Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman
Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman is presented by The Mac Parkman Foundation
The mission of this show and the foundation is To serve as a source of information, resources, and communications to the community of parents, coaches/Athletic trainers, medical staff, and athletes that are affected by sports-related concussions and to raise awareness of the long-term implications of concussive and sub-concussive trauma to our children.
Broken Brains will also explore how Concussive Trauma impacts our Service Members and Veterans.
Join us every week as Bruce interviews leaders and experts in various Medical fields, as well as survivors of Concussive trauma.
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Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman
Operator Syndrome, Brain Trauma & the Fight for Veteran Mental Health
In this episode of Broken Brains, host Bruce Parkman talks with Dr. Chris Frueh, a leading authority on Operator Syndrome, brain trauma, and mental health among veterans and first responders. They examine the devastating effects of repetitive brain trauma, PTSD, and hormonal imbalances, while spotlighting alternative treatments like ketamine and psychedelics. The conversation calls for urgent, holistic solutions to combat the rising mental health crisis—and save lives.
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Hey folks, welcome to another episode of Broken Brains with your host, Bruce Parkman, sponsored by the MA Parkman Foundation, where we look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma, from repetitive head impacts that affect our athletes to repetitive blast exposure, which affects the brains of our special operators and military personnel, and how these conditions are affecting their mental well-being and their mental health. And why is that important? Because this is not trained in our nursing, psychiatric, medical or suicide prevention communities. That makes you the front line of defense to understand this issue so that you can protect those that you love and make informed decisions. So we bring on researchers, doctors, patients, players, everybody from this universe, so you can have that 360-degree look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma and the connections to brain damage and mental illness so you can be informed. On today's show, we have another amazing guest here, Dr. Chris Free, coming in from the fine state of Hawaii, a clinical psychologist and researcher who's a very well-known mentor in our space here in Special Operations. Dr. Chris Free is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, Hilo, with over 30 years of experience working with military veterans, special operators, and defense contractors. A leading expert in trauma and operational stress, he has authored more than 300 scientific publications and a graduate textbook on adult psychopathology. Dr. Free's groundbreaking work on operator syndrome explores the interconnected physical, psychological, and interpersonal challenges faced by elite military professionals. His current efforts to extend supporting the firefighter and first responder communities to improve health, wellness, and performance are also groundbreaking as those are two critical segments of our population that get little to no attention at this time. He has advised the U.S. Department of Defense, the VA, the State Department, and has testified before Congress and serves as a consultant to organizations to include the Navy SEAL Future Foundation, Hunter Seven Foundation, and the Boulder Crest Foundation. His insights have appeared in major outlets such as the New York Times, Time Magazine, The Economist, and Men's Journal. Thank you so much. This is Dr. Free, and I thank you so much for coming on the show, sir. Oh, well, thank you for having me. Honored to be here. Really appreciate it. So just give us a quick background of how Dr. Free ended up becoming one of the foremost subject matter experts on the issues that are facing our veteran community today.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I don't know that I can answer the latter part of that question, but I can tell you how I got my start. Father was a Vietnam veteran as a physician in the Air Force, so not a combatant, but he deployed to Vietnam when I was a child. I was about five, six years old at the time. My other, my hero from my childhood was my great-grandfather, who was a veteran of the of the Battle of San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War, 1898. And you may be thinking, well, how was he my hero? Well, he lived to be 99 years old. So I was 14 when he passed. And I knew him. I knew him pretty well, and I knew his story straight from his, you know, straight from him. I went to school in graduate, I went to graduate school in clinical psychology to work because I wanted to work with veterans. I didn't know much about veterans in the sense of what they might need help with, but I did have a sense from both my father and my great-grandfather that there were lasting effects from war on soldiers. And so I started graduate school at the University of South Florida in Tampa, in your neck of the woods, in 1987. And the diagnosis of PTSD had just come into the nomenclature in 1980. Organized psychiatry added PTSD as an official diagnosis, only seven years before I started graduate school. So when I got into graduate school, I was pretty, pretty excited to become a PTSD expert and work with veterans on PTSD issues. So that was my first job. I mean, I did my dissertation and then my last year of training at the VA Medical Center in Charleston, South Carolina, which is affiliated with the Medical University of South Carolina. And then I stayed there for another 15 years as a full-time clinician for seven of those years. And then the next eight of those years, I started getting research grants. So I had a mixture of research and clinical responsibilities. And then I left the VA in 2006. Loved the patients. I loved most of my colleagues. It was a great place to work. But I just lost faith that the VA from a from a monolithic perspective that it was that it was doing right by veterans. And I just couldn't continue to be a part of it anymore. Many of the policies, many of the things they weren't doing, and then just a lot of the day-to-day failures that I was able to see in terms of taking care of veterans, I just decided it was time. And so after 15 years, I left. Kind of thinking my my work with veterans might be over. I took a job here in Hawaii at this little podunk. Podunks, that's not, I didn't mean to use that word. That's not fair. But small university, liberal arts, small classes teaching, well off the beaten path. But then I ended up with work in Houston. And so I was commuting between Hawaii and Houston every month. And I did that for 12 years. Taylor College of Medicine first, and then University of Texas. And in the process of doing that, I became involved with a small foundation in Houston that was set up by several former special operators. And it was, it was really about creating a community there in Houston. So, yes, they had like they were called the Quick Reaction Foundation, and they had the ability to provide immediate resources to operators. I think they were capped at about$5,000, but they could be quick with it. You need a flight to get to a hospital on the other side of the country, you know, boom, we could buy that ticket right away. But they also had happy hours and events. And so it became my friend circle in Houston.
