Hi, and welcome to the ADHD Kids Can Thrive podcast, real talk, practical tools, and hopeful stories for parents and educators supporting kids with ADHD.

I'm Kate Brownfield, your host and a certified whole person and ADHD parent coach.

It's my joy to bring you advocates and experts in ADHD to help you on your own journey.

For resources and coaching, visit ADHDkidscanthrive.com.

Now, please enjoy this conversation.

Okay, my guest today is Dr.

Adashir Mehran.

He's disrupting the mental health field, delivering more effective practices to heal depression and to ease the emotional suffering of people across the world.

He is a psychologist, trauma therapist, behavioral researcher, and a leadership and team coach.

He is the author of the best-selling book, You Are Not Depressed, You Are Unfinished.

Everyone else portrays depression as an immovable cause, a mood disorder that must be treated.

Dr.

Mehran busts this myth and focuses attention on the real culprit, the unfilled life we must lead when we deny our birthrights.

He is the developer of the Bill of Emotional Rights, based on 30 years of research, coaching, and clinical work.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Kate, for that introduction, for this invitation.

And I look forward to discussing in our conversation about my focus about disrupting the mental health field, what that means, which actually it's a hopeful approach to looking at mental health field, which topics like depression, ADHD, anxiety, obsessive compulsive.

These are scary topics, overwhelming topics.

Parents and teenagers, they look at those topics as, oh my gosh, there's something wrong with me.

That's one way to look at it.

It's a good way to look at it.

It's a medical model, but there is a different dimension of the reality is that mental struggles are data, our information, our adaptive responses.

So when somebody has ADHD, anxiety, depression, you name it, inherently there's nothing wrong with them.

They are responding to the environment, to their upbringing or how they see the world in a very predictable and reversible pattern.

Once we go with that route, Healing, addressing mental health challenges become rather actually enjoyable, hopeful, and a lot quicker and lasts longer.

That's been my work, which I look forward to sharing more.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So tell us the piece like from the beginning, like a little bit about your own personal journey that is kind of how you blend your personal and your professional journey to kind of where you are today for the types of people that you treat, what you're advocating for, etc.

Thank you.

So I stumbled upon the work I do, just like many people who discover something through just noticing.

I've come to realize one of the best skills in life, which I try to have a son who is 22 year old.

Skill in life is the power of noticing.

Just notice what is happening.

If you notice without judgment, we're trying to fix.

Almost everything we need to fix or address is right in front of us.

That's what Steve Jobs has been known for.

That he looks at a number of things and says, ah, customers want it.

So I was a graduate student, Columbia University, New York.

And two things was going on at that point, early 20s.

I realized I'm very depressed coming from a dysfunctional family.

So I was in therapy in New York City.

My therapist, great therapist, we would go session after session, talk about the same thing.

I was getting bored.

Literally, I didn't want to go.

I didn't have much money, but I paid money to talk about my mom, my dad.

And I realized when I talk about my family hurt and my emotional struggle, there's kind of a story.

There's a pattern.

And my therapist was trying to relieve, help me relieve my pain.

And I was thinking, you're going nowhere.

This is almost going 18 months.

And I keep talking about my mom, what's wrong with my mom.

I'm going nowhere.

And I was doing my clinical training as a future psychologist at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital.

And I worked with depressed people, suicidal, schizophrenia, drug addicts.

And I noticed when I treat them as a dignified, respectful human being, men and women, And avoiding, slowing down, diagnosing, giving them a label, trying to fix their depression, anxiety, and so on.

But I start to listen to them, their story.

They were a predictable pattern in their stories.

Inherently, there was nothing wrong with them.

They ended up on the wrong side of the street, bad families, parents who were not there, abuse, the wrong crowd from the beginning.

and what they all wanted, they all wanted, They wanted more love.

They wanted more respect, more safety.

Don't harm me.

Don't abuse me.

Just listen to me.

Respect me.

They wanted basic human dignity.

And I start to do that.

So what happens?

Patients start to love me.

They would ask the attending psychiatrist, can I work with Dr.

Mehran?

And their symptoms were keep getting better.

