Dr Yousuf Raza | Psychiatry, Pakistan & the Pursuit of an Islamic Identity | MindTrap with Mufti #34

[Music] [Music] people

we are doing it tonight we are doing it we have an amazing and absolutely outstanding guest i'm just gonna bring up the intro for you right here allahu akbar there you have the the profile of dr yusuf razza an amazing uh religious and science but sorry scientific expert hailing from pakistan somebody who specializes in reconciling between religion and

science and also a practicing psychiatrist in a country like pakistan people so let me just bring that doctor and thank you for being on mind trap with us tonight thank you so much for having me

i said i wanna come everyone watching all right so wow doctor what a uh uh there's just so many things here to unpack um you know religion science psychiatry pakistan [Laughter] so i you know before we get into any of this for people who are just uh you know they're coming across this today they're not so familiar with your background can you tell us in in in your words uh

sum up a bit of your journey we know you're the director of an institute julie bieber institute uh in islamabad today a bit about that mate just bring that to our attention in your amazing words okay thank you thank you mufti um i'm uh i'm a psychiatrist right as multisab said so i got my fcps specialization in psychiatry along with that i did a diplomate in logotherapy which is a particular school of psychotherapy uh founded by victor frankl uh i pursued all of this um under um the guidance and mentorship

of my teacher dr bassett koshel he's a professor of sociology and religion and prior to that i had a background in religious activism um i studied a whole lot of doctors pursued his line of thought for the longest time until 2014 i was part of his organization that he'd left behind i parted ways with that in 2014 and i've been pursuing my uh this particular line of the religion and science relationship and for myself particularly how psychology

fits into that mix so that's what i'm i'm doing i i offer coaching and of consultant consultancy through through my website uh use of reza.com that's my professional line of work other than that i have the i'm an instructor at julie bieb institute as well so we're also launching this other program called parvaz in which it's going to be for uh the university students and mental health initiative so there's all of that and you're based in islamabad

is that yes i'm based in islam right so speaking of psychiatry speaking of pakistan yeah there's clearly a need i mean what what are you facing on your kind of whether it's a daily basis or generally is it are you guys inundated flooded with this whole or are you handling it or what are people accepting this is it because it's pakistan at the end of the day what's

[Laughter] so um when we talk about pakistan there's less than 600 psychiatrists in the country right um there is a need for at least 10 000 mental health professionals we don't have those right so uh we're less than 600 there are more pakistani psychiatrists abroad mind you there's more pakistani psychiatrists in the uk and us and canada than there are in pakistan and so we're incredibly understaffed in that respect

clinical psychologist similar number less than 600 we practically like mental health workers in society the social worker domain psychiatric nurses practically non-existent um most of the psychiatrists that do practice here are concentrated in the private sector right in the major cities we have lahore islam but karachi that's practically it the other cities will have one or two the other major cities uh will have one or two and then the rest is pretty much there's nothing there um compounded

on top of that our practice of psychiatry and this is not just pakistan world over is becoming more and more of a pill pushing enterprise in which you see someone for five ten minutes you prescribe a pill supposedly that's supposed to solve all problems and uh that's like 90 greater than 90 percent of psychiatrists and i'm being generous probably 99 so there's that problem and then on top of that the psychological support that is given is uh is is

not culturally assimilative as it should be we have a lot of resources within uh pakistan within the muslim world with in the east that are undermined that are not adequately appreciated obviously not by the eurocentric american schools of thought in psychiatry and psychology but as eastern psychiatrists and psychologists we haven't really lived up to our identity and really have not tapped into those indigenous resources which really have been helping the mental health of

the population for generations to completely undermine those not look to benefit from those so yeah there's uh there's a whole lot of problems and that's where we relate with that religion and science issue as well they're just like science religion isn't it isn't it clearly well known though that it's just it's just a gin it's clearly a gin yet it's not schizophrenia it's not it's the jin speaking isn't this the common perception in pakistan though that

if there's uh you know [Music] so there's the there's the seher there's the kala jadu there is the uh coming from one side uh if we take it uh generally lightly we go on the depression spectrum which is obviously more common it is that leads people to uh to develop this and then uh actually it'll be more precise to say it's just weak faith and nothing else it's just a problem in your prayer and nothing else and that is compounded from the other

side of the spectrum where it's just chemicals and nothing else where it's just neurotransmitters and nothing else where it's just an absence of yoga and nothing else so this short of one party saying one thing is the problem the other party's saying the other thing is the problem it's that it is nothing but what i'm saying that's the major problem the nothing butness that comes in you know that creates you know this um when you say it's not just neural transmitters oh are you because some people might think you're saying achar no it's

torabot jin and you mean here uh things like logo therapy and and the whole meaning in life and stuff like that because that's uh the whole works of viktor frankl and this is a huge area of interest for you tell us a bit about this for people who are not familiar with uh with this area of psychology so logotherapy uh founded by victor frankel viktor frankl was a jewish psychiatrist neurologist um born in vienna raised in vienna and that practically meant that he lived a good couple of years in the

concentration camps in auschwitz and other concentration camps as well uh in the second world war so he's a survivor of those concentration camps and a psychiatrist neurologist uh he had uh exchange with freud he had he was under the uh the the mentorship of alfred adler those are the more popular schools of thought frankl not so uh popular and then on top of that after he uh survived the concentration camps he got a phd in philosophy and then uh

interestingly his phd focused on religion and psychology as well the the relationships between religion and psychology it was um later on published as man's search for ultimate meaning and then uh he had uh 29 other phd's uh

[Laughter] i've got 29 phds [Laughter] you know this thing of meaning in life um this has i mean statistically it's shown that a person's happiness or obviously happiness is it's a generally understood word but it's difficult as a term just like love is difficult as a term to define but i i've within psychology when when i was doing my degree they used terms like subjective well-being to

refer to happiness now this uh they say that statistically through research i mean what we were looking at is that a person's subjective well-being is massively influenced by what they find as meaning in life if they can find some meaning despite being in the most uh you know not a poverty stricken or war you know kind of like struck environments yet if they find some meaning it can change uh the overall well-being is this um is that what you're kind of building on over there in in your therapy

okay yes yes uh this is something that frankl introduced see when frankel is working in the middle of the 20th century the the environment and the university and psychiatry as a field is a product of the the european enlightenment and disenchantment right so what that practically means is uh prior to this enlightenment what was associated with meaningfulness was primarily originated in religion with the scientific enlightenment with the disenchantment that happened uh in europe along that time

not only did that do away with any role that religion had to play in the academia in in in in the university it also the baby was also thrown out with the bath water so to speak in a lot of ways one of those was uh meaningfulness yeah right so for frankl to talk about meaning at that time was very revolutionary it was and even still even still we have the research that you're mentioning it is not even a question anymore that is meaning important for subjective well-being and happiness it is integral it is integral

those who are researching or say a more intelligent question is going to be is it possible without meaning yeah wow is it is it so that's how much it has been uh established and that has a lot to do with what franco sowed the seeds for and is usually not given enough credit for because as somebody who was in the kind of the the whole you know victim of the nazi thing and in in those concentration camps a place where really in fact a detailed study showed that those people who survived the the concentration camps

were not the ones that one would have assumed would have survived so if they like if you're to place your bets and say well look all these people are in concentration camps you've got you know 500 of these men who do you think would survive so people would assume you know the ones who got the most muscles youngest strongest healthiest but it wasn't necessarily that was it it was actually the ones who had a why to live for uh they had a reason definitely wasn't it and yeah so okay i mean it was something along those lines it was along those lines that frankl was asked that you're a psychiatrist and a

neurologist and you don't you you're you don't believe in determinism that uh you know our uh there's there's psych psychic factors or they're psychic drives or biological mechanisms neurotransmitters that determine human behavior you don't subscribe to that so it was a shock for the person questioning to frankel frankel says yes i am a psychiatrist and a neurologist and i do accept that psychic drives and biological influences they do influence human behavior they are part of they do determine human behavior

but i am also a survivor of concentration camps three concentration camps and from there i understand that human freedom has a very integral role to play as well it is not just these factors biological or psychological that human beings are determined by freedom of will human being's choice and then that choice towards meaningfulness is that's that's fundamental for uh for well-being for for growth really so in places like pakistan what are like obviously i mean it's just like any place in the world there will be a huge

wide array of problems but they will be like common uh you know strong or generally certain common problems that you face within society people are suffering from a particular type of thing with a lot of commonality in that what are some of the main issues that stand out for you guys from a psychological perspective in pakistan so okay uh if we talk about no because i was going to say you know like people maybe that are coming to you you're seeing um or whether you know many of them are coming to you or not but what you're seeing in society from that background you're thinking well

god damn we've this is a problem in pakistan for example or this is um see uh for me my uh my time in a public hospital where i was trained as a psychiatrist i would see a different array of problems now that i am uh primarily a tele psychiatrist i give coaching and consultancy online now i see a very different part of the population right so now the part of the population that uh that i have access to or who approaches me is usually a university going population

undergrad students um people um expats right people from pakistan who have gone abroad in the uk in the u.s and then there's uh their second generation expats so these are the the and their problems are very similar right so they're in a university where they have all of these things that they're learning that they're uh studying and you know their career paths that are drawn from them for them and they they hail from a culture right and that culture is it's a

collectivist culture it has a it's a religiously rooted culture right so from that religiously rooted collectivist culture they're going to a university which is essentially a um rooted in an individualistic it has individualism as its ideal it has quite a western it's very it's very western right so we have um many expat situations within the university right so for them this the perplexity that that creates right where i come from the

values that i was always told to hold dear and now what is going on and prevalent within the university right and then doesn't that and then how that manifests as relationship problems and then um identity problems uh just general existential crises this is what i was saying oh manifest as depression this is what i was going to say that doesn't that trigger or cause not trigger but so much land a person in a crisis of faith because because religion as it's perceived in especially because

it's so salient in pakistan and it's the soul or appears to be the sole monopoly of the clergy so you know the kind of people who are going to um you know the kind of people who are going to let's say universities they're seeing you know this kind of very different culture very kind of upper maybe middle class upper middle class kind of families they're coming from i take it a lot of them can't identify with that kind of maulana class of people genre so and because it's uh well you know

religion is like um you know like take a look religion so people would feel sometimes i i this is my under impression that they feel they've got a hard choice if i want islam it's gotta look like that or you know then and i can't seem to come to terms with that like maybe because of all their education enlightenment they kind of feel well that doesn't really add up i mean is this uh i take it this is really a lot of this is behind you guys the whole july b kind of institute isn't it to reconcile so what are some of the key issues that people come up with as a crisis

