- [Announcer] "Your Fantastic Mind," brought to you, in part, by Sarah and Jim Kennedy.

(authoritative music) - Welcome to "Your Fantastic Mind."

I'm Jaye Watson.

This week is all about game changers.

The definition of a game changer is something that effects a significant shift in the current manner of doing or thinking about something.

Well, that describes all the stories we get to share with you right now, beginning with one that is really going to get on your nerves, one in particular, the vagus nerve.

Almost 800,000 people across the country have strokes each year.

Incredible new technology is using the vagus nerve to help people recover, even years later.

(authoritative music) (bell dings) - [Therapist] Good morning.

- [Tanya] Hey, good morning.

- [Jaye] Tanya Baird steps through the door.

- [Therapist] Okay, I'm gonna have you go ahead and sit down.

- [Jaye] Continuing on a path she didn't expect.

- [Therapist] I will give you instructions first on how to do the task.

- [Jaye] Today is a day Baird will learn if all the struggle and effort.

- [Therapist] Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.

(disks jingling) - [Jaye] Has paid off.

- (chuckles) Thought my health was pretty good.

(laughs) I thought it was pretty good.

I mean, I wasn't on no medication or anything like that.

- [Woman] You're fine.

Keep trying.

(traffic whooshing) - [Jaye] It's a struggle that began in the middle of the night in 2017.

- It happened in the night.

It happened between 1:00 and 3:00 in the night because I got up to go to the restroom at 1:00.

I was fine.

I could walk.

Everything was fine, and at 3:00 I woke up.

I looked at a clock.

I said, "Oh, it's 3:00.

"I got another hour before I have to go to work," so I said, "I'm gonna go back to sleep and everything."

I went to turn over, and I couldn't move.

(phone beeps) - [Operator] 911.

What's your emergency?

- [Jaye] Tanya's mother, who lives with her, called 911.

She had suffered a stroke.

- That was from when I was in the hospital.

That was like the next day I was in the hospital.

They started me doing therapy immediately, the next day.

- [Therapist] Push off of the chair.

Up, up, up, up, up.

- [Jaye] From her time in the hospital and then at an inpatient rehabilitation facility, she made gains.

- [Tanya] Oh, I was probably like about 70%.

Let's go ahead.

I'm ready.

- [Jaye] But getting back to 100% did not happen.

The stroke impacted the right side of her body, and she couldn't use her hand.

- I was at therapy at Emory, and they said, "A lady wanna come talk to you "about doing a study for us," and I was thinking, I was like, "I don't know.

"I ain't doing no study," right?

(laughs) I said, "I'll talk to her, (laughs) "but I ain't doing no study.

"She can forget that."

- [Jaye] While she wanted to regain motion, the study sounded too involved.

- She told me about it, and she said, "It's a device that they have to implant," so I was like, "What, I have to have surgery too?"

I was like, "I'm not having this."

I let her finish her little spiel, (laughs) and I'm just going about my business.

- [Therapist] Okay, just relax.

Take a deep breath.

- [Jaye] After thinking about it and talking to her doctors, Baird decided to do it because what if it actually worked?

- [Therapist] Today, we're going to do the Wolf Motor Function Test.

(therapist tapping) - [Jaye] The Wolf Motor Function Test.

- [Therapist] Ready, set, go.

- [Jaye] A test that measures upper extremity mobility is used around the world for stroke patients.

It is named for this man, Dr. Steven Wolf.

- As a physical therapist, I always had an interest in the control of movement.

- [Jaye] Dr. Wolf's lifelong interest led him to become a global leader in stroke rehabilitation research.

One of the most disabling parts of a stroke is the profound loss of using an arm or a hand.

- [Steven] I'm glad you're interested in this study.

- [Jaye] Dr. Wolf was the lead investigator of the revolutionary EXCITE study, (objects clunking) which showed that constraint therapy, when people use their affected hand and arm for several hours every day while the other hand and arm are immobilized, experience dramatic increased mobility.

- That became recognized as one of the clearly defined interventions that one could rely upon for successful recovery.

(pensive music) - [Jaye] The EXCITE study was named one of the most important studies of the past 75 years.

The reality is that most people's recoveries after a stroke plateau.

- We have this nice little curve that we show.

Here's time, and here's some kind of outcome measure, and there's this slope, right?

And it starts to plateau, usually, in most cases, with traditional rehab, at about three months, most stroke.

Our task, our mission, is to change the slope of that improvement curve and its longevity, its duration.

- [Jaye] Dr. Wolf is the principal investigator at the Emory site for this new study that has grabbed worldwide headlines.

