense of dread, and they can't actually move forward. But there's some really excellent treatments, and I'm gonna come to treatments in a minute, but there's some excellent treatments for all the things that I'm listing here. But first let's just get through the five categories. Then there's also something called social anxiety. What is social anxiety? It's like it sounds, having a hard time in social settings with people or groups of people. It's really hard for them to interact with people. Kids have this and it's not about being shy. It's not about being shy. It's actually about having a real sense of dread of being able to speak in a public setting to a group of people, to their fears of making friends in a social setting. And some people, adults and children both have this. There's another category called phobias. And phobias, this is truly where we use the word irrational, fears. They are fears about something. How many people don't like spiders? Come on, I'm not gonna diagnose you, don't worry. Shuffle, all right, heights, heights, elevators, yeah. People have, and then some people have very irrational fears like birds or dogs or who knows. Airplanes, thunderstorms, there could be all kinds of things. Okay, not for the Nagyasa reasons, okay guys, but rather for you're really scared of a dog, truly. Mashallah. Interestingly enough, most spiders don't bite. And interestingly enough, most spiders, almost all, are not deadly in any way. But there are people when they see a spider, they will scream until that spider is out of the way. True, this is called a phobia. And if it doesn't interfere in your daily life, you don't have to go see a doctor for it. But there are some people where the fear is so intense, it truly does get in the way. Like the fear of public spaces, or the fear of crowds, or the fear of heights, it may be getting on an elevator and you will live on a high rise. Like it's really hard, right? And there are things that you, I had a patient, I worked with her, and she's, all her family lived overseas. I don't know how she got on the first airplane here, but for all the years she's lived here, she's never been able to go back and visit her family. Like serious, serious fears of airplanes. And I'm not gonna tell you, cause I don't want to get this in people's mind. When she would get on an airplane, I mean, it's, she would say, you know, her husband would sleep and her kids would, whatever. And she would sit there not watching the TV screen or reading a book. She literally sit there gripping her moussach just reciting the whole way. And I'm talking like 13 hours. I'm like, people would say, oh, Alhamdulillah, you finished the khutim. She's like five. And like the whole time. And you think, oh, that's nice. No, it's not. She is, it's dread. Yeah, hold on. It's dread, dread. And so we did a form of one of the treatments I'll tell you about it is something called exposure therapy. And it's a gradual systemic exposure therapy. And it's not fun, but it's highly effective. And when she did this, it's very, we started with very small things. Cause she doesn't want to think about airplanes, right? She doesn't want to see an airplane. Every time she sees an airplane, she kind of has like one of those trigger reactions, right? And so slowly, but surely, slowly, but surely, you know? Until we finally got her to go sit. She would park her car. I had her part of one of the exercises to park her car at the airport and just watch the planes take off and landing. And so on and so forth. I mean, I won't bore you with all the details, but I mean to say it's a gradual systemic. That's a vertical low. And she got on that plane that summer. This is a few years back. She was like, I actually had to watch the movie. She was just like so amazed cause she didn't believe this thing was gonna work. She was like, I was just talking to you gonna help me with this terrible thing. I said, just wait, just wait. There are some serious exercises that go with this, but it's highly effective, so panel. No medications in this particular case, but there are some cases that require the medications. So what I say, there's no easy answer why because there's different categories. And each one has their own types of treatments. So I promise to finish the list. So let's finish the list. In also under anxiety disorders, there's another one that's very important that's called post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. And this is of course somebody who experiences a trauma. The trauma could be a terrible thing like war or it could be a car accident or it could be some other form of trauma or difficulty a person went through. And afterwards they are triggered by whatever it is that caused the trauma in the first place. Sound, hearing it again, seeing it again, had the smelling it again, anything that can maybe bring those triggers back to the surface. And there are ways to actually desensitize those triggers and to allow the person to live a very fruitful, wonderful life. But if a person with PTSD, true clinical PTSD does not get treated for it, it's a very limiting life. Part of our training and residency was to work at the VA, the Veterans Administration, where we had all of these men who came back from war and women, and it was hard