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Welcome back. I'm super excited about the topics that we'll be discussing today with the guest, David Rudd. David he is the former president of the University of Memphis Distinguished University professor and the Cofounder of the Rudd Institute, which is the National Center for Veteran Studies at University of Utah and University of Memphis.
To give a frame of reference about David's rich of experiences, his CV alone is about 79 pages long, given his long tenure as a licensed psychologist and a distinguished academic with over 15,000 citations. The reason why I'm really excited for today's interview, in addition to being excited for all the other interviews, of course, is because as a first generation Asian American who got my naturalized citizenship through the military service of six years in the Army, I attribute a lot of my opportunities through the gateway of education. And of course, the prestige or the perceived importance of higher education have indeed shifted over time.
It's not the same as 40 50 years ago when David went through his education process. It's not the same process as my immigrant parents who only got to where they were because of their higher education opportunities. A lot of folks now, they go through YouTube, other creative avenues or the nontraditional routes at the same time.
I have always wondered why college tuition has been rising at such an alarming rate for the past two, three decades. And there frankly isn't a lot of information and data about the student debt and its detrimental impact for the American economy and the global economies. Because whether we like it or not, the US.
Is a giant player in all aspects of economies. I hope you take away something that you can apply to your own life. And we will also discuss extensively about the power and the importance of emotional capacity and emotional well being and why emotionality affects our optimality in terms of how we show up day to day, whether it's productivity related or interpersonally.
With that, I hope you enjoyed today's Discover More episode. Part of what distresses me are students that come to a college or university and immediately seek out only those connections that are consistent with their perspective. And so rather than expand their perspective, they become more and more isolated.
And I think that really limits their opportunity to learn. I think it limits their opportunity to grow, I think it limits their opportunity to be successful. And you see that more and more today outside of college and university life.
You see that in society as a whole. Discover More Podcast is for introspective thinkers with growth mindsets seeking authentic lifestorms. As a therapist, Benoit Kim highlights the magical relationship between healing and the optimal human experience of what we call life.
Here is your mental health being a top priority today and every single day? Let's get this started. Welcome back to Discover. More podcast.
Expect to learn about the cutting edge suicide prevention handbook by the very expert. David's impressive journey of becoming president of a large university. The untold reality of being an academic.
Why mental health underlies everything we do and much more. David, welcome to the show. Thanks.
Yeah, good to be with you. Awesome. So from my research, you showed that in 2019, you testified before the House Committee on Education and Labor Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Investments.
How was that experience, and why are you so deeply passionate about student success overall? Yeah, it was a good experience. I tell you, those are always interesting exchanges in Congress, and particularly around critical issues like affordability for higher education. At the heart of that hearing really was about the affordability issue, about how do we contain costs to make sure that college and university access is maintained and ultimately ensure a broad base of access across the country.
As you know, one of the most significant challenges, really, is affordability. The only thing that has outstripped medical cost increases over the course of the last two decades is higher education cost increases. And they have been unparalleled and unwieldy and for most individuals, difficult to manage.
Yeah. So I think that is a perfect segue going to the higher education realm, because as we spoke briefly offline, I think there is a huge discrepancies or gap between the general public's expectations of what higher education should be versus the reality of how it is. So higher education is supposedly nonprofit, but as you know, the astronomical endowments alarmingly increasing tuition costs in the past two decades.
And I feel like a lot of institutions are operating not so much like non for profit, but for profit model. Do you have any thoughts as being the president of a large R one research university for the past decade? That's a good question about whether or not they really operate as nonprofits. And particularly if you look at the things that increase cost.
So it's not necessarily the cost of faculty, it's not necessarily the cost of staff. It's a lot of peripheral cost. One of those is college athletics, and a lot of those are peripheral costs around core infrastructure.
So housing, dining cost, athletic cost, things that may arguably not be essential to higher education. So it really is a challenge to think about what is at the heart of higher education, really what's important and what's critical to what we do, and ultimately, how do we price it and how do we think about that as an issue. The problem for higher ed has just been incremental increases in tuition.
I'm sure that your experience was probably very similar to my experience and everyone else, that every year you just see an annual bump in your tuition. Where do those dollars go? And I think that higher ed really has to answer those questions for students, both at the undergraduate level and the graduate level. Yeah.
I want to highlight what you said, that, of course, it's a large umbrella, which encompasses a lot of different factors. That is why the tuition is increasing every year we talked about. We do need to identify and discern some of the most important pieces.
And David, I know you're a first generation graduate yourself. I can kind of assume that that's why student success is very passionate to you because you were also the beneficiary of scholarship through the army. What do you think is the most important quality of higher education, whether that's how it is now or from your personal experience through the lens of a first generation graduate? Yeah, I think the most critical element in terms of impact of higher education is access of students to have relationships with faculty, the ability to relate to faculty not just in a classroom, but outside of a classroom, and making sure that faculty are not stretched so thin that they don't have time for that.
I think one of the most critical challenges that faculty face are just a broad array of demands that make it difficult for them to interact in meaningful ways with students and particularly outside of the classroom. Some of the most impactful look at my personal experience. Some of the most impactful times that I had as an undergraduate were times that I spent with faculty outside of the classroom.
Part of the reason I became a psychologist is I developed a relationship with one of my professors, a fellow by the name of John Darley, who actually was one of the most prominent social psychologists in the world at the time. And it really had significant influence on my decision on what to do. But it was a function of being able to spend time with him, talk with him, and really get to know and understand what psychology was about that would not have happened just in a classroom.
And I worry that we're losing a lot of that capacity. I worry that we're losing a lot of the elements of higher ed that are probably more impactful, more meaningful for students. Would you say that the higher ed carries the same weight as it did when you are coming up the rank or when you're going through the education process? Yeah, probably.
It's probably changed a little bit with the escalation of cost. Certainly higher ed has great impact on ultimately issues about financial status and financial well being. I mean, that data is pretty overwhelming.