- [Announcer] This study- - [Announcer] What makes this study- - [Announcer] In this study- - [Jaye] Wolf and researchers at 19 other rehab centers in the U.S. and the UK recruited 108 people between the ages of 22 and 80 years old.

All had had strokes from nine months to 10 years prior.

The goal was to see if vagus nerve stimulation from this device made by MicroTransponder.

- [Therapist] Ready, set, go.

- [Jaye] Paired with physical therapy could improve long-term loss of hand and arm function that had not come back.

- Vagus nerve is one of those 12 cranial nerves that we have, and some of them you all may have heard of already having to do with your sight, your taste, your smell.

Those are specific nerves that govern those functions.

Vagus, in Latin, means wander, and the vagus nerve is the wandering nerve.

It starts off in our brain and has pathways from our brain to go to various organs and sites in the brain.

When you're at home, you're gonna be able to do this on your own.

- [Jaye] Dr. Wolf walked participants through the process, the first step being surgery.

- [Steven] You'll be under anesthesia.

- [Jaye] Baird and the other participants had neurostimulators implanted in their chest walls.

Then, an electrode was wrapped around the vagus nerve in the neck.

- [Steven] That coil's actually going to be surgically wrapped around the nerve 'cause that's where the stimulation is going to occur.

(pensive music) - [Jaye] The vagus nerve emerges from the medulla oblongata portion of the brain stem and goes down the throat, lungs, heart, and intestinal tract.

The neurostimulator sends painless half-second electrical pulses up the vagus nerve, causing chemicals called neuromodulators to be released in various parts of the brain.

Researchers say these neuromodulators appear to help activate neuron pathways in the brain, which play an important role in restoring muscle movement.

Basically, it helps reteach the brain to find new ways to do what it did before, which means routing around damaged areas and recruiting healthy parts to take over from those lost to the stroke.

- And then, using viable nerve cells to reinform and reeducate, to induce what we call functional neuroplasticity, making things work or engaging them in a way they haven't been done before.

- [Therapist] For the next task- - [Jaye] After Baird underwent surgery to implant the device- - [Therapist] Go.

- [Jaye] She did 90 minutes of physical therapy three times a week for six weeks.

In this triple blind study- - Good job.

- Okay.

- [Jaye] One group received real stimulation paired with physical therapy, and one group received sham stimulation with physical therapy.

No one, not Dr. Wolf or any of the research teams, knew who was getting real or fake stimulation.

- The determination of real or sham, make-believe stimulation, was controlled by one individual, and that information was withheld from the patient, from the therapists, from the evaluators, and from the investigator.

- I think I'm getting this stuff for real.

(laughs) I couldn't wait to find out.

- And all the patients were asked, at a set point in time, "Do you think you're getting the stimulation "or do you not think you're getting it?"

And there are equal numbers of incorrect guesses.

- [Jaye] At the end of six weeks, 75% of patients who had their vagus nerve stimulated during physical therapy saw clinically meaningful benefit compared to only 33% of those in the therapy-only control group.

After six weeks, Baird and the other participants continued with 30 minutes a day of at-home exercises, using a magnet to turn on the neurostimulator.

By the three-month mark, 88% of participants receiving stimulation had improved.

- [Patient] Now I'm able to cast out and crank it back in without any help.

- From a fisherman who could once again wind and cast his reel to a man whose once-lifeless hand could hold and pour a cup of water, to Baird, using her hand almost three years after her stroke.

- It has helped me 'cause I've gained so much control over my hand that I didn't have before.

- [Jaye] At home, Baird turns on the neurostimulator when she wants to fold clothes or work out.

- Before, it's just present.

It was just that you just saw it.

It was just there.

That was it.

I couldn't move it.

I couldn't lift it.

I couldn't do nothing.

It was just a hand, but after having the vagus nerve stimulator, now I can do more things with my hand.

I can lift it up.

I can pick up something, do things like that.

- [Therapist] I will give you instructions.

- [Jaye] At Baird's final evaluation, she is able to do things she has not done in years, like stack quarters and pick up a pencil, small tasks that have a profound impact on one's life.

The FDA has already approved MicroTransponder's device.

The advances may be more high tech, but the goal has never changed for Dr. Wolf: to help people get their lives and mobility back.

It turns out a wandering nerve that has been within us all along may hold the key to helping our brains heal us.

- [Steven] We're at the beginning of a journey that's a very exciting one because we have some sense of positivity guiding our direction.

(hopeful music) - From regaining range of motion to bodies in motion, we take you to a lab unlike any other, where researchers are exploring the connections between our balance and our cognition, how one impacts the other.

It's a lab where flamingos, ballet dancers, and insects have been studied and where humans, for the good of science, get the rug pulled out from beneath them.

