Ariel Ganz, PhD | Mental Healthcare Innovations Summit 2023
so mental health is a global crisis and it’s predicted by the World Health Organization to be the leading cause of disease by 2030 so how many years is that in a few short years mental illness could be the leading cause of disease and that’s not surprising considering that already mental illness is driving all of the leading causes of death cardiovascular disease suicide covid-19 um diabetes Etc so already stress anxiety depression contribute to disease State our health is determined by our genetics and our environment so our environment can include things like Diet exercise toxin exposure lifestyle Etc and one thing that makes me feel excited and hopeful is that the effect of our environment enironment on our biology depends on what we’re thinking and believing about our environment so if I’m in this room with you then I could have the thought you’re interested to hear what I have to say and that would be maybe a neutral thought a neutral belief and it would be neutrally represented in the brain um and so you know you have your environment that’s the blue box and then the green is if you have a neutral belief about your environment or I could think you hate this talk I’m giving a bad example the slide says my boss but now I’m speaking about you know us here maybe it’s confusing so okay so that’s a threat belief you don’t like me and now all of a sudden even just thinking about it and sharing the example I can feel my heart rate is accelerating my breathing is changing and what’s going on behind the scenes is that you have activation of reaching to the brain like like the anterior insula the dorsal anterior singlet cortex you have activation of the sympathetic nervous system the HPA axis that are driving um production of signaling molecules such as cortisol um noro nephrine um Etc insulin and these all go and have Downstream effects in the body so just based on what I’m thinking and believing in this moment I can directly impact my physiology and that can also impact for example production of inflammatory cyto kindes in inflammatory States so as Dr George slavich shared with us earlier even just feeling stress for 10 minutes can dramatically change your um inflammatory State at least in the oral um uh container we researched this method that’s called inquiry based stress reduction and this method is a powerful way to change the the way that you’re thinking and believing so the question is if our thoughts are so powerful and our thoughts are driving our biology and changing you know our real time physiology in the moment and then you know Downstream causing chronic disease inflammation Etc how can we actually change those thoughts so that we can use that as a powerful lever to activate our health so this is one method it’s called inquiry based stress reduction and interestingly it’s very very similar in how it works as to what Dr Nolan Williams was describing around Iain so he said you know you have a thirdparty view on your traumatic path so that’s the same thing here but it doesn’t involve any drugs so what happens is that you notice what you’re thinking and believing and you write it down so I’m thinking believing that this talk is going too slow so I could write it down okay and then you can question that and it consists of four questions is it true yes can I absolutely know it’s true that this talk is going too slow no and then you witness how do you react when you believe the thought and who would you be without the thought and you can do this for events that were in the past similar to IBO game so now you’re taking a third party witness where you’re taking your memory you’re bringing it forward and you’re actually changing the memory because what happens is that you realize that what you think happened didn’t happen and you also realize um what was the role of what I was thinking and believing in my suffering so if I’m with my friend and I think she’s ignoring me in the moment I might think that that was due to her but once I come back and reflect what I can see is that my belief that she was ignoring me caused a lot of my own suffering and the other thing that I can see is how did I treat her when I believed that she was ignoring me what did I do and maybe I was mean to her maybe I was cold and then maybe she did start to ignore ignore me right um okay so this is the method and there have been a ton of studies on this over 20 studies 30 researchers seven countries and they’ve all shown meaningful changes in psychos social health we did a study um profiling 47 people across a 9-day immersive intervention and we measured millions of data points so we took blood we took psychometrics we took stool and then we you know did the full multiomic measured lots and lots of stuff we found that 91% of our participants recovered from depression in 9 days and that effect lasted for 14 months so that’s really really powerful just to give you as a point of comparison um in anti-depressant drugs this is actually a different way to look at it but in anti-depressant drugs about 30% of people get better and then here this is looking at percentage symptom reduction so all the bars on the left are studies of um either anti-depressants or different forms of therapy Etc and you can see that the percentage symptom reduction in depressions score is about 55% whereas we saw I believe we saw an 86% symptom reduction there’s but there’s different ways to look at it and so this is also twice um as effective basically as psychedelic assisted Psychotherapy as well I know it’s a little confusing because 86% reduction in the score and then 91% of people who um cross the threshold from being depressed by their depression score to not being depressed in addition we saw gigantic and Lasting improvements in anxiety stress loneliness life satisfaction hope and meaning and we had a really high study retention um so at the 14-month Mark it’s hard to read this but almost every single participant was either practicing this still in their life daily week or sometimes which is extraordinarily high for an intervention another thing that we saw in our biological data was decreased inflammatory gene expression and again these were results that were lasting so inflammatory gene expression um goes down and then it stays down for several months and that was also true of the antiviral um Gene panel as well a second study that we did um in a similar domain was looking at a Six-Day immersive Retreat of a fully different um approach called Date With Destiny and this is kind of the hodgepodge of Psychosocial interventions so basically it just takes everything that is known to work for depression anxiety and wellbeing and just puts it together in six days 100 hours of treatment that’s like two years of therapy um so they do meditation they do gratitude they do Community Connection they do cognitive reframing they do journaling they do goal setting value reframing everything and here we did a randomized control trial the control was gratitude journaling uh which is an active control what we saw is that 79% of depressed participants had a depression score below the threshold for depression at one week post like immediately post the intervention