November 26, 2025 | GradWell Season 2 View transcript ⚠️ JavaScript is required to view the podcast player. Guest Dr. Patricia Deldin is a transformational and creative leader in the mental health space. After teaching at Harvard for several years, Dr. Deldin was hired by the University of Michigan to serve as both the Chair of the Clinical Area and Director of Clinical Training in Michigan’s Clinical Psychology program. During her tenure at Michigan, Dr. Deldin also helped shape the structure of the University’s Depression Center, formerly serving as its Deputy Director, and helped to launch the National Network of Depression Centers. In 2014, she began to shift her research focus from understanding psychopathology to developing a new, more accessible, evidence-based mental wellness program, Mood Lifters. Since its inception, Mood Lifters has served over 2,000 people and worked with over 30 organizations. In December 2022, Mood Lifters was acquired by Color Health. Resources Indianapolis YMCA Mood Lifters – Virtual Program (Click drop-down menu under “Chronic Disease Prevention Programs”) The next cohort starts the first week of December 2025 Granite YMCA Mood Lifters Please scroll through the following pages to find resources on the various dimensions of well-being that Dr. Deldin mentioned in this episode Physical Wellness Resources Social Wellness Resources Social Wellness Resources pt2 Resources on the Graduate Advisor Relationship Emotional Wellness Resources Resources on Finding Meaning and Purpose Reach out to Dr. Deldin with any questions: [email protected] Email us about the podcast: [email protected] Stay in touch by joining Gradwell’s MCommunity group! Transcript Sam Hobson: Hey, welcome to GradWell, a limited series podcast that explores various ways the University of Michigan can support its graduate students and their journey to create a wellbeing in our everyday lives, brought to you by Rackham Graduate School. This season, we’ll be talking to members of our academic community whose research intersects various dimensions of wellbeing. I’m Sam Hobson, a PhD candidate and a GSSA in Rackham’s Professional Development and Engagement Office. My fellow grad students, it’s time we start placing as much importance on ourselves as we do our work. You’re worth the effort. Patricia Deldin: If you want to feel joy, remember you have to take time for joy. Sam Hobson: Hello, hello. Today’s resource is Dr. Patricia Deldin, professor of psychology and psychiatry here at Michigan. Today, we’re going to be discussing Dr. Deldin’s intervention that she created as an alternative to traditional mental healthcare called Mood Lifters, exploring the intersection between emotional and physical wellbeing. I am super excited to have y’all with Dr. Deldin and me today. Okay, we’re going to get started. So Dr. Patricia Deldin is a transformational and creative leader in the mental health space. After several years teaching at Harvard, Dr. Deldin was hired by the University of Michigan to serve as both the Chair of the Clinical Area and Director of Clinical Training in Michigan’s clinical psychology program. During her tenure at Michigan, Dr. Deldin also helped shape the structure of the university’s Depression Center, formerly serving as its deputy director, and she also helped to launch the National Network of Depression Centers. In 2014, she began to shift her research focus from understanding psychopathology to developing a new, more accessible, evidence-based mental wellness program, Mood Lifters. Since its inception, Mood Lifters has served over 2,000 people and worked with over 30 organizations. And in December 2022, Mood Lifters was acquired by Color Health. Hi, Dr. Deldin. Thank you so much for being here with me today. To get started, what brought you to this research focus? Patricia Deldin: Well, it’s actually, you just mentioned the National Network of Depression Centers and being part of the Depression Center. So I’m formally trained both as a neuroscientist, a biological psychologist, and a clinical psychologist, and most of my research, up until 2014, was in the neuroscience domain. It was a meeting actually where Dr. John Grayden had been presenting or pitching the idea of a national network to our scientific and national advisory board at the Depression Center. And he provided very compelling data to me because I’ve been thinking inside the brain, and that’s how I was approaching depression and thinking about or worrying about the frontal lobes and the amygdala and the hippocampus and all that stuff. And in his talk, he made me look at the broader picture that we were dealing with in a new way. He’s a very brilliant man, great big picture leader. He showed us data of the cancer center when it started and cancer’s morbidity and mortality after it started. And you see a 20-year lag in once they started the public health campaign and created the cancer centers, this 20-year lag of decrease in smoking and then decrease in lung cancer, for example. You see the same important changes in heart disease. You see these nice dramatic changes since around the ’60s and ’70s of decreased morbidity and mortality, and then he showed depression. And what you saw there is across… It happened to pick exactly the year I started as a professor, early 1990s, and showed that depression increased over time. Suicide rates increased over time. And then bipolar had to improve, our treatment of bipolar hadn’t improved that much either. And then I looked into it further, and nothing really had changed for the better. In fact, things seemed to be getting worse. And it was in that meeting, I have this aha moment. Here we are publishing all this fantastic work in the best journals in the field. I’ve been at the very best places, and we’ve had no impact, basically. That’s not to say individually we haven’t had an impact, which we do, there are great therapists and meds help people, but as a whole, as a population, things were getting worse. I decided, at that moment, I had to do something different. Sam