Welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. The podcast to help you in your journey

towards becoming a wise, empathic, genuine and connected mental health professional.

I'm your host, Dr. David Puder, a psychiatrist who splits his time practicing psychopharmacology,

individual and group psychotherapy, medical director of a day treatment program,

medical education research, and teaching residents and medical students.

I am here today with Dr. Mary Ellen Eller, and she is a soon to be graduating fourth year resident,

and we have done a little project the last couple weeks together, kind of preparing for this,

talking about performance enhancement. So specifically, this is going to apply to athletes

and also people who are performing at a high level, whether it's like a musician or, I don't know,

maybe even some sort of public speaking, or what are other examples of performance?

I think for performance, we really easily think about very elite athletes or people at a high level that we look up to,

but you and I perform every single day when we show up to work.

And so realizing that this can be for basically anybody, I think it's really important.

Yeah, so tell me a little bit about how you got interested in this.

So my background before I went to medical school was always, I grew up as a gymnast.

I competed as a gymnast, and then I transitioned into coaching and then throughout college,

and for several years into medical school, I worked as a performance consultant for gymnastics,

where any elite team could call me up, and I would come, I would work with their elite athletes,

and we would look, so the score in gymnastics is very skills-based.

And so once you get up to the elite level, you want to be able to optimize and get as many points as possible,

but a lot of times they would call me in because people had kind of reached their limit.

And so at that point, my focus was very much on gymnastics.

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