CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Storytelling and Mental Health

For more than 25 years, Sanjay Gupta, M.D., has reported from major events around the globe for CNN, including the front lines of Afghanistan and Iraq, Ground Zero in Manhattan, and natural disasters such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, famine in Somalia, and the Ebola outbreak in Guinea. He’s sat down with presidents, and he’s collected at least four Emmys along the way.

During a plenary address at this morning’s Opening Session, Gupta will share with Annual Meeting attendees what he’s learned about people and the importance of proactively tending to brain health. In an interview with Psychiatric News, he offered a preview of his remarks.

Psychiatric News: What do you plan to talk about during your plenary at APA’ s Annual Meeting?
Sanjay Gupta: I want to show how we can educate people about important medical issues through storytelling and reporting. One of the themes I plan to focus on is why brain health and mental health should be part of the same conversation. I also plan to talk about the five key pillars for brain health and overall well-being—and how they map directly onto evidence-based psychiatric care and prevention.

PN: What do clinicians need to know about the five pillars of brain health?
Gupta: The five pillars are daily levers that anyone can engage to build a better brain at any age. Movement, both aerobic and strength training, is one of the most powerful known interventions for brain health. It is directly related to neurogenesis, improved blood flow, mood, and cognition.

Discover involves lifelong learning, novelty, and cognitive challenges, which can build cognitive reserve and plasticity. I think of them as daily “brain stretches.”

Relax involves a recognition that stress is necessary, but the culprit is relentless stress. The goal is not to live a stress-free life, but to define true moments of relaxation throughout your day.

I choose the word Nourish, instead of diet, to reinforce the idea of an eating pattern that is rich in plants, healthy fats, and low in toxic added sugar. This will support the brain and the microbiome, which are tightly linked to mood and cognition.

Finally, Connection is about building strong social ties; these can reduce stress, lower dementia risk, and buffer against depression and cognitive decline.

PN: You have said we need to take steps to proactively maintain our mental wellness. What does this look like, and how can we achieve it?
Gupta: Too often the focus in our society is on treating mental illness after it occurs. Proactive mental wellness, by contrast, is the idea of treating mood and mind in the same way that cardiologists might treat blood pressure: tracking, protecting, and tuning in to indicators long before crisis hits. This includes scheduling movement and sleep, as well as intentional “discovery moments,” or learning something new in an area that pushes us outside our comfort zone. It’s also important to protect a consistent window of downtime. Most importantly, we need to consciously and intentionally invest in a few key interpersonal relationships.

PN: You have also said that overall, people’s capacity for joy doesn’t decrease as they age. How can people tap into this inherent capacity for joy, despite typical age-related challenges?
Gupta: The data here are reassuring: Emotional well-being tends to stabilize or even improve with age, despite physical problems that may accumulate. … As we age, we are better able to shrink life to what is essential, not what is necessarily impressive. We can double down on relationships, gratitude, purpose, and small daily pleasures—such as walking, music, or mentoring—in bite-size ways.

On a personal level, my deepest joy comes from spending time with my family, caring for my patients, and telling stories that reduce people’s suffering. … People often tell me that my reporting makes them feel less alone, and this is one of the greatest compliments I have received as a journalist.

PN: You have spoken openly about your own mental health after covering the famine in Somalia. What helped you the most with healing?
Gupta: The famine in Somalia was one of the most difficult stories I’ve covered during my 25-year career. It shook my faith. It is very hard to reconcile starvation and death in one part of the world while there is tremendous abundance elsewhere. My trauma manifested as intrusive images, nightmares, sleep disruption, and, most disturbingly, a persistent sense of helplessness. What helped me the most was acknowledging that this was, in fact, trauma, as well as engaging in formal mental health care treatment. Psychotherapy gave me structured time to process what I had witnessed and allowed me to develop tools to manage my excessive guilt. Eventually, I turned this awful experience into purpose: focused philanthropy and covering food insecurity and related policies with a new urgency.

PN: Many people avoid seeking help or even discussing their mental health for fear it will be held against them professionally. How can we change this?
Gupta: For physicians, members of the military, and others, there is a real fear that seeking help will be career-damaging. Change needs to happen from the top down. It makes a big difference when senior clinicians, officers, and executives openly share that they have sought mental health treatment and are still highly respected, trusted leaders. All organizations need built-in support such as embedded mental health check-ins, peer support offerings, and access to care, creating a system where “help” is the default, not the exception. Finally, from a policy standpoint, licensure and privileging forms should focus only on current functional impairment when it comes to mental health questions, not on past treatment history.

PN: What is the key takeaway that you would like your APA audience to retain?
Gupta: I would love to reinforce the idea that mental health is brain health and vice versa. And I want to show that our brain health is built—or eroded—every day through our simple habits. Psychiatrists are not just treating patients: They are in a unique position to coach people and communities long before a crisis occurs; they can model that seeking help is a sign of strength and wisdom, not weakness. ■