Hobson: Hearing your story makes me reflect on our responsibility as scientists and how we can do a lot of science and the public impact. So it can still be quite limited, even though we can do very good science for the discipline for the academy and moving that forward. I think we have the responsibility to use all of this delicious knowledge that we have and are creating and have access too to try to make real tangible impact in people’s lives if we can. And so all I have to say is I’m grateful. I’m grateful that you were like, “Wow, there’s something that I can do and so I will.” Patricia Deldin: With Mood Lifters, I thought about what I thought of as the very best things across everything I learned over the previous 30 years of my career. What was the best interventions around individuals, in terms of psychology, like behaviors and thoughts and feelings, and more of my bio side, which is more the sleep and other kind of biological processes that are very involved with these illnesses, as well as relationships. And this, I wanted to be a social psychologist when I grew up and how people interact and how they want it, how important the context in which we live. So we have this body, who is biological, and this mind and heart, and rest of it that’s psychological, but it’s in a context, usually. I was very confused on how to put together the brain changes I was studying with the stress literature and knowing that people who are much more likely to be depressed had very stressful lives. So is it really that the brain is going wrong or is it that how they’re… How is that all working together? And so what I did for Mood Lifters is… The background of Mood Lifters is, I was literally sitting in a WeightWatchers meeting, I had lost a bunch of weight. I had been dragged there kicking and screaming by a colleague because I didn’t want to go. I didn’t need help. The whole stigma and embarrassment and shame that everyone feels about going to therapy or weight loss. And then I lost 35 pounds and my colleague had talked me into it. He’s like, “It’s really scientifically sophisticated. You sound like our patients when you talk, Patty, come, come with me and everything.” And then one day I was sitting there, I turned to him and he said, his name is Chris Peterson, he’s passed away, was a positive psychologist. I said, “You know, Chris, why don’t we have something like this for mental health?” This was in 2004, this pre-anything like all the apps and all that other stuff, the only thing that was out there was pharma and therapy, basically. I said, “Why don’t we have something like this? It’s highly evidence-based. They’re scientifically-oriented. They changed the model and then they ended up changing it back while I was in it and I’m like, “Oh, they’re watching the data, and they help people. I read the business model. They can help people for $15 a week. They’re helping five million people. Could you imagine if we had a program like this?” And he laughed at me. He said, “Patty, there is no way you could do something like this. ” And I was like, “Well,” [inaudible 00:07:26]- Sam Hobson: Watch me. Patricia Deldin: So going back to what you said is using the scientific knowledge from across these different domains, I took the best of what I knew from the biopsychosocial aspects of the major depression, bipolar, mental health research in general, took what I thought was the very best of it that I could put in a program that was like WeightWatchers where we met weekly, we had peer leaders, we were following the data very carefully. And the big part was we had the social connection, they had shown that in person meetings were much more effective than online. And so we knew that there was a social component. And for me, it was really critical to have the meetings. You go and stand on a scale in front of someone, that’s pretty motivating every week. And then you go and you hear about other people who are having the same problems. You have a leader. My first leader was a real estate agent who had lost 175 pounds the fifth time she tried. I knew. I have a PhD. I have to eat less and move more. So it wasn’t that. It’s not like I didn’t know how to do it, it’s I didn’t have the social support, motivation, and program to follow. And I think that’s a lot about what mental health is, too. So I created this program, loosely based it off of WeightWatchers. People come in, they check in with their mood and relationships and biology, each week have a topic where we might cover something that’s evidence-based like sleep problems or how to eat healthy for mental health, how to handle stress and stuff like that. So I cherry-picked the very best, put it in a program. And in WeightWatchers, I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but instead of trying to eat each food, so a donut might be 15 and apple might be one. So for WeightWatchers, you try to get under a certain point value to lose weight. And they’re guaranteed that you lose, if you do this, 0.5 to 2 pounds. We don’t have anything like that in mental health. How many cognitive restructurings is that? How much, whatever. The only places we do is in sleep and exercise. So what we did is we took the same program, so instead of weighing in, we checked in, we had a group format, we had peer leaders who’d been successful at our program. And then across 15 weeks, we did three of five different categories of activities around biology, so like exercise and eating, sleep, because I did a lot of sleep research and so I wanted to be sure, and I think it’s central to mental wellness, and then psychology and relationships and behaviors, and we did across all these domains. We stopped at 15 because we had to test it and all the strategies that went into Mood Lifters across these domains were evidence-based. What I thought of was the best. Sam Hobson: That sounds wonderfully creative. Patricia Deldin: And all the other thing people said is, “Why didn’t anyone else think of this before?” And that’s the biggest compliment you can get. Sam Hobson: Yes. I’m so excited to learn more. I want to establish, before we move forward, that because you study mood, specifically anxiety, depression, and stress, you probably know exactly what those things mean. And I think that culturally, we all have these ideas, but I want to make sure that our listeners today are, we’re all on the same page when we say, “Mood,” and when we say, “Anxiety, depression, and stress.” And so can you define these things for us from your professional perspective? Patricia Deldin: I sure can, but I want to give you a caveat. I’m of the opinion that emotions and feelings are normal and helpful. They help us communicate to ourselves and others. Without emotions, we wouldn’t survive. We wouldn’t avoid the bus that’s about to hit us. They’re telling us stuff. They’re keeping us alive. So normal anxiety, normal sadness, normal stress are perfectly healthy. By definition, if they get to be too much or at the wrong time, or you feel uncomfortable or the disruptive in some way or dangerous, that’s when it becomes a disorder. But normal emotions, as uncomfortable as they are, are super helpful. So anxiety, for example, is a perfectly healthy emotion. It’s only when it’s too much at the wrong time, or it’s out of your control and you’re really struggling where it becomes a problem, because anxiety, it can be really helpful in order to get you to perform well. So the optimal amount of anxiety, I know that sounds terrible because any anxiety feels awful, but that there’s an optimal amount, and when it’s too little or too much is when you start having problems. So anxiety that’s normal is the fight or flight response that we need in order to survive. But when you have fear or worry or stress or unease that is interfering with your life, that is what anxiety is. And anxiety tends to be future focused like, “I’m worried about failing an exam. I’m worried about not being able to do my dissertation. I’m worried that, that person doesn’t like me and that means I will get fired or I won’t be able to graduate.” Something like that. Having the feeling isn’t necessarily a problem, but too much is at the wrong time. Depression is sadness or low mood. Usually people say depression colloquially in exchange for sadness, but it actually isn’t. So sadness is normal. Depression, usually we like to call it by its full name, which is major depression. And that’s when you’re feeling too much guilt or guilt at the wrong time. Too little pleasure. You’re feeling low mood, your sleep gets disruptive. Usually with anxiety, your sleep also can get disrupted, but with anxiety, it’s falling asleep. Whereas with depression, major depression, it’s staying asleep. We feel low energy. And honestly, it’s so interesting. I’ve probably done 2000 psychiatric interviews and you ask someone how they feel about themselves. Of all the words in the lexicon that you could use, I’d say, I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but it feels like around 90% of people say worthless. Now, this doesn’t matter who they are. They could be the President of the United States or whatever. They are going to feel that feelings of worthlessness or guilt. So stress also, I like to think of it as a U-shaped curve. Too little stress, you’re feeling bored and restless and not challenged. Too much stress, you might not be able to sleep, you’re not doing, performing, well. You need an optimal amount of stress again in your life. And there are also two kinds of stress. There’s what we call distress, which is the negative emotions. Then there’s also eustress, which is the positive emotion. So like today, you might feeling you stress, you, Sam, because you’re thinking, “Oh, I’m going to get to do an interview today. I love doing interviews. I’m a little nervous, but boy, that’s fun, right?” And again, you’d be bored, maybe, if you didn’t get to do these kinds of things or interesting other slightly stressful, positive things. So again, stress, sadness, and anxiety are all healthy emotions. It’s just when they get out of line with what is helpful to you that we worry about them. Sam Hobson: Is the metric for what is helpful individual or is there a line where we could say, for most people, this is too much? Patricia Deldin: Well, there’s some people who think there’s a line like you have a virus or you don’t. For example, you have COVID virus in your system or not. Well, even with that, that’s not that clear. I think of these kinds of things and the literature shows this, and I didn’t think of this for all illnesses in the past, but I do now. The vast majority, they’re on a continuum like blood pressure or diabetes blood sugar. So it’s At some point you decide to treat, and that might be different for different people. So the question is, there is a cutoff, officially. I find that cutoff not to be very helpful, personally. That’s why in Mood Lifters, we don’t actually study diagnoses. If you’re feeling stress and depression and sadness, I don’t really care what your diagnosis is. I do, of course, I care, but that’s not going to change whether you can come to Mood Lifters. You could have no symptoms and want to prevent them and come to Mood Lifters and benefit. I think of it more on a continuum of sadness, being on a continuum and only at some point is it too much, because again, how much is too much when my mom died? Sam Hobson: I feel as if, culturally, there’s a narrative put out that it is very absolute. And I wonder to what extent this understanding of the spectrum that you’ve presented to us could help people better navigate these more intense feelings of anxiety and sadness and stress. Because I think, maybe, oftentimes we fight like, I’m not depressed. But instead, maybe I’m somewhere on the spectrum that I don’t want to be rather than, well, I’m not exhibiting X, Y, and Z behaviors that are on the other side of this line, and therefore, that is not me. My brain is spinning about the potential of what that type of perspective could provide for us. Patricia Deldin: First of all, if you normalize having an