Hello, this is Richard Jacobs.  I am the executive director of the Finding Genius Foundation and a non-profit, a 501 C3. I’m also the host of the Finding Genius Podcast. This year, in approximately October, I will have reached 3000 interviews with researchers and clinicians and all kinds of people in the bio-medical and health world. I’m working on a project which you likely know about because you are on this list called the Anxiety and Depression Codex. I’m going to be sharing with you what I am learning as I go through this journey. This approximately 18 month journey to create a resource for people that have anxiety and depression or for people that know people that have anxiety or depression and the bottom line of the resource and I’m going to repeat this a lot, this central idea is that if you have these problems or know someone that does, that person will affect everyone around them.

They will affect everyone around them, maybe like a planet. Their anxiety and depression is a gravity that pulls on everyone they come into contact with whether it’s at the store, a family member, a co-worker, a fellow church goer etc. If it’s a negative energy that’s depressed or angry or anxious energy, again, that gravity will pull down everyone near them. I’m not saying this to make people feel bad, I’m saying this because this is the truth unfortunately. Conversely, if you are in a good mood, you have the reverse gravity and if you are happy and if you are positive, that also affects every single person you come into contact with and helps someone, it makes them feel better. So, if I can help hundreds of thousands or millions of people around the world with their suffering and not only improve their own symptoms and their own lives, that will also spread to people that they know.

Let’s say the average person knows 150 people, which is what’s called the Dunbar number. It seems to be a number that’s scientifically based that people know at least somewhat. So, to help a million people, it’s 150 million people affected if there is no overlap. So, that’s a lot of people. So, that’s really the big goal of the anxiety and depression codex.

I’m going to give you one more way to think about it that I’ve also mentioned before but if you go to a practitioner, whatever they do, cognitive behavioral therapy or if they prescribed SSRIs, whatever it may be, they are likely to give you maybe one thing to do to help with your anxiety or depression. They are likely to know probably about 1% of all the possible treatments out there. My goal with this project is to gather 21% of all the possible treatments out there because that would just be 20 times better than what is out there from any one practitioner.

I think it would be a home run on top of a home run. Long preamble here, I want to get to you today another topic that I’ve recently learned. I’ve been doing interviews now with a lot of healthcare practitioners to learn. Researchers, clinicians etc. The more I talk to people, the more I learn about anxiety and depression. I’ve got to become a big time expert in it really to run this project and make it work and I’m doing it through interviews.

My goal is to interview at least probably 100 different people, researchers, clinicians etc. and then an additional 100 people that have these problems, anxiety, depression and related disorders. If you are listening and you would like me to interview you and hear your story, I’d love to do that. It can be anonymous if you want, we can call you Mr. or Ms. X. We don’t have to give your name. If you want to give your name, great but for the podcast, we are definitely looking for people that either have direct experience with someone that has anxiety and depression or they themselves. So, here is what I’ve learned.

So far, at least, I see 3 levels of anxiety and depression. Level 1 is acute, you are told you have cancer, your husband or wife wants a divorce, you lose your job, something happens, something really bad happens, it’s acute, it’s right there in your face. Of course, a lot of people would feel anxious or depressed about bad events in their life. That’s not what this project is for, unfortunately. Not that it’s not valid but for those people what caused their distress is much more obvious. The method to fix this distress, they may come out of this project, there may be helpful things but I can’t help everybody, I have to focus. Now, there is the second group, the chronic people. These are people that have had anxiety or depression, they may have been diagnosed or they may not, they’ve had it for months or years or decades.

God forbid but some people, that’s what happens to them. That’s chronic, that’s not acute. There doesn’t seem to be any, perhaps on the surface reason that they are that way. It could be maybe a hormone imbalance; it could be many things but this is what the whole project’s goal is to figure out. Is it their diet, do they need cognitive behavioral therapy, is it their microbiome, are brain scans showing something etc. We’ve gathered so far 21 or 22 possible treatments and we are going to begin researching them shortly. Again, this is for people that have chronic problems over a long period of time. I learned recently through an interview that there is a third level. These are the people, unfortunately, that are seriously mentally ill. Schizophrenia, manic depressive, bipolar disorder, psychoses etc.

This project, I think will definitely have a big impact on these people. I think the treatments that we uncover and we find may be a huge resource to these people but they are not the avatar, they are not the main focus of this project. Why? Because I don’t think a project of this nature is going to get us all the way there and people in that state, I think more likely caretakers or family members etc. would need the resource, again, nothing wrong with that. But I don’t think it’s a fit for this project.

I’m focusing on the chronic long haul people that really need the help because the answer is not obvious. Again, what comes out of this project, I know is going to help the people that are highly mentally ill, maybe they are homeless, I mean who knows. But these are the 3 levels that I have identified. Correct me if I am wrong. Maybe there are more major dimensions to anxiety and depression but this is what I’ve learned so far and I hope this is interesting and helpful to you. So, this middle level, the chronic level is what we are focusing on and now comes the end part.