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Mental health and Lyme disease go hand in hand yet are not often addressed in the healing process. Not only does Lyme cause a variety of mental illnesses, but the loneliness experienced within the Lyme community exacerbates them. Today we have Dr. Jane Marke, a holistic psychiatrist from New York City. We will talk about a topic not often discussed with Lyme, mental health, and how Lyme causes depression, anxiety, suicidal tendencies, and many other psychiatric disorders. Dr. Mark specializes in Lyme psychiatry, and she has found great success practicing a technique called integrative psychiatry. She is also a fellow Lyme warrior.
To learn more about Dr. Jane Marke and her New York City Practice go to her website.
Watch the video here.
Mimi:
So Dr. Marke, thank you so much for coming on today. I heard you speak this fall at one of the Lyme summits online. So I really liked what you were talking about, especially related to teens and mental health and Lyme. So thank you so much for coming on today because I think it’s an important topic.
Dr. Jane Marke:
Thanks for having me.
Mimi:
Yeah. So how did you come to focus on Lyme patients for your practice?
Dr. Jane Marke:
I like to say I got into Lyme the honest way, which I had it.
Mimi:
Oh, you did. Okay.
Dr. Jane Marke:
So I had Lyme for many, many years before I was diagnosed, and when I was finally diagnosed, last time I dated myself by saying I got it at age 17. I was diagnosed at age 60.
Mimi:
So you had it that long before you were diagnosed.
Dr. Jane Marke:
Pretty sick. But I got diagnosed, and I did extremely well with treatment. I had a fabulous year, actually traveled, which I hadn’t been able to do in a long time, and thought I was cured. Then a year later, I relapsed. So what I discovered was Lyme didn’t take the model of infectious disease that I’d been taught in medical school and internship and residency. I realized I needed to learn. So I started going to ILAD meetings, and I did a preceptorship where I sat in the office of a Lyme doctor one day a week and learned how to treat Lyme and take the Lyme classes that teach you how. I gradually began to recognize that some of my psychotherapy patients had Lyme.
Dr. Jane Marke:
So my first diagnoses were people who I’d already been treating for a long time and not recognizing this. I mainly had a psychotherapy practice. Once I started recognizing Lyme in my own patients, I began to get known, and people referred me to people they thought may have Lyme. It just went from there. It took off. And now, 80% of my practice is psychiatric symptoms with Lyme disease.
Mimi:
Wow. Okay, wait. So there’s so much to unpack there. First of all, I’m amazed that you could go through medical school having Lyme. I mean, I don’t know if it’s anything like what I’ve been going through. I have a hard time reading, concentrating, memorizing, stamina. Those 24-hour shifts that you were going… How did you do that with Lyme?
Dr. Jane Marke:
I had a lot of trouble reading, and I put in more hours than any of my friends. I would just sit there with the textbooks, and I would highlight them. Then I would underline it; then, I would rewrite it, rewrite it again, rewrite it again. I did nothing else other than trying to pound the information into me. When I got it pounded in, it often left very quickly. The way I really learned was by doing. I learned more in internship and residency, but I had a tough time getting through medical school. I worked really, way harder, and I was not at the top of the class.
Mimi:
Right. Well, kudos to you that you could do that, honestly.
Dr. Jane Marke:
I had a philosophy for many, many years as I got sicker and sicker that I don’t encourage anybody to have. It’s called FIDO. The first word is a curse word. Can I say it here?
Mimi:
Yeah, sure.
Dr. Jane Marke:
It’s fuck it, drive on.
Mimi:
Okay.
Dr. Jane Marke:
And no matter how I felt, I would just say FIDO. I raised two kids as a single mom, and it was all FIDO, FIDO, FIDO. So it was very hard.
Mimi:
I can’t imagine. Yeah, with the kids too. I mean, that’s a lot to be a single mom, go through medical school, and then provide for all of you. What ultimately got you better? Was it antibiotics, or what treatment ultimately?
Dr. Jane Marke:
It was antibiotics more than anything.
Mimi:
Yup.
Dr. Jane Marke:
I recently had one treatment with hyperbaric ozone for another reason, for a post-COVID reason, and I never got night sweats again. So I think this one treatment with hyperbaric ozone treated my bizia, which was still tagging along.
Mimi:
So what do you think caused your relapse?
Dr. Jane Marke:
Stress.
Mimi:
Stress. And have you had the change the way you’ve eaten, and you’ve had to maintain that this whole time.