emotion like sadness. So to me, all of psychopathology is too much or too little of something that’s a normal behavior or thought or emotion. So like I said, we already knew that about stress, but I think all illnesses are like that. The last one for me to be convinced by is being on a continuum with psychosis. How can psychosis? Either you have schizophrenia or you don’t. That was the last one. But then I had a brilliant grad student who helped me think about it differently, and it was one of her studies that she really got me thinking that she actually did an intervention with people and got them to increase their paranoia pretty dramatically. A very, what seemed to be an innocuous intervention, like reading a scary first person story. I was walking home and someone was following me. We raised paranoia. Obviously that’s not the same as schizophrenia, but it did get me start thinking. She would say, “Well, behaviors like crossing your fingers or baseball players wearing the same socks no matter what.” These sort of superstitious behaviors is on a continuum of not rational thinking, right? And so that’s a harmless one. When does it change to not harmless? So even on that, I think of that as a continuum. And you can have lots of perfectly healthy people will occasionally hear a voice, you hear your name called or something. Is that on the same continuum for hallucination? So anyway, so my view, we know this, there’s a lot of research on this in personality disorders, for example, that it’s a dimension instead of a category. I think, personally, that fits all psychopathology and all of it happens in the brain. So there’s a biological component, but it all happens within a social context and with an individual person. So for example, let’s take grad school. Grad school’s stressful, period. Sam Hobson: No? Patricia Deldin: I know. I said new thing. No one’s ever said that before. Do you see it as eustress or distress? If you want to have grad school without stress, you probably shouldn’t go to grad school because there’s way more work than you can ever do. There’s a lot of pressure to perform around the very best people and you’re doing important work, otherwise, you wouldn’t be here at Michigan. So stress is going to be part of it. How do you manage that stress? When does it get to be too much? What is a normal amount? And it’s also true for conflict and understanding people. So you’re a student, there’s a lot of students around you and we expect. So for example, to me, one of the most important factors on wellness in grad school is your relationship with the advisor. Now, you’re in an intense environment over six years. You’re two different people in two different roles. You’re going to have conflict. It’s just going to happen. There’s going to be misunderstandings, there’s going to be all kinds of things. How do you deal with that? How about let’s normalize that, let’s teach people how to cope with that, which is what we do in Mood lifters, how to address some of those issues. Instead of thinking that it’s bizarre or wrong or something’s bad and it’s dangerous, how about just, you’re two people who are in an intense environment who probably have intense personalities because you’re here and driven or you want to be here. So there’s going to be headbutting. So to normalize that and then teach skills around preventing those from getting unhealthy, as opposed to normal conflict, for example. Sam Hobson: So what I’m hearing is that, perhaps, the getting past the threshold or to an unhealthy place, an aspect of that is the denial of the normativity and the naturalization of these experiences. Patricia Deldin: Partly. Partly, but I don’t know. Denial’s pretty negative. I think it’s a lack of awareness. And these negative emotions are highly uncomfortable. So people will come to me and say, in Mood Lifters, for example, “Patty, I never want to feel sadness again.” I’m like, “I’m not going to help you with that.” One, because I don’t think you’d want that, really, but for two, that’s just not practical. It’s like going to a doctor and saying, “I never want to be sick again, doctor.” Well, you can’t do that. But if you do, when you have a fever, you come back and see me. I’ll help you with that. I’m going to try to give you prevention like vaccines to try to keep you well, but you might still get sick, so we’ll have to deal with it then. But anyway, it’s this understanding that these emotions are normal and helpful. They’re telling you something. They’re saving your life. They’re making you feel close to people. They’re keeping you safe away from dangerous people. They’re doing all kinds of things for you. So let’s just talk about when they get unhelpful. Sam Hobson: So Dr. Deldin, research has shown that graduate students are more likely to experience mental health challenges such as anxiety and depression, and less likely to receive mental health care to address these challenges. Why do you think this mismatch exists? Patricia Deldin: Oh, I wish I knew why that mismatch exists. Again, there’s more, at least I found, there’s way more work you can do in grad school than there’s possibly… You could have two or three of you and then you’d probably feel about on top of things. There’s just so much work and there’s going to be stress, and some people come in and it’s going to be different. Some people are going to have genetic predispositions that just a little bit of stress is going to push them over, while other people are going to do just fine and thrive in this level of stressful environment. But most people, the rates go up. One of the things when I started Mood Lifters, I thought it was money and access, which was the number one reason people didn’t get help. Well, actually that’s not true. Most people want to fix it on their own. So you have these really… And so there’s one, stigma. There’s stigma, like in, say, Asian communities, there’s very, very high stigma about getting help. But everybody, not everybody, the vast majority of people try to fix it on their own. So you