SPEAKER_00:I'll just pause there because that's kind of maybe where the story of operator syndrome begins, but I'll pause there for to let you get a No, I mean, I mean we could dive into quite a few things there, but you know, going back to your, you know, you the point about the VA, I don't know if you can talk specifically about what you were, you know, bothered by, but you know, we do talk a lot on the show about you know the the reliance on you know pharmaceuticals to address mental health issues instead of focusing on brain optimization and the well-being of the soldier. But yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I can I can say it pretty I can summarize it fairly quickly. I and again, I left in 2006, so it's been 20 years since I've really had much awareness of what direct awareness of what goes on in the VA. But my experience was a lot of the patients we served, well, most of the patients we served were over medic, were heavily medicated. And that depended somewhat on the psychiatrist who who was the prescriber. Some psychiatrists had a had a heavier hand than others, and that bothered me. We also saw a lot of people gaming the system, a lot of a lot of people claiming to be veterans who who gamed the system. Some of them actually were veterans, not all of them were. Some of my research was on treatment for PTSD, some of it was on treatment service delivery models, different ways to bring the services to veterans. And some of it was looking at the role of disability seeking in PTSD care. And this has been well documented in a book by Daniel Gade titled Wounding Warriors. But the VA and policies on disability encourage and have for a long time veterans to come in and report a PTSD because it's a very compensable disorder within the VA. So we did some research. We published a series of studies showing that the disability incentive had an effect on how people presented, how they represented the severity of their illnesses, and even how they shaped the narrative of their military career. So, for example, one thing that we saw was a lot of people coming in claim, a lot of people coming in claiming either to be POWs of the Vietnam War, and they weren't. They were only about no.
SPEAKER_00:I worked, I'm sorry, I worked in the survival compound in Fort Bragg for you know special operations for three years. And you know, we had Colonel Nick Rowe as the leader there, so yeah, there's not a lot of POW.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I worked with, I was I did some work with the NAM POWs, the NAM POW organization. So Mike McGrath, this was 20 years, 25 years ago, was the president. And so I worked, I knew Mike, I worked with him. He could name every single Vietnam POW alphabetically. Yeah. That's one of the things they did. Yeah. So that if anybody got out, they could then represent back to America. Here's the list of guys that that were in Hanoi Hilton. That is the we had so I knew, I knew who were were POWs from Vietnam and who weren't. I mean, there's a very there's a public list. You can go and you can look at the list. But the VA wouldn't do that. The VA took people at their word. Oh, you say you're a Vietnam POW, okay. Well, cool. Because it was advantageous to the VA, they got extra money for every POW they enrolled. Wouldn't you know? Yeah. So that was a problem. The other problem that I saw over and over again was people coming in claiming to be special operations. Can't tell you how many SEALs and Green Berets from Vietnam came into our clinics. Yes. Yeah. So, so pretty sure I only in my 15 years at the VA, I'm pretty sure I only worked one individual. Uh he was from Marine Force Recon, and he had done some some real stuff in Vietnam that I was able to know and document. I think that's the only special operator I ever met uh when I was working at the VA. Now we did a we did what I would thought was going to be a pretty interesting research study. Um, and I worked with a guy named Jug Burkett. Burkett wrote a book in, I think it was 1998 or 99, titled Stolen Valor. That's where the phrase stolen valor comes from, is his book. All right, did not know that. And and and Burkett was a Vietnam veteran who got fed up with all the Vietnam veterans, all the people out in the public eye in throughout the 80s and 90s claiming to be Vietnam veterans, usually claiming to be Vietnam veterans for a purpose like running for sheriff's office or advertising a business. And some of them were in the news for being, you know, sick or having problems or legal difficulties, whatever. And so what he started doing was he would write to the St. Louis Per Military Personnel Records Center and get their DD 214s, and then he would expose them. Then he wrote a whole book about this. And then he worked with the FBI to identifying and sort of bring down some of these, some of the some of these posers. And then Congress created a law, the Stolen Valor Act law, which originally was going to be a felony, and I think now it's a mist to a lot of discussion about that.
SPEAKER_00:So let's talk about PTSD. You know, when I hold on, let me finish. Keep going. Yeah, keep going. I'll back.
SPEAKER_01:Good. There's more. Yeah, there's more. So I worked with Jug. I reached out to Burkett and said, and and we he we collaborated on a research project where what we did at our end was we we wrote to the person, we did a Freedom of Information Act, we got a hundred consecutive patients reporting that they were Vietnam veterans, and we got their DDT. And what we found was a shockingly low percentage of them, only about a third, told us the truth about their military service in Vietnam. And we had a handful of guys claiming to be SEALs or special forces, they weren't. We had other guys that we had well, yeah, a lot of people who claimed uh that they were, you know, in combat combatants, and they probably weren't because nothing related to combat was on their DD 214 and their MOS was uh some something in logistics and supply or whatever. Right. And and we submitted it for publication, and people at the central office of the VA found out about it at the time it was submitted for publication. So I got a call from one of my mentors who was a director of the PTSD Center, National Center in Boston, and he called me and said, you can't publish this because it would be bad for the reputation. It could harm our it could harm the funding for PTSD programs, it it shines a poor light on the diagnosis of PTSD because it implies that that's all veterans want is disability for PTSD. And so I said, well, but the data are real, they're meaningful. And so we had this conversation. Well, but it's only 100. So it's a small sample. Yeah, it's a small sample, but 100 is not a it's not really small. And if we find a huge signal in 100 patients, then maybe we should do a slightly larger study, replicate this, and maybe we'll uncover something here that we should know about. Nobody wanted to know about this. Nobody wanted to know about it. So he told me if I proceeded to publish it, my career as a scientist would be over. The threat was he threatened my career. And so we published it, and it got a lot of attention. We published it in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2005. It got a lot of media attention. Like, and I mean all over the all over the world it got media attention. And so I was rewarded by that by the VA assigning me a handler who had to follow me everywhere I went and be a part of every interview. And and so it was, I was very, my voice was very much shut down, and so I left. That's when I decided I can't work for an organization that's gonna censor me like I'm in in Soviet Russia.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, they you know, number one, thanks for your courage, because most scientists would probably not have published that journal. You know, you got careers, you got a car, whatever, you know, whatever your issues are. And uh, and of course they want the the money to keep coming. But the uh, you know, the issue of PTSD is that that's a tough one, man. And when I retired in 01, well, you never said anything about that stuff. You weren't gonna, you know, and and yet now, I mean, when I retired, I I was told to go apply for disability. I didn't intend on it, but I I did. And now in the veteran community, everything's about disability. You know, what's your rating? How do I get to 100? Right? I mean, he got lawyers right now. I met a guy, cannot make this up, who was in the Navy for four months and is 100% disabled.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Never been in combat. Four months. He barely went through basic training. What did you do? Like he was like a cook or something. I don't know. I mean, it was not like he was a Navy SEAL and he got hurt, you know, in buds or something, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Well, I always want to be careful because it is possible that somebody got injured and disabled in the first week of basic training. I mean, it's theoretically possible. Probably they brought in somebody. Probably those guys are people who really were fragile and vulnerable to begin with and and um really weren't appropriate to even have joined the military. But it's an issue. It's a huge issue. I never discourage anybody from applying for disability. In fact, the operators I work with, I encourage. You got to make them have those kids. Yeah, I have to, right. And and they say, well, I don't want to take the money that somebody else might might need from the VA. And I always say, don't think that way. That money is there for you. You earned it, and they're giving it to, you know, when you look at the other people who are getting disability, you're at the far end of the spectrum of people who actually are very injured. And I think that leads us into the operator syndrome decision.