for of faith right so when somebody is uh at a university and they have they have these the culture behind them and when they look to be religious and obviously they've always been told the religious ideals and what it means to be religious and then like you said the way that's practiced there is an authority that's associated with it and it's very absolute in how that authority is the culture in the university seems to be very different you have a chance to question you can ask

the more you ask the more you're encouraged right over here you're not supposed to ask anything so naturally when questions develop in their minds then they pretty much have very few places to go to that if they're if there's some very basic questions about god about prophethood about afterlife about morality um they know that if they were to go to a typical clergyman then

the the response would be just you know we don't ask these questions and and you're actually on many occasions maybe even like if you insist you'd get told off uh just just this monday on monday nights i was just i ended up mentioning an example where i said well uh you know i said that oh when i was in karachi this uh i didn't realize but they had a big issue i didn't know this with colors so i i don't know so i had shalwar kami

so i didn't realize but this was really winding the ustada the the mawlana i didn't know so you know you know he's holding the pressure in and then he just has this outburst and says what the hell is wrong with why did you wear these uh you know these uh these kind of these uh libas and i was like i don't know what he was talking about i was like yeah am i sitting here in a have i got like a mankini on here like so and and then when i asked him that what what's the problem with colors

because i genuinely didn't understand like like i thought i'm i'm wearing everybody's wearing should work with me i'm wearing your welcomies and he said yeah but yours has got colors so i thought and like and he the point was this he got so offended with me kind of because i asked again like i said like why would islam have a problem with colors so he was so offended about me asking to explain to him that he he like i was getting like they seriously told me off and basically then some of the guys even said to me shh just just be quiet i let it go because i was like i don't unders

and so this is a really simple thing i remember on one incident i asked this uh our there was our you know the grand mufti the of the dharlifta so whilst i was training as a mufti in karachi i asked him we were walking and i think i know it i relayed this story as well on a previous monday nights i said you know we're just walking and i asked him i said that look why is blood nudges like because i don't i don't believe blood is nudges like that's not my understanding and i said that a lot of the fukaha sadies but just because it's haram like when the quran when it says about harim ali madam

that that's because the pagans used to drink blood as a ritual and that's haram but even if it's haram not every haram thing is nudges like poison is haram it's not nurtures so i asked him that chef what why is you know you know that what's the dele after all and we're just walking and i'm thinking about it i'm at this stage i'm a maulana i'm in i'm training and he just got me in a headlock and just kind of like i was like okay and then he's like just dragging me and then he just kind of like punches me in the ribs and just goes shut up don't ask these

kind of things and i thought what the hell i thought okay but this yeah this kind of uh attitude this is in a madrasa this is in a madras and i expect a university student for whom uh you know like they're there they have access to to dawkins they have access to sam harris they have access to daniel dinette i had a a a a student who had dropped out of his 10th grade he did not even continue past that or woman he had a translated um article

from richard dawkins and he's like and he's showing that to me it's an urdu translation he's actually pushing it in my face and look at what dawkins is saying and i was like and he he's not even from like an elitist school he doesn't even know proper english and he has access to that material in urdu right and he's he's he's he's like answer me this there's there's that that doesn't make sense right so they want to have

the the peace the it associated with spirituality uh but the kind of path that they have to walk upon yeah and the kind of questions that they have to answer before that that path that they walk upon it there's no uh they don't they don't have anywhere to take those questions they don't have anywhere to take those questions so and that the problem would be both cited again uh from the religious side it's a weakness of faith just shut up and believe right as if faith is something you can command someone to just have like i would frankel gives this example he's like you

can't command somebody to laugh you have to tell them a joke that's right you have to elicit it you have to elicit that right and on the other hand these questions to a psychiatrist would be symptoms of depression they're not going to be seen as something that may have led to the development of symptoms of depression but they are a symptom of depression those same neurotransmitters messing up fix those instead absolutely shut off the alarm bell yeah and the fire will go and and i agree with you i i disagree so much with that culture as well in saying um even though it is a quick fix to saying well take these drugs and don't worry

they're gonna you know give you a bit more you're gonna sort out the serotonin reuptake and and you're gonna feel a bit better but but obviously if there are problems there if a person is struggling with in life overall if they're not being treated then you're just going to have another junkie a glorified junkie you know this is what we've just said with prescription pills so yeah so i mean hmm so when people come to to your course or you're teaching them i mean do you find you guys manage to reconcile is it is it tough because there's obviously a very fine line in pakistan as well to what extent what

one can say uh you [Music] [Laughter] [Laughter] reconciliation is probably a huge claim that's uh you know a huge way forward what we start off with is with every student that we take up is let's just try to understand the various dimensions of the problem first because one of the greatest

tragedies that we have is how this religion and science problem is treated in a quick fix manner like a five-minute youtube video proving the existence of god and the truth of islam or christianity or what have you right minute video six minute video ten minute video one day seminar let's be real in all of our fields medicine psychiatry psych sociology physics chemist we would not treat any issue so dismissively yeah that's true

like how would a physicist feel if the different interpretations of of of quantum physics are just brushed aside in a five minute video and one day's seminar they would be offended like how what's going on here so how can something that some people have really spent their entire lives grappling with theological schools of thought that they're studying physics then biology and their psychology and their kalam and all of the sciences that they're bringing in and they're trying to make sense of it people expect no give us a

give us a quick fix so what the first thing that we look to do is we're here this is a serious endeavor we're looking for serious students if you're looking for a quick solution you're looking for maggie noodles and you pop open the packet you put it in for two minutes you're done go ahead and get that and you'll find that on youtube you'll find people making those claims if that floats your boat by all means we're looking for people who are genuinely interested in the problem let's any problem any disease in medicine you understand the pathology first

actually we spent well we didn't come to treatment until our fourth and fifth year of medical training the first three years is all about learning the diseases and um what's going on the normal and the abnormal and the normal and the abnormal and then we can make sense of the the the treatment so when do when people do come we're like yeah let's start with understanding the problem and yes when we do start delineating the problem then comes up okay how dare you even bring this up we had one of our texts one of uh a basic text that we teach in our work

workshops is the autobiography of abdul-majid and he's a and he's a very respected scholar of the dubai and we would have students from that uh from those medars from that school of thought would be like let's not study yes let's why why is that part of the curriculum this is good he's seen as two children

what he the way he would uh the way he would describe his journey from uh where he was a well-rooted cultural traditional uh muslim who is actually having debates with christians with all these different religions establishing islam in his teenage writing articles and from there he goes to atheism and then his journey back so all of that is seen and how he describes those different stages they're incredibly educational

in trying to understand this problem of of perplexity that results in uh the religion and science but uh but let's say somebody now comes to you you're treating them and but there's this huge you know overarching kind of narrative in the this backdrop that look mental health is really just you know it's not me it's not mental health it's a gin and it's easy you know i i just spoke to someone in recently like this year i've speaking to someone and they were having relationship issues here so this guy who

is quite learned uh reasonably learned in islam he's like you know he's not like an average person so his wife has left him so she had left him they've been i don't know married like it was like a stable as in sorry not stable but a lengthy relationship and she'd now left him had enough packed it in so i was speaking to him and he said well look uh you know there's no real problems here so i said well why would she leave you then and he said i know what the problem is i said okay what's the problem he said that the problem is that she and this is in the uk it's a uk british born you know he said the problem he said i've had it checked out i said have you okay

what's the problem so i was expecting like some kind of you know like oh i had a fight or maybe she caught some text message of mine or maybe you know like i was expecting something like this was the problem he said oh the problem is he said i've had it checked out she's got an she's got an ashik gin these were [Laughter] so she's got a gin who's madly in love with her and that gin has kind of like led her astray so you know i'm thinking to myself are you for real and this person said to me look i know you know fair enough you know most you may not believe in these things but

it is it's this is the case i know it and so in pakistan now like okay saying that in england aloud still you sound pretty dumb but imagine the whole culture kind of just goes duh that's a given so how do you counter that how would you how do you deal with that so um again there would be two different approaches when somebody comes to us as a student obviously we're going to take it from a different way when somebody comes to us and that's the structure understand the problem take it step by step when somebody comes to me as a patient right when somebody approaches me for

counseling or therapy or how that's that would be that's yeah that's the angle i'm interested because as a as a student you could just tell them look in islam this doesn't you know there's no sahih there's no this they're there to listen but as a member of the public what would you say to them see as coming from the speciality of psychiatry right their personal beliefs whether they hail from christianity or islam or particular denominations of islam if i were to take a stand against those then that

i'm doing not only a disservice to the person who is sitting in front of me but also to my profession right they did not come to me to have their religious beliefs uh preached to me like i cannot preach my understanding so as a as a local therapist i will uh talk about the importance of meaning i will talk about the importance of ultimate meaning right but i cannot enforce my meaning on somebody else i cannot

tell them what their meaning in life is i cannot tell them what their ultimate meaning in life is and then the particular um details of that if they let me in that door right if they say okay we share the same religion we share the same belief system now i want you to help me out in there there i will i can take a stance i can give them an opinion but then again not having uh not being a mufti right i can't do what you can do right so i can tell them that there are these different opinions

right i can point you towards those sources and people who would have those different opinions but uh predominantly what i would do here given the cultural background i would look to work within their system and see that from within their system okay fair enough you understand for this to be caused by jinnah but from within your system can jinn not cause human behavior can they take away your freedom of will yeah is that is that something that you would attribute to them so i would work from there because if i

take a stance and challenge that that very strongly held belief uh my my mental health aims are going to be because i see the problem is it's like you mentioned before about viktor frankl saying look you can't just say laugh and the person laughs you have to tell them a joke i mean because what you have to do is create the genuine emotion simulating it is not the same now you see even you see when people like people will speak to me they will say

uh you know oh such and such this is happening a gin problem or black magic or stuff like this now so the now even when i tell them like even the ones i'll tell very genuinely very nicely very look there's no sahih hadith this people do believe in this stuff it's more folklore it's kind of you know it's just a risen it's not in the quran or hadith it's not people won't accept it like it doesn't matter like if you say it because you see to them the the

