Doomscrolling, Brain Rot and PTSI: How Digital Devices Are Harming Us - Dr. Gene Lipov

Dr. Jean Lipov is a well-known medical doctor based out of Chicago that specializes in digital trauma, brain rot, doom scrolling, and long-term effects of overuse on cell phones and laptops on developing brains, leading to mental health trauma and emotional damage depression. This guy will be talking my language. This is the CounterCultural Mom Show. I'm Tina Griffin. Mental health has to be addressed this week in the program, and with us we have anesthesiologist Dr. Jean Lipov. Dr. Jean, how are you doing today? Welcome to the program. I'm doing great. Just call me a pain doctor. It'll be easier than anesthesiologist. Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's about it. That's not going to be in the final. No one knows what just happened. You're something else. So the pain doctor, were you a young kid? I mean, back then, you and I didn't have cell phones. Maybe we had a pager. What got you into the interest, and when did you start showing that interest in studying the brain and everything dealing with brain rot with tech? Well, the way it started is, you know, I've done pain medicine for 40 years, so I've been doing it a long time. So about 20 years ago, I figured out that an old procedure called Stella Gangnam block helps PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Yes. So that led me to understand why it worked because nobody's ever done it. So I got self-trained in neuroscience of trauma. So that's kind of the background 20 years ago. Then about, so I have a 23-year-old son now. Okay. So he's had the usual craziness with the phones, the video games, all of that stuff. And I've been telling him, it's like, you know, this is really not good for you. He goes, whatever. Move on. So about a year ago, two things happened. Number one, I read an article, it said mimetic disease is spreading. I was like, hmm, that's interesting. What is that? Never heard that term. So mimetic disease, the way that this was psychologist, that was a post. And basically he was saying that when you watch things, it affects you on the, on a phone. It actually has an effect, psychological effect. You can get depressed. You can get other things. Like one of the things that people talked about during COVID was digital Tourette's. They can get Tourette's syndrome by watching somebody with Tourette's. Oh my word. Why that happens. So that was one, I was like, wow, that's interesting. So to me, all psychology is biology. Meaning if somebody has a psychiatric issue going on, there's some biological change going on. So that was the first step. So I thought interesting. Then my kid goes, you know, I'm sick and tired of technology. I was like, what? That's crazy. That makes no sense to me. Right. Right. He goes, I want to start building Legos. So he started building Legos, like massive 5,000, 7,000 pieces of Legos to get away from tech. So I'm looking at that's like, that is very strange. So, you know, like me, I always look at, I always dig at understanding why things work the way they do biologically. So turns out there's a huge movement to put the phones down, replace them with dumb phones. 17% of Gen Zs has already switched to dumb phones. Up to 70 to 80% of Gen Zs now want to break the phones. Phone breaking is basically deactivating a lot of the features of the phone and make them like dumb phones. Wow. So I said, at that point, I thought, well, that's pretty crazy. So in the process of that, you know, it's like to me, when I need a bunch of stuff, I put a book together. So I just published this. Amazing. So digital brain rot, my beautiful picture. I love it. I love it. So the origin of why I learned a lot about it is because I started to understand why does that happen? I know it happens. No question happens, right? So in fact, I submitted a medical article, hopefully it'll get published soon, that PTSD, a topic I know a lot about, and digital PTSD, meaning when you do a lot of doom scrolling, has the same mechanism. So they work on the same principle. What happens is when somebody has severe trauma in a battle, let's say, or rape or something horrible, fight or flight nervous system activates like that, right? It also activates a significant amount of immune response. That's just how the body is built. Also, if you have PTSD, you don't sleep. Lack of sleep leads to inflammation. Well known. High inflammation leads to suicide. That's a fact. Now let's look at the phones. Every time you have a little scroll of something scary, it activates your fight or flight system just a little bit. But if you get 100 or 200 of that per day, you got a lot of activation. Oh my gosh, the light bulb is going off in my brain right now. Oh my word. That's