because the majority of them head for the hills. They go live far, far, far, far away from people isolated completely. They don't want to interact or can't interact with society again when they have very intense because everything is triggering them. But there are treatments for this and highly, highly effective treatments. So why do I say all of this? And the one that I didn't say is actually the sixth number in the category, it's number six. Some people say it's separate, this is the new DSM or in previously, number six was OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. And this condition has a high level of anxiety as well. But it's very specific. It's obsessions and compulsions. So when a person kind of obsesses over something and then has actions in which they actually repetitively do something over and over again, all in what, like a ritual. They're trying to move away the very anxiety that's caused by the obsession that they have. And this is something honestly is very difficult, but the treatment here too is very effective. So what are all these treatments that I'm referring to? Well, first and foremost, if I were to tell you what is the treatment as a psychiatrist, the gold standard for all of these conditions, it depends on the severity. It's usually a scale or a spectrum. Everything from mild to moderate to extreme to severe. And certainly anything from the moderate onwards usually requires medication and therapy. But something that's more on the mild side could really suffice with just the therapy. And I'll tell you some of these, but then I'm gonna come back to the Islamic point of view. Why? Because I know that not everyone here is gonna be convinced with the medical, biological discussions on this, even though hopefully they're very straightforward, but I'll integrate the two together because I believe that integrating the two together for a person of faith, for a believer, a movement, is actually going to be imperative and important. So let me tell you something about all the treatments I'm gonna tell you. All of them have one thing in common. They all say that worrying, the worrying part of anxiety is not effective. It is not an effective coping mechanism. What do we do when we worry? It's a kind of coping mechanism, but it's not effective. And like we said, it kind of spikes higher and higher every single time. So what is effective instead? I'll just list out a number of things that are used in these therapies. Things like self-monitoring your external thoughts. Okay, hold on. Somebody tell me, what is self-monitoring from the Islamic perspective? Someone said it. Murakaba, good. Self-monitoring, okay, next. Working on relaxation techniques. What is an equivalent of this potentially from our Islamic perspective? Yes, and think it, good, absolutely. These are all ways, yes, deep breathing is one of the ways that you actually work on your kind of relaxation techniques. And there's many of them, breathing being one of them, which actually in some forms of thicket is also done. I'm trying to combine pre and bring it closer for if they're like, oh, we already do some of this. Oh, some of this is already in our tradition. Yes, actually it is. What else? Cognitive restructuring. Taking a concept, when they say the example of a glass half empty or half full. And some people look at it half empty and some people look at it half full. But when you cognitively restructure the way you think, you can take a very negative or pessimistic way of looking at something and change it. And the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, was excellent at this. Of course he was excellent. But I mean to say, it was so beautiful the way he did this. Some of the Ahadith that I look at as a Subhanallah, this is literally cognitive restructuring. Like for example, there's a Hadith in which he says when a person experiences a difficulty, somebody would say if they experience a difficulty, this is terrible. Instead what is the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam says? When a person experiences a difficulty, this is Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala blessing him. It's amazing. Like when you think about it, whoa, it's not a bad thing. It's actually a good thing. It's Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala actually what? Bringing us closer to him. Now somebody who doesn't come from kind of a place of iman and perspective, this perspective is a hard one to understand. I've certainly tried to explain it to my non-Muslim colleagues and they're like, what? I'm like, hold on, hold on. You have in the field cognitive restructuring, right? Like yeah. Don't you help patients take them from a negative thought or an internal what they call negative core beliefs and help them reshape it into something that is actually positive, yeah? That's what the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam is doing, right? It's beautiful when you think about how it is that this Dean has so many of these aspects, if not all of them in it. What else? Keeping a diary, what they call a worry diary or a worry log. Why? Because sometimes when somebody has anxiety, it's just filled, their head is like filled with all these thoughts and until they put them on paper, they don't