Now, what's interesting though, I would argue that because of the affordability issue, because of the costing issue, that where you get your degree matters less today than it did 30 years ago, that opportunity is more available and accessible as it should be. And the issue of where you get an undergraduate degree is probably less of a critical issue than where you go to professional school or get a graduate degree, which is a good thing. And the idea of paying exorbitant amounts of money.
So if you look at NYU, one of the most expensive universities to attend in the world. And part of that is not just tuition costs, but living and dining cost. In New York, aggregate cost on an annual basis, including tuition at NYU approaches $90,000 a year.
Yeah, that's a significant amount of money. I think those kinds of issues really beg the question of what is the value of a degree and what is the value of a degree from a specific institution relative to cost and debt? And student debt is a huge issue for many, many reasons and it's going to ripple through, ultimately will ripple through the national economy for the next couple of decades. I want to zoom in for a second.
Can you tell me more about why do you said that you think the importance or the prestige of undergraduate degree is less and less prevalent or common as maybe like professional training? Can you tell me more about that? Yeah, absolutely. And some of that is very much I'm really a clinical scientist and part of that's data, if you look at your higher ability, if you're a psychologist, go and get a PhD in psychology, it matters very little where you got an undergraduate degree and it matters very significantly where you got your graduate degree. That what drives professional opportunity really is not just where you attended, but who you worked with.
It is a very small world. Actually, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article just a month or so ago, maybe a little less than a month ago, that almost 20% all tenure track faculty and I forget what the degree domains were ultimately came from five different universities. I don't know if you happen to see that article.
It is a very small world at the professional level, and I would tell you specifically for academia, less so for physicians and nurses and healthcare providers and others, but for academia it is still a very small world and who you work with as a graduate student has impact if you want to be an academic. Interesting. So let's go down to the realm of educator for a quick second.
David. So from your experience as ten years as a leader, executive leader of a university, which is a president, in addition to being a distinguished professor of psychology for many more years before that, could you curate, like, a list of successful qualities that you've seen from the students you either interacted with or the students you had created or established? Relationship, as you said, relationship is an important pillar that I think is being undervalued more so than ever. It could be something quick answer or long answer, whatever you want to take, but I just want to provide some references from your own experience from the other side of the table.
Yeah, absolutely. Because I think that's a really good question. Yeah, I would tell you argue that it really is about being open as a student to different perspectives, different ideas.
That is, the students that are open to perspective don't come into a higher educational experience with a very narrow band view, but they recognize and understand that the real goal of higher education is to expand your perspective in life. It's to expand and to change the way that you look at the world in a productive and meaningful fashion. Students who have that kind of flexibility have that kind of openness, and then I would add the flexibility and openness students who are willing to take risk.
And when I say that, I'm really talking about taking risk by being engaged in whatever the academic environment is in the classroom or in the lab or outside of outside of the classroom, in the lab, to develop relationships with faculty, to develop relationships with graduate students and develop relationships with staff members, really, that is critical. So if you go back I've had an advisory committee that I appointed and maintained every year that I was president. And I always told the students it was ten students a year.
And I always told the students to be sure to maintain the relationship, to really think about me as a part of their network. I think a part of what students miss is the idea that when you're in a college or a university, you're building a network. And that really to get the most out of that educational experience.
You want to build a network and relationships that endure that last a lifetime. And I really encourage those students to do that on an annual basis. And I was surprised only about 20% of the students ever took me up on that.
And when I say that only about 20% of them would ever reach out to me independently, would ever ask if they could give me a phone call or have lunch, and I will tell you every time they did, I agreed. And there are a handful of students that served in those advisor roles that I still have a relationship with today that I've been more than happy to write letters of recommendation for graduate school to help them in terms of their perspective and approach to research and other activities. That really is critical.
And that's not just openness and flexibility, but it's a little bit of risk taking and a willingness to put yourself out there and be vulnerable in developing relationships with faculty. Probably not a more critical thing if you want to become an academic to do than to develop those relationships early, maintain them, and really recognize that they're a great resource for you. Yeah, I view that I view your response as the microcosm of the real life, because the relationship ability to initiate, ability to seek out risk, ability to seek discomfort, create and establish networking for prolonged reasons, they apply to adults.
Doesn't matter what age you are or what stages of life you're in. So I just want to highlight that I think you're absolutely correct it's kind of a broader lesson just about life in general. I couldn't agree with you more.
And I think their core tenets of what you just said is this openness, our ability to be open to feedback and new information. Do you have any thoughts on the danger of extreme cognitive rigidity and the importance of mental flexibility and life through your wide, rich, diverse experiences? Yeah, great question. I do.
I have a number of thoughts about it. Part of what distresses me, not just as a former president, it distressed me greatly when I was an active president, but also as a psychologist, are students that come to a college or university and immediately seek out only those connections that are consistent with their perspective. And so rather than expand their perspective, they become more and more isolated.
And I think that really limits their opportunity to learn. I think it limits their opportunity to grow. I think it limits their opportunity to be successful.
And you see that more and more today outside of college and university life. You see that in society as a whole. I mean, we are very fragmented.
We are very divided. And we seem to only go to places to listen to our perspective that affirms what we already think, instead of expanding our perspective and trying to develop and grow. I think it's very dangerous.
You can see that in American politics today. You can see globally as well. It is an area of deep concern for me personally, I think for a lot of people in this country today.
Yeah, I always joke about because my background is a former policymaker and I jokingly say that the two reasons why American and global politics are burning down is because of rigidity and fear and fear that could be insecurities, trauma, unintended emotional issues and so on. But I do view those as the primary factors as to why everything is happening around us every single day. Yeah.
Frankly, one of the things that certainly fuels fear since and detachment from the perspective of others. It's easy to be afraid of people that you don't know. It's easy to be afraid of people that you don't understand.
And certainly American politics and arguably global politics today fuels that kind of detachment, that kind of separation. I have a quote by Maya Angelo. I mean, she is one of the most ubiquitously attributable figures, so it might be misquoted, but I would love to share this with you if you have any thoughts.
