Kendra Campbell, M.D.: Free Range Psychiatry

Dr. Mark Leeds [00:00] Dr. Kendra Campbell, welcome to the podcast.

Kendra Campbell, MD [00:02] Thank you. I am so very excited to be here.

Dr. Mark Leeds [00:05] Oh, me too. Thank you. Thank you. I wanted to talk to you because I really love your Instagram feed or your Instagram post. The Free Range Psychiatry. First of all, I love the name too. Just it’s an incredible name and you just post some really incredible stuff. And so I was in another interview and you came up in the conversation we were talking about the trauma to the brain and damage caused by psych meds and I said I said you know there’s this thing I keep seeing on instagram free range psychiatry and they and they’re talking about all the same stuff and the people I was talking I think it was from that film Medicating Normal and they said we know free range psychiatry you know she’s one of our people And so I thought, you know, I have to talk to you and just learn more about it. So, yeah, so tell me, how did that come about? Tell me about free-range psychiatry.

Kendra Campbell, MD [01:00] Yeah, okay, where do I begin this tale? Well, I would say that a part of this tale involves my own kind of personal journey, which I’m going to try to make a long story short here, which is that I guess about five years ago, I found myself not doing very well. I was working as a psychiatrist in New York City in a very busy emergency room, actually working there as an attending and managing the ER. And essentially, I was in really terrible physical health, mental health. I was on a bunch of medications myself and really just burned out working in the system of psychiatry, seeing the revolving door, seeing the same patients come in. And again, seeing how the current healthcare model was just failing. I mean, miserably failing everyone, seeing how medications really didn’t make much of a difference. And really just, yeah, I kind of just got to a point where I had this, epiphany. I had always wanted to have children. And long story short, a doctor, my doctor, said, you know, you probably actually could have kids if you were maybe quit your job and, you know, did a bunch of things to kind of work on your health and lifestyle. And I kind of took that little tidbit of advice and ran and essentially like overhauled my entire life. I cut down my hours, eventually completely quit, quit that job. I changed my diet. I quit smoking, drinking. I mean, all the, all the toxic habits that I had, and there were quite a few of them. And just slowly or actually even more quickly than And I thought my health started improving. I eventually came off my medications one by one to the point where I was on zero medications. And then ultimately through the process of IVF, I was able to conceive two healthy embryos, which are now two healthy children, two and three. So I had this, you know, after going through that myself and just seeing just how powerful this kind of, kind of like holistic lifestyle approach could be and how transformative it was. Personally, I was so inspired that I basically decided I want to share this with everyone. I ended up meeting or coming in contact with Pamela Wible, who I think you also know. I did the Live Your Dream course. And essentially, that was just the inspiration for me to say, I’m leaving the system. I’m starting my own gig. So that’s what I did. I left New York City, quit that job. I moved to Virginia. That’s where my family was. And I launched a free range Psychiatry. The name actually came to me during a run. I was running over a bridge in New York City. I can still remember the moment that it came to me. So the idea is kind of like, you know, the idea from the beginning was for it to be kind of virtual, also doing house calls. So essentially without cages, without walls, so kind of free range. And then, of course, the idea that it’s very holistic approach. So the free range kind of worked. So initially when I started, it was just me. And I was seeing patients in this little bitty office. I was seeing patients in the office, also doing telemedicine and also doing house calls at the time. And I started out kind of not knowing a whole lot. I had done a lot of research and reading about the holistic approach, but I’ve learned a lot, a lot since I first started. But the thing that really struck me is that when I first started free range, I had this idea that probably medications, you know, maybe had their place, but I was going to kind of add other things into it, into the mix, like, you know, adding meditation and yoga and diet. But the thing is, I realized pretty darn quickly that really wasn’t even the case. I realized that my patients actually were doing worse when they were on medications, just in general, like maybe they were better if they had other things as well. But if they were on those medications, they still weren’t seeing those same improvements or doing as well as my medications that were able to, or my patients that were able to come off of them. So eventually I actually developed this kind of super niche, which is not only doing holistic psychiatry, but I specifically do holistic psychiatry now to help people come off of psychiatric medications. People just started coming to me because at one patient I was able to get off and then another patient, another patient, and sort of like, you know, the word gets out. And what I know now is that there are so few psychiatrists in the world that actually do this or have this area of expertise that I was overnight. I was a mega expert in doing this because there’s just not a lot of people. So that’s what I started to do. I started just seeing patients and working with them through a holistic approach to get them off their psych meds. And what an amazing, like, you know, honor to be like, you know, to walk with people in that journey, by the way, that’s a whole side thing, but I can definitely talk about that. And then essentially my wait list kept getting longer and longer. And I realized I can’t do this on my own. There are so many patients and I’m just one little person and I have kids and I just can’t do this. So I ended up expanding Free Range and actually turned it from what was initially a sole proprietorship into a nonprofit organization. So we expanded into a nonprofit. We added psychiatrists. We added admin staff and other people. Now we have, I think, around there’s probably around 10 or 12 of us in Free Range right now. And ultimately I even after doing this for a while realized that there since there weren’t even enough psychiatrists that really people needed this training and I actually founded a fellowship so we have the free range fellowship which is where I train other MDs and nurse practitioners basically to do this to do holistic psychiatry and to help people safely come off their psych meds and yeah that’s where we are right now and we continue to grow and expand And so much, literally almost every day, there’s something happening, which is really, really exciting. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Leeds [06:43] Yeah, that’s incredible. I mean, it’s true. There’s really not a lot of people doing this. And that’s incredible that you’re helping to, you know, to train people, to train doctors. And that was my first thought when I became aware that there was this need. And then there’s also doctors you know for example in Dr. Wible’s group that want to drop out and do something different and there’s an incredible opportunity you know of you know you want to have a connection with your patient and be able to talk to your patient and spend time with them and really do something to make a difference in their life and here’s someplace where you can really do that so yeah

Kendra Campbell, MD [07:22] I mean honestly it’s my it is I feel like it is such an honor that I get to do this that I get to do this work that I get to spend literally basically as much time as we need with patients. We have so many different things. We also have this virtual support groups that we run, like every day of the week, there’s a different group that people can go to. And really, I mean, it is, I say this and like, I know all the people at Free Range, we kind of have this mantra, which is that like, things are different at Free Range, which is that kind of almost every policy, almost every way that you can think of running an organization and running healthcare, like as it is right now in the United States, we kind of do the opposite. Like we just do everything a little bit different. And it’s so refreshing for me to be able to do this. It’s, I know it’s so refreshing to all the other people who get to be a part of free range. And it’s certainly the, you know, feedback I’ve gotten from patients is that they’re just like, holy crap. Like, like, I can’t believe you exist. I can’t believe that there are people that are doing this. And oh my God, if I had only met you like, you know, 20, 30 years ago, how different my life would have been. And it’s so powerful. So rewarding.