the same thing. Yes. And I can see the point. We have the suicide rate is number two among our youth today. And I've been addressing what kind of content are they watching. You're addressing, yeah, what kind of content and for how long, and what does it do to the body? PTSD, fight or flight, inflammation, and then get to the point of suicide with the steps you just explained. Also, the more doom scrolling, the higher the chance of suicide. There's a proportion. It's not 100% correlation, but there's a high correlation. Final thing is when you look at the phone at night, a lot of our youth are looking at the phone like 1 or 2 a.m. If you don't sleep, it activates, guess what? Sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight, and inflammation. There you go. Same stuff. Circadian rhythm is also messed up. Same mechanism. Same mechanism. That's right. This is eye-opening. Gene, what you're basically saying is we have to be very diligent in watching what our kids are seeing and how much they're on the phones, these gadgets, because of what can happen as a result, which could lead to literally death in more than one way. Can you address how you are leading the shift from PTSD to PTSI, which is post-traumatic stress injury? PTSD is one of many terms that has been used to describe post-traumatic stress disorder or something that happens that makes you feel bad. The Romans called it the tremble 2,000 years ago. Civil War brought us soldier's heart. Then there was shell shock, World War I, battle fatigue, Vietnam syndrome, and here we are in PTSD. The problem with PTSD disorder, so the way I look at it, disorder is what's wrong with you. Injury is what happened to you. So when people talk about PTSD being an invisible wound, they're missing the point. That was invisible in the 80s. That's true. Now we have new scanners called FMR, functional MRI, PET scan, other scanners. We can actually see a brain change or activation of amygdala on a brain scan. So it's real. So if you know it's real, then you actually can tell the patients, like, if you have a broken leg, nobody's going to argue with you. Do I have it? I don't have it. No, you have a broken leg. Let's fix it. Who's going to argue that, right? There's no stigma. There's a broken leg. You just broke the leg, whatever. It doesn't matter how you broke it. It was a hammer or car accident or a fusion bomb. It doesn't matter, right? What matters is the ultimate fracture, right? The same thing here, PTSD, it doesn't matter if it's childhood abuse, military action, rape, whatever. It doesn't even matter. The brain changes the same in all of them. You can actually replicate PTSD in a rat and a dog. In fact, I treated a dog with PTSD using my technique. So you know it's a real thing, right? So the person who came up with the term PTSD, post-traumatic stress injury, is Frank Ungberg. Frank is a very famous psychiatrist. He's now 87. So he passed this hot potato on to me, the name change. So in 2013, he went to American Psychiatric Station and said, you need to stop using the term PTSD. It's killing people. Change it to PTSD, post-traumatic stress injury. He went there with Pete Torelli, who was a four-star general. Unfortunately, they were rejected. So if you want to know the whole story and my whole website, ITSPTSI.com, I'm trying to collect data on how many people would like to have that changed. I did a survey on 3,000 people in 2023. Thank you. That's right. What it shows is that if you change the name PTSD to PTSI, stigma gets better. Hope comes back. There they are. That's Pete Torelli. That's a military guy. And then people get more care. That's Frank. So there's videos and all that kind of stuff. So they go, that 3,000 people is just not enough. I was like, what are you talking about it's not enough? Change the name. They go, no, I don't think so. So I'm working toward that still. So if you have any ideas, so 3,000 is not enough. I would like to get 100,000. So if you have any ideas how to promote that survey, nobody makes money on that. This will just save lives. It's really simple. Okay. This is like a no-brainer for our crowd, everybody out there. I know we have enough people watching each and every week, even if 10% of you were active in participating in this survey, but I'm going to ask that all of us answer the call for the sake of our kids. Go to ITSPTSI. That's ITSPTSI.com. Where do we go, Gene, once we're there to do that short little survey? Just go to the beginning of it. Just go to ITSPTSI.com. Save a life. Act now. Click there. Subtle, right? I mean, you can see I'm subtle. This is phenomenal. This is a no-brainer. Thank you for making that super simple. Everybody, take the survey. Save a life. I don't think it could be easier. What do you think? It's