SPEAKER_00:It does. And I'll say that because I showed up at a VA hospital for the first time, I think it was like 2015. I've been retired for almost 15 years. And this large African woman came out and said, Where is that sergeant major? I was like, and she grabbed me by my ear and she's like, Where have you been? I go, What are you talking about? And she said, You this is your first time in the VA? I wanted some Viagra, right? I heard they gave it away for free. I'm like, Yeah. She goes, and she had my DD214, whatever, right? And my DD214 is literally two pages long. And she goes, and I said, Well, we're fighting two wars. I don't need to come in here for these guys. There's a lot of men. And she's like, You deserve this. And she dragged me back there. She was so upset. And so but to this day, I run across guys that, you know, Cold War vets, you know, we didn't fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. We jumped a lot. We did a lot. I mean, I fought in El Salvador and Co. It's the training. It's the training. It's the training. And then a lot of them did perform highly classified roles where the psychological tress was through the roof. And I've worked with a bunch of these guys over the years. But I talked to one guy, he's been retired as long as me. He's just trying to get some, he just applied to the VA. I like, come on, dude. Get over. And the same thing over and over and over again. All these men and women that have done some really badass stuff.
SPEAKER_01:I love the story you told about the woman that grabbed you by the ear and pulled you in. That warms my heart. Yeah. I want to hear more stories like.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it is. But you know, the whole issue of PTSD, we can go down a lot of trails on that. But there are many components to that that we're starting to find out, you know, and we know now that repetitive blast exposure, and there's so many parts to these jobs now. Like we just saw a horrifying report from Dr. Pearl on the on the issue of CTE, the football disease, in our special boat operators. Because every time they smack those waves and the helmets and oh, dude, it was horrifying to think you know that what's going on. They said it was the worst, like worse than Aaron Ron Rodriguez. Like it was crazy. Yeah. And this is part of our jobs that we have to function. So there's a whole bunch of things unpacked. So talk about operator syndrome. And how did you start understanding that there was basically what could be a diagnostic criteria or a syndrome that surrounded a certain subset of military uh personnel? Right.
SPEAKER_01:So here's the story. It's it's really it's really pretty simple. About 15 years ago, maybe not quite, I found myself hanging out and spending time with a group of operators. And they came across branches. They were not all, the guys that started this were Navy, but there were Army, Marines, Intelligence Agency, Air Force, everybody was in this group. I would say there were about 30 or 40 guys. So early on, I was asked to sit down and talk with a few of them because they weren't doing well. So here's how that very here's the very first conversation. And they pretty much all went this way. Hi, what's going on? And we're not in a clinical setting. We're we're in an office at the neuroimaging lab on at Baylor College of Medicine. I was able to get them in under one of my research protocols to get their brain scanned. But first I had a two, three hour conversation with each of them. And those conversations went like this. So what's going on? I don't know, doc. I'm not doing well. I don't feel like myself. Something's off. Can't put my finger on it. Okay, so immediately I'm thinking, oh, this is probably PTSD, right? That's the signature injury that we're all supposed to be on the lookout for. Here's a guy who was a Navy SEAL, he was a development group, he was on the missions that they made movies about. He's a tall man, he's a large man, he's, you know, he's somebody you literally look up to in a lot of figuratively and literally. And what was he doing in his life? He was living in a house out in the country, about uh, you know, 45 minutes from town, not doing much of anything. He was drinking a handle of vodka every other day, and you know, three or four handles a week, and he started smoking and he wasn't working out, and he didn't have any energy to do this. And without going through the whole, the whole process of it became trial and error, because I quickly realized he didn't have PTSD. He didn't have the fear reactivity. He didn't have the avoidance of military cues that you would expect with traditional PTSD. So it was like, well, this is something different. So took his brain scan, looked at it with a neurologist buddy of mine, who his, and I took him a handful, I think there were four brains that we looked at together. And I didn't tell him much about who the, who the guys were. And what he said was, these look like relatively healthy brains, no lesions, tumors, white spaces, relatively healthy brains, but based on the ventricle atrophy, probably the the guys were probably about 80 years old. He thought he was looking at geriatric brains. And that was a what? Because this guy had never been blown up in combat. And this was well before Daniel Pearl's 2016 paper, which I consider to be a seminal moment in our understanding of brain injuries, blast brain injuries. So I was kind of flying blind at this point. How did they get what happened to their ventricles? Why did they atrophy? These were not guys that had been blown up in an IED, they hadn't been in a helicopter crash, they hadn't, you know, they didn't have anything that that jumped out at you or jumped out at me at