She said well, allegedly she said that tribalism by definition means that you are connected and rooted in a tribe. Therefore, tribalism requires otherism like. Without the perceived enemies or others, tribalism by nature fundamentally cannot exist.
Do you have any thoughts there? Yeah, I think interesting, the idea that somehow we've equated tribalism to conflict. And I think that certainly to some degree, her quote reflects the ad tribalism in and of itself is not the issue but it's the perspective that anyone with a different opinion, a different perspective, is somehow an enemy and somehow an opposition to the perspective that you or I or someone might have. That's a part of what has been fueled very effectively in American politics over the course of the last decade.
And it's unique. I don't know that it's ever been this intense. Now, part of the intensity is driven by technology, I think it's driven by access to information and the capacity to limit your access to information to only the information sources you want to hear from.
And that is unique. I mean, that is something that really has changed over the course of the last five to eight years, is the capacity to listen to only what you want to listen to. And certainly news has not always been that way, but it certainly has developed very precisely into little tribal entities about political perspective, social perspective, all of that is counterproductive for democracy.
A deep concern. I used to be very active politically when I was younger, and it wasn't as divided and wasn't as hostile and certainly wasn't as aggressive as it is today. Yeah, I think your response reminds me of you have a Bon Jovi's quote or I think with one of his song lyrics, he says, the more things change, the more things stay the same.
And I think a lot of people forget that. Right? So I wanna you you talked about technology. You attribute a lot of this chasm, a lot of this political, social, economic conflict to the rise of technological front.
Can you share us, from your experience as academic and a licensed psychologist, the connections or the correlation that you see between social media and mental health for young adults and adults? Yeah, no, absolutely. Part of it is understanding the psychology of the psychology of social media. There's a very specific psychology that's not different than other potentially other areas of entertainment that are potentially malignant.
So let me give you an example. So, gambling. So I don't know if you have spent time in Vegas, gambled.
I'm not particularly fond of gambling very much, as I mentioned to you, clinical scientist. So I know the ODS. And the reality is, if you gamble and if you sit at the table long enough, you're going to lose.
It's just the function of the ODS. It's just statistics. But in Vegas, there are industrial organizational psychologists that work very specifically on the design and the development of a casino to keep you in the casino to make sure that you sit at the table as long as they can possibly get you to sit there.
So that the longer you stay, the more money you lose, which means the house wins. And so if you're in a casino recognizing there are no windows in the casino, there are no clocks in the casino, when you start winning, they give you free drinks in a casino. They do all of these things to facilitate potential malignant behavior which results in financial loss and related emotional distress.
I don't know if you've ever noticed when you are in a casino and you're in the elevator, they run periodic announcements of people winning and somebody just won a giant jackpot on a slot machine. All of that is to perpetuate the idea that you can win. Knowing the reality is the longer you stay, the more you lose.
And it's just the reality of how those games are set up. That's the way social media is built. So social media is built very much the same way it is meant to keep you engaged with your phone and there are all sorts of things that are done.
So if you're on Instagram or TikTok or Twitter, whatever the social media avenue, there are all sorts of little tricks that are done to keep you engaged, to keep that area of your brain firing so that you will continue to look at your phone and you'll continue to engage with that media. Part of the problem is much of the content that does that is provocative and potentially malignant different than if I sit at a jack black table for an hour versus 4 hours. If I sit there for 4 hours, I'm more likely to lose significant amount of money just because of the way it works.
It's the same thing on social media. The more I'm engaged, the more likely I am to be drawn into things that are going to have negative impact on my self image, my overall sense of esteem and efficacy. Just given the nature of how it's built, I don't know that most people look at it that way or think about it that way.
Interesting. I think that might be the most concrete analogy I've heard using gambling and the setup of gambling and how that facilitates our innate desire to win or create shortcuts, to fame, our wealth onto social media. And the correlation of the longer the time you're stuck in that container, the more dangers or more harm you're exposed to.
I think that's pretty amazing. It's a very sad thing. And you can look at all the studies that look at engagement with social media, particularly for adolescents, for latent kids and adolescents, and there's a clear connection in terms of time and malignant impact, in terms of self image, esteem, efficacy, depression, anxiety, all of those things.
I mean, it can create a certain fragility. And what's interesting about it is it's such an echo chamber and such a narrow band of society to begin with. It's not really representative of anything other than itself.
It's just not a broad swath of society that you're accessing. So it draws certain kinds of personality types that play certain roles within that domain. It's really fascinating when you look at it.
So you're not spending 6 hours on TikTok creating dancing videos every night? David. No, I'm not. Yeah, me either TikTok is similar to the Atlanta city or Vegas effect where the moment you go in, like I said, it's lightless, it's timeless, seemingly timeless.
And it feels by the time you awaken your consciousness four or 6 hours have fled by. It's pretty insane. And that applies to people with Kitins cultivated awareness as well.
Yeah, it's really sad. I've been traveling a lot this year, as I'd mentioned to you. It is amazing to sit in an airport and to look around and see the number of people that their only engagement is with their phone.
It's interesting. I'll give you a really quick anecdote. So I do a lot of work with the Department of Defense have done over the years around suicide prevention.
And so I was with an army unit and they were in morning formation and it was 500 600 soldiers and they're in morning formation. And I'm talking with the commander about the challenges and why they might be having this problem with escalating suicide rates. And immediately for a conversation, they broke formation.
Every single soldier pulled out their phone and started interacting with their phone. Just fascinating to watch and to wonder what the role is of technology in terms of relationships and identity and how we learn to regulate upset and feeling. And it is a very significant challenge.
I would tell you that technology is a really big issue in a lot of ways. Anytime you're in a social context and you look around and you look at the level of disengagement in terms of people. So if you look at a family at dinner, it's always fascinating.
Look at you'll see families where every single individual is engaged with their phone during a dinner and actually talking. These are, I think, very significant things around individual development and overall well being and how my brain is going towards superficiality in terms of relationship building. I think a lot of people in 2022 have qualms or they're vocal about superficial relationships they're surrounded by and I think there is some correlation with that and the increasing use of social media.
