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For centuries, philosophers, theologians, and physicians have all tried to answer the same question: what does it mean to live a good life?
Modern psychiatry took up that question and proceeded to narrow it. Instead of asking what's working in a person, it asked what was wrong. Symptoms catalogued. Diagnoses multiplied. The result is a field fluent in pathology, and far less fluent in flourishing.
My guest today is Dr. Paul Conti, a Stanford and Harvard-trained psychiatrist and author. Back for his second appearance (ep. 705), Paul is here to flip the script on a field he says has spent the last century polishing the hood instead of looking at the engine. Instead of focusing on what's wrong with us, he's asking the more generative question: what's going right?
I've known Paul not just as a guest but as a patient. A few years back, I sat in a room at his clinic in Portland and confronted some of the narratives I'd been carrying about my childhood. That experience didn't fix me. But it gave me something more useful, a way of understanding myself that moved me from blame into agency.
That same approach sits at the heart of his new book, What's Going Right: A Powerful New Method for Optimizing Your Mental Health. It's less a self-help manual than a blueprint for becoming a friend to yourself.
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