(pensive music) - [Lena] We're gonna have something like that.

- [Jaye] When you're deeply curious about a lot of different things- - So then, in order to get this...

I went from a insect lab to a human biomechanics lab to a animal research and neuroscience lab.

So you should have more- - [Jaye] The often linear world of science- - [Lena] I also went through a dinosaur stage during grad school, so... (laughs) - [Jaye] Can be a challenge.

- I think this is a problem that a lot of young scientists face because you have to study this very, very specific thing that's even more specific than you could imagine.

- [Jaye] Neuromechanist Lena Ting has taken her love of evolutionary biology and engineering and computer programming and neurophysiology (machine beeping) (machine whirring) and robotics- - [Lena] This model here.

- [Jaye] And has married them together, creating a body of research that is changing our understanding of balance and movement.

From why flamingos stand on one leg to how insects and ballet dancers move (device whirs) to floors that challenge our ability to balance to robot walkers that could one day help us cross the street, the neuromechanics lab in the basement of Emory University Rehab Hospital is home to Ting and her team and a host of fellow researchers working to change the future of how we assess, treat, and prevent mobility disorders.

- [Lena] Our primary research focus is in how we maintain our balance, so basically, stand up.

It's not something that people really think about until they lose their ability to do so.

- [Researcher] Katie, can you go pulse up and down on your balls of your feet one more time?

- [Researcher] Yeah, I'll adjust it to make it comfortable.

- So the way that we've been studying balance control is by putting people on a movable platform, so it's a big device in the floor.

You stand on it, and we literally pull the rug out from under you.

(device whirs) (subject laughs) And while we're doing that, we have cameras around the room and dots all over people, just like in the movies.

In addition, we measure electrical activity in the muscles, so we stick, it's just like having a EKG done, but it's on all of the muscles of your legs and other parts of your body, and more recently, we've been adding what we call EEG, which is now electrodes on your head to measure brain activity.

Try to map how the signals are coming from the sensory information through different parts of the nervous system, the spinal cord, brain stem, the cortex, and then generating a motor response in the muscles that ultimately is useful for having you regain your balance once we push you.

We collect a lot of data, right?

So we have lots of channels of muscle activity, of biomechanical movements, of forces, and then we have to interpret it, so that's the hard part of the job.

That's where the engineering comes in.

That's where the math comes in, in trying to look at coordination across all of these modalities.

(device whirring) - [Jaye] This platform can also illustrate the divide between young and old.

- When we started measuring brain activity in young, healthy adults, sometimes not much happened, right?

And that means they're highly automated, and this is not a challenging task for them.

- [Jaye] Balance is automatic, like breathing, not something you think about until you begin to lose it, which is what happens to many of us as we get older, hence the phenomenon known as stops walking when talking.

- Because older adults, when they start to lose this automatic ability to balance, then they have to dedicate their attentional resources, and so they can't walk and talk at the same time, and so you might notice this in some people: they'll walk, and if you go to walk, and you talk to them, they'll have to stop because they're paying attention to their balance.

That's not how we normally do it or young people normally do it.

They walk and they text.

(laughs) They walk, and they're, actually, what you're supposed to be doing, which is looking for traffic, navigating all of those things.

The balance part is what we call an automatic function in a healthy person, where, and you may know this, you don't think about balance.

However, it's a super-complex interaction of many parts of your brain, your nervous system, and your muscles and sensory system that is constantly shifting around without your awareness.

- [Jaye] Ting's research can help scientists and clinicians better understand what's happening in the brain before that first fall, and that understanding could lead to ways to maintain and even improve brain health to prevent falls.

(ethereal music) The lab also features a balance beam that progressively narrows to test people's balance.

- [Subject] (groans) Darn it!

I was trying- - [Jaye] Most people cannot walk the entire length of it, but ballet dancers could.

- In contrast, the ballet dancers, they didn't have to change their movement patterns from walking over ground to walking on the beam, and the important thing about that is that it's one of the reasons that we think you can identify ballet dancers by the way that they walk because in doing this highly skilled training, they're not just reshaping the motor patterns that they're using for dancing.

Those are actually building on their walking movement patterns and changing those, and so you can actually see that in everyday movements, and not just when they're dancing, so we know that, for people who are highly skilled musicians and dancers, they are able to do lots of their skills without activating as much of their brain, so that means that those patterns get learned at a deep level, we call subcortical level, where it becomes automated, which doesn't mean that it's like robotic.

It means that they're able to call upon these skills without much mental effort, and that means that they can spend their mental effort on the choreography and their artistic expression and anything else that they need to be doing beyond just getting the movements out.

(impassioned dance music) - [Jaye] These skills can be used for rehabilitation.