Dr. Jane Marke:
I did, but I don’t know. I honestly don’t that much. I stay away from gluten. I’ve gone through periods of being very strict with my diet of no gluten, no dairy, and all I can say is that everything that I have had and experienced has been unpredictable. I could write a story about the causes of each flare, and they don’t really have any truth value. They’re just-
Mimi:
They’re all different each time.
Dr. Jane Marke:
Yeah, they’re just stories.
Mimi:
Yeah. Now, do you believe you can get rid of Lyme, or you just put it into recession?
Dr. Jane Marke:
Well, I believe that with the drugs we have now that we can get rid of them. I don’t think we were very good at getting rid of persisters for a long time. But I think with the studies that have come out of Stanford, where they’ve just run everything through to see what kills persisters, we now have drugs that kill the persisters for Lyme. Disulfiram is one of them. Peplomycin and dapsone kill the persisters. Tinidazole and Flagyl will do, but they’re not as good as peplomycin or dapsone, or even disulfiram. So they kill Lyme persisters, and now we have a whole list of things that kill Bartonella persisters. Dr. Tom Moocroft has been getting excellent results with methylene blue and clotrimazole, and I’ve been using that recently. I can’t tell you whether I have fabulous results with that, but given the killing impact on persisters versus the free-floating forms should be a great combination.
Mimi:
So when you see patients, are you actually dealing with treating their Lyme, or are you helping them more with the psychiatric part of it?
Dr. Jane Marke:
I’m helping more with the psychiatric part. I treated Lyme initially, but as my practice grew, the patients became more and more complex. They went from being simple anxiety or depression in fairly early Lyme to being very complicated patients with really debilitating symptoms that really are very time intensive and emotionally intensive for me. So I don’t want to treat. I want the Lyme doctors to treat. But I will occasionally with the patients I think will be very compliant and is good about taking meds and keeping with the program, and reporting problems. So I will do disulfiram, and for Bartonella, I will do methylene blue clotrimazole because these don’t have to be monitored all that closely. But not in general, and most of the patients also have Lyme.
Mimi:
You have to take into consideration the mold or the parasites or any of the other stuff. What percentage of your patients are adults versus teenagers or children?
Dr. Jane Marke:
So I start at age 17. So I can tell you that of the phone calls I get, and I get daily phone calls for new patients. That of the phone calls, I have to say no to a large number because they’re under 17, and I’m not set up to be dealing with the school system. So everything you have to deal with younger kids. I’m not trained in child psychiatry. So I start at 17. I would say that the majority of patients being referred to me now are between 17 and 28. That’s new. That’s a shift over the years. The patients that I got originally were in their 40s and 50s, maybe their 30s. They had kids. Occasionally I would diagnose their kids. But usually, it was the adults coming to me.
Mimi:
Right. If anyone’s listening and they have children under 17, is there anybody you refer out at this point or does what you do but for younger?
Dr. Jane Marke:
I don’t have anybody specific for the teenage group. I think Dr. Mal up in Boston is taking care of teenagers. Rosalie Greenberg is taking care of the younger kids, more the elementary school-aged kids. She really wants to catch them young, and she’s wonderful with them. But I don’t have a large list for the teens, and I should make it. I should have a list.
Mimi:
They come to you with psychiatric issues, and then you kind of figure out that it could be Lyme.
Dr. Jane Marke:
They’re a mix. They come to me with psychiatric issues, and mostly they’ve heard that it might be Lyme. A friend tells them, “Go get it checked out.” So instead of going to a Lyme doctor because their symptoms are psychiatric, they come to me. I will do an extensive workup in all of the blood so that by the time I’m sending them to a Lyme doctor, they’ve had a vast array of blood work.
Mimi:
That’s amazing because I think most psychiatrists don’t do blood work. It always amazes me when I hear friends or families that are going on psychiatric drugs. And I’m like, “Well, have you tested to make sure your vitamin D is high or make sure you don’t have Lyme?” They’re looking at me like, “What?” And I’m like… It just amazes me that many psychiatrists don’t do a blood test to figure out what’s going on internally.
Dr. Jane Marke:
Psychiatric residency is very soft on medicine. They do a very light medicine—half of an internship. I train to be an internist. So I did a full internal medicine residency. I board eligible in internal medicine. And when I switched to psychiatry, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like throwing Thorazine and antidepressants at people. I thought these were terrible drugs. I didn’t like therapy. I thought that what I was being taught was bloody. I never saw anybody do therapy. My teachers would report what they did behind closed doors. I would report what I did behind closed doors, but we never saw it. In medicine, you always saw what people were doing. If you were going to learn how to do a lumbar puncture, you saw somebody do a lumbar puncture. And you did a lumbar puncture with somebody watching you. Then you taught it.