have these really independent, smart people who’ve been used to being very successful coming into an environment and I’m guessing, guessing there’s the stigma. It’s wanting to fix it on your own. And some programs have lack of access. Some people simply don’t do Mood Lifters, even, because they don’t have time. The idea of taking an hour to themselves, they just don’t feel like they can even do that. So there’s a high demand for time, a high demand for high performance, and people want to fix things on their own. They might not even be aware that they’re having problems like we were talking about before. So I think there’s a combination of both biological, psychological, social pressures and risk factors that make it hard to get care, but you’re in a high pressure environment with high intensity people. It’s going to, again, as stress goes up, incidents of mental illness, it’s the Diathesis Stress Model tends to go up. So I think that’s why there’s more because of the stress, but also this combination of feeling safe to get it, feeling like you need it, and things like that make it hard. I think it’s hard everywhere, but I think it’s particularly hard for this population. Sam Hobson: In previous episodes of this season, we’ve talked a lot about the intense individuality that is asked of us in graduate school and yet, the collaborative, communal requirement of knowledge creation of even getting through graduate school that goes unspoken, but is necessary. And I wonder when you were saying that we want to do this ourselves, are we the types of people who have been called to or drawn to a very hyper-individualistic space where we’re supposed to create by ourselves, right? And perhaps that translates into other areas of our lives. If we expect and likely thrive in this space with these behaviors and in this direction, why would we not apply that to other aspects of how we live? Patricia Deldin: I think it’s a combination of factors. That intensity, that drive might be why you have been so successful to this point. So again, I have a son who’s really focused, but he can also really focus on negative things just as well. And it’s been striking to me because I’m thinking, wow, if you took that gift he has, this ability to pay attention and really focus on something. For example, thank goodness he doesn’t do this too much like ruminate, but if he did apply it to that stuff, he’d be really good at ruminating. So again, remember, the way I view mental illness is really from a biopsychosocial perspective. So there are going to be some people are just going to bring the genetics to it. And it might be in that kind of ability to focus to the exclusion of everything else, but that everything else might be what keeps you healthy. So let’s say you just are driven, you love what you’re doing. It could be a positive thing. I love reading my journal articles and working really hard, but I forget to exercise and need healthy. Oh, by the way, I shouldn’t stay up until 3:00 in the morning, I need to sleep. All those things might keep me healthy. It could be a positive thing, but it also could be a negative thing, right? That same ability to attend. So remember, I think of mental illness and normal emotion have multiple levels of things. So what you described was the individual, but you’re also in an environment that you have to compete with people who have 20 publications and you have advisors who might maybe getting tenure or something. You might be experiencing sexism or racism on top of it. So you’re in this culture of pressure, right? In this culture, in this social, and you have that relationship with your advisor you’re trying to work, and oh, by the way, your mom’s driving you crazy and you’re worried about your little brother. So that’s all still happening. I had grandparents die. I had my mom died all this stuff during grad… My grandparents died during grad school, that’s really stressful. So you have that environment impinging on you and then you’re not sleeping, you don’t have money to buy good high quality food. You don’t have time to make it even if you had it. You’re not exercising because, oh, by the way, you have that paper due and you would exercise, but. So it’s all those things, I think. So that’s an individual component, but grad school is the time component, the pressure, the individual, I think all plays a huge role in why we see these kinds of things. That’s why Mood Lifters, we try to… We’re not a one size shop. For you, it might be mainly, I’m driven, I don’t sleep because I’m so busy working at night, I love what I’m doing, but you’re still only sleeping four to six hours a night. You can’t have as much positive affect the next day. My research shows that, for example. So it could be a positive thing, even. That’s why Mood lifters, we try to touch all those bio, psycho, and social components. Sam Hobson: I really do appreciate the multidimensionality that is your perspective and your approach. And so with that said, what did you specifically do within the realm of graduate students and Mood Lifters? Patricia Deldin: We had done some randomized control trials and we had done a bunch of pilot testing and we found that it was working as well as therapy. It’s crazy. People were reducing depression, anxiety, stress, and so forth. We had so many people between the business and studies. And so we were seeing that every population was improving. Sam Hobson: What did you find? Patricia Deldin: Grad students, we found… Well, across the board, in general, we do tons of pre-measures, tons of post measures, and then we look one month and six month after treatment when we’re doing what we call a randomized control trial, which is the gold standard. And what we have found is that across those, and this is a little bit more here, a little bit more there, so don’t quote me on every single group. Okay? So this is in general. We find that it significantly reduces depression and anxiety, and that those effects either improve over time after the program ends, so they get even less anxious