Biomedical research engineer Rish Rastogi and neuroscientist Madeleine Hackney are also ballroom dancers.

Hackney is a collaborator of Ting's and a former professional dancer- - [Instructor] All right, everyone, when you get a chance, grab a partner and start dancing.

- [Jaye] Whose research has shown that teaching modified tango classes to people with Parkinson's disease improves their balance and helps them do other tasks while walking.

- T, A, N-G-O.

- [Jaye] Hackney's tango classes inspired Ting to figure out how to make assistive robots more intuitive to use.

(device whirring) - [Lena] One of the things we noticed is that this what we call haptic interaction or this physical interaction at the hands was incredibly important in guiding people during dance and helping people with Parkinson's walk, and in fact, when I went, sometimes they have you close your eyes, and in fact.

people's movements get even better.

(impassioned dance music) - [Jaye] The end result could be futuristic walkers, robots that provide the balance benefit that comes from human touch.

- We want it to act like somebody holding your hand across the street, but we don't understand why holding somebody's hand improves their balance, so that's why now we're using the robot to study the human and what that physical interaction imparts to their ability to walk.

- [Jaye] To visit Ting's lab and the labs of her neighbors is to take a step into the future of personalized medicine.

- [Researcher] Yep, that's good.

- [Jaye] Around the corner is collaborator and physical therapy researcher Trisha Kesar.

- [Trisha] Can I do left leg?

- [Jaye] Who rehabilitates walking patterns in people who've had strokes.

- So with the cameras as well as the treadmill, we're able to measure how someone's moving after a stroke.

Which angle is their ankle or knee?

How much is the difference between their affected or unaffected leg?

As well as how much they're pushing off or pushing down on the ground, so just as an example, if I was to slow down my right leg, which we're doing now, so as you can see, my right leg is now going half the speed of my left, and that causes this limp, right?

And it kind of mimics, even though I don't have a stroke, what someone with stroke would experience.

Using these data, what we're trying to do is capture each person's what we are calling gait signature, so the complex, different kinds of 26 different variables for each individual, how they're moving.

What are the differences between their affected and their unaffected leg?

So we can target their gait individually, develop treatments that can now tailor to their own walking pattern.

- [Researcher] There we go.

- [Jaye] A few doors down from Kesar is neuroscientist Michael Borich.

- This is a manipulandum.

It's a robot that allows us to very quantitatively measure movement as well as to apply forces to one's movement to understand how people control their movements.

- [Jaye] Borich and Ting are collaborating on exciting research looking at brain activity that connects our thinking and moving and how one impacts the other.

- We are requiring participants to move in a pattern, and this pattern, in this particular case, is either in numbers or alternating between numbers and letters, and when we have individuals do this, it's a measure of attention, but it's also a measure of your ability to shift and move your... And so it looks at how flexible one's thinking is, so if you have to move, say, from number 1 to letter A, that is more challenging for the brain than, say, going from number 1 to number 2.

- [Jaye] People who were not good at this set shifting (machine whizzes) were not as good on the balance platform, and brain activity was affected by both.

That brain activity showed that cognitive stiffness is related to motor stiffness.

- Imagine if you could do this pen-and-paper test, and it might say something about your predisposition for a later balance impairment.

That would be really important.

- [Jaye] It could be an opportunity to intervene or prevent something, and it shows that what you do for your body affects your brain and vice versa.

- And so there's evidence, too, that some cognitive training might improve your balance and balance training might improve your cognition, and again, this is an idea where we shouldn't be separating balance and cognition into as distinct bins as we are in science.

- At the beginning of her career, Lena Ting wasn't sure she fit in as a scientist.

20 years and over 90 studies later, she is a trailblazer who has found her balance, linking many fields of science, seeking a deeper understanding of our ever-changing brain and body connection.

(ethereal music) The overdose crisis in America continues to get worse.

More than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the year ending in April of 2021, the most of any year on record.

There is a nationwide effort to fight this epidemic by engaging an influential group in America: faith leaders.

This story begins with one man's years-long journey from the crack house to the pulpit.

(pensive music) (audience applauding) The journey of one's life is impossible to quantify or measure.

- But this talk tonight, well, tonight just might be unique.

- [Jaye] In the case of William Cope Moyers, one defining distance is five miles.

- "There is nothing more I can do for you," my father said.

"I'm finished."

- [Jaye] What happened five miles from this Atlanta church pulpit is the reason Moyers is here.

- I grew up in a church.

My father's an ordained Southern Baptist minister, and when I was born in 1959 in Fort Worth, Texas, my father was in seminary, and he and my mother, at the age of 21 or 24 or 25, they were pastoring a small church, and so I'm a man of faith.