that time. So suddenly they don't have PTSD, but their brains are 80-year-old brains. Then I got their hormone. So something I'd never before done, I said, let's get a hormone panel. And what came back was the testosterone of 80-year-old men. Now I'm really scratching my head because that didn't make any sense to me. How does this 37-year-old uh stud physical specimen have low testosterone? I'd never seen that before, never even thought about testosterone before. No, but none of us had. Mental health doesn't look at hormones for some reason. We should, but we don't. Yeah. It's one of our, it's a it's a disgrace, one of the one of the many disgraces to the field of traditional mental health care. Then I got sleep studies, and they all sleep apnea. Then as we start getting their hormones treated, some other things, and I'm having a lot of conversations. You know, I'm talking with these guys every, you know, hour or two every week or more. When I'm in Hawaii, we're having phone calls, and I'm just, I'm not charging, I'm not billing, I'm not keeping records. These are just conversations I'm having with friends, and I'm functioning kind of like a coach. And as these, this handful of guys started to feel better, other guys from the group started coming to me and their friends and their friends. And if I fast forward to today, I've worked with about 600 operators individually, including private defense contractors, being Iraqi, about 50 Iraqi and Afghani interpreters, some in the U.S., some in their home countries. I was working with four Afghani interpreters who had been embedded with special operation units uh in the two months leading up to our abandonment of Kabul in 2021, and I lost all contact with them at that point. That's uh, you know, that's something that that I have to own and live with, as we do as a nation. And that was the journey. So over time, I started, as I started learning things, I just started writing them down. I kept a living document. Holy cow, these guys also have hearing problems and they have vision problems. So within a few years, I had this document and in my head this phrase operator syndrome. Here's another operator who has the syndrome, traumatic brain injury, primarily from blasts, but also all the other things, diving, hard, hard landings from jumping, repelling, rucking, tactical driving, the vibrations of helicopters and fixed swinging air platforms, many other things, combatives, you know. Then there were impact injuries, but it was really the blast exposures that really stood out. And so TBI, and then from there you go, well, they have vertigo and disequilibrium from the TBI. They have headaches, they have cognitive problems, memory, short-term memory, concentration are disrupted. Then there's the hormonal disruption, which in which in virtually all of the men meant low testosterone, but often elevated estrogen, progesterone, thyroid, human growth hormone, often out of out of alignment. Then we have the sleep, the sleep apnea, the insomnia. What you realize is it's there was this chronic high op tempo that meant during the career, stress hormones were always elevated. There was not really sufficient recovery periods ever for a career in special operations, plus the night work, traveling across time zones, even training in the U.S. East Coast soldiers often fly to the West Coast and vice versa for training activities. And that circadian disruption has a profound effect on the brain and the body and the metabolism. And then you start to see that the metabolism, the cardiometabolic functioning is all often kind of jacked up. Excuse me. Especially in first responders. You see the cardiometabolism. Oh my lord, I can't even imagine what our first responder would look like. The cardiometabolic dysfunction, first responders is just massive. Sleep deprivation, poor diet, no time to exercise, constant stress. I mean, it's the perfect recipe for shortening the human life, and we're not even paying attention to it, which is tragic. We uh and then you have the hearing problems, the vision, the balance. You have the existential issues that go with this. Described one of my own existential issues with the working with the Afghanis. I mean, I'll tell you last a few days ago, Wall Street Journal had an article about a group of Afghani refugees who are in Qatar. Middle of the desert. Who are likely who may be sent home. Which would be stupid. Tragic. And I'll tell you this without going into the details. I worked with an one of the enterprises that moved 60,000 of them out of Afghanistan since 2021. A year ago, I was on one of those flights that landed in Doha with an entire flight full of Afghani families fresh out of Afghanistan. Now I'm thinking those people are still sitting there in the desert and may even be sent home. It just breaks my heart. And we got shut down in January of this year. We all of that, all of that work, all of that effort got shut down. So we still have a lot of Afghanis who worked with us and their families who are in in Afghanistan. So pause for questions, comments.
SPEAKER_00:No, no, I mean, dude, I mean, the journey's amazing. Now you get to this point where you have this, you know, pretty that's an accurate description of how I retired. Sleep apnea, the whole, I mean, just a mess, right? And I was a sergeant major, my men would have wanted it, like I did before that, but still, you know, but it is something that, you know, where we we just assume is old age or aging, whatever. And yet we really don't do a lot about it. So you know, so so where did you so now you've got a a syndrome. So is this when you started writing a book to put the book out? Or did you do any more research to validate and drive home the point?
