Farideh Banafshei is a relational integrative therapist who integrates and tailors evidence-based psychological interventions for mental healthcare, drawing knowledge from diverse schools of thought, to optimally create the most supportive approach to best suit her patients’ needs. She specializes in areas such as anxiety, depression, relationship issues, trauma, phobias, and personal development.
Today, she joins the show to discuss trends in Artificial Intelligence and telemedicine in the aftermath of the global pandemic, alternative medicine options, and therapeutic approaches that she employs with her patients.
Key Takeaways
01:25 – Farideh Banafshei joins the show to discuss everything from the recent coronation of King Charles III to her journey to psychology
09:54 – What impressed Farideh the most about J. Flowers Health Institute
10:41 – The growth of A.I. and Telemedicine in the aftermath of Covid
13:53 – Alternative medicine and the use of saffron
16:32 – Other techniques that Farideh uses for therapeutic approaches
21:10 – Why it is so difficult to find good mental healthcare in the UK
25:14 – Dr. Flowers thanks Farideh for the incredible work she continues to do in mental health
26:40 – Dr. Flowers thanks Farideh for joining today’s show and Farideh leaves listeners with her thoughts on what it means to understand the human condition
Resources Mentioned
J. Flowers Health Institute – https://jflowershealth.com
J. Flowers Health Institute Contact – (713) 783-6655
Subscribe on your favorite player: https://understanding-the-human-condition.captivate.fm/listen
**The views and opinions expressed by our guests are those of the individual and do not necessarily reflect those of J. Flowers Health Institute. Any content provided by our co-host(s) or guests is their opinion and is not intended to reflect the philosophy and policies of J. Flowers Health Institute itself. Nor is it intended to malign any recovery method, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.
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Farideh Banafshei – Telemedicine, Therapy & Access To Quality Mental Healthcare
The Coronation & Farideh’s Journey To Psychology
Welcome, everybody to Understanding The Human Condition. I’m your host Dr. James Flowers at J. Flowers Health Institute right here in Houston. I’m excited to introduce everyone to our London psychologist, Farideh Banafshei. Farideh, welcome.
Thank you for having me.
How is London?
London is good. We are getting a little bit more of the warm weather coming through. It’s nothing compared to Houston, but it’s relatively warm. It feels like spring is arriving.
I’ll get into your history in a little bit. The big thing on everybody’s mind is the coronation. How was it leading up to the coronation? What was the stress of the city? What was the mindset in the UK? Everybody thinks this is just an event, but it also has an impact on everyone. It has an impact on our human condition. Things in London stopped. You had to pause. Everybody had to pause and celebrate this or not celebrate it but had to recognize it by not being able to work on certain days. Tell us about the experience leading up to and then after the coronation.
It was such a monumental time and experience for everyone because some people lived through three coronations now. They watched the queen and then now they’re watching Charles and the anticipation. He’s been living a whole life waiting for his moment to be coronated and you see it in him. You can see it in the people.
It’s always a lovely time because there are so many street parties. There are so many people who come together to celebrate. Even if they’re not celebrating the Royal Family as such, they’re celebrating being together. That was probably taken away during the pandemic and COVID. It’s the idea of everyone being able to come together.
For every coronation, we have a dish that’s almost named after the person who’s been coronated. For the queen, it was coronation chicken. Lots of people don’t recognize that the coronation is very staple in British cuisine. They didn’t recognize that in the queen when she was coronated. Charles is a coronation quiche. Everyone who was into baking was baking hundreds and hundreds of quiches and giving them out in the streets.
It was lovely and it was different. There are so many tourists that come around. I know there are lots of people from all around the world who follow the Royal Family. It’s an element of everything, isn’t it? It’s fashion. It’s celebrities. It’s royalty. It’s everything together. It puts England back on the map a little. It was fun.
It’s so much seen as a fairy tale in real life.
The traditions backdate for hundreds and hundreds of years. It is seen as this entire almost historical element of England coming through.
What did you do? How did you participate?