- I'm Bill Moyers.

- [Jaye] Moyers' Baptist minister father was the legendary journalist and author Bill Moyers, who also served as press secretary for President Lyndon B. Johnson.

- We never talked about this in my family.

We didn't think we needed to.

We talked about the war in Vietnam, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, OPEC and long gas lines, faith, the birds and the bees.

We didn't talk about substances 'cause we didn't think we needed to.

- [Jaye] Moyers started smoking marijuana as a teenager.

- I smoked it because it was offered to me.

I didn't smoke it to get high or to end up in a crack house.

I smoked it because I was a teenager and teenagers take risks and I didn't think anything was wrong with that, and I smoked marijuana, and I liked it.

I liked what it did for me.

It made me feel good.

It took care of what I call this hole in my soul, this place that, for me, ached with a sense of imperfection.

(pop top snaps) (beer gurgles) - [Jaye] Moyers says he went from abusive drinking to full-blown addiction in college and drugs followed.

- It just consumed me, and I went to treatment four times over five years between 1989 and 1994.

That's how difficult it was for me to come to terms with the fact that to recover I needed to embrace all of the things that were wrong with me, not just my using.

(traffic whooshing) - [Jaye] Moyers followed his father into journalism, a rising young producer at CNN in Atlanta, married with two little boys.

Three years into recovery, the pull of the drugs dragged him from the life he had built.

- And I'm dying inside because I'm not doing the things that are important to tend to the garden of my recovery.

I'm just getting on with my life, but I'm running harder and harder and looking good and doing all that stuff and succeeding and climbing the ladder at CNN.

(horn honks) (traffic roaring) I finally went to the corner of Boulevard and Ponce De Leon because I just couldn't imagine living my life the way I was living anymore, and I just wanted to sorta check out, and for me, checking out was about getting high, and then, checking out was about dying, so I was holed up in that crack house from October the eighth to October the 12th, and I knew that I was not doing a very good job of hiding out because there was a lot of whispering in the neighborhood about the white guy, and I stood out like a sore thumb in that neighborhood.

(traffic whooshing) I have two distinct memories.

One is of being here as an...

In deep trouble.

I got back in the car- - [Jaye] We returned with Moyers to the crack house.

- No one would ever believe that, so I- - [Jaye] Now an apartment building.

- [William] That was it, right there.

- [Jaye] It's only the second time he's been here in 27 years.

Moyers' bosses at CNN and his family searched for him, and after four days, they found him.

- And I remember walking out that front door.

Deputy sheriff showed up at the door.

They banged on the door.

They said, "We want the white guy, just the white guy," and when I couldn't answer the question now what am I going to do?

Multiple relapses.

Multiple treatments.

The gig is up, right?

I opened the door, and I was delivered.

I walked out of there.

What I will never forget was leaving behind the other eight people in that crack house.

- [Jaye] It was not an end that day.

It was the beginning of a recovery journey that has lasted 27 years in which Moyers has become a bestselling author and a national recovery expert.

In his role as vice president at Hazelden Betty Ford, a renowned addiction treatment and advocacy organization, he reconnected to his Georgia roots, helping create the Addiction Alliance of Georgia, a unique statewide treatment, research, and education partnership led by Emory University and Hazelden Betty Ford.

- [William] I've come home, and I feel right at home.

(ethereal music) - [Jaye] It is five miles from another lifetime to the pulpit at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church.

- I'm a prime example of the fact that addiction does not discriminate.

- [Jaye] From the pulpit is how Moyers also believes we can fight back against an epidemic that has claimed a record number of lives, that faith leaders can be the game changers, the lifesavers.

- [William] It's okay.

You're not alone.

(ethereal music) - A group is coming together to train and educate members of the clergy on how to help their parishioners.

- [Jaye] Carol Pine's life goal was not to get in front of TV news cameras.

- Now, they don't have to become treatment counselors- - [Jaye] But this career business journalist realized her own story was one that could be used to effect change.

- When I was struggling in my disease of alcoholism, had I known or observed that my pastor had created a safe place for me to come talk to him, in that case, about what was troubling me, I would have sought him out.

(Eliyahu praying in Hebrew) - We are a Jewish center located here Intown Atlanta, and we source everything to the Torah.

Jeff was a wonderful person.

He was at, studying at Georgia State College, was in recovery, unbeknownst to us.

- [Jaye] When Rabbi Eliyahu Schusterman lost a member of Chabad Intown to an overdose, his life and mission changed.

- The mission of Chabad is to promote godliness and goodness in the world.

- [Jaye] In the basement of Chabad Intown is now Jeff's Place.

- We have AA meetings and other 12-step meetings that take place here on a weekly basis.