even realize what they are or how many they are or what's causing them, what triggers them, what hurts them, what situations causes this more or less. And this is very useful when you put these out here. Focusing on the present moment. What is this in our Dean? We're told, you said prayer, sorry? So let's sit down. Your prayer, is this? Oh, prayer, your prayer, I know it's the last one and you said prayer as well, right? As in the focus, the focus in the here and now. Focusing on this prayer, like you said, as though it's your last, right? Doing the good deed, the Hadith talks about if you are going to plant a sapling and Yom al-Qiyamah, right? The end of times happens. What should you do? You still plant it, even though you know it's not gonna survive. So in the present moment, you're in the present, doing what you need to do in the present. These are all parts of our tradition as well. Subhanallah. When you start to connect these things, now I get to tell you the fancy names for all of this. But every time I read these things, I say that's a Hadith, that's an ayah, that's from the Seerah, right? Subhanallah, if we're able to connect the things together. But here we have these terms called avoidance model of worry, AMW, that's one of the forms of training anxiety, intolerance uncertainty model, I-U-M, metacognitive model, MCM, not the masjid, emotional dysregulation model, EDM, right? Acceptance-based model, ABM, and so on and so on. And so you say, okay, I will find out, that's why I didn't start with this. This is why I didn't say to you, ABM, ABM. It's really what, right? But by telling you what they do in these models and how they're connected to our tradition, now it's a lot closer to home. Does that make sense? Yeah? So let's talk about what this is, this thing that I just said about bringing these things together. This is the field that we call Islamic psychology. And it's an up-and-coming field, it's actually really a revival of a field that's always been part of our tradition, Subhanallah. And the reason I'm very excited to share with you is because even in, let's take the example, let me give you a case scenario. Let's take the example of a person who has anxiety from public speaking. This sitting up here like this would be very, very difficult, right? Every time they try to speak in a public setting, they try to give a talk or a speech or an announcement, they just get tongue-tied or they just freeze. They can't, they just, they can't. It's very difficult. So what is the therapy? If you look at the Western Psychology textbooks, they'll say to you, give them scripted or unscripted cognitive activities. So what they mean by that is you're going to actually give them a script in which they're going to practice, right? And desensitize that anxiety so that finally when they get up here, they're able to speak without the trouble, all right? Now for me, when I hear this scripted therapy, I think about the vikr. The vikr to me is a certain script. If you take one of the of God that are, for example, from the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam or directly from the Quran, it's scripted. You repeat something over and over and over again. Now I prefer to do it scripted rather than someone say, I'll give you an example. In the books, they'll say, tell the person to close their eyes and to imagine themself on a tiny boat in a gentle stream, right? They're floating down the stream. The leaves are falling. They're going through. They don't know how they're going to get to the other SI. And so, and there's a whole script. There's a whole script to this whole thing. And at the other end, you're calm, you're relaxed. You worked through your worries and it's effective. Personally, I prefer that if the script was an Islamic script. Right, let's do the same thing, but use an Islamic script. How? Let's take the person who had the public speaking anxiety and I would give them the verses directly from Surah Taha. What verses am I referring to? Yes, Allah know what Ali, exactly. Absolutely. I would say, close your eyes and let's do this together. Right? Right, okay, hold on. Let's take the, because there's a whole script here, but let's break this down little by little. What is, what is, here is, let's first start with that first verse. Here is Sayyid al-Musa. He's about, he's told by Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala, go to Fir'aun, the tyrant of the land and he's anxious. Yeah, I just said anxious. Why do I know that? Because the du'at that's being said is very specific. What is that first, someone translate that first line? Rabbi Shrahali Sadri. Yes, yes, he says, oh Allah, right? Rabbi, right? Like you said, open my chest or kind of another way we can say it about, you know, relieve me from this constriction. Think about it. Rabbi Shrahali Sadri, it's the most amazing thing. For somebody that has anxiety, you know, you know that that feeling of constriction is one of the core things you feel in anxiety. And here is the du'at that's being said by Sayyid al-Musa, to what? To open that up. To relieve his constriction. Okay, Rabbi Shrahali Sadri, what? Wa yassirli amri, make easy my task. I have a difficult task ahead of me. Wa halu l-uqtatan millisani, what? And this Subhanallah is amazing. We