overarching backdrop supports it like the general psychosocial narrative that they uh associate with accepts it so like in india pakistan there is a concept of the churel yeah like the choril like we don't know what the chorale is is this lady who's you know got long hair hangs around swamps got her feet backwards um and i don't usually she has a wedding does she have a wedding dress oh that's interesting okay i don't know about the wedding dress part but uh and so now the feet backwards

the feet backwards here that's we were told that as kids oh my god the feet are backwards and you know it's a journey and you're thinking you're thinking you'd be and when you're when you're driving away she's running with you she can keep up are you a oh defeat so and isn't she she's scared of i think fire and she's scared of an axe or something is she scared of something like that or have you heard of that no i've heard something uh like that as a kid but now different cultures have this so like in a lot of the

uh the spanish speaking they have that la yarona this you know this lady whose child has been she's lost her child and she comes in a similar choral kind of way and she comes for people now islam came to you know hindustan to to the indian subcontinent now they've already got this concept of so how do you fit the choral in islam because obviously there's not surely in islam so they just say well okay then she must be a jinn you know it's like they superimpose whatever like the islamic narrative on the cultural narrative whatever it is they just

superimpose it you know you know it's like so it doesn't in a way it doesn't it's not an information deficit you know when you tell someone that yeah there's no sahih hadith you know there's no hadith there's no in fact the quranic verse says like you mentioned about uh iblis that allah saying you know him himself saying that look you know i didn't have no power over them i couldn't physically move you know uh innamada i just said to them why don't you do this they did it

you know why why am i responsible for the shaytanis thing yeah and so but people even if you've got the ayat the ahadith kalam the culture just doesn't accept it they're like you know it's like that's what they're saying to your face they're saying yeah he's definitely lost the plot he's got it he's got a gin [Laughter] great see one thing what i would what i would say do that is

as uh like academically for us to take the conversation to that level i don't think we're there yet exactly i don't think i don't think that as uh as as psychologists and theologians we have established that dialogue sufficiently and uh appropriately we haven't carried that process uh to the level of maturity that is necessary to give definitive opinions on on on matters like that right that

that still remains to be done that that's a debt that more than anything else the people of pakistan with our legacy especially considering allama iqbal being one of the founding fathers of pakistan that's a huge debt on us which is what makes us surprisingly uniquely placed that not only do we have the the the exposure to the western civilization and the and knowledge right the the entire culture science philosophy everything western we have access to right and then the culture

that we have behind us we have access to that as well so then to not carry forward what allama iqbal left for us as the reconstruction of religious thought in islam is a is a huge disservice when we say people like allah i mean allama iqbal's understanding i think i think it's amazing but his understanding is one built on reason and it's a very uh his understanding you know the reconstruction of islamic thought the whole his way of looking at islam his way

even you see i find it ironic like there's an irony that allama iqbal is so rated in pakistan but yet surely those people hate those views though but they just don't they don't make the connection between those views in allama iqbal like they won't say uh you know so for example uh i know i got into this discussion yesterday the second coming of jesus now allama iqbal was somebody who didn't accept that and he actually asked [Music] from india to write a book detailing why there is no second coming

of a messiah now you see and in the beginning he mentions i'm writing this because allama iqbal has asked me and everything so now here is a connect like an example i'm just using that as an example that although people will say even the ulama will quote allama iqbal they'll call him allama iqbal they won't say you know like you know like this this even recommends but yet if anybody had a similar view or an outlook that we should look at the dean with reason we should critique things we should they will be excommunicated they will be

you know take fear called a kafir or a fascic uh well that's such an irony i don't i don't get that because you've got this is allama iqbal in essence see and again we will find the same habits reflected on both sides so you will find people just on the basis of conclusions writing off someone that they hold in very high esteem right and what their methodology was what their how was what their why was

is not going to be given any consideration or any serious consideration just the what that they ended up in that's just what ascribes us to him or away from him he holds that opinion he has to be balm right without that's not all so that's from one side but then you will find this same uh mullah attitude represented by let's say praves hoot boy when he reads the reconstruction of religious thought in islam and he finds that to be anti-science okay when he sees that when he looks at that he says oh he's saying that uh physics has

learned to critique its own foundations so physics is all gone so that's the angle and that's the lens with which it's a kind of dogmatism on both ends yeah in essence isn't it that's what so it's not you don't have to have a beard to to have that you don't have to belong to a mother you can be from a university you can have a phd in in science for that matter that's actually something that rupert children he identifies that this is the ideology of materialism for which um the university is now a citadel right it's it's it's pretty much um that we have to conform to these

dogmas in order to be considered scientists and just like in a religious domain you're not allowed to question certain dogmas in the scientific domain those i those dogmas of materialism are also beyond question your integrity as a scientist is is is similarly question sheldrake is is a huge pioneer hence of like the whole you know the kind of like um almost a lot of things that fall under like parapsychology almost this whole you know these uninexplicable phenomena psy within psychologies and i

uh yeah but i mean this this thing coming back to there and the reason i'm in intrigued by because you're obviously in your in pakistan and from there with a great understanding of that and that in a strange way impacts us here because of the the kind of diaspora the whole the the asian kind of community in the uk or in europe in america and it's kind of connected it's kind of like a stream feeding through still the whole mindset definitely is it possible to increase tolerance in places like pakistan i mean

do you think it's practical like this [Laughter] see um since we've only started off it's been a couple of years but yes there's been opposition yes the nazok mizaji yes the criticism yes the questions but the promise of of of the students what they have to bring to the table in terms of their commitment to both science and religion to the subject as a whole like yes there's

those who want the two-minute fix but then there are those who are like okay let's we're ready to go through the the pain then the struggle of actually understanding what this is there are those who would say okay we're we're willing to uh give up a a a career in in you know some electrical engineering or uh industrial engineering whatever all of those applied sciences to look at this incredibly huge social problem and pursue the social sciences pursue the religious sciences pursue the anthropology of it or the sociology of

it or the psychology of it and let's let's go let's be in a world where applied science is the lucrative option they're willing to pursue uh theoretical careers careers in so that's that potential is here as well and they're willing to uh put in that time have that discipline and they have the this this is the younger generation that you're seeing you can this is this is the younger generation and they have the reverence as well the the respect that the class discipline

that um perhaps in a western university would be a rarity like if you address if you address the teacher with i i remember one of our i was giving an interview to a university and they're like i don't like this sir being addressed as sir this is these are ways of establishing authority and all of us but over here this the respect that we give to the teacher as part of the educational process but is that is that that respect thing is a part of the tradition of those lands isn't it like the you know the greater yeah i mean just the east in general has

a huge respect protocol in general doesn't it towards elders you know you address people even the language up you know the whole thing caters for that yeah so uh hmm but i mean i i do get that but do you feel that this you see do you feel that there's a great insecure because i i feel this that there's a great insecurity in pakistan about religion and to me it doesn't make sense why because the whole country is muslim like i don't see why you'd be in like i could understand if you're a minority becoming insecure about your faith because you think it's getting oh my god

you know like people we're being targeted as muslims let's say but in the country pakistan is just a muslim country out overwhelmingly muslim so i definitely sense an insecurity why do you first of all whether you sense that and why do you think that is because it doesn't make sense to me um there's this paper that a canadian is a philosopher philosophy professor actually i believe in mcgill university his name is charles taylor and in a preface of a book the entire

preface is about allama iqbal and it starts with saying we need to reread iqbal he goes on to identify an insecurity that uh is prevalent both in the east and the west and the way it's it's psychologically on the mark the way he puts it out that this insecurity is is rooted more in an inability to relate with the other an inability to understand the other so for religion the other would be

science right for east the other would be the west right so when you don't know the other then you're more afraid for for europe there's an ar it's arguably people say it's a hadith but at the very least it's a it's a quote from the salaf that uh that people become easily opposed to anything they are ignorant of by default they're opposed to it yeah right and so that that just manifests itself as with that insecurity to the level of becoming a paranoia but i mean that's okay that one could

say well okay fair enough that's like to do with let's say science and to do with things like this uh but there's a there's a kind of insecurity i feel about islam like people feel they're like so on edge yeah uh like recently in islamabad there was this thing i don't know what's happening with it now about uh uh about the mandir mandir so they're gonna mandir uh i think it was as far as i've read online it was passed i i saw some clips online people freaking out people saying you know imran khan what's that where does it imran khan lee what's it called bundy

what's the name of the place you know it's like why don't you go make it in your place if you want to give them a monday give it the uh and i'm thinking to myself look come on look you guys are all muslim nobody islam isn't going to disappear you know if hindus have a mandir what's the big deal like you know this hindus will go they take it like just as you would want in india people to have masjids um like sure you know like people in india would be happy that yeah you know they've got a monday there as well but the reaction was like there was a huge

insecurity like yeah if we let this happen today like i watched some speeches they said if we let this happen today tomorrow islam will be ripped out of our homes and we won't be able to they will snatch the quran they will snatch and i can't understand the insecurity because everybody's muslim and i'm thinking yeah why are you guys so afraid like do you sense this see though those insecure voices they are prevalent and they're very loud they are very loud but if you're to ask me more than the

mander being a threat the the unbridled and un the critically life at the university is more of a threat yeah i mean i don't believe the actual uh is a threat at all but i'm just saying that yeah the reaction is an insecure it's like people are on edge like you know like you say anything they're like ready to whoa whoa don't you know it's like i was watching i don't know if you've heard of kunal kamra but he's an he's an amazing indian stand-up comedian i absolutely love him i mean if people by the way this is just uh if you're into comedy you got to watch the

guy i love him uh two bits he's uh and he's very controversial in india so he's uh you know people always saying to him pakistan this that you know like gaddafi because he critiques like modi government and he does this kind of stuff but he was saying in a recent clip uh and he doesn't make that much stand up anymore which is a shame but he released one recently and he was saying yeah he goes i'm sitting at home and my mom his mom's reading out of whatsapp and she goes

you know and it's like that hindus are in danger in india yeah they are in danger of losing their country that [Music] in the year 2080 or whatever every india is going to be another muslim country in hindu kanji you know this is the one country they've got in in the whole world so this kind of scare mongering like and he's obviously mocking it saying look do you know the population of india do you know the population of hindus and but i feel the same thing is happening in pakistan in a way like

this this like there's this kind of like people are like spreading this fear islam you know it's like um and i don't and i don't see why that's true because i mean i i don't know whether there are any answers to these but i'm just saying i i don't know whether that could be changed or do a whole generations have to pass [Laughter]