Dr. Mark Leeds [08:23] Yeah. One, one thing that concerned me with, and I, you know, just the idea of like, I know that there’s a lot of over-medicating and mis-medicating people, definitely children. But what about, just for example, like I have a patient that comes to me for opioid addiction treatment and we were having this conversation, you know, and I was really excited about the idea of helping people off of psych meds and the possible toxicity that’s caused by these medications. And he got excited about it and he said, you know what, I think you’re right. I want to quit my bipolar meds. And I said, well, wait, hold on a second. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s the best idea. I don’t know what’s going to happen. You know, what if you next thing you know, you’re, you know, getting arrested or running around with the wrong people or, you know, like, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that. Like, like, how do I know that you can come off of those medications or not? Like, how would you address something like that?

Kendra Campbell, MD [09:15] Yeah. And this is such a common thing that comes up. And honestly, when I first started this work, I didn’t really know the answer to that question. And I can’t say that I 100% have the answer to that question, but I definitely know what I know and what I’ve seen work. So, you know, what I learned in medical school and residency is that, you know, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are serious mental illnesses. And, you know, all the rules are different, right? Like these people need to be on medications for the rest of their life. That’s what I was taught. I subsequently now know that is not true. That’s it’s absolutely not true. Not only is it not true that people with like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia need to remain on medication forever. Not only is that a myth and untrue, and we do have data to support this, and also I can tell you definitely through clinical experience that’s true, but not only is that not true, but we actually have data, not a lot, because of course who’s going to fund the data that says this, or the research that shows this, but we do have enough data to support that, and they’ve looked at different things, different antipsychotics, lithium, mood stabilizers, long-term, when you look at the long-term prognosis, that people who remain on the medications actually have worse functionality. So worse, poorer quality of life, you know, less likely to be employed, less likely to have friends, less likely to, you know, be housed, all these things, then the people who remain on the medications for life. So the outcome, the long-term outcome is actually better if you’re not on the medication. So that’s, I mean, that’s pretty, pretty crazy. That’s pretty amazing. And that’s, of course, certainly goes in the face of everything that I saw. So what I have, what I now know is that in treating, you know, people with serious mental illness, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia with a holistic approach, what I now understand is there’s a couple of different things. Number one, if you can, this is, this is hardly ever the case, but if you’re able to actually never give them medication, like if you see them when they’re young, for example, like our first break or something like that, and you can avoid medicating them then. If you can avoid giving them medications, their prognosis, their course, their trajectory is forever changed in a positive way. They will likely do so much better if that medication was never introduced into their system, into their brain. Because of course, the problem is that once the medication is introduced, it creates basically a physiological dependence. You know, I use the analogy here that it is the same as illicit drugs, like heroin, you know, all opioids, everything like that. And I know some people get a little upset with me when I do that, But it is, in fact, the exact same physiological mechanism that your body becomes dependent upon an antipsychotic as it does an opioid. Same mechanism here. And so what we know, of course, is that, you know, well, you know, for example, when you withdraw from opioids, what happens? Right. Of course, all of those symptoms come back. So the pain is what you know, everything is that is the opposite, of course, comes back with pretty, pretty full force. We call that withdrawal. Well, in fact, that’s the same thing that happens with mood stabilizers and antipsychotics. So a lot of these studies and a lot of these people use this analogy to rationalize why meds are good. So let’s say you have someone with bipolar disorder and they’ve been on lithium for 10 years. And you take them off of lithium. What’s going to happen? That probably, especially if you do it abruptly, they’ll probably at some point become manic, maybe even psychotic. But that does not actually necessarily mean that they need to be medicated and that it was the underlying disorder. What you can actually be witnessing. And in fact, I can talk about how you would know the difference, but what you can be witnessing is in fact an acute withdrawal, right? With antipsychotics, they call it dopamine, dopamine, super sensitivity. So when someone’s been on an antipsychotic for a long time and they stop, they go into an acute withdrawal and they have dopamine super sensitivity. And of course they can become acutely psychotic, right? So the good news in all of this, though, is that in my experience, if the taper is done incredibly slowly, and I mean way, way, way more slowly than than what you’d read probably in any textbook or talk to a lot of people, very slowly, very incremental. And at the same time, you’re addressing the underlying causes, the underlying things that may have been contributing to them having these symptoms to begin with. Yes, you can safely get people off of their antipsychotics, off of their mood stabilizers. Takes time and it takes a lot of effort, but it certainly is possible. And it’s amazing and it’s beautiful to be able to witness somebody through that process that may have been on those medications for so many years.

Dr. Mark Leeds [13:45] Yeah. Now suppose, just for example, like say someone takes Prozac 20 milligrams and I think Prozac probably comes in tablets or capsules and I think comes in a 10 and a 20. So say, you know, if I’m taking 20 milligrams of Prozac and you’re like, okay, we’re going to come off of it really gradually. I’m like, okay, would I go from the 20 to the 10? Like there’s nothing in between really. Like they haven’t really set it up for that.

