 Hello, Psych2Go viewers. Our guest for today's live stream is renowned psychiatrist and scientist and founder of Mindex Sciences, Dr. Alexander Nikolescu. Over the last two decades, Dr. Alexander's incredible work includes the groundbreaking development of blood tests for psychiatric disorders. And he's been featured on PBS, Fox News, BBC News, ABC News, and so many other publications that showcase his amazing work. Welcome, Dr. Alexander. Thank you so much for joining us today. Great to be with you, Michelle. Absolutely. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? Yeah, so I'm a psychiatrist. I see patients who get referred to me from colleagues primarily at this point, could have complicated cases and so on. I also run two large research labs at Indiana University School of Medicine when I'm a professor, where we do a lot of this sort of cutting-edge work. And in addition, I founded a company, Mindex Sciences, to take these products out there so people can have access to them. So we developed apps, we developed blood tests that can be used to bring more precision and clarity to mental health, to help people sort of take charge of their own mental health, not have to go through that whole uncertainty trial and error process, all those issues that are sort of part of current practice. In the end, you know, it's individuals who benefit the most from these. I mean, certainly these tools help doctors and therapists and counselors and coaches and so on. But in the end, it's your life. So you better take charge of it and make sure your things are going in the right direction. Thank you so much for that. And before anything else, I just wanna know what inspired you to work on such an amazing mental health development? Like just, it wasn't like something personal because it's just something so groundbreaking. Yeah, yeah. So in my case, actually, ever since I was a kid, I wanted to work on the brain. I felt it was like the ultimate frontier. So when I was in high school, I wanted to be a theoretical physicist, but then I decided, you know, the human body, the brain are much more interesting. So I went into ultimately the medical school, then did graduate work. My graduate work was in genetics. And at that time we were studying the genetics of cancer. That was back at Scripps in San Diego, California. And cancer was very much a head of psychiatry in terms of having, you know, genetic tests that can inform, you know, what type of cancer you have, what treatment you should be on and so on. So then after I finished my graduate work and went back to finish my clinical training at UC San Diego and so on, I brought a lot of those insights from cancer into psychiatry and wanted to see if we can use some of the same genetic tools, the same precision tools to mental health. Mental health, you know, is a bit behind, was a bit behind other medical specialties at that time we just wanted to, you know, make psychiatry just part of, you know, regular healthcare, regular life, you know, nothing sort of mysterious or esoteric. And really in the end part of primary care and preventive care, when you go to your doctor for your annual or your pediatrician, you should get some of these assessments and tests done just like you get assessed and tested for screened for anything else. So you can catch things early, intervene early and so on. So that was really the motivation to, can we do something where I could combine sort of my passion for understanding the mind with bringing some precision and relief to how clinical practice is done. And we've been on this journey, my group has been on this journey for over two decades now. Wow. Yeah, I've moved to Indiana almost 20 years ago, specifically to work on this. There was an opportunity here to develop a long-term study in a stable population to follow people over time, see when they're doing well, not doing well, get their blood samples for genomic studies. And just this sort of long-term approach has been very productive for us. And I think we're almost caught up, if not caught up with cancer at this point, we can have precision. And who knows, in some areas, we may be a little bit more advanced because it's not just about biology and doing a precise lab testing and genetic testing. You also have to understand how people feel, think and behave. So we developed digital tools for that. In particular, we have an app that we released called Life and Mind. Life and Mind. It's downloadable from the Apple Store, Google Store. People can use that to take charge of their lives to measure in a precise way, how they feel, think, how life events affect their feelings, thoughts, behaviors. It's very comprehensive. So it's basically your mental health in a sense. In a nutshell. In a nutshell. And thank you so much for bringing up that point because a lot of the times people treat mental health and healthcare as if they're two different things, but mental health is healthcare, right? Correct. Yeah. There's no health without mental health. Mental health is not healthcare. Yeah. And that's our mission here at Psych2Go. Thank you so much for that. And so I'm gonna just start with my first question. How do you believe that the development of blood tests for anxiety and depression will revolutionize mental health and the healthcare system at large? You know, so I like to say it's sort of a small step for medicine, but it's a big step for the field of psychiatry. In psychiatry, we weren't used to be able to objectively assess how people feel and think until we develop these blood tests. And, you know, if you think about it from the