just said about the person who has the anxiety speaking in public. Now Sayyid al-Musa, we know, according to the tafasir, he had a speech impediment, an actual impediment, right? Whether it's an impediment or not, the point is for you, whether you have an impediment or not, when you stand up, it's like an impediment. It's like a knot in your tongue. Oqtatan, literally a knot in my tongue, right? And so he says, wa halu l-uqtatan millisani, remove the constriction or the impediment or the knot from my tongue. Yafqahu qawli, that they can understand my speech, but he doesn't stop there. What's the, who knows the rest of it? Haa. Wa jaalli wa zeeran min ahli, haaruna ahi. And grant me help from my family. Who? His brother Harun. Grant me a helper. So this is very important. People say, I can do this on my own? Our Dean says, if you need help, you ask for help. And if you can't do it alone, find your Harun. Right? Does that make sense? Haaruna ahi. Then what is Harun gonna help him with? It keeps going. Ushdudi bihi azri. What does that mean? I get strength through him. He knows, this is a big task and I can't do it alone and I am anxious because that's Far'aun. So he asks for help, right? To open that constriction, to make it easy for him, to untie the knot in his tongue, to give him help from someone else that he can lean on. Literally, I mean, metaphysically lean on, right? Ushdudi bihi azri wa ashrikhu fi amri. It's beautiful that I can share with him my task, this heavy task. And what are they gonna do? What's the rest of it? What are they gonna do? Fa'inu sabbihaka kathira wa nadkuraka kathira innaka kun tabina wa sira. That we can glorify you much and remember you much because truly you are overseeing us. And what does Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala respond? It's a dialogue. What does he respond and say? Qala qad'u tida su'ulaka ya Musa. And you have been granted your request, O Musa. It's beautiful, beautiful. Anybody who's dealing with anxiety, constriction, difficulty, public speaking, social anxiety, phobias, anything that I just mentioned, these things look at the direct example. It's right in the Quran. We've read it. We all have read this surah multiple times, but we don't always necessarily make those connections. So if it was my patient, I would say, let's read surah all together. And let's do a script through this. This is what I mean by Islamic psychology. Part of this is actually going back into our own tradition, which like I mentioned, so much of what's there is actually things that you can connect to the tradition directly. And for a believer, it actually helps because you say, this feels like home. This feels like something that really helps me through to overcome this anxiety that I'm going through. And so now back to Abu Umaama for a minute and whether it's Abu Umaama, the prophet, sallallahu alayhi wasallam, giving him the dua, I seek refuge from Allah, may I seek refuge from Allah, right, al-Hazan. Or whether it's the story of Sayyidina Musa having a dialogue with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to relieve his constriction and anxiety, or whether it is the prophet, sallallahu alayhi wasallam himself using this dua himself every single time or telling us, tadaw, tadaw, ya'abad Allah tadaw, seek out help, seek out treatments, right? And so I say it, I remind us, and this is where I'm going to wrap up the conversation. I remind us that our noble predecessors when they understood Islam well, when they understood the Qur'an and the sunnah, when they understood these verses and these ahadif, you had amazing products. You did not have a community or society that shied away from mental health or shied away from anxiety or shied away from getting help or called it ayyib or bad or weak iman or any of this. Instead you ended up with a society you have people like Ibn-Hazm, right? I'm just going to give you three examples, quick examples. Ibn-Hazm is an Andalusian scholar from Muslim Spain and he was a jurist, historian, a philosopher, a theologist, a poet, I mean many things. You know our scholars, Masha'Allah, they're encyclopedic scholars. They did 101 things, Masha'Allah. And Ibn-Hazm has a very famous line about anxiety. We actually have a book coming out called Muslim Mental Health by the APA, the American Psychiatric Association and in my chapter on anxiety, we quote Ibn-Hazm because it's amazing, you know what Ibn-Hazm says? And this is in the 900s, right? He says, his book is called Al-Aqlaq al-Siyar, Morals and Behaviors. And he says, I have tried to find one goal in which everybody would agree to be excellent and worthy to be striven after. And I found only one and that is to be free from anxiety, Masha'Allah. And I read this, I said, SubhanAllah, amazing, right? And what is he talking about? Why is Ibn-Hazm say that? He says because all he says, he's a philosopher. He says all human endeavors, okay? Everything we do as humans is basically to push anxiety far away. This is his philosophy. So what does he mean? He says for example, if somebody is trying to have social activities, what are they doing? They're pushing away loneliness, the anxiety of loneliness. If they're trying to distance themselves by working hard, they're pushing away the anxiety of