are not protected from child sexual abuse islam because the poor are not getting their rights right they have they are trampled and the islam because people are taken for a ride by corporates left right and center by um anyone and anything that's in power is able to is able to um just use the people who are on the lower rungs i i would say dance degree that's more of a hatred you see i told value 100

but i would just say there personally this is just me i would say for that as opposed to islam that i would say that you know people like where is because abuse issues in pakistan um you know unfortunately i mean they they are i mean that's something that's actually an area that's i'm sure i'm sure very prevalent with you know mental health and things like this and especially women uh this whole thing i mean what is what is it on the ground there i mean is it as bad as people because the perception is of pakistan is people think you know it's like really terrible when it comes to women

um i don't i mean because i've discussed this in in the past with people and i've said well actually it's quite strange because in many pakistani households the matriarch is the kind of strong figure you know this you know this kind of sauce figure that you know and she's kind of like the the kind of the boss and but it's interesting because the impression from afar is that women are always oppressed you know wn and people are like doing zulu non-stop and and i'm sure that does happen as well but what is it on the ground over there in your experience see i i see i completely agree with you

that the way it's projected it's pretty it's not it's not much different from that fear politics that is used to islam a feminist ideologies like is like pakistan but we don't have similar problems i mean where how you can't cut paste a again a eurocentric or an american feminism and look to uh you know try to rescue someone who doesn't even think they need to be rescued right wait wait let me rescue you like but i'm not in danger no no you are endangered you are suffering you are oppressed let's let us come and rescue you

there's no consent to the person who's being rescued we as when we're giving basic life support we're supposed to take consent i'm going to save you i'm going to give you cpr is that okay that's but over here that doesn't apply that doesn't apply just come and sweep one and run a bit like i suppose there was that earlier on this year there was that women's protest march that mirage meri mercy that this uh and i spoke about it on monday nights with mufti and i said that look i'm all for women's rights and i feel that in countries like pakistan sure they need empowerment and i support that i support it all over the

world but i did say that i felt you know if they used certain placards like don't like for example a woman should never be hit or something like this if or a one every like just there was like somebody had a placard something like i can't remember it now but it's something like bertiga to study or something like this talim and you know daughters deserve education and i think everybody at least in public would agree with that like if they had placards like that like saying uh you know there should be no violence they should be everybody should have an education everybody should um

but in a country like pakistan i thought having very provocative kind of black uh you know like apni roti hood you know it's like you know it's like this i thought that you know it's so counterproductive that was my opinion um i don't know since you're there uh and it's your daily interaction what are your thoughts see we have to if we have to respect that there is a cultural setup that's been there for so long you can't just simply swoop in and look to uproot that and we know and we know this from our experience in psychotherapy

that there are places around the world uh village populations that you've gone in with your rescue missions of psychotherapy and that's done the society more harm than good you cannot not look at an indigenous people their entire culture their history what is holding them together and simply think that you're you're coming in with these ultimate solutions of universal import because they're scientifically credible scientifically credible in a in a western population yes replicable there perhaps but then to look to

carry that here cut paste that here and so with the with the uh looking to bring in the the the feminist wave as well yes there will be there are women's issues here that do need to be addressed granted but they have you have to give the local people a voice again ironic you are you're looking to give the women a voice here but where is that village woman on your activist panel where is she where is her voice you're victimizing her you are subjugating her by not having her represented you know

that's where is that interesting because you know i i went to this uh psychology conference a little while a while back and it was on subjective well-being so you had all these professors from different backgrounds some from evolutionary from different cognitive backgrounds from and they were presenting their research on happiness and i remember one professor he was speaking about like samples they've taken case studies from some of the uh like some from uh some of the richest places or not riches but uh you know most uh opulent and affluent like new york manhattan for example they used manhattan as an example

they used a couple of other western key kind of opulent affluent locations and then some incredibly deprived locations so i can't i can't remember i think somewhere uh by eritrea in africa or somewhere they used some examples they used bangladesh i remember bangladesh and the interesting thing was they said i remember the bangladeshi study like the the the kind of sample that they were bringing together that a lot of the the ladies that they were women they were speaking about gender and stuff like this they actually found people were actually like they scored relatively

happy and it was counterintuitive because they were thinking you know here you've got these people who've been flooded on so many occasions and they've been like this they live below beneath the poverty line they're struggling how could this lady possibly be happy but they found a lot of the people buy and lot for the most part like they kind of scored above the to as a as like reasonably happy um and it was really and when they were explaining their findings they were saying that they didn't expect this to be the case but it turned out to be the case and it was to do with

not necessarily because they didn't have money and they didn't have those kind of things but it came back to their place in life like that lady saw her place in life as a mother this meaning she had in life that i you know like these are my children i'm a wife i'm a mother i'm a you know i do this i live this role and it provided her happiness like she was happy she wasn't kind of brainwashed or anything that that was her world um and it's strange because obviously these kind of this discord like if somebody said to a

well but are you really living your life are you living a life that's been getting you know what about your choice would you like you know want you to break away don't know don't think about your children don't think about your husband what about you you know like now if you were to force feed her let's say so many like a radical different way of thinking uh and she did get on board like imagine you trained her to think like that i'm pretty sure she would just go into depression because sh she wouldn't be able to cope in that culture would she because yeah see that's something you asked me that like what do i see very commonly in a

uh population of married women educated mothers one of the greatest reasons for depression in them is that i haven't been able to make much of my career i mean they had difficult pregnancies they had difficult children to deal with two three children and they're a handful two two years apart and then an incredible guilt oh my my friend is now a specialist in this and that and we we graduated uh from medical college and you know i should have been earning this much or i should have been doing this much all i am is this housewife all i am is this mother of three

you know stinky children and the husband who is ungrateful and he's never home and doesn't give me time see that that's that would yeah that sounded almost personal i was gonna say i was gonna say that there's gonna be like some talk application being completed [Laughter]

you haven't been able to negotiate that we haven't been able to negotiate with that as as husbands as uh as men who want educated wives what do we they need there needs to be like a role arrangement to share their motherhood responsibilities right if you meant so to make some room some for their career paths we don't have any idea of uh you know the the maternity leaves that should be there that should be necessary there is no accommodation for that uh paternity leaves have there is no

conception whatsoever we want women to work like men and be mothers at the same time our professional organizations are not making any arrangements for that working from home adjustments none of that seems to be happening and then there is this this mental health chaos that results we are not able to negotiate with that as a society and he keeps the gin the gin not very busy

they have to go you know i was just taking i was just taking life easy now i have to go possess these people as if life wasn't difficult enough now watch when i possess you yeah but wow i mean um does that i wonder whether i mean this is just a question it may not be the case uh because i know there is with the general youth and the middle class this kind of divergence with them and faith but what about women that are going through these kind of crises

of let's say struggling to find a an accommodating society for their career aspirations especially like when they're married you know should they be at home husband or family there's expectations versus aspirations does that tear on their faith or not really or is do you find that people then use the faith to say like you know

you know you know like sit at home and using do you fee is there does this go on or no see i had i had a i had a patient um i even blogged one of the few blocks that i ever did um she was 1617 actually the blog i changed the gender but anyways it was actually fine binary [Laughter] no we do stuff too you know protect identity but it's been long enough so i think the identity is secure now confidentiality will still be maintained

father becomes incredibly religious uh incredibly religious and comes home one day and says that i don't think you should study anymore and she's like what and he's like i also think you should remain fully covered even when you're at home and she's like okay and he's like all this tv that you like to watch you know this is all you know you're not allowed anymore father becomes religious the the girl was brought to me after being given an antidepressant by a psychiatrist who saw her for half an hour listened to everything that

she said and then didn't say anything and gave her a pill and she's like still the same after two weeks of taking that medication and she told me this this story and i get and she had history of uh cutting herself uh not being able to sleep the whole you know and when i dug deep there was this incredible guilt i'm like what are you guilty about she's like well my father is right this is how it's supposed to be this is what islam is and i was like how about we say fair enough that's your father's interpretation and it may not necessarily have to be

the islam there may be other interpretations you know in which you have room to breathe and uh a couple of weeks from she the next visit one week from there her self-cutting was gone her weeping spells were gone her um most 70 of her symptoms had resolved simply because she was made to understand that that's one interpretation there may be others that's all of what i did i didn't even have to say that this is what i believe or this is what you should believe no nothing just possibility opened up and unfortunately then she was gone because her father found out and i

wasn't i wasn't pushing his agenda you know this this thing that you're saying this whole guilt-centric islam this is so prevalent so prevalent i see here i i see definitely over uh you know in the east um damn that because it it completely drowns individuals suffocates them for oxygen um i mean how do you guys cope with that because that's got to be yeah that's got like like how you're saying this this actual patient i mean this

it's got to be this is like a pandemic i'm assuming not again frankel gave this a name then an airplane yep just uh that should yeah i don't know why it picks it up from there but it shouldn't really it's just my microphone being being really efficient when it's not meant to be yeah i was like i have never oh no i i have been flying over all the time i'm not that far from the neighborhood okay so uh frankel actually gave this a name it's called ecclesia ecclesiogenic depression wow

oh something that is church or clergy oh yeah right from the ecclesiastic okay because it's not just so it's not just a um so we neurogenic psychogenic somatogenic you know so we have uh those um terminology so that's something that is a it's it's a it's a prevalent phenomena it is uh across religious societies definitely so in the east as well unfortunately and um we can't see we can't do away with the phenomena of religion

as a treatment of it that just can't be the answer right we cannot then now proselytize oh see this is what religion does to you like there is atheistic proselytization using the therapeutic pedestal as well we can't do that either no i agree right we can't either so we have to uh we have to then engage develop that therapeutic alliance first that relationship of a therapist and a client or a patient and the psychiatrist and then carry that forward from there generate conversation

identify educational resources that they can you know from all different options that they have encourage them to pursue those options and have that that that it's called a socratic dialogue with them to uh from within themselves see what we believe as logo therapists that the spiritual resources yes the the guilt also can be triggered from uh the guilt is inside but it's triggered from outside right there's this spiritual blackmailing that takes place but the

the healing those spiritual resources are also inside the human being and through a meaningful dialogue you can bring that out as well you can help them come out of those suffocating circumstances and explore other options which they don't have to you know rebel because i you see what i found is that this uh guilt kind of centric approach this ecclesiogenic approach thing i found that it has it's like the bean that is built like that it has its