person's perspective, there's a lot of uncertainty in their mind. You know, is this really happening? What am I feeling? Is this just me being, you know, weak as the sort of fluff of character? Why can't I get over this and so on? So when you do, you know, these blood tests and see, you know, there's something objective. It's not that, you know, mysterious, just like you have certain things that are off when you have diabetes and so on. It's something objective that's happening. There's no stigma, no shame. It guides treatment. That removes a lot of the uncertainty and stigma that still surround, unfortunately, you know, mental health disorders. So that's on the patient side. And, you know, they can be reassured. They can see, you know, is the treatment working? Are the, you know, the biomarkers improving those, you know, molecules that have been tracked by the blood test. Then from a clinician perspective, again, it, you know, it removes uncertainty. Diagnosis in psychiatry, if you're just sort of relying on the current DSM or trying to sort of fit people into those boxes is very, very imprecise. Most people end up with multiple labels, you know, depression, anxiety, PTSD, borderline, whatever, you know? And that's sort of, you know, an implicit way of saying, you know, patients are complex. They have multiple things going on. We're trying to put these labels on them for insurance reasons for, you know, so that we can have something to have as a primary diagnosis and maybe as a, you know, to guide treatments. But those are imprecise. Now, when you have, you know, objective things that say, well, this is, you know, this is depression, this is bipolar, this is anxiety, this is primarily, you know, PTSD and so on, then that clarifies things. And in addition to these tests that we devolve much people in a personalized way to existing treatments. So you would see, you know, you might benefit from lithium or you might benefit from acetalopram or you might benefit from this or that. In a personalized way, as opposed to your doctor thinking you have depression, they give you an antidepressant and you have bipolar and antidepressant makes you worse or trying medications that are not a good fit for you biologically and so on. So it helps patients, it helps doctors. It helps everybody, I think, because in the end, if you had this as part of your annual, right? When you go to your primary care doctor, your pediatrician for your annual exam and you get an extra blood tube for your mental health, you could catch early on before something develops. You know, if you're, you know, if your things are moving in the wrong direction and you could address them early on and it's much better to try to prevent things than to treat something when it's full blown. Avoids a lot of, you know, misery for the patient, disruption to their lives, ER visits, hospitalizations, things like that. Yes, thank you for that. And then just to add to that, and I had a question for you as well. Do you think that developing these blood tests and treating it more like, you know, kind of like the way you would treat like cancer, like taking a blood test or a pregnancy test? Or diabetes, or diabetes. Yeah, or diabetes. Do you think you'll help eliminate the stigma that you see so much with mental health? People not believing it's real, that it's just made up? Absolutely, absolutely. And that's what a lot of my patients tell me, like, thank you so much, Doc, for developing these things because now I see it's not just in my head and the people can see, you know, I'm going through these things. There's something real happening inside of me that's leading to this behavior. So I think that would be sort of a direct consequence of normalizing, you know, mental health and making it just like any other medical specialty. It removes all the stigma. Already through the work that you and others are doing, you know, there are all these well-known people, celebrities and so on that, you know, come out and say, look, you know, I have bipolar or I have depression or I suffer from panic attacks and so on. And that helps. But still, you know, just having something objective showing, you know, it's a biological abnormality. It can be treated, can be improved, it can be resolved. I think it's very helpful and it's a relief to patients. Yeah, and it's so interesting that it's been, you know, it's a long time coming because they haven't developed this up until now. You know, you guys are starting to develop this, but how come you think that these types of developments haven't been made yet? Because when you think about it, panic attacks, anxiety, depression, a lot of those disorders have like people experience a physiological reaction, yet we still can't test it. And as of right now, we still can't test it in blood. We still can't measure it the way we would measure diabetes and all of that. Why do you think after all this? As of right now, we can actually test it. So, you know. Well, now, but like, why has it been such a long time coming? Yeah. It's very hard to develop this test. So it took us 20 years of hard work. And the reason being, you know, for example, you know, in cancer, you can biopsy the tumor and then correlate, you know, whatever blood test you develop with what's happening in the tumor and so on. In psychiatry, we can biopsy the brain, right? It's, yeah. So we had to, you know, do this all this detective work and careful stepwise discovery, validation, testing of things that correlate with symptoms. And you have to be, you know, very thorough and careful how you identify these things, validate