and less depressed over time, or it stays the same in the times that we’ve tested it. So Mood Lifters not only in people who are already having symptoms, it reduces it, it also seems to prevent the onset of anxiety, particularly anxiety from graduate students. Sam Hobson: Dr. Deldin, why does Mood Lifters work? Patricia Deldin: Well, that’s a good question. That’s what we’re trying to figure out now, what we’ve been trying to figure out. By the way, that graduate student study was done with a grad student named Neema Prakash. And so I want to give her credit. She did the vast majority of the work on that project. And Elena Pokowitz did the vast majority of work on the undergrad study and the adult study was done mainly by a grad student named Cecilia Votta. So my grad students are brilliant and hardworking. They’re really pretty amazing. So why does it work? That was what we were starting to study. If you ask people who are in the program, and this actually is why you do science, because it was not what I predicted at all, it’s the other people, the leaders and the other members of the group, and continuously, what’s the number one factor? And I thought from my experience in WeightWatchers, it was the program and the leader that the leader got me convinced, but then it was the program that I followed, but it never occurred to me, it wasn’t salient to me that it was the other people in the room doing it with them, how much that mattered to me. And so for me, I was thinking it’s going to be the points program and it’s going to be the peer leaders because the peer leader was critical for me. And that people said, basically, across studies that we’ve asked them, it’s the other people. Going through this with other people. With hindsight, of course. Of course, again, like I said to you before, even WeightWatchers works much better in person than it does the app or whatever. I recently was honored with being alumni of the year at University of Illinois, and I gave a talk on the bottom line is that what really matters for people in their life. In the long run, if you’re on your deathbed, there’s some Harvard studies have shown, over your lifetime, what matters the most in having a good life is other people. So other people, good relationships matter. So ironically, getting people to come to a group is really hard because they feel part of depression is shame and guilt, and then part of anxiety is worry. Are they going to like me? Are they going to say something stupid? So getting people to come often is very difficult. But once they came, they found the social support, the normalization. Oh, I used to be a professor at Harvard and the motto by the students was, “Don’t let them see you sweat.” They couldn’t share the weaknesses with other people there. And so here is people saying, “I feel that way.” And we started, also, it was very interesting in talking to these people, they had to develop a whole new lexicon on how to approach these things. So Mood Lifters, they didn’t talk about their problems almost ever, for a long time. What they did is talk about solutions. So for example, it wasn’t, “Oh man, you go to your therapist, talk about how you’re just not sleeping, just not sleeping.” No, no, no, no. We go to Mood Lifters and assume that you might not be sleeping well, or at some point you may not sleep well. Oh, by the way, if you can’t sleep, this is what you do and this is what you do to change it. Anyone can make these changes like, “What is the problem that’s causing you for not sleeping?” Put on light, dark shielding curtains. So when they’d come back the next week, they would say, “Oh, are you still having problems sleeping?” And they’re like, “Did you get your curtains put up? You said last week you were going to do it.” And then they’d be clapping for each other and patting each other. “You did it. You called your daughter, even though I know that was stressful for you.” I’ll tell you a little bit of a story. So I ran the very first group. I thought this is a crazy idea. Mood lifters for mental health? That’s crazy. So I just sent out this little blurb to friends of Dexter, which is I live in Dexter, and said, “Hey, I have this idea. I’m building this mood lifter. It’s kind of like WeightWatchers. I didn’t have a name for it yet, actually. Something like WeightWatchers for mental health.” And one of the first things that happened that was noticeable, and I’m like, it’s not like treatment, it’s not therapy, it’s something different. We had more people sign up than we could take. We took the first eight, seven showed up. I had grad students come and sit in me and they’re like, “Pat, that doesn’t feel like therapy at all. It feels like just people getting together and they’re happy and joking and they’re talking to each other.” I said, “Yeah, don’t forget, these are just people from the community that are trying to help me out to build this program.” And they decided to have a potluck party at the end. That doesn’t happen in therapy groups. Grad students like, “This is so weird. It doesn’t feel like therapy.” I’m like, “I know, but they’re very healthy people. They just are helping out.” Well, it turns out I was wrong about that. One, and she allows me to share this data. She was a business professor, interested in business model. She was already 90% healthy and she continued to get even more healthy. She’s like up in the top of, she didn’t have any psych pathology at all. Then there’s two people. One person did no points, didn’t do the program, just came and also treated like traditional therapy and just complained about difficulties she was having and not complain in a negative way, just that’s all she did was talk about her problems. No points program, did no work outside. Another one was inconsistent in coming, except for the one that didn’t do any of the program, even those other two improved by about 30%. But the four who did come and did the program, they actually started out as severely ill. One was suicidal, one had severe depression, anxiety, and they completely