SPEAKER_01:The book the book came a few years, the book was came out last year. Can I show the book? Yeah, man. Promote yourself, dude. Shameless uh promotion here. It's a thin bit and it's a it's an easy to read because I wrote it for the community. This is intended to be a self-help book for operators and their spouses, and really it's relevant also for first to first responders and other soldiers in the combat arms. A massive population. So large groups. So this the operator syndrome is a framework, it's relevant to many people, not just operators, but but uh operators are at the extreme end of this spectrum, I guess. So we published a medical paper in 2020, five years ago. And paper's titled operator syndrome. It was a descriptive paper describing this. And within the first few months of publication, it did the equivalent of kind of going viral. Which I I have over 300 scientific publications I've never experienced as a scientist. That's pretty cool. And it went it went viral, not among the psychologists or the the F and VA people, it went viral with the community. So operators were sharing it in my LinkedIn group at that time. I probably had 1,500 operators on my LinkedIn profile. And and so when I posted it, they took it and it and it went to the grassroots, which was just amazing. It was amazing. That was beautiful. And everybody said I should write a book. A lot of my friends said I should write a book, so I did. And I wrote the book, it was published a year and a half ago, very specifically as a resource for the community, for the operators, for their families. So it's intended to be a practical guide. Here's what operator syndrome is, here's what it looks like, and here's all of the many, many, many things that you can do to find solutions to each piece and part of it. And throughout the book, I've got quotes. So it isn't just all me. I've got quotes probably from 40 different operators from different branches. I've got quotes from spouses, and I We've got quotes from a handful of care prof of clinical scientists and such. So some people said it's almost more of an anthropological book than a psychology book, which I which I'll take that as a I like, I like that comparison.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, we have problems with diagnosis, and the reason for that is the lack of awareness between military service, combat, and you know, mental health. Everybody thinks, ah, you saw too many bodies. You were deployed downrange, somebody touched you and you're a child. Nobody. Even in our NECOs and polytrauma clinics right now, um, you know, they're assessing that you have exposure, but then we go to talk about treatment, it's the same old, same old. Bag of drugs, therapy. You might get a horse, ride a horse, you get a dog, you know. All right, I got it. But we gotta fix, we gotta fix this. We gotta fix his brain. Is it all right? So let me ask you a question. So given everything that you described, all that that whole barrel of problems that our military operators how many of those are related to their brain health? Well, a hundred percent.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, yeah. And and we can we can leave it at training. You know, I sometimes man, I talked to to uh a gentleman the other day who who just happened to be in Hilo and we met up for a cup of coffee kind of thing. And he he said he loved the book, it was really helpful, explained all these things. And then he went on to basically express how he didn't feel like he maybe should have operator syndrome because he was never deployed to combat. Good Lord. Yeah, and I and I was like, Well, dude, you were you were a Navy SEAL from basically 1980 to 2020. So 25 years as a Navy SEAL. Yeah, okay, you didn't go to the global war on terror and you miss Vietnam and you feel like maybe you didn't do enough. That stop it. Just stop it. Because you trained. You were the Ferrari in the garage, you were ready to go, you did all that training, you got all the injuries, and you trained and prepared and mentored the next generation of soldiers who did fight the G Watt. Um it's the training. And that's that's what I think a lot of the health provide healthcare providers can't quite grasp. It's the training, it's not necessarily deployments, and not not not not minimizing the deployments themselves, but the training itself does it. And here's a here's a part of the here's part of the concept of operator syndrome is it's physiological. It's not about your Freudian dreams about your mother. It's not that you are going to need to talk to uh a 25-year-old um blue-haired therapist who has never, you know, never seen or been any done anything anywhere, who's has all these assumptions, and that's the problem, is all the assumptions that we bring to the therapy table. And I did it myself 15 years ago. I did it myself, assuming that it was all about combat, assuming it was PTSD, from psychological trauma. But now what I say is it's physiological and it's physiological, starting in the brain, but the brain governs everything in the body. So metabolism is affected, hormones are affected, joint health, everything is affected, as you know, as you know. So because these are all interrelated, we can't just do one thing. We can't just go, okay, we'll treat one thing on the list and then we'll get to the other things next year. We've got to do it all together. Got to. We've got to be simultaneously evaluating and treating the hormones, evaluating and treating sleep apnea and insomnia, and then just go down the list. And by the way, I and I think this is the next piece of what you and I are maybe kind of what you're interested in, is we do have good treatments. We've got all these things that can help with brain health. Why are we not using them? Why are we still stuck on the bucket of pills and the therapist?
SPEAKER_00:Well, since you're leading with the question, why are we? We've got, you know, and I pounce on this all the time because I uh, you know, in our legislation, we have legislation in Congress right now, um, hopefully going to be sponsored by Senator Mark Wayne Mullins that talks about the issue of repetitive blast exposure, but on the treatment side makes all the modalities from electronic modalities, HPOT, neurofire, neurofeedback, photobiomodulation, TMS, whatever, psychedelics, stellate ganglion blocks, you know, the brain optimize, you know, brain optimization protocols, you know, to get the brain healthy. We got all these out there. And we have over 90% of the veterans that do any one of these say, this has helped me. This has positively impacted my life. Yet every one of them's out of pocket right now. And and I don't even know if that covers anything on your list. I would love to hear what is in terms of.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. My list is the low-hanging fruit for anybody who's listening is get a hormone panel, get a sleep study if you haven't had them. Start there. Those are quick, those are easy. You get objective data that any doctor can look at and go, yeah, that's an issue. And then they can be acted upon. I mean, we usually like to start with hormones, getting hormones addressed, which does not necessarily mean testosterone replacement therapy. It can mean a lot of other different things. From there, stelly ganglion block is another intervention I recommend. And it's it's outpatient, it's quick, it's not super expensive, and it works immediately. And it has a lasting effect for anywhere from two to 12 months, sometimes even longer than that. And now we're pretty sure that stelly ganglion block, also ketamine, also psychedelic journeys, all of those we're learning have profound benefits to brain health. They stimulate neurogenerativity, we're pretty sure. And that research is is really going hard at that right now in a lot of different places around the country.