Kendra Campbell, MD [14:09] Exactly. And I hate to sound conspiracy theorist here, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the pharmaceutical industries have made it incredibly difficult to taper people off of these medications using just the normal dosages that you can get. Now, how I get around that is that I actually do use compounding pharmacies, which it sounds complicated, but honestly, it’s actually easier to use compounding pharmacies than regular pharmacies, I found, which is kind of crazy, but it’s actually more convenient, to be honest with you, because it’s a simpler process, and they don’t have all these taxes that they send you. And I don’t know, it just seems easier. So I do that. And I’ve never used these, but I know that they exist and people in the UK use them. There’s something called tapering strips. I think the website’s called like tapering strips.com or something like that, where you can actually go and get these cool strips where, you know, it’s Lexapro 10 and Lexapro 9.5, Lexapro 9, you know, and you can order those online and have those shipped to you. I’ve never used them with a patient because I, you know, end up just prescribing it myself, but that is another option. So there are ways to get around it. But again, the pharmaceutical industry didn’t make it easy, of course.

Dr. Mark Leeds [15:16] Yeah, yeah, they it seems like they’ve designed these medications to be on permanently.

Kendra Campbell, MD [15:22] Yes. And from I just want to say too, I mean, and we have known that there was a physiological dependence on these medications. And like SSRI, since they first started, since the very first study was done on Prozac, they knew about it, right? But they have done everything that they can to make this information unavailable to bury it, you know, so that because this is like the biggest secret there is, right? You know, it really reminds me of the whole opioid epidemic, right? Like, it’s the same thing, right? The longest time, of course, every doctor was told, these are great. They’re not addictive. They have more pain, even more. No problem. Right. And big pharma was like, yes, totally safe. No, not even possibility, but possibility of addiction. And of course, what did we find out? So I think we are on the edge of that right now. Like, I think we’re probably months to years away from having another psychiatric medication epidemic. Same thing where people are like, holy shit, this is a big problem. And wow, they’ve been lying about it for a really long time.

Dr. Mark Leeds [16:24] Yeah. And in fact, as bad as the opioids can be, probably some of these psych meds are far more dangerous. I mean, opioids are considered to be relatively safe, apart from the addiction and the respiratory depression. You know, if there is a known quantity and it’s used properly, you know, there. In fact, I was recently a, you know, a doctor, an ER doctor was concerned, you know, a patient had been taking a very low dose of ketamine. And he said, well, you know, maybe the ketamine causes this problem. And I was comparing, you know, the patient’s psych meds and looking at ketamine. And one of them, the psych med had paragraph after paragraph of adverse reactions, including suicide attempt being buried in the middle as an adverse reaction. And then the ketamine, I thought I must be looking at the wrong paper. I don’t see really just like a couple of things. I mean, it had almost nothing in there. I mean, so there’s a huge difference between one and the other with the possible adverse reactions.

Kendra Campbell, MD [17:24] There truly is. I mean, it is absolutely mind blowing to me. I mean, the list of possible adverse reactions to all the psychotropic medications like and I have seen them. I have seen the liver failure, kidney failure, permanent movement disorders like I have seen everything. People’s teeth falling out like it just that there are so many of them. And the fact that we, again, like you said, like we kind of think these other medications are dangerous, you know, but psych meds are so safe when in fact we have the data right in front of us to know that is absolutely not the case. And I have to say that although the, you know, I have worked in a detox and I’ve seen people withdraw from opioids and alcohol. And of course that is, I don’t minimize that at all because that is quite a horrific and painful process to go through. And I’ll also say, though, that I have witnessed this process of people, you know, detoxing off of the psych meds. And I have to say it, you know, it looks more horrific. And the thing is, it lasts so much longer. Like, you know, you’re looking at a couple of days to maybe a couple of weeks, usually, you know. But with psych meds, it can be months to years where people are still having what they call protracted withdrawal syndrome. Still having those symptoms many, many, many months after they stopped taking them.

Dr. Mark Leeds [18:40] Yeah. And there’s a debate going on in this one group that was kind of interesting. There’s a guy proposing that, and we were talking, we were kind of comparing the tapering process gradually coming off of various psych meds to kind of being like landing a plane. Like, obviously, the worst way to land a plane is to aim the nose straight down and crash. I mean, That’s like quitting cold turkey. And that’s never a good idea. And you don’t want to come in too steeply. But this guy’s argument was you also don’t want to take forever. You know, his theory was, you know, these medications are in some ways toxic to the brain. And if you take too long, you’re exposing the brain to the toxicity. And maybe you want to taper not too fast, but also not too slowly.

Kendra Campbell, MD [19:23] Yeah. And I do agree with that. I’ll say this, too, because everyone’s always asking me, what is my protocol? And like what? And I’ll tell you this. I have some rules that I use when it comes to the tapering, but I don’t have an exact protocol. And the reason is because every human being is so unique. I mean, that’s holistic medicine, right? Like every, I’m not going to treat you like everyone else because you are so different. There’s so many, I mean, from, from like, you know, your mother’s relationship to food, to like what you’re eating, to like how long you’ve been on a medication, the variables are endless. And so, yeah, it’s always, I’m always doing this kind of calculation and the same thing. And that’s why, especially when people come in, let’s say they’re on five different psych meds, which happens all the time, I usually will start with the one that I think is the worst, the one that I think may be the most toxic to their brain and causing them the most problems. Usually I will start there. But it is this careful balance because, you know, if you go too quickly, it can be pretty horrific. And what happens in my experience is if you go too quickly, and then the symptoms come back so bad that it really frustrates, of course, it’s really frustrating, you know, and so then they might be, you know, decide, you know what, I can’t do it. I don’t want to try this again. I just can’t do it. And so there is some benefit to going slow enough that, you know, they’re not going to feel that way so that they, you know, kind of have the courage to kind of persevere and keep going.

Dr. Mark Leeds [20:35] Yeah. Would you say like, like with a lot of physical health conditions, you know, you can’t really, you know, positive thinking is probably not going to heal a broken bone any faster. You know, it might take six weeks or more, but you know, does, does having a positive mental attitude and a person’s outlook, does that help with overcoming these complications and adverse reactions?

Kendra Campbell, MD [20:57] Not only does it help, it’s probably the most important thing. It is. And, you know, I’m not, I’m saying this, I can tell you this from clinical experience, but there’s also a lot of research that shows this too. This is backed up by, you know, people have looked at this. When you look at the mind-body connection, it is so clear. I mean, it is more than clear that so much of our biology and everything is really based in our thoughts and our emotions. And so I can tell you 100% that whatever your perspective and your thoughts and your outlook and whatever you’re thinking and feeling during this process is going to determine the outcome, 100%.