them, make sure they're real reproducibles. And we did all that and we published all that before we launched any of the tests. So it's not easy. That's the short answer. It's not easy because you're trying to find an objective measure for a subjective feeling, right? You have these first things that, you know, people feel and think, whereas in cancer, there's a tumor in diabetes, you know, there are other objective things that you can cross-match with in colon cancer. You have a colonoscopy that you match your liquid biopsy blood tests against us and so on. So I think that was the primary reason. Also, psychiatry, right or wrong, you know, mental health in general is viewed as complex, you know, the current DSM has over 300 diagnoses categories. And that sort of complexity and confusion and criteria and how do you, what do you diagnose, et cetera, has also made this harder. We went for very simple quantitative phenotypes. We developed our own tools to measure mood, anxiety, stress, so you can get the number at this moment in time for your anxiety, for your mood, for your stress, and that's all in the life and mind app. And that simplified things, you know, instead of trying to find biomarkers for depression, depression is something very heterogeneous and, you know, there are many subtypes. We found biomarkers that track your mood state. So, you know, if you're on the low side, if you're on the high side, if you go up and down like in bipolar. So I think being very precise about measuring feelings, thoughts and correlating that with very precise biological measures has been very important and that's how we did it. It's not easy. That's why it took so long. It's definitely not easy. It's like revolutionary. This is gonna revolutionize healthcare. And so I just wanted to get into specifics. How do the blood tests, how do the blood tests you're developing determine whether someone has anxiety or not? Like what is the exact process? I know that in one of the PBS documentaries I was watching about, you know, your development is that you guys test biomarkers. So can you explain that to our audience? Yeah, yeah. So biomarkers, it's an abbreviated term for biological markers. These are molecules in the blood that are a marker of disease, whether it's disease severity at that moment in time or disease risk. So a simple way to think about it is that, for example, for diabetes, which is very common disorder, glucose is a biomarker there. It's a biological marker. You measure somebody's glucose, blood sugar, you know, if it's in the normal range, is it abnormal at that moment in time? There are other markers in diabetes. There's one called without being sort of too technical and playing the doctor here, but it's called hemoglobin A1C. That one, if you measure it, it tells you like more like long term whether, you know, this is more of a long term thing as opposed to the glucose which fluctuates from hour to hour depending if you ate or not. So by analogy, there are those two types of, those two categories of biological markers for different mental health conditions. Some that measure state at that moment in time, how anxious you are at that moment and some that measure your long term risk of having future worsening of your anxiety, episodes that can land you in the ER, the hospital, and so on. And, you know, people often ask me like, well, you know, do I need a blood test to tell me that I'm anxious right now? I can feel it, you know. Yeah, you feel it. Yes, you don't need a blood test to tell you that. I mean, you're experiencing what you're experiencing and that's the truth of that, you know. That's the reality, what you're experiencing is what matters. But you might need the blood test to help, you know, confirm that there's a biological process that can be addressed through therapy or through nutraceuticals or to medications. Yeah, and so just sorry to interject, I wanted to know, and would the biological markers help determine if it's genetic? You know, this is a very good question. Let me dispel a myth. Okay. Everything is gene and environment. Everything. In biology, in medicine, in life, all of who we are and what we do, our genes and environment interacting. It's just in some cases, it's more the genetic predisposition and less the environment. And in some cases, it's primarily the environment. You're going through really bad things in your life and those really affect your biology. But in the end, our biology, upstairs and downstairs, are genes getting turned on and off depending on your genetic predisposition and what's happening in your environment or what medications you're on, what drugs, what stressors, et cetera. So in the end, it's all genes and environment. And that's what we measure with our biological markers. We measure gene expression, how active certain key genes are. And that's the result of your genetic predisposition and of the environmental things that you're going through. So that's sort of the Zen answer to the coin. It's both genes and environment. Yeah, and I feel like sometimes people don't want to accept that maybe it's in their genetics to be predisposed to depression and anxiety. I think that's also where the stigma comes from as well, right? But your genes are not your destiny. You can modify their expression with therapy, with lifestyle changes, with nutritional supplements, with medications. So I think it's actually a very hopeful message that even things that have where there's a predominantly genetic component can be corrected and modified. That's how medicine works. You're modifying gene expression with treatments. And