Dr. Jane Marke:
It wasn’t that way in psychiatry. So I did fellowship training in something called consultation-liaison, which is psychiatry in the general hospital. So I worked on dialysis, transplant units. I worked on burn units. I worked on coronary care units. I stayed in the general hospital. So I stayed comfortable with it. Even before I was treating Lyme, I knew that I was going to do thyroid studies for anybody with psychiatric symptoms. I was going to look for syphilis. I was going to look at their B12. There was a basic panel for anybody that came to me, and that was before I learned about integrative medicine. It was just straight medicine. You still had to do it.
Mimi:
Right. And most psychiatrists don’t do any kind of panels. Correct?
Dr. Jane Marke:
I can’t tell you how many people I cured by treating their hypothyroidism with their celiac disease.
Mimi:
Right. So that’s kind of why I wanted to go at. Before you realized that it’s thyroid or Lyme or something, what type are they diagnosed with? If somebody didn’t realize that that’s what was going on.
Dr. Jane Marke:
Depression. Most of them were depressed.
Mimi:
Just depression.
Dr. Jane Marke:
Yeah. Some of the celiacs were OCD. Brain fog, ADD.
Mimi:
So with depression, what percentage would you say you could probably make a better cure with treating them for something else that was going on underlying? It wasn’t actually really depression.
Dr. Jane Marke:
If it’s a thyroid problem or a celiac problem, 100%.
Mimi:
Wow.
Dr. Jane Marke:
They all get better. That’s the absolute cause of their problems.
Mimi:
It’s amazing how these viruses or conditions cause psychiatric issues. It’s because their brain is either being attacked or inflamed or…
Dr. Jane Marke:
Yeah, it’s inflammation. Even peripheral inflammation. You get the flu; your brain doesn’t work well.
Mimi:
It’s true.
Dr. Jane Marke:
The inflammatory molecules in your bloodstream defuse into the central nervous system, making you feel sick. All we want to do is lie in bed. You’re very tired. It’s not your muscles making you tired. It’s your brain saying you’re tired, lie down, don’t get out of bed. So even if the infection isn’t in the brain, the inflammatory molecules diffuse into the brain.
Mimi:
Right. If you talk to colleagues who are not doing the same thing, do you even try to attempt to explain to them what you’re doing?
Dr. Jane Marke:
It can be tough. Very, very difficult. I gave a grand rounds lecture at one of the hospitals in New York City, and a child psychiatrist came up to me afterward. She actually stood up and said this while people were there and said, “You shouldn’t be listening to this because she’s telling you that Lyme causes PANDAS. And she’s presenting a case where the PANDAS came on gradually, and PANDAS happened like this. And this girl developed symptoms gradually.” Well, people notice symptoms suddenly, frequently. Talk to the person in the course of weeks.
Mimi:
Right, right. It’s just because you don’t realize it, and then all of a sudden, it’s like, “Wait, what happened? I used to have this great, cheery daughter, and now she’s not anymore.” That makes sense. So when you call it integrative psychiatry, what else does that entail? Does that mean giving them supplements? What else does that mean for people who don’t understand what that is?
Dr. Jane Marke:
Well, it’s a holistic approach, and it uses both conventional and complementary therapies. It’s very personalized. So it is what we can all orthomolecular medicine, which is the treatment of psychiatric and medical problems with nutrition and nutritional supplements. That would be one piece. We test for underlying causes. Most psychiatry, if you think about a Siegfried, most psychiatry is trying to paint the leaves green. If the leaves are hallucinating or delusional, most psychiatry is aiming at that. At the same time, integrative psychiatry is trying to look at what’s coming in the roots. Is the soil good? What’s the ecosystem?
Dr. Jane Marke:
So we could test for inflammation, hormones, neurotransmitters, vitamins, amino acids, other toxins like mold, heavy metals. I don’t look for parasites in general. Although I’ve diagnosed parasites in people who have had GI symptoms, and I don’t just send the stool off. I have a parasitologist who would go in and look and get the organism out. So I don’t generally do the parasites myself, but I refer. Then we look at GI function. We look at psychosocial issues. How is the support system? What are the relationships like? Is this somebody who lets in intimacy or doesn’t? Who can accept help or pushes it away? Is family supportive or not supportive?