defense mechanisms it's kind of survival it's structure within it and that is that it tells the people that you see i know you're feeling bad but that's good that you're feeling bad because that's going to bring you to tawba that's bringing you closer to god you need to worry once you stop feeling bad and and you see this is the kind of uh the kind of the dna that keeps it alive in a way because when you tell people like obviously my fata are very controversial um

so obviously to people i would say you know to them almost everything is halal according to me which i don't know may or may not actually may be true but uh like i will say music isn't haram you know watching tvs and haram there's no actual for this kind of stuff i've obviously been very controversial spoken on issues like masturbation uh that these things are not haram and that sexual suppression um is is causes a lot of psychological issues for people now you see people one i understand that these topics are taboo so people don't like to talk about them and then they don't like to associate religion with them and

especially some cultures more than others like i feel especially the desi culture and then they don't want to associate with oh no they definitely don't want to associate and then they wouldn't want you you're definitely going to be blacklisted after this i'm gonna put out a disclaimer right here given in this interview he only did this people if you're watching this he only did this interview in the hope that he could convert me to the right path [Laughter] i am doing that this was that form of you know so

yeah so people because i still see so you see because i find the thing about especially like anything sexual it's interesting that i find that desi culture is so you know like sensitivity levels are on steroids uh compared to the arab culture the arab culture at least is a lot more open on matters of sex but the desi culture and i was saying this in one of my um i think it was a monday nights or it was something but i said it on a previous discussion i said it's interesting

that in the uh that i i'm not aware of any actual words for the private parts apart from euphemisms like the or or like instrumental kind of terminologies like but they don't actually have a name for the organs uh they they would either just say like a private part or alai tanasu like a reproductory organ or uh but or they'll have swear words they'll have swear words but they won't have any formal neutral words like that i'm familiar with

like maybe you could use an arabic word that's actually very you could use an arabic language it's very true uh you could use an arabic word to get away with it but i don't think the awam would understand arabic like so if you use the term or you to use the word like this like in arabic they have neutral terms they have swear words but they have neutral terms in english you have neutral terms and you have swear words as well but it's that sensitive about these things it doesn't even have words for them it's like only swear words or euphemisms like so see that's something i never thought about that even in our medical terminology when we're taking our medical history whenever we would have to use all the words now that you mention it we don't

really have words we would always come at it using um these kinds of indirect terminology i just always think about these kinds you never thought about it because you're a pious person [Laughter] you know this is the thing so it's not me right so but yeah so this uh the reason i was anyway coming back to the topic that people feel that they've said to me look you shouldn't give these kind of fatwas

okay one thing they say you joke and laugh too much so okay put that aside but even if you are serious you shouldn't give these photos why because and this was a person this is a real life example somebody was saying to a friend of mine that so they get into this discussion and he says you know you know mufti you know what the hell is mufti on about you know i watch this video we're saying you know according to the self of this ummah and according to these imams you know ibn hasam and these people show kearney you know masturbation isn't haram and what the hell why would he say something like this and my friend said to him obviously this is just real talk he said to him look he said come on bro

don't lie you do it what are you on about so he's like so the guy's like yes so okay i do it but at least i feel bad about it afterwards so this is it that kind of christian guilt thing judeo-christian kind of thing has really come through you know this uh we need to feel bad and it's good that we feel bad this enough you know this malama this kind of sense of uh nafsalawama they will say you know this kind of like uh um

this is what the nurse does so i'm you know i i find that my iman is still alive now but the the problem with that is then you have a people that are so ridden with and burdened with guilt that and they're bottling it all up and you know they're living these strange lives and yeah so i this is where this is where um franco becomes so much more important but not just frankel also freud and how both of them are relevant uh frankl in the sense how he helps us distinguish between true

guilt and false guilt right so um there is that incredible benefit of guilt that we have to what does he say truth just true false guilt okay true guilt would be with respect to your own kind like if you've done like somebody's stolen something committed murder done something like this they they feel guilty about okay yeah of course right right so that you have your own conscience you have your values all your that you conform to and then you're not living up to them you're even things that you haven't um studied enough as you wanted to you're not eating as healthy as you should you haven't worked out as

much as you always like before this session before this session i was like doctor i gotta hit a gym session today let me and i've gotta you know otherwise they will have two doctors and i gotta say doc has been incredibly patient with me you know i've i felt so bad i've been like you know we've been kind of missing each other because of me really not because even today i was like i so desperately need this gym session not a problem at all um i'm actually very impressed that you can pull it off two in the morning we have 24 7 gyms yeah it's uh but yeah so this this is positive one

thing your own energy i'm a vampire this is the nocturnal people but yeah so this is the positive guilt that you're saying which is which is true which is part in line with the quran isn't it that kind of recognizing acknowledging that look we have this this side of us this nerfs this side of us yeah so the spiritual blackmail when that just misuse abuses this guilt the reactionary modernism will come in and pathologize guilt altogether and take it completely you don't have to feel guilty about anything at all

and so it's like everything's game then everything's pretty much game so um that's where i said frankel is relevant the way freud is relevant how a llama says that freud has rendered an inestimable service to religion i didn't know this that uh allama iqbal was fond of fruit i mean i'm fond of fruit i'm a huge fan of freud freud marx he would speak he would criticize them when he has to but he would uh where they've rendered a service

he would go all out in acknowledging and praising the the what they've contributed to to humanity so llama wouldn't hold back he wouldn't hold back either way so what freud the way the way you mentioned the way it's taboo in pakistan in our eastern culture the way it's not even so in uh in the arab culture this is how europe was at the time of freud right and so when he's uh talking about neurosis in his time when he's talking about hysteria as it was called back in those days the way he describes hysteria

we don't see that in the us and uk today in the same form but we do see it in pakistan we do our psychiatry colleagues who work in the er in the psychiatric er in in the uk will not see those conversion disorders or those manifestations the way freud would describe but we would here in pakistan that would be a daily emergency psychiatry that you would see those conversions where psychological symptoms are manifesting as physical uh physical psychosomatic right and there's psychosomatic right the the prevalence

of psychosomatic here why the stigmatization of psychological issues not press uh taking them oppressed sexuality yeah and then repress sexuality that's the other is this the case study of the the girl who's possessed by a jinn but they marry her off and she becomes normal like in pakistan i i've seen that quite a bit so that that works live

um yeah because i remember in the mother's side they used to bring this girl in occasionally she was related to one of the students and i mean she she wasn't a young age i don't know she must have been in the late teens at least so they used to bring her in carrying her in like every two weeks or so would be like in the evening sitting there all the mothers and this is like and they're coming in like a tragic movie scene and you think like what the hell's going on and they're carrying this girl and running with her and um and and she's had a gin attack right so they'll take her into the office and the mawlana shark would heal the screaming from inside

they'd be like you know he's doing the dumb and um and then this would be a repetitive thing and then then we heard that because some of the family was in the mother assad and they were like really well off kind of apparently family so the mother says to always take care of them but uh then she got married and somebody said oh well she got married and she's totally fine now you're like a cha-cha virgin patty there you go so again attributing something that can have a psychological explanation um just because it's it's a taboo subject

to something which is even more occult to the entire uh to the entire system of the un the the entire system of belief or the cultural belief you're doing a disservice now when you are just blanketly giving those explanations around that's it creates problems so that's that's where freud can be very very helpful to us and even more than that oscar oscar fister the way he carries psychoanalysis and uh there is in the light of psychoanalysis the way he has he presented christianity

precisely addressing the issue of guilt and fear from the christian tradition and um presenting its alternative this is oscar more positive oscar fister he's a he's a swiss analyst um so his his service is there that we have so much to learn from there we have so much to teach from our tradition and there's so much what's something that fister would have kind of said about because he's somebody who kept religion in fact he went on to become a pastor or something of of faith so what what he was that was it was exactly all right okay i thought you became that off

so what would he said to allow to kind of like bridge that that that issue with the whole you know issues like psychological or repressed sexuality these kinds of things and then christianity which is also a very can be a very kind of puritanist faith so see he would he would address his uh his fellow christians and advocate to them to take freud seriously that he's onto something huge and that we need in our uh as educationists in our schools in our churches there's a lot of phenomena that is

that has a psychoanalytic uh basis and we need to take freud seriously is the theories that he's extended they can be incredibly useful to us and then he would with the utmost respect address freud and say that within your system of explanation we can uh accept that but that doesn't have to be the final explanation of all kinds of religiosity there can be a religiosity or truth of religion which is not pathological yeah which is not disease right so he would have this dialogue on both sides and we have examples

like these to uh to benefit from in our particular social situation that we find ourselves in in the 21st century it was obviously a bit you know the whole a bit harsh on religion but then to be fair carl jung was fine with religion um of you know being with freud but you know i i want to say here this whole thing of repressed sexuality pakistan the general culture uh as i understand it is that women ain't really given like they're not really meant to have

that kind of sexuality like it's as in like what i say they're not meant to as in it's not acknowledged that you know it's not is it like men it is that oh but that's men you know men will always be after women they will always which i'm not denying from an evolutionary psychological perspective but women's sexuality is completely in the dark like invisible like women meant to have sexual desires and that if a woman had sexual desires that's like filthy and you know like oh my god is she a to be this this is the my perception of how the culture is

see and that is uh that is true and uh that is representative of a lot of the problems at least again my uh the sample that i represent would be biased because i do deal with pathologies with when this has already resulted in problems but yes we see people women who newly married even a couple of years into their marriage and they are having marital issues why because sexuality was an incredibly difficult issue for them to negotiate with because they've grown up for the most of their teenage years through their puberty with this sense of

having to to feel guilt even for harboring those kinds of thoughts which are simply natural and hormonal and uh once they've spent all that time repressing that all of a sudden when they're married they're supposed to let loose and it doesn't it's not a switch that you just turn on and off and so there will be a variety of uh of of sexual problems that will result i mean this as a concept there's that and i want to come back to that but there's also the from the offset like even if she was with i'm like from the offset if she is willing to embrace her sexuality she is she wants to i mean she's a

sexual being she wants to be like that let's say it's within a legitimate relationship with her own husband this will be like it's it's not really acknowledged like it would be like what the hell like a very like seen as a very kind of lustful um like she will have the makam of the like the of babylon you know it's like she's like what the hell like can you imagine like let's say a lot of pakistani families they are uh a lot of them live with the kind of like the greatest setups or the parents and everybody now can you imagine a woman uh wanting to go to the bedroom with the husband it would be seen as like a