improving, you know, everyday, yeah. And so I was going to ask, how do biological markers in the blood correlate with brain function and the behavior of a person? So, you know, that was the key thing. You know, why would you see something in the blood that reflects what's happening in the brain, right? And there are three reasons for that. So the brain and the immune system, really when we're looking in the blood, we're looking at the activity of immune cells, white cells. The brain and the immune system are very closely linked together during your embryonic development. They're highly interrelated tissues. Then after you're born, there's still a lot of brain immune interactions. So, you know, how you feel and think your stress can affect your immune system. This is why when people are stressed out, they're more prone to develop flus, colds, et cetera. And conversely, your immune system can have a strong impact on your brain. You can, you know, when you're sick and you're in an inflammatory state and so on, it really affects how you feel. Think you become depressed. Your cognition is impaired and so on. And the third reason is they're the same genes, upstairs and downstairs, and some of the same environmental components turn on and off the same genes, upstairs and downstairs, whether it's stress hormone or medication or some other sort of environmental things from the external environment or from the internal milieu. So for those three reasons, we're able to pick a peripheral signature that correlates with what's happening in the brain. You have to be very careful. So that's why we do these things. It takes us many years to identify and validate and test these things because it's like a needle in the haystack. Many things are changed in terms of, in the blood, in terms of gene expression and so on. How do you find the real signal that tracks what's changing the brain is the challenge and we develop very careful methods to do that and that's been what helped us achieve these breakthroughs. Absolutely, and on the point of the breakthrough I want to test before our audience segment, I wanted to know, when is your blood test development going live? When are we going to see it in pharmacies? When are we going to see it in clinics, hospitals, everywhere nationwide? So I have good news and bad news. Okay, let's start with the good news. The good news is these blood tests are available right now from Mindex Sciences. There are seven blood tests that are being offered. So we have a blood test for mood disorders that can tell you whether it's depression or bipolar, severity, future risk, what medications, what nutrients it goes through. Blood test for anxiety, one for stress, one for pain, which is another subjective issue where having something objective is very helpful to patients and doctors, one for suicide risk, one for memory disorders and one for longevity. So we have seven tests currently on the market. We'll have probably three more by next year. We're working very hard on something for psychosis. It's under peer review at the major journal now. We're working hard on something for ADHD and we may have something for alcohol use disorders as well. So the good news, the tests are available. The bad news is that these tests are very expensive, all this technology to do them and so on. And currently, so currently they are self-pay. We're working very hard to get them reimbursed. So we're putting together data and studies and so on to go to Medicare, to go to insurers, to get them reimbursed because we feel very strongly that everybody should have access to them. But currently they're available only as self-paid to patients and doctors who prescribe them, who patients who can afford them. So I think the big mission for us over the next year or two is to move these into being reimbursed and so on. So good news, they're available. Bad news, they're not yet reimbursed. And they need to be. I mean, they should be like national by now, right? This is an amazing development. And international, I mean, we have, you know, people from doctors and patients from other countries who have ordered and received the results of these tests. The issue with reimbursed and so on is that you have to go through a very sort of elaborate, careful process for that. And we've already been working on it for a year. So we have, you know, some initial, we have some codes for the tests, we have some initial pricing decisions for when Medicare approves it and so on. But the, you know, the steps that have to be done take a long time, you know, to get something approved. And we, you know, MindEx Sciences is a relatively small startup. We are now sort of, we got more investments and we're going to use those investments to do the necessary groundwork to get these tests reimbursed. So it will take probably a year or two. I'm very conservative. So I say year or two, if it happens sooner, that'd be great, but, you know. That would be amazing. Soon enough, this amazing development should be all around the country. You know, I'm always like glass half full. In the meantime, something else that's very useful and affordable is instead of doing this blood liquid biopsy blood testing, which is still expensive, almost everybody or everybody could do a digital biopsy. They could use the Life and Mind app to really get in a quantitative way, you know, how they're feeling, thinking. And those are sort of very simple state-of-the-art measures that were used to develop the blood tests. So in the meantime, and they are used along with the blood tests for patients who get the blood test. In the