I live near Little Venice. There’s a river and all the different streets come together. There are flags put up everywhere and everyone has almost communal gardens, so we will share a space. I didn’t attempt to cook quiches but just enjoyed it. That’s how I celebrate.
That’s so wonderful. Congratulations on all of that. I think it’s amazing. Many people here in the United States get up at 3:00 AM to watch. It was quite the event watching from here. Too bad we couldn’t have all been there. Farideh, you represent and work with J. Flowers Health Institute in London as a psychologist. Tell us a little bit about your background. Tell us about all the way from where you were born, how you ended up in London or were you born in London, and why you decided to become a psychologist.
I’m originally from an Iranian heritage, but I was born in London. I’ve been here my whole life. I’ve been in Central London my whole life. However, with that comes the melting pot of London. There’s so much diversity here. There is so much richness in the city of London, especially in the center. If we go all the way back to my childhood, the irony is a lot of people go into psychology thinking, “I know I want to become a psychologist. I know I want to do this.”
My two passions were economics and psychology. When I was much younger than I am now and I was about 18, I had the choice of picking between psychology and economics. I think I picked finance initially. I hadn’t picked psychology. I picked finance and I went into this world that was very robotic, quite rigid, and producing huge projects relating to government and regulation and all these different things, but it didn’t fulfill me.
It didn’t give me an element of satisfaction. It was fun. I was young but the irony of the transition between economics and psychology hit one day when I was about 25. The gentleman who shared a desk next to me. He was about to retire. He was about 67 and he said to me, “Farideh, every day you come into work and you sigh so loudly. It’s annoying me, and I’m looking at you full of youth. Come on. Get it together.” He was honest about it. To be frank, he highlighted something for me, which was I do this, it’s fine, and everyone works in different industries and some people love it, but I didn’t.
On a risky whim, I quit my job with no actual plan of what I wanted to do in my life. I went back to the drawing board and I realized I enjoyed psychology. I enjoy the elements of humans, relational elements, and everything to do with that. I went back and did a master’s in affective disorders at King’s College London. I picked that university because they’re leading in research and they’ve got a strong background in the medical field here. You get to work with some of the best in the field and you are taught by some of the best in the field.
“Working with some of the best in the field unlocked this new passion in me. I researched migration’s impact on mental health, with perinatal women and those with addictions. This sparked my passion for addiction recovery.”
I unlocked this new passion in me. I did a lot of research on the effects of migration on people and the effects of migration on developing effective disorders. I did a lot of research on perinatal women and people with addictions. That drew this passion in me and I ended up working in addictions for quite a few years, and then it expanded. That’s how I ended up doing a doctorate in counseling psychology. Now I’m near enough to the end of the doctorate and things crossed. I’ll be finishing that soon.
That’s how I ended up in psychology. I think it’s been such a more fulfilling enjoyable career. I’ve been able to do some teaching and lecturing with psychiatry students who choose not to go into becoming a general practitioner, but working in mental health. I’ve done a lot of different charitable work. I work with older adults with dementia and work with leading forefront people who are developing software almost with AI technology where you sit down and you’re putting these headsets for people who can’t leave the house. In this respect, they’ve done it with all that adults but realistically, thinking about how technology can involve our practice and how we provide care.
J. Flowers Health Institute
I then got to meet you and Robin. That’s one of the biggest points, isn’t it? I got to come to Houston to see the wonderful work you do. One thing that settled nicely in my brain when I came out to see J. Flowers Health Institute at the end of last year was how much of the forefront of medicine you are and of healthcare because, in England, we are very well-versed in research. There are wonderful practitioners, but we’re very risk-averse. I think that in America you’re one step ahead of us in the type of care that you provide and the type of holistic care you provide, how intricate and spoke that could be, and how tailored that could be. I think that was inspiring and lovely to see.
“One thing that settled nicely in my brain when I came out to see J. Flowers Health Institute at the end of last year was actually how much at the forefront of medicine you actually are.”