poverty. If they are eating, drinking, playing, you know, so on, what are they doing? They're trying to push away the anxiety of boredom. Like everything he gives you, an example of what it is, the basic stuff we do as humans is a kind of pushing away of this dispelling anxiety. And then he says, there's only one path that leads to complete dispelling of anxiety. And that is being in the service of Allah most high. Everything else is misguided and absurd. These are his words. But what he means by that is, if you take everything you're doing and you make it for Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, suddenly the anxiety starts to dissipate because you're doing, whether it's playing or getting a good job or whether it's education or whatever you're doing, even though there might be anxiety of loneliness of poverty or so on, if it's for the sake of Allah, suddenly now you have, but it's all streamlined. And it's a great, right? Masha'Allah. Okay, look at Abu Zaid Al-Balkhi, who's one of my favorites. Somebody I've published on in my papers on anxiety and phobias and OCD by Al-Balkhi in the ninth century. I won't bore you and tell you too much, but the papers are there, insha'Allah, for you to read. But I will say to you about Abu Zaid Al-Balkhi. One of the things Abu Zaid Al-Balkhi did in the ninth century is he had these classifications of mental illnesses. And the reason this was amazing and published, and when I came to write the paper, my first paper on Al-Balkhi was on OCD and Al-Balkhi in the ninth century. The quick short nutshell story in a nutshell is basically I went to the main head of OCD at Stanford, who was one of the main top, top people in the country, one of the forefathers of OCD, they call him. And his office happened to be down the hall from mine. And I went to him and I knocked on the door and I said, I found something in a text that's really old. And it talks about what I think is OCD. And he said, okay, what century is this? I said ninth. He said, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He said, I or whatever, and he's true. If you look up the textbook on OCD, it's written by him. He said, no, no, no, I've done all my, I'm a history buff. No, no, no. And he starts talking about the Greeks and the Romans and of course he skips over the Muslims, of course. And he goes straight to the 19th century. And I say, no, no, no, no, no, no. But in the middle, they were the Muslims. He said, no, no, no. I said, it's right here. He said, he said, well, how come I didn't come across it? I said, can you read Arabic? He said, no, can you? I said, yes. He said, go translate that and come back. And I said, okay. I went to my office, translated it for a little while, came back. When he saw, I took OCD specifically because it caught my attention out of all the chapters that caught my attention. This is Abu Zaid al-Balkhiyy's book called Masalih al-Abdani al-Anfus. And now there's a translation of part of the book called Sustenance of the Soul. You can look it up. It's on Amazon by our great forefather, Rahimahullah, professor Malik Badri, translated part of this book. Anyway, this is before the translation. I translated the part on OCD and I went back to this professor and I showed him. And this man, I kid you not, he started jumping, jumping. He was so excited. He said, this is amazing, this is amazing. You have to publish it today. And I said, because he was so amazed because what Abu Zaid al-Balkhiyy did in the 9th century is he figured out the classifications of OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. And I compared it to the DSM-5, which was our manual that we use in psychiatry to diagnose all mental health conditions. And he got every single diagnosis, correct, point by point in the 9th century. And you know what the history books will tell you? Your psychology 101, history of psychology, they'll tell you OCD is a new illness discovered in the 19th century. The first case was talked about maybe in the 17th century and the full diagnosis wasn't until the 19th century. I'm telling you 9th century, a millennium of a difference. So when people start saying, oh, a Muslim's mental health, they say, hold on, hold on, hold on. If anybody knows about mental health, it's the Muslims. And you know what inspired them? What inspired someone like al-Balkhiyy? What inspired him was, Ya'ibah ad-Allah, tada'u, tada'u, Allah will not send down an illness unless he sends with it a cure. And so they said, okay. They made no distinction between physical illnesses and mental illnesses. They said they're all illnesses. And so if there is a cure, there's going to be a cure for all things. And they took theory, because you could say, well, balkhiyy's theory, okay. What about Ibn Sina next, who wrote amazing work on anxiety, or at Arazi, right, who were actual physicians, who took, who had, who were actual doctors in actual hospitals treating. And there's a great story about Ibn Sina and I'll close it shallow quickly with this. But there's a great story of Ibn Sina, who he met a man who ever, who was, he was crying and he was sometimes laughing and he was sometimes, I call maybe like manic, you know, just up and down and up and down and just, you know, sometimes to shovel and sometimes, and people