meantime, you can just get the app, get a very comprehensive assessment of yourself and keep track of how you feel and think. And then it's like a Fitbit for the mind. You can look, you know, you can take that at the appointment to your therapist or doctor and see, look, these are the numbers. I've been going up and down or I've been stable. Guys, guys download the app. I'm downloading it today right after this interview. Download it. This is just revolutionary. Be part of this. So yes, everyone download the app. What is it called? Can you repeat it? It's called Life and Mind. It's Life and Mind. X Mind. Life and Mind. And it's available on Apple, right? Apple and Google. Both places, yeah. Amazing. So that brings me to our audience segment where we answer your viewer questions. I'm super excited. We have a lot of people in here. So let's begin. Go for it. Our first question is from Miranda. She asks, doctor, when will you guys develop blood tests for schizophrenia? I was diagnosed years ago and this would be very helpful. So thank you for that question. We actually have developed something, but it's currently, we like to publish the data in a peer-reviewed journal before we launch the test on the market. So at this point, the manuscript, the study describing that work is under review at the major peer-reviewed journal. Once it goes through the peer-review process and it's published, then we will launch the test also at MindEx Sciences. Might be six months. Usually at this sort of high level journal, it takes a while to get things published. And we always publish in sort of high visibility, high impact peer-reviewed journals. At that time, we'll launch it at MindEx Sciences and it will be accessible to physicians to order it for their patients. And it doesn't have to be psychiatrist. Any physician, any prescriber can be a physician, assistant nurse practitioner, can order these tests. We wanted to make it easy for people to have access to them since they're so, new and not everybody and every psychiatrist might know about them. So, and also, a lot of primary care doctor or concierge doctors who are the ones who are actually ordering these tests, for them it's natural, it's part of their workflow because when you're an internist or primary care doctor, you order blood tests all the time when you assess somebody. And it's just another report that you have there that helps you do your job, basically. So thank you for that, doctor. And then the next question, and you'll see it on the screen. So Jason asks, doctor, can hypofrontality be proven? Not with blood tests or not so far in terms of what we've developed, but I think there are imaging tests, brain imaging tests that are potentially useful for that. I don't know that they are used as part of routine clinical practice, but they're things like PET scans, PET stands for positive emission tomography, PET scans or maybe functional MRIs and so on that are used in academic settings in research setting or are used by neurologists actually in clinical practice. So that might be a way in which you could get tested to see if the frontal part of your brain is more or less active. Thank you. And then Eric, when asked a very good question, does every blood cell hold meaning to something psychological? No. You have red blood cells and white blood cells. These are, you're essentially testing the immune cells, the white blood cells. And the primary job is to do their immune function but they closely reflect and interact with the brain. There is a signal inside them that we are able to measure and track that's relevant to what's happening in the brain but it's not like you have a blood cell for anxiety, a blood cell for depression and so on. You have panels of biomarkers, meaning dozen biomarkers that are best for tracking anxiety, another panel that's good for tracking depression, another for pain and so on. But there are no blood cells that are specific for any disorder. All right, thank you for that, for clarifying. And then the question is on the screen just because people are actually very interested in the app. Could you just rephrase it again? Akram asked, LifexMind is what the app is called. So you could just rephrase it because they're planning on downloading it, yay. That's what it's called, LifexMind, yeah. Perfect, thank you for that question. Then this is a good one. And since you are psychiatrists, I just wanted to see your general thoughts on this. Mr. Sevi asked, I might have ADHD. What is the best way to tell my parents about it? I'm a big believer in the truth. Just tell them what you're experiencing, what you're feeling, how it interferes or not with your daily life, with your school, with your job. And there are ways to get tested for ADHD. The current testing is neuropsychological where you got your school counselor or outside psychologist and you get a battery of test and they can establish fairly well that you have a diagnosis of ADHD. If you use the LifexMind app, we have a very simple assessment there where you can actually track your attention, your ADHD and from day to day. So that sort of gives you an idea if it fluctuates, what events affected and that type of data might be useful as well to your therapist, your clinician and so on. As an aside, before we had the technology and the apps and so on, patients would come to me and I would ask them, how has your mood been over the last three months? And they would have to recall how it was, right? Whereas now they just bring the app and I looked there and it's like in an Apple Watch or Fitbit, you can see exactly the number, the states and