- Your Fantastic Mind brought to you in part by Dennis Lockhart in memory of Mary Rose Taylor.

And by.

(gentle music) - This week on Your Fantastic Mind.

- Fear is sort of the price of admission to what they want to do.

- What makes someone a thrill seeker?

We dive deep into the science of fear and we do it in a place made famous by one of the country's most popular scary TV shows.

- And it's not necessarily the danger that they're after, it's really the experience.

But they don't feel the danger in the same way.

- In a country with a growing mental health crisis, Dr. Ken Duckworth is removing stigma.

- Everybody has a purpose on this planet and that's my purpose.

- One story at a time, including his own.

- And I thought to myself, I am the most alone person in this whole world.

- And she went from being a world-class conductor to a brain tumor patient.

- Still struggling to talk.

- A long thought comeback you won't wanna miss.

Welcome to Your Fantastic Mind.

I'm Jaye Watson.

Which kind of person are you?

Would you rather curl up on the couch with a nice movie or would you like to jump out of an airplane?

Would you like to take a walk in the woods or would you rather ride a giant roller coaster?

When we look at the science of thrill-seeking, the answer to why we take risk or not is in our brains.

And where we shot this story as you're about to discover is a place popular with thrill seekers.

- Back when I was an undergrad at Emory, I knew this as the Georgia Mental Health Institute, it was a regional mental health institute.

- It seems appropriate when discussing the science of fear and thrill-seeking to do it in a place that is an infamous backdrop for one of TV's most popular scary shows.

- My friends who know me well say that it's not for me 'cause I get scared really easily.

- We invited psychologist Dr. Kenneth Carter to join us at the former Georgia Mental Health Institute which is known to fans of Netflix's Stranger Things as Hawkins National Lab.

A place where a lot of bad stuff happens.

- Papa!

- Fear is sort of the price of admission to what they want to do.

For me, it's just about understanding other people.

- And there are literal signs from thrill seekers all over this now empty building, slated to soon be demolished.

Stranger Things fans have found their way in and left their mark.

- I am not a sensation seeker.

Absolutely.

I'm not a thrill seeker, I'm a chill seeker.

- Dr. Carter does not know that the lobby area we are in is where a famous character met a very unfortunate end in season two of Stranger Things.

Carter did want to understand why people would seek out experiences he avoids at all cost.

And his book "Buzz" Shares research and sheds insight into the people who are risk takers, sensation and thrill seekers.

- A lot of it is biological.

I mean, maybe 60 to 70% of it's due to some chemicals that we have that are more likely to make people thrill seekers than not.

And it's not necessarily the danger that they're after, it's really the experience but they don't feel the danger in the same way.

- Carter says there are two main chemicals involved.

Cortisol, that is the fight or flea chemical that kicks in when something scary happens and dopamine, which is a pleasure neurotransmitter, the feelgood chemical.

- So, when I'm in a roller coaster, I've got so much cortisol in my system, I'm not enjoying it.

So, even if I do have some dopamine, it's just too overwhelming for me.

A high sensation seeker on the other hand is gonna have a lot of dopamine, a lot of pleasure but not that much cortisol so they're in that sort of vibing state.

- Basically, thrill seekers aren't as scared as the average person.

- One of the common questions I ask them all when I've interviewed thrill seekers is, you know, do you have a death wish?

And they always sort of laugh at that because they say I feel like I have a life wish, right?

And so, what I'm really doing is I'm living and experiencing all the aspects of life.

Their bodies aren't sending off those alarms that tell them that this is a dangerous thing.

And so, they're more likely to engage in those things because their bodies not saying don't do this.

My body, as a low sensation seeker is telling me like, almost everything is dangerous.

And so, I probably don't engage in life as much as a high sensation seeker might.

But the problem is I just don't have the, you know, the hardware to run that program in my body.

- Dr. Carter and I made our way into the bowels of the building and because he didn't know what happened in Stranger Things in these halls or this boiler room or these tunnels and because there was a video crew with him in the dark, he was fine still.

Now that you've been at ground zero, do you think you'll watch Stranger Things?