shameful act like what's wrong with her like she's like it's not like it's seen only in a negative light isn't it even if she i'm first of all beginning with if she's willing to embrace it which is natural anyway it's seen as like a dirty thing like what the hell is wrong with her and actually ashamed for it in society i mean yeah and that would that would sow the seeds for promiscuity as well so once you've established that having such thoughts is evil yeah right and then they're naturally experiencing those thoughts

then to just go into a self-fulfilling promise oh i have these thoughts that means i am evil so evil is and evil as evil does so i might as well just follow through is just the the next logical step and a lot of people would then uh you know and then come back with with years of guilt they couldn't say islam about me right so yeah and on the other extreme there's cases like this is cases from pakistan yeah that i've heard of there will be the opposite extreme like what you were speaking about where because of society sheltering women and

the um the steroid version of you know like everything is modesty and so women being quite sheltered from sex or sexuality or that kind of stuff and then on the other hand a lot of the young men drowning in porn um so there was a case where now that the guy is married and he's got the girl he thinks this is going to be some kind of like a gung-ho kind of a porn episode going on and it results in like tragic scenarios where the girl is like completely obviously like utterly violated and she's because

she got she's not coming from any sexual background that kind of thing and the guy is whether he's coming from a sexual background or not but he might not be either but he's just like he's bottled up years of this repression like and it's that boiling point and he's watched all this kind of like this kind of porn and all this kind of stuff going on and he just thinks that this is what's gonna happen now and and he goes in there wants to do everything uh and then this resulting in like what the hell is wrong with you and this and that and or the woman just being completely violated and stuff like this so

it could even the other way around so they're they're expecting this hollywood kind of a performance that's going to take place and it takes them two weeks to even consummate their marriage and the guy then starts having insecurity about himself that okay i am not uh i cannot perform and then performance anxiety further uh complicates the issue so i've actually dealt with couples who have gone for two three four years in marriage not being able to consummate simply because there was absolutely no education and they had he had no education

he's like yeah there's no hollywood there's this hollywood education that they just this uh ideal that they had in mind and when they actually do get married nothing like that takes place and then that gives results in fears and anxieties and that just uh that becomes the habit that becomes the norm then and um even going to a psychiatrist for issues like these it'll take months if not because then there's the culture of the emasculation isn't it because it's like for because then it's a huge issue as well of like if if the person's got performance

anxiety if he's got these kind of things then that's like a huge dis i i think generally it would hit men hard uh quite ironically no pun intended it would be the only hard thing that they don't want hard is the issue [Laughter] they go yeah life is it would hit men quite seriously i think worldwide especially in societies as well like

pakistan which are quite patriarchal um you know where the man is the man and man's manhood is kind of almost linked to his sexual his ability to have sex and yeah so i think that would make it eve you know quadruple it would kind of like the whole thing like to turn up to a psychiatrist and say you know i've got issues that said i used to when i was in pakistan i used to see these on the on the buses and the stickers and the you know like they're now text messages are they now text messages at that time yeah they were like yeah you know this this

to sort this out uh to sort out your martani [Laughter] uh what was the other one you know to get some black magic done for you but yeah wow i do see i mean are these things taught in education now like sexual education is that something i don't know in in see it became we we ran a campaign when i was uh training in psychiatry with my professors uh the the the zen issue had happened where she had been

like the horrendous unmentionable things that that took place and we started our campaign even before that but then we took this on and necessarily when you have to create a awareness about child sexual abuse you have to give out a degree of sexual education and the lack thereof or how taboo the subject has become is precisely the ground in which sexual abuse is going to proliferate it's going to grow the more silence there is about something like this the more the perpetrators have uh an edge in getting away with it because they know it's not going to be spoken of right and

the psychological issues that develop after abuse are are are worsened greatly exacerbated sim because of how it's handled after the abuse has taken place right so it's very likely that the girl uh simply because it's taboo little girl six years seven years 10 years 12 years even boys they're not going to be able to talk about it to their parents because that's just not something that they do right that they don't talk about stuff like that and uh so if they're uh tortured inside they can't express it if they're being abused regularly there's not there's no

adult help that they can see there's a possibility that um there will be they will be told off and we have had cases like this they're very prevalent actually that when the mother finds out she starts by blaming the girl herself it's your fault and you're just not leaving any any any chance and it is really it is a a manifestation of of of allah's grace that not more people are psychologically unwell or not more personalities are ruined than what we actually do you see what what did they logically it should have been a whole lot

when they do this blaming is that out of shame of the community or the other reasons because i've seen that quite a bit in dc communities this whole thing of like if there's an abuse case they you know shh you know like you know or it must be what the hell were you doing you know like blaming the uh is that just out of fear of the community you know is is that the what will people say that that's a very important that's a very important uh dimension of it that now your honor is going to be put in our family's honor who will eventually marry you that kind

of thing yeah that kind of precisely precise and i i feel that this i i mean i don't know you you'd have a greater knowledge but this is my perception that when it comes to children abuse children sexual abuse like child sex sexual abuse that there are perhaps many more boys being sexually abused because people feel that they can get away with it with the boys uh because with the girls one that the girls sometimes are not so available in these places and two they feel that um you know it will become such a big thing

and with the boys they'll think well you know you know it's like that kind of i don't know if that if you if that's but this was when i was in pakistan i kind of sensed that that in the in the culture that it was this thing of like if it was a boy it was like it was a bit like a slap on the wrist kind of a thing that you know you know you shouldn't have done it but jello orga is like one of those things do you do you see that see it is definitely it is definitely more prevalent than is recognized like people would uh generally imagine that maybe something like this does not happen to

boys or will not happen boys uh statistically obviously there is uh there are issues with uh the studies that have taken place for obvious reasons the stigma associated the uh the methodologies the the infrastructure that you have available all of that there does create complications but yes statistically it is one and it's every fifth girl child and every 20th boy child but then again these are uh they're still under under representations they're still under representations um there may be a whole lot cold greater incidents than that right that's interesting i mean i didn't

know the statistics i was just going by my perception when i studied there and i lived there for many years i saw that people were very um like you know the stories i would hear from people like what they used to do what they had been up to or people they knew it they were quite shocked i mean not quite they were very shocking and it was seen as like like i was so shocked how normal they just felt it was like they felt that well that's normal everybody goes through like for boys they felt that was a normal almost like a stage people go through in life and i was like what the hell are you

guys on about like it's it was like a huge uh maybe that's because more so these people were associated with madrassas or something but i don't know but this was my perception of stories that i hold that i heard in the greater narrative when i stayed there for those see any any any hostile situation any boarding situation whether that's a school university or a madrasa you would find where they're being housed together um these incidences would be greater and yes uh boys would are more likely to be in boarding's boarding schools than than than girls so in that particular population boys would

definitely but i i even heard it like in villages i heard that like this was what because once again coming back to access and that the boys were usually always about and the other thing i was that they felt this was it what my what i was taking from what they were telling me that they felt it was easier to get away with because they felt that if they touched up a girl see it's interesting because when you compare like human rights like you take countries like let's say pakistan and india you compare human rights and and things like this and liberal values and it's interesting like let's say

rape that that is it's like it's india has one of the the highest certain parts of india the highest rate going on in the world in certain parts of it i know in parts of dilli it's a problem in other parts now pakistan doesn't have it like that at all and one of the reason one of the reason is the the kind of backlash that that it would create because of the honor the honor of women so people would like kind of they would kill over it and they would go mad over it like it would so this this same kind of thing was what i sensed from what people were what i used to

hear stories that they felt that oh with a girl it could kind of blow out a proportion but with by abusing boys they felt that like they they are more likely to get away with it but i just yeah i mean the whole thing is is very uh you know tragic may allah you know make things easy see what one one reason why that may be um the the difference in statistics despite the uh the the what you just mentioned is the usual perpetrators are actually known to the family oh right okay they may even be relatives

right so they have access to the inside of the house one way or the other and that power dynamic see there's uh the perpetrator has to keep in view to that who will will be easily silenced yeah that's a very annoying their head a little girl is is more likely to be frightened into silence than than a boy yeah i was more talking about like out in the outside world like as in not you you're right you're talking yeah yeah you're very that makes absolutely yeah the statistics would be

actually strangers are less likely to be perpetrated yes the usual perpetrators for the prevalent uh abuse that is that that's there are known to the family they're known to the family so that's what makes it even more complicated so yes make things easy uh for uh people all over and especially in pakistan right i mean with so moving forward right moving forward like you you are uh part of and you are yourself and part of a beacon

of uh hope for pakistan for the future generations this whole trying to you know bring forth a sense of enlightenment hand in hand with with the faith with religion uh i felt that you know this uh this is by contact that's been made with me you know people sending me messages people from pakistan i felt this with people from india as well that have messaged me but uh that this this kind of especially the upper middle classes the younger people especially there's a huge gap between faith and them and many of them are

covert kind of like they've given up on faith whether they announce it or not because obviously announcing in pakistan is a just wearing a death target but i mean a lot of them have just given up on islam altogether do you see a lot of that do you do people come to you do they discuss this with you definitely definitely they they would share their concerns their questions um and it's a normal part of growing up this this process of finding your meaning in life and then finding that meaning and what that has to do with

religion is a normal part of growing up and when that normal part of growing up of being human is not given its um it's it's it's due yeah the the respect that it deserves the uh the time that it deserves then necessarily people will make those choices covertly and it's it's going to be a huge influencing factor in their uh mental health issues it will definitely complicate it may be the reason that's leading to their mental health issues developing

it is definitely going to be one of the complicating factors and compounding factors so do you feel that there's a a in recent times like in the last i'm talking just two decades something like that do you feel that there's a further over emphasized islamization of things taking place in pakistan like um like from in the psychosocial narrative as well like from language to dress to societal things like they are like so for example i've noticed like i

do actually say quite often like but i've noticed people have stopped saying moving away from the word khuda to just saying no we should only use the arabic word i've noticed that people like pakistani or women have changed the hijab style to an arab style arab style hijab i've noted we don't say ramzan we say and and they start to say ramadan kareem as well i've noticed on some of the things i mean there's nothing wrong with these things per se they're fine but i feel is this an artificial attempt to you know look let me put this to you some people i was having a

discussion with somebody a friend of mine uh indian muslim and he was saying to me that look we're speaking on like issues india pakistan and this came up that he said look if that this is from that analysis like this kind of analysis that you see pakistan has to oh if it doesn't like if you take away like his point was this like if you take away islam from the arabs they're still arabs if you take away islam from the turks they're still turks if you take away islam from pakistanis they are then just indians