Right. Any thoughts come up for you there? Yeah, I would tell you so if you look at the work we do very much the therapies that we do are around building emotional skill. So they're really about building emotional soothing capacity, stress tolerance, building interpersonal relationship.
Those are skills. You can't build that skill with your phone. And I think that that's a part of the challenge.
And so there's an issue of attachment in life in terms of relationship attachments or early attachments with mother and father figures and others in life and individual vulnerability, the capacity for intimacy and all of these things are really important. And I think technology undermines that. I think technology and the utilization of technology really early in life undermines that capacity.
And I would tell you that that's what we see in treatment on a very consistent basis particularly if you look at latency age kids or adolescents that are having the most significant problems, it really is a function of those skill sets. And so what we do is work with them to help them develop those skills, learn those things and then try to develop those relationships in their own lives, oftentimes in their own families. Yeah, I just want to echo that and put down the messaging board that it's not for us to self pathologize or pathologize others, but for us to accept the reality of the container we reside in because technology or social medias are not going anywhere, we have to coexist with them.
So we must learn how to deal with this coexisting reality that's ever changing every year. Yeah, that's really well put and I would agree and it really isn't pathology, I would tell you. It's just skill.
I mean it's just learning the development of certain skills that if you develop skill in area ABC and D and you've never spent time in EFGH, you're not going to develop that capacity very well. And it really is a function of just spending time with and helping people do that. But yeah, the issue of pathology is a really important one and I think particularly psychologists, we tend to over pathologize and always default to pathology as an explanatory model and it's not a healthy good thing to do.
Yeah, I greatly appreciate your humility and as you said, you're an amazing psychologist yourself. So my brain is also going somewhere weird. And bear with me, I want to make a weird connection to see if you have any thoughts.
So you brought up Vegas and I learned recently that just 40, 50 years ago the suicide rate in Vegas is extremely high. That's when the windows were unlocked there was a lot of rooftop access, balcony access and as you may know from our research, the suicide rate was attributable to the open gates, so to speak. In terms of when you get home you're depressed from the astronomical amount of money that you lost x, Y and Z.
However, that was somewhat counter than halted. Once we established all these external measurements I want to tie that to the social media usage that you alluded to. What do you think we can do as individuals and as a society to safeguard our future kids adolescence in their mindset and mental health from this excessive and incessant usage of social media? But I would tell you that we really need to limit the utilization.
It's like anything else, things in life in moderation are healthy and it's the excessive use that becomes the problem. We taught moderation, we taught the ability to self regulate. Give you an example.
So when our daughter was twelve she was having some difficulty sleeping, was really grumpy in the morning and just really irritable and I could never quite figure it out. What happened is I looked at our cell phone bill. And noticed that she was using her cell phone in the middle of the night and responding to text in the middle of the night.
And so we just came to an agreement that we would not have access to phones in the evening and during her sleep hours and, and because she couldn't regulate it, she wasn't at the you know, she really wasn't able. When she'd get a notification that she had a text, she'd always respond whether it's two 304:00 in the morning. And the inability to regulate that was creating problems.
So it's really looking at it I think is an emotion regulation thing and explaining it, I mean, we explain this to our kids that you need to learn how to manage not just certain feelings but impulses. And when you feel an impulse to respond, you need to learn to think and you can have a very strong wave of emotion where you want to respond and that's a large part of what goes on in suicide. In the suicide research, if you look at Vegas, you mentioned Vegas, what they did is they limited access to lethal means by not allowing windows to open on high floors.
I mean, all sorts of things, you're right on the money. And what happens is if you curb an impulse, you get an outcome that's different in the behavior because the impulse doesn't persist. It's an impulse by definition.
So it's a short burst of emotional experience and if you just learn to wait you have different outcomes. And that goes from the far end of the continuum that if you feel like you want to say something mean to somebody, to you feel like you want to kill yourself. And it's learning to manage impulsivity and impulses that really is a critical thing as a part of emotion regulation.
So we've always approached it that way and I would really encourage people it's very much the same and understanding when you use social media, it activates certain pleasure centers in the brain that are very much like using substances and as a result you ought to limit usage. That's the healthy appropriate thing to do. Just like if you use alcohol, you limit the amount of usage that there's a healthy appropriate range and it's that way for everything.
Yeah, I think a lot of people nowadays tend to demonize dopamine release from social media or substances and dopamine is just a molecule of more. It just wants more of what you just did. So it's more of a behavior and not really about the biological responses to what we're doing.
I want to add a quick and sino. I've been seeing a lot of research for developing onset like ADHD for adult population and I know a lot of research shows that ADHD is internalized and developed since young age. But I'm sure there's a lot of other research argue otherwise because the majority of my listeners are about 27 to 34.
So they might be like, oh, we're good. I'm not a young adult. I'm not an adolescent.
We're safe now. Not quite. The excessive usage of social media is ubiquitous, despite of what life stage or age you're in.
So I just want to share that quick sign, though, real quickly. Yeah, very important one to think about. When you're engaged with technology, you're not engaged with people, and it's not the same thing.
And I think part of the challenge is we tell ourselves we're somehow engaged with people when we're engaged with technology. It's not the same thing. You have different kinds of relationships when they're technology based or over dependent on technology.
And I think it's important to recognize that in terms of long term stability of intimate relationships, there are a lot of skills that are critical to develop and work on in order to be able to maintain those relationships over time. I want to make another leap and connect this with I think you'd appreciate these questions, but this is something I've been thinking a lot about and tying to everything we just said the last ten minutes. So as a first generation college graduate who went to pursue his doctorate many moons ago, any thoughts in the following statement that I read a while ago? He said, this is pertaining to a clinical psychology as a field relating to the pathology that we talked about.