And their health was improving so much.

Supervisor said that, whatever you're doing is working.

What is it you're doing?

And I was just thinking, I don't know what I'm doing.

I'll just treat them as respectful adult versus broken people.

And what they were sharing, they were predictable stories.

And I start to take notes.

So in my description, I talked about behavioral researcher.

I love data.

I continuously, every day I read I connect the data this article, with that article, with that research I notice they're telling me something I hear it, I don't quite get it so I start to create a lot of posters post-it, you know, notes and I went on a 30 plus year journey of decoding what they were telling me And that became the backbone of emotional rights That we humans, the same way we even get our vitamins There's a structure to our vitamins Vitamin A, vitamin D, calcium, etc, etc If you don't take certain vitamins We know what it does to our body You don't take iron, calcium Then I noticed that what they're asking There's certain basic emotional needs They need to connect They need to be dignified they need for my body to be safe, they need to express myself.

That once the patients who experience those needs, their symptoms, their pain, minimized, dropped rather quickly in a matter of sessions versus months and years.

Yeah.

And that became the genesis of my work, my book, that I talk about emotional rights, that these are as elemental as our DNA.

And there's seven of them.

We are born, we are wired to experiencing them.

The tragedy is that nobody has taught us that.

When we were raised, you were taught manners, school, the subjects, so on.

Nobody told us that there are basic emotional needs you have, dear child.

Parents have them, relatives, coworkers, and so on.

So once we have that, we can disrupt mental struggles very quickly.

Because mental struggles means that those needs are unfulfilled.

And that's what I talk about.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, is fulfillment.

When we feel fulfilled, we still have struggles in life, of course.

But we do better.

We figure it out.

We are nicer people.

We are kinder to people.

And that's my story.

Yeah.

Okay, so it's leading me to, okay, so you work a lot with high achievers also.

So you mentioned like you worked, you started out in your schooling, really working with people who were really struggling.

Yes, yes.

Drug addicts.

Highly depressed, severe mental illness.

But a lot of your work also is working with high achievers and high achievers who are also struggling with their mental health.

Right?

That's right.

So how is that?

So I think what's really interesting about you and your work.

Is that you really

Kind of hone in on people who are actually functioning high in society.

And what we deem as the most successful people in our society are also struggling with depression.

And what does that look like?

And how does that happen, right?

That's right.

That's right, Kate.

So the way I ended up working with high achievers, so I was finishing my doctorate.

I was looking to what do I do with my work.

So there were two options.

I become a clinician in New York City, get a clinic or join a clinic.

And I was thinking, to be honest, psychologists are crazy people.

All we do, we just sit and analyze people.

So I was looking for an answer.

Lo and behold, a major corporate headquarters in New York City called me through one of my professors and said, we're looking for psychologists to join us as full-time staff.

And Sally was fantastic.

Downtown Manhattan, who doesn't want to work there?

And you will be working with your people on succession planning program, people who become future leaders of the company.

They're coming from the best schools in the country.

So I joined them, loved the job, and it was a pivotal moment.

As I was doing psychological testing, personality testing with those leaders to help them find themselves to become better at what they do, I consistently saw higher rate of depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, ADHD, aggression, substance abuse about two to three times higher than the general population.

What was mind-boggling for me was they didn't know that.

They didn't want to know that.

And all they cared was, I'm doing great.

I'm eating my bonuses.

I have my gold Rolex.

And I want to be a vice president in this time, executive vice president, and so on.

It was a curse of resiliency.

In our society, we glamorize resiliency.

Resiliency basically means the skill and the mindset of you hit the rock bottom, something happens you figure out you learn from it and you bounce back again so high achievers are like thoroughbred horses They, when in doubt, when something bothered them, when they were in pain, all they did, they worked longer hours.

They pushed through.

So they were doing several things.

They were numbing themselves.

Yeah.

They were denying emotions.

They could talk about emotions, but they could not feel it.

They were delaying that.

They were using the term, someday I will talk with my wife.

Someday I will tell my husband I'm not happy with our marriage.

Someday I will take a vacation and be with my children.

So that someday go next month, next year, and they were waiting.

