 Listen to how Muslim scholars classified and diagnosed mental health a thousand years before the West did. One of the first things I did when I entered into the field of psychiatry is I wanted to know what the early Muslims had said about mental health and so I looked at multiple what we call primary texts, the early texts of the Muslim scholars because I was sure that they must have written about mental health in a way that they wrote about medicine and surgery and humanities and all different sciences that we celebrate but I didn't hear anything about mental health and so in that search, Masha'Allah, we were able to find so many different scholars that talked about mental health one of whom is named Abu Zaid al-Balkh. He's from the 9th century and he has a book called Sustenance of the Body and Soul and in his section on mental health he classifies all these different mental health illnesses one of which is we call OCD, obsessive-pupulsive disorder and as a modern-day trained psychiatrist I'm reading something from the 9th century that looks so much like what we diagnosed today as OCD but OCD is supposed to be something that's a new illness that's discovered in the 19th century and written about then and I was comparing side-by-side what Anbenqi wrote to what the current DSM which is our book where we diagnose a psychiatrist's mental illnesses and they looked so similar. So I ran across the hall to where one of the main heads of OCD in our department was and I said I think I found something that actually might be earlier than what the books are saying and he said no no no no that can't really be and I said well can you read in Arabic and he said no can you and I said yes he said well then go ahead and translate it and come back and when I did it was a point-by-point connection everything in Benchi diagnosed was actually what we have in the current DSM about OCD and he said you must publish this now and subhandle law we were able to publish it and it actually turns over history because history needs to be rewritten that the Muslims were actually some of the very first to diagnose and classify this is our heritage our legacy we need to reclaim it a couple weeks ago I recorded a tiktok with the staff of Maria Mamira Brahimi about a Muslim scholar who likely was the first to discover certain mental health illnesses like OCD obsessive compulsive disorder and many of you asked can you tell us more about this scholar named Abu Zeh del Balchi and what he did and how did he treat something like OCD back in the 9th century well he had three steps and this is so amazing because it's so it mimics what we have today number one he says medications and people are so interested in this because I think really or Muslim scholars talked about medication for mental health even for that far back and we say yes absolutely because idea here is you take whatever is needed to actually get better and that is an Islamic concept number two talk therapy and this blows people away because I don't realize that Muslims are some of the first to discover and to actually talk about talk therapy at Balchi actually talked about a certain kind of talk therapy for OCD that was exposure therapy and that basically means that you take the very things that a person obsesses about and worries about and you gradually expose them to it until desensitize them this is the gold standard treatment for OCD today and that's amazing but he got the first two things exactly the way we have them today now the third needs to be revived back and his third step was spiritual advice so many people complain that psychology is a lost at soul because we don't have the soul and spirituality in psychology today like it used to be back when the Muslims were talking about psychology so that's on us to revive it and to bring back spirituality into the treatment process many of you guys asked where is this published how can I read this well we published this in mainstream academic medical journals why because we wanted everybody who writes on this afterwards to cite it so we can rewrite the narrative from here on out but if you follow the Instagram handle here for the lab my lab the Stanford Muslim mental health and Islamic psychology lab we put out weekly content related to this and if you continue to follow me here I'll be talking about mental health and Islamic psychology