didn't know what was wrong with him. And so they brought him to Ibn Sina. And so he was trying to figure out what was wrong with this man. And so he took his pulse to try to figure out what is it that's causing him so much distress and so much anxiety. And there's an illness that he talks about in his books and many of the books of that time. They talked about something called love sickness. And he figured out, and he started to narrow that every time he'd say a city, a certain city, right? Kept narrowing it down, narrowing it down, narrowing it down until he figured out what city was causing him the most anxiety. And from the people in the city, he kept saying all the names of the family, the big families of that city, all until he figured out which family was causing the most distress. And then when he finally got there, all the way to the end, he realized that his heart, this man's heartbeat, this technique, this man was obsessed by a specific woman. And so he realized it was love sickness. And he said, the way in order to treat this man isn't a medication I give him, it's actually, he needs to get married. And he beseeched this family on the man's behalf, that he married this woman. And then the man's symptoms went away. He said, Allah, this is in his book, and the Qanun, Qanun Futlaver, the Canon of Medicine. And he says in his book, by reaching his beloved, I'm amazed how quickly he became re-energized. And so it's clear to me that human health is obedient and under the control of the mind. Subhanallah. And so what is this? When we wrote about this in our book, we wrote about how this is essentially psychosomatic medicine. And it's essentially, it's a physical condition that's actually psychologically based, right, or driven. And so this manifestation of anxiety. Why do I mention these stories in all of these people? Ibn Hazab, Ibn Al-Balkhi, and Ibn Sina, and these amazing things. Because what they did successfully is they took theory into practice. And they went from practice into actual institutions. What do I mean by this? When we talk about things, whether all types of mental illnesses or conditions, it's not just theoretical. It's like the prophet said, it's not just a viket or a prayer, right? It's not just making a safe space. It's actually finding treatments and places in which you're able to actually help people who need the help they need. Get the help they need. And you know what our tradition is, and this is how I'll end, inshallah. Some of you know that we have a, Alhamdulillah, my lab at Stanford now has a new nonprofit associated with it that's called, Madistan. The Madistans are the American or Latin Americans. I mean, the Latin, excuse me, Westernized kind of term for bimadistan. Bimad is the Persian word for the ill person. Stan is the location of. And bimadistan, or as they're termed madistans or maristans, right? We're basically the Islamic hospitals or Arabic, it's dada shifa. The hospitals that the Muslims built. And the one thing, if nothing else that you walk out of this lecture with today, inshallah, is that the Muslims were the first in all of human history when you look at all the hospitals that were built across all the civilizations of the world. They were the Muslims were the first to put psychiatric wards inside of their hospitals. You don't get that from a tradition or people who don't understand mental health or push it away or say this is just someone who has poor spirituality in a weak E-man, no. You get this from a society and a civilization that understood, that took the hadith, that read the same ayat that we read today, the same hadith we read today and actually implemented it from theory to practice to actual institution building. And when they built these institutions and spaces where people were able to heal, they were not asylums. They were not the kind of psychiatric wards that you think of today. And certainly not where I trained, inshallah. And I hear there's some other psychiatrists in the room, welcome, inshallah. That's not where you're trained either, these kind of locked facilities that are very isolated. No, these are facilities that were beautiful. Just like all this beautiful Islamic architecture, this is what was part of their buildings as well. And they had greenery. They had all senses being healed at the same time. Not just your cognitive, because they had a lot of talk therapy and yes, when I wrote my paper on an Belchi that the professor was jumping up and down, not only did he figure out OCD, but he actually described the kind of talk therapy that would treat him or treat a person with OCD, called exposure therapy. Today we call ERP, Exposure and Ritual Prevention Therapy. El Belchi literally describes this in his text. Let's talk about it. These hospitals, these treatment centers had all of the senses addressed. The therapy, cognitive, the behavioral, you're hearing and you're seeing so sound or music therapy, art therapy, color therapy, aroma therapy, massage therapy. They had all these things as part of the treatments. It's what we call holistic medicine. The mind wasn't separated from the soul or the body. And hence, El Belchi's book is Sustainance of the Body and Soul, purposefully, because he wanted to say mind and body are together. And today, when