Dr. Jane Marke:
We look at mind-body issues. So we’ll teach meditation and relaxation techniques, exercise. We’ll encourage that. We try to use natural remedies for symptoms like depression, anxiety, insomnia rather than use drugs. That would be what integrative psychiatry is about. And we do psychotherapy. Maybe not all integrative psychiatrists are trained in psychotherapy, but I got fabulous psychotherapy training along the way. So I love it, and I was trained in trauma work. So I identify pre-existing traumas and the trauma of Lyme. And I will frequently do EMDR, which is a specific technique for trauma with my patients. Other psychiatrists will do other techniques. I was trained in other techniques, but that’s the one that I’ve landed on, that and the-.
Mimi:
EMDR?
Dr. Jane Marke:
Yeah.
Mimi:
Well, I’m glad you brought that up because that is a big part of it is… And that’s the piece I was at the end when I still wasn’t getting better is really dealing with past issues. I don’t think people take that… Either family upbringing or something that’s happened in your life or the stress. It’s not really talked about that much as far as processing it, and you might not even know what happened to you. It could’ve happened so much younger. But people just think, “Oh, I stored it away inside.” But it’s eating at you, even if you don’t realize it. You just can’t hold any hate or whatever for anybody that’s wronged you in the past because it’s hurting you.
Dr. Jane Marke:
When people get Lyme, their pre-existing issues with their family and relationships and intimacy don’t go away. So Lyme doctors and psychiatrists may land on treating the symptoms and treating the symptoms in this integrative way, but not necessarily going into the past or looking at that. So I end up doing therapy with a lot of my patients, and that’s unusual. But I want to improve their relationship with their doctors. I want to teach them to be good patients. I want to teach them how to have a relationship with their illness. I want to teach them how to play the hand that they’re dealt that day.
Mimi:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Jane Marke:
Most people want to teach acceptance. I think that’s very hard. So I try to teach surrender. Just surrender to what you have today and go with it.
Mimi:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Jane Marke:
And people have issues with their families. I can’t tell you how many young Lyme patients I have who have very destructive family relationships that really need to be worked on, and they need to understand their feelings and emotions. So even if they never got Lyme, they’d be needing therapy.
Mimi:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). No, it’s true. Then do you find with a lot of your patients who have Lyme that they’re angry about it, and that’s not letting them get better, or they’re kind of like, “I’m going to get better?” Is that the difference between some people getting better and not is that attitude of, “I am going to get better. I’m going to overcome this,” versus I’ve talked to other fellow Lyme people, and it’s like they’re angry because it’s robbed them of years of their life. I’ve gone through stages where I’ve been super angry, having lost six years of my life in a sense. And the pain and the expense, it’s a lot to take in.
Dr. Jane Marke:
Yeah. I deal with that too. Even though I’m mostly in remission, symptoms remain, and they go up and down. So I, too, have huge medical expenses, and I’m not really thinking and retiring because I still need to pay my medical expenses. Yeah, people are angry at what they’ve lost, especially younger patients. Younger patients tend to be angry that they’re missing out on the college experience.
Mimi:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Because even if you can go, you can’t drink and party and stay up late and eat whatever you want, which most college kids can.
Dr. Jane Marke:
Yeah. I didn’t have that. I was never angry, but when I came to realize how this has defined my life, I have felt sad about, “Gee, I’ve done this well. I might’ve been a superstar.” Who would I have been having I not had to deal with this, had I not had incredible insomnia and been exhausted all day from not having a sleep, daily headaches for years, family issues because my family thought I was a hypochondriac. I never got support from my family for being sick. It just didn’t happen. I had more sadness and grief. But in my younger patients, there’s more anger. In my older patients, there’s more grief.
Mimi:
I think the way I look at it is; it’s interesting because I had a similar where once I figured out what was going on, I got treated for a year. I thought I was better, and I was like, “Okay. I’m never going to mention the word Lyme again. I don’t want it to identify me.” And I just moved on. I was like, “I’m ready to just go to whatever I was already doing before I got Lyme.” Then I relapsed, and at that point, I wasn’t getting better as quickly as I thought I was going to the first time. So that’s when I kind of embraced this. It’s like, “You know what, this has got to be who I am, and I’m going to take everybody on my journey instead of just being by myself.” Because then I’m helping people.
Mimi:
If I can help one person from committing suicide or… Because that’s a huge thing that no one talks about. It is bad. I can never understand why someone would commit suicide ever until I got to that low point in Lyme that I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I can see why somebody would do this because if I didn’t have children and I didn’t have money, there’s no reason to live because you’re in so much pain and you don’t see a way out.”
