Dr. Alex Schmidt's practice primarily focuses on treating symptoms of severe Early Childhood trauma, working with perpetrators and victims of sexual violence, conducting risk assessments for the courts, and treating kids from the foster care system with severe trauma histories.
Alexi Tchinsky is a clinical psychologist who specializes in anxiety disorders, including obsessive presentations, acute PTSD, complex PTSD, attachment trauma, and working with immigrants, neurodiverse individuals, and people going through life transitions.
Dr. Michael Levin and Alexi Tchinsky connected through an article in The New Yorker about Dr. Levin's work on regeneration and the idea that a cell could be nudged to replicate or heal after traumatic injury. Alexi was interested in the semantic piece of trauma and how it is held on a cellular record, and how treating it upstream at the source could facilitate downriver repair.
The two fundamental things that OCD focuses on are contamination and safety.
In the brain of people with OCD, the thalamus does not get enough stimulation and the oxytocin or endorphins do not come when they complete a task. This creates anxiety and shame, which can scale up somatically into physical symptoms.
Checking and contamination are two different subtypes and presentations of OCD. Checking is a hyperactivation of disgust, while contamination is a post-traumatic obsession wash and compulsion.
The analogy for PTSD is a vase that's been hit with a small hammer and there's a little crack. If the vase has been tapped a hundred times before, something comes along and it falls to Pieces.
Substances such as nitrous oxide, ketamine, psilocybin, and high doses of THC can cause dissociative experiences. Neurological issues, such as bilateral damage to the hippocampus, can also lead to dissociations.
Severe boredom or sensory deprivation might cause dissociation due to the lack of stimulation and the overwhelming nature of being the only mind around. However, this is just a theory and more research is needed to confirm it.
The body stores traumatic memories through physical reactions such as bracing, tightening of muscles, and changes in blood pressure. These reactions are a way for the body to prepare for or endure trauma.
The idea is to give the body a different medium to write into, instead of locking up the muscles or other changes. This could potentially redirect the stress reaction and prevent it from solidifying in the body.
The size of the hippocampus is a predictive factor of resilience, with larger hippocampi tending to result in less trauma. Regenerative medicine to heal the hippocampus may increase the capacity to sustain stress.