- Probably not.

But I'll ask some friends about it.

- There is a dark side to thrill seeking.

There are higher levels of substance use and abuse among high sensation seeking people.

But they also play important roles in our communities.

- We need them in our society, you know, first responders, emergency room physicians and nurses, window washers like, in high-rise buildings, police officers, you know, we utilize those individuals to help sort of protect society and do certain kinds of things and they're really good at being able to do that.

But we also need people like me to sort of stop bad things from happening because we're there with the extra cautious people.

And so, trying to find that balance and sort of understanding each other and ourselves to me is what this is all about.

- So, for those of us who like our risk taking confined to scary TV, we can take a cue from high sensation seekers and broaden our horizons in a safe way.

- The other thing I think we can learn from them is to really, really focus on the things that bring us that sense of awe in the world.

You know, as a low sensation seeker, I get sort of that awe experience from sunrises and the beach.

High sensation seekers get it from climbing up on mountains and that kind of stuff.

I think we could all use that awe in our lives a lot more.

- If you're curious about how much of a thrill or chill seeker you are, Dr. Carter has a quiz in his book that you can take.

You answer statements with numbers from one to five with one being not like me, five being very much like me.

Some of his statements are, I would like to explore strange places.

I would like to take off on a trip with no pre-planned routes or timetables.

I get restless when I spend too much time alone.

I like wild parties.

I would love to have new and exciting experiences even if they are illegal.

I would like to do frightening things.

The higher the score, the more of a thrill seeker you are.

But the scoring even breaks it down more to your boredom susceptibility and your disinhibition score.

You can find the quiz in Dr. Carter's book "Buzz" and we'll put a copy on our social media for you if you wanna take it.

We can learn a lot from deep brain science.

We also learn a lot from our own lived experiences.

You're about to meet a man who is a mental health expert but he decided that the best way to help people understand mental health is not from him but from the people living with mental health issues.

We caught up with Dr. Ken Duckworth as he met some of the stars in his new book.

- Hi.

What a pleasure.

- If you didn't know better.

- How fun is it to meet you?

- This is cool.

- You would think that psychiatrist Dr. Ken Duckworth was doing things backwards.

- Hi.

So nice to meet you.

- It's nice to meet you too.

- First, he wrote a book.

- What a pleasure.

- Now he's meeting the people whose stories he told in the book.

- Thank you for this.

- The timing was not his, it was COVID's.

- [Ken] This funny thing happened in the pandemic.

Mental health became a we problem, not a they problem.

So, instead of being asked to do media events on mass murder and mental illness, which was a very common category of media requests and now it was how do people cope?

How do you deal with isolation?

Does teletherapy work?

How do you stay connected to other people?

If you feel depressed, is that normal in these difficult times?

My kid is having suicidal thoughts.

This is all the stuff I'm interested in.

- Today I am with Dr. Ken Duckworth.

- Duckworth, a Harvard professor and the chief medical officer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, NAMI interviewed over a hundred people via Zoom about their mental health journeys.

- 'Cause they're experts too.

You lived with something for 30 years, you've learned something.

Back in the day, you were ashamed and you chose privacy.

Now it's, I went through something.

Maybe it could have meaning to help another person.

That gives them the gift of being a teacher and also gives meaning to what they went through.

- Three of the people whose stories are in the book, are Tera Carter, - I Will say until 2009.

- Kenya Phillips - I was hearing voices - And Elisa Norman.

- You three are amazing and you all have different lessons.

- Dr. Duckworth has flown to Atlanta to meet them in person.

- I was in the music industry and, you know, really started going through a cycle of manic and depressive episodes.

But you know, culturally, you know, there's a lot of stigma as it relates to mental health in the Black community.

And so, I did not know what was going on with myself.

I just knew that things was not right and it continued to escalate until I landed in the hospital in 2014.

And so, I did get a diagnosis of bipolar disorder - Today, Tera Carter works at Skyland Trail, a residential mental health treatment center.

And she's one of Georgia's peer specialists, people with lived experience who are certified to help those in crisis.