Dr. Jane Marke:
I think sometimes the thought of suicide is a comfort. So I can tell you that I had thoughts of suicide from a young age, but they were never in the moment. So I would say, “If this doesn’t go away by the time I’m 30, at 30, I can always kill myself.”
Dr. Jane Marke:
Then it was, “Well, life is going okay at 30 or 40. I’m married. I have my kids. I’ve got stuff going on. But if I’m still having all of these things happening to me after the kids are grown, and they’re out of the house, I can always do it then.” So there was a comfort in feeling like, “Ah, sometime in the distance, I could decide I’m going out.” I don’t really feel that way anymore except for Alzheimer’s.
Mimi:
Yeah. I think for anybody listening, knowing that you’re not alone, you’re not crazy. It’s okay to feel that way. Just don’t do it. Reach out for help. It will get better. It will get better. For anybody who’s listening who might be considering it, it will. I know there’s going to be days where… Even now, I wake up some days, I’m like, “Oh my god, I feel so bad. I can’t do this anymore.” Then tomorrow’s a different day. I try to detox more and…
Dr. Jane Marke:
I think almost everybody gets better, but it’s a marathon through life. If you get the drugs that kill the persisters, maybe you will have a complete cure. But you still might be left with some symptoms.
Mimi:
Right. That’s kind of where I’m at now. That’s why one of my doctors, he’s like, “You have to think of it as almost like termites because,” he’s like, “termites is the Lyme. You’ve killed the termites, but they’ve left damage that you have leftover.”
Dr. Jane Marke:
Yeah.
Mimi:
Have you ever prescribed ketamine to anybody?
Dr. Jane Marke:
Oh, often.
Mimi:
You do. Okay. I’d love for you to talk about that. I had had it done because at that point, when I had it done a couple of years ago, and I was definitely at my low. I was in constant pain, and that’s when my neurologist was like, “I’ve done it with hundreds of people.” I feel like no one really talks about that much for Lyme, which is kind of interesting. I, at the time, was totally against it because I’m somebody who doesn’t even want to take Tylenol. But I think I was at a point now where I was like, “Okay, I’m in so much pain, and I don’t know what else to do.” She kind of equated it to, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it is. It’s like resetting the bar because Lyme takes the bar down. Your nervous system is just getting over-hyper from everything. The Lyme has done so much damage to your nervous system that you’re just overreacting, and you need to kind of reset it or bring the bar back up. Explained it to me, but I’d love to know.
Dr. Jane Marke:
I’m generally using Intranasal.
Mimi:
Oh, intranasal. Interesting. Okay.
Dr. Jane Marke:
People give it to themselves at home. So I am maybe treating them with antidepressants and all kinds of herbals for inflammation, but they’re not perfect. They’re not well enough. So I give them ketamine, and I tell them, “Use four times a day,” something like that for when you’re really having a bad time. It gives them a vacation. It gives them an hour to two hours of really feeling well again. The most important part of that is that whatever day is your best day, that shows that you have the neuroplasticity and physical plasticity to be that person of that day. So if ketamine makes you feel alive again and things are giving you pleasure, and you’re doing something you love, you know that that’s possible, and you can get there. But I don’t find that the nasal gives a permanent resetting. So you, I take it had the intravenous, and you felt that it helped you in a way that stayed.
Mimi:
Yeah, it has stayed. I did it one session several days in a row. She told me that some people come back once a year, once every six months. I haven’t done that because I haven’t been in that much pain again. But it definitely brought me out of that bump where honestly, the first day I did it, I came out and was actually smiling. It gives you that smile and just that extra second to take an extra break so that you can actually think, actually take your vitamins. Just actually gives you a second to breathe is how I felt. It allowed you to then be like, “Okay. I can actually take my vitamins today. I actually can get my head around making a phone call.”
Dr. Jane Marke:
That’s how I feel about giving the nasal.
Mimi:
Yeah. It just gives you that extra… It will not cure you, but it will get you just to point in the right direction and get you going in the right direction, to get you the tools. If it’s eating well, supplements, calling the doctor, whatever it is to get you moving forward.
Dr. Jane Marke:
Or just feeling pleasure for a few hours. Just like the people you’re with or watching TV and feeling engaged in your watching sitcom. It could be that simple.