and in order to remain pakistani the thing that's demarcating that distinction to them is only the faith so they have to over emphasize the faith to artificially create and forge an identity uh so i was thinking about it i mean i don't know what your thoughts are on on that it's an interesting uh kind of analysis i mean what would you think tying in with this in recent maybe two decades is an over or there is a kind of islamization i've felt i could be wrong but i've just felt this

see the the development uh of the independence of pakistan and then the whole process the history and before and then how pakistan has um like these 73 years come along the way it is 73 years now it's 73. there's going to be 73 sects all of them are in the hellfire except one one one for a year yep

so there has been this emphasis it is unfortunate see what the one of the beauties historically that we see of islam uh is how it has been able to um assimilate and relate with every culture that that it has gone to right and i don't i don't think it manifests any more beautifully than it does in the indian subcontinent right the way the the the the tradition that we have and to now start stripping off those

those elements of uh the subcontinent islam and to say that there is no such thing is to take away a huge chunk of history in in search of this puritanical pristine uh islam of the ages uh of like 14 centuries ago which uh it's how do you relate with 14 centuries ago if you

is just a version narrated to you you know in other narrations it was not what you think it was and because like we could take as an example uh even if you take subtle things like look at urdu is the national language of pakistan now i do feel on a side note i do feel sometimes you know on a site this is an interesting question let me ask you you know they use and i don't mind this because obviously it's easy for me they use a lot of arabic words more and more in formal urduja to kind of pass it off as distinct to hindustani and the whole thing and so but do the public actually understand

these words because i thought to myself come on i understand them because i understand arabic but does the public really understand this kind of like they'll say like you know here uh i don't know like [Music] like i remember when they had you know when that thing happened with the uh i forgotten his name now the the indian pilot they were handing him over so they were saying okay usual they're gonna hand him over at let's say five o'clock in the morning but they didn't write subba they wrote

in in the news like i was reading and i thought i thought but it looks like i thought but wouldn't understand but maybe they can make it out but that's just a quick point that wasn't my main point but does the public actually understand this level of urdu mostly we don't mostly know mostly we don't unless kissing you know we've struggled with a little bit of arabic here or there um and see this is actually not very different from the religion and science problem

okay when the self can't relate with the other and if the self is religion and the other is science i could go relate if you can't make those relationships then any relationship that self has made historically naturally you're going to start having to chop those off exactly exactly and what you're going to be left with is this um there there was this meme um on the the last arab on earth and uh he had a sword in his hand and he had a sword in his leg and he was fighting himself yeah i i did see that i was going to the i got distracted with

that point there the order thing but i was going to say is that look you've got urdu beautiful language but i find in pakistan i mean this i could be wrong about this because i don't live in pakistan but i this is my perception through social media through things when i did live there is that pakistan although it celebrates allama iqbal i don't find them celebrating ghalib or meer who are like

and i feel this is because they were from dili and they kind of think and okay partially okay one could say that they you know they just speak about alcohol and all this stuff but so maybe the maulanas are a bit you know uh blah blah blah but but i i even with the or just people in general i i felt this i don't know i spoke to somebody is this the reason that they feel um in fact i had a mind trap with somebody an indian uh poet speaking and he was saying that the same thing in india they don't celebrate the like allama iqbal or they don't celebrate

uh as much you know the pakistani kind of poets uh do you i mean do you feel this or is this something you've never really thought about that they don't this thing this gap with like mirtaki mead and these kind of people and and urdu in pakistan see as far as the the content goes right there the poetry of allama iqbal and the poetry the work of thought of allama iqbal the thought that the poetry of meat that he kimer of mirzad our alienation from that that

content would be as great across the board it's just as a we're we're in we're a very strangely alienated population this the millennium i think hello slightly four oh you're back you're back we just yeah we came just for a second we lost you but you're back you have to know that you're talking to someone from pakistan has to give up every hour

you know this is [Laughter] uh definitely would be interesting growing up growing growing up in school we would pride ourselves for not knowing urdu we would pride ourselves we would have be offered all levels urdu as a second language wow and i am embarrassed today but in school i was proud to take urtu as a second language okay and that's the that's that's the way we were like for us as

as elitist schools you know for the the the going to getting our old levels and all of that speaking english and where that was the thing so so that's your kind of background coming from all of all of that very english speaking the whole thing and growing up that's the majority of our schools now you're going to become doctors and engineers if you've gone to an urdu medium school forget it you don't have a you don't have a professional career ahead of you yeah you don't have a professional career ahead of you and um if it gets worse right it's not like we have much of a connection to the english tradition or the western tradition

the university student today would be just as ignorant of freud as they would be available yeah right more than we don't know that's all that was thrust down our throats in the younger classes that's it most people don't even know that there is a book called reconstruction of religious thought in islam that allama iqbal uh authored they don't know that so it's it's it's with the languages i don't think those who are attached to the language those who are

uh people of the language they would take fondly to uh whether it's manto or it's uh uh khalib or it's iqbal or it's meet me they're they're very they would be attached to you another thing on following from that uh train of thought and then i'd like to take a few questions if we can and i know we've obviously taken up so much of your time as well being mindful of that i don't even realize how much time but this following on with this thought i am kind of so uh gutted like like i'm into the whole you know i'm into anthropology and history like

ancient history the indus valley civilization yeah you've got in pakistan today you've got the harappan civilization kind of findings and i know in india they've found rakhigiri and some other places but i feel that in pakistan like this is some of potentially this is arguably the oldest amongst the oldest known civilizations on earth and the most intriguing you know these were civilizations that for example they found no weapons there yeah they found no signs of kingship or anything like that they so they're really intrigued how did

these people live yet they had an accounting system they had coins these kind of what not coins but their version of whatever they were using to trade these kind of things that they found in certain shapes they had a writing system they had which they haven't still deciphered yet and it's not although now i think the world heritage thing has got involved and said look but you know there was i was watching this video where there was some bachara from sindh who was there saying look just out of passion i because this is ancient and it belongs to the ancients i stop people from taking the bricks they just take them home and you know they make they want to make an extra gate and they're taking

uh potentially a seven thousand year old yeah and i i feel like why is there no passion in trying to like like even from a government perspective like there isn't this is it and i feel is it partly because they don't want to know that ancient history like it's not part of us we are now muslim they would have been hindu or whatever they were you know humseki it's like in a way they feel maybe more connected with oring zeb who really is not related to let's say generally speaking modern-day pakistanis wouldn't be generally but

then they would to the original people of let's say sin then which would be punjab and these places i i don't like honestly because i'm so i'm so into this whole indus valley and ancient civilizations when i watch these i think why are they not investing in this like i don't why are they not working on why is there no passion towards it i don't know what are your thoughts on this i can see um when we talk about our rich culture we we look at that culture we look at that history

from the same lens that we look at our current identity in our relationships and that chopping off attitude is going to go it's going to trickle in i mean there is an indian part to our identity that we have to own all right that we have to be proud of that uh that saree jahan says that side of iqbal yeah that we have to we have to own that as much as the the tradition that was here

prior to the coming of islam yeah right that is because islam came into that tradition that culture and was assimilative of it it wasn't uh altogether rejecting right which is why it was allowed to survive in this place to begin with if it was altogether rejecting and polemical to it it would not it would not last a day yeah right it was it it had that that beautiful relational character inherent inside of it and uh unfortunately we seem to have lost that somewhere along the way

so the pakistan that envisioned it was that that same pakistan that would be that relational that would be able to bring in all of those polar opposites in a fruitful dialogue in a fruitful relationship whether they come from the west or the east the historical past or the uh the the the distant future right so i did feel it was kind of uh this kind of the same thing exactly what you're saying and and i feel it does tie in with that insecurity discussion we had in the beginning and and this is why i was really i really

loved the fact that imran khan did uh open up the gurdwara thing in punjab for the sikhs in india and i thought that that's even though some people you know went mad on him for that saying he's insulted the prophet and um yeah that's a different discussion i guess but yeah i thought alhamdulillah at least you know this because it goes to show it's uh it's it's building bridges isn't it between communities living in harmony yeah definitely see the the the poem that allama iqbal has written about guru nanak okay right the the way he has the way he has appreciated

uh his contribution to monotheism i mean to this mentality that allama iqbal doesn't make any sense at all yeah why is that person coming from it's true absolutely absolutely should we uh let us people if you've got any uh questions quick questions you want to fire away at uh dr saab right here feel free let me take some of your questions uh some people were just off on their own discussions here

uh somebody said yep they feel it was a good thing the imran khan thing yep we agree with that let me see uh right now uh is it oh right okay this is more an islamic uh question but if you um it's about reciting the quran is it permissible to recite it using the tunes uh do you if you want to answer answer that doctor i have no idea well i suppose you know it's not the traditional way but you know if it connects you to the quran fair enough um somebody said why were you asking the

historical questions uh and not psychiatry because i i felt that look it's connected this whole thing with pakistan identity you know you uh uh dr youssef you are involved in in your whole julie b center is about trying to bridge between faith and and the modern day contemporary world that's the whole uh thing isn't it so and i feel that with identity it does tie in because it's a huge struggle that's what i felt that's the connection anyway in case you were wondering even in psychiatry i think uh one of the

greatest tragedies of the field of psychiatry is to not take from literature from poetry from religion from philosophy from uh from history from that's that's something that is really um strangulating the field in itself and making it less and less beneficial and there is so much that we can we can give if we open doors to all of these different resources so right uh is there a god part in the brain is there a part of the brain is there is there a part of the brain that is wired

for the god gene i mean is that they have i mean there's been certain studies to demonstrate that certain uh you know certain kind of uh parts of the genetic code may be linked into that for i mean their their answer is it's for survival purposes and things like that isn't it like um i've i've forgotten the got it at the tip of my tongue actually the the actual gene that they they claim that there's some there's a particular gene found in theists more often

and stuff like this but would you feel god believing in god is as a psychiatrist would you feel that it's an inherent part of human beings or is it more is it nature nurture um so as far as as far as psychiatry is concerned right now the nature nurture question is is is obsolete it's the question is wrong nature influences nurture and nurture influences nature genes are not independent of environment uh they are influenced by environment

epigenetics took care of that um so um we can't make those and whatever uh neurological uh correlations we do find i mean that's not how we prove faith yeah right you will you will find correlates to um atheistic ways of being as well right and um correlation is not causation we have you know that entire that entire um narrative as well so uh somebody said yep it's 50 50.