Dr. Mark Leeds [21:34] Okay. Now, if you have, say you have a patient that’s doing incredibly well, you know, just finished, completed tapering and has come off of the medication and you’re meeting with that patient. And then say you get a call from their spouse, you know, and say from the husband, he said, you know, I’m really not happy with the progress. You know, my wife is in bed half the day and, you know, she’s, you know, she’s not herself. She’s not the fun, loving wife I remember from a year ago. And, you know, what am I supposed to do here? How can I make things better and help her along?

Kendra Campbell, MD [22:04] The interesting thing is I’ve had that happen. I’ve gotten that phone call. So yeah, I’m very familiar with it. So the first thing I just want to talk about is just that, But for me, of course, the most important thing is who it is that I’m kind of treating and how they feel about things. And so a lot of this is kind of a couple of part answer I have to give. Hopefully I’ll remember to come back. So a lot of this has to do with. So the whole idea of why somebody kind of took psychiatric medications in the first place. So let’s say that they were depressed because they’re you know, someone died or something like that and they ended up going into antidepressants. So it’s important to understand that sort of the process of coming off of psychiatric medications, I liken it actually to like a spiritual awakening, a spiritual process, which is so many of my patients have said, like, this is literally like a spiritual awakening. But it’s also kind of a coming home to yourself and a coming back to like, what is normal, right? So I talk about this a lot. Like I talk about normalizing the human experience, right? So we have been sold this myth, I believe, by the pharmaceutical industry that crying is bad, that being sad is bad, that laying in bed all day and not doing anything is bad. I disagree. I think that all each one of those things is human. I think that if you have a death and you’re grieving it, the DSM now says that if you grieve it for longer than a year, you have a disorder. I think that’s total bullshit. I think this is all normal. I think, I think so much, we have spent so much time pathologizing and medicating normal that we’ve almost lost touch with like, what does it actually mean? So sometimes, you know, what I, how I see myself in this process of supporting people as they’re coming off the meds is really just like normalizing what they’re going through. Right. Like I can, I remember this lady, she was actually a therapist and she was talking about how, you know, she’s coming off of her medication and she’s just like crying every day on the way to work, you know? And I just kind of really talked to her, talked with her for a while about how, like, maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Like maybe it wasn’t a sign of something bad. Like maybe she’s just normal and she’s processing emotions. I tell everybody I cry almost every day. And I think that’s normal. So to the beginning of your question is, I think I would talk about like, how normal is this? Like even talking to the patient and normalizing it for them and trying to figure that out. And then number two, I would probably have that conversation with the spouse, which again, you couldn’t do this in a, in a regular psychiatric visit, right? But the great thing is we routinely invite family members into two meetings. And so I would probably talk to the spouse and honestly have that same discussion with them and say, like, you know, how much of this? And maybe some of it isn’t OK. Maybe some of it is something. And, you know, maybe we do need to do something. But I think I think a lot of times it’s not a lot of times it’s just like normalizing the experience. And I know for me as a doctor, I have learned through doing this type of work too, that we’re entrained when a patient complains that we have to fix something, we have to do something. So they come in and they say, oh, Dr. Campbell, like I’ve been in bed all day and I’m crying and like, I wish I’d go back on the bed. I got to do something. And of course, I have that natural instinct still that’ll say, oh, yeah, I got to do something. And then I stop myself and I pause and I remind myself that’s not the case, right? That’s not always the case. And most of the time, my job is to do nothing, is literally to do nothing. So I think I would kind of bring that conversation in and sort of, you know, basically get the, you know, talk to the spouse about that. And also, of course, talk to the spouse about how he might support, you know, how that he might support the patient or whatnot. Because that, you know, when I talk about like, you know, the prognosis and how people are, whether people are not able to come off these meds, this number two variable, like number one is probably their outlook. Number two is their support. So if they have somebody, if they have somebody who can support them, they do entirely better than somebody who doesn’t have that support. And unfortunately, a lot of people fall in the category of not having much support. I’m not sure if I actually answered your intent of that question, though. So if you know,

Dr. Mark Leeds [26:07] I think I think that’s good. Yeah, I mean, that’s, you know, having family support is important. Having support around the person, having a positive outlook. And then also, but yeah, I mean, if you have a spouse that says, I really just don’t like the way my wife or husband looks in bed and they’re just, you know, they get up and walk around a little bit and they’re just laying around and not doing, you know. But, you know, maybe at this stage they’re at, that’s normal. You know, that’s where they should be. And I was thinking of another thing, and I don’t know if this is the right thing to share with a patient, but a patient was, or a family member was complaining about that. And I had this memory pop in my head of a patient that I had seen years ago on a house call. And he was a guy with ALS. He was in bed. His husband, you know, had brought him home. And they were, he had him on a ventilator in a hospital bed in their home. And the guy could barely move his eyes. He could barely communicate. And it was kind of a sad situation and they liked me coming. I went there like two or three times. And I think after that, it was kind of hard for me to see the whole situation. And I told him, I think you need like an expert. I was just out of residency and I said, I think you need someone that knows more about his condition. And he said, no, we like you. We want you to come here. You kind of cheer him up. And, but I was thinking like, I mean, it was a horrible thing. And for people going through that, But, you know, I know, you know, there’s really nothing good about that. It’s terrible. But, you know, I was thinking like, you know, for someone that maybe spends half the day in bed and can’t get up very much, but they’re still functional. They can move their limbs. They can get up and walk around if they need to. They can eat dinner with the family. They can watch TV and laugh and enjoy things. I mean, just thinking like, I mean, none of us, most of us, thank God, don’t have to go through that. I mean, I don’t know if I should be telling that story to patients, but it just hopefully, I mean, maybe gives people a sense of gratitude. Like, wow, at least we’re not going through that.