so on. So I think for yourself to gain insight for those who help you on this, it's useful to have that data because memory is very fickle and it's colored by your current state, right? Yes, thank you for that doctor. And then someone asked, I suffer from excessive anxiety about the future. I am a student and I have a problem with overthinking the events of my life. Do you have any advice? I think that's a great question because not just as a psychiatrist but you've been a student. So I just wanna know what your advice is to this viewer. And I'm a parent as well. Yeah, amazing. Parent of students. So I'm a mentor of a lot of students over the years, you know, from undergrads to med students, fellow young faculty. Yeah, this is a great question. So what we're noticing nowadays, you know, as professionals and in society in general is this increase in anxiety. It's a huge increase in anxiety, especially in younger people especially in females. And there are a variety of reasons for that. You know, things are moving faster. There's all the social media comparisons, all those things that are happening. We just went through COVID, a lot of things going on. So the best advice is like for anything in order to improve it. So the first step is, you know, acknowledging that there is a problem assessing it with an app or a blood test or by talking to a trained professional and then doing something about it. And the way to do something about it is what we call, I don't want this to sound too fancy, but biopsychosocial, right? So you have to improve, you know, let's start with bio. You have to improve your biology a little bit so you're a bit more resilient to anxiety. So that means, you know, guarding your sleep so you get enough sleep, meditating if you are so inclined. It's very useful in terms of calming your brain and your biology. Trying to take a walk in nature or exercise every day, very useful. Trying to eat, you know, a healthier diet with a lot of fruits and vegetables and not a lot of junk food. All those things make your biology better. Change the genes that, you know, underlie your brain function, your body function and the brain and the body are highly interconnected. So that's the bio part of dealing with anxiety, just making yourself more resilient. The psychological part is, you know, you break things down into smaller bits and you deal with them one thing at the time instead of worrying about the whole thing. Just trying to like fix the whole issue take it day by day, step by step. One thing at the time, take a little step forward, let's step forward and then, you know, slowly realize, hey, you know, I can cope with this and then, you know, builds confidence and then you can cope with the next thing and so on. We've all been through that, we've all been through that. And then socially, you know, avoid environments or activities or inputs that make you more anxious whether that means- I know, are toxic, yeah. Yeah, whether that means, you know, cutting down on some social media that's negative, stopping, you know, comparing yourself obsessively with other people, you know, running your own race. Except this YouTube channel, but other social media, you know. Yeah, right, thank you. Watch Psych2Go, but just avoid Instagram every day. Yeah, all those social comparison are putting a lot of fake pressure on young people. In the end, you know, run your own race, be a best self. That's what matters and stop comparing yourself with other people. So sort of arranging your social environment in a way that is nurturing and helpful to you as opposed to stressful and anxiety generating. So those are some things you could do even without medications. Now, if it's sort of severe anxiety, short term or medium term, you could also get medications and a trained clinician can help you with that. Our blood test can guide somebody, a doctor who orders them to see, you know, what are the best matches and so on. Definitely, thank you. And then I just wanted to bring up this comment. Dany said, say hi to the doctor for me. And this is gonna be one of our last questions coming up from Jason. Thank you so much for that donation as well. Doctor, should there be more tests in mental health facilities for hypofrontality? If not, why so? So as I said, you know, we don't have yet a blood test for hypofrontality, but there are imaging tests for that. And again, imaging tests are a little bit more expensive, you know, putting somebody in a brain scan in a, you know, functional MRI and so on. I think it's a very interesting area that needs to be developed in the future. And if I wasn't doing what I'm doing, which is working on the biological basis with blood tests and so on, you know, this is something else that, you know, I would have been sort of interested in doing, like imaging the brain directly and seeing, you know, what insights we can get there. And they're, you know, good researchers, good clinicians who are trying to do that. So I would be optimistic that in five to 10 years we'll have maybe more portable devices and more inexpensive ones that can be used routinely in clinical care. There's also futuristic stuff going on. There's a company in LA, I think, called Kernel that's made a helmet to measure blood flow in the brain. I have no affiliation with them, so this is not like endorsement or advertisement, but I don't entirely understand the process. But there are a lot of good developments. Science is great. You know, science always moves things forward and makes life better for people, for society and so on. If done properly, I mean, you can, you know, science