and by one month after the intervention 100% of participants had a depression score um you know were no longer depressed 100% of participants had recovered and that one we don’t have the longer term data but ziv who spoke earlier is doing a follow-up study now that he’s tracking people over a year again we saw Improvement in other psychosocial traits so why does all of this matter not just for our mental health but also for our physical health because social connection is the number one predictor of longevity it’s not whether you smoke it’s not your diet it’s not if you you know sit at home and watch TV all day and eat junk food it’s none of that it’s not if you exercise it is the quality of your Social connections and there’s been some data to show that relationships can um slow aging so our minds are aging us we know that stress accelerates epigenetic aging we know that depression can lead to mitochondrial dysfunction inflammation and cellular syence and we also know that people who experience trauma high levels of uh the trauma that Dr Ramos spoke about have a 20year reduced lifespan on average which is really high so you know it’s very clear that trauma um stress and relationships are extraordinarily important for our health and our longevity still we don’t know you know how psychosocial factors actually drive these despite it being you know such an important predictor so how can we access access this huge potential this huge lever that is so so important for our longevity so potentially through some of these approaches like digital mental health psychedelics awareness practices therapy Etc um and so for the first study that I shared with you and then there’s also this study here by um David Spiegel showing that among um people who had metastatic breast cancer Psychotherapy and self hypnosis was actually able to extend lifespan by 18 and half months which is really incredible and then Manny Faria who’s an undergraduate in our lab spearheaded um adding to our multiomic study looking at a predictor of biological aging and we used this measure called RNA age Cal which is not as great as epigenetic aging but it’s a proxy measure for biological aging using RNA and what we saw is that among participants who had this accelerated biological aging phenotype at the start of the study so we got rid of everyone except for people who were had accelerated aging and what we saw is that among those participants they had a rapid deceleration of their aging within this nday period and for depressed participants who started with accelerated biological aging they had an even more dramatic effect and it’s a small sample size so it’s more like a pilot study um and I hope that next week can get the actual epigenic aging however to me this suggests that we can actually reverse biological aging through psychosocial interventions which is again is not surprising given that psychosocial factors are the number one predictor of longevity so I’ll just leave you with this the future of mental health is connection and I hope that we can all expand our connection with each other today and tomorrow um at the Salesforce Tower and so please if you haven’t already registered it’s going to be a really special day tomorrow we have niku sedarat who is a high school student who’s going to be leading a workshop on youth mental health she started an entire um organization offering resources to high schoolers that’s reached thousands of students we have many of the speakers from today are leading hourlong talks to go a bit deeper into what they did we’ll have meditation breath work so if you liked the breath work this morning we’ll have an entire hour of breath work twice um and we’ll have singing again with Chris pan from my intent um we’ll have James Dodie back to speak about compassion and his uh digital health and generative AI app we’ll have George Dr George slavich back to speak about um you know the Mind Body Connection Etc so I’m very excited and I hope you’ll all join us and please email me tonight or sign up um yeah and so thank you to everyone who worked on these studies thank you in particular for this event and for This research to Mike my adviser he’s the most open-minded I think I already said this scientist I’ve ever met so I’m very um grateful to get to be here and grateful to be your lab thank [Applause] you any any questions questions is that based off of Byron Katie’s work yeah that’s super cool I should have mentioned that yes so it’s the work of Byron and Katie yeah is it true is it yeah that’s very cool yeah yeah more of a com oh and another thing just like a fun fact we did a smaller not study where a high school student for her high school project had 10 high school students just for 10 minutes a day go to this website 10 minutes a day for 10 days and they had a 40% reduction in anxiety um even though some of them started with zero anxiety wasn’t like a very official study um but what was so interesting to me is that in the same way that we had this super high retention where people who did it were still doing it 14 months later every single high school student out of those 10 students said that they would do it again either in general or if they felt really stressed and I think that the reason for that is because it’s so power F and so effective so even you know personally I don’t always love sitting down to do that practice however what I notice is that when I’m truly suffering when I do it yeah Al also I think another detail from that that’s really important is that once people learned it once it’s stuck with them basically for the rest of their lives one more question I think we’re all ready to go home yeah I think everyone’s like yeah where do we eat um great any any final words to to wrap maybe a thank you from Mike turn the mic over Mike you want to give the uh the final words here thank you awesome day go home
Ariel Ganz applies her PhD in nutrition from Cornell to her research at Stanford on precision mental health and well-being. Her personal journey with mental health inspires her research, which has been published in leading academic journals across mental health, nutritional biochemistry, and precision medicine. Working with Precision Medicine Pioneer Dr. Michael Snyder, Ariel is at the forefront of applying multi-omics to clinical mental health research. Ariel also co-teaches the ‘Engineering Wellness’ course at Stanford, and is a founding partner at Arben Ventures, championing early-stage startups at the cutting edge of deep-tech health and wellness. As a co-founder of the Stanford Mental Healthcare Innovations Summit, and with her speaking engagements at venues like CERN, NextMed Health, and university classrooms, Ariel is deeply committed to amplifying interdisciplinary connection, and transformative ideas in mental health.
The Mental Healthcare Innovations Summit at Stanford Medicine brings together creators and action-oriented leaders across research, policy, government, funding, and mental health advocacy to build a cross-sector community and drive forward the powerful existing and emerging innovations in mental health to collectively reimagine what it is like to give and receive mental healthcare.
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