Kendra Campbell, MD [28:00] Yeah, no, I mean, it is. And by the way, just wanted to know, I, my mother had ALS. I actually lost my mother to ALS last year. So I, yeah, I completely 100% can empathize and understand everything about that story that you just shared. But yeah, no, I think so much of that is right. We’re talking about like mindset and gratitude, gratitude for what we have. And, you know, this idea, by the way, of gratitude is also another thing that I’m like super, I get super excited about because again, like gratitude is, it is so healing and it is everything. Right. And it’s the one thing that, you know, also like, you know, people can’t take away, right. No matter how bad you’re doing, no matter how horrific your life is and you can’t walk, whatever they’re going around you. If you’re able to have gratitude, it changes everything. I mean, we actually, there’s studies that looked at how like gratitude changes our DNA, right? It changes like so much. It changes the electrical rhythms in our heart, right? It changes our heart rate variability like so much just by that shifting out of like, you know, sorrow or even like victim mentality or whatever and into gratitude literally is this energetic shift that I think is, I think it’s incredibly powerful.

Dr. Mark Leeds [29:17] Yeah, yeah. I agree with that. I think there’s no doubt that the power of gratitude can bring a person back to realizing, wow, not only are things not that bad, but things are actually pretty great. Now, I’ve also heard, you know, there was like some audio book I listened to, and this guy was going on about studies about forgiveness, that you can actually get into like the most ideal state of mind. And they were talking about alpha brainwaves and stuff like that, but their forgiveness was very important. And that’s kind of a hard thing to talk about with some people because I haven’t gone through the trauma that some other people have gone to. So for me to tell someone you should forgive everyone, it might even be taken as offensive. But what do you think about that, about forgiveness?

Kendra Campbell, MD [30:01] I absolutely agree. And I mean, there’s studies even showing that, again, like the negative health effects of not forgiving, of holding grudge. Like literally we hold this in our DNA, in our cells, right? So when we are able to let go, when we’re able to forgive, again, it changes everything. I agree, though, that you have to be very careful in how you present this. Because the way that I kind of present it is it’s not saying that what they did is okay. We all have the ability, no matter if someone does something horrific to us, we each have that ability to forgive it. Right? But just understanding that it is not saying that it was okay. It is not in any way condoning or saying that what they did is okay and separating it in that way. I always like to recommend the book by Viktor Frankl, The Man’s Search for Meaning, right? You know, he was a psychiatrist who was in a Nazi concentration camp. And so kind of, you know, he wrote this book about kind of like that, right? Like he ultimately was able to forgive, you know, his captors and everything that he went through. I mean, if that’s not the ultimate kind of test of forgiveness, I don’t know what is. But again, he wasn’t accepting it. He or he wasn’t, you know, saying that it was okay, or in any way like that. But it’s a different thing. So it’s not easy. It’s not easy. And I think people have to be in a space where they’re ready to talk about something like that. And not everyone is ready. And that’s okay. And you just have, you know, we just respect and honor that not everybody’s at that point where they’re able to do that. And that’s, that’s okay. Maybe they will be able to in the future, maybe not.

Dr. Mark Leeds [31:33] Yeah. Thank you. What do you think? What do you think about therapy? Like when I think about psychiatry, I think about like a traditional psychoanalysis, you know, like Freud and someone on the couch and, you know, what about tell me about your mother and your childhood? Is there any usefulness to that or what kind of therapies are useful?

Kendra Campbell, MD [31:53] Yeah, that’s such a great question. Wow. This is a great question. So I, you know, My whole life, I, again, in my medical training and psychiatry, like, you know, I learned that therapy is great and, you know, it’s always talked about how wonderful it is. So my opinion is that it’s kind of just like every other tool, right? It can be used if used, if used in the correct way by the right person in the correct type of environment, therapy can be life-saving. I do think that there can be potentially a huge benefit. However, the flip side of that I’ll say is that many times that’s not how therapy is happening. Many times the therapeutic relationship is not that great. And we know by the way, that they’ve done studies that looked at all the different types of therapy because everyone always wants to know which one’s the best one, psychoanalysis, DBT, CBT, which one’s the best. And guess what they found out? It doesn’t really matter. The only thing that really matters is whether your relationship with the therapist, if you know, this comes back to what I was saying, right? It’s all this stuff like that’s, that’s the critical thing. And I always think that about medicine, right? I always think that the, you know, the best doctors are not the ones that have like psychopharmacology memorized in their head. They’re the ones that can connect and relate and hold a safe space for a patient. And the same goes true for therapy. So if you’re in therapy and you’re not connecting with your therapist or whatever, then it’s probably wasted time. And that’s one of the reasons why I think a lot of people end up in therapy for many, many years. There’s other reasons as well. So it can be helpful for some people if that relationship is there. However, when it comes to sort of when I think about my recommendations and when I work with people, what do I think, you know, what is my top recommendations? So, you know, we haven’t talked a lot about trauma, but let’s just say that I believe that trauma is essentially at the root of everything, right? It’s essentially, and I mean like, you know, as they say, big T trauma and little T trauma, I’m talking about everything. I’m not just the big stuff, but also the little stuff, you know, the parent who wasn’t there, who wasn’t, didn’t give you all the love that you need, all of those things. So essentially, I believe that is actually at the root of basically all disease, physical disease, mental disease, whatever you want to call it. Although I think it’s kind of silly to call them two different things, but anyway, so when I think about therapeutic modalities and helping people heal, usually where my mind goes, where my mind and energy goes to is trauma healing. That’s where I think the money is at. Now, does therapy help with trauma healing? It can, but again, thinking about this from a holistic level. So I’m holistic. I believe mind, body, spirit, all connected, not distinct. They all relate to each other. You can’t be disentangled. So when you think about therapy though, it is essentially a mind level intervention, right? So when you’re, when you’re in therapy talking, you’re up here in your brain, you’re just thinking you’re intellectualizing, right? And that’s, that can have some benefit, but where is trauma like stored in our body, mind, body, and spirit. So if we’re just doing therapy, we’re essentially, you know, addressing maybe this one little aspect of this traumatic, this trauma, right? But if you really, really want to heal, you got to go do every level. You got to think about the spiritual and you got to think about the body, the physical. Like I’m sure you’ve heard of like body keeps the score, like all these different, you know, you got to feel it to heal it, the traumas in the tissues, all these different things. You know, we have a bazillion, so much, so much evidence to know that in fact, trauma is stored, like literally in our body. And so yeah, so I’m a big believer in using also somatic treatments and all these other different types of deeper trauma healing modalities besides just therapy. But it can be helpful, definitely, for some cases and for some people.