Mimi:
Feeling normal again. Then it flips because you would be like, now I had two good days in a month. Then it went from I had one good week. Then now it’s like now I have one bad day a month. So it’s kind of flipped itself on its head. I still have bad days, but now it’s the reverse of what it used to be. But I don’t think people talk about ketamine enough to give people a reprieve, to get them feeling like they can do it. So they can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Dr. Jane Marke:
But it’s being used more. It’s catching on.
Mimi:
I just have not met many people that have had it. When I ask people, they look at me: other Lyme patients or other Lyme warriors. I’m one of the only people I know that have used it.
Dr. Jane Marke:
But I know Lyme doctors and Lyme psychiatrists are using it.
Mimi:
Yeah. Now is there anything else I haven’t covered that you think is important?
Dr. Jane Marke:
Yeah, there is. There’s something that I wanted to talk about that I don’t see talked about very much. I think there are personality changes that people have when they get Lyme, and they’re painful and detrimental. But they’re expectable and real. So, for one thing, I think people who have Lyme are frequently seen as being non-empathic and non-compassionate because they’re very self-involved. It’s tough to get out of themselves and sympathize with somebody else. So your friend had a breakup. Can you really be there for your friend? Well, you can’t. You can’t. You’re wrapped up in the intrusive thoughts that keep coming up or the depersonalization and how to get through the depersonalization or how to deal with the OCD things. It’s tough for somebody whose brain is doing that much damage to them to have empathy.
Mimi:
That’s a perfect point because I find that to be my problem, especially with my children. Because you’re in constant pain, and as you said beginning, what was it? I forgot what you said, the acronym. But you’re just kind of getting through the day.So when someone comes to you with an issue, you just want to be like lash out and just be like, “Waa! You don’t know what I’m going through.” So it’s hard to find empathy for other people when you’re trying to relate it to yourself and everything that’s happening.
Dr. Jane Marke:
It can also be subtle and emotional. I do believe I was a good mother. That whenever my children had a problem, I was there for them. But I think there might have been an emotional component that wasn’t conveyed to them with it. While I was always there, I’m not sure that I could get it so that they felt my soul comforting them.
Dr. Jane Marke:
I think that that’s an important thing for psychiatrists and therapists to address. I think the loss of sense of value and purpose, and worth is massive. I like to teach people the story of the light and the vessel, and I try to get this in at every lecture or whatever, webinar, anything I’m doing. But there’s a story that pre-dates the Bible that there was the light and the vessel in the beginning, and all was harmony. But as the vessel became filled with light, it too became light. It needed to give. There was nobody to give to, and there was a big bang, the vessel broke, and we all are made up of shards of light and vessel. And healing the universe is experiencing yourself as either the vessel or the light.
Dr. Jane Marke:
So it’s taking help because that gives other people the pleasure of being the light to you. People feel good when people accept help. They feel like they’ve been helpful. They feel happy that they were able to help. So being the vessel gives other people the chance to be the light. So I try to help people become the vessel and accept help, knowing that they will be the light when they’re better. So that’s how I try to deal with that.
Mimi:
That’s a good point. I love that.
Dr. Jane Marke:
You mentioned the loss of identity. Are you your illness, or are you you? I try to separate the sense of self that we have souls. We have a soul that can grow; that is our personality. But it’s not the things that our illness is making us do at that point. It’s a deeper part of us, and that’s good. That’s always there. I try to connect with the soul of my patients. Not everybody’s comfortable with that word. But I find that it’s helpful. Just using self is often not enough to touch people.
Dr. Jane Marke:
Shame. I think I want to say a word about shame. When people lose it when you lose your temper at your child and feel terrible because you know you shouldn’t be doing that. You shouldn’t be raging at the things you’re raging at, or you’re wrapped up in your OCD and have to do things that keep the family waiting, and nobody can do anything until you’ve gone through your rituals. There’s a lot of shame. So I think it’s important to work with the shame and guilt that people feel. I just wanted to add that because those are personality issues rather than the major psychiatric issues, which are severe anxiety, depersonalization, intrusive thoughts, tick like thoughts, counting, spelling, saying the same thing over and over in your head, having earworms, and hearing music that’s almost like a hallucination. Still, it won’t go away, becoming bipolar, even becoming schizophrenic. These are like the major things. I was just mentioning the more subtle things, and they deserve to be also addressed.
Mimi:
Because they can eat at you as well and cause you not to get better.
Dr. Jane Marke:
Yeah.
Mimi:
Yeah. This has been amazing. Thank you so much, Dr. Marke. I really appreciate it. Anyone who wants to reach out can find you at janemarkemd.com to see your services and business. You’re located in New York City.
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