We have, for example, we have a Narcan training coming up, which is a critical, critical tool in saving lives of people who are in an opioid crisis.

- Welcome.

My name is Carol Pine.

- [Jaye] In Savannah, Pine cofounded the Interfaith Addiction and Recovery Coalition to train and educate faith leaders.

- I believe that in order for faith leaders to have an impact, they have to be able to speak out loud from the pulpit about this subject, and in order to speak out loud, they have to to be educated.

(gentle music) - [Jaye] Nearly one in three people who attend religious services are either struggling with addiction or love someone who is.

Only 12% of faith leaders in this country learn anything about addiction and recovery in seminary or religious study.

- We are up against the reality that we've lost over 101,000 lives in a 12-month period.

- [Jaye] Chris Thrasher is the director of substance use disorders and recovery at the Clinton Foundation.

- When someone has a problem with a substance use disorder, they more often go to their faith leader than their physician, than a family member, a friend.

They're going to their faith leaders, and here's the thing.

Faith leaders are not getting this in theology school or in seminary.

They're not getting the training, but yet we look at them as being authorities in this area, so what we thought was let's go all in on training our faith leaders.

- [Woman] This is real.

This epidemic is real.

- [Jaye] This is a group uniquely positioned to remove the stigma of addiction and to connect their congregants to care.

The Clinton Foundation has trained faith leaders in Houston, Texas; Jacksonville, Florida; Little Rock, Arkansas; and throughout Georgia.

- I felt that this was an opportunity that I've been waiting on.

- [Jaye] Faith leaders get an education on the science of addiction, and in addition to praying with families, can help them take action.

- This is something really worth the effort and time.

- [Jaye] Connecting them to help in their community.

- And we have a simple, singular mission.

- [Jaye] Carol Pine and Rabbi Schusterman are among those who've been trained.

- Because I think this story carries such a powerful message and guidance around the struggle of addiction.

(gentle music) We spent nine or 10 months learning about the opioid crisis, understanding its underpinnings, its history, and learning how faith leaders, who are the natural go-to for so many people who are struggling, how we can be, how we can contribute to the solution.

(Eliyahu praying in Hebrew) We need to bring the conversation around addiction being a disease as opposed to a moral failing into the conversation.

We have to bring down that wall.

We can't be afraid to talk about it.

We can't be afraid to share our children's struggles, our own struggles, right?

The more we can bring down those walls, the more the water flows both directions.

- [Jaye] It's a model that can spread across the country with science and faith sharing the same goal: to stop losing people to a preventable disease, to show that recovery is possible.

- [Eliyahu] Faith leaders are trusted messengers in their community.

(gentle music) - From a drug epidemic to a nationwide physician shortage, one that could get worse with so many healthcare workers suffering burnout from the COVID pandemic, Georgia has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country, and more than half of Georgia's 159 counties don't have a single psychiatrist to provide critical mental health care to mothers and mothers to be.

Now, state lawmakers, through the Department of Public Health, have created a program that can provide that care no matter where women live in the state.

It's called PEACE for Moms.

(pensive music) - [Alycia] This is little Eloise.

(gentle music) She's three months old today.

She's my third baby.

- [Jaye] Between the births of her first and second child, Alycia Cullen had what millions of moms have dealt with: postpartum depression.

- I was feeling just out of control of who I was, my identity, who I was going to be, what the future looked like, feeling like my heart grew two sizes, having a new baby, my heart grew, but that meant my responsibilities grew.

My worries grew.

I cannot be more excited to start back up.

- [Jaye] The work Cullen did with psychiatrist Dr. Toby Goldsmith got her to a better place mentally.

(bittersweet music) There are countless mothers like Cullen across Georgia, across the country, who need help and don't get it.

- We review every case of every woman who has died within 365 days of giving birth or having been pregnant.

Are you gonna start working again soon?

- [Jaye] Dr. Goldsmith is on the Georgia Maternal Mortality Review Committee.

- I believe our most recent meeting consisted of 20 cases.

We are reviewing 2018 at the moment.

- [Jaye] Georgia has a big problem when it comes to caring for women during and after pregnancy.

- We are failing women, in general, after they are pregnant, and as a result, women are dying.

- [Jaye] Georgia has the second-highest rate of maternal mortality in the country.

- It's moms dying within a year after having been pregnant.

(melancholy music) - [Jaye] Georgia's maternal mortality rate is 26 deaths per 100,000.

The national average is 17.

- He's very photogenic.

My name is Mitzi Joy Williams Brown, and I'm a neurologist.

What kind of snack are you getting, buddy?

(laughs) Bet you do want a donut.

