Hello, everyone. Welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind. I’m your host, Kristin Maxwell, and in this show, we explore the process of transformation, and give you tools and strategies you can use to transform your own life. Today, I’m delighted to be talking to Dr. Achina Stein about a subject that I know a lot about, and it’s near and dear to my heart, and that is unraveling the physical causes of depression and anxiety. Dr. Stein is a board-certified psychiatrist and functional medicine practitioner. Through her private practice, Functional Mind, Dr. Stein works with patients to determine the root cause of their mental symptoms. Dr. Stein, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Thank you Kristin. Thank you for having me.
Yes, this is a subject that I want everybody to know about, so I am so happy that you’re here today. And my first question is always, what superpower did you discover as the result of mastering your mind?
Well, the superpower that I always have said was a gift from God, because I just never understood where it came from, but I know it’s there, is my ability to do… What I call it, like psycho-surgery with my mind, and in terms of understanding people at a root level, on an emotional level, and I always am able to, or I seem to be able to, people tell me that I seem to be able to get right in there and get down to the bottom of things mentally for people in a session many times. But that’s actually been transformed by incorporating, getting to the root cause of the physical symptoms or physical root causes of their mental health symptoms. So it’s all weaved in one on top of the other, and there’s all these layers that I’m able to determine by just talking to someone, and within a couple of hours.
Huh. That’s truly amazing. Everybody needs that. All the doctors. So for those people who don’t know, what is a functional medicine doctor?
It’s a tough thing to describe to people sometimes, because functional medicine is considered a type of integrative medicine, where you use what we call alternative way of treating people, but I don’t really think that that’s a good definition, because it really is a melding of let’s say, conventional medicine and naturopathy in one. We look for what’s causing issues from a physiological level, at a cellular level, and it’s the dynamics of what’s happening in the body, as opposed to a silver bullet, like one cause.
And a lot of people who are in construction, in plumbing, or an auto mechanic, kind of gets that, like the difference between a brand new car, let’s say you were buying a new car, the difference between a brand new car and a 10 year old car, people intuitively know that there’s probably a lot that that 10 year old car went through, and as compared to a brand new car, and you don’t really know if it’s been in an accident, you don’t know if it’s been run into the ground by not taking care of it, the oil changes, the maintenance that’s required. You might get some idea by what it looks like, and you might have a mechanic look at it under the hood, but you don’t really know what it’s been through until you actually maybe drive it, but there’s a lot of layers of issues that cause a car to work well, or have more problems. Do you know what I’m saying?
I do. And we’ll get into this, but when you go to a regular psyche… well, you are a regular psychiatrist also, sorry. So the traditional medical model, you will go and they might give you an antidepressant, and that just treats the symptoms of your depression and anxiety, and you’re saying that really, what we need is to take the hood off of us, and see what are all the body systems that are causing you to feel depression or anxiety. Is that right?
Right. I mean, there’s multiple root causes. There’s biological causes, there’s psychological causes, and then there’s social causes. And so, I have actually always practiced that way, even as a conventional doctor and looking at the bio psychosocial spectrum of a person, and you can have depression based on your social experience and how you interact with your environment, you can have depression based on your internal mental experiences, like with automatic negative thoughts, and low self-esteem, and you can have what all doctors understand are medical issues that can cause depression as well, like hypothyroidism, B12 deficiency, folate deficiency. And most conventional doctors who are thorough in their assessment and in determining the underlying causes of the depression, medical causes of depression, they do tend to look at that.
How you interpret the blood work is another story, but the proper way of giving a diagnosis of a depressive disorder, one of the depressive disorders, is ruling out medical causes. And so, there is a list of medical causes that some doctors know about, but the functional medicine piece has more to do with inflammation, and that has to do with looking at what in the body is causing inflammation, and how that inflammation is also affecting the brain, and the brain is connected to the body. So it’s looking at the whole picture, and it’s sort of like if you had a flood in your basement, that water, depending on how long it’s there, can seep into your Sheetrock, into the ceiling, or depending on where it’s come from, like the toilet, right? And if it’s from the toilet, then you have all of this sanitation issue that needs to be dealt with as well.
So if the water is there for a long time and it seeps into things, it can create other issues over time. So if you were able to get that water out of your basement quickly, you probably wouldn’t have it necessarily seep into the basement Sheetrock, whereas if it’s been there for a month, let’s say, the whole basement probably going to be ruined. That doesn’t mean to say that… so there are lots of chronic issues that people have that have multiple layers of symptoms, that can be caused by one issue, but then it’s looking at all of those layers and removing them one at a time, in the same way that you would fix a basement.
Right. Yes, okay. So what I want to do is go through you, go through with you what some of those symptoms are, what are the chronic issues that your body can have that are going to potentially cause or contribute to depression and anxiety, but before we do, we have to take a break. So can you tell people where they are going to learn about you, about your practice? And I understand you have maybe a program coming up that people can do remotely. They don’t have to be living where you live.
That’s right. Yeah. Well, they can find me at Functional Mind LLC. They can just Google Functional Mind LLC, and it should come up. That’s my private practice. They can also go to achinasteindo.com, and I will be coming out with a book in the next couple of weeks. It’ll be launched on February 13th, and it’s called, What If It’s Not Depression?: Your Guide to Answers and Solutions, and people will be able to do an online health coaching program with me to find their root cause of their symptoms.
That’s great. Okay. Hang on for a moment, and we’ll be right back.
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