The quote is the field of clinical psychology has been largely dictated by weird, western educated, industrialized rich, and democratic intellectuals who don't fall within the standard deviations of the norm and expect the general public to adhere to these air, quote, evidence based clinical interventions that are skewed toward the very demographic of their own. That who established I know it's a very broad question, and I don't know if you have any thoughts, but any take on that? I don't know that I necessarily disagree with a lot of that. I think a part of the challenge is to the whole issue of pathology and pathologizing issues.
A part of it is really two things. One, to understand the push in psychology for decades it's not so much now, but for decades the medicalization of psychology. So there really was probably after World War II, a real push to kind of medicalize psychology to compete with physicians, to really compete with if it's a medical problem, there's a greater sense of competency capacity, and there is a greater status in medicine relative to psychology traditionally.
I think this whole issue of medicalization has always been a challenge that we've medicalized emotional functioning, which is a real issue. The other thing is to understand that. The diagnostic manual so we're in the fifth plus iteration of the diagnostic manual for psychology and psychiatry that originally was created to facilitate reimbursement, that was originally created simply as a tool so insurance companies would know what you're doing and how do we pay you.
So when you go to a physician and you have a broken arm code that is used to quantify what you get paid for that procedure. That's what the DSM was. It really was an effort to create a matrix of diagnostic understanding to say, okay, you get paid if somebody has this problem, this problem, this problem, here's how we're going to pay you.
It wasn't really a theoretical perspective, but it became with that coupled with medicalization, it became kind of the guiding principle in psychology that really was problematic. And it pathologized everything. I would tell you, if you look at the work we do as suicide, specifically, the thing we do is we don't pathologize it.
We argue very specifically about it as a skill problem and not a pathology problem. It's not about having major depression, bipolar illness, schizophrenia, whatever the diet. It's about having the skills to self manage.
And so that's what we teach. And when we started doing that, we got more effect. When we moved away from pathology, we got more effective.
If you go back into the early 90s, we were trying to treat illness and not having any impact at all. It's when we started to conceptualize normal emotional functioning and how somebody may have varied from what they needed to develop that would really help, is when we started to have impact. All of the foundation of stigma is based in the pathologizing of emotional functioning.
If you go back to early theories, there are five or six early theorists on emotional pain. All of those definitions early on about emotional pain, emotional suffering, and believe that it was a function of individual adequacy, individual lack of capacity. I mean, all of these things that fuel shame, all of these things that fuel stigma, and as a result, undercut whether or not somebody wants to get help.
So it's a really interesting issue, and I frankly agree with it. I think we went the wrong direction, and we stayed in that lane far too long. Interesting.
So I sense the theme of prestige, or the perceived prestige between the psychologists and the physicians, MD versus Phdsid. Is it fair to say that that's less prevalent now than when you were coming up or when you alluded to a couple of decades ago? Yeah, there's no question it's less of an issue. It's really been nice to see that kind of progress.
Now you see psychologists I worked for about 15 years in medical centers. Before I came back into academia. I was full medical staff, UC psychologist, integrated in full in medical units.
Whether it's psychiatry, whether it's primary care, whether it's internal medicine, neurology, you see psychologists routinely integrated. There is less and less distinction between PhDs and PsYds. You see SIDS routinely now on faculty in psychology have seen that 30 years ago.
And so, yeah, it's been good to see those barriers be reduced. They're still there to some degree, but it's been good to see those barriers reduce. That's awesome.
I wanting to sprinkle some positive psychology and hope throughout this pretty heavy topic. But I do feel like the self perceived prestige is often more self gratifying than actually provide values for those who are seeking help. And I think we as a society must reconcile and come to a place where we review value and helping before the prestige or the honorifics that we have behind our names.
Absolutely. And we've got challenges, I think, at the society level about how we view those things and certainly around issues of emotional functioning. Yeah.
So I want to follow up on the skill based prism that you view suicide through versus the pathology based prism. And I think this is the most fitting question to you as 1% in all of PubMed suicide literature for the past decade, which is insane. I mean, for non academic folks, 15,000 citations doesn't really it's just a number, but for those who understand, it's an insane amount of citations.
And this is a loaded question. So please feel free to take this how you may in terms of skills based prism to view suicide and the danger and the risk of suicide. If you were to curate a quick handbook that you can equip every college student and every adult in America with, what sort of a qualifiers or bullet points would you have on the hem book? That's a great question.
I think a part of it is probably would. I think one of the things we don't do well is define emotional functioning. I don't know.
If you talk with people just about the range of their emotional experience, you get a good idea of somebody's emotional regulation capacity just like you build physical capacity in certain areas. We need to work to build emotional tolerance. And when I say that, I'm really talking about nature of attached conflict rejection in the relationship.
How do we build emotions in terms of our own sense of self image around that and not have it be so remarkably vulnerable? Some individuals and I think that's the area that we just don't do anything with. So that if you look what we teach kids in junior high and grade school, we don't teach about emotional functioning and emotional pain and how regulate that, what are the implications for your self image? These are all things we do talk about and those are really critical things. And so when I work with somebody that's suicidal, those are always issues.
Always. It's probably the first time. And if I'm working with somebody who's in their 20s or 30s or their 40s or 50s, it may be the first time they've ever had any really substantive discussion about it.
I think that's tragic and we've got to find a way to integrate that in earlier in the education and development of young people in terms of how they think about distress tolerance, your ability to tolerate upset. What do you do when you get upset and how in a healthy way. And that all of that's normal that there is emotional pain is a normal experience.
It's not something we should run from. But if you look at most negative affective words like guilt and shame and others, people don't want to talk about it, and as a result, they develop limited ability to manage it. And so that really is what the focus is about.
So I, in many instances, life, David, I sort of equate emotional functioning, everything that you alluded to with optimal performance in life because you have to have minimal incongruences inside of you to really show up professionally interpersonally and relationally. So with you, David, with all your experiences and all these diverse toolkits you have within your disposal, what and how do you do to ensure your peak performance in such a high level every single day? Yeah, I absolutely agree with you that it optimal performance and it really ought to think about it that way. And actually, I would argue that the emotional side is probably heavily weighted than the physical side in terms of optimal performance.