- [Jaye] Dr. Mitzi Joy Williams Brown is a married mom who had a terrifying experience during childbirth with her first child, Chase.

- I just remember laying there, and I really thought I was gonna die.

I was laying there gasping for air, and I'm telling the people I can't breathe, and no one seemed to believe me.

(medical devices beeping) - [Jaye] The epidural given to Dr. Williams Brown spread upward, and she struggled to breathe.

- I felt the sensation spread all the way up my chest, and I remember gasping for air, and so everyone's like, "You're just having a panic attack.

"It's fine.

"You're just anxious," and I'm like, "I'm not anxious.

"I can't breathe," and I remember vividly the sensation of everything going black.

- [Jaye] Dr. Williams Brown was intubated and had an emergency C-section under general anesthesia.

Today, Chase is a healthy boy with a little sister, but the experience still haunts her.

- And I'm a doctor, so if I have symptoms, and I am struggling to get people to believe what I'm saying, I can't imagine it's like for someone who doesn't have people to advocate for them or have the medical knowledge.

What happens to them?

- [Chase] Hey!

- [Mitzi] Dude, you're back.

(Chase speaking indistinctly) - When you look at the data, the statistics show that the outcomes for doctorate-level African American women are the same as high school age or high school degree white women, and so there's a disparity there, so even if you're educated, and you're smart, and you're a colleague, it doesn't mean that you'll get the same care as people who don't look like you.

(somber music) - [Jaye] When you break down Georgia's maternal mortality numbers, you see the racial disparity that black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.

- We see hemorrhages.

We see embolisms, pulmonary embolisms, cerebral embolisms.

Women have heart attacks and have cardiac illness as well as women die due to domestic violence.

Women die due to motor vehicle accidents.

Women die from suicide, from drug overdoses.

There's an element of access to care.

It's racism.

It's the fact that a lot of these women are coming into pregnancy already ill, and therefore, they are more vulnerable.

- [Jaye] Perinatal care, care during and after a woman is pregnant, is hard to come by if you live in rural Georgia.

Half of the state's 159 counties have no OB-GYNs.

Nine counties have no doctors at all.

- [Toby] Approximately 20% of women will experience some kind of psychiatric illness during the course of their pregnancy or the postpartum.

(truck rumbling) - Those one out of five women who need mental health care struggle because half of Georgia's counties have zero psychiatrists.

Twiggs County, Georgia sits in the center of the state, more than 100 miles south of Atlanta.

The average cost of a home here: $66,000.

The population is shrinking.

20 years ago, 10,000 people lived here, and today, that number's just a little over 8,000, but maybe the most concerning number of all is one, the number of doctors to care for the people here, and that one doctor is an OB-GYN.

- What's gonna be the best time for you to come?

I have a lot of patients who are what we call the working poor, and so they are employed.

They cannot afford health insurance, but they also have a hard time affording services.

That's honest.

So I have probably 40% African American, 40% Caucasian, and then 20% other.

I've known you for a very long time.

It's been like three years.

- [Jaye] As the only doctor in all of Twiggs County, OB-GYN Dr. Keisha Callins tends to all sorts of minor emergencies for women and men.

- [Brooke] Can I have a hug?

He is eight months old.

He's got the brightest blue eyes you could possibly have.

He's so sweet.

How you doin'?

- [Jaye] But her main focus is her women.

21-year-old Brooke Draughon is a first-time mom.

- It ended up getting really terrible, and I would cry for days and days and days.

I couldn't get out of bed.

I didn't wanna do anything with him.

I felt detached from him, and it was just horrible for me.

- [Keisha] That's good, so now you're going down from here.

- [Jaye] When medication Dr. Callins prescribed for Brooke didn't work, she reached out to a newly created state program called PEACE for Moms.

Georgia State Legislature, through the Department of Public Health, approved funding for this psychiatric program, which pairs clinicians across the state with psychiatrists at Emory who can help guide and recommend treatment for women before, during, and after pregnancy.

- They can pick up the phone and call PEACE for Moms, and we will guide them.

If necessary, we will tell them about other scales to give their patient so we can have a better idea of what's going on with that individual, and we will hold their hand through the process.

- [Jaye] The nonprofit Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Georgia also helps mothers find social services and other supports.

More than a dozen states have similar programs, part of a nationwide effort to curb the maternal mortality rate, which has gone from 7.2 deaths per 100,000 in 1987 to 17.3 deaths in 2018.

- I'm not depressed.

I'm not crying all the time.

I'm actually energetic and happy to get up and do stuff, and so I've seen a real...

It's been a real game changer.

- [Jaye] The right medication helped Brooke overcome her postpartum depression.

- This program, for me, provided that people realize how helpful it is, I mean, I tell people all the time, "When women dazzle, everybody shines," okay?