ridiculous. ITSPTSI. I'm going to pray that you have your 100,000 people after this episode airs through the show. I would love that. Let's do this, everybody. If you've been following anything I've been doing for the last two or three decades about warning parents and helping teens make wise media choices, this is my wheelhouse right here. I love kids. I love teens. I would take a bullet for the cause, and I stand by my ground from 30 years ago making that statement. So keep up the excellent work with that. Absolutely phenomenal. We're going to go to a short commercial break. Dr. Gene, we come back. We're going to talk more about the Digital Toxicity Awareness Day. That rocks. More with Dr. Gene right after this. You fight every single day for your kids, for what they eat, what they learn, what they watch. So why would you settle for healthcare that doesn't fight for your family too? 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There was a lawsuit against Metta, which was significant, and they settled for $18 billion, which is a pretty good number, I think. And part of what they did, they basically, they didn't quite admit, but it's a settlement, right? So what they said was that the accusation was that the platform is designed to be addictive. This is not the first lawsuit that was lost. There was one in March. In fact, I have a chapter on that as well, the lawsuits that have been lost. But the reason it happened was that basically they had so much evidence showing that the platform is designed to be addictive and it needs to not stop the scroll. It's designed to be endless. So it turns out what the new limits are going to be in between 13 and 17 years old, they're going to allow only scrolling for like two hours a day. It's going to be ending. There's going to be an end. So it's going to be safer, which is amazing. The other thing to keep in mind, this is now Metta, right? Which is Instagram and Facebook. That is not the worst offender. The worst offender is TikTok. If you compare TikTok to all the other platforms, TikTok clearly, what it seems to be, well, it has to be very technically scientific. It seems to be more addictive. It makes people more tired and have more effects because it's so good at following people around and predicting the algorithms. It's really, really good. Yeah. It hooks them right in there. That is... But it's really good to keep you on and that's how they make the money. Yeah. Yep. It is connected. It's crazy. You were the right person for this week on mental health. What is multi-generation trauma and epigenetic transmission? Can you explain more of that? Yeah. Sure. Of course. So I have a degree in genetics from 1980. So epigenetics, really not known at that time. So basically what it's saying is that turns out trauma happens to the person, right? The genes can actually change. There is a change in expression of genes and that goes two or three generations. You can find the signs of that. So my grandfather was in Ukraine and he went through a lot of stress. So he gave it to my father who was a flyer in World War II. So he had a lot more stress and he passed it on to me and I had PTSD and I had to get treated. So what that means is that if you have the same type of person that, let's say twins, right? One of them had a great life. Another one had a horrible life. They both have children. The one whose father had trauma, the child, let's say the child was not traumatized at all. That chance to develop PTSD is much higher compared to one who didn't have a father with trauma. So the body remembers. That's what's weird. It's so crazy, but makes complete sense. I read a little bit about this years ago, but I know that you're just bringing a lot of this stuff to service again and stuff is starting to connect in my brain as I'm hearing you share this wealth of knowledge today. So Gene, with what you just shared, how are you treating PTSD? Thank you. So basically there's an old procedure called Steli-Giglion block, which I made a little more effective. It's called DSR, Dual Sympathetic Reset. It's an injection in the neck where we put the fight and flight nervous system asleep for like eight hours and resets the brain to pre-trauma state. We use ultrasound to make sure it's the right area and success rate has been pretty high between 75 and 85 percent. So again, think of a computer that's reset. That's what we're doing. So what we're doing after we do the injection, about half of the people feel relaxed and they can sleep and they can actually talk about what happened to them without breaking down. So what it's doing, it's deactivating the fight and flight system so people are chilled. We are not erasing this. In fact, the memory of the event may be clear, but it doesn't have the emotional