Dr. Judy Ho is a triple-board licensed clinical and forensic psychiatrist, a tenured associate professor at Pepperdine University, and a published author. She's the co-host of syndicated daytime television talk show The Doctors, and CBS’ Face the Truth. Dr. Ho focuses on things we should all talk about: ADHD, self-sabotage, attachment issues, and how to communicate with our teenagers properly.
“As a culture, we are going about mental health all wrong. We want to treat everything at the symptom level,” says Dr. Ho. For example, when it comes to weight loss, many of her patients can skip Lap-bands and surgery and get on Ozempic. “But the minute they pull back on the medication, all the weight comes back because they never deal with those underlying issues of what it means to eat healthily. They don’t address why they were reaching for unhealthy foods as a way to regulate themselves. They don’t address their ‘food-as-coping’ strategy.”
Loneliness, she says “is like smoking 15 cigarettes a day, in terms of the impact it has on your overall health, your mortality, and your early chronic issues.”
“It’s killing a lot of people, but they don’t reach out. They isolate and hide from the world and never address their need for connection.”
For anxiety, depression, and loneliness as well, people are increasingly depending on what she calls digital co-regulation – which has an even darker side.
“Whenever people feel stressed, they immediately reach for the phone for social media. It is like an addiction because it temporarily feels great, yet it pushes away the underlying problem. But over time, you grow a dependence on it. Worse, you begin to feel deeply unhealthy, because of the negative messages that it's giving you.”
Teens especially suffer from this.
“Teenager self-talk is filled with all these messages that they’re getting from social media about what they think they should be, and it makes it really hard for them to actually regulate their emotions more effectively. The teen brain is trying to develop a sense of identity and form [its] executive function, but social media disrupts those pathways in a big way. The best thing that we can do is to really focus on quality time in real life… and modeling that for the kids in our lives.”
“We live in a frenzy of digital input, which causes anxiety in so many ways. You just have to return to real life without your devices around.”
To hear more of Dr. Ho’s analysis of the anxiety caused by a frenetic digital culture; how Taiwan integrates medical care vs. American health care – which tends to be siloed; the causes of ADHD; self-sabotage; how disgusting kids’ menus are at restaurants and how that sets them up for a lifetime of bad health; why the semi-colon is an important symbol for recovering addicts; and why burnout may be the next wave of health crisis, watch the full video here.
Written by Adam Gilad
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