AI And Telemedicine
Thank you very much. It was wonderful having you in Houston, but we loved having you in London even more representing us and you’re doing an amazing job. You talked a little bit about using AI telemedicine throughout COVID. I’m sure that with the advent of COVID, coming on, and then going away, you probably were surprised as I was about the number of people who choose to continue to do telemedicine.
This is true. That was such a big shift, wasn’t it? The shift happens so quickly in a way in the whole world. I don’t think any practitioner could have envisaged the way technology took over our healthcare with the way were doing with it and how we were doing the things we were doing. People went from saying, “You have to turn up in the office at 12:00 for your appointment,” and that’s that. Suddenly, we’re entering the private homes and lives of absolutely everyone. There’s so much to do with that in terms of it’s opened up so many different doors, but we can’t overlook the fact that sometimes we lose that human connection. Sometimes it’s hard to convey the contextual elements of someone’s reality or what’s happening to them.
What I ended up seeing is that tech, AI especially, in the last couple of years has almost been pushed to the forefront, and then perhaps its development escalated quickly. Especially for people with agoraphobia, depression, and anxieties, they’ve been able to create these secondary worlds and allow people with the use of any virtual reality or any video graphics to experience and immerse themselves in parts that they’ve been disconnected for so long.
Are you leading them through these sessions when they’re using AI and virtual reality? Are you on one end of the computer talking to them or do they do it on their own?
There are two ways they can do it. There are headsets that they can get. They can have if they choose to have a practitioner with them in the home, and that’s completely fine. They put their headsets on and initially, you can pick between different worlds that you want to enter, whether you enjoy a walk by the beach, whether that’s with nature, whether it’s with animals. You go through this experience and you tell it what you want to see. You tell the developers of the technology.
Unfortunately, at the moment it is at a stage where they’ve created eight realities. You pick between the eight realities, but if I give you an example there was a gentleman with dementia who hadn’t necessarily spoken in about a year. The individuals in the care home were a bit worried because he expressed himself with 1 or 2 words only for a year.
He put this headset on and he went for a walk in a forest. When he was young, he had a dog that he would walk in the forest every day. At the end of his experience, he took the headset off and said, “That was amazing.” For someone who hasn’t been able to articulate any form of emotion and any kind of connection for that long, it’s unlocking something in the brain that is able to connect people even if their physical bodies can’t be them.
Alternative Medicine
You’re always on the cutting edge. I’m going to give you one word and I want you to expand on it for all of us. Saffron.
I’m laughing because it’s different here. A lot of buzz and craze is going on with herbal medicine and alternative medicine. There’s so much going on with that. That’s not to say that it’s taking over the medication or not to say that it doesn’t have medication and talking about therapies doesn’t have a space. The idea of a holistic natural way of life is coming forward in all of these different ways of being. One thing that’s almost like a big boss at the moment is the use of saffron. There’s been a lot of work and research done on the idea of using saffron to combat some of the symptoms of anxiety and depression. Using it to elevate the mood increase libido and do all of these different things that people are finding a side effects of having these chronic mental health conditions.
“The idea of a holistic, natural way of life is really coming forward in all these different ways of being.”
Two of the things with depression anxiety are a lack of human connection, lack of intimacy, and lack of desire and motivation to do anything. People are finding that having more saffron in meals as a spice or into rice or into your stews or whatever you fancy has helped elevate people’s mood. It has helped get people out of the house. It’s insane to say this because you wouldn’t think herbs and spices would make such a massive impact. It’s been found that it being for 3 to 4 months, it has massive alleviation in depressive symptoms. A lot of herbal medicine practitioners that I’ve been speaking to at the moment have been suggesting that.
Many times, we’ll talk to our patients who have chronic pain syndrome about anti-inflammatory herbs. Things like cherries, cayenne, and turmeric are all wonderful herbs to use for anti-inflammatory. I had not heard about saffrons. As soon as we hang up here, I’m going to go to the store and get some saffron.