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I will, I could speak to all of that. I mean, I, you know, when I woke up sucking my thumb about four years ago, um, you know, I had to basically educate the VA on, you know, what I had done to my brain. You know, as a Green Beret, got shot in the head in training accidents, uh, you know, military rugby. That was army, all army rugby for eight years. And I mean, just went on and on, parachute jumps. And the guy goes, Do you have any scars? I go, Yeah, come look at my eyebrows. He comes up, he goes, What the hell are you doing? I go, I'm a prop on military rugby, dude. I've got I've had so many concussions, you know, whatever. He goes, Yeah, you're a mess. Because I was not a good human being at the time. But after the stellate ganglion blocks and, you know, and starting right into ketamine, and you know, you know, not just sleep, but just eating right, you know, and just fixing my life has done amazing uh things. And it and and um I'd like to know more about the research on because when you do ketamine, you feel like you just ran a marathon, your brain feels like it just ran, you are tired. So there's something going on there outside, and there's a whole nother part of this on the spirituality side where you literally start working on yourself as a human being, and that's a perk. That's a perk. On top of fixing your brain, right? You start becoming a better human being, you're releasing trauma. Oh my God, the stuff that's I've dumped on psychedelic therapy. And uh, but yeah, to your point. Not all from the military. We hear a lot of guys with childhood adversity that's through the roof. The stuff we carry, my childhood was abhorrent. The stuff that we carry, I'm still trying to, my dad died 40 years ago. I'm still trying to make him proud. You know, these are the things that we do as human beings, but the stuff that you get that that you had before and then after the military, you know, how good of a husband were you, and how good of a father would you? Can you accept yourself, love yourself? These are all evolutions of the human psyche that come back to us and we they make us better, on top of getting to the root cause of our problem, which is those 22 years of you know, smashing that brain around.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. And and one of the things that happens over time, and probably pretty quickly in a career, is the chronic systemic inflammation throughout the body, flowing in the bloodstream, but including the neurons, the neuroinflammation is a driver of psychiatric illness and brain, you know, brain, you know, poor brain health. It's also, by the way, a driver of cancer, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, depression, any psychiatric illnesses, any chronic health diseases, metabolic dysfunction, obesity, diabetes, etc. So we all in modern society should be doing anything we can to reduce the inflammation in our bodies. And for our operators and soldiers and first responders, that that inflammation is part of what's driving the dysfunction and the misery and the impairments to all of the to your ability to think and to function. So, what can we do to reduce the inflammation? And every anything we can do is really important. So that does mean eliminating, yeah, it does mean improving your diet, eating a clean, whole foods diet, eliminating sugar, soda, junk food, fast food. You know, minimizing or eliminating that as much as possible. Alcohol and tobacco are major sources of inflammation. One of the things that that can bring down inflammation is hot sauna and cold plunge. I prefer hot sauna. I'll do both, but I'll prefer hot sauna because we have that more research on hot sauna. But it brings down the risk of inflammation. I'm gonna jump my sauna tonight. Go spend 20 minutes a week, 20 three times a week, spend 20 minutes in a sauna. Good for your brain. It's even good for your heart.
SPEAKER_00:What about so I have a cold plunge and a sauna, but I heard that if you do them like like you cycle them three times, they're supposed to do something for your HGH or some uh some kind of hacking thing.
SPEAKER_01:I don't know, I don't know about that. I don't know about that. I know that's a popular thing, the contrast could go for it. Contrast therapy, yeah. It's it probably increases the uh misery of the whole experience. Oh, it's horrible. I hate it.
SPEAKER_00:Which many people probably assume means it's gonna be better for you, right? The more pain you'll be. I still think it's an ego thing. But talk about this inflammation. How can we naturally, you know, get rid of that neuro? Not and I think you're talking about like inflammation throughout the body, not just neuroinflammation. Right.
SPEAKER_01:Well, so diet, good sleep, moderate exercise, hot sauna, or cold plunge, or practices, meditation, any kind of quiet recovery, you know, an hour or two a day where you can just kind of get absorbed into something and lose track of time, but that's a good thing. And then, you know, you talk to people, and then you have interventions like stelic ganglion and ketamine that can can make a difference. There's a lot of people using functional medicine. Mark Gordon, Dr. Gordon's work using peptides and and and dietary supplements. I think there's a lot of promise for that, and I'm excited to see what his protocol looks like in a few years and what kind of data he's got on his protocol.
SPEAKER_00:We're testing that right now with 100 veterans in Florida. We've got uh we've got a grant for 100 veterans, 100 veterans for free ketamine treatment, and 100 veterans gonna go through Mark Gordon's treatment. So I'd love to understand what kind of data you would like to see us pull from that since we're running the study. Sure. So yeah, love to have him. I'd be happy to have that conversation offline with you. I'm gonna see Dr. Gordon next week. Ah, dude, tell him hi, man. He's been on the show twice, man. We're as a matter of fact, he's the guy that got us ripping energy drinks for our Army Navy blast. I'll send you an invite. Uh, we have uh uh an actual rock and roll concert for suicide prevention and mental health programs for veterans on the Army Navy game. So the Army Navy game. Right, Baltimore Stadium. 3,000 people. We got fuel playing. We might have an ACDC cover active. They were my band. I played bagpipes and ACDC band, but they they kind of went down that rock and roll drugs and craziness circuit. So I think they might be back. We might bring it up there. But yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be a great time. We'll get you an invite. But Mark's good people, man. Love Mark, man. Love him all day long. Yeah, I'm gonna spend two days with him next week. Dude, tell him hi. But uh, you know, and con you know, not not contrary to your point, but I want people to understand that haven't done a lot of this. When you say, oh, you gotta you gotta stop drinking, you know, most of our veteran population go, no way, or you know, whatever, right? You gotta take, you know, no more McDonald's. I'll tell you, after, you know, a couple years of you know psychedelic therapy and working on myself, I don't drink anymore. Like I and I used to drink like a Viking every weekend. Everybody knew me as Pac-Man. You just lose the urge, which is you you start really wanting to be healthy, and the things that make sense, you start desiring more.
SPEAKER_01:Uh I hear that a lot. What what psychedelic medicines have you used?
SPEAKER_00:I've done uh ayahuasca, uh lecibin, ketamine, and I'm going through uh voluntary ibogaine treatment next week just to experience it so I can I like to walk the walk, and you know, they don't make you any any worse. Um I think that uh they are profoundly I've watched, including special operations guys, go to these ayahuasca retreats with multiple suicide attempts, snort and heroin, and the worst parts of their life. And they come out with hope for the first time.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And um it's really amazing what we do. And so it's powerful. It's really powerful. Powerful as you know, the Ibogain, the success rate with suicidal ideation and addiction treatments is unparalleled with anything we know about. Even in the pharmaceutical space cannot touch it in terms of effectiveness. You know, why it's a Schedule I drug, subject to abuse when you don't want to abuse anything after you're done with it. So go figure that one out. But um, you know, we we are very plural plant medicine when when it's supervised. Not and there's nothing recreational about these things. You don't want to do them again. You're just dealing with for saying that. Yeah, nothing again with you on that. Yeah, there is nothing fun about these psychedelics, but the outcomes are always positive. You know, people talk about bad trips. You want the bad trips, that's processing trauma, that's processing stuff that you gotta get rid of. And once it's gone, man, Chris, it's gone. Like the the it's it's uh something else.