So they had the mental apparatus that they delayed their own emotional needs for them to succeed.

And they were great at it.

And after that company, I moved to other companies.

we came to California, realized it is everywhere.

Many of us high achievers do that.

A data point two years ago, Harvard Business Review, which is the premier management journal, globally, published a survey result that up to 50%, 5-0% of U.S.

Chief executive officers report to be lonely in their jobs.

This is not lonely at the top.

This is lonely as a lifestyle.

So when you're lonely, that's another code word for depression, for anxiety.

So when you're lonely, it means that they are lonely, they feel isolated, they part of themselves, they numb it, they hold on, they delay, and then they perform.

So that's what high achievers do.

And that's what high achiever moms and dads do.

They deny their emotions, their beings, and they perform externally.

The way you know they are depressed is the number of physical ailments they have.

Gastrointestinal complication in women, cardiovascular issues in men, blood pressure.

And so one of the exercises I do with my clients, which some get intrigued with it, some people, they get annoyed, is that, I said, tell them, open your backpack, your shoulder bag, your purse, show me what medications you have.

There's so much medications, Advil, etc., things to basically numb the pain.

Another data point, every day across the United States primary care departments, in adult primary care, up to one third of visits are due to depression.

Doctors know this, and it's called functional illnesses.

So they do all sort of tests, MRI, results more or less within the range.

Doctors say there's nothing wrong with you, but patients are in pain, discomfort, shooting pain, the neck, gut.

So that's how opiate crisis has started.

Yeah, okay.

People are in pain, discomfort, racing hearts, you know, like skin rashes, you know, the migraine, and so on.

They numbed, but the pro format was zoomed.

They, what's important is that they tolerate that.

And this goes for so long, years and decades.

My hope in this work, in this conversation, Kate, is that telling people you can still be very successful, be awesome as you are, and attend to your emotional needs, to what you need to feel again, to love again, to be passionate again, they are not either or.

Somehow along the way, when we grow up, we learn to just push, to perform, to be successful.

But it always will catch up with us.

So pain, when people tell me, Ardashir, I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I have ADHD, literally I have a guess here, I say, dear friend...

It's your wake-up call.

Your body alarm says, wake up and claim you.

Pain is trying to say that there's greatness in you.

There's bigness in you.

There's life and vitality.

Claim it.

Don't delay it.

You delay that, you will feel more depressed.

You will feel more hurt.

You'll feel more pain.

Pain is the invitation to come home again.

Yeah.

Okay.

So as I'm listening to you talk too, I think there's like a whole range of people who are high achieving or not, who are having severe problems, right?

There's a lot of people who are dealing with depression.

What did you say?

Like a third of the people who come into an urgent care are actually just having depressive symptoms.

Exactly.

Is the pain and emotional pain not addressed and it shows in the body?

Is the body that is hold on.

It's almost the analogy I use is we all drive a car.

Imagine your car, you push the gas and you push the brake at the same time.

It takes a lot of emotional and physical energy to know you're not well, but you're still pushed through.

That's why gut gets tight.

That's where anxiety is.

That's where chest it is that is like anger, emotions, things you want to express, you hold back.

So body is in hold on and still you're performing.

So it's the wear and tear in the body.

It does not have to be like that.

The reason is nobody told us this.

Nobody told us this.

Okay.

So this podcast, we're talking to the parents.

So parents who have kids who have ADHD, they tend to have anxiety.

It can lead to depression and it shows up in all different kinds of ways.

There's high-achieving kids who have been diagnosed with ADHD and, outstanding in school but at home and in their bodies they're really suffering.

Yeah and then

There's kids who grow into this who are numbing out with the video games and the screen time right we have kids who don't want to leave the house after they grad they somehow they get through high school and then they don't want to leave right and they're overcome with depression so So as parents, you know, of a kid who's struggling, you know, what, you know, if they're younger, what are the steps for a parent to, like, embrace their child's emotional health early on to allow them to find out who they are and not get caught up in the rigor of society, which is a very, very hard task for parents.

So what are some steps parents can do to just kind of slowly nurture that despite what's going on in the world?

