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.

In this podcast episode, I am going to dive into a topic that is near and dear to my heart.

I work in a unique kind of role in psychiatry because I am the medical director of a day treatment program,

an IOP and a partial program that said about, you know, either three or eight hours a day,

three to five days a week. And in this program, I treat people with all sorts of medical issues,

whether it be head injuries, strokes, seizures, psychogenic seizures,

fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, chronic migraines, chronic pain, uncontrolled diabetes.

So I see a vast sort of conglomeration of people with medical issues and psychiatric issues.

And one of the common complaints that I get is with focus and concentration.

And I found that also, if I am able to optimize their brain function,

their total brain function, something that I am going to call sensorium.

If I can optimize that, then they can engage at a higher level in the psychotherapy process.

And they can also sort of regain a lot of the function that they may have lost

through having medical issues.

And so I have this unique approach to how to kind of think through sensorium,

total brain function, which I would like to share with you.

In this first episode, I'm going to go through the basic theory of it

and some of the stories that kind of can illustrate it.

...