SPEAKER_01:Five years ago, I was very much I was very negative on psychedelic medicines five years ago. And and today I am not negative at all. I'm very supportive of it. I've worked with heroic hearts of its and and Martin Polanko at great organizations, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and the anecdotal benefits I've seen in dozens of my friends, dozens of the men I've worked with, including many spouses, is just actually phenomenal. And now we have research coming out, published medical research really supporting a really promising signal. We need a few more randomized controlled trials, but I think we're gonna get to the point where VA and modern medicine is gonna have to accept we have uh very legitimate, powerful treatments here that are gonna threaten the big pharma model, perhaps.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my God, farmers run scared from this, man, because I mean I just I was talking, we just were at MCON uh yesterday, which was Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01:MCON.
SPEAKER_00:I did that last year. Yeah, we did the Vegas. We did MIC. You know, we're out there talking about vents in juice, and it's amazing. We had an NFL concussion spotter come up to us. And he's like, you know, I'm the guy that's looking for guys on the field. He was a former Marine. And we started talking about, you know, our repetitive impacts and repetitive blast exposure and all that. And he goes, So you're not against contact sports. I go, no, buddy. We're trying to make them safer. I said, what would you say about waiting till 14, taking the contact out of practice and just playing football games because nobody's gonna be playing in the NFL except for a few select? He goes, I could get all behind that. I said, dude, that's how we get rid of CTE. But we've got an entire industry of CTE people that don't want to want to see CTE go away, right? It's like this is crazy. So, you know, but to your point, if um, you know, I do believe that the wheels are starting to turn that we, you know, if we even go back and are unafraid to open up that book on, you know, the fact that we've lost the equivalent of two wars of combat veterans every year to suicide. And we open up that book and we looked at, you know, MOSs, and we looked at, you know, combat deployments, and we looked at medical records, and not including bad contact discharges and other anonymous discharges, we're gonna find that we failed a lot of people. And, you know, and we didn't do a lot of things right. And then that's our job with the knowledge that we're gaining, you know, specifically from you, sir, is how do we go forward and do a better job? And I was on General Fenton's brain health team up until he retired uh a couple weeks ago, and I saw a man, a four-star general, that was fully committed to addressing this issue. And, you know, I'm on the outside now. You know, he's looking at our guys, and the the meetings he had are all about look, we got to go whack people. We got to be the most lethal force out there, and we are going to be. But what can we do now to make sure that we are and that our kids are taken care of? And the man is just an amazing, amazing leader. Uh, but you know, they're they're addressing this now, and which is great, but we still got I first heard of General Fenton when he was Colonel Fenton.
SPEAKER_01:It was in the context of an early conversation with with one of my guys from Special Forces who who was telling me if you ever come across this guy named Fenton, he's the most amazing leader of men.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And I've so I've heard what you just said many times over.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I knew it was a captain, and I just, oh yeah, I'm a defense contractor, I do some stuff, and you know, and um that's how we knew each other again because I kept ended up working for him like people would contract me out back a long time ago. And he goes, Parkman, I go, sir. And uh so then he'd always seems like tell me about brains. So we go in the corner, and that guy would dedicate 15 minutes to me while his entire staff was like, we got to get the general, get the and he's just so interested in how can we fix this? How can we diagnose it? Because, you know, we And you know the fact is, you know, how do you how do you tell guys that are suffering from mental illness that look, dude, you've got you have trained yourself into mental illness. We now have to take a step back, and we're gonna have to do some career changes for a little bit and help you recover because you're not crazy. And that's what uh you know a lot of our a lot of our guys are naturally afraid of.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's physiological. So what I say is it's physiological, that means it's inevitable. You do this, these things long enough to your brain, frequently enough to your brain, it doesn't matter who you are, your brain is gonna be affected, it's gonna be injured, and you're gonna develop these things over time. There's just there's no way we could we could, you know, if we put your hand on a block and hit it with a sledgehammer, your hand is gonna be mangled. It's gonna be bloody and mangled. It's not your fault. It's not because you're weak, it's not because you have a deficient hand to begin with. It's inevitable.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, sir. Can you also can we also state that because it's physiological, it can also be addressed and improved and you know, repaired. We're not gonna get, you know, can we can we you know is that is that also a a true statement?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yes. And and I mean, we're not gonna reset you to where you were when you were 18. That's not gonna happen for any of us. But we we have so many things that can bring healing and recovery, happiness, functionality, and that includes as you get better and as you heal, as you recover, your family, your your marriage, your children. Oh you know, there's there's just I always want to be hopeful for everybody. And to my my rage, my anger is we have solutions, we have interventions, we are choosing not to use them. For some reason. We are and change is happening very, very slowly. It's probably happening. You know, last year in the National Defense Authorization Act, a year ago, there was a there was a thing in there, I don't know what you should call it, whether it's a writer or a paragraph, but about hormone health for soldiers. And it was it was a it was a list of things that needed to be done for soldiers' hormone health. It didn't survive. It got pulled out at the, you know, towards the end of the process. But they did keep it in. What did stay in the 2025 NDAA was that the Secretary of Defense would have to come to Congress this year and give some kind of report on hormones. So they had to do something. And from what I hear, uh Secretary Heggseth is very much interested in doing more for sleep and hormones for soldiers, both for quality of life, but also to enhance lethality.
SPEAKER_00:He's very big into optimization, which goes both ways. Optimization can also help heal a little bit of the pain that we're going through. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01:And as you, as I'm sure you know, uh this past January, just 10 months ago, CMS came out and and finally identified traumatic brain injury as a chronic as a chronic potentially chronic disorder.