- You know, one of the things that you hear a lot is, well, you know, you don't understand, you know, you don't know what it's like to live with this and you know, and that's when I can kindly come in and say, oh yes, I do know.

- I was at a historically Black college and while I was there, I went through a mental breakdown.

- Kenya Phillips is now the manager of support groups at NAMI.

- NAMI was my gateway.

That's when I started my wellness journey because I was around other people who looked like me.

And it's not always like a color thing, it was just more so people who experienced a mental health diagnosis also and they were living some productive lives.

- When I was 25, I had my first psychotic episode.

That's me in high school.

- Elisa Norman wrote her own book about her mental health journey.

- Well that's good.

- Sharing her story with an even bigger audience is an important step.

- Everybody has a purpose on this planet and that's my purpose.

And I had to go through so much since I was 25 to get to this point.

And I can talk about it without having that fear, you know, because if I can help one person understand although you have been to a mental health facility, although you have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, you can live successfully in recovery.

- The seeds of this book of Duckworth's career choice were planted when he was a young boy.

- My dad was a loving, good guy.

I was never mistreated.

When I was eight years old, I was playing in the basement with my friends.

We had built a fort underneath a bunch of blankets covered by books like every other kid has ever done.

And I heard these booming sounds upstairs and clearly my dad was screaming or something was happening.

And I came up to see the police remove him from the house.

And this was my first introduction into the idea that my dad had something that was more complicated than the next dad.

- Duckworth's father had bipolar disorder at a time when no one spoke of it.

His father was hospitalized for years over the course of his life.

- I went to visit him at the state hospital many times and it's really the lowest moment in my whole career.

I'm overwhelmed by the visit.

I sit in this parking lot and I thought to myself, I am the most alone person in this whole world.

Like, there is absolutely nobody that I can talk to about this.

I wanted to know what happened to him and I needed to know everything I could.

So, I made a decision to become a psychiatrist to help him.

- You are not alone is what Duckworth needed to know long ago in that hospital parking lot.

Now he and a hundred plus people are part of a book whose mission and message is just that.

People feel so much shame and negative social attitudes about the brain and mental health.

We don't understand it very well.

Fine that doesn't mean that you should hide in shame and secrecy with conditions that clearly do better when you're connected, integrated, and talking about it.

Thank you.

Bye now - In our final story tonight, this person shapes the music, makes all of the decisions on dynamic, tempo, and balance.

They are great at interpreting music in new and different ways.

That's why the conductor of an orchestra literally takes center stage at every performance.

It is a role that is still male dominated.

Only a handful of women are conductors and you're about to meet one of them.

Amy Wilson was at the pinnacle of her career when she received a diagnosis that changed her life.

Wilson allowed us to chronicle her fight to lead her orchestra again.

- I feel like it fuels me up, like, it feels so joyful when I'm conducting.

I'm just so joyful doing it and it feels like what I'm supposed to be doing.

And that's it.

- Amy Wilson is that rare person who at a tender age proclaimed her destiny.

.

- I told my mom when I was three, I wanted to be a conductor.

My mom's a conductor too.

- Amy succeeded in a male dominated industry, becoming the music director and lead conductor for the Atlanta Phil Harmonic Orchestra.

- My energy had just started to nose dive.

- In December of 2019, at 44 years old, Amy was diagnosed with a brain tumor, a low-grade oligodendroglioma.

The tumor was in the right frontal lobe of her brain and was almost four centimeters in size.

Surgery to remove it was the first step.

Then radiation and chemotherapy.

- It was hard.

I knew the day I got the phone call from the neurologist that they had found a lesion that my life was gonna forever change and everything.

Nothing was gonna be the same.

And for months and months and months, I wanted to go back to the day before that day where I could just live a happy, carefree life and not have cancer in my life.

Tonight I had a fruit and cheese for dinner.

I was nauseous.

- The treatment that saved her life left her very impaired.

- [Amy] The brain surgery caused me to have a limp.

- Okay.

Sure.

- [Amy] Okay.

- We'll have you stand up.

- [Amy] Okay.

I might need a hand.

- That was great.