please my question uh i don't know what your question is somebody said please answer my question then they've not answered the question they've not asked the question i don't know what your question is so um right the nature of devils and demons in psychology i think you kind of uh did mention that but would you like to uh answer from from your psychological perspective the nature of demons and devils um you did mention in your like you

briefly alluded towards carl jung um when we find within the jungian system a an illusion towards archetypes and basically the entire psychoanalytic uh depth psychology school of thought it is very um hospitable to the idea of sub personalities within the human being right that a single human being is uh it's not a simple saying okay this is my personality and that's it we have conflicting thoughts we have conflicting emotions and uh they are of the nature of of of of being very very

strongly influential over our uh the course that and the choices that we make we make the choices but yes there are influencing factors from within so historically the ideas about demons about xiaopin they're very very powerful ideas psychologically speaking in how they uh empower people to deal with their day-to-day challenges like i use that that framework uh repeatedly especially with uh people who who share the same faith that you know the the

that can be used as scapegoating as well we have to that's and that's not conducive towards mental health that you just attribute everything towards demons or demonic influences and all of that that there's that but then there is also uh okay i get thoughts and they're incredibly evil thoughts but they don't have to define me and my choice and my actions can be independent of that that's that's very uh those are very useful um tools to to develop on seva has asked frank sometimes frank sometimes it feels i think she's saying frank says sometimes it feels there is no bad in

this world and then you hear something or remember something bad and then you think there is not any good in this world right okay frank or frankel i i'm not quite sure frank some oh unless she's referring to somebody in the comments oh i thought she was speaking about frankel but uh now it's about the comments okay uh right why is psychiatry regarded as the lowest of medical practices in pakistan lowest in what sense in terms of uh like it's not given the like it's not seen as prestigious or as

um as the other like if you're a heart surgeon or if you're i suppose a heart surgeon is different but you know but even if you were somebody else dealing a lungs but i don't know dealing with something else but if you said i'm a psychiatrist they probably think acha [Laughter] yeah you couldn't get it anywhere else um there's a lot of reasons for that first as the stigma associated with uh with mental health issues extends towards the field itself the mental health professionals is a very commonly held belief that your patients are crazy and you

know looking after crazy people your entire lives you become crazy so that's also a commonly held perception it's definitely not very lucrative uh it is you know you don't make as much as uh orthopedic surgery do they owe to them is it not on the same scale as well no no no right okay the money is in the procedures the money is in the procedures uh whoever is doing the procedures so i mean okay that's understandable but in the sense that the surgeons and but what about other parallel kind of like let's say a gps or a certain consultant who's not actually doing surgery uh is it still

way below them is there still a disparity between the um as far as again there would be an entire spectrum the really good psychiatrists would be uh you know really know they'd be charging an arm and a leg as well um but then again there's the the the num the amount of time that a psychiatry patient needs or should be given right that would balance out so a physician would spend 20 minutes with a patient or a cardiologist would spend 20 minutes ideally a psychiatrist should be spending 45 minutes to an hour

right and so then to charge three times would usually not be taken uh very well by the patient population other than that recovery from psychological issues is not as uh promising prognosis is not you know you have an infection you take antibiotics within a week 10 days you're better your fever goes away your symptoms goes away you have a broken bone you get a surgery eventually things start healing yeah with psychological problems they're not that straightforward they're not that straight antidepressants will not have the response rate of antibiotics or antipyretics right you take an antibiotic fever goes

down but antidepressant 50 of the population would respond uh you know yeah somewhat and one third would respond very well and entire particularly i was at a conference a couple of years ago and and one of the you know the kind of lead professors uh in research as well was explaining this saying that look uh if you take the medical genre as a whole he said like 50 years ago if you had cancer if a person had cancer and if they had it today they are in a much better position clearly a you know a

an astronomically much better position than like 60 years ago uh with modern technology modern breakthroughs modern and in many kind of illnesses and diseases and things like that that is the case but he was saying actually you know in psychiatry there isn't actually a profound difference i mean there's more drugs and things but there isn't it's one because the brain is so difficult to you know to fully fathom it's it's the it's weird because by we fathom the world and in itself it is almost almost still an enigma we can't really fathom it so he was saying and that's in you know in

like the world over the science is yeah it's still it's still not made huge breakthroughs but see and there's there's there's another dimension to it so um for a typical psychiatrist in the u.s and this is actually from the textbook of psychiatry they would say that psychiatry for the best part of the 20th century was wasting its time um paraphrasing obviously but some of the same effect going to in the direction of psychology whereas what we should have been doing is going in the direction of neurology right right more and more brain more and more chemicals what frankl would say to that is no

that's not the case what we have been messing up is in this reductionism is in this nothing butness that has crippled us we are not looking at the biological dimension appropriately because we're not looking at the psychological dimension and the spiritual dimension appropriately we have to give all three dimensions they're due then and only then will be able to make uh real progress you cannot ignore the kidneys and only focus on the heart and the liver and expect that you're treating the entire human body yeah no absolutely uh a last one for you doc but this is a bit of a tough one i

don't know what your thoughts on this would be what would you as a person you know as a physician who focuses on the brain and as a muslim somebody who's involved in muslim theology and metaphysics as well what do you think of consciousness where do you feel it lies um i i have my theory on this but uh i mean i'd love to get your thoughts what what do you think of consciousness

oh does the consciousness lie in the brain yes does it lie only in the brain no okay simple answer to a very difficult question you see i feel personally consciousness is the rule and i feel that consciousness is actually out there but we kind of tap into it like a device like the way a phone will receive a signal um and then from the islamic perspective i would feel that they are connected uh how they connected i don't know but this then creates that you know

that they are somehow uh connected and how how would you how would you relate that to the to the body mind or the body spirit dualism yeah because i would feel that there is definitely a dualism in the sense that um the the life that is coming into us not the biological life but the consciousness thing is actually external it's a non-local consciousness um so it's a non-local rule that we kind of tap into that's what i would feel uh this is and i would feel that this is you know like from the sense of allah

saying that we breathed into adam this rule this is what triggered consciousness because i would feel that before adam they were homonyms uh you know that that were homo sapien they just didn't have the cognitive revolution of consciousness um so that's my kind of take on it i don't know if you've ever thought like that or if you've see i wouldn't um i wouldn't venture an opinion as such but i would say that um in my reading both frankel and iqbal uh in their uh description they would they would steer clear of dualism

they would steer clear of dualism they would relate uh mind body spirit in in different ways um how i i mean you know maybe maybe some other time sure no absolutely no that's a very lengthy and a very tricky kind of question it's called a hard problem absolutely it's an absolute hard problem irresolvable doctor it's you're taking it there again it's been [Laughter] it's an it's been an absolute pleasure before we go uh where can people reach out to you if they want to know more about you

uh i have put up the website in the in the youtube link as well but tell us uh if people want to reach out they want to find out more what you're doing maybe people in pakistan that are watching this that want to connect with you as well or worldwide what should they do throw it out of stock throw it at us with some antidepressants um they can reach me on my facebook page with my name as it's spelled here uh dr youssef reza they can reach me on my email the website web address is given yousefrezza.com my email would be useful at usefrezza.com so twitter would be use of psych but i'm

not too used to all of those platforms facebook and email is what works for me best and will you prescribe free antidepressants to us [Laughter] 10 milligrams eastside you know on that note i don't know if you if you if you want to say this but are you are you down with psychedelics or not really i'm i'm a huge i'm a huge advocate of things like dmt and uh magic mushrooms what what do we call mushrooms in pakistan what do we call mushrooms i think the the part of the society that they're prevalent in they're still

called mushrooms yeah do they grow they're not they're not [Music] yeah okay sure i suppose maybe they're not that organic or they must be organic in some parts but yeah okay but i i take it you're not that's the junkies this is the gateway to consciousness [Laughter] i'm gonna come from an angle where i've seen the worst manifestations of all of these drugs i've seen how they've ruined lives

families so i'll be very very cautious i do know that there is a whole lot developing when you're saying ruined lives you're talking about things like these psychedelics like magic mushrooms and things like dmt i don't i've not heard of them ruining lives i've heard statistically they enhance lives and they actually can treat anxiety depression things like that actually see the part of the population here particularly that will resort to those kinds of drugs will never just resort to oh yes of course of course always going to be uh a cocktail

and when they do resort to them obviously the necessary precautions are are not going to be taken yeah they're not going to be taken so there's going to be um i've seen people who've come back from trips uh that they that they took and then they had a lifelong anxiety to deal with oh wow that it worsened a state that was already there and um even though they're off the drugs but the depression and the anxiety i'm left to deal with wow so uh wow okay no that's that's very it's a very sensible choice you know yet about this you know it's like me

you know there's a historic in india they had this kind of psychedelic which they used to call in the vedic tradition soma and there's this huge research on what was the soma plan plant um i mean maybe in another discussion if you ever look into that i'd be really intrigued but that's there's a huge kind of discussion you know graham hancock and all these people who are researching ancient civilizations and the kind of entheogens i call them entheogens by the way these are they're not hallucinogens they are basically to connect with god and theodogens

right so with that people we're gonna wrap this up it's been absolutely awesome i've benefited so much from you uh shukran once again and i'm actually seriously i have to say these people i have to say this publicly i am actually so i was you know i'm i i'm overwhelmed with the thought that in islamabad you actually were watching watching my nonsense going on on youtube

i forget it's actually being live streamed but it's it's an absolute honor to make this connect um and i i really am you know whenever i connect with people that especially when they're so distant and they've kind of been like watching some of my stuff or going over some of my things i find it seriously really i don't just say this i'm being honest it is actually you know it actually touches because i i almost can't believe it in a way i think no way so shukran for taking your time out and for really hey thank you so much for having me it was it was very

like i didn't i honestly did not notice i don't even know how long this has been now two and a half hours so that was incredible so guys so i had a lot of fun i learned a lot it was a very very uh incredible uh stimulating discussion informative discussion we were so accommodative [Music]

[Laughter] people take very good care of yourselves do subscribe to uh do check out uh dr youssef's his webpage and also his social media sites if you haven't already subscribed to mine then just wait till you need antidepressants i'm gonna put up my page do subscribe make sure you like click the notification bell i'm on i've also launched my patreon thing check it out people if you wanna if you wanna get active on that side other than

that take very good care of yourselves oh