SPEAKER_00:It's not something you have it and we treat it, and then then you're and it's all over. And then how do we yeah, and now we gotta do something with this, which is why you know your book, your position is all about action. And that's the one thing that's been we've done talked about this. I'm gonna introduce you to a small group of people that are getting ready to put the together a program to really address this. It's something that, you know, kind of the catalyst was my son and our foundation getting together. And then as we know, we we host um the summit, the only summit on repetitive brain trauma every year. We'll get you invited to next year. I think Dr. Pearl might end up helping us get sponsorship. But you know, by bringing these people together and talking about the lack of action, it became aware that, dude, we've been talking about this stuff for years, man. We got to do something about it. We still got, yeah, we've done we still got 22 a day or 44, whatever. There's still one, too, you know, over one is the editude is more than enough. You know, we still got to do something. So I'm gonna introduce you to a small group of guys that are getting together and girls to go and address this. Um, we're handling the legislative aspect of this, but but Dr. Free, your message that, you know, yeah, you've served your country. Now you can be repaired. Now we got to get that out to the first responders. Oh my God, what those men and women see is far worse than what most combat veterans see when they after they come back for the the majority of these people, what they do in their jobs. And we don't do anything for them at all.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and and you know, I never want to compare one man's trauma or to another man's or or a woman's, but one of the things that's truly unique for first responders is they're fighting the battle in their own. Oh my God. And they're taking it home every day.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. They I and I will compare it to my, you know, 21 years of military service. Talking to them, I can't compare what I do. I I would have never been even to be a cop. Just to be able to take that home, go up and down like that every day. We we definitely need a higher level of respect for what these folks do for our society.
SPEAKER_01:And we're we've got a paper we're writing right now where we're taking all the existing medical research on law enforcement and we're mapping it onto the operator syndrome framework. And it, I mean, it's right there and black and white. It's very clear. They have everything on there. Not surprised. And their mental health care, they don't have a VA. They don't have a national entity. They have nothing. It's a patchwork regionally. And some places do really provide really good care, others, other. I'm working with a private company, a startup company, that has created a solution for law enforcement and first and firefighters, all first responders. The concept is former operators who are providing individual one-on-one coaching to first responders. And it's remote, it's via Zoom. But they're using, they use their own, you know, their live their own experiences and their own credibility, which, you know, your average therapist doesn't have, can't have, and their own lessons learned, and they're using the operator syndrome, and they're bringing it all together to provide one-on-one coaching. And it's turning, I mean, we just they just started earlier this year, but it's they've raised a lot of, they've raised good venture capital money, and they've signed about 50, 50 or more, probably by now more, departments around the country, police and fire departments, including some very big city.
SPEAKER_00:Let me know more about that because um uh my daytime job, we're getting ready to get skewed by uh a very two very large channels dealing right into law enforcement. Um, and we can at least create awareness when we're talking to them about our product, we're on the data side. And I'll talk to you about that too, because I own some very cool patents that can help you with your data normalization at a fraction. I'll donate it to you. That'll take multiple disparate data forms and put them into one for whatever platform you want.
SPEAKER_01:So the group the group I'm working with is called Sharp Performance. Okay. And it started by a green beret.
SPEAKER_00:Of course it was. Of course it was. It wasn't a book, it wasn't a movie. That's what a seal would do. I can see Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Although he has pretty nice hair.
SPEAKER_00:I love my seal buddies. I love him. I love them.
SPEAKER_01:He has pretty nice hair, so maybe he's not really owning. Big watch. But yeah, I should introduce you.
SPEAKER_00:You might enjoy. I'll I'll s I'll send you a little information. Ah, I'd love to meet him. Yeah, I'd love to meet only to help out, right? As much as we can, promote him. Uh if I can. He'd be a good guest for your for your Oh, dude. Sounds like it. So, Dr. Free, as we close out, tell us, uh, tell our audience how they can find you. Uh, talk to them about the book. Where's it located? Do you have a website? And what else are you working on? Um, promote yourself, man. Go ahead. Throw it out.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, I do have a website. It's my name, Chris Free.com. I don't know how exciting that would be for anybody. The book, Operator Syndrome, is easy to find. You can order it directly from Ballast Books, or you can get it from Amazon, or I guess wherever books are sold, as they like to say. What I'm working on right now, I left out the most one of the most exciting things I'm working on. So there is one VA program now working with the operator syndrome framework, and that's the Palo Alto VA. They have a program for operators there, and they've collected enough data over the last couple of years. So their research team is just getting ready to submit a paper validating, empirically validating the operator syndrome framework. And the data is really strong.
SPEAKER_00:The data is really let me know if we're we have strong ties to the uh James B. Haley Clinic here in at Tampa Bay, at Bay Pines. So let me know if um maybe we can template that or we can help expose um their program when it when you're ready. You know, no big deal. Okay. Cool beans. All right. Well, Dr. Free, thank you so much for coming on the show. I've heard about you for a while now. It's uh it's an honor to meet you, and uh and I'll make sure I get out for a moose to be here sooner or later and sit down with you and have that cup of coffee. Love to do that. Come on over to Hilo. Will do. Never been that one. All right, folks, another great episode of Broken Brains. Look at the stuff that we're learning. Remember, this is something that's not studied out there, so pay attention. Go do your own research, go do your own learning. Remember, download the book. It's free on the website, Broken Brains and Youth Contact Sports, become smart or on your kids playing sports. Our app, Smart, our HeadSafe, is on the Google and Apple Play Store. We have the Army Navy game, December 13th, fuel concert, ripping energy drinks, horse soldier bourbon, all you can eat, all you can drink. Come on down. It's our biggest fundraiser of the year, and everything goes to our veteran population for mental illness programs and suicide prevention. Like us, subscribe us, send us around. We need all the help we can get. And remember, if you got children, they only got one melon. We've got to take care of it, do a better job. God bless you all. We'll see you next time on Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman. Take care.