remitted in this time period. So that was really striking to me that there’s a lot of pieces I think that work. One, we give them very explicit goals. We talk about it as solutions as opposed to problems. I’m not afraid to talk about problems at all, but it seems like they were getting stuck in the problems without solutions. That it was normal, and we actually gave them things to do each week. We base it on WeightWatchers, a very bite size, no pun intended, things that we could get people to do to actually improve their lives. And so I think it’s a combination of amazing peer leaders who had been successful, who gave people hope, being in a group of very supportive people who were cheering you on and had your back. They ended up meeting after Mood Lifters ended. They developed a social network. They used a new language about solving problems as opposed to like, what can you do about the fact that you and your daughter are estranged, as opposed to coming and talking to me about it without solutions. We already knew from the literature, again, I put this in there, too. The more people do in between sessions, no matter what orientation, the better they do. And this was an explicit program on to do stuff. So it’s a combination of having support group, having great peer leaders, and a program that was solution focused, I think. And it works as well as therapy. And so that was shocking to me that we could get these engineers and housewives and stay home moms and undergrads to be as effective as traditional therapists. And we had tested that actual fact. And sure enough, peers in this program were as effective as trained clinicians. The last group I personally ran before I sold the company was a senior group. They were working hard and talking about abuse, talking about loss, and yet, they’re giving each other rides and they were meeting up for coffee. So it was really powerful. It’s a really powerful model. Sam Hobson: Yes. It really seems like that. I am so happy for you to have had this experience. This feels really, really fulfilling and purposeful. Patricia Deldin: It does. So the most surprising thing that I discovered in my work is that it worked best for people who were severely ill. So when I thought that I created Mood Lifters was therapy light, but that’s not the case. So if you look across where people start and where they end up, you’ll get a 50% reduction in people with severe pathology and a 25% reduction. And it just goes as you get more ill, the more it works. So these things aren’t light. These things aren’t unimportant. Sleeping well, eating, all those things really do matter. And most of the things are within people’s control. I think does help to have a program. But again, that was the biggest surprise for me was that it works best in the more severe populations. And I think the biggest deal, in some ways, is that it’s preventative, as well. And so that would be my second-biggest thing because I had been looking for prevention programs in my role in the Depression Center and I couldn’t find any that were consistently working. And so we started a program for little kids, we have a program for teens, and I think those are the key times. So for example, Sandy Graham Berman built a version of Mood Lifters, she calls it Kids Empowerment Program. And what the teachers and parents were saying is like, “Do you realize that what you’re doing is helping them for the rest of their life?” That’s the idea. So if people learn the importance of all these different aspects, that it can actually make a difference. So you, Sam, and all the grad students, are in control. Again, depending on their genetic risks, some people, it won’t matter how much they do and all that stuff, but most people have the tools and the power to get through grad school thriving, under stress, but thriving with some of these strategies. And the more ill you are, the more these things are important to do, even though it’s [inaudible 00:37:31] like doing them less. Sam Hobson: That makes sense. If a grad student here, at Michigan, were interested in lifting their mood, where could they go and what should they do? Patricia Deldin: What they should do is unfortunately we don’t have a study going on right now. So when I sold Mood Lifters to Color Health, they’re choosing to just do the cancer. They developed a cancer version of Mood Lifters and that’s what they’re doing right now. I’m still doing research with YMCAs in other states and they’re doing more general programs. So they could look at the Indianapolis YMCA system and they could look at Granite, because Indianapolis is doing them via Zoom, so that’s a place that they could go to get help with Mood Lifters. But the things that we taught Mood Lifters are in the literature, but sometimes it’s hard to parse out. It’s in the popular press, but there are also things that don’t really work in the popular press. So if I were to give advice, I have I think about eight things I’d suggest people to do. One is prioritize your physical wellness. Sleep, for example, my research showed very related to positive affect, particularly deep, high quality sleep. So if you’re not feeling very joyful, and if you’re starting to feel sad and anxious, it seems like your biology is the foundation of your wellness. So if you’re tired, personally, when I’m tired, I get emotional. I’m not as rational because I’m more emotional than I would like to be. So sleep is key. Eating well. Exercise is equally effective to antidepressants. If you do it 30 minutes a day, five times a week. So eating doesn’t have to be expensive, but I know high quality produce and things like that take time. It could be raw apples. It could be apples and oatmeals for breakfast, but that’s a very good healthy diet. So it’s focused on that. Exercise, sleep, eat healthy, really important. Sleep, we gave its own category in Mood Lifters. So really working on your sleep. Prioritizing time. And then if there are other things waking you up like light or sounds or whatever, you can take care of those. The