Dr. Mark Leeds [35:15] Yeah. Yeah, I think we had a yoga expert on the podcast, and she talked about trauma being stored in the psoas muscle. And I think I’d read about another kind of meditation or yoga or something where they said that trauma is stored in the base of the spine. So I guess different philosophies believe it’s stored in different parts of the body, but it’s definitely a physical thing.

Kendra Campbell, MD [35:38] Yeah. And in fact, I even go even a step further to believe that. So I believe with my belief that we also have this energetic body, there is science to support this as well. But so that literally, not only do we store it in our body, but we actually store it in an energetic field around our body. And there are actually people who do therapies like that. They will actually take tuning forks and sort of feel the different sort of energetic fields around your body and literally can go through and find like different trauma stored in different kind of levels around you. I know this may sound a little woo woo, but I promise you there is some science to support this. But yeah. And so it’s pretty it’s pretty fascinating when you really get down into the deep of it and understand sort of how connected everything is. Right. And I guess like the disservice that we do to people when we just say, you know, when you think about trauma and disease being energetic, spiritual mind, And it’s very clear to see how a pill that, you know, changes a level, you know, blocks some dopamine or blocks some serotonin in your brain clearly ain’t going to be the thing that’s going to fix that.

Dr. Mark Leeds [36:40] Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And these, every, every one of these drugs, you know, when, you know, when you’re in medical school and you have to recite, you know, this is how this drug works. This is how that drug works. But when you really read the product information, they all start out that we don’t know how it works. This is a proposed mechanism, but nobody really knows how any of them work.

Kendra Campbell, MD [37:02] Not a clue. And that’s how the chemical imbalance myth got started. Right. So, you know, they had these medications and they thought that they were doing something and people seemed less depressed. So they said, oh, OK, like that’s you know, that’s it was the monoamine hypothesis was where it first started. Anyway, so they said it’s changing the levels of these things. So these things, these chemicals, these neurotransmitters must be the cause of depression and the cause of everything else. So that’s how this whole, oh, this was all done by the pharmaceutical industry, right? There was actually no real science that supported this. But they came up with this whole theory of like chemical imbalances. You have certain neurotransmitters are high or low, and that’s what causes all these different illnesses. So if you take these magical pills that correct those imbalances, you’re good to go. And of course, now we know they’ve done literally thousands of studies that they tried to prove that this was the case and they never could. Because it’s not the case. So, you know, it’s interesting, though, because, you know, even though this is now pretty commonly accepted that, you know, it’s a myth, and there’s no such thing. Oh, I can tell you, there’s still a lot, thousands, if not millions of people out there who still believe that there is some sort of chemical imbalance.

Dr. Mark Leeds [38:05] Yeah, yeah, that’s definitely, yeah, it doesn’t make sense. I mean, how can you talk about imbalance when you can’t measure it? I mean, so, but have you know, something I’ve been kind of interested in reading about lately is a condition of akathisia, you know, the movement disorder that comes from toxicity from psych meds and withdrawal from psych meds. And it’s kind of a terrifying thing to see someone on YouTube that has and to read about, you know, people feeling that they want to climb out of their own skin. And I almost don’t even like talking about it because I’m afraid I’m going to trigger somebody by even bringing it up. But is there, have you worked with people like that? Is there their hope for them? Do they get over it eventually? Or what do you do with that?

Kendra Campbell, MD [38:47] Yeah. And I just want to say, take a moment to say, actually, I was just about starting to create a video actually about akathisia, because really, I think out of all the horrific things that psychiatric medications do, it’s got to be, I mean, at least the top are really close. Like, I mean, it’s absolutely horrific. We know that thousands of people commit suicide every year because of akathisia caused by their psychiatric medication. So there are thousands of people dying because, you know, we put them on a psychiatric medication, which caused such severe distress. Like, you know, I’ve never experienced it myself, but watching someone and having it described by many patients, like I can’t even imagine that level of something, you know, of something horrible kind of going on. But yet that they actually kill themselves. And I also just want to take a moment to say that I have seen hundreds or probably thousands of times, someone gets started on a psychiatric medication, like let’s say an antipsychotic or something, and they have akathisia, and the akathisia is not recognized by the person who prescribed that medication or by other prescribers. Prescribers and it is assumed to be a new mental illness, right? Oh my God. They’re so agitated. Now they’re agitated. Now they’re psychotic. Now they have bipolar disorder. Now they have this or that. Like literally they get a new label and they get another medication added. I have seen this happen in the emergency. Like I have seen this happen so many times. Like, so I just want to take a moment to just like, it’s just kind of, I can’t even imagine that. I can’t even like, you know, my heart goes out to everybody that’s ever experienced this. So I’ve, I’ve worked with many patients who’ve had it both, you know, during while they were on the medication and then also the taper. And I’ll say this, there is hope. And in pretty much, actually, not even pretty much like all the patients that I know that I have treated it does go away eventually. I like to be able to tell people a timeline, but I really can’t. I just was talking with a patient this morning who said, or not my patient, but was in a social media. But anyway, they had said that It took them about a year. They had akathisia, severe akathisia coming off of clonazepam for about a year before they were able. So there are things, there are some things that we can do to try to minimize it. You know, having a really slow taper is one of them, just supporting the body’s ability to heal, all the things that we kind of do during this process anyway. So there certainly is hope, but it’s pretty horrible. And I mean, and honestly, like, you know, if that were even like the only side effect, like, let’s just say that was the only side effect that could happen with psychiatric medications, I would say like, is it really worth it? You know, like, is it really the possibility that we could do that, the possibility that they could experience that they could in fact commit suicide because of that? Is that worth whatever reason that we’re starting this medication? You know?