It’s good. I’ve got a client here who finds it difficult to connect with his partner. The intimacy isn’t there anymore. He said saffron made a very huge difference.
Therapeutic Approaches
That’s so amazing. What other techniques do you use in your private practice in London? What’s your go-to therapeutic approach when working with clients?
There are a lot of buzzwords and we describe ourselves as practitioners. It has allowed people to understand our way of working. The best way to describe my work is I’m a relational and integrative psychologist because the way I like to work is fundamentally understanding the root cause of what’s going on for you. Giving you tools is wonderful and fantastic, but if I place a Band-Aid on essentially what is going on for you, you’ll be back in a couple of months with a different set of issues.
I love using psychodynamic therapy like contemporary psychoanalytic work to understand someone from their childhood or their relational upbringing. What was it like? What are your core memories? What was it like with your parents? What was it like growing up for you? Taking that and seeing how that has manifested in someone’s current life so that when we give you tools, we help you heal from the original wounding source.
If the issue came from the idea of a broken relationship with your father and it’s manifesting in your 20s, 30s, and 40s in a way that you don’t know how to control the anxiety that you feel from it now and you think you’re getting nervous in work meetings, for example, anxious presenting or but the root cause is when you are 6 or 7 years old.
No matter how many tools I give you like cognitive behavioral therapy-wise or anything, it’s not necessarily going to do what you want it to. I like to work from the root cause all the way up until now, and then we can start to give you tools that work for you and hope to maintain genuine therapy to change in the future so you don’t find yourself going through the loop of therapist after therapist.
While you’re talking, it reminded me of a conversation I had with a young man somewhere else in California here in the United States. He called and he said, “I don’t understand my behavior.” I said, “What’s the behavior that you’re looking at?” He said, “I had a girlfriend for six years and we had a wonderful relationship, and then I ran into an old girlfriend from eight years ago and we started having conversations. I didn’t tell my current girlfriend about those conversations, and then she asked me to go to dinner, so we went to dinner with her, and then it elevated from dinner into intimacy.”
He started having a dual relationship with both women. That went on for another six months and neither woman knew about it, and then he met a third woman who he didn’t tell about the other two women and was courting this third woman, then they all found out about it. They all met at one location, called him, and said, “Meet me here.” He walked up and all three of these women were sitting there.
He’s like, “I don’t understand my behavior. Am I a sex addict? Am I an addict in general? What’s going on? I don’t understand why I act like this. I’ve never done it before.” I said the same thing to you. I said, “We need to go all the way back and we need to look inside and outside from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet, look at personality-driven, look at your attachments and your life, look at parents and take time to understand who you are and how you think about relationships in your life and do a full 360-degree evaluation, and figure out what is going on because you can’t just slap a label on it that you’re a sex addict.”
“If you haven’t ever done this before and it happened over the last year, I don’t know if you’re an addict on the telephone or not. I don’t know what your personality is, but let’s take time and evaluate from that 360-degree cycle analytic approach, as you were talking about, and go all the way back and even look at attachments to parents, what their relationships were, and what their relationship styles were.” He was super excited. He is on his way to doing an evaluation. I know that it will help people figure those things out. I think that you’re so good at doing that in London. I wish you’d move over here to the US and work with us here.
I have an idea, Dr. James. How about we create a second J. Flowers in London?
Mental Healthcare In The UK
We need to continue to talk about that. That’s right. Tell me more about therapy in general. How do people access therapy in the UK? In the United States, it’s either a private pay or an insurance base. What is the system like in the UK and how easy or difficult is it to access good mental health practitioners in the UK? A lot of people fly to the US for health care. You guys have amazing healthcare, but a lot of people choose to come here. What’s your experience with speaking with your patients and their difficulty in finding a good mental health therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist?
It’s slightly different here than it is in America because we have the National Health System, which is free healthcare. However, what it was let’s say 50 years ago is very different from how it is today. For lack of a better term, it’s almost on its knee. It’s difficult to access mental health care in general. It’s extremely hard. The waiting list is as long as one year. You have hundreds of people waiting to access care.
