The Childhood Trauma Doctor: Your Childhood Trauma Changes The Shape Of Your Brain & Causes Parkinson's! How Not To Ruin Your Kids! Dr. Paul Conti

**Paul Conti** (0:00)
Trauma is like a virus, and it gets passed along to your children, even if their children are not born until years later, because trauma can change the expression of our genes. So we need to understand whether trauma is afflicting us, how it's afflicting us, and how we can treat it if it's there.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:16)
Dr. Paul Conti, psychiatrist, expert in treating trauma.

**Paul Conti** (0:20)
He's worked with Kim Kardashian and saved Lady Gaga's life.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:23)
And been in clinical practice for over two decades. How many people have some form of trauma?

**Paul Conti** (0:28)
Well over half the population.
And trauma can change us in very negative ways. For example, the odds of traumatic brain changes are very, very high. We know trauma makes us age faster than our calendar age. And we know that ultimately the root of depression, addiction, Parkinson's disease is from trauma.
Modern science knows this, but we'll give them pills. With the idea that pill is gonna fix everything, and then we're surprised that tens of thousands of people die each year from prescribed pills. And we've let that happen.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:59)
What should we be doing instead?

**Paul Conti** (1:01)
The key to all of this is curiosity. So for example, let's say someone is addicted to their phone. Oftentimes addictive behavior is meant as an escape from something or even to self-punish. But when you scratch the surface of that, you might learn about an episode of sexual abuse that happened when the person was a child. This is not uncommon.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:19)
What are the telltale signs that I am traumatized? What can I do to alleviate the trauma? And then can you completely get rid of a trauma?

**Paul Conti** (1:26)
The answer is based in hard science, so...

**Steven Bartlett** (1:32)
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Dr. Paul Conti, on the front of your book, it says Trauma, The Invisible Epidemic.
Why did you use those two words, invisible and epidemic?

**Paul Conti** (2:18)
Well, as a practicing psychiatrist, what I started seeing over and over and over again is that the root cause of the vast majority of what I was treating, whether it was depression or addiction or panic, that ultimately the root of it was trauma. That if we traced back, what we would learn is that there was something that had happened in that person's life. It could have been acute or it could have been chronic over time, but that changed their brain. So the brain is then different going forward and that is the root of the problem. So from that sense, I could see there's an epidemic because this is behind what is ailing us, right? The 50% or more of complaints to general medical doctors are coming from mental health, right? These are general physical medical medicine doctors. So you imagine how much of what is going on inside of us is affecting our health.
So the epidemic of trauma is touching us in so many ways, but we're not identifying it. We're identifying different illnesses, for example, like, oh, that person has depression, that person has cardiovascular disease, that a heart attack, right? But those things may be linked, including autoimmune diseases, all aspects of mental and physical health, but we're not seeing that at the heart of it is the trauma that then changes us, and our brains and our bodies are different as we move forward. So to start seeing this commonality, that this is everywhere and we're not identifying it, because one of the impacts of trauma is to make a reflexive sense of guilt and shame in us. So then we sort of hide things away, so we're changed, made less healthier, and the very trauma itself leads us to have a tendency to keep it inside, to not share, to not get help, to not do the kinds of things that would lead us to recognize the epidemic.

**Steven Bartlett** (4:14)
How many people have some form of trauma? Because when we think of trauma, sometimes people think of PTSD, soldiers coming back from war.