Thank you.

That is a very important question, Kate, and very heartfelt questions because I'm a parent.

And our son, when he was six or seven years old, he was getting into trouble in school.

He was misbehaving, talking to class, knocking trash cans down.

So, lovely principal asked us, take your son to a child psychologist.

He's misbehaving.

He's becoming a problem.

He's a good kid.

There's something going on with him.

So we took our son to a therapist, a wonderful therapist.

After a few sessions, therapists asked my wife and I to go and meet with her.

And she said she asked our son, how are mom and dad at home?

My son, eight years old, told the therapist, my dad at home is sad and quiet, and had much better words description for mom.

That was the harshest thing and hardest thing that I ever heard in my life, and it was a wake-up call.

So I was raising my son the way my dad raised me.

My dad was sad and quiet.

My grandpa was sad and quiet.

They were severely depressed.

So what my son saw, a father who's there, we were going to soccer, to AYSO, everything, but I wasn't emotionally there.

I wasn't seeing him.

I was acting like a father versus being a father.

Statement by Gabor Mate, one of the leading psychiatrists, the psychologist, is that our job is not to raise grown-ups.

It's to help our children grow up.

So I realized I'm a trained psychologist But as a parent I'm a rookie Nobody taught me how to be a parent And I didn't have a role model My mom was severely depressed And So when our children get diagnosis, they are not doing well, they do not wanna go from school, high school to college.

Where we start, we don't subcontract healing to a psychologist.

The healing starts at home.

Children, they basically reflect the culture of the family.

So there comes down to several factors.

To what extent they have emotional connection built in them, that they feel connected.

Connected means that I love me as a child, boy or girl, because you love me and I feel a sense of connection.

There's a wholeness that I experience being with you.

There's a safety I feel experience being with you.

So the safety, like when children grow up, this is fascinating.

As a caregiver, a mother, we hold the baby, then the baby starts to walk.

They go one or two steps.

They always look back to see, am I doing okay?

And say, sweetie, go, go.

Then they go around the corner, then the next room, so on.

So they learn from attachment to separation to independence.

Many children, that phase gets warped because as they separate, they feel anxious.

They feel, I'm not capable.

I can't go far enough.

I need the sheltering at home.

The other in the sense of, you know, one of the reasons our kids, there's so many of them are medications that we haven't taught our children the power of feeling and expressing emotions and being in touch with our emotions.

We prize our children to use verbal language.

Use your words.

These are good sentences, you know, versus that.

How are you feeling?

What is sensing in your body?

And for us not to judge, not to interpret, but for them to express their thoughts.

Is the intellectual development, there's an emotional development.

The children who struggle, and I see a number of teenagers, parents recommend to me, they struggle with expressing emotions.

Their emotions are numb, diffuse, or it comes as anger, or sense of shame and sense of, I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough.

So this is the part about not learning that.

So the journey of healing for children is a start about how are we, the culture of family, mom and dad, and some of the basic foundation of love, connection, finding me, finding my emotions and going forward.

You mentioned about ADHD.

So growing up, at a certain point, I was diagnosed with depression, ADHD, and anxiety.

Those three experiences typically travel as triplets.

Yes.

Triplets, I love that.

They go together.

And it just breaks my heart.

One of my adult clients came to me.

she was taking medication for depression, separate medication for anxiety, another one for ADHD.

When she told me, I didn't tell her that, but my sense was shame on the doctor.

Didn't realize that it's the same nervous system, that you helps bring the person back to their body, to their emotional wellness, emotional wholeness, and you approach each one of them together versus separately.

So when those three exist, ADHD, depression, anxiety, the thing to do, look at the person, look at the child, teenager, and see what else is going on in their lives, in their schools, in their community.

Because those triplets, usually the one you want to focus first is anxiety.

When a child is anxious, when a grownup is anxious, means they're looking for stability, predictability.

They feel unsure.

Usually they have the leaky gut, like in a very tight gut.

Anxiety triggers ADHD, distractiveness, and then the executive functioning.

You wanna see if the person, the child or grown up, do they have a sense of settling in, being comfortable, feeling safe, connected, as a way in their to their lives versus all they want is that they just feel lost.