oomph because the emotional memory lives in the amygdala and regular memory lives in the hippocampus. So we are deactivating the amygdala. Oh my gosh, that makes complete sense. I'm going to be flying up there sooner than later. You have a great neck. Yeah, exactly. I need that. Is post-traumatic stress biological? A hundred percent, because the whole idea is that if you can see the injury, it's real, right? So that's what I mean. PTSI is a visible wound. It's not an invisible wound. You just need the right scanner. Everything you're saying makes so much sense today. And I love the way we did this interview. It's like, this is a very new topic for me. It really is. I did not do a lot of research on digital brain rot. So just to have you on here has been eye-opening for me today. Okay, we're going to go to a short commercial break. When we come back, Jean, we have to find out how to get our hands on your book immediately. Probably buy a ton of copies because everybody we know is currently probably having digital brain rot daily. So we need your information. 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This message provides an eye-opening in-depth look at today's pop culture and the effects it has on our kids. This is a must for any parent with children who have a tech gadget. Watch Netflix, ingest social media, play video games, and use apps. That should pretty much cover every kid in America. Get this series for your family and another one for a family with teens, tweens, or toddlers. It makes an excellent gift. The topics covered in this Hollywood Exposed series are how TV shows and movies promote identity crisis and gender confusion, how celebrities promote satanism and witchcraft in today's music, how video games, sexting, bullying, and social media impact our children, and how to safeguard your home from today's harmful entertainment. Download this Hollywood Exposed series from our website today and tune in with your kids immediately. Just go to counterculturemom.com and click on that store tab. Let's rewrite Hollywood script for our kids. Everybody out there, thank you so much for tuning in today. Phenomenal websites you have to check out right now. You won't even need to write these down. Digital Brain Rot is the first website you have to check out. Grab a copy of Digital Brain Rot, doom scrolling, get your brain back. This book is hot to trot right now. Gene, what's in this phenomenal read? So it talks about what happens to the brain, real biology. It also gives you what happens, how is each generation affected differently. And there are specific things you can do to get better to reduce brain rot. Turn the phone to gray mode. No phones in the bedroom for any reason. Buy an analog clock with the little alarms on top. No phones in the bedroom because you're going to scroll. It's going to affect your eyes. It's going to reduce melatonin. It's not going to sleep right. Last but not least, we have to check out your website. A ton of knowledge. All parents out there, I'm telling you're going to love the website here and what he has on it. Dr. Eugene Lipov.com. It's Dr. Eugene Lipov, L-I-P-O-V.com. We can bring you in to speak. You have a fantastic blog, a lot of research as well with the effects of what you talked about today. I know a lot of parents will get a wealth of knowledge on one. Actually go up and go to Substack. We have all the latest stuff there. Substack. That is phenomenal. So Substack as well, everybody, a ton of info, media podcasts, featured videos, media coverage, all of it right here at Dr. Eugene Lipov.com. I cannot wait to literally dig into your website because of the wealth of knowledge you've got. And I've been talking about this topic for years, but you dropped a lot of bombs in my head today. So thank you for jumping on the show. Keep up the excellent work all for the sake of our kids. You're doing an excellent, excellent job. Everybody out there, share this episode with everybody you know. Parents need to know this information. Let's get it out there, people. Counterculturemom.com. Click on the show tab. We shoot it. You share it. Get it out there to as many parents and teens as possible and grandparents. Everybody's training up and raising up kids these days. Dr. Eugene, I'm watching you. Keep up the excellent work. Thank you. Social media can absolutely affect our mental health. If you want to be aware of what's going on with your kids' mental health, you have to check out the Bark app at Bark.us. That's Bark.us. They alert you to anything suspicious going on with your kids' devices, including suicidal or depressed-geared language. It's a must-have for families who want to protect their kids in today's tech-crazy world. 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