“What the National Health Service, which is free healthcare, was fifty years ago is very different to how it is today. It’s difficult to access healthcare in general. It’s extremely hard.”
Unfortunately, most that they can provide at the moment is checking up on the telephone with a 10-minute phone call, “Are you okay? Your symptoms haven’t changed.” They’re worse or not, and they’re giving six weeks’ worth of free treatment. There’s been a huge shift going to private healthcare. There were a lot of people seeking out insurance and a lot of practitioners who worked with insurers to provide more accessible care because people needed immediate help. They are seeking help.
There’s a huge shift in acceptance of mental health. There’s been a lot of different terminology that’s been used in the last few years especially that almost helps people access the idea of explaining how they’re feeling rather than denying or pushing it aside. What that has done is created this immense need. You’ll find different practitioners and psychologists trying to meet those needs. A lot will work for the NHS or the National Health System, but a lot have then stepped away from providing private healthcare.
You hit the nail on the head because of this need for it and this desire for it but not necessarily having very obvious spaces to go to, people end up coming to America. Many of our clients are coming to Houston to J. Flowers because of that. You need someone to say, “Sit down with us. Attend the evaluation and we will find out what’s wrong with you,” or to create this great piece of work. We understand you from all these different angles.
“You need someone to offer a comprehensive 10-day evaluation, understand you from multiple angles, and provide tailored treatment. J. Flowers does this so beautifully. That’s the thing missing in London. It’s a lot of self-knowledge.”
We give you this tailored intervention and treatment program. We help you move forward there. That’s one thing J. Flowers does so beautifully. That’s something that’s missing in London. It’s difficult. It’s a lot of self-knowledge. You have to go out there and search and seek. That’s what people find difficult. That’s what people are struggling with here.
I agree. It is all about coming down to understanding and helping them understand their human condition, uncovering that, and allowing them to go home and thrive and live a happy healthy thriving wonderful life. What I was saying is to go back and thrive and not just survive. You took that leap of fate back in your first job where you said you would come in and sigh.
For a while, you were just going on every day. It was your job. You did your job and you went home. This gentleman was the impetus of your behavior change who was at the end of his career and said, “Go do something else. If you’re not happy, go do something. Figure out what’s going on. You took time off. You reflected on your life and you said, “I think I’m going to go work with people in psychology.”
That was an amazing right decision for you because you have such a passion for this and it shows every day. Every time we talked on the phone and we talked about either shared patients or patients that you’re working with, either in private practice or with J. Flowers, it does show the depth of knowledge and your understanding of the entire human system and condition of working with families. I appreciate it so much.
Thank you, James. It’s wonderful working alongside you, Robin, Michael, and the whole team. When I was in Houston, I met so many of the clients there because I think my work in London is very specific in terms of we do the pre-assessment work and we get them out to Houston and they end up to their treatment programs, but I was able to connect with the clients after that. In the middle of their treatment programs, coming towards the end of their treatment programs. I think the difference in how they feel is monumental. You use the word thrive. It is that. You’re giving people back agency, autonomy, individuality, and power. There is no price you can set there. There is no alternative to that. That’s the biggest part of treatment.
Understanding The Human Condition
I agree. Unfortunately, we’re running out of time. Farideh, thank you so much. I know it’s evening time in London. I hope you have a wonderful evening and we will talk again. What would you like to leave our listeners with and your concept of your view of Understanding The Human Condition?
That’s a good question. I think understanding and seeking internal peace from within and understanding yourself in a 360-degree way unlocks parts of you that you couldn’t ever imagine. If you could ever seek anything, it is to seek an internal understanding of your inner world.
Thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for working with us. I know you also have a thriving private practice. We’ll talk to you very soon. Have a wonderful evening. Take care. Thanks, everybody. You can find J. Flowers Health Institute at JFlowersHealth.com, or you can call us at (713) 783-6655, and we’ll see you all soon. Take good care. Bye.