When she first came to us, she wasn't really able to stand or walk very well at all.

You have that bursitis on this side too.

- Dr Ashish Khanna is the director of Cancer Rehabilitation at Winship Cancer Institute.

- A little bit more.

- I really, after every step, every step I think about how often.

- Amy couldn't undo all that she'd been through but she could try to regain and reclaim some of what had been lost.

- Do you have any pain here?

So, this motion turning over, this motion here with anger at less.

She required help with almost with every single discipline that we have in rehabilitation medicine.

She required physical therapy just to be able to stand.

At that point when we saw her, she was in a wheelchair so she was unable to stand.

She needed occupational therapy to help her with her arm.

Of course, she's gonna be a conductor.

She had a lot of difficulty with the arm.

She required speech therapy.

- Still struggling to talk.

- But she needed a lot of help with formulating thoughts and speech and interpreting language as well.

- I need to capture it to just write.

- I'll try.

Bye-bye.

- Amy wanted more than walking and talking.

- Let you stand on your toes.

- The goal was something even her her doctors weren't sure was possible, to conduct again - One of the biggest deficits she had, of course, as a conductor is just the immense amount of concentration you can imagine to read sheet music and then just try to conduct and, you know, arrange the different pieces.

- And when you're waving your arms, you're not following the music, you're actually leading the music.

And so, I'm telling them when to like slow down, speed up.

No, this is the beat.

It's like, beating a stick on the ground except you're beating it in the air so that you don't make sound.

But I'm just, I'm also showing them like, how to play like, smooth or really short or really strong or you know, really powerful and you play now, hey, no, no, no, don't play right now.

So, like, your mind and your body are doing like so many things and you're being pulled in directions.

Working on picking up her feet.

This one's really hard.

This one's really exhausting.

- Amy committed to her therapies, including cognitive the with the neuropsychologist.

- So, this is a cognitive therapy.

Yeah put my brain.

- These sessions.

And what I want you to do.

- Helped Amy with thinking - Iron Gate.

This is black - Good.

- Reasoning - Painted or taped a blue.

- And working memory.

- It's a gate.

- During her recovery, Amy was diagnosed with cutaneous T-cell lymphoma.

She's in the middle of treatment, which includes chemotherapy and radiation.

- I found out on February 28th that I had cancer.

- One of the most important parts of her recovery from her brain tumor is her support group with the Southeastern Brain Tumor Foundation.

A place where she is understood.

- And I was so sad.

- Is supported - And I felt so alone.

- And supportive of others.

- It took quite a while for her too.

- And doesn't feel isolated in her struggles.

- And it just makes you feel better, it lifts you up.

- More than two and a half years after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

- Okay, everybody.

- Amy is making her return to conducting.

And not taking a safe or easy way out.

- All right, here we go.

- Instead, she has chosen the most difficult piece her orchestra has ever played.

Symphony number five by Dmitri Shostakovich.

- The Shostakovich is 45 minutes and that's more than twice as long as any work that I've conducted since I was diagnosed.

My orchestra, this is a big piece for them.

I really wanted to push them and take this big step with them.

I'm a little anxious about the mental and physical fatigue, endurance because I don't get much, you know, in rehearsal where I get to stop all the time, it's not a problem 'cause I get to put my hands down for five seconds.

But in concert, I gotta keep going.

Brain cancer has tried to take things from me.

It has tried to take conducting from me but I have been fighting very hard.

- In front of an audience for the first time in three years, Amy flawlessly and exhaustively conducts, willing her changed body and brain to perform at the highest level.

(audience clapping) In the audience, the doctor who gave Amy the tools she needed so that she could hold this baton, keep her arms lifted, and her attention fixed on countless musical details all at once.

The journey to get to this night filled with struggle but also a love for music so powerful, nothing could keep her from it.

- I think music brings healing to my life and immersing myself in it is a really wonderful and joyful experience.

(audience clapping) - That's gonna do it for us this week.

See you next time on Your Fantastic Mind.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - Your Fantastic Mind brought to you in part by Dennis Lockhart, in memory of Mary Rose Taylor.

And by.