has also been used for a lot of, you know, not so great things, but true science done properly has always sort of advanced society. So I'm very optimistic about the future and about how some of these things can become part of routine care. And once they become more widespread, they're more affordable because when you do something that scale at volume, the price goes down and then everybody can have access to it. And that's our vision. That's what we want. So like just to not just normalize it so that it's widely available and it can be affordable because often a lot of people don't get, you know, mental health care that they need because it's just so expensive. Yeah, but it's the argument that we're going to make to insurers and so on and employers is that it's much more expensive to hospitalize somebody or have them, you know, they are repeatedly or, you know, not do their job or, you know, flounder around than to get them the proper assessment and treatment right from the beginning. So you always have to make the money argument with payers. Absolutely with harm with all of them because- You all know like it's so great for patients, for their families as a clinician, you know, it's so great to have those tools to help people. When you go to payers and insurers, you also have to make the economic argument. So it's very hard to refine that so that they can see the merit in these things. Which is a sad reflection of our society, but you and your team are doing the best to make our society a better place. So thank you so much for that. And you're also fighting the same good fight. Thank you. With Psych2Go's mission, definitely, that's what we're trying to do to expand mental health education. And so that concludes our, you know, our audience segment with our amazing Psych2Goers. Thank you for your amazing questions. I just wanted to start our final thought segment and I just wanted to know. So do you think, and I know that as a psychiatrist, like you've seen a lot of patients and things have changed over the years because of the advent of social media, do you think that social media is creating like a depression anxiety epidemic among our younger generation? Do you think that the need for blood tests and so much medication for depression is kind of a sign of just this epidemic of the younger generation feeling malaise and feeling jaded about what they see on social media and comparing themselves? Absolutely, 100%, 110%. I think you hit the nail on the head. And I would recommend to your audience to look up this author, Johann J-O-H-A-N, Johann Hari, H-A-R-I, Johann Hari, he wrote three great books. One is about attention and ADHD. Another one is about depression and another one is about addictions. He's done an amazing job of looking at all the potential biological, environmental, social media causes and so on. He's also a great writer and those books are best sellers. He has a couple of TED talks that have, I don't know, 15 million viewers, 20 million viewers. I'll link it in the description. So I would highly recommend that. Again, I have no connection with Johann. I just think he's a good guy who's done a tremendous service to society by his exploration of ADHD, depression and addictions in those three books, that trilogy of books. And my experience, my thoughts, my professional opinion is the same that social media has been extremely detrimental for younger people who are the heaviest users, exactly in the ways that you mentioned. They, it's an addiction. It's a very strong addiction and it distracts them from their daily life. It distracts them from doing things that are more healthy for them, like real world experiences in nature with friends, sports, going outside and so on. And that comparison between yourself as you are and the fake portrayal or somebody has their best self on social media. You don't see them when they're not doing well. You see them when they're- Only when things are going well. That comparison is very depressing, angiogenic, stressful. It's also an avenue for a lot of negativity, for mob mentality, for bullying, for so on. So if I was, I had a magic wand that would delete social media apps, most of them from most people's phones. They are useless and not only useless in the long-term but toxic. Now, you need to socialize with people, but it's very important, but do real connection. Like talk to them in person or talk to them on the phone or text them, meet with them. You know, you have nowadays all this amazing technology to do that. Don't go on those streams that are extremely addictive and where you get caught in that loop and then you dissociate and then five hours have gone by and you feel worse than at the beginning and you've wasted your life basically. Absolutely. And remember guys, a lot of what you see on social media is fake like the doctor mentioned. A lot of what you see is just like people putting their best selves out there or fabricating things just to make their lives seem better than what they are. Everyone goes through it. No one has a perfect life. So just remember that. And so with that being said, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure, Michelle. I really enjoyed it and keep up the good fight. And for all of you out there, for all of you out there, you know, things are improving constantly. So keep an eye out on developments and you know, a lot of people are working very hard to make mental health better, including our group. Including you. Yes. Thank you very much. Have a nice rest of the day. Absolutely. Thank you to our Psych2Go viewers. We love you. Have a great day. Bye-bye.