If you get your mamas right, everybody's good.

(somber music) - [Jaye] Dr. Williams Brown feels the same way about the patients she treats with multiple sclerosis.

She's also been on the other side, when she felt her voice was not heard, and will never forget how that felt.

- First, we need to believe people when they tell us they have certain symptoms.

All of us have biases, right?

If you're born, and you had parents who had a certain worldview, and you were around certain people and grew up in certain circles, all of us have differences in our worldview, but we have to stop letting that affect the way that we deliver care compassionately to those that we serve, especially when we serve people that don't look like us.

(somber music) - For our final story, we move from mothers to grandmothers.

The special bond between a grandparent and her grandchild is unique, less complicated than the parent-child relationship.

Researchers scanned grandmothers' brains while they looked at photos of their grandchildren, and what they saw gives new insight into this special intergenerational bond.

(pensive music) - [James] Thank you so much for coming in today.

- [Jaye] Vicki Shumann is 69 years old.

- [James] Vicki, we're gonna be putting you in the MRI scanner, and you're gonna be lying flat on your back.

- Shumann is not here to have anything personally assessed or diagnosed.

Rather, she is part of an anthropological quest.

- [James] We'll have a mirror over the top of your head, and you'll be able to see photographs of your grandson Chase.

Grandmothers have actually been kind of understudied, and so this was really the first time that anyone's been able to take a look at the grandmaternal brain and understand something about grandmaternal brain function.

(ethereal music) - [Jaye] Anthropologist and neuroscientist Jim Rilling and his team, Minwoo Lee and Amber Gonzalez, recruited 50 grandmothers: 26 white, 21 black, two Hispanic, and one biracial.

Each had at least one grandchild between the ages of three and 12 years old.

- We asked them to provide us with photographs of their grandchild, the grandchild that they felt closest to emotionally, and also, photographs of the grandchild's same-sex parent, who, in many cases, would be their own biological child, and then we brought them into the MRI scanner, and we took pictures of their brain, of their brain function while they viewed those pictures of both their grandchild and their grandchild's same-sex parent.

(MRI whirring) - [Jaye] While in the MRI, the grandmother volunteers viewed these photos along with photos of people they didn't know and various objects, and what was discovered gives incredible insight into this special intergenerational bond.

It comes down to empathy.

- When the grandmothers were viewing pictures of their grandchild, they particularly activated areas of the brain that have been implicated in emotional empathy, so being able to share the emotions of their grandchild, feeling their joy when they're happy, feeling their distress when they're sad, whereas on the other hand, when they were viewing pictures of the grandchild's same-sex parent, who was often, as I said, their own biological child, the focus of activation was more on areas that are involved in something called cognitive empathy, which is different from emotional empathy, so that's when you cognitively process what someone is thinking or feeling and why.

You think of it at a more cognitive level, and so it suggests to us that the mental approach that these grandmothers take when they're engaging with their grandchild is different from the mental approach that they're taking when they engage with their own biological child.

(ethereal music) - [Jaye] The data may be telling us the grandmothers possess strong empathy for their grandchildren, feeling what they're feeling, and with the adult child, a desire to understand what they are thinking and feeling, but more from a cognitive rather than empathetic perspective.

- It was an epiphany to me that I was empathetic.

I just knew there was so much love there, and he's a good kid.

- [Jaye] 12-year-old Chase is one of Shumann's five grandchildren.

- I've told my children, maybe more than once, that I really love them, but I'm thinking I love my grandchildren even more.

They're easier.

I don't have the worries of dealing with life.

I can just deal with them.

- There's a well-known theory in anthropology called the grandmother hypothesis, and that posits that the reason why human females live for decades beyond menopause is specifically so that they can take care of their grandchild, grandchildren and improve the likelihood that they will survive.

- [Jaye] With grandparents living longer than ever, their impact on their grandchildren's lives can be profound.

There's another factor at work here: the cute factor.

- They're cute, right?

They have a big head, big eyes, big forehead, short, stubby limbs, and so they may be programmed by evolution to tweak the grandmaternal brain in a particular way that adults are not.

- [Jaye] Science may show what's happening in a grandmother's brain, but life shows what's happening in their hearts.

- I mean, with that first grandchild, my heart just burst.

It was wonderful, and all my friends are the same way.

The friends I have, they just have a new grandchild, and I say, "You'll see.

"It's hard to describe, "very hard to describe until you're a grandparent."

(ethereal music) - That's gonna do it for us this week.

See you next time on "Your Fantastic Mind."

(authoritative music) - [Announcer] "Your Fantastic Mind," brought to you, in part, by Sarah and Jim Kennedy.