A Medium Walks into a Psychiatrist's Office with Dr. Al Powers and Brittany Quagan
Life, Death & The Space Between with Dr. Amy Robbins
Dr. Amy Robbins
4.8 • 585 Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2021
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A Medium Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office with Al Powers and Brittany Quagan
“The voices are real. Real experiences. They deserve to be taken seriously as real human experiences; as real as anybody else’s.”
– Dr. Al Powers
Episode Summary:
Have you ever heard voices? Do you know anyone who hears things when others don’t? Are they delusions -- or are they spiritual experiences? Does it matter?
In this episode, we talk with Dr. Al Powers, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist on faculty at the Yale Department of Psychiatry, and Brittany Quagan, a working medium and “voice-hearer” who attributes her experiences to her spirit guides. They work together on the Yale COPE (Influence/Control Over Perceptual Experiences) Project.
Yale COPE Project goals are:
- To learnfrom those who hear, see, and feel things others can’t/don't
- To understandthe ways people can control these experiences and their lives
- To create new treatmentsfor those who need them
Listen in to understand how Dr. Al Powers and Brittany Quagan are bridging the gap between spiritual and mental health experiences. Which may not be so terribly different.
Topics We Discuss:
- Delusions vs. spiritual experiences
- Pros and cons of antipsychotic medications and applicability to voice hearers
- How the Yale COPE project gives voice hearers control over their voices
- Voice hearers who saw their experiences as spiritual (vs. pathological) exerted more control over their voices
- Empowering voice hearers by humanizing these experiences
Contact the Yale COPE Project:
If you, or someone you know, has perceptual experiences like hearing voices when no one is speaking, you are invited to join in the COPE Project. You do not need to have influence over the voices to join! Learn more about Dr. Al Powers and Brittany Quagan and the Yale COPE Project.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everybody. |
| 0:03.5 | We are live on fireside today. |
| 0:07.4 | I am so excited. |
| 0:10.0 | I'm Dr. Amy Robbins and welcome to Life, Death, and the Space Between Podcast. |
| 0:15.6 | I'm a licensed clinical psychologist and medium and here we explore life, death, consciousness, and what it all means. |
| 0:24.9 | I am so excited for today's show because it really feels in so many ways like the merger of |
| 0:31.7 | everything that I think about in my life. And here it is for you all to hear about. So today I have Al Powers |
| 0:42.7 | and Brittany Quagan on the show. Al is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who is passionate |
| 0:50.0 | about understanding human experience and building bridges to help us empathize with each other's |
| 0:57.8 | experiences. The way he chooses to build these bridges is by viewing experiences like hearing |
| 1:04.5 | or seeing things other people don't on the same spectrum with everyday perceptual experiences. |
| 1:11.6 | He believes that by understanding perception, we can begin to help normalize experiences |
| 1:17.6 | and decrease the stigma and dysfunction they sometimes carry. |
| 1:22.6 | Dr. Powers has an MD PhD from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. |
| 1:29.3 | After completing the PhD phase of his training, he returned to medical school and began working with Dr. Philip Corlatt on computational models of delusion formation. |
| 1:40.3 | He recently founded the Co-Project, which he is here to talk about today. |
| 1:46.0 | Brittany began hearing voices when she was about 15 years old. |
| 1:50.8 | She experiences these voices as spirit guides. |
| 1:54.5 | Along with the voices of spirit came an influx of distressing experiences such as anxiety, panic attacks, depression, |
| 2:03.3 | health paranoia, and suicidality. |
| 2:06.4 | She didn't know what was happening and didn't know what she was hearing. |
| 2:11.4 | Brittany self-medicated with substances and alcohol because in those moments, the voices |
... |
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