GUEST SERIES | Dr. Paul Conti: How to Improve Your Mental Health

By self-scrutiny, what are the givens? ... If you can't solve the problem, go back and look at the givens? What are you taking for granted. 'Oh, I know that every time I see an x, that x equals 4.' Really? Maybe you wrote down 4, somehow, because you were thinking of 4 at the time, and x actually is a 3. So, just go back and look at what you're taking for granted.

Envy, when it is the product of aggression or pleasure-seeking being too high, always unfailingly creates destruction.

Human beings have a long history of under-appreciating the power of the discoveries that are then in their own hands. So, we discover gunpowder—how long had you were shooting each other. We discover nuclear fission—now, are we going to destroy the planet? So, social media, it's a discovery ... Big, powerful discoveries deserve to be treated with respect.

The wish for or the impulse to really just suppress intrusive thought born of trauma or whatever else is really futile. That's not going to work ... We have to embrace these narratives and not expect them to disappear in a finger snap.

The vast majority of narcissism—maybe all of it, we don't know for sure—is rooted in the childhood trauma of not feeling good enough.

Do I want to be impacted by the opinions of this other person? Because I can let someone else's onions... very much impact my thoughts. But I want to kind of decide that. Do I really value that person's opinions? I don't want them automatically inside my head, telling me how I feel about myself.

We think, okay, aggression and pleasure drive, if one or the other or both is too high, we end up at envy; and if one or the other or both are too low, we end up with demoralization.

Asking of better questions about oneself is really what leads to the understanding—so, better forms of inquiry. To me, these better forms of inquiry, better questions, are really the cardiovascular exercise, the strength training, the flexibility training, the mobility training, coordination training of physical health—just translate to mental health.

We could have intrusive thoughts because there's trauma in your background. It may be very clear trauma that you're not facing and addressing. Then, you have intrusive thoughts that say 'I'm not safe.' Go look for what's still in the unconscious mind...

Narcissistic people, not always, but are often very seductive because of that appearance of mastery, of control ... We could look at it in the short-term and say that person had mastery over the room; no one said anything for an hour but them ... They had control over the room. But what they're doing is exerting over control.

The field of psychiatry has, historically, wanted to be sort of part of the rest of medicine, or like the rest of medicine. And what I believe it's ended up doing is glorifying the taxonomy—glorifying a category, mechanism, of understanding human beings.