Dr. Mark Leeds [41:32] Yeah. Yeah. And that’s what they say about it. Is it the best treatment is prevention, which is, you know, of course, not very reassuring to someone who already has it. But yeah, definitely it’s something that doctors should be aware of before they think, you know, this is really no big deal giving a patient Prozac or Paxil or whatever other segment they want to give. These things are not totally harmless at all.

Kendra Campbell, MD [41:55] And that is literally kind of my, essentially, one of our biggest missions with Free Range is to spread awareness about this so people know this, so they have this knowledge, so they can make a decision. I mean, that’s the whole thing. I preach a lot about informed consent because it’s not happening. It’s not happening. I ask all my patients, were you told about this? Were you told about that? No, no, no, no, no. They were not told about any of the things that then come up and they have to deal with. And I always ask them too. I’m just curious, like if you had known, you know, that this would have, this could have happened back when, you know, would you have chosen to start the medication? So far, I think it’s probably a hundred percent of people have told me no. Of course, you know, hindsight’s different, but still, you know, if we were really having these conversations with people like we should be, like it’s our job, our moral, ethical, and legal responsibility to do as physicians, the world would be a lot different, you know?

Dr. Mark Leeds [42:49] Yeah, definitely. Now, something that’s coming up, and, you know, we don’t know if this is going to be like the future, the next problem, or if it’s good or not, but the thing that’s coming up now is psychedelic therapy, and, you know, marijuana is already out there. That’s like almost legal everywhere, and psilocybin, you know, the magic mushrooms, you know, everyone’s talking about that. There’s now big money behind that and pharmaceutical companies trying to get it approved. And, you know, we already have ketamine, which is legal and there’s these ketamine infusion clinics. Is there, what do you think about that? Is there benefit? Is it like going to be the magic bullet that cures everything or do we have to be careful with that?

Kendra Campbell, MD [43:29] Yeah, this is such an excellent question. Okay. So I’ll say this. I personally am a huge fan of psychedelics. I’ve used them myself. I haven’t legally used them with patients, but I patients have used them while I have supervised them and helped them during the process, you know? And so, and I’m somewhat familiar with, you know, how they work and everything like that. I think that there is, again, you know, it’s almost like therapy. I can almost say the same thing, which is it’s a tool. It’s one tool. It happens to be a very powerful tool though. Right. I, you know, I try to, I make the analogy sometimes that, you know, one psilocybin trip is kind of like 20 years of therapy, you know? So it packed into a couple of hours. It’s a very powerful tool. So I believe that it certainly has the ability to eliminate, to help people, I would say not eliminate, to help many, many, many people heal from trauma to PTSD, depression, addictions. Like, you know, we, the studies are coming out and the data are like astonishing when you look at it, right? Like when you, when you compare that, for example, to like the psychotropic drug trials, like there’s, they can’t even, they can’t even be compared. Like the results are just pretty astonishing. And of course you don’t have pretty much any of the horrible adverse reactions that you do to the medications. So they’re a powerful tool. They can do a lot. But no, they’re not a magic bullet. And of course, you probably knew that I was going to say this, but there is no magic bullet. Oh, that’s the big thing here. Guess what, people? There’s no such thing as a magic bullet. And I know that we live in a culture, we live in a society where that’s what everybody wants. And I don’t blame them. I want that myself. Trust me all the time. I want just a quick fix. I want a magic bullet. I just want one thing that I know that I have to do. And also it’s very sexy, by the way, to sell it that way, right? This one thing, take this one thing and you can cure everything. Very sexy, very appealing, total bullshit. So I believe that’s certainly the case with psychedelics. It’s not the magic bullet. It is one powerful tool, but I will also say the pharmaceutical industry is getting interested in it, very interested in it. And I can already see evidence that of where this is going to happen. And I anticipate, I mean, historically, how many times has big pharma, like when they got into something, how many times has that actually really benefited anyone? Not really. So I, my, I suspect that they will find a way to corrupt it. Well, they will find a way to, you know, just kind of essentially ruin it as they do. And just another thing I just kind of wanted to say, like on that topic too, of using like plant medicine. So we have plants, right. And we have plants that have like cannabinoids, like, you know, the marijuana plant has all these, all these different things that are in it, right. Actually cannabis is a perfect example because there’s CBD, there’s THC, there’s terpenes, there’s so many different things right in it. Right. But of course, and as a plant and as consumed as a plant, it probably, it has specific, medicinal types of benefits. Right. And also not only that, but when it’s consumed or when it was consumed for thousands of years, it was done to in a sacred ceremony, right? It was sacred. It was done, you know, with the community, there was drumming, there was this, it was obviously like a spiritual kind of thing, right? So what we have done, though, is that we come along, right? And we and we do this with all of the things that we find in plants, right? We narrow it down to one little chemical, we isolate the one little molecule, right? Like we did, you know, when you look at pharmaceuticals, right? We took out something from nature that seemed kind of good. And then we boiled it down, stripped all everything away, stripped the meaning away, stripped this how it was sacred script, stripped everything away down to this one little molecule, and then said, here, now we have this thing. And I think that’s exactly what they’re going to do or try to do with psychedelics. And my point here is that’s not how it works. There’s a reason why we, there’s a reason why we have cannabinoid receptors in our brain. Like, just think about that for a minute. Like, why did we evolve? Why do we have cannabinoid receptors in our brain and body? Like, why? Like, if you think about that, like, it’s pretty deep that we evolved like that. Obviously we evolved very closely. But I will say this, nature is a million times more brilliant than any scientist I’ve ever met, or researcher or pharmaceutical company. And so we have to respect that, we have to honor that. And when we don’t, bad things happen. And I fear that’s kind of maybe the case of what would happen with psychedelics as well.

Dr. Mark Leeds [47:39] Yeah, that makes sense. I actually, I think, early this morning, I was reading in one of the one of these groups I follow, I’m following like all these different groups on Facebook just to see what people are talking about. And someone mentioned a, some kind of, I don’t know if it was a mushroom lady or a mushroom website, but they weren’t even talking, I don’t think they were even talking about the magic mushrooms and psilocybin. I think they were talking about healing mushrooms that can be used for all kinds of different things. And that just seemed like a whole new interesting topic that I had never heard of, that there’s all kinds of different mushrooms that might help with some of these symptoms.