most important part of sleep is waking the same time every day in terms of setting your circadian rhythm. So wake up every day at the same time. Exercise 30 minutes a day, five times a week, and eat healthy, particularly a Mediterranean diet seems to be best for depression. Anything that’s good for your brain and heart’s going to be good for your mood. Then my next thing would be prioritize relationships. Now by this, I mean your students, the other students. Remember you’re in this together and often, if you can work together, it’s much better than competing, and try to really use those relationships in a positive way. And remember, everyone’s under the same amount of stress, so give people grace if people are struggling sometimes. Your advisor is probably one of the most important ones. Remember they’re human. They might care a lot. They might make mistakes. You’re going to have conflict. They’re under different kinds of stress than you can ever imagine. Expect to have problems with them. Get help if you do and have it be normal. Talk to them. Don’t mind-read. Don’t assume they don’t think. I’ve had that happen with my own grad students. They misunderstood things, got their feelings hurt, felt not supported, even though I care about them more than they could ever imagine. But also parents, avoid some toxic relationships and then really focus on positive ones. Look for support, however that would be. Because again, in the long run, other people matter, as Chris Peterson said, and relationships are the key to wellness across the board. Then if you start having thoughts or emotions that you’re not able to control or that are getting in your way, get help. It could be something like Mood Lifters, it could be therapy, it could be a minister, it could be a good friend. I’m lucky most of my best friends are clinical psychologists, so we help each other out. Another thing I like to say is we expect to be happy. Well, there’s a couple kinds of joy and pleasure. Part of that is meaningfulness, and I get a lot of meaning out of my work, as you can tell. I care a lot about it. I don’t go out like party or those kinds of things and feel joy in that same way that I used to, maybe, when I was in college, for example. So think about meaning as a way of getting joy. Maybe religion gives you that kind of meaningfulness, or nature or whatever it gives you, that sense of awe and deep things. But you don’t expect to feel angry for no reason, but yet, people expect to feel happy all the time. If you want to feel happy, do things that give you joy. So it could be, for me, I’m a glassblower. I get a lot of joy out of that. I love nature. And so I get pleasure out of walking in the woods. We did a study on that actually. It doesn’t have to cost money. It could be writing letters. It could be watching your favorite sitcom. If you want to feel joy, put yourself in joyful events because it just doesn’t just happen. It’d be weird if it did. If you just felt joy all the time, that’s not very typical. I don’t mean weird in a bad way. I just mean statistically deviant. So if you want to feel joy, remember you have to take time for joy. And as my mom said, “Patty, you have to spend money on joy sometimes.” You do sometimes have to spend money, that movie ticket, going out and taking that little vacation away with your partner, for example, but doesn’t have to take money. It could be watching the sunset for 10 minutes. So again, take time for joy, make it a priority, take time for relationships, make it a priority. It doesn’t have to be a lot of time. It could be texting your partner and saying, “Hey, you looked really beautiful last night,” or, “I really appreciate it when you hug me. ” It could be something like that. So those are the things. Remember all of it, the body, the mind, the emotions, the people, your behaviors matter, and try to keep that holistic perspective, but also accepting that you’re in a difficult situation and it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and that keeping your health across all these domains is worth effort, I think. Sam Hobson: Thank you, Dr. Deldin. That is a needed reminder, at least for me that this is- Patricia Deldin: It matters. Sam Hobson: Yeah. Yeah. Patricia Deldin: There’s evidence for everything I just said. So those are all the things. Get some sunshine in your retina. Sam Hobson: Dr. Deldin, do you have anything else you’d like to share with us before you go, before we go? Patricia Deldin: Well, I really appreciate this. I care very much about grad student mental health, and if there’s anything else I can do to help, that’d be great. Sam Hobson: Here are three takeaways for your wellbeing journey. One, emotions like anxiety, stress, and sadness, although uncomfortable, are healthy and normal experiences that help us navigate life. It is only when it is too much or at the wrong time that they become unhealthy. Two, I know as graduate students, we are problem analyzers, but Dr. Deldin’s research helps us understand that when we focus on solutions, it helps us work through our problems. And three, the only way we’re going to experience joy is if we make time for it. I know it can be easy to get caught up in all the things we have to do, but even five minutes here, three minutes there makes a difference. Check out our website for resources related to this episode at rackham.umich.edu/gradWell. You can reach out to Dr. Deldin with any questions you have at [email protected]. You can contact us about the podcast at [email protected], and make sure to join us for our final episode of the season where I chat with Elizabeth Rohr, Rackham’s wellbeing advocate about the past, present, and future of graduate student wellbeing. I’ll see you then. Hey, hardworking grad student. Thank you for tuning into GradWell. I hope you can take something away from this episode with you. If you like what you heard, be sure to write a review, like, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. For more information, check us out on social @umichgradschool.
