Checkout The Video Transcript

Janice Edwards – Welcome to signature Silicon Valley I’m Janice Edwards and thank you so much for joining us. We’re starting off today talking about mental illness. Dr. Sonia Parikh and Dr. Vidushi Savant have created Savant Care, an innovative model for really approaching some of the concerns dealing with mental illness. As we’re looking into the holiday season and with stories that have been in the news in the last few months about suicide and domestic violence it seemed like a really important time to take an opportunity to look at what can be done to help people with coping with a lot of needs so welcome to you both thank you for being here.

Sonia Parikh – Thank you

Vidushi Savant –We’re happy to be here

Janice Edwards — I appreciate your being here, because the hope is that someone watching who was either in need of services or a family member who has discerned that someone is in need will find information that will help them take those next steps so before we get into that let’s talk a little bit about savant care because this is a new innovative model that you’ve created what makes it different from the typical way of treating mental illness

Sonia Parikh – So Dr. Savant and I, while we were training at Stanford we noticed that psychiatric care of today doesn’t look much different from the care of 20 years ago. So you know being in the heart of Silicon Valley we have decided to kind of start a model practice that uses New Age technologies, I mean kind of integrates all of the evidence based technologies that can treat mental illness into one practice

Janice Edwards – Okay so what does that mean specifically in terms of the technologies

Vidushi Savant – So basically there are different centers all over the US, big university centers are developing different treatments like virtual reality for addiction or virtual reality for phobias, then there’s a newer treatment transcranial magnetic stimulation which is not as new anymore but it’s it’s relatively

Janice Edwards – So, transcranial as opposed to the frontal lobe which is what people think as opposed to the old model…

Vidushi Savant – Yeah

Janice Edwards – in terms of shock therapy

Vidushi Savant – Yeah

Janice Edwards – This is stimulation is it basically shock therapy for another part of the

Vidushi Savant – So basically it is it stimulates a part of the brain that’s relevant as a part of electroconvulsive therapy the you know, you stimulate the whole brain so it has more side effects whereas what you want to do is you want to stimulate a particular part of the brain which is the one that matters and that’s what transcranial magnetic stimulation does and then there’s more treatments like biofeedback and EMDR and these treatments are evidence-based but they are constricted to certain centers in us so what we want to do is we want to be able to bring these treatments to people first you know all over Bay Area and then multiply it to all over the US and we want technology on our side, so we want to use technology to be, to make us more efficient and also to be…

Sonia Parikh – To buy higher quality care

Janice Edwards – Because certainly one of the stories that touch so many of us was Robin Williams suicide. And, like we all who met him in some way had a story about him. I’ve interviewed him, I worked on the set of Mrs. Doubtfire just so i could see him work but obviously people who were close to him knew about his pain and of course you never treated him we can’t really say specifically what’s there but I think what people try to look for in terms of understanding is so someone’s dealing with depression and a medical diagnosis and they’re having low moments what would be the intervention that might prevent them from deciding it’s just too much? What…what would you look at recommending for someone who might be watching or know someone who started to have those kinds of conversations are indicated that despair is a daily occurrence?

Sonia Parikh – Well, I think first of all, understanding the warning signs of you know impending suicide. And you know some of which include you know a family, if you’re a family member of someone who’s suffering noticing that they’re losing interest in you know things that they used to care about, their.. they’re talking more about dying and looking up ways online to try and die, saying goodbye to people, giving away prized possessions you know those are these are some of the warning signs…

Janice Edwards – Right…

Sonia Parikh – And so once you know your kind of aware that something’s happening there, suicide is very preventable. In the sense that ,there is help out there and they’re effective treatments available so what a family member can do is, or the the patient’s themselves you know 911, going to a nearest emergency room, its always available and there’s suicide hotlines one of which is 1-800-273-TALK, available to anyone and 24 hours a day completely confidential. And you know seeking mental health care a lot of these a lot of psych patients who are suffering from a depression actually see primary care doctors and don’t ever see a mental health professional and so you know there are there are a lot of us out there and you know wanting to help and having effective treatments available to them…

Janice Edwards – So with that transcranial stimulation or something be something that would help retrain the brain out of depression or…

Vidushi Savant – Yeah it can, it can, so basically we have different strategies right one is acute crisis management and then the other is long-term treatment. So there’s a lot of evidence that if you take away legal means of suicide you know if you take away their guns if you take away their medications that they can overdose on if you take but this looks like a nice case it was a belt so it’s not necessarily thing right, I mean but you know but you can’t prevent every single because a lot of people just you know use different kind of means but if you like, you know there’s a suicide hotline on bridges you know so that if you are walking at the bridge thinking about doing it you could just pick up the phone and call someone.

Janice Edwards – Hopefully if that person can think of it differently I think one of the things that comes out here and especially during the season where many people reflect on the holidays and missing others is that maybe sometimes you take those steps where you don’t leave someone alone even though they say I just want to be left alone that you really take it more seriously than you would have before because I think that many times people don’t want to think mental illness. They’ll look at certain behaviors whether it’s suicidal conversation and if we’re talking about domestic violence which you want to talk about before this segment concludes as well is people are not addressing the wise and that when I hopefully when we talk about this now and switching to domestic violence obviously the Ray Rice case in the NFL brought a whole lot of conversation into that realm but in terms of someone who’s making a decision to be physically violent what kind of treatments can ultimately alter that behavior, I mean because many times that’s where people stay in certain situations but what are your recommendations from a mental illness perspective?

Vidushi Savant – So there are different causes for aggression and the treatment would be, would depend on the cause of aggression. So you mentioned you know football players like one of the common causes for aggression in that population who plays contact sports is traumatic brain injury so basically the brain sort of jiggles in your skull and it hits your skull at multiple places and you get injuries, so there are certain parts of the brain that are sensitive to these injuries and are also the parts of brain that control your behavior and emotions, so if you have a lot of brain injuries you know you can have a disinhibition of control over yourself and aggression can also independently come as a part of brain injury so but it’s not that they can’t control their behavior entirely they can control when an episode of rage is coming on a person with the traumatic brain injury is what I’m talking about. But they can control how they take their anger out like you can teach in cognitive behavior therapy about how to control your anger?

Janice Edwards – Like the biofeedback would help someone become aware of that and we should say I mentioned Ray Rice, we know nothing specifically about that situation we’re just mentioning because it was one in the news so that, that’s one where biofeedback and a combination, sometimes even EMDR to deal with past trauma it’s something that might be effective

Sonia Parikh – And of course medications

Vidushi Savant – And of course medications

Janice Edwards – Yes medications and that’s the reluctance. Too many people are concerned that the medication will take away their personality. But how do you persuade people that medication can often be the saving grace as opposed to the failing one?

Sonia Parikh – That is you know our duty every day in practice because obviously a lot of our medications are stigmatized but you know a lot of our medications are very symptom oriented, you know we we target symptoms and in this particular case aggression is the symptom and there are a lot of proven medications, that you know have studies behind them that are very helpful in these cases.

Janice – So in this case if someone is seeing a primary care doctor they would get a referral and then it would come and hopefully with the technology as well as…

Vidushi Savant – Yeah

Janice Edwards – Some of the tradition would see improved results

Vidushi Savant – Yeah

Janice – Well thank you very much for joining us thank you and continued success. If you want to no more about savant care the details are on our screen.