Kendra Campbell, MD [48:14] Yeah, actually, I’m really fascinated with that. And I don’t, I know very little, but I have also started, I watched that movie, Fantastic, sorry, Fantastic Fungi. Have you seen that movie? It was so good.

Dr. Mark Leeds [48:23] No, I heard about it. Yeah, I guess.

Kendra Campbell, MD [48:26] It’s just, it’s a well done. It’s really a well done documentary. Lovely. It was beautiful too. But yeah, they kind of go into some of them. And that was my inspiration actually, when I saw that movie and I’ve been since doing my own kind of research and I’ve been like experimenting, like we grow some lion’s mane mushrooms here, which are like, have all these kinds of different brain benefits. But yeah, it’s pretty, pretty amazing. Like mushrooms are, I mean, they are one of the most amazing things I think that there is like, you know, they have an entire underground internet, which is pretty crazy. They all communicate with each other, like through this crazy, they call it mycelial network underground, like, oh, yeah. Oh, it’s just crazy. It’s crazy and fascinating. And yeah, I think, I mean, you know, this is the interesting thing about how it works. So like, probably, you know, many of the there are people and shamans who have known a lot of this stuff for like thousands of years right and then we come along and like discover it like what’s means discovered to be this and I’m like actually you know and so that’s a like you know I see like cultural appropriation cultural appropriation like colonialism kind of thing going on sometimes with that so I try to always be like respectful and you know kind of honor that when I’m you know thinking about in using these types of things.

Dr. Mark Leeds [49:35] Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Yeah, you have the shamans that people go on these ayahuasca journeys with. And then you have the probably somewhat corrupted Ibogaine Mexican clinics where one of them I looked up and I was trying to track down who owned it looking for someone to interview on the podcast. And it turned out it was like a Miami real estate guy owned a chain of clinics in Mexico. I’m like, well, that doesn’t sound the same as going with a shaman out into the desert and taking tea.

Kendra Campbell, MD [50:02] That’s exactly my point. Yep. If it can be corrupted, it will, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And so much is lost when we do that. That’s the, you know, so much.

Dr. Mark Leeds [50:12] Yeah. So you’re, you’re, you’re living out on the road now, right? You’re like in an RV traveling the country.

Kendra Campbell, MD [50:19] That is correct. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Leeds [50:20] So are you enjoying that lifestyle?

Kendra Campbell, MD [50:24] Absolutely love it. It is liberating. It is freeing. It is challenging. I’m not going to lie. There are challenges, especially because I have a two and three year old child. So with the little kitties, it can be a little hard. It can be stressful sometimes. But just the freedom that I, that it has brought to me into my life, I can’t even put words to it. And also just this idea of minimalism. Like I’ve just been really kind of really wrapping my head around the idea of minimalism and living my life that way, living simpler with less things. And as somebody who has struggled with anxiety my entire life, like I can’t tell you, I mean, how liberating and fascinating it was for me to determine like, once I got rid of, so to move in here, we moved out of like a five bedroom house, something like that. We got rid of 98% of everything we owned, right? And it wasn’t easy, but it was kind of fun. And I have to tell you though, my anxiety decreased. My anxiety level went down now that I have like less stuff. Like again, this is, this is, these are the things that are so mind blowing, right? When you look, when you think about like holistic medicine, because who would have thunk? Like, you know, you go to a psychiatrist, you say, I’m feeling anxious, right? They give you know, a pill, right? But what if instead of giving you a pill, they said, well, how much shit do you own? How does that shit make you feel like, you know, why don’t you just get rid of all your shit and then come back and see how you feel like how different how different things would be but yeah absolutely love it and I feel just so incredibly lucky every day like talk about gratitude I literally every day wake up so grateful that I’m able to do this like really so much gratitude

Dr. Mark Leeds [51:56] Yeah yeah that’s incredible and I mean where I am in Fort Lauderdale you know I think on the east coast maybe like it’s a little bit scary thinking about living in a in a vehicle but I remember when I went to school in Iowa like as you as I would drive further west, like the rest stops would change, you know, like, as you go further east, you know, you see 24 hour security, the doors are locked, nobody’s walking around. But as you go, like, as it got closer to like, where I went to school in Des Moines, Iowa, like further to the Midwest, there’s people walking their dogs and kids playing at the rest stops. And, you know, they’re more of like parks than just like a place to park your car and use the bathroom. And I mean, there’s like a lot of really great friendly places where you can stop and probably your kids can play with other kids. And it’s not everything is not like it is on the East Coast, where it’s all kind of scary getting out of your car.

Kendra Campbell, MD [52:41] Absolutely. And actually it’s funny because we’ve been in Florida for a little bit because this is where my in-laws live and they are helping to like watch our kids sometimes, which is really nice. But that’s our next thing. We’re actually gonna head North and then we’re gonna be heading West. And then we’re gonna essentially kind of go up and down the West Coast. That’s what we’re gonna do in about two weeks. So yeah, I’m really looking forward to that. And the kids love it. I mean, that’s the great thing about also this age is that they just love it. You know, they just think it’s a big party adventure every day. They also don’t know that it’s not normal though which is kind of interesting they’re just like doesn’t anybody live in the house on wheels yeah

Dr. Mark Leeds [53:14] […] and yeah I mean unless you’re out driving on the road I mean you don’t you don’t get to see all that stuff

Kendra Campbell, MD [53:34] Yeah yeah no that’s, I mean, my favorite part is just to explore and meet new people, see new things. Like it’s just an endless, endless fun, I think.

Dr. Mark Leeds [53:44] Yeah. Yeah. Of course you don’t want us all to do it. Cause then there’ll be too much traffic. There’ll be a million of us parked.

Kendra Campbell, MD [53:50] I’m happy that not everybody does it. That’s fine by me.

Dr. Mark Leeds [53:53] Yeah. So, okay. Yeah. Dr. Kendra Campbell, thank you for joining me on the podcast.

Kendra Campbell, MD [53:58] Thank you so much. This has been so much fun. These were like such a amazing questions that you asked. So it really an honor. And I thank you so much for reaching out to me.