Implementing the Mental State of the World Report in Your Practice with Dr. Tara Thiagarajan | POP 1401

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How does your environment shape your mental health more than you realize? Why do stronger relationships matter more than a bigger paycheck? Are we treating symptoms while overlooking the bigger picture?

In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok discusses implementing the Mental State of the World Report in your practice with Dr. Tara Thiagarajan. 

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Meet Dr. Tara Thiagarajan

Dr. Tara Thiagarajan is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Sapien Labs, a nonprofit organization dedicated to understanding the human brain and mind through large-scale, global research. A neuroscientist with a Ph.D. from Stanford University, she has spent her career exploring how our rapidly changing environment shapes brain function, mental wellbeing, and human behavior. Before founding Sapien Labs, Tara led Madura Microfinance, building it into one of India’s largest microfinance organizations serving more than one million people annually. Through initiatives such as the Global Mind Project and the Mental Health Quotient (MHQ), her work is helping reshape how we understand and measure mental health around the world.

Visit Sapien Labs and connect on LinkedIn and Youtube. Read The Mental Health State of the World. 

FREEBIE: Take The Next Generation Mental Health Assessment and Use Promo code MHQ_Joe2026 to Participate in their Beta Program! 

The basics behind The Mental State of the World Report 

We use a measure called the “MHQ” that we developed, and essentially what this does is it looks at 47 different aspects of mental function and problems … That people rate on a life impact scale. (Dr. Tara Thiagarajan)

This assessment was derived from psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience. 

It’s essentially taking everything people often ask about the human mind across disorders and capabilities, and synthesizing it into something that gives us a 360-degree view of the mind and what’s going on with it.  

This assessment positions individuals on this aggregate metric, the MHQ itself, that goes from clinically distressed to thriving. It’s a continuum, and we’re trying to see where people and populations sit … What are the changes that are happening, are there differences in groups, and what’s driving that? (Dr. Tara Thiagarajan)

When the MHQ is lower, it means that people are struggling functionally. 

The importance of social connection versus more money

We typically think that it’s all about money, and the more money have the better off you should be. 

However, an interesting trend Dr. Thiagarajan and her team discovered is that when, with other lifestyle factors remaining constant, people trade other aspects of their life purely for more money, their mental health becomes more at risk.

The challenge is that what you see is that, in a macro sense, as people have had more money, what they have traded off have been things that are very important for developing mental health. (Dr. Tara Thiagarajan)

Dr. Tara’s team found that, for example, people who had greater love and care for others have better mental health overall. Similarly, those who have close family bonds have better mental health overall. 

Therefore, when income goes up in relation to diminishing family closeness and love for others, overall mental health struggles. 

Another trend her team found was the use of products that disrupt the nervous system, such as using a smartphone, especially when the person is very young. 

 What we see is a very steep drop in mental health and in adulthood for every younger age below 13 [who] have got phones, so below 13 seems to be exceptionally dangerous for kids [and their mental health when using smartphones unregulated]. (Dr. Tara Thiagarajan)

What matters when it comes to kids’ mental health

Some of the essential factors that matter when it comes to the healthy development of a child’s mental and social wellbeing can include:

• Not using smartphones or technology with internet access without any restrictions prior to the age of 13 
• Being allowed free time to play outside and in nature while not optimizing all their time for school extracurricular activities 
• Having a varied diet and not eating exclusively or too much ultra-processed food 

Another major aspect is ultra-processed foods. This was surprising to us because there’s not been a lot of research on it, but today there are over 4000 chemicals in the food system, like preservatives, emulsifiers, colorants, additives, all sorts of things, and many of them are actually neurotoxic. When you start consuming more and more of it … The toxin load right from infancy or even gestation … has a whole range of effects on the nervous system. (Dr. Tara Thiagarajan)

Essential things for therapists to know

As Dr. Tara explains, a lot of these issues are systematic and structural. 

Food insecurity, poor nutrition, housing issues, social security, a lack of boundaries and restrictions around tech; these are all issues that affect the vast majority of the population, whether in the United States or abroad. 

The key is to recognize them, because once enough people do, they can be changed. 

A lot of these [issues] are societal and structural in nature, but I think that those societal and structural things can change when individuals are very much aware of how they’re effecting them, right? (Dr. Tara Thiagarajan)

A lot of therapy and its approach to care has stemmed from a symptomaic basis where the therapist focuses on the individual. 

However, if we can start looking at the wider social factors, such as food nutrition, tech usage, and social support and their affect on people’s brains and nervous systems, therapy can actually hone in more on how to help a person. 

Click here to take the MHQ assessment. 

Dr. Tara Thiagarajan’s advice to private practitioners

Ultimately, our mental outcomes and the health of the mind is profoundly shaped by the environment, and I don’t think you can underestimate by how much.

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Resources mentioned in this episode:

Visit Sapien Labs and connect on LinkedIn and Youtube. Read The Mental Health State of the World. 

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