you hear the term mind, body, medicine, people think what? All this new age medicine thing. No, no, no, this is part of our tradition. It's holistic healing. And so when I say all of this, I hope it's an understood thing that as we go forward in order to really help our societies and our children and our loved ones and ourselves heal, it's gotta be holistic. And when you do it just medical, it's not enough. But at the extreme of doing it on the other side of doing it just spiritual, it's also not enough. And if you do it just folk, as in to say like, you know, kind of like, you know, drink some seven up. It's also not enough. Okay, inshallah, right? But when you bring everything together, mind, body, soul, spirituality, right? And your medicine and your therapy and all the senses integrated and you don't take religion out of it, the person is able to actually heal. So I hope, inshallah, these are some discussions that I hope today have been enlightening for the discussion on anxiety. What is it? What are the symptoms? Where do we find it in our tradition? Where do we find it in the Quran and in the sunnah, right? And how do we go forward in order to help ourselves and our families and our loved ones heal? And the message of course that in this pandemic, we've all been touched by this. And I hope inshallah that means that we actually are willing to take the steps forward to help those in our communities that need help. Before I end, I know someone's gonna say, can you see patients? May Allah bless you, inshallah, bless you. I only see patients in California. This is not by me, but by Stanford rules, but forgive me. I only see people that are in that location. However, in this very room here tonight, you have several, I can see them, inshallah, several Muslim mental health professionals. And in addition to that, there is a list. The last time I looked at this list of who is in the state of Michigan, who is a Muslim and a mental health professional, there were over a hundred therapists, psychiatrists, counselors, social workers, family marriage therapy, so on and so forth. There are, it's so different than when I was a kid here 20 years ago. Mashallah, honestly. So please seek out these resources and how do you find their resources? They're in different places. The one place that I know of is my own website on Maristown, I have these bookmarks up here of the website, the QR code or the website is here. And when you go to maristown.org backslash resources, one of the tabs literally say in Michigan. So please click on that, it'll take you to the directory that has all the Michigan Muslim mental health providers. So if you listen to this and you said, yeah, my kid really needs some help, or maybe I need some help, mashallah, write yourself. Then I hope, inshallah, you'll find the person you need there. Please don't hesitate. The turning point for me and my closing story is we had an extended family member who we all knew, all of us, all of us knew this person has anxiety. All of us knew, I mean, we could see it. In everything, in his interactions, there's always a sense of anxiety, right? And he would be, we all be sitting as a family, big family gathering, and he would be sitting to the side kind of just thinking about, and you say, what's wrong, Foulad? What's wrong? And he would say, you know, I don't know if we're gonna make it to 2025. And he was just very difficult subhanallah, right? And it affected his marriage, it affected his kids. Like it was a hard thing. Finally, finally, finally, alhamdulillah. He was able to finally be convinced and it's really hard for him to give me to the brothers in the room, I'll bless you all because you are the key. You are the Allah, you are the key. But it's really hard to get Muslim men into therapy. And I say that just from my own personal experience. But when it gets there, like this extended family member of ours, it was a night and day. He went through therapy, finally, right? And God helped for this crippling anxiety that he had. And now when you see him, whether it's his family, his marriage, his children, or even just interactions with us and all the society, even his workplace, you see a whole other person. And so one day I asked him, I said, how was the therapy? And he said, my only regret is that I didn't do this sooner. I wish my parents, they were a different generation, different era. I wish they had figured out, saw the symptoms, the red flags and actually recommended me for help. He said, I don't know what would have, how my life would have shaped differently. Now he's in his 40s. He said, I don't know what my life would have been like. And I said, law yafta hababa shaytan, right? Saying law would have, could have, should have, opens the door of shaytan. Don't do that to yourself. But from here forward, march forward. And insha'Allah, things are gonna change. He said, yes, insha'Allah. And to me that was, because it's such a personal thing and someone within our family, it's like, when I saw that change, I said, everybody needs to hear this, that there is some real help out there and it's strong and it's helpful. And so I pray insha'Allah for healing for you and for me and our families and all of our communities. And Alhamdulillah, peace be upon you. Peace be upon you.