That it's more about emotional. Cognitive functioning really is critical. Now, I would not profess to I would never claim that I've always had good balance of these things.
I would argue, certainly make an effort to have good balance these things. I've got a great partner in life, Loretta, who I've known since I was 14 and had a lifelong relationship with. That is arguably one of the great things is when you have relationships in life that help you maintain balance, it's a lot easier.
And certainly we've got a couple of children that are grown adults now that have helped do that. Those are things that really give your life balance. I think a part of that is how do you develop your perspective in life, whether that's in terms of religious perspective or spiritual perspective in life, a lot of that is driven by the nature of our relationships.
The one thing I would argue, one thing about great, about being a psychologist is I believe this is really important work. I think it has value and meaning independent of anything else to be able to work with people. I mean, I feel enormously grateful for all of the people that I've had the pleasure of working with over the years.
And I would argue I have learned as much as they have from the experience that doing therapy is about learning, growing and developing. And that's on both sides, I would tell you that a therapist that stops developing and growing is a therapist that's become ineffective. Yeah, I agree with that 100%.
And this is a perfect segue to entrust you the sponsor of this episode. And as David alluded to, he has different avenues and toolkits. He has to make sure and ensure his emotional functioning so that he can show up to his best version of himself every single day.
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On their website at Magicmind Co. Magicmind Co using my discount code discover 14 for 20% off of any one time purchase on their website. An additional 25 of 45% off of any subscription based purchase on their website at Magicmind Co.
Additionally, you also get to contribute to their Saving Amazon Rainforest effort by checking out their website at Magicmind Co 14 daysofmagic. So David, I have another quote for you and I would love to hear your thoughts and I think this will tie into everything we just talked about for the past ten or 15 minutes. Naval Ravicon, the founder and the former CEO of Angelist and a prolific American Indian investor, he said all best things in life compound and iterate over time.
During your tenure as a president for the past ten years or during your tenure as a licensed psychologist, do you have any thoughts in terms of the quote that all think all best things in life, whether it's relationship, investment, emotional functioning, indeed do compound over time? Yeah, I would actually agree with that. At the heart of that is the issue of persistence. And that's really a part of this idea of optimal performance.
The idea of persisting in the face of adversity and challenge is really critical and they do compound and build over time. If I look in my own personal experience, a part of building good relationships is persisting in times, in really developing the capacity and the skill to manage and deal with those things. If I look at the relationships that I have personally and look at our relationships with our children, part of development, particularly if you're a parent, is that very thing.
It's about persistence. Persistence in the face of adversity is a tough thing in a lot of circumstances, and a part of that is the importance of time and waiting. The capacity to wait is a really important skill.
One of the things we talked earlier, one of the things I worry about is that social media undermines that. It creates a certain impulsivity and urge to respond when sometimes the best thing we can do is wait and do nothing. It is interesting.
It's a good question, yes. So the natural question would be any salient examples, top of your mind you can provide with the listeners that when you did wait and you upheld the delayed gratification, can you share what sort of a magic happened or blossom on the other side? Yeah, sure. I think probably the most personal would be in working with individuals that are really suffering and struggling to help someone build distress tolerance.
You really have to be able to sit and work with someone who's in significant pain over time and not feel compelled to do the work for them and not feel compelled to protect them, because ultimately that undercuts their own capacity, their own sense of efficacy, inability to build skill. And it's really not that dramatically different than you think about. If I look at our daughter, kids have difficult times, and allowing them to experience those difficult times and learn from it.
So if you have a child that has a bad relationship and they're in enormous amount of pain and you feel the need to somehow fix and remedy that as a parent, it doesn't let them do the work and grow and develop on their own. I mean, a lot of our growth comes in these moments of pain. What's important is the capacity to reflect on it, understand it, make some sense of it and then internalize that moving forward.
That's really important and that requires you to wait and not to, you know, not to move too quickly and and not to jump to conclusions and to wait and see sometimes what happens. Patience is hard but an important piece of persistence. Yeah, I feel like my heart is bleeding from what you just said because as a therapist, my biggest struggle is learned helplessness and this need of as you alluded to beautifully to wait for the clients and patients to witness and experience a breakthrough on their own terms.
At the same time as therapists with heightened empathy capacity. When we see the people in front of us struggle and drown in pain, we feel this need to go in and rescue them and, as you said, remedy their pain. And that's a learning process, and it's a growth area for me, but I just want to echo that, and that's not difficult.
It is very difficult as a therapist, as a friend, as a spouse, as a partner, because you want for people who care about the relationship component of their life I think it's a natural tendency for us to try and to help out others but in a way, at least through therapy container, it does rob away their chance of breaking through themselves. Yeah, I agree with you. And if you look at it from a parent's perspective, if you see your child and in a relationship and you know that it's probably not a great one, it's not malignant, but it's not a good one, and it may end up being a painful one.
For people to really learn, they're going to have to experience some of that pain individually. But trying to protect them is really counterproductive different than developing physical capacity. I mean, people don't run marathons by not experiencing some physical pain and haven't developed that capacity over time.
It's very much that same way emotionally. And we just don't do a great job of understanding that, learning that, and applying that in our own emotional lives, particularly in the US. And in Western culture.
Yeah, that's interesting. Right? Because I have had many public figures on on the show influence or academic or anything in between. And I often get messages like, oh, your guest was amazing.
I aspire to be them. I want to be doing the cool things they're doing. They're not seeing the journey that took these guests, including yourself, to become where you are.
It's an arduous journey, to say the least. And there's so much intricacies and nuances there, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it's just one of the things we don't talk enough about is when people have failure experiences.
There's never success without failure. I mean, it's just a simple reality. If you're going to do anything innovative in your life, whether it's at the personal level or the professional level, you're going to have failure experiences.