They feel marooning, meandering, overwhelmed.

What the work to do is to help them, support them in managing anxiety first.

And then with ADHD, as you do that, ADHD subsides significantly in that part, they find more control, more structure, more predictability in their environment once anxiety comes down.

Depression usually comes later.

Depression is about what are the needs this person, this child experiences or not experiences or they are in need of.

Then being able to express themselves, the sense of connection, sense of being connected to how much shame and blame and guilt going on in the family and so on.

So the approach is that always a start for better results with anxiety, settling in, Then the ADHD approach settles in and then move to depression.

So the main thing to do is instead of focusing on fixing a given condition, see the life of the child in a full context.

What are they doing to survive?

That's all they're doing to get by.

Yeah, based on the context of who they are, right?

That's right.

And they go into the survival mode.

That's right.

And it's always not what we want, right, as a parent maybe with our child, but it's about recognizing them for who they are.

Exactly.

Just like my son who said, my dad is sad and quiet.

He was learning to be sad and quiet.

He was learning from me.

So I said...

I haven't been much of a role model.

So I went on decades-long course correction, be a better father.

Thank God for my wife.

She's a much better psychologist.

She's not a psychologist, but I'm learning from her.

But so when your children are like that, who are they learning that from?

And can you be a different role model and learning together?

You don't have to be a perfect pattern.

Yeah, yeah.

But what you need to do is learn the job one day, one event, one birthday party at a time to get it right.

Because the ultimate lesson we want children to learn is we stumble many times and we get up many times, get up better.

Children learn doing better, getting better versus I need to be perfect.

No one is perfect.

We break down, we fall, we're making mistakes, but we get up as a better person each time.

That's the ultimate lesson.

Yeah, that's wonderful.

Okay, so as we wrap up, you've said so much.

Would there be anything that you'd have, like just in words of wisdom for parents who are navigating this journey with their child, who they are suspicious especially that their child has depression?

Yeah, yeah.

And really, that's taking hold and kind of creating worry, you know, a lot of worry.

So as a parent, when our children are not doing well, Our role as a parent typically is that go help them.

What we do as parents, we give advice.

We have solutions.

Have you tried this?

What when children, even adults, when they struggle, what they crave is a connection.

So let me digress a bit.

There's a reason suicide hotline, when you call that number saying that I may do something risky, something hurtful.

The other side, what that person does, all they do is listen to you.

They don't try to fix it.

They say, I'm here.

I want to hear you.

Tell me about you.

What is your life going on?

Who is in the house with you?

Are you safe right now?

You show compassion.

You show affection.

And you show deep humanity.

I'm here in this moment with you.

That's what we all want.

That's what our children want.

So when children struggle, can they talk to us in their own language and for us to hear their world, how they're trying to figure things out, how do they make sense from the world, their pain, things they struggle with, and for us...

Just listen, be respectful, give them a space to say the things they cannot say to others, to their own friends.

For them, give them a space that whatever I say, it's okay, it's good, it's my thoughts and mom and dad are not judging me.

They just wanna hear, they wanna be helpful.

Children don't wanna add advice, they wanna be heard.

But once we do that, the relationship gets better.

They may ask for advice.

So what do you think I should do with that?

What did you do?

My son these days said, Dad, what do you do?

Then I tell him the stuff I did.

I said, Dad, you were messed up.

I said, I was David.

And you're still here thriving.

I'm still here.

I said, that's life.

You mess up.

We get up.

Life is a comedy show.

That's life.

So be with your children, hear them, because once you do that, that helps them to know that I have a home.

It's very important for children.

The way that I judge a family, judge is a very strong word.

If a family is wholesome, the children feel that I have a home.

Home is not a place.

Home is a place of heart.

And children can travel for their jobs, for their college, go far away places, but they know there's a home.

Children who don't have that home, when they leave, they leave.

They don't want to call family.

They don't want to come back for holidays.

But what that home is that there's a place, there are people to hear me, to honor me.

I can be me as I am with all my good and the bad and ugly and the dramas.

That's the ultimate gift.