It's how you respond to those and what's your perspective? I would tell you every single clinical trial that we've done, we talk with patients after the trial about what helped them, what didn't, what was useful, what was not. And we've made changes based on that feedback, and we've had failure experiences, and we've learned and grown from each one of those. I will tell you each and every time we've done that, we've gotten better at what we do.
And it's because we were able to embrace the experience as a part of growth and development, not somehow as indicative of enduring failure. And I think these minor changes and alterations in perspective are really cool when you think about the way you phrased it earlier, about optimal performance. Yeah.
This is another weird connection, but reminds me of a quote that Will Smith said a few years back. He said that a lot of people, especially now, through the rampant use of social media, everyone and their mothers like to compare themselves with influencers, the people with glamorous lifestyles. He cautioned against those young folks that you should be afraid of making it or becoming famous, because once you make it, the only thing that could happen is losing it.
But when you're on the climb up during the journey, you actually have something to strive for. And for some reason, that quote sort of resonate with what you just shared. Yeah, it is interesting.
And I think that when you look at anyone that arguably has achieved at certain levels, and ultimately when you ask them what they feel pleased about and what are they grateful for and proud of, almost uniformly, it's the nature of the relationships that they built and maintained over time and the lives that they've had the privilege of being a part of. It always tends to come back to relationships and the quality and nature of those for each and every one of us. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. We're definitely coming towards the tail end of the episode. David and I do want to make it a full circle and to instill some more, hopefully, depending on what you respond to.
This question tying back to the suicide conversation earlier, your first publication on Suicide Ideation was published in 1989, before even I was born. Since then, have you noticed any notable changes in the suicide prevention landscape in America? Specifically, we've gotten a cluster of things that actually make a difference for people. We understand the problem a little bit better.
We've made progress around stigma and had movement on stigma. But I will tell you, I mean, I was reading an article yesterday. Half of Americans believe that getting therapy is a sign of weakness.
I mean, so stigma is still a big challenge, and there's significant misunderstanding around that. But at the heart of it, we've gotten better at what we do. But there's still significant resistance in misunderstanding about suicide as all.
Now, one of the interesting things I would tell you is we've got some data and there's converging data elsewhere that shows that suicidal thinking is not necessarily a good predictor and actually is a very poor predictor of whether or not somebody will attempt suicide or die by suicide. And that suicide suicide thinking is very different than motivation to die. I mean, that those are very different things clinically.
And so we're working on some stuff now about that impact. What we do clinically, when we do assessment, and ultimately how do we respond to it and help people understand it looks more like suicidal thinking is a marker of distress but not necessarily a marker of risk. And those are very different things, and it's an interesting wrinkle in what people thought we knew about this problem.
Yeah. That reminds you of the great training you provided at USC, which allow me to get connected with you. You talked about the suicidality traits versus emotional states.
And I don't know if you want to give, like, a quick in terms of unlovability, unresolvability things like that that you highlighted, just to give, like, a quick reference and insights for folks who might be dealing with some risk or who know, because, as we know, life is full of suffering every single day. Yeah, absolutely. We really found three primary themes to how people view themselves that tend to create vulnerability for suicide and really falls around three themes.
One, this idea of unlovability, the idea that I'm worthless, I'm unlovable, I'm a failure, I'm damaged. The idea of unbearability, which is my feelings are unmanageable. I can't stand the way that I feel, and if I have to feel this way, I would rather die.
And then unsolvability that my problems can't be solved. There's not a solution, they can't be managed. I would rather die because these problems are unsolvable.
Those three themes tend to cut across identity for people that are significantly at risk. They're all three things that can be addressed and targeted by looking at them very quickly, by trying to understand them. And that's been a significant part of the challenge.
But it's a very simple perspective, I mean, unlovability, unbearability and unsolvability and it really distills a lot of stuff down to a manageable amount of information and in clinically a context that we can target very specifically. Yeah, I think the common seeing of information is power. I personally disagree because we're dealing with the era of information.
I think application is power. So that is a great information for the listeners. Right, but then what can they do with this set of information you just provided? Anything like a quick guidance or advice there? Yeah, I think that recognizing one, that if you're feeling those things, those things are probably embedded and started early in life.
We learn things about ourselves early in life and those things are reinforced at different points and sometimes the reinforcement is because we misunderstand and we're not able to gain perspective, to be able to evaluate it in a broader and potentially more accurate way. And so if people are feeling those things, I would really encourage and that's where therapy really helps. Therapy can make a difference.
And it's hard to get that kind of a perspective shift. If you're feeling and if you believe that you're unlovable, if you believe that your feelings are unbearable and if you believe your problems are unsolvable, I mean, those are good indicators that it's a good time to sit down with somebody, work on those things. And the good news is that the majority, and I would tell you the significant majority of people that enter therapy and work on those things make progress and feel better and are able to find a life worth living.
Yeah, I think a great reframe because I love language, because I'm trilingual and I think we are the stories we tell about ourselves and about others. A great reframe I've heard is oh, I don't want to be saved, therapies are trying to save me. The reframe was I'm just helping you to get unstuck.
And I think that changes the perception dramatically because savior complex, nobody want to be saved because to recognize they need to be saved, imagine they have problems to be dealt with. So I like the reframe of being unstuck versus being saved or helping someone out necessarily. Yeah, I think that's really well put and I absolutely would agree with that.
Therapy is not about that. It really is about getting perspective and clarifying and I just encourage people let's make sure what you feel and what you think is accurate. If you're going to make a decision that's that significant, let's just make sure it's accurate.
And to. Help them understand that a lot of the distortion in what they think and feel is embedded in things that happened a long time ago that have led us to have certain blinders in life. And sometimes somebody else can help remove those, clarify it, and come to more accurate understanding of who we are, where we are, and why we do what we do.
I think the saying of perception is reality has been floating around the interweb. Can you challenge that and tell us why perception is not reality? Yeah, I would tell you that perception more often than not is distorted and it's distorted by a lot of things. It's distorted by the information sources that we are exposed to and recognizing that oftentimes we are drawn to sources that reinforce old distorted ideas about who we are.
For most of us, they're patterns and approaches and perspectives that we developed early in life and sometimes they had disproportionate weight of significant figures in our lives, whether that was a mother, a father or someone else. And if we had trauma in our lives, that creates significant noise and clarifying and removing that noise really is important. Therapy helps do that.
It helps us gain a more accurate perspective in understanding that we sometimes create a lot of distortion and the very things that we want to change. We end up looking in exactly the wrong places, just given habitual patterns of behavior in misunderstanding of what our own emotional experience is and therapy can clarify that and can really help people remove the noise and ultimately make some nice progress and grow a little bit. Can you define and tell me what does being a psychologist mean to you, David? Because I think not everyone has a proper context of what that means and I don't mean like a job description per se, but what does this vocation of being a psychologist mean to you personally? That is a really good question.
I think that it's a unique opportunity to be a psychologist, to have the opportunity to really spend time thinking about people and relationships in life and really what what generates meaning and purpose and value in our existence. I would tell you psychology is really about our recognizing, understanding our own emotional, physical experience in life and trying to find a productive, meaningful pathway and make our own contribution and leave the world in a little bit better place than where we started. And that really is what the effort is.
I think it's to leave it a little better than we found it. And psychology is really a unique opportunity to do that. It's a chance to work with people at their most vulnerable.
Always think about what a remarkable thing that is that people come to see us at their most vulnerable, an enormous amount of trust to do that and that we ought to honor that trust by being thoughtful and careful in making sure what we do is helpful and healthy. And I've always believed clinical science helps us do that. It helps narrow down what makes a difference and what doesn't.
It's a great way to spend a life and not just make a living. The relationship as a pillar really shines through through all of your responses, and I really appreciate that. Well, thanks.
Yeah. All right, so this is where I hit you with the Discover more questions before I roll out the red carpet for you, David. It serves twofold fold.
One is after this extremely insightful conversations, what is a domain in your life you're excited to discover more about after the fact? The second question is what is a domain in our respective listeners lives you want to encourage or even challenge to discover more about? After listening to this episode, I tell you've got some great questions. They're very thoughtful. I think, for me, when I look at the questions that you ask and what we talked about, I really think the issue of integration, of well being with physical well being in terms of how we think optimum performance and how do we conceptualize that, how do we conceptualize emotional health in the integration of emotional pain? Suffering is an area that I am looking at in more depth and detail and how do we communicate that? I mean, how do we communicate that in a way that really helps people develop those skills? Because it's not something we do well.
And a part of it is we don't really have the framework, the language and perspective to do it because the way we've approached it from this pathology perspective for so long. So I think that's an area that, for me, that's a domain I'm going to look at in more depth and detail and work a little more on. How about for the listeners? What would you like to encourage them to discover or think more about after the word? I would really encourage listeners to look at what do they do in their own day to day lives.
Can you quantify how you regulate your emotional experience and your emotional well being in your life today and just go through a normal daily schedule? So what do you do on a daily basis to regulate your emotional well being, your emotional health? And what are your approaches when you deal with emotional upset and emotional distress and emotional pain and identify steps that help that help not just build distress tolerance, but really help build intimacy and stability in relationships when there are periods of emotional pain and suffering? Because the single most significant response to emotional conflict is avoidance, and ultimately what that does is damage relationships, dissolve relationships. The single most toxic element to a relationship in terms of longevity is guilt. The number one response to guilt.
So when we know that we've done something to hurt someone, we avoid that person rather than deal with what we did and pursue forgiveness in a relationship. And so think about strategies, about how you start to approach that, resolve those issues and recognize that avoidance in that context is not a good thing and it can damage the very relationships we rely on the most. Yeah, I think the simplicity of simply tracking and reviewing the archives of our habits is profound.
Just simply reviewing and tracking it, you're not making any changes yet, but just doing that, I think, gives you a good overview of, as you said, beautifully. Are you even doing anything considering or thinking about your emotional well being day to day? So, yeah, this is what I roll out the red carpet for you, David. I had a lot more questions to go, but I feel like anytime you speak, I enter a new wormhole of curiosity.
So this could be a six hour conversation, so hopefully I could have you on for round two down the road. But this is where I roll out the red carpet for you, David. Where could people follow up with you, ask any more questions, and even check out any cool and interesting projects in the horizon? I've got a Rudd Institute, and if you just look at University of Memphis Rudd Institute, you can find a lot of the work we do with veterans through the Rudd Institute for Veteran and Military Suicide Prevention.
You can look at some of the work that we feature on my Twitter page at U of M passpres. Not A-Z-A lot of the work that we do is featured. I'll use Twitter as a communication mode, but we started a digital therapeutic company to digitize a lot of the treatment work that we do, and it's a company called We Therapeutics.
In the coming year, we're in the middle of now. We'll have digital therapeutic out on the market next year, and I would encourage people to pay attention to that, certainly. Just if you have questions, want information, always email me at mdrud at memphis.edu.
You can Google me and find all sorts of links pretty simply. So I would encourage people to reach out, happy to respond and happy to help when possible. Yeah.
When you look up David Rudd on Google, a dashing picture of him in this very formidable outfit and suits, this pop up. So he is very well known in the clinical psychology realm. Yeah, like I said, I really appreciate the time.
I know you're traveling around the globe quite literally every single week, so I appreciate you making the time today. My pleasure. Really enjoyed it and really appreciate the thoughtful conversation.
Thank you. Yeah. And to all the listeners, as always, I'll include all the important and pertinent show notes in the episode link below.
And for all the YouTube watchers if you want to support this podcast so I can continue to bring on amazing and interesting guests like David Rudd. If you can subscribe share and this episode with one person, if you found any value in today's conversations and for all the audio listeners episodes always drops on Monday and I greatly appreciate everyone's intentions and following towards the very end th deep and immense